The sun rose higher. The Carthaginian ships, like an army of intelligent centipedes, crept back together. Signal flags fluttered; trumpets called across the water. The ships formed a huge rectangle, ten by ten, and crawled into the entrance to the bay.
"Zeus blast them!" snarled Dionysios, sitting on his huge horse. "If we had half our ships in the water, we could surround the head of their column and crush it, as the Hellenes crushed the Persian fleet at Salamis."
Since the bay curved sharply to the north, behind the sheltering peninsula of the Aigithallos, the Carthaginian fleet made a slow column-left as it entered the narrows. Inside the bay, Dionysios' remaining merchant ships struggled slowly northward under sail and oar, towards the far end of the bay behind Motya. In the meantime, the few Syracusan triremes afloat formed a line across the bay to protect the merchantmen from the oncoming enemy.
Dionysios, peering beneath his palm at the Punic fleet, said to his staff: "They think, if they stay in the midst of the channel, we cannot reach them with missiles from shore. Soon they shall learn differently. Go, Zopyros, and give the command to shoot when you think it best."
Zopyros galloped down the peninsula to the narrows at the entrance to the bay, where half the catapults were posted. Cantering down the line of ships and war engines, he raised his arm and shouted:
"Quiet, everybody! Get ready to shoot! Stop talking, all of you! Prepare to shoot!"
On came the Carthaginians. Zopyros could hear the flutes of the coxswains sounding slow time, to keep the ships in formation and ready for surprises.
"Shoot!" he yelled, bringing his arm down smartly.
Trumpets sounded. There was a vast snapping of bowstrings, hissing of arrows, and whir of slings. The air was filled with missiles. Some fell short; some reached the nearer ships.
Then the catapults began to discharge: crash, crash, crash. Their darts arcked high into the air and shrieked down upon the Punic fleet. Some fell among the ships in the middle of the channel. Like an echo, the sound of missile fire came from across the bay, as the troops on the mainland discharged their projectiles. The crews of the catapults strained at their windlasses to get off a second volley, and a third.
Trumpets sang across the waves. The Carthaginian galleys stopped rowing and sat in the waters of the bay with lifted oars. Commands were shouted from ship to ship; flags fluttered. The rain of Greek missiles continued as the galleys pushed forward with their oars on one side and pulled back on the other. With much roiling of the water, the ships slowly turned about, each in its own length.
Still bows twanged and catapults crashed. The Punic ships filed out of the bay, some of their oars trailing limply where the rowers had been struck at their benches. Zopyros raised his arm. The catapult men and the archers and slingers stopped shooting. Thousands of soldiers, drawn up in formation during the battle of missiles, burst into cheers.
All along the shores of the bay, gangs of men, who had been sweating to get triremes into the water, renewed their efforts. Outside the mouth of the harbor, the Carthaginian fleet formed a half circle, facing the channel into the bay. Dionysios growled:
"They hope we shall come rushing out into their jaws. We outnumber them two to one, but we cannot bring our numbers to bear. Herakles! How can we get two hundred ships into the outer sea without their being crushed one by one as they emerge?" His cold gray eyes searched each of his staff officers in turn.
Zopyros said: "You could haul the ships overland across that low neck of land at the base of this peninsula, sir—"
"And what would keep the foe from destroying them one by one as they were launched on the seaward side?"
"You could set up the catapults along the beach. The Carthaginians fear catapults out of proportion to their real danger, because they've never faced these weapons before."
"Good!" Dionysios showed his teeth in a tight-lipped smile. "Young man! Take an order to Leptines and remain with him to help with the work ..."
All the rest of that day and through the night, the Siceliot army hauled ships across the isthmus at the base of the Aigithallos. Thousands of men dragged each ship by scores of ropes. Although the ships slid easily across the muddy, marshy ground, the soldiers sank to their knees in the muck. Not a few were killed when they slipped and fell on the churned-up ground and the ships were hauled over their prostrate bodies.
By the following dawn, more than a hundred Greek triremes rode the waves of tire outer sea; but the Carthaginian fleet had vanished.
Thus, as the fiery heat of the Sicilian summer beat down upon besieged and besieger alike, began the fourth year of the ninety-fifth Olympiad, when Soundiades was Archon of Athens. The siege of Motya dragged on. The gap in the causeway was filled at last and the causeway itself enlarged.
The last stages of rebuilding the causeway were the most costly, for the Greeks had to carry the widened structure up to the very walls of Motya. Here a natural ledge extended out into the bay, west of the main gate of the city. This ledge provided Dionysios with a platform on which to mount his siege engines.
All day and all night, men trotted across the causeway with stones and sand to enlarge the ledge. In the daytime they went in pairs, one carrying his basket of stones while the other held a shield over the heads of both to ward off missiles from the walls. The corpses of Dionysios' soldiers littered the Motyan end of the causeway. Every night there was a mass cremation on the mainland, sending a smell of burnt meat through the besiegers' camp.
If Himilko's failure to relieve Motya discouraged its citizens, they did not show it. Day and night they showered missiles upon the Greeks working under the walls, while under bombardment themselves from Greek archers and from catapults on the causeway. From time to time, smoke rose above the temple of Baal Hammon as the first-born of the leading Punic families were passed through the fire. Every time he saw this smoke, Zopyros was glad that he had rescued one child, at least, from this cruel fate. At these times, especially, he worried about Iris family, hoping that they had had the sense to stay in Syracuse.
At last Dionysios' large siege engines—the belfries and rams— rolled out upon the causeway. It took several days, under the ceaseless downpour of missiles, to bring them one by one to the walls of Motya, to lever them around to the right, to roll them out on the ledge, and finally to turn them to the left again to face the beleaguered city.
With a flourish of trumpets, the next phase of the attack began. The two ram tortoises moved up to the wall. The rams inside these engines, swung by chains from the roofs of the wheeled sheds, began pounding the masonry. Day and night they pounded—boom—boom —as if two demented gods were beating a pair of cosmic drums, a little out of time. As the crew of each ram tired, another crew relieved it.
The Motyans dropped fire, stones, and heavy beams down upon the tortoises. Now and then one was damaged or caught fire. Dionysios' men would draw it back, put out the fire, and repair the damage. Then they pushed it forward to the attack again.
At last, the wall in front of one ram crumbled and collapsed with a frightful roar and a vast cloud of dust, burying the front end of the tortoise. Trumpets sang; infantry, brave in bronze cuirasses, greaves, and crested helms, climbed into the breach. Missiles rained upon the soldiers. Many fell, writhing in pain or limp in death. Others pressed on. The Motyans and their Greek mercenaries met them shield to shield, jabbing with spears, swinging swords and axes, and grappling body to body. Time and again the besieged thrust back the attackers.
Meanwhile Dionysios' men, with shovels and even with bare hands, hauled away the debris that had fallen from the wall. Then the wall in front of the other ram collapsed in its turn, and another bloody struggle took place in the breach.