Rome's Lost Son (16 page)

Babak nodded to himself as if he were unsurprised by the answer he had received, his fingers twisting the point of his beard. ‘So be it; we shall see honour satisfied. I shall dress for battle.’ With a deft twitch of the reins he pulled his mount round and set off at a canter back down the hill; his entourage followed, leaving their parasol-bearing slaves scampering after their masters to the jeers of the auxiliaries lining the stone walls of Tigranocerta.

‘Well, that told him,’ Magnus observed as shrill horns blared out from the Parthian host. ‘You had him pelting off with his tail between his legs to change his clothes, no doubt for the fourth time today.’

‘Honour to be satisfied? What does that mean, Vespasian? What have you condemned us to?’ Paelignus hissed, his Greek evidently just adequate enough to understand that phrase.

‘Nothing that we can’t cope with, procurator; I suggest you order your prefects to stand the men to and have the Civic Militia mustered and issued with bows and javelins.’

‘You do it, seeing how all this seems to be your suggestion.’ With a suspicious glare Paelignus stalked off.

Vespasian called the prefects over. ‘Gentlemen, our esteemed procurator has left it to me to make the dispositions, which I think is, in the circumstances, a very wise and far-sighted decision.’

‘In that he doesn’t have a clue what to do?’ the prefect Mannius asked.

‘He is the best judge of his own abilities.’ Vespasian suppressed a smile. ‘Mannius, your First Bosporanorum cohort takes this southern wall.’ He looked at the four other prefects. ‘Scapula the east, Bassus the west, Cotta the north, and you, Fregallanus, will keep your lads in reserve. All of you will mount your ballistae on the walls; fix them well – we won’t need to dismantle them for we’ll not be taking them with us when we leave.’

‘When we leave?’ Mannius questioned.

‘Yes, Mannius, when we leave.’ Vespasian’s tone precluded any further discussion on the subject. ‘All of you divide up the Civic Militia equally between you until we get a clue as to which of the walls the Parthians will be favouring with their attentions.’

‘With an army that size it’ll be all of them at once,’ Fregallanus, a battered-looking veteran whose nose seemed to take up half his face, commented sourly.

Vespasian gave him a benign smile. ‘Then splitting them evenly between the walls now is the right decision.’ He glanced south at the enemy; there was much movement within their ranks as units of both light and heavy cavalry peeled off to either side followed by scores of covered wagons. ‘I suggest, gentlemen, that you keep one half of your men resting and the other half on watch and rotate them every four hours. Have the women set up kitchens every two hundred paces and tell them to keep the cooking fires going day and night; I don’t want any of the lads to complain about fighting on an empty stomach. And also have teams of boys and older men ready with fire-fighting equipment, as I imagine that Babak will try and warm things up for us. It would be churlish not to return the favour, so have as much oil and sand heated as possible in case they should make an attempt to get over the walls.’

The five prefects saluted with various degrees of enthusiasm, although Vespasian judged that they would do their duty, and dispersed to carry out their orders. Vespasian joined Magnus who was watching the unfolding manoeuvres of the Parthian army. The cavalry were still splitting off left and right but were making no attempt to encircle the city. One column were crossing the bridge to the western bank and then dismounting and setting up tents and parking their covered wagons on a grassy hill half a mile to the south of the city while the other column headed north, past Tigranocerta, following the Kentrites towards the pass in the next mountain range, some fifty miles distant, leading to Lake Thospitis and the heartland of Armenia.

‘Babak doesn’t seem to be very interested in using his cavalry,’ Magnus observed as yet more of the troopers disappeared north.

‘I think we’ll see why very soon,’ Vespasian replied, straining his eyes further down the Sapphe Bezabde pass. ‘In fact, I can see them now.’

Magnus shaded his eyes and squinted as the last of the cavalry left the pass leaving behind an infantry force that would easily outnumber the defenders of Tigranocerta by at least five or six to one and, behind them, as many slaves. ‘Fuck me!’

Vespasian, once again, declined the offer.

