Total War Rome: Destroy Carthage

18

Fabius stood with his feet apart on the wooden platform high above the harbour, his helmet held against his left side and his right hand grasping the pommel of his sword. The old scar on his cheek was throbbing, as it always did before a battle. He took a deep breath, savouring the few moments he had here alone. The sun had not yet risen above the jagged mountain of Bou Kornine across the bay to the east, its twin peaks etched against the red glow of dawn like a giant bull’s horns. To the south, the pastel blue of the sky seemed to merge with the horizon, a smudge of dull red that obscured the arid hills and low plain leading up to the coast. For days now a wind had blown in from the desert that covered everything in a fine red dust, making their eyes smart and their throats burn. Today it had abated, and he was able to take in lungfuls of air without coughing. The tang of dust was still there, a coppery taste, and it made his veins pound as if he had just drunk a draught of wine, quickening his pulse. It tasted like blood. It tasted like war.

It had been an extraordinary time since he and Scipio had returned from Africa to Rome, leading to Scipio’s election as consul and his return to Africa as a general a little over a year previously. Election to the highest office at his age had been unprecedented, but showed the urgency with which Rome had finally been persuaded to regard the threat of Carthage. Almost fifty years of lobbying by Cato had paid off, aided in his final years by Polybius and then by Scipio. After returning to Rome, Scipio had finally thrown himself into the political fray, having seen that the death of Cato might make his own efforts critical in swinging opinion in favour of war. To Scipio’s huge satisfaction, it had not been the power of his gens and his political manoeuvring that had won the day, but rather his military reputation; and that had been the reputation not of a patrician who had risen swiftly to high command, of a man such as Metellus, but instead of a soldier who had gained it by hard slog as a tribune in Spain and Africa, an officer who led from the front and whom many veterans in Rome had fought alongside and could vouch for personally.

Those in the Senate whom Scipio despised, those who represented the social order that had caused him such personal anguish, had not been instrumental in his success. It was his standing as a soldier’s soldier among the legionaries and the veterans and their families that had forced the Senate behind him, even including his enemies, who had feared that not supporting him might lead to a popular uprising and the installation of Scipio as dictator. They included the senators whom Scipio and Polybius knew were traitors to Rome, who had conducted secret negotiations with Carthage to line their own pockets and who looked to the rise of Metellus in Macedonia and Greece as the driving power of a new Rome in the east. In the event, Scipio and Polybius had not needed to expose these men to get Rome behind their cause, but it was a trump card, should there be any hint of the Senate withdrawing support. For now, he was secure in his power base; his regard for his legionaries had paid off in the support that the plebs had given him, and he in turn would provide those men with the glorious victory and future that would more than repay their trust in him.

Fabius looked back over the vast expanse of the Roman fleet anchored behind him, and the encampment of the legions in the plain to the south. There had been another reason for the emergency election of Scipio to the consulship. War with Carthage had been openly declared more than two years before, ending the period of shady conflict in which Rome had officially only been providing training and advisers for her ally Masinissa in his attempt to counter Carthaginian incursions into Numidian territory. With the arrival of the legions, the Carthaginian stronghold at Utica had been taken, Carthage had been forced to relinquish all territorial gains and there had even been a Roman breakthrough into the northern suburbs of the city itself, albeit quickly repulsed. But the campaign had not gone as hoped. Carthage had become a city besieged, but the war had quickly become a stalemate. There had been a danger of Roman resolve plummeting, the support of the people fading and the next elections producing consuls who were appeasers rather than warmongers. That further lobbying by Polybius had made the election go the other way had put the onus on Scipio to bring the siege to a head, a task that he had taken on with huge relish. In six months of extraordinary activity he had brought the full might of Rome to bear, mustering the largest assault force ever seen. It was now no more than a matter of days, possibly less then twenty-four hours, before the final signal would be given. No army had ever been better prepared to end a siege, one that could change the course of history.

Fabius glanced at the plume on his helmet. Scipio had been true to his word, given five years ago when he had promoted Fabius to centurion after the siege at Intercatia; on being made consul he had promoted Fabius to primipilus, chief centurion, not of a particular legion but on his headquarters staff, meaning that Fabius was the senior centurion of the entire army under Scipio’s command. It was a huge responsibility, giving him de facto authority even over the junior tribunes, as the man the legionaries looked up to as much as they did to Scipio. Fabius had remembered the old centurion Petraeus on his promotion; he had returned to the farm in the Alban Hills to collect the ashes that had been buried in a jar by Brutus after the terrible night when Petraeus had been murdered, and he had taken them to the tomb of Scipio Africanus in Liternum as he had promised Petraeus that he would do, fulfilling Africanus’ own request. Part of him was still in awe of the grizzled old centurions that he saw among the legions before Carthage, and he had to remind himself that he too was now over forty and would have looked just as gnarled to the young legionaries here today. He was one of the dwindling cadre still in the army who had served under Aemilius Paullus at Pydna, the last great set-piece battle fought by a Roman army, but his memories were shared in the mess tents only with other centurions, not with the new recruits. His job as senior primipilus was to maintain discipline in the army, and he could no longer commingle with the men and tell stories of past wars by the campfire; that would be for their fathers and uncles in the taverns of Rome, veterans who would tell of Pydna just as their fathers had of Zama, and as those here today who survived would of the final siege in a conflict that had soaked up Roman blood and treasure for over a century now.

