Chapter 19

Port Invictus

Velius stood atop the walls of Port Invictus, surveying the sprawling Carthaginian siege works encircling the city, taking in the trenches and barriers dug by the enemy to protect themselves from the Britannian artillery. Despite this artillery, the Carthaginians had made steady progress toward the city walls. At the rate they were gaining ground, Velius estimated they would be close enough to assault the walls and get clear of his artillery in a few weeks’ time.

He squeezed his eyes shut for a moment, pressing against his eyelids, trying to smother the headache that had been gaining on him. A week of hard travel without much sleep, spurred on by the desire to get to his men, was starting to catch up with him.

The cohorts defending Port Invictus were battle-hardened but depleted, slowly being whittled down by the need to man the line of forts and protect supply trains. Even if he’d had a full legion here, he lacked the numbers for a direct sally against the Carthaginians. Gordianus had arrived with his legion in the mountains the evening before, but they might as well have been on the other side of the world, what with the sea of Carthaginians between them.

His only hope was that they could hold out until their massive foe was whittled down to the point they were forced to pull back. Even with their trenches and log barriers, they were losing hundreds of men a day, by Velius’s estimate, and that was before Gordianus got fully engaged. Still, it would be weeks before they finally killed enough to force them to retreat.

At least he still had supplies coming in from the sea, so he didn’t have to worry about starving.

As if in answer to his thoughts, in the distance, fire erupted from Gordianus’s legion camped on the mountainside. Shells smashed into the Carthaginians, mostly into the ground around the trenches on the mountainside of the Carthaginian positions, as his gunners got their aim, with only a few landing on the trenches themselves. The ones that did hit the trenches destroyed everything mercilessly, throwing bodies and material into the air like dolls.

Unfortunately, the Carthaginians had laid their defenses out well, with the trenches going to the foot of the mountains and stretching a ways back before opening up to a middle position between the two wide sets of trenches. From Gordianus’s present position, their artillery could currently only reach part of the Carthaginian forces encircling Port Invictus. They couldn’t reach the middle section which was unprotected by trenches and filled with tents and supplies for their soldiers.

When Gordianus pushed forward, he’d be able to rain shells there, destroying the Carthaginians’ safe area between the two sets of cannon. Of course, to push forward, Gordianus would have to deal with the Carthaginians already on the mountainside. They were the ones set to perform the ambushes Aelius had mentioned. Through his glass, he could see men moving toward Gordianus, up the mountainside, angling in on where the cannons were firing.

Gordianus was an experienced soldier, though, and had prepared for it. As the Carthaginians scrambled up the mountain, smaller puffs of smoke appeared all across the crest as riflemen, probably the legion’s best shots, began picking them off. With impressive rapidity, bodies began to roll back down the slope, like shells dropping from a fishing net as it lifted into the air.

The Carthaginians weren’t going to be able to dislodge the seventh legion from their position. Not with cannons and rifles able to fire down the slope. What they could do was slow their progress down the mountainside even more.

It was frustrating.

“Sir, look,” one of Aelius’s tribunes said, pointing down towards the closest trenches.

Velius looked through his spyglass, following where the tribune was pointing. A group of Carthaginian soldiers rushed forward, pushing large, wheeled catapults toward the walls of the port, but were still inside the trenches. It was unclear if they would be able to launch their payloads from there, but Velius doubted they’d have deployed them if they didn’t think it would work.

“Target the catapults!” Velius yelled to his gunnery officers. “Concentrate fire on them!”

The wall cannons roared, belching clouds of grey smoke as they fired. Shells arced through the air and smashed against the Carthaginian barricades. Wood and dirt sprayed into the air where the shells impacted. Several balls found their targets, landing past the barricades and into the trenches themselves. Two of the catapults disappeared in blasts of fire and shrapnel.

But more machines were already being pushed forward, weaving through the trenches to replace the ones that had been destroyed. His cannons were too few to cover the entire encircling siege line and many of the wall positions didn’t have a good angle on the newly erected barricades sheltering the catapults.

Whenever he knocked out one position, more machines were brought up to take their place. The Carthaginians were willing to absorb losses to get their catapults in range of the walls. Once there, they could begin bombarding the walls and city in earnest.

The walls could take the pounding, as could the port itself. Whatever they destroyed could be rebuilt. If they rained enough stones, they could create enough casualties to make it impossible to hold the port. Which had to be their plan. Worse, if it was flaming rounds. Most of the gunpowder was in protected stores, but they had to have cartridges with the cannons. A few fabric balls soaked in tar and lit on fire could destroy entire positions, taking whole chunks out of the wall if they hit the gunpowder near a cannon.

And he couldn’t just take their ammunition away. Without the cannons’ continual fire, the Carthaginians would charge, attempting to take the wall.

“Increase the rate of fire. Destroy those catapults,” he ordered.

The order wasn’t needed. His men saw them and understood the danger. It was more a sign of his own uneasiness with the situation. It wasn’t enough to stop the Carthaginian effort. Several of the catapults had their arms pulled back, ammunition being loaded into their baskets.

“Brace for impact,” he ordered. “Have the gunners secure their ammunition as best they can. Possible incendiary rounds.”

There wasn’t much they could do, but at least they’d be warned.

As he watched, a catapult arm slapped forward, sending its payload sailing through the air. As soon as it cleared the trench, a part of Velius’s mind recognized that something was different. It wasn’t a large ball of rope soaked in tar, nor was it a stone. It looked like a large clay pot, which was unusual. He’d heard of pots full of oil being thrown, prior to flaming rounds, intended to increase the damage caused. That kind of thing wouldn’t damage the walls, and the Carthaginians would know that. Yes, it would increase the chances of gunpowder being set off, but it didn’t seem likely the Carthaginians would know that.

He was still trying to process what he was seeing when the unthinkable happened. The container smashed against the wall and exploded, expanding out in a ball of flame. Chunks of masonry blew away from the wall, leaving a gouge in the side of the wall. It took a moment for the sheer shock of what he was seeing to pass and his brain to work again. He was still in disbelief that the Carthaginians could have gotten gunpowder, but it wasn’t exactly the same as theirs. If that container had been even half full of Britannian gunpowder, the explosion would have been larger, which meant either the container was practically empty, which was possible but didn’t seem likely, or it was weaker than what they used.

Velius didn’t understand the substance fully, but he’d had a conversation with Hortensius the previous year when they were developing it, and he remembered the manufacturer talking about testing to find the right ratios to give just enough explosive power. Even weaker though, it was still a huge danger.

Velius’s worry was proven correct when two more pots sailed through the air. One exploded prematurely, well away from the walls, suggesting there was some kind of pre-lit fuse on the pots, but the other landed close to one of the cannons. Close enough that the fireball itself, or perhaps some flaming debris, hit the cannon’s supply of gunpowder. The explosion showed just how different their gunpowder was from what the Carthaginians were firing.

The explosion shook the ground under Velius’s feet halfway across the port and obliterated not only the cannon and its crew, but an entire section of the wall. The cannon tube itself flew high into the air, smashing to the ground outside the walls, as chunks of masonry flew in all directions amidst billowing smoke and dust.