Fronto stepped regretfully past a young legionary lying lifeless near the stake fence, his helmet dented so deeply inwards from a sling bullet that it had smashed the skull and driven into the brain, and strolled back toward the river and watched the work.
Three days at most now, as long as the Eleventh could continue to hold the bank and protect the workmen. He felt confident in that. With three legions at work here and one protecting them, there were still two legions in the main camp facing Ilerda. Fronto could not imagine a general worth his salt committing a sizeable force to stop the bridge and thereby endangering his stronghold. No, the bridge was not worth that risk. The Pompeians were willing to commit a small auxiliary force to irritate and slow Caesar, but they would not send their legions here.
With a sense of satisfaction, he toured his makeshift camp, Felix falling in alongside him. His mood soured a little at the sight of Salvius Cursor standing at the camp’s southeast corner with two more centurions. Bracing himself, prepared to grit his teeth and not argue in front of the men, he approached Salvius.
‘How are things going, Tribune?’
Salvius Cursor saluted. ‘Well, Legate. Permission to begin work on a more permanent defence?’
Fronto mused for a moment. With only half rations, and short on sleep after their night time crossing, the legion could do with rest. But it would be helpful to have better defences here. He was sure Petreius and his men would not come at the moment, but circumstances might change, and having a fortification at this end of the bridge could certainly be useful.
‘Agreed, but only in small shifts. Take a cohort at a time for the work and do it in two hour shifts so the rest of the men can rest.’
Salvius Cursor saluted again, his face registering his disapproval and disagreement, but his mouth remaining mercifully shut tight.
‘Hello, what’s this?’ Felix murmured, gesturing out from the fence of stakes. Fronto followed his gaze and spotted the dust cloud. The three men stood silent for a long moment, watching. Fronto could feel the primus pilus tensing, ready to give the order for his men to fall in at the defences again.
‘Are those Caesar’s flags?’ Fronto muttered.
There was another long pause, and then Salvius Cursor nodded. ‘It is the cavalry returning. And it looks like they found the supplies.’
The men watched with a wave of relief breaking over them. Three hundred cavalry had left the camp four days ago, but the approaching column, moving confidently and swiftly below the red and gold bull flags of Caesar, numbered more than a thousand horsemen, with thousands more on foot, a line of wagons stirring up immense clouds of dust. Moreover, there seemed to be a huge number of cattle being driven alongside, adding to the grime.
Even as they watched, a small group of horsemen broke away from the front of the column and rode off toward them. Half a dozen legionaries scurried across at Felix’s barked command and dismantled part of the sudis fence, leaving a gap for a gate. Fronto, Felix and Salvius stepped out through the open section and into the wide ground before the camp. They were on foot, for horses had not been ferried across, given the small size and light construction of the boats they had used.
It became clear as they approached that the majority of the horsemen were decurions of Gallic nobles, but the two riders at the fore were the leaders. As they approached and reined in, Fronto nodded a greeting, grinning at Galronus.
‘Caesar will be pleased to see you, my friend. You found the supplies, then?’
‘That and more,’ laughed the Remi noble. We’ve a few thousand reinforcements under Prince Cisiambo of the Aedui here,’ he indicated the other rider, who bowed his head. ‘We routed a sizeable force of Petreius’ men, and on the way back we stumbled across a party of Pompeian foragers. They ran like the wind when they saw us, so we gathered up their cattle and grain and added it to the supplies. I reckon the legions will eat like kings for a while.’
Fronto sighed with relief. ‘Good, cause my lads are getting a mite hungry now.’
‘How’s the bridge?’
‘Getting there, but it’ll be a couple of days yet. We’ve been having trouble with enemy archers, but I think we have it under control now. You’d best get the caravan into the camp and rest everyone.’
He turned to Salvius Cursor. ‘You’d best get to work on your defences, but string it out and double the camp size. We have to make room for our guests, now.’
Things were finally looking up. Now all they had to do was find a way to break Ilerda.
Chapter Twelve
16th of Quintilis - Ilerda
Fronto leaned back in the tent and sighed in relief, wiggling his toes as he poured another cup of wine and water. Galronus and Felix both followed suit, though Antonius remained sitting upright in the campaign chair, his cup barely registering emptiness before it was full once more. His consumption was the subject of amazement among the others, given that at the end of the night, having drunk enough wine to float a liburnian, he would stand, stretch, and then go about his duties as though naught but water had passed his lips. In fact, water most certainly hadn’t passed his lips, the wine he drank entirely uncut. Knowing that Antonius had intended to join them, Fronto had requisitioned two extra jars of wine. But he could hardly blame the man. Everyone was in a celebratory mood.
The last five days had seen fortunes begin to change. Following a period of dangerously low supplies, hunger and increasing discontent, the new sturdy bridge had been completed, the supply chain reactivated and reinforcements and a wealth of food and goods arrived. Then, in an unexpected turn, a number of ambassadors had arrived from various local towns and tribal centres, renouncing their allegiance to Pompey and his officers and taking their oath to Caesar. Two units of native warriors had come over to join them, one of whom had been serving as roving foragers for Petreius, even, working out of Ilerda across the river.
