Scourge of Rome

XXXVI

It was all about the timing. And that depended on Titus.

Valerius knew by the sound of the big siege catapults that the attack had begun long before he reached the Fifteenth’s camp. The throwing arm of each monstrous weapon measured fifteen feet and could hurl a boulder the size of a large cauldron almost half a mile. The power they generated meant they had to be pegged to the ground to stop them dashing themselves to pieces. After each throw teams of men hauled at the massive levers that helped pull the arm back against its own tension. When the sling was loaded, the engineer in charge released the arm so it flew forward to be halted by a cushion of strawfilled leather bags. The thunderous impact made a massive ‘whump’ and the sound echoed through the valleys to the west of Jerusalem as he approached the camp.

Titus had brought twenty of them to invest the city and, of these, fourteen hurled their missiles at the third wall close to the famed Tower of Psephinus. On the far side of the city, the Tenth legion used its catapults to add to the terror of the thousands crammed into the eastern sector of Bezetha. True to his word, Titus also arrayed his light artillery, normally kept in reserve until the walls had been weakened. The onager and scorpio catapults pitched their missiles over the walls into streets packed with refugees sheltered only by tents and makeshift lean-tos. Valerius could only imagine the effect they were having on the unprotected civilians. He’d seen a small boulder from an onager remove the heads of two men and eviscerate a third. A five-foot ‘shieldsplitter’ bolt could gut one and then pin the man in the next rank so they were like chickens on a spit. It took a fatalistic courage to stand and face such anonymous, random killers. Valerius doubted the unblooded Passover pilgrims would stand it for long before they sought greater protection in the centre of the city.

He guided his mount past the camp towards the artillery line. It seemed the most likely place to find Titus, but when he reached the catapults the young general was elsewhere. He reined in Lunaris about four hundred paces from the walls.

It seemed Vespasian’s son was in a hurry.

The legions were formed up just out of catapult range. It might have been a bluff to draw the defenders’ attention away from what was happening elsewhere on the walls, but Valerius doubted it. The Fifteenth was on the left, their ranks angled diagonally towards the Mount of Olives, their eagle proudly displayed as if challenging the enemy. To the right, the Fifth waited patiently in their cohort squares for the glory that was to come. A vexillation of two thousand men from the Twelfth would form the centre once Titus had overcome these walls. Between the legions stood their associated auxiliary cohorts, men from Hispania and Lusitania, Syria and Thrace, Gaul and Pannonia. Thirty thousand men eager for a fight after the weeks of waiting and digging.

But first they must overcome the walls. Titus had placed his siege towers and rams in threes on either side of the Tower of Psephinus, with the ram in the centre of each trio. As Valerius watched, the legionaries who would man them formed up to haul and push the mighty towers over ground levelled by their engineers. To the front, five hundred men spat on their hands and took a grip on ropes a foot thick, while half as many added their weight behind each tower. The key was to get the enormous structure moving on its greased axles. At first the only result of their efforts was a judder through the tower and a slight tilt in the direction of the walls, where the defenders, ever more numerous, gathered to jeer at their efforts.

Titus’s artillery commander had prepared for this moment. When he judged the crowds on the parapets were thick enough he called the order for the shield-splitters and the onagri to change their aim. Now the light artillery of three legions – the men of the Twelfth had brought their entire contingent – was brought to bear on a single section of battlements. Men turned in disbelief as the comrade next to them disappeared in a cloud of pink, before the ramparts cleared as if a single hand had plucked them clean.

‘Archers!’ The order elicited the blast of a cornicen and Valerius saw his former comrades of the Emesan column ghost forward on foot across the cleared ground. Now it became clear why Titus had chosen this as his point of attack. The Tower of Psephinus dominated an open plain beyond the walls, but to do so it had been necessary to create a parrot’s beak in the defences. Of all Jerusalem’s defensive positions this was the worst placed for the neighbouring towers to provide support. It allowed the Emesans to close on the wall and take their positions before the defenders could recover. Now, whenever a head appeared to brave the onslaught of the onager and shield-splitter missiles, it was greeted with a well-aimed volley of a dozen arrows.

With a final convulsive heave the first of the towers moved forward with a hideous squeak of wooden wheels. Soon a second followed, and a third, until all six lumbered at a hesitant snail’s pace towards their goal.

The rebels had their own catapults, taken during the humiliation of the Twelfth at Beit Horan or captured when the Zealots overwhelmed the city’s garrison. When the siege towers and rams came within two hundred paces the defenders launched ranging shots from within the city. Great chunks of masonry from demolished walls and buildings curved in mighty arcs to shake the ground when they landed.

Serpentius rode up to Valerius’s side and produced a helmet and a leather tribune’s breastplate from his pack. ‘This isn’t the place to be if you’re not properly dressed,’ the Spaniard growled. Valerius dismounted and stripped off his cloak, and allowed Serpentius to strap the breastplate into place before pulling on the helmet. The former gladiator nodded in the direction of the Judaean missiles. ‘Not a good idea to be around when they arrive.’

‘True,’ Valerius agreed. They both had close acquaintance with the destruction that could be caused by the big catapults. ‘The question is whether they can hit what they aim at. At Cremona the operators were experienced ballistarii who’d been working them for half a lifetime. Even then their tribune admitted they were lucky to hit anything that wasn’t a mile wide.’ As if to prove his point a missile fell with a crash five hundred paces to the south and nowhere near the towers, which moved inexorably towards the walls.

‘They might do some damage when the cohorts go forward. Big formations make big targets,’ Serpentius pointed out with the cheerful detachment of an observer who knew nobody was going to ask him to be part of one of those targets.

