Skip DeLirio's Worst Ever Gig

by C C Taylor

  He watches as Hanno approaches an old man seated on a rock, gestures towards Uncle DeLirio and puts his hands towards his mouth. The old man nods. Skip has understood, produces the flute and plays along.

  Now, young Marcus, I have never taken in these African smokes they speak of, but Scipio told it to me thus, if I can remember his exact words, “I felt like I was in heaven relaxing with the gods,” he said. “And all the nonsense of rowing over black seas to chop off human heads now seemed ridiculous. There is nothing more to live for than this. When we die we go down to Hades, good and bad together, so what does it matter? Live now…those are the thoughts that were in my head.”

  And when the music died down, Skip remained standing and wordlessly – he was a mimo after all – re-enacted the career of Julius Caesar for the benefit of the Africans, who fell about laughing. He trotted out the favourite old myths, which, it seemed, the Africans were perfectly familiar with, and now he had a new part to incorporate…here he comes, wading onto the beach just over there and oops! Another one bites the dust…quick, think of something witty…Africa! I have you! Come on, this is new material!

  He’s having the best of times. He’s free of constraint, letting his imagination run on, the pauses are perfect, the laughter comes on cue. And just when he’s thinking, you know, there might only be fifty of us round a camp fire in the middle of a desert, but going off percentage of audience enjoying it, this might even be my best ever gig.’

  Then suddenly…chaos. Again. The flashing of blades in the dark, that now familiar swishing noise and the pounding of hooves. First they cut the reins of the Romans’ horses, which stampeded off into the dark desert beyond the circle of campfire light. Then they made for the group around the fire. Who were they? Was it a trap? Were they deserters from both sides? There was time to think nothing except, well that’s that, then, here I die with Pompey in the Egyptian desert, when from the other direction, more chaos! More noise, shouts, trampling…

  Hanno has jumped up and grabbed Scipio’s arm, dragging him with him into the darkness, but Scipio sees who the latest visitor is. Wouldn’t you know it? Caesar himself to the rescue. Again. It’s like the little fucker won’t leave Skip alone.

  Now, Scipio has to make a quick decision. Chance a new life with his new chums in a strange land, probably never returning home, but, come on, let’s be honest, more likely to end up on the winning side, or…lead a group of disgruntled savages to almost certain death under the feet of elephants.

  Caesar had seen him, so it was decision time. And in that fraction of a second, the decision was made. He wrested himself free of Hanno and came running to shelter behind the line of Roman horse.

  A little bit more chaos to finish off…the noises die down, save for agonised cries from the fatally wounded who lie scattered around…Then back to camp, the horseless ones clinging as they could to the horses of other riders.

  *“Landica!* Self-polluter! I should rape you in the mouth! I should rip off your coleones and make you wear them around your neck!”

  Your great, great uncle has no option, but to listen to this as he is tied to a chair in Caesar’s tent.

  “Today, I receive news that one of my ships was captured off the coast. Scipio…the REAL Scipio, the man, the warrior, not the pansy flute-player…our enemy…THAT Scipio captured them. There were a hundred of them. Scipio offered them a place in his army, just like that…do you know what they said?”

  “No, Caesarness…”

  “They said we will NEVER abandon Caesar. We are prepared to take on a thousand of your troops in combat. Each man of us against ten of yours.”

  There is a silence. Skip doesn’t know where to look.

  “Well?”

  “They…they won. They beat a thousand men, Caesar.”

  “They would have, shit-for-brains, but Scipio had them massacred straight off. What do you think of that?”

  “They’re…very…brave?”

  Caesar paces up and down scratching at his bald pate.

  “And me. Here. With you. Brave men dying on the beach. And me. Here. With a…I’d have you whipped thirty nine times. Lucky for you that I need you up there, in front of the troops and with all your fucking limbs.”

  Caesar spends a good few moments more pacing and muttering to himself.

