by David Weber
"Pace, boys, don't let the bitch slide," Clodius ordered, his voice showing the strain of physical effort if not of fear. The gangway was narrow. If they let gravity carry a corner of the gallery over the side, they were well and truly fucked. The crossbows that sank bolts vainly in the mud roof would turn the force into a score of shrieking pincushions before any of them could be untangled from the overturned gallery.
Behind them, present only in their prayers, the log weapon was being swung into position. Like the gangway, it pivoted in a socket dug into the ramp, but the teams which lifted it did so through hawsers attached to a pair of shear legs. The hundreds of men hauling back on each hawser were covered by equal numbers of legionaries with raised shields, adequate protection for targets near the extreme range of the defenders' bows.
Nobody knew it all, thought Vibulenus as the archers in the tower shifted their aim from the gallery to the teams of men swinging the hollow log. The army Crassus marched into Parthia thought it had all the answers to war, but the squadrons of horse archers supplied with camel-loads of arrows had battered the legions the way the waves defeated a cliff.
But the furred, quick-handed autochthones of this place did not have all the answers either, despite their ability to spew flame as a fountain spurts water. Their missile weapons depended on the tension of bent wood. Real artillery powered by torqued skeins of ox sinew would have slaughtered the lightly-protected lifting teams faster than they could be replaced.
As the shear legs straightened toward vertical, the forward end of the log angled upward to the height of the tower's battlements. A third crew, protected by the rampart, marched along the guardwalk hauling a chain that drew the end of the device sideways. The log now formed the hypoteneuse of a right triangle whose straight sides were the platform of the siege works and the face of the tower.
The defenders must have expected the log to be used as a ram. Even now, as it lifted to an unexpected angle which displayed the hollow interior lined with bronze sheet, it looked more like a ram than it did anything else in their experience-or in the experience of the Romans who had built and were about to use the device.
At the base of the pivoting log was a high screen of wicker and leather. It covered a final crew of legionaries, leavened this time with a few local auxiliaries, and the great bellows made from whole oxhides. One of the auxiliaries gave a high-pitched order as the log steadied into position. The men on the arms of the bellows poised, but only when the centurion relayed the command in a parade-ground bark did a pair of legionaries grip the handles of a pottery jar and lift it toward the broad funnel mounted on the base of the log.
Liquid spouted from the top of the tower. It had began to burn halfway along its course toward the mobile gallery.
Vibulenus and his fellows had staggered off the lower end of the gangway, to the glassy remnants of the original siege ramp. At the tribune's first step, his leg crunched through what had seemed to be firm ground. It was like walking through a crusted snowdrift, except that the edges drew blood as they scraped Vibulenus' calf.
The gallery dipped forward as other Romans broke through as well. The fire had consumed everything flammable in the siegeworks; but wherever there was enough silica in the earth to vitrify, glass had kept the fill from setting under its own weight and the heavy rains. The sprawled remnants were not impassible, but they provided a barrier of hidden pits covering half of the last twenty feet between the new ramp and the base of the tower.
And that saved the lives of the men in the gallery.
The defenders were expert in their use of flame, so expert that the first gout of blazing fluid travelled from the spout with the conflicting pulls of gravity and outward inertia in an arc calculated to splash it under the roof of the gallery. The autochthones knew that by flooding the area when the assault force was directly beneath, they could destroy the legionaries as completely as they had the first siege ramp-but there was no need to runnel flame over the refractory roof of the gallery if the clinging, erosive liquid could be splashed onto the legs of the men inside.
The gallery wobbled to a halt three feet short of where the defenders expected it when they started their flame on its long fall.
Vibulenus' calves itched in a way that was more intrusive than any pain could be. Sweat that raced down his thighs paused and burned when it reached the grit and abrasions on his lower legs. He could not take a hand from the bar he carried to scratch the affected area. His palms were hot and the skin of them, though calloused by swordhilt and shield strap, slipped over the muscle and bone beneath. The unusual stress of carrying the gallery was reducing his hands to puffy, bleeding blisters.
The tribune could see only dimly. The assault force was in an artificial valley between the siege ramp and the sheer wall of the tower. Most of what sunlight did scatter through was blocked by the sheltering roof, and even the remainder was blurred by the sweat and tears which Vibulenus could not wipe away. The tumbling flame, striking and splashing before the gallery, instantly returned light and color to a microcosm of gray pain.
"Mother!" screamed Clodius, loud enough for the tribune to hear him and be surprised. Everybody was shouting, though, and the flames roared as they splattered and eroded the earth. The fire was deep red, with flecks of quicklime as white as rage and a shroud of ragged smoke that was visible only at a distance from the bubbling flame.
The gallery grounded before anyone had the presence of mind to order it down. Hands dropped the bars in panic as the men of the assault force tried to jump back. They tangled themselves with the structure and the men behind them.
A legionary in the fifth row did manage to leap out the rear of the shelter. Sunlight and the imprisoning hugeness of the structures before and behind drove the man back under the roof of a moment later. He brushed off his helmet on the eaves. As it rolled on the blackened rubble, a dozen quarrels snapped toward and clangingly against it.
