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.