'Thus ordain the gods,' he shouted. 'That like unto Alexander in ages past, the Persians must submit, both this city and Ctesiphon itself. So their conquerors shall join the ranks of the immortals, and by the holy blood of this sacred ox shall you, my men, be strengthened and purified for the triumph that awaits you. To conquer!'
'To conquer!' roared fifty thousand voices, a cry that carried to the battlements of the doomed Maozamalcha. 'To conquer!' they repeated again and again, increasing in pitch and volume, aiming to send their message, throbbing and reverberating, to the gates of Ctesiphon itself. 'To conquer!' the voices boomed, and Julian stood motionless, the unspeakable, dripping organ held high over his head, staring at the heavens as the troops raged and raved before him. The enormous pyre behind him, prepared in advance with a stack of cottonlike palm wood smeared with pitch to receive the sacrificial carcass, burst into a ball of flame shooting into the sky, an acrid black smoke pouring in pulses into the air and settling heavily over the men. Their excitement had grown to a fever pitch with the rhythmic chant, and as I glanced at the walls of the city looming high over us, across the river flats I saw the battlements filled with a line of silent Persians. The garrison and the city's inhabitants, thousands of them, had been drawn from other parts of the fortifications in their curiosity at the uproar in the Roman camp below, the soldiers' polished mail gleaming starlike in the early rays of the sun.
Suddenly Julian dropped his bloody arms, passed the liver to Maximus, and drawing a sword turned his back to the men. He faced the lines of artillery and engines that had been set up in the night parallel to the walls: a dozen huge ballistae, their cords wound taut on the massive winches and loaded with enormous, iron-tipped wooden javelins; a row of 'scorpions,' each bearing a boulder the weight of a man, poised in a long net to be whipped slinglike over the top of the lever when the tension on the cords was released; field catapults poised to let fly showers of deadly, thick-stocked bolts; and a thousand archers, long bows at the ready. He thrust his sword into the air in a prearranged signal. With an earsplitting screech that silenced the roar of the men before us, the cords of the engines snapped to and screamed off their reels. Forty massive levers from the engines shot up simultaneously. Oak slammed against iron and iron against earth, and the air became black with boulders and bolts, whistling toward the astonished defenders. The mob of Persians on the wall scarcely had time to blink before the stones slammed into their ranks, each of them carrying away a dozen men at a time. A huge wooden bolt shot completely through a Persian officer's chest armor and impaled three men behind him, leaving holes in their torsos big enough to insert a hand. One scorpion, misfiring from careless loading of the boulder the night before, flipped into the air at the release of its cord and hurled its chassis directly backward, crushing and mangling the body of an engineer so badly as to defy recognition. But the worst terror was in the city itself.
Screams arose from the towers opposite us, and scarcely had the dust of the initial impact cleared when Julian's thousand archers, at a command, dipped the tips of their arrows into the pots of flaming pitch that had been placed at their feet and filled the air with a black cloud of smoking, stinking missiles, aimed high over the heads of the defenders on the ramparts to land in the roofs and hayricks of the city behind them. More screams of pain and terror rose into the air, this time from women behind the walls, and as the archers and artillery filled the sky with their whizzing, shattering hell, a pall of thick smoke rose from a dozen points within the walls and obscured our view.
At the first, massive eruption of artillery, the infantry troops at the sacrifice were shocked into silence and awe. Within seconds, however, a huge cheer welled up and the men broke out of the parade ground like water bursting through a dam, racing to their cohorts' assigned positions behind the artillery, prepared to leap forward at Julian's command to storm the city as soon as it had been softened by the barrage. The sun rose higher in the sky, the smoke behind the walls thickened, and the stench it carried to our lines carried the smell of death, of roasting meat, of excrement and vomit and all the unspeakable carnage and suffering of a city under siege. For hours the artillery attack continued, relentless, pounding, each stone driving into the granite-hard walls, forcing open fissures and cracks, toppling battlements — yet still the walls held, still the massive gates remained closed. The defiant defenders, during the occasional lulls in our hails of missiles, let fly taunts and obscene insults to our parentage or genitals, in ancient and crudely inflected Greek.
At first our troops, out of sheer nervous energy and anticipation of the pillage to come, were unable to remain still; when their offers to assist with the engines were rebuffed by the methodical artillery engineers, they put themselves to use hauling boulders and other ammunition for the machines to fire. Even so, the growing heat of the day under the blazing sun, and the thickness and stink of the black air began taking their toll. Frustrated and angry at the delay, the men collapsed in the dirt, tugging at their stifling armor and helmets, shading their heads under shields hastily propped on lances embedded in the ground. Shortly after noon, after a sustained artillery attack of such force that it would have leveled the walls of Rome itself, Julian rode through the ranks, furious and dripping with sweat, and issued the order to cease fire. The engineering companies collapsed exhausted on the ground, calling for water and food, and the support staff came running to assist them. Julian stood a moment watching the men eat and drink greedily but silently, and then, dismounting, he stalked wrathfully into his field tent, where he remained for the rest of the day.
Things fared no better the next morning, when our troops again watched in resentment and rage as the Roman engines and artillery poured a withering hail of missiles and boulders on the benighted city, still without fatal effect. Julian was almost crazed with impatience and fury. Five bulls he had sacrificed that morning to Ares, magnificent beasts that the haruspices argued the army could not spare for merely one offering, and for a minor city at that. He knew, for his whole life he must have known, that such offerings to false gods were of no more effect than a man's footsteps on the shifting sands, yet still he persisted in his folly. That whole day he refused to meet my eyes, the eyes of a man who would not have hesitated in calling him to task for his damnable obstinacy. He paced up and down the lines angrily, raging at the impregnable walls as a wolf prowling round a sheepfold howls at the gates, jaws thirsting for blood while lambs and ewes huddle fearfully within. He brutally abused the hapless engineers as they struggled to keep up the rate of firing he demanded, calling down the gods' curses on the steadfast Persians in their hellhole of a stronghold, refusing the entreaties of his advisers to drink water or to rest. Fear was developing in him that he would be unable to take the city without a protracted effort. What was worse: the first, early rumors had been received by his scouts that King Sapor was approaching with his massive army.