Emperor of Rome Page 11

  A nudge from Magnus brought Vespasian out of his reverie; his eyes followed the direction of Magnus’ pointed finger aimed up at the darkling mass of Jotapata’s precipitous mount. Taking a few moments to let his eyes focus in the gloom, he slowly began to make out a dim blur of slightly lighter shadow slowly descending. Vespasian turned to the optio and signalled for him and his men to be ready for swift action.

  Some loose scree, tumbling from above, confirmed the arrival of a messenger. Magnus clamped his hand over Castor’s snout as a growl began to rumble in the hound’s throat upon hearing the falling stones; obedient to his master’s wish the beast ceased its noise.

  Vespasian’s heart quickened and he found himself holding his breath; the figure stilled as if listening intently to the night around him. No one moved. Even the dogs detected the tension and remained motionless.

  After a score or more pounding heartbeats the man resumed his descent, more scree heralding his coming. As he neared the bottom, he paused to listen again and, satisfied that there was no one about, raised his head and did a soft imitation of an owl hoot before getting down on all fours, pulling a fleece over his back and beginning a slow crawl along the gully floor in Vespasian’s direction. With caution he came on until he was directly below the Romans, no more than fifteen feet away and, to the uninitiated, easily mistaken for a sheep in the dark. Vespasian raised a palm and shook his head, guessing that, because of the owl signal, there was a second man following the first down who would certainly turn back at the slightest noise from below.

  Letting the first man crawl past, Vespasian stared up into the darkness, praying that he was right in his hunch. Just as he began to lose hope and was about to order the pursuit of the messenger, now disappeared into the night, another fall of scree confirmed that he had been right. He pointed at the dogs and then out into the night after the first man; Magnus understood. It had been for this eventuality that they had risked bringing Castor and Pollux along. Vespasian would take the second man quietly whilst the dogs would hunt and catch the first, many paces away from the gully; if the chase was heard up on the ramparts of Jotapata, Yosef would guess that one of his men had been caught out in the open by a patrol, but being so distant from the gully he would deem the route still safe.

  It was with a sudden lurch forward that Vespasian hurled himself down the wall of the gully as the second man was directly below him; the optio and his men followed him down as Magnus launched his dogs out into the night on the trail of the fugitive.

  Already on all fours the second man had no time to make a bolt for freedom as Vespasian crashed down upon him, pinning him to the ground. With a couple of right jabs into the man’s face, he halted his squirming and the optio and his men were able to restrain him and stuff a gag into his mouth as from out in the darkness came the sound of canine excitement and human terror.

  Working fast, Vespasian frisked the messenger and within a few moments had retrieved a note secured beneath the man’s belt.

  Still keeping as silent as possible, Vespasian signalled for a couple of the legionaries to drag the man away before setting the optio and the rest of his men after Magnus and his hounds.

  ‘There ain’t much left of him, I’m afraid,’ Magnus whispered as Vespasian caught up with him.

  ‘I wasn’t expecting there to be,’ Vespasian said, prodding the mangled and blood-slick corpse with a toe and trying to ignore the sound of Castor and Pollux tucking into some tasty treat they had ripped from the carnage. ‘Did he have anything on him?’

  ‘Just this.’ Magnus handed him a note similar to the one he had already retrieved.

  ‘Under his belt?’

  ‘Exactly.’

  ‘Come on, let’s get back; I’m curious as to who our friend Yosef chooses as his correspondents.’

  ‘“To Yohanan ben Levi, greetings,”’ Hormus said, translating from the Aramaic.

  Vespasian was immediately outraged. ‘That slippery bastard; where is he? Did the messenger say where he was bound?’

  Titus shook his head. ‘I’m afraid the messenger died whilst being severely questioned; he gave nothing away. My agents haven’t reported any sighting of him either.’

  ‘I’m beginning to lose all faith in them; not that I had much in the first place. Go on, Hormus.’

  ‘So Yosef is appealing to Yohanan to stir up his supporters in Jerusalem and usurp power from the priests,’ Vespasian summarised after Hormus had finished. ‘If that happens then there will never be a chance of a negotiated settlement.’

  Caenis frowned in thought for a few moments. ‘Perhaps, but I imagine that should that happen, there will be civil war between the factions, which will be of great benefit to us.’

  ‘In that they’ll be doing our job for us? Yes, I suppose so.’

