Antony and Cleopatra (30 page)

Well, he couldn’t make a festering sling missile, thought Publius Ventidius, but he could make a more lethal one. From his experience with field artillery, he knew that the biggest boulders did the most damage, not so much from their own massiveness but from their ability to shatter whatever they hit and send pieces of it flying. If the catapult or ballista was really efficient, it sent missiles at higher speed than an instrument whose rope spring was damp or hadn’t been wound as tightly as possible. Lead. A pound of lead occupied a much smaller volume than a pound-weight stone of the hardest rock. Therefore it would gather momentum inside the sling pouch, which could be swung faster, and fly farther than a stone due to its velocity. And when it hit, it would change its shape, flatten, or even develop a spine. Lead missiles were not unknown, but they were designed to be flung from small field artillery over the top of city walls, as at Perusia, and that was a blind exercise of debatable effectiveness. A lead ball thrown by an expert slinger at a specific target from, say, two hundred feet, might turn out to be extremely useful.

He had the legion artificers make a small number of pound-weight lead balls, warning them that if his idea bore fruit, they would have to make thousands upon thousands of pound-weight lead balls; the chief artificer cunningly countered by suggesting that thousands upon thousands of pound-weight lead balls would be better contracted out to a private supplier.

“A private supplier will fleece us,” said Ventidius, manfully keeping a straight face.

“Not if I detail half a dozen legionary journeymen to weigh each ball and check it for humps, lumps, and bumps, general.”

Having agreed to this arrangement, provided the chief artificer also supplied the lead and made sure it wasn’t adulterated by the addition of a cheaper metal like iron, Ventidius carried a bag of lead balls to the slinger practice range, laughing to himself. You never could get the better of a resourceful, clever legionary, no matter how hard you tried or how senior your rank. They grew up much as he had done, hand-to-mouth, and they weren’t even afraid of three-headed dogs.

Xenon, the chief of the slingers, was at his station.

“Try one of these,” said Ventidius, handing the balls over.

Xenon balanced the small object in the declivity of his sling and swung the weapon until it whistled. An expert flick, and the lead ball screamed through the air to land on the midriff of a bolster. Together they walked to inspect the damage; Xenon gave a squeak, too amazed to yell.

“General, look!” he said when he was able.

“I’m already looking.”

The missile hadn’t punched a hole in the soft leather, it had torn an irregular, gaping aperture, and rested at the bottom of a moil of earth and gravel.

“The trouble with your bolsters,” said Ventidius, “is that they contain no true skeleton. I suspect that these lead balls will behave differently when they hit something with a skeleton. Therefore we’ll try the missile on a condemned mule.”

By the time the mule had been found, five hundred slingers were gathered as closely as possible around the test site; word had spread that the Roman commander had invented a new projectile.

“Rump facing the path of the ball,” Ventidius ordered. “It will be used on fleeing horses about the mule’s size. A horse down is an archer down. The Parthians may keep up the supply of arrows, but horses? I doubt there’ll be many spare ones.”

The mule was so maimed that it had to be put out of its misery at once, its hide torn open, its nether innards mangled. When dug from the carcass, the missile was no longer a ball; it resembled a flattish dish with a ragged perimeter, the result, it appeared, of hitting solid bone on its way in.

“Slingers!” Ventidius hollered. “You have a new weapon!”

Cheers went up from every side.

To Xenon he said, “Send word to Polemon that I need fifteen hundred more slingers and a thousand talents of lead left over from his silver mines. Pontus has just become a very important ally.”

Of course it wasn’t as simple as that. Some of the slingers found the smaller missile harder to throw, and some, hidebound, refused to see its excellence. But gradually even the most obdurate slingers grew expert in throwing lead, and swore by their new kind of weapon. Modifications to the sling pouch also helped, as use proved that a lead ball wore the flimsier slings out faster than a stone did.

At about the moment when content among the slingers was widespread, fifteen hundred extra slingers arrived from Amaseia and Sinope, with more expected from Amisus, farther away. No fool, Polemon counted on his generosity and speed paying big dividends later on.

