Fire in the East

by Harry Sidebottom

  As the tale ended, with the Sassanids on the island, Antigonus looked enquiringly at Ballista, who enigmatically said yes, adding, if they were all still around that night. The northerner thanked the messenger and again parted with some coins.

  But the tide cannot flow one way for ever. All too soon, and at the cost of only one more ballista, the Sassanid artillery had crossed their zone of impotence. They had reached their intended shooting positions just within effective range. Persians swarmed about, dismounting the artillery from their rollers, setting up protective screens, putting the ammunition to hand, winching back the sliders, placing the missiles, aiming and releasing.

  Ballista felt a slight tremor run through the gatehouse as a stone struck. The time of carefree observation was over. Now the air had become a thing of menace; everywhere the tearing, ripping noises of missiles. To the right a man screamed as a bolt shot him from the wall walk. To the left a short section of battlements exploded in stone splinters as a missile struck. A man lay in the middle of the debris moaning. Another lay silent. Passing the word for carpenters to erect a makeshift battlement, Ballista reflected that, other things being equal, the defenders should win this exchange of artillery. They had twenty-five ballistae to eighteen, and the advantages of a higher position, as well as stone, not wooden, walls for protection.

  Yet other things were not equal. The two City Takers remaining mobile had crept forward into maximum artillery range. Just when the enemy would be shooting back, the northerner was going to have to order his ballistarii to change targets. As they came in range, the huge siege towers would be the sole targets. Now it would be the turn of the defending artillerymen to endure shot without being able to return it; there can be little worse for any soldier. About to send off the runners to give the order, Ballista added that any ballistarius who aimed at anything other than one of the siege towers once they were within range would be flogged to death. Allfather, the exercise of power has corrupted my soul.

  Leaving their ballistae 200 paces from the wall, the main body of Persians huddled as close as possible behind the line of mobile shields. Men fell to traps underfoot and arrows slicing down from above. Yet to the defenders it seemed no time at all before the line of mantlets was established a mere fifty paces from the walls and the Persian bowmen were bending their bows. Ten, twenty, thirty thousand arrows; it was impossible to guess. Like a shadow passing over the face of the sun, they made the day grow darker.

  All along the wall, and behind it, the arrows fell as thick as hail in the deep midwinter. On the wall, and in the streets and alleys behind, men fell. The archers on the wall shot back. The defenders had some advantages: they were higher up, well protected by stone crenellations and the stout shields of the legionaries; almost all their arrows found their mark - so vast was the number of Sassanids that they formed a dense target and the mantlets could not shelter them all. But it was an unequal contest: fewer than 650 bowmen against innumerable thousands.

  Sassanid arrows were striking home. Defenders were falling - far too many. Ballista wondered if all his planning, his clever ruses, would prove in vain. Would sheer numbers prevail? Would sheer weight of missiles clear the walls and leave the city open?

  Endurance. They just had to endure. Ballista knew that only discipline, old-fashioned Roman disciplina, could get them through. For nine nights and nine days the Allfather had hung on the tree of life. His side pierced by a spear, voluntarily the Allfather had endured on the tree to learn the secrets of the dead. The northerner smiled. So much for the romanitas of the Dux Ripae.

  The white draco hissing in the breeze attracted the full ferocity of the Sassanids. The air above the Palmyrene Gate was thick with missiles. Ballista was hunkered down behind the parapets in the midst of a makeshift shieldwall. It was hard to see or hear. Then, above the awful clamour of the storm of steel and stone rose the sound of cheering. Thin, half-swamped by the noise of battle, but exultant, came chanting: ‘Ro-ma! Ro-ma!’

  Ballista peeked out around the crenellations. He jerked his head back into safety as an arrow snickered off the wall. He looked again. The northern half of the plain was enveloped in a great mushroom cloud of dust. Not wanting to tempt fate, Ballista retreated behind the parapet for a few moments. When he looked again the dust had cleared a little. He could see why his men were exulting. The northernmost City Taker was no more. In its place was a tortured tall frame of beams and girders. As Ballista watched, a man leapt from the top storey. The falling man, incongruously, looked as elegant as a pantomime dancer. Two, three, four more eastern men jumped to a certain death. Then, with a ponderous inevitability, the remains of the tower imploded.

