Rome 3: The Eagle of the Twelfth (31 page)

Until now, they had not faced archers in a solid block, but men scattered through the legions, King Antiochus of Syria not having wished to put his archers in the line of fire until specifically requested. Now that he had been made to understand the urgency, I had one hundred bowmen with fifty arrows apiece placed under my orders. At my request, I had a part-century of the VIth in attendance as shield-men, chafing under a strange command, and sour because their assault had failed and ours might succeed.

I stood alone in the centre of the rank, holding the bow Lupus had given me. I had no shield, nor any intention of having one; we were out of range of all but the longest bowshot and I needed to show that the men of Rome were not afraid. That was a lie, of course; my mouth was too dry to swallow and my guts were clenching and unclenching with horrible regularity, but I was learning how not to show it.

The archers stood in two ranks, fifty to my right, fifty to my
left.
They were Greek-speaking Syrians, dark-haired, dark-bearded men who looked, dressed, ate and thought exactly like the Hebrews – and who would kill any man who said as much in their hearing, for they loathed their neighbours with a passion unmatched anywhere in the empire.

As bowmen, they were not the quality of Vologases’ horse-archers, or even the Pannonians we had fought with at the Lizard Pass, though they were easily as fond of finery. They wore ivory guards on their left forearms to counter the slap of the string and tabs of leather on the fingers of their right hands to ensure a smooth loose. I had been loaned the same, and took it as an honour.

‘Ram, ready!’ Horgias’ voice came back in time with his horn signals. Macer was almost as good as Tears at that.

I raised my bow. The men needed no command: they had orders to shoot as I did, unless told otherwise.

I drew. The air about me hissed to the sigh of one hundred bowstrings. I smelled honey again, and heard bees enough almost to drown out Horgias’ cry.

But not quite.

‘
Forward!
’

I loosed. My men did likewise. The air sang. One hundred and one arrows soared up to the top of the temple wall. I heard screams. Some of them were Roman. Most were not. I was already drawing on the next arrow, raising …

Boom!

Taurus’ new ram hit the temple door. I loosed again and this time the song of the arrows was lost in the deep belling note of the ram on the door and the deeper shuddering hum of the sling-ropes after it. Caught in that tone, with my whole body reverberating to its song, I loosed again, and again and again until—

‘Stop!’

I held up my hand. My men held their bows still. Ahead
of
us, not a face looked over the temple wall. No man stood on the heights of the Antonia. I had no idea how many we had hit, but nobody could have survived that barrage for long.

‘Is that it?’ asked a Syrian from my left. Artacles, his name was, I think.

‘I doubt it.’ I squinted up at the top of the wall, shielding my eyes from the sun. ‘Unless we’ve killed the man who sent the Hebrews to take our siege engines, then he’s still inside there, and he’s not stupid.’

‘What will he do?’

‘What would you do?’

There was a pause, and the ram struck again. As the thunderous noise died away, Artacles said, slowly, ‘I would find shields to keep my men safe.’

‘Exactly. Or broad oak boards, which are of greater length and take fewer men to hold. I think, if you look up at the southern corner, you’ll see they are bringing some up the steps there now. If we shoot at once, we can delay them a while longer …’

I nocked, raised, loosed and hit the lead man who was carrying one end of a wide, flat board across the top of the wall. He fell outwards down the wall to lie still at its foot, so that I could be sure of the kill. In the flurry of arrows that followed, three others, I thought, went the same way, but they fell inwards, and so were uncertain. And by the time we nocked again, the boards were in place, raising the height of the wall by four feet.

‘Hold.’ I raised my hand. ‘Let me test this.’

I took three paces forward and tried one shot at a far steeper angle than we had before. It soared over the barrier, but, for the first time, an answering arrow came back. It struck the ground near my feet and skittered back towards me so that I had to take a step sideways to let it past.

‘They’ll get our range soon,’ Artacles said. ‘Best get yourself a shield.’

‘Later.’ My head still ached dully, but I was feeling expansive and calm. The buzz of bees was constant in my ears now and a knot had taken hold of my stomach that was beyond the usual stir of battle. I had an idea and wished I had not.

