Iron Winter

50

On the battlefield south of Carthage, Nelo was in the reserve. He and the rest of his unit were kept back while the main phalanxes stood firm against the last ragged charge of the Libyan rebels, and then when the Carthaginian cavalry was unleashed at the enemy.

It was the afternoon of what now passed for a spring day in North Africa, dry, dusty, cool. The battlefield had once been an extensive farm by the look of it, but after years of drought it was abandoned, the olive trees withered, the stubble of the last grain crops dry in the fields, the fences of the stockades robbed for their wood. It had taken the Carthaginian force half the day to ride out here. The scruffy Libyan rebels, numerous but disorganised, had showed rudimentary military thinking by clinging to a scrap of high ground in the hope of gaining some advantage. General Fabius had ignored this, had drawn up his army in the ruins of this farm, and had simply waited.

And as the Carthaginian command had evidently expected, the Libyans lost their nerve and attacked.

‘You see?’ Gisco had said, Nelo’s sergeant, always ready to draw a lesson to deliver to his ragtag troops of conscripts, levies and volunteers. ‘What have I told you? It is sometimes harder not to fight than to fight. Braver to wait than to charge in. You must pick your moment. Watch and learn, if you ever want to be a general like Fabius.’

Now it was only a question of time, as the Carthaginians steadily pressed. Nelo stood at the centre of his phalanx, with his sword and spear and the hand-me-down helmet that pinched his brow, hoping to be spared his first real action for one more day. Dreaming of the sketches he might make of the scenes before him if he got the chance.

At last the Libyan formation broke and the survivors started to run. The Carthaginians cheered. Fabius raised his sword, horns blasted, and a ripple of commands spread out through the Carthaginian army.

Sergeant Gisco grinned and raised his thrusting spear. ‘Our turn, lads! After them and finish them off!’ The men of Nelo’s phalanx surged forward after the fleeing Libyan survivors, running across a field already strewn with corpses.

But Nelo didn’t have a chance to move before a hefty shove in the back pitched him onto his face. Suniatus, of course. The big man peered down at him. ‘Too slow, aurochs!’ And he gave him a kick in the head for good measure, and ran on.

Naturally, in the midst of the advance, Gisco saw this and pointed his sword tip at Nelo. ‘Northlander! You’re on a charge! Get to your feet!’

Nelo struggled up, shook his head, hefted his sword and stabbing spear, and ran with the rest.

As Gisco never failed to remind them, the men of this unit were the dregs of the conscripts and levies the suffetes, the executive officers of the city, had raised to swell out the Carthaginian army, as rumours swirled of the advance of the Hatti horde by land and sea. Even Suniatus was a poor soldier for all his bullying: strong, fearless, but evidently too stupid to obey the simplest order. But the men around Nelo seemed keen enough as they charged — keen to get among the killing at last, especially if it could be against an opponent already beaten and demoralised, and keener, perhaps, to get their hands on some booty.

Already they closed on the Libyans.

The Carthaginians descended with a roar. Sergeant Gisco himself went in with sword swinging, cutting down rebels like a sickle in a field of wheat. Suniatus threw himself on the back of a fleeing Libyan, forcing the man to the ground and stabbing him brutally in the side of the face with his sword, over and over as the man writhed and blood spilled. Nelo had got used to the noise of battle, or so he thought, but he had always been out of it before, held back from the fray. Now he was in the midst of it, and the noise of men screaming in anger or pain all around him was astonishing. It was like an abattoir.

Suddenly there was a hiss, a blur, and something shot past his ear. A javelin!

Shocked, heart hammering, he turned to see an enemy warrior, wounded, blood streaming from his leg, but with a round wooden shield in one arm, sword in wooden scabbard. He wore a crude leather tunic as a herdsman might wear, but he had no protection at all for his bare arms or legs or face, and if he’d ever had a helmet it was long lost. He hardly looked like a soldier at all. But he had some kind of loop of leather around his fingers, which he was fitting into a notch on another javelin. He was fumbling, pale from loss of blood.

