It did not occur to him that he was countermanding the centurion. He was placing his game pieces in the illuminated security of his imagination. The dark and bloody reality — of which his body was a part — did not impinge on what was right from a standpoint of command.
“We’re safe close by the wall if we move fast,” the tribune shouted. When his words had no effect for a further long moment save to turn heads toward him, he added, “Move!” and prodded the ribs of Clodius and Niger.
“Come on, soldiers!” roared the centurion, ducking under the crossbar with the jerky certainty of a boulder rolling downhill — after the tribune pushed it. “Let’s take this fucker down!”
No one else in the mobile gallery could get out the front until the leading row clambered free. Those men wouldn’t have been in the front rank unless they were willing to leave cover. They scrambled from under the shelter, and Vibulenus followed them in the irrational certainty that the remainder of the assault force was coming also. He was playing a complex game of Bandits, and they were the carved-stone counters on the board moving as he willed.
For that matter, they did follow him — every man of the assault force, because they were Romans . . . and they were soldiers . . . and they were, by all the gods, being led.
The tower was a sullen candle with a pillar of flame above the streaks of blazing fluid crawling through the stonework and arrow-slits of the upper stories. The lowest twenty feet of the wall had been built without openings, and even above that level many of the embrasures had been bricked up against side effects of the defenders’ own flame weapons. With the top of the tower a dripping inferno, the ground near the base of the structure was a dead zone which none of the weapons in the fortress could reach.
The outer world swept back over Vibulenus as he squirmed out of the gallery’s dark and stinking cover. Heat had sources again instead of being a dull ambiance. The gout that had splashed before the gallery was now shrunken to a handful of sulphurous pools to the right side, and the body of the archer — also shrunken — lay for the tribune to leap as the quickest way to the wall and greater safety.
The hollow treetrunk was a slash against the sky, its muzzle-end rimmed with tiny flames. Vibulenus hoped they would not pour another jar of fluid into its breech in order to repeat the process. At the time he planned the attack, multiple spurts of flame had seemed both necessary and reasonably safe. He had not fully appreciated the way the fire clung like a solid thing wherever the fluid had ignited. The interior of the great tube must contain thousands of hot spots which would turn a fresh draft of fluid into a fireball at the breech end this time.
But that was the concern of others, while the wall was a matter for Vibulenus and the nineteen men with him.
The lower rows of that wall were blocks two feet high and three across. Their thickness was concealed until the first one was prised out, and Clodius Afer was already organizing that. The centurion wedged the thicker edge of his pick-mattock into one vertical crack while Niger and another legionary ran their crescent-bladed turf-cutters over the upper and lower surfaces of the block against which he was prying.
Vibulenus chopped the mattock blade of his own tool against the remaining edge of the block so that he and Clodius could thrust against one another. They all carried ordinary pieces of entrenching equipment, though some of the soldiers began using their swords because the blades reached deeper into the interstices of the wall. The blocks themselves were of fine-grained stone which showed no tendency to split or shatter, but the mortar in which they were laid had burned to powder.
Clodius gave a shout and leaned sideways against the head of his tool, levering that end of the block three inches from the line of the wall in a shower of gritty mortar. The tribune shouted also in unconscious imitation and thrust back, using the greater leverage of the helve. Blood and pus from his blistered palms gleamed on the hickory shaft, but Vibulenus did not notice it. The stone, already loosened and held by decreasing friction as more of it was tugged clear of its fellows, shifted even farther than it had at the centurion’s thrust.