‘But the legates will push them in fast, so they won’t be targets for long. Once they get close to the walls they’ll be safe enough.’ He paused. ‘We may have to go back into the city.’

Serpentius noted the change of tone. ‘So it’s our turn again, eh?’

‘This isn’t an order from Titus, but I have my own reasons for going.’ Valerius gave the short version of Tabitha’s story and the Spaniard listened with a look of sour disenchantment.

‘What do we care about the future of a rabble of Jewish barbarians?’ he spat.

‘I care about this one.’

Serpentius turned to Valerius and his eyes were like looking into an empty grave. ‘Sometimes, after I got hit over the head, I’d lose consciousness and when I went under I knew I wasn’t coming back. That’s how it was down there.’ A nerve twitched in his cheek as he remembered the ordeal in Hezekiah’s Conduit. ‘What if they’ve blocked the exit or flooded the tunnel?’

‘I don’t think so. Apart from anything else I have a feeling it might be someone’s way out.’

‘When?’

Valerius studied the walls where the towers were creeping ever closer. ‘That’s up to Titus and our Judaean friends.’

‘Look!’ The Spaniard pointed to where four cohorts trotted in columns across the open ground to reinforce the men in the siege towers. This was clearly the moment Simon bar Giora had been waiting for. A storm of shield-splitter bolts and ballista missiles from hidden catapults greeted the advancing legionaries. Valerius saw men plucked out of the ranks and blood spray the air, but the compact columns ignored the casualties and were soon protected by the bulk of the towers. These had stopped just short of the wall, but the legionaries pulling the two ram towers dropped their ropes and added their weight to that of the men behind. Slowly, the two towers inched forward until the massive head of the ram could be brought against the cut stone blocks of the wall. The engineers’ calculations had been perfect, for each tower topped the defences by four or five feet.

Behind the closest ram, legionaries hauled the giant ash trunk back to its full extent and then released it against the wall for the first time. The impact shook the whole tower, but strangely it was a second later before a giant clang split the air. A frozen heartbeat when it seemed the entire battlefield stood still was followed by a lusty cheer from the attackers. Another mighty clang signalled the strike of the second ram, and the rhythm was set. A rush of defenders appeared to hurl rocks from the walls down at the operators, only to be swept away by the spears of legionaries in the flanking towers. At the same time Roman artillery deluged the top of the walls with a lethal hail of missiles to deter a flanking attack.

Valerius felt his heart quicken as he imagined the nerve-shredding chaos inside the attack towers. Hundreds of fully armoured legionaries packed into the stifling gloom of the inner storeys, waiting to make their way up the ladders to the fighting platforms. To reach them they’d have to struggle through stacks of pila waiting to be passed upwards and past a stream of wounded being carried below to the medicus. Every successful strike of the ram would come at the cost of a Roman life on the fighting platform and the waiting men would be showered in the blood of those dying above. An angry murmur filled the air – the familiar background to a faraway battle – punctuated by the shrill screams of men plummeting from the battlements and the towers. His ears throbbed with the thump of ballista, onager and scorpio launches. Bolts and boulders flew towards Jerusalem in a constant rush and the air was split by the clang of the iron ram heads. Artillery centurions barked ceaseless commands for corrections or shouted for more ammunition.

Without warning the sound of battle changed to a higher, more urgent pitch and Valerius saw a flash of yellow on the parapet close to one of the rams.

‘Bastards.’ Serpentius grimaced as a streak of flame lanced out from the Judaean defences and cascaded down the animal-skin flank of the ram tower. Burning oil, carried in open buckets by pairs of men prepared to die to ensure it went where it would do most good.

‘I hope by all the gods they’ve wet those skins properly.’ A soldier’s greatest fear was to be trapped in a burning siege tower with hundreds of men battling to reach the constricted trap door exits. If this one caught they would be hurling each other off ladders as the wooden structure turned into an inferno. For all the poets said, there was no such thing as a good death, but surely burning was the worst of all? Every man’s eyes were drawn to the terrible drama being acted out around the pinnacle of the towers.

Every man but Serpentius.

He touched Valerius on the arm. ‘See those bushes at the base of the wall just beyond the stone tower?’

Valerius strained his eyes until he could make out a patch of dusty green. ‘What about them?’

‘They shouldn’t be there. I’ve been looking at these walls for days and the rebels have cleared every inch of ground around the base to give them a clear field of fire. And it’s not just that. I thought I saw movement.’

Valerius looked for a senior officer to inform, but they were all occupied. In any case, what could he tell them? That Serpentius might have seen something move in a patch of bushes that some lazy work gang had ignored? But he’d known the Spaniard long enough not to ignore his instincts. He pulled himself into the saddle and Serpentius did likewise. They walked their horses forward into the killing zone, neither man quite sure why they were doing it.

‘What do you think?’

‘I don’t know, but that stretch of wall will be out of sight of the men in those siege towers.’

Valerius increased his pace and angled his mount towards the tower closest to the danger area. ‘It’s probably nothing,’ he didn’t sound convinced, ‘but we’ll let them know about a possible threat and get ourselves out of there. I’d planned a quiet day.’

By now they were halfway to the siege towers, and Valerius searched the walls for anyone who might be targeting the two isolated riders with a captured ballista. Serpentius’s face split into a knowing grin, but he kept his mouth shut.

‘What?’ Valerius demanded.

‘I was just think-’

But Valerius would never know what the Spaniard was thinking. And his chances of a quiet day were disappearing with every hundred Judaean rebels who spilled out of those innocent bushes. He could see them making their way in a stealthy rush towards the siege towers two hundred paces away, but they were invisible to the attacking Romans.