Fire in the East (21 page)

 

Ballista woke to a beautiful morning, clear and crisp. Wrapped in a sheepskin, he watched the sun rise over Mesopotamia. The vast bowl of the sky turned a delicate pink; the few tattered shreds of clouds were silvered. Pursued by Skoll the wolf, as it would be until the end of time, the sun appeared on the horizon. The first wash of gold splashed over the terrace of the palace of the
Dux Ripae
and the battlements of Arete. At the foot of the cliff the wharves and whispering reedbeds remained in deep blue shadow.

Ballista had had only a very few hours’ sleep but, surprisingly, they had been deep and restful. He felt fresh and invigorated. It was impossible not to be full of well-being on such a morning - even after the disaster of the previous evening.

Behind him, Ballista could hear Calgacus approaching across the terrace. It was not just the uninhibited wheezing and coughing, there was also some very audible muttering. Unshakably loyal, in public the aged Caledonian was silent to the point of being monosyllabic about his
dominus.
Yet when they were alone he presumed on a lifetime’s acquaintance to say what he pleased, as if he were thinking aloud - usually a string of criticism and complaint: ‘Wrapped up in a sheepskin ... watching the sunrise ... probably start quoting fucking poetry next.’ Then, at the same volume but in a different tone, ‘Good morning,
Dominus.
I have brought your sword.’

‘Thank you. What did you say?’

‘Your sword.’

‘No, before that.’

‘Nothing.’

‘Beautiful morning. Puts me in mind of Bagoas’s poetry. Let me try some in Latin:

What do you think?’ Ballista grinned.

‘Very nice.’ Calgacus’s mouth pursed thinner, more shrewish, than ever. ‘Give me that sheepskin. They are waiting for you at the gate.’ His mutterings - ‘time and place ... not find your father spouting poetry at the sunrise like a lovesick girl ...’ - diminished in volume as he retreated into the palace.

Ballista walked with Maximus and Demetrius to the burnt-out shell of the magazine. Mamurra was already there. Possibly he had been there all night.

‘We will do what is ordered, and at every command we will be ready.’ The
praefectus fabrum
saluted smartly. His face and forearms were black with soot.

‘How does it look?’

‘Not good, but could be worse. The building will have to be demolished. Almost all the artillery bolts are burnt. All the spare fittings for the
ballistae
- washers, ratchets and the like - are buried under that lot.’ He ran a hand across his face, the gesture of a tired man. ‘But all the shaped stones for the
ballistae
were stored outside, so they are all fine. I am going to have ropes rigged to try and pull the walls down outward. We may be able to salvage some of the metal fittings, some of the metal tips of the bolts - depends how hot the fire got in there.’ Mamurra paused, took a long drink of water and tipped some over his head. The soot ran, leaving strange black streaks. ‘Anyway, not quite the total disaster someone wanted.’

‘You are sure that it was arson?’

‘Come with me.’ Mamurra led them to the north-east corner of the building. ‘Don’t get too close to the walls. They could come down at any moment. But have a smell.’

Ballista did, and his stomach turned. He saw again the pole slowly beginning to turn, the
amphora
above his head start to tip, remembered the screams, and the other smell - the smell of burning flesh.

‘Naptha.’

‘Yes, once you have smelt it you never forget. Not if you have seen it in action.’ Mamurra pointed to a small, blackened ventilation louvre high up in the wall. ‘I think they poured it in there. Then probably threw a lamp in.’

Ballista looked around, trying to picture the attack in his mind: Last hour of daylight; no one around. One man, or more? And would he have run or tried to mingle with the gathering crowd?

‘There are witnesses. Two of them.’ Mamurra pointed to two men sitting unhappily on the ground, guarded by two legionaries. ‘They both saw a man in the street of the sickle-makers running away to the south-east.’

‘A good description?’

Mamurra laughed. ‘Yes, both excellent. One saw a short man with black hair wearing a rough cloak, and the other saw a tall man with no cloak, bald as a coot.’

‘Thank you, Mamurra. You have done very well. Carry on and I will be back when I have talked to the witnesses.’

