The Sassanids stopped. The four on the wings had arrows notched, their bows half bent. There looked to be about ten in the main body.
‘Vardan, son of Nashbad, leading a patrol of the warriors of the Suren.’ The voice was one used to authority. ‘And who are you? You have a strange accent.’ I
‘Titus Petronius Arbiter and Tiberius Claudius Nero.’ At the sound of the Roman names the starlight glittered on the swords which the Sassanids drew, from the flanks bows creaked as they were pulled to maximum draw. ‘Mariades, the rightful Emperor of the Romans is our master. Shapur the King of Kings himself decreed that his servant Mariades send men to reconnoitre by stealth the postern gate of the town of the unrighteous.’
There was silence for a while. Ballista could feel his heart beating, his palms sweating. At length Vardan replied. ‘And how do I know that you are not deserters from the Great Emperor Mariades?’ There was a wealth of scorn in ‘Great Emperor’. ‘Roman scum running to its own kind?’
‘If we were fools enough to desert into a doomed town we would deserve to die.’
‘There are many fools in the world, and many of them are Romans. Maybe I should take you back to camp to see if your story is true?’
‘Do that and I will come and watch you impaled tomorrow morning. I doubt that the Mazda-worshipping Shapur, King of Aryans and Non-Aryans, will take kindly to his orders being countermanded by an officer of the Suren.’
Vardan walked forward. His men were clearly taken by surprise. They started walking hurriedly after their commander. Vardan held his long sword at Ballista’s throat. The others closed round. The commander put his sword aside and peered closely into Ballista’s face. The northerner returned his gaze.
‘Uncover the lantern. I want to see the face of this one.’ A Persian behind Vardan began to move.
‘No. Do not do that.’ Ballista put all his experience of command into his voice. ‘The great King’s mission will fail if you show a light. The Romans up on the wall could not fail to see it. Shapur will not get the information, and we will meet our deaths at the foot of that wall.’
There was an awful moment of indecision before Vardan told the lantern-bearer to remain as he was.
Vardan brought his face so close that Ballista could smell his breath; a waft of some exotic spices. ‘Even in the dark with your face blackened like a runaway slave I can still see you well enough to recognize you again.’ Vardan nodded to himself. Ballista did not move. ‘If this is a trick, if you are in the town when it falls, I will seek you out and there will be a reckoning. It will be I that watches you writhe on the stake.’
‘Mazda willing that will not happen.’ Ballista took a step backwards, keeping his hands well away from his sides. ‘The night is advanced. If we are to return by dawn we must be going.’
Ballista looked over at Maximus, jerked his head towards the wall and walked to the edge of the circle of Sassanid warriors. The two blocking his way did not move. He turned back to Vardan. ‘If we do not return tell our master Mariades that we did our duty. Remember our names: Petronius and Nero.’
Vardan did not reply. But at his sign the two men blocking Ballista’s way moved aside. Ballista set off.
It is very difficult to walk normally when you think that someone is watching you and even more difficult when you think that someone might try to kill you. Ballista forced down an urge to break into a run. Maximus, Allfather bless him, had fallen in directly behind his dominus. The Hibernian would take the first arrow. Yet Ballista’s back still felt terribly exposed.
Fifty paces was about the real limit of accurate bowshot, less in a dim light. How far had they walked? Ballista started to count his steps, stumbled slightly and went back to concentrating on walking as normally as possible. The walk seemed to last for ever. The muscles in his thighs felt twitchy.
In the end, the wall of the ravine came as almost a surprise. Both men turned, crouching, making themselves the smallest target possible. Ballista realized that he was panting. His tunic was soaked in sweat.
‘For fuck’s sake, Petronius and Nero?’ Maximus whispered.
‘It’s your fault. If you ever read anything apart from the Satyricon some other names might have appeared in my mind. Anyway, let’s get the fuck out of here. We are not home yet. The reptiles might change their minds and be after us.’
