Читать книгу Hannibal - Ross Leckie - Страница 10

Leaving Sicily, my father’s orders were that our troops should return gradually to Carthage. They had not been paid for several years. Huge sums we did not have were due. I knew my father’s mind, for I was with him when he admitted Gisco and other Elders who had come to our house. “I have fought for nearly seven years in Sicily,” my father said, “and now you have peace. Give me mine. I must see to my own affairs. Pay the soldiers as you can. They are to trickle back, not flood.”

“Pay them, Hamilcar, with what?” cried Gisco.

“Why, the jewellery you wear itself would pay a squadron, Gisco,” my father joked, leaving the room. But he had every confidence in Gisco. “He may be no soldier,” my father said, “but as an administrator he has no equal.”

Several days later, my father left Carthage with Hamilax and four trusted slaves on a tour of his estates, his forests of oak at Zartana, his granaries at Chozeba and Tirzah, his summer house at Issachar and farms of sheep and goats at Marephath. He was to be gone for several months. We were all to wish he had not gone at all.

We became aware of the mercenaries’ returning almost imperceptibly in the months my father was away. Their camp was to the city’s rear upon the plain that stretched away and round the gulf to Tunis. I saw it grow as, each afternoon, I went for my ride with Abdolonim. The Ligurians had been first to return and pitch their ordered tents of skin upon the sand. Then came the Lacedaemonians, a race apart, who slept upon the ground within the ditch that they had dug. Soon the Balearics came, slingers from the Spanish isles, who formed no order like the rest but mingled, ate and slept wherever they could. Darytians from Gaetulia next put up their shelters of dry grass and waited in the wind.

A month passed and returning Iberians set their marquees of canvas with the rest; the Gauls made shelters out of planks, the Libyans out of stones. The Negroes and Numidians slept in trenches in the sand. The camp grew. There were 10,000 there, then 20,000 and Abdolonim would not let me near and a sense of menace grew around the camp as strong as was the reek and stench of this great host, the mercenaries of Carthage.

From the city to the camp plied traders, pedlars, women, boys. The women were of every nation on the earth, brown as dates, sallow as olives, yellow as melons, white as alabaster; women sold by sailors, seized by soldiers, stolen from desert caravans, captured at the sacking of cities, worn out by the penises and practices of many men when they were young and beaten when they were old, left to die among the donkeys and the dung. All moved and mingled in the camp, women of Cappadocia with gold plates in their hair, of Gaul with wolfskin on their breasts. Those of Cyrenaica, wreathed in violet gauze, vermilion-faced, sang songs of sadness where they sat on mats of rush. Amongst the clamour and the smell and smoke of many fires moved Lusitanians, with necklaces of sea-shell and pendulous naked breasts, gathering for fuel the droppings of the animals to be dried in a strengthening sun.

So much I could see for myself. But by the month of Eloul, in mid-summer, I began to hear from the servants and the slaves and from Silenus of merchants unpaid for their wares, of women for their services. Sellers of oil and water, tailors, moneylenders, bakers all complained of accounts ridiculed. For a sheep, the mercenaries offered the price of a pigeon; for three goats that of a pomegranate. The soldiers, it was said, had begun to drink wine, a thing forbidden on pain of execution in a Punic army. Prowlers were abroad at night and from the city there came complaints of thefts and rapes and pillagings. With the summer heat there rose a tension that afflicted all. Even Silenus found no consolation in his scrolls, in his philosophies.

Still my father was away. Still Gisco waited. I felt for the mercenaries, unpaid still, and knew that they must dream of many things that might have been and some that might yet be. One would buy a farm, one a ship, returning to their native lands with that of value from their years of war for Carthage. So did I imagine them dozing in the sun, counting up their years of service and their gear lost, their arms and shields and horses. Now, they had nothing, save their wounds and scars and grumblings. Carthage replied with barred gates and doubled watch and silence.

At last Gisco acted. I was at Khamon’s Gate to see him depart in his purple litter, bunches of ostrich feathers at each corner, crystal chains and ropes of pearl swinging to the movement that it made.

Behind him went twenty dromedaries, their bags heavy with gold, the bronze bells around their necks clanging as they lurched along. Around them rode the horsemen of the Sacred Legion, armoured in golden scales, astride their snorting stallions from Hecatompylus, the plumes of their bronze Boeotian helmets soaring to the sky. Then came the clerks on donkeys, with the tablet and the abacus for reckoning what was owed. With them went Silenus, unadorned as was his way, in simple cotton shift. Last in litters came the Twelve Interpreters, skilled in desert tongues, each with parrots tattooed on both arms, their headdresses of peacock plumes swaying softly in the breeze.

That struck me at the time, that Gisco knew at least he must communicate with many men who had no common tongue. Some dekadarchoi, some captains, Silenus had told me, would know Punic, but he was to speak the words of Gisco to the Dorians and Spartans, the Boeotians and the other Greeks. The Twelve would deal with the Libyans and Numidians. As for the rest, the Gauls and the men of the west beyond the Pillars of Herakles, Silenus did not know.

It had, I knew, always been a policy of Carthage to keep its army polyglot. So would insurrection be more difficult. But if this worked in war, it did otherwise in peace. The Truceless War began, as Silenus said, not from principles nor passion, but because people could not communicate. I have made it my business from that time up to this to learn the tongues of those around me.

