Glancing back, Marcus could see the truth in Dubnus’s words, as the first of the Sarmatae warriors stormed across the span in pursuit of the fleeing scouts.
In front of them the fort’s western gates opened ponderously, a solid column of soldiers pouring out to face the barbarian attack with spears and shields. Dubnus shook his head as they ran towards the Britons, his voice bitter with disgust at the scale of the disaster.
‘Too little and too late. By the time we’ve got a cohort out here and ready there’ll be five thousand men facing them. This is fucked. .’
Shouting the watchword, the small group straggled to a halt behind the advancing soldiers as they formed up into a disciplined line, each century starting the ritualised hammering of spears on shields as soon as they were set in place, while fresh troops were pouring through the gate’s twin openings with a speed that seemed to belie Dubnus’s words. As the Tungrians watched, a column of soldiers appeared around the fort’s north-western corner, and Dubnus spun to see the same thing happening at the other end of the fort’s western wall. He stared at the onrushing troops for a moment before turning to Marcus with a strange expression.
‘This is a trap, isn’t it? Every man in the fort must have been waiting behind those gates, kitted up and ready to fight for this lot to be deploying that quickly. Did you know about this?’
Marcus shook his head.
‘Not as such. My orders were to go looking for trouble, and if I found it then to give the signal and run for the gate. Why would the tribunes tell us what they had in mind, when one captured man might reveal the plan? But I don’t think this can be all there is. .’
Arminius nodded in agreement.
‘The Sarmatae will send ten thousand warriors across that ditch if they are given enough time. There must be some way to stop them, or why allow them to capture the means of crossing?’
Craning his neck to look between the soldiers in front of them, Marcus realised that there were already a thousand men and more across the ditch, mostly holding their ground while their strength built with every man that crossed the bridge, while a few skirmishers ventured forward to send arrows thudding into the auxiliaries’ shields. Martos stepped to his side, making the same calculation.
‘Two infantry cohorts and the Thracians are all this prefect has to fight with, unless he brings our men into action. I would expect that if he has a trap to close on these men, then the time-’
With a bellowed command from the walls above them, the bolt throwers on either corner of the wall flung their missiles at the bridge in unison, blazing fire bolts which flew to impact directly beneath the structure. The timbers took light in an instant, and a moment later the bridge’s length was a mass of flames, the fire’s greedy roar overlain by the harsh shouts and screams of the mass of men who had been fighting to cross the span and get to their enemies. Marcus looked at his comrades, nodding slowly.
‘I see. Pitch, probably painted all over the bridge timbers. I thought I could smell something odd when I was crossing. But that can’t be all there is to this, or what stops them from simply jumping down into the ditch and making a run for it?’
As if to answer Martos’s musing, and as the warriors who had already crossed dithered in the face of the Roman line that was still strengthening with every moment, the fire raced away from the bridge and up the ditch in both directions, following a trail of pitch which had clearly been laid with this desired outcome in mind. The roaring flames quickly set light to the pine trees that had been felled and laid along the bottom of the trench, their branches already primed with more of the sticky sap. In a dozen heartbeats the length of the defence was ablaze, denying the Sarmatae who had already crossed any means of escaping to their own side of the ditch’s line. With a blare of horns the waiting lines of soldiers advanced to fight, their enemies silhouetted by the fire raging behind, and looking at his companions’ fire-lit faces Marcus realised that the advancing Romans would appear to be little less than the servants of a vengeful god, their armour flashing gold in the fire’s light. Panic swiftly overcame the last vestiges of discipline possessed by the Sarmatae trapped between the blazing ditch and the implacable soldiers, some men throwing themselves at the Romans in blind, mindless fury, whilst others hurled themselves at the flames, sprinting to leap into the teeth of the blaze in the hope of reaching the far side unscathed. A few men who had flung away their weapons and armour succeeded in the attempt, but many more fell short and dropped, screaming with terror, onto the burning trees. Their hair and clothing ignited instantly to leave them rolling in shrieking agony before oblivion took them. The remainder fought like wild men, caught between the two implacable threats of fire and foe, but to little avail; the Britons’ spears harvested them with the efficiency of corn threshers as the desperate barbarians flung themselves at the advancing line of shields.
