Gods and Legions (39 page)

The entire night Julian spent conferring with his generals as to the best means of achieving a quick victory. Ultimately, however, his strategy was decided not on the basis of military counsel, but from his reading of history. At dawn, bleary-eyed but excited at the solution he had devised, he summoned Sallustius, who entered the tent with his usual dignity and calm.

'
This
is the key to our victory!' Julian exclaimed enthusiastically. 'This will have us in the gates by tomorrow without further bloodshed.' They conferred quickly in low tones, the older man shaking his head slowly at first, and then forcefully, his face reddening in anger when he saw that Julian was refusing to listen.

'Madness!' Sallustius muttered as he stormed out of the tent a few moments later.

Julian smiled at me wearily. 'He's no longer schooling a boy soldier,' he said, a touch of defensiveness in his tone. 'You would think that an Emperor's word would have counted for something in that old fool's mind.'

Within an hour he had put his plan into play. He ordered the artillery and archers to provide a withering cover fire on the city's battlements, forcing the defenders to dodge behind their motley protective curtains for safety. He then stationed himself in the middle of a phalanx of a hundred handpicked troops, their tightly packed shields arranged over his head and to the sides of the wedge like an enormous tortoise, to protect him from arrow shots and other missiles. In this formation they awkwardly stormed the city's main gate, which consisted of a huge wooden structure reinforced with iron bars and fittings. Instead of weapons, the men bore only crowbars, chisels, and carpentry tools.

The army held its collective breath, praying to all its gods for the safety of the Emperor. The enemy, quickly realizing the identity of the daring raid's commander, in turn focused all its efforts on destroying the squad of makeshift locksmiths cowering under the shields below them. A deadly hail of arrows, bricks, and stones poured down upon Julian and his men, clattering upon the raised shields and staggering the soldiers beneath with the force of their impact. Several fell as their shields buckled from the weight of the rocks dropped from above, and when other men stepped in to fill the gap they too stumbled and swayed. Even to us standing in safety in the lines fifty yards away, Julian's voice was audible under the tenuous roof of shields, bellowing at his men. 'Put your backs into it!' he cried as they worked to pry off the door's iron bars. 'Burst the hinges, men, saw the boards!' To no avail. Try as the Roman artillery might to repel the defenders above the main gate, all the Persians' resources were being focused on the small Roman squad, for the winnings at stake were too great for them to ignore.

The effort was doomed. Several moments more, and the defenders began hauling up to their tower enormous rectangular building blocks, the kind that would crush a man's foot even if gently set down upon it – the effect they would have being dropped from fifty feet would be too horrible to contemplate. A shout rose up from the Roman army, urging the small squad to return before disaster ensued, and this time Julian heeded. Carefully retaining their formation, still sheltered beneath their dented and splintered shields, the wedge of men stumbled back to their lines, out of the defenders' stone-throwing range, dragging with them those who had been wounded in the ill-fated foray. The army cheered as if it had won a great victory, while the Persians on the battlements matched the shouting with their own hoots and obscene gestures.

Sallustius was furious as he strode back into the tent that afternoon, but Julian silenced him with a baleful stare before he had a chance to say a word.

'Are you going to dispute the wisdom of Scipio, Rome's greatest general?' Julian asked, pushing forward a battered scroll containing Polybius' history of the Carthaginian War.

Sallustius eyed the volume suspiciously, then looked coldly at Julian.

'Read it!' Julian ordered.

Sallustius remained immobile, still staring at Julian, coolly, calculatingly, as if seeking to assess what might be passing through his mind, to determine how far he might be pushed.

'READ IT!' Julian screamed, his voice cracking and his eyes bulging. The guards stopped their pacing outside and one of them peered cautiously in through the door.

Still Sallustius held his stare until Julian glanced away; then slowly and deliberately he stepped forward and picked up the volume with the thumb and forefinger of his hand, as if handling a bit of rotten carrion with tongs. He scanned the passage that had been marked in the margin with a bit of charcoal.

'I read here,' said Sallustius dryly, 'that the gate Scipio attacked was sheltered by a stone arch, and that he and his men were able to work on the door at their leisure while the barbarians above them were helpless to repel them, since their missiles could not strike. Scipio was indeed a wise general.'

