‘Good news, General,’ the centurion called to me. ‘We’ll soon have a full breach.’
‘But how has it happened so quickly?’
‘Luck, I suppose. I saw some cracks develop a few hours ago and we’ve been concentrating all our fire on the weak spot.’
They certainly had. I saw how the endmost machines in the line had been turned a good thirty degrees. Every piece of artillery had been realigned to focus on the point where the wall had begun to crack and crumble.
‘How long until we have a breach we can attack?’ The voice belonged to Pansa. I turned to face him, and he looked at me, puzzled.
‘Are you all right, General? You don’t look well.’
‘I’ll be fine. I just had some very suspect cheese, that’s all.’
‘So long as you’re sure, sir. I don’t mind taking control of the army while you recuperate,’ he said earnestly.
‘No need for that, Pansa. Well, you heard what he said: how long until the breach is big enough for an assault?’ I asked the engineer.
‘Hopefully no more than another four hours or so, General.’
‘Very well, then I will sit here and wait until we are ready.’
A man was sent to bring one of the chairs from my tent while Pansa had the army prepare itself. Not wanting to be caught out by a sudden sally – after all, the machines had to be within a mere 200 paces of the walls to be effective and we couldn’t risk losing them to a suicidal enemy attack – we learned the lesson of the day before and had the men stagger their meal-times so that there was always at least a full legion ready for action.
It was mid-afternoon when I heard a clattering sound, a few cries of pain and three men were lying prone on the ground.
‘Slingers!’ the engineer shouted. I grabbed the helmet which had been resting beside my seat and hastily strapped it on.
‘Why are they using slingers only now?’ I asked, saying the words more to myself than anyone in particular.
‘They’ve probably only just found the slings in a storeroom somewhere,’ Pansa answered.
As the front two ranks weaved their way between the machines, with their shields held high to protect them, some men dragged the wounded out of harm’s way. The stones, no bigger than your fist, had dented one man’s helmet and knocked him unconscious. The other two had not been so lucky: their faces were a bloody mess. One was even missing some teeth.
The stones were still raining down on us as the legionaries formed a protective wall, the front rank using their shields to cover themselves while the second held theirs aloft and at a reverse angle to make a higher screen without leaving themselves exposed. The slingers’ ammunition was too small to see until it was directly above you, and by then it was too late. One of the siege engineers standing next to me was suddenly plucked back, the stone catching him right on the throat. His hands clasped at his neck as he fell, gasping for breath.
We endured this barrage for an hour or more before the storm of stones began to falter, the defenders clearly running low on ammunition. We lost thirty dead and almost a hundred wounded, but the soldiers who operated the onagers if anything worked even faster, perhaps in the knowledge that once a breach was made they and their machines could retreat to the safety of our makeshift camp.
The occasional missile would fly through the gap we had battered in their wall, crashing into some unfortunate building. The only consolation was that the garrison would have moved any civilians away from the side of the city we were assaulting; the only men we killed would be soldiers. But as more and more of the wall was destroyed it reduced the size of the target for our engineers. The shots kept pounding though, and ammunition was beginning to run short. The men watched silently, waiting to be unleashed. As the sun began to sink in the west, soon to be obscured by Placentia itself, a lucky shot hit the wall low down, plumb on one of the largest cracks. Huge chunks of the wall came crashing down and to a man we craned to see the damage it had caused.
It seemed to take an age for the dust to settle, but the murky haze began to clear. At last we had a breach, wide enough for eight, maybe ten men to walk abreast. Through the dust I could make out the glint of swords and spears as the defenders massed within the gap. I turned to face the nearest cohorts.
‘We have our breach, men. Only a few soft guardsmen and a bunch of slaves stand in your way. Engineers, I want you to focus the ammunition you have left on the gates, try and give our boys another way into the city. The Twenty-Second Legion will have the privilege of being the first men to cross the threshold of Placentia.’ I drew my sword clumsily with my left arm and raised it to the sky. ‘For Vitellius!’
