Total War Rome: Destroy Carthage

9

After a final difficult climb the horses broke through the treeline and they were on open ground. Ahead of them the slope lay covered with huge fragments of rock, shattered and jagged, like the weapons of giants from some prodigious battle at the dawn of time. Beyond that, Fabius could see the first patches of snow, and then a bank of cloud far above that obscured the snow-capped peaks he had seen on clear days from the forest clearings below. It was a forbidding place, and he could see why the ancients had thought it the abode of the gods. He remembered the last time he and Scipio had climbed this high, almost ten years ago on the eve of the Battle of Pydna, when they had raced up the slopes of Olympus and stood at the summit like gods themselves, surveying a world that seemed theirs for the taking. Far below them the battleground had appeared laid out like the strategy games that Scipio and the others had played in the academy only months before, as if real war could indeed seem little different from a game, far above the smell of blood and the anguish of the wounded they were to experience when they came down again. But that had been a long time ago, and things now were different. Scipio was no longer a young blood yearning for his first command, but had made himself an outcast, dismissive of the career path laid out for him in Rome and tormented by his love for Julia. And there would be no thought of climbing a mountain peak today. If they were to stand any chance of catching a boar, they were going to have to remain on the edge of the forest, skirting the undergrowth where the great beast was said to lurk, keeping on guard all the time for its frenzied attack.

Scipio saw something on the ground, slid off his horse and drew his cloak around him. A flurry of snow swept over them like a cold exhalation from the mountains, and Fabius shivered. Soon the temperature would drop below freezing and this place would be under many feet of snow, impassable until spring. Scipio knelt down and pointed to an upturned rock and a patch of a fresh disturbance in the soil, and then looked up at Polybius. ‘Boar?’

Polybius leaned forward in his saddle, staring. ‘It’s just where I’d expect a boar to dig for roots, along the treeline. We need to see if there’s a scent trail. Fabius, where’s your dog?’

Fabius started, and looked around. He had forgotten about Rufius in the last awkward stretch up the path. He stood up in his stirrups, peering into the mist that was now rolling down and enveloping the fringes of the forest, reducing the visibility to less than fifty feet. He put his fingers to his mouth to whistle, but then thought better of it. Some instinct told him not to give their position away, or reveal that they knew the dog was missing. The feeling of unease he had experienced earlier returned, stronger than before. ‘Rufius never goes off by himself,’ he said. ‘That’s why I never bother keeping an eye out for him.’

‘Wolves?’ Polybius said.

Fabius shook his head, frowning. ‘They’ve been shadowing us in the forest, but if they’d taken Rufius there would have been a fight and we’d have heard it. You can hear Rufius’ bark for miles.’

Scipio stared at him, and then at Polybius. ‘Could somebody have been following us?’

Fabius felt the blood course through him, and he no longer felt cold. His senses were sharpened, and he suddenly seemed to hear noises more clearly in the forest, branches wavering in the wind, crackles in the undergrowth. He was Scipio’s bodyguard again, no longer just his hunting companion. He slipped off his horse, gave the reins to Scipio and pointed up the slope. ‘Take the horses into the mist and conceal yourselves among those rocks. When it’s safe to come out, I’ll blow three times on my horn.’

Polybius dismounted and came alongside. ‘What will you do?’ he said.

‘If there is someone following us, he may have been doing so for some time and will know that Rufius answers to me, that he comes back as soon as I whistle. If he has taken Rufius he may be trying to induce me to go back along the trail to look for him. If he takes me down, then you two are easier picking. I’m going to whistle, but I’m not going back along the trail.’

Polybius offered him the boar spear. ‘You’ll need a weapon.’

Fabius opened his cloak, revealing the handle of the Celtic dagger his father had given him. ‘I have all that I need. But if he’s stalking us he may well have a bow, and we’re within arrow range of the treeline. You need to get to those rocks. Now.’

He put his fingers to his mouth and blew a long, piercing whistle, repeating it three times. He waited in silence for a few minutes, but Rufius still did not appear. Then he slapped the hindquarters of his horse and watched Scipio and Polybius lead the three animals up into the mist. He took off his cloak, dropped it and then crouched down and ran into the treeline to the left of the trail, ducking forward as he pushed his way through the thicket of spruce and fir that skirted the forest. The dense foliage gave way to more widely spaced pine trees, and he made his way more easily towards a marshy plateau they had passed on the way up, a residue of the mountain torrent where it had overflowed during the spring melt. He worked his way round the edge of the marsh, taking care to keep himself concealed from the trail some five hundred feet to his right.

