Raptor (62 page)

And I waited, and I waited, and so did the other six thousand Ostrogoths wait, the whole day long. During that day, I think almost a thousand of the six thousand made excuse to amble along the street where my turma was posted, to take a look at me and my silent trumpet of Jaíriko. Early on, those looks were merely curious or wondering. But as the hours dragged on, the looks became suspicious, derisory, even resentful. After all, every man was in helmet and armor, and the day got hot, and we sweated and itched inside our metal and leather integuments, and the only nourishment (dispensed only once, at high noon) was bran biscuits and tepid water, and we were bidden not to make any noise with our weapons, and to talk only in low tones, and not to laugh or sing—as if there was anything to laugh or sing about.

Sundown brought some alleviation of our long-drawn-out torment, for the dusk was cool. But still my trumpet made not a sound or a twitch, and there was nothing for us to do but go on waiting and hoping that it would. So that is what we did, though there was much grumbling in the ranks. When the night came down, the men resignedly prepared to sleep in place on the hard street stones, and each turma’s optio appointed men to take turns staying awake and alert. Since I was not one of those selected in my turma, I gave my container to our optio, a grizzled warrior named Daila, and asked that each succeeding guard be ordered to watch it.

“And wake me instantly,” I said, “if it swells or bursts or fizzes or does
anything.”

The optio gave a baleful look at the object I had handed him, and another at me in my ludicrously oversized armor, and said drily:

“Little beetle, I think you can sleep soundly and all night long. My father was a farmer. I could have told you that oats take at least seven days to germinate. If we have to wait for these to put out roots enough to pry apart those gates, we will
all
be sleeping right here for most of the summer.”

I could only murmur, and halfheartedly, “I do not think the oats actually have to
grow…”
But Daila had gone off, to post the guards of the first watch.

He was right about one thing. I slept all night undisturbed, until the blushing dawn woke me. I hurried over to the guard, who yawned and tossed my container at me, grunting, “Nothing to report.” I caught the thing, regarding it with almost as much contempt as the guard had done, and made my way through the other waking and stretching warriors to the optio Daila, and asked his permission to go and seek out Theodoric.

At the turma of lancers I was told that Theodoric, after having spent the night waiting like everyone else, had now gone to his praitoriaún. So I trudged off to his house, and I was so bowed down with discouragement and dejection that I think my leather skirts must have dragged the ground.

“Well, so much for that,” sighed Theodoric, when I gave him the doleful news. “It was worth the try. Let me at least reward you for the try, Thorn. There is some of that horsemeat left.” He called to Aurora to bring food. When she did, he handed her the mute trumpet and said, “Here, take this out of our sight.”

It was a despondently silent meal that he and I shared, sitting there in our unneeded armor. Theodoric apparently had no alternative siege ideas to propose. Neither did I and, if I had, I would not now have dared to mention them. So, except for the sound of our chewing of the tough meat and our sips at our water goblets, there was not another noise until a small and whimpery one came from the kitchen:

“Eek!”

Theodoric and I looked at one another across the table, then simultaneously sprang up and through the door. The girl was backed against one wall of the tiny kitchen, and for a change she was pale instead of blush-pink, and she was staring wide-eyed at the brick cooking hearth. On one of its flat ledges she had deposited the trumpet, and evidently later had laid a long-handled ladle there, without noticing that she had propped it across the metal container. She was gazing now at that ladle, because it was creeping, seemingly of its own volition, almost eerily, sideways along the ledge. Even as we three watched, it slid a little more rapidly, overbalanced at the brink of the ledge and toppled onto the earthen floor.

“The trumpet sounds!” Theodoric exulted. “It has bulged!”

“But ever so slightly,” I muttered.

“Perhaps enough. Bless you, Aurora!” He pecked a kiss on her pale cheek, then beckoned urgently to me. “Thorn, come!”