Arriving at the mercenary camp, Gisco and his entourage were soon surrounded by men clamouring for the pay that was their due. Two heralds sounded silver horns, the noise died down and Gisco spoke, standing on a table of the clerks. First he told, Silenus said, of the Republic’s gratitude to its soldiers for the service they had lent to Carthage. “We want our money, not your gratitude!” cried back someone who spoke Punic. Gisco ploughed on. Times, he said, were hard. Carthage was now poor – “But you are not!” came voices from the back – “and if a master has only three melons, is it not right that he should keep two for himself?” The indemnity to Rome was crippling. The treasury was empty, the purple fisheries exhausted, the farmland abandoned in the war producing nothing. Carthage would have to sell its silphium reserve and further tax the trading towns. “Why, only yesterday,” said Gisco, “I had myself to pay for a bath-slave what a year ago would have bought me an elephant, no” – he must have thought they would appreciate his wit – “a virgin from Bithynia.”

So Gisco went on. “Excuses are like arseholes,” came a voice in Greek from the back of the crowd. “Everybody’s got one!” Those that understood – not Gisco – laughed.

By now the crowd was thousands strong and pushing hard against the circle around Gisco formed by the the Sacred Legion. “You will be paid, all of you, in full – but in time.” Gisco paused to let first Silenus, then the Twelve translate this to the crowd. The menace grew as the words “in time” sank in and were passed in many tongues around.

“I have with me,” Gisco then cried out, “a xthet of pure gold for each of you as earnest of our faith. As for you Balearics, whose pay is always women, a caravan of virgins, fattened up and rubbed with benjamin, is even now on its way from Abdera. We have commissioned galleys which will take you to your homes. You will be paid in full before you leave.”

“For our horses too?”

“Yes,” said Gisco mournfully, “for your horses too. Now form up lines before these clerks who will pay you each the gold and take a record of what more each of you is due.”

This too was translated round the camp. Numidians from the mountains, wrapped in the skin of bears, who had been leaning forward, ominous on their clubs, and Dorians, flaxen-haired, who had begun to finger their swordbelts made of iron, now relaxed. It might, Silenus thought, have worked, for these were people who had trusted Carthage, some for generations.

But just as the mercenaries were beginning to form obedient lines, a giant Campanian stepped forward and sounded a great horn. He was beyond the horses and before the mercenaries and what he said was said so fast the harm was done before any could gainsay. He announced rapidly in six different languages, in Latin, Gaulish, Balearic, Libyan, Iberian and Greek, that he had something important to say. Since it was Greeks who were most numerous around him, he went on in Greek.

“Now hear what this man has truly said,” the Campanian shouted. “He called you cowards, vermin, sons of dogs and bitches. Had you not lost for Carthage the war with Rome, she would not have to pay her indemnity to Rome so why, then, should you be paid?” Silenus tried to move to Gisco to translate this for him, but was held fast in the press. “One stater is all you will get. These clerks are here to record not what you will be paid but how you are to be punished, in the Cantabrian mines or as galley slaves. These were the true words of Gisco. Let us not take a stater. Let us take Carthage itself!”

So simply was it done. The horsemen of the Sacred Legion were pulled from their mounts, Gisco’s circle drowned. Hands tore off his necklace of blue stones, his gold clasps, his heavy earrings. The dignity of Carthage was trampled in the dust.

They were all held then in a human corral, the Sufet and Silenus, the Twelve, the clerks, the high-born of the Legion. The bags of gold were brought. The Campanian – his name was Spendius – seemed in command. “What shall we do with them?” came cries. “Kill them!” said one, and “Cut off their balls!” another. “No, let’s eat them …” Spendius held up a great axe, double-edged. Silence fell. “What we shall do” – he paused – “is keep them,” he said, “as hostages, though we may have some sport with him” – and he prodded Gisco in the stomach with his axe – “first.”

Silenus was a gentle man. The pain it caused him first to witness what was then done and next to recount it to the Council was a pain from which he was never to recover. Years later in Spain I found his copy of Homer’s Iliad with this passage marked and marked again. Priam, King of Troy, is mourning for dead Hector, his greatest son, champion of Troy which now must fall, for Hector has been killed by Achilles:

γεραιὸς

ἐντυπὰς ἐν χλαίνη κεκαλυμμένος˙ ἀμϕὶ δὲ πολλὴ

κόπρος ἔην κεϕαλῇ τε καὶ αὐχένι τοῖο γέροντος,

τήν ῥα κυλινδόμενος καταμήσατο χερσὶν ἑησι.

The old man sat veiled, beaten into his cloak. Excrement lay thick on his head and neck, he was an old man, for he had been rolling in it, he had gathered it and smeared it on with his hands.

