by Ian Ross
‘Shapur has learned that Nisibis will be no easy prize,’ Dorotheus went on hurriedly, reading his mood. ‘He surely knows that taking the city will cost him dearly, both in men and in time. It occurs to many of us, therefore…’ He paused to glance left and right at the other men of the assembly. ‘… that this might be a propitious time to approach the Persian king and make an offer of negotiation.’
Castus had been expecting something of this sort, although nothing quite as bold. ‘To what end?’ he said.
‘To… to the end of, well… of ending the siege!’ Dorotheus stammered awkwardly. ‘Of preventing further needless loss of life and destruction of property! The honour of the defenders has been satisfied, and now we can treat with Shapur as equals.’
‘As I understand it,’ Castus said, ‘Shapur regards no man as his equal.’ He glanced at Vorodes, who sat alone at one side of the hall. The curator did not meet his eye.
‘So you’re determined to continue this war?’ another councillor asked, speaking Greek with a very thick Syriac accent. ‘Even when so many must die?’
‘Would you rather be slaves?’ Castus’s voice grated in his throat. Anger swelled through his fatigue, and he could barely articulate what he needed to say.
‘We know,’ Dorotheus said, dropping his pretence of civility, ‘that the emperor Constantine is dead. His son Constantius is surely too concerned with affairs of the succession to lead a relief army to break the siege. But if we negotiate with King Shapur ourselves, he might agree to spare the city, perhaps after the payment of a certain sum of money. What better option do we have? How much longer can we hold out against such odds?’
Castus could only glare at him. Words massed in his head, angry, bitter words. With only one of those words he could condemn this man Dorotheus to instant death. He could sense Iovinus standing ready behind him, the six soldiers – selected especially for their size and brutal appearance – were ready to follow his orders without question. For a moment he considered it.
A burst of fierce laughter came from the back of the hall, and all turned. Bishop Iacob had struggled upright, and stood pointing at Dorotheus, his face twisted in mirth. ‘The flock has seen the wolves!’ he cried. ‘Ha! Behold how terrified they are! Are you so quick to yield to the evil one, Dorotheus? Does the silver quail in the smelter’s furnace? Does the earth quail before the plough? The Lord scourges all his adopted children!’
‘Bishop, please,’ Dorotheus replied, spreading his open palms. ‘We do not yield. We merely seek peace…’
‘Peace!’ the bishop spat. ‘What does Shapur know of peace? Does the lamb beg mercy of the ravening wolf? You bend your head to the Persian and he will smite it off! The destruction of his great tower has wounded his pride, and now he is angry. He will not rest until our city is laid low, our churches destroyed, our people slain or led in chains… Walk out of this city if you dare, but do not expect mercy, and do not expect anyone else to follow you!’
Silence followed the bishop’s words as Iacob subsided, wheezing slightly, into his seat.
‘The priest’s right, for once,’ Castus said, hooking his thumbs in his belt. The support had been so unexpected that he wanted to laugh with relief. ‘There will be no negotiation with the enemy.’
At once a storm of muttering broke out, cut through with hissing whispers. Castus motioned to Iovinus, and the Protector barked an order. All six troopers behind him took a step forward, slamming the butts of their spears on the marble floor in unison. The councillors fell silent again. Castus noticed Vorodes closing his eyes with an expression of resignation.
‘The matter is settled,’ Castus declared, then swept the chamber with a fierce glance, turned on his heel, and marched towards the doors.
*
‘You underestimate them at your peril,’ Sohaemia said. ‘Remember these are proud men, accustomed to power. You take away their power, treat them as children, make them appear ridiculous, and they will hate you for it.’
‘Their feelings are none of my concern,’ Castus replied.
From the denuded roof garden of the curator’s house he could see the breach in the outer wall, the ruin of the Persian siege tower a twisted black skeleton in the evening light.
‘All the same,’ the curator’s wife said. ‘They are like water, always trying to find the easiest path. You block them one way, and they will find another.’
