Colleen McCullough - 3. Fortune's Favorites

To say that Pompey was in a better frame of mind after the old woman from the Further province left to take his fleet back to Gades was perhaps a slight exaggeration, but there certainly had been a stiffening in his spine. He removed himself from his quarters to join Afranius, Petreius and the more junior legates in putting the finishing touches to his restructured army. As well, he thought, that he had insisted on taking one of the Piglet's legions away from him! Without it, he could not have campaigned. The exact number of his soldiers offered him two alternatives: five under strength legions, or four normal strength. Since he was far from being a military dunce, Pompey elected five under strength legions because five were more maneuverable than four. It came hard to look his surviving troops in the eye this being the first time he had really done so since his defeat but to his gratified surprise, he learned that none of them held the deaths of so many of their comrades against him. Instead they seemed to have settled into a dour determination that Sertorius would not prosper, and were as willing as always to do whatever their lovely young general wanted. As the winter in the lowlands was a mild and unusually dry one, Pompey welded his new units together by leading them up the Iberus a little way and reducing several of Sertorius's towns Biscargis and Celsa fell with satisfying thumps. At this point, it being the end of March, Pompey withdrew again to Emporiae and began to prepare for his expedition down the coast. A letter from Metellus Pius informed him that after taking delivery of his forty warships and three thousand talents of gold in Dianium, Sertorius himself had departed into Lusitania with Perperna to help Hirtuleius train more men to fill the reduced ranks of the Spanish army, leaving Herennius in charge of Osca. Pompey's own intelligence network had markedly improved, thanks to the efforts of uncle and nephew Balbus (now in his service), and his Picentine scouts were faring better than he had expected. Not until after the beginning of May did he move, and then he proceeded with extreme caution. A man of the land himself, he noted automatically as he crossed the Iberus at Dertosa that this rich and extensively farmed valley looked very dry for the time of year, and that the wheat coming up in the fields was sparser than it ought to be, was not yet eared. Of the enemy there was no sign, but that fact did not fill Pompey with pleasure on this second march into the south. It merely made him more cautious still, his column defensive. Past Saguntum and Lauro he hurried with averted face; Saguntum stood, but Lauro was a blackened ruin devoid of life. At the end of June, having sent a message he hoped would reach Metellus Pius in Segovia, he reached the wider and more fertile valley of the Turis River, on the far bank of which stood the big, well fortified city of Valentia. Here, drawn up on the narrow flats between the river and the city, Pompey found Herennius and Perperna waiting for him. In number, his Picentine scouts informed him, they were stronger than he, but had the same five legions; some thirty thousand men to Pompey's twenty thousand. Their greatest advantage was in cavalry, which his scouts estimated at a thousand Gallic horse. Though Metellus Scipio and Aulus Gabinius had tried strenuously to recruit cavalry in Narbonese Gaul during the early winter, Pompey's troopers numbered only four hundred. At least he could be sure that what his Picentine scouts told him was reliable, and when they assured him that there was little difference between scouting in Italy and scouting in Spain, he believed them. So, secure in the knowledge that no Sertorian cohorts lurked behind him ready to outflank him or fall upon his rear, Pompey committed his army to the crossing of the Turis. And to battle on its southern bank. The river was more a declivity than a steep sided trench, thus presented no obstacle even when battle was joined; its bed was rock hard, its waters ankle deep. There was no particular tactical advantage to be seized by either side, so what developed was a conventional clash which the army with better spirit and strength would win. The only innovation Pompey used had arisen out of his deficiency in cavalry; correctly assuming that Perperna and Herennius would use their superiority in horse to roll up his flanks, Pompey had put troops bearing old fashioned phalanx spears on the outside of his wings and ordered these men to use the fearsome fifteen foot long weapons against mounts rather than riders. The struggle was hotly contested and very drawn out. By no means as gifted a general as either Sertorius or Hirtuleius, Herennius did not see until it was too late that he was getting the worst of it; Perperna, to his west, was ignoring his every order. The two men had, in fact, not been able before the battle began to agree upon how it should be conducted; they ended in fighting as two separate entities, though this Pompey could not discern, only learned of later. The end of it was a heavy defeat for Herennius, but not for Perperna. Deciding that it was better to die if Sertorius insisted he must continue the war in tandem with this treacherous, odious man Perperna, Herennius threw his life away on the field, and the heart went out of the three legions and the cavalry directly under his command. Twelve thousand men died, leaving Perperna and eighteen thousand survivors to retreat to Sertorius on the Sucro. Mindful of Metellus Pius's warning that he must not reach the Sucro until the end of Quinctilis, Pompey did not attempt to pursue Perperna. The victory, so decisive and complete, had done his wounded self the world of good. How wonderful it was to hear his veterans cheering him again! And to wreath the eagles and the standards in well earned laurels! Valentia of course was now virtually defenseless, only its walls between the inhabitants and Roman vengeance. So Pompey sat down before it and subjected it to a merciless inspection which revealed more than enough weaknesses to suit his purpose. A few mines a fire along a section made of wood finding and cutting off the water supply and Valentia surrendered. With some of his newly learned caution, Pompey removed every morsel of food from the city and hid the lot in an abandoned quarry beneath a carpet of turf; he then sent the entire citizenry of Valentia to the slave market in New Carthage by ship, as the Roman fleet of Further Spain just happened (thanks to the foresight of a certain Roman Piglet) to be cruising in those waters, and no one had seen a sign of the forty Pontic triremes Sertorius now possessed. And six days before the end of Quinctilis did Pompey march for the Sucro, where he found Sertorius and Perperna enclosed in two separate camps on the plain between him and the river itself. Pompey now had to contend with a distressing dilemma. Of Metellus Pius he had heard nothing, and could not therefore assume that reinforcements were nearby. Like the situation on the Turis, the lay of the land bestowed no tactical advantage upon Sertorius; no hills, big forests, handy groves or ravines lay in even remote proximity, which meant that Sertorius had nowhere to hide cavalry or guerrillas. The closest town was little Saetabis five miles to the south of the river, which was wider than the Turis and notorious for quicksands. If he delayed battle until Metellus Pius joined him always provided that Metellus Pius was coming then Sertorius might retreat to more suitably Sertorian country or divine that Pompey was stalling in the expectation of reinforcements. On the other hand, if he engaged Sertorius he was grossly outnumbered, almost forty thousand against twenty thousand. Neither side now had many horse, thanks to Herennius's losses. In the end it was fear Metellus Pius would not come that decided Pompey to commit himself to battle or so he told himself, refusing to admit that his old greedy self was whispering inside his head that if he did fight now, he wouldn't have to share the laurels with a Piglet. The clash with Herennius and Perperna was only a prelude to this engagement with Sertorius, and Pompey burned to expunge the memory of Sertorius's taunts. Yes, his confidence had returned! So at dawn on the second last day of Quinctilis, having constructed a formidable camp in his rear, Gnaeus Pompeius Magnus marched his five legions and four hundred horse onto the plain opposite Sertorius and Perperna, and deployed them for battle.