Such, I suppose, Silenus thought his sorrow and his suffering to be. Yet his was a less brutal suffering than many begun that day. First the mercenaries put Gisco in a frame of rough-hewn planks. To the board behind his neck they nailed his hands and to the one between his legs they nailed his knees. A man they called Zaracas did these things, moaning with the pleasure that this brought him. It was Spendius, though, who put out the Sufet’s eyes, pushing with his great strength on the Sufet’s sockets with his thumbs until both eyeballs popped. Then he bit through with his teeth the cords of both the Sufet’s eyes. His tongue, Silenus said, was torn out by Zaracas, his ears cut off by a dark-skinned Libyan they knew as Mathos. Then they put his eyeballs, his ears and his tongue on a rope of pearl they tore from Gisco’s litter and they placed it round the neck of Silenus of Caleacte and sent him back alone to Carthage to tell the Council of their terms.

Silenus left the Sufet living still and all his clerks and Twelve and Legionaries lying in a rubbish pit where pigs snarled for scraps. First Spendius had had them tied together, a collar of iron round each neck in the manner of the caravans of slaves that cross the trackless deserts of the south. Silenus saw the camp boys come, filthy, naked, uncircumcised and verminous and urinate upon their heads. Spendius brought the quartered azure standards of the Sufet and threw them down upon their heads.

I was in my father’s hall, its floor of polished lapis-lazuli, when that night the Elders came to hear from Silenus of the mercenaries’ terms. The night was dark. A grey mist filled the sea which beat against the wall of Carthage with a noise of sobs and dying breath. The Elders came into the hall bearing their sticks of narwhal horn. In mourning for the shame upon the Sufet, some had torn their robes. Others bore their beards enclosed in mauve leather bags fastened round their ears with silken blackened string.

They heard from Silenus of terms they could not meet, had they even wanted. Outrageous sums were asked, gold and silver, mines in Spain, ten zeters too of land for every man. For their leaders they demanded in marriage virgins of the great families of Carthage. This outraged the Elders that our Punic blood should even be presumed to mix with that of barbarians. Meantime they wanted from our stores amphorae of wine and guinea fowl, mackerel and meat and spice and seasonings, all this within two days.

Baalhaan, the senior there, spoke out for all and ordered Astegal himself, High Steward of the Council, to leave that night and find Hamilcar my father. Safe for many months within their walls, the Elders of the Council could not speak for peace. So they spoke for war.

Those were oppressive days. Silenus was too weak to teach or talk. He stayed in his room, seeking solace in Euripides. The city gates were barred to all. The people of Carthage were terrified and tense, our household servants sullen and recalcitrant. There was dark talk of a holocaust, a tophet in our tongue, the burning alive of children to appease Melkarth and Tanit-pene-Baal. Even Tunis, our subject city just across the bay, had, we learned, revolted, its Elders opening their gates, its merchants their stores and its women their legs to the mercenaries.

Two days later, the supplies unsent, we heard the mercenaries were before the wall, just out of bow shot or of javelin. No Carthaginian would have fired, though, for this is what we saw, those many of us high and safe upon the wall. Twenty of the Sacred Legion were lined up, tied to short and sharpened stakes.

Six mercenaries approached the first. Spendius the Campanian was there, his skin gleaming with woad, his amulets of silver gleaming in the sun, and Mathos and yes, Zaracas, Silenus said. The bonds of the first Legionary were cut. Spendius and Mathos seized his legs and stretched them out. Two others took his shoulders and his arms. They lifted him up and, muscles heaving, brought him swiftly shuddering down, impaling him between the legs and upwards through his guts upon the stake. Taking his shoulders from behind, the giant Spendius pushed him down again and then again, laughing a crazed laugh and each time the Sacred Legionary screamed a scream that filled the air.

It can only have been worse for the other nineteen, knowing what awaited them. I have had many men impaled. How long they live depends on many things. If the stake is long, it penetrates the heart and death is swift. If the impaled is old or frail or weak of will, their ordeal is soon ended.

The mercenaries’ stakes were short, their victims young and strong in body and mind. I am then sure they were alive when, one by one, Zaracas cut their throats before us all and caught some blood of each within a bowl. By Melkarth and Eschmoun, by all the brightening stars, by moon and sun and sea, each tribe on earth has customs and has ways which, though peculiar to itself and strange to others, is no less wrong for that. Yet what Zaracas did next, no man should have done or do again.

Turning to the walls of Carthage, stepping forward to us all, he raised the bowl and moaned and drank in one great draught the blood of twenty of the Sacred Legion. Beside me, Silenus retched, turned and hurried away. Raising his head towards the sun like a stag drunk newly from a stream, Zaracas sang a weird and sickening song, a war paean, a dirge.

Baalhaan had called for catapults to fire. Too late. I stood and watched as the missiles of the catapults kicked up the empty and the blood-stained sand.

The sky was dark for days thereafter, rank with smoke, shutting out the sun. The mercenaries were burning the country villas of the rich, some no doubt of the house of Barca among them. Their numbers grew, swelled by slaves who joined them to be free. Wild bands of Nomads, dressed in white cloaks of wool with leather necklets, wooden earrings, their boots of hyena skin, came on quadrigas and joined the waxing camp. Bandits, broken men from Cape Phiscus and the promontory of Derna, Garamantians mounted on their painted mares, Atarantes who curse the sun, locust-eating Auseans riding zebras and wild asses, Gysantes who eat lice and Zuaces, covered in ostrich feathers and masked with black veils, all these came to join the mercenary host and destroy Carthage.