A ray of weak sun lanced through the clouds and, as if invited, I stepped forward into it and turned round to face the bowmen behind me.

‘The Hebrews will try to use the boards as cover to shoot back at us. If we step forward and aim high and long, we can keep them back from the wall.’

As if to test my theory, a man’s face appeared at the barrier. A sling whirled in a blur by his head. I drew and loosed without thinking, as Uncle Dorios had taught me. I missed, but so did the enemy slingshot. A small lead pellet big enough to break open my skull cracked on to the ground between me and the wall, kicked up a small plume of dust. The next did much the same, and the next. With my fourth arrow, I struck the slinger in the throat and he toppled backwards, out of sight. If he screamed, I didn’t hear it: we couldn’t hear anything over the thunder of the ram on the door, but I was still expecting—

‘Look out!’

It was Artacles who called, I think, but it was Tears’ voice I heard, and in any case I had been waiting for this. I threw myself sideways, rolling on to my shoulder to keep my bow from harm. A ballista stone the size of my head hurtled past where I had been and gouged a hole in the solid earth big enough to hide a sheep in.

‘Loose!’ I screamed, over the noise of the archers’ shock. ‘Shoot as fast as you can along the line that stone came from before they—’

‘
Look out!
’

Two pairs of hands wrenched me out of the path of the second stone. By the third, we were running backwards, by the fourth we were just running, all tactics gone, all ideas abandoned, all chance of success fading with each running step.

And then the Hebrews brought up the catapults. They had taken thirty, plus fifteen hundred bolts that were the length of a tall man’s leg and nearly as thick, tipped with iron shaped to penetrate armour. Shot by a man who knew how to sight and loose, nothing could stand against them.

These, I thought, were aimed by an expert. The first volley were rangefinders and scattered on to empty ground. After that, every one was sent to kill.

I saw one pierce a bowman through his mailed chest, come out the other side and kill the man behind him, pinning his body to the hard earth. After that, they came in a volley so fast and so hard that all we could do was run as far as we could, and each of us try to find somewhere to hide. I ended up in the armoury tent, set far back against the beast garden, as far back, in fact, as one could go without leaving the city.

And among all the many deaths, there were perhaps only half a dozen of us who thought to look to the ram – and so discovered that the catapults had been a diversion, much as the attack on us at Gabao had been a diversion, and the real attack was on the ram as it tried to break through the gate.

The stones that had so nearly killed me had been the most distant from the wall. The rest had been sent at progressively steeper angles until they were dropping from the heights of the sky, just on our side of the wall.

They fell in volleys of three at a time and crashed on to the ram and the men about it, and these were not the small stones the size of a man’s head but massive rocks big as bulls’ heads and bigger; one in six was so wide a grown man could not wrap his arms round half the width.

The first volley crippled the ram. The rest – I counted thirty shots in all, but there must have been more – smashed into the men around it, crushing their shields to tinder and their bodies to bloody pulp.

‘Sound the retreat!’ It was Lupus who called it, although it should have been Gallus. ‘Call them back! Retreat in good order! Now!’

Nobody was listening to him. A broken horn lay to my left, waiting for one of the smiths to have time to weld the handle back on. I hauled it out of the clutter of other broken kit, hitched it over my shoulder and blew the retreat as loudly as I knew how.

It wasn’t pitch perfect by any means, but it was a rhythm every man knew second only to the order to advance. I wasn’t sure anyone would hear me over the screams of dying men, and was thinking to run in and haul them out bodily when Horgias and Tears emerged – alive! Both alive! – bellowing orders at the survivors that sent them running like hares for the safety of the tent lines.

‘That’s it,’ Lupus said, as the senior centurions gathered at the flags; only twelve of us were left. It felt like a repeat of Rhandaea, only that we had not yet surrendered.

Lupus, though, thought we were close to abandoning the fight, which was the next worst thing. ‘We’re finished,’ he said. ‘Gallus had little enough heart for this at the start, but he’s lost it all now, and more. He’ll have us marching out in the morning.’

