Hannibal. Ross Leckie

have with me,” Gisco then cried out, “a xthet of pure gold for each of you as earnest of our faith. As for you Balearics, whose pay is always women, a caravan of virgins, fattened up and rubbed with benjamin, is even now on its way from Abdera. We have commissioned galleys which will take you to your homes. You will be paid in full before you leave.”

      “For our horses too?”

      “Yes,” said Gisco mournfully, “for your horses too. Now form up lines before these clerks who will pay you each the gold and take a record of what more each of you is due.”

      This too was translated round the camp. Numidians from the mountains, wrapped in the skin of bears, who had been leaning forward, ominous on their clubs, and Dorians, flaxen-haired, who had begun to finger their swordbelts made of iron, now relaxed. It might, Silenus thought, have worked, for these were people who had trusted Carthage, some for generations.

      But just as the mercenaries were beginning to form obedient lines, a giant Campanian stepped forward and sounded a great horn. He was beyond the horses and before the mercenaries and what he said was said so fast the harm was done before any could gainsay. He announced rapidly in six different languages, in Latin, Gaulish, Balearic, Libyan, Iberian and Greek, that he had something important to say. Since it was Greeks who were most numerous around him, he went on in Greek.

      “Now hear what this man has truly said,” the Campanian shouted. “He called you cowards, vermin, sons of dogs and bitches. Had you not lost for Carthage the war with Rome, she would not have to pay her indemnity to Rome so why, then, should you be paid?” Silenus tried to move to Gisco to translate this for him, but was held fast in the press. “One stater is all you will get. These clerks are here to record not what you will be paid but how you are to be punished, in the Cantabrian mines or as galley slaves. These were the true words of Gisco. Let us not take a stater. Let us take Carthage itself!”

      So simply was it done. The horsemen of the Sacred Legion were pulled from their mounts, Gisco’s circle drowned. Hands tore off his necklace of blue stones, his gold clasps, his heavy earrings. The dignity of Carthage was trampled in the dust.

      They were all held then in a human corral, the Sufet and Silenus, the Twelve, the clerks, the high-born of the Legion. The bags of gold were brought. The Campanian – his name was Spendius – seemed in command. “What shall we do with them?” came cries. “Kill them!” said one, and “Cut off their balls!” another. “No, let’s eat them …” Spendius held up a great axe, double-edged. Silence fell. “What we shall do” – he paused – “is keep them,” he said, “as hostages, though we may have some sport with him” – and he prodded Gisco in the stomach with his axe – “first.”

      Silenus was a gentle man. The pain it caused him first to witness what was then done and next to recount it to the Council was a pain from which he was never to recover. Years later in Spain I found his copy of Homer’s Iliad with this passage marked and marked again. Priam, King of Troy, is mourning for dead Hector, his greatest son, champion of Troy which now must fall, for Hector has been killed by Achilles:

       γεραιὸς

      ἐντυπὰς ἐν χλαίνη κεκαλυμμένος˙ ἀμϕὶ δὲ πολλὴ

      κόπρος ἔην κεϕαλῇ τε καὶ αὐχένι τοῖο γέροντος,

      τήν ῥα κυλινδόμενος καταμήσατο χερσὶν ἑησι.

      The old man sat veiled, beaten into his cloak. Excrement lay thick on his head and neck, he was an old man, for he had been rolling in it, he had gathered it and smeared it on with his hands.

      Such, I suppose, Silenus thought his sorrow and his suffering to be. Yet his was a less brutal suffering than many begun that day. First the mercenaries put Gisco in a frame of rough-hewn planks. To the board behind his neck they nailed his hands and to the one between his legs they nailed his knees. A man they called Zaracas did these things, moaning with the pleasure that this brought him. It was Spendius, though, who put out the Sufet’s eyes, pushing with his great strength on the Sufet’s sockets with his thumbs until both eyeballs popped. Then he bit through with his teeth the cords of both the Sufet’s eyes. His tongue, Silenus said, was torn out by Zaracas, his ears cut off by a dark-skinned Libyan they knew as Mathos. Then they put his eyeballs, his ears and his tongue on a rope of pearl they tore from Gisco’s litter and they placed it round the neck of Silenus of Caleacte and sent him back alone to Carthage to tell the Council of their terms.

      Silenus left the Sufet living still and all his clerks and Twelve and Legionaries lying in a rubbish pit where pigs snarled for scraps. First Spendius had had them tied together, a collar of iron round each neck in the manner of the caravans of slaves that cross the trackless deserts of the south. Silenus saw the camp boys come, filthy, naked, uncircumcised and verminous and urinate upon their heads. Spendius brought the quartered azure standards of the Sufet and threw them down upon their heads.

      I was in my father’s hall, its floor of polished lapis-lazuli, when that night the Elders came to hear from Silenus of the mercenaries’ terms. The night was dark. A grey mist filled the sea which beat against the wall of Carthage with a noise of sobs and dying breath. The Elders came into the hall bearing their sticks of narwhal horn. In mourning for the shame upon the Sufet, some had torn their robes. Others bore their beards enclosed in mauve leather bags fastened round their ears with silken blackened string.

      They heard from Silenus of terms they could not meet, had they even wanted. Outrageous sums were asked, gold and silver, mines in Spain, ten zeters too of land for every man. For their leaders they demanded in marriage virgins of the great families of Carthage. This outraged the Elders that our Punic blood should even be presumed to mix with that of barbarians. Meantime they wanted from our stores amphorae of wine and guinea fowl, mackerel and meat and spice and seasonings, all this within two days.

      Baalhaan, the senior there, spoke out for all and ordered Astegal himself, High Steward of the Council, to leave that night and find Hamilcar my father. Safe for many months within their walls, the Elders of the Council could not speak for peace. So they spoke for war.

      Those were oppressive days. Silenus was too weak to teach or talk. He stayed in his room, seeking solace in Euripides. The city gates were barred to all. The people of Carthage were terrified and tense, our household servants sullen and recalcitrant. There was dark talk of a holocaust, a tophet in our tongue, the burning alive of children to appease Melkarth and Tanit-pene-Baal. Even Tunis, our subject city just across the bay, had, we learned, revolted, its Elders opening their gates, its merchants their stores and its women their legs to the mercenaries.

      Two days later, the supplies unsent, we heard the mercenaries were before the wall, just out of bow shot or of javelin. No Carthaginian would have fired, though, for this is what we saw, those many of us high and safe upon the wall. Twenty of the Sacred Legion were lined up, tied to short and sharpened stakes.

      Six mercenaries approached the first. Spendius the Campanian was there, his skin gleaming with woad, his amulets of silver gleaming in the sun, and Mathos and yes, Zaracas, Silenus said. The bonds of the first Legionary were cut. Spendius and Mathos seized his legs and stretched them out. Two others took his shoulders and his arms. They lifted him up and, muscles heaving, brought him swiftly shuddering down, impaling him between the legs and upwards through his guts upon the stake. Taking his shoulders from behind, the giant Spendius pushed him down again and then again, laughing a crazed laugh and each time the Sacred Legionary screamed a scream that filled the air.

      It can only have been worse for the other nineteen, knowing what awaited them. I have had many men impaled. How long they live depends on many things. If the stake is long, it penetrates the heart and death is swift. If the impaled is old or frail or weak of will, their ordeal