stocks of food ample for several weeks. Best of all, they had persuaded the prefect of an auxiliary unit of Dacian spearmen in transit to the east to remain with his men in the city. The unit was less under strength than some, having three hundred soldiers with its standards.
Ballista had been busy – more than busy: he had worked himself to exhaustion. He had ordered the hasty construction of a wall along the quayside to close the inner end of the Lion Harbour. Stakes had been driven into the bed of that harbour and the one below the theatre. Large stones had been dragged up on to all the wall walks, ready to be dropped on approaching Goths. Acquiring the stones, as well as the need to provide construction material for the new wall, had involved the knocking down and smashing of quite a few monuments and many statues. As soldiers would, the Dacian auxiliaries had gone to it with a will. Any number of large metal pots and cauldrons capable of being placed on a fire had been requisitioned. Together with the combustibles and the sand to be heated, they also now waited on the battlements. Arrows with tar-soaked rags tied around their heads were stacked nearby. The aqueduct which entered the city through the south-eastern wall was blocked. At this, the members of the Boule had protested: the waters would not run in the famous nymphaeum; the Baths must be shut. Hippothous had intervened: they could still drink; were not the Milesians justly proud of the sweet water from the deep Well of Achilles?
Physical resources were one thing, manpower was another. Ballista had set about augmenting the three hundred auxiliaries. A sweep of the town, mainly the bars and brothels, turned up regular soldiers detached from their units. These stationarii – on special assignments, on leave or overstaying it – added another ninety trained men. There were one hundred men chosen for the watch of Miletus, and another hundred young men being trained as ephebes. To these Ballista added three thousand citizens, volunteers for the most part, some of whom had in their day received a little military instruction when ephebes. Lastly, there were fifteen hundred slaves, who were provisionally offered their freedom, depending on their performance.
The raggle-taggle defence force had to be armed. The stocks of the few weapons dealers were confiscated. Spears, swords, shields and armour long dedicated in the temples were brought forth, although many of these turned out to be useless with age. Arms kept in private homes, as heirlooms or for hunting, were collected in the agora. All over the city, carpenters and leather-workers were put to making shields. Night and day, the streets were loud with the clangour of blacksmiths beating out javelin and spear heads.
With the limited means at his disposal, Ballista had shaped his plans. The armed citizens and slaves were distributed evenly around the walls. They could throw and drop things; some of them had bows and knew how to use them. But there was little point in keeping any back as a reserve; they would be no use hand to hand against Gothic warriors. The men chosen for the watch and the ephebes had been mixed in with the Dacian auxiliaries and the stationarii. The idea was to pad out the number of the latter and stiffen the former.
Ballista had thought long and hard about how best to deploy his inadequate number of trained men. The first decision he had taken, and he still considered it his best, was to station a hundred and fifty of them in the temple of Apollo Delphinios. There they could cover both the Lion Harbour and the small fishing jetty to its east. Less obviously, they could also prevent any Goths coming down into the main city from the more northerly of the eastern fishing harbours. That this implicitly meant abandoning the northern residential districts to the enemy was something he carefully failed to mention.
Another group of one hundred and fifty he quartered in the Baths of Faustina. These protected the Theatre Harbour and, similarly, they could try to stand in the way of any Goths who had scaled the land walls at the base of the peninsula. Again, in the latter case, the fate of the southern area of houses was not discussed.
From the remainder, he had created six small units of forty men. These were ordered to various important places around the walls: one at each of the two fishing jetties on the east, one where the aqueduct crossed into the city, one each at the Lion Gate and the Sacred Gate in the southern wall, and one in the Western Market.
This left just fifty trained men. Forty of them were to remain with Ballista as his bodyguard and the only reserve. The final ten, aided by a large number of labourers, were to operate the two siege engines he had constructed.
At the siege of Arete, Ballista had seen pieces of artillery which had been hit by enemy projectiles. One had been smashed and had fallen on its side. One of its torsion springs lay horizontally on the ground. The image had stuck in his mind.
An artillery piece was a complicated bit of equipment, hard both to build and to maintain. Two vertical torsion springs each had an arm which powered a slide which threw the stone or dart. Here, Ballista had overseen the creation of two new and radically simplified weapons. A huge torsion spring, made from the long tresses of Milesian women, was set horizontally in a stout wooden frame. Its one arm was winched back almost flat to the ground. A stone was placed in a sort of bowl at the end. Released, the arm sprang vertically. When it hit an upright retaining bar, the stone was hurled.
These improvised artillery he had placed at the foot of the theatre, covering that harbour. There had only been time for a couple of test shots before the Gothic sails had been sighted. The weapons had worked, if with alarming inaccuracy. Ballista hoped the latter would prove less important than the factor of surprise.
Standing on the hilltop in the cool night air, Ballista stretched and yawned. He knew he had done all he could. He had just over five thousand defenders. They outnumbered the Goths in the region of two to one. But only one in ten of his men had any real training. In fighting men, the Goths outnumbered the Milesians about five to one. But the walls would make a difference, and so should the artillery.
High above, the moon fled through the sky. At the end of time, when the snows of Fimbulvetr, the winter of winters, lay across the world, the wolf Hati would run the moon down and devour it. Ballista shrugged the image from his mind. That lay in the future, as did the fight for Miletus. Ballista knew the ways of the Goths. They did not attack at night. He called Maximus and Hippothous to him. They were all bone tired. They might as well get some sleep.
Ballista woke with a feeling of profound dread. Although next to no breeze came through the open window, somewhere in the house a door clicked. Outside, the leaves of the ornamental shrubs rustled. The very air seemed to heave like a swelling sea.
Unwillingly, he forced his eyes open. Nothing. He sat up, looked all around the bedroom. By the faint light of a low lamp, he could see the room was empty. Unsatisfied, he got up, checked the room again. Still nothing. He stepped to the window, felt the cool night air on his face. Nothing disturbed the tranquillity of the moonlit atrium. The humped shapes of the men of his bodyguard slept peacefully.
Ballista lay back on the bed. Strangely, he felt almost disappointed. For most of his adult life he had been haunted by the daemon of the emperor Maximinus Thrax. Intermittently, but always in the dead of night, Ballista would wake to find the huge, hooded figure regarding him.
Julia, true to her Epicurean upbringing, had tried to argue it away: it always happened when Ballista was tired and under extreme pressure; it was no apparition but a figment of his mind. Ballista did not believe her. Twenty-four years earlier, he had broken his oath and killed the emperor he had sworn to protect. The body of Maximinus Thrax had been mutilated, denied burial. Barred from Hades, it was only too likely the dead emperor’s daemon would walk the earth, seek out the one responsible.
Ballista had not seen the daemon since he had killed Quietus. As he fell asleep again, Ballista wondered about the shade of that ephemeral emperor. Another sacramentum broken, another mutilated corpse, another daemon whispering revenge.
‘Wake up!’
Ballista was sunk deep in sleep; it was hard to surface.
‘Wake up, you lazy bastard.’
Ballista forced his eyes open. Maximus’s concerned look and the gentle hand on Ballista’s shoulder belied the Hibernian’s harsh words.
‘At fucking last.’
Ballista threw back the sheet, swung his feet to the floor. ‘The Goths are in the city?’
‘No,’ said Maximus, ‘but they are moving.’
‘You could have let me sleep until they got here.’
Maximus laughed. ‘Sure, are you not the brave one.’
‘What can you do?’ Ballista, having laid down fully dressed, pulled his boots on, reached for his sword belt. ‘Time to go.’
‘No, not until we are armed.’ Maximus hauled the softly shimmering pile of mail towards the bed. ‘ You might
