‘Through the main gate in the west wall, or scale the walls themselves, neither of which you’ll be able to do without someone noticing.’
‘We could just wait until Poppaeus storms the fortress and try and grab Rhoteces in the chaos of the attack,’ Vespasian suggested.
‘You could, but if I were Poppaeus I would have a crack squad of legionaries charged with eliminating him and you would find yourselves fighting Romans as well as Getae.’
‘It looks like we’re going to be in the shit, then,’ Vespasian observed. ‘Don’t worry, Sabinus, you won’t be able to smell it over the stench of your clothes.’
Sabinus allowed himself a wry smile. ‘Very funny, little brother. What about getting away, Pomponius?’
‘By boat again; get Faustus to have your horses and things waiting a mile or so downstream and you’ll be away before Poppaeus even knows you were there. The only thing you’ll have to worry about is not bumping into the Danuvius fleet, which is stationed in the river to prevent the Getae’s transports from rescuing them.’
Vespasian resigned himself to the inevitable. ‘Well, I suppose it’s a plan of sorts, and seeing as it’s the only one we have it will have to do. The only alternative is to walk away and let the priest die in Sagadava.’
‘That sounds like an appealing option,’ Sabinus observed, ‘and a lot less hassle.’
‘In the short term, yes,’ Pomponius said, ‘but in the long term if Sejanus isn’t removed everyone suspected of opposing him will find themselves and their families faced with options a great deal less appealing. So I suggest that you go and get a decent night’s sleep, gentlemen, because you’ve got a day and a half’s hard ride ahead of you followed by a long and dangerous night’s work as soon as you get there.’
‘We should do it the night that we arrive?’ Vespasian exclaimed. ‘Surely we should make a reconnaissance of the place and finalise the plan?’
‘I’m afraid you don’t have the time. When I left, Poppaeus boasted to me that every Getic warrior would be dead by the end of this month. If he’s going to keep that promise I imagine that he’s going to attack on the second to last night of the month and that is only three days away.’
CHAPTER VI
A thick cloud of grey smoke hung over the ancient fortress of Sagadava. At first Vespasian and his companions were worried that Poppaeus had already made his attack and they had arrived too late, but as they drew closer it became apparent that the smoke was the issue of the Roman fires and mobile forges crammed into their siege lines surrounding the beleaguered Getae. Although the scale of the siege was nothing compared to the huge, four-mile-long fortification that Poppaeus had built to pen in the Thracian rebels four years previously, it was still an impressive sight, even from a distance.
The fortress had been constructed with great slabs of brown stone almost four hundred years earlier by the Getic king Cothelas, a vassal of Philip II of Macedonia, to protect his western border from attack by river. It was set on the spine of a sharp ridge at its junction with the equally steep slope that ran parallel to the river 150 paces from its bank. Another ridge thrusting inland, two hundred paces to the west, not only made attack from that direction extremely hazardous but also funnelled a frontal assault from the south into a flat killing ground before the main gate in the west wall at its junction with the south wall; it was a formidable refuge. Great walls, three hundred paces square and twenty feet high, surrounded an inner keep on the northeast corner, which towered over the river. In its heyday catapults would have been mounted on its wide, flat roof that would have been able to sink enemy shipping without receiving any return fire; but now the roof was empty, the catapults having rotted away long ago, as the Getae’s power to the south of the Danuvius faded after the Gallic invasion and they withdrew across the river, making way for more primitive tribes without the technology to repair them. When the Romans, under the general Marcus Crassus, grandson of the triumvir of the same name, had conquered Moesia in the early years of Augustus’ reign they had found the fortress in a dilapidated state and had easily overcome the remnants of the Saci tribe sheltering within it. They made a few repairs to its fortifications but, because its strategic significance had been overshadowed by the great Lysimachid fortress at Axiopolis a few miles downstream, they had since garrisoned it only with a nominal force of low-grade auxiliaries who had been no match for the Getic horde that had descended upon them.
Vespasian and his comrades paused a mile from the Roman lines on the crest of a hill, stripped of trees by the besieging army to build the siege wall, and looked down upon the bustling hive of activity that was a siege in progress. A two-mile-long horseshoe-shaped wooden wall, with each end abutting the river, enclosed the castle and a fortified settlement that had grown up next to it, in the lee of the other ridge to its west; between these hundreds of horses milled aimlessly.
Three gates had been built into the siege wall, close together, at its central point; behind each stood a massive, newly constructed, wheeled siege tower, thirty feet wide at their base, tapering to ten feet at their summit. Each had a long ramp attached to their top levels; the ramps had been hauled vertical by pulley systems in readiness for the slow, manhandled journey across no-man’s-land which would end with them crashing down upon the walls of their objective and disgorging hundreds of assault troops from the bellies of the towers.
Behind the Roman lines, set back just far enough to be able to shoot over the wall when the order to attack came, dozens of stone-throwing onagers and bolt-shooting ballistae were being assembled. They, along with the Cretan auxiliary archers advancing with the towers, would provide the covering fire, peppering the walls of the fortress — just within range over four hundred paces away — with lethal missiles in an effort to prevent the Getic bowmen from causing too many Roman casualties.
In amongst all the siege apparatus scurried thousands of legionaries working as carpenters on the towers, as navvies levelling the ground for the artillery pieces, as smiths in the mobile forges, hammering out iron bolts to feed the hungry ballistae, or as masons chipping away at chunks of rock, rounding them off so that they would fit snugly into the slings of the onagers. The sound of their ceaseless labour blended with the shouts of their officers in a cacophony so loud that it was plainly audible from where Vespasian and his group sat on their horses.
‘Ain’t that just typical of the army,’ Magnus said with a wry grin. ‘They’ve got the whole of Moesia to run about in but they decide to cram as many people as possible into one small corner.’
‘But I don’t think that they’ll be here that much longer,’ Sabinus observed. ‘To my eye they look to be almost ready. Pomponius’ guess was right, they’ll be going in tomorrow.’
‘We’d better get on with it, then,’ Vespasian said, kicking his horse forward. ‘We need to find Faustus in amongst all that.’
Faustus was easier to find than expected. The first cohort was stationed at the middle gate, putting the finishing touches to the huge siege tower parked a few paces behind it. The din of scores of legionaries working wood with hammers, saws and chisels, constructing the staircases and staging platforms in the bowels of the tower, was intense but not quite loud enough to drown a familiar voice.
‘It just has to be fit for purpose, not a fucking work of art; you’re not going to live in it with your sweethearts, no, you lucky sods are going to fight from it. Now get a move on. If the Fifth Macedonica finish their tower before we do I’ll lose ten denarii to their primus pilus and I’ll be forced to send every tenth one of you back home to your mothers without any balls.’
The noise of construction intensified as Faustus stepped out of one of the tower’s entrances, brushing sawdust off his shoulder.