Sword of Rome

XLII

‘It won’t be long now.’ Valerius drew his gladius free from its scabbard for the first time.

Serpentius heard the doubt in his voice. ‘Would you rather be somewhere else?’

‘It doesn’t feel right to be killing Romans.’

The Spaniard’s only reply was to spit in the direction of the attackers and Valerius knew he was thinking of his burning village and the long years fighting for his very survival in the arena. Serpentius called Gaius Valerius Verrens friend, but he had as much reason to hate Romans as any man alive and today he would get his chance to cleanse that stain on his honour with blood.

‘Ready.’ Valerius had seen the attacking formations first tighten and then break up into individual components as each century homed in on its target area of the walls. When they reached a line of white pegs hammered into the earth, he shouted the command. ‘Fire.’

From the cleared area where they had waited within the walls, an entire wing of green-cloaked auxiliary archers from Syria loosed their bows, sending a shower of arrows soaring into the air in a great hissing swarm. Before the first volley had reached the top of its arc, a second followed, and then a third. Fifteen hundred arrows in the space of twenty seconds. The sky above the attackers turned black. Valerius had seen barbarian assaults decimated by the arrow storm, but he watched with a feeling close to pride as the legionaries’ scuta came up in a single movement and the arrows rattled harmlessly against the big shields. A few more casualties as the shafts found gaps and weak spots. It would slow them — the archers would fire until they were out of arrows — but it could never stop them.

This was war. Move and counter-move. Caesar’s Tower on a larger stage, with human pieces.

A gigantic crack seemed to sunder the air and Valerius flinched as something stung his cheek. He put his hand up and it came away bloody. When he looked to his left three men were down, writhing among the shattered remains of their onager, which had been struck by a missile identical to the boulders they had been firing at the enemy. One tried to stand, his face a mess of blood, but before anyone could go to his aid he staggered blindly off the edge of the parapet and fell thirty feet to smash on the cobbles below. The others, a tangled mess of entrails and shattered bone, went still.

‘Clear this mess away,’ Serpentius ordered, and a section of replacements carried the dead men off before taking their place. The Spaniard reached up and tugged something from Valerius’s face. He held up an oak splinter the length of his finger. ‘A few inches higher and it would have had your eye out.’

Valerius met his gaze. ‘That’s why I have two.’

By now an increasing number of missiles were striking the walls and causing casualties among the defenders, but Valerius knew that this would soon cease, as their attackers became fearful of hitting their own men. For the two legionary formations had reached the wall and pools of brightly coloured shields formed as the individual centuries went into testudo to protect the ladder crews.

The first ladder rose by the gate above which Valerius stood, quickly followed by another and then another. With the battle joy rising inside him, he stood up to his full height. He knew he looked nothing like a Roman officer with his beard, his wild hair and his badly patched Batavian chain mail. But he was a warrior. A warrior invested with the confidence of the gods. A warrior to follow. To victory.

‘First Adiutrix,’ he roared. ‘Ready!’

Officers repeated the cry all along the wall and a host of wide-eyed glaring faces anticipated the next order, twitching with the eagerness of starved hunting dogs. A few of the marine legionaries, driven half-mad by the waiting, would have risen, but checked at Valerius’s snarl. ‘Wait, you sons of sea spawn. You’ll have your chance. Wait!’

They waited until the ladders appeared on the wall. They waited until the wooden uprights began to vibrate beneath the feet of the men climbing them. And still he made them wait. Arrows lashed the air above the parapet and turned it into a place of death. ‘Wait!’

A first red and yellow shield appeared, raised high to protect the owner’s head from arrows and spears that had never appeared. The legionary was puzzled by the lack of opposition. He had expected to be dead by now. Valerius’s ears reverberated with the roars of the attackers, the shrieks of the dying, the deadly zupp of passing arrows and the clatter of iron spears breaking impotently against the walls.

‘Now!’ He roared the order above the cacophony.

Juva rose to tower over the twin boar emblem of the leading legionary’s scutum, a double-headed woodman’s axe held like a toy in his great paws. ‘Give a sailor an axe and watch the blood and teeth fly,’ an old friend had once told Valerius. Now he watched as the big Nubian brought the curved head down and in three terrible blows chopped the shield to splinters, leaving the incredulous owner holding little more than the boss and a few scraps of wood. But the men of the Fifteenth did not lack courage. With a scream of defiance, the man attempted to take the final step that would put him on the parapet. It was too easy. Valerius leaned out and stabbed down, forcing his gladius into the gaping mouth until blood vomited past the blade and the point scraped on backbone. The dying legionary went rigid and his fingers lost their grip on the ladder so that he fell backwards, taking the man below with him to his death. In the same instant, a second big sailor hurled a boulder that crushed a third attacker’s chest and splintered the rungs so that the whole construction fell apart, sending the remaining men into the ditch to be impaled on the iron-tipped hedgehogs, where their tent mates used them as human stepping stones. A similar combination of pitiless assaults saw off a second ladder. Meanwhile, powerful hands, long educated to push and haul on ships, expertly hooked the V-shaped ends of two specially prepared poles against the top rungs of the outermost of the four ladders. Desperate fingers scrabbled to free them, but the marine legionaries heaved until the ladders slowly swayed upright. With a terrible inevitability, they pitched slowly backward with the combined wail of a dozen doomed men heralding their entry to the Otherworld. A marine capered on the parapet, screaming insults at the seething mass of men below until an arrow took him in the eye and the caper turned into an elegant pirouette that sent him over the edge.

