Fire in the East

by Harry Sidebottom

  ‘We must help them,’ Demetrius blurted.

  Ballista did not reply.

  ‘We must do something,’ the Greek boy continued.

  ‘Sure it would be good,’ said Maximus, ‘but there is nothing to be done. It will all be over by the time we get any troops there. And, anyway, we cannot afford to lose any more men.’

  Ballista watched for a while in silence, then said that they should go to the southern wicket gate, in case there were any survivors. Climbing down the steps from the Porta Aquaria, the northerner turned things over in his mind.

  Ballista had been driven by the words dinned into him by his mentors in fieldcraft: a passive defence is no defence at all. An inactive defence not only hands all the initiative, all the momentum to the besiegers, it undermines the defenders’ discipline, their very will to resist. So, since the burning of the ram, Ballista had quite frequently sent out small nocturnal raiding parties. But his heart had somehow not been in it.

  The death of Antigonus had changed things. In Antigonus he had lost a master of clandestine operations. How the northerner missed him. Ballista thought back to the masterly way in which Antigonus had wiped out the Sassanids left stranded on the island in the Euphrates after the first failed assault on the city: twenty dead Persians, and not one Roman had fallen. Among the high reeds that night, death had come to the terrified easterners with bewildering speed and efficiency. The raiders Ballista had sent out since had tried their best, but the results had been mixed. Sometimes they were spotted and the mission abandoned near the start. As often as not they took as many casualties as they inflicted. And now, tonight, there was this unqualified disaster. Whatever the textbooks said, whatever the doctrines of his mentors, Ballista would send out no more raids.

  Ballista stood by the open wicket gate and thought of Antigonus. It was strange how in a very brief time he had come to rely on him. It was one of the strange things about warfare - it quickly formed strong bonds between unlikely men, then with death it could even more suddenly break them. Ballista remembered the artillery ball taking off Antigonus’s head; the decapitated corpse standing for a few moments, the fountain of blood.

  Lungs burning, limbs aching, sweat running into his eyes, Castricius plunged on through the reed bed. He had hurled away his helmet, ripped off his mail coat when he reached the foot of the cliff. In flight lay his only hope of safety. On and on he ran, the date palms waving above his head, stumbling as roots twined round his legs. Once he fell full length in the mud, the breath knocked out of him. Fighting the exhaustion and despair that told him just to stay where he was, he struggled to his feet and plunged on.

  With no warning, Castricius was clear of the reed beds. Ahead in the moonlight was the bare rock floor of the ravine; on the far side of it a group of torches along the low wall and around the wicket gate. There was no sound of pursuit. He set off at a run nevertheless. It would be a shame to get this far, so close to safety, and then be cut down.

  They heard him coming before they saw him; the rasping breath, the dragging footfall. Into the circle of torchlight stumbled an unarmed man covered in mud. His hands were bleeding.

  ‘Well, if it is not the tunnel rat Castricius,’ said Maximus.

  As spring turned to summer, deserters crawled through the ravines or slunk across the plain in both directions. It was a feature of siege warfare that never failed to amaze Ballista. No matter how futile the siege, some defenders would flee to the besieging army. No matter how doomed the fortress, some of the attackers would risk everything to join the encircled men. Demetrius said that he remembered reading in Josephus’s Jewish War that there had even been deserters from the Roman army into Jerusalem just days before the great city was captured and burnt. Of course there was an obvious explanation. Armies consisted of a very large number of very violent men. Some of these would always commit crimes that carried the death penalty. To avoid death, or just postpone it for a short time, men would do the strangest things. Yet Ballista could not help but wonder why these men, especially among the besiegers, did not instead try to slip away and hide, try to find somewhere far away where they might be able to reinvent themselves.

  There was a trickle of Sassanid deserters into Arete, never more than twenty, although it was suspected that others had been quietly despatched by the first guards they encountered. They were a great deal of trouble. Ballista and Maximus spent a lot of time interviewing them. Bagoas was emphatically not allowed to talk to them. It proved impossible to distinguish between the genuine asylum seekers and the planted spies and saboteurs. In the end, having had a few of them parade along the wall in an attempt to upset the besieging army, Ballista ordered all of them locked up in a barracks just off the campus martius. It was an unwanted extra problem. Ten legionaries from the century stationed there in reserve, that of Antoninus Posterior, had to be detailed to guard them. They had to be fed and watered.