  A strange hush settled across the battlefield. The fighting slackened as both sides came to terms with the enormity of what had happened. The siege tower had been heading almost directly towards a tower housing one of the biggest pieces of artillery. The repeated impact of twenty-pound stones slamming in at a great pace must literally have shaken the City Taker apart.

  Demetrius looked around. The fighting top of the Palmyrene Gate was littered, almost carpeted with spent missiles. As the fighting died down, defenders slumped down against the walls or the two enormous ballistae. Although he tried not to, the young Greek could not help repeatedly looking at the two corpses thrown in the corner. A slick pool of their mingled blood seeped out from under them. Demetrius both wanted and at the same time did not want to know their identity.

  Was the fighting over? Zeus, Apollo, Athena and Artemis, please let it all be over, at least for today. Demetrius noticed some slaves carrying parcels and jars emerge from the trapdoor. They bent double as they moved. Stray missiles were still flying across the roof. For a moment the young Greek had no idea what the slaves were doing. Then, looking at the sky, he realized that it must already be towards the end of the fourth hour of daylight, the time that the kyrios had ordered the troops to take their early lunch. In one way the time had gone so quickly; in another, the screaming and the terror seemed to have lasted for days. Demetrius thought how Zeus, in the divine poetry of Homer, held back the day so that Odysseus and Penelope could enjoy their lovemaking and sleep. Today was nothing like that; Arete was nothing like Ithaka.

  Earlier, when Ballista had called for his impromptu mid-morning snack, Demetrius had been unable to eat; there had been no saliva in his mouth. Now, as the fighting seemed to be dying down, he felt ravenous. Taking some bread, cheese and an onion, he started to wolf them down.

  The kyrios was chewing in a desultory way. He was sitting on the floor with his back against the southern wall, Maximus and Antigonus either side of him. In quiet voices they were holding an intermittent technical discussion on the limits of depression of artillery pieces. Demetrius wondered at them. How could repetition ever so dull a man’s senses that this morning of horror, this dealing in death, could become as mundane as reaping a cornfield? He began to giggle. Maybe it was because they were barbarians; an Angle, a Hibernian and a Batavian. To stop his giggling, Demetrius bit a large mouthful out of his onion.

  Arete was in the eye of the storm. This isolated and previously insignificant town had been willed by the gods to become the latest focus of the eternal war between east and west. The conflict had always been there, from the earliest records. First, the eastern Phoenicians had kidnapped Io and the Greeks had responded by abducting first Europa then Medea. After the Trojans had taken Helen, things moved from girl-taking to war-making. The Achaeans burnt Troy, the Persians burnt Athens, and Alexander burnt Persepolis. The sands of the desert were sodden red with the wreck of Crassus’s legions at Carrhae. Abandoned Roman corpses marked Mark Antony’s retreat from Media. Julius Caesar was struck down on the eve of yet another war of revenge. Wars of revenge had repeatedly been undertaken by the emperors Trajan, Lucius Verus and Septimius Severus. Then came the Sassanids, and the east had struck back. Thousands of Roman dead at Meshike and Barbalissos. Antioch, the metropolis of Syria, and so many others burning in the time of troubles
. East against west, the conflict that could never end.

  Arete was the epicentre of a conflict of cosmic proportions; a never-ending clash of civilizations, an eternal clash of gods. The full might of the east was hurled against the west, and here eternal Rome - humanitas itself as some would have it, all of its arts and philosophy - was defended by three barbarians eating bread and cheese. Demetrius’s stream of consciousness was broken by the sudden arrival of a soldier.

  The messenger also trampled into Maximus’s excellent reverie. The Hibernian had lost interest in the finer points of depressing artillery some time ago. His mind was running over the new girl at The Krater: nipples like a blind cobbler’s thumbs, trim little delta, willing as you like. It was funny with girls - no matter what sort of nipples they had, they always wanted different ones. The girl from The Krater with her big brown aureoles like dinner plates said she would rather have small, neat little nipples. The girl from the bar at the north end of town, who had tiny, delicate pink nipples, wished hers were bigger. Maximus did not care; the girls were both lively well-built blondes. Certainly they would look good together.

