Onslaught: The Centurions II by Anthony Riches

Author:Anthony Riches [Anthony Riches]
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi
Publisher: Hodder and Stoughton
Published: 2017-08-31T04:00:00+00:00

The Old Camp, Germania Inferior, August AD 69

‘Here they come!’

The two first spears stood by the side of one of the new bolt throwers that had been built in the previous few days, their metal components copied from spare parts by the civilian smiths who had moved inside the Old Camp’s walls and set up their forges in empty barracks blocks, the weapons’ wooden bodies and firing platforms built by the legion’s carpenters. Marius turned and looked down into the fortress, surveying the open space between the walls and the buildings that remained, now that the legion work gangs had finished tearing down everything within fifty paces of the rampart. The walls were studded with artillery on all four sides of the camp, each one of the heavy bolt throwers double-crewed to ensure that men tired by the effort of rewinding the weapons could be rotated to maintain the best possible rate of shooting. Baskets of iron- tipped and finned bolts were stacked neatly behind the wooden shields that would be dragged into place by waiting legionaries, designed to protect the men working the big weapons from enemy archery as the bolt throwers traversed to left and right in search of targets. Smaller man-portable scorpions, weapons taken from the fleet’s vessels before they had retreated back up the river, stood ready with crews and their own shield bearers alongside the ranks of soldiers waiting in the empty spaces on all sides of the fortress, ready to hurry to whichever point of the wall was the first to come under attack.

‘If it’s not ready by now then it never will be. Better to concentrate on the enemy and start working out what their first move might be.’

Marius nodded at Aquillius’s dour statement, turning back to stare out over the expanse of mantraps and jutting stakes that now surrounded the fortress at the enemy force approaching them from the west.

‘They won’t attack immediately. They’ll want to know what it is that they have to overcome. But when they do …’ He scanned the Batavi column for a moment. ‘I don’t see any siege equipment, do you?’

The other man shrugged.

‘No. And nor did I expect to. These tribesmen might have served with the legions, but that doesn’t make them engineers. And there’s a big difference between watching a siege engine at work and building your own. They’ll know all about the use of catapults and towers, but the odds of them being able to build them are probably about the same as my being able to jump off this wall and avoid hitting the ground below us. A battering ram will probably be the limit of their abilities. And any men sent to swing that ram will be dead long before they get the chance to test our gates with all this artillery at our disposal.’

They watched in impassive silence as the enemy column turned off the road, splitting to either side as the various parts of the Batavi army set up camp according to their usual practices.

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