  Initially, larger numbers slipped out of Arete. This soon stopped. The Sassanids had a summary way with them. Along the plain, tapering wooden stakes were erected. The deserters were impaled on them, the spike through the anus. It was meant to be horrific. It succeeded. Some of the victims lived for hours. The Sassanids had placed the stakes just within artillery range, taunting the Romans to try to end the suffering of those who had been their companions. Ballista ordered that ammunition not be wasted. After the corpses had hung there for a few days the Sassanids took them down and decapitated them. The heads were shot by artillery back over the walls of the town, the bodies thrown out for the dogs.

  If there was a motive beyond an enjoyment of cruelty for its own sake, Ballista assumed that the Sassanids wished to discourage anyone from leaving Arete to keep the demand for food in the town as high as possible. If the Persians hoped in this way to cause supply problems, they would be disappointed. Ballistas’ stockpiling in the months before the siege had worked well. With careful management, there was enough food to last until at least the autumn.

  The relative abundance of supplies was augmented by the arrival of a boat carrying grain. It was from Circesium, the nearest Roman-held town upriver. The passage of fifty or so miles had not been without incident. Sassanid horsemen were out in force on both banks. Luckily for the crew, the Euphrates, although winding, was wide enough to be beyond bowshot for most of its course here if one kept to the middle passage. The boat tied up opposite the Porta Aquaria on 9 June, ironically enough the festival of the vestalia, a public holiday for the bakers.

  The crew was somewhat put out. Having run considerable risks, it had been hoping for a more voluble reception. Yet, in many ways, the arrival was something of a disappointment to the beleaguered garrison of Arete. Additional grain was welcome but not essential. When the boat was sighted the general expectation was that it was full of reinforcements. The crew of ten legionaries seconded from Legio IIII was a very poor substitute.

  Never really having expected more men, Ballista had been hoping for letters. There was one. It was from the governor of Coele Syria, the nominal superior of the Dux Ripae. It was dated nearly a month earlier, written en route for Antioch _ ‘Well away from any nasty Persians’ as Demetrius acidly commented.

  The letter contained self-proclaimed wonderful news. The emperor Gallienus, having crushed the barbarians on the Danube, had appointed his eldest son, Publius Cornelius Licinius Valerianus, Caesar. The new Caesar would remain on the Danube while the most sacred Augustus Gallienius toured the Rhine. In Asia Minor the gods had manifested their love for the empire, a love engendered by the piety of the emperors, by raising the river Rhyndacus in flood and thus saving the city of Cyzicus from an incursion of Goth pirates.

  There was nothing else in the governor’s communication except platitudinous advice and encouragement: Remain alert, keep up the good work, disciplina always tells. Ballista had been hoping for a communication from the emperors, something in purple ink with the imperial seal that could be waved around to raise morale, something with some definite news of a
gathering imperial field army, a relief column tramping towards them - possibly even something that contained a projected date for the lifting of the siege. Being informed that old-fashioned Roman virtus would always endure was less than enormously useful.

  The wider picture grew worse after a private conversation over a few drinks with the legionaries from the boat put the ‘wonderful news’ into context. Far from crushing the barbarians on the Danube, Gallienus had had to buy peace from the Carpi, the tribe he had been fighting there, so that he was free to move to the Rhine, where the Franks and the Alamanni were causing havoc. The new Caesar was just a child, a mere figurehead left on the Danube, where real power was in the hands of the general Ingenuus. The flood waters of the Rhyndacus might have saved Cyzicus but nothing had stopped the Goths sacking Chalcedon, Nicomedia, Nicaea, Prusa and Apamea. The whole of Asia Minor was threatened. The general Felix, accompanied by the great siege engineer Celsus, had been sent to hold Byzantium. Valerian himself, with the main field army, had marched into Cappadocia to try to drive the Goths from Asia Minor.