Demetrius was standing just outside the postern gate. He was surprised to find himself there. Admittedly Cocceius the decurion and two of his troopers were there as well. But even so Demetrius was surprised by his own bravery. Part of his mind kept telling him that he could hear and see just as well, maybe better, up on the tower. He pushed such thoughts away. There was a strange exhilaration in being outside the walls after so many months.
Demetrius stood with the three soldiers, listening and watching. The dark was alive with small sounds; the scurrying of nocturnal animals, the sudden rush of wings of a night bird. The gentle wind had moved round to the south. Fragments of sound, voices, laughter, the cough of a horse, drifted across from the Persian pickets on the far side of the ravine. Once, a jackal barked and others joined in. The chink of pickaxes came and went. But there was nothing that betrayed the progress of Ballista and Maximus.
The young Greek’s thoughts drifted far away to the dark plain before the walls of Troy, to the Trojan Dolon slinging his bow across his shoulders, pulling the pelt of a grey wolf around him and stealing forth to spy out the Greek camp. Things had not gone well for Dolon. Out there across the dark plain he had been hunted down like a hare by cunning Odysseus and Diomedes of the great war cry. In tears, begging for his life, Dolon had revealed how the Trojan pickets lay. It had done him no good. With a slash of his sword Diomedes had cut through the tendons of his neck. His head dropped in the dust, and his corpse was stripped of his back-strung bow and the grey wolf-pelt.
Demetrius fervently prayed that Ballista and Maximus did not share the fate of Dolon. If the young Greek had had the poetry of Homer to hand he would have tried to see how things would fall out. It was a well-known method of divination to pick a line of the Iliad at random and see what light the divine Homer shed on the future.
The thoughts of Demetrius were dragged back to the present by the sounds of a Sassanid patrol making its way along the ravine up from the river. He heard the challenge ‘Peroz-Shapur’ and the response, ‘Mazda’, then a low exchange in Persian. Demetrius found himself, like the others, on the lip of the ravine, leaning forward, straining to catch the words. It was pointless. He did not know a word of Persian.
Demetrius physically jumped as a flood of light came from the postern gate. He spun round. In silhouette in front of the gate stood Acilius Glabrio. The torchlight caught the nobleman’s gilded cuirass. It was moulded to resemble the muscles of an athlete or hero. Acilius Glabrio was bareheaded. The curls of his elaborate coiffure shone. His face was in shadow.
‘What in the name of the gods below is happening here?’ The patrician tones sounded angry. ‘Decurion, why is this gate open?’
‘Orders, Dominus. Orders of the Dux.’
‘Nonsense, his orders were that this gate remain shut at all times.’
‘No, Dominus. He told me to keep the gate open until dawn.’ The junior officer was cowed by the seemingly barely controlled anger of his superior.
‘And why would he do that? To make it easy for the Persians to get in?’
‘No ... no, Dominus. He and his bodyguard are out there.’
‘Are you mad? Or have you been drinking on duty? If you have I will have you executed with old-fashioned severity. You know what that entails.’
Demetrius did not know what that entailed, but presumably Cocceius did. The decurion started to shake slightly. Demetrius wondered if Acilius Glabrio’s anger was real.
‘Even our beloved Dux is not such a barbarian that he would desert his post to run around outside the walls in the middle of the night.’
Acilius Glabrio half turned. He pointed to the gate. ‘You h
ave moments to get inside and return to your post before I have this gate shut.’
Arguing with senior officers did not come easily to Cocceius. ‘Dominus, the Dux is still out there. If you close the gate he will be trapped.’
‘One more word from you and it is mutiny. Inside now.’
The two troopers sheepishly went inside. Cocceius started to move.
‘No.’ Demetrius almost shouted. ‘The Dux heard the sounds of tunnelling. He has gone to spy out where the Persian mine is being dug.’
Acilius Glabrio rounded on him. ‘And what have we here? The barbarian’s little bum boy.’ He stepped close to Demetrius. He smelt of carnations. The torchlight highlighted the little ruffs of beard that were teased out in curls from his neck. ‘What are you doing here? Selling your arse to this decurion and a few of his troopers so that they open the gate and let you desert?’
‘Listen to the boy, Dominus. He is telling the truth,’ Cocceius said.
