‘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.