attack lay between those rivers; the other sides of the hill fort had approaches that were too steep for a proper assault.
‘As you said, Aquila, if this place falls, it will break the spirit of Iberian resistance.’ Aquila smiled, knowing that his general, who was not one for hyperbole, had not finished. ‘The question is, will our spirit survive to see it destroyed?’
Aquila felt that he was seeing something familiar that he recognised from a dream, but it was hard to tell if that was true or just wild imagination. He had heard so many tales about the place, he felt he knew every stone and earthwork by heart. All around them the legionaries were hard at work constructing a camp, which seemed the wrong course of action. As always, when faced with a problem, he took his eagle in his hand, something Titus observed.
‘Does that bird have the power to divine the future?’
The quaestor smiled at him. ‘Many people have thought so.’
‘Like every man in the legions,’ he continued, answering the look on Aquila’s face. ‘I’ve had no end of hints, friend, that I should consult your charm, so that we can all get out of this alive. The men have great faith in it and no faith at all in the priests and their chickens.’
Titus looked again at the fortress of Numantia, a place so much stronger than he had ever imagined, a site that truly lived up to its reputation. For the first time since they had set out, he considered that he might have to order a retreat, wondering if even the novel tactic he had decided to employ would work on such a formidable obstacle. His mind went back to the conference he held on his return from the south, to the looks on the faces of his officers as he outlined his plan to turn Brennos’s great defensive bastion into a trap.
‘Our weapon, gentleman, is a combination of action and inaction. We will make breaches in the wall of the fort, and men will die doing so, but we will have plenty of time to rest between assaults.’
The eyes that had fixed on him then, in a look brazenly enquiring, had been those of his quaestor and they had quite plainly posed the question: what are we going to do about all the tribesmen not in the hill fort? Titus knew he had truly gained Aquila Terentius’s trust at that point, for as he spoke, the look in the eyes changed from challenge to wonder. He told them that he intended to build a wall all the way round Numantia, interspersed with forts that Brennos’s allies would have to attack. He would besiege the enemy within, while those without would be forced to attack him in a situation heavily to their disadvantage. Such a situation would discourage them, and once that happened, he would detach enough men to fight their way back to the coast, opening up a supply route which meant he could stay in front of Numantia forever.
Like all plans, it looked good on paper; now, with the task visible before him, it was less so. But Aquila’s next words, delivered with such heart-warming conviction, chased any thoughts of failure away. ‘If we can eat, General, and they can’t, then they must eventually surrender.’
Titus looked at the terrain. Apart from the fertile strip by the river it was rocky and inhospitable, no place to camp an army unless regular supplies could be guaranteed. He would have to forage for several weeks, living off the land, but it was also no place for the people inside the fortress to grow food other than that one plateau, which could not sustain them forever. Their hillsides were more barren than the plain.
‘A tough nut, Aquila, but seemingly not impossible. I suggest we ride round the place and see where we should site our forts before it gets dark.’
They all knew Marcellus’s orders, nor had he missed the looks — part uncertainty, part mistrust. The galleys weighed anchor and, to loud cheers from the massed ranks of the Lusitani, they swung their bows to head out of the bay. The warrior chieftains might have wondered why they formed up and rowed out to sea abreast of each other — a manoeuvre Marcellus had been forced to employ, and there was no way of knowing if that would allow those on the beach to guess the truth. The fog was thinning as the morning sun burnt it off, but it was still enough to swallow them up, while all the time his single drum beat the pace for the whole fleet.
‘I see no other way to split them up,’ he said to Regimus. ‘If we decline to go ashore and wait until the fog lifts, then their ships will simply run away. They know they can’t stand against quinqueremes.’
‘Would that not count as a victory?’ asked Regimus.
‘No!’ snapped Marcellus. ‘We have to land sometime and beat them in battle, and that applies to their ships as well. We’re here to stay.’
‘I still think you’re taking a terrible risk, Legatus,’ said Regimus, who had remained formal ever since he had issued his commands.