Everyone but me seemed to have been expecting this; but then everyone else had seen Gallus dither over the assault in the first place. I stared at Lupus. ‘I thought you were worried about the weather closing in.’

‘That too.’ He turned away. I turned him back.

‘Then we have to break through the gate today,’ I said.

Eleven of my fellow officers looked at me and laughed. All
except
Lupus, who was the only one who counted.

To him, I said, ‘Fire. All we need is fire. They’ve just turned the ram to matchwood. If we can pile it against the gate and set fire to it, we can still weaken it enough to get through. We know how well a ram burns now; trust me, they make a good fire. Nothing will stand against it if we can make it hot enough.’

Lupus blinked once, slowly, then nodded. ‘Do it.’

I asked for volunteers, and then had to turn half of them away. My century came, what was left of it; we had lost thirty-two men to the missiles at the gate, of whom at least half were dead. So that I might not seem to be favouring my own, I made up the numbers with men from the first cohort and brought along the first century of the VIth as well.

I set signallers on the rise by the palace with particular instructions to watch for missiles and let us know as soon as they saw them. We arranged different calls for stones and catapult bolts and a brief, easy system to let us know roughly where they were aimed. I set the archers to keep men from the temple heights while we worked, so that they might not attempt to put the blaze out too early, and while I did that Taurus led his engineers in gathering every bit of flammable material that could be found, plus the tallow, lamp oil and tinder to start a fire and keep it going.

The sun was a glowing orb behind Herod’s palace by the time we were ready. Taurus brought me a small green-enamelled ember pot with ties to fix it to my belt.

‘There are twenty of these,’ he said. ‘We found them in the king’s palace. As long as even one of us lives, we’ll get the fire going.’

I clapped Taurus on the shoulder. ‘Stay safe,’ I said simply. ‘And keep Horgias safe for me.’

I’m not one for speeches, but something was needed for the
men
and I could not address them all singly. To that end, I climbed halfway up the steps to the palace and turned to look down on them. They gathered in good order, effortlessly, even now when they were burdened with bags of wool and straw and the cloaks of dead men.

I raised my hand to speak to them, as Corbulo had done once, and if that was hubris I apologize, but it did not feel like it then: I was shaking with the battle-fear that I always felt, but pride, too, that we had come this far, that we had grown to be a fighting unit against such bitter odds, that these men – each of them – believed in me enough to follow me back to the carnage at the gate.

‘We have suffered enough at the hands of this rabble. Now is our chance to give them back the fire they gave us. And to rescue our wounded. Each man has his task. You know what to do. Do it well, and we will win this city before sundown.’

They cheered a little, but it was not a time for cheering. I jumped down from the steps, found the head of my small force, raised my right hand, and stabbed it forward.

‘
Go!
’

I carried a proper shield this time. Running in its shade, I saw only the churned ground beneath my feet. I jumped ballista stones that lay like hail in the dirt, and soon after jumped dead and living men, and splintered lengths of wood.

The air around the ram stank of blood and entrails and fractured timber. I pushed through until I reached the iron-capped head, where the great tree that Taurus had found and felled lay cracked on the ground in a mess of broken beams. Four men sheltered me with their shields as I dragged and threw and kicked fragments of wood, some of them longer than a man’s arm, into place around the ram.

‘Fleece,’ I called, and men passed me what they had carried bundled up under their shields, and soon, from the back, came jars of lamp oil taken from the palace, and then tallow,
and
behind me others and others were doing the same, so that soon enough we had the whole thing padded and wadded and ready to burn.

Horgias’ face grinned up near my own. ‘Have you the ember pot?’ he asked.

He was one of the twenty flame-holders – I had seen Taurus give him a red-coloured pot – but he was giving me first fire and I was not about to turn him down.

I unhooked the pot from my belt, and blew on it, and saw the charcoal glow to cherry red and blew again and it was the colour of fired apricots, and again and it was the noonday sun. Surrounded by the smells of tallow and oil, I fisted a hole in the wadding and leaned in and tipped the brilliant fragments on the bed there, and blew as on the face of a sleeping lover and saw a flame rise and dance and leap and catch.