‘For Vitellius!’ they echoed. The engineers didn’t even have to cheer their own success but set to moving their lumbering machines to face the city gates. The foremost cohort of the Twenty-Second, led by their young tribune, formed a testudo to protect themselves from the archers on the walls. Once the formation was complete they shuffled forward, standing too close together to march normal-length paces for fear of making holes in the tortoise shell of curved shields.
There were 200 paces of open ground to cross, open but for the corpses of the auxiliaries who had failed to scale or return from the walls. The second cohort was already forming up behind them, ready to reinforce the first wave; the breach was too narrow to send more than one cohort at a time into the attack. It would be suicidal to send them in close support, needlessly into range of the bowmen high up on Placentia’s walls. The first cohort was nearing the walls now. I could make out the tribune in the rear rank of the testudo, the broad purple stripe on his cloak flanked by four cloaks of deep scarlet on either side. He was a brave young man to join the first attack.
The bowmen took their time, searching for chinks in the body of men beneath them. Flights of arrows thudded into the roof of shields but some of them found their fleshy targets. The cohort marched on, leaving dead and wounded men in their wake. Up ahead was a rough group of defenders, not bunched together to form an impenetrable wall, for the lumps of rubble made an organized line impossible. Most of them carried gladii, a few bore two swords, others had spears or tridents coupled with a net. They were the gladiators.
There was a loud crash, then another and another. The defenders were throwing rocks from the parapet, hefty chunks of stone too heavy to be repelled by a simple wooden shield. The cohort was at the wall now, but the breach was a good foot above ground level. It wasn’t much of a height advantage, but the gladiators made it tell. The rear of the cohort was still formed up in a testudo, but the front had broken free to engage with the enemy hand to hand. The arrows and rocks just kept on coming, and I couldn’t see any of our men forcing their way into the breach. How could slaves hope to fend off the cream of the Roman army?
I ordered a third cohort to prepare to join the attack. By now the first cohort was floundering, and the second was heading into the killing zone at the foot of the walls. I could just make out a flash of purple in the midst of the fighting. The rear of the testudo must have made it to the walls, but then a rock came hurtling from above, crushing the tribune’s head. With the loss of their officer, the spirit of the first wave broke and they ran back towards us. The artillery was still firing shot after shot at the gates but doing no damage that I could see. Hastily I waved on the next cohort.
‘Go on, don’t give them time to recuperate!’ But it was too late, the surviving gladiators in the front rank had rotated; now my troops faced new, fresh men.
The first of the survivors from the initial assault were making it back to our lines.
‘What’s wrong with you?’ Pansa bawled. ‘How can a few slaves send you packing?’
‘They’re not just any slaves, Legate,’ a man answered. ‘They’re the best gladiators in all of Rome, used to fighting in single combat. With the rubble and the high breach we can’t attack them in line.’
‘I’ve never fought anyone like them,’ another chipped in.
The sky was beginnin
g to darken, and it was getting harder to see the impact of our attacks. I could just make out the gladiators hacking, stabbing and lunging, and a pile of bodies growing higher and higher. Soon the legionaries faced a small climb just to get within reach of the defenders’ swords. The gates still stood, stubbornly refusing to cave in before the onslaught from the artillery. We needed another entry point to the city, and quickly. I grabbed the chief engineer by the arm and shouted over the noise of the mighty machines launching yet another volley.
‘Can we burn the gates down?’ I yelled in his ear.
‘We can use naphtha, but it will make our shots less accurate.’
‘Surely one hit is all we need?’
The centurion nodded, and relayed my order to his men. By now the fourth wave was preparing to join the assault; the gladiators were still holding firm. As the first fireballs were launched towards the city, Quintus caught my eye. He was the reason I hadn’t sent in my own legion, the Fourth, to lead the attack on Placentia. I owed my friend so much, and he had seen too much death and tragedy for a man of his tender years. But I knew deep down that he felt our siege of the city was wrong, and I didn’t trust him to lead my men into a potential death trap for a cause that wasn’t his own. Thankfully it was the Twenty-Second’s tribune and not my friend who had lost his life in the assault.
