“I think we underestimated our local allies, a bit,” Vibulenus said, looking up. Another sleet of arrows crossed one of the moons—even now the size and reddish cloud-streaked color of it made his spine crawl slightly.
Clodius Afer grunted, shrugging his thick shoulders under the mailcoat. “Easy enough when they’re sitting up in them towers, sir,” he said.
Vibulenus nodded. The centurion had a point, but it was a bit of a parochial one. Bowmen couldn’t slug it out like Roman legionary infantry, granted. But they could be extremely effective when used properly; Parthia, and campaigns since, ought to have taught them that.
“They needed something to keep those spearmen and axemen off them,” he said musingly, wiping the palm of his right hand down the leather strips that made a skirt under his tribune’s cast-bronze armor. “The way . . . the way those Parthians could ride away from us, shooting us up and we couldn’t catch them, you see?”
Afer grunted again; by the sound of it, he did see. “They’re killing a lot of the barbs,” the squat man said. “But it ain’t going to stop ’em.”
Vibulenus picked up his shield. It was lighter than the oval scutum of the legionaries, although it didn’t give the same degree of protection to the left leg—the leg you advanced in combat. It also had a loop through which he slid his forearm, and a handhold near the rim, rather than the single central handgrip of the line infantry’s shield. It was Greek in form, like the rest of his gear. Romans had beaten Greeks all the way from Epiros to Syria, talking less and hitting harder—but when Roman aristocrats went to war, they wore gear that wouldn’t have been out of place in Alexander’s army. There was an obscure irony to that, he thought.
“You’re right,” he went on aloud. “They’re not stopping for shit.”
They did pause on the nearer edge of the ditch, massing before they charged. Arrows and sling bullets were slapping into them in a ceaseless barrage; he could see laborers bringing more ammunition up the ladders that marked the rear faces of the towers, out of the corner of his eye. The screams seemed to be as much rage as pain out there, though.
Hmmm. They’re waiting for the ladders to be handed up out of the ditch . . . no, they brought enough to leave those. They’re handing fresh ones forward, and bundles of brushwood.
Even dumb barbs learned, eventually. That was one reason his father had approved of Caesar, Crassus’s political ally, and his conquest of the Gauls. You had to overrun them before they learned too much. Roman politics, more distant than those alien moons . . .
The enemy rushed forward again, the long rough-made ladders in the front ranks. Those dissolved in screaming panic as they ran full-tilt into the “stimulators,” covered with hay and invisible in the night anyway. Thousands piled up before that jam, throwing the front ranks full-length into the barbed iron. More hands took up the fallen ladders, walking forward cautiously, or simply over the writhing bodies of their predecessors. The archers and slingers and the ballistae the Romans had made switched their point of aim to the pileup behind the first ranks. Big figure-eight shields went up in an improvised roof, but most of the projectiles punched right through the light leather-and-wicker constructions.
“Still comin’,” Afer said expressionlessly, the thick fingers of his right hand absently kneading the hilt of his sword.
“Not as many,” Vibulenus said.
The legion’s Tenth Cohort was drawn up behind them, a reaction force ready to rush to any part of the fortifications where the enemy made a lodgment. As they would, as they would . . .
“Holding them up like that in a killing ground, it’s really softening them up for us,” Vibulenus said. “Wouldn’t care to meet all of them in an open field.”
Afer grunted again, too proud to say aloud what they both knew; that horde would have overrun a single legion in a single shrieking rush. It could be done—the Cimbri had done it to three consular armies, before Marius caught them and smashed them. You needed a really good commander and enough numbers to keep from being flanked. Then, yes you could kill naked barbs like this all day until your arm got tired from gutting them.