Hannibal, page 58
‘Is it not clear that the Carthaginians had hoped that we would attack Carthage?’ Publius asked. ‘Once we had done that and were entrenched, committed, limited to the grounds that the enemy had for generations shaped for its defences, then and only then would their massive army attack us, not from the city itself but from behind our backs. They would have chosen the spot, the time, the circumstances. They’d have marched in with one unified force under their best commanders, numbering the exact maximum they could muster. This, at least, is what they wished. But something very different will take place.
‘This war began with deceit and trickery,’ Publius said. ‘Now it will end by the same.’
There was some debate about what Publius then proposed, but it was half-hearted. The generals all saw its deadly efficiency and knew that any other course might mean their doom. Accordingly, the evening before the scheduled meeting, the various generals led their men out and into positions near the Libyan camp. They waited until dark and, letting their men’s eyes adjust, marched with no torchlight to give them away. Each corps carried a red-hot ember in an earthenware jar, wrapped in leather to insulate it and pierced with air holes to feed the coal.
When Publius judged the hour right, he took a reed whistle and played a wistful melody. Others picked it up and passed it on, as had been arranged. With this, the keepers of the coals in four different areas tipped them onto the dry timbers they had prepared. Men huddled close round each of these, protecting the infant flame from the wind that had begun to blow. As soon as the red glow flared into gold tongues, men came forward with torch after torch.
Publius, from where he stood at a distance to take in the whole scene, saw the lights multiply from a few small points into many moving flames. He watched as four fires became hundreds, carried by men in sweeping movements that fanned out all around the camp. He knew the moment the first torches touched the thorny perimeter wall. And he saw how moments later the torches leaped in somersaulting arcs, landing among the reed-and-wood structures. With the evening wind buffeting across it all, it was a matter of a few breaths before the whole place was aflame. The dry wood and reeds went up as quickly as lamp oil.
The Africans woke and at first none understood the horror that was afoot. A few guards shouted alarms, but they were unheeded. Men ran out of the camp’s few exits in disarray, bleary-eyed, often weaponless. They stumbled, pushing one another, in a frenzy, some of them swatting at their burning garments. Then they were cut down by what to them seemed to be soldiers the shape and colour and consistency of flame, who stepped out of the gloom with sword and spear. Within moments there were so many bodies piled by the entrances that the Romans had trouble planting their feet. Or perhaps it was fear that made them clumsy, for the scene before them soon became a vision of hellish agony. By the time the third and fourth contingents of soldiers had replaced those stationed at the exits, they were not soldiers but angels of mercy, cutting down the flaming, maddened, humanlike figures that ran howling out into their last escape.
In the full light of the following day the army took in the scene with hushed amazement. The camp was a blackened wasteland. Demons of smoke drifted through the charred remains, bodies in every imaginable contortion, man and beast likewise reduced to black, shrivelled versions of their former selves. The charred poles and skins that had been shelters could have been carcasses too. Syphax had, of course, been in the camp to perform the purification rites. Publius had required these especially for this purpose – to keep him out of the city and away from his new bride. He had been captured during the night and now sat bound by the arms and legs. He stared with unreasoning eyes at the scene around him and yelled curses at Publius, at Rome and the gods of Rome. He called them all liars and scoundrels and said that history would know their perfidy. A day would come when all of their sins returned to plague them manyfold.
So he harangued them for some time, but Publius soon got the gist and stopped having his diatribes translated. Later, the king hung his head and blubbered into his chest, looking as dejected as a mutilated veteran of some forgotten war. Thus was Fortune fickle, even for kings of men. Hanno had not been found, but nothing in the world suggested that he had done anything except ascend towards the heavens in ash and flame. He had gone the way of the army of Africa, leaving Carthage undefended and, finally, conquerable.
