The Eagle of the Twelfth

Chapter Twenty-Five

The Hebrews didn’t attack our front lines a second time, but many thousands of them had evidently used the original assault as a cover and, marching through supposedly impassable mountains to the far end of the pass, had laid waste to the three cohorts of the IVth who had not only been keeping our backs safe, but had been guarding the giant siege engines we had left behind.

The guides had been right when they told us that a lightly armoured man could run the length of the pass in a morning. Still fired by the fury of battle, we of the sixth cohort pushed ourselves to our limits and, having left before noon, arrived at the far end in time to see the winter sun layer itself along the western horizon.

We were too late, of course.

The battle, such as it had been, was over. The IVth was destroyed, not a man left standing. Worse, the siege engines and artillery had been either stolen or — those pieces that were too big to remove — broken up and piled together and set alight in a fire of such monstrous proportions that nobody could approach closer than thirty paces of it without blistering their skin. Dead men’s armour melted on the bodies nearby, oozing like candle wax in the heat. Even as we watched, parts of our siege towers collapsed in on themselves with a crash and we had to spring back out of the way of the new, flatter flames.

The Hebrews were long gone. Setting light to the fire had been their parting shot, and even that had been done by men with fast horses. Horgias found their prints or we wouldn’t have known of them at all, but there was no dust cloud to show where they had gone.

I sent men off to track the enemy, hoping to find some stragglers, while the bulk of us stayed where we were, to put out the fire and assess the damage.

In the first of these, we failed soundly. Hot as a furnace, it would have taken a lake full of water and ten units of Rome’s fire brigade with piston-pumps even to stand a chance of quenching the blaze and we had no more water than the skins we carried with us. Not wishing to waste it on the fire, we found a store wagon that had not been destroyed and took thirty shovels and used them to throw earth on to the blaze, but we might as well have spat at the sun.

There was nothing to do but watch, and curse and count our losses.

On that account, I sent Tears to number the dead men of the IVth while Taurus and his engineers set to work calculating how many of the siege engines fed the flames, and therefore how many had been stolen to be used against us.

Taurus came back first. He was soot-stained, and there were blisters on the backs of his hands. His gaze was haggard, but not, now, with the shame of our legion but at the horror of what he was seeing: engineers can take the destruction of their equipment harder than they do the deaths around them.

He saluted, a thing I had never seen him do unprompted. ‘Report, if you’re willing to hear it?’

I found my face becoming smooth, as Lupus’ did, not to smile at his new enthusiasm. ‘I’m ready. Thank you.’

He ticked them off on his fingers, working from memory, and it was as if he detailed the deaths of his sons.

‘Four out of five siege towers have been burned — the fifth, you’ll remember, we took with us through the pass. So they have no siege towers, which is a blessing. Of the forty-four catapults we left, thirty have gone, plus all their bolts. The remaining fourteen are burning. Of the seven ballistas, the six smallest have been taken and the carts that carried their shot have gone with them.’

He paused to look at me, to see if I grieved as he did. I closed my eyes and tried to imagine the havoc that an army inside a city could wreak on its besiegers with that kind of equipment. The catapults shot spears the length of a man, and caused devastation when loosed into crowded cities. I could only imagine the horror they might wreak on a massed assaulting army.

The ballistas were no better. They shot graded stones from the size of a man’s head up to the size of a balled tent bag; one volley could kill a dozen men if they were closely grouped, and injure as many more so that they soaked up the medical resources and reduced the morale of the troops. Nothing makes men nervous like the sight of their fellows with their limbs crushed to matchwood.

I opened my eyes. Taurus was watching me closely. ‘What of the Son of Zeus?’ I asked.

Son of Zeus was the largest of the ballistas, a wall-breaking monster that shot stones that had the height of a man as their diameter.

‘They didn’t move it,’ Taurus said. ‘It was too big.’

I smiled at that. ‘Well, at least we still have that. If we can get it through the pass, then-’ I caught sight of his face. ‘What?’

‘They broke the lever arm and cut the strings. It’ll take days to make it fit for use.’

‘We haven’t got days. We’ve got about one night before they get home and work out how to use the things they’ve taken.’ I bit my lip. ‘What of the battering ram?’

‘The ram is at the heart of the fire,’ Taurus said miserably. ‘The rack’s more or less intact, but there are no trees near here anywhere close to the size of the one we’ve lost.’

The ram had been a thing of strange, unwieldy beauty. The oak tree that formed the ram itself was the length of three men, one atop the other, and as wide as all three tied together about the waist. The cradle built to carry it had consumed fourteen trees. The armoured rack from which it was suspended to give protection to the men as they approached a gate was drawn by a team of twenty oxen.

The oxen, I had already seen, had not been driven away. Some things simply move too slowly. By this stage, I was only grateful that they had not all been slaughtered, and wondered why.

I must have spoken aloud without meaning to, for Horgias, who had just come back from tracking up in the hills, answered me.

‘If our oxen are still alive, we have to feed and water them and they slow us down. If they’d killed them, there’d be rotting meat here at the end of the pass through half the winter. The first Hebrews came down that way.’ He pointed up to the steep, forested hillside at the south of the pass. ‘But half of them cut across the pass at the place where it narrows halfway down so they could come in from both sides and behind. A third arm came at them from the west.’

‘The Fourth was surrounded,’ I said.

‘Completely.’

Tears joined us then, with news that there were no wounded, ours or the enemy’s. ‘The Hebrews cut the throatsof the fallen before they left,’ he said. ‘And there’s a group of ten centurions at the far side who have been beheaded. Not very cleanly.’

‘Gods.’ I rubbed my hands into my face, kneading my cheeks. ‘I suppose we should count ourselves lucky they weren’t crucified. Everything else they’ve done is Roman.’ I looked at Horgias. ‘How many Hebrews did this?’

He took off his helmet and ran his hands through his sweat-sodden hair. ‘Twenty thousand,’ he said. ‘At least. And if you allow that there were another ten, maybe fifteen keeping us busy at the other end, that’s a lot of armed men.’

‘Too many.’ I kicked at a flaring lump of wood that had fallen from the fire. ‘Hebrews and Parthians all working together. And disciplined, too. This took real tactical skill to conceive and to execute. The Hebrews aren’t supposed to be like this. They’re a rabble. They fight amongst themselves sooner than fight the enemy. Everybody knows that.’

‘Not any more,’ Horgias said.

‘Exactly. That’s my point.’ Sparks hit my face; I turned away. ‘Whoever’s leading them thinks like a Roman. This is exactly what you or I or Lupus would have done.’

‘If we had fifteen thousand men to spare for a diversion.’

‘Which evidently they did. And now they have ballistas and catapults that they can fire at us from inside Jerusalem.’ I raised my arm, and men began to withdraw from the stripping of the enemy. ‘Tears, send runners to Lupus with the news. Let them go in pairs; they’ll be running through the night. Horgias, we need to give the dead of the Fourth a proper funeral. Have the men gather the bodies while Taurus and I devise a way to get them on to that bloody fire without burning ourselves in the process.’