Clash of Empires

by Ben Kane

  Upwards of three days had passed since word of Flamininus’ arrival had reached the Macedonians; the legions had been marching up the Aous valley from sunrise to sunset each day. Sick of waiting where they could see nothing, Demetrios, with Kimon and Antileon, had asked and received permission from Simonides to join the peltasts on the ramparts. Several skins of wine had seen them offered places on the walkway with a fine view of the Romans and their allies, who were assembling unit by unit. Demetrios and the others pointed and stared, much as the peltasts were doing. Spirits were high, but men were on edge.

  Thousands of the enemy were in sight now; they had forded the river and filled the open ground before Philip’s defences. Milling about in front were hundreds of warriors who had bound themselves to Rome: swarthy Epirotes, wild Illyrians and a smattering of Dardani. Expendable allies, they would no doubt be in the initial assault. Legionaries with triple-feathered crests formed the first line; Demetrios knew these to be the hastati, young men with some experience in battle. Behind, he saw more of the crests. These were the principes, mail-shirt-wearing veterans who usually finished what the hastati had started. At the back were the triarii, Rome’s best infantry. Simonides had said they were kept in reserve unless the need was great.

  It was hard to watch the enemy prepare for battle. Demetrios’ guts were in constant cramp; he kept having to empty his bladder. Yet it had to be even more unpleasant for the enemy soldiers tasked with attacking their fortifications.

  Send fear into their hearts, great Zeus, he asked. Make them tremble as they draw near, and let our artillery reap them like wheat. When they throw their ladders at the wall, give us the strength to hurl every last man into the ditches.

  ‘I’m sick of waiting,’ grumbled Antileon. Like Demetrios, he was armed with sarissa and sword; his shield leaned with the others against the rampart. A dozen spears they had procured from the armourers were stacked alongside. ‘You?’

  Demetrios nodded. ‘The sooner the child-rapists come—’

  ‘The sooner we can get it over with,’ said Kimon, finishing his sentence. ‘We all feel the same.’

  Time dragged by. The comrades could determine no reason why the Romans weren’t attacking: their lines seemed fully formed. They amused themselves by playing dice – Demetrios lost half the contents of his purse to a grinning Kimon – and wagering who would kill the most enemies. Kimon reckoned a dozen or more; Antileon nine; Demetrios opted for a conservative seven. No one mentioned the possibility of being slain. Despite these attempts at distraction, their eyes often moved beyond the parapet to the massed enemy lines.

  Demetrios was having another piss when the Roman trumpets sounded. Heart racing, he bounded back up the ladder and shoved his way between his friends.

  The entire enemy front was advancing. A mixture of allied warriors and hastati, they came at a steady pace. The non-Romans cheered and shouted, and hammered their weapons on their shields. Among the legionaries, a grim silence held sway.

  ‘Here they come,’ said Kimon, his usual grin absent.

  ‘Let them come,’ snarled Antileon.

  ‘I didn’t believe it before. Sometimes they march in silence,’ said Demetrios, shivering.

  ‘The bastards are as scared as us. They’re just trained to keep quiet,’ said Kimon with contempt.

  The peltasts had no interest in copying the Romans’ tactic. Insults and war cries filled the air, and their spears clattered off shields.

  Half a thousand paces had separated the enemy from the Macedonian fortifications. At four hundred, the hastati were still in formation, but hotter heads among their allies had broken away from their fellows and charged. Soon the entire contingent of warriors was running towards the Macedonian ditches.

  They would come nowhere near Demetrios and his comrades. Fools, he thought. Why rush to your deaths?

  His eyes returned to the hastati, who continued to tramp at the same speed. Three hundred and fifty paces separated them from Demetrios’ position, while the warriors were a third of the distance closer. The artillery began to shoot. Twang went the bolt throwers. The catapults made deeper, ominous thunks. In no time, the air was full of missiles and rocks.

  Black blurs, the arrows scythed through shields and flesh alike, often cutting two men down. The carnage caused by catapults’ stones was mesmerising. Shields and helmets were no defence. Prayer helped not at all. Shredded into chunks of muscle and bone, men ceased to exist. Heads vanished in sprays of crimson and brain matter. Limbs were ripped clean off. Great gaps opened in the warriors’ ranks, and still the artillery shot, each weapon loosing every fifteen heartbeats without fail. Ranged in over days of practice, aiming at a massed enemy, the catapults and bolt throwers could not miss.

