by R. W. Peake
The scale of the work for this second line was certainly much more ambitious, but he also had everyone but the men with him laboring, including every able-bodied man in the city, regardless of caste. In terms of complexity, it was a straightforward task, and it was, Abhiraka realized with some chagrin, something that he should have thought of years before. All that was being done was digging a deep and relatively wide canal around the northern side of the city, with both ends ultimately connecting with the river. If he had had the time, he would have made the ditch more than a hundred paces wide, and at least twenty feet deep, but there simply wasn’t enough of that precious commodity, even with every available man turned to the task. It would be half that wide, and only about ten feet deep, if there was time for it; even then, much depended on this first real battle in terms of buying time to complete it. Inadvertently aiding his cause was the sudden halt by the Romans, barely ten miles distant, where, against the advice of his counselors and the commander of his bodyguard, Abhiraka had insisted on riding to see for himself. Stopping about a mile away, thanks to the open ground, he got the chance to see for himself what a Roman marching camp looked like, and it stirred in him a sense of unease, particularly when the man who had been one of the scouting party that had been shadowing the enemy for the previous week said that this wasn’t unusual.
“You mean,” Abhiraka asked him, his eyes never leaving the sight of the dirt wall, wooden towers, in which he could see men, although they were too far away to make out whether they were staring this direction, “they do this every night?”
“Every night that we’ve been watching them, Highness,” his scout confirmed, but in his mind, this wasn’t the most bizarre thing, which he related next, “but in the morning, before they resume the march, they destroy their camp!”
This served to get Abhiraka’s attention, and he tore his eyes away to stare at the scout. It wasn’t that he disbelieved this man, necessarily, but this was so unusual that the thought crossed his mind, and it prompted him to ask sharply, “What do you mean, ‘destroy’?”
“I mean,” the scout answered, and while it was generally forbidden to look royalty in the eye, he felt it was worth the risk, “that they fill in the ditches, then burn the towers.”
Abhiraka stared at the man for a long moment, one that was uncomfortable for the other man, but then he turned his attention back to the camp.
“They don’t want to leave something behind that can be used by their enemies,” he concluded, then after a heartbeat, added grimly, “and it sends a signal to their own men.”
While the scout had reached the first conclusion on his own, now he looked over at Abhiraka in surprise, asking, “Signal, Highness? What sort of signal?”
“That they don’t intend to retreat,” the king replied succinctly. Then, having seen enough, he turned his horse and said, “We need to get back to make sure our surprise is ready.”
Abhiraka’s ignorance of the presence of Caesar and the fleet wasn’t due to incompetence, but it was based in his overestimation of his small navy and the underestimation of the massive fleet that it had taken almost eighteen months and a staggering amount of money to build, particularly in a relatively short period. Also, Caesar’s practice of having a screen of ships that sailed ahead of the main fleet, along with the composition of these ships, meant that any other vessel that wasn’t Roman was quickly swept up. To achieve this, the screening vessels were all of the style called the Liburnian, which were simply the fastest sailing craft in the known world. On those rare occasions where they encountered ships that were too heavily armed to be tackled by just one Liburnian, the mobility of these ships meant that, before one Roman craft got into trouble, the strange ship would be surrounded by at least a half-dozen other Liburnians. With only one exception, every ship’s master who found themselves in this predicament chose surrender, and it was in this manner that Caesar’s fleet was actually growing in size, as he confiscated any ship that didn’t belong to nations allied with Rome. Since the universal practice in the known world, save for the city-states of Greece, and Caesar’s fleet that used Legionaries to man the oars, was to use slaves, Caesar’s decision to use the newly captured Pattalans as partial crews did answer the nagging question the army had about them. However, Caesar had gone one step further than this; in exchange for agreeing to serve at the oars under Roman command, the slaves who were selected to remain with their respective ship were also promised their freedom once this campaign was complete. At the time, it certainly seemed to be a prescient decision; it helped relieve the cramped conditions aboard the existing ships, although these new additions only carried cargo and animals, but it would prove to be another source of trouble for Caesar in the future. And, when the single quadrireme that was the pride of the Bargosan king found itself quickly surrounded by Liburnians, its master, like every other before him in this situation, surrendered without a fight. Only one ship, a small bireme evaded capture initially, and for a brief period of time, it appeared as if it would manage to escape upriver to warn the Bargosans that there was another Roman force. It took one of the navarchae of the Liburnians actually ramming the bireme a half-mile up the river, holing it and sending it to rest on the river bottom, then slaughtering the crew as they foundered and thrashed for the riverbank before Caesar felt somewhat confident the threat of discovery was contained.
