He later told me that he concluded the barbarian's bluster was less for the sake of rankling us than for maintaining the cohesiveness of his own restless forces. Chonodomarius was the leader of a huge collection of families and clans, but the ties of fraternal kinship among barbarians extend only so far, and in that, Brother, the Alemanni are not much different from us civilized men, truth be told; for just as the sons of the Emperor Constantine slaughtered each other mercilessly, real love between brothers is a rare occurrence indeed. Whether this is because of the sins of Adam or, what is more likely, the effects of primogeniture and the inheritance laws, I cannot say. The Beast's strengths, to us, appeared formidable, but within his own clans his position could be precarious.
Fortunately, Sens was well stocked, due to the fresh influx of supplies for the farmers' market to have been held the day of the attack; and water was abundant, from the large number of springs and fountains inside the city walls. Defensive weapons, too, were readily available, for Sens had long been a regional distribution center for military provisions. Apart from each soldier's plentiful complement of arrows, bows, javelins, and spears, the walls were well supplied with more powerful devices, often requiring several men to operate: 'wolves,' which are a type of crane set up over gates, with tongs for grasping the head of a battering ram as it strikes, and a winch to haul it sideways; 'scorpions,' portable devices designed to hurl stones by applying the crank-twisting and sudden release of a rope of hemp or human hair; and 'wild asses,' which are rather larger and more unwieldy scorpions.
It was the catapult that was particularly fearful, from the standpoint of damage to humans and animals. The device is a huge mechanical bow designed with grooves fitted with thick bolts with wooden fletching, which can be shot with murderous force. It is operated by three men, one the 'spotter' to sight the target and place the bolt in the horn groove, while the two others wind the crank. The spotter then releases the catch and fires the heavy bolt to astonishing effect, at such a speed that no sloping of the arrow over distance even needs to be taken into account. On one occasion I watched as a barbarian cavalry officer was selected as the target. The spotter took careful aim, and upon firing, the bolt whizzed invisibly across the field and slammed into the officer's thigh, neatly piercing his thick armor and penetrating all the way through the horse's ribs. The impact was so strong it actually lifted the animal's hindquarters into the air before it fell, the man's near leg pinned to it by the bolt, and his far leg crushed under the fall of the horse. With that, I thanked God that I was not the barbarians' camp physician.
The garrison would be able to hold out for several weeks at full provisioning, twice that long if rationing were imposed, perhaps indefinitely if the civilians were ejected and thrown to their fate with the barbarians. It was simply a matter of waiting for Marcellus to arrive with reinforcements from Reims. But as day after day passed with no signs of salvation from that quarter, and with the barbarians becoming bolder, Julian's confidence in Marcellus' ability to lift the siege began to flag. On the day of the initial attack he had sent several pigeons, with identical messages, ordering Marcellus to bring assistance. He received no response. Runners were then dispatched, a riskier proposition given the likelihood of their being seized and tortured after slipping outside the walls; yet at least two of them successfully made it past enemy lines, as we were informed by the small signal fires they set that night on a vacant ridge just to the northern limits of our view. The messages, however, were as if scattered by the winds of heaven, puffed into the clouds unheard and unread. Marcellus did not arrive, and Julian boiled with anger at the delay, suspecting the worst of the commander.
It was soon apparent, from our vantage point high atop the walls and from the loud, unguarded voices of the barbarians wafting through the still night air, that Chonodomarius would not be able to keep his men in check much longer. When we could see that an all-out attack was being prepared, Julian ordered the city's smiths, both army and civilian, to work night and day on the manufacture of primitive and forgotten devices he recalled from his readings of Plutarch — caltrops. These consisted of iron balls, each fitted with four sharpened spikes a foot or so in length, equidistant from each other on the sphere. They could either be carefully positioned, or simply tossed on the ground from atop the walls; but however a caltrop lands, it always rests upon a firm tripod of spikes, with the fourth aimed straight up in the air. The troops called them the Devil's burrs. Hundreds of the devices were quickly crafted and by darkness strewn thickly on the ground outside the walls around the main gate, and on the narrow stone bridge leading to the entrance, where Julian had judged the enemy's attack would come.
This measure was none too soon, for the very night the caltrops had been placed, the enemy mounted a massive assault. It began with a feint by a smaller detachment that Chonodomarius had shrewdly directed toward a weak point in the walls on the far side of the city opposite our main gate, diverting a large number of our troops to that area. Just as we succeeded in fending them off, however, shouts rose from the sentries manning the entrance and we rushed back, fearing the worst.
The worst had occurred. While the bulk of the Acolytes and the garrison were defending the rear of the city, a half dozen traitors within the walls had made their way to one of the towers at the main gates. There, they overpowered the crew manning the massive oaken gate bars and pulled the winch, raising a beam and allowing one of the two enormous gates to swing open. With thundering, slashing hooves, a squad of torch-wielding Alemanni cavalry plunged toward the open door, followed by a mob of howling infantry, their bodies naked and streaked with flame-colored paint, like that of their barbarous leader. We ran breathlessly along the tops of the walls, still several tower lengths' distant from the defensive bulwarks over the gates, watching their approach in despair. The Germans' terrifying size and the ghastly paleness of their skin, an infernal vision if ever I had seen one, struck all of us with dread; as the ancients knew, in all battles it is the eyes that are conquered first, and if the outcome of this engagement had depended upon what we saw, we would by now all be laboring in some frigid, northern iron mine with brass slave chains pinning our manhood backwards by the foreskin.
As the Germanic horse troops stormed onto the narrow stone bridge, unable to see clearly by their wavering torchlight but trusting in the smoothness of the path that funneled them toward the open gate, the animals caught their hooves in the spikes of the caltrops lying thickly on the flagstones. Screaming in pain, they stumbled and fell, impaling themselves and their riders, raising howls of rage from those falling upon them from behind. We had not yet fired a single shot above the milling, moaning horses, and the barbarian infantry, running just behind the horsemen, must have assumed that the collision and piling were due merely to the riders' incompetence at trying to force too many horses simultaneously onto the narrow bridge. Bellowing in reproach at the writhing cavalry and animals blocking their path to the open entrance, which they could see only yards before them, they swarmed over the mounds of horses and men, leaping down the other side onto the caltrop-studded bridge — and impaled themselves in turn, in the feet and groin, on the evil spiked spheres awaiting them there like patient, ravenous spiders.
The nature of a caltrop, unfortunately, is that it can penetrate only one man, after which it has been neutralized; so by their sheer numbers, the barbarians charging blindly up the mounting piles of dead and wounded soldiers and down the other side were slowly, but effectively, making their way closer to the entrance. The caltrops had bought us sufficient time, however. The traitors wielding the winch that had opened the gate, seeing Julian's troops racing back to the entrance, lost heart in their task and dodged outside the gates to join their fellows. There, they were themselves pierced painfully and fatally through the feet and buttocks by the caltrops placed before the door. The open gate was quickly slammed shut and the Roman troops, taking their customary places on the wall up above, began raining missiles and stones down on the infuriated barbarians below, making short work of those who had had the misfortune to become impaled but had not yet died. The enemy retreated in disarray, and the remainder of that night was filled with the sounds of their howling, in pain and mutual recrimination, with the frustrated bellows of the Beast sounding loudest of all. Again and again he issued his obscenity-laced demands that the Caesar meet him personally to surrender the city. By morning, however, the barbarians had dispersed into the hills, leaving a thousand smoldering campfires as their only trace.