Ventidius wasn’t idle while sling training went on, nor was he entirely pleased. The new governor of Asia Province, Lucius Munatius Plancus, had installed himself at Pergamum, well to the north of Labienus’s incursions, situated in Lycia and Caria. But a Pergamite in Labienus’s pay sought Plancus out and convinced him that Ephesus had fallen and Pergamum was the next Parthian target. Flustered, not very brave, and prone to listen to false counsel, Plancus had packed up in a panic and fled to the island of Chios, sending word to Antony, still in Rome, that nothing could stop Labienus.

“And all this,” said Ventidius in a letter to Antony, “while I was busy landing fifteen legions in Ephesus! The man is a dupe and a coward, and must
not
be dowered with troops. I have not bothered to contact him, deeming it a waste of time.”

“Well done, Ventidius,” said Antony’s letter, arriving just as Ventidius and his army were about to march. “I admit that I gave Plancus the governorship to get him out from under my feet—a little like Ahenobarbus in Bithynia, except that Ahenobarbus is no coward. Let Plancus stay on Chios, the wine is superlative.”

When shown this reply, Silo chuckled. “Excellent, Ventidius, except that we’ll be leaving Asia Province without a governor.”

“I’ve thought of that,” Ventidius said complacently. “Since Pythodorus of Tralles is now Antonius’s son-in-law, I’ve summoned him to Ephesus. He can collect the tributes and taxes in
tata
-in-law Antonius’s name, and send them to the Treasury in Rome.”

“Oooh!” said Silo, strange eyes wide. “I doubt that will please Antonius! His orders are, directly to him.”

“No order that’s been given to me, Silo. I am loyal to Marcus Antonius, but more loyal to Rome. Tributes and taxes exacted in her name must go to the Treasury. Similarly with any spoils we might collect. If Antonius wants to complain, he can do so—but only after we’ve beaten the Parthians.”

He was feeling his oats, Ventidius, for the leaderless thanes of Galatia had massed every horse trooper they could find and come to Ephesus eager to show this unknown Roman general what good horse troopers could do. Ten thousand of them, all too young to have perished at Philippi, and anxious to preserve their grassy plains from the depredations of Quintus Labienus, too close for comfort.

“I’m riding with them, but not headlong,” Ventidius said to Silo. “It’s your job to get the infantry on the road, quick-smart. I want no fewer than thirty miles a day from my legions, and I want them on the most direct route to the Cilician Gates. That is, up the Maeander and across northern Pisidia to Iconium. Take the caravan road from there to southern Cappadocia, where you’ll pick up the Roman road that leads to the Cilician Gates. It’s a five-hundred-mile march, and you have twenty days. Understood?”

“Completely, Publius Ventidius,” said Silo.

It was not the habit of a Roman commander to ride; most much preferred to walk, for a number of reasons. For one, comfort; a man on horseback had no relief for the weight of his legs, which hung down limply. For another, infantry liked their commanders to walk; it put them on the same level, literally as well as metaphorically. For a third, it kept the cavalry in their place; Roman armies were largely composed of infantry, more valued than horsed troops, which over the centuries had become non-Roman, an auxiliary force of Gauls, Germans, Galatians.

However, Ventidius was more used to riding than most, due to his career breeding mules. It tickled him to remind his loftier colleagues that the great Sulla had always ridden a mule, and that Sulla had made Caesar the God ride a mule when a young man. What he wanted was to keep a stern eye on his cavalry, led by a Galatian named Amyntas, who had been secretary to old King Deiotarus. If Ventidius was right, Labienus would retreat before such a large cavalry force until he found a place where his ten thousand Roman-trained infantry could beat ten thousand horse. Nowhere in Caria, or in central Anatolia; he could do it in Lycia and southern Pisidia, but to retreat in that direction would render his communications with the Parthian army tenuous. His instincts, and they were right, would lead him across the same ground Ventidius had outlined to Silo as the legions’ route, but days ahead of the legions. Ten thousand horse on his heels would force him to flee too fast to keep his baggage train, loaded down with loot only ox wagons could carry. It would fall to Silo; Ventidius’s job was to keep Labienus hurrying back toward Cilicia Pedia and a Parthian army just on the far side of the Amanus range, the geographical barrier between Cilicia Pedia and northern Syria.

There was only one way Labienus could pass from Cappadocia into Cilicia, for the immensely tall and rugged Taurus Mountains cut central Anatolia off from anywhere east of it; the snows of the Taurus never melted, and what passes there were lay at ten and eleven thousand feet, especially in the Anti-Taurus segment. Except for the Cilician Gates. It was at the Cilician Gates that Ventidius expected to catch up with Quintus Labienus.