With that he turned on his heels and stalked out, leaving Julian glaring after him in silent rage.

In the end, the city Pirisabora posed no further hardship to us, once the proper resources were applied. Sallustius walked straight from Julian's tent to the quarters of the engineering brigades, and ordered that a machine the Greeks know as a
helepolis,
a 'city taker,' be constructed with all possible speed. Few in the army had ever seen or even imagined such a device, though Sallustius' own encyclopedic knowledge of military history allowed him to easily rattle off a description of the machines Poliorcetes had developed in Macedonia centuries before: an enormous tower constructed of strong wooden beams and covered with hides, green wicker, mud, and other noncombustible materials. Within two days it was complete, standing six stories tall, towering over even the city's ramparts. Twenty archers armed with flaming arrows and soot pots manned the topmost level, while ten feet below them a ramp was suspended by chains, to be dropped down onto the top of the battlements as soon as the device had been rolled close to the base of the walls. Fifty soldiers were picked to lead the rush from the tower into the city, and the entire army would follow close behind, either up the five flights of wooden stairs and over the ramparts, or through the city gates themselves if the attackers from the tower were able to open them from the inside.

At the mere sight of this terrible machine the inhabitants surrendered without further struggle.

The destruction of Pirisabora renewed the troops' spirits. With considerable hardship, but now eagerness to match, the troops floundered and sloshed again through the marshes and fields, commandeering dugout canoes and rafts from the inhabitants and running down and slaughtering the disorganized Persian defenders in the swamps. Fourteen miles we traveled this way, a distance that under normal circumstances would be scarcely more than a morning's easy trot, even with the crushing load of gear each man bore on his back. With the flooding and skirmishing, however, the journey took nearly two full days. Small bridges were constructed of planks cut from the spongy wood of palm trees, resting on rock pillars built in the waterways. Where the marshes were too deep, platforms were floated on inflated bladders cunningly sewn together of sheep hides coated with bitumen. We were so close to Ctesiphon we could even smell it; at times, when the wind was from the east, it bore with it faint whiffs of the spices and herbs of a marketplace, a marketplace so massive that only Ctesiphon could contain it. Julian knew that if he could reach the city before the King was able to reinforce its garrison, then its walls and all its wealth – indeed control of the entire Persian Empire – would fall to him.

It was fourteen miles, as I said, until we arrived at the ancient city of Maozamalcha, before which the army stopped and stared in awe. On every side rose steep, high rocks allowing only a narrow approach with winding detours. Huge towers rose over the outcropping nearly as high as the central citadel, itself standing on a formidable, rocky eminence. The land was slightly less severe to the rear of the city, with a slope leading down to the river, yet on these walls the defenders had amassed a fearsome array of artillery and other weapons that prevented attackers from forming up for a sustained assault. Spies informed us that the city's garrison was not the meager, underfed, and undertrained local militia that we most often found defending the battlements in such situations. Rather, the walls were defended by a large detachment of King Sapor's regulars whom he had assigned here before he departed up the Tigris, on the off chance that we might take this approach to Ctesiphon. For once, the hapless King had guessed right.

Julian slowly picked his way around the city on his horse, surrounded by a handful of generals, his deformed shadow Maximus, and a small coterie of light-armed guards, scanning the walls from all angles, careful to remain out of shooting range of the obscenity-shouting defenders on the ramparts. They stopped here and there to examine a landscape feature, the opportunity for an approach, a perceived weakness in the structure of the battlements – there were none. No city is completely impregnable, but it takes a trained eye to envision how a stronghold like this might be taken, and a strong stomach to imagine the consequences of doing so – or of failing to do so. If we were to succeed in our attack on Ctesiphon, this large garrison could not be left at our back.

Late that night, after consulting with Sallustius and his generals, Julian decided on a classic siege approach. He himself would direct the open assault and the placement of the artillery and siege engines. Just as we were leaving the tent after making this decision, the cavalry commander Victor galloped up with a small guard, their faces dimly lit by the sputtering torches they carried.

'What news, Victor?' Julian asked as the man stiffly dismounted from his foam-flecked horse. 'If you miss another strategy meeting we'll assign you to the kitchens.'

'A thousand pardons, Augustus,' Victor mumbled calmly, above the snickers of Maximus and the others. 'I went out last night on reconnaissance down the eastern road and was delayed in returning.'

