Fire in the East

by Harry Sidebottom

  ‘Look, Kyrios, over there.’ Demetrius pointed to the wall walk just south of the gatehouse. A knot of four Sassanid clibanarii had made it over the crenellations. They stood, shoulder to shoulder, their backs to the ladder. Five or six bodies, Persian and Roman, lay at their feet. A ring of defenders had drawn slightly back from them. As the Greek youth watched, another eastern warrior scrambled over the parapet, then another.

  ‘With me. Maximus, Antigonus, equites singulares, with me.’ Without waiting to see if his order was being obeyed, Ballista drew his spatha and hurled himself through the trapdoor and down the stairs.

  As the press of men on the roof thinned out Demetrius dithered. He drew his sword. Should he follow his kyrios ? He felt foolish holding the gladius that Maximus had given him. If he went down there he would just get himself killed, would get in the way and get the others killed.

  Demetrius saw his kyrios emerge from the tower on to the wall walk below. The northerner set off at a run. With his left hand he - unbuckled and tossed aside his black cloak. It fluttered and rolled down the inner earth ramp. Maximus and Antigonus were with him, six equites singulares right behind. The Dux Ripae was yelling some war cry in his native tongue.

  There were eight Sassanids in the group by the time Ballista reached them. The nearest one swung overhand at the northerner’s head. Ballista brought his sword across his body, rolling his wrist, forcing the blade of his opponent outward then, seemingly in the one motion, launched a backhanded cut which landed heavily in the Persian’s face. As the first Sassanid fell sideways Ballista aimed a series of heavy blows at the next man, who covered up and cowered behind his shield.

  Demetrius watched, heart in mouth; so much going on at once. Maximus killed a Persian. Then Antigonus another. One of the equites singulares went down. More Sassanids were falling than Romans. More Sassanids were falling than were getting off the ladder and on to the battlements. A group of Iarhai’s mercenaries was attacking from the far side. Ballista unleashed a barrage of savage cuts which drove an easterner to his knees, battered his shield aside, thrust the spatha sickeningly into his face. As the kyrios put his boot on the man’s chest to pull his sword out he half slipped. The walkway was slick with blood. A Sassanid seized the opportunity to lunge forward, catching Ballista’s helmet a glancing blow. With his left hand the northerner swept off the damaged helmet. With his right he parried the next blow. One of Iarhai’s mercenaries drove a sword into the Persian’s back.

  It was done. As if at a signal the three Sassanids still standing turned and scrambled for the elusive safety of the ladder. All three were cut down from behind.

  Ballista rubbed the sweat from his eyes. He looked up and down the wall. There were no easterners still on the wall walk. Still taking care, crouching behind the battered crenellations, he looked over the wall. It was done. Panic was spreading through the Sassanid ranks. Where before individuals, the wounded, real or pretend, had been making their way back to the camp, now there were small groups. As Ballista watched, whole bodies of warriors turned and fled. The trickle had become a flood. Shapur’s assault had failed.

  ‘Ball-is-ta, Ball-is-ta.’ The chants rang across the plain, taunting the retreating Sassanids. ‘Ball-is-ta, Ball-is-ta.’ Some of the legionaries howled like wolves, the story of the Dux’s father Isangrim turning from something to mock into a source of strange pride.

  Ballista waved to his men, shook hands with or hugged those around him. As he was released from Maximus’s bear hug, the northerner recognized the leader of the group of Iarhai’s mercenaries.

  ‘What the fuck are you doing here?’ His voice was harsh. His concern for her was making him angry.

  ‘My father was... indisposed. So I brought the men you asked for.’ Bathshiba met his gaze. One of her sleeves was torn, a smear of blood showing.

  ‘Allfather, but this is no place for a girl.’

  ‘You did not object to my help just now.’ She stared up at him defiantly.

  ‘That was you?’

  ‘Yes, that was me.’

  Ballista mastered his anger. ‘Then I must thank you.’

  XIV

  The stricken plain beyond the western wall of Arete was a ghastly sight.