  Bad as the news of public affairs was, Ballista was more disappointed that there was no letter from Julia. He missed his wife very much. It had not been beyond the bounds of possibility that a letter written by her in Rome or from Sicily could have found its way to the eastern extremity of the imperium, to Circesium and on to the boat. With any letter Julia wrote she was bound to enclose a drawing by their son, a scribble of such abstraction that only the boy himself could tell what it depicted. It was ten months since Ballista had seen his son. Isangrim would be growing fast. Changing quickly, but hopefully not out of all recognition.

  Battening down his disappointments, Ballista turned back to marshalling his meagre resources to defend the town. The ten new legionaries were assigned to the century of Lucius Fabius at the Porta Aquaria on the grounds that their experience as boatmen might be of more use there than elsewhere. Casualties had been surprisingly light on the day the great battering ram had been burnt and only a few had been lost to occasional Persian arrows or in unfortunate forays until the disaster in which the young optio Prosper died. The centuries of Legio IIII on the desert wall still mustered nearly fifty men each, the turmae of Cohors XX forty. Ballista had reinforced them with another hundred of the levy bowmen from the numerus of Iarhai. The northerner hoped that serving alongside the regulars would both instill resolve in the conscripted townsmen and encourage their expertise. He was very aware that it might go differently, that the lax discipline of the levies might infect the regulars. So far, things seemed to be going as Ballista wished, but he would have liked it if Iarhai would appear more often on the battlements. The grizzled caravan protector seemed ever less inclined to have anything to do with the military affairs of the siege.

  As the season advanced to high summer the temperature grew ever hotter. From the walls of Arete mirages could often be seen shimmering out in the desert, making distances difficult to judge, masking the movement of the Persians. For a northerner, the heat was almost intolerable. As soon as clothes were put on, they were soaked in sweat. Sword belts and armour straps chafed, rubbing skin raw. But that was not the worst of it. There was dust everywhere. It got into eyes, ears, mouths, down into lungs. Everyone who was not a native of the town had a persistent hacking cough. The dust somehow penetrated into the very pores of your skin. And then there were the flies and gnats, continually buzzing and stinging, covering any morsel of food, swarming on the brim of every drink.

  There were only two moments of the day when it was less than hellish to be outside. In the evening, the temperature dropped as a cooler breeze blew over the Euphrates and the sky turned briefly a lapis-lazuli blue. Just pre-dawn, the wild fowl flew and the bowl of the sky was a delicate pink before the sun was hauled free of the horizon to begin its task of punishing men.

  At noon on 6 July, the first day of the festival of the Ludi Apollinares, Ballista was lying in the pool of the frigidarium avoiding the heat of the day. As the bathhouse was the private one attached to the palace of the Dux Ripae, the northerner was on his own. Castricius, his latest standard-bearer, walked in and saluted smartly.

  ‘A large dustcloud has been spotted off to the south, our side of the river, heading this way.’

  By the time Ballista had reached his accustomed post on the Palmyrene Gate the dustcloud was unmistakable. A tall, dense, isolated column, it could be caused by nothing but an enormous train of men and animals marching upriver. Most likely, the vanguard would reach the Sassanid camp by early afternoon the next day.

  The Persian column made good time. By noon its forerunners could be seen approaching the camp. Line after line after line of camels stretched away as far as the eye could see. Swaying gently, all were heavily laden, some were hauling things along the ground. Ballista saw that there were next to no accompanying troops. The Sassanids were supremely confident.

  ‘What is it? There seem to be very few armed men. That must be good.’ Several soldiers smiled at Demetrius’s words.

  ‘Unfortunately not,’ said Ballista. ‘They already have all the warriors they need.’

  ‘Probably more than they want,’ said Mamurra. ‘They outnumber us by so many they actually could do with fewer mouths to feed. And the danger of plague is always greater with a really large army.’

  ‘Then those camels are carrying food?’ Demetrius asked.

