by Ian Ross
‘Strategos,’ said a stooping bearded man, wiping blood from his hands with a cloth. ‘You continue to send us new guests!’
Castus shrugged. ‘Don’t blame me.’
The man was named Nicagoras; he was a Cappadocian Greek, and reputedly the best surgeon in the city. He had volunteered his services several days before. Now his fine white tunic was daubed with stains, some brown and some bright red.
Following the surgeon through into the main hall, Castus scanned the lines of straw mattresses on the polished marble floor. Men lay bloodied and bandaged, some immobile, others thrashing in agony. Their cries echoed from the marble-clad walls. The slaves were still dressing the wounds of the Gothic warriors newly arrived from the evacuated suburb. A pair of slave women were kneeling beside one of them, trying to hold him down, both of them weeping openly. In the middle of the room, another slave was mopping up a lake of blood. Castus stared at it, his eyes glazed, entranced by the washes of bright red across the veined grey marble. Exhaustion clouded his mind.
‘Strategos?’ the surgeon said again. Castus snapped upright, focusing his thoughts. A fly buzzed in front of his face, and he swatted it away.
‘I was saying that we need more clean linen for bandages, and more wine. Fresh straw for bedding too – these Goths in particular seem to bleed a prodigious amount! I suppose it must be true that the peoples of the north have more blood in their bodies, which is why they’re so fierce and intemperate. The few Arabs I’ve seen in here so far are almost desiccated by comparison…’
‘You’ll have what you need,’ Castus said, bemused by the surgeon’s detachment from the gory scenes around him. The man reminded him in some ways of Diogenes. He turned to one of the staff secretaries following him, who made a note on his tablet.
Leaving the hospital, Castus exhaled heavily, then breathed in the warm dusty air. The mob of wounded soldiers gathered in the shade of the portico raised their hands in salute as he passed. But he could see the way that the civilians in the doorways along the street looked at him, the mingled fear and suspicion in their eyes. Six days of siege, he thought, and already they’ve had enough. How much longer until the people of the city turned against him?
*
‘So, tell me some good news.’
‘Nobody’s plotting to murder you yet,’ Diogenes said. ‘At least, not as far as I’ve been able to discover.’
Castus stared out to the west over the line of the walls. They were standing amid the remains of the curator’s roof garden, in the scant shade of a palm-leaf awning. The urns of ornamental shrubbery had long since been removed. ‘Good to know,’ he said. ‘And what else have you found out?’
‘How much do you want?’ Diogenes asked with a dry smile. He had let his beard and hair grow, and had taken to wearing his ragged old philosopher’s cloak again. With the crippled dog hopping everywhere after him, he appeared an eccentric figure. But in a city like Nisibis, he blended in quite well.
‘Disturbances in the bread queues,’ he said. ‘Rumours the bakers are going to refuse to work without payment in coin. Rumours that the Jews are planning to poison the cisterns. Rumours that the enemy are infiltrating murderers into the city, disguised as Bactrians…’
‘Any truth to it?’
‘Not that I can determine,’ Diogenes said, then sucked his teeth. ‘But one never knows. The close confines of a besieged city seem to breed and incubate such stories in remarkable profusion. And there have been effects: yesterday a mob attacked a group of Armenian merchants in the market district, accusing them of being Persian spies. Another mob, Christians this time, tried to burn a Jewish synagogue for the same reason.’
Amazing, Castus thought, that he had failed to notice any of this. For days now he had imagined that he held the city firmly in his grip. But so much was happening that he had missed altogether. ‘What about the council,’ he asked, ‘and the other prominent citizens?’
‘There was a secret meeting last night,’ Diogenes said, ‘at the house of the defensor, Dorotheus. Several senior members of the Boule attended. They were apparently discussing whether to approach you and demand that you negotiate with Shapur.’
‘Were they indeed?’ Castus exclaimed with a snort of laughter.
‘I have a list of their names, if you want it.’
