and human off the road, cursing them foully for dawdling. Warned by an urchin who ran errands for them, the contubernium of ten legionaries hurriedly stopped playing dice and tumbled out of the guardroom. Pulling their equipment into order, they came to attention.
The Dux Ripae gently pulled up his horse. He held up his hand, and his entourage of four halted behind him.
The customs official watched the northerner look over the Palmyrene Gate. Gods, but he was huge; huge and fierce, like all his kind.
'Good day, Telones,' said the barbarian in good Greek, an agreeable expression on his face. He repeated the affable greeting to the boukolos and the legionaries, then indicated to his men that they should move on, and rode out of the city of Arete.
'Nasty-looking brute, isn't he?' The telones shook his head. 'Very nasty. I wouldn't like to cross him. Savage temper – they all have.'
About half a mile from the gate, where the necropolis ended, Ballista reined in Pale Horse. He studied the tower tombs. There had to be at least five hundred of them. Apart from at Palmyra, he had never seen anything like them. Each stood on a square stepped plinth as tall or taller than a man. Above the plinth was a first storey, two or three times as tall again, decorated with plain columns sculpted in relief. Looming above this were another two or three storeys, each resembling a flat-roof house and diminishing progressively in size.
The dead were placed in niches in the walls inside with the precious possessions they would take to the next world. Grieving relatives entered via the sole door and ascended an internal staircase up to the roof to eat a funeral meal. The sealing of the niches and the securing of the tomb were left to the undertakers.
It must have taken generations to build them all, thought Ballista, and we have three months to pull them down. Left standing, they could shelter an attacker from missiles from the walls, act as observation posts, be converted into artillery towers or destroyed by the Persians to provide materials for siege works. The citizens of Arete would hate it, but the eternal resting place of their ancestors had to be razed to the ground.
'Demetrius' – as he started to speak, Ballista saw that his secretary had his stylus poised – 'we will need cranes with wrecking balls. We will need haulage – lots of ox carts for the bigger debris, donkeys for the smaller.' Ballista paused to make sure that the Greek could keep up. 'And lots of labour. There are said to be 10,000 slaves in the town. We will requisition every able-bodied male – that should give us at least 2,500. Then we will impress citizens and employ the troops – hard work, but the soldiers do enjoy knocking things down. In areas where no one is working at the time the ballistae can use the tombs for target practice.' The northerner detected a qualm on his secretary's part. 'Oh, of course, we will let the families remove their loved ones first.'
Ballista played with Pale Horse's ears. 'And would you make a note about security at the gates? The northern and southern postern gates are to be closed unless I order them opened. The guards at the Palmyrene Gate and the Water Gate are to be doubled. Everyone entering or leaving is to be searched, not just for weapons but for messages. I want the searches to be thorough: shoes, seams of tunics and cloaks, bandages, horse furniture – messages can be stitched into bridles as easily as into the sole of a sandal. Let Acilius Glabrio know that I hold him responsible for carrying out these orders.'
Demetrius stole a glance at his kyrios. He seemed to draw energy from violent action, from physical danger. Fighting the Borani in the Aegean, rushing into the burning magazine yesterday – after both, the northerner had seemed invigorated, more purposeful, somehow more fully alive. Long may it stay that way. Gods hold your hands over him.
Demetrius could not stop his thoughts returning to the dream-diviner. The encounter had shaken him. Was the old man a fraud? He could have worked out that he was Ballista's secretary logically. Demetrius had given away the fact that he habitually used dream-diviners when he talked of the doors of ivory and horn through which the gods send false and true dreams. As Demetrius had never consulted the old man before, it could be assumed that he was new to town – and who but Ballista had recently arrived in town with a young well-spoken Greek secretary in tow?
The old man had predicted tumult and confusion, treachery and plotting, possible death. Were the dreams divinely inspired, or was their interpretation more prosaic – a warning, designed to unsettle and undermine? Was it in some way connected to the sabotage of the magazine? Should he tell Ballista? But Demetrius felt obscurely guilty about the whole episode and, more than that, he feared Ballista's laughter.