Castus turned to her, quizzical. ‘Sounds like you’re giving me a warning,’ he said with a half-smile.
He had not seen Sohaemia for many days. She had slipped into the house unobtrusively – he could hardly ban her from her own home – and come to find him on the roof terrace with a casual air, as if she were just taking in the view. He knew her visit was deliberate.
But she made no answer to his statement. ‘I was sorry to hear about your son,’ she said instead. ‘His injuries are not too grave?’
‘Thanks to the gods, no.’
‘They say he was a hero. Without him, the tower would never have been destroyed. He insisted on freeing many of the prisoners too. You must be very proud.’
‘Always,’ Castus said quietly.
‘My son Barnaeus wishes to fight. Vorodes is trying to stop him. But if this war continues, perhaps all of us will experience it directly.’
‘There’s no other way,’ Castus said firmly. ‘You understand that? Shapur will never rest until Nisibis is destroyed. But if we hold out long enough… He lacks supplies to feed his vast army for a long time – already he’s stripped the country bare for miles around. This siege will end, one way or another.’
Sohaemia closed her eyes, and Castus saw her mutter a prayer. He wondered again how much control she exerted over her husband, and how much in turn Vorodes held over the other grandees of the city. He could only hope that she did not share the delusions of Dorotheus and the others who counselled surrender.
‘Bishop Iacob has announced that he will fast until the city is delivered from evil, as he puts it,’ she said. ‘He’s gone to the church, and says he’ll remain there, praying and fasting. Fasting and praying… Many of the ignorant, you know, are already saying that it was he who defeated the Persian attack – he cursed their tower and made it burst into flames! Now they flock to his church… Do you think his methods will prove better than yours?’
Castus snorted a laugh. ‘No. But at least he’ll be out of my way.’
Sighing, Sohaemia pulled her shawl around her and turned to go. For a moment she looked at Castus, and he saw something like pity in her eyes.
‘You are a very inflexible man,’ she said. ‘But the best iron bends with the strain. And if it does not – it breaks.’
XXIII
Castus leaned out over the parapet of the eastern rampart, staring down at the river.
‘You see what I mean?’ Gunthia asked, his thick Gothic accent giving his words an accusatory bite.
‘It doesn’t look natural, agreed,’ Castus said. ‘It’s not usual for this season?’
‘No, dominus,’ said the centurion of the Sixth Parthica, who stood with them on the rampart. ‘I’ve been stationed here in Nisibis for eight years, and I’ve never seen the river like this. It falls towards the end of summer, after the last meltwater from the mountains slackens and before the rains, but never so fast. It’s been dropping steadily for two days now.’
Castus made a sound in his throat. The River Mygdonius, usually a wide expanse of swift-flowing grey-brown water, had contracted to a slow trickling stream. To either side, the riverbed showed as an expanse of mud, still wet and dark at the centre but drying rapidly to a cracked yellow crust. The sight was uncanny, ominous. As if the river was somehow flowing backwards. A few hundred paces upstream, the masonry piers of the demolished bridge in front of the Gate of the Sun stuck up like broken teeth in a withered jaw.
‘So they’ve dammed the flow,’ Castus said quietly, pulling his head back from between the merlons of the rampart.
‘They must have don
e it just up there to the north, where their siege lines cross the ravine,’ Gunthia said.
Castus nodded, sucking his teeth. Were the Persians trying to cut off the water supply to the city? Surely they would know that Nisibis was supplied by a spring inside the walls, and had deep rock-cut cisterns.
‘You think they’ll try and attack the gate across the dry riverbed?’ the Gothic tribune asked.
‘Maybe.’
