by Dan Wallace
“And,” he said, “the Numantine town of Malia is just miles away.”
“Malia?” I said out loud. “That’s the town that Pompeius secured some years ago, hostages and all. So, it’s just a few miles away? We might be able to re-provision there.”
“Not immediately,” said Sextus. “At present,” he said flatly, “the town is under siege.” His reply puzzled me until he went on. “Mancinus and his entire army has surrounded Malia and look ready to attack.”
Of course, I was more than surprised, I was stunned. A host of emotions assaulted me, relief and joy that we had caught Mancinus before he’d conquered Numantia, confusion from the knowledge that he had not even reached the Numantines’ city, and slight bafflement at his siege of Malia, a town from all reports subservient to Rome. Perhaps its status had changed, hardly an unusual occurrence in Hispania, as I’m sure you know. Then, it occurred to me that Mancinus had reduced Numantia already and was returning to Hispania Citerior and Rome in triumph. In all likelihood, Malia had broken its treaty with Pompeius, thereby requiring the consul to delay his celebration until he’d brought this last Numantine stronghold back under control. Woe to the hostages, I thought gloomily, plunged again into depression as dark as Hades.
“Then, let us go and hail the consul, Sextus,” I told him. I then placed Casca in command, cautioning him to keep the legion steady and alert on through to Malia, where we would rejoin them.
We cantered the five miles to Malia without incident, reasoning that the harassing Numantines had melted away when realizing how close they were to the full force of the Roman army. The camp praetor welcomed us and sent us immediately to Mancinus’s headquarters. I presented him with a formal salute. To my surprise, he came up and greeted me warmly, grasping my arms with his hands. “Welcome,” he said, “to Hispania, Tiberius Sempronius Gracchus! Look, Quintus, young Tiberius has joined us, and none too soon.”
“Welcome, Quaestor,” said Fabius, a handsome figure of a man who presents himself as the perfect model of Roman masculinity. “I am delighted to see you in camp, he said cheerfully, and relieved to be relieved soon of my extraordinary duties.”
I thanked Fabius, telling him it was my pleasure to be there. Then, I congratulated Mancinus on his brilliant successes to date. He replied, “You celebrate me too soon, Quaestor. I haven’t done anything brilliant just yet. But I will with your help. The Numantines still defies us. But now that you are here, we can dispense quickly with Malia and move on to Numantia itself. Have you raised your legion?”
Father-in-law, I was flabbergasted. We pushed our men and they did their best, but we did not meet my goal of reaching Mancinus in two weeks. It took us three weeks to meet him, and he was barely ahead of us, while the Numantines ranged freely, scorning the Roman mandate.
“A full legion, Consul,” Sextus told him. “Five miles away and on the march,” he boasted, slyly distracting them from my confoundment.
Mancinus turned to me then and again clasped my shoulders. “Now, that is brilliant,” he said. “Five miles away? Then, we will attack Malia at dawn.”
Our men arrived and were folded into the main camp. Mancinus informed me that our legion would be kept in reserve since we’d just arrived after a long journey. I imagine he decided this, too, after seeing all of the old evocati and farm boys in our ranks. When our men learned that they would be reserves, they were incensed, and I did my best to assuage them. They ate and drank well that night and slept until the cornicens roused them with their assembly call.
Father Appius, I cannot express how bewilderment turned into concern as I witnessed the assault unfold. Completely sacrificing any element of surprise, Mancinus brazenly formed the troops in front of Malia’s gates, barely out of ballista range. With a loud klaxon, he sent his cherished Fifth legion directly at the walls and ordered the siege towers to advance. Before his men had marched a hundred paces, a wave of enemy cavalry swept around the walls directly at the advancing troops. The legionaries readied their pila, but the enemy horsemen ignored them as they raced their mounts to our siege towers. The pila struck many of the barbarians down, but a few rode abreast of the towers and threw leather bags that burst oil all over the wood. By this time the siege towers were within arrow range, and flaming shafts curving from the city walls lit the oil. As our troops tried to douse the fires, arrows struck them down. Seeing the towers consumed, the front line faltered. The Numantines wasted no time in sending out another flight of cavalry to attack the milling legionaries, while survivors from the first group of Arevaci horse flew to the ram to kill our men moving it to the gates.
