A trio of ballistas fired from the battery a furlong behind the rampart on which Vibulenus now crouched. The artillery's arms slammed against the padded stops, lifting the rear mounts from the platform until gravity thudded them back.
Two of the missiles were head-sized stone balls which crashed into the battlements of the tower. One ball disintegrated while the other caromed off nearly whole, in a shower of fragments battered from the wall. It would be possible to breach the fortress with ballista stones, but it would take bloody forever…
The third ballista sent a pot trailing smoke in a low arc over the wall of the fortress.
"Eat that, you bastards!" shouted a legionary farther down the guardwalk, but the sight did nothing to improve Vibulenus' state of mind.
The locals in this place, where the sun was too white and the days too long, brewed a liquid that burned like the air of the Jews' Gehennum. Pitch, sulphur, quicklime, bitumen, and saltpetre were dissolved in heated vats of naphtha, the foul-smelling fluid that pooled like water in many of the valleys hereabout. Shot over the walls in firepots like the one the ballista had just flung, it destroyed the defenders' housing, panicked their livestock and-who knew?-perhaps killed somebody.
But the same fluid, poured by the hundreds of gallons from the top of the tower, had devoured in flames the original siege ramp across which the legion had expected to storm to victory.
It wasn't that a flame attack had been unexpected. Galleries had protected the soldiers as they built the ramp closer to the walls. They were covered with raw hides over a layer of green vegetation that acted as a firebreak, as well as a cushion against heavy stones. The framing of the siege ramp was timber and theoretically flammable, but no one had believed that freshly-cut logs, none of them less than eighteen inches in diameter, were at any real risk.
The defenders had waited until the face of the ramp had advanced within ten feet of the fortress and the log-corduroyed upper surface of the Roman construction was nearly on a level with the battlements of the wall proper. Then, despite arrows showered by the trading guild's local auxiliaries, they had thrust spouts through the crenellations of the tower defending the vulnerable angle on which the Roman attack was centered.
From the spouts, dispersed and carried outward by gravity, came the fluid which clung and blazed and could not be extinguished. Water only spread the flames and made them burn the harder by igniting the quicklime. Even dirt and sand, shovelled desperately onto the fires by some of the quicker-thinking legionaries, rekindled only minutes later when the hell-brew soaked to the surface.
There was an hour of havoc and terror, men lost and equipment destroyed-tools, battering rams, and the galleries which were meant to protect them. But, as the defenders continued to spew fluid on the ramp from which every living thing had been driven, the framing timbers themselves caught fire. The flames continued to spread until the entire quarter-mile width of the siege ramp had become involved.
The flames rose higher than the granite tower which had spawned them, and the smoke lifted a thousand feet before spreading into a pall that hid the sun for three days and wrapped the corpse of the legion's expectations. Artillery on platforms a furlong back from the nearest flames was ignited by the radiant heat, and the ramp's filling of earth and rubble turned to coarse glass which crumbled and gouged when the legion finally began the task of rebuilding.
The defenders' artillery was light, catapults which shot arrows from ordinary bows instead of using the power of springs twisted from the neck sinews of oxen. As a result, they could not hurl firepots against their besiegers and spread their yellow flames along the teams of men and oxen dragging fresh material up the ramp. Few of the legionaries doubted, however, that this attempt would end in as complete a disaster as the first, once the siegeworks advanced to within ten or so feet of the tower's face.
"The trouble is," said Vibulenus, "these little furry wogs know what they're doing."
He was on a needless tour of the advanced works, to inspect them and report back to the Commander. The tribune could by now have figured within a foot how closely the ramp approached the fortress, calculating from the amount of material that had been carried forward since the most recent tour of inspection. Timber was the limiting factor since the nearer slopes had been denuded to form the initial works. The legionaries were stretching the available wood this time by using fascines of rolled wickerwork to bind each advance of the siege ramp; but even so, heavy logs were needed as pilings to anchor the fascines against the weight of the fill behind them.
The unsteady ruin of the former ramp was more detriment than gain as a foundation, and Vibulenus was not alone in dreading the way the wicker underpinning would burn, despite the layers of sod intended this time to cover the works on the final approach.
"Too right," Clodius agreed, giving the trembling arrow a nod which showed that he mistook the tribune's meaning. "I don't think much of their bows-they're quick, sure, but they're no problem with armor the way the Parthians, they shot us't' dogmeat. But some of 'em could shoot out a crow's eye, looks like."
"I mean…" Vibulenus said, focusing on a great timber, an entire treetrunk over a hundred feet long, being dragged up the approach. The teamsters, locals driving the draft animals which looked very similar to the way the tribune remembered oxen looking, would halt out of arrow range until darkness.
"I mean," the younger man continued now that he thought he could phrase his statement so as not to seem to rebuke Clodius, "They're too good all over. Good with their bows-" one of the auxiliaries chose that moment to rise and pump three arrows smoothly toward the tower, ducking back before an answering shot "-good on their fortifications, good on everything. We've been fighting dumb barbs too long."
"They can't meet us in the field," said the centurion, more sharply than he would have spoken had not his pride been touched.
"We'd eat 'em for breakfast," Vibulenus agreed easily. He was watching now and thinking about the timber, suitable for a ship's keel, as it inched up the ram under the labor of forty yoke of oxen. "But we don't have anything like that fire of theirs, either."
"We don't need it," insisted Clodius Afer, misunderstanding again. "They've built with stone, and they got the height besides. We could pour the stuff down the face a' that wall all day and it wouldn't bring down the tower. Hercules, they nigh did that when they, you know… The other ramp."
The works were lightly manned since the previous disaster. The Commander might not care about the legionaries as individuals, but he must have been telling the truth about their value to his precious guild. The irretrievable loss of twenty-seven men at a blow had shocked him as grievously as it had the survivors of the conflagration. He had agreed without hesitation when the tribunes and senior centurions insisted at the following staff meeting that it was better to risk a sally by the defenders than to risk the legion as a whole in a sudden firestorm.
From the Fourth Century, picketed to the immediate right of the section which Clodius' century held, a non-com was scrambling along the guardwalk toward Vibulenus. It might be Niger, promoted to watch clerk when Clodius took the neighboring century. That would be a pleasure, because there was very little fraternization across the ranks when the legion was in the field- and they had been in the field an unexpected three months already, with victory more distant every day that brought no beneficial change…
"Maybe they'll run out of food," Vibulenus said glumly. He drew his sword and held it so that on the polished flat of the blade could be seen the reflected tower, blurred and less substantial than the reality that was worth a man's life to view from this close up. "Or water."