I stood alone in the centre of the rank, holding the bow Lupus had given me. I had no shield, nor any intention of having one; we were out of range of all but the longest bowshot and I needed to show that the men of Rome were not afraid. That was a lie, of course; my mouth was too dry to swallow and my guts were clenching and unclenching with horrible regularity, but I was learning how not to show it.
The archers stood in two ranks, fifty to my right, fifty to myleft. They were Greek-speaking Syrians, dark-haired, dark-bearded men who looked, dressed, ate and thought exactly like the Hebrews — and who would kill any man who said as much in their hearing, for they loathed their neighbours with a passion unmatched anywhere in the empire.
As bowmen, they were not the quality of Vologases’ horse-archers, or even the Pannonians we had fought with at the Lizard Pass, though they were easily as fond of finery. They wore ivory guards on their left forearms to counter the slap of the string and tabs of leather on the fingers of their right hands to ensure a smooth loose. I had been loaned the same, and took it as an honour.
‘Ram, ready!’ Horgias’ voice came back in time with his horn signals. Macer was almost as good as Tears at that.
I raised my bow. The men needed no command: they had orders to shoot as I did, unless told otherwise.
I drew. The air about me hissed to the sigh of one hundred bowstrings. I smelled honey again, and heard bees enough almost to drown out Horgias’ cry.
But not quite.
‘ Forward! ’
I loosed. My men did likewise. The air sang. One hundred and one arrows soared up to the top of the temple wall. I heard screams. Some of them were Roman. Most were not. I was already drawing on the next arrow, raising…
Boom!
Taurus’ new ram hit the temple door. I loosed again and this time the song of the arrows was lost in the deep belling note of the ram on the door and the deeper shuddering hum of the sling-ropes after it. Caught in that tone, with my whole body reverberating to its song, I loosed again, and again and again until ‘Stop!’
I held up my hand. My men held their bows still. Aheadof us, not a face looked over the temple wall. No man stood on the heights of the Antonia. I had no idea how many we had hit, but nobody could have survived that barrage for long.
‘Is that it?’ asked a Syrian from my left. Artacles, his name was, I think.
‘I doubt it.’ I squinted up at the top of the wall, shielding my eyes from the sun. ‘Unless we’ve killed the man who sent the Hebrews to take our siege engines, then he’s still inside there, and he’s not stupid.’
‘What will he do?’
‘What would you do?’
There was a pause, and the ram struck again. As the thunderous noise died away, Artacles said, slowly, ‘I would find shields to keep my men safe.’
‘Exactly. Or broad oak boards, which are of greater length and take fewer men to hold. I think, if you look up at the southern corner, you’ll see they are bringing some up the steps there now. If we shoot at once, we can delay them a while longer…’
I nocked, raised, loosed and hit the lead man who was carrying one end of a wide, flat board across the top of the wall. He fell outwards down the wall to lie still at its foot, so that I could be sure of the kill. In the flurry of arrows that followed, three others, I thought, went the same way, but they fell inwards, and so were uncertain. And by the time we nocked again, the boards were in place, raising the height of the wall by four feet.
‘Hold.’ I raised my hand. ‘Let me test this.’
I took three paces forward and tried one shot at a far steeper angle than we had before. It soared over the barrier, but, for the first time, an answering arrow came back. It struck the ground near my feet and skittered back towards me so that I had to take a step sideways to let it past.
‘They’ll get our range soon,’ Artacles said. ‘Best get yourself a shield.’
‘Later.’ My head still ached dully, but I was feeling expansive and calm. The buzz of bees was constant in my ears now and a knot had taken hold of my stomach that was beyond the usual stir of battle. I had an idea and wished I had not.
A ray of weak sun lanced through the clouds and, as if invited, I stepped forward into it and turned round to face the bowmen behind me.
‘The Hebrews will try to use the boards as cover to shoot back at us. If we step forward and aim high and long, we can keep them back from the wall.’
As if to test my theory, a man’s face appeared at the barrier. A sling whirled in a blur by his head. I drew and loosed without thinking, as Uncle Dorios had taught me. I missed, but so did the enemy slingshot. A small lead pellet big enough to break open my skull cracked on to the ground between me and the wall, kicked up a small plume of dust. The next did much the same, and the next. With my fourth arrow, I struck the slinger in the throat and he toppled backwards, out of sight. If he screamed, I didn’t hear it: we couldn’t hear anything over the thunder of the ram on the door, but I was still expecting ‘Look out!’
It was Artacles who called, I think, but it was Tears’ voice I heard, and in any case I had been waiting for this. I threw myself sideways, rolling on to my shoulder to keep my bow from harm. A ballista stone the size of my head hurtled past where I had been and gouged a hole in the solid earth big enough to hide a sheep in.
‘Loose!’ I screamed, over the noise of the archers’ shock. ‘Shoot as fast as you can along the line that stone came from before they-’
‘ Look out! ’
Two pairs of hands wrenched me out of the path of the second stone. By the third, we were running backwards, by the fourth we were just running, all tactics gone, all ideas abandoned, all chance of success fading with each running step.
And then the Hebrews brought up the catapults. They had taken thirty, plus fifteen hundred bolts that were the length of a tall man’s leg and nearly as thick, tipped with iron shaped to penetrate armour. Shot by a man who knew how to sight and loose, nothing could stand against them.
These, I thought, were aimed by an expert. The first volley were rangefinders and scattered on to empty ground. After that, every one was sent to kill.
I saw one pierce a bowman through his mailed chest, come out the other side and kill the man behind him, pinning his body to the hard earth. After that, they came in a volley so fast and so hard that all we could do was run as far as we could, and each of us try to find somewhere to hide. I ended up in the armoury tent, set far back against the beast garden, as far back, in fact, as one could go without leaving the city.
And among all the many deaths, there were perhaps only half a dozen of us who thought to look to the ram — and so discovered that the catapults had been a diversion, much as the attack on us at Gabao had been a diversion, and the real attack was on the ram as it tried to break through the gate.
The stones that had so nearly killed me had been the most distant from the wall. The rest had been sent at progressively steeper angles until they were dropping from the heights of the sky, just on our side of the wall.
They fell in volleys of three at a time and crashed on to the ram and the men about it, and these were not the small stones the size of a man’s head but massive rocks big as bulls’ heads and bigger; one in six was so wide a grown man could not wrap his arms round half the width.
The first volley crippled the ram. The rest — I counted thirty shots in all, but there must have been more — smashed into the men around it, crushing their shields to tinder and their bodies to bloody pulp.
‘Sound the retreat!’ It was Lupus who called it, although it should have been Gallus. ‘Call them back! Retreat in good order! Now!’