by Ian Ross
The streets of the city were still filled with cool twilight. Bodies were sprawled across the open ground inside the wall, some of them wounded or dead, others men who had dropped, exhausted, to sleep while they had a chance. Castus saw Nicagoras the surgeon with a party of city slaves moving between them, administering whatever help he could. How long would it be before the enemy launched their next assault? Already the dawn sun would be drying the mud in the riverbed. After the night’s triumph, there was a feeling of impending defeat in the air. Castus could almost taste it.
‘Do you hear that?’ Lycianus asked abruptly.
Castus turned to him, frowning. He could hear nothing at first, only the groans and whispers of the injured disturbing the dawn stillness. But then he heard it too. All of them did: the men still labouring at the defences, the wounded and the exhausted, Nicagoras and his slaves. All of them heard, and straightened up, listening.
From the streets behind them came the sound of chanting.
No, Castus realised, not chanting – it was singing. Many people, all singing together, and getting closer. He drew back his shoulders, staring at the mouth of the nearest street. He did not know the song; it was nothing like the raucous tunes that soldiers sang. But he had heard singing like that often enough, back in Antioch.
Then the first of the figures appeared from the mouth of the street. A man in a loose white tunic led them. Ephraim, the young presbyter from Iacob’s church. And behind him, walking in a swelling column, came a mass of other civilians, both men and women, all of them singing a Christian hymn.
‘Your bishop sent you?’ Castus asked as the presbyter approached him.
‘The Blessed Iacob has commanded all the faithful to come,’ Ephraim replied, his grave face breaking into a smile. ‘And in the name of God, we will help defend God’s city!’
And Castus clapped his hands onto the young priest’s shoulders and grinned back at him. Now, he thought, perhaps, they had a chance.
XXV
‘So how did you convince him, in the end?’
Ephraim composed his features into a pious expression. ‘It was not I who changed the bishop’s mind,’ he said, and gave a self-deprecatory shrug. ‘How could I? In the fervour of his prayers, during the early hours, the Blessed Iacob was granted a vision of the Archangel, who pointed to a verse in the Book of Ezekiel: Your prophets, O Israel, are jackals in the desert! You have not gone into the breaches, or built the wall that it might stand in battle on the Day of the Lord...! And so the Blessed Iacob instructed us to clothe ourselves in the armour of God and take a stand against the devil’s schemes, to…’
‘I understand,’ Castus said, cutting him off.
Hours had passed since the arrival of the presbyter and his congregation, and this was the first opportunity he’d had to speak to the young priest man to man. But clearly he would get little sense out of him. The realisation that had seeped into the old bishop’s starved and prayer-dazed mind might have come from some god or divine vision, Castus supposed. More likely it had come from the suggestions of the younger priests. He would never know.
Whatever had caused the change, it had certainly worked. All along the line of the new fortifications there were people labouring hard in the hot morning sun. Dust-covered men and women, even children, were pulling down the remaining buildings inside the wall, scraping up the debris, passing bricks and masonry hand to hand, and stacking the rubble onto the growing breastwork. Now that the engineers had checked the surviving stretches of wall and pronounced them stable, Castus had been able to tighten his line of defence around the two large breaches. The new walls would be rough, but they would stand six feet tall and six feet thick, solid masonry with a fighting parapet. But he hardly dared to imagine how they might stand up to a full-scale Persian attack.
He was surprised to see Dorotheus among the labourers. The magistrate gave him the briefest nod of acknowledgement; as a Christian himself, he had apparently decided that the bishop’s command could not be ignored. But there was no sign of Vorodes. Only the curator’s son remained, working hard in his father’s place.
A thin screen of soldiers still held the two breaches; the rest of the defenders were sprawled amid the rubble mounds, sleeping, or trying to sleep. Castus joined Barbatio and together they clambered onto the low spur of broken wall and stared out over the riverbed and the plain beyond.
‘At least the bastards have stopped shooting arrows at us,’ the legion commander said, wiping the sweat from his brow. ‘Saving their shafts, I reckon.’