Still looking upon the scene and thinking thoughts such as this, Publius saw the approaching messenger and the banner under which he rode. The message had been five days in transit, not such a short space, really, but short enough for Publius to feel some urgency. He thought he saw Fabius’ trembling hand in the document, but even that did not lessen its impact. Hannibal was marching on Rome, the despatch said. The Carthaginian made no secret of this but instead rolled across the land announcing his movements with drums and horns like some travelling entertainment. He was sweeping in new allies along the way and had also unleashed a hitherto unseen degree of barbarity directed by his general Monomachus, who worshipped the Child Eater and was at that very moment devouring Italy’s young. The Senate chastised Publius for the grave danger he had placed them in, saying that he had promised Hannibal would quit Italy on word of his arrival in Africa. Instead, the invader had used the consul’s absence to strike his final blow. Rome now found herself in the greatest peril she had ever faced. The burden of this rested upon Publius’ young shoulders. He was, therefore, recalled to protect Rome. Immediately. There must be no delay.
Looking south from the terrace adjacent to her rooms at Cirta, Imilce thought it ominous how little of consequence happened in the whole great swath of country she could see. It was true that labourers worked the fields; a flock of birds rose, swooped, and landed, flying from one field to the next and on again, dodging stones thrown by children employed for the purpose; a breeze stirred the palms lining the river and set them rattling; a cart trundled along beneath her, two men talking in Libyan atop it; the dry hint of smoke drifted in from the continent, a scent mixed with the smell of the vast stretches of farmland. Yes, much was happening as she stood there, but all of it seemed false, an imitation of life in denial of the larger movements afoot. She was sure of this and found it most disconcerting that the world was such a resourceful deceiver. From the moment she placed her fingers on the smooth mud of the wall she felt that she must not move until the mystery hanging in the air had been revealed. As it turned out, she did not have to wait past mid-morning.
She first saw them as a ripple on the horizon, a dark line that for some time appeared and disappeared. She thought it might be a trick of the light, the play of heat demons out on the plains. And then the strange thought came to her that a mighty flock of ostriches was rushing towards them. But this impression vanished almost as quickly as it came and she knew what it was that she looked upon: an approaching horde of mounted men.
‘Is it my husband returning?’ a voice asked, flat and emotionless.
Imilce did not turn to meet Sophonisba. She smelled her sister’s perfume, and that was enough to increase her melancholy. The fragrance was just slightly musky, masculine in its richness of tone. It struck the back of the nose, so that by the time one scented her she was already deep inside. Imilce felt the younger woman’s hand slip over hers. She reached up with her thumb and acknowledged her by clasping her little finger for a moment. They had been together every day now for weeks, ever since both she and Sapanibal had insisted on travelling with Sophonisba to Cirta. Such an escort was customary when a young woman journeyed to wed in a foreign nation, and the two older women would accept none of Sophonisba’s protests. Indeed, Imilce found the resolution with which the girl accepted her fate almost unnatural. She kept reminding herself that Sophonisba was a Barca. That was where her strength came from. She had said as much before. ‘I am not like most girls,’ she had said, long ago. ‘I do not pray for childish things. I pray that I will somehow serve Carthage.’ And so she was doing. Imilce wondered whether she, too, was serving Carthage when she held Sophonisba as she sobbed, in the hour before dawn when she sometimes slipped away from Syphax’s bed. How cruel the things nations ask of their women.
‘I cannot tell,’ Imilce finally answered. ‘They’re horsemen, but—’
‘They will have been victorious. I should prepare myself. The king will want me.’
So she spoke, but Sophonisba did not lift her hand or move away. Imilce felt the film of sweat where they touched. She almost thought she could count the rhythm of the girl’s heartbeat through her palm, but it might have been her own pulse. She was thinking about this, and had been for some time, when Sophonisba whispered: ‘They are not Libyan. They ride under King Gaia’s banner.’
The young woman possessed keen eyes. Just a moment later the guards must have reached the same conclusion. A shout. And then the great drum beat the alarm. Men and women and children all knew the sound and responded. Soldiers sprang up from rest and yelled instructions to one another. Those outside the city dropped their work. Women of the fields lifted their garments above their knees and ran for the gates, which started to close, the loud clicking of their works yet another signal of distress.
