by Dan Wallace
“To join Mancinus and the other legions?” Didius asked.
“No. Mancinus plans to make a stand with his back against the Durius. We will lend support from higher ground.” He turned to Casca and Sextus and spoke softly. “Get me Titius. I want him to ride with you, Sextus, and you Casca. Guide them to the group of hills opposite Mancinus’s fortifications. Tell the immune to find the best point to defend closest to Mancinus. Shafat, Didius, and I will follow with the Ninth at nightfall. We’re going to finish in Hispania where we’ve done our best, Romans, taking the high ground.”
Chapter 16. Survival
The men of the Ninth kneeled in a crouch behind the massive tree trunks that formed the major part of their fortifications on the high foothill overlooking Mancinus’s earthen camp nearly a mile away. Titius had galvanized his fellow immunes and the troops to Herculean feats in a matter of a few days and nights. Scores of men wielding only their swords took turns hacking, slicing, and cutting down trees with diameters as wide as a foot each. As a result, a solid, six-foot barricade of green tree trunks lined the hillside just below its apex, reinforced by logs hammered into the ground. On the far corners of the long log wall stood square towers twice as high. The thick wooden boxes commanded the flanks and also served well for watching both the movements of the enemy and of their fellow Romans squeezed in together against the riverbank.
The heavy wall continued up and around to the top of the hill, closing at the peak of the high ground. Two more towers on each side looked out over the back, which fell off into outcrops of sharp rock with brambles growing around small rivulets and springs coursing down the incline. Another, shorter log wall ran further up the hill parallel to the front wall. The interior wall was punctuated by narrow corrals attached behind it. Nearly 1,500 feet in length and half as long at its width, the size of the complex defied belief in the fact that it had been raised almost overnight. The Ninth had been spared attacks for those three nights because Titius had reversed convention by ordering the men to leave a number of trees intact around the encampment. Those trees felled had been cut in a pattern that left tall saplings and others unsuitable for construction standing as a screen. The head immune explained that leaving trees in the way also would help diffuse an attack by an overwhelming force. The spaces between would allow archers and artillery to narrow their target areas, thus creating lethal barrages when they let loose their weapons. Tiberius wasn’t as sure about these innovations, but the cocky little engineer was absolutely sure.
“And, wait until you my wasps. The Numantines will regret the day they decide to fight us here!”
“Let us hope so. Pray to the gods, Titius, that your new machines work their magic. Our survival could depend upon them.”
The troops themselves were spent, exhausted from nonstop labor for three days and nights while barely eating enough to survive. Because of the springs on the far side of the hill, water was not a problem. Food was. Soon they, too, would be eating their horses, though Sextus was doing his best, raiding nearby settlements for sheep and goats, anything they could butcher and eat. Amazing, thought Tiberius, how short a time it took to bring an army to its knees when it has lost its lines of supply. Just a matter of weeks, he thought. Why would the Numantines attack at all when they knew that the Romans would fall and die on their own?
He imagined the Numantines’s glee at the suffering of these young warriors, their death ordained for doing Rome’s bidding. He thought of Quarto Minor, grieving over the loss of his father, not yet aware that his life itself would soon be over. Every one of the farm boys that he pulled off the land to fight for Rome’s glory and tribute soon would face the worst death for a soldier, alone in an alien land. All of them were destined to die as things stood now, the Fates had decreed their deaths. He shook his head, this was not right, but it was imminent.
The line of his jaw hardened as he envisioned the terrible images. He would not let it happen, not without trying. He would engage the Fates themselves if needed. Death be assured or not, he would drag as many Numantines to Hades with him as he could.
The fight wouldn’t be long in coming, he soon learned. As he mused standing near one of the corrals in the back, he heard a sentry cry out. A troop of Numantine riders had appeared on the hill behind the camp. They were close, just a few hundred feet away as the crow flies. As rugged as the terrain was between the two heights, carved by a stream below on its way to the Durius, there was no fear of an immediate clash on either side. Still, the barbarian horsemen stood so close that the legionaries could see the strange emblems painted on their shields and breastplates, plaid-patterned linen shirts, the flourish of horsehair looping out of their round helmets, and the wild striations in their light-whiskered beards. The men on the opposing slopes stared at each other, silently weighing the portent of the sudden encounter and what it would bring.
