“Sorry,” muttered Vibulenus, snatching up his helmet which had been ringing softly on the guardwalk where it had fallen. Near the crestholder was a dent with a gouge and a smear of poison in the center of it. The bronze was already beginning to verdigris where the poison touched it. The tribune sucked in his lips and rubbed the metal clean against the turf. “I forgot how damn much that tower overlooks us since they burned us out last.”
“This’s the sharp end, right enough,” the centurion agreed grimly. “We’re supposed t’ be issued some oxhides t’ cover the guardwalk so at least they can’t see us so easy from up there.”
Vibulenus nodded upward in agreement, then donned his helmet again. The blow had not hurt him as much as it surprised him, but three inches to the side and the quarrel would have been through his forehead.
The tribune’s sweat was as cold as the morning air. There were no small mistakes; only times you were luckier than you deserved to be.
There were times you weren’t lucky as well, and in the air as a reminder hung hints of the charred ruin of the siege ramp which the present one replaced.
Twenty-seven legionaries had been caught in the conflagration which wrapped the first ramp in flames so hot that corpses could not be recovered, much less reanimated. Hundreds of the local auxiliaries — archers mostly, like these — had died at the same time . . . but that didn’t matter, because they were bound to die some day, finally and irrevocably, unlike the members of the legion.
Unlike Gaius Vibulenus Caper, whose fingers traced the dent in his helmet as he thought and shuddered.
Clodius Afer was thinking along the same lines because the breeze carried a whiff of roast flesh on the cleaner odor of wood smoke. It was there if you knew to sniff for it . . . and that was as hard for a legionary here to avoid as it was to keep from picking a scab. “Looked so simple,” said the centurion.
“This much timber around —” Afer continued as he nodded toward the hills sloping everywhere within his arc of vision, covered with the stumps that had provided material for the siege works “—wasn’t even a risk, just hard work muscling the frames into place and backfilling with dirt.”
A trio of ballistas fired from the battery a furlong behind the rampart on which Vibulenus now crouched. The artillery’s arms slammed against the padded stops, lifting the rear mounts from the platform until gravity thudded them back.
Two of the missiles were head-sized stone balls which crashed into the battlements of the tower. One ball disintegrated while the other caromed off nearly whole, in a shower of fragments battered from the wall. It would be possible to breach the fortress with ballista stones, but it would take bloody forever . . . .
The third ballista sent a pot trailing smoke in a low arc over the wall of the fortress.
“Eat that, you bastards!” shouted a legionary farther down the guardwalk, but the sight did nothing to improve Vibulenus’ state of mind.
The locals in this place, where the sun was too white and the days too long, brewed a liquid that burned like the air of the Jews’ Gehennum. Pitch, sulphur, quicklime, bitumen, and saltpetre were dissolved in heated vats of naphtha, the foul-smelling fluid that pooled like water in many of the valleys hereabout. Shot over the walls in firepots like the one the ballista had just flung, it destroyed the defenders’ housing, panicked their livestock and — who knew? — perhaps killed somebody.
But the same fluid, poured by the hundreds of gallons from the top of the tower, had devoured in flames the original siege ramp across which the legion had expected to storm to victory.
It wasn’t that a flame attack had been unexpected. Galleries had protected the soldiers as they built the ramp closer to the walls. They were covered with raw hides over a layer of green vegetation that acted as a firebreak, as well as a cushion against heavy stones. The framing of the siege ramp was timber and theoretically flammable, but no one had believed that freshly-cut logs, none of them less than eighteen inches in diameter, were at any real risk.