  Perhaps a hundred and fifty paces out, the charge came to a dragging halt. Demetrios estimated that a full quarter of the warriors were down, dead or injured. The rest could take no more. With the defenders’ jeers following, they dropped their weapons and fled. No mercy was granted. The artillery rained down yet more volleys, wreaking a fearful slaughter.

  ‘Our turn,’ said Kimon, dragging Demetrios’ attention to the ground in front of their position.

  The hastati were now within range, and the artillery crews facing them were ready. Twang. Thunk. Arrows shot up. Stones curved arcs through the air, and among the hastati, men died.

  Demetrios studied the nearest catapult crew, who worked almost as one. Using lengths of wood inserted into the ratchet wheels, a man either side of the weapon wound the arm back to its maximum angle. Two men loaded a stone into the leather pouch that hung from its end. The instant they had stepped back, their officer pulled the release rope. Faster than the eye could see, the arm snapped upright. As it collided with the thick wooden upright forming the middle section of the frame, the stone was hurled into the air.

  Demetrios followed its passage, a high trajectory that briefly silhouetted it against the azure sky before it plummeted to earth. The stone’s power was such that it obliterated an hastatus – one moment he was there, the next he was gone – and killed the two men behind him before breaking the limbs of several in the ranks behind. Officers bawled orders, and the gaping hole in the legionaries’ formation closed.

  Demetrios’ gaze returned to the catapult. It was about to shoot again: the arm was nearly wound down to its fullest extent, and the loaders stood ready with another large rock. There was a terrible beauty to the weapon, he decided, remembering how he’d almost been slain by one at Abydos.

  ‘Ready yourselves!’ shouted the nearest peltasts’ officer. ‘Do not throw until I give the order.’

  Demetrios set down his sarissa and selected a spear from the stack. Urged on by their officers, the hastati were running now. Two men in every six to eight were carrying a ladder. Perhaps a hundred and twenty paces separated them from the ditch, and the artillery barrage was relentless. High-pitched screams of agony carried from everywhere beyond the wall. Bodies, and parts of bodies, littered the ground. Demetrios could see pools of blood, and what had to be pieces of skull and brain tissue. His stomach turned.

  A spear shot over the rampart, hurled by a young peltast close to their position. Mocking laughter from his fellows went up as it thumped into the dirt well before the hastati.

  ‘Hold!’ roared the furious officer. ‘Hold, curse you!’

  No more spears were thrown, and the hastati passed inside the artillery’s killing range. They had suffered as many casualties as the allied warriors, but their attack did not falter. Demetrios could identify faces now. To a man they were grim, lips peeled back with the effort of running. He saw fear, but more than that, he saw determination. Romans were entirely different creatures to their allies, he decided.

  ‘Seventy paces,’ shouted the peltasts’ officer.

  Demetrios’ vision had narrowed. All he could see were four or five hastati, right in front of him. He could sense Kimon and Antileon on either side; he knew they too had their right arms cocked back, ready to t
hrow.

  ‘Sixty!’ came the officer’s cry.

  Demetrios ran his tongue over dry lips, and picked an hastatus whose helmet was missing a feather.

  ‘Fifty. LOOSE!’

  Demetrios threw. There was no time to see if his shot had been accurate; he picked up another spear.

  ‘Loose at will!’ ordered the officer.

  Demetrios looked down; the hastatus with the missing feather was no longer there. Taking aim at another Roman, he hurled downwards with all his might.

  The four spears they’d had apiece were gone in no time, and the hastati were clambering down into the ditch in their scores. Try as they might to avoid harm, some trod on the caltrops; others fell onto the sharpened spikes. There were so many, however, that ladders were soon being slammed up against the rampart. One appeared in front of Kimon, who seized hold of it and with a mighty shove, sent it tumbling sideways. One of the two hastati who’d been on the ladder landed on his feet, but the other wasn’t so fortunate, impaling himself on a wooden stake.

  Demetrios snatched up his sarissa. It was if it had been designed for this situation, he thought, leaning over the parapet. A neat thrust, and he skewered an hastatus where his neck met his trunk. Spraying blood, the man dropped off the ladder, taking the comrade below with him. Demetrios repeated the move when the fallen man picked himself up and made a second attempt to climb. He did it again and again, until his arm muscles ached.

  A little time passed. Not a single Roman had reached the rampart alive. Corpses now lined the ditch so deep that the hastati reaching it could walk straight across. The uneven flesh and bone footing for their ladders made it hard to ascend, and far easier to unbalance. Stay where they were, however, and the legionaries would die from a spear hurled by a peltast. Death ruled supreme.

  Demetrios spied an optio beating men with his long staff, forcing them forward. ‘They’re wavering!’

  He leaned right out over the parapet, and when the staff-bearing optio looked up, Demetrios stabbed him in the eye. In a few fingers’ breadth, and out again. The optio dropped like a discarded rag doll, and the hastati nearest him quailed.

  ‘MA-CE-DON!’ bellowed Antileon.

  The cry was taken up along the rampart, a swelling wave of noise that rose to the skies. It gave the defenders heart, and leached away the last of the legionaries’ courage. In ones and two, in larger groups, they broke and fled. Shields and swords dropped on the bloody ground, unwanted. In vain the injured cried to be saved; many were trampled to death in the chaos.

  ‘We did it,’ said Demetrios, clapping a grinning Kimon on the shoulder.

  Antileon spat over the parapet. ‘They’ll be back.’

  ‘Not for a while,’ said Demetrios, full sure that the scale of the slaughter would give the Roman commander cause to deliberate.

  He was wrong.

  By the time men had clambered down the far side of the fortifications, their purpose to retrieve spears and kill enemy wounded, and returned, the trumpets had ordered the principes to advance.

  The struggle on this occasion was bitterer, and more prolonged. Better armoured than the hastati, fewer principes were slain by arrows. Despite the stones, which reaped swathes of death and destruction, they did not falter. Thanks to the savagery of the first attack, the defenders had fewer spears, so fewer Romans died inside the final fifty paces. With the ditch filled with hastati corpses, the principes who reached the base of the walls could throw up their ladders at once.

  Up they came. Down they fell, but thanks to the soft corpse-landing, the casualties were not as severe as before. Tired, drenched in sweat, Demetrios, his comrades and the peltasts used their spears until there were none left, or they had broken. Then it was time for swords, which allowed more principes to climb to the rampart. Not long after, they won a foothold at last. Wounded, but apparently unstoppable, a huge princeps forced his way onto the walkway ten paces from Demetrios. Attacked from left and right, he was soon cut down, but his sacrifice allowed two other principes to follow his example. They killed a pair of peltasts, even as more Roman heads appeared at the parapet.

  Demetrios hurled himself forward, cracking his aspis into the nearest princeps’ shield. A savage headbutt, and his helmet rim smashed the man’s nose. A heartbeat later, he stuck the stunned princeps in the neck. With a great heave, Demetrios sent the body tumbling to the ground behind the fortifications, bringing him nearer to the still-climbing princeps. He had one foot on the ladder, one on the walkway. Shield in his left hand, gripping the timbers of the parapet with his left, he was defenceless. Demetrios smacked him in the face with his aspis, and pushed the man backwards, into the ditch. The other princeps on the rampart had been slain by a peltast; together he and Demetrios threw the ladder earthward, toppling yet another legionary onto the piled corpses. The pair exchanged a pleased look, and went back to their positions.

  On it went, until the principes could take no more. For every brief, failed foothold that they won, a score died. The haemorrhaging of their strength could not go on, and at length, their commanders realised it. Trumpets sounded the recall, and the principes broke off their assault. In stark contrast to the hastati, they did not run. Some even helped injured comrades to hobble away. One had the courage to stand within spear range, lift his tunic and expose his privates, all the while hurling abuse at the defenders.

  Spears were thrown, but the princeps just laughed. In no hurry, he let his tunic fall, picked up his shield and walked away, offering his back to his enemies.

  A peltast near the Companions levelled his spear.

  ‘Don’t,’ said Demetrios.

