Against the legionaries with picks, the structure had no protection save the weight of individual blocks. Those were no match for men with the strength and boarhound determination of Clodius Afer and his fellow volunteers. Including Gaius Vibulenus, who —
“Watch it!” ordered the centurion, jumping down and back as the block he was dragging teetered on one corner.
Vibulenus stepped clear and glanced around. To the left of his own little group, a thirty-foot length of facing shuddered down and outward, battering and pinning a number of the legionaries whose individual efforts had combined to something unexpectedly great. The gap rose jaggedly to a peak twenty feet up the surface, a corbelled arch sealed by the wall’s rubble core.
The tremors and release from that slippage sent down not only the block Clodius was removing but three of those above it as well. “Come on, back,” the tribune shouted. He bumped into a soldier who was trying to cover them both with a shield.
Feeling sudden panic at being trapped between moving rock and immobile bronze, Vibulenus slapped the legionary in the middle of the breastplate and screamed, “Back, curse you! Back!”
The shadow slicing across the ruddy inferno above them snapped the tribune’s eyes upward.
The teams had released the ropes which held the hollow log poised just short of the tower battlements. That effort was unnecessary now, especially since the defenders were beginning to desert the remaining walls of the fortress in despair. A collapse of the enemy’s will to fight was more devastating than a breach in his walls — but it had to be exploited immediately, and a few hundred additional legionaries boosting and dragging one another up temporarily undefended fortifications could be worth a week’s grueling siege work after the defenders regained their courage.
The log struck the tower just beneath the flame-wrapped battlements and clung there. Heat threw ripples in the air and made it seem that the whole tower shook. Or else —
“Retreat!” the tribune said, his voice raised but his tone again that of emotionless command as his mind distanced itself from everything physically immediate.
Niger, braced by the centurion, was clambering up the pile of tumbled stone to pry loose another series of blocks. The soldier, still looking younger than the eighteen he had been when captured by the Parthians, had lost his helmet, but sweat plastered his hair to his scalp in a black cap.
Vibulenus gripped Clodius and Niger, each by an elbow. The tribune’s thinking processes were too orderly and multiplex at the moment for him to be surprised that he held two strong men without strain. “The wall’s about to collapse, I think,” he said into the rage-distorted face of the centurion. Clodius was drunk with haste to accomplish his business, and that monomania turned to fury at anything which attempted to frustrate it.
“Get them moving,” the tribune continued coolly, unconcerned that reflex had lifted the pick in Clodius’ hand for a stroke to clear his arm, “Just away from the tower — don’t try to climb back up the ramp. You too, Niger. Get on with it, boys.”
The tone or the look in Vibulenus’ eyes penetrated Clodius’ mind before he recognized the tribune as a friend. He looked up, swore, and dragged the willing Niger with him toward the troops milling to the left of the gap he himself had torn.
“Get moving, ye meal-brained fuckers!” roared the centurion. “This fucker’s about t’ fall on our fuckin’ heads!” Using his pickhandle as a cross-staff and his bellowed certainty as a goad, the squat non-com set up a motion in the troops like that of a wave sucking back from the shore over which it has swept.
Bricks blew out of embrasures midway up the face of the tower. Another floor had collapsed onto a further store of flammable liquids.
Vibulenus turned toward the right flank as Niger and the centurion bullied men to safety in the other direction. He saw no one he knew by name, though soot, helmets and emotion were effective masks. “Run for it, boys!’ he called in cool arrogance, gripping a pair of the nearest men by the shoulder. One of them wore a centurion’s red cross-plume on his helmet. “Get ’em moving before the wall comes down!”