‘Is Vorodes on the list?’
‘No, he’s not. Although I’ve been unable so far to determine his relations with them… I’ll keep working on it.’
Castus had never enquired where Diogenes came upon his information. Such things, he suspected, were best left in the shadows. But he made a note to order doubled sentries on the ramparts throughout the night; if anyone in the city wanted to communicate with the Persians, they would have to cross the wall somehow. There was no way out through the gates now.
‘I’ve been learning Persian as well,’ Diogenes said. ‘One of the Sogdian residents is teaching me. Fascinating language. All things considered, I thought it might come in useful.’
‘Let’s hope it doesn’t come in too useful, eh?’ Castus said, and turned his attention back to the walls.
Two days had passed since the evacuation of the eastern suburb, and the enemy were now directing their assaults upon the western perimeter. Only on that side of the city was the ground beyond the walls level enough to bring up heavy siege engines. But the defences were strongest there as well: first the wide rock-cut dry moat, and the outer wall behind it. Inside that wall was the open strip of land, the killing ground, before the much higher and thicker inner wall rose above it with its towers and battlements. And on every tower and every rampart walkway there were ballistae, archers and slingers waiting to rain death upon the attackers.
But even now, as Castus stared out from the roof garden, he could see the siege works creeping closer. First, the Persians had encircled the city entirely with a trench and palisade wall. Then, three hundred paces north of the Edessa Gate, they had begun to build a causeway across the dry moat, packing it with rubble and debris torn from the demolished monumental tombs. A fog of brown dust almost obscured their work, but Castus could make out the dark shapes of the mantlets, massive sloping hide screens, pushed forward on rollers, that sheltered their archers and engineers. Far out on the parched plain he could see the hulking shapes of elephants, dragging great sleds of rubble towards the moat. And amid the dust men swarmed and seethed, thousands of them labouring in the heat. When they died under the missile storm of the defenders, their bodies were flung down into the moat among the heaped debris, to raise the causeway with their own flesh and bones.
This, Castus had realised, was how the Persians conducted sieges. They seldom used artillery – Egnatius had told him that they distrusted torsion engines – and instead relied on brute force and overwhelming numbers. They ground cities down with the pickaxe and the spade, the ladder and the ram. Then the rush at the walls, heedless of casualties.
Watching the steady and relentless Persian approach, he was filled with a sense of utter hopelessness. Surely nothing could stand against such a force. Nisibis might hold out another few weeks, even a few months, but in the end the pressure would be too great. The city would break open, and all within would die.
Perhaps, he thought, that was their fate. Perhaps that in itself would be a kind of victory: if they could destroy enough of Shapur’s force here, he would not have the strength to push his advance further west. Nisibis would be the rock that blocked his path, even if the city itself was destroyed in the process…
But then he remembered what Sohaemia had said to him, in this same place days before. Don’t drag the rest of us down with you… Castus had seen little of the curator’s wife in recent days; with the house full of soldiers and military staff, she had chosen to move elsewhere. He was glad of that; even the memory of her words undermined his resolve. He needed no such distractions now.
Turning his gaze, he stared across the rooftops of the city. Total stillness under the noon sun. The streets were empty
, deep cracks of shadow between the buildings. There was nobody on the flat rooftops or in the temple precincts. It seemed as if some sudden plague had wiped out the entire population, or an enchantment had lulled them to sleep. He could see figures along the rampart walks, most of them sheltering from the sun under rough awnings. Now and again the arm of a catapult would jolt up from behind the wall, flinging its missile out into the fog of dust. But, compared to the ceaseless activity of the enemy, Nisibis seemed almost entirely passive. A victim, he thought, powerless against impending fate.
A shudder ran through him, and he made a warding sign against bad omens. He wiped the sweat from his brow. From somewhere in the streets below him he could hear a child calling out for its mother. A barking dog. Slowly the sounds of the city, the sounds of humanity, drifted back to fill the noon silence.
No, he thought. We’re not dead yet.