Unsettled, a few Roman archers shot arrows at the Numantines, which the horsemen easily avoided with a few deft moves of their mounts. Other legionaries tossed pilas that fell harmlessly into the gully, until an optio cursed at them to stop wasting spears.
Sextus snapped an order and his auxiliaries ran and jumped on their horses, sped out of the compound, and down the slope. The Numantines watched the Roman cavalry hurtling down and around in search of a way up to their position. The Numantine riders waited for a few more moments, then wheeled about and disappeared below the other side of the opposite hilltop.
Tiberius stepped away from the wall and signaled with his arm to Casca. All of the centurions and optios began to trickle from their command points to the center of the square situated beneath a large evergreen. Sextus joined them from the corral in the northeast corner of the compound.
“Is everyone here? All right. Now that they’ve found us, the Numantines, their Arevaci brethren and the rest, they will attack us first. If they intend to destroy the Roman army barricaded against the river, they cannot leave us at their rear. So, they will come for us. They don’t need to commit their entire force, which means that Mancinus won’t be able to relieve us.”
As they absorbed his words, a pallor seemed to descend upon the already grim visages of his men. Shafat kicked dirt at his feet. Sextus’s usual wry smile now seemed fixed in rictus.
Didius spoke up bitterly, almost caterwauling, “Why attack us at all? They know they have every one of us caged up. Why don’t they simply starve us into surrender?”
Before Tiberius could answer, Casca shook his head and said, “We’re too close to Mancinus. The Numantines do not want to risk a desperate, simultaneous attack from both positions, which would be likely. Any soldier would rather fight and die than starve to death. The Numantines will attack us as soon as they can, probably at first dawn.”
He turned to Tiberius and said wearily, “Orders, sir?”
Tiberius watched as the others gradually straightened to listen.
“Assemble the men in center square. When I finish, put them at their posts. They sleep in armor tonight, and every night until the Numantines attack.”
Except for guards on watch in the towers, the men of the Ninth gathered around the middle of the hilltop fort. Some leaned on wooden posts spaced around the square, others sat splay-legged, leaning back on outstretched arms to keep upright. Still others simply stretched out on their sides, cupping their heads in hands propped up on their elbows, gazing cockeyed at the center where their tribune was likely to stand. They looked tired and gaunt, Tiberius noted, which heightened his anxiety. He didn’t like speaking to a lot of people under any circumstances, and his words this time would be vitally important.
Yet, what could he tell them? Fight for your lives, which are likely to be lost anyway? Strike until you surrender and become slaves forever somewhere far from home? Die for Rome’s ambition, because those who lose are shamed or forgotten. Punish your enemy for keeping you from ever seeing your loved ones again. Lose everything because it is the will of the gods, fall bravely to save your place on the boat across the Styx. Or, he
could lie.
Tiberius motioned to an orderly, who positioned a stump in the middle of the square. Wearing full armor and the horned helmet given to him by Appius, he put his hand on the shoulder of the orderly and levered himself up onto the stump. A slight breeze whispered past him, and the light was failing as nighttime began its descent. He turned his head and spoke softly to the orderly, who quickly brought forth two torches on long staffs and planted them to Tiberius’s left and right so that the troops could see his face clearly.
He cleared his voice and began. “Men of Rome ... sons of Italia ... soldiers of the Ninth. We’ve come this long way to Hispania, to the walls of Numantia itself, only to fall short in our quest, with great loss of our comrades. The gods have not smiled on our efforts for reasons known only to them, and they have ordained more trials for us in this barbaric land. But Fortuna can change luck, and time and again she will do that. She will change our luck if we remain stalwart. We can change our fate ourselves if we fight like the Furies in the coming clash.
