Hannibal. Ross Leckie

mercenaries’ stakes were short, their victims young and strong in body and mind. I am then sure they were alive when, one by one, Zaracas cut their throats before us all and caught some blood of each within a bowl. By Melkarth and Eschmoun, by all the brightening stars, by moon and sun and sea, each tribe on earth has customs and has ways which, though peculiar to itself and strange to others, is no less wrong for that. Yet what Zaracas did next, no man should have done or do again.

      Turning to the walls of Carthage, stepping forward to us all, he raised the bowl and moaned and drank in one great draught the blood of twenty of the Sacred Legion. Beside me, Silenus retched, turned and hurried away. Raising his head towards the sun like a stag drunk newly from a stream, Zaracas sang a weird and sickening song, a war paean, a dirge.

      Baalhaan had called for catapults to fire. Too late. I stood and watched as the missiles of the catapults kicked up the empty and the blood-stained sand.

      The sky was dark for days thereafter, rank with smoke, shutting out the sun. The mercenaries were burning the country villas of the rich, some no doubt of the house of Barca among them. Their numbers grew, swelled by slaves who joined them to be free. Wild bands of Nomads, dressed in white cloaks of wool with leather necklets, wooden earrings, their boots of hyena skin, came on quadrigas and joined the waxing camp. Bandits, broken men from Cape Phiscus and the promontory of Derna, Garamantians mounted on their painted mares, Atarantes who curse the sun, locust-eating Auseans riding zebras and wild asses, Gysantes who eat lice and Zuaces, covered in ostrich feathers and masked with black veils, all these came to join the mercenary host and destroy Carthage.

      The trumpet heralds signified that, once again, there were mercenaries before Khamon’s Gate. Hundreds of us climbed the walls to watch. Silenus this time would not come. My brothers Mago and Hasdrubal were with me. What we saw was mercenaries digging a pit. To this they brought their prisoners, already emaciated, foul, tufts of hair torn out, and last Gisco, carried in his frame, a monstrous tiara of hippopotamus hide on his head. They had daubed unguents on his wounds, his knees, his hands, his eyes, his ears to stave off infection, keep him alive for suffering.

      Into this pit were thrown the ambassadors of Carthage, but not until the legs of each were broken by bronze bars. Then came donkeys, bearing Gisco’s gold. The mercenaries poured this basket by basket over the men below until they lay gleaming in the sun, all but drowned in gold. Huge Spendius reached down and took up some coins. These he stuck to an arrow-shaft smeared with tar and with his great bow of yew he shot the arrow swiftly at the city gate before him. We did not understand, until a sentry brought the arrow to Baalhaan on the wall.

      The coins were not of gold, but gilded lead. Gisco had played and lost.

      Discovering this duplicity seemed to change the mercenaries. Now, day by day, they marshalled and wheeled upon the plain. Their archers for practice shot at flamingoes on the lagoon. From their camp we heard no more the sound of drunken revelry but, instead, that of their smiths, forging swords and shields. Piles of lances soon were to be seen, stacked like sheaves of corn and in their pit before the walls before our eyes the Sufet of Carthage and those who had gone with him died from thirst and sun and leaden gold.

      Some messengers reached the Council, passing in the night through wicket gates to bring the news of widespread insurrection. Of our subject cities, all but Utica and Hippacritae had risen up, murdered their Carthaginian garrisons and opened their gates to Spendius and Mathos, now acclaimed as joint Schalischims, Generals of the Free. The two loyal cities were besieged, and from our walls all could see the carpenters and masons, smiths and wrights among the mercenary host prepare for siege the catapults and rams, ballistae, onagers and tollenones that would soon, we thought, be turned on Carthage.

      Yet the city was impregnable, all knew that, standing within its mighty walls on its own peninsula almost surrounded on three sides by sea and on the last by a lagoon. The mercenaries might straddle the neck of land which joined the city to the continent and on which they were camped beside the river Macaras, but we would wait. We had water, food enough to wait for Hamilcar, my father, who would come and lead an army to destroy the hubris of the mercenaries.