It seemed that the ongoing conditions of siege and the resilience of the Caesarian force were beginning at last to have an effect on the defenders and their subjects. While it had not brought Caesar’s army any closer to taking Ilerda itself, it had strengthened their position and weakened that of Pompey’s men. As long as the two Pompeian commanders maintained their huge supply base in Ilerda town and access over that bridge to the rich forage lands beyond, though, the siege would go on interminably.
‘I’m surprised you’re not with Caesar, though,’ Fronto said, gesturing to Antonius. ‘He likes to keep you close when he’s planning things, and I saw his expression earlier. He’s planning furiously now, because he can feel victory almost at his fingertips.’
Antonius rolled his eyes.
‘Not always. You know the old man. Sometimes he plays things so close that no one but him knows what’s going on. After the briefing I hung around to see if he needed me and I was all-but dismissed. He had that glint in his eye, though.’
Fronto nodded and the four men gradually wound down the night until finally Felix yawned, stretched and rose, bidding farewell to all and heading back to his own quarters. Galronus followed shortly after, and some time after midnight, Fronto finally managed to turf out Antonius, who, he noted, took that remaining jar of wine and a cup with him.
Alone at last and with a comfortably fuzzy head, Fronto shuffled down onto his bed and lay flat. He dozed off quickly and spent a strange time lost in a dream where he was chasing the boys through the streets of Massilia, waving papers at them and having to leap hurdles that all bore Caesar’s bull emblem.
How long he’d been asleep he couldn’t say, but when he woke it was in utter confusion. The interior of the tent resolved in the gloom and he couldn’t reconcile it with what was happening in his head, which was still in Massilia trying to catch the boys. A figure blurred into vague shape and it took a long moment for him to realise it was a full-grown adult figure and not little Marcus.
‘Wha…’
‘Get up, Marcus.’
Fronto blinked a few times. Galronus. It was Galronus.
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‘What?’
‘Get up.’
Accepting the offered hand and using it to pull himself up from the cot, Fronto rose unsteadily to his feet. ‘What’s going on?’
‘Just come on.’
‘I need my boots. My cloak…’
‘It’s warm and the turf is dry. Come on.’
Still utterly confused, Fronto followed his friend from the bed and out through the tent. As they stopped, the Remi noble pointed off toward the left hill – the walled town. Fronto squinted into the night. His eyes shot open as he realised what he was looking at.
‘Fire?’
Galronus nodded. ‘It’s been going for a quarter of an hour at least. One of the decurions woke me. Caesar’s down by the camp gate. The men who came over from Petreius’ army say it’s the granaries.’
Fronto peered at the orange glow from behind the walls of Ilerda town and the roiling black smoke pouring into the purple sky, golden sparks rising on the plume of heat. It was a conflagration of impressive proportions, and the thickness of the smoke suggested that the inhabitants were trying desperately to extinguish it with bucket after bucket of water. They were clearly failing. That was the problem with wooden structures filled with grain. They burned hot and powerful.
A suspicion washed through him.
‘Only the granaries?’
‘Apparently.’
‘That’s a very selective conflagration, isn’t it?’
Galronus shrugged and Fronto folded his arms. ‘Stay here. I’m going to belt my tunic and put on my cloak and boots.’
A few moments later he was out once more and attired respectably. ‘Come on.’
With Galronus at his heel, he made his way through the camp toward the gate where Caesar would be standing and observing this lucky turn of events. All across the camp, men had emerged from their tents and were gazing up at the burning of Ilerda. Many were smiling with relief, for it meant another change in their fortunes, though no one would cheer, for the burning of a Roman town was not in truth a subject for joy.
A small knot of officers stood atop the gate, watching what was happening at Ilerda, and Fronto had to nudge his way between other staff officers.
‘They’re containing it well,’ Antonius noted, gesturing with his wine cup, the dark contents sloshing about but not quite slopping over the rim.
‘Not well enough,’ Fabius replied. ‘That’s the bulk of their supplies. Now they’ll be at least as reliant on forage as us. More so, with civilians to keep fed as well.’
Fronto narrowed his eyes. ‘I would hate to think we had stooped to starving civilians just to gain the edge militarily.’
Caesar turned an unreadable expression upon him. ‘I can assure you, Fronto, that I gave no such order.’
I’ll bet, thought Fronto in the privacy of his head. No such order. A few well-placed hints or suggestions to those former Pompeians who had come over to their side would have done the trick without the need for an order.
‘This changes the whole siege,’ Antonius smiled.
‘How so?’ Caesar frowned.
‘They don’t have a huge supply of grain to fall back on.’
‘While that is certainly true, they have good forage and excellent access to it over their stone bridge. They can still hold us off for many weeks.’
‘Then we need to cut off their access to forage,’ Fronto murmured. ‘Or make foraging difficult and dangerous for them. They don’t have much in the way of cavalry, while we have plenty. We could harry them and stop their forage parties. Galronus proved that when he brought in the cattle from that little raid of his.’