The trumpet heralds signified that, once again, there were mercenaries before Khamon’s Gate. Hundreds of us climbed the walls to watch. Silenus this time would not come. My brothers Mago and Hasdrubal were with me. What we saw was mercenaries digging a pit. To this they brought their prisoners, already emaciated, foul, tufts of hair torn out, and last Gisco, carried in his frame, a monstrous tiara of hippopotamus hide on his head. They had daubed unguents on his wounds, his knees, his hands, his eyes, his ears to stave off infection, keep him alive for suffering.

Into this pit were thrown the ambassadors of Carthage, but not until the legs of each were broken by bronze bars. Then came donkeys, bearing Gisco’s gold. The mercenaries poured this basket by basket over the men below until they lay gleaming in the sun, all but drowned in gold. Huge Spendius reached down and took up some coins. These he stuck to an arrow-shaft smeared with tar and with his great bow of yew he shot the arrow swiftly at the city gate before him. We did not understand, until a sentry brought the arrow to Baalhaan on the wall.

The coins were not of gold, but gilded lead. Gisco had played and lost.

Discovering this duplicity seemed to change the mercenaries. Now, day by day, they marshalled and wheeled upon the plain. Their archers for practice shot at flamingoes on the lagoon. From their camp we heard no more the sound of drunken revelry but, instead, that of their smiths, forging swords and shields. Piles of lances soon were to be seen, stacked like sheaves of corn and in their pit before the walls before our eyes the Sufet of Carthage and those who had gone with him died from thirst and sun and leaden gold.

Some messengers reached the Council, passing in the night through wicket gates to bring the news of widespread insurrection. Of our subject cities, all but Utica and Hippacritae had risen up, murdered their Carthaginian garrisons and opened their gates to Spendius and Mathos, now acclaimed as joint Schalischims, Generals of the Free. The two loyal cities were besieged, and from our walls all could see the carpenters and masons, smiths and wrights among the mercenary host prepare for siege the catapults and rams, ballistae, onagers and tollenones that would soon, we thought, be turned on Carthage.

Yet the city was impregnable, all knew that, standing within its mighty walls on its own peninsula almost surrounded on three sides by sea and on the last by a lagoon. The mercenaries might straddle the neck of land which joined the city to the continent and on which they were camped beside the river Macaras, but we would wait. We had water, food enough to wait for Hamilcar, my father, who would come and lead an army to destroy the hubris of the mercenaries.

Baalhaan, acting Sufet, grew impatient. He appointed to command one Haggith, on my mother’s side a cousin of the Barcas, a merchant, pallid-skinned from hours inside at long accounts and reckonings.

The Sacred Legion was some 6,000 strong. To their number Haggith decreed all able-bodied citizens should be added. Each morning as the cocks crowed they lined up along the Mappalia for drill with lance and sword. Haggith was everywhere about the city, the arsenal, the treasury, the lighthouse, the corn bins and the cisterns, checking, ordering, disposing. He had the elephants from the city walls prepared. Their bronze breastplates were re-cast, their tusks gilded, their towers renewed and strengthened. I saw all this as each day I walked about the city and wondered: when will my father come?

Haggith was ready, his force prepared. Abdolonim was going with them, captaining a cohort, and so it was not with my father that I first saw the standard of the Barcas going off to war. The mercenaries were now divided into three armies, one beseiging Utica, one Hippacritae and the third encamped still upon the landward plain. Each, it was thought, was of some 20,000 men.

Haggith’s force was only half of that. He put his trust in our elephants, knowing that my father had had none in Sicily and that the mercenaries would be unfamiliar with their lethal ways. The Council had determined that Haggith should first relieve the siege of Utica, a morning’s march across the Gulf of Carthage. In Utica were galleys which we needed to bring fresh supplies and troops.

All of us who stayed behind crowded onto the wall above Khamon’s Gate to see the force depart at early dawn. To reach Utica, they would first have to face the mercenary army on the plain. Haggith’s army formed into one long line three deep and marched upon the mercenaries. The Sacred Legion formed the first line, the household slaves and servants, armed with slings, on the flanks. Next came the heavy infantry, their long pikes waving in the air. Amongst them were the city’s freedmen, unacquainted most with war but bristling like porcupines with arms – a lance, an axe, a club, two swords. Last came the elephants in five squadrons, the camp followers in between, and flanking them on either side the Numidian cavalry on nimble short-legged garrons, the riders bearing but a shield of hide and scimitar.

They had surprise at least to help them. As they came near the mercenary camp – we could see all now in strengthening light – at Haggith’s command the last line of the elephants and cavalry, he amongst them, his purple litter rocking like a ship at sea, held back. The Legion and the infantry marched on to a great sudden din of tympani and trumpets, assbone flutes and drums.

Action stirred across the mercenary camp like a dog fresh from water. Horns were sounded and the mercenaries came out, their slingers to the fore. They began the slaughter. Before their volleys of clay pellets and lead bullets the Legionaries fell, first one, then two, then twenty, scores. The forces were perhaps 200 strides apart when, on the run, hard at the Legion’s centre, the giant Spendius in the van, a wedge-shaped syntagma of mercenaries armed with long Etruscan swords burst through the Legion’s line and fell upon the freedmen and the merchants in our centre.