Without question, the front line needed support, as their ranks collapsed and the triarii were already engaged. I had mounted Chance at the beginning to see better, while Lysis held his reins since the horse had become agitated, being in his first battle in a long time. Lysis himself looked pale as he gazed toward Mancinus and the other officers just a few paces away. Seeing the first rank slowly give ground, I jerked the reins from Lysis and walked Chance over to Mancinus.
“Consul, the first rank is flagging,” I said, and he did not reply. Instead, he twisted the leather reins of his horse with both hands. “Consul, I said, the Fifth needs reinforcement.”
Mancinus never looked at me as he muttered, “Why aren’t they sweeping the field?”
“Consul Mancinus!” I shouted, “The Numantine horse are too mobile for them. Let me send in my auxiliaries, please, sir!”
Mancinus bit his lip and nodded briskly to me. I turned Chance and slashed the air with my left arm. Sextus cried out, and our auxiliaries galloped across the field. They were on the Arevaci before they knew it, and the enemy horse sprinted back behind their town fort.
Sextus roared to the front rank, and they followed him with their ladders. The bold young warrior urged his horse to the walls, where it died beneath him. No matter, he made it up and over, winner of the Mural Crown. Seeing the first rank climbing the ladders, Mancinus took heart and called to me, “Follow your eques’s lead, Gracchus, and take down Malia!”
I shouted at Casca, and the men formed a column with shields up. They rushed the gates of Malia where the ram stood unmanned, legionary bodies strewn around it. Before long, the gates came crashing down and Malia fell.
We suffered 400 casualties in this assault, and our victorious troops took their spoils with Mancinus’s blessing. I tried suggesting to him that a show of restraint might erode the will of those in Numantia awaiting our arrival. He would have none of it, however, swearing by Jupiter and Mars that the pernicious Numantines and their fellow Arevaci tribesmen constantly defied Roman hegemony and require suppression again and again at great cost to the Republic. The consul said that he would not put up with it, that he would vanquish this centaurian race once and for all. On that vow, he ordered all surviving Malian warriors to be crucified at once, and the women and children to be sold into slavery. Malia itself would be burned to the ground and those in Numantia would quake and sue for peace.
As I watched, the surviving five or six hundred warriors in Malia were stretched and hanged on crosses fashioned from the wooden posts of their city’s breached walls. I witnessed three thousand of the town’s people crying as they were sorted out and roped together according to sex and age, then saw the old and infirm driven out on the high plains to die. I feared that word of this action would have the opposite effect on the Numantines than that which Mancinus intended. While his legionaries gambled away the measly plunder to be had from Malia and fought drunkenly over the women, girls, and boys they expected to have that night, I volunteered my men to tend to the funeral pyres of our noble dead. Newly named the Ninth by Mancinus, and I its acting military tribune, my legion of old soldiers and farm boys grumbled slightly under their breath at this somber duty compared to the pleasures they were missing. Then, they saw the souls of nearly 400 legionaries ascend to the gods. They honored their fellow soldiers at attention, while I thought of how easily these lost men had perished
in such an ill-conceived, poorly executed attack. And Numantia looms, Appius.
We march in two days. I trust that I will send you another letter in due time. But if I don’t, dear Father-in-law, know that I love your daughter far beyond the honor of marrying into the Claudii. I love Claudia as the essence of my own spirit, a gift from the goddesses Juno and Venus for some good deed of mine that I cannot imagine ever could warrant such favor. She is the burning star in my sky, Apollo’s gift of love, the glory of all the gods. I love her and the children she has given us; please protect them always.
Vale,
Tiberius
Cornelia crushed the letter in her hands as she turned her eyes to Appius. “Curse the dark shades of the underworld, he sounds terrible!”
