‘The cliff at the far end can be climbed. It is dangerous, but possible.’
‘How do you know?’
‘I saw a child climb down to collect snails.’
Sabinianus rounded on the youth. ‘You said no one left Canartha’s village unless they joined him.’
‘My father talked to Canartha before he knew the evil of his nature. I came with my father.’
Gordian intervened. ‘Could armed men climb this cliff?’
Mirzi fiddled with the bandage on his right wrist as he thought. ‘Not with shields and spears. Not with helmets or in armour. It would be best if they were barefoot.’
‘If they were seen from the top, they would not stand a chance,’ Menophilus said.
‘They would have to climb at night,’ Mirzi agreed.
‘If I took fifty of the Frontier Wolves,’ Menophilus said, ‘we could make the ascent tonight. When you attack the wall just before dawn, we could take them in the rear.’
‘Why you?’ Arrian asked.
‘I am a great deal younger than the rest of you,’ Menophilus said with a straight face.
‘This is madness!’ Sabinianus exclaimed. ‘We are miles from anywhere, deep in tribal territory. To divide our forces, send some off almost unarmed into the night, is the final idiocy. The barbarians knew we were coming. We have been led into a trap.’
The damaged hand of Mirzi automatically went to his hilt. ‘You doubt my word?’
Gordian stepped between them. ‘Sabinianus doubts everything.’ He turned to Menophilus. ‘What do you think?’
The Quaestor toyed with the ornament in the form of a skeleton on his belt, considering slowly. ‘Rather than assign men from the speculatores, we should ask for volunteers. Offer good money for those who get to the top, and the same for the dependents of those who fall. No armour, helmets, shields or spears. But we must have boots. Our men are not used to marching without them. The rocks would cut their feet to shreds. Also, we will take iron tent pegs and ropes, as many as we can carry.’ Menophilus paused. ‘If we have some of the light shields the Frontier Wolves use and some javelins, we may be able to haul them up when we have made the climb.’
‘Have you done much climbing?’ Sabinianus asked.
‘It is not one of my favourite pastimes.’ Menophilus’ line was funnier for being delivered with his customary Stoic earnestness.
After nightfall, no campfires were lit until Menophilus and his volunteers had left. Gordian found that sleep eluded him. In the middle watch, he got up and walked the perimeter. Snatches of music and songs drifted from the village. Lights flickered as the barbarians came and went from their huts.
All ways of dying are hateful to us poor mortals. Gordian had grown fond of Menophilus. He did not want to be responsible for his death, did not want his friend to die. With a horrible clarity, he knew that he did not want to die himself. No, that was not how it should be. As so often, he summoned up the tenets of his philosophy. There was no pleasure or pain after death, just as there was none before birth. There was nothing to be scared of. Death is nothing to us. But there was a tightness in him that his words did nothing to loosen. After a time, he went back and rolled himself in his blanket, watched the stars wheel, and settled to wait for the night to end.
A hand shook his shoulder, and Gordian surfaced from the deepest of sleeps.
‘Two hours before dawn,’ Sabinianus said quietly.
Somewhere in the back of Gordian’s mind, wisps of a dream twisted out of his grasp; his father … Parthenope and Chione weeping … some lines of Homer: ‘There will come a day when sacred Ilion shall perish’.
In the darkness, Lydus drew up the auxiliaries of the 2nd Cohort with as little noise as possible. Even so, the rattle of their arms and the scrape of the hobnails seemed loud enough to wake the dead. Gordian moved among them, a word here, a pat on the shoulder there. It was never easy to send men into combat.
No sounds or lights could be detected in the village.
The sky lightened in the east, enough to reveal the dark bulk of the phalanx of men, twenty wide and ten deep. No trumpets rang out. A murmur ran through the ranks and they began to edge forward.
Still no shouts of alarm from the barbarians.
Gordian and his officers mounted up and rode back through the lines of the speculatores and the men from the 3rd Legion. They went a little uphill, far enough to hope to view the fighting.
Half-glimpsed movements along the wall. The unmistakable twang of bows.