XXI
‘What in the name of God is that?’ Sabinus cried as he joined Castus at the rampart.
From the tower roof of the Edessa Gate, they gazed out westwards across the outer wall and the moat towards the Persian siege works. In the middle distance, ahead of the surrounding palisade and just outside the extreme range of the defending artillery, a vast construction was rising in the dawn sunlight.
‘The doom of Nisibis,’ muttered Oribasius, commander of the First Parthica.
Castus hissed at him, and the prefect looked abashed. But all the officers gathered on the tower shared Oribasius’s unease. Castus himself had spent the night in one of the chambers of the gatehouse, and had slept badly. All through the hours of darkness he had been disturbed by noise from the enemy lines, shouts and trumpet blasts, and the noise of hammering and clanging metal that had filled his sleeping mind with troubled dreams of his father’s forge. He had woken before sunrise, weary to his bones, and called a meeting of his officers on the tower top. Now all were gathered, and the results of the Persians’ night of labour were clear for all to see.
It had taken the enemy only three more days to complete their ramp across the moat, three hundred paces north of the gate. Three days of grinding struggle for the men on the ramparts as they hurled down everything they had at the attackers, and all of it in vain. The ramp formed a broad road that sloped up from the plain to the outer wall. Already the Persians had sent their engineers against the base of the wall, parties of men hacking at the bricks and stones with pickaxes and crowbars, while the defenders above them dropped rocks and burning incendiaries down onto them. Their casualties had been enormous, but they had not been daunted. And now they were preparing for the final crushing assault.
They must have built their siege tower in sections, Castus guessed, and then raised it and assembled it under cover of darkness. It was a monstrous structure, over sixty feet high, with sloping sides rising from a broad wheeled base to a fortified archery platform at the top. At present, in the first light of day, only the framework was standing, a scaffolding of huge timbers and planks lashed and bolted together. But, as Castus watched, the Persians were hoisting plates of metal to armour the lower half of the tower, and hanging rawhide over the upper sections.
‘The men have already given it a name,’ Egnatius said with a wry smirk. ‘They’re calling it Shapur’s Bastard!’
Castus snorted a laugh. ‘Looks evil enough,’ he said, and spat over the ramparts.
He could see that the lowest section of the tower formed an open gallery; hundreds of men were labouring in its shade, lifting a massive wooden beam into place and suspending it from thick cables. The beam was tipped with iron: a battering ram. Once the tower was moved forward across the causeway that bridged the moat, the swinging ram would quickly bring down the weakened section of the outer wall. Then the Persians would have to level the broken foundations and heave the tower across into the open space between the walls. Only then could they lower the two broad drawbridges that already hung from one of the tower’s upper storeys. And once that happened, Castus thought, the city would be theirs: nothing would be able to stem the tide of men surging across the bridges and onto the inner ramparts.
‘How quickly could they move it close enough, do you think?’ Sabinus asked.
Castus sucked his cheeks, considering. ‘It’ll take them most of the day to bring it up to the outer wall,’ he said. ‘They’ll probably aim to hit us when the sun’s in our eyes. We’ll need to pound them with everything we’ve got before then.’
He knew that the greatest challenge for the Persians would lie in forcing their huge tower in over the ruins of the outer wall. For all that time it would be exposed to the defending artillery, archers and slingers. That, he thought, would be their one good chance to destroy the beast, and bring Shapur’s Bastard to its knees. He turned to face the sun, kissed his fingers and raised them to the light. A quick muttered prayer. Several of the officers around him did the same.
‘Egnatius,’ he said. ‘I’m giving you and Mamertinus command of the southern defences, either side of the Singara Gate. Barbatio – you take the north. Gunthia’s already holding the Gate of the Sun. The enemy’ll probably send feint attacks against all sides while we’re distracted by the tower. Lycianus will remain in the central market with two hundred mounted men, as a reserve. I’ll take command here, with Sabinus and Oribasius as my deputies. May the gods watch over us all.’
