Enemy of Rome

XLIX

The Castra had not been taken. They cleared the Porta Viminalis, lungs burning and legs shaking with the long run uphill, and there it stood: huge and impregnable, a massive red-brick square with walls three times the height of a man studded with towers at regular intervals. It had been the Praetorian barracks since the time of Augustus, but it was a fortress too, with the largest armoury in the city. Now the survivors of Vitellius’s Praetorian Guard streamed from the Viminal gate or down the Via Salaria to make their last stand here. No surrender for these men. They were the veterans of the German legions who proclaimed Aulus Vitellius Emperor and they had no illusions about their fate if they were captured. Aprilis summed it up for all of them. ‘If the bastards want to kill us it’s going to cost them dear.’

Valerius knew that if he refused to draw his sword against the Flavians he’d be condemned as a spy or a coward, and the outcome would be the same in either case. He had already seen one man, a civilian accused of signalling to the attackers, being executed, his head rolling in the dust of the parade ground.

He tried to put Domitia out of his mind, but her face kept forcing its way into his head. His inability to protect her tore him like an almost physical pain. If he climbed one of the towers he would be able to see the roof of the Golden House, but he might as well have been in Parthia for all the good he could do.

Aprilis found him a silver breastplate, and offered a scutum with the silver lightning bolts of the Guard on the face. Valerius shrugged back his sleeve to show the mottled stump of his arm. ‘All I need is a sword.’

Valerius had plenty of experience of sieges. Preparations for this one were more hurried and less ordered than they’d been at Placentia, where Valerius and Serpentius helped see off Caecina’s legions. There was no shortage of pila, which lay stacked in bundles at intervals along the wall. What was in short supply were archers and artillery. The first could be relied on to make life difficult for anyone attacking the walls or climbing the big siege ladders, the second for breaking up the attacks with boulders the size of a man’s head or the devastating five-foot ‘shield-splitters’. But the most pressing lack was in manpower.

The Vitellians had begun the day with three cohorts and about ten thousand militia, a force barely capable of hindering the Flavian legions, never mind stopping them. When the Praetorians had been forced to retreat the armed civilians had melted away like snow in summer. Aprilis and his comrades had fought bravely to hold the Milvian Bridge and the Salarian Way, but they had been relentlessly forced back, taking casualties along the way. The Castra was defended by barely half the three thousand who had marched out to defend Rome.

Valerius reckoned the walls of the fort at around four hundred and fifty paces by four hundred, which meant less than one man to defend every pace of wall. That didn’t take into account those needed to man the few ballistae and onagri in the towers. Nor did it leave any reserves, which, from his experience at Placentia, Valerius knew would be vital to respond to any breakthrough. There would be no care for the wounded, no rations brought to the walls. Every man would have to fend for himself. All Marcus Antonius Primus had to do was throw a legion at each wall, use his archers to keep the defenders’ heads down, and the fort would be swamped. ‘It is hopeless,’ he warned Aprilis. ‘We won’t last a day.’

‘Then what is your alternative?’ the centurion challenged.

‘You should surrender,’ Valerius said flatly. He knew it was unthinkable for the Praetorian, but the words had to be said.

Aprilis’s face reddened. ‘Use that word again and I will kill you myself,’ he said, and turned to walk away.

From their viewing point on one of the corner towers, Valerius watched the legions form up for the attack. He could see the symbols of at least five different units on the big shields that were visible from his position. Long lines of legionaries were waiting patiently in open order just out of range of the defenders’ non-existent archers, the heavy ballistae arrayed behind them. The distant rattle of hammers identified carpenters knocking together the covered siege ramps that would bring the attackers within reach of the wall without exposing them to spears or arrows. In addition, Primus would have ladders every five or ten paces and the besiegers would swarm over regardless. He almost laughed. Siege? They’d be fortunate to last till darkness fell.

‘We need to find somewhere to make a stand when they break through.’ Valerius was surprised to find Aprilis back at his side.

‘We might hold them for a while from the armoury.’ Valerius left unsaid that the end would be the same in any case.

The Praetorian caught his tone. ‘A man must fight to his last breath and his last heartbeat,’ he said. ‘What other way is there?’

Valerius didn’t reply. The armoury was in the centre of the fort, part of a sprawling complex of buildings close to the principia. What did it matter anyway? Their chances of reaching it with the Flavian legionaries crawling over the walls were more or less non-existent. It was only a matter of time. And time was running out. By now it was dusk, but whoever commanded the siege was in a hurry. With an enormous rush the first catapult missile tore the air above them, the sound instantly followed by an echoing crash. It had begun.

Valerius adjusted his breastplate as the legionaries of the Third Gallica began their slow, inexorable march towards the west wall where he stood. Line after line of brightly coloured shields. The first of the smaller artillery pieces loosed their missiles and he heard a crash and screaming away to his left. It was going to be Placentia all over again, but at least at Placentia the defenders had reason for hope and optimism. Here there was only a grim resolve. Despair, fortified by a measure of truculent defiance.

He thought of the men who would climb the ladders. Men he had fought beside on the road to Cremona. I won’t kill unless I have to. He must have spoken the words aloud because Aprilis laughed. ‘Then you will certainly die here.’