“Now, we await a larger force. To any ordinary man, to any ordinary warrior, we yaw and pitch on a sea of calamity. Blood drains from the face, fear gnaws within like a white plague. But we are not ordinary men, we are not ordinary warriors. We fight for Rome, we fight for the Ninth, we fight for our birthright, to win! Let us meet the tribes of the Numantines, the Arevaci, the Lusitani, and any other Hispanic horse-loving goat herders on these wooden walls and stain them ruby red with their blood. Let us meet them hard, blade for blade, and bring them to their knees for the death stroke. We’ll crush them and send their survivors howling back as a lethal lesson of what comes from fighting Romans face to face!”
He ended on a crescendo, joined by Casca and the other centurions and optios in a ragged, roaring cheer. But only a few men joined in. The rest seemed as fixed-eyed as they had been at the beginning of his speech. Spent men, he thought, men too tired to be afraid and perhaps too tired to fight.
He jumped off the stump and headed for his quarters. “Deploy the troops,” he said in clipped words over his shoulder. “Attend me when you’re finished.”
Rain rolled in with the dawn. The sky grew somewhat lighter above the trees, but the shadows in the wooded hillsides remained deep, still. Even so, every now and then they heard the far-off sound of a horse snorting or a coughing neigh from the dark tree line below them. They were here, thought Tiberius. He crouched near the western corner’s lower tower, bent so low behind the barrier that only his eyes cleared the wall’s edge. The conditions favored the Numantines; we can’t see, so they can attack. Well, he thought, we’re as ready as we’ll ever be.
Titius had shown him his latest contraptions, tiny ballistae that fired large, arrow-shaped projectiles. Wasps, he called them, fashioned by himself and the other immunes during the brief lull after the palisade had been completed. Tiberius was skeptical, but the engineer’s glib promises about their capabilities, true or false, hardly seemed likely to affect the outcome that they faced. Because of their small size, the immunes had been able to produce a good number of them. They could fire quite a flight of them at the enemy, if the little machines did work.
A dull bellow, like a cow, could be heard coming low on the hill. Another answered, then several more, signal horns. Suddenly, a thousand horsemen burst from the thick trees and rode roaring up the hill. They weaved deftly through the patchwork of trunks left in their path, closing on the Roman wall quicker than possible. Behind them, a thousand more riding warriors galloped out, followed by a thousand more. When the first line was 300 feet away, a flight of arrows flew over their heads at the Roman fort from the tree line, followed by spears from the riders as the range shortened.
Even as he rose up to shout to the men near him, Tiberius could hear his yell echoed up and down the wall by the centurions and optios, “Down!” “Get down!” The Roman troops clung to the interior of the wall as the projectiles flew above them, and the pounding of the hooves grew louder, closer. Tiberius turned his torso back to the second wall and the corrals behind them, where a hundred miniature ballistae, the wasps, stood poised to be fired. “Titius!” he thundered.
Titius signaled, and 100 darts flew straight down the hillside, over the Roman walls and into the breasts of the horses and men who had just reached the wall.
Tiberius heard the screams of the wounded horses, high and shrill like women, and saw gouts of blood pour from a rider struck in the chest by a four-foot arrow. The second line crashed into the first, stalled before the wall when Didius sounded, “Pila!” and a line of legionaries whipped them into the air from the second wall, devastating the first and second wave of Numantine riders. Still, they came, met by a hundred more bolts from the wasps and more pila from the second wall, with the Romans up front rising up to thrust eight-foot spears down at the horses and men trying to breech the palisade.
The next flight of wasps flew over the milling mass of horses and warriors at the front of the wall pounding into the third line of Numantine cavalry. The horsemen barely flinched as they pressed up the slope to join their comrades, war cries filling the air as they surged up to attack. And, they began to find openings, hurdling over the wall, past the legionaries flailing with their long spears, and pivoting their horses hard to assault them from behind.