Appius nodded his head solemnly. “He’s in a tenuous position. If what he says is true, we can only hope that what happened at Malia will prove the same at Numantia. Despite Mancinus’s mercurial inclinations, Roman soldiering may prevail.”
“Horse manure! Better generals have lost in that Hispania sinkhole than Mancinus, and with more men. We need to get another army to them. To win, an inept like Mancinus must use overwhelming force.”
“And how can we do that, Cornelia? They’re marching on Numantia even as we speak. They may already be there, the battle could be over now, won or lost. We can’t get an army there in less than two months! What could they do then?”
“Save the survivors or exact revenge for my son!”
Appius sighed. “How are we to achieve this?”
“First, by going to the Senate. Philea, my cloak!”
Cornelia dropped the crumpled letter on a side table next to her bed. As she emerged from her chambers with Appius beside her, Philea wrapped an exquisite lavender cloak patterned with gold embroidered flowers around her shoulders. On her way to the front door, Cornelia turned her head to Claudia, who had just come out of her own room.
“Claudia, your father and I are going out. We will be back for supper.” The light in Cornelia’s green eyes struck Claudia like the moon reflecting on the black surface of a summer lake.
After Cornelia and her father had left, Claudia stood in the vestibulum alone. She casually walked over into Cornelia’s room. Standing in the doorway, she gazed around until she saw the crumpled letter on the table. She glided over and slipped it into the folds of her dress. Calmly, she left the room and returned to Tiberius’s study. Once inside, she locked the door and stepped over to settle down again in his favorite chair. Then, she pulled the letter from her clothing, flattened it out, and began to read.
Chapter 13. The Numantine War
Sextus scratched at the still fresh, scabrous wound running over his shoulder. A noble symbol of his bravery, true, but a pain in the rump nonetheless. He’d been lucky, the Arevaci’s blow had barely penetrated after cutting through the leather strap of his lorica. But now he’d need a new lorica and a new horse.
After their vigil over the fallen troops, the Ninth finally had been allowed to stand down and pick over the few, remaining Malian goods still left. A paltry selection, indeed, sighed Sextus, a few faltering hags, some broken pottery and furniture, and a couple of sickly-looking goats and pigs. The men didn’t care, they slaughtered and ate the animals and passed around the hags along with any wine that they could find. Sextus took a quick turn with one scrawny girl, the right of an eques redoubled by winning the Mural Crown. The act was mechanical and boring for the most part. He was too tired, and the girl was terrified, so after a weak tryst he told her to go. Then, he drank a cup of wine and fell asleep.
Now, here he was at the base of the wall where he had achieved his trophy. Behind him, six of his auxiliaries stood in a half circle awaiting his orders. They looked beat and almost bewildered at their bad luck in being chosen by the Eques for the gods knew what, instead of being asleep back in their tents. Well, Sextus thought, pedicabo eos. He turned his attention back to the wall where his great mount Triumph lay in a heap. Big black birds flapped around him, alternating between pecking at each other and the dead horse beneath them. Sextus pulled his sword and swung at them half-heartedly. They flew out of reach while he stung his arm by inadvertently striking the shafts of arrows sticking out of Triumph’s breast.
Ah, what a good horse you were, he thought, a noble beast worthy of your name. Never once did you falter until the last when the night shades spirited you away. He pressed his lips together as he gazed, slowly swinging his head back and forth at the sight.
Gradually, he lifted his eyes. There were birds everywhere, in flight over the town walls and on the ground feasting on Arevaci corpses. Let them pluck out their staring eyes, they wouldn’t feast on my Triumph.
“All right,” he barked. “Get ropes and spades. Drag him out of here over to that glade. Bury him deep so that nothing can get at him. And, make sure you get all the arrows out of him before you put him in the ground.”
The men looked stunned, which fueled his anger. But by Mars, he would have sent Triumph to the gods by fire if it wouldn’t have scandalized him in the eyes of the entire army.
“Dig, you stinking curs! I’ll be back to make sure you did it right!”