Castus made a noise of agreement. He was looking down at the riverbed and the drying crust of cracked earth that covered the broad expanse of mud. The sun was hot on his head. Sol, he thought; his own patron deity was aiding the enemy now. The sentries had already reported Persian scouts probing the riverbed further upstream, just beyond archery range.
Where are they? he said under his breath. The army that had mustered the day before had disappeared almost completely, back to their camps and entrenchments. Did Shapur and Zamasp intend to wait all day before sending in their troops? Nervous tension jumped in his gut, and he felt a cool flush across his brow. This could all be a ruse… They could be massing to attack another part of the wall… Castus had already pulled most of his best soldiers from the other sections of the city ramparts to hold the breaches. But no, he thought – the Persians would not pass up the chance to attack. The assault would come here, and it would come soon.
Back at the rubble wall, he met Diogenes wandering along the line of the fortification. The old man looked dazed and reddened by the sun, but his hands were blistered and his tunic dirty; clearly he too had been helping with the construction.
‘I’m amazed,’ Diogenes said with a cracked smile. ‘You have half the world under your orders, brother. Men and women, soldiers and civilians… It appears the efforts of the Christians have shamed the other citizens into action too. I’ve seen temple priests and slaves, merchants and caravan guards, Sogdians and Armenians, even Jews, all working together. For the first time in my life I see a vision of genuine collective labour – a shame that it takes the threat of imminent annihilation to bring it about!’
‘So it’s always been,’ Castus said. Despite his habitual disdain for civilians, he had seen them roused to action once before, at Massilia, and knew they could be brave if it came to it. And with the breaches yawning wide, few could be under any illusions of safety or security now.
A small boy ran past, carrying a single brick. Castus watched as the child passed his load to a woman, who handed it up to the men on the new fortification.
‘But are you sure you shouldn’t rest, brother?’ Diogenes asked, leaning closer. ‘May I summon the doctor, Nicagoras, to examine you? You’re looking much worn, much burnt by the sun, if I may say so.’
‘You may not,’ Castus snapped, hiding his discomfort – Diogenes looked quite bad himself. Could Castus possibly look worse? They were both old men, pushed to their limits. He could only pray silently for a few more hours, a few more days, of strength and endurance.
*
Time passed rapidly, the sun blazing overhead and then slipping below the rooftops to the west. It was the end of the tenth hour, the day’s heat beginning to drop into the cool of evening, when a runner came from the ramparts.
‘Dominus, they’re mustering.’
Castus followed him at a steady stride; there were plenty of people watching, and he did not want to cause a panic by running. Labouring up the broken steps, he crossed the rampart and peered out towards the Persian lines. The first rolling noise of drums came from across the plain, the first wail of trumpets.
The enemy flowed out of their camps and gathered on the plain like men assembling for a parade. Out of the evening haze came blocks of cavalry in glittering armour, elephants with tall towers filled with archers, squadrons of light horsemen wheeling and gathering on the flanks. And before them all, a vast spreading host of infantry filled the dusty plain. How many Pe
rsians, Castus wondered, had they slaughtered already? Thousands. But tens of thousands remained. And now, before night fell, all of them would be storming the breaches in the walls.
‘Send word to all the unit commanders,’ Castus said to the staff tribune behind him. ‘We can expect a full-scale attack in an hour or less. Signal to other sections of the defences too. And have Lycianus send us as many dismounted archers as he can spare from the reserves. Keep the rest of the people busy at the construction work.’
The tribune departed, and Castus turned his attention back to the enemy. As he narrowed his eyes to distinguish the details in the haze, he could make out the dark shapes carried by the front-rank infantry. Fascines, he realised: great bundles of reeds and sticks, like the ones they had used to build their rafts the night before. Now the Persians would use them to lay a path across the field of thick mud below the breaches.