The young Galatian troopers were at the exact age that produces the finest, bravest warriors: not old enough to have wives and families, not old enough to think of joining battle against the enemy as anything to be afraid of. Only Rome had managed to turn men older than twenty into superlative soldiers, and that was a mark of Rome’s superiority. Discipline, training, professionalism, a secure, ineradicable knowledge that each man was a part of a vast unbeatable machine. Without his legions Ventidius knew he could not defeat Labienus; what he had to do was pin the renegade to one spot, make it impossible for him to negotiate the Cilician Gates, and wait for his legions to arrive. In trusting Silo, he was handing the coming battle over to Silo.

Labienus did the expected. His intelligence network had told him of the enormous force sitting in Ephesus, and when he heard the name of its commander, he knew he had to retreat from western Anatolia in a hurry. His booty was considerable, for he had touched places that Brutus and Cassius had not. Pisidia was full of shrines to Kubaba Cybele and her consort, Attis; Lycaonia full of temple precincts to deities forgotten to the rest of the world since Agamemnon had ruled Greece; and Iconium a town where Median and Armenian gods had temples. So he tried desperately to haul his baggage train along with him—an exercise in futility. He abandoned it fifty miles west of Iconium, its wagoneers too terrified of the pursuing Roman horde to think of stealing its contents. They fled, leaving the two-mile-long train of bellowing, thirsty oxen deserted. Ventidius paused only to free the beasts so they could find water, and trotted on. When, in the fullness of time, the loot made its way to the Treasury, it amounted to five thousand silver talents. No priceless works of art, but a great deal of gold, silver and gems. It would, he thought as his rump lifted and fell to the gait of his mule, be a fitting adornment at his triumph.

The country around the Cilician Gates was not good horse country; its forests of various kinds of pine grew too closely to permit of grass, and no horse would eat such redolent foliage. Each trooper carried as much fodder with him as he could, one reason why Ventidius hadn’t hurried. But the troopers were crafty, gathered every tender fern shoot they could find; to Ventidius they looked like the
lituus
of an augur, finished on top with a curlicue. Between the fodder his army still had and the fern shoots, he estimated they could survive for ten days. Enough, if Silo was sufficiently tough to push his legions on at thirty miles a day. Caesar could always get more miles than that out of legionaries, but Caesar was unique. Oh, that march from Placentia to relieve Trebonius and the rest at Agedincum! And what gratitude, to kill the man who rescued you. Ventidius hawked, spat at an imaginary Gaius Trebonius.

Labienus had arrived at the top of the pass two days before and managed to fell sufficient trees to make a camp in proper Roman style, using the logs to make high walls, digging ditches around the periphery, and erecting towers at intervals atop the walls. However, his troops were Roman-trained, not Roman, which meant that there were faults in the camp design—cutting corners, Ventidius called it. When he arrived, Labienus made no attempt to come out from behind his fortifications and give battle, but Ventidius had not expected him to. He was waiting for Pacorus and his Parthians to come from Syria; that was the prudent thing to do. It was also a risky waiting game. His scouts would have found Silo and the legions, just as Ventidius’s scouts by now had ascertained that there were no Parthians within several days’ ride of the Cilician Gates. Farther east than that Ventidius did not dare send scouts. The most cheering fact was that Silo couldn’t be too far away, judging from the speed at which Labienus constructed his camp.

Three days later Silo and the fifteen legions came down the flanks of the Taurus; they had beaten the Parthian relief—still some distance away and obliged to climb from the coast at Tarsus, exhausting work for horses as well as men.

“There,” said Ventidius to Silo, pointing as they met; he had no time to waste. “We build our camp above Labienus, and on rising ground.” He chewed his lip, came to a decision. “Send young Appius Pulcher and five of the legions north to Eusebeia Mazaca—ten will be enough to fight in this country, it’s too rugged for mass deployments of that size, and I don’t have the room to make a camp square miles in area. Tell Pulcher to occupy the town and be prepared to march at a moment’s notice. He can also report on the state of affairs in Cappadocia—Antonius is anxious to know whether there’s an Ariarthrid capable of ruling.”