The officers around him straightened, raising their hands in salute. There was nothing more they needed to say. Castus watched them as they departed, with a dull tug of anguish in his gut. He trusted all of these men – even Oribasius, who was eager to make up for his failings in the earlier battle. He had drawn them all here, and now he was sending them into a fight that could bring death for them all. Their obvious faith in his command was a bitter comfort.
As the sun rose higher and the shadow thrown by the western wall contracted, Castus stared at the line of mantlets at the far end of the Persian causeway. The big hide-covered screens covered the enemy archers, but could easily be rolled aside when the siege tower was moved closer. Already the big onager catapults behind the wall were in motion, the throwing arms jerking upwards with a shuddering crash, the slings whipping heavy boulders up in arcing flight over the fortifications and down against the mantlets. Castus had ordered the battery of catapults along the wall here reinforced; there were six of the machines that could feasibly hit the tower as it approached, all of them capable of throwing the heaviest missiles. Could the armour plates and hides covering the tower protect it against repeated direct hits? Soon enough he would find out.
Drums rolled, and high-pitched trumpets wailed out on the plain. The Persians were moving now, bringing up columns of assault troops and archers, thousands strong. There were elephants too, Castus saw as the sun rose higher. Four of the huge animals were positioned on either side of the tower, with great cables lashed around them to drag it forward. The tower had six storeys above the ram housing, all with slits for archery; he guessed that the Persians would only send men up there once the tower was a lot nearer the outer wall.
As he descended the steps from the gatehouse and emerged onto the wall walk, Castus noticed a strange huddle of figures gathered close to the next tower. Baffled, he quickened his pace, his small group of staff officers and bodyguards following him. Many of the figures were civilians, he noticed, members of the city militia, with a few soldiers among them, and most were kneeling on the walkway. A high cracked voice rose above the noise from the Persian siege lines, intoning solemn words.
‘What’s this?’ Castus demanded as he approached. ‘What’s happening here?’
The kneeling people were entirely blocking the walkway; across their bent backs, Castus caught sight of the shabbily dressed group at the heart of the congregation. Christian priests, he realised. And the bishop, Iacob, was leading their prayers.
‘Amen!’ the kneeling men cried in unison. Castus was just about to push his way between them when a voice stopped him.
‘Excellency, please.’ It wa
s the grave-looking young priest who so often accompanied the bishop. Presbyter Ephraim, Castus recalled. ‘This is the day of the Lord,’ Ephraim said in a hushed and hurried voice.
Castus took another step forward, and the young priest laid a hand on his chest.
‘If you forbid our flock to come to the House of God,’ he said, ‘then the House must come to them!’
Castus gazed at the priest, fighting the temptation to swat him aside for his effrontery. The Christians’ holy day was better known as the Day of the Sun; he had not realised that it had come again so soon. Eleven days, he calculated, since Shapur had first appeared before the walls of Nisibis. And, true enough, he had ordered that none of the militia or the Christians among the troops were to leave their posts to attend the church.
‘Please,’ Ephraim said again. ‘The most blessed Iacob is conducting the ceremony of the Eucharist. Allow us this, and we will depart.’
Stifling his outrage, Castus stared at the bishop and his attendants. The kneeling men were shuffling forwards, heads bowed, then taking sips from a cup of wine as Iacob muttered over them.
‘Father,’ Sabinus said. ‘It would be best to let them proceed. I… I gave the bishop permission myself.’
‘You did?’
Sabinus did not flinch from Castus’s fierce expression. ‘The ritual might help inspire the militia at least,’ he said.
Now Iacob had finished distributing the wine, he straightened and spread his arms, addressing the whole group of congregants. ‘Remember, brethren, that though we live in this world of the flesh, our weapons are not those of this world! Fight rather with the weapons of the spirit, of prayer and the power of faith! For the word of God is a mighty sword, and in his name we will trample the serpents and the scorpions that beset us!’
