They had come out on the edge of the enclosed rectangular harbour, a basin that led to a fortified entrance at the eastern side, with the twin-peaked mountain of Bou Kornine visible in the background. Fabius realized that the harbour must be parallel to the outer one where the Diana had berthed, only completely man-made and landlocked. There were only two ships berthed inside, one a typical Phoenician-style wide-bellied merchantman with eyes painted below the bows, and the other a sleeker design that was neither warship nor merchantman, with gunwales higher and more robust than Fabius was used to seeing. The wharf beside the vessel was lined with baskets filled with fragments of stone, some of it shimmering and metallic. As he and Scipio passed, a slave came down a gangplank and heaved another basket to the ground, sweating and cursing. He glanced ruefully at Fabius, who had stopped to look. ‘Feel free to give a hand, if you have nothing better to do,’ the slave said in heavily accented Greek. ‘I’m just about done in.’
‘What is it, in the baskets?’ Fabius asked.
‘Tin ore, from the Cassiterides, the Tin Isles,’ the man said. ‘At least, that’s what the Punic sailors call the place, after the Greek name, but I know it differently. Some of us from the west of the island call it Albion, and others Britten. You see, it was my home, where I was happily going about my own business until I was snatched during a raid by a neighbouring chieftain, sold to the Gauls, traded by them for an amphora of wine to an Italian shipper, and then given by him as a present to a Carthaginian merchant to oil some deal. So I find myself here, the slave of a Phoenician captain who is about to take me by sea right back again to my home island to help load more of this stuff. I wouldn’t mind so much if they shipped it in ingots, which would be easier to carry. They keep it as ore because the weight of the rocks acts as ballast in the rough seas of the Atlantic Ocean.’
‘It could be worse,’ Fabius said. ‘You could be a galley slave.’
‘Or mucking out seasick elephants.’ The man jerked his head down to the far end of the harbour. ‘You see that shipbuilding yard? They’re building elephantegoi, elephant carriers. They say that not even Hannibal had specialized elephant ships like that.’
Fabius followed his gaze, and then stared at the man. He clearly had no love for the Carthaginians, and was garrulous. Fabius knew that to enquire more might have aroused suspicions had the man not been a slave, but in this case he could take a calculated gamble. He reached into a pouch on his belt and took out one of the Macedonian gold staters that Scipio had given him earlier in case they needed to bribe potential informants, and tossed it to the man. ‘Tell me more.’
The man took the coin, eyed Fabius for a moment and quickly concealed the gold. He began to talk animatedly, telling him about the elephant carriers, but after a few minutes a swarthy man appeared on deck, cracking a whip and glaring at him. Fabius shouted at the slave as if telling him off for talking to him, and then marched on. They could not risk suspicious eyes alighting on them, and stopping to talk to the slave had been pushing their luck. Scipio stood waiting at the edge of the channel linking the rectangular harbour to the circular war harbour, and Fabius hurried up to him, talking under his breath. ‘It’s just as the kybernetes said. The Carthaginians are importing metal not only from Gaul, but also from the Albion Isles. That cargo is worth its weight in gold.’
They walked briskly along the portico beside the channel to the war harbour. As they approached it, an extraordinary structure came into view. The kybernetes had described it to them the night before, but even he had never seen it from the inside. The harbour was built around a circular basin that Fabius estimated at a stade and a half in diameter, about a thousand feet, large enough to accommodate the four-banked quadriremes and five-banked quinqueremes — called by the Carthaginians pentereis, their Greek name — that had traditionally been the biggest vessels in the Carthaginian fleet. In the centre of the basin was an island perhaps half a stade across made up of a circular structure that rose to a watchtower in the centre. The same style of roofed portico had been used around the island and the outer edge of the basin, a uniform design that made the structure more grandiose than anything yet built in Rome. Most remarkable of all, the spaces between the columns served as shipsheds, around the outer edge as well as the island; he could see the prows of warships poking out, galleys that had been drawn up on slipways. There must have been at least two hundred openings, at least half of them occupied. On the far side, a section of sheds was being used as a shipbuilder’s yard, with stacks of wood and cordage visible and the partly built shells of vessels propped up on wooden formers. Only one warship was floating in the basin itself, drawn up against the wharf just beyond the entrance, a small, single-banked lembos that looked like the vessels that Fabius had seen at the Roman fleet base at Misenum on the Bay of Neapolis, used by crack teams of oarsmen to send people and messages faster than the larger galleys could ever manage.
Fabius remembered Polybius in the Macedonian forest ten years earlier, telling then of rumours that the Carthaginians were rebuilding their war harbour; this structure could not have been much older than that. The marble veneer was still sharp edged and mirror bright, and stacks of it lay in a mason’s yard beside the entrance. The marble was a high-quality stone that must have come from Greece, and the columns of the portico were a beautiful honey-coloured stone that Fabius recognized from a stone bowl that Gulussa had shown him, from a newly discovered quarry in Numidian territory south-east of Carthage. This harbour was not some hasty half-measure, built by a people desperate to restore some vestige of their military pride, but was an arsenal far superior to anything of Rome herself or in the Greek world, a structure built by a people who confidently expected to project their power far beyond these shores once again.
He knew that Scipio would be using every moment to size up the tactical implications of a naval encounter with the new Carthaginian warships. Just before the entrance to the circular harbour was another checkpoint, this time one that Fabius knew they could never hope to penetrate, though they might be able to get close enough for a better glimpse of what lay inside. Two guards with spears firmly planted barred their way as they approached. ‘No entry without authorization,’ one of them said in Greek, guessing that they were mercenaries and not Carthaginians. ‘I am the optio of the guard. State your business.’
Scipio stood before the man and saluted, holding his fist to his chest. ‘Urgent message from Hasdrubal to Hamilcar, strategos of the pentereis squadron.’
The man grunted. ‘I don’t know of a squadron commander with that name, but I’m new to the job. From Hasdrubal himself, you say? I’ll need to go to the admiral’s island to find out. Wait here.’ He clicked his fingers and another guard sauntered out from the guardhouse beside them to take his place. Looking annoyed, the optio stomped off around the edge of the harbour towards a wooden bridge that led to the island in the centre. Scipio yawned, sighed heavily and turned away from the harbour, feigning a lack of interest. He paced slowly back towards the rectangular harbour, stopping and putting his hands on his hips when he knew they were out of earshot of the soldiers. Fabius had followed him and spoke in a low voice. ‘Who in Hades is Hamilcar the strategos?’