The gallery tilted down as rank by rank the men supporting it found footing on the slanted gangway. Vibulenus was straining so hard at his burden that fear of stumbling drove out his fear of what would happen if they reached their goal.
Behind them and to one side, centurions shouted hoarsely as their squads began to raise and swing the hollowed timber on which rested all hopes of success. The trunk that had given Vibulenus the idea, a hundred and twenty feet long and straight as a die, had been chosen to execute the plan as well. Legionaries had sawed the trunk in half lengthwise and hollowed it with adzes so quickly that the tribune himself marveled.
On the estate of the Vibuleni, such labor would have been performed by slaves — less well, and taking three or four times as long to accomplish. They were slaves, every man in the legion, and at some level they all knew it; but they didn’t think like slaves. There were citizens of Rome and the best soldiers in the world, despite the vagaries of a consul who should have stuck to politics and similar forms of extortion.
“Pace, boys, don’t let the bitch slide,” Clodius ordered, his voice showing the strain of physical effort if not of fear. The gangway was narrow. If they let gravity carry a corner of the gallery over the side, they were well and truly fucked. The crossbows that sank bolts vainly in the mud roof would turn the force into a score of shrieking pincushions before any of them could be untangled from the overturned gallery.
Behind them, present only in their prayers, the log weapon was being swung into position. Like the gangway, it pivoted in a socket dug into the ramp, but the teams which lifted it did so through hawsers attached to a pair of shear legs. The hundreds of men hauling back on each hawser were covered by equal numbers of legionaries with raised shields, adequate protection for targets near the extreme range of the defenders’ bows.
Nobody knew it all, thought Vibulenus as the archers in the tower shifted their aim from the gallery to the teams of men swinging the hollow log. The army Crassus marched into Parthia thought it had all the answers to war, but the squadrons of horse archers supplied with camel-loads of arrows had battered the legions the way the waves defeated a cliff.
But the furred, quick-handed autochthones of this place did not have all the answers either, despite their ability to spew flame as a fountain spurts water. Their missile weapons depended on the tension of bent wood. Real artillery powered by torqued skeins of ox sinew would have slaughtered the lightly-protected lifting teams faster than they could be replaced.
As the shear legs straightened toward vertical, the forward end of the log angled upward to the height of the tower’s battlements. A third crew, protected by the rampart, marched along the guardwalk hauling a chain that drew the end of the device sideways. The log now formed the hypoteneuse of a right triangle whose straight sides were the platform of the siege works and the face of the tower.
The defenders must have expected the log to be used as a ram. Even now, as it lifted to an unexpected angle which displayed the hollow interior lined with bronze sheet, it looked more like a ram than it did anything else in their experience — or in the experience of the Romans who had built and were about to use the device.
At the base of the pivoting log was a high screen of wicker and leather. It covered a final crew of legionaries, leavened this time with a few local auxiliaries, and the great bellows made from whole oxhides. One of the auxiliaries gave a high-pitched order as the log steadied into position. The men on the arms of the bellows poised, but only when the centurion relayed the command in a parade-ground bark did a pair of legionaries grip the handles of a pottery jar and lift it toward the broad funnel mounted on the base of the log.
Liquid spouted from the top of the tower. It had began to burn halfway along its course toward the mobile gallery.