The intervention attracted the full attention of Acilius Glabrio. Now the young patrician’s anger was palpably genuine. Turning from Demetrius, he approached the decurion. ‘Have I not warned you? Inside now.’
Cocceius dared a final appeal. ‘But Dominus, the Dux ... we cannot just abandon him out there.’
Forgetting the sword at his side, Demetrius bent down and picked up a rock.
‘Are you disobeying a direct order, Decurion?’
Demetrius felt the rock sharp and gritty in his hand. The curls on the back of Acilius Glabrio’s head shone in the torchlight.
‘Ave, Tribunus Laticlavius.’ A voice came from beyond the torchlight.
Acilius Glabrio whirled round. His sword rasped from its sheath. He crouched, his body tense.
Two ghostly figures, blackened and streaked with dust, emerged into the circle of light. The taller pulled a cloth from his head. His long fair hair fell to his shoulders.
‘I must congratulate you, Tribunus, on your diligence. Patrolling the ramparts in the dead of night, most admirable,’ Ballista said. ‘But now I think that we should all go inside. We have much to discuss. We have a new danger to face.’
XV
Ballista went to take a last look at the Persian siege ramp. He peered out from behind the makeshift parapet. Virtually every day the Sassanid artillery smashed the parapet to pieces. Then that night the defenders rebuilt it.
Despite the thick cloud of dust the progress of the ramp was clear enough. The Persians had begun work thirteen days before the kalends of August. It was now nine days before the kalends of September. Counting inclusively, that was thirty-six days’ work. In thirty-six days the ramp had inched forward some forty paces and been slowly lifted up almost to the level of the parapet of the town wall. The ditch in front of the wall, which had taken the defenders such trouble to dig, had been packed with rubble. A gap like a canyon still separated the ramp from the defences. But the canyon was only about twenty paces wide, and it was partly filled by the defenders’ own earth bank up against the wall. When the canyon was filled the Sassanid storming party would have a final approach over a level land bridge some twenty-five paces wide.
The progress of the siege ramp had been bought at the cost of the back-breaking labour of thousands. Every morning in the grey light of pre-dawn the Persian vinae, the mobile shelters, were pushed forward and joined together to form three long covered walkways. Under these, lines of men laboured to bring up the earth, rubble and timber that those at the front, protected by stout screens, dropped down into the space before the ramp. At the sides of the ramp more workers, again protected by screens, levered and mortared into place the mud bricks which formed the retaining walls.
The ramp’s progress had been bought at the cost of the lives of many, many men in the Sassanid ranks. Soon after work had begun Ballista had sited the town’s four twenty-pounder artillery pieces behind the wall in line with the ramp. Several houses had been demolished to create the new artillery emplacement. Those property owners that could be found had been promised compensation - should the town not fall. Every morning the vinae had to advance on the same lines, and then stay in place throughout the long day. Every morning the ballistarii in charge of the twenty-pounders, having checked the settings of their weapons, could fire blind at a high trajectory over the wall, reasonably confident that, sooner or later, with help from the spotters on the wall, one of their smooth round stones would hit one of the vinae at terrifying speed; would smash its wood and leather and reduce to a sickening pulp the men labouring in the illusory safety beneath.
As soon as the look-outs on the wall shouted, ‘hit, hit,’ the defending bowmen would emerge from the shelters they had dug in the base of the town’s internal glacis, sprint up to the battlements and pour a devastating hail of iron- and bronze -tipped arrows into those Sassanids exposed as they feverishly worked to repair or reposition the vinae.
Ballista had ordered that the two six-pounder artillery pieces sited on the towers at the threatened stretch of wall concentrate on the bricklayers working on the ramps’ retaining walls. The ballistarii in charge of these had a clear line of vision. The screens could not withstand repeated impacts. Here again, over time, the slaughter was immense.
The Sassanid artillery had done what it could to destroy its counterparts. But so far they had been unable seriously to curtail the havoc caused by the defenders. Ballista had had to replace both the six-pounders and most of their crews twice, and one of the twenty-pounders had been smashed beyond repair. There were no further reserves of stone-throwers. Yet the volume of shooting had been little reduced.
