Sarum - Edward Rutherfurd [111]
But the Romans did not attack; they took their time. To the surprise of the natives, they calmly dug a small fortification in front of the gate. This took them two hours. Then, from the back of their column, they slowly wheeled a huge catapult and brought it to the little fortified rampart they had built, together with a cart containing several enormous rocks.
While this work proceeded, Vespasian sat on a leather stool, out of range of the walls. He took no notice of the Durotriges at all, but coolly dictated a memorandum to a scribe:
The first fort we have encountered belonging to the Durotriges is beside the sea. There is a shallow harbour behind it, which the hill protects from the sea. The fort had two walls. As our reports suggested, the warriors of the tribe are brave but undisciplined.
The gate of the fort was breached and the place taken.
“You may carry this to the governor now,” he remarked to the scribe. “This place will be ours by sundown.”
At a nod from the legate, the catapult was now put into action. A huge stone rocketed in a great arc and crashed against the gate, which split. A minute later, a second rock burst the entire gate wide open.
“Take it,” he ordered.
Now, for the first time, the Durotriges discovered the perfect, impersonal efficiency of the fighting machine that the young commander was so coolly directing against them.
A century, eighty men in military organisation of that time, had drawn up in formation under their centurion. Now those in the inside ranks raised their shields above their heads, each shield touching the next to form a solid metal covering. Those in the first and the outside ranks held their shields in front of them or at their side so that the front and flanks were protected in a similar manner: this formation was the famous testudo, or tortoise and was neither more nor less than a human, armour-plated tank – a favourite formation of the Romans, and almost impregnable. At a nod from the centurion, the testudo moved smartly forward and went through the open gate of the fort while the spears, arrows and sling-stones of the defenders bounced uselessly off its raised shields. A second century followed at once; then a third.
Slow, mechanical, indestructible, these man-machines then set to work upon the Durotriges inside the fortress. The shield wall of the testudo would suddenly flash open, like a line of shutters, and the pila – the Romans’ short, heavy, bolt-like spears – would shoot out. At close range the pila could drill a neat, square hole in a man’s skull. Those who came within reach would receive a harsh thrust from the legionaries’ short, flat-bladed swords. The Romans moved along the inside of the walls and across the open ground below the hill while the brave Durotriges dashed themselves to pieces upon their metal shell. They hacked the defenders unmercifully. By mid afternoon, as Vespasian had known they would, they had cleared the entire fortress.
The Romans took the merchandise from the barns and the boats in the harbour. The controller of the mint had just time to bury his stock of silver coins in the ground under his hut before the soldiers walked in and killed him – a little hoard which archaeologists would find nearly two thousand years later.
The massacre was watched by a single figure from a safely concealed point in the rushes on the opposite bank of the harbour. He was tall, thin and stooped, with a lean, hard face and narrow-set eyes. After he had carefully watched the gate being smashed and the Durotriges cut to pieces, and satisfied himself that the defenders had no chance of success against the Romans’ fighting methods, he loped along the bank on his curious, long-toed feet, and stepped into a large canoe made of hides stretched over a wooden frame, with a broad, shallow draught. Taradoc the canny riverman made no attempt to paddle up river to warn Tosutigus and the waiting defenders of the dune at Sarum. Hugging the bank, he slipped quietly to the harbour entrance and out into the open