Trumpets sounded, and the mass of enemy troops began to move forward. Along the rampart the ballistae were clicking as the crews winched back the slides. Down below him, Castus could hear his officers mustering their troops and assembling them in phalanx formation in the breaches. Many of the people labouring at the inner wall had ceased their labours as they heard the sound of the Persian drums and horns; stunned, they stood slack-mouthed and open-handed, transfixed by fear. Already the overseers were pushing them back to work. The wall was finished in most places, but there were still large gaps where some groups had not worked as hard or as fast as the others. It would be several hours yet until the defences were complete. If the enemy broke through before then, all would be lost.
With as much calm as he could muster, Castus descended the steps and located his group of staff officers. Sabinus was with them, and Castus called him aside while his orderly dressed him in his linen arming vest and cuirass. ‘Keep a watch over the inner wall,’ he said. ‘As soon as you judge it’s ready enough, give a signal. But not until you’re sure.’
‘Where are you going to be?’ Sabinus asked. He had stripped the linen bindings from his arm, and was wearing a scale corselet and helmet; his bandaged eye and the glazed pink scars of his burned face showed beneath the rim.
‘At the breach,’ Castus told him. His son looked appalled, but Castus clapped a hand on his shoulder before he could speak. ‘That’s where I need to be,’ he said quietly. ‘You have your orders – now go, and we’ll meet again soon.’
‘May God grant it,’ Sabinus said, and pulled his father into a tight embrace.
Barbatio already had his men assembled in the breach, and the rear ranks opened as Castus moved between them. He climbed up onto the same spur of wall he had used as a vantage the night before, then turned to address them all.
‘You know me,’ he called, then paused and coughed. A few of the men gave wry laughs, and coughed back at him.
‘You know me,’ Castus said again, finding his old voice, the parade-ground roar he had known in his younger years. ‘You know I trust all of you to stand your ground like soldiers. I saw you do it last night. Now you have to do it again! The bastards out there,’ he shouted, ‘want to come in here. Are you going to let them?’
‘No!’ a few men cried back. ‘Never!’
‘Only a few more hours, brothers,’ Castus called to them. ‘Then we fall back to the inner wall. Wait till you hear the trumpet. Until you hear it, stand fast! It’s going to be hot, and it’s going to be bloody. But remember you’re soldiers. Legionaries or cavalry, Goths or Armenians, it makes no difference. We are Romans! We do not yield!’ he shouted, raising his fist.
The answer was sudden, two hundred men yelling in unison, spears beating against shields. ‘RO-MA VICTRIX! RO-MA VICTRIX!’
And from across the plain came the cheering of the Persian host as they began to advance, the noise of drums and trumpets meshing to a wild pulsating din. The first arrows came slanting across from the mounds on the far side of the river, rattling off the broken rubble.
‘Shields! Form testudo!’
Castus jumped down from the wall, pulled on his helmet and took a place between the fourth rank and the reserves. He fumbled slightly as he tied his helmet laces; his hands were shaking. Barbatio joined him, nodding a quick greeting. Then the shields rose around them, screening them from the incoming missiles.
Peering between the heads and backs of the men in front of him, the shields overhead, Castus tried to glimpse what was happening on the far riverbank. At first he saw nothing; then a tide of men advanced out of the dust, many toting the big fascine bundles and flinging them down into the riverbed. The arrow storm was growing thicker, a steady hail of shafts slamming down into the locked covering of shields. Head lowered, back bent, Castus listened to the battering of arrowheads punching into wood and rawhide. The air beneath the shields was dense with sweat and dust, and the sun broke through in blinding shards. A man dropped, his blood spattering the soldiers to either side of him, and the formation shifted.
Screaming battle cries came from beyond the wall. Castus could see only the dense press of armoured bodies all around him, but he knew that the first wave of the attackers would be crossing the muddy riverbed and throwing themselves at the corpse-strewn rubble below the breach. Already they would be scrambling upwards, climbing the ramp of debris. Arrows were still falling, arcing down at a steep trajectory, but the Armenians and slingers at the rear of the Roman phalanx were returning the volleys. Above the roof of shields the dusty air was filled with flickering death.