‘Testudo!’ Lydus’ shout echoed among the rocks. A crash as the shields of the auxiliaries swung up and locked together over their heads. Moments later, the thunk of arrows into leather and wood. Wild barbarian yells, but as yet no screams of pain from the Romans.
‘Loose!’ The voice of Aemilius Severinus carried well. The first volley of Roman arrows vanished into the gloom. The archers, shooting blind, had been ordered to aim long. Most likely, the majority of the arrowheads would embed themselves harmlessly in the flat roofs of the village, but their passage overhead would remind the men making the assault that they were not alone.
There was a fast rattling, like the tambourines of the followers of Cybele greatly amplified. The defenders were throwing stones. They were bouncing off the shields. Gordian noticed that the light had strengthened enough to let him take in the whole scene.
Descending the ditch broke the cohesion of the testudo. Arrows and stones were finding their mark. Men were falling. The ladders were adding to the confusion. As the auxiliaries went up the far side, the first casualties were being helped to the rear. Gordian sent Arrian to usher the unwounded back into the fight.
The 2nd Cohort had reached the foot of the wall. Ladders reared up. The barbarians were well prepared. The battlements were thick with warriors. Poles and pitchforks levered the ladders sideways, sent them crashing down. The barrage of missiles intensified. At the extreme left a soldier got on to the wall, then another. Both were surrounded, cut down. The ladder was pushed away. At two other places a few attackers achieved the wall walk. Both inroads were swamped by sheer numbers.
Gordian gazed beyond the fighting. All was quiet in the village. There was no sign of Menophilus and his volunteers.
The retreat began with a few men at the rear. Soon, all the auxiliaries were backing away. They did not break and run but edged backwards, dragging their injured and the ladders.
‘Aim for the wall!’
Aemilius Severinus acknowledged Gordian’s shouted order. The defenders ducked down behind the parapet. For the first time, they had to cower beneath their shields. It allowed the 2nd Cohort to withdraw and re-form behind the other two units virtually unmolested.
‘Third Legion, advance!’
The legionaries took up the scaling ladders. Again twenty men wide, this column was only five deep. They roofed themselves with their shields and trudged forward. Centurion Verittus had them in good order.
The barbarians showed restraint. Only the occasional individual popped up and wasted an arrow on the testudo. Gordian thought this Canartha had a remarkable grip on his men.
When the legionaries reached the ditch, the speculatores had to switch back to aiming for the village for risk of hitting their own men. The defenders reappeared. The storm of arrows and stones resumed; if anything, more intense than before. Perhaps the natives were encouraged by the repulse of the previous attack. With luck, they might soon run short of missiles.
Beyond the noise, still nothing moved in the village.
Legionaries clambered up the ladders. Some went sprawling back to the ground. Others, in the face of sharp steel, hauled themselves over the parapet. Fighting became general along the wall. The day hung in the balance. Again, numbers began to tell. One by one, the legionaries on the wall were cut down. Below, the first men began to retreat.
Gordian dug in his spurs, calling for Sabinianus. They rode through the lines of the 2nd Cohort, through the speculatores. At the ditch, Gordian jumped down,
turned his horse free. It clattered away.
Gordian snatched up a discarded auxiliary shield. The grip was wet with blood. He slipped as he went down into the ditch. A jagged rock skinned the back of his legs. By the time Gordian had cleared the obstacle, all the ladders were down. No attackers were left on the wall. The legionaries were pulling back. Gordian shouldered his way to the standard-bearer, ordered him forward. The man looked blankly at him. Gordian seized him by the shoulder, pushed him towards the wall.
‘With me!’ Gordian grabbed one end of a ladder. Sabinianus helped him swing it up. The men hung back.
Covered by his shield, Gordian climbed one-handed. A rock thumped into the shield. Another dinged off his helmet. The wound Mirzi had given him ached. Blades hacked down at him. He thrust the shield over the parapet. A wide sweep of his sword cleared a space. He scrambled off the ladder, one foot on the parapet, and jumped down on to the wall walk.
