The day before, they had looked across at the walls and seen the Carthaginian general Hasdrubaclass="underline" a great bear of a man, sunbronzed with a braided beard, his armour draped in a lionskin with jaws that opened over his head. His people may have wanted to surrender, looking in despair at the massed Roman fleet and the legions, but history weighed heavily on Hasdrubal, leader of a city that had lived on borrowed time and might never rise again. Hasdrubal had ordered his soldiers to burn the crops and hack down the olive trees, denying them to the Romans but also taking away the last food source for his own people — a suicidal gesture of defiance. He had executed Roman prisoners in full view of the legions, ensuring that he would be shown no mercy. He was up against a war machine more powerful than any in history, and he was egging them on, taunting them. For Hasdrubal, there was only one way out, and taking as many of his people with him as possible seemed to be his own calculation of war.
Fabius looked back up, and for a few moments, staring at the horizon, it was as if he were suspended in mid-air above the scene; he felt as if he had risen to join the gods and move the affairs of men around like gaming pieces, like the dioramas of battles Scipio and the others had practised on years before in the academy. Then he heard the clatter of Scipio and Polybius climbing the ladder to join him, and he snapped back to reality. They were no gods, but Scipio was consul and general of the largest Roman army ever assembled, and this tower had been built to allow him an eagle’s eye view of the battlefield, to prepare the most devastating assault on a city ever seen in history.
‘Ave, Fabius Petronius Secundus, primipilus.’ Polybius had come up first, and cracked a smile. He had changed little in appearance over the years, except for grey streaks in his beard and lines around his eyes, and seeing him in his decorated breastplate and Corinthian helmet took Fabius back to the last time he had seen Polybius in armour, more than twenty years before on the field of Pydna when he had charged single-handedly against the might of the Macedonian phalanx.
Fabius saluted. ‘Ave, Polybius. Any word from Ennius yet?’
‘His men are clearing the last mound of rubble from beside the walls. We will be joining him shortly to see the preparations first hand.’
Scipio came up the ladder, wearing the breastplate he had inherited from his grandfather, newly polished but with the dents and scars of war deliberately left unrepaired. ‘He’d better hurry up,’ he said testily, coming up beside them. ‘I intend to order the attack today.’
‘He knows it. He will be ready.’
Fabius turned to his general. ‘Ave, Scipio Aemilianus Africanus.’
Scipio put a hand on his shoulder. ‘Ave, Fabius, my old friend. We are close to battle again. Are you ready for the assault?’
‘I have been ready for this all my life.’
Fabius glanced at Scipio and Polybius. The two men were very different, one more a man of action and the other by inclination a scholar, but they had been close friends since they had first met when Polybius had been appointed Scipio’s teacher in Rome. Polybius sometimes forgot who was general and who was adviser, but he had an encyclopedic knowledge of military history and gave good counsel, even if Scipio sometimes did not heed it. On this of all days, Fabius had deliberately addressed Scipio by his full name: as Africanus, the cognomen he had inherited from his adoptive grandfather, the great Scipio Africanus who had confronted Hannibal more than fifty years before, yet whose intention to crush Carthage had been thwarted by the weakness of the Senate in Rome, by men who wanted to appease rather than destroy. They had learned their lesson over the next fifty years, had seen Carthage rise again, had seen her war leaders become defiant, and now Scipio stood before the city walls as his grandfather had done, ready to finish the job.
In those fifty years, a new generation of Roman officers had emerged: ruthless, professional, schooled together in the art of war. They had burned and rampaged their way through Greece, where Scipio’s rival Metellus was now poised to take Corinth, and under Scipio they had brought Rome back to the walls of Carthage. The best of them were here now, those who had not died in battle or were not still in Greece: Ennius, chief of the specialist cohort of fabri engineers; Brutus, a monster of a man with his curved scimitar, so unlike the Roman gladius; and in the plain to the south, the Numidian prince Gulussa and the Scythian princess Hippolyta, both brought under Rome’s wing at an early age and now poised to lead their cavalry in the onslaught against the city’s southern wall. They were all in their fighting prime, hardened, blooded, experienced, exactly what the old centurion Petraeus who had trained them in Rome had wanted.
Scipio took his hand off the sword pommel and gestured at the scene. ‘Tomorrow will be a day for your Histories, Polybius.’
‘If you ever let me write it. I seem to have traded in my stylus for a gladius.’
Scipio cracked a smile. ‘Your day will come. In the afterlife, perhaps.’
‘We should have a good vantage point to view the battle from here.’
Scipio pointed at the red welt on his thigh, a wound that had never properly healed. ‘I didn’t get this from staying behind, did I? The only view I will get will be the tunnel of smoke and spattered blood as I follow Brutus into the attack. As soon as the trumpets sound, I will be at the head of my legionaries.’
‘You know that’s against my advice,’ Polybius said. ‘This army can fight on without a Brutus, but not without a Scipio. And if you follow Brutus, expecting to kill, you’ll be disappointed. The last time I followed him into battle was at Pydna, when he was perfecting the cross-cut with his sword: one cut from the groin to the head, and then, in the same sweep, while the two halves are still standing, another cut across the midriff. One man becomes four pieces. There won’t be any left in your path alive.’
‘I will ask him as a favour to leave me a few. In one piece.’
Scipio put his hand back on his sword pommel and stared out. He had acquired the scar on his leg more than twenty years ago against the Macedonian phalanx, as a junior tribune who always led his men from the front. Fabius well remembered how the old centurion Petraeus had won his greatest honour, the corona obsidionalis, by killing his tribune when he had faltered and by leading his maniple into battle himself, winning the day. He had never let the boys at the school forget it. They may be destined for high rank, to command maniples, legions, armies, but they would always be under the watchful eye of their own centurions, never able to slip up. That was how the Roman army operated. The centurion had taught them well.
A bellowing noise came up from the harbour, and the sound of cursing. They looked down to where a wide-bellied merchant ship had been offloading war supplies onto the wharf. A gang of legionaries with their armour stripped off had been hauling a beast up from the hold, a hoary old elephant covered in welts and scars, its bloodshot eyes flashing up at them each time it swung its head. The optio in charge of the work party yelled and the two lines of men hauled on the ropes again, but the beast refused to budge, and with an angry swoosh of its trunk knocked two men sideways into the water. Then a large Numidian slave in the hold, the elephant-master, cracked a whip against its backside and the beast finally moved, bellowing and hobbling across the planks until it stood tottering on the wharfside, scanning the legionaries balefully as they kept their distance.