  Titus waved away from under his nose a trail of smoke from one of the oil lamps. ‘It would be far more complicated than that, should it happen. There are so many different factions, all hating one another, it’s amazing that there isn’t a civil war in Jerusalem already. Eleazar ben Shimon, for example: he commanded the Jewish army that did so much damage to the Twelfth at Ben Horon. He’s also a Zealot, but Yohanan can’t stand Eleazar because he’s considered to be the greatest hero for defeating a legion, and Eleazar can’t stand Yohanan because he won’t acknowledge him as such. If Yohanan’s faction of Zealots were to take power then you can be assured that Eleazar will fight him.’

  ‘Well, perhaps we should hasten that eventuality. Do you think you could find a way of getting this letter to Yohanan without him suspecting it came through our hands?’

  Titus took the letter from Hormus. ‘Leave it with me.’

  Vespasian turned back to Hormus. ‘Who is the second letter addressed to?’

  Hormus glanced at the parchment. ‘Ananus, the chief priest in Jerusalem.’

  ‘What does it say?’

  ‘“Since you asked me to hold out for a week to give you time to organise a relief force, twenty-two days have passed.”’

  Vespasian put up his hand, halting Hormus. ‘What’s a week?’ ‘Seven days,’ Titus said. ‘It’s what they call the six days of labour and then the Sabbath on the seventh; like our market interval of nine days.’

  ‘So, Yosef must have been asked by the authorities in Jerusalem to hold out for seven days from the time we arrived and he slipped into Jotapata. He’s been a disappointed man for fifteen days then.’ He signalled his freedman to continue.

  ‘“We have done our part of the bargain, where is yours? We held out for the seven days that you asked for and we shall hold out for forty more, but I warn you, Jotapata will fall on the forty-seventh day; I have seen it. And with Jotapata falls Galilee and once Galilee is gone then so will fall Transjordan and it will be just a matter of time before you see a Roman army before Jerusalem’s walls. How long will the Lord preserve you for then? Remember, the forty-seventh day; after that Judaea will be lost and the blame will be laid at your feet for not keeping your word and relieving Jotapata.”’

  Vespasian rubbed his chin as Hormus put the letter down. ‘The forty-seventh day, eh? That’s another twenty-four from today; we can’t have them holding out for that long – it’ll inspire other towns. Titus, you had better hurry with your ram.’

  CHAPTER V

  IT WAS A mighty engine of war: magnificent in size and awesome in power; Vespasian felt that the end of the siege must surely be in sight. The Brute, as the ram was affectionately called, rumbled forward. Suspended within a latt icework of sturdy beams by a web of ropes and protected by a roof of dripping, soaked hides, The Brute presented a fearsome sight with its burnished iron ram’s head gleaming in the sun; its beauty belying its capacity for destruction.

  But Vespasian knew that its deployment would not be an easy affair. If he were in Yosef’s position he would not yield the open ground, between the siege lines and battlements, unfought; for it was there, out in the open, that the chance to set fire to The Brute best presented itself –
although it was, at most, a forlorn hope. So it was that as the two centuries, one on either side of the engine, pushed the great beast forward on many wheels across the ramp spanning the trenches, Titus’ entire legion moved in support with them, hauling the two siege towers, their extra height making them rock precariously on rougher ground.

  It was to be, Vespasian hoped, the final play in the agonising fall of Jotapata that had now been almost a month and a half in coming. Ever since the discovery of the gully and sheep ruse, the town had grown weaker by the day for it had not been just messages that had been getting through, but also much-needed supplies in the form of barrels of water and salted beef rolled along the gully by the ‘sheep’ and then hauled up to the town by cranes with, Vespasian assumed, greased pulleys for they were noiseless. For a couple of nights after the discovery the Romans had apprehended at least a dozen men either leaving with messages or coming with victuals, until, by the third night, the flow dried up as Yosef realised that his courier system had been discovered. However, during that time five more messages had been intercepted and Vespasian wondered just how many more there had been and whether the ones his men had seized were duplicates or originals; somehow his suspicion was that they were the former. This time they were to Eleazar ben Shimon urging him to have a rapprochement with Yohanan and take on the conservative priesthood together, and then to Yohanan begging him to do the same with Eleazar, and finally to the Jews of Alexandria, Antioch and, more alarmingly, to the fifty thousand or so Jews in Rome, imploring them to stand firm with their eastern cousins and defy Rome. He had written immediately to all the governors concerned – his old friend Tiberius Alexander, the prefect of Egypt, and Mucianus in Syria, as well as his brother Sabinus, the prefect of Rome – advising them all to stamp down hard and swift on any signs of discontent and nail up a few scapegoats as examples to the rest. This had been almost half a moon ago and he was still to receive replies and did not know yet whether the Jewish rebellion had spread beyond the confines of Judaea and Galilee.