He remembered going with Scipio to the cave of the Sibyl on the eve of their departure for war in Macedonia more than twenty years before, when they had been little more than boys. There had been a smell there too, a reek of sulphur rising from the underworld, and the fragrance of leaves she threw on the hearth that made his head reel. He was meant to have stayed outside while Scipio entered, but had secretly run into the cave for a few moments after the others had left. She had touched him, a wizened finger extending from the darkness, and had spoken in riddles that he knew pointed to his destiny, to the destiny of Scipio and Rome, though he still did not know what they meant. All he knew today was that they were near the endgame in a war that had ravaged Rome for generations and bled out the best of her manhood on fields of battle across half the civilized world.

He remembered standing in front of a map of the Mediterranean in the academy in Rome a few days before that visit, while the old centurion Petraeus traced out Hannibal’s march over the Alps more than fifty years before, showing where they had fought in Gaul, in Italy, in North Africa, but his pointer always coming back to unfinished business: to the city of Carthage itself. Fabius stared out over the city now, a mass of flat-topped buildings and narrow streets leading up to the great temple on the Byrsa hill, the place where Queen Dido of Tyre had staked her claim almost seven hundred years before, centuries that had seen Carthage rise from a Phoenician trading post to the most powerful city in the west, with colonies in Sicily and Sardinia and Spain and ambitions that had nearly eclipsed Rome itself.

The tower he was standing on had been constructed by Ennius and his engineers on the admiral’s island in the centre of the circular harbour, where the Carthaginian fleet had once been housed in shipsheds radiating from the shore. The harbour had been taken after savage fighting a few days earlier, leaving the foreshore drenched with blood and heaped with Carthaginian dead, their bodies still smouldering on the funeral pyres outside. It was only a toehold into the city, but it meant that Carthaginian naval might was smashed for all time. Scipio had ordered his legionaries to go no further, but instead to consolidate their position so that they could exploit the weakness now exposed in the Carthaginian defences behind the harbour, to make sure that when he gave the order the largest amphibious and land assault in history would sweep through the city like a tidal wave.

The enemy killed in the harbour had been soldiers, mostly mercenaries; ahead lay thousands of civilians, men, women and children, terrified and cowering in their homes, counting down their final hours. The night before, on their ship offshore, Polybius had read them passages from Homer’s The Fall of Troy and the playwright Euripides’ The Trojan Women, wanting them to remember the cost of war. Looking across from the ship towards Carthage, the moonlight sparkling off the waves as they lapped the shore, they had listened to the story of Astyanax, the brave son of Hector, Prince of Troy, a little boy who had been hurled off the walls of Troy by the victorious Greeks a thousand years ago, his mother weeping as she was led into slavery. For a while Fabius had let the play affect him, and had thought of his own wife Eudoxia in Rome, of their young son. But now, in the cold light of dawn, compassion seemed a weakness. Now, death, all death, whether to soldier or civilian, was just a calculation of war.

The day before, they had looked across at the walls and seen the Carthaginian general Hasdrubal: a great bear of a man, sunbronzed with a braided beard, his armour draped in a lionskin with jaws that opened over his head. His people may have wanted to surrender, looking in despair at the massed Roman fleet and the legions, but history weighed heavily on Hasdrubal, leader of a city that had lived on borrowed time and might never rise again. Hasdrubal had ordered his soldiers to burn the crops and hack down the olive trees, denying them to the Romans but also taking away the last food source for his own people — a suicidal gesture of defiance. He had executed Roman prisoners in full view of the legions, ensuring that he would be shown no mercy. He was up against a war machine more powerful than any in history, and he was egging them on, taunting them. For Hasdrubal, there was only one way out, and taking as many of his people with him as possible seemed to be his own calculation of war.