For the remainder of the day the Parthian conscript infantry and slaves crossed the bridge to the western bank and swarmed like ants around the walls of Tigranocerta, just within bowshot and well within the range of the carroballistae, which by midafternoon were all rigged on the defences. Vespasian, however, kept his word and did not give the order to shoot; he knew it was vital for Tryphaena’s scheme that Rome should not be seen as the aggressor, and the more he had thought about her plan, the more he had become determined to see it through to a successful conclusion.

When the last of the Parthian force had crossed the bridge the middle two arches were destroyed making retreat impossible.

‘Well, that makes Babak’s intentions quite clear,’ Vespasian mused. ‘He’s not going to give his conscripts the chance to run. Excellent.’

Magnus looked gloomy. ‘You should have held the bridge.’

Vespasian was unrepentant. ‘I’m trying to do this with minimal loss of life. Their heavy cavalry would have forced a crossing sooner or later and then their light cavalry would have destroyed our retreating lads before they gained the city. What we have now is the same result: a siege, but without our first incurring casualties. And I’m very happy to watch them get into position.’

And so the Parthians laid out their siege lines unmolested. As night fell, thousands of torches were lit so that the great works could continue in the golden light encircling the town like a halo. Unrelenting in their exertion and goaded on by the bullying of their officers or the whips of their overseers, the silhouetted figures levelled ground, dug trenches and raised breastwork
while the unsleeping sentinels on the walls watched, the torch-glow flickering on their faces set hard with the determination that all the enemy’s work should be for nought.

Vespasian repaired to a room in the palace at the top of the city and slept, knowing that in the coming days he would have precious little time to do so. When Hormus brought him a steaming cup of hot wine the following dawn he rose and donned his armour, feeling refreshed and ready for the coming ordeal. Sipping his morning drink he pulled aside the gently billowing curtains and stepped out onto a terrace that commanded a view south; his gaze wandered down the slope of flat roofs punctuated by thoroughfares and alleyways, over the walls lined with artillery and sentries and on to the fruit of a day and night of unceasing Parthian labour. And the sight took his breath away: the city was encircled by a brown scar scored in the verdant upland grass of the Masian foothills; but it was not the scale of the works nor the speed with which they had been completed nor the thousands of waiting troops within them that astounded him, it was what was behind. Scores of siege engines that had been dismantled for the march were being reassembled by the slaves in the growing light. But these were not the light carroballistae that fitted onto mule-drawn carts that the auxiliaries travelled with; these were far heavier. Squat and powerful with a kick like the mules they were named after, the
onagers
’ throwing arms were capable of hurling huge rocks to smash walls and, if Tryphaena’s information was to be believed, of delivering a weapon of far greater terror; a weapon of the East that Vespasian had heard of but had never seen deployed. One look at the stacks of earthenware jars next to the piles of rounded stone projectiles behind the fearsome engines told him that he would soon witness the destructive power of that strange substance named after Apam Napat, the third and lesser of the trilogy of deities in the Parthians’ Zoroastrian religion; Mithras and Ahura Mazda, the uncreated creator, being the other two.

‘You’re to keep everything packed, Hormus,’ Vespasian said, taking a tentative sip of the scalding wine. ‘With what they’ve got down there honour may be satisfied sooner than I thought.’

‘Master?’

‘We may be leaving in a hurry.’ Vespasian raised his gaze and surveyed the mountains, towering with majesty up from the foothills to form the natural barrier between Armenia and the Parthian Empire. ‘A shame really; it’s beautiful country, don’t you think so, Hormus?’

Hormus stroked the scraggy beard that tried but failed to disguise his undershot chin as he contemplated the scenery, uncertain how to respond having very rarely been asked his opinion by his master on anything more aesthetic than the order of precedence that clients should be received in. ‘If you say so, master.’

Vespasian frowned at his slave. ‘I do; but you should have your own opinion on the subject and not just take my word for it.’ He gestured at the expanse of natural beauty that dominated the vista, dwarfing the relatively insignificant disfigurement that humanity’s belligerence had scratched in its shadow. ‘This should speak to you, Hormus; after all, it is somewhere around this area that your family came from – you told me Armenia, didn’t you?’