Midway along the edge of the marsh a small stream cut through and drained the boggy water down the slope, bubbling through the undergrowth below him. It was only about three feet wide, but he knew that the embankments on either side would be less solid than they seemed, saturated with water from the marsh. He spotted a rock in the centre of the stream, leapt over and stood on it, feeling it sink slightly with his weight, and then flung himself towards the far bank, hoping that the sound of the stream would drown out the noise. As he hit the bank it gave way in a cascade of mud and rock, and he scrabbled frantically at the tree roots that had become exposed, grabbing one and hauling himself up onto the bank. He silently cursed the noise. Anyone on the trail would have heard it. He would have to take his chances with an enemy who might now be expecting him to come from this direction, and pick him off with ease if he had a bow.

But suddenly there was another noise, an immense crashing through the undergrowth, a grunting and panting like he had never heard before. A gigantic beast bounded past him, snorting and slavering, its tusks thrust forward and its eyes red like fire. It was gone before he could properly register it, a blur of black, hurtling across the marsh in a spray of mud and crashing into the undergrowth on the opposite side of the trail, intent on some unknown quest. Fabius lay back, trying to control his breathing, and shut his eyes for a moment. The Macedonian royal boar. Scipio would be none too pleased that he had seen one and they had not been able to give chase. But he thanked the gods that they had never had the chance. Their spears would have splintered off its sides like twigs, and they would have been gored like prisoners in the circus. He opened his eyes and held his breath, listening hard. The sound of the boar had been swallowed up by the forest. He had been hoping to hear barking. If Rufius had been alive, then the boar would have set him off and his bark would have been audible for miles. But there was nothing, just the discordant cackle and bubbling of the stream and an eerie whistling in the treetops from the wind that was picking up across the mountain slopes.

His heart sank. Rufius had been his link out here to Eudoxia, and he could hardly bear to think of him being gone. He felt an anger stir up inside him, a bloodlust he had not felt since he had stood in the line at Pydna and watched the Macedonians spear his wounded comrades to death. Whoever had done this would pay.

He thought hard. The sound of the boar would have covered up the noise of his fall. He might still have a chance. He knelt up, listening for anything unusual, and then resumed his trek around the edge of the marsh, keeping below the level of the bank. The mud that now caked his body would camouflage him, help him meld with the underbrush. He would come out on the trail near the last place where he had seen Rufius trotting beside him as he had ridden up towards the treeline. He reached the dried-up stream bed, looked carefully in both directions, and then clambered over the trunks that criss-crossed the bed where they had been felled by the foresters who had cut timbers for Philip of Macedon’s tomb a hundred and fifty years before. The trail followed the line of the stream on the other side, and after making his way over the last trunk, he crouched down beside the marks made by their horses’ hooves less than an hour before. The snow had begun to fall more thickly, swirling down the cut from the mountain slope, reducing the visibility to below a hundred feet. If his gamble had worked, their assailant would be somewhere ahead of him looking upslope, his back to Fabius, expecting him to come down the trail from the treeline.

He took the dagger from his belt, its blade gleaming dully but the edge razor-sharp where he had honed it by the fireside the night before. He held it in his left hand, the blade pointing backwards, and walked slowly forward with the marsh on his right, half-expecting at each step to hear the whistle of an arrow. After about twenty feet he saw a large black crow hopping determinedly over the rocky ground of the trail, and then another. They were bustling around something, pecking at it, pulling away flesh. Fabius saw a splash of blood on the rocks, then the familiar black and white fur, the feathered flights of an arrow sticking out. He shut his eyes, trying to control himself. He could not afford to stop now, or to disturb the crows. He crept past, gripping the dagger as hard as he could, his eyes focused ahead, hardly breathing.

