They heard him coming before they saw him; the rasping breath, the dragging footfall. Into the circle of torchlight stumbled an unarmed man covered in mud. His hands were bleeding.
'Well, if it is not the tunnel rat Castricius,' said Maximus.
As spring turned to summer, deserters crawled through the ravines or slunk across the plain in both directions. It was a feature of siege warfare that never failed to amaze Ballista. No matter how futile the siege, some defenders would flee to the besieging army. No matter how doomed the fortress, some of the attackers would risk everything to join the encircled men. Demetrius said that he remembered reading in Josephus's Jewish War that there had even been deserters from the Roman army into Jerusalem just days before the great city was captured and burnt. Of course there was an obvious explanation. Armies consisted of a very large number of very violent men. Some of these would always commit crimes that carried the death penalty. To avoid death, or just postpone it for a short time, men would do the strangest things. Yet Ballista could not help but wonder why these men, especially among the besiegers, did not instead try to slip away and hide, try to find somewhere far away where they might be able to reinvent themselves.
There was a trickle of Sassanid deserters into Arete, never more than twenty, although it was suspected that others had been quietly despatched by the first guards they encountered. They were a great deal of trouble. Ballista and Maximus spent a lot of time interviewing them. Bagoas was emphatically not allowed to talk to them. It proved impossible to distinguish between the genuine asylum seekers and the planted spies and saboteurs. In the end, having had a few of them parade along the wall in an attempt to upset the besieging army, Ballista ordered all of them locked up in a barracks just off the campus martius. It was an unwanted extra problem. Ten legionaries from the century stationed there in reserve, that of Antoninus Posterior, had to be detailed to guard them. They had to be fed and watered.
Initially, larger numbers slipped out of Arete. This soon stopped. The Sassanids had a summary way with them. Along the plain, tapering wooden stakes were erected. The deserters were impaled on them, the spike through the anus. It was meant to be horrific. It succeeded. Some of the victims lived for hours. The Sassanids had placed the stakes just within artillery range, taunting the Romans to try to end the suffering of those who had been their companions. Ballista ordered that ammunition not be wasted. After the corpses had hung there for a few days the Sassanids took them down and decapitated them. The heads were shot by artillery back over the walls of the town, the bodies thrown out for the dogs.
If there was a motive beyond an enjoyment of cruelty for its own sake, Ballista assumed that the Sassanids wished to discourage anyone from leaving Arete to keep the demand for food in the town as high as possible. If the Persians hoped in this way to cause supply problems, they would be disappointed. Ballistas' stockpiling in the months before the siege had worked well. With careful management, there was enough food to last until at least the autumn.
The relative abundance of supplies was augmented by the arrival of a boat carrying grain. It was from Circesium, the nearest Roman-held town upriver. The passage of fifty or so miles had not been without incident. Sassanid horsemen were out in force on both banks. Luckily for the crew, the Euphrates, although winding, was wide enough to be beyond bowshot for most of its course here if one kept to the middle passage. The boat tied up opposite the Porta Aquaria on 9 June, ironically enough the festival of the vestalia, a public holiday for the bakers.
The crew was somewhat put out. Having run considerable risks, it had been hoping for a more voluble reception. Yet, in many ways, the arrival was something of a disappointment to the beleaguered garrison of Arete. Additional grain was welcome but not essential. When the boat was sighted the general expectation was that it was full of reinforcements. The crew of ten legionaries seconded from Legio IIII was a very poor substitute.
Never really having expected more men, Ballista had been hoping for letters. There was one. It was from the governor of Coele Syria, the nominal superior of the Dux Ripae. It was dated nearly a month earlier, written en route for Antioch _ 'Well away from any nasty Persians' as Demetrius acidly commented.
The letter contained self-proclaimed wonderful news. The emperor Gallienus, having crushed the barbarians on the Danube, had appointed his eldest son, Publius Cornelius Licinius Valerianus, Caesar. The new Caesar would remain on the Danube while the most sacred Augustus Gallienius toured the Rhine. In Asia Minor the gods had manifested their love for the empire, a love engendered by the piety of the emperors, by raising the river Rhyndacus in flood and thus saving the city of Cyzicus from an incursion of Goth pirates.
There was nothing else in the governor's communication except platitudinous advice and encouragement: Remain alert, keep up the good work, disciplina always tells. Ballista had been hoping for a communication from the emperors, something in purple ink with the imperial seal that could be waved around to raise morale, something with some definite news of a gathering imperial field army, a relief column tramping towards them – possibly even something that contained a projected date for the lifting of the siege. Being informed that old-fashioned Roman virtus would always endure was less than enormously useful.
The wider picture grew worse after a private conversation over a few drinks with the legionaries from the boat put the 'wonderful news' into context. Far from crushing the barbarians on the Danube, Gallienus had had to buy peace from the Carpi, the tribe he had been fighting there, so that he was free to move to the Rhine, where the Franks and the Alamanni were causing havoc. The new Caesar was just a child, a mere figurehead left on the Danube, where real power was in the hands of the general Ingenuus. The flood waters of the Rhyndacus might have saved Cyzicus but nothing had stopped the Goths sacking Chalcedon, Nicomedia, Nicaea, Prusa and Apamea. The whole of Asia Minor was threatened. The general Felix, accompanied by the great siege engineer Celsus, had been sent to hold Byzantium. Valerian himself, with the main field army, had marched into Cappadocia to try to drive the Goths from Asia Minor.
Bad as the news of public affairs was, Ballista was more disappointed that there was no letter from Julia. He missed his wife very much. It had not been beyond the bounds of possibility that a letter written by her in Rome or from Sicily could have found its way to the eastern extremity of the imperium, to Circesium and on to the boat. With any letter Julia wrote she was bound to enclose a drawing by their son, a scribble of such abstraction that only the boy himself could tell what it depicted. It was ten months since Ballista had seen his son. Isangrim would be growing fast. Changing quickly, but hopefully not out of all recognition.
Battening down his disappointments, Ballista turned back to marshalling his meagre resources to defend the town. The ten new legionaries were assigned to the century of Lucius Fabius at the Porta Aquaria on the grounds that their experience as boatmen might be of more use there than elsewhere. Casualties had been surprisingly light on the day the great battering ram had been burnt and only a few had been lost to occasional Persian arrows or in unfortunate forays until the disaster in which the young optio Prosper died. The centuries of Legio IIII on the desert wall still mustered nearly fifty men each, the turmae of Cohors XX forty. Ballista had reinforced them with another hundred of the levy bowmen from the numerus of Iarhai. The northerner hoped that serving alongside the regulars would both instill resolve in the conscripted townsmen and encourage their expertise. He was very aware that it might go differently, that the lax discipline of the levies might infect the regulars. So far, things seemed to be going as Ballista wished, but he would have liked it if Iarhai would appear more often on the battlements. The grizzled caravan protector seemed ever less inclined to have anything to do with the military affairs of the siege.