A barbarian came at him from the right. He blocked the blow with his blade, smashed the edge of his shield into the bearded face. The man staggered, getting in the way of his companions. Gordian checked over his shoulder. Sabinianus had his back.
Seeing their officers alone on the battlements, the legionaries surged towards the wall. Men fought to get on the ladder.
Two more warriors jabbed at Gordian. He took one blow on his shield, parried the other. He shaped to cut left, but thrust right. Both natives gave ground. There was a throng behind them.
A crack of wood, sharp over the sounds of battle, then shouts of pain and fury. The ladder had broken under the weight of men. The barbarians roared, triumphant and mocking. The pair facing Gordian rushed forward. A lifetime of training took over. Gordian stepped inside one blow, took the other on the rim of his shield. Turning, he used his weight to force one off the battlements, then chopped down into the knee of the other, finished him with a neat backhand.
High shouts, obviously orders in some barbaric tongue. The enemy shuffled away. A man down in the village, pointing up at the isolated Romans. A hideous sound as an arrow tore past Gordian’s ear. It felt to Gordian as if he had been here before: trapped on the wall, the ladders broken. It was Alexander the Great in some Indian town. The Macedonian had jumped down.
‘Sabinianus with me.’
Gordian charged the barbarians to his right. Its very unexpectedness made them shy away. Hacking and cutting, he drove them back past the head of some steps. Without pause, he plunged down.
The steps protected their right. They huddled together, crouching low behind their battered shields. Arrows thudded into the wooden boards, struck splinters out of the stonework. Gordian was gasping. His chest hollow and empty. Death is nothing to us. An impact jarred up into his shoulder. Something smashed into the side of his helmet. Blood ran hot down his neck. Death is nothing.
The hail of missiles slackened. A confusion of competing noises. The clash of steel behind and above. High-pitched yells of surprise and horror in front. Gordian’s head was ringing. He peeked around the rim of his shield. The barbarians were milling, their heads turning in all directions.
‘Menophilus!’ Sabinianus shouted. ‘Rescuing us is becoming a habit.’
A wedge of men was fighting its way down one of the alleys from the village. The enormity of the surprise robbed the barbarians of their senses. Some were fighting back; some stood and let themselves be cut down. The majority were running, this way and that, wildly seeking an illusory safety.
Hobnailed boots clattered down the steps. A knot of legionaries covered Gordian and Sabinianus with their shields.
‘Are you hurt?’
Gordian did not reply. He was trying to clear his head, think what needed to be done.
‘The gate – we have to get the gate open.’
A legionary helped Gordian to his feet. He was surprised that he was staggering. His thigh ached; his head hurt.
Groups of legionaries were appearing all along the wall. Up there, resistance was sporadic, still fierce in some places. The legionaries with Gordian overran those who stood between them and the gate.
It was the work of moments to lift the bar and open the gate. Legionaries flooded in, the Frontier Wolves hard on their heels. The auxiliaries of the 2nd Cohort would not be far behind. They had friends to avenge and would have no intention of missing out on the raping and plunder.
Gordian leant on his shield. Doing the same next to him, Sabinianus looked as white as a man who had stepped barefoot on a snake. Gordian thought that someone ought to keep some troops together, in case there was further opposition or other barbarians lurking in the hills. He was too tired. Gingerly, he explored the cut on his scalp. It had largely stopped bleeding, probably was not too serious. The lines of poetry from his dream came to him:
For I know this thing well in my heart, and my mind knows it:
There will come a day when sacred Ilion shall perish,
And Priam, and the people of Priam of the strong ash spear.
CHAPTER 19
The Northern Frontier
Near the Town of Viminacium on the Danube,
the Ides of May, AD236
Timesitheus watched the beaters working down the field. Next to him, Macedo, the Prefect of the Osrhoenes, sat his horse in silence. It was good hunting country: gentle timbered slopes coming down to broad plains dotted with villas and stands of mature trees. The wide channels of the Danube glinted in the spring sunshine off to the north.
