‘Close up! Close the ranks!’ Valerius heard the first shouts of the centurions, decurions and optiones as they struggled to maintain the cohesion of the formations. A discernible growl went up from the legionaries as they came on, leaving a scattering of still figures in their wake like jetsam discarded by a ship. He felt an involuntary flare of triumph as he watched his enemy fall, but he understood that he could not let passion control him. His artillery salvos would hurt them, but would not stop them. The machines were slow to load and their commanders might get five shots away before the angles of fire meant more would be useless. A few dozen casualties, possibly a hundred. Just a pinprick, but Valerius was satisfied.
Something whirred past his helmet.
‘Keep your head down, idiot, unless you want a hole in it.’
Valerius ignored Serpentius’s admonition and concentrated on the battle unfolding before him. From the gaps between the attacking formations, and on their flanks, swarms of auxiliary archers and slingers ran forward to close on the walls. When they were within range, he ordered the bowmen scattered among the defenders to engage them. But the archers were a sideshow; the gustatio before the meat. It would soon be time for the main course.
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.