Vibulenus grimaced slightly. He’d have forbidden taking any of them in, too; the Roman force and their auxiliaries had only about thirty days of supplies. But he’d have let them through and into the countryside, at least. None of them were fighting men. At least the stink of rotting meat wouldn’t be quite as bad then.
“I think they’re having trouble organizing their supply train,” he said in a neutral tone, by way of replying to the other’s question.
The enemy host sprawled out to the edge of sight was stunning, even in the dark. They’d built bonfires of their own, too. Painted figures in masks and bones capered and screamed around them, in religious rite or propitiation or sorcery or some unimaginable alternative. Other figures screamed and writhed in wicker cages on platforms built above the fires, sacrifices roasting slowly and then tumbling down as the supports under their containers burnt through. Between and behind the fires the enemy warriors seethed, like maggots spilled out of a putrid corpse. The firelight made the edges of their weapons a twinkling like stars on a broad lake, eddying and milling as far as sight could reach.
“Organize their supply train?” Clodius Afer asked. “Sir, them, they couldn’t organize an orgy in a whorehouse. Three gets you one they’re starving already, and it’s less than a week since they showed up.”
“So, yes, they’ll come,” Vibulenus said. “Soon, I think. Tonight. They can signal to the fortress, light reflected on mirrors.”
The eddying and swirling was beginning to take on a pattern, and drums were beating among the enemy. A minute later he decided that it was warriors pounding the butts of their spears or the backs of their axes against the rawhide inner surface of their shields. For a while it was discordant babble, and then more and more of them fell into a rhythm. Tens of thousands of impacts per second, not all together because the enemy force was simply too large, but it rippled across the Romans like thunder echoing in a mountain pass.
The noise was so stunning that Vibulenus missed the shouts and crashing noises coming from behind him for a moment. A runner came up, panting.
“Sir,” he gasped. “Senior Centurion Rusticanus reports the enemy in the fort is making sorties—all three gates. They’ve got hurdles to fill the ditches, portable bridges, and grappling irons and ladders.”
Vibulenus felt his mind go cold, into a distant place where everything moved like stones on a gaming-board. “My compliments to the First Spear, and carry on,” he said.
“Hercules,” Clodius Afer said. “Here they come.”
The numbers of the barbarians charging forward towards the outer face of the Roman works were stunning. Not exactly frightening—not the way standing helpless under the Parthian arrow-storm had been frightening—but . . . impressive.
The light of the fire-baskets extended out as far as the initial deep trench. As the enemy reached it and bunched at the further edge, the catapults and onagers along the line of the siege works opened up. The torsion springs of the smaller devices threw six-foot javelins, or ten-pound rocks. Darts pinned three and four together at a time; rocks shattered torsos into loose bags of blood and splintered bone and exploded skulls with the finality of a hobnailed sandal coming down on a cockroach. The heavier throwing machines were usually used to batter down stone walls; here they threw man-heavy rocks into a target impossible to miss, sending the great rocks bounding and skipping through channels of pulped flesh. The horde ignored it, dropping into the great ditch, handing down ladders, propping them against the inner wall and swarming upward.
A native trumpet shrilled, high and womanish. The towers along the Roman lines were crowded with the local auxiliaries, foot and chariot crews both. Arrows lifted in clouds, driven by the powerful horn-and-sinew bows, their three-bladed steel heads winking in the firelight. Lead bullets whistled out, hard to see in daylight and invisible now. Many of the auxiliaries were using staff slings, with the cord fastened to a yard-long hardwood handle. Lead shot from weapons like those could punch right through a heavy-infantry shield and kill the man behind it through his armor. There was plenty of ammunition.