  But this concern was now pushed to the back of his mind as he watched Jotapata’s bane finally moving towards its walls. Finally. And it had been a long time, far longer than hoped. The four days that Titus had promised to rig the ram had turned into twelve due to the suicidal raids of the Jews. Realising that they had nothing to lose in delaying the readying of the ram as, with its arrival, their death warrants were already signed, it made little difference to them whether they died trying to burn it or as a result of it making a breach for the legionaries to storm. And so, night after night, attacks, each more daring than the last, were made on the workshops of the carpenters and smiths attempting to complete the rigging. Many lives had been lost, mainly Jewish, and Vespasian had marvelled at the pointlessness of the exercise: Yosef’s men were sacrificing their lives for an already lost cause and yet they were queuing up to do so. It was madness; as if the whole race had made a mutual pact of self-annihilation in an attempt to get their strange god to prove his existence by saving them from themselves. As far as Vespasian was concerned he was going to do as much as he possibly could to help push this obstreperous people into oblivion.

  And, as the gates of Jotapata opened to disgorge the expected sortie, Vespasian felt a surge of vicious joy that yet more of the fanatics were going to die. ‘Gods below, I hope they throw every man that they’ve got against us now, then the ram will become redundant because we can slaughter each one of the bastards before the gate.’

  Titus, on a horse next to him, looked weary of the endeavour. ‘If only, Father; but, knowing Yosef, as we have come to know him over the last month and a half, I guarantee you that he will send no more than five hundred of the fanatics with torches and pitch, maybe even some Naphtha – if they have any, which I doubt – to try to set The Brute alight and die whilst failing to do so.’

  Vespasian sighed. ‘I’m afraid you’re right and we’ll be obliged to have a few hours battering the walls whilst they throw all manner of shit down at us.’

  It was with resignation that father and son silently agreed the truth of the matter and watched a few hundred Jewish fanatics, all bearing torches, swarm out of the gates and head straight towards the ram to throw their lives away in an impossible quest.

  And die they did, many before they had even raced fifty paces, as Malichus’ Arab archers and the Syrian auxiliaries let fly volley after volley, supported by the legion’s artillery shooting over their heads, into the mass of men, screaming at one another to urge each other on, hurtling towards The Brute. Down they tumbled and Vespasian’s sense of vicious joy melted into a feeling of bored resignation at the futility of it all; battle, he knew, could be glorious – terrifying but glorious – but what he beheld was naught but stupidity, aimless stupidity. He felt that if he had to watch one more of these fanatics give their life for a doomed cause he would … well, what more could he do? He was killing them anyway. And so he sat and watched as the sally was thinned out the closer it got to its objective until just a couple of hundred made it to the cohort that protected the ram. They threw themselves onto the blades of their enemy as they tried to hurl their torches over the legionaries’ heads towards the ram; none managed to. So as the ram came within bowshot of the walls, crushing the limp bodies of the Jewish dead and wounded under its huge, solid wheels, Vespasian’s bitterness at Yosef’s complete disregard for the lives of his men felt sour in his throat. He prayed that if one man survived within the town, it would be the Jewish leader so he could have the pleasure of nailing him to a cross.

  Flaming arrows in volleys, smoke trails grey beneath the clear sky, flew from the town to thump, staccato as hail, into the wet hide roof, there to fizzle to extinction as The Brute pressed on.

  ‘I’d better be joining the legion, Father; we’re nearly there.’

  Vespasian nodded, trying to keep the fear for his son’s safety from his mind. ‘Take care and remember, don’t bring the towers onto the walls until there is a viable breach. With three points of entry at once we’ll have them, finally.’

  Finally. That word again, Vespasian ruminated, watching Titus gallop away as ballistae projectiles whistled overhead, keeping the walls of Jotapata clear of rebels but unable to halt the constant stream of smoke-trailing arrows that were now being aimed more randomly, as they were being released from behind cover. Finally. But was it really? Of course it was not: there were many towns that had closed their gates to Rome as Traianus had reported in the last month. All the while that Vespasian had been delayed before the walls of Jotapata, Traianus, having taken Japhra, had progressed with his legion through southern Galilee, from town to town, investing most of them and forcing their surrender with far more alacrity than Vespasian had enjoyed. Nazareth and Tarichaea had been the most stubborn but their populations were now either dead or being herded west as slaves; six thousand were being sent to Corinth where Nero had instigated the building of a canal to cut through the isthmus and revolutionise shipping in Greek waters.