He clapped on his helmet, seized up the contus lance he had laid aside while we ate and hurried from the house. I put on my own helmet and followed him. We had no sooner got outdoors than we heard another sound commence. It was a low thrumming that seemed to vibrate all the air roundabout. Theodoric ran for the street that led directly to the gate, and I followed. As we ran, the noise ranged upward in pitch, to a sort of wordless singing, then to a shrill keening. The Ostrogoths we passed were all standing, milling somewhat, looking befuddled, tightly clutching their weapons. Many of their officers were craning their heads curiously around the edges of the sheltering houses, looking in the direction of the gate. Theodoric did not peer from concealment; he incautiously ran right to the edge of the open area fronting the entryway. But no arrows came down from the battlements; the Sarmatae must have been as perplexed and confused as were our own men.

When I caught up to Theodoric he was pointing and laughing and doing a kind of gleeful dance. That unearthly, air-quivering noise was coming from the gate itself, for it was being strained and imperceptibly deformed at every point where I and my men had inserted a container, and it was loudly complaining of its agony. The keening now became mixed with other noises: the groans of stubborn old wood being bent, the splinterings of overstressed wood giving way, the screeches of spikes and bolts being twisted. I could see and hear iron staples and bosses wrench themselves from the surface beams here and there, each with a harsh rasp or twang of noise.

Suddenly the weakest part of the gate, the wicket door inset in the right-hand panel, buckled and partly shattered. The wicket had of course been made of a size to admit one person at a time. When it splintered, we could see that the upper part of its opening was blocked by a crossbar inside. But the wicket was now a tangle of broken wood that could be cleared to make an entrance as wide as a man and half as high.

Theodoric instantly wheeled and shouted to the nearest waiting turma of foot soldiers, “Ten men with swords! To the gate! Break open that wicket! Get inside and raise all crossbars!”

The first ten men in that column unhesitatingly dashed forward and across the open area. The Sarmatian sentries above had regained their wits enough to send down a hail of arrows, so only nine of the ten men reached the gate, while Theodoric and I dodged to safety behind the corner of a nearby house. The first warriors to arrive at the buckled wicket hacked at it with their swords and tore at the fragments with their hands, and one after another the nine men stooped and lunged through the jagged opening. For all they knew, they were committing suicide by doing so, if there were Sarmatae waiting just inside, but they went eagerly.

Theodoric shouted now, “Bring up the ram!”

The blunt point of the thing poked out from behind the row of houses where it had been lurking. The long trunk had to be slowly manhandled around that corner by its carriers. But when it was in the main street, pointed toward us, the leading man bawled, “Left! Right!
Double
pace! Left-right! Left-right-run!” and the great ram came up the street as fast as the many men propelling it could race.

Although the other nine men had only just got inside the gate, and there was no telling what they might be doing or what might have happened to them in there, Theodoric waved the ram-bearers on. He gave a commanding sweep of his lance, ending with it pointing at the gate. He meant that they were not to pause for further orders, but to continue in their present headlong rush, gaining impetus as they did so, and they were to hit the gate regardless of whether it opened or showed signs of weakening or even if it stood as firm as before.

But just then the gate did open inward, though only a crack of about three hands’ span, enough for me to see a commotion of indistinct activity within. In fact, as we would all soon realize, several things were happening at once. Our nine men had lunged through the wicket to find that they were—as Theodoric had earlier conjectured—actually between two gates, and the farther one was solidly shut. Nevertheless, as commanded, they proceeded to wrestle the two immense crossbars of the outer gate from their sockets in the arch walls and their brackets on the gate panels. The men were just starting to tug those panels open when the
inner
gate miraculously also began to open. The Sarmatian gate guards had ill-advisedly chosen that moment to emerge and investigate the strange noises they had been hearing from beyond that inner gate.

All in the same moment, our battering ram struck the crack already opened in the outer gate. The panels slammed inward against the arch walls, and such was the impetus of the running ram-bearers that their weapon went on to burst wide the inner gate as well. What with that great ram hurtling through and the heavy gate panels flinging open, there ensued a turmoil of tossed and mashed and falling and flailing bodies in there, and a clamor of yells, curses and screams. But what most caught my eye was what looked like a sudden small snowstorm of glinting metal—my numerous trumpets of Jaíriko flung high and wide and all about.

Theodoric shouted, “Lancers! Rally on me!” Then, without waiting for them, he ran for the gate, heedless of the arrows still pouring down from the walls, leaping over the bodies of two of the ram-bearers who had been felled by those missiles.