Only part of the growing tension in Caesar that his Centurions were witnessing was due to not knowing the fate of Pollio and half the army; the city of Bargosa had been under observation for the previous three days, and despite demanding updates almost by the watch, his scouts insisted that there was nothing that would indicate the Bargosans were aware of the approaching fleet. Caesar had not only learned of Abhiraka’s project of effectively making the city an island, he had already incorporated it into the burgeoning plan for taking the city, although he hadn’t uttered a word of it to Volusenus or any of the Primi Pili. Part of the reason could be attributed to Caesar’s general secretiveness in such matters, but it was mainly because he didn’t know enough about the construction of this new waterway. It was one thing for men to observe it from a good distance; Caesar had been informed that they had to shinny up trees to get a good look, but he wasn’t going to trust that this new canal would be wide enough for his purposes. Estimating the depth had been a relatively simple matter since the scouts had observed men working and, as long as these Bargosans weren’t a race of midgets, there would be enough draft for his biremes, and perhaps his triremes, provided that they weren’t loaded too heavily. The width was another matter; what he was being told was that it was at least fifty paces wide, which would be just wide enough for a single ship but certainly no more than that if they wanted any room to maneuver. This, he thought ruefully, was one of those times you have outsmarted yourself; one specification for the biremes constructed in Clysma had been that they be built much wider than the standard, and when one added the length of the oars on either side, he estimated that while there would be room to put some distance between a ship and the dirt wall from the spoil that lined the city side of the canal, his vessels would undoubtedly come under fire, probably literally, from archers positioned on that wall, loosing flaming missiles. It was just one of the many problems with what he was thinking of doing, but somewhat perversely; at least, this would be how men like Pullus viewed it, rather than repel him from the budding idea, Caesar found himself returning to it more, with every passing watch. Was it risky? Absolutely, but he also had the benefit that arose from his fleet growing, not shrinking. Nevertheless, he wouldn’t be making a decision until he had laid eyes on this canal itself, which he intended to do the next morning. He hadn’t lied to his Primi Pili about putting the rest of his cavalry ashore, along with at least one Legion, but he had intentionally left out the fact that he would be leading the cavalry. The only way for what he had in mind to work relied on precise information, and when it came to precision, at least of the level that Caesar required for this, there wa
s only one man he trusted…himself.
“He did what?” Pullus stared at Balbus, his face registering the utter shock his second in command’s words had caused.
“He went ashore,” Balbus repeated, enjoying the sight of his Primus Pilus so shocked, although he shared Pullus’ feelings.
Caesar had always been foolhardy in Pullus’ view; the times he had said as much in front of Scribonius and Balbus, he had either missed or ignored the look of wry amusement they exchanged at the thought that, of all people, Pullus would be commenting on it. This, however, particularly when two of the men who were the senior Legates were already missing, meant that only Volusenus, who had been appointed in overall command of the fleet, was left. And, while Volusenus was universally considered the best Praefectus Fabrorum any of the Centurions had ever served with, and he was at least competent at commanding Legions, he wasn’t in the same league as Pollio and Hirtius. One slight blessing, at least in Pullus’ view, was that Caesar had postponed the offloading of a Legion until his return, leaving the army with nothing to do but loaf aboard the ships. Some men took that time to go swimming, although the number of men who knew how to swim was pitifully small, and as Pullus watched from the railing, the germ of an idea was planted in his mind about something that would keep the men busy when the campaign season was over, provided the weather didn’t become too cold. Neither he nor any other man in Caesar’s army to this point had ever been this far to the south, and the idea of an equator was still several centuries away, but what Pullus and his comrades had already experienced was that the farther one traveled south, the hotter it became, and worse, more humid. Otherwise, it was a welcome respite, and when the afternoon squall came, the men were ready, having rigged their sagum together, or more commonly, the crew dragging out spare sails to create an awning that provided some respite from the downpour. Bored with watching the men floundering about, Pullus retired to his cabin, which he shared with Balbus when his friend didn’t sleep out on deck, deciding to catch up on his sleep; only the gods knew when he would have another chance. As well as he knew Caesar, he was acutely aware that when their general returned, it would be with a head full of ideas that always ended up with men sweating. If, he thought, he doesn’t do something stupid and get himself caught.
Pullus had nothing to worry about; Caesar was cautious, and with Gundomir on one side, and somewhat surprisingly, Teispes on the other, he never worried about his safety, if only because the two of them wouldn’t let him out of their sight. The transfer of both the German and Parthian from the posts in which they served when Caesar led the army out of Susa with the cavalry had occurred at Barbaricum; that Caesar had relented in this was due more to the fact that Gundomir had pestered him endlessly, insisting that the German’s place was by his general’s side, reminding Caesar that this was the role Gundomir had been fulfilling for well more than a decade, going all the way back to Gaul. What surprised Caesar; indeed, it would be more accurate to describe him as shocked, was when, once Caesar relented, Gundomir had suddenly made it conditional, the condition being that the one-eyed Parthian be transferred as well. And, after giving it a few moment’s thought, not only had Caesar conceded, he realized that he should have expected as much, at least how Gundomir and Teispes had bonded with each other. As the weeks passed, and the two men spent more time in each other’s company, that bond had steadily grown, much to the discomfiture of both men, who at least made a pretense of not trusting each other completely, a fiction that Caesar quickly saw through once in their company for more than a watch. Regardless, they both made sure Caesar was never out of their sight as he moved eastward from the shoreline on the north side of the river. His stealth was aided by the fact that barely fifty paces from where the dirty brown water changed to the dirty brown of the beach, there was an unbroken line of thick vegetation.