  ‘I do not think that we are going to be that lucky.’ Ballista wiped the sweat out of his eyes. ‘I am very much afraid they carry timber.’ The soldiers within earshot nodded gravely but, seeing that the young Greek seemed none the wiser, Ballista continued. ‘One of the things that has kept us safe, kept the Persians so quiet for the last couple of months, is the lack of timber around here. What little there was we burnt before they arrived. You need wood for pretty much all siege works - to build artillery, siege towers, battering rams, ladders, mantlets, tortoises and all types of screens. You need wood for pit props if you are mining. Taking a town calls for lots of wood - unless, of course, you just offer the defenders big sacks of gold to go away.’

  ‘If only, Dominus, if only,’ said Castricius.

  ‘Yes, indeed, Draconarius, it is a pity that the Sassanids are such bloodthirsty fuckers that they would rather impale us than bribe us.’

  It took two full days before the last of the caravan arrived. The Persian camp now flowed over all the plain as far as the hills. Camels bellowed, men shouted, trumpets called. Although all seemed chaotic, some organizing principle must have been at work. Within a day, carpenters could be seen hard at work, the fires of mobile field forges were fired, and strings of unloaded camels were heading off to the north-west.

  The camels returned a day later. Gangs of men could be seen unloading bricks. This time it was the praefectus fabrum, Mamurra, who explained the finer points of siege engineering to the young Greek.

  ‘They are going to build a siege ramp to try to overtop the wall at some point. Now, a siege ramp, an agger, is mainly built up out of earth and rubble. But the soil round here is sand, spreads as easily as one of Maximus’s women, so they need retaining walls. That is what the bricks are for. The reptiles have not been as idle as we thought. They have been making sun-dried bricks somewhere out of sight, probably up in one of the villages in the hills to the north-west. With all that wood they are making vinae, mobile shelters for the poor bastards who are going to have to build the agger, and artillery to try and fuck our ballistae and stop us killing them all.’

  ‘Thucydides tells that it took the Spartans seventy days to build their siege ramp at Plataea,’ said Demetrius hopefully.

  ‘If we can delay them that long it would be good,’ Mamurra replied.

  ‘Is there nothing we can do to stop them?’

  Ballista slapped a fly on his arm. ‘No need for despair.’ He looked closely at the squashed insect and flicked it away. ‘I can think of something that might work.’

  During the night of ao July the Sassanids moved the
ir artillery, thirty ballistae, into range opposite the southern end of the desert wall. Sunrise saw them emplaced behind stout screens some 200 paces out. The artillery duel began again. By lunchtime long chains of vinae were in place, making three long tunnels, at the front of which the beginnings of the ramp began to be evident. The long period of inactivity was over. The siege of Arete had entered a new and deadly phase.

  ‘You look like a man offering a bun to an elephant. Come on, hand it over.’ Although Ballista spoke with a smile, the doctor was plainly terrified. He was a civilian. His shabby tunic suggested that he was not at the peak of his profession. He held the arrow in both hands. Or rather, he had both arms held out, palms up, the arrow resting on them. His whole demeanour said, ‘This is nothing to do with me.’

  Seeing that the doctor was not going to move, Ballista slowly stepped forward. Making no sudden movements, as if the doctor were a nervous horse, he took the arrow. The northerner studied it closely. In most respects it was unremarkable, about two and a half foot long, with a three-bladed and barbed iron arrowhead about two inches long. On this, blood and human tissue were still evident. As with most eastern arrows, the shaft consisted of two parts, a tapering wooden footing joined to a longer shaft of reed. For reinforcement, the join was bound with animal tendon. The shaft was decorated with bands of paint, one of black and two of red. What was left of the three feathers which made up the fletching appeared not to be coloured but a natural white. Possibly goose feathers, Ballista thought.

  The arrow shaft bore various cuts and nicks, no doubt the legacy of whatever hooked and hideous instruments the doctor had employed during extraction. But what made this arrow so unusual and potentially so significant was the strip of papyrus unravelling from it. The papyrus had been bound around the very end of the shaft. The feathers of the fletching had been glued on top of it. The papyrus was some three inches long and about half an inch wide. Its inner face was covered with Greek characters written in a small, neat hand. There was no punctuation, but of course that was quite normal. Ballista tried to read it, but he could make out no words. All that emerged was a random-seeming sequence of Greek letters. He detached the coded message and handed it to Demetrius.