Total War Rome: Destroy Carthage

24

Twenty minutes later, Fabius stood beside Scipio in front of the first maniple of the first legion, their swords drawn. They had crashed through the breach made by the ram, Fabius slightly ahead, and had run up the street towards the Byrsa hill, expecting opposition behind every street block. But there had been none, and they had quickly realized that Hasdrubal and his depleted force of mercenaries and Carthaginian troops must have retreated to a defensible position close to the centre of the city, to the place that Fabius and Scipio had seen three years before near the old quarter of houses below the Byrsa. The two men had reached that place now, and stood aside while the legionaries streamed into the open area where they had seen the Sacred Band training, now stripped of its embellishments; it had clearly been used as a storage facility for the troops, with wooden grain bins around the edge that all seemed empty.

Ahead of them lay a wall of rubble hastily built to block the streets on the south side of the city; along the top was the wooden palisade they had seen three years ago above the level of the surrounding houses. As the legionaries in the vanguard surged forward and sought gaps in the barrier, a blare of trumpets sounded from the parapet and Hasdrubal appeared with a group of soldiers, all of them wearing the burnished breastplates and lobed helmets of the Sacred Band. Fabius watched in astonishment as two four-horse chariots came into view beside them, veering round and facing in opposite directions, the horses stomping and whinnying on the narrow ledge. It seemed a baffling spectacle, of no clear purpose, until he saw what was held between them: it was a man in a legionary’s armour, his head swollen and unrecognizable, his arms tied to the back of one chariot and his legs to the other. Fabius turned to Scipio, gripping his arm. ‘Hasdrubal is taunting you again. That must be one of the Roman prisoners taken during the fight for the harbour. Hasdrubal knows that the traditional way of executing traitors in Rome is to draw them between two quadrigae.’

Hasdrubal bellowed; there was a swish of whips and the two chariots leapt forward along the parapet, almost immediately tumbling off the side into a tangled mess at the base of the wall, the horses shrieking and neighing. As they did so the man tied between them was torn in half, his upper torso springing forward like a slingshot, spraying his innards over the legionaries watching in horror below. There was a collective howl of anger, and a surge forward that the centurions struggled to control.

But worse was to come. Four wooden poles were quickly raised where the horses had stood on the parapet, and four more prisoners appeared, shackled and naked except for their helmets. Hasdrubal bellowed again, and they were tied to the poles and dangled over the legionaries below. A giant Nubian slave appeared, wearing only a loincloth, with metal hooks where his hands should have been. He clashed them together, and then tore at the nearest prisoner, ripping a jagged chasm across his midriff and pulling out his intestines. He sauntered over to the next one, jeering at the Romans like a circus clown, and then with both hooks gouged the man’s eyes out and ripped his cheeks open. He spun around and slashed his hooks over the third man’s groin, ripping off his genitals and flinging them out over the legionaries below. He stood in front of them, beating his chest and howling. Fabius felt sick, and he saw Scipio swallow hard. The other legionaries, the comrades of the men on the platform, looked stunned with horror, unable to move.

‘Enough of this,’ Scipio said to Fabius. ‘However we do it, we need to get onto that parapet.’

‘No need.’ Fabius had caught sight of someone familiar out of the corner of his eye. There was a swooshing sound over the men, and the Nubian reeled and then fell forward, an arrow in his forehead. Enraged, Hasdrubal drew his sword and chopped the legs off the fourth prisoner, leave him to bleed out copiously over the parapet, and then he hastily moved out of sight. The legionaries in the square parted to make way for Gulussa and Hippolyta, who had been with their cavalry on the plain outside the city but had led a dismounted party up from the breach that had been made in the landward walls. Hippolyta was wearing the skin of a white tiger beneath a Roman cuirass, and her red hair was bound in a tight knot behind her helmet. She held her bow with another arrow ready, and looked over at Scipio. The four prisoners on the poles were groaning, terribly mutilated. The senior centurion of the first maniple turned to her, his voice hoarse with emotion. ‘Put them out of their misery,’ he said. ‘They will thank you for it.’ Scipio nodded, and Hippolyta raised her bow and in quick succession shot an arrow into the heart of each man, killing them quickly and mercifully. Fabius closed his eyes for a moment, trying to forget the scene. He could see the legionaries looking restless, uncertain. It was essential that they regain the momentum of their charge up from the harbour, or else they would falter and be cut down as they followed the side alley up towards the Byrsa that he and Fabius had seen on the reconnaissance three years before.