Encumbered by their gear, unable to go forward or go back, tripping over dead and dying, blinded by their own blood, the Legion and the infantry of Carthage fell in piles of limbs and lances before the mercenary swords. Spendius swung, as if a flail, a giant axe, and heads and arms and hands were littered on the sand. Beside me on the wall, Baalhaan groaned and turned away.

The mercenaries began to sing a song of victory, ululating through the dust and smell of blood. But then a new sound came, a searing, soaring trumpeting of elephants, a sound of madness and of rage. In one single line, Haggith himself brandishing a pike and mounted on a great bull, the sixty elephants of Carthage charged upon the press of mercenaries and our shattered troops.

The elephants’ tusks were gilded, their ears painted blue, their trunks daubed with red lead. Each had a spear fitted to its chest, a sabre to its trunk, a cutlass on each tusk, circles of sharp spikes around each lower leg. Blood flowed over their great ears from the goading of their drivers who sat and screamed from towers of leather on the elephants’ backs. Behind each driver rode two archers, now showering their arrows on the host, on friend and foe alike. Armoured in bronze, the elephants broke upon the battle.

Men were choked by trunks, decapitated by cutlasses and sabres, disembowelled by tusks. Human entrails hanging on their heads and trunks and tusks, the elephants raged, trampled, hacked and gored, rearing on their hind legs, smashing men to pulp, tearing limb from limb, wheeling, turning, deadly, mad. One had a mercenary impaled on its chest’s great spear, and shook as to be finished with the cadaver. The beast turned, trumpeting, possessed, back towards Carthage, ripping with its trunk parts off the body, a lower leg, a forearm, then a head, throwing them aside along its charging way.

Another, maddened by a mercenary arrow in its eye, threw off its tower and ran on bellowing to the camp, straight through the stockade wall, mowing down the tents and huts of grass, passing on from sight.

The frenzy passed, though several of the beasts ignored their drivers and stood, pounding with their feet at piles of dead, making a mush of what had once been men. The mercenaries that survived had fled.

I went out with the Sufet and his guard to greet the victors, those that lived. Then pouring from the city came the people, most with knives in their hands, flocking to have their revenge upon the mercenaries. In groups of four or five, some were still defiant and alive. These the people killed like mad dogs, from a distance stoning them. Some were stabbed and stabbed again by women, children, slaves. Haggith sought the corpse of Spendius to have, he said, the head mounted on a pole and carried on to Utica. It could not be found.

It grew hot. The people of Carthage worked with bare arms, reapers, murdering the dying. Baalhaan had rounded up the hundred or so mercenaries who, though wounded, could still stand. The elephants’ work was not yet done.

The prisoners were led down to a flat place by the river. At Baalhaan’s command, ten elephants followed. I did not go to watch. The screams of men and trumpeting of elephants, that was enough. Then, at first in ones and twos, and then in a black crowd, the ravens came to settle on the dead and dying, pecking out by choice the eyes and exposed guts.

Haggith re-formed his force and went on to relieve Utica. His messengers brought news that the mercenaries had not opposed him. He was in the town. All was well.

But into their town the Uticans had admitted only Haggith and some few. The elephants, the army had stayed outside the walls. That night, the mercenaries returned in force, led by Mathos and, it was said, by Spendius. Not for nothing had they served with Hamilcar Barca in Sicily.

They dealt simply with the elephants. Rounding up a herd of pigs and sheep, the mercenaries covered them with pitch. They set light to the animals and drove them blazing through the dark to where the elephants were tethered. Terrified, the great beasts fled into the night, but not before they had wreaked havoc on the men about them. What the elephants began, the mercenaries finished, slaughtering many, seizing arms and gear before they stole away as they had come.

One thing they did they must have planned with care. At next daybreak by the main gate into Utica, Haggith found some forty of the elephants’ drivers, lying ordered, tongues protruding, faces blue and nostrils oozing slime. Each wore round his neck a bowstring cord.

At dusk, Haggith slipped away from Utica and found in the hills the remnants of his army. Marching only at night, hiding by day in olive groves and orchards, he made his laborious way back to Carthage. Of all this he gave at least a true account to the Elders, of how at Gorza and then three times more he might have fallen on the mercenaries, but he was afraid. Perhaps his honesty won him his life. He could feel the cross that was his due. He had lost sixty elephants, 3,000 men, corn and baggage, gold and silver. He asked for poison in his shame. The Elders would decree. Then my father came.

He had been far in the interior, deep in the mountains of Marazzana when Astegal found him. He had returned in the night, unheralded. Already the mercenaries were encamped again across the isthmus, cutting Carthage off. Hamilax it was who woke me in the very early light. “Hannibal, your father bids you go to him.” Hamilax looked older, drawn.

“My father! Where?”

“He says that you will know.”

Without thinking I dressed, ran from the house and to the wall and found the stone and slipped inside and climbed. He stood there, gazing out to sea. Without turning, “Am I in time, Hannibal?” he asked. I shivered in the morning chill. I did not know. “Yes!” he cried, and turned and strode across the battlement to me. “I have come in time. Carthage called and I am here. Remember that, Hannibal.”

“But Father,” I spluttered, “Gisco, Haggith …”

“I know, I know. Come and sit down.” We moved to a bench in the lee of the wall.