Castus scanned the ruins of the abandoned suburb on the far side of the river. He saw the burnt shells of the buildings shimmering in the waves of heat, and the decaying fly-blown remains of men and horses slain in the fighting over two weeks before still lying out in the open; bleached bones, shreds of blackened flesh and scraps of armour, picked over by the carrion birds. There was no enemy in sight; since the burning of the Persian tower, the besiegers had retreated to their camps behind the palisades that ringed the city. There had been no further attacks, although several times the people of Nisibis had heard drums beating and the wailing of horns, and the men on the walls had seen the dust clouds as the Persian army paraded or manoeuvred.
Over twenty days the siege had lasted now, and in the midsummer heat Nisibis was suffering. The sense of entrapment, and the prospect of imminent assault, had worn at the nerves of the defenders and stoked the discord among the city factions. Only the day before, there had been rioting in the market district, and Castus had ordered Egnatius and Lycianus to clear the streets with their mounted troopers. No doubt, he knew, the trouble had been partly the work of enemy agitators.
The militia still mustered for their duty on the ramparts, but with every passing day their numbers thinned, men creeping away to conceal themselves rather than stand the long watches in the punishing heat, or spend the night gazing anxiously out into the blackness, expecting at any moment a sudden assault.
And with every passing day the crowd around the steps of Iacob’s great church above the agora grew greater. Woman and children and old men huddled on the steps, many kneeling and praying, others calling out to the bishop in piteous voices to save their city from destruction. All knew that Shapur was planning something, and the drying of the river suggested that it would come from the east this time.
‘Quite a drop from the wall foundations to the riverbed,’ Castus said, almost to himself, as he peered down from the wall. ‘They’d have trouble bringing siege engines across… Even ladders would be difficult.’
Frowning, he scratched the mosquito bites on his neck. Even with the river running dry, the deep bed presented an obstacle to attackers. But here, on the eastern side, Nisibis had only one line of defence. He leaned out again, further this time, studying the base of the walls.
‘You think they might try tunnelling?’ Gunthia asked, leaning from the next embrasure.
Castus made a noise in his throat, non-committal, then pulled himself back from the parapet and turned to face the city. Vallio passed him a flask, and he swigged from it – the water was warm, sulphurous-tasting – and wetted his scarf to wipe his face.
‘Keep watching them,’ he told Gunthia. ‘Whatever they’re planning, we’ll find out soon enough.’
*
By the first light of the following day the men on the eastern wall could see the rows of heavy mantlets that the enemy had moved forward under cover of darkness, and by sunrise the Persian engineers were already labouring in the cover of the big hide-covered screens, building a line of fortified mounds along the far bank of the dry riverbed.
‘Archery platforms,’ said Barbatio as Castus joined him. The stolid young commander of the Tenth Gemina had brought all his men and half of the Seventh to reinforce the eastern defences. Already the archers and the ballista crews on the ramparts were lofting arrows and bolts across the river, aiming at any Persian who showed themselves from behind the covering screens.
Castus sucked his cheek, squinting into the low sun. ‘What would you do,’ he asked, ‘if you were Shapur?’
‘Me, dominus?’ Barbatio said, and shrugged. ‘He’s got the numbers, and he don’t much care about losses… Mass assault across the riverbed, maybe? Archers on the mounds to keep our heads down, then bring up ladders and storm the wall?’
Nodding slowly, Castus peered into the far distance, beyond the screens and the mounds to the circuit of Persian palisades and the camps beyond them. Sure enough, he could make out the huge royal banner gleaming in the morning sun. What was Shapur really thinking? And was there any way to counter his planned attack?
By midday, it was clear that the Persians intended something more than a simple assault on the walls. The line of fortified mounds now stretched all along the far bank of the Mygdonius, each manned by archers, and under their covering volleys the enemy were pushing their hide-covered screens forward across the dried riverbed. Behind the screens came long wheeled sheds, linking together to form galleries that protected the men within from the missiles of the defenders. As the galleries crossed the cracked mud, the men on the ramparts began heaving down huge rocks and blazing baskets of pitch at them. Wood shattered, men screamed, but still the enemy advanced, pushing steadily forward until they reached the dry bluffs below the city walls. Then the engineers moved in, hacking at the bluffs with pickaxes and mattocks.