Most of the naphtha-infused missiles sailed way beyond the walls and into the city itself, causing huge explosions on impact. There was no way of knowing what carnage the fire was wreaking beyond the thick slabs of stone. Quintus walked away in disgust. I could have called him back, but it would have served no purpose. The Fourth were far more attached to me than to the man who shared a name with the leader of a crushed Gallic rebellion. Given the right cause Quintus could have been a great leader of men, but I knew then that this was not his fight. I looked up to the heavens to issue a silent prayer to the gods that Quintus would forgive what we were doing, but then I noticed that the sky was tinged with orange. It wasn’t because the sun was setting, for it had long since passed below the horizon. Placentia’s majestic theatre was on fire.
The gates to the city were still intact, but within minutes of catching fire the finest theatre in northern Italia was an inferno. The building must have been hit by some stray shots from our onagers, since it lay beyond the city’s south-eastern corner, but on a direct line extending from our artillery towards the gatehouse. All I could see of the theatre itself were the high flames licking at the topmost parts of the timber stands for the cavea, where the women and plebs would have sat.
But it was the pinpricks of orange against the dark of dusk that worried me more. In retribution, no doubt, for burning their theatre, the bowmen were firing flaming arrows into the sky, hoping that a high, arcing trajectory would reach our distant lines. Immediately, nearby men moved to protect me with their shields, but through the gaps within my new layer of armour I could see that the vast majority of arrows were falling short, plummeting down early because of their heavier, flaming heads. Quickly I was ushered a good forty paces back, well beyond range. The shields were withdrawn just as another volley sailed into the night. It was like a cloud of fireflies cascading down from the heavens.
I watched as the engineers hurriedly loaded the machines. In his rush to get behind his onager, one man, using it as cover from the storm of arrows, knocked over an amphora of the foul-smelling naphtha. The soldier barely registered it, but my stomach clenched with sickening fear as I realized what might happen. The first arrows fell short, some plummeting into the earth, others skimming across it because they landed at too flat an angle. Some thudded into the wood of the machines, while a few managed to find their intended targets. They were the lucky ones, the men with searing shafts embedded in their chest or throat. My eyes were fixed on that emptying amphora. Time almost came to a halt as the inevitable arrow plunged into the dirty pool.
In horror I saw the pool ignite in an instant, the flames dancing, devouring everything in their path. They followed the trail towards a pile of amphorae neatly stacked together. The blast of the explosion knocked me back, a sudden wave of immense heat as the scene before me was transformed into a roaring, raging vision of carnage. Four of the onagers were on fire, their handlers running about wildly as their whole bodies were consumed with flames. Their cries of anguish carried over the crackling of the fire as one by one they fell to the ground and tried to smother the prancing, agonizing flames.
Before I could react, men were already hurrying forward with buckets of water, trying to put out the fires engulfing their comrades, but most of them were scorched to death long before the water arrived. They tried to put out the fires devouring the onagers but the heat was so intense that they could not get close enough to empty their buckets.
Our only hope of taking Placentia now was the breach, but many good men had already thrown their lives away on the swords and spears of the gladiators, and who knew how many more men it would need to capture the place.
‘General Severus!’ a voice called. ‘General Severus!’
A rider was negotiating his way through the crowd of soldiers rushing forward to drag the bodies of the burned and the burning back to the line and the attentions of the medical orderlies. His dark face against the burnished metal of his helmet marked him out as one of Cerberus’s men.
‘Over here,’ I shouted, waving my good arm. The rider spotted me at last, urging his horse onward through the sea of moving bodies. His horse was exhausted, its chest heaving after a hard, fast journey.
