‘It’s quite beautiful, in its way,’ Hadrian said, ‘although I doubt any painter could capture that light.’

Crispinus frowned. ‘There is so much dust.’ He did not remember such a cloud around the ram on the other side.

A cornu sounded the alarm.

‘That’s not dust,’ Ferox said. ‘It’s smoke.’

XXIV

Outside Nicopolis

The Ides of May

The thirty-sixth day of the siege

THE RAMP BURNED, and so did the tower. It started slowly, the air becoming hotter, and ever thicker smoke coming up from underneath and through the gaps in the timber supports. They had used a lot more wood to speed the construction, and that helped the blaze gain hold. No one had thought to protect the tower from fire coming from below, so its big wooden wheels and the beams of its floor soon began to burn.

‘Can we haul it back?’ Hadrian had asked, when he and the others galloped over to help organise the firefighting.

‘Not designed that way,’ Caecilius replied. ‘No time to set up ropes to haul it back and if we let it roll it will smash itself to pieces.’

‘Then let’s get the flames under control!’

There was no water close enough to make this easy. Bucket chains were formed from the stream, but that was back beyond the camp, had very little water in it, and they probably lost half of what they carried in their hurry. Crispinus let some of the barrels in the camp be loaded onto waggons and brought forward, but it was not remotely enough.

‘Like pissing into Etna!’ Caecilius shouted. The blaze was raging, the noise so loud that it was hard to understand what anyone was saying. Stones came from the walls, smashing anyone in their path, while bolts and arrows knocked them down. Men died, achieving nothing, but they kept trying, for after toiling for so long it was hard to see the work consumed. In the end it took much shouting, and some blows from the troopers escorting Hadrian and Crispinus, to pull men back. The fire lit the night, burning on for hours, and the next morning a cloud of dirty smoke drifted across the city.

No one had died from the fire itself, for there had been time to pull everyone from the tower and the works around the ramp. A dozen had been killed by missiles and twice that many wounded, with a similar number burned more or less severely.

‘It’s gone,’ Caecilius told them, ‘all of it.’ They were on the observation tower, Hadrian, Crispinus and ten officers crammed into the narrow platform.

‘Can anything be salvaged?’ Hadrian asked.

‘No. It’s gone – the tower, the ramp, more than a month’s work… finished. Buggers must have been mining for a good while. Got right underneath, packed the tunnel with oil, tallow, pitch, anything that would burn. Once that’s ablaze it’s bound to go up and all that dry wood – poof!’ Caecilius gave a thin smile. ‘Well, you know what I mean. We were so busy feeling smart about our own mine that we never thought that they’d be burrowing away at the same time.’