  “What were you doing? Deserting? Or did you want to play with the girlies? And that filthy pagan music. Who was the darkie I recognised? Hanno, you say? That figures. Hanno is an African name. They blow like the wind, the deceitful fuckers. But you’re back. That’s good news. I suppose. And we only lost a few horses and that useless Galatian… And the other Numidians who ran off. Better to have them there than corrupting us from within. All those years making out to be Roman, fighting our battles…I don’t understand these people. They must hate us to the bone… Anyway, they’re gone now. And as for you…” (Skip fears the worst) “…untie him! He’s not going anywhere. Keep him in his own tent…on half rations.”

  The bodyguards do as asked and Skip is bundled away.

  Well, so the waiting game continued, young Marcus. Until one fine day, Caesar decided to set fire to the camp and march 20 miles to the south, to a town called Aggar, but there were too many javelins raining down from hidden places for anyone’s liking and the place was no treasure, so finally he decided to go and besiege this town called Thapsus. Skip is mighty relieved to hear it’s a siege and not a battle. Maybe the nice Thapsians will just give up.

  No such luck. Off they march towards Thapsus. The city has high walls on the inland side and sea behind it. They stand before the walls.

  Caesar does the usual hollering at them.

  “Who is your leader?”

  They shout back, “Scipio.” For the love of Neptune, are these people stupid?

  “I ask you once again. With who will you fight?”

  “With whom, Caesar,” Skip says and regrets it.

  Luckily, any redress is cut short by the sound of the rather stupid citizens clamouring and shouting together. After a while, the gates are opened and a messenger approaches. He stands square before Caesar.

  “Sci-pi-o!” he shouts in his face.

  “Right, then,” JC wheels his horse round and nods to the two closest henchmen who pounce on the messenger, who seems to be beyond caring, almost insolent. In his barbaric Latin, he begins to screech, “Juba! Juba venit! Temba! Olifant!” And he puts his hands to his mouth in the form of tusks, “Olifant!”

  “Right,” JC says, “I’ve had enough. Put him to death…where they can see him…tear his arms off first.”

  And they did! They tied him between two horses…I shouldn’t be telling you these parts, but…oh, you’ll learn one day…these things happen. The horses go off in different directions and the poor fucker, fucks no more. Scipio watched it. He told me. He tried not to but he couldn’t not watch. He said it was the most disgusting thing he’d ever seen. He dreamed about it for nights afterwards. That and his one-eyed pal, the torturer Taurus. Our Scipio was no soldier, remember, he hadn’t seen things like that. Ever. Once a street urchin tortured and hanged a cat in front of him, while he did nothing. The same thing had happened then. Bad dreams and night sweats as he watched the helpless animal writhing before him again and again. But from then on, he vowed if ever he saw an animal being harmed, that he would do something to stop it. And of course a man is an animal. But what could he do?

  “When will they fucking learn?” Caesar rages while they’re doing it.

  But your uncle, for all his gory fascination, is more interested in what the Numidian had said before being put to death. Olifants. How many fucking Olifants? This sounded bad.

  Now Caesar was a master general, of course, and used the terrain to his advantage, but what he didn’t know, young Marcus, was that most of the land before the city walls was marshland, so they had to approach by the north coast. The problem with this, of course, is that there’s only one way out. I should say, there were in fact two ways out,
but the other one round the east side of the marsh, led to a corridor through which Juba’s troops were approaching. So that was a non-starter.

  So, although JC thought he had chosen the territory, he had in fact been led into a trap. The first they knew of it, was the strange wailing sound coming from behind them. Curious heads turned. Caesar told them to look forward, but then rode past them to listen more closely. All are silent now, listening, as the wailing grows louder. Caesar orders his troops to turn and what do they see? A hundred elephants marching towards them along the route they’ve just taken.

  Their riders stab them now and again, to make them wail. There are two riders on every elephant, Skip notices, one to control the beast, the other one armed. And behind the elephants, Labienus’ troops, now fully formed up, easily outnumbering the starving band of bedraggled Romans.

  Skip knows what’s coming next and he sees men beckon him forward to take the front line. He is slapped on the back and cheered. ‘These men must be simpletons’, he thinks. Finally he takes his place before them, mounted on one of the finest horses, tunic flapping in the salty wind. He looks like that statue of Vulcan that sank under the sea below Olympus. A sorry sight.