"All right," ordered Gaius Vibulenus. His voice was as cool as the core of him which shock had disconnected from the sweating, punished body he wore. Clodius Afer and the other men in the front rank were being burned by the pool of fire which closed their end of the gallery, and the tribune's own shins were scorching. "We're going to side-step left, now. Take your bars and lift!"
He should have worn his greaves… and he was so disoriented that he almost failed to obey the orders he had given the men who were suddenly under his actual control.
The gallery bucked convulsively and grounded again as the sideways shift tripped several legionaries over the outstretched legs of their fellows. All the horns and trumpets in the legion brayed simultaneously while the shelter lurched another step away from the flames.
The ground shook as a huge fireball ignited on the roof of the tower. It was so bright that it shadowed the receding pool of flame near the assault force.
Ever since the gallery began its tortoiselike advance, the tribune had been too caught up in his immediate surroundings to think about the larger aspects of his plan. The professionals of the legion, rank and file as well as the centurions, had done their job with the stolid excellence of a grist mill grinding away its allotted task.
When Rusticanus gave the signal, two soldiers poured their jug of enhanced naphtha into the breech of the log. The local officer who advised on the process had suggested igniting it with water to spark on the quicklime. The legionaries had chosen to risk an open flame instead, something they understood as they did not understand starting fires with water.
The centurion in charge stepped to the log when the legionaries jumped back. He thrust a torch into the funnel glistening with the residue of thickened fluid. Fire bloomed from the touchhole.
"Bellows!" ordered Rusticanus.
Horns and trumpets cried out in a cacaphony intended to terrify the enemy rather than communicate orders. As the sky echoed, the twenty strong men on each lever of the bellows began to stride forward, ramming the air in the oxhide chamber into the base of the hollow log and the
fire already blazing there.
Flame spurted twenty feet in the air from the touch-hole before a pair of soldiers clamped a bronze plug down on it. The air surging from the bellows mixed with the fluid and rammed it toward the open end of the tube over a hundred feet in the air. When oxygen bubbled into and through the burning liquid, the combination puffed explosively up the hollow trunk-and out, in an orange-red flash, across the defenders on the top of the tower.
The spurt was of superheated gas, not fluid that clung with the tackiness of pitch and molten sulphur, but it crinkled the bowstaves, armor, and faces of those archers it enfolded as they crouched at embrasures. The two defenders pouring liquid through a spout wailed and dropped their open vat as flame burst from it to meet the puff expanding from the hollow log.
There were several hundred additional gallons of fluid on the tower in closed containers which shattered when spreading fire wrapped them. When half the jars had ignited in a matter of seconds, the remainder exploded simultaneously. Part of the crenellations, fragments of equipment, and the bodies of defenders too fiercely ablaze to be recognized as living things rained in all directions from the top of the tower.
The flare mounted in a hemisphere, like the cap of a mushroom thrusting itself through the loam, until it broke free of the stone and wrapped in upon itself to climb still higher on the reflected heat of its own cumbustion. The platform from which it had lifted was bare of any form of life save the few defenders who still thrashed in the blazing sheet which had devoured their eyes and lungs already.
Vibulenus knew his weapon had been successful when an object slammed the sloping roof of the gallery and bounced, then fell again to the ground before the assault force. It could have been a burning missile, heavy enough that its shock grounded the shelter again. What sprawled in a smokey wrapper of flames was not a timber, however, but a corpse that had been a cross-bowman before his flesh melted and heat cracked the phial in which he dipped his quarrels. The resinous poison burned blue.
"All right!" ordered Clodius Afer in a voice burned skeletal by emtion and flame-dried air. "Left on the count, boys, and put your backs-"
"Out the front with your tools, men," said Vibulenus, speaking from a mind where everything had a place, like the markers of a board game awaiting the next shake of the dice cup.
It did not'occur to him that he was countermanding the centurion. He was placing his game pieces in the illuminated security of his imagination. The dark and bloody reality-of which his body was a part-did not impinge on what was right from a standpoint of command.
"We're safe close by the wall if we move fast," the tribune shouted. When his words had no effect for a further long moment save to turn heads toward him, he added, "Move!" and prodded the ribs of Clodius and Niger.
"Come on, soldiers!" roared the centurion, ducking under the crossbar with the jerky certainty of a boulder rolling downhill-after the tribune pushed it. "Let's take this fucker down!'
No one else in the mobile gallery could get out the front until the leading row clambered free. Those men wouldn't have been in the front rank unless they were willing to leave cover. They scrambled from under the shelter, and Vibulenus followed them in the irrational certainty that the remainder of the assault force was coming also. He was playing a complex game of Bandits, and they were the carved-stone counters on the board moving as he willed.
For that matter, they did follow him-every man of the assault force, because they were Romans… and they were soldiers… and they were, by all the gods, being led.
The tower was a sullen candle with a pillar of flame above the streakes of blazing fluid crawling through the stonework and arrow-slits of the upper stories. The lowest twenty feet of the wall had been built without openings, and even above that level many of the embrasures had been bricked up against side effects of the defenders' own flame weapons. With the top of the tower a dripping inferno, the ground near the base of the structure was a dead zone which none of the weapons in the fortress could reach.