  The messenger was attempting to salute while bent double. Ballista and Antigonus saluted back without getting up. As a slave rather than a soldier, Maximus took pleasure in not feeling the need to join in.

  ‘Good news, Dominus.’ The soldier sat down with relief when Ballista indicated. ‘The barbarian attack on the south wall has been driven off. There were about 5,000 of them. The reptiles formed up out of range on the plateau. But by the time they were descending into the ravine we had ten ballistae on them. The bastards were looking shaken when they started to climb our side of the ravine. When the bowmen of larhai and Ogelos started shooting and we rolled those bloody great stones you had us put out down among them the Sassanids ran like the true easterners they are - no stomach for it, no balls.’

  Living in the moment, almost like a child, Maximus had actually forgotten all about the threat to the southern wall. But the news was welcome: things on the desert wall were bad enough on their own.

  Ballista thanked the messenger and sent him back with an order for Iarhai to bring 300 of his archers round on to the desert wall.

  Trumpets rang and drums boomed across the plain. Sassanid commanders shouted themselves hoarse trying to put the enthusiasm back into their men, to lift the tempo of the attack. The stream of incoming missiles picked up. Demetrius cowered closer to the floor. Wearily, Ballista, Maximus and Antigonus got to their feet and huddled behind the parapets, now and then looking out.

  A terrible crash came from the tower to the north of the gate. Again a cloud of ominous dun-coloured dust billowed into the sky. It was followed by a rhythmic shout of pain like an animal bellowing. A Sassanid stone-thrower had scored a direct hit on one of the two Roman ballistae on the tower; the resulting jagged, fast-flying splinters of wood had reduced the platform of the tower to a charnelhouse.

  Before Ballista could issue any orders, Mamurra had appeared on the stricken tower. The praefectus fabrum was organizing a work gang to throw the shattered remains of the bolt-thrower off the tower and sending men to drag a spare piece of artillery from the magazine. The corpses joined the remnants of the machine on the ground and the living were pushed into getting the remaining ballista working.

  For the moment the defenders’ main problem lay in the one Sassanid City Taker remaining operative. It had resumed its painful advance on the Palmyrene Gate. While it stood and was capable of movement, all the artillery of the defenders that could get an aim on it had no other choice. Only the towers at the extreme north of the desert wall were able to hit back at the Sassanid artillery tormenting them.

  The last City Taker was taking a dreadful pounding. Again and again smooth round artillery stones, six-pounders and twenty-pounders, smashed at terrible speed into the tower. Bolts from ballistae and arrows caused havoc among the myriad men hauling the behemoth. The City Taker shook, seemed to stagger, but then, with new men on the ropes and with the terrible squealing of thousands of joints of wood under intense pressure, it advanced again.

  Twice, work crews raced ahead of the siege tower to deal with Ballista’s traps. The carefully concealed pits at one hundred and at fifty paces from the gate were filled in, but at frightful cost. The crews ran into an almost solid wall of tipped steel. The pits were partly filled with their bodies.

  Inexorably the City Taker rolled on. If it reached the gate, if its drawbridge crashed down on the roof of the gatehouse, the siege was over, the town would fall. Ballista knew that now there was just one hope of stopping the siege engine reaching the gate. Did the Persians know that there was one more pit hidden a mere twenty paces from the gate? The Suren had not come that close. As far as Ballista knew, no Persian had come that close. But had the traitor warned them?

  Nearer and nearer came the skin-clad tower. The smell of uncured hides, wood and the sweat of men preceded it to the gatehouse. Thirty paces, twenty-five: no work crew racing ahead. Twenty paces. Nothing. Had Ballista miscalculated? Were the beams too strong? Would the City Taker cross unhindered over the trap?

  There was a deep, deep groan. The surface of the road moved, the hidden boards over the pit began to buckle under the weight of the tower. A distinctive smell wafted up. One by one the boards snapped. The tower lurched forward. Men screamed.

  Ballista snatched up a bow and arrow. The smell of pitch was strong in his nostrils. He touched the combustible material to a brazier. The arrowhead flared. Taking a deep breath, he stepped out from the shelter of the crenellations. He flinched as a Persian arrow shot past his face. He exhaled, and forced himself to lean out over the wall, to ignore the dangers, to concentrate on what had to be done. Dimly he was aware of missiles nicking off the stone around him. There was the dark opening of the trap. He filled his lungs, drew the bow and released. The arrow seemed to accelerate away, a smoke trail curling after it.