‘It’s a small enough victory, given the force still arrayed on the other side of that ditch, but perhaps still enough to give Purta pause to wonder what other tricks we have up our sleeves. I see you’ve collected somewhat more men than you left our camp with?’
Tribune Scaurus had walked through the gates behind the last of the Britons, raising an eyebrow at Arminius and Martos who both shrugged in response. Marcus saluted wearily, turning to make his way back to the Tungrian camp with a crestfallen expression.
‘Indeed Tribune, a victory. But bought at a cost I would have been loath to pay, had I known in advance what the nature of the bargain would be.’
The Sarmatae attacked again at first light, their rage stoked by the sight of fifteen crosses raised behind the line of the now heavily defended ditch. Upon each cross writhed one of the small number of enemy horsemen captured on the ice the previous day. Tribune Leontius nodded grimly at the doomed prisoners, speaking in conversational tones to his colleagues.
‘This will provide the bolt-thrower crews with some target practice, I suspect.’
As he predicted, enemy archers quickly ran forward into bowshot of the crucified men, each man braving the artillery’s long reach in the hope of putting an arrow into their helpless brothers and ending their torture. When half a dozen of the captives were slumped down lifelessly on their crosses for the death of a single incautious archer, who had chosen to string another arrow rather than move from the spot from which he had loosed his first shot only to have his spine torn out by a swiftly aimed bolt, Leontius ordered the crosses to be set alight. Greasy plumes of smoke rose into the air as the flames swiftly consumed their human offerings, and the archers withdrew in the same zigzag runs that had brought them close enough to shoot at the captives, earning a grudging note of respect in Scaurus’s voice as he spoke to Julius.
‘Worthy of our admiration, I’d say. I wouldn’t want to run at four of those monsters whether I had the freedom to dance about and put their aim off or not. And with that done, I’d expect Purta to land his next punch quickly now. He knows every moment he’s stuck on the wrong side of these walls brings the arrival of our legions that much closer.’ He rubbed the amulet tied to his right wrist reflexively. ‘Always presuming that Our Lord sees fit to ensure that Tribune Leontius’s message reaches them, of course. .’
Purta’s response to the previous night’s disaster came soon enough and to the dismay of Scaurus in particular. A ragged flood of slaves poured forward towards the ditch, goaded on by whips and spears and sheltered behind an arc of raised shields, staggering under the load of their buckets of soil and rocks. Their first task was to fill the stake-studded pits that waited to cripple the unwary, and as they laboured to follow their masters’ shouted commands the enemy archers came forward again in strength, showering arrows at any of the defenders who showed themselves above the ditch or fort walls. Forced to take shelter from the hail of missiles, the soldiers hid behind their defensive wall while the barbarians’ slaves completed their initial task of making the approach to the ditch safe before being driven to attack the defensive line itself. Pouring the contents of their buckets into
the ditch, each of the slaves turned away to retrace their steps under the goading of their Sarmatae masters. With the Thracian bowmen unable to shoot at the Sarmatae workforce in the teeth of the overwhelming enemy archery it was left to the bolt throwers to deplete the toiling slaves, and the officers watched grimly as the pitiless bolts ploughed into their labouring ranks.
‘This day would seem to have been a long time in the planning, given that our enemy clearly came prepared for a siege, although I doubt he expected to face quite such a stubborn resistance. There will, of course, be Romans among those labourers. .’
In truth Leontius was only confirming what most men had already realised, recognising scraps of Roman garb amidst the mass of humanity toiling to build a now discernible ramp across the ditch and realising that there were captured men, women and even children among the slaves.