  But Caesar’s chin is up. He’s seen elephants before. Pompey tried this trick on him at Pharsalus, but Big C knew both how to defeat them – with rapid pila, arrow, sling and javelin attacks – and how to use them. ‘Aim at the eyes, lads!’ After all, the Roman army had invaded Macedonia with elephants, and at Magnesia the war was waged between the two hundred elephants of Antiochus and the sixty of Lucius Cornelius Scipio…yes, that’s right, another Scipio. A real Scipio. Not the Scipius Africanus; that was his younger brother. My point being, in all this, that the elephants don’t frighten Caesar the least bit. He knows how to use elephants. And how to attack them. Or at least he better had.

  “All right Scipio, son…” (‘Son’? This was a new one). “Your hour is here. You will ride straight towards the army with the Ninth and Tenth, and the Second and Seventh behind. You go straight, you hear me? Straight at them. On the command. Not fast, not slow.”

  “Sir?”

  “On your right and left, you’ll have the Fifth Larks Legion split into two and alongside them the skirmishers will be running. I’ve got Scythians in there, archers, and some of the tougher Gauls. Their job is to attack the elephants. Have you got that? You leave them to it. You…never mind…eyes front! They open up the route and you drive straight through the middle. I know Labienus’ men and the cowards sit huddling right there in the midst of all the bodies, thinking they’re protected. They’re going to shit themselves, when they see the elephants peel away and you and the standard-bearer marching at them impassively…”

  Skip is nodding at the instructions but having a hard time imagining himself remaining impassive under a shower of flaming spikes. He keeps his chin up, nonetheless.

  “Ready, then? Go!”

  “Yes, Caesar…”

  And he digs heels into his horse so it walks the few paces forward to where the standard-bearers ride, their chests swelled out with pride. Skip tries an imitation of the posture, but why? You can’t see it under the armour. Thank Pallas Athene.

  “Wait for the signal!” Caesar screams.

  But most of the men are looking over at the mass of Labienus’ troops. Something is happening. They seem to be facing in different directions, the elephants are stomping from frustration. Surely, this is the moment to attack.

  One of the trumpeters thinks so, and sounds the call.

  “Wait!” Screams Caesar.

  But it’s too late.

  Oh for the love of Pan and Vulcan, and all the gods in Olympus or Hades or wherever they hang out. There’s your Uncle Skip, now, making history. Leading the Fifth into battle with thousands of legionnaires on his heels. If he ever gets out alive, he thinks, he’s going to spin this tale, get some coins minted, and buy Metella a necklace…something. But if you asked him just right then how many of his plans he thought he’d get to fulfil, he’d have said, ‘Whatever I can get done in the next five minutes,’ as sure enough, down came the arrows. Some heavy javelins were scything through the air as well and – Jupiter alone knows how – lumps of burning tar. He looks around to try to figure out where he is in the chaos.

  Next to the standards, he thinks – Couldn’t be better, and begins to pray to an array of gods in which he had not hitherto believed.

  The brave archers go galloping past with their even braver foot soldiers, who run right up to the elephants, despite the showers of arrows and sword-swipes trying to lop their heads off. By this time, men from the Fifth are with them, running with them and hacking at the elephants’ legs with axes.

  Skip, cringing, shoulders hunched, watches how they employ their finely-honed skills in chopping down the great beasts. They used old circus elephants to practise, back at the camp in Rome, Marcus. I know, I know, you like elephants. Not many of them would have survived the Battle of Thapsus, I suppose. Half of them had fled to trample their own troops at the first hail of Scythian arrows.

  Now, the Alexandrians taught us that it was best to get the beasts drunk before a battle (so that’s what all the wailing would have been about), as this way they become even more fearsome. However, the problem is that if they got out of control, they really got out of control. So for that reason, each rider had a big metal spike and a heavy hammer…Hmm…? Why? Well, to drive the spike through the top of the elephant’s head into its brain, of course. That would stop it, wouldn’t it?

