It was now the third hour. For the third time, Gaius Scribonius Mucianus, Tribunus Cohortis, commanding officer of Cohors XX, had not turned up. Was he deliberately trying to undermine Ballista by showing ostentatious disrespect?
Whatever was happening with the tribune, Turpio had been given a direct order. If the auxiliary unit was not on the parade ground in the next few moments, the first centurion would be later – in the middle, tied to a stake, his ribs bared by the flogging.
Ballista's rising temper was stemmed when a mounted soldier appeared from behind the barracks block and conveyed the request of the first centurion that Cohors XX be allowed to begin its manoeuvres.
The infantrymen of Cohors XX marched on to the campus martius in a column of fives. There should have been 960 of them but, to the various experienced military eyes on the tribunal, it was obvious there was nowhere near that number. The column executed a simple series of manoeuvres, very shabbily: century collided with century, man bumped into man.
The order was given for the first rank to shoot. Ballista counted several seconds between the first arrow and the last. By the turn of the fifth rank, almost all semblance of shooting by volleys had disappeared. For some seconds after the order to cease, arrows still arced through the air. It was a sign of very poor discipline that a bowman who had taken an arrow from his quiver, notched it and drawn his bow would disobey an order rather than go to the trouble of putting it back. The unit's manoeuvring to re-form as a line at the far end of the campus martius was, if anything, worse than its earlier efforts.
'Where the fuck are the rest of them, and how come, of those who turned up, only about half have all their kit?' Maximus whispered in Ballista's ear.
Ballista thought the same. The only redeeming feature that he could see was that the individual marksmanship was not too bad; most of the arrows were fairly closely grouped around the man-sized targets of wood inside the western wall.
A trumpet sounded Pursuit! and, after an interval, two groups of horsemen – presumably two turmae of Cohors XX – galloped on to the campus martius. There looked to be about sixty troopers in each. The nearer appeared to be the turma of Cocceius which had accompanied Ballista from Seleuceia, but the troopers in both groups were so lacking in order that it was hard to be certain of anything. They approached the fixed targets and, as soon as they were within range, began shooting arrows. At fifty yards each trooper wheeled his mount to the right and attempted to execute the Parthian shot, firing backwards over the horse's quarters as he galloped away. As the turmae were not in disciplined columns but rode as two amorphous clumps, this was a manoeuvre fraught with the dangers of trooper shooting trooper and horse colliding with horse. In the event it passed off not too badly. One horse bolted, refusing to turn and galloping straight ahead. Its rider threw himself off before he reached the target area where the arrows were falling. Another horse, turning and finding one of its fellows heading straight for it, dug its feet in and refused. Its rider shot over its neck and was deposited on the sand.
While this was going on, the other three turmae had entered quietly and taken up a four-deep line to the right of the parade ground, but these seemed barely at half strength, about thirty troopers in each. Ballista could see what Turpio was trying to do: to disguise both that the unit was massively under strength and that its units were in a dreadful state of training. The centurion must have stripped men from three of the five turmae to bring just two up to strength, hoping that the antics of these two full-strength turmae would draw attention away from the undermanning of the others.
When the two loose horses had been caught and their troopers remounted, the original two turmae formed up in front of their companions. An order rang out for them each to perform the Cantabrian Circle, little more than a simple piece of formation riding in which a cavalry unit galloped in a circle, always turning to the right to keep its shielded side to the enemy. As each man came to the point closest to the enemy he shot his weapon at a target. Every mounted unit in the empire practised it but Ballista had never heard of a Roman army actually employing it in battle.
At first all went well. The campus was filled with two whirling circles of horsemen, turning in the same direction as the sun. The horses moved at an easy canter. The noise of drumming hooves, the twang of the bows, the whoosh of the arrows tearing through the air, the thump as they hit, bounced back off the walls. Dust rose in the air. More and more arrows flew. Then disaster struck. The only real difficulty with the Cantabrian Circle was if the horsemen lost the line of the circle – cornered too fast, or spun out of the intended path. The latter happened. One horseman strayed from the nearer circle. The frantic efforts of a trooper from the further one to get out of the way merely confused his mount. The collision was sickening. The two horses and men went down in a tangle of limbs and bodies. After a moment one horse struggled to its feet and ran off. Some seconds later, its rider sat up. But the other man lay motionless, and his horse thrashed with awful screams as it tried to rise with a broken leg.
Now there were long delays before the medical orderlies carried off the motionless trooper. Ballista noticed that they used a door instead of a stretcher which showed their complete lack ofpreparedness but, at the same time, a certain ingenuity. It was also some time before the unit's farrier arrived to put down the injured horse. While three men sat on the doomed animal, the farrier pulled its head back. With an almost unbearable affection he stroked its muzzle, then pulled the glinting knife across its throat. The initial spray of blood shot out several yards; then cane the arterial blood. It spread quickly, relentlessly over the sand. The dying horse's efforts to breath through its severed windpipe added a pink foam to the bright-red pool.
Eventually the cohors had clumsily manoeuvred itself to stand before the tribunal. Many of the men had a hangdog air. They looked not at their new Dux but at the ground or at the back of the man in front of them. An unnerving number, however, looked up at Ballista with dumb insolence, the very set of their shoulders challenging this northern barbarian.
What will I say to them? thought Ballista. Allfather, how am I going to play this?
'Silence! Silence in the ranks for Marcus Clodius Ballista, Vir Egregius, Dux Ripae.'
A murmuring continued.
'Silence in the ranks!' bellowed Turpio. This time, there was some response.
'Milites,' said Ballista, 'it seems to me that military manoeuvres have their own rules. Add too much, and the whole thing becomes an over-complicated pantomime but, equally, take too much away, and you are left with nothing to show the skill of the units.' Ballista paused. The murmuring was stilled.
'You carried out very few manoeuvres. The infantry did not adopt skirmish order, did not countermarch. The cavalry tried no complicated manoeuvres; neither the xynema nor the touloutegon.' The murmuring returned. 'Yet you are not to be blamed too savagely. Your depleted numbers and your lack of equipment point to your being neglected by your officers, as do your limited range of manoeuvres and your limited success in carrying them out. Your marksmanship, however, points to your own skill.'
The men were silent. More of them looked up at Ballista. Now it was not just those whose demeanour said 'fuck you' who would catch Ballista's eye.
'By tonight you will have a new commander. In two days' time you will begin to train again. By the spring, Cohors XX Palmyrenorum Milliaria Equitata will be at the peak of efficiency, as befits a proud unit, one established under Marcus Aurelius, one which has campaigned under Lucius Verus, Septimius Severus, Caracalla, Valerian and Gallienus.' Again Ballista concluded: 'All except essential details, to be determined by First Centurion Titus Flavius Turpio, will take a day's leave.'