Hormus’ smile was wan beneath his equally feeble beard. ‘Somewhere
near
Armenia, master, but I don’t know where. My mother told me in her tongue but when she died I forgot that language as it was of no use any more, and with it I forgot the name of my land.’

‘It’ll come back if you hear it again,’ Vespasian assured him but then hoping that he was wrong; a sense of belonging was not what he wanted for Hormus, preferring his slave to be compliant and meek – no, perhaps meekness was not something to be wished upon him either.

There was a scratching on the door and Hormus crossed the room, his footsteps muffled by the sumptuous rugs of deep reds, blues and umbers with which the floor was littered.

‘You’d better come quick, sir,’ Magnus said as the door opened; he was wearing the chain mail of an auxiliary. ‘Paelignus has seen that the Parthians have got some serious artillery and he doesn’t want to play any more, if you take my meaning?’

‘I do. Where is he?’

‘Mannius caught him trying to slip through the gate; he has him under arrest in the gatehouse.’

‘You have no right to hold me!’ Paelignus shrieked as Mannius showed Vespasian and Magnus into the small room where the nominal commander of the expedition was being held.

Without pausing, Vespasian slapped Paelignus’ cheek as if he were punishing a recalcitrant slave girl. ‘Now listen, you rapacious worm, I’ll do anything I like to you if you try to go over to the enemy again. I may even hang you on a cross and see if that does anything to straighten out your back.’

‘You can’t do that; I’m a citizen.’

‘Perhaps I’ll forget that fact just as you seem to have forgotten where your loyalties lie. What were you trying to achieve?’

Paelignus rubbed his cheek, which was coming out in a reddish welt. ‘I wanted to save us. There’re thousands of them and they’ve got artillery.’

‘Of course they’ve got artillery, but can they use it?’ He grabbed the procurator by the arm and dragged him from the room, past the guards on the door, who were unable to conceal their amusement at the sight, and up the stone steps next to the gates that led to the walkway running along behind the crenellated parapet. Magnus and Mannius followed, the prefect putting the two guards on a charge as he passed for failing to show due respect for an officer.

Vespasian held Paelignus’ chin in a cruel grasp and forced him to look through a crenel at the enemy lines. ‘See there, procurator, thousands of them, just as you said, but they’re conscripts. None of them have had any training beyond being shown which end of an arrow or a javelin to aim at the enemy. They look impressive but they’re nothing compared to our lads; they’re just cattle, human cattle, to be stampeded forward knowing that they cannot retreat because the bridge is down. Their best troops are their cavalry, half of whom have disappeared north and the other half are sitting on that hill and, apart from shooting arrows at us, will take no more part in the proceedings than the spectators at the Circus Maximus. As to the artillery; even if they make a
breach in the walls, who’s going to storm through it? The crack Parthian infantry? The Immortals and the apple-bearers are with their King of Kings; this Babak is just a satrap of a client king, we have nothing to fear from his infantry.’

As he finished the last word, a single arrow soared into the sky, trailing a thin furrow of smoke over the Parthian host. A mighty roar emanated from the siege lines followed by the massed release of thousands of archers and Vespasian knew that he was about to have the veracity of his words tested as the sky went dark with tens of thousands of arrows.

The Parthian assault on Tigranocerta had begun.

CHAPTER VIIII

A
RROWS FELL, CLATTERING
, in a relentless percussive roll, with showers of sparks off the stone wall, walkway and the paved streets below; a hail of iron and wood that was fatal only to the very few foolhardy enough to look up into it and then unlucky enough to receive a direct hit in the eye or throat. For the rest of the garrison on the wall the initial volleys were little more than an annoyance as, by the time they had flown through the dawn air to the city, they were spent and the sight and sound of them was far more fearsome than the reality; if they did pierce an exposed arm or leg, they hung limply from the limb and could be withdrawn with minimum pain and little blood. For the populace of the city they did not signify, as very few fell further than ten paces beyond the wall such was the excessive range.