“Is Carthage in such peril, Hannibal? Let me tell you of the Nysalles, a tribe who once inhabited deep inland the Libyan desert. The south wind dried up the water in their storage tanks. They were left with no water whatsoever. And so the Nysalles declared war on the wind and marched out to defeat it. The wind blew, and covered them with sand. They were wiped out, and now the Nasamones hold their land.

“Do you understand? The mercenaries have declared war on Carthage. They might as well have declared war on the wind. But I have much to do, and you will help me. This will be for us rehearsal for a greater war. Come.”

So for the next weeks I accompanied my father everywhere as he prepared for war. The classroom was forgotten. I hardly saw Silenus or my mother or my siblings. This was learning of a different kind.

The campaign of Hamilcar Barca against the mercenaries began not in the shrill of trumpets nor the clash of arms, but at a desk, early, morning after morning. Everything was recorded, tabulated, planned, the stocks of men and arms and horses, elephants. “I cannot fight them – yet,” my father often said. By the middle of each morning we were all about the city, my father kind and brusque, gentle and harsh by turns as occasion demanded.

The blacksmiths had no bronze. My father took it, for all the extravagant protests that he met, from the Elders’ treasury. The armourers had no gut for bow-strings. The hair of all the city’s female slaves was shorn and used instead. When that proved not enough, my father turned to freedmen’s wives.

He drew 300,000 gold kikars from the Syssitia, the company of merchants, and imposed a tax of 200 gold xthets on the rich. If one refused to pay or claimed he lacked the means, his household goods were sold at public auction, my father himself a leading bidder. A thing unparalleled, he even demanded money of the priestly colleges – and got it. Who could deny a Sufet who had himself contributed 160 sets of armour, 2,000 xthets, 3,000 gommors of wheat and much else besides?

He sent Hamilax by ship – the mercenaries had no fleet at least – to Liguria for 3,000 soldiers, all to be paid a full year in advance at sixteen copper xthets a day. He reformed the Sacred Legion, those 3,000 who had returned with Haggith or remained behind as garrison, dismissing and replacing officers, forbidding wine or women, compelling them to train all day and sleep at night on the ground within the public squares.

He drilled his growing army. The infantry were given shorter swords and lighter shields and ash sarissae, lances thirteen cubits long. To the heavy cavalry of the Sacred Legion he added 800 men he picked himself from Malqua, a thing unheard of, training them relentlessly, equipping them with bows and light double-edged axes, tunics of leather and caps of weasel-skin. From even slaves and artisans he chose 300 men as slingers. His was an absolute command, and yet each week he sent accounts to the Elders.

Two months passed, three. The people grew anxious, sullen when we passed. “Barca is afraid,” they said. “Barca is a quartermaster, not a general. Will he never march?” Across the plain beyond the pit where Gisco’s and the others’ corpses rotted, the mercenary camp was once more full and threatening. Round it now and right across the isthmus to the river ran a wall of mud and stakes, topped by thorns. At intervals along its length, the mercenaries had set up strange and chilling scarabim and sorceries, chevrons and charms. Dead eagles, human foetuses, heads of lions, strangled ravens passed their stench into the breeze.

Still my father waited and prepared. Several times he woke me in the night. Alone we slipped out of the city through the wicket by Khamon’s Gate and walked west across the sand to where the river Macaras wound into the lagoon that guarded Carthage’s side.

Fast and full of menace flowed the river, strong and silent through the night. We combed the banks among the marshes looking for firm ground and placing markers when we found it. I threw a branch into the water and, by the moonlight, saw it carried swift away. How could an army ford this? My father knew what I was thinking. “Tomorrow, I will show you, Hannibal.”

The next evening, we climbed the western wall. The wind we call a chthon was blowing, relentless from the west, as it always did at certain times each month. My father pointed to the river mouth. “Now watch, Hannibal, watch!” The wind coursed over the dunes of soft and drifting sand, picking up clouds of it as it passed over the river. Gradually, the flow of water slowed. The river mouth was silting up. In growing dark, it closed. “By morning, the channel will be clear again. We will cross, Hannibal, this time next month – if the wind blows,” and he smiled. “Now go and sleep, my son.” I left my father standing with his plans.

The next morning my father told me to go with Hamilax and five slaves to the workshops of the carpenters, collect eighty mallets and long chisels he had ordered and take them to the yard where his elephants were being quartered and equipped. He was there before us. He had the eighty drivers of the elephants form one line four deep. “You all know what happened to the elephants before Utica. The mercenaries may try something similar again. If your elephant runs amok, kill it” – and he bent down to pick up a mallet and a chisel – “with these. You know the spot – between the ears. But strike hard and quickly, at the first sign of trouble.”

I was dozing in a chair beside my father late at night. He and Hamilax were talking. I woke up at the unfamiliar name, “Naravas”. “Go to him, Hamilax. Tell him to await the signal. Give him” – and my father took from out the chest before him a great ring of gold and onyx – “this.” Hamilax took the ring and nodded, left the room.

“Father, who is Nava, Nara … ?”

“Naravas, Hannibal. Do not forget that name. Carthage has few allies, even fewer friends. He is both. You will meet him when he comes. Now, let’s both go to bed.”

