Next morning Simon came to fetch him. ‘Get dressed, and be quick about it!’ He would not say any more, and vanished leaving two of his soldiers waiting outside. They were almost in the street before he reappeared, and even then he said little other than they were going to the eastern wall because it seemed bound to collapse very soon and they wanted ideas to help stop the Romans.

‘Isn’t there the second wall?’

‘No. It’s not finished, so we need either to speed that up or stop them before they get there. This is important, so you must find a way.’ At a nod, the soldiers dropped back a little. ‘They have taken Sara to the prison, along with all the Princess Azátē’s little court.’ Domitius remembered the screaming in the night and prayed that it had not been Sara. Word had spread days ago that the princess was with the Romans, along with her brother, but at first the magistrates had left her household alone, beyond the guard maintained since the start.

‘Why now?’ Domitius asked.

‘Does it matter? To save her and the family, I need to prove myself, which means so do you – or I’ll kill you myself.’

There was only so much he could do. Big cracks were visible in the back of the curtain wall, and a glance from one of the towers showed that the front was worse, both where the ram had hit and where the men were undermining it. The whole thing looked ready to fall at the next thump of the ram, and he was almost surprised when it did not.

‘Artillery,’ Domitius said after he had thought a while. He pointed from the wall at the flat tops of the houses they were trying to make into an inner wall. ‘There at the far end and opposite it. The range will be close, but you shoot at an angle at where the breach is going to be. Pound them with stones as they come across it. And bolt shooters there, there and there. Same thing. Don’t aim straight ahead because it will go high. Shoot along and across them.’

The strategoi appeared, and Simon explained the ideas to them.

‘They need more. You can see how many gaps there are. We’ve barely built across one of the alleys and the two widest are open.’

‘Stakes.’ Simon frowned, so Domitius used his fingers to show what he meant. ‘Lots of stakes, driven into the ground and sticking up diagonally.’

‘There won’t be enough to block the alleys.’

‘Doesn’t have to. What we want is enough to slow them down, make them stop and try to push them aside or weave their way through. While they’re stopped we are hitting them with everything we can throw. The last of the oil can pour down on them.’

‘How do we drive stakes into paved roads?’

‘Rip the stones up. Put them on the roofs and we have more to drop on them as they come in.’