I was almost impelled by his ardor for combat to run after him. But I restrained myself and waited while the mounted lancers, then the contubernia of archers, then two or three turmae of dismounted swordsmen pelted past me, the foot soldiers all holding their bucklers overhead for protection against the deluge of arrows. I waited until my own assigned turma came by, and, as I fell in with them, I flashed a broad, triumphant, gloating grin at our optio, Daila.

I can give no real account of the battle for Singidunum. No man who took part in it could. Of any battle, the individual combatant can recount only the minute fragment in which he participated. During that, he sees none but his nearest fellows and foes, knows only whether those few are advancing or retreating, killing or dying. The rest of the action is as remote from him as if it took place on another continent, and he never knows whether it is being won or lost until it is concluded.

Even during his own small part in the battle, he may be less aware of the fighting in which he is engaged than he is of a multitude of inconsequential other things. A trained and experienced warrior can almost unconsciously wield his weapon and dodge an enemy’s, while he gives his closer attention to annoying distractions. I myself had had enough practice at swordsmanship so that I was less concerned with doing it properly than I was with worrisome trifles:

The sweat that streamed from my forehead and blurred my vision… the irritation of a chafing rash under my arms, from having lived so long in my armor… the street dust, kicked up by so many struggling men, that clogged my nose and stung my eyes… the hotness and heaviness of my feet, swollen from having been so long booted… the overwhelming tumult of shouts and grunts and oaths and screams… the deafening din of sword blows on helmets and shields and corselets, deafening not just because those sounds were loud, but because they were stunningly concussive, like having one’s ears clapped hard by cupped hands… the sickly sweet smell of spilled blood, and the stench of excrement voided by the bowels of the dying, and the acrid odor of fear, fear everywhere…

There were fewer arrows raining from above, as our turma ran toward the ruined gateway in a column of fours, holding our bucklers above our heads. But we had to thread our way among many bodies, some of them limp, some feebly moving, on the open pavement before the wall and in the tunnel-like arch leading through it. Once inside the wall, our turma dissolved, and it was every man for himself.

As we spilled into the city, we met no organized resistance. If there had earlier been a heavily armed phalanx planted there to repel our invasion, Theodoric and his lancers had effectively scattered it. And his bowmen had easily picked off most of the Sarmatae atop this section of the wall, because the defenders’ perch up there was only a wooden shelf with no protection behind. More bodies lay everywhere about the entrance and at the base of the wall, but there were at least twice as many Sarmatae as Ostrogoths.

I, like every other man of our turma, went running into the city’s warren of streets, seeking an enemy to close with. And I stayed close to our optio, Daila, deeming him the likeliest to find action—and the best man to have near me when I found some. He and I passed numerous couples and knots and crowds of men fighting, but the Ostrogoths among them were clearly holding their own, so we did not interfere. Of other people, we espied only the occasional fearful face of a townsman or a woman, peering apprehensively from behind a shutter or through the crack of a door or over the edge of a roof.

Then, in one of the city’s squares, we came upon a fiercely fighting group that Daila
did
elbow his way into, and I followed his lead. Six or seven Ostrogoths were dueling with about the same number of Sarmatae, and those latter were ranged in a protective ring about one other man. He was elderly, unarmed, clearly terrified and—considering the circumstances—very oddly dressed, for he wore a rich green toga hemmed with gold. Even above the clash of arms, he could be heard loudly crying for mercy in a number of languages: “Clementia! Eleéo! Armahaírtei!”

When the optio and I joined the fray, the Sarmatae were soon overpowered. But I must confess that I did not do much toward accomplishing that small victory. Though I delivered several sword blows, I discovered that my Roman gladius merely glanced off the Sarmatian scale armor. The Ostrogoths’ snake-pattern blades did not; they sheared right through it. Three of the Sarmatae fell, and the others scampered away. Then one of the Ostrogoths made a lunge with his sword at the toga-clad old man, but Daila moved faster. To my vast astonishment, though, he did not slash at the old man, but skewered the Ostrogoth, who fell like a log. None of that man’s fellow warriors showed any dismay at that, or even any surprise; they simply dashed off after their fleeing foes. But I exclaimed to the optio: