by M C Scott
‘What will he do?’
‘What would you do?’
There was a pause, and the ram struck again. As the thunderous noise died away, Artacles said, slowly, ‘I would find shields to keep my men safe.’
‘Exactly. Or broad oak boards, which are of greater length and take fewer men to hold. I think, if you look up at the southern corner, you’ll see they are bringing some up the steps there now. If we shoot at once, we can delay them a while longer …’
I nocked, raised, loosed and hit the lead man who was carrying one end of a wide, flat board across the top of the wall. He fell outwards down the wall to lie still at its foot, so that I could be sure of the kill. In the flurry of arrows that followed, three others, I thought, went the same way, but they fell inwards, and so were uncertain. And by the time we nocked again, the boards were in place, raising the height of the wall by four feet.
‘Hold.’ I raised my hand. ‘Let me test this.’
I took three paces forward and tried one shot at a far steeper angle than we had before. It soared over the barrier, but, for the first time, an answering arrow came back. It struck the ground near my feet and skittered back towards me so that I had to take a step sideways to let it past.
‘They’ll get our range soon,’ Artacles said. ‘Best get yourself a shield.’
‘Later.’ My head still ached dully, but I was feeling expansive and calm. The buzz of bees was constant in my ears now and a knot had taken hold of my stomach that was beyond the usual stir of battle. I had an idea and wished I had not.
A ray of weak sun lanced through the clouds and, as if invited, I stepped forward into it and turned round to face the bowmen behind me.
‘The Hebrews will try to use the boards as cover to shoot back at us. If we step forward and aim high and long, we can keep them back from the wall.’
As if to test my theory, a man’s face appeared at the barrier. A sling whirled in a blur by his head. I drew and loosed without thinking, as Uncle Dorios had taught me. I missed, but so did the enemy slingshot. A small lead pellet big enough to break open my skull cracked on to the ground between me and the wall, kicked up a small plume of dust. The next did much the same, and the next. With my fourth arrow, I struck the slinger in the throat and he toppled backwards, out of sight. If he screamed, I didn’t hear it: we couldn’t hear anything over the thunder of the ram on the door, but I was still expecting—
‘Look out!’
It was Artacles who called, I think, but it was Tears’ voice I heard, and in any case I had been waiting for this. I threw myself sideways, rolling on to my shoulder to keep my bow from harm. A ballista stone the size of my head hurtled past where I had been and gouged a hole in the solid earth big enough to hide a sheep in.
‘Loose!’ I screamed, over the noise of the archers’ shock. ‘Shoot as fast as you can along the line that stone came from before they—’
‘Look out!’
Two pairs of hands wrenched me out of the path of the second stone. By the third, we were running backwards, by the fourth we were just running, all tactics gone, all ideas abandoned, all chance of success fading with each running step.
And then the Hebrews brought up the catapults. They had taken thirty, plus fifteen hundred bolts that were the length of a tall man’s leg and nearly as thick, tipped with iron shaped to penetrate armour. Shot by a man who knew how to sight and loose, nothing could stand against them.
These, I thought, were aimed by an expert. The first volley were rangefinders and scattered on to empty ground. After that, every one was sent to kill.
I saw one pierce a bowman through his mailed chest, come out the other side and kill the man behind him, pinning his body to the hard earth. After that, they came in a volley so fast and so hard that all we could do was run as far as we could, and each of us try to find somewhere to hide. I ended up in the armoury tent, set far back against the beast garden, as far back, in fact, as one could go without leaving the city.
And among all the many deaths, there were perhaps only half a dozen of us who thought to look to the ram – and so discovered that the catapults had been a diversion, much as the attack on us at Gabao had been a diversion, and the real attack was on the ram as it tried to break through the gate.
The stones that had so nearly killed me had been the most distant from the wall. The rest had been sent at progressively steeper angles until they were dropping from the heights of the sky, just on our side of the wall.
They fell in volleys of three at a time and crashed on to the ram and the men about it, and these were not the small stones the size of a man’s head but massive rocks big as bulls’ heads and bigger; one in six was so wide a grown man could not wrap his arms round half the width.
The first volley crippled the ram. The rest – I counted thirty shots in all, but there must have been more – smashed into the men around it, crushing their shields to tinder and their bodies to bloody pulp.
‘Sound the retreat!’ It was Lupus who called it, although it should have been Gallus. ‘Call them back! Retreat in good order! Now!’
Nobody was listening to him. A broken horn lay to my left, waiting for one of the smiths to have time to weld the handle back on. I hauled it out of the clutter of other broken kit, hitched it over my shoulder and blew the retreat as loudly as I knew how.
It wasn’t pitch perfect by any means, but it was a rhythm every man knew second only to the order to advance. I wasn’t sure anyone would hear me over the screams of dying men, and was thinking to run in and haul them out bodily when Horgias and Tears emerged – alive! Both alive! – bellowing orders at the survivors that sent them running like hares for the safety of the tent lines.
‘That’s it,’ Lupus said, as the senior centurions gathered at the flags; only twelve of us were left. It felt like a repeat of Rhandaea, only that we had not yet surrendered.
Lupus, though, thought we were close to abandoning the fight, which was the next worst thing. ‘We’re finished,’ he said. ‘Gallus had little enough heart for this at the start, but he’s lost it all now, and more. He’ll have us marching out in the morning.’
Everyone but me seemed to have been expecting this; but then everyone else had seen Gallus dither over the assault in the first place. I stared at Lupus. ‘I thought you were worried about the weather closing in.’
‘That too.’ He turned away. I turned him back.
‘Then we have to break through the gate today,’ I said.
Eleven of my fellow officers looked at me and laughed. All except Lupus, who was the only one who counted.
To him, I said, ‘Fire. All we need is fire. They’ve just turned the ram to matchwood. If we can pile it against the gate and set fire to it, we can still weaken it enough to get through. We know how well a ram burns now; trust me, they make a good fire. Nothing will stand against it if we can make it hot enough.’
Lupus blinked once, slowly, then nodded. ‘Do it.’
I asked for volunteers, and then had to turn half of them away. My century came, what was left of it; we had lost thirty-two men to the missiles at the gate, of whom at least half were dead. So that I might not seem to be favouring my own, I made up the numbers with men from the first cohort and brought along the first century of the VIth as well.
I set signallers on the rise by the palace with particular instructions to watch for missiles and let us know as soon as they saw them. We arranged different calls for stones and catapult bolts and a brief, easy system to let us know roughly where they were aimed. I set the archers to keep men from the temple heights while we worked, so that they might not attempt to put the blaze out too early, and while I did that Taurus led his engineers in gathering every bit of flammable material that could be found, plus the tallow, lamp oil and tinder to start a fire and keep it going.
The sun was a glowing orb behind Herod’s palace by the time we were ready. Taurus brought me a small green-enamelled ember pot with ties to fix it to my belt.
‘T
here are twenty of these,’ he said. ‘We found them in the king’s palace. As long as even one of us lives, we’ll get the fire going.’
I clapped Taurus on the shoulder. ‘Stay safe,’ I said simply. ‘And keep Horgias safe for me.’
I’m not one for speeches, but something was needed for the men and I could not address them all singly. To that end, I climbed halfway up the steps to the palace and turned to look down on them. They gathered in good order, effortlessly, even now when they were burdened with bags of wool and straw and the cloaks of dead men.
I raised my hand to speak to them, as Corbulo had done once, and if that was hubris I apologize, but it did not feel like it then: I was shaking with the battle-fear that I always felt, but pride, too, that we had come this far, that we had grown to be a fighting unit against such bitter odds, that these men – each of them – believed in me enough to follow me back to the carnage at the gate.
‘We have suffered enough at the hands of this rabble. Now is our chance to give them back the fire they gave us. And to rescue our wounded. Each man has his task. You know what to do. Do it well, and we will win this city before sundown.’
They cheered a little, but it was not a time for cheering. I jumped down from the steps, found the head of my small force, raised my right hand, and stabbed it forward.
‘Go!’
I carried a proper shield this time. Running in its shade, I saw only the churned ground beneath my feet. I jumped ballista stones that lay like hail in the dirt, and soon after jumped dead and living men, and splintered lengths of wood.
The air around the ram stank of blood and entrails and fractured timber. I pushed through until I reached the iron-capped head, where the great tree that Taurus had found and felled lay cracked on the ground in a mess of broken beams. Four men sheltered me with their shields as I dragged and threw and kicked fragments of wood, some of them longer than a man’s arm, into place around the ram.
‘Fleece,’ I called, and men passed me what they had carried bundled up under their shields, and soon, from the back, came jars of lamp oil taken from the palace, and then tallow, and behind me others and others were doing the same, so that soon enough we had the whole thing padded and wadded and ready to burn.
Horgias’ face grinned up near my own. ‘Have you the ember pot?’ he asked.
He was one of the twenty flame-holders – I had seen Taurus give him a red-coloured pot – but he was giving me first fire and I was not about to turn him down.
I unhooked the pot from my belt, and blew on it, and saw the charcoal glow to cherry red and blew again and it was the colour of fired apricots, and again and it was the noonday sun. Surrounded by the smells of tallow and oil, I fisted a hole in the wadding and leaned in and tipped the brilliant fragments on the bed there, and blew as on the face of a sleeping lover and saw a flame rise and dance and leap and catch.
‘Hold. Hold the cover. Don’t let them put it out yet.’
I nursed that flame as if it were my only son, and all round the ram nineteen other men did likewise. My small group leaned in over it with their shields against a volley of missiles that blasted down on us, for our archers were running short of arrows and saving their last for the time when the flames needed the greatest help. Men fell at the edges, but for every one that fell, another stepped in to take his place until the fire was no longer dancing but roaring, sucking in air, giving out heat that made my sore heart heal again.
And then, cutting over the havoc, a long, high note from the signallers on the palace rise—
‘Run!’ I screamed it, or Horgias did, or someone else back down the ranks who knew the calls we had arranged. ‘Hot sand!’
Before the threat of sand heated almost to melting point, we scattered like sheep before a wolf, like hares before hounds, only faster, and came to a stop at the tent lines, where Lupus had the archers shooting long, endless volleys until their fingers bled and their arms were strained out of their sockets.
I snatched up the pale Parthian war bow and joined them and, together, we killed men by the dozen, by the hundred, but there were tens of thousands in the city of Jerusalem and we had only twenty arrows left apiece.
They came to an end, as they must, and after that we could only wait and watch as the flames of our creation, the beautiful, vast, roaring fire that we had built, was quenched first by sand and then, later, by water.
I watched the final embers blink to darkness. ‘We’ve weakened it,’ I said. ‘It wouldn’t take another day of the ram.’ And then, remembering, ‘Did Tears get all the wounded away?’
‘Before you ever lit the fire,’ Lupus said. ‘That was well done.’
‘But not the fire.’
‘It was well done,’ he said, woodenly, and then with more feeling. ‘It was well done. We’re fighting against men with talent in there, and we are led by one with none.’
Lupus stayed with us a long time, watching the smoke die to damp ashes before he bade us good night and took himself to Cestius Gallus’ tent, where our commander waited with our new orders.
CHAPTER TWENTY-EIGHT
WE MARCHED OUT of Jerusalem with the dawn on the seventh day after we had entered it.
The XIIth legion had lost over two thousand men out of a full complement of nearly five thousand, with another eight hundred wounded drawn in ox wagons behind; the VIth had lost half their number, though with fewer wounded. The three cohorts of the IVth, of course, had been wiped out to a man.
Cadus’ legionary and allied horse were almost intact, barring the losses at the mouth of the Beth Horon pass, which had been few. The allied infantry likewise had lost only eight hundred men, most of them in the skirmishes and battles before we ever reached Jerusalem, but were otherwise largely untouched.
But the XIIth had sought the glory and the XIIth had borne the loss. In poor heart, knowing how failure further sullied our already desperate situation, we neither sang nor spoke to each other as we marched.
The rebels fell on us before noon, harrying the rear centuries who were guarding the wagons. Gallus gave us no order to break ranks and go to help them, but Priscus, a centurion of the third rank who had command of the VIth now, turned his men round anyway, to marshall a defence.
Thus it was that we lost half of the remaining men of the VIth, ten of the supply wagons and all of the wounded before nightfall.
We ran the last miles to the safety of a small legionary fortress at Scopus, halfway to the Beth Horon pass. I had lain unconscious through our first stay there, and would as readily have slept through this one; it was a dreary place with little to recommend it save that it put stone walls between us and the Hebrew spears, which meant at least we could light fires, cook food and sleep.
We slept badly and woke to a dull, damp dawn that threatened rain but did not deliver. We cursed the sky for that; it helped us to think that a good downpour would have hurt the Hebrews more than it hurt us.
We left Scopus, fervently hoping never to see it again, and began the rapid-march beloved of Caesar, who could get an entire legion with all the baggage across forty miles in a day. We made the four miles to Gabao, the battleground at the mouth of the Beth Horon pass, before Gallus called a halt.
Gabao is not a fortress, but we had built redoubts and staked them on the way down and those remained in place. I had rather more confidence in them than I had in the defences at Scopus, but that was little enough.
We centurions were so few now that we were all invited to meet Gallus in his tent. It was the first time I’d seen him close up and the first time I’d seen him at all since we set out for the Beth Horon pass.
My first thought was that he was sick with fright. My second was that he was simply sick: close to dying, in fact.
Always a tall, lean man, he was thin, now, to the point of emaciation, with the skin of his face stretched tight over his skull and his eyes sunk so deep in their sockets they seemed to glow from the back of his head. His hair was almost gone, but what was left, in plumes ab
ove his ears, was a rich, dark colour, as if it were twenty years younger than the man himself. His eyebrows, too, were thickly luxuriant.
I stared at him until Lupus, who was beside me, trod on my foot and brought me to silent attention.
Gallus began with no civilities. A brazier stood between him and us and he clasped his hands behind his back and paced back and forth on his side of it as he spoke, sending his shadows dancing against the far walls of the tent.
‘As you know, the pass of Beth Horon is a death trap. The enemy have already shown that they have a different, faster, route through the mountains to its further end and the heights are a gift for any man trying to ambush those going through. Still, with them harrying us as they do, we cannot afford the time to march round, which means we must run for it, literally.’
He waited for someone to say something. When nobody did, he paced the breadth of his tent and back once more and came to a halt behind the brazier. He swallowed, as if his throat were too tight. He looked the way I feel before battle, although I hope I hide it better. I watched his larynx bob up and down behind the drawn skin of his neck.
Drily, he said, ‘This has the merit of being a defensible position and therefore we will stay here for the rest of today and tonight. We will march out at daybreak tomorrow, by which time I want the mules and oxen dead and their carts destroyed, particularly the siege engines. Destroy every one and if necessary burn it. We must leave nothing to the enemy that they have not already got.’
That was it. We were dismissed moments later, with no time for questions, or discussion, or any plans beyond that.
Killing mules is a foul task and one best left to the butchers. Every cohort has half a dozen men whose skill is in killing cleanly and fast but even they hate mule-killing.
It’s not that they are harder to kill than horses, but they are so much more intelligent that after the first one, when they know what’s coming, they become almost impossible to handle. The oxen, by contrast, stand eating corn from a bucket and each one killed seems as surprised when the pole axe hits it between the eyes as the one before and the one after.