The Remi, next to him, shook his head. ‘With just the bridge a few miles away it takes hours at best to get a sizeable cavalry force across, and if we run into trouble we might get trapped, unable to cross back at speed. I have no desire to waste the entire cavalry force trapped on the far bank as we try to feed two men abreast across the bridge while four legions butcher us. Remember what happened to the foragers before we arrived?’
‘Then if the bridge is inadequate, we need a better crossing. Mamurra?’
The siege engineer turned, his brow creased in thought. ‘Building endless bridges is an inelegant solution.’
‘Then find me an elegant one,’ Caesar said, that glint back in his eye once more.
* * *
In fact, It had taken Mamurra but the blink of an eye to decide upon his elegant solution. Within the hour he had set upon an idea. Three further hours of riding with a Praetorian escort had provided him with the location for his plan, and a further three hours had ensued persuading Caesar and the staff that it would work. The famous siege engineer had a reputation unsurpassed and few men – even veteran engineers – would argue with him, but this latest idea had seemed ridiculous.
Two days now the work had been going on, but this morning Mamurra had summoned them to his work site three miles upstream. It was, he said, almost time.
Fronto stood with Galronus on the podium, formed by the spoil heap from the works, Caesar, Antonius, Fabius and the other officers all present. Mamurra looked confident. The morning already sizzled in the searing sunlight and the sounds of nature – bees, cicadas and birds were audible as part of the tapestry, woven through the gurgling flow of the Sicoris and the tense sound of cohorts of men waiting.
Fronto cleared his throat. ‘Look, I know you know your engineering, and I can hardly claim to be grounded in any kind of science, but it seems to me that water always stays at the same level. You just can’t make it lower in one place. It doesn’t work like that.’
Mamurra turned with that long-suffering expression borne by all engineers when they had to explain their works to the uninitiated. ‘That is most certainly true, Fronto. But the fact is that the same quantity of water pours along the Sicoris no matter how wide or narrow, deep or shallow it is. Floods, meltwater and drought can change that, of course, but no matter, it will still throw the same volume of water along its course. And what happens if you empty a small, deep bath and use the water to fill a wider bath, Fronto?’
With a sour face, aware that he was being treated like an idiot student, Fronto sighed. ‘The bath will be wide but shallower.’
Precisely. The Sicoris here is too deep for the cavalry to cross safely, as could be said for its course all the way from the confluence many miles up into the hills. But here, the surrounding ground is low, almost at river level, the ground is soft, made even softer by the many days of rain, as you can see from the number of landslides along the banks. Easy digging. And here there are rocks in the river bed, which my scouts have seen from the trees. Those rocks have, over the years, gathered sediment and raised the river bed a little. If there is to be a crossing, this is the place. All we had to do was take this narrow bath and make it a wide one, if you understand my thinking.’
Fronto grunted an answer that could have been anything and went back to watching.
‘Are we ready, then?’ Antonius asked.
‘All is in place. Watch carefully, gentlemen.’
At a single blast from a horn, the work parties bent to their final task.
Two days of labour had seriously scarred the landscape. A single channel some thirty feet wide and almost a thousand paces long, at a depth of just five feet, now ran parallel to the river, separated by just ten feet of untouched ground. Two more channels had been constructed parallel with it, narrower and slightly shallower. A single cohort had moved across the bridge and created a similar channel on the far side. All these four new channels were currently dry and empty, but at each end, where they met the river bank, the water had been kept out with a single wall of tightly bound timber.
As the officers watched with a mix of scepticism and wonder, the soldiers hauled on ropes and tugged those wooden obstructions from the large channel with some difficulty. River water surged into the thirty foot channel the instant the timbers moved, almost carrying the temporary wall and the soldiers holding it away, though by som
e miracle they managed to hold position and lift the wood from the water. Other men waited only until that channel was full, then tugged away the board walls to the next, smaller, narrower channel, allowing the event to repeat on a slightly smaller scale. Then the third channel was opened, and across the river: the same.
Fronto watched, impressed. The ten foot earth banks that had separated the channels were almost swept away immediately, eroded and turned to sediment before his very eyes. In half a hundred heartbeats, he watched the Sicoris widen from eighty paces to around one hundred and twenty. And as the waters spread out, the river bed became visible, particularly since it was rising slightly with the muck washed into it in the process.
‘The God of the Sicoris favours Caesar, I believe,’ Mamurra said grandly, flinging out his arms to the river theatrically.
The general, his eyes narrowed, turned to Galronus. ‘What say you?’
The Remi noble peered at the river. ‘Unless anything changes, that presents no problem as far as I can see. I’d say at the deepest it would reach the shoulder of most cavalry horses. And wide enough for the best part of a turma to cross at a time. Should be a swift route to the far bank.’
‘Good. Are your riders rested?’
Galronus shrugged. ‘As rested as they can be. They are ready for action, certainly.’
‘Very well,’ the general smiled. ‘Take as many of the cavalry as you feel can reasonably be controlled in a single column, equip yourselves for several days, and cross that river. I want you to range far and wide, find any of Petreius and Afranius’ foragers and deal with them. I want their food supply to grind to a halt. Can you do that for me?’
FIELDS OF MARS Page 28