Castus held fast to the mailed shoulder of the man in front of him, gripping his sword hilt with his other hand. Jolts of panicked dread pulsed through him, and bursts of exhilaration, and all he could hear was the muffled thunder of his own blood.
Then, with a sudden rush, the attacking horde struck at the wall of shields that closed the breach. The formation shuddered, then heaved. Every man threw his shoulder into the hollow of his shield, pressing forward against the ranks in front. As the shields lifted from above him, Castus got a brief flash of sun and a gust of fresh air. Then the dust rose like smoke between the press of bodies, and a murky brown twilight consumed everything.
Through the screaming of the attackers came the clash and grate of iron, the thud of spears and axes against shield boards, the hack of blades cutting flesh. Castus kept his head down, sensing the battle rather than seeing it; he felt every shove and surge, every blow through his whole body. Choking dust masked his vision, and the air reeked of fresh blood and sweat. A spear arced down, and he dodged it, then broke the shaft beneath his boot. A surge from the rear and he stumbled forward, his feet catching on the uneven ground. The man ahead of him jolted and then reeled back, his face a ruin of blood where a slingshot had struck him. Castus caught his body as it fell; the men behind him seized the fallen man, then he stepped forward into the vacant place.
All along the front line the fighting was close and savage. Castus caught glimpses of it between the men ahead of him. The Persians were hurling themselves at the shields in a wild frenzy, hacking with their axes and slamming with clubs and mauls, others behind them stabbing out with spears at every gap in the line. In the second rank, a tall soldier in scale armour and a gilded helmet, a centurion of the Tenth Legion, was striking over the heads of his comrades, yelling with every blow, a steady chant of fury as he fought. ‘Decima! Gemina! Decima, you bastards!’
Another soldier fell, just in front of Castus. Clambering over the injured man, Castus moved forward again. Now he could see the attackers clearly. Wiry bearded men in conical fur caps, howling as they fought. The men in the front two ranks were cutting them down with grim methodical vigour, a steady and relentless butchery, but still they came. Fresh waves of attackers swarmed up the ramp of rubble from the trampled morass of the riverbed. Spattered with mud, they clambered over the heaped corpses of their own dead and threw themselves into the fight.
But now the assault was losing momentum. The Roman lines tightened once more, pushing forward over the trampled bodies. Back in the thi
rd rank, Castus saw the last few attackers falling back, some of them dragging their wounded comrades with them. For a few brief moments it seemed to be over. The men in the rear passed forward flasks of water; Castus took one, splashed his face and mouth, then passed it on.
Then, as he looked forward again, he saw that the first attack had only been a foretaste of violence. The real assault was about to begin.
Marching up from the riverbed, across the mire of mud, blood, bodies and trampled fascines, came a solid phalanx of armoured men. Dismounted cataphracts in full-length scale cuirasses, mailed sleeves and gauntlets, tall plumed helmets. They wore mail hoods that covered their faces, with staring eyeholes just below the helmet rim. Some carried heavy maces or straight-bladed swords; others wielded long lances in both hands. As the remnants of the first attack wave parted before them, the cataphracts climbed the ramp of debris and corpses and advanced. They came on in silence, implacable, invincible in their heavy armour. The Roman lines rippled before them.
‘On my command,’ yelled the centurion of the Tenth, ‘two steps forward!’
A heartbeat of hesitation, then the troops around him tightened ranks, shields clashing together. The centurion shouted, and the formation surged. They caught the advancing Persians just as they reached the top of the slope, the impetus of their brief counter-charge slamming the attackers back. Castus saw several of the armoured men fall at once, others stumbling. He grinned with fierce satisfaction; the centurion had earned himself a gold torque, if he only lived through the fight.
But already the cataphracts were recovering, pushing forward again. Maces and swords hammered at the shields; lances jabbed down across them. Some of the Persians just rammed themselves against the Roman line, trying to break through it by strength alone. The weight of men and metal appeared unstoppable. Castus braced himself, grinding his boots in the dust, but he could feel the formation edging backwards. Men were falling in the front ranks, the crush too great to drag them clear.