As Ballista watched, a six-pound stone moving almost too fast to see crashed into one of the screens shielding the bricklayers. Splinters flew, a cloud of dense dust erupted, the screen seemed to buckle, yet it remained in place. Another one or two of those and that will be another gone: more dead reptiles, and another delay.
Ballista ducked back behind the parapet. He sat down, resting his back against it, thinking. Every night the Sassanids withdrew to start again the next morning. Why? Why did they not work through the night? They had the manpower. If Ballista had been their commander they would have done. The northerner had read somewhere that under the previous eastern empire, that of the Parthians, there had been a reluctance to fight at night. Maybe it was the same with their Persian successors. Yet they had been digging the mine from the ravine at night. Possibly it took something special to drive them to it. It was a mystery - but war was one long series of inexplicable events.
‘I have seen all I need for now. Let us go down.’ Crouching, Ballista moved to the stairwell in the roof of the tower, and down the stairs. He walked the few paces to the northern of his two mines. Castricius was waiting just inside. Ballista waved his entourage in first: Maximus, Demetrius, the North African scribe, two messengers and a couple of equites singulares.
‘We can talk here.’ Ballista sat down. Castricius squatted down next to him, Demetrius near by. Ballista noted the solid-looking lintel, the thick pit props. It was not too bad here, just near the entrance. The oppression of the enclosed space could not overwhelm him when it was but three or four steps from the open air.
On the other side of the mine a line of men passed baskets of spoil from hand to hand out of the tunnel.
Castricius produced several scraps of papyrus, all covered in his scrawled writing. He expounded with admirable clarity and brevity the course of his tunnel. It was under the wall, under the outer glacis, and was scrabbling like a mole towards the Persian siege ramp. Consulting one piece of papyrus after another, he outlined his projected needs for pit props and slats to hold up the sides and roof, lamps and torches to light the work, and various incendiaries and their containers for the ultimate purpose of the mine. As Ballista approved the figures, Demetrius wrote them down.
Castricius went to check on progress; Ballista sat in silence where he was. A Sassanid missile thundered into the wall above. A fine shower of earth fell from the roof. Ballista, from wonde
ring if the opposite pit prop was slightly off centre, found himself thinking about Castricius and his changes of fortune. He must have committed a terrible crime to have been sent to the mines. He had survived that hell, which spoke of uncommon resilience; he had joined the army (was there a regulation that should have prevented that?); finding the corpse of Scribonius Mucianus had brought his knowledge of mines to the attention of his Dux; being one of the three survivors of the ill-fated expedition of the young optio Prosper had won him the post of standard-bearer to Ballista. Now, for a second time, his experience of the mines had aided him, bringing promotion to acting centurion to dig this tunnel.
Another stone hit the wall; more dust drifted down. From this mine and the mutability of fortune, Ballista’s thoughts moved along unconsidered back roads to the question of treachery. Demetrius had not been able to unravel its secrets, but the mere existence of the coded message attached to the arrow showed that there was still at least one traitor in the city of Aretc - or, at least that the Persians thought there was still a traitor active in the town. Ballista was sure they were right.
What did he know about the traitor? Almost certainly, he had murdered Scribonius Mucianus. He had burnt the artillery magazine. He had tried to organize the burning of the granaries. He was in communication, albeit sometimes interrupted, with the Sassanids. Clearly the traitor wanted the city to fall. Who could want such a thing, such a very monstrous thing? Could it be one of the townsmen, one of those who had lost their homes, family tombs, temples, slaves and all the liberties that were most precious to them because of the defensive measures Ballista had put in place? And hadn’t he played his own part? How far could one go before destroying the very thing one was trying to protect?
If it was one of the townsmen, it was a rich one. Naptha cost a lot of money; it stank: only the rich could afford it, and the luxury of space to conceal its noxious smell. If the traitor was a townsman, it had to be one of the elite, one of the caravan protectors - Anamu, Ogelos, even Iarhai — or one of the other town councillors, like that ever-smiling Christian Theodotus.
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