But Babak had not intended the archery of his conscripts to cause death on a grand scale; he was using it to preserve lives – the conscripts’ own – until he deemed it right to spend them. As they released their arrows, haphazardly in their own time, the conscripts were pushed forward, the few braver ones willingly but the majority with the whips and spear- and sword-points of their officers, jabbing and lashing them into action. And then the cavalry began to form up in long lines of horse archers and deep blocks of closer formation lancers. As Vespasian, safe within the lee of the parapet and still restraining Paelignus, peered through the crenel, he realised what the heavy cavalry had been doing since dismounting: they had, like Babak said he would, dressed for battle. Gone were the bright trousers, embroidered tunics, elaborate headdresses and gaudy caparisoning and in their place was burnished iron and bronze armour, both of laminated plate and chain mail that covered the riders entirely as well as the
heads, necks and withers of their mounts. As they were unable to march more than a very short distance in their full battle gear before falling victim to complete exhaustion, their armour was transported in covered wagons. Vespasian had heard of these cataphract cavalrymen so weighed down by metal that they could only charge at the trot, knee to knee, needing no shield and driving all before them with their twelve-foot
kontoi
, but he had not expected to see them deployed here. What in Mars’ name could they possibly achieve on a hill before a walled city?

But this question was soon to be answered as he watched the herd of conscripts come on across the two hundred paces of open ground between the siege lines and the walls. Arrows still spat from them in their thousands but despite the decreasing range their accuracy did not improve; in fact, quite the reverse as more and more flew high or slammed into the walls, hastily aimed as the advance accelerated from a walk to a jog. Their war cries increased commensurately with their speed, rising in note and apprehension as terror for what awaited them began to outweigh the fear of their officers driving them.

Vespasian raised his head and risked a quick look east and west before an arrow hissed past him in what was very nearly a lucky shot. Nothing was moving on either side; only the southern wall was under attack and he immediately understood why. ‘Mannius!’ he shouted at the prefect sheltering a few paces away. ‘It’s just us they’re interested in. Send messengers to the other three walls and tell them not to come to our aid; that’s what Babak will be hoping. They’re to stay where they are under all circumstances. And tell Fregallanus to bring half his reserve cohort up to stand by here on the off-chance that we need a little help; they should have the heated oil and sand ready by now.’

Mannius saluted.

‘Oh, and get us some shields, they might prove useful.’

Grinning at the understatement, the prefect despatched his runners before ordering his officers to ready their men.

Along the southern wall centurions and optiones shouted at their men hunched under shields to prepare to hurl the first of their three javelins; the auxiliaries hefted their throwing weapons,
lighter than the
pila
issued to legionaries but capable of greater distance, and waited, grim in the face of combat. A paltry amount of the Civic Militia archers stationed amongst the auxiliaries on the southern wall shot at the oncoming mass through crenels, but so few were their number that they did less harm than the men goading on the attack from behind with swords, spears and whips.

As the horde reached one hundred paces out the cataphract cavalry started crossing the siege lines and fanning out behind the conscripts with the light cavalry forming up behind them. Vespasian comprehended with a jolt what they were to be used for and why. ‘They’re to prevent the infantry from retreating.’

Magnus squinted his one eye. ‘What? Are they going to drive them into the wall and hope they push it over?’

‘No, I can see ladders; they’re going to try an escalade.’

Paelignus yelped and twisted from Vespasian’s grip to hurtle back down the steps.

Magnus moved to fetch him back but then thought better of it. ‘Just against this wall?’

‘Yes; Babak is trying to draw away the troops on the other walls.’

‘He must think you’re stupid.’

Vespasian slipped his
gladius
from its scabbard, enjoying the weight of it in his hand. ‘No, he thinks Paelignus is in command.’

A young auxiliary scuttled up with three shields. ‘We only need two now, lad,’ Magnus said, taking one for himself and handing another to Vespasian. ‘The procurator has just remembered some urgent paperwork that needs his immediate attention.’

