‘Worthy of our admiration, I’d say. I wouldn’t want to run at four of those monsters whether I had the freedom to dance about and put their aim off or not. And with that done, I’d expect Purta to land his next punch quickly now. He knows every moment he’s stuck on the wrong side of these walls brings the arrival of our legions that much closer.’ He rubbed the amulet tied to his right wrist reflexively. ‘Always presuming that Our Lord sees fit to ensure that Tribune Leontius’s message reaches them, of course. .’
Purta’s response to the previous night’s disaster came soon enough and to the dismay of Scaurus in particular. A ragged flood of slaves poured forward towards the ditch, goaded on by whips and spears and sheltered behind an arc of raised shields, staggering under the load of their buckets of soil and rocks. Their first task was to fill the stake-studded pits that waited to cripple the unwary, and as they laboured to follow their masters’ shouted commands the enemy archers came forward again in strength, showering arrows at any of the defenders who showed themselves above the ditch or fort walls. Forced to take shelter from the hail of missiles, the soldiers hid behind their defensive wall while the barbarians’ slaves completed their initial task of making the approach to the ditch safe before being driven to attack the defensive line itself. Pouring the contents of their buckets into the ditch, each of the slaves turned away to retrace their steps under the goading of their Sarmatae masters. With the Thracian bowmen unable to shoot at the Sarmatae workforce in the teeth of the overwhelming enemy archery it was left to the bolt throwers to deplete the toiling slaves, and the officers watched grimly as the pitiless bolts ploughed into their labouring ranks.
‘This day would seem to have been a long time in the planning, given that our enemy clearly came prepared for a siege, although I doubt he expected to face quite such a stubborn resistance. There will, of course, be Romans among those labourers. .’
In truth Leontius was only confirming what most men had already realised, recognising scraps of Roman garb amidst the mass of humanity toiling to build a now discernible ramp across the ditch and realising that there were captured men, women and even children among the slaves.
‘We can only console ourselves that each one we kill has been freed from a grim existence that will already have visited misery and degradation upon them, and which can only end badly one way or another. You there!’ he called out to the commander of the nearest bolt thrower in an admonishing tone. ‘Don’t shoot at the men around the ditch, aim further away to allow your bolts to spear two or three of them with one shot, rather than just pinning single men to the ground!’
The centurion saluted briskly, bellowing fresh orders at the men labouring to wind the massive weapon back to its maximum power, and Marcus turned away, sick at heart at the scale of the slaughter being necessarily visited upon the helpless slaves. He spun back as a loud bang and a scream of agony told of some unexpected disaster, finding the bolt thrower’s crew in chaos and one of their number staggering drunkenly with a chunk of wood protruding from his shattered forehead. The soldier fell full length to the tower’s wooden floor and lay still, one foot twitching spasmodically.
‘One of the torsion bars broke. That poor sod is as good as dead.’
Leontius nodded grimly at Julius’s words, pointing at the wrecked weapon.
‘So is my bloody bolt thrower, and I’ve no means of mending the damned thing unless I take a bar off one of the weapons on the rear wall to keep this one shooting.’
He conferred briefly with Scaurus before ordering the repair, the two men agreeing that there was little option but to keep all four weapons on the western side in action. The Sarmatae slaves laboured on without rest, their loads of mud and rocks combining with the bodies of those of them that fell to the defenders’ missiles to slowly but surely send the ramp’s tongue poking forward into the ditch. Julius cast an expert eye across the scene soon after midday before pronouncing an opinion.
‘Clever stuff. See how they’re making it higher than the defences on the other side, even though that takes longer? That way when they come to launch an attack off it they’ll have the high ground.’ He shook his head with a worried frown. ‘They’ve made a good start, although every pace they advance gets harder as the ditch gets deeper beneath them. And they’ll slowly but surely grind the life out of those slaves if they keep working them at that rate.’ He looked down at the ramp again, wincing as a bolt thrower’s missile ploughed through the labouring workers in a chorus of tired screams from those around the bolt’s point of impact. ‘I’d give it a day, perhaps less, and then the barbarians will be at spear point with the men behind that wall, while archers on either side shoot arrows at them from close enough to make their shields useless. And there’s nothing to break or burn with an earth ramp. They’ll be over the wall and behind the ditch in strength soon enough after that, if they’ve the willpower to spend a few hundred warriors smashing their way over the wall.’
Scaurus nodded his agreement.
‘Which goes without saying they do. And once they’re behind the ditch they’ll have free run of the walls, and built from stone or not, that means they’ll have the gates smashed in soon enough after that. For all Leontius’s bravado, I’d say that the defence of this place won’t last long thereafter, not with the sheer mass of men they can bring to the fight. We’ll make them pay, but we won’t stop them.’
Late in the afternoon another bolt thrower’s torsion bar failed, with equally dire results for the crew who lost two men badly injured to the flailing bowstring. Leontius pondered taking a replacement part from the sole remaining weapon on the eastern wall, but decided against the idea after a moment of thought.
‘Better to keep some means of lighting up the bridge on your side of the defence, eh Tribune? It surely can’t be long now before your friend Balodi arrives on the scene?’
As darkness fell he shook his head at a request from his first spear to withdraw the Britons from the defences and pull them back into the fort.
‘The blighters are within a dozen feet of the rampart, close enough that a good stout wooden plank might just be enough to get them across and over the wall. You can withdraw half the cohort at a time, but I want five centuries on duty and ready to fight them off if they try to jump the gap without finishing the ramp.’
The slaves laboured on into the night by the light of torches carried by the warriors whose sticks and whips continued to goad them on through their obvious exhaustion. Scaurus accompanied the fort’s officers back up onto the walls after they had taken a quiet dinner, throughout which he had brooded on their situation with the look of a man wrestling with a personal dilemma. The torches illuminating the ramp had clearly edged perceptibly closer in the hour or so that they had been at their meal, and Julius’s prediction looked likely to be fulfilled sooner rather than later. With a decisive nod he turned to Leontius, pointing down at the activity below them.
‘Purta has made an error in continuing to drive the ramp’s construction after dark. I think that the time has come to put a stop to this activity, at least for the time being?’
Scaurus explained his idea, and Leontius’s approval was as enthusiastic as ever, though tempered by the unavoidable impact on the slaves labouring below them. Once all sources of light that might betray their new tactic had been removed from the fort’s walls, the Thracian archers were marched up onto the fighting platform one century at a time, until the side of the fort which faced the attackers was thronged with men, standing as instructed in perfect silence. Leontius muttered an instruction to his runner, chopping his hand forcefully down into an open palm.