  Other fire arrows darted into the pit, into the mouth of the large terracotta storage jar which had been hidden there. With a roar the naptha ignited. The flames shot up, curling and licking around the siege tower, darting up its companionways and the ladders inside. Men screamed. Ballista smelt something like roast pork.

  ‘Ball-is-ta, Ball-is-ta.’ The chants rang out from the walls. ‘Ball-is-ta, Ball-is-ta.’

  But the ordeal of the town of Arete was not yet over for the day. The sight of their tower and their men burning goaded the Sassanids. Trumpets called and drums thundered. Noblemen roared commands.

  ‘Per-oz, Per-oz, Victory, Victory.’ A proud chant came from the desert. ‘Per-oz, Per-oz.’

  Like a great wave driven against the shore by the frenzy of the sea, the easterners came out from behind their line of mantlets and set on towards the wall. The storming party was several thousand strong, each man clad in armour. The Sassanid knights, the clibanarii, had dismounted. The noblemen were even carrying their own siege ladders.

  The human wave had fifty paces to cross, fifty, long, long paces. From the first step men fell, smashed backwards by the bolt from a ballista, curling round the shaft of an arrow, clutching a foot lacerated by a caltrop, screaming piteously as the stake concealed in its pit penetrated soft tissue, scraped down bone. Men fell in droves - as they crossed the open space, as they descended into the ditch, as they climbed out again. The Sassanids left lines of their dead and dying, but they reached the earth bank against the wall of Arete, they swung the siege ladders up against the battlements, and the first of them began to climb.

  Now the simple but vicious devices honed by generation after generation of wicked, heartless human ingenuity were unleashed against the Sassanids. As the ladders banged against the wall defenders sprang forward with rustic pitchforks. Catching the uprights between the tines, the soldiers pushed the ladders sideways. Despite the arrows whistling past their ears, more defenders joined in; pushing, pushing ever harder. As one man fell another took his place. Those siege ladders not well secured at the base
slid sideways, gathering momentum, shedding men, some crashing into neighbouring ladders. Sassanid warriors went spinning head over heels down to the unforgiving ground.

  Great rocks, barely to be lifted by three or four men, were manhandled on to the parapet. They teetered for a second then tipped. Brushing men off the ladders, smashing the rungs, pushing the uprights irreparably apart, the stones plummeted to earth.

  High out over the battlements soared the arms of Ballista’s three new giant cranes. Levers were pulled and the great chains released their immense boulders. Where they struck, in the blink of an eye ladders became kindling, men were reduced to a pulp.

  All along the wall walk were flurries of activity. Teams of four legionaries thrust well-wrapped metal poles through the handles of the big metal cauldrons hung over the fires. With haste, but carefully, they lifted the glowing bowls clear of the intense heat. Delicately they manoeuvred their spitting, crackling burdens to the edge. Grunting with effort, they hoisted the poles on to their shoulders then, most dangerous of all, they carefully, so very carefully, tipped the contents over the parapet.

  Men screamed. The white-hot sand flowed down the face of the wall, down the earth bank. The sand set fire to hair and clothes. The tiny grains penetrated the gaps in armour, the eye sockets in helmets, burning and blinding. Men ran, screaming, ripping off their armour, which had turned traitor, trapping the agonizing, scalding sand. Men rolled on the ground, beat at themselves, all unconscious of the arrows of the defenders, which continued to rain down.

  The carnage below the walls was immense. Yet not all the Sassanid ladders were pushed aside or shattered. Still, gaily clad warriors, silk surcoats and streamers floating around steel armour, climbed unbroken ladders. There was no chanting now. They were saving their breath for climbing, for what was waiting for them at the top.

  It is hard to climb a ladder and fight at the same time. For most of those Sassanids who reached the top all that awaited them was a series of blows from a Roman spatha which sent them crashing back down again. But in a few places warriors made it over the parapet and on to the battlements. Most of these footholds were overrun almost immediately, swamped while the numbers still overwhelmingly favoured the defenders.