Castus watched it all with a sense of horrified amazement. Nothing the defenders could throw at the enemy seemed to daunt them. The Persian engineers worked surrounded by their own slain, under a relentless barrage from the ramparts above them. Stripped to their loincloths, their limbs dark with mud and filth, they swung their picks and hammers with a wild ceaseless fury. The noise of iron scraping rock and gouging earth rose above the shouts of the defenders and the screams of the dying.
Leaning from an embrasure, Castus watched as the men on the rampart levered a massive rock out over the brink and let it plunge; the missile spun in the air, and then crashed down against the head of one of the galleries: dust and fragments of broken stone flew, blood spattered, and then the screaming began again. But almost at once a fresh surge of men were dragging the mauled bodies of the dead and injured aside and throwing themselves into their work.
‘They really do mean to tunnel under the walls, then,’ Gunthia said.
‘I wouldn’t be so sure,’ Castus replied. He was up on the north tower of the Gate of the Sun, where he had established his command position. Iovinus and Vallio accompanied him, both with shields ready to block any incoming arrows. The storm of missiles had become so constant now that it was easy to disregard them, just as Castus had learned to disregard the flies and mosquitoes that filled the air.
‘The wall foundations are dug deep,’ he said. ‘And if they got far enough to tunnel beneath them, we’d easily see where they were going to break through on our side, and we’d be waiting for them to appear.’
‘So what then?’ the Gothic tribune asked, his brow creased.
Castus could only shrug. Black smoke billowed from the riverbed, where one of the burning projectiles had set a gallery alight. The flames were doused quickly, but the smoke remained, hazing the scene of ongoing destruction.
There was a new moon that night, nothing but a bright sliver in the sky, and Castus sent Gunthia and a hundred of his men on a scouting expedition out through the Singara Gate and up the western side of the ravine. They returned within the hour; Gunthia reported that he had located the dam that the enemy had built to block the river, but it was too heavily guarded to approach. ‘Too big to break either,’ Gunthia said. ‘Like a fortress wall, heavy timber packed with wet clay. They’ve built it up on either side of the ravine as well.’
No chance of destroying the dam then; Castus had hoped that it might be possible. By sunrise the following morning he was back on the gate tower, tired after a sleepless night. Diogenes joined him, and as they breakfasted on bread, cheese and olive oil they heard trumpets braying from the Persian camp. The excavation work that had continued through the hours of darkness showed no signs of slackening.
�
�They’re not tunnelling, anyway,’ Barbatio said, saluting wearily as he emerged from the stairhead. He crouched beside Castus and then gestured downwards, towards the base of the wall. ‘It looks like they’re quarrying out caves or hollows, just up to the foundations. Most of them are to the north there, past where the wall of the eastern suburb meets the far bank of the river. More of them a couple of hundred paces south… It’s strange. Why not just dig in one place?’
The same question had been haunting Castus all through the night. Shapur’s engineers were directing their energies at a multitude of points all along the north-eastern quadrant of the wall defences. They were taking terrible casualties in the process too. Why waste so many men for so little gain?
‘Maybe they’re just probing for the weakest part of the foundations?’ Iovinus suggested. ‘Then when they’ve found it, they’ll bring up a ram or something…’
‘They’d need a massive ram to break down that wall, even with the undermining,’ Barbatio said. ‘We destroyed their last one – I doubt they’d find another one more powerful still!’
Castus paused as he chewed. He felt a strange slow stillness creeping over him. Gulping heavily, he reached for the flask of vinegar wine beside him. His hand was shaking as he lifted it to drink. Cold realisation flowed through his blood, and he felt his scalp tighten.
‘They’ve already got their ram,’ he said quietly. ‘And it’s getting more powerful with every passing hour.’
*