‘Otho’s army, sir,’ the rider said breathlessly, ‘they’re at Mutina.’
‘Mutina?’ I said incredulously. ‘But that’s only seventy miles from here!’
‘They were at Mutina when I left, sir, but it didn’t look as though they were stopping. They left their artillery and all the baggage that could be spared at the town, and are marching at double pace. I’d say they’re just over fifty miles away by now.’
My mind whirred frantically. Only fifty miles away? At that pace, Otho and his praetorians would be at Placentia in little over a day, and my army had already taken far more casualties than I had anticipated in the assault, and the city was not yet won. Resignedly, I told a tribune to bring the senior officers to me, on the double.
‘I wish I had brought better news, General,’ was all the scout could say.
‘You’ve almost killed your horse trying to bring it to me in time though. I’ll ensure your commander is made aware of your efforts.’
Pansa, Publilius, Cerberus and Quintus were all found within minutes. They looked solemn and weary. Who wouldn’t be after watching our pitiful attempts to take the city?
‘The army will retreat in good order to Cremona,’ I said.
No one spoke. They didn’t know about Otho’s imminent arrival and yet they all knew it would be madness to waste more men on Placentia’s walls.
‘Otho and his army have just passed Mutina,’ I continued. ‘It seems we won’t be able to win this war on our own.’
‘We’ll make the bastards pay for the men we’ve lost though,’ Publilius growled.
‘Valens and his men can’t come quickly enough,’ Cerberus added.
My shoulders slumped. I had failed, and soon Valens would be there to gloat at our losses. The prospect of his sneering almost seemed worse than the sight of the charred corpses of those wretched engineers.
* * *
The army trudged forlornly back along the road towards Cremona. The defenders of Placentia had jeered as we packed up the few siege engines that had survived the explosion, dismantled our makeshift camp and headed east for the bridge over the Po. The men were silent, except for the wounded who lay in the wagons that had housed the onagers which had perished in the flames. After an hour’s march you could still make out the blaze that was Placentia’s theatre, a building that could seat over 40,000 people. It burned so brightly that it looked as though the sun, being contrary, had decided to rise in the west.
; The bridge was up ahead. The thought struck me that we could make camp where we stood, then we could stop Otho from meeting up with his eastern reinforcements. But that would lose us the initiative. Placentia’s garrison, freed from our siege, would join Otho’s column. The force keeping the Postumian Way open would converge with the detachments from Pannonia and they would approach Cremona from the east, so we would be trapped between two armies. Maybe it wasn’t such a good idea after all.
Totavalas rode alongside me. The officers wanted to be with their own men, trying to keep their morale up, but the Hibernian knew his place was by my side.
‘Don’t be too hard on yourself,’ he was saying. ‘The fortunes of war and all that.’
‘The fortunes of war? People only say that when they can’t bring themselves to admit the failure was their fault.’
‘Was it really your fault that the siege weapons were destroyed?’
‘No, but it was my decision to assault the city when we had only one breach. I was reckless with my men’s lives.’
‘But isn’t it because of these men that we’re rebelling in the first place? They knew that to put their man on the throne there would be blood, now they’re shedding it for you and Vitellius.’
‘In that order?’ I asked, smiling weakly.
‘Well, it is for me, but then again I haven’t been spilling much blood for the cause, have I?’
‘You are my rock, Totavalas, my dependable Hibernian rock.’
He laughed appreciatively. ‘And what does that make Quintus?’
‘Right now? He likes to think he’s my conscience, but he feels more like a stone around my neck.’
There was a commotion up ahead. A man stood alone on the bridge, his horse gently nibbling at the grass on the river bank.
‘I’ll only say it once more, I want to talk to your general.’
‘And who shall I say is asking?’ one of my men replied. ‘Why should we take you to him when you won’t tell us your name?’
‘I’m a praetor of Rome and have ridden from the emperor’s column to talk to General Severus.’
The Sword and the Throne Page 15