And then the snow parted and he saw it. About twenty feet ahead a man was lying on his front behind a rock, facing up the slope, a bow of Scythian shape held in front of him with an arrow strung, ready to pull back. He was wearing a sheepskin coat, but the hood was down and his long black hair lay in braids on his back. Fabius recognized him from the foresters’ camp three days before, a burly mountain man who claimed to be from Pamphylia in Asia Minor, whom Fabius had taken to be a simpleton. The man had offered to guide them towards the best boar-hunting grounds but one of the foresters had taken Fabius aside and warned him to stay well clear; the man had only arrived a few days before and had no knowledge of the forest, but had known plenty about Scipio and had been asking about his hunting success even before he and Fabius had arrived in the camp. Fabius had put it from his mind, but now he remembered how discomfited the foresters had been, as if they were afraid of him. The man had even played with Rufius and thrown him a stick, feeding him choice morsels of meat until Fabius had stopped him. Now he knew how the man had coaxed Rufius to within killing range. He had been planning this for days. Fabius felt his body surge with rage, a barely controllable desire to kill.

He crept closer. A crow behind him squawked, and the man shifted. Fabius froze, holding his breath. Then the man pulled up his hood and resumed his position. Fabius leaned forward, head down, just as Rufius would have done, his whole being focused on his prey. Then he sprinted forward, leaping with his dagger poised just as the man realized something was wrong, landing heavily on the man’s back and smashing his face into the rock. The man howled in pain, blood gushing from his mouth. Fabius ripped back the hood and grabbed his braids, pulling his head back as far as it would go and holding the dagger against the man’s throat. He brought his face near the man’s ear, close enough to smell the sweat and the oil in his hair. ‘We meet again, Pamphylian,’ he snarled in Greek, yanking the man’s hair back and seeing the shock in his eyes. ‘If you want this to be quick, you will tell me who sent you.’

The man coughed and spat out teeth, his nose streaming blood, then curled his lips and wrenched his head against Fabius’ hold, drawing blood as the dagger sliced into the skin of his neck. He struggled again and then went still as Fabius pulled his head back close to the breaking point. ‘Go to Hades,’ he muttered, his mouth clenched in pain.

Fabius whipped the dagger out from beneath the man’s neck and slammed his face into the mud below the rock. He brought the dagger down into the man’s outstretched hand, driving it hard and twisting it round so that the bones and sinews cracked and snapped. He felt the man convulse with pain and heave upwards as he tried to breathe in the mud. He pulled out the dagger and thrust it back under the man’s neck, pulling his face out of the mud and holding it back again. The man coughed and retched, spewing out blood and mud and saliva, his eyes caked over and his nose broken and contorted.

Fabius came close to his ear again. ‘Tell me what I want to hear, and I may decide to spare you long enough for Scipio to question you. Then he can decide your fate. He may be generous.’

The man spat, and said something. Scipio leaned down, listening. ‘Say it again,’ he snarled. The man did so, and Scipio heard the name. So that was it. He kept the knife at the man’s neck, and then looked at the mangled hand, noticing the distinctive red graze on the inside of the man’s wrist, the mark of an archer using a bow without a leather wrist guard. He remembered how he had got that mark: the tufts of black and white fur on the trail behind, the crows. He let go of the man’s head, lifted him up under his midriff until he was half-kneeling and brought the point of the dagger to just below his sternum. The man stiffened, terrified. ‘What are you doing?’ he mumbled, his face dripping blood. ‘You said that you would spare me.’

‘I only said maybe. And then I remembered my dog.’

In one swift move he thrust the dagger in up to the hilt, ripping through the man’s heart and lungs, twisting for maximum effect. He pulled it out and then grasped his head and twisted it sideways, breaking his neck. He saw the man’s eyes glaze over, and his last breath crystallize in the cold air. He got up, wiped the dagger on a grassy knoll and sheathed it, and then took out his horn and blew three short blasts. The snow was coming down harder now, already lying like a ghostly sheen on the man’s body and beginning to obscure the hoofprints on the trail ahead. He started to run towards the edge of the forest where he had last seen Scipio and Polybius. They would need to get down off the mountainside before the trails became impassable. They had little time to lose.