‘We can only console ourselves that each one we kill has been freed from a grim existence that will already have visited misery and degradation upon them, and which can only end badly one way or another. You there!’ he called out to the commander of the nearest bolt thrower in an admonishing tone. ‘Don’t shoot at the men around the ditch, aim further away to allow your bolts to spear two or three of them with one shot, rather than just pinning single men to the ground!’
The centurion saluted briskly, bellowing fresh orders at the men labouring to wind the massive weapon back to its maximum power, and Marcus turned away, sick at heart at the scale of the slaughter being necessarily visited upon the helpless slaves. He spun back as a loud bang and a scream of agony told of some unexpected disaster, finding the bolt thrower’s crew in chaos and one of their number staggering drunkenly with a chunk of wood protruding from his shattered forehead. The soldier fell full length to the tower’s wooden floor and lay still, one foot twitching spasmodically.
‘One of the torsion bars broke. That poor sod is as good as dead.’
Leontius nodded grimly at Julius’s words, pointing at the wrecked weapon.
‘So is my bloody bolt thrower, and I’ve no means of mending the damned thing unless I take a bar off one of the weapons on the rear wall to keep this one shooting.’
He conferred briefly with Scaurus before ordering the repair, the two men agreeing that there was little option but to keep all four weapons on the western side in action. The Sarmatae slaves laboured on without rest, their loads of mud and rocks combining with the bodies of those of them that fell to the defenders’ missiles to slowly but surely send the ramp’s tongue poking forward into the ditch. Julius cast an expert eye across the scene soon after midday before pronouncing an opinion.
‘Clever stuff. See how they’re making it higher than the defences on the other side, even though that takes longer? That way when they come to launch an attack off it they’ll have the high ground.’ He shook his head with a worried frown. ‘They’ve made a good start, although every pace they advance gets harder as the ditch gets deeper beneath them. And they’ll slowly but surely grind the life out of those slaves if they keep working them at that rate.’ He looked down at the ramp again, wincing as a bolt thrower’s missile ploughed through the labouring workers in a chorus of tired screams from those around the bolt’s point of impact. ‘I’d give it a day, perhaps less, and then the barbarians will be at spear point with the men behind that wall, while archers on either side shoot arrows at them from close enough to make their shields useless. And there’s nothing to break or burn with an earth ramp. They’ll be over the wall and behind the ditch in strength soon enough after that, if they’ve the willpower to spend a few hundred warriors smashing their way over the wall.’
Scaurus nodded his agreement.
‘Which goes without saying they do. And once they’re behind the ditch they’ll have free run of the walls, and built from stone or not, that means they’ll have the gates smashed in soon enough after that. For all Leontius’s bravado, I’d say that the defence of this place won’t last long thereafter, not with the sheer mass of men they can bring to the fight. We’ll make them pay, but we won’t stop them.’
Late in the afternoon another bolt thrower’s torsion bar failed, with equally dire results for the crew who lost two men badly injured to the flailing bowstring. Leontius pondered taking a replacement part from the sole remaining weapon on the eastern wall, but decided against the idea after a moment of thought.
‘Better to keep some means of lighting up the bridge on your side of the defence, eh Tribune? It surely can’t be long now before your friend Balodi arrives on the scene?’
As darkness fell he shook his head at a request from his first spear to withdraw the Britons from the defences and pull them back into the fort.
‘The blighters are within a dozen feet of the rampart, close enough that a good stout wooden plank might just be enough to get them across and over the wall. You can withdraw half the cohort at a time, but I want five centuries on duty and ready to fight them off if they try to jump the gap without finishing the ramp.’
The slaves laboured on into the night by the light of torches carried by the warriors whose sticks and whips continued to goad them on through their obvious exhaustion. Scaurus accompanied the fort’s officers back up onto the walls after they had taken a quiet dinner, throughout which he had brooded on their situation with the look of a man wrestling with a personal dilemma. The torches illuminating the ramp had clearly edged perceptibly closer in the hour or so that they had been at their meal, and Julius’s prediction looked likely to be fulfilled sooner rather than later. With a decisive nod he turned to Leontius, pointing down at the activity below them.