It was his job as primipilus to take the initiative in situations like this, to restore discipline. He leapt up on a stone grain bin and turned to address the men. ‘Legionaries,’ he bellowed. ‘Our comrades watch us now from Elysium. They wear full armour and are decked with the dona militaria of heroes. Now we go forward. There is a way up the alleyway to the acropolis. Our comrades will be avenged.’ He looked at the senior centurion of the first maniple. ‘Form the testudo,’ he bellowed.

The centurion ran out in front of his men, turned to face them and raised his shield above his head. Instantly the first line copied him, locking their shields together to form a solid mass above their heads, and then on down the ranks as the cry of ‘Testudo’ went up from the other centurions until the entire force formed one continuous mass of shields. The centurions ran to the front and the rear and joined the formation just as the Carthaginians began pouring boiling olive oil down on them from the parapet, causing grunts of pain but no disorder in the line. Ahead of them the alleyway was clear of defenders for at least two hundred paces, but Fabius knew that the mercenaries on the walls and the warriors of the Sacred Band would come down and attack once they realized that the testudo was all but impregnable to anything they could drop on it.

Fabius and Scipio raised their shields above their heads and ran forward. Behind them they could hear Brutus pounding along the stones, and he soon overtook them. After about fifty paces they saw the first of the enemy in the alleyway, a mixed lot of mercenaries with the armour and weapons of half a dozen nations, Latins among them. Brutus charged headlong into them, his huge curved sword slashing to the left and right, slicing men in half and spraying their innards over the walls. The first victim of his fearsome cross-stroke was a Celtiberian who made the mistake of standing his ground. Brutus paused for a moment, eyeing the man up and down, and then with shocking speed swept his sword through the man’s exposed midriff, cutting him in half, and then up between the man’s legs to quarter him, drawing the sword right up through the neck and head. Fabius had seen it once before in practice on a prisoner but was still horrified by the result, an indescribable mess in the narrow confines of the alley. Ahead of him the mercenaries who had seen Brutus at work turned and retreated, bunching up together and inadvertently making themselves easier for him to kill, while others darted away on either side in a suicidal run towards the advancing legionaries; they would know they had no chance of survival, but could hope for a less gruesome end than the one being experienced by their comrades further up the alley.

A Carthaginian of the Sacred Band appeared suddenly in front of Fabius, breathing heavily, his sword at the ready. There was a sound like a rope snapping in the wind and the soldier lurched forward and swayed, a look of incomprehension on his face. Out of the corner of his eye Fabius saw something like a snake’s tail slither back down the stone steps of the alleyway. The Carthaginian dropped his sword with a clatter and his neck erupted with blood, spraying Fabius’ breastplate and face, and the man then tumbled and fell, the blood pumping out of his body and streaming down the cracks between the stones. Fabius glanced back and saw Gulussa coiling his whip for another strike. He remembered the day in Rome when King Masinissa had presented Gulussa with the rhino-skin whip, a memento of his time fighting alongside the elder Scipio that he had hoped his son would use once again in war with Carthage. That time had come but, fifty years on, the whip was meaner, more vicious. Gulussa had taken it back to Numidia and had his craftsmen splice razor-sharp steel blades into the tip, and then had honed his skills deep in the desert, fighting on camelback, in dust storms, in places that seemed to Fabius barely imaginable. He had returned to Rome with his skill perfected: the ability to use the whip to ring a man’s neck at twenty paces and slice through both jugular veins at once.

The whip flicked out again like a lizard’s tongue, uncoiling slowly at first and then lightning quick, this time striking a Carthaginian on the base of his helmet and slicing through his lower jaw. The man screamed in agony, dropped his sword and held his severed jaw to his face, spitting and spraying blood. Scipio leapt forward for the kill, thrusting his sword hard under the man’s kilt, pushing up from the groin as far as it would go and then twisting and pulling it out, jumping back while the man vomited blood and fell to the ground, dead. Fabius slipped on the slew of blood and bile that pumped out between the man’s legs and then righted himself and ran forward behind Scipio. Hippolyta was beside him now too, pulling arrow after arrow from her quiver, using her double-curved Scythian bow to place shots expertly in the neck where the enemy armour left them most vulnerable. Body piled upon body, yet still the Carthaginians came. Ahead of them Brutus scythed his way forward, leaving mutilated bodies and body parts on either side, bloody hunks of meat that piled against each other in the gutters as if they had been swept down from some butcher’s shop in a mighty deluge of blood.