Marcellus ignored him, calling softly to the oar master to keep his time steady. Another man stood beside him counting off the number of strokes and, as he reached a thousand, the oar master gave a quick drum roll. Regimus pushed the sweep and the rowers on one side lifted their oars so that the galley swung round in its own length. Timing at this point was crucial and Marcellus left the decision as to when they were fully round to Regimus. The older man called to the oar master, who gave another quick roll on the drum, before reinstating his steady beat, which increased slowly as the oars bit into the water. By the time the line of galleys emerged once more from the fog, they were going at battle speed, racing towards the shore in line abreast, Marcellus, in the bows, relieved to see that his enemies had done that which he expected; he had no need to abort his progress. Instead he called for more effort.
The Lusitani, thinking the Romans had departed, had broken ranks and they were milling about like a mob, half still on shore, the rest anything from ankle- to knee-deep in the shallows. The horns sounded in panic as their chieftains tried to reform them, which only added to the confusion. The gorgeously clad warrior who had challenged them to battle was in the water, in front of his men, using the boss of his shield to try to get them back into line. Marcellus watched the shore eagerly as it came near, and also the two galleys on either side as they edged slightly closer to his vessel. The men in the bows were standing by to release the corvus, the bridge that dropped from the front of the ship, which would provide a dry and defensible route for his soldiers to get ashore.
The Lusitani, still disordered, swept forward to form a ragged line in the shallows, just behind their leader, their indiscipline playing further into their enemies’ hands. They expected the Romans to heave to, anchor, then wade ashore. It was impossible to count how many, hemmed in by those behind them, died in the shallow water, crushed by the quinqueremes’ bows as Marcellus drove all his ships at ramming speed into the soft sand of the beach. Their leader was one of them, his gold-embossed metal breastplate cracking like a nutshell as the prow drove over him, sending his blood flowing outwards to stain the clear blue water. The wooden bridges, with their evil spikes, dropped onto the heads of the tribesmen, disabling even more and, as Marcellus’s troops careered across them, the Lusitani found the Romans in their midst. The sailors, obeying their orders, rushed like Egyptian acrobats along the oars, which were raised out of the water, with each galley now so close that they interlocked. Quickly they lashed them together so that the entire fleet presented a solid line that could not be penetrated, either by the warriors on the shore, or the ships that would come in to aid them, should the fog disperse.
To begin with, it was a series of individual combats, not a battle, but the Romans had the advantage. They could, if driven back, retire to a safe and unassailable base: their galleys. Once they gained a foothold on the beach, they could be reinforced, fanning out to form a proper line. The battle raged back and forth, but every movement, in either direction, cost the lives of more Lusitani warriors than Romans. Marcellus, once he was sure his fleet was secure, personally led the main assault from his galley, for the first time in his life truly at liberty to use those skills he had learnt as a boy and a man on the Campus Martius.
He was the first to get a sizeable body of legionaries ashore. The men at the oars, now armed and numerous, poured onto the beach behind him, his advance party forming a line that the tribesmen could neither breach nor destroy. The men from the next galley to the right, after a hard fight, linked up; and, in time, the same thing happened on the left, until the entire foreshore was in Roman hands. The legionaries, at the command, advanced steadily, pushing back the tribesmen until the majority of them were penned against the rocks that surrounded two sides of the bay. Some escaped up the gentle incline in the centre, driven hard by the pursuit, but most died where they stood, their blood turning the golden sand to deep red.
Marcellus had floated his ships off on the rising tide before the fog lifted. The small Lusitani ships, numerous and loaded with men, looked upon a scene they had never thought to see. Floating before them lay an impenetrable line of battle-ready quinqueremes, while just inland the Romans were occupied building a stockade.
Their horses’ heads drooped wearily by the time Titus and Aquila returned; the sun was well down in the sky and would be gone within the hour. Their tents were up, with hot water waiting and the air full of the smell of food. Fabius, with his usual scrounger’s ability, had found the ingredients for a sumptuous meal, including several large fish from the nearby river.