The outer world swept back over Vibulenus as he squirmed out of the gallery's dark and stinking cover. Heat had sources again instead of being a dull ambiance. The gout that had splashed before the gallery was now shrunken to a handful of sulphurous pools to the right side, and the body of the archer-also shrunken-lay for the tribune to leap as the quickest way to the wall and greater safety.
The hollow treetrunk was a slash against the sky, its muzzle-end rimmed with tiny flames. Vibulenus hoped they would not pour another jar of fluid into its breech in order to repeat the process. At the time he planned the attack, multiple spurts of flame had seemed both necessary and reasonably safe. He had not fully appreciated the way the fire clung like a solid thing wherever the fluid had ignited. The interior of the great tube must contain thousands of hot spots which would turn a fresh draft of fluid into a fireball at the breech end this time.
But that was the concern of others, while the wall was a matter for Vibulenus and the nineteen men with him.
The lower rows of that wall were blocks two feet high and three across. Their thickness was concealed until the first one was prised out, and Clodius Afer was already organizing that. The centurion wedged the thicker edge of his pick-mattock into one vertical crack while Niger and another legionary ran their crescent-bladed turf-cutters over the upper and lower surfaces of the block against which he was prying.
Vibulenus chopped the mattock blade of his own tool against the remaining edge of the block so that he and Clodius could thrust against one another. They all carried ordinary pieces of entrenching equipment, though some of the soldiers began using their swords because the blades reached deeper into the interstices of the wall. The blocks themselves were of fine-grained stone which showed no tendency to split or shatter, but the mortar in which they were laid had burned to powder.
Clodius gave a shout and leaned sideways against the head of his tool, levering that end of the block three inches from the line of the wall in a shower of gritty mortar. The tribune shouted also in unconscious imitation and thrust back, using the greater leverage of the helve. Blood and pus from his blistered palms gleamed on the hickory shaft, but Vibulenus did not notice it. The stone, already loosened and held by decreasing friction as more of it was tugged clear of its fellows, shifted even farther than it had at the centurion's thrust.
Archers on the wings of the fortress flanking the tower were shooting furiously. Some of the bolts struck the rear of the abandoned gallery, but Vibulenus and his men were protected by the wall they were assaulting. For all that, bits fell from higher up the tower as its structure warped under stress of the flames. They were not missiles as such, but a fire-wrapped scrap of battlement landed close enough to the tribune to scorch his calves, and another chunk flattened a file-closer as it rang from his helmet.
There was too much noise for the assault to be truly coordinated, but the veteran soldiers knew their jobs well enough to work without direction. Clodius and Vibulenus each levered again in quick opposition, between them prying the stone far enough for the two legionaries to drop their turf cutters and grip the block directly. Tendons stood out at the inside of Niger's elbows as the tribune stepped out of his way.
"There, by Hercules!" the legionary shouted while the block, as thick as it was high, slid out of place and crashed to the ground. It tilted as if contemplating a roll that would have put everyone nearby at risk, but it settled back with a second thud.
The legionaries had broken into rough teams, not because they were organized that way but simply because men in a tight spot look instinctively for the support of a few fellows. Another block pitched to the ground moments behind the one Clodius had attacked, though it was ten feet to the side and only incrementally helpful in weakening the structure. Aided by their initial gap, the tribune and the three men with him began to worry loose a block offset in the next layer above.
The horns and trumpets again blew the general call that would normally signal a charge. Apparently tha
t was what Rusticanus-or the Commander?-had in mind. Legionaries protected by no more than their shields and armor began to pour over the face of the siege works fronting the tower.
Archers shot at them, but the auxiliary crossbowmen made good practice against the defenders. Without the lowering threat of the tower, archers employed by the trading guild could sweep the battlements of opponents concentrating on Roman infantry.
Vibulenus stuck his pickhead into a crevice and braced his free palm against the wall for leverage. He felt the violent shock before he heard it, fire-gnawed beams in the tower collapsing under the weight of the flagstoned top floor. Flame shot skyward in a giant version of the bellows-driven puff from the tube which had started the conflagration. Rising, wholly separated from the structure from which it sprang, a fireball expanded while its color changed from incandescent white to red as dull as that of iron quenching in blood.
"Watch it!" ordered Clodius Afer. A second stone tumbled from the wall, cracked against the first, split, and rolled to either side. Niger already had his turf cutter inserted beside the next block over and was prying so hard the thick shaft bowed.
The core of the wall was rubble, compacted between the stone facings and to an extent cemented together by time. It was not true concrete, however, and seeping rainwater had leached pockets from the material. Vibulenus chopped at it with his pick. The iron sparked but bit deep enough to crumble out a headsized chunk. Niger continued tilting his block with the help of another legionary.
Hundreds of men were joining the assault force, elbowing one another in their haste to attack the wall with their weapons. Few of them had proper tools for the job, but they did carry their sheilds. Lifted overhead by the latecomers, these provided real protection against the increasing rain of fragments as well as psychological benefit to the men concentrating on their work of destruction.