Another deafening chorus rose from the men. The centurion Quintus Pesco turned to him, his voice hoarse. ‘Scipio Africanus, the men of the first legion would follow you to Hades and back. As they would have done for your grandfather.’
Scipio raised his sword and moved back against the wall of the alley, pulling Polybius with him. ‘Men, are you ready?’ he shouted. There was a huge cry, and he nodded at the centurions, who angled their shields forward from the testudo formation and raised their swords, followed by the legionaries. Scipio pointed his sword forward and bellowed. ‘Do your worst!’
Ten minutes later, Fabius and Scipio walked into the cloud of dust that had been left by the advancing legionaries, entering a storm of death like nothing Fabius had seen before. The narrow alleys of the old quarter were strewn with flickering patches of fire, some of it consuming the timbers of houses where the fireballs had impacted half an hour before. In the dust the glowing naphtha made a nightmarish sight, as if they were walking again into the burning fumeroles of the Phlegraean Fields, only this time the fire was man-made. The air was filled with the an acrid smell of burning, and with the stench from a place where people had lived confined together for months with little food and hardly any water for sanitation; each narrow house had its own rainwater cistern, and they had seen lower down in the city that they were nearly all empty.
For a few minutes after the legionaries had gone on ahead there had been a terrible din of shrieking and yelling, a noise that had come from further away as the soldiers had moved forward; now the place was eerily quiet, punctuated only by the sound of soldiers kicking around inside the houses looking for loot, and the occasional grunt as a wounded Carthaginian was finished off. Corpses lay everywhere: soldiers of the Sacred Band with their polished armour, most of them mere boys; mercenaries who had stripped off theirs in a futile attempt to escape recognition, but been hacked down anyway; old men and women, even children, all caught up in the slaughter. To clear the streets the legionaries were hauling bodies off to either side and dumping them in the cisterns, filling them to the brim so that limbs and torsos were visible poking out, some still twitching. The legionaries had been incensed by the terrible scenes of their comrades being mutilated, and they had spared nobody. Fabius knew the inevitable reckoning of war, but this was beyond any rampage he had seen before.
He followed Scipio as he picked his way through the bodies and headed to the foot of the Byrsa. Silently, the legionaries they passed joined them, their swords dripping with blood, until most of the maniple had rallied again under their centurions. Polybius came up and stood beside him, wiping the blood off his face. ‘We’re at the temple steps. The city is nearly taken.’
Fabius passed Scipio a skin of water that a legionary had brought up to them. He gulped it down gratefully, then raised the skin above his head to let the water pour over his face. He passed it back, and wiped his forehead against his tunic sleeve. Fabius was conscious for the first time of his own rasping breathing, coming short and fast, and he tried to calm himself. The noise of battle had abated all round the city; he heard only the occasional shriek and cry, the sounds of falling masonry as the fires took hold, the stomping and whinnying of horses, the heavy breathing and marching of a thousand legionaries crammed into the streets behind. Even Brutus had stopped, a few paces away to the right, panting like a bear, the bloody point of his scimitar resting on the lower step that led up to the temple. The whole army was waiting, watching to see what Scipio would do next.
Fabius peered through the smoke towards the top of the steps. The Carthaginian army had been annihilated, but he knew there were still people up there, cowering in the temple precinct. He remembered the little boy he had watched mounting the steps in the Tophet less than an hour before, Hasdrubal’s own son. He knew the man himself would be up there now, waiting for them. It was as if the temple were another altar and Hasdrubal was orchestrating the ceremony, forcing Scipio to mount the steps as if he himself were a participant in some final, apocalyptic scene of sacrifice.
Fabius sensed the army behind him, shifting, restless. He took a deep breath, tasting the acrid reek of smoke, the coppery tang of blood, feeling his veins engorge. He remembered what the old centurion had taught them. Scipio must not let his men see him hesitate. Fabius watched him grip his sword and look at Polybius, and then at Brutus. ‘Let’s finish it,’ he growled.
He began to run up the steps, sword in hand, his armour clanking, swerving to avoid the burning patches of naphtha from Ennius’ fireballs. Fabius followed, and he could hear Polybius and Brutus behind him, and the mass of legionaries surging forward to the base of the steps. He pounded forward, his teeth bared, every muscle and sinew in his body straining, the sweat spraying off his face. Time seemed to slow down, as if the weight of history were pulling him back, a history that had denied this day to Rome for so long. Then he was over the final step and on the temple platform, crouched in readiness with his sword forward, his chest heaving as he tried to catch his breath, hearing only the pounding of blood in his ears. He was beside Scipio, and could only see eight or ten paces ahead; the temple was obscured by a billowing plume of smoke that rolled off the platform to the north to join the pall that hid the city streets, making the group at the temple seem cut off and on their own, invisible to the thousands of legionaries below as they confronted the final nemesis of Carthage.
Polybius and Brutus came up on either side of him, breathing hard, catching their breath. ‘I can feel heat, coming from ahead,’ Polybius panted. ‘The temple must be on fire.’
‘I see nobody,’ Brutus growled, looking around.
‘He’s here,’ Scipio said under his breath. ‘Trust me. Keep alert.’
The four men stood in a semi-circle, their backs to the stairs, their swords held out as they stared into the smoke. Gulussa and Hippolyta joined them silently on either side, Gulussa with his whip coiled in readiness and Hippolyta with her bow drawn, a barbed arrow pulled back. They waited, hearing nothing, not moving. And then a sudden gust of wind blew the smoke aside and revealed the temple, its great stone columns soaring into the air some fifty paces ahead. Polybius had been right, but it was not the fireballs that had caused the heat. The temple was packed around with bundles of olive branches, just as the Tophet sanctuary had been. Hasdrubal had planned the suicide of his own city down to the last detail. Flames licked at the bundles between the columns, a crackling and hissing that soon became a roar. The doorway to the inner sanctum beyond the columns looked like the entrance to a furnace, an orange-red glow where the fire had already consumed the wood that had been rammed inside. Fabius put his hand up to shield his eyes, feeling the heat scorch his arm. He remembered being shown the place in the Phlegraean Fields where Aeneas had descended into the underworld. That had required imagination to envisage, but this needed none. This looked like the entrance to Hades.
The wind gusted again and he saw Hasdrubal, no more than twenty paces away to the left of the temple, a torch burning in a metal holder beside him. He was still wearing his lionskin, but it was smeared with blood; he stood with his feet planted firmly apart. Beside him was a woman with crudely cropped hair, her scalp blotched and bleeding and her clothing in rags, stooping over two small children. Hasdrubal held her by the nape of her neck and pushed her forward, his face contorted with rage and grief.