Colleen McCullough - 5. Caesar

"Yes, Quintus, axe time. You're in charge of the logging. All that experience against the Nervii will come in handy, because I want those thousands of logs in a hurry. We can't stay here more than a month. By then it has to be over." Caesar turned to Titus Sextius. "Sextius, find what stone you can. And earth. As the terrace advances, the men can tip it over the edge into the dip for fill." It became Fabius's turn. "Fabius, you're in charge of the camp and supplies. The Aedui haven't brought up any grain yet, and I want to know why. Nor have the Boii sent any." "We've heard nothing from the Aedui," said Fabius, looking worried. "The Boii say they don't have any food to spare, thanks to Gorgobina and I believe them. They're not a numerous tribe and their lands don't yield a cornucopia of plenty." "Unlike the Aedui, who have the best and most in Gaul," said Caesar grimly. "I think it's high time that I wrote a note to Cotus and Convictolavus." His scouts informed him that Vercingetorix and his enormous army had settled down fifteen miles away in a place which prevented Caesar's leaving the area without encountering them, for the Bituriges marshes were not merely around Avaricum and the amount of solid ground was limited. Worse than this, every barn and silo within reach was in ashes. Caesar detached the Ninth and Tenth from construction work and kept them ready in camp in case the Gallic army attacked, then commenced his siege terrace. To protect it in the early stages he put every piece of artillery he had behind a palisade on high ground, but conserved his stone ammunition for later days. The present situation was ideal for scorpions, which fired a three-foot-long bolt made very simply from a piece of wood; the business end was sharp, the other end whittled into flanges which acted like the flights on an arrow. Suitable branches lopped from the trees Quintus Cicero was logging were stockpiled, and the specialist noncombatants who did nothing save make scorpion bolts set to shaping them, checking against templates to make sure the flanges were correct. Two parallel log walls rose on either flank of the causeway, the dip in between them only partially filled to afford the laboring troops better protection from the archers and spearmen on Avaricum's battlements. The long shelter sheds called mantlets advanced in time with the terrace. The two siege towers were built at the Roman camp end of the parallel walls, and would not be pushed down the walls until they were finished. Twenty-five thousand men toiled from sunrise to sunset every day, logging, shaping, winching, rolling, dropping the finished round beams into place, all at the rate of many hundreds of logs a day. At the end of ten days the terrace had crept half the way to the walls of Avaricum, and at the end of ten days there was no food left save scraps of bacon and a little oil. Messengers kept coming in from the Aedui full of apologies: there had been an epidemic of winter illness, a cloudburst had bogged a train of wagons to the axles, a plague of rats had eaten all the grain in the silos closest to Avaricum, grain would have to be brought from the other side of Cabillonum, a hundred and twenty miles away ... Bivouacked at the terrace itself, Caesar started to make rounds. "It's up to you what I do, boys," he said to each laboring group in turn. "If you want, I'll lift the siege and we'll return to a good feed in Agedincum. This isn't a crucial business; we can beat the Gauls without taking Avaricum. Your choice." And the answer was always the same: a pestilence on every Gaul, a bigger pestilence on Avaricum, and the biggest one of all on the Aedui! "We've been with you for seven years, Caesar," said Marcus Petronius, centurion spokesman for the Eighth Legion. "You've been mighty good to us, and we've never brought you disgrace. To give up after all this work would be a disgrace. No, thank you, General, we'll tighten our belts and soldier on. We're here to avenge the civilians who died at Cenabum, and the taking of Avaricum is a task worth our salt!" "We'll have to forage, Fabius," said Caesar to his second-in-command. "It'll have to be flesh, I'm afraid. They've left no granary unburned. Find sheep, cattle, anything. No one likes to eat beef, but beef is better than starvation. And where are our so-called allies the Aedui?" "Still sending excuses." Fabius looked at the General very seriously. "You don't think I ought to try to get through to Agedincum with the Ninth and Tenth?" he asked. "Not past Vercingetorix. He's hoping to see us try. Besides, if the Aedui continue to be delinquent after Avaricum falls, we'll need everything it contains." Caesar grinned. "Rather foolish of Vercingetorix, really. He's forced me to take Avaricum. I suspect it's the only place in this benighted land where I'm going to find food. Therefore Avaricum will have to fall." On the fifteenth day, when the siege terrace was two-thirds of the way to the walls, Vercingetorix moved his camp closer to Avaricum and set a trap for the Tenth, foraging. He rode off with his cavalry to spring it, but the ploy came to nothing when Caesar marched with the Ninth at midnight and threatened Vercingetorix's camp. Both sides drew off without engaging, a difficult business for Caesar, whose men were spoiling for a fight. And a difficult business for Vercingetorix, who found himself accused of treachery by none other than Gutruatus. Gutruatus was beginning to have doubts about the high command, and wondered if perhaps he would fill a king's shoes better than Vercingetorix. Who talked the war council onto his side and actually managed to gain a little ground in his struggle to be hailed as King of Gaul. For the army, on hearing that he had been forced to defend himself, cheered him mightily after the war council ended in the manner peculiar to Gallic warriors, by clashing the flats of their swords against their shield bosses. The army then gave him ten thousand