‘Purta has made an error in continuing to drive the ramp’s construction after dark. I think that the time has come to put a stop to this activity, at least for the time being?’
Scaurus explained his idea, and Leontius’s approval was as enthusiastic as ever, though tempered by the unavoidable impact on the slaves labouring below them. Once all sources of light that might betray their new tactic had been removed from the fort’s walls, the Thracian archers were marched up onto the fighting platform one century at a time, until the side of the fort which faced the attackers was thronged with men, standing as instructed in perfect silence. Leontius muttered an instruction to his runner, chopping his hand forcefully down into an open palm.
‘Pass the signal to illuminate the enemy, and then to evacuate the forward positions.’
After a moment for the order to reach the forward troops, a handful of lights appeared in the darkness below them, thin shelled pots filled with pitch and topped with burning rags. The men holding the improvised missiles promptly threw them over the ditch’s defensive wall and into the toiling workers where they broke, their sticky contents ignited by the flaming linen to spill across soil and workers alike. Screams rose out of the darkness as several bodies writhed in incandescent agony, their clothing aflame, and Marcus watched as Scaurus put a hand over his eyes in horror. Looking down from the wall he saw dark shapes hurrying away from the ditch, and a moment later the Thracian’s prefect barked an order to his archers.
‘Archers, at one hundred paces, ready!’
With a rustle of arrows being drawn from their quivers the Thracians prepared to shoot, their bows creaking in the night’s calm. If the Sarmatae realised what was about to happen, the screams of the burning slaves hindered any attempt to order a withdrawal.
‘Archers. . shoot!’
The Thracians loosed their missiles at the lights dancing below them, hundreds of arrows arching down into the compact mass of slaves trapped under their bows. A renewed chorus of agonised screams rent the night air as dozens of men, women and children staggered and died under the storm of arrows.
‘Ready. . shoot!’
Another volley flashed down from the walls to riddle slaves and warriors alike, the sounds of their pain and distress redoubling in volume. Men were shouting from behind the mass of slaves, although whether their commands were to retreat or stand fast under the hail of ir
on was unclear.
‘Ready. . shoot!’
The third volley broke the slaves as completely as an infantry charge might have done, and the sounds reaching the wall became those of a desperate mob stampeding for perceived safety. The night was filled by both the desperate shouts of men as yet unhurt but in fear of their lives, and the pitiful cries of those pierced by arrows or simply trampled underfoot in the mob’s panic.
The Thracian prefect looked to Leontius, but the fort’s commander shook his head and raised his hand to order another volley.
‘Archers, at two hundred paces, ready!’ The bowmen raised their weapons to give the arrows greater range, stretching the bowstrings back to their ears in readiness to send them high into the air. ‘Shoot!’
The fourth volley whistled away, leaving a moment’s silence before the arrows rained down amid the fleeing slaves and warriors, eliciting yet more screams and further panic, and Marcus knew that Leontius would repeat his hand signal before the gesture was made.
‘At three hundred paces, ready!’ The bows were now pointed up at the stars, their wielders forcing every possible ounce of effort into their weapons to send them high into the night sky for maximum reach. ‘Shoot!’
The cries of distress were distant now, and sounded oddly tired to Marcus’s ears, as if those men struck by this final volley were so exhausted from their flight that they could muster no more energy to protest against their cruel fortune than a groan of dismay. Leontius nodded to the Thracian prefect, who turned back to his men with an unreadable expression.
‘Archers, stand down. First Spear, take them back to quarters.’
The officers watched as the Thracians filed off the walls with blank faces, their minds closed to the havoc they had inflicted on the defenceless slaves. From the ditch below them the cries of the wounded were the only sound remaining in what was otherwise a sudden silence, incongruous after the long day’s chaotic din.
Leontius congratulated Scaurus sombrely, although there was no mistaking the relief in his voice.
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