Vespasian looked out again as the speed of the advance, fifty paces out, increased to a run and the war cry was now more of a hysterical scream than a martial challenge; the ladders were now very much in evidence but the shooting had tailed off. He tensed, preparing for what he knew would follow, and offered a prayer to Mars that he would hold his hands over him and see him safely through his first combat since he left Britannia five years before. He had been sadly aware of the tightness of his back- and
breastplates as he fastened them on that morning and fervently hoped that his extra weight would not slow him down too—

‘Release!’ Mannius’ cry brought Vespasian out of his introspection. As the command was echoed each way along the wall by centurions and their optiones, the eight hundred auxiliaries of the I Bosporanorum rose to their feet and, in one fleet movement, hurled their first javelins towards the packed oncoming mass of unarmoured conscripts protected only by the flimsiest wicker shields. Sleek iron-tipped projectiles hurtled down into an unmissable target, slamming into the exposed chests and faces of men whom, just a couple of months earlier, had been forced from their farms and workshops to fight for a cause that they did not understand against a people they did not know. And down they went, their terrified war cries little different from the screams of pain and anguish that they became as the blood exploded from ghastly punctures punched through torsos, necks, limbs and heads by tearing iron. Arms were flung high over pierced bodies bent back as if attempting some macabre tumbling act; gore sprayed in mimicry of the movement and faces distorted with pain into wide-eyed, bared-toothed rictus snarls as they crumpled to the ground to disappear, trampled beneath the feet of those behind who, however much they would have wanted to, were unable to halt because of the momentum of the terrified horde jabbed and whipped into following them. Feet tangled with the thrashing, writhing limbs of the wounded or the shafts of the weapons impaling them, bringing down men so far unscathed to share the crushed death of their howling comrades as, an instant or so later, the auxiliaries of the I Bosporanorum pulled back their right arms for a second time, all brandishing a fresh javelin.

But it was not with impunity that they killed; feathered shafts appeared, as if conjured out of nothing, in eyes and throats of more than a score of auxiliaries as their arms powered forward again. More shafts juddered into shields, vibrating with the impact, as others rebounded off chain mail to leave vivid bruising on the unbroken skin beneath; the horse archers had entered the fray and, with a lifetime of experience with their beasts and weapons, their aim was good. But still well over seven hundred
javelins hurtled into the human cattle now less than fifteen paces from the wall so that the terror in their eyes was visible for all the defenders to see. And see it they did and they took heart as more of their foes were pummelled to the ground into which their lives would seep away as they turned it to mud with their blood and urine. With the joy of battle rising within them, the men of the I Bosporanorum took up their third and final javelins.

However, the horse archers were fast and closer now and numerous auxiliaries flew back as if yanked from behind to crumple on the walkway or tumble to the street, their uncast weapons clattering to the ground. But most of their comrades drew their straight
spathae
from their sheaths having reaped the final long-range batch of lives before the close-quarters slaughter began. And then ladders, scores of them, swung up and slapped down onto the walls to be pushed back by the defenders; but each one that fell seemed to be replaced by two others, such was their number. The horse archers kept their aim, almost unerringly, at head height above the wall as the auxiliaries hacked and pushed at the ladder tops in attempts to topple as many as possible before the weight of bodies on them made the task impossible. More defenders went down screaming, dead, dying or wounded as the feathered shafts flicked amongst them. Vespasian and Magnus joined the frantic attempt to ward off the escalade, heaving at the ladders that kept on arcing up from below, for although the auxiliaries had hurled nigh on two thousand javelins into the mass, most of which had struck a target, thousands more of the human cattle came on, knotting at the foot of the walls, pushed on by a new terror behind them: the terror of a solid wall of mounted metal, punctuated by lance points. Those cattle closest to the cataphracts shoved and kicked their way forward to escape the deadly shafts and trampling hoofs so that those nearest the defences were forced to choose between a certain crushed death compressed against the wall, or a probable pierced death on the blades of the defenders, twenty feet above them.

And so the human cattle began to climb the ladders.

*

‘Where’s the oil and sand?’ Vespasian shouted at Mannius as he tried to twist away a ladder that had slammed against the wall in front of him.

The prefect bellowed at a centurion, who sent a man scurrying down the steps.