It was the second evening of the month of Ziph. The river Macaras was silting up. My father had sound the call to arms. Suddenly Carthage was astir. Soldiers armed themselves as women wailed against their chests. Horses reared, protesting at their bits. The Elders came in litters to attend, the priests and acolytes to bless. They showered the way before the gate with pine cones, symbols that the mercenaries should be as pine trees which, once cut down, are destroyed forever.

With muffled arms in silence in the dark we passed through Khamon’s Gate, my father leading on his speckled bay, I beside him on my pony. We came to the river. As had been planned, half the elephants were led a hundred yards upstream into the river, their bulk checking the river’s flow. The other forty formed a wall downstream to stop any men or gear swept away.

The mercenaries’ campfires burned on as we crossed. We marched along the further bank and then re-crossed the river. We camped in silence on the plain behind the mercenary host. No fires were lit. Salted beef was passed. At first light by whispered word we assumed order and marched.

It was fully light when the mercenaries’ sentries saw us. Their trumpets sounded. The mercenaries poured out to form one long line. With screams and shouts they ran towards us. We held formation. I had seen my father draw this in his hall with Hamilax and again with his commanders before we left Carthage, again and again and again until tempers frayed but everyone understood. Our elephants were first, light infantry and slingers in between them. Our second rank, ten strides behind, was heavy infantry, and then our third, cavalry and bowmen.

Five hundred strides before the forces would have met, my father’s trumpet rang out. As one man, our army stopped, our elephants turned round and passed through the soldiers in the second row who followed in their turn. With cries of scorn – they are running away already! – the mercenaries rushed towards us, their spearmen, bowmen, slingers throwing as they came.

They met one straight and solid line, now longer than theirs. I was kept to the rear, beside my father and his trumpeters and Hamilax. Our infantry had formed syntagmata, solid and impenetrable squares with sixteen men two ranks deep on all four sides, pikes protruding, shields reaching to the ground. An elephant was stationed to the left and right of each syntagma, the heavy cavalry behind. The mercenaries broke against this wall. They were impaled upon the pikes, unable to break through, their line too thin, their men too tired by running.

Inexorably, our centre holding firm, our wings began to close. If the mercenaries also had a plan, I could not tell it. Through the dust I saw only mercenaries hacking at our syntagmata. From the elephants’ towers, our bowmen shot. Above the noise there was the screaming of the elephants, some enraged by arrows in their sides, but held steady by their drivers. Before each of our syntagmata there grew a wall of dead and dying. A group of mercenaries broke away, running to the east. My father sent cavalry after them. I saw scimitars flash, the mercenaries fall.

Some were braver. A group of perhaps sixty Sicilians, clad in leather, armed only with short swords and shields, stood resolute before a syntagma. Three of them slipped beneath an elephant as it trumpeted and reared. They cut at the animal’s girth until its tower fell and then, bawling, it fell too, its belly hanging from the cuts of many swords. Its dying bulk was a further wall beyond which the mercenaries could not pass as my father’s slingers from behind kept up their murdering rain.

The mercenaries now were bunched, our circle closing and then closed upon them. The elephants advanced, as I had seen them under Haggith, pounding, tearing, rage released at last. We sat and waited, watching. Only Spendius and some forty with him cut their way through. Hamilax turned his horse to follow. “Let them go, Hamilax,” my father said. “We’ll settle with them later. Meanwhile, they can be our messengers.”

At last, exhausted, the elephants withdrew. Another trumpet, and the syntagmata broke up, laying down their pikes and man to man addressing such resistance as was left. Many mercenaries just put down their arms, holding up their necks for the sword’s cut. Others put their sword hilts in the sand as spikes and sheltered behind their shields. They were killed by lances from behind.

A battle is like lust. The frenzy passes. Consequence remains. The fighting was over by mid-morning, but the aftermath continued through the day. We had lost only some 600 men. Two elephants were dead. The mercenaries’ losses were enormous and all that day our soldiers moved among the dead and the dying, stripping armour, collecting arms, throwing corpses onto piles.

We took 2,000 prisoners. Five hundred were taken to a stand of eucalyptus trees by the river. Hamilax saw to their disembowelling. They then were tied by their own guts to trees.

The mercenary camp was next, the huts and hovels fired, the women and campfollowers rounded up. They were marched up to the outer southern wall of Carthage. The archers took their time in killing them for sport, drawing then relaxing bows, laughing, hitting first a thigh, an arm until their victims bristled from the arrows and bled, moaning, to death.

Gisco’s pit my father ordered covered with earth. By evening we were ready again to march. Alone, my father and I walked up-river to bathe in the Macaras. We came upon a trail of blood. A wounded mercenary had dragged himself away for water. We found him near the bank. Ravens had taken his eyes, but he was alive. Without a word, my father drew his sword, cut off the mercenary’s head and kicked it into the river.

We marched first to Utica. The mercenaries, under Zaracas the prisoners said, had abandoned their siege. We went on to Hippocritae only to find the same. My father, Hamilax and Haggith conferred. Haggith was sent with 4,000 to besiege Tunis, held it was said by Mathos. We were to find and destroy the forces of Spendius and Zaracas and then join Haggith at Tunis.