The two men looked cowed and resentful. One had a black eye. Ballista well knew the mutual antipathy between Roman soldiers and civilians, but he was surprised by the stupidity of the troops. These two men had come forward to volunteer information. By some misplaced process of guilt by association, they had been bullied, possibly beaten up. There was no way they would help in the future.

Ballista, having asked Maximus to go and fetch him some fresh water, spoke gently to the civilians. Their stories were as Mamurra had said. It was just possible they had seen two different men. There was some uncertainty about timing. But it was equally likely that they just remembered things differently. Neither had recognized the man. The questioning was leading nowhere. Ballista thanked them and asked Demetrius to give them a couple of
antoniniani
each.

Ballista returned to Mamurra. ‘Right, here is what is going to happen.’ He spoke quickly, confidently. ‘Mamurra, have this building torn down and rebuilt about twice the size, with a wall round it and plenty of guards. There is nothing like shutting the gate after the horse has bolted.’ Mamurra smiled dutifully. ‘You are also going to form and command an independent unit of
ballistarii.
The twenty-four specialist
ballistarii
already in Legio IIII will be transferred to you, as will another ninety-six ordinary legionaries. Each
ballistarius
will be responsible for training four legionaries. By the spring I expect a unit of 120 specialist
ballistarii.’
Mamurra started to say something, but Ballista cut him short.

‘Also by then I expect your men to have built, tested and sited another twenty-one bolt-throwers - there is room for two bolt-throwers on every tower that now contains just one. You can requisition any civilian labour, carpenters, blacksmiths that you need. Select the legionaries yourself. Don’t let Acilius Glabrio pass off his worst cases on you.’

A slow grin spread across Mamurra’s square face.

As Ballista walked away, Maximus spoke quietly to him in Celtic. ‘If your young patrician did not hate you before, he sure will now.’

 

The
telones,
seeing them coming down the main street, knew that this was no time for jocular anecdotes, about philosophers or anything else. Certainly it was no time for officiousness, let alone extortion. The
boukolos
straight away started to herd a family of tent-dwellers and their donkeys out of the way, roughly pushing animal and human off the road, cursing them foully for dawdling. Warned by an urchin who ran errands for them, the
contubernium
of ten legionaries hurriedly stopped playing dice and tumbled out of the guardroom. Pulling their equipment into order, they came to attention.

The
Dux Ripae
gently pulled up his horse. He held up his hand, and his entourage of four halted behind him.

The customs official watched the northerner look over the Palmyrene Gate. Gods, but he was huge; huge and fierce, like all his kind.

‘Good day,
Telones,’
said the barbarian in good Greek, an agreeable expression on his face. He repeated the affable greeting to the boukolos and the legionaries, then indicated to his men that they should move on, and rode out of the city of Arete.

‘Nasty-looking brute, isn’t he?’ The telones shook his head. ‘Very nasty. I wouldn’t like to cross him. Savage temper - they all have.’

About half a mile from the gate, where the necropolis ended, Ballista reined in Pale Horse. He studied the tower tombs. There had to be at least five hundred of them. Apart from at Palmyra, he had never seen anything like them. Each stood on a square stepped plinth as tall or taller than a man. Above the plinth was a first storey, two or three times as tall again, decorated with plain columns sculpted in relief. Looming above this were another two or three storeys, each resembling a flat-roof house and diminishing progressively in size.

The dead were placed in niches in the walls inside with the precious possessions they would take to the next world. Grieving relatives entered via the sole door and ascended an internal staircase up to the roof to eat a funeral meal. The sealing of the niches and the securing of the tomb were left to the undertakers.

It must have taken generations to build them all, thought Ballista, and we have three months to pull them down. Left standing, they could shelter an attacker from missiles from the walls, act as observation posts, be converted into artillery towers or destroyed by the Persians to provide materials for siege works. The citizens of Arete would hate it, but the eternal resting place of their ancestors had to be razed to the ground.

