himself killed, would get in the way and get the others killed.
Demetrius saw his kyrios emerge from the tower on to the wall walk below. The northerner set off at a run. With his left hand he – unbuckled and tossed aside his black cloak. It fluttered and rolled down the inner earth ramp. Maximus and Antigonus were with him, six equites singulares right behind. The Dux Ripae was yelling some war cry in his native tongue.
There were eight Sassanids in the group by the time Ballista reached them. The nearest one swung overhand at the northerner's head. Ballista brought his sword across his body, rolling his wrist, forcing the blade of his opponent outward then, seemingly in the one motion, launched a backhanded cut which landed heavily in the Persian's face. As the first Sassanid fell sideways Ballista aimed a series of heavy blows at the next man, who covered up and cowered behind his shield.
Demetrius watched, heart in mouth; so much going on at once. Maximus killed a Persian. Then Antigonus another. One of the equites singulares went down. More Sassanids were falling than Romans. More Sassanids were falling than were getting off the ladder and on to the battlements. A group of Iarhai's mercenaries was attacking from the far side. Ballista unleashed a barrage of savage cuts which drove an easterner to his knees, battered his shield aside, thrust the spatha sickeningly into his face. As the kyrios put his boot on the man's chest to pull his sword out he half slipped. The walkway was slick with blood. A Sassanid seized the opportunity to lunge forward, catching Ballista's helmet a glancing blow. With his left hand the northerner swept off the damaged helmet. With his right he parried the next blow. One of Iarhai's mercenaries drove a sword into the Persian's back.
It was done. As if at a signal the three Sassanids still standing turned and scrambled for the elusive safety of the ladder. All three were cut down from behind.
Ballista rubbed the sweat from his eyes. He looked up and down the wall. There were no easterners still on the wall walk. Still taking care, crouching behind the battered crenellations, he looked over the wall. It was done. Panic was spreading through the Sassanid ranks. Where before individuals, the wounded, real or pretend, had been making their way back to the camp, now there were small groups. As Ballista watched, whole bodies of warriors turned and fled. The trickle had become a flood. Shapur's assault had failed.
'Ball-is-ta, Ball-is-ta.' The chants rang across the plain, taunting the retreating Sassanids. 'Ball-is-ta, Ball-is-ta.' Some of the legionaries howled like wolves, the story of the Dux's father Isangrim turning from something to mock into a source of strange pride.
Ballista waved to his men, shook hands with or hugged those around him. As he was released from Maximus's bear hug, the northerner recognized the leader of the group of Iarhai's mercenaries.
'What the fuck are you doing here?' His voice was harsh. His concern for her was making him angry.
'My father was… indisposed. So I brought the men you asked for.' Bathshiba met his gaze. One of her sleeves was torn, a smear of blood showing.
'Allfather, but this is no place for a girl.'
'You did not object to my help just now.' She stared up at him defiantly.
'That was you?'
'Yes, that was me.'
Ballista mastered his anger. 'Then I must thank you.'
XIV
The stricken plain beyond the western wall of Arete was a ghastly sight.
From the roof of the gatehouse there was a panoramic view of the horror. Like flotsam thrown up on the shore after the storm has spent its fury, the Sassanid dead lay in distinct waves across the plain. The furthest wave was some 400 to 200 paces from the wall. Here the dead lay as individuals; crushed by a stone, skewered by a bolt, grotesquely half sunken in the ground in the trap which had killed them. The next wave ran almost to the wall. Here the dead at least had company, lots of company. They lay in lines, groups, even low hillocks. Here they had found another way of dying. The often brightly dyed feathers of arrows fluttered in the fresh southerly breeze. Bright, gay, like bunting at a festival, they added an inappropriate, macabre touch to the scene of devastation. Finally, there was the horror below the wall. Piled on top of each other, three, four, five high, they concealed the earth. Smashed, twisted and broken, the corpses here were almost all burnt.
For eighteen years, more than half his life, Ballista had had a particular horror of being burnt alive. Since the siege of Aquileia, everywhere he had served he had seen men die in flames. The High Atlas Mountains, the green meadows of Hibernia, the plains of Novae by the Danube, all had brought forth their crop of the burnt ones and here they were again at the foot of the wall of Arete; hundreds, possibly thousands of Sassanids burnt by naptha and white-hot sand, their thick black hair and tightly curled beards reduced to charred wisps, their skin, turned orange, peeling away like singed papyrus, obscene pink flesh showing raw underneath.
Although there was the continuous low buzz of innumerable flies, the bodies looked strangely uncorrupted. It had been thirteen days since the assault. On comparable bloody fields in the west, Ballista knew that after four days the corpses would have begun to rot, fall apart, become unrecognizable. Here, the corpses of the Sassanids seemed to be drying up like dead tree trunks, without putrefaction. Turpio, boasting his local knowledge, put it all down to diet and climate; the easterners ate more frugally and were anyway desiccated by the dry heat of their native lands.
The Sassanids had not gathered their dead. Possibly they thought it would be interpreted as a sign of weakness if they asked for a truce to collect them. Maybe it was just unimportant, given that they would then expose the corpses to the birds of the air and the beasts of the fields. Ballista noted that religious scruples had not held them back from looting the dead. No one could leave the city of Arete; all the locals were refugees, in the town or elsewhere or – the gods have mercy on them – prisoners of the Persians – yet every morning more of the corpses were naked; armour, clothes and boots gone. The scavengers could only come from the Sassanid camp.
Thousand upon thousand of dead Persians; it was impossible to estimate their numbers. Demetrius told how the Persian king calculated casualties. According to Herodotus, before a campaign 10,000 men would stand packed as closely as possible together. A line would be drawn around them. They would be dismissed. A fence, about navel-high, would be constructed on the line. Ten thousand men at a time, the army would be marched into the paddock until all had been counted. At the end of the campaign the procedure would be repeated, and the King of Kings could find out how many men he had lost.
Bagoas laughed a bitter laugh. He claimed to know nothing of this Herodotus, but clearly the man was a liar or a fool. What good would it do to know casualties to the nearest IO,OOO? In reality, before Shapur, the beloved of Mazda, went forth to chastise the unrighteous, he had each warrior march past and drop an arrow. When the Mazda-worshipping King of Kings returned freighted down with fame and plunder from the lands of the non-Aryans he had each warrior pick up an arrow. Those arrows remaining gave the number of the blessed who had gone to heaven.
Demetrius shot the Persian boy a vicious look.
Ballista did not press the matter. He knew that the actual number of Persian dead was unimportant. Another hundred dead, another thousand dead – in itself, it made no odds. Given their overwhelming numerical superiority, it was not the Sassanid bodycount that mattered but their willingness to fight, and Shapur's willingness to commit them to fight. Ballista knew that to save the town of Arete he had to break one or the other. He suspected that the Persians would crack before their King of Kings.
Roman casualties were by comparison negligible. Yet they were higher than Ballista had anticipated, higher than was sustainable. The Sassanid arrow storm had been like nothing the northerner had experienced before. For a time he had thought it would empty the battlements of defenders unaided. If the easterners could be brought to repeat it for three or four days in a row, the defenders would simply run out of men. But Ballista knew that no troops in the world could stand before the walls of Arete day after day and take the casualties the Sassanids had endured.
On the Roman side, the bowmen had suffered most. The six centuries of Cohors XX Palmyrenorum had suffered over 50 per cent casualties. Each century was now down to just fifty effectives. The legionaries of Legio