  From the roof of the gatehouse there was a panoramic view of the horror. Like flotsam thrown up on the shore after the storm has spent its fury, the Sassanid dead lay in distinct waves across the plain. The furthest wave was some 400 to 200 paces from the wall. Here the dead lay as individuals; crushed by a stone, skewered by a bolt, grotesquely half sunken in the ground in the trap which had killed them. The next wave ran almost to the wall. Here the dead at least had company, lots of company. They lay in lines, groups, even low hillocks. Here they had found another way of dying. The often brightly dyed feathers of arrows fluttered in the fresh southerly breeze. Bright, gay, like bunting at a festival, they added an inappropriate, macabre touch to the scene of devastation. Finally, there was the horror below the wall. Piled on top of each other, three, four, five high, they concealed the earth. Smashed, twisted and broken, the corpses here were almost all burnt.

  For eighteen years, more than half his life, Ballista had had a particular horror of being burnt alive. Since the siege of Aquileia, everywhere he had served he had seen men die in flames. The High Atlas Mountains, the green meadows of Hibernia, the plains of Novae by the Danube, all had brought forth their crop of the burnt ones and here they were again at the foot of the wall of Arete; hundreds, possibly thousands of Sassanids burnt by naptha and white-hot sand, their thick black hair and tightly curled beards reduced to charred wisps, their skin, turned orange, peeling away like singed papyrus, obscene pink flesh showing raw underneath.

  Although there was the continuous low buzz of innumerable flies, the bodies looked strangely uncorrupted. It had been thirteen days since the assault. On comparable bloody fields in the west, Ballista knew that after four days the corpses would have begun to rot, fall apart, become unrecognizable. Here, the corpses of the Sassanids seemed to be drying up like dead tree trunks, without putrefaction. Turpio, boasting his local knowledge, put it all down to diet and climate; the easterners ate more frugally and were anyway desiccated by the dry heat of their native lands.

  The Sassanids had not gathered their dead. Possibly they thought it would be interpreted as a sign of weakness if they asked for a truce to collect them. Maybe it was just unimportant, given that they would then expose the corpses to the birds of the air and the beasts of the fields. Ballista noted that religious scruples had not held them back from looting the dead. No one could leave the city of Arete; all the locals were refugees, in the town or elsewhere or - the gods have mercy on them - prisoners of the Persians - yet every morning more of the corpses were naked; armour, clothes and boots gone. The scavengers could only come from the Sassanid camp.

  Thousand upon thousand of dead Persians; it was impossible to estimate their numbers. Demetrius told how the Persian king calculated casualties. According to Herodotus, before a campaign 10,000 men would stand packed as closely as possible together. A line would be drawn around them. They would be dismissed. A fence, about navel-high, would be constructed on the line. Ten thousand men at a time, the army would be marched into the paddock until all had been counted. At the end of the campaign the procedure would be repeated, and the King of Kings could find out how many men he had lost.

  Bagoas laughed a bitter laugh. He claimed to know nothing of this Herodotus, but clearly the man was a liar or a fool. What good would it do to know casualties to the nearest IO,OOO? In reality, before Shapur, the beloved of Mazda, went forth to chastise the unrighteous, he had each warrior march past and drop an arrow. When the Mazda-worshipping King of Kings returned freighted down with fame and plunder from the lands of the non-Aryans he had each warrior pick up an arrow. Those arrows remaining gave the number of the blessed who had gone to heaven.

  Demetrius shot the Persian boy a vicious look.

  Ballista did not press the matter. He k
new that the actual number of Persian dead was unimportant. Another hundred dead, another thousand dead - in itself, it made no odds. Given their overwhelming numerical superiority, it was not the Sassanid bodycount that mattered but their willingness to fight, and Shapur’s willingness to commit them to fight. Ballista knew that to save the town of Arete he had to break one or the other. He suspected that the Persians would crack before their King of Kings.

  Roman casualties were by comparison negligible. Yet they were higher than Ballista had anticipated, higher than was sustainable. The Sassanid arrow storm had been like nothing the northerner had experienced before. For a time he had thought it would empty the battlements of defenders unaided. If the easterners could be brought to repeat it for three or four days in a row, the defenders would simply run out of men. But Ballista knew that no troops in the world could stand before the walls of Arete day after day and take the casualties the Sassanids had endured.