Imilce looked round from one tower to the next and then out to the horizon, waiting for someone to end the alert, to explain away the banner as a prank or a misunderstanding. It had to be, for no enemy army should be approaching them now. Hanno had assured her they had everything in hand. Either the Romans would make a peace, he said, or the Libyans would rout them with their superior numbers. She tried to think of some way that either possibility could lead to this new development. Perhaps the peace had been concluded, and the approaching force was friendly—
Sophonisba whispered again. ‘The gods are punishing me still. It’s him.’
It took Imilce a moment to pick him out amid the throng of men, but there he was. Masinissa. Imilce glanced at her sister-in-law but could read nothing in her profile. It was stony and cold and distant: all strange words to describe such rich features. Sophonisba’s lips parted. ‘Let us go closer.’
It took a few moments to leave their quarters, walk through the palace, and cross the courtyard. The men might have barred them from scaling the gate tower, but none yet knew what to make of Sophonisba. She might be only a girl, or she might be a tyrant queen with the power of life and death over them: they were not sure which. They parted before her, and the two women soon found a vantage point overlooking the city’s main entrance.
‘Look at him,’ Sophonisba said. ‘Just look . . .’
Indeed he was something to behold. Gone was the lithe adolescent figure Imilce had last seen frolicking with his friends after a lion hunt, gone the roundness of his boyish features and the handsome innocence of his eyes. Masinissa rode as a man at the head of a mass of men. He wore a royal garment, a vibrant sweep of indigo cloth wrapped round his body and up into his hair to form a headdress. He approached the gates of the city with utter confidence, his legs and feet bare. The vibrancy of his dress made him the centre of attention outside the walls. Those behind him seemed a dusty, sunbaked manifestation of the continent itself: dressed in many hues but all beginning and ending in shades of brown, clothed in animal hides, tattooed, with knotted manes of hair, lion teeth dangling round their necks, spears clenched in knotted fists.
Masinissa shouted that the gates had best be opened. The city’s new monarch had arrived; he was thirsty and hungry, for meat and for the pleasures of his office.
The magistrate in charge in Syphax’s absence answered that he opened the gate for no man but his king. He joked that the young prince had been sent to the wrong destination. The city was sealed against him, he said. That was plain to see. Perhaps the prince was ignorant of the army awaiting him on the plains. If he wished to win the city, he must first turn and face its king.
Masinissa grinned widely enough to show the ivory of his teeth. Alas, the magistrate was mistaken in many ways. First, he was no longer a prince. And second, the battle on the plain had already been fought, and won by the Roman-Massylii alliance. Syphax’s army was in ruins. Dead and burned already. As this was so, debate was of no use. Simply open the gates and all inside would be treated fairly.
‘The battle is concluded,’ he said. ‘Let us shed no more blood today. We are all of Africa here. Now open!’
At a shout from an officer, the spearmen along the entire wall facing him lifted their weapons up to the ready. Masinissa was within spear range and could easily have found himself a cushion stuck by a hundred points. His soldiers called for him to retreat somewhat, but he lifted his fingers and snapped them – one loud pop – in the air above his head. A moment later, in answer, two mounted guards led a bound man forward. He sat straight-backed on a silver horse, his hands chained behind his back, his head bare to the heat of the sun, dressed like the simple prisoner he now was.
‘Behold your former king,’ Masinissa said.
Sophonisba inhaled sharply, a breath like a child who has just stopped crying. She must have recognized her husband immediately. The magistrate, however, did not. He shouted down that never had this man been his king. The Massylii laughed at this. A guard at one side of the man in question shoved him savagely with the butt of his spear. The man gripped the horse with his legs, but not tightly enough. He tumbled off, landing hard upon his shoulder. His cheek pressed against the parched soil, and his neck bent dangerously. The horse did not move. It simply blew air through its nostrils and waited for its rider to fall completely free. Having done so, the man stayed curled on his side, in a foetal pose, deaf to Masinissa’s calls that he rise.