      Baalhaan, acting Sufet, grew impatient. He appointed to command one Haggith, on my mother’s side a cousin of the Barcas, a merchant, pallid-skinned from hours inside at long accounts and reckonings.

      The Sacred Legion was some 6,000 strong. To their number Haggith decreed all able-bodied citizens should be added. Each morning as the cocks crowed they lined up along the Mappalia for drill with lance and sword. Haggith was everywhere about the city, the arsenal, the treasury, the lighthouse, the corn bins and the cisterns, checking, ordering, disposing. He had the elephants from the city walls prepared. Their bronze breastplates were re-cast, their tusks gilded, their towers renewed and strengthened. I saw all this as each day I walked about the city and wondered: when will my father come?

      Haggith was ready, his force prepared. Abdolonim was going with them, captaining a cohort, and so it was not with my father that I first saw the standard of the Barcas going off to war. The mercenaries were now divided into three armies, one beseiging Utica, one Hippacritae and the third encamped still upon the landward plain. Each, it was thought, was of some 20,000 men.

      Haggith’s force was only half of that. He put his trust in our elephants, knowing that my father had had none in Sicily and that the mercenaries would be unfamiliar with their lethal ways. The Council had determined that Haggith should first relieve the siege of Utica, a morning’s march across the Gulf of Carthage. In Utica were galleys which we needed to bring fresh supplies and troops.

      All of us who stayed behind crowded onto the wall above Khamon’s Gate to see the force depart at early dawn. To reach Utica, they would first have to face the mercenary army on the plain. Haggith’s army formed into one long line three deep and marched upon the mercenaries. The Sacred Legion formed the first line, the household slaves and servants, armed with slings, on the flanks. Next came the heavy infantry, their long pikes waving in the air. Amongst them were the city’s freedmen, unacquainted most with war but bristling like porcupines with arms – a lance, an axe, a club, two swords. Last came the elephants in five squadrons, the camp followers in between, and flanking them on either side the Numidian cavalry on nimble short-legged garrons, the riders bearing but a shield of hide and scimitar.

      They had surprise at least to help them. As they came near the mercenary camp – we could see all now in strengthening light – at Haggith’s command the last line of the elephants and cavalry, he amongst them, his purple litter rocking like a ship at sea, held back. The Legion and the infantry marched on to a great sudden din of tympani and trumpets, assbone flutes and drums.

      Action stirred across the mercenary camp like a dog fresh from water. Horns were sounded and the mercenaries came out, their slingers to the fore. They began the slaughter. Before their volleys of clay pellets and lead bullets the Legionaries fell, first one, then two, then twenty, scores. The forces were perhaps 200 strides apart when, on the run, hard at the Legion’s centre, the giant Spendius in the van, a wedge-shaped syntagma of mercenaries armed with long Etruscan swords burst through the Legion’s line and fell upon the freedmen and the merchants in our centre.

      Encumbered by their gear, unable to go forward or go back, tripping over dead and dying, blinded by their own blood, the Legion and the infantry of Carthage fell in piles of limbs and lances before the mercenary swords. Spendius swung, as if a flail, a giant axe, and heads and arms and hands were littered on the sand. Beside me on the wall, Baalhaan groaned and turned away.

      The mercenaries began to sing a song of victory, ululating through the dust and smell of blood. But then a new sound came, a searing, soaring trumpeting of elephants, a sound of madness and of rage. In one single line, Haggith himself brandishing a pike and mounted on a great bull, the sixty elephants of Carthage charged upon the press of mercenaries and our shattered troops.

      The elephants’ tusks were gilded, their ears painted blue, their trunks daubed with red lead. Each had a spear fitted to its chest, a sabre to its trunk, a cutlass on each tusk, circles of sharp spikes around each lower leg. Blood flowed over their great ears from the goading of their drivers who sat and screamed from towers of leather on the