  On the Roman side, the bowmen had suffered most. The six centuries of Cohors XX Palmyrenorum had suffered over 50 per cent casualties. Each century was now down to just fifty effectives. The legionaries of Legio IIII Scythica had escaped more lightly. On average, each of the eight centuries along the western wall had lost ten men, bringing their numbers down now to about sixty each. Ten of Mamurra’s artillerymen were absent from the standards. Extraordinarily, as they had been in the eye of the storm, just two of Ballista’s bodyguard, the equites singulares, had fallen.

  Of the combined Roman casualties of well over 400, about half were dead. They had been buried in the open area to the east of the artillery magazine, which had been designated an emergency cemetery. Ballista was very aware of the dangers of plague and disaffection if the bodies of the defenders were not treated with all due respect. Issues of health and religious sensitivities made the extra effort of burial more than worth while. The rest of the casualties were too badly injured to fight. The majority would eventually die; many of them in agony from blood poisoning. Before that happened, the military medical teams would be very busy. Every trained soldier who could return to the ranks would be very necessary.

  When the Sassanid assault failed they had totally quit the field. They had dragged away out of range their mantlets and ballistae, and the luckiest of their wounded. The following day they had stayed in camp, given over to their mourning; high, wild music and wailing, barbaric to western ears. Then, their grief somewhat assuaged, they had turned their hands again to the siege.

  The surviving siege tower, the southernmost City Taker, the one which had fallen through the roof of an underground tomb, was hauled back to the Sassanid camp, where it was promptly broken up. The majority of its timbers were reused to construct a very large wheeled shed; what the legionaries called a ‘tortoise’. Bagoas was happy to tell everyone what the shed would shelter - no less than the illustrious Khosro-Shapur, the illustrious Fame of Shapur, the mighty ram that had battered down the double walls of the city of Hatra. For fifteen years since that glorious day, Khosro-Shapur had rested, dedicated to god. Now Mazda had put it in the mind of the King of Kings to bring the great ram forth to give anew evidence of its prowess. It would have been transported in pieces, and was now being reassembled to be hung from mighty chains under that shed. Nothing, Bagoas earnestly assured his listeners, nothing, neither gate nor wall, could stand against it.

  Thirteen days since the assault, and now it was all going to happen again. Ballista looked out at the squat shape of the tortoise under which sheltered the Khosro-Shapur. He wondered if he had done enough to deny it, to keep it out. Certainly he had done what he could to replace the casualties. Two troopers had been transferred into the equites singulares from the turma of Cohors XX led by Antiochus on the north wall. Likewise, ten legionaries of Legio IIII had joined Mamurra’s artillerymen from the century of Lucius Fabius at the Porta Aquaria on the east wall. Ballista had noticed that one of the replacements who appeared on the battlements of the Palmyrene Gate was Castricius, the legionary who had found the body of Scribonius Mucianus. Four hundred men from the numerus of Iarhai had been ordered to take their places on the desert wall. Ballista had made further specifications: 300 of them were to be trained mercenaries and only 100 recently recruited levies; the caravan protector was to lead his men in person; Bathshiba was not to be seen on the battlements. (Ballista put away, as something to consider later, whenever there was time, the strange, new reluctance to fight on the part of Iarhai.) The new arrangements meant that the western wall was nearly as well manned as before the assault. It did, however, mean that the other walls were each defended by only 200 mercenaries backed by a small number of Roman regulars and, in the cases of the east and south, a crowd of levies. Ballista knew that, as the siege went on and casualties mounted, he would be forced to rely more and more on the local levies. It was not a reassuring thought.

  Across the plain the Drafsh-i-Kavyan, the battle standard of the house of Sasan, flashed red, yellow, violet in the early morning sun as it moved towards the great battering ram. It was followed by the now so familiar figure on the white horse. As Shapur arrived the magi started the sacrifice. Ballista was relieved to see that, despite their reputation for necromancy, it involved no people. There were no Roman prisoners in sight.