Vespasian gave up trying to dislodge the ladder, now weighed down securely in place by three hapless conscripts who had no choice but to climb or fall; he looked down into their terrified eyes, gritted his teeth and, squeezing hard on his sword’s hilt, brought it up behind his shield, ready. A brace of arrows slammed into the leather-covered wood, straining the muscles of his left arm with the abrupt impact; he rolled his shoulders, loosening them. Magnus growled next to him, working himself up to battle fever, his one good eye glaring down at the enemy with the same wild intensity as the inanimate glass copy. And on they came, forced inexorably upwards by the press of cattle below; struggling to hold on to the ladder as it bounced and bucked under the different pace of each man’s ascent, the conscripts screamed in terror at the proximity of death either above them or below. But natural instinct took over: to fall into the crush beneath them was certain oblivion, but there was a small chance of survival up on the wall and so they took it and surged on up. All along the defences, to either side of Vespasian and Magnus, the Parthian swarm mounted countless ladders that rose from their massed formation like bristles on an angry hog’s back.

‘Stop the bastards here, lads!’ Vespasian roared above screams and bellows to the men around him as another arrow punched his shield; he braced himself squarely on his feet, his left leg leading, and, hunching his shoulders down, kept his eyes focused on the ladder head just protruding above the base of a crenel. His world shrank as his concentration intensified and he saw the top of the headdress of the first man up the ladder. With an inchoate snarl he exploded forward, punching the tip of his blade, through shattering teeth, down the gullet of the bearded conscript at exactly the same moment as a bloodied arrowhead burst from the man’s right eye socket in a spray of gore and jelly. The horse
archers had not ceased their volleys as the conscripts reached the top of the ladders.

‘The horse-fuckers are carrying on shooting!’ Magnus spat in indignation as a shaft hissed past his sword arm, which was stabbing repeatedly forward. ‘They’re killing their own men.’

‘And ours,’ Vespasian shouted, looking to his left as he yanked his blade from the dead Parthian’s mouth, releasing the corpse to drop, deadweight, onto his erstwhile comrades. To repulse the escalade the auxiliaries exposed themselves to the horse archers’ continual onslaught and more than a few had fallen. ‘They can afford to kill ten of theirs for each one of ours.’

And that was the bleak arithmetic upon which Babak had evidently based his plans: force the defenders into exposing themselves as they prevented the conscripts gaining the wall and keep the hailstorm of sharpened iron pouring down upon them; the human cattle were collateral damage in the greater objective of thinning out the resistance on the southern defences and forcing reinforcements to be called from the as yet unassailed walls.

Still the conscripts kept on climbing, forced up by the straining pressure below, and still the hail hammered into both Parthian and Roman auxiliary alike. Vespasian’s shield thumped with hit after hit, the irregular, hollow thuds booming in his ears, as he held it rigid and punched and slashed with bloodied sword from behind it at those Parthians lucky enough to gain the wall without being shot by their own side. Twenty paces to Vespasian’s right, along the defences, where the ladders were thickest, a pocket of conscripts had managed to gain a foothold, pushing back the auxiliaries, more by weight of numbers than by prowess. The cattle bellowed their fear and slashed, at the real soldiers hemming them in, with low-quality blades that buckled or snapped when parried by a standard-issue auxiliary spatha. The defenders pressed back at them with their shields, herding them into a tight knot that became tighter as more conscripts completed the ascent and were forced by pressure from behind to jump screaming into the fray. Blades flicked from between auxiliary shields, opening bellies and arteries as the penned-in cattle strove uselessly to defend themselves in such restrictive circumstances.
But still they swarmed up the ladders, adding to the pressure and widening the knot despite the culling to which they were being subjected. However, they died at a slower rate than they were replaced and so the foothold grew and the dead soon became the saviours of the living as they remained upright, jammed against the auxiliaries’ shields so that their blades could no longer reach unpierced flesh. By some miracle the conscripts were making progress and the defenders directly facing them were now forced to jump from the walkway to a twisted-ankled, broken-legged landing on the paving stones below, leaving only their comrades to either side, four men wide across the walkway and two deep, hunched and straining against their shields, to hold back the growing herd.