At the mere sight of this terrible machine the inhabitants surrendered without further struggle.
The destruction of Pirisabora renewed the troops' spirits. With considerable hardship, but now eagerness to match, the troops floundered and sloshed again through the marshes and fields, commandeering dugout canoes and rafts from the inhabitants and running down and slaughtering the disorganized Persian defenders in the swamps. Fourteen miles we traveled this way, a distance that under normal circumstances would be scarcely more than a morning's easy trot, even with the crushing load of gear each man bore on his back. With the flooding and skirmishing, however, the journey took nearly two full days. Small bridges were constructed of planks cut from the spongy wood of palm trees, resting on rock pillars built in the waterways. Where the marshes were too deep, platforms were floated on inflated bladders cunningly sewn together of sheep hides coated with bitumen. We were so close to Ctesiphon we could even smell it; at times, when the wind was from the east, it bore with it faint whiffs of the spices and herbs of a marketplace, a marketplace so massive that only Ctesiphon could contain it. Julian knew that if he could reach the city before the King was able to reinforce its garrison, then its walls and all its wealth — indeed control of the entire Persian Empire — would fall to him.
It was fourteen miles, as I said, until we arrived at the ancient city of Maozamalcha, before which the army stopped and stared in awe. On every side rose steep, high rocks allowing only a narrow approach with winding detours. Huge towers rose over the outcropping nearly as high as the central citadel, itself standing on a formidable, rocky eminence. The land was slightly less severe to the rear of the city, with a slope leading down to the river, yet on these walls the defenders had amassed a fearsome array of artillery and other weapons that prevented attackers from forming up for a sustained assault. Spies informed us that the city's garrison was not the meager, underfed, and undertrained local militia that we most often found defending the battlements in such situations. Rather, the walls were defended by a large detachment of King Sapor's regulars whom he had assigned here before he departed up the Tigris, on the off chance that we might take this approach to Ctesiphon. For once, the hapless King had guessed right.
Julian slowly picked his way around the city on his horse, surrounded by a handful of generals, his deformed shadow Maximus, and a small coterie of light-armed guards, scanning the walls from all angles, careful to remain out of shooting range of the obscenity-shouting defenders on the ramparts. They stopped here and there to examine a landscape feature, the opportunity for an approach, a perceived weakness in the structure of the battlements — there were none. No city is completely impregnable, but it takes a trained eye to envision how a stronghold like this might be taken, and a strong stomach to imagine the consequences of doing so — or of failing to do so. If we were to succeed in our attack on Ctesiphon, this large garrison could not be left at our back.
Late that night, after consulting with Sallustius and his generals, Julian decided on a classic siege approach. He himself would direct the open assault and the placement of the artillery and siege engines. Just as we were leaving the tent after making this decision, the cavalry commander Victor galloped up with a small guard, their faces dimly lit by the sputtering torches they carried.
'What news, Victor?' Julian asked as the man stiffly dismounted from his foam-flecked horse. 'If you miss another strategy meeting we'll assign you to the kitchens.'
'A thousand pardons, Augustus,' Victor mumbled calmly, above the snickers of Maximus and the others. 'I went out last night on reconnaissance down the eastern road and was delayed in returning.'
Julian's expression sobered. 'No trouble, I hope? Any sign of Sapor advancing down the Tigris?'
Victor straightened his shoulders proudly. 'No trouble, Augustus. On the contrary. I rode to the very walls of Ctesiphon and encountered no opposition.'
The gathering went dead silent. Julian stared.
'To Ctesiphon and back, in one day? My God, Victor, that's seventy miles.'
'Yes, sir. There are one or two more forts to be taken, but the garrisons are huddled inside like virgins, afraid to show. The roads are clear. Sapor is nowhere in sight.'
Julian smiled thinly as he glanced around at his officers. 'Men — Ctesiphon is ours.'