Fabius looked back up, and for a few moments, staring at the horizon, it was as if he were suspended in mid-air above the scene; he felt as if he had risen to join the gods and move the affairs of men around like gaming pieces, like the dioramas of battles Scipio and the others had practised on years before in the academy. Then he heard the clatter of Scipio and Polybius climbing the ladder to join him, and he snapped back to reality. They were no gods, but Scipio was consul and general of the largest Roman army ever assembled, and this tower had been built to allow him an eagle’s eye view of the battlefield, to prepare the most devastating assault on a city ever seen in history.

‘Ave, Fabius Petronius Secundus, primipilus.’ Polybius had come up first, and cracked a smile. He had changed little in appearance over the years, except for grey streaks in his beard and lines around his eyes, and seeing him in his decorated breastplate and Corinthian helmet took Fabius back to the last time he had seen Polybius in armour, more than twenty years before on the field of Pydna when he had charged single-handedly against the might of the Macedonian phalanx.

Fabius saluted. ‘Ave, Polybius. Any word from Ennius yet?’

‘His men are clearing the last mound of rubble from beside the walls. We will be joining him shortly to see the preparations first hand.’

Scipio came up the ladder, wearing the breastplate he had inherited from his grandfather, newly polished but with the dents and scars of war deliberately left unrepaired. ‘He’d better hurry up,’ he said testily, coming up beside them. ‘I intend to order the attack today.’

‘He knows it. He will be ready.’

Fabius turned to his general. ‘Ave, Scipio Aemilianus Africanus.’

Scipio put a hand on his shoulder. ‘Ave, Fabius, my old friend. We are close to battle again. Are you ready for the assault?’

‘I have been ready for this all my life.’

Fabius glanced at Scipio and Polybius. The two men were very different, one more a man of action and the other by inclination a scholar, but they had been close friends since they had first met when Polybius had been appointed Scipio’s teacher in Rome. Polybius sometimes forgot who was general and who was adviser, but he had an encyclopedic knowledge of military history and gave good counsel, even if Scipio sometimes did not heed it. On this of all days, Fabius had deliberately addressed Scipio by his full name: as Africanus, the cognomen he had inherited from his adoptive grandfather, the great Scipio Africanus who had confronted Hannibal more than fifty years before, yet whose intention to crush Carthage had been thwarted by the weakness of the Senate in Rome, by men who wanted to appease rather than destroy. They had learned their lesson over the next fifty years, had seen Carthage rise again, had seen her war leaders become defiant, and now Scipio stood before the city walls as his grandfather had done, ready to finish the job.

In those fifty years, a new generation of Roman officers had emerged: ruthless, professional, schooled together in the art of war. They had burned and rampaged their way through Greece, where Scipio’s rival Metellus was now poised to take Corinth, and under Scipio they had brought Rome back to the walls of Carthage. The best of them were here now, those who had not died in battle or were not still in Greece: Ennius, chief of the specialist cohort of fabri engineers; Brutus, a monster of a man with his curved scimitar, so unlike the Roman gladius; and in the plain to the south, the Numidian prince Gulussa and the Scythian princess Hippolyta, both brought under Rome’s wing at an early age and now poised to lead their cavalry in the onslaught against the city’s southern wall. They were all in their fighting prime, hardened, blooded, experienced, exactly what the old centurion Petraeus who had trained them in Rome had wanted.

Scipio took his hand off the sword pommel and gestured at the scene. ‘Tomorrow will be a day for your Histories, Polybius.’

‘If you ever let me write it. I seem to have traded in my stylus for a gladius.’

Scipio cracked a smile. ‘Your day will come. In the afterlife, perhaps.’

‘We should have a good vantage point to view the battle from here.’

Scipio pointed at the red welt on his thigh, a wound that had never properly healed. ‘I didn’t get this from staying behind, did I? The only view I will get will be the tunnel of smoke and spattered blood as I follow Brutus into the attack. As soon as the trumpets sound, I will be at the head of my legionaries.’

‘You know that’s against my advice,’ Polybius said. ‘This army can fight on without a Brutus, but not without a Scipio. And if you follow Brutus, expecting to kill, you’ll be disappointed. The last time I followed him into battle was at Pydna, when he was perfecting the cross-cut with his sword: one cut from the groin to the head, and then, in the same sweep, while the two halves are still standing, another cut across the midriff. One man becomes four pieces. There won’t be any left in your path alive.’

‘I will ask him as a favour to leave me a few. In one piece.’

Scipio put his hand back on his sword pommel and stared out. He had acquired the scar on his leg more than twenty years ago against the Macedonian phalanx, as a junior tribune who always led his men from the front. Fabius well remembered how the old centurion Petraeus had won his greatest honour, the corona obsidionalis, by killing his tribune when he had faltered and by leading his maniple into battle himself, winning the day. He had never let the boys at the school forget it. They may be destined for high rank, to command maniples, legions, armies, but they would always be under the watchful eye of their own centurions, never able to slip up. That was how the Roman army operated. The centurion had taught them well.