* * *

Fifteen minutes later, Fabius reached Scipio and Polybius, who had left the rocks when they had heard his horn and brought the horses back to the edge of the forest. He had found a trickle of water from a spring on the way up to wash the mud off his face and hands, but he realized that he had been sweating profusely, and the halt at the spring and then the bitter wind from the mountain had chilled him, making him shiver. He picked up his cloak and wrapped it round himself, and then took the skin proffered by Polybius, gulping the wine down gratefully. He wiped his mouth on the back of his hand, passed back the skin and then took the reins of his horse. ‘It was the Pamphylian from the foresters’ camp,’ he said to Scipio, and then he turned to Polybius. ‘He had offered to guide us, but we were wary of him. He’d arrived only a few days before, asking questions about Scipio.’

Polybius grunted. ‘Did you give him a chance to say who sent him?

‘He killed my dog. But he had his chance. It was Andriscus.’

Polybius looked at Scipio grimly. ‘Andriscus may have been the one who gave this man his instructions, but Metellus would have been behind it.’

Scipio looked pensively up the mountain slope, narrowing his eyes against the snow and the wind. ‘It seems that even here in the abode of the gods I cannot escape the vindictiveness of Rome.’

‘The only way to better Metellus will be to rise through the cursus honorum as he has done, to become a senator and qualify as a legate. You will be safer from him in Rome, where you will show the strength of your personality and the power of your gens, and make it less easy for him to undermine you. In places like this, on the edge of the unknown, you are no longer safe. Your death out hunting would arouse no suspicions, only regret among those of your gens and supporters who have watched you seemingly throw away your destiny and escape as far as you could towards the very edge of the world.’

Scipio looked down at the imprint of the tracks they had seen earlier, now only shapes in the snow. ‘Without Rufius, we have no hope of chasing a royal boar. Perhaps we have strayed too far into the hunting preserve of the gods, and that is one beast beyond the hope of men to see.’

Fabius began to speak, but then stopped, feigning a cough. Scipio’s mind was still not made up, and Fabius did not want to be the one to persuade him to stay here any longer. He would tell him about his encounter with the boar at an opportune time later, perhaps when Scipio was at last wearing a legate’s helmet and had turned his mind from hunting to war.

‘A wise decision, Scipio.’ Polybius mounted his horse and drew it round so that it faced down the slope, and he peered over the treetops towards the west. ‘Do we have to return by the same route, or is there a way out that avoids going past the foresters’ camp? Where there’s one in the pay of Andriscus, there may be others. Best for them to believe that we have disappeared and the task is done, or else we will be hunted throughout Macedonia until we escape.’

Scipio nodded. ‘About five stades back down the trail a narrow track leads off to the west, skirting the edge of the mountains until it reaches the kingdom of Epirus. It is arduous going, but we have our bedding rolls and we can hunt for food. Once we reach the shore of the Adriatic, we can find a ship to take us to Brundisium and safety.’

‘Should we leave the body exposed? To conceal it might be to delay others on our trail.’

Scipio mounted his horse and shook his head. ‘No. We will use two timbers cut and left here by the foresters, and we will crucify the corpse in the middle of the trail. Anyone coming this way expecting to find our bodies will know never to cross the path of Scipio Aemilianus.’

Polybius gestured at Fabius. ‘Or his bodyguard.’

Scipio’s horse reared up, smelling something that Fabius knew could have been the boar, and Scipio pulled hard on the reins until it pawed the ground, snorting and whinnying like a cavalry horse about to charge. He brought it under control again, and then looked at Fabius, nodding acknowledgement. ‘You have done a deed of valour today, Fabius Petronius Secundus, and I will not forget it. When I lead a Roman army, you will be primipilus of the first legion.’

Fabius squinted at him and shook his head. ‘Make me a centurion if I earn it, but I’d rather stay your bodyguard. Someone needs to watch your back while you two talk about strategy and the best way to use a boar spear to kill a man.’

Polybius grinned and put his hand on Fabius’ shoulder. ‘I am sorry about your dog. He will await you in Elysium. And you will remain Scipio’s bodyguard, whatever rank he gives you, I will see to that. One day Rome will realize the value of men like you, and she will create a professional army that will conquer the world.’ A bitingly cold wind swept down from the mountain slope, ruffling the manes of the horses, and he pushed away from Fabius’ horse and pulled up his hood, turning to Scipio. ‘Winter is upon us. We need to leave. To Rome?’

Scipio gave him a steely look, watching Fabius mount up, and then kicked his heels into the flanks of his horse. ‘We will crucify the man who killed our dog first. Then to Rome.’