The imperial field army had left Castra Regina in Raetia as soon as the worst of the winter had broken. The immense column had taken two months by easy stages to reach Viminacium in Moesia Superior. It was camped in and around the legionary fortress and town, readying itself to cross the river into Dacia. Maximinus was eager to confront the Sarmatians and other barbarians infesting that province.
The campaign was of little interest to Timesitheus. The next day, with Tranquillina and his household, he would continue on south and east. Naissus, Serdica, Hadrianoupolis – they would follow the great military highway to Perinthus, where they would pick up the Via Egnatia, and so on to Byzantium and the crossing of the Bosphorus into his new province of Bithynia-Pontus. There was a long journey still ahead, and demanding work at the far end, unravelling complex civic finances and confronting the intransigence of atheist Christians, in addition to the normal duties of a governor. He was glad to be out hunting, glad to be away from the intrigue of the court.
Macedo owned a dozen well-bred Celtic gaze-hounds. Timesitheus had always enjoyed hunting. This was very different from what he had known in his childhood on Corcyra. There, the mountainous, broken ground had meant going on foot with a few local scent-hounds and nets. It might have been back in the days of Xenophon. If he were honest, the resources of his family would never have stretched to Celtic hounds, Illyrian horses and liveried huntsmen.
The beaters, more than twenty of them in line abreast, were walking a field sown with wheat. One of Macedo’s huntsmen had been out before dawn, and reported that there were several hares. It was well known that the braver, more intelligent hares made their seats in such open, worked land. They did so, Arrian of Nicomedia had written in his Cynegeticus, to challenge the hounds. Timesitheus thought it more probable they chose such places because they could not be stalked so easily by foxes. Whatever the reason, it promised good sport.
Macedo had not invited anyone else. The two mounted men waited behind a huntsman with two hounds on slip leashes. Other hunt servants, likewise clad in thick, embroidered coats and stout boots, held the rest of the hounds further back. The red and white feathers of their scarers flashed as the beaters drove across the front of those waiting. Timesitheus ran an educated eye over the two bitches in the slips. A brindle and a black, both long in the stand from head to tail, they trembled slightly, necks arched and proud.
A shout came from one of the beaters, taken up along the line. They had put up a hare. It took three or four huge jumps from its seat. Ears pricked, it sat for a moment the
n bounded away from the noise and the motion.
The huntsman crouched, walked the hounds forward, getting himself down to their horizon. The bitches were well trained. They pulled lightly on their collars but remained completely silent. The huntsman released the top ends of the slip leads. In a blur the hounds were gone. No one, Timesitheus thought, could fail to thrill at the beauty of their acceleration. He put his heels into his horse’s flanks.
The hare saw the hounds and angled diagonally away.
Timesitheus and Macedo put their mounts into a fast canter.
The hare ran straight until the brindle bitch in the lead was but a pace or two behind, then jinked to the right. The brindle turned fast, but overshot. The black cut inside. She turned the hare left, then right. The brindle was coming up again, clods flying from her claws. The black turned the hare again – two, three, four times. Her strike was clean. She pulled up in a flurry of mud, shaking her prey. If the snap of her jaws had not killed the hare, its neck was broken now.
Macedo jumped down and took two eggs from a straw-packed bag on his saddle. He handed one to Timesitheus and retrieved the hare. The bitches frisked around, panting, wagging their tails. Dismounting, Timesitheus caught the brindle bitch. He pulled her muzzle up, cracked the egg and tipped it into her mouth. Both men made much of the bitches, rubbing their ears, praising them.
No sooner had they returned, and another two hounds been led out, than another hare was running. The next huntsman made a mess of things. The hare was panic-stricken, almost under them, when he slipped the hounds. Less than ten paces, and the lead dog had killed. Macedo looked furious.
‘Fine hares have often perished ingloriously, having had no time to do anything worth remembering.’ Timesitheus spoke to avert his companion’s anger from the hapless huntsman.
‘You are right.’ Macedo mastered himself. ‘Let us have a drink and something to eat.’
The hunt servants led away horses and hounds and busied themselves spreading blankets in some nearby shade. Timesitheus and Macedo were left alone.
Throne of the Caesars 01 - Iron and Rust Page 19