  But, whatever the relative rates of success between Vespasian and Traianus, one thing was certain: the rebellion was strengthening on the back of Jotapata’s success in holding out for so long. So this ‘finally’ was for Vespasian just the first of what would have to be many ‘finallys’, for it was now clear that he would have to fight every pace of the way to Jerusalem.

  With Traianus’ success in the south, the way to Tiberias was now secure and it was with a feeling close to nausea that Vespasian contemplated a possible recurrence of recent events. It felt like far more than two months ago when he had resolved to end the rebellion quickly as he stood before the rebel town of Gabara. As The Brute closed on the walls, and Titus, his red cloak still visible despite the rising dust and falling smoke, joined it to take up command, Vespasian counted the days since Gabara in his head; it did not take long for him to arrive at fifty. He then subtracted the days between that victory and his arrival at Jotapata and frowned when he realised the answer was forty-six.

  This was
the forty-sixth day of the siege.

  Forty days’ worth of supplies was what the prisoner had told them upon their arrival; but men could fight on without sustenance, at least for a little while, so there had been no reason to assume that the town would fall immediately the last bushel of grain had been consumed. No, it had been Yosef himself who had predicted in his letter to Jerusalem that the town would fall on the forty-seventh day, and he had been insistent that the chief priest mark his words with care; but at the time he, Vespasian, had dismissed them. It had not been until now that he had considered them again. Forty-seven days? Am I destined to fail again today, Vespasian wondered, but will triumph tomorrow? Did that mean that Yosef had always planned to allow the town to fall and had chosen the forty-seventh day to do so in the hope that it would induce Vespasian to deal more leniently with him should he survive? But no, that could not be, as Yosef was unaware that Vespasian knew of his prediction and, besides, it was pure coincidence that The Brute, after much delay, had been ready by this, the forty-sixth, day. So, therefore, had Yosef really seen into the future and known that the town would fall on the forty-seventh day because he was in possession of the power of foresight? But if that were so, why had he come to the town in the first place, seeing as he already knew that it was lost? Shaking his head, Vespasian put these thoughts from his mind and drew his eyes back to the unfolding events of this, the forty-sixth day of the siege of Jotapata.

  The low grumbling of cornua rose up from the field above the crashing footsteps of a legion marching in time, steady and measured, despite the arrow storm cracking down on upturned shields. No shouts or war cries came from the XV Apollinaris, thus making their advance all the more threatening for their resolve needed no bolstering by bravado.

  And so The Brute crossed the killing ground between the siege lines and the walls; but apart from the occasional unlucky legionary it was only Jewish dead that were left in its wake. It was with a renewed storm of stones and bolts, targeted by the artillery crews at the stretch of wall directly above The Brute, that it reached its destination. Titus’ conspicuous cloak flashed in and around the centuries wielding the huge engine and his, and the centurions’ and optios’, shouted commands rose over the still-silent legion, stationary to either side of the ram. Back the great tree was hauled, slow but fearsome on its straining ropes; safe beneath the overhanging roof, its handlers sweated as muscles strained to gain every possible inch of swing. And it was with the first collective shout ejaculated by the Romans that, at Titus’ shrill command, they thrust The Brute forward. Down the great tree swooped, its shining bulbous ram’s head to the fore, reaching its lowest point as its ropes became vertical, its velocity ever increasing; its momentum, now Titanesque, forced it into the wall of Jotapata. The earth shook with the report of the blow, as if Vulcan himself had beaten on the stone with his hammer; its echo resounding around the hills as splinters of stone exploded from the impact. The frame upon which the great siege weapon was mounted juddered and jolted back, sending many of the crew toppling to its wooden floor. The Brute rebounded, its ropes thrumming with contrary forces as it reached a lesser apex from which to dive forward again. With a further deep concussive shock, the ram’s head gorged out another spray of shards to leave a wound the depth of a fist in the ancient walls of Jotapata. But the walls were ten-feet-thick and The Brute would have to strike many a time before the stone would weaken and then begin to tumble.