Tiberius didn’t hesitate. He leaped to the top of the wall and ran across it, slipping and sliding on the slick logs, but also swinging his sword freely at the horsemen now within range. He sliced the shoulder of one man, slapped away the swing of another’s long blade, thrust at the head of one of the Numantines inside the compound, and shouted at the top of his voice for Didius to attack. Didius yelled out an order, and the troops behind the second wall scrambled over and started in on the rear haunches of the Numantine horses that had jumped the front wall.
A stinging blow to the head knocked Tiberius off the wall headfirst into the compound. He sat up, shaking away the cobwebs while grabbing at his helmet. He pulled it off to find an arrow stuck in the raised metal cleft of one of his horns. Flipping the helmet aside, he stood up and climbed back onto the front wall rampart. The Numantine riders outside had retired to the tree line. The few left inside turned and twisted their mounts as the Roman troops ganged up on them from all quarters. A few managed to vault over the wall on the run as their companions fell to the legionaries’ spears.
“They’ve packed it in,” yelled Shafat, “they’re done.” The men who heard him raised tired shouts out at his words, until they heard the horns again and the pounding hooves. “To your posts!” bellowed Casca, and Tiberius called to Didius to return back to man the second wall.
Titius let loose another volley of bolts, and Didius’s men threw more pilas, but the Numantines were quicker to the walls this time. Shafat and Casca led separate squads of men into the alley between the fortress walls to attack a new wave of Numantines inside. They attempted to hamstring the horses and kill their riders, but more and more leaped over to slash down at the Roman soldiers.
Tiberius glimpsed a small band of legionaries surrounded by Numantines. He picked up a shield from a fallen soldier and raced over to join the pressed soldiers. Three men had gone down by the time he reached them, and the enemy riders circled quickly, closing in as they swung their long swords. Two men on either side of Tiberius fell, while he and the last two deflected blows with their shields and stabbed upward at their attackers.
Suddenly, one of the horses screamed and nearly fell on them. They jumped sideways to avoid its flailing form, kicking and biting at the spear sticking out of its belly. The horse snapped teeth at its attacker, Casca, the bloody haft of the broken spear in his hands. Casca reached back and smashed the horse on the head, which went still. He straddled its carcass and thrust the jagged edge of the broken shaft into the helmet of the rider.
Tiberius spun around in time to ward off a blow from another Numantine horseman. The other two legionaries had fallen, and the Numantines crowded their horses together trying to reach h
im. As he stepped back next to Casca by the dead horse, he recognized one of the enemy warriors, the small, grey-haired man he’d seen leading the retreat from the riverbank ambush back beyond Salduba. The grey-haired chieftain shouted at the riders, who pulled up and spread out, waiting for the command to attack again. Water splashed up from their horses pawing the saturated ground, their blood high, impatient to thunder ahead again. Slowly, the Numantine chief raised his sword, almost in salute, before dropping it like a counterweight cut loose from a gate. But before the band of horsemen could charge, Sextus bolted out of the rain with the last of his auxiliaries.
Seeing the Roman riders, the grey-haired chieftain jerked at his horse. He gestured to a rider close to him who pulled out a curled ram’s horn and blew three deep, short notes. Without a moment’s indecision, the chieftain and the other Numantines inside the perimeter broke off the battle and rode for the wall, grabbing up any unhorsed companions they could on the way. In just a matter of seconds, they gracefully glided over the front of the palisade and disappeared into the thundering rain, all gone except for their dead and wounded.
“Sound assembly,” Tiberius said, breathing heavily between each word. “Get the wounded to the surgeon immediately. Have the annonae optios butcher any wounded horses to roast for the men. Get these dead barbarians out of here and away from the perimeter. Prepare the Ninth’s fallen for funeral biers. But first make sure that the towers are manned, and the walls have sentries. We’re the key to the survival of Mancinus’s army. They’ll have to attack again.”
The centurions and optios left at once to carry out their orders. At first, the din from the wounded men groaning and the dying horses shrieking compounded the thudding that Tiberius felt in his head from the arrow strike to his helmet. Soon, though, the cries began to mute as the horses and the enemy wounded were dispatched. The rain began to taper off.
Tiberius rubbed his temples. “How many lost?”