They were coming to the end of the alleyway now; the walls on either side were funnelling them towards the cluster of tightly packed houses, the old quarter of the city at the foot of the acropolis. Word had reached Ennius on the ships to halt the creeping barrage of fireballs ahead of the legionaries while they were advancing so quickly, but now the signallers had instructed him on Scipio’s command to renew the barrage and pulverize the old quarter of the city before they reached it. The fireballs landed with renewed ferocity, the first ones so close that they made the ground shudder, others landing further ahead among the houses as the observers signalled back to correct the range. Above them on the walls, the Carthaginians were still flinging down rocks, pottery vessels, burning oil, anything they could get their hands on, but most of the missiles were bouncing harmlessly off the testudo formation as the legionaries moved inexorably forward, their shields interlocked over their heads. Behind them Hippolyta’s Scythian archers were finding their mark, felling the Carthaginians on the wall and adding even further to the mounds of corpses that littered the alleyway. Still the legionaries marched on, relentlessly, the clanging of their armour punctuated by the hoarse shouts of the centurions, the testudo narrowing to a width of only four or five shields as they approached the end of the alley, their swords drawn and ready.

Fabius had guessed that as soon as they reached that point the remaining defenders would flee the ramparts and retreat into the old quarter ahead of them, to take refuge among the civilians cowering there and make a last stand. They had seen nothing of Hasdrubal since the grisly mutilation of the Roman prisoners on the walls, but Fabius could guess where he had gone. He squinted up at the temple on the Byrsa, its smoke-wreathed roof visible high above the houses, then looked back down at Brutus as he scythed his way to left and right to clear the last of the Carthaginians from the alley. Scipio held up his arm, halting the legionaries. Polybius made his way through from the rear and came alongside, his sword dripping with blood.

‘Ennius has exhausted his ammunition,’ he panted. ‘The last fireball contained green dye as a signal, and I saw it. That means the way ahead is open for you.’

Scipio wiped the sweat and blood from his face on his tunic sleeve. ‘There can be no more than a few hundred of them left.’

‘The Sacred Band?’

Scipio nodded. ‘The mercenaries are all dead or hiding. There’s no escape for those who are left. They’ll burn to death or die in the smoke.’

‘Hasdrubal?’

Scipio pointed his sword at the temple. ‘I’m sure he’s gone up there, waiting for me. For now, I’m more concerned about my legionaries. They’ve seen Brutus kill dozens, seen Hippolyta’s archers take down more, seen me kill in that alleyway. But so far most of them have spent this battle huddled under their shields.’ He took the cloth that Polybius offered, wiped his face again and jerked his head at the testudo. ‘This lot are the first legion. Some of them fought with me in Spain. They’ll be baying for blood. If I don’t give it to them, they might just take it out on us.’ He grinned at Polybius, tossing the cloth back. ‘And then you really would be writing your history book in the afterlife, wouldn’t you?’

‘Could you offer Hasdrubal terms of surrender?’ Polybius said. ‘There are hundreds, maybe thousands of civilians in that quarter. It’s where most of the surviving inhabitants of the city have sought refuge from the fires. If you unleash the legionaries, they won’t easily distinguish soldiers from civilians. It will be a massacre.’

Scipio shook his head. ‘Surrender? Hasdrubal? Not likely. And wasn’t it you who read Homer to me last night, about the fall of Troy? I don’t recall Achilles hesitating because of women and children. Rome showed Carthage mercy once before, half a century ago. This time there will be none.’

He turned round, facing his centurions and legionaries, and raised his bloody sword. ‘Men,’ he bellowed. ‘It seems that I have had all the fun. Now that’s not fair, is it?’

They bellowed back, a great roar, and Scipio grinned at them. ‘Men of the first maniple,’ he continued, ‘some of you have been with me since Spain. Some of you centurions even taught me how to fight. Old Quintus Pesco over there was once so dismayed with my pilum throwing that he promised to give me five of the best on my backside and send me to clean out the latrines. And I was his commanding officer.’

There was a roar of approval, and Scipio slapped the nearest centurion on the back, then put his hand on the man’s shoulder, looking back at the legionaries. ‘You are all my brothers. And like brothers everywhere, we love a good fight.’

