Hannibal. Ross Leckie

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.”