They cowered and began moving toward the big horse’s body, which had begun to smell, spilled blood always first to foul the air. Flies buzzed around everywhere, further accentuating this dark Hades on earth. No place to eat breakfast, Sextus mused as he made his way back to the camp perimeter.
He watched the hung-over legionaries striking tents and bundling equipment, complaining the entire time of how their heads hurt. Now, the men were supposed to be readying themselves for the critical march to Numantia. But they moved slowly, less injured from wine, Sextus thought, than by the idea of leaving this safe place to face a stronghold that housed three times as many warriors as this little town, warriors who were likely to fight to the end when they learned the fate of their fellow barbarians. The centurions were sure to dismiss these misgivings by smacking a few backs with their vitae. As for himself, he was starving, now feeling no ill effects from his wound or from his carousing last night. He wondered where he might find something to eat.
Sextus reached his tent and sat down on a camp stool in front of the open flaps. Food, he thought, where will it be? Not at the Ninth’s hearth. The way things look, that had been packed up long ago. Leave it to Gracchus to kick his legion’s ass. Wasted though they all seemed, the legionaries of the Ninth seemed much farther along than Mancinus’s lot. Then, it hit him: Mancinus’s ovens. If the consul’s army dragged in forming up, most likely his cookery dawdled as well. He stood up and stretched his long frame to the heavens. Then, he started his long legs in motion toward the Via Principalis where Mancinus’s praetorium was situated, not too far from the quaestor’s quarters.
As he walked, Sextus thought what a strange bird was Quaestor Tiberius Sempronius Gracchus. While every Roman soldier did his level best to get blind drunk and laid, Tiberius Sempronius sat in his tent handwriting letters home. He didn’t even call for a scribe, he wrote them himself! Sextus shook his head; if he tried to write a letter in his own script, no one would be able to cipher it at all. They’d think he was a spy, or a sorcerer, or worse. No, he was not much at letters, Sextus admitted to himself. But Gracchus wrote to everyone―his father-in-law, his mother, his wife! For all Sextus knew, he might even be sending post to his house slaves! Strange for a fellow plebeian, Sextus mused, even one of Gracchus’s lineage. But you couldn’t fault him as a military man. He’d proven it early on with his own Mural Crown, and his behavior on this campaign had been a model of efficiency and tactical ingenuity. Sextus smiled wolfishly as he recalled those Arevaci bastards running from them by the river, and the other lot just caught in Malia and now hanging from crosses. If you concentrated, you still could hear them crying out on the plains next to the smoldering town. Maybe the Numantines could hear them, too. They were next.
He reached the via principalis and turned left toward the praetorium. Sure
enough, he could see the smoke rising from the cook fires. He also could see the annonae packing up, so he broke into a trot. Before they could put all the victuals away, Sextus swooped down and grabbed a loaf of bread and what was left of a lamb’s haunch. He tore the loaf in two, then pulled the final scraps of meat off the leg and tucked it between the two halves of bread. The annonae optios complained at the interruption, but he ignored them, deciding instead to check in with the quaestor.
He found Tiberius pouring over the payroll scrolls. Tiberius looked up at Sextus and said, “These rolls were a mess when I received them. Fabius’s handling of them was a disaster. Nothing was accounted for, and the legions haven’t been paid for months. Mancinus and Fabius must have been distracted in the extreme to allow affairs to reach such a state.”
“Perhaps these distractions led to lapses in the numbers in more than one way.”
Tiberius sat back. “Surely you would not disparage the consul, Sextus, by accusing him of avarice?”
“Not avarice, just enterprise, Quaestor, a genius for it. Both he and Fabius returned from Macedonia and Corinth as wealthy men. Heavy in the slave trade, I understand.”
Tiberius nodded, “Leave it to one of your station to give a nod to Mancinus’s business acumen. Not quite consular, though.”
“True enough, Quaestor, but it’s one way to solve the dilemma of having patrician blood but not the million required to join the ranks of the Senate.”
Tiberius gave him a steely look, “Be careful, Sextus. Don’t allow camp comradery to lead you too far.”