volunteers to reinforce Avaricum. An easy matter to get them into the town, for the marshes held a man's weight comfortably; they were helped over the walls on the far side of Avaricum from Caesar's siege terrace. On the twentieth day the work was nearing completion, and had approached the walls so closely that the ten thousand extra men inside the town were put to good use. A log wall joining the two parallel Roman siege tower walls was rising out of the partly leveled dip right against Avaricum itself; Caesar intended that he would storm the battlements on as wide a front as possible. The defenders tried constantly to set the mantlets on fire, though they failed in it because Caesar had found sheets of iron inside the oppidum of Noviodunum, and used them to roof the mantlets at the Avaricum end of the shelter sheds. Then the defenders switched their attention to the log wall rising against Avaricum's outside, tried to demolish it with grappling hooks and windlasses, all the while pouring pitch, burning oil and blazing bundles of tinder down upon the heads of any exposed soldiers. Avaricum's defenders put up their own breastworks and towers along the ramparts, and below the ground a different scheme progressed. Mine runnels were dug down into the bowels of the earth until they were lower than the bottom course of the walls; they turned then and went forward until they were under Caesar's siege terrace. The Avarican miners dug upward to reach the bottom layer of Roman logs, saturated them in oil and pitch, and set fire to them. But the logs were green and of air there was little; great billows of smoke gave the scheme away. Seeing them, the defenders decided to increase the fire's chances of taking hold by making a sortie from their walls onto the Roman walls. Skirmishes developed, the fighting grew fiercer, the Ninth and Tenth erupted out of camp to join in, the sides of the mantlets caught and burned, and so did the hide and wicker skin of the left-hand siege tower, which had been pushed most of the way toward the town. The battle raged all through the night, and was still going on when dawn broke. Some soldiers began hacking down into the terrace with axes to make a hole to channel water in, while some of the Ninth diverted the stream supplying the camp and others manufactured a chute out of hides and sticks to carry the diverted water to the fire beneath the terrace. A perfect opportunity for Vercingetorix, who might have won his war then and there had he brought up his army; but Gutruatus had done the Gallic cause no good turn in accusing Vercingetorix of abandoning his army to gallivant off with the cavalry. The King of the Gauls, not yet hailed as King of the Gauls, did not dare to avail himself of this wonderful chance. Until he was hailed King, he didn't have the authority to move without first calling a war council, and that was too protracted, too quarrelsome, too fruitless a business. By the time a decision might have been reached, the fighting at the walls of Avaricum was bound to be over. At dawn Caesar brought the artillery to bear. One man on the town ramparts proved a particularly accurate marksman as he hurled lumps of fat and pitch into a fire blazing at the base of the left-hand siege tower. A bolt from a scorpion, dramatic and unexpected, plugged him through the side. When another Gaul took his place, a second bolt from the same scorpion, which had the range nicely, killed him. As fast as each new Gaul started hurling his incendiaries, the same scorpion felled him; and so it went until finally the fire was out and the Gauls had retired from the fray. It was the artillery, in fact, which won the tussle. "I'm pleased," said Caesar to Quintus Cicero, Fabius and Titus Sextius. "We obviously do not make enough use of artillery." He shivered, drew his scarlet general's cloak closer about him. "It's going to rain and rain. Well, that will end the risk of more fires. Get everyone onto repairs." On the twenty-fifth day the work was done. The siege terrace was eighty feet high, three hundred and thirty feet from one tower to the other, and two hundred and fifty feet from the walls of Avaricum to the Roman side of the dip. The right-hand tower was pushed forward until it was level with the left one, while icily cold, torrential rain fell remorselessly. Exactly the right time to begin the assault, for the guard atop the Avaricum battlements was sheltering from the elements, sure no attack would come in this weather. As the visible Roman troops went about their duties at an ambling pace, heads hunched into shoulders, the mantlets and siege towers filled with soldiers. The two towers winched down their gangplanks to thump onto the ramparts, while men spilled out from behind the shield palisade along the Roman wall joining the two tower walls, and put up their ladders and grapples. The surprise was complete. The Gauls were ejected from their own wall so quickly there was hardly any fighting. They drew up then in wedge formation in the marketplace and the more open squares, determined to take Romans with them as they died. The rain kept cascading down; the cold grew intense. No Roman troops descended from the Avaricum ramparts. Instead, they lined them and did no more than stare into the town. A reflexive panic started; the next moment the Gauls were running in all directions for the lesser gates, the walls, anywhere they thought might provide an avenue of escape. And were cut down. Of the forty thousand men, women and children inside Avaricum, some eight hundred reached Vercingetorix. The rest perished. After twenty-five days of short commons and considerable frustration, Caesar's legions were in no mood to spare anyone. "Well, boys," Caesar shouted to his troops, assembled in the Avaricum marketplace, "now we can eat bread! Bean and bacon soup! Pease pottage! If I ever see a hunk of old cow again, I'll swap it for a boot! My thanks and my salutations! I wouldn't part with a single one of you!"