  Two of the defenders’ ballistae had been knocked out during the assault. One had been repaired, the other replaced from the arsenal. Mamurra had done well. Three of the enemy artillery pieces had been hit; two on the approach, one during the retreat. It could be seen that they had also been replaced. But no more had been constructed. Ballista’s rigorous scorched-earth policy was bearing some fruit. There was no timber for miles. If they wanted to build more siege machines the Sassanids would have to fetch the materials from a great distance. Ballista felt reasonably sanguine about artillery; he still had twenty-five pieces on the western wall to the Persians’ total of twenty.

  Preceded by the Drafsh-i-Kavyan snapping in the wind, Shapur rode across to a raised tribunal, where he took his seat on a throne glinting with precious metals and jewels. Behind the throne loomed the terrifying, wrinkled bulk of his ten elephants. In front were the Immortals commanded by Peroz of the Long Sword and the Jan-avasper, ‘those who sacrifice themselves’, led by Mariades.

  Ballista found it unsurprising that Shapur had not so far tried to use his tame pretender to the Roman throne to undermine the loyalty of the defenders of Arete. Who would follow an ex-town-councillor turned brigand then traitor like Mariades? It was as unlikely as anyone trying to elevate to the purple a barbarian warrior such as Ballista himself.

  The battering ram was being cleared for action, camp followers, priests and their paraphernalia herded away. A chant began: ‘Khos-ro-Sha-pur, Khos-ro-Sha-pur.’ Here was the heart of the matter - the great ram, the Fame of Shapur and its protecting tortoise. From where it had been reassembled, Ballista assumed that it would advance straight down the road to the Palmyrene Gate. He had based his dispositions on this assumption. He hoped that he was right. Everything he could use to frustrate the ram was at the gate. The cowhides and chaff he had requisitioned were piled near by. Would the councillors remember sniggering when their barbarian Dux had announced their requisition? Ballista’s three mobile cranes were stationed behind the gate. They were fitted with iron claws, a plentiful supply of enormous rocks to hand. And then there was his new wall. For four days the legionaries had laboured to finish the wall behind the outer gate. It was a pity that the painting of the Tyche of Arete had been obscured by it. The superstitious might read something into it - but Ballista was not superstitious.

  Would the King of Kings send the Khosro-Shapur straight down the road into the teeth of the carefully prepared defences? Or would he have been warned by the traitor? Since the failed attack on the granaries, there was one fewer traitor in the town of Arete. But Ballista was sure that there was at least one remaining. It had taken at least two men to burn the magazine, at least two men to murder Scribonius Mucianus and dispose of his body. Adm
ittedly no traitor had told the Sassanids about the naptha-filled jar buried just before the gate that had trapped the central City Taker. But the northerner felt certain this was proof of a problem of communication rather than evidence that there was no traitor.

  Shapur waved his arms, purple and white streamers flying. Trumpets blared and drums thundered. The great tortoise housing the Khosro-Shapur moved forward, as did the mantlets, the ballistae and innumerable hordes of bowmen.

  ‘Do you think he practises that?’ Maximus asked.

  ‘What?’ Ballista replied.

  ‘Whirling those streamers about. Imagine what a prick he must look practising on his own. Pointless anyway. Not exactly a practical skill.’

  ‘Why do you spend what little time you have when not rattling the bed practising those fancy moves with your gladius ?’

  Maximus laughed. ‘It intimidates my enemies. I have seen grown men cry with terror.’

  Ballista looked at his bodyguard without speaking.

  ‘Oh, well, I see what you mean, but sure it is an entirely different thing,’ Maximus blustered.

  ‘One cannot help but think that on the whole it is a good thing that I own you, rather than the other way round.’

  The great battering ram was coming straight down the road, the mantlets shielding the ballistae and bowmen flung out on either side.

  Allfather, here we go again. Almost unconsciously Ballista ran through his pre-battle ritual: slide dagger out, snap it back, slide sword out, snap it back, touch the healing stone on the scabbard.

  As the Sassanids came into range past the white-painted humps of rock Ballista nodded to Antigonus, who made the signal, and the artillery began to shoot. This time the northerner had instructed the ballistarii to aim exclusively at the enemy artillery. The Persians pushing the great battering ram would marvel at their luck, an unlooked-for piece of luck which Ballista thought might give Shapur and those around him pause for thought.