A bellowing noise came up from the harbour, and the sound of cursing. They looked down to where a wide-bellied merchant ship had been offloading war supplies onto the wharf. A gang of legionaries with their armour stripped off had been hauling a beast up from the hold, a hoary old elephant covered in welts and scars, its bloodshot eyes flashing up at them each time it swung its head. The optio in charge of the work party yelled and the two lines of men hauled on the ropes again, but the beast refused to budge, and with an angry swoosh of its trunk knocked two men sideways into the water. Then a large Numidian slave in the hold, the elephant-master, cracked a whip against its backside and the beast finally moved, bellowing and hobbling across the planks until it stood tottering on the wharfside, scanning the legionaries balefully as they kept their distance.

Polybius stared. ‘Zeus above. I recognize that backside. That’s old Hannibal, isn’t it? I last saw him at the triumph of your father Aemilius Paullus.’

Scipio nodded. ‘Our friend from the academy in Rome. The last surviving prisoner of the war against his namesake.’

Polybius narrowed his eyes. ‘Was this your idea?’

‘You know what they say about elephants. When they’re ready to die, they go to the same graveyard. Well, this is Hannibal’s home, and it is about to become a graveyard. It was an act of compassion.’

‘Compassion?’ Polybius scoffed. ‘I don’t think the old centurion taught anything about that.’

Scipio grunted. ‘Well, if Hasdrubal taunts us, I can taunt him back. There could be nothing more humiliating for him than to see the last survivor of the glorious Hannibal’s elephant corps hobble through the ruins of Carthage, to collapse and die on the steps of their temple.’

Polybius cast Scipio a wry look. ‘That’s more like it.’

‘Do you remember at the academy in Rome, how Petraeus punished Ennius once by making him sleep in the dung in the elephant’s stable?’

‘For a week. He’s never got rid of the smell.’

‘The centurion has been much on my mind lately, on this of all days. I wish he could have seen us here.’

‘He was a hard taskmaster, but a true Roman,’ Polybius said.

‘He is with my adoptive grandfather now, in Elysium.’

‘He knew he could never be here. His time was another war, with your grandfather against Hannibal. And he died an honourable death.’

‘Fighting an enemy from within,’ Scipio muttered.

‘He died for the honour of your grandfather. For the honour of Rome.’

‘He will be avenged.’

Fabius stared at the elephant, suddenly remembering the scene all those years before of the old senator Cato following that swishing tail through the Forum during the triumph of Aemilius Paullus, an act of warning about Carthage that had stunned the crowd to silence; Cato had gone now to the fields of Elysium, but the legacy of his warning lived on in the irascible beast now about to lumber its final steps through a city it had last seen more than seventy years before, when Hannibal had mustered his elephant corps for their extraordinary but ill-fated campaign through Spain and over the Alps towards Rome.

Fabius guessed the thoughts that would be running through Scipio’s mind. The centurion had made them into professional army officers, the first in Rome’s history. Since the Celtiberian War their success in battle had led to more wars, to more conquests; they had not had to return to Rome to endure the tedious succession of civic offices that had been the lot of their fathers and grandfathers. And the men under them, the legionaries, were no longer just civilian levies recruited for one campaign and disbanded when it was over. Those here before the walls of Carthage included men Scipio had fought alongside five, even ten years before: battle-hardened, gnarled, tough. Scipio had seen to that. If the Senate in Rome would not create a professional army, Scipio would do it for them. And he knew that those who had tried to bring Scipio’s grandfather down, those who had ordered the death of the centurion, were driven not just by envy. They feared the power of the army, and the rise of a new breed of generals. Above all, they feared the name Scipio Africanus, now born again.

Fabius remembered the inscription on the elder Scipio’s tomb at Liternum, more than a hundred miles south of Rome near the Bay of Naples, the tomb of a man who had been forced into exile and lived his final years in bitterness. Ingrata patria, ne ossa quidem habebis. Ungrateful fatherland, you will not even have my bones. Fabius watched Scipio’s knuckles turn white as he gripped the railing. The centurion Petraeus was not the only one who would be avenged. And there was something else, something that Scipio never spoke of. Fabius could see the amulet on Scipio’s chest, a little carved eagle on a leather thong, soaked and hardened with the sweat and blood of war. He remembered who had given it to him all those years ago, and he swallowed hard. To become who he was now, consul, general, he had been forced to sacrifice a love that would have destroyed his military career. He had sworn that he would play the game, do what was needed to rise to the top, and then throw off the shackles that had caused him such anguish. He would not go back to Rome as his grandfather had done. This day would be his vengeance; after this he would no longer be enslaved to Rome. He would become Rome.