There was another roar, and Scipio pointed his sword up the alleyway. ‘Over there, in those houses, are the last remaining Carthaginians, the so-called Sacred Band. Kill them all, and you will have won the greatest victory Rome has ever known. You will go home heroes, and your families will be honoured for all time. But do your job well here, and I won’t let you stay at home for long. Where we’re going after this, I promise you war and plunder like you’ve never seen before.’

Another deafening chorus rose from the men. The centurion Quintus Pesco turned to him, his voice hoarse. ‘Scipio Africanus, the men of the first legion would follow you to Hades and back. As they would have done for your grandfather.’

Scipio raised his sword and moved back against the wall of the alley, pulling Polybius with him. ‘Men, are you ready?’ he shouted. There was a huge cry, and he nodded at the centurions, who angled their shields forward from the testudo formation and raised their swords, followed by the legionaries. Scipio pointed his sword forward and bellowed. ‘Do your worst!’

Ten minutes later, Fabius and Scipio walked into the cloud of dust that had been left by the advancing legionaries, entering a storm of death like nothing Fabius had seen before. The narrow alleys of the old quarter were strewn with flickering patches of fire, some of it consuming the timbers of houses where the fireballs had impacted half an hour before. In the dust the glowing naphtha made a nightmarish sight, as if they were walking again into the burning fumeroles of the Phlegraean Fields, only this time the fire was man-made. The air was filled with the an acrid smell of burning, and with the stench from a place where people had lived confined together for months with little food and hardly any water for sanitation; each narrow house had its own rainwater cistern, and they had seen lower down in the city that they were nearly all empty.

For a few minutes after the legionaries had gone on ahead there had been a terrible din of shrieking and yelling, a noise that had come from further away as the soldiers had moved forward; now the place was eerily quiet, punctuated only by the sound of soldiers kicking around inside the houses looking for loot, and the occasional grunt as a wounded Carthaginian was finished off. Corpses lay everywhere: soldiers of the Sacred Band with their polished armour, most of them mere boys; mercenaries who had stripped off theirs in a futile attempt to escape recognition, but been hacked down anyway; old men and women, even children, all caught up in the slaughter. To clear the streets the legionaries were hauling bodies off to either side and dumping them in the cisterns, filling them to the brim so that limbs and torsos were visible poking out, some still twitching. The legionaries had been incensed by the terrible scenes of their comrades being mutilated, and they had spared nobody. Fabius knew the inevitable reckoning of war, but this was beyond any rampage he had seen before.

He followed Scipio as he picked his way through the bodies and headed to the foot of the Byrsa. Silently, the legionaries they passed joined them, their swords dripping with blood, until most of the maniple had rallied again under their centurions. Polybius came up and stood beside him, wiping the blood off his face. ‘We’re at the temple steps. The city is nearly taken.’

Fabius passed Scipio a skin of water that a legionary had brought up to them. He gulped it down gratefully, then raised the skin above his head to let the water pour over his face. He passed it back, and wiped his forehead against his tunic sleeve. Fabius was conscious for the first time of his own rasping breathing, coming short and fast, and he tried to calm himself. The noise of battle had abated all round the city; he heard only the occasional shriek and cry, the sounds of falling masonry as the fires took hold, the stomping and whinnying of horses, the heavy breathing and marching of a thousand legionaries crammed into the streets behind. Even Brutus had stopped, a few paces away to the right, panting like a bear, the bloody point of his scimitar resting on the lower step that led up to the temple. The whole army was waiting, watching to see what Scipio would do next.

Fabius peered through the smoke towards the top of the steps. The Carthaginian army had been annihilated, but he knew there were still people up there, cowering in the temple precinct. He remembered the little boy he had watched mounting the steps in the Tophet less than an hour before, Hasdrubal’s own son. He knew the man himself would be up there now, waiting for them. It was as if the temple were another altar and Hasdrubal was orchestrating the ceremony, forcing Scipio to mount the steps as if he himself were a participant in some final, apocalyptic scene of sacrifice.

Fabius sensed the army behind him, shifting, restless. He took a deep breath, tasting the acrid reek of smoke, the coppery tang of blood, feeling his veins engorge. He remembered what the old centurion had taught them. Scipio must not let his men see him hesitate. Fabius watched him grip his sword and look at Polybius, and then at Brutus. ‘Let’s finish it,’ he growled.