Julian's expression sobered. 'No trouble, I hope? Any sign of Sapor advancing down the Tigris?'

Victor straightened his shoulders proudly. 'No trouble, Augustus. On the contrary. I rode to the very walls of Ctesiphon and encountered no opposition.'

The gathering went dead silent. Julian stared.

'To Ctesiphon and back, in one day? My God, Victor, that's seventy miles.'

'Yes, sir. There are one or two more forts to be taken, but the garrisons are huddled inside like virgins, afraid to show. The roads are clear. Sapor is nowhere in sight.'

Julian smiled thinly as he glanced around at his officers. 'Men – Ctesiphon is ours.'

IV

The instant the sun shot its first rays over the camp, like bolts fired from a catapult, the long knife slid home. Steaming blood spewed forth in thick, ropy bursts, drenching the spotless white folds and purple hem of Julian's linen gown and pulsing into the large, wrought-silver basin at his feet. The breathing of the quivering animal, stunned in advance with a blow from a poleaxe, subsided into a choked gurgle, and its huge eyes bulged and then clouded as the lifeblood drained from its body. The assembled troops watched silently as the seers' florid prayers to the war god Ares rang in their ears. A moment after the gash was inflicted in the throat, the purple stream hissing into the basin lost momentum and subsided to a low trickle; the trembling head flopped limply to the dust, and with an enormous shudder the animal died.

Immediately the two Etruscan haruspices, dark, smallframed men in conical hoods who had accompanied Julian on all his travels since his apostasy and for whom I had no use, leaped to their tasks with their knives held high in enthusiasm. Slicing open the lower belly with a neat flourish, they beckoned Julian over. Well versed in his technique, he bent down on one knee before the still-quivering animal, inserted both arms up to the elbow into the cavity, which the largest of the two sorcerers struggled to hold open for him, and, after a moment of grunting and tugging, emerged with the glistening purplish liver clutched tightly in both hands like the head of an enemy grasped triumphantly by a barbarian as a trophy. He knelt reverently before the haruspices and Maximus as the three solemnly placed their hands on his head and then on the liver, palpating it, testing its firmness, examining its color and the thickness of its vesicles. Each man finally mumbled some abomination to the gods and daubed a streak of blood on Julian's forehead and temples. Standing erect he raised the liver high above his head, blood pouring in rivulets down his arms, dripping onto his beard and bared chest, staining the sleeves and bodice of his ceremonial vestments, as the assembled troops held their breaths.

'Thus ordain the gods,' he shouted. 'That like unto Alexander in ages past, the Persians must submit, both this city and Ctesiphon itself. So their conquerors shall join the ranks of the immortals, and by the holy blood of this sacred ox shall you, my men, be strengthened and purified for the triumph that awaits you. To conquer!'

'To conquer!'
roared fifty thousand voices, a cry that carried to the battlements of the doomed Maozamalcha.
'To conquer!'
they repeated again and again, increasing in pitch and volume, aiming to send their message, throbbing and reverberating, to the gates of Ctesiphon itself.
'To conquer!'
the voices boomed, and Julian stood motionless, the unspeakable, dripping organ held high over his head, staring at the heavens as the troops raged and raved before him. The enormous pyre behind him, prepared in advance with a stack of cottonlike palm wood smeared with pitch to receive the sacrificial carcass, burst into a ball of flame shooting into the sky, an acrid black smoke pouring in pulses into the air and settling heavily over the men. Their excitement had grown to a fever pitch with the rhythmic chant, and as I glanced at the walls of the city looming high over us, across the river flats I saw the battlements filled with a line of silent Persians. The garrison and the city's inhabitants, thousands of them, had been drawn from other parts of the fortifications in their curiosity at the uproar in the Roman camp below, the soldiers' polished mail gleaming starlike in the early rays of the sun.