  The peltast gave him an incredulous look. ‘Eh?’

  ‘Enough brave men have died today.’

  The peltast sneered. Closing an eye, he threw. His shot was daring – the princeps must have been seventy paces from the fortifications. To Demetrios’ amazement, the spear drove deep into the meat of the Roman’s right thigh. Bellowing like a spitted boar, he dropped to one knee. Delighted cheers rose from the peltasts, and the man who’d thrown grinned at Demetrios. ‘Second shot should finish him.’

  Demetrios didn’t have the energy to argue, but he was glad when the peltast missed. By then, two of the princeps’ comrades had come to his aid. The peltast’s third spear landed well short, and with a curse, he gave up.

  Wiping away sweat, Demetrios surveyed the battlefield. Many hundreds of bodies decorated the ground. Thinner at the limit of the artillery’s range, they multiplied in number closer to the defences. At the ramparts’ base, they filled the ditch. In some places, they lay the height of a man. Plenty were still alive. Arms moved here; fingers twitched there. Pain-streaked voices cried for their mothers. They moaned unintelligibly, shrieked at the uncaring sky.

  Demetrios could look at the carnage no more. A hammer blow of exhaustion hit him, and he sat down, setting his back against the parapet that they had fought so hard to defend. His eyes closed, but all he saw was mangled, bloody corpses.

  Tomorrow would be the same.

  CHAPTER XXXVII

  Felix yawned. The trumpets hadn’t yet sounded, signalling the end of his sentry duty, but it wouldn’t be long. He peered at the enemy ramparts through the early morning light, and saw nothing of significance. The sentinels there were as bored as he, like as not. More than a month had passed since the first failed assault on Philip’s positions, and although Flamininus continued to send troops against the Macedonians, every subsequent attempt had ended the same way. These defeats, and the numerous casualties suffered, had seen Flamininus’ tactics change. Attacks now tended to be probing efforts. For most legionaries, therefore, life had entered a kind of routine. Skirmishes and scouting were the norm by day; a pleasant peace held sway each night.

  Felix’s sentry duty had dragged by, as it always did. The first hour often wasn’t too bad: belly full from the evening meal, a man could enjoy the sunset, and feel grateful that he hadn’t died in the brutal fighting thus far. During the seco
nd and third, it was easy to keep busy, walking along the rampart and having a word with the sentries to either side. In the fourth and fifth, a man tended to grow cold and bored. Thoughts of home, and of family, if a man had one, filled the mind. Frustration that he would remain in this miserable valley, for only the gods knew how long, drove them out.

  The anger could be used to keep drowsiness at bay, but not for long, because the sixth hour and onwards were the worst. This was when men fell asleep. Felix no longer had that problem, however. Any time his eyelids drooped, images of Ingenuus’ terrified face filled his mind, and he jerked awake again, guilt ravaging him.

  A good centurion came to check on his soldiers when they were at their lowest; Pullo was no different. Just a couple of hours before, he had crept from sentry to sentry, placing his hobs with such care that if a man wasn’t alert, the first he knew was when Pullo appeared by his shoulder.

  Felix had been weary but wide awake when Pullo came to check on him. Despite knowing that Matho was nowhere nearby, Felix’s heart had leaped into his mouth. It took a good while after Pullo’s departure for his nerves to settle down. This obstacle bypassed, the last period of his watch had been the hardest of all; he’d thought of nothing but Ingenuus until the first rays of sunlight had tinged the eastern horizon. With the end of his watch in sight at last, he had brightened up. It wasn’t his turn to cook; a nap would be in order while one of his comrades prepared bread over the fire. Once he’d eaten, Felix decided, a proper sleep was called for.

  After that, he would go hunting. The army diet of bread and wine kept a man alive, but by the gods, it was monotonous. The countryside had been emptied of supplies. Luxuries like cheese and meat were available, the quartermaster being the chief source. Prices were extortionate, however, and often beyond the means of ordinary soldiers. Pilferage could be profitable, but a man risked the fustuarium if caught. The best option was to head into the hills with a spear, asking the gods’ favour. Felix was a proficient hunter. More often than not, he returned with a rabbit or a hare, and sometimes even a deer or wild boar.