He began to run up the steps, sword in hand, his armour clanking, swerving to avoid the burning patches of naphtha from Ennius’ fireballs. Fabius followed, and he could hear Polybius and Brutus behind him, and the mass of legionaries surging forward to the base of the steps. He pounded forward, his teeth bared, every muscle and sinew in his body straining, the sweat spraying off his face. Time seemed to slow down, as if the weight of history were pulling him back, a history that had denied this day to Rome for so long. Then he was over the final step and on the temple platform, crouched in readiness with his sword forward, his chest heaving as he tried to catch his breath, hearing only the pounding of blood in his ears. He was beside Scipio, and could only see eight or ten paces ahead; the temple was obscured by a billowing plume of smoke that rolled off the platform to the north to join the pall that hid the city streets, making the group at the temple seem cut off and on their own, invisible to the thousands of legionaries below as they confronted the final nemesis of Carthage.

Polybius and Brutus came up on either side of him, breathing hard, catching their breath. ‘I can feel heat, coming from ahead,’ Polybius panted. ‘The temple must be on fire.’

‘I see nobody,’ Brutus growled, looking around.

‘He’s here,’ Scipio said under his breath. ‘Trust me. Keep alert.’

The four men stood in a semi-circle, their backs to the stairs, their swords held out as they stared into the smoke. Gulussa and Hippolyta joined them silently on either side, Gulussa with his whip coiled in readiness and Hippolyta with her bow drawn, a barbed arrow pulled back. They waited, hearing nothing, not moving. And then a sudden gust of wind blew the smoke aside and revealed the temple, its great stone columns soaring into the air some fifty paces ahead. Polybius had been right, but it was not the fireballs that had caused the heat. The temple was packed around with bundles of olive branches, just as the Tophet sanctuary had been. Hasdrubal had planned the suicide of his own city down to the last detail. Flames licked at the bundles between the columns, a crackling and hissing that soon became a roar. The doorway to the inner sanctum beyond the columns looked like the entrance to a furnace, an orange-red glow where the fire had already consumed the wood that had been rammed inside. Fabius put his hand up to shield his eyes, feeling the heat scorch his arm. He remembered being shown the place in the Phlegraean Fields where Aeneas had descended into the underworld. That had required imagination to envisage, but this needed none. This looked like the entrance to Hades.

The wind gusted again and he saw Hasdrubal, no more than twenty paces away to the left of the temple, a torch burning in a metal holder beside him. He was still wearing his lionskin, but it was smeared with blood; he stood with his feet planted firmly apart. Beside him was a woman with crudely cropped hair, her scalp blotched and bleeding and her clothing in rags, stooping over two small children. Hasdrubal held her by the nape of her neck and pushed her forward, his face contorted with rage and grief.

‘Scipio Aemilianus,’ he bellowed, his voice hoarse. ‘Look what you have done.’ He pulled the woman’s head up with his other hand to reveal her face. Fabius stared, and reeled. Even on this day of bloodletting, when he had watched their own legionaries being horribly mutilated on the parapet, he was not prepared to see a woman like this. Her eyes were gone, the sockets empty and red, the blood dripping down her face and spattering on the stone slabs in front of her. Fabius remembered the piercing shriek he had heard after the little boy had been sacrificed. This was the boy’s mother, Hasdrubal’s wife, and those were her other children. In her anguish she had not only ripped her clothes, and cut her scalp. She had torn out her own eyes.

Hasdrubal leaned forward, saying something to her, and then steered her between the two children, placing their hands in hers. He turned them towards the burning entrance to the temple. He pushed, and she stumbled, and then she started to run, dragging the children along. She shrieked as she passed through the columns with her children still beside her, their little bodies erupting like torches as they disappeared in the flames, and then they were gone.

Hasdrubal crouched forward, his huge arms bent in front of him, his fists clenched, and roared like a beast. He stayed there for a few moments, panting, staring at Scipio. Then he reached back and picked up a pottery amphora that had been lying behind him, smashed its neck and raised it up, his biceps bulging as he poured oil over his head, over the lion’s mane, until it was dripping and glistening. He tossed the pot aside, and then grasped the burning torch from the holder beside him. With both hands outstretched, he turned towards the mountain of Bou Kornine to the east, its twin peaks just visible over the pall of smoke, and closed his eyes. Then he turned back towards Scipio, roared again and dipped his head into the flaming torch, igniting his beard and the lion skin in a blast of burning oil.

Fabius again seemed to see movements happening slowly, as if in a dream. Hasdrubal crouched down, the flames sizzling over his head, his mouth wide open, the torch held out. He turned towards the temple and began to run, his huge legs pounding the stones, the flames from his head rising high above him as he picked up speed, a human torch rushing to join his wife and children in the underworld. At the last moment the torch tumbled from his hand and he disappeared into the burning temple, fire joining fire, and was gone from sight.

