The Mandubian chief was shaking his head, his face despairing, but he could find no words to argue, for the king had spoken an edict and the decision had been made.
‘It is a waste,’ said Critognatos darkly.
‘What?’
‘The Romans will not let them leave. They will die before the legions’ defences, or they will come back here, and when they do we must be hard and not let them in to eat our grain once more, lest we all starve for it. But if they were to simply take a knife to their own throats, then the larders would fill with fresh meat and we would last weeks longer!’
Vergasillaunus lost his grip on Cavarinos as the angry noble ripped his arms free and threw himself at his brother.
‘You vile, sick, twisted bastard!’
Critognatos reeled under the first heavy punch and fell, enduring a flurry of blows before Cavarinos was pulled from him by three of the gathered chiefs. As the smaller of the two brothers was hauled back across room, flexing his knuckles and snarling imprecations, Critognatos rose with a malevolent grin, spitting out a broken tooth and wiping the smeared blood across his face.
‘Now that is the attitude that would win us the fight. See how my brother only gets his blood up when fighting his own.’
Cavarinos yelled and tried to break free of the restraining arms, his bloodied fists lunging.
‘Release the Mandubii, then,’ Critognatos spat out a wad of blood. ‘But heed my words. When they come crawling back, you cannot let them back in unless it is as meat.’
* * * * *
Fronto climbed the rampart and peered down at the scene before them.
Several thousand women, children, old men and invalids, some on carts, some with beasts of burden, everyone with a bag of their belongings. None armed or armoured. No warriors here. And many in floods of hysterical tears. He felt sick.
‘We don’t have to house them or feed them, Caesar, but the noble thing to do would be to let them through. They pose no threat to us.’
‘Not directly,’ the general replied, eyeing the distraught civilians with a neutral expression.
‘You cannot be seriously considering turning them down.’
‘I am doing just that, Fronto.’
‘What threat are they to us?’
‘None. But their very presence tells us that the rebels are beginning to find food in short supply. Why else would they send their womenfolk to us? They are conserving supplies. And that means that every mouth we allow past our defences eases the enemy’s situation.’
‘That’s cold, general.’
Caesar turned to Fronto. ‘We can be fairly sure that a relief force is on the way, the size of which is unknown. It could be massive. If there is any chance that we can bring Alesia to its knees before that happens, we must leap at it. We cannot let these people go free. This is war, Fronto, and we do what we must to bring it to a satisfactory conclusion as soon as possible.’
‘I understand that, Caesar. I do. But we are dealing with a general who burned his own people’s lands just to deny us food. Do you think for one moment Vercingetorix will let those people back into the city to resume their drain on his granaries?’
‘Probably not.’
‘And so those people will be trapped on the slopes and will starve and die beneath their own walls.’
‘Which will undoubtedly cause ructions and distress to the enemy up there. Imagine how you would feel if it were your wife or sister, Marcus.’
Fronto simply could not find a more convincing argument against the inhumanity of this course. Military logic wholly supported the general’s decision, but Fronto’s heart could not.
A voice called up beyond the wall in stilted, thickly-accented Latin, and the half-dozen assembled officers stepped to the parapet once more. In the wide flat stretch of ground between the initial wide ditch and the more wicked Roman defences, one of the Mandubian civilians had stepped forth. He was an old man, almost entirely balding and with a heavily-lined, careworn face.
‘Slave!’
‘What?’ asked Antonius, frowning.
‘We be slave!’
Fronto felt his heart sink slightly further. That the poor bastards might voluntarily offer themselves up for slavery told him with no uncertainty that the whole bunch were well aware of their position — little more than a burden to their own people and a weapon to the general. Some of the legionaries on the wall looked around at the officers hopefully. Slaves meant money, and every man in the army had made a small nest-egg with the funds from six years of slave caravans back south to Italia and Massilia and Narbo.
Fronto shook his head at the nearest one. ‘Eyes front!’
As the legionaries turned back, disappointed at such lost profit, Fronto raised his eyebrow at Caesar.
‘No,’ the general said finally, addressing the old man beyond the wall, the ditches, the pits and the sharpened stakes. ‘There will be no slavery here. You are not permitted to pass our lines and we have no need of you. Return to your city.’
‘Can… not,’ managed the old man in the unfamiliar tongue.
‘You have no choice. We cannot have you camped around our defences. You have the count of two hundred to take your beasts and carts and move back up the slope, or my scorpions and archers will start pinning limbs to the ground. Now go.’
As the man shook his head desperately, Caesar turned his glittering gaze on Fronto. ‘Give them a clear count of two hundred and then have the barrage begin.’
Fronto nodded unhappily, and the general turned to Antonius. ‘And tell the artillerists to aim for wounds, not kills. We want a deterrent to drive them back up the hill, not a thousand corpses to bury.
* * * * *
Cavarinos stood before the oppidum’s heavy wall, atop a steep incline where the greenery often gave way to striations of bare grey rock, the heat beginning to make the day tiresome already. A mile below and to the west he perused the most impressive section of the Roman siege works. No different in form really to the rest of the circuit, this section on the flat plain provided the best view and, because of the level ground, the twin ditches before the rampart were water-filled here. To the right hand — northern — edge of the plain, at the base of Mons Rea, the largest of the Roman camps sprawled across the lower slopes.
It was permanently busy. Units of horse were constantly ranging out over the nearby countryside and returning, the outer gates spending more time open than closed, forage parties collecting timber and stone and the grain and livestock commandeered from the local Mandubian farmers, legions training and exercising, engineers and work parties upgrading, improving and maintaining the system.
Or at least, that had been the case until half an hour ago. Then, as the late morning sun had approached its apex, sweating out the worst of the summer day, the ranging Roman scout units had arrived back at the fortifications en masse and at speed. The forage parties had been withdrawn into the fortifications, engineers and workers dismissed back to their units and the legions called to standards and then deployed around the ramparts.
Relief? After nine days of hardship it had seemed too much to hope.
His eyes slid closer, to the scattered figures on the lower slopes, just out of Roman missile range. The thousands of starving, weak, exhausted and terrified civilian Mandubii had, as the days wore on, diminished to mere hundreds. Critognatos had watched the poor abandoned souls beginning to eat those among them who had died of exposure or hunger or illness, and had wisely kept his opinion to himself at the looks of sick hatred Cavarinos shot him, though the knowing half-smile on Critognatos’ face spoke clearly of his view of the matter.