Suddenly Julian dropped his bloody arms, passed the liver to Maximus, and drawing a sword turned his back to the men. He faced the lines of artillery and engines that had been set up in the night parallel to the walls: a dozen huge ballistae, their cords wound taut on the massive winches and loaded with enormous, iron-tipped wooden javelins; a row of 'scorpions,' each bearing a boulder the weight of a man, poised in a long net to be whipped slinglike over the top of the lever when the tension on the cords was released; field catapults poised to let fly showers of deadly, thick-stocked bolts; and a thousand archers, long bows at the ready. He thrust his sword into the air in a prearranged signal. With an earsplitting screech that silenced the roar of the men before us, the cords of the engines snapped to and screamed off their reels. Forty massive levers from the engines shot up simultaneously. Oak slammed against iron and iron against earth, and the air became black with boulders and bolts, whistling toward the astonished defenders. The mob of Persians on the wall scarcely had time to blink before the stones slammed into their ranks, each of them carrying away a dozen men at a time. A huge wooden bolt shot completely through a Persian officer's chest armor and impaled three men behind him, leaving holes in their torsos big enough to insert a hand. One scorpion, misfiring from careless loading of the boulder the night before, flipped into the air at the release of its cord and hurled its chassis directly backward, crushing and mangling the body of an engineer so badly as to defy recognition. But the worst terror was in the city itself.

Screams arose from the towers opposite us, and scarcely had the dust of the initial impact cleared when Julian's thousand archers, at a command, dipped the tips of their arrows into the pots of flaming pitch that had been placed at their feet and filled the air with a black cloud of smoking, stinking missiles, aimed high over the heads of the defenders on the ramparts to land in the roofs and hayricks of the city behind them. More screams of pain and terror rose into the air, this time from women behind the walls, and as the archers and artillery filled the sky with their whizzing, shattering hell, a pall of thick smoke rose from a dozen points within the walls and obscured our view.

At the first, massive eruption of artillery, the infantry troops at the sacrifice were shocked into silence and awe. Within seconds, however, a huge cheer welled up and the men broke out of the parade ground like water bursting through a dam, racing to their cohorts' assigned positions behind the artillery, prepared to leap forward at Julian's command to storm the city as soon as it had been softened by the barrage. The sun rose higher in the sky, the smoke behind the walls thickened, and the stench it carried to our lines carried the smell of death, of roasting meat, of excrement and vomit and all the unspeakable carnage and suffering of a city under siege. For hours the artillery attack continued, relentless, pounding, each stone driving into the granite-hard walls, forcing open fissures and cracks, toppling battlements – yet still the walls held, still the massive gates remained closed. The defiant defenders, during the occasional lulls in our hails of missiles, let fly taunts and obscene insults to our parentage or genitals, in ancient and crudely inflected Greek.

At first our troops, out of sheer nervous energy and anticipation of the pillage to come, were unable to remain still; when their offers to assist with the engines were rebuffed by the methodical artillery engineers, they put themselves to use hauling boulders and other ammunition for the machines to fire. Even so, the growing heat of the day under the blazing sun, and the thickness and stink of the black air began taking their toll. Frustrated and angry at the delay, the men collapsed in the dirt, tugging at their stifling armor and helmets, shading their heads under shields hastily propped on lances embedded in the ground. Shortly after noon, after a sustained artillery attack of such force that it would have leveled the walls of Rome itself, Julian rode through the ranks, furious and dripping with sweat, and issued the order to cease fire. The engineering companies collapsed exhausted on the ground, calling for water and food, and the support staff came running to assist them. Julian stood a moment watching the men eat and drink greedily but silently, and then, dismounting, he stalked wrathfully into his field tent, where he remained for the rest of the day.

Things fared no better the next morning, when our troops again watched in resentment and rage as the Roman engines and artillery poured a withering hail of missiles and boulders on the benighted city, still without fatal effect. Julian was almost crazed with impatience and fury. Five bulls he had sacrificed that morning to Ares, magnificent beasts that the haruspices argued the army could not spare for merely one offering, and for a minor city at that. He knew, for his whole life he must have known, that such offerings to false gods were of no more effect than a man's footsteps on the shifting sands, yet still he persisted in his folly. That whole day he refused to meet my eyes, the eyes of a man who would not have hesitated in calling him to task for his damnable obstinacy. He paced up and down the lines angrily, raging at the impregnable walls as a wolf prowling round a sheepfold howls at the gates, jaws thirsting for blood while lambs and ewes huddle fearfully within. He brutally abused the hapless engineers as they struggled to keep up the rate of firing he demanded, calling down the gods' curses on the steadfast Persians in their hellhole of a stronghold, refusing the entreaties of his advisers to drink water or to rest. Fear was developing in him that he would be unable to take the city without a protracted effort. What was worse: the first, early rumors had been received by his scouts that King Sapor was approaching with his massive army.