For a moment, the scene grew chaotic. Masinissa’s men wrestled the man up from the ground, kicking and cuffing him and demanding that he stand. He made himself deadweight, then bared his teeth and nipped the flesh of one guard’s cheek. At Masinissa’s direction, one of the Massylii clamped his hands round the man’s head and tilted it towards the sun, showing first one profile and then the other. They ripped his tunic down the chest, as if this would identify him. And then they held his hands up for inspection, pointing at the lion track tattooed there. The magistrate could have no question now. It was Syphax.
Masinissa dismounted and strolled so near to the wall that he hardly even had to raise his voice. ‘Fortune has turned,’ he said. ‘I wouldn’t be here before you now, except that your king seized my father’s domains a few months ago. We who were blameless he dishonoured. We who were proud were made to bow before him. But all has been set right again. I’m not here to harm you. Why would I, when you are now my servants? All that Syphax took from us I reclaim; and all that was previously Syphax’s I now call mine. You will find me a kinder master than he. So open!’
But still the magistrate hesitated. He argued with his advisers and thought up new questions to ask the young king, who grew more and more annoyed. What had become of the Carthaginian leader? Hanno Barca was dead, flown into the air as ashes. He was a memory. If they knew Publius Scipio, Masinissa said, they would not doubt him. The consul had lost barely any men in the battle, such as it was. Publius had sent him to pacify the city through offers of peace, as a brother, but if the gates stayed closed then Cirta – with no army in all of Africa to call on – would find herself besieged by the might of Rome.
One of the officers saw a chance to throw a gibe and did so: was Masinissa truly a king? He sounded more like a bed partner to the Roman. The laughter along the walls flared and died quickly, nervously. In answer to it Masinissa kissed his fingers and pushed the air in front of him out with the palms of his hands. He swore that his offer of mercy ended in the next few moments. ‘If the gates do not open now I will commit myself to the slaughter or imprisonment of the entire population, the mutilation and torture of the magistrates . . .’
He began to detail the methods he would use, but Imilce did not hear him. Sophonisba grabbed her by the arm and dragged her through the soldiers, pushing and cursing her way down off the battlements and into the crowd below. The young woman’s grip was bruising, but Imilce did not care. She was hardly aware of the people around her. She was not thinking about what was to happen to her next, or about the turn of fortune in the war, or about Hanno’s death, or how she might survive the next few hours. Instead, she thought of her son. Ideas came at her like darts zipping in from unseen attackers. Hamilcar was safe in Carthage! What a joy that he was safe in Carthage! But the next moment, Imilce realized she might never see him again, might not know what became of him. He might forget her in the coming years and call some other woman mother. She thought of Didobal caring for him, and this struck her as both a relief and a sadness. She had a momentary fantasy that Tanit would feel her distress and lift her up and fly her home to Carthage. She closed her eyes, even as she stumbled forward, asking the goddess to let her touch him again, let her cradle that boy in her arms and kiss him and kiss him and kiss him . . .
Even in this state she recognized the grinding clink of the main gate. The decision had been made. She opened her eyes and realized that they had not got very far at all, just to the edge of the central courtyard, which they would have to cross to get back to their quarters. She could see the gate shifting heavily. Sophonisba ignored it and kept on. They pressed their way slowly through the mass of tightly packed bodies, the scent and heat and sweaty proximity almost overwhelming. Imilce’s head swam and for a moment she feared she would faint.
Then Sapanibal was with them, solid, head-clearing, determined. She grasped both women round the neck and pulled them in to her and began explaining their means of escape. She had already sent a servant to gather peasants’ clothes for them. They would meet her near the northeastern gatehouse, which had a secret door that she had arranged to have opened. From there they would make their way to the docks. Perhaps one of them would ride a donkey. They would look like servants sent by their master on some task. None would question them, as long as they beat Masinissa’s men to the harbour. She believed they could do that, but they must leave immediately. The captain of the vessel that brought them would wait for them. She was sure he would, and after that it was only a matter of navigating home through the Roman sea patrols. It would not be easy, but they must . . .
