With any letter Julia wrote she was bound to enclose a drawing by their son, a scribble of such abstraction that only the boy himself could tell what it depicted. It was ten months since Ballista had seen his son. Isangrim would be growing fast. Changing quickly, but hopefully not out of all recognition.
Battening down his disappointments, Ballista turned back to marshalling his meagre resources to defend the town. The ten new legionaries were assigned to the century of Lucius Fabius at the Porta Aquaria on the grounds that their experience as boatmen might be of more use there than elsewhere. Casualties had been surprisingly light on the day the great battering ram had been burnt and only a few had been lost to occasional Persian arrows or in unfortunate forays until the disaster in which the young optio Prosper died. The centuries of Legio IIII on the desert wall still mustered nearly fifty men each, the turmae of Cohors XX forty. Ballista had reinforced them with another hundred of the levy bowmen from the numerus of Iarhai. The northerner hoped that serving alongside the regulars would both instill resolve in the conscripted townsmen and encourage their expertise. He was very aware that it might go differently, that the lax discipline of the levies might infect the regulars. So far, things seemed to be going as Ballista wished, but he would have liked it if Iarhai would appear more often on the battlements. The grizzled caravan protector seemed ever less inclined to have anything to do with the military affairs of the siege.
As the season advanced to high summer the temperature grew ever hotter. From the walls of Arete mirages could often be seen shimmering out in the desert, making distances difficult to judge, masking the movement of the Persians. For a northerner, the heat was almost intolerable. As soon as clothes were put on, they were soaked in sweat. Sword belts and armour straps chafed, rubbing skin raw. But that was not the worst of it. There was dust everywhere. It got into eyes, ears, mouths, down into lungs. Everyone who was not a native of the town had a persistent hacking cough. The dust somehow penetrated into the very pores of your skin. And then there were the flies and gnats, continually buzzing and stinging, covering any morsel of food, swarming on the brim of every drink.
There were only two moments of the day when it was less than hellish to be outside. In the evening, the temperature dropped as a cooler breeze blew over the Euphrates and the sky turned briefly a lapis-lazuli blue. Just pre-dawn, the wild fowl flew and the bowl of the sky was a delicate pink before the sun was hauled free of the horizon to begin its task of punishing men.
At noon on 6 July, the first day of the festival of the Ludi Apollinares, Ballista was lying in the pool of the frigidarium avoiding the heat of the day. As the bathhouse was the private one attached to the palace of the Dux Ripae, the northerner was on his own. Castricius, his latest standard-bearer, walked in and saluted smartly.
'A large dustcloud has been spotted off to the south, our side of the river, heading this way.'
By the time Ballista had reached his accustomed post on the Palmyrene Gate the dustcloud was unmistakable. A tall, dense, isolated column, it could be caused by nothing but an enormous train of men and animals marching upriver. Most likely, the vanguard would reach the Sassanid camp by early afternoon the next day.
The Persian column made good time. By noon its forerunners could be seen approaching the camp. Line after line after line of camels stretched away as far as the eye could see. Swaying gently, all were heavily laden, some were hauling things along the ground. Ballista saw that there were next to no accompanying troops. The Sassanids were supremely confident.
'What is it? There seem to be very few armed men. That must be good.' Several soldiers smiled at Demetrius's words.
'Unfortunately not,' said Ballista. 'They already have all the warriors they need.'
'Probably more than they want,' said Mamurra. 'They outnumber us by so many they actually could do with fewer mouths to feed. And the danger of plague is always greater with a really large army.'
'Then those camels are carrying food?' Demetrius asked.
'I do not think that we are going to be that lucky.' Ballista wiped the sweat out of his eyes. 'I am very much afraid they carry timber.' The soldiers within earshot nodded gravely but, seeing that the young Greek seemed none the wiser, Ballista continued. 'One of the things that has kept us safe, kept the Persians so quiet for the last couple of months, is the lack of timber around here. What little there was we burnt before they arrived. You need wood for pretty much all siege works – to build artillery, siege towers, battering rams, ladders, mantlets, tortoises and all types of screens. You need wood for pit props if you are mining. Taking a town calls for lots of wood – unless, of course, you just offer the defenders big sacks of gold to go away.'