His mood broke when a short, slightly built legionary trotted up to him late in the afternoon, his hair not merely matted but encrusted with sweat and grime, flakes of drying dirt covering his torso like a skin disease, his eyes red and squinting in the bright sunlight. The watchful guard of suspicious Gauls at first refused to let him pass to address the Emperor, until Julian glanced over and spied the commotion the small man was beginning to make as he raised his voice indignantly. The Emperor smiled as he called the guards back.

'Suffer the little ones to come unto me,' he said calmly, with a sly look my way, which I ignored. 'Even the filthy little ones. In fact – especially the filthy ones, if the news this man bears is what I hope.'

The trooper approached, his face still flushed in anger at the guards, and there was no indication of obeisance in his posture or voice as he stood before the Emperor. 'It is ready,' he said simply.

'Good man,' replied Julian, clapping him on his dirt-laden shoulder without hesitation. 'What is your name, soldier?'

'Exsuperius, my lord.'

'Exsuperius. "The overpowering one." Your name is a good omen, soldier, for this very night the Persians will receive their comeuppance from one who is indeed overpowering. "Exsuperius" will be our password this night, and you, soldier, will personally open the gates of this foul city to the Roman army.'

Exsuperius nodded, slowly and with a great dignity utterly at odds with his ditchdigger's appearance. Without another word he turned and walked sedately past Julian's fidgety guards and disappeared into the bowels of the vast Roman camp.

It was once believed that the Romans were aided in their struggle against the Lucanians in the Pyrrhic War by Ares himself, though far be it from me to understand why such a god, even if he did exist, would compromise his majesty by consorting with mortals in such a way. The story was that in the very heat of battle an armed soldier of tremendous stature was seen carrying a huge scaling ladder and leading an impossible charge up the city walls to ultimate victory. The next day, during review, no such soldier could be found, though rewards and honor would have been his to receive – hence the belief that he must have been a god.

No such problem confronted Julian, however, for Exsuperius lived up to all the Emperor's expectations of him, and happily received a laurel crown for his efforts. Long into the night, after the enemy's still-enthusiastic catcalls and jeering had finally subsided, the little miner led fifteen hundred picked troops slithering on their bellies through a tight, sandy tunnel a hundred yards long that had been hastily braced with bridging timbers carried by the river fleet. Shortly before they were expected to arrive at the end of the tunnel, trumpets sounded the attack and the entire army rushed to arms, throwing up simultaneous assaults on three sides of the city and raising a terrifying clamor to distract the wary inhabitants from the clinking of metal tools beneath their feet.

The ruse was successful. As the Persian garrison leaped to the walls to repel the night attack, the mine was opened, and Exsuperius and his band sprang out to find themselves in the bedroom of an elderly woman so fragile, or so weary, that she failed even to wake up at the sound of her floor bursting open and three cohorts of armed Romans storming through. They made their way into the streets, which were empty, as every able-bodied inhabitant of the city was fighting at the walls or cowering in their houses. After finding their bearings, the invaders raced to the main gate, slew the sentries from behind without difficulty, and threw open the doors.

The Persians stood shocked on their battlements, forgetting even to fling their missiles, as the Romans rushed into the city in a frenzy. Julian himself was in the front ranks, shouting his demands for the enemy to surrender, but his words were drowned by the screaming of women and children and the clamor raised by his troops as they destroyed everything and killed everyone in their path without regard to age or sex. He sat his horse in the middle of the tumult the remainder of the night, coldly surveying the destruction, watching expressionless as Persian soldiers on the high battlements drew their daggers and slew themselves, stabbing their own throats or hurling themselves to the ground.

Nabdates, the governor of the city, was brought in the morning with eighty of the King's soldiers, all of them badly mauled and beaten by their captors, some with eyes already put out or ears lopped off. They had been found cowering in a hidden cellar, hoping to survive the carnage above them until the Romans departed, when they would be able to emerge in safety. Julian put his face up close to Nabdates, who averted his swollen and blackened eyes, and then he turned back to Sallustius, his lip curled in a disdainful sneer.