IV
The instant the sun shot its first rays over the camp, like bolts fired from a catapult, the long knife slid home. Steaming blood spewed forth in thick, ropy bursts, drenching the spotless white folds and purple hem of Julian's linen gown and pulsing into the large, wrought-silver basin at his feet. The breathing of the quivering animal, stunned in advance with a blow from a poleaxe, subsided into a choked gurgle, and its huge eyes bulged and then clouded as the lifeblood drained from its body. The assembled troops watched silently as the seers' florid prayers to the war god Ares rang in their ears. A moment after the gash was inflicted in the throat, the purple stream hissing into the basin lost momentum and subsided to a low trickle; the trembling head flopped limply to the dust, and with an enormous shudder the animal died.
Immediately the two Etruscan haruspices, dark, smallframed men in conical hoods who had accompanied Julian on all his travels since his apostasy and for whom I had no use, leaped to their tasks with their knives held high in enthusiasm. Slicing open the lower belly with a neat flourish, they beckoned Julian over. Well versed in his technique, he bent down on one knee before the still-quivering animal, inserted both arms up to the elbow into the cavity, which the largest of the two sorcerers struggled to hold open for him, and, after a moment of grunting and tugging, emerged with the glistening purplish liver clutched tightly in both hands like the head of an enemy grasped triumphantly by a barbarian as a trophy. He knelt reverently before the haruspices and Maximus as the three solemnly placed their hands on his head and then on the liver, palpating it, testing its firmness, examining its color and the thickness of its vesicles. Each man finally mumbled some abomination to the gods and daubed a streak of blood on Julian's forehead and temples. Standing erect he raised the liver high above his head, blood pouring in rivulets down his arms, dripping onto his beard and bared chest, staining the sleeves and bodice of his ceremonial vestments, as the assembled troops held their breaths.
'Thus ordain the gods,' he shouted. 'That like unto Alexander in ages past, the Persians must submit, both this city and Ctesiphon itself. So their conquerors shall join the ranks of the immortals, and by the holy blood of this sacred ox shall you, my men, be strengthened and purified for the triumph that awaits you. To conquer!'
'To conquer!' roared fifty thousand voices, a cry that carried to the battlements of the doomed Maozamalcha. 'To conquer!' they repeated again and again, increasing in pitch and volume, aiming to send their message, throbbing and reverberating, to the gates of Ctesiphon itself. 'To conquer!' the voices boomed, and Julian stood motionless, the unspeakable, dripping organ held high over his head, staring at the heavens as the troops raged and raved before him. The enormous pyre behind him, prepared in advance with a stack of cottonlike palm wood smeared with pitch to receive the sacrificial carcass, burst into a ball of flame shooting into the sky, an acrid black smoke pouring in pulses into the air and settling heavily over the men. Their excitement had grown to a fever pitch with the rhythmic chant, and as I glanced at the walls of the city looming high over us, across the river flats I saw the battlements filled with a line of silent Persians. The garrison and the city's inhabitants, thousands of them, had been drawn from other parts of the fortifications in their curiosity at the uproar in the Roman camp below, the soldiers' polished mail gleaming starlike in the early rays of the sun.
Suddenly Julian dropped his bloody arms, passed the liver to Maximus, and drawing a sword turned his back to the men. He faced the lines of artillery and engines that had been set up in the night parallel to the walls: a dozen huge ballistae, their cords wound taut on the massive winches and loaded with enormous, iron-tipped wooden javelins; a row of 'scorpions,' each bearing a boulder the weight of a man, poised in a long net to be whipped slinglike over the top of the lever when the tension on the cords was released; field catapults poised to let fly showers of deadly, thick-stocked bolts; and a thousand archers, long bows at the ready. He thrust his sword into the air in a prearranged signal. With an earsplitting screech that silenced the roar of the men before us, the cords of the engines snapped to and screamed off their reels. Forty massive levers from the engines shot up simultaneously. Oak slammed against iron and iron against earth, and the air became black with boulders and bolts, whistling toward the astonished defenders. The mob of Persians on the wall scarcely had time to blink before the stones slammed into their ranks, each of them carrying away a dozen men at a time. A huge wooden bolt shot completely through a Persian officer's chest armor and impaled three men behind him, leaving holes in their torsos big enough to insert a hand. One scorpion, misfiring from careless loading of the boulder the night before, flipped into the air at the release of its cord and hurled its chassis directly backward, crushing and mangling the body of an engineer so