  In fact, this was what began to happen. Even as they charged back into their own army, with men frantically trying to take aim at a huge nail on a moving elephant…some hit, some miss, blood spurted, elephants raged and almost all of them ran back to where they’d come from, trampling the majority of our enemy for us. That doesn’t matter, Skip was thinking, I still want a medal. The few elephants that remained within reach were now buckling under the axe blows, flailing around like mad. One of them takes a legionnaire up in his trunk, and tosses him up in the air and into the enemy lines.

  Thank Jupiter that’s not me, thinks Skip, as a ball of something hot and sticky misses his head by a palm’s breadth leaving him open mouthed. Then it’s like time stands still. All around is noise and movement but he experiences it as a calm. His eyes meet the eyes of an elephant that is laid out on the floor straight ahead of him, limbs half hacked off, bleeding, pierced by arrows and he understands the elephant. Him and the elephant are friends. Neither of them wants to be there. Both were plucked from their comfortable homes, put through brutal training practices and forced to chance their life for a higher cause in which they had no interest. Yes, Skip recognises all that in the dying beast. And the dying beast looks at Skip, pleading with the eyes of a dying creature, for Skip to help him somehow. He hears Caesar’s now distant voice fading on the wind.

  “Where’s the aquilifer? Find the cunt! By Jupiter’s balls, I won’t lose another Standard.”

  The elephant’s last image before closing its eyes forever will have been that of your great-grand uncle, mounted on a horse, in the midst of battle, and then being hit in the chest by something heavy and falling to the ground.

  The elephant closed his eyes and Scipio began to scrabble around, hunched over trying to figure out who was who and what was happening. He’d lost sense of the direction even. All he could see were legs, breast-plates, mud, blood…

  Then a hand grabs him and pulls him along past the butchered corpses. In an instant, he recognizes the dark-skinned proditor, Hanno and decides to take his chances with him. As they cower behind the huge bodies of prostrate lifeless elephants, they see how Caesar orders the men to stop, but some of the generals are crazed now and refuse to stop, cutting down even their own men who try to stop them obeying Caesar!

  “I’m no expert,” Scipio says, “but I’d say we have to get the fuck out.”

  But Hanno is seemingly untroubled. He is not weighed down by armour, and he knows the t
errain. He guides Scipio into the nearby marshes where the armies cannot cross but where the light-footed can trace a path over the quicksand, if they know where to tread.

  After running over squelching sand banks for about half an hour, they arrive in the very middle of the marsh. They stop. They both collapse exhausted and look up at the purple sky.

  “What am I doing?” Skip asks. “Why am I coming with you? We’re routing you. You’ve lost thousands and Caesar’s army is almost untouched.”

  “You see over that horizon?” Hanno points east, still gasping.

  “Yes.”

  “There is the sea again, so there is only this other coast by which to leave.”

  “So?”

  “Juba is coming along this coast. He has sixty more elephants.”

  “The elephants were not a success, Hanno.”

  “Juba knows how to command elephants. Juba loves elephants. Juba never puts elephants in shows for the people to laugh at or harm. Now eat this, you will rest. Near sunset we begin to move. No one can know we are here.”

  “How do you know this route?”

  “This is my land. I was captured as a slave and taken to Rome. Many many years, then I buy my freedom, now I am in the army. Always, I know, if I come anywhere near my home, I will escape.”

  “You are an ex-slave? Do you know what they’ll do to you if they find out?”

  “Who? The Romans? I do not expect to see more Romans until we return and kill them all. It is lucky for you that you play the flute.”

  “So you tricked your way in the army somehow…I mean…how?”

  “I am a person who can make things move, Scipianus. I know they are always fighting on the coast of my land, so I wait for an opportunity. And they bring me straight here. They cannot follow us over those marshes. They are picking over the bodies now, but when Juba comes, we will see him arrive from over there…” (He stretches out his hand again)

  “Though we will be far away from here by then, of course. If all goes well we will be with them. The camp is less than a day walking this way. In one hour we are on a sand bank which is firmer and wider, then we can walk at night. Also there is moonlight.”