“Something’s wrong,” Scribonius mused, “or else Caesar wouldn't be so worked up.”
As we watched, Caesar jerked his horse around and came galloping back to the formation, giving orders for the artillery to open fire and focus on the gate. This sudden reversal swept through the ranks and we began to talk amongst ourselves, speculating on what could have happened.
“Silete!”
The Pilus Prior seemed more irritable than usual, and I wondered if even he was beginning to get nervous about what was going on. With the artillery all concentrating their fire on the gate, it did not take long before it crashed open, one of the doors hanging by what appeared to be a thread from a distance. Immediately afterwards, the bucina and cornu sounded the advance at the double and the First Cohort peeled away, jogging towards the gates, followed by us, then the rest of the Legion.
“Keep your intervals you bastards,” roared the Pilus Prior as we drew closer, our eyes fastened on the parapets, waiting for men to suddenly pop up and start bombarding us with missiles. Fortunately it never happened; the First Cohort went sweeping through, followed by us immediately behind them, they fanning out to the left as planned, us fanning out to the right. Immediately we noticed that the area of the town surrounding the gate seemed to be deserted, except for a few old men and women, along with some people who looked infirm and weak. This town was arranged in such a manner that it was laid out in two levels; the original part of the town was built on the shelf of the hill and was fairly level, then as it grew, a second level had gotten added that was built further up the slopes of the hill. After a quick search of the lower town, we huffed and puffed up the narrow streets to the second level, finding only more old and sick people. All of these we put to the sword since they held no value as slaves.
It turned out that the only able-bodied men left were the few men on the parapet above the gate negotiating with first the Tribune, then with Caesar. As we descended back down, we saw them by the gate, bound and on their knees, surrounded by the officers and some of the senior Centurions. Despite their state, they looked up at the men surrounding them with defiant expressions, a couple of them even smiling, like they had won some sort of victory, which in a sense they had. It was only after one of them was summarily executed that the others began to talk, finally explaining how the inhabitants of a town, not only combatants but all of the citizens who lived there that could walk, had vanished. One of the men indicated a street that was very hard to spot, branching off the larger street on the side of the town nearest the ocean that led up to the upper town. Because of the stone construction, it blended in as part of the wall that the street followed and was not really visible until you were almost on top of it. Sending a Cohort down the road, they came to a sheltered cove, where the boats that had hauled the people across the river had been moored. With the upper part of the hill above this spot dropping off into a sheer face more than a hundred feet above the water, the approach to the drop was so steep that the men on top of the hill had no way to get close enough to look down and see the harbor. It turned out that even before the sun came up to shine on our army ready to assault the town, the Gallaeci had determined that there was no real way to stop us from taking it. Our reputation preceded us and they knew that we would not just go away until the town fell and once it did, all the people in it would suffer a terrible fate. Therefore, as soon as the sun went down, they began evacuating the place and the only reason the men on the parapet seemed to have a change of heart and ceded the town was because the last of the boats had just pulled away. By the time the last boat that left after the sun came up reached a point where they might have been seen by our men on the hill, their attention was turned completely on the town, this being when Caesar gave the order to make ready to fire on the town with their artillery. Despite ourselves, we held a grudging admiration for the guile and skill of the Gallaeci, even if it meant that we would have to face these same men again.
The town was sacked, except there was little of value left behind, and we were immediately given orders to break camp to resume our pursuit of the Gallaeci. Those Gallaeci who remained behind to stall us were tortured, but it became clear that they did not know where their compatriots were headed. Since they were under no illusion that they would escape their situation alive, there was no need for them to know where the rest of the tribe was headed. This was not good news, because it meant that we were forced to march along the coast, which in this part of Hispania is extremely hilly. While giving us a commanding view of the ocean and the area ahead, it also meant that our pace was considerably slowed, no matter how hard Caesar pushed us. The end of the campaign season was rapidly approaching, betrayed by the cooler nights and shorter days, and it was our baggage train that slowed us the most. At some point every man found himself, his shoulder hard up against the back of a wagon, pushing with all their might as the mules and oxen struggled to pull their load up each hill. In many ways, however, going down the hill presented more risk, since there was a danger of a wagon being too heavy for the beasts to control, so we would use ropes attached to the back of the wagon and act as a multi-man brake to keep the wagon from careening out of control down the hill and smashing into other wagons or our comrades. Despite it being a little more than 30 miles from the town to the spot where we finally caught sight of the Gallaeci, it still took the better part of four days to cover the distance.
When we finally found them, there was a collective groan from the entire army. Our scouts had come rushing back with some sort of news, but it was not until we crested a hill and looked down on what lay before us that we in the ranks saw what we were facing. There was a bay, with a deep inlet that crossed in front of us, cutting some few miles deep into the land, the bulk of Hispania being to our right. Out in the bay were a number of islands, three small ones arranged in a row, crossing to our front perpendicular to our line of march, all clearly deserted. Farther out past that were a pair of islands, arranged parallel to our direction, and much larger. One of them appeared to be deserted as well but even from a distance, the second island, even farther away, was clearly inhabited because of the smoke rising above it that signaled the presence of people. We had to make a sharp right turn in order to follow the inlet around to a point where we were opposite the larger islands and as we drew closer, more details appeared. The larger of the two islands is shaped like a crescent, with the open end facing away from us and on the low hills of the island we could see fortifications. There were a large number of boats of varying sizes pulled up onto the beach opposite where we stood and it did not take a military expert to know that this is where the Gallaeci had fled from the town. To make matters worse, soon after we arrived opposite the first island the scouts came back to inform us that further north, perhaps ten miles ahead, was another island that was fortified in a similar manner. We stood watching the low hills of the first island as the command group conferred and the mood was apprehensive, to put it mildly. Very few of us had any experience on the water, making the idea of getting in boats to be ferried over to either of these islands unappealing in the extreme. However, Caesar was not to be denied, and in truth, it did not make sense for us not to finish the job so we resigned ourselves to our fate and waited to see what we were supposed to do.