But it was not with impunity that they killed; feathered shafts appeared, as if conjured out of nothing, in eyes and throats of more than a score of auxiliaries as their arms powered forward again. More shafts juddered into shields, vibrating with the impact, as others rebounded off chain mail to leave vivid bruising on the unbroken skin beneath; the horse archers had entered the fray and, with a lifetime of experience with their beasts and weapons, their aim was good. But still well over seven hundred javelins hurtled into the human cattle now less than fifteen paces from the wall so that the terror in their eyes was visible for all the defenders to see. And see it they did and they took heart as more of their foes were pummelled to the ground into which their lives would seep away as they turned it to mud with their blood and urine. With the joy of battle rising within them, the men of the I Bosporanorum took up their third and final javelins.
However, the horse archers were fast and closer now and numerous auxiliaries flew back as if yanked from behind to crumple on the walkway or tumble to the street, their uncast weapons clattering to the ground. But most of their comrades drew their straight spathae from their sheaths having reaped the final long-range batch of lives before the close-quarters slaughter began. And then ladders, scores of them, swung up and slapped down onto the walls to be pushed back by the defenders; but each one that fell seemed to be replaced by two others, such was their number. The horse archers kept their aim, almost unerringly, at head height above the wall as the auxiliaries hacked and pushed at the ladder tops in attempts to topple as many as possible before the weight of bodies on them made the task impossible. More defenders went down screaming, dead, dying or wounded as the feathered shafts flicked amongst them. Vespasian and Magnus joined the frantic attempt to ward off the escalade, heaving at the ladders that kept on arcing up from below, for although the auxiliaries had hurled nigh on two thousand javelins into the mass, most of which had struck a target, thousands more of the human cattle came on, knotting at the foot of the walls, pushed on by a new terror behind them: the terror of a solid wall of mounted metal, punctuated by lance points. Those cattle closest to the cataphracts shoved and kicked their way forward to escape the deadly shafts and trampling hoofs so that those nearest the defences were forced to choose between a certain crushed death compressed against the wall, or a probable pierced death on the blades of the defenders, twenty feet above them.
And so the human cattle began to climb the ladders.
*
‘Where’s the oil and sand?’ Vespasian shouted at Mannius as he tried to twist away a ladder that had slammed against the wall in front of him.
The prefect bellowed at a centurion, who sent a man scurrying down the steps.
Vespasian gave up trying to dislodge the ladder, now weighed down securely in place by three hapless conscripts who had no choice but to climb or fall; he looked down into their terrified eyes, gritted his teeth and, squeezing hard on his sword’s hilt, brought it up behind his shield, ready. A brace of arrows slammed into the leather-covered wood, straining the muscles of his left arm with the abrupt impact; he rolled his shoulders, loosening them. Magnus growled next to him, working himself up to battle fever, his one good eye glaring down at the enemy with the same wild intensity as the inanimate glass copy. And on they came, forced inexorably upwards by the press of cattle below; struggling to hold on to the ladder as it bounced and bucked under the different pace of each man’s ascent, the conscripts screamed in terror at the proximity of death either above them or below. But natural instinct took over: to fall into the crush beneath them was certain oblivion, but there was a small chance of survival up on the wall and so they took it and surged on up. All along the defences, to either side of Vespasian and Magnus, the Parthian swarm mounted countless ladders that rose from their massed formation like bristles on an angry hog’s back.
‘Stop the bastards here, lads!’ Vespasian roared above screams and bellows to the men around him as another arrow punched his shield; he braced himself squarely on his feet, his left leg leading, and, hunching his shoulders down, kept his eyes focused on the ladder head just protruding above the base of a crenel. His world shrank as his concentration intensified and he saw the top of the headdress of the first man up the ladder. With an inchoate snarl he exploded forward, punching the tip of his blade, through shattering teeth, down the gullet of the bearded conscript at exactly the same moment as a bloodied arrowhead burst from the man’s right eye socket in a spray of gore and jelly. The horse archers had not ceased their volleys as the conscripts reached the top of the ladders.
‘The horse-fuckers are carrying on shooting!’ Magnus spat in indignation as a shaft hissed past his sword arm, which was stabbing repeatedly forward. ‘They’re killing their own men.’
‘And ours,’ Vespasian shouted, looking to his left as he yanked his blade from the dead Parthian’s mouth, releasing the corpse to drop, deadweight, onto his erstwhile comrades. To repulse the escalade the auxiliaries exposed themselves to the horse archers’ continual onslaught and more than a few had fallen. ‘They can afford to kill ten of theirs for each one of ours.’
And that was the bleak arithmetic upon which Babak had evidently based his plans: force the defenders into exposing themselves as they prevented the conscripts gaining the wall and keep the hailstorm of sharpened iron pouring down upon them; the human cattle were collateral damage in the greater objective of thinning out the resistance on the southern defences and forcing reinforcements to be called from the as yet unassailed walls.
Still the conscripts kept on climbing, forced up by the straining pressure below, and still the hail hammered into both Parthian and Roman auxiliary alike. Vespasian’s shield thumped with hit after hit, the irregular, hollow thuds booming in his ears, as he held it rigid and punched and slashed with bloodied sword from behind it at those Parthians lucky enough to gain the wall without being shot by their own side. Twenty paces to Vespasian’s right, along the defences, where the ladders were thickest, a pocket of conscripts had managed to gain a foothold, pushing back the auxiliaries, more by weight of numbers than by prowess. The cattle bellowed their fear and slashed, at the real soldiers hemming them in, with low-quality blades that buckled or snapped when parried by a standard-issue auxiliary spatha. The defenders pressed back at them with their shields, herding them into a tight knot that became tighter as more conscripts completed the ascent and were forced by pressure from behind to jump screaming into the fray. Blades flicked from between auxiliary shields, opening bellies and arteries as the penned-in cattle strove uselessly to defend themselves in such restrictive circumstances. But still they swarmed up the ladders, adding to the pressure and widening the knot despite the culling to which they were being subjected. However, they died at a slower rate than they were replaced and so the foothold grew and the dead soon became the saviours of the living as they remained upright, jammed against the auxiliaries’ shields so that their blades could no longer reach unpierced flesh. By some miracle the conscripts were making progress and the defenders directly facing them were now forced to jump from the walkway to a twisted-ankled, broken-legged landing on the paving stones below, leaving only their comrades to either side, four men wide across the walkway and two deep, hunched and straining against their shields, to hold back the growing herd.
‘Stay here,’ Vespasian ordered the auxiliaries to his left, satisfied that they should be able to hold the position. ‘Magnus, with me!’ They hurtled along the walkway, past a dozen or so private combats where the defenders were hurling the conscripts back through the crenels — or at least preventing them progressing forward — and came to the outer edge of the ever-expanding melee as it abutted the parapet through and over which the conscripts flowed. Arrows hissed higher overhead as the horse archers’ commanders realised that progress, which should not be impeded by slaughtering the cattle making it, was being made on this section of the wall and they had their men raise their aim into the city beyond.