Valerius turned and a shudder of unease ran through him as he found himself staring into Juva’s smouldering eyes. Before he could react, the Nubian had run past him along the wall to where the occupants of a new ladder were just completing their climb. The topmost legionary swung his leg over the parapet and with a casual swing of his axe Juva severed it at the knee. While the shocked owner was staring incredulously at the mutilation, the axe reversed and looped up to take him below the chin, splitting his screaming face in two and sending his brass helmet spinning. The second man on the ladder advanced, head down, unaware of the fate of his comrade. When he finally raised his helmet to be confronted with Juva’s savage face and the plunging axe, he threw himself backwards, taking two men down with him. Juva waited at the top of the ladder, roaring defiance and daring anyone to meet him. The next man hesitated until a pilum thrown from the wall took him in the side and he fell away. Still, another took his place and scrambled doggedly upwards to where a spray of scarlet marked his end. Arrows peppered the parapet where they stood and Valerius hauled the Nubian away as a dozen new ladders targeted the gate. ‘You are more use to me alive than dead,’ he snarled. Juva glared at him for a moment and the axe twitched in his hands before he obeyed.

At their side, Serpentius grinned. ‘And I always thought sailors were soft.’

All that long day they held the walls, and all the long day the attackers fought and died. Fell back to regroup, attacked and died again. They were so brave that Valerius became sick of killing them. The life expectancy of any man who reached the parapet could be measured in seconds, but still they came and still the left-handed sword rose and fell, its blade clotted thick with the blood of countless victims. He killed, because if he did not kill Domitia Longina Corbulo would die. He killed to survive and he killed because Serpentius fought at his side and the Spaniard’s relentless savagery never waned.

Urged on by Aulus Caecina Alienus, the near-exhausted legions attacked a third time, reinforced by four fresh cohorts from their comrades of Twenty-first Rapax. The assault was coordinated with an all-out bid by the Vitellian auxiliaries to take the west wall. For the first time they reached the parapet in enough numbers to make Titus Vitricius Spurinna throw in his reserves. Serpentius, Valerius and Juva found themselves fighting alongside black-tunicked Praetorians in a desperate street brawl where helmets and teeth replaced swords and spears and Juva somehow laid hands on a long-handled Celtic blade that sang as it carved great swaths through the screaming enemy ranks. At some point it must have ended, because the only living Vitellians in Placentia lay groaning and bleeding their lives away on the stone slabs. Valerius found himself with his back against the parapet, his whole body shaking as if he had a fever and his tongue cloven to the roof of his mouth by thirst. He watched Serpentius and Juva move among the enemy wounded giving the mercy stroke and noticed a dullness in the sky that heralded night and made him wonder where the day had gone. He wanted only to sleep, but Spurinna had given him command and a commander must record who still lived and who had died, ensure his men were fed and watered, and replenish the stocks of weapons. First he had to help heave the enemy dead over the walls to take their place among the great heaps of corpses clogging the ditch. Corpses who had once been the cream of the Rhenus legions. Who had once been Roman citizens. With the last body gone, the futility of civil war almost swept him away and he leaned against the cold stone and would have wept if Serpentius hadn’t cuffed his shoulder and thrust a water skin at him. Thankful that only the Spaniard had witnessed his weakness, he drank deeply and the moment was gone.

‘We’ll have to do it all again tomorrow.’ He wiped his cracked lips.

Serpentius’s blood-streaked features were a picture from Hades. ‘Let them come.’

‘First I have a job for you.’

Serpentius turned to stare at him. ‘Are you trying to get me killed again?’

What seemed like an eternity later, Serpentius lay in the cellar of what had once been a house by the amphitheatre whose giant shadow he could feel looming above him. The groan and creak of iron-shod wheels rent the air as he went over Valerius’s instructions in his head.

The one-handed Roman had predicted that Caecina would ask for a truce to recover his wounded and they’d watched as a whey-faced emissary confirmed the request. In the growing gloom it had been simple enough for the Spaniard to slip out among the cloaked and hooded men who quartered the battlefield with torches, seeking out the living from amongst the countless, anonymous dead. Eventually they concentrated their efforts where they were needed most, on the charnel house ditch below the walls, and he was able to squirm his way across the battlefield to the hiding place.

The groaning wheels meant he would have to wait a little longer, but he had been fed and watered and the battle fatigue that affected other men was alien to Serpentius of Avala, so he was content enough. He lay back in the darkness and closed his eyes.

All was quiet when he opened them again. He checked the bag at his waist to ensure he hadn’t dropped anything, and slithered noiselessly towards the massive bulk of the amphitheatre. The door was where Valerius had said it would be, on the north-west side, away from the legionary camps, and he found the handle after only a minimum of groping. Inside, he followed the steps downwards and through a maze of corridors that were etched on his brain from the plan Spurinna had provided. His nose told him this was where they penned the animals that were to die in the arena, and he passed a room that smelled of liniment and fear and stirred a familiar anger inside him. Eventually, he knew he was beneath the arena because he could hear thumps and murmurs from the earth-covered wooden floor above, where Aulus Caecina Alienus had sited his recently constructed great siege weapons. Without hesitation, Serpentius felt about in the darkness until he found the door he was looking for. Behind it lay piles and piles of bitumen-soaked brush and bales of straw, stockpiled here by Placentia’s defenders for just this purpose. Just one place, Valerius had said. You need to light it only in one place. The reason was apparent in the smell of newly applied paint that filled his nostrils. Paint that covered every inch of the wooden structures around him and the seats in the amphitheatre above. Spurinna had said it was some infernal compound of sulphur and bitumen that could be relied on to combust. It seemed almost witchcraft and his fingers twitched in the sign against evil, but he was pledged to carry out his mission. Cautiously, he held the iron rod he carried over the nearest bundle of gleaming brush and struck the flint against it until a single glowing spark twirled through the gloom.