'If only, Dominus, if only,' said Castricius.
'Yes, indeed, Draconarius, it is a pity that the Sassanids are such bloodthirsty fuckers that they would rather impale us than bribe us.'
It took two full days before the last of the caravan arrived. The Persian camp now flowed over all the plain as far as the hills. Camels bellowed, men shouted, trumpets called. Although all seemed chaotic, some organizing principle must have been at work. Within a day, carpenters could be seen hard at work, the fires of mobile field forges were fired, and strings of unloaded camels were heading off to the north-west.
The camels returned a day later. Gangs of men could be seen unloading bricks. This time it was the praefectus fabrum, Mamurra, who explained the finer points of siege engineering to the young Greek.
'They are going to build a siege ramp to try to overtop the wall at some point. Now, a siege ramp, an agger, is mainly built up out of earth and rubble. But the soil round here is sand, spreads as easily as one of Maximus's women, so they need retaining walls. That is what the bricks are for. The reptiles have not been as idle as we thought. They have been making sun-dried bricks somewhere out of sight, probably up in one of the villages in the hills to the north-west. With all that wood they are making vinae, mobile shelters for the poor bastards who are going to have to build the agger, and artillery to try and fuck our ballistae and stop us killing them all.'
'Thucydides tells that it took the Spartans seventy days to build their siege ramp at Plataea,' said Demetrius hopefully.
'If we can delay them that long it would be good,' Mamurra replied.
'Is there nothing we can do to stop them?'
Ballista slapped a fly on his arm. 'No need for despair.' He looked closely at the squashed insect and flicked it away. 'I can think of something that might work.'
During the night of ao July the Sassanids moved their artillery, thirty ballistae, into range opposite the southern end of the desert wall. Sunrise saw them emplaced behind stout screens some 200 paces out. The artillery duel began again. By lunchtime long chains of vinae were in place, making three long tunnels, at the front of which the beginnings of the ramp began to be evident. The long period of inactivity was over. The siege of Arete had entered a new and deadly phase.
'You look like a man offering a bun to an elephant. Come on, hand it over.' Although Ballista spoke with a smile, the doctor was plainly terrified. He was a civilian. His shabby tunic suggested that he was not at the peak of his profession. He held the arrow in both hands. Or rather, he had both arms held out, palms up, the arrow resting on them. His whole demeanour said, 'This is nothing to do with me.'
Seeing that the doctor was not going to move, Ballista slowly stepped forward. Making no sudden movements, as if the doctor were a nervous horse, he took the arrow. The northerner studied it closely. In most respects it was unremarkable, about two and a half foot long, with a three-bladed and barbed iron arrowhead about two inches long. On this, blood and human tissue were still evident. As with most eastern arrows, the shaft consisted of two parts, a tapering wooden footing joined to a longer shaft of reed. For reinforcement, the join was bound with animal tendon. The shaft was decorated with bands of paint, one of black and two of red. What was left of the three feathers which made up the fletching appeared not to be coloured but a natural white. Possibly goose feathers, Ballista thought.
The arrow shaft bore various cuts and nicks, no doubt the legacy of whatever hooked and hideous instruments the doctor had employed during extraction. But what made this arrow so unusual and potentially so significant was the strip of papyrus unravelling from it. The papyrus had been bound around the very end of the shaft. The feathers of the fletching had been glued on top of it. The papyrus was some three inches long and about half an inch wide. Its inner face was covered with Greek characters written in a small, neat hand. There was no punctuation, but of course that was quite normal. Ballista tried to read it, but he could make out no words. All that emerged was a random-seeming sequence of Greek letters. He detached the coded message and handed it to Demetrius.
'Who did you dig this out of?'