Gisco knocked the man’s javelin aside, and he stumbled back onto one knee.

‘He could have killed you!’ the sergeant screamed in Nelo’s ear. ‘That javelin missed your stupid melon of a head by a thumb’s width. If not, you’d be lying in the dirt already, Northlander. Dead! Everything that you are, have ever been, or ever might have been, spilled out into the Dark Earth for all eternity, for that’s where bad soldiers end up, believe you me, never mind what the Jesus botherers will tell you. All because of him! That man in the dirt, who never saw you before today! And now he’s trying again. Are you going to stand there and let him? Are you, aurochs? Are you?’

It was Gisco’s screaming that drove him forward as much as the shock.

Still the fallen warrior fumbled with his gear. This time Nelo knocked the javelin aside with the shaft of his own spear. The man fell back on the ground and raised his sword, but Nelo, remembering his training at last, fell on him, straddling his torso and pinning the man’s sword arm with his own gloved fist. For one heartbeat his eyes met his enemy’s. The man was dark, even darker than most Libyans. Nelo smelled blood, and dust, and sweat, a richer stink of horses and cattle and hay. He looked older than Nelo. His face was lined and heavily weathered, as if he’d spent much of his life out of doors. He was strong, Nelo could feel it in the way the man struggled in his grip, but he was too exhausted to break free. All this in a heartbeat.

Nelo swept his sword across the man’s throat. Skin and cartilage resisted, but he dragged the blade through. Blood spurted, shockingly bright, and the man choked and spewed blood from his mouth. Still he stared at Nelo.

‘Again!’ yelled Gisco. ‘Again and finish it!’

Nelo swung his sword once again, this time a chop as if he was severing an ash branch, and he felt the sword cut into the bone of the neck. The man shuddered once, and his eyes rolled, and he lay still. Nelo’s sword was stuck in the bone. He had to drag at it to release it.

Then, suddenly filled with revulsion for the bloody corpse under him, he scrambled to his feet.

‘There.’ Gisco clapped Nelo on the back. ‘You did it, aurochs! You took a life. No worse than sticking a pig in training, was it? And now you’ve done it once you can do it again, you’ll see, it gets easier every time. And look at this.’ He leaned over and with a brisk chop of his own sword he severed the man’s right hand. Gisco lifted the hand by its little finger, almost delicately, as its stump dripped blood. There was a fine leather strap around the first two fingers. ‘See those loops? To help him throw his javelins. Libyans don’t do that. This isn’t a Libyan bastard, he’s an Iberan bastard. This is what Iberans are good for.’ He threw down the severed hand. ‘All they’re good for. Now, we use Iberan mercenaries for they’re useful in specific situations, but we don’t expect the ungrateful bastards to start chucking javelins at us, do we?’

‘No, sir.’

‘But here he is.’

‘I suppose they are hungry in Ibera as well, sir.’

‘I suppose you’re right. The whole world’s hungry, and they’ve all come here to pinch our grub, the Iberan bastards from across the strait, and the Libyan bastards who live around the corner, and the Hatti bastards who are on their way across the Middle Sea. But they aren’t going to succeed because we’re going to fight them and stop them and kill them, aren’t we, aurochs?’

‘Yes, sir.’

‘Right, there’s still a few Libyans left. Get stuck in. If you find a helmet that fits you take it; that acorn shell on your head looks ridiculous.’ For a moment he glanced down at the mutilated Iberan, at blood-splashed Nelo. ‘An Iberan and a Northlander, fighting to the death on a scrap of Carthaginian soil. I don’t suppose either of you wanted to be here, and we don’t want you here, but here you are, and this is the way it has to be.’

‘Yes, sir.’

‘You’re still on a charge. Go, go!’

Nelo ran off, after the fleeing Libyans and his own jubilant comrades. Already the crows were gathering overhead. Even the crows were hungry this spring.