In the months that followed we sought an enemy we could not find. There were skirmishes in plenty, alarms in the night as mercenaries attacked our pickets, then withdrew. My father remained calm. “See how well I have taught them, Hannibal! Hamilax, warn Naravas.”

We followed the mercenaries into the inland hills and then the mountains. Our food grew scarce, our lice fat. My father ordered the tents of all the officers to be burned. We slept on the ground among the men. The closeness of an army is a thing of love. I found it first among the mountains of Marazzana.

For months more we marched and skirmished. We came to a plateau, ringed with peaks. “It will be here,” my father said. That moonless night the dark was suddenly ablaze with light. In a ring, around, above us, burned a thousand fires. Our elephants, uneasy, trumpeted their alarm. My father simply slept.

He gave his orders in the half-light. “Beef, Hamilax, as much as they can eat, and all the dried figs too. Send me the commanders,” and to them my father gave his plan. With stomachs full, our army formed into one square. The syntagmata and elephants were its outer rank all round. The cavalry and slingers were within. When the sun rose, we were ready.

They came in silence from the peaks above, very many, four or five to each of us, ordered this time, menacing. Their slingers shot. Our shields were raised. Their first charge was exploratory, by light-armed men. They lacked the heavy cavalry or elephants which could have breached our line. Our slingers killed or wounded many as they came. The next was far more serious, of heavy infantry behind high Roman shields, pressing hard upon our eastern side. A second force attacked us from the north. A third approached our southern side. Well out of shot, the mercenaries were forming for the charge in ranks upon our eastern side. They began to run, a wave of men towards us, three deep, greater by 200 strides than was our length.

In unison, our trumpets rang. My father was chewing calmly at a fig. From the east, the sun behind them, banners waving, arrow-shaped, a host of cavalry rolled towards us in a cloud of dust.

“Nar-a-vas, Nar-a-vas.” Hamilax began the shout which all the ranks took up. The horsemen caught the main mercenary line, cut through it cleanly, wheeled and cut again. Of its own volition our square became a charging line and I was among them on my pony by my father in the dust and blood and noise. A bearded Gaul ran to me. In one sweep my father’s sword cut off his swinging arm. His blood sprayed me. I gloried in the battle and since that day I have loved to fight and know no fear.

I still see now my father embrace Naravas when, hours later, all was done. Together they themselves cut off the arms of Spendius, using his own sword. Zaracas too we captured, wounded but alive. We saw to one elephant, its trunk cut off, its entrails hanging. Hamilax killed it with a chisel between the ears.

We left the carnage to the lions and the vultures. Spendius, his stumps bandaged, was thrown over a horse. Zaracas was dragged behind. Late in the evening, ten days’ hard march later, we came to Tunis. Approaching across the plain, we had expected to see Haggith’s campfires burning. “Perhaps he has already taken the city,” Hamilax said.

“Perhaps,” my father replied.

In the dark, the crosses were eerie. At first light the next morning they were not that. Haggith was there, what was left of him. They had crucified him with a dagger in his mouth, having cut off his genitals, his toes and fingers. On both sides away from him there ran a line of crosses round the city wall.

My father sent a force to cut the bodies down. Fire from the walls repelled them. He sent Hamilax to Carthage for catapults. We waited. He had men scour the countryside for wool and this, soaked in pitch, was tied round rocks and stones. Then my father had all our men, Naravas’ too, equipped with bows and set to making arrows, their heads daubed in pitch.

Tunis’ buildings were not of stone but clay and wattle, roofed with grass. We prepared for weeks. We were ready, yet still my father waited for one more thing to be right – wind.

The catapults were set up, sixty of them. A dry wind came from the south and blew all day. Before the walls in sight of all, my father had Spendius and Zaracas brought and held. His first sword-stroke cut off Spendius’ head. His second cut the torso from the hips and the mercenaries on the walls of Tunis watched in silence. Zaracas he split first to the hips with one great downward swing.

Without the arms of Spendius there were still ten pieces of two men, catapulted into Tunis. That done, great braziers were lit before each troop of archers and each catapult. At one trumpet, a rain of fire fell upon Tunis. It burned for three days and nights. Four times, each of those days, my father renewed his hail of fire. He knew how much water there was in Tunis.

Irregular groups of mercenaries sought a different death. Some, on fire, jumped from the walls. Others ran from the gates. Some of these were killed. Most were captured and then crucified upon the crosses of Haggith and his men. All about the crosses and our camp sat and squawked the black and bloodied ravens.

Of course Carthage rejoiced when we returned, our bodies blackened by the smoke, our clothes fouled by the reek of burnt flesh. “Hamilcar, our saviour, Eye of Khamon,” cried the people, even Baalhaan, wearing his tiara with its eight mystic tiers, an emerald shell in the middle. I slipped away. I wanted to see Silenus. I had missed him. He was not in our classroom. But a scroll was open on his desk. It was the fourteenth book of Homer’s Iliad and, returned from the Truceless War, I read:

Ζεὺς

ἐκ νεότητος ἔδωκε καὶ ἐς γῆρας τολυπεύειν

ἀργαλέους πολέμους, ὄϕρα ϕθιόμεσθα ἕκαστος.

The gods decreed that from youth even unto old age we should labour, fighting in arduous wars, each of us until we are dead.