They all stood transfixed for a moment, staring.

‘It is finished,’ Brutus growled.

Polybius put a grimy hand on Scipio’s shoulder. ‘Thus ends Carthage.’

Scipio wiped the sweat from his eyes, blinking hard, still staring at the temple that had become a funeral pyre. Gulussa came up beside him, put one foot on the tip of his whip and shook the handle, lowering it as the whip coiled round into a tight bundle. He picked it up, stowed it into a pouch on his belt and sniffed the air, shading his eyes and peering to the south. ‘I can taste the desert in the wind,’ he said. ‘We should be wary of staying here too long. The wind is picking up and will carry with it much dust, and will fan the flames below.’

Polybius walked a few steps over to the north edge of the platform, and came back with a look of concern on his face. ‘It’s worse than that,’ he said. ‘Ennius warned me that the substance in his fireballs burns with such intensity that when the fires join together they create their own wind, and that in turn feeds the flames. The houses are mostly built of stone and mud brick, but the frames are timber and the fires are already leaping from house to house. When they reach the old quarter below us with all those bodies for fuel, the fire will burn even more ferociously. Ennius calls it a firestorm, and that’s what’s happening now. Our soldiers will have to be content with looting what they can find as they leave. We don’t have much time.’

Fabius glanced beyond the blackened façade of the temple and saw what he meant. It was a different kind of wind, a sucking, swirling motion in the smoke that seemed to tumble down the side of the platform like a whirlpool. Where it disappeared he could see a red glow in the city street as intense as the glow inside the temple; the leading edge of the fire was advancing along the street at frightening speed, engulfing more and more buildings as it went. Scipio turned to Gulussa and Hippolyta. ‘Go down and order the trumpeters to sound the retreat. The legions must evacuate the city immediately, marching back to the harbours. Send messages to Ennius and the naval commander to draw all ships further offshore. Brutus, join them.’

‘There are horses from my cavalry without riders after the fighting,’ Hippolyta said. ‘I will find mounts for us.’

‘Go now,’ Scipio said. Fabius watched them rush down the steps, leaving only Polybius and Scipio by his side. He looked at the firestorm. Carthage would destroy itself, just as its leader had destroyed himself and his people. He turned to Polybius. ‘I remember what you once read to me from Homer’s Iliad, the words of the goddess Athena. The day shall come when sacred Troy will fall, and king and people shall perish all.’

Polybius looked at the scene of devastation in front of them, and then at Scipio. ‘But the fall of Carthage owes nothing to the utterances of a god. It was a Roman feat of arms, and the feat of not just one Scipio, but two. Today, your grandfather can rest easy in Elysium. When I come to write my history of this war, people will forget about Achilles and Troy and will instead read about the two generals named Scipio Africanus, and the fall of Carthage.’

Scipio raised an eyebrow at his friend. ‘If I ever give you time to write it.’

‘The war is over, my friend.’

Scipio said nothing, but looked across the sea to the northeast. Fabius followed his gaze, trying to read his thoughts. This war is over. Some day soon, perhaps already, another city would fall, the final Greek stronghold of Corinth, and Metellus would stand on that acropolis too, scanning the devastation and feeling the same rush in his veins as he stared into the future.

Fabius remembered the words of the Sibyl, words that she had told him when he had seen her alone, words that he had never uttered to Scipio: she had told him that both Scipio and Metellus would stand over fallen cities, as Achilles had done at Troy. It was their destiny, and the destiny of Rome. But then Fabius remembered what else she had said, to him alone, when she had beckoned him back into the cave and touched him with her wizened finger, her breath caressing his ear like an exhalation from all of history.

He mouthed the words to himself now.

One of them will rule, and one will fall.

Polybius had been watching him, but they both looked down as Hippolyta came bounding back up the steps. Halfway to the top she stopped. ‘I have horses waiting below, Scipio,’ she shouted. ‘We must ride.’

She turned to go back down. Polybius gestured for Scipio to move, pointing to the fire rushing towards the temple platform from the north, and then began to clatter down the steps after Hippolyta. Fabius lingered for a moment with Scipio, staring one last time. He took a deep breath, tasting the dust from the desert again, the acrid reek of burning, the smell of blood.

He felt exhilarated.

Carthage was not the end. It was the beginning.

He knew what was to come.