‘Demetrius’ - as he started to speak, Ballista saw that his secretary had his stylus poised - ‘we will need cranes with wrecking balls. We will need haulage - lots of ox carts for the bigger debris, donkeys for the smaller.’ Ballista paused to make sure that the Greek could keep up. ‘And lots of labour. There are said to be 10,000 slaves in the town. We will requisition every able-bodied male - that should give us at least 2,500. Then we will impress citizens and employ the troops - hard work, but the soldiers do enjoy knocking things down. In areas where no one is working at the time the
ballistae
can use the tombs for target practice.’ The northerner detected a qualm on his secretary’s part. ‘Oh, of course, we will let the families remove their loved ones first.’

Ballista played with Pale Horse’s ears. ‘And would you make a note about security at the gates? The northern and southern postern gates are to be closed unless I order them opened. The guards at the Palmyrene Gate and the Water Gate are to be doubled. Everyone entering or leaving is to be searched, not just for weapons but for messages. I want the searches to be thorough: shoes, seams of tunics and cloaks, bandages, horse furniture - messages can be stitched into bridles as easily as into the sole of a sandal. Let Acilius Glabrio know that I hold him responsible for carrying out these orders.’

Demetrius stole a glance at his
kyrios.
He seemed to draw energy from violent action, from physical danger. Fighting the Borani in the Aegean, rushing into the burning magazine yesterday - after both, the northerner had seemed invigorated, more purposeful, somehow more fully alive. Long may it stay that way. Gods hold your hands over him.

Demetrius could not stop his thoughts returning to the dream-diviner. The encounter had shaken him. Was the old man a fraud? He could have worked out that he was Ballista’s secretary logically. Demetrius had given away the fact that he habitually used dream-diviners when he talked of the doors of ivory and horn through which the gods send false and true dreams. As Demetrius had never consulted the old man before, it could be assumed that he was new to town - and who but Ballista had recently arrived in town with a young well-spoken Greek secretary in tow?

The old man had predicted tumult and confusion, treachery and plotting, possible death. Were the dreams divinely inspired, or was their interpretation more prosaic - a warning, designed to unsettle and undermine? Was it in some way connected to the sabotage of the magazine? Should he tell Ballista? But Demetrius felt obscurely guilty about the whole episode and, more than that, he feared Ballista’s laughter.

Yet at that moment Ballista’s thoughts were also of treachery; he was also trying to divine the future. If he went over to the Persians and were appointed general, what would be his plan of attack?

He would pitch camp about here; five hundred paces out, just beyond artillery range. In his imagination, Ballista removed all the tombs from the approach, saw the defences as they would be that coming April. He would launch an assault straight away. It would go in across the flat plain - no cover of any sort. From four hundred paces out, artillery bolts and stones would start to fall, his men would begin to die. In the last two hundred, arrows and slingshots would kill many more. There would be traps underfoot, pits, stakes. Then a ditch, more stakes, more traps. The men would have to climb the steep glacis, ghastly things hurled and tipped on to them from the battlements, crushing, blinding, burning. Once the ladders were against the wall, the survivors would climb, hoping against hope that the ladders would neither break nor be pushed over, that they would not be hurled to the bone-breaking ground. And then the final few would fight hand to hand against desperate men. The assault might succeed. More likely, it would fail. Either way, thousands of the attacking warriors would die.

A plain covered in dead and dying men, a failed assault - what would Shapur do? Ballista thought of everything Bagoas had told him about the Sassanid. It was vital to understand your enemy, to try and think like him. Shapur would not be deterred. He was king by the will of Mazda; it was his duty to bring the bahram fires to be worshipped by the whole world. This town had played him false before, opened its gates then massacred his garrison. This latest rebuff would be but another sign of the evil nature of its inhabitants. He was Shapur, King of Kings, not some northern barbarian warlord little better than the warriors he led, not some Roman general terrified of the emperors’ disapproval. Casualties would not be an issue: the men who died would be blessed, their place in heaven assured. Shapur would not desist. He would not rest until everyone in the town was dead or in chains, until only wild beasts slunk through the ruined streets of Arete.