Hannibal. Ross Leckie

the host, on friend and foe alike. Armoured in bronze, the elephants broke upon the battle.

      Men were choked by trunks, decapitated by cutlasses and sabres, disembowelled by tusks. Human entrails hanging on their heads and trunks and tusks, the elephants raged, trampled, hacked and gored, rearing on their hind legs, smashing men to pulp, tearing limb from limb, wheeling, turning, deadly, mad. One had a mercenary impaled on its chest’s great spear, and shook as to be finished with the cadaver. The beast turned, trumpeting, possessed, back towards Carthage, ripping with its trunk parts off the body, a lower leg, a forearm, then a head, throwing them aside along its charging way.

      Another, maddened by a mercenary arrow in its eye, threw off its tower and ran on bellowing to the camp, straight through the stockade wall, mowing down the tents and huts of grass, passing on from sight.

      The frenzy passed, though several of the beasts ignored their drivers and stood, pounding with their feet at piles of dead, making a mush of what had once been men. The mercenaries that survived had fled.

      I went out with the Sufet and his guard to greet the victors, those that lived. Then pouring from the city came the people, most with knives in their hands, flocking to have their revenge upon the mercenaries. In groups of four or five, some were still defiant and alive. These the people killed like mad dogs, from a distance stoning them. Some were stabbed and stabbed again by women, children, slaves. Haggith sought the corpse of Spendius to have, he said, the head mounted on a pole and carried on to Utica. It could not be found.

      It grew hot. The people of Carthage worked with bare arms, reapers, murdering the dying. Baalhaan had rounded up the hundred or so mercenaries who, though wounded, could still stand. The elephants’ work was not yet done.

      The prisoners were led down to a flat place by the river. At Baalhaan’s command, ten elephants followed. I did not go to watch. The screams of men and trumpeting of elephants, that was enough. Then, at first in ones and twos, and then in a black crowd, the ravens came to settle on the dead and dying, pecking out by choice the eyes and exposed guts.

      Haggith re-formed his force and went on to relieve Utica. His messengers brought news that the mercenaries had not opposed him. He was in the town. All was well.

      But into their town the Uticans had admitted only Haggith and some few. The elephants, the army had stayed outside the walls. That night, the mercenaries returned in force, led by Mathos and, it was said, by Spendius. Not for nothing had they served with Hamilcar Barca in Sicily.

      They dealt simply with the elephants. Rounding up a herd of pigs and sheep, the mercenaries covered them with pitch. They set light to the animals and drove them blazing through the dark to where the elephants were tethered. Terrified, the great beasts fled into the night, but not before they had wreaked havoc on the men about them. What the elephants began, the mercenaries finished, slaughtering many, seizing arms and gear before they stole away as they had come.

      One thing they did they must have planned with care. At next daybreak by the main gate into Utica, Haggith found some forty of the elephants’ drivers, lying ordered, tongues protruding, faces blue and nostrils oozing slime. Each wore round his neck a bowstring cord.

      At dusk, Haggith slipped away from Utica and found in the hills the remnants of his army. Marching only at night, hiding by day in olive groves and orchards, he made his laborious way back to Carthage. Of all this he gave at least a true account to the Elders, of how at Gorza and then three times more he might have fallen on the mercenaries, but he was afraid. Perhaps his honesty won him his life. He could feel the cross that was his due. He had lost sixty elephants, 3,000 men, corn and baggage, gold and silver. He asked for poison in his shame. The Elders would decree. Then my father came.

      He had been far in the interior, deep in the mountains of Marazzana when Astegal found him. He had returned in the night, unheralded. Already the mercenaries were encamped again across the isthmus, cutting Carthage off. Hamilax it was who woke me in the very early light. “Hannibal, your father bids you go to him.” Hamilax looked older, drawn.

      “My father! Where?”

      “He says that you will know.”

      Without thinking I dressed, ran from the house and to the wall and found the stone and slipped inside and climbed. He stood there, gazing out to sea. Without turning, “Am I in time, Hannibal?” he asked. I shivered in the morning chill. I did not know. “Yes!” he cried, and turned and strode across the battlement to me. “I have come in time. Carthage called and I am here. Remember that, Hannibal.”

      “But Father,” I spluttered, “Gisco, Haggith …”

      “I know, I know. Come and sit down.” We moved to a bench in the lee of the wall.

      “Is Carthage in such peril, Hannibal? Let me tell you of the Nysalles, a tribe who once inhabited deep inland the Libyan desert. The south wind dried up the water in their storage tanks. They were left with no water whatsoever. And so the Nysalles declared war on the wind and marched out to defeat it. The wind blew, and covered them with sand. They were wiped out, and now the Nasamones hold their land.

      “Do you understand? The mercenaries have declared war on Carthage. They might as well have declared war on the wind. But I have much to do, and you will help me. This will be for us rehearsal for a greater war. Come.”

      So for the next weeks I accompanied my father everywhere as he prepared for war. The classroom was forgotten. I hardly saw Silenus or my mother or my siblings. This was learning of a different kind.

      The campaign of Hamilcar Barca against the mercenaries began not in the shrill of trumpets nor the clash of arms, but at a desk, early, morning after morning. Everything was recorded, tabulated, planned, the stocks of men and arms and horses, elephants. “I cannot fight them – yet,” my father often said. By the middle of each morning we were all about the city, my father kind and brusque, gentle and harsh by turns as occasion demanded.

      The blacksmiths had no bronze. My father took it, for all the extravagant protests that he met, from the Elders’ treasury. The armourers had no gut for bow-strings. The hair of all the city’s female slaves was shorn and used instead. When that proved not enough, my father turned to freedmen’s wives.

      He drew 300,000 gold kikars from the Syssitia, the company of merchants, and imposed a tax of 200 gold xthets on the rich. If one refused to pay or claimed he lacked the means, his household goods were sold at public auction, my father himself a leading bidder. A thing unparalleled, he even demanded money of the priestly colleges – and got it. Who could deny a Sufet who had himself contributed 160 sets of armour, 2,000 xthets, 3,000 gommors of wheat and much else besides?

      He sent Hamilax by ship – the mercenaries had no fleet at least – to Liguria for 3,000 soldiers, all to be paid a full year in advance at sixteen copper xthets a day. He reformed the Sacred Legion, those 3,000 who had returned with Haggith or remained behind as garrison, dismissing and replacing officers, forbidding wine or women, compelling them to train all day and sleep at night on the ground within the public squares.

      He drilled his growing army. The infantry were given shorter swords and lighter shields and ash sarissae, lances thirteen cubits long. To the heavy cavalry of the Sacred Legion he added 800 men he picked himself from Malqua, a thing unheard of, training them relentlessly, equipping them with bows and light double-edged axes, tunics of leather and caps of weasel-skin. From even slaves and artisans he chose 300 men as slingers. His was an absolute command, and yet each week he sent accounts to the Elders.

      Two months passed, three. The people grew anxious, sullen when we passed. “Barca is afraid,” they said. “Barca is a quartermaster, not a general. Will he never march?” Across the plain beyond the pit where Gisco’s and the others’ corpses rotted, the mercenary camp was once more full and threatening. Round it now and right across the isthmus to the river ran a wall of mud and stakes, topped by thorns. At intervals along its length, the mercenaries had set up strange and chilling scarabim and sorceries, chevrons and charms. Dead eagles, human foetuses, heads of lions, strangled ravens passed their stench into the breeze.

      Still