This also marked the first time that Caesar and the men of his army became acquainted with a tree that was not only ubiquitous, but was awesome to behold. With trunks that weren’t actually composed of one solid mass, but what seemed to be dozens of smaller trunks that rose from the ground before merging into a larger one, it was the spread of the branches upward and outward, before curving gracefully in a downward direction that made them so unforgettable. The canopy of branches created by each tree could extend outward for thirty paces in circumference around the central part of the tree, creating an area of shade that meant that, once they entered this first forest, the rising sun was blotted out almost as much as the great forests of Germania on the other side of the Rhenus. The perpetual shadow created by what Caesar and his party could see stretching into the distance was almost total, making it somewhat cooler, at least in comparison, and under the cover of these awe-inspiring trees, Caesar and his party cautiously advanced in the direction of Bargosa. They had only gone a couple of miles from the beach when the forest ended, where they encountered the first of several cultivated fields, and a dilemma. The Germans acting as the advance scouts, seeing the sudden change in the form of the sight of unbroken sunlight, had dismounted and crept up to a spot where they could observe what awaited them. Working out in the field were several people; to the fair Germans, these were some of the darkest people they had ever seen, even more so than the Parthians, but what they were doing needed no explanation. With implements that, while these Germans wouldn’t ever stoop to using them, they recognized, the party of natives, consisting of several men, almost as many children, and a handful of women, were systematically working down the rows of plants that were about knee high. It didn’t take the Germans long to determine where the field ended and the land returned to its original stage, enabling them to maneuver past this first field without being forced out in the open, but before a third of a watch had passed after encountering this first field, Caesar and his party ran out of cover. Thankfully, there were no soldiers about, but at the same time, it was going to be impossible to get closer to the city unobserved, at least in a party as large as Caesar’s, and while he was loath to kill civilians, especially given his plans, neither was he willing to wait until nightfall. Consequently, the first of several local farmers mysteriously vanished, some of them never to be seen again, while the bodies of the others would be discovered in the shallow graves where they had been left, but only after several days when it was too late for the Bargosans to be alerted that Caesar was nearby.
It was shortly after noon before Caesar, who had insisted on forging ahead with just a half-dozen men, including the scout who had given the first report about the city, laid eyes on Bargosa himself. And, despite his age, and his status, like the scout who first laid eyes on the city, he was forced to climb up a tree before he was satisfied that he was at the best vantage point he could afford to risk. While Gundomir and Teispes, who had accompanied him to this observation spot, watched him clinging to a branch thirty feet up with a combination of amusement and concern, Caesar’s eyes missed nothing, sweeping the area around the city, which he saw was a great deal larger than Pattala, although it was slightly smaller than the twin cities of Ctesiphon and Seleucia. However, it was what Caesar didn’t see that was the most telling; aside from the small army of laborers, who he could see had already completed the canal and were now working on erecting a wooden palisade along the dirt wall, there was very little sign of a military presence. There were certainly sentries, and during the period of time he was watching, he saw small detachments of soldiers, who seemed to be armed with spears, although it was impossible to tell with any certainty because of the distance he was from the walls, marching along the rampart of the city. Outside the walls, which Caesar estimated to be no more than twenty feet high, with the construction being large blocks of the kind of fired mud brick that seemed standard in this part of the world, while there were soldiers visible scattered along the dirt wall, after observing them for a few moments, Caesar determined that these men weren’t watching for a threat but instead were ensuring that the working party performed their tasks. He realized this could be po
tentially important, since it indicated that the populace wasn’t fully invested in the protection of Bargosa, but that was for later; now, what mattered was that they were doing their collective part to strengthen the city defenses. Just as he was about to slide down out of the northern gate, which was now about three stadia from the newly created canal, a line of elephants appeared, each of them ridden by a single rider. So arresting was the sight of the beasts that Caesar was content to remain standing on the branch he was using as his platform and simply watch them. The animals weren’t armored, but were wearing large leather harnesses, and while Caesar observed, their handlers led them in single file towards Caesar, whose perch was to the west. As he watched, they were brought to a pile of large logs, each of a uniform length and similar circumference, where men were waiting to hitch the animals to a bundle of the logs that had been tied together. One by one, the animals lumbered back in the original direction, each of them dragging three logs whose circumference was the size of a man’s chest. Having seen enough, Caesar clambered down with an agility that, for a man in his fifties, was quite impressive, his mind already working furiously as he did so. By the time he reached the ground, he had the beginning of a plan, but he also committed one of the most elemental errors of a commander.