Yet at that moment Ballista's thoughts were also of treachery; he was also trying to divine the future. If he went over to the Persians and were appointed general, what would be his plan of attack?
He would pitch camp about here; five hundred paces out, just beyond artillery range. In his imagination, Ballista removed all the tombs from the approach, saw the defences as they would be that coming April. He would launch an assault straight away. It would go in across the flat plain – no cover of any sort. From four hundred paces out, artillery bolts and stones would start to fall, his men would begin to die. In the last two hundred, arrows and slingshots would kill many more. There would be traps underfoot, pits, stakes. Then a ditch, more stakes, more traps. The men would have to climb the steep glacis, ghastly things hurled and tipped on to them from the battlements, crushing, blinding, burning. Once the ladders were against the wall, the survivors would climb, hoping against hope that the ladders would neither break nor be pushed over, that they would not be hurled to the bone- breaking ground. And then the final few would fight hand to hand against desperate men. The assault might succeed. More likely, it would fail. Either way, thousands of the attacking warriors would die.
A plain covered in dead and dying men, a failed assault – what would Shapur do? Ballista thought of everything Bagoas had told him about the Sassanid. It was vital to understand your enemy, to try and think like him. Shapur would not be deterred. He was king by the will of Mazda; it was his duty to bring the bahram fires to be worshipped by the whole world. This town had played him false before, opened its gates then massacred his garrison. This latest rebuff would be but another sign of the evil nature of its inhabitants. He was Shapur, King of Kings, not some northern barbarian warlord little better than the warriors he led, not some Roman general terrified of the emperors' disapproval. Casualties would not be an issue: the men who died would be blessed, their place in heaven assured. Shapur would not desist. He would not rest until everyone in the town was dead or in chains, until only wild beasts slunk through the ruined streets of Arete.
The party moved on to the entrance to the southern ravine. Here they dismounted and led their horses down the stony slope. Ballista went first, boots sliding on loose stones, slipping in the mud. At the bottom it was wider and they could remount and descend further. By the time the walls of Arete loomed high on the left they were deep indeed.
It was obvious at a glance that no one in their right mind would try and storm the southern wall of the town. It would take an age to ascend for the slope was long and steep and, apart from the occasional small thorny shrub, the side of the ravine was completely bare. Open to any missiles from above, it was a perfect killing ground.
Not that the side of the ravine could not be climbed at all. There was a postern gate at the top, and it was crisscrossed with paths or goat tracks. A guard would have to be kept. Many towns had fallen because the attackers had climbed difficult places that the defenders had neglected to watch. But only surprise or treachery could get the enemy into the town here.
As they rode on, the ravine opened out in front of them. From this distance, the city walls were invulnerable to attack by ballistae. Ballista noticed a large number of caves high up the slope just under the walls. Several vertiginous paths led to them.
'They are tombs, Dominus,' one of the cavalrymen said, 'Christian catacombs.' He spat. 'They don't want to be buried with the rest of us in our necropolis, and we don't want their corpses there.' He spat again. 'If you ask me, they are the cause of all our problems. The gods have looked after us, held their hands over the imperium for centuries. Then along come these Christians. They deny the gods exist, will not offer sacrifice. The gods are annoyed, withdraw their protection, and you get the time of troubles. Stands to reason.' Thumb between index and forefinger, he averted the evil eye.
'I know little of them,' said Ballista.
'May the gods keep it that way, Dominus,' replied the trooper, getting into his stride. 'As for their 'Thou shall not kill' bollocks, I would like to see how they feel about that when a bloody great barbarian has his prick up their arse – begging your pardon, Dominus.'
Ballista made a negating gesture as if to say, Think nothing of it, I am often of a mind to inflict anal rape on members of minority religious sects.
The ravine narrowed somewhat, then opened out as it reached the floodplain of the Euphrates. Away to the
