The optio peered at the palisade. ‘Maybe two hundred warriors and the same number of civilians, most of them women and children. But the number is falling by the hour. Take a look at that little procession to the left.’
Fabius followed his gaze to a small opening in the inner curtain wall some fifty feet to the left of the entrance below the tower. Out on the open ground in front was a low flickering fire, and he realized that it must be the source of the faint odour of roasting flesh that wafted through the breach in the wall. He could make out several figures through the smoke, dragging something towards the fire, and others around it, seemingly rushing at random and running to and fro. ‘Is it some kind of ritual?’ Fabius said. ‘A sacred ground?’
‘It’s sacred, all right,’ the optio said grimly. ‘One of the prisoners says that the open area in front is used for single combat between warriors, to settle scores and select the next chieftain. But what’s going on out there is a different kind of ritual.’
Ennius was looking through a long tube with crystal lenses at each end that Fabius remembered seeing him make at the academy. He passed it to Scipio, who balanced it on a rock and aimed it at the smouldering fire and the people, closing one eye and squinting through the lens. ‘Jupiter above,’ he muttered. He looked down, and then passed the tube to Fabius, who leaned against the shattered edge of the opening and looked through it. The image was wavering, distorted, blurred at the edges with bursts of colour like a rainbow coming in and out of focus, but after a few moments he realized that the centre of the lens was undistorted and he settled his eye on the view, magnified four or five times from the image he could see with the naked eye.
What he saw was a vision of horror. The people going towards the fire were dragging human bodies behind them, mud-caked, emaciated forms barely distinguishable from the living, clothed only in rags and their hair long and knotted. Once there, they threw the bodies into the embers, and waited until they caught fire. But others were there too, circling the pyre like vultures. Fabius saw one of them dash in and pulled out a corpse, chopping frantically at it with an axe and then stumbling away with a severed arm in his grasp, sinking his teeth into the flesh. Those who had brought the corpse then ran after him as he staggered away and brought him down, hacking at him in the mud until he lay still. Surrounding the scene, Fabius could see others who had escaped with their prize, squatting in the mud like dogs and gnawing at hunks of dismembered flesh. Fabius lowered the tube and offered it to the optio, who shook his head. ‘Been watching that all day,’ he said. ‘I don’t want to see any more.’
Ennius turned to Scipio. ‘We can talk all we like about starving a city into submission, drawing battle lines in the sand and pushing toy soldiers across model landscapes in the academy. But this is the reality. We may let hunger win the war for us, but there is no honour in watching a proud people reduced to this.’
Scipio raised himself on his knees, exposing his body for a moment through the breach. An arrow suddenly whistled in and clanged off his breastplate, cartwheeling away into the distance. They all ducked below the line of the wall, and Scipio looked down at the dent where the arrow would have plunged into his chest. He looked at Fabius, and then at Ennius. ‘All right. I’ve seen enough. With your fabri and my century we will have three hundred men to storm through this breach. We will form up on that open ground, and challenge their warriors to come out and meet us.’ He turned to the optio. ‘What do you say, legionary? Are your men ready?’
‘We await your command,’ the man growled, half pulling his sword from his scabbard. ‘Let’s finish it.’
12
Half an hour later, the Roman assault force was drawn up inside the wall, some four hundred strong, arraigned in a line three deep that stretched along a frontage of some five hundred yards. Scipio and Fabius stood a few yards ahead of the line, the primipilus of the fabri beside them, while Ennius remained with a reserve of one hundred men on the wall where he could also look back down towards their camp and direct the fire of their solitary catapult.
Their plan to mount a pre-emptive assault had been overtaken by the Celtiberians, who had clearly been watching intently and had sallied forth from their palisade as soon as they saw the legionaries begin to form up. They were there now, perhaps three hundred of them, bellowing defiance, solitary piercing yells that joined and rose steadily to a roar, a straggling line about a thousand feet from the Romans in a field that dropped from both lines of soldiers down a slight slope towards a strip of flat ground in the centre, some five hundred feet from where Fabius was standing.
He felt the heft of his sword, weighing it in his hand. He and Scipio had first whetted their blades with Celtiberian blood a week before when they had charged through the breach and taken the wall, and now the battle-lust was coursing through him again, and he was yearning for more. It was time.
Scipio turned towards the primipilus, and then to him. He raised his sword, and his mouth opened in a snarl. For a few seconds all that Fabius could hear was the pounding of the blood in his ears, and then he was bounding forward, running as fast as he could towards the charging Celtiberians, his sword raised, yelling at the top of his voice.
He could see the centre of the field more clearly now: a strip of level ground about thirty feet across where the two slopes converged. There were pools of standing water left by the recent rains, and patches of mottled ground where the mud showed through. It was a natural feature, an area of boggy ground that would normally have been covered by grass, but something that could have been protected and maintained to give the illusion of continuous firm ground. In that instant Fabius realized that there was something wrong. It was a trap. The Celtiberians may have been reduced by hunger and exhaustion, but what had seemed a desperate, disorganized charge had in fact been a ploy, duping the Romans into thinking that they could be met halfway and easily destroyed. They were being drawn into a killing ground, just as he and Scipio had once goaded an enraged water buffalo into a dried-up watercourse that was liquid mud beneath, leaving the beast trapped and wallowing and easy prey to their spears. If they carried on unchecked, the legionaries would become enmired in the same way, thrown into disarray and distracted by the need to stay upright – moments in which they would take their eyes off the enemy and the Celtiberians would have the advantage.
Fabius knew that the Celtiberian chieftain would be watching them with eagle eyes; if Fabius tried to stop the legionaries now, showing that he had spotted the trap, the chieftain would also halt the momentum of his own charge. But Fabius could play them at their own game: he must lead them into thinking that the Romans were going headlong into the morass, ignorant of its dangers. He sprinted further ahead, running as fast as he could, holding his sword high. The Celtiberians were like a foaming floodtide surging down the slope, swords and limbs waving, muddy water spattering above them like spindrift flecking the crest of a raging surf. Fabius was less than a hundred feet away from the mud now, and he counted the seconds. One. Two. Three. He suddenly stopped and turned, staggering sideways to regain his balance, and bellowed as loud as he could: ‘Halt! Hold the line!’
The primipilus of the fabri saw and understood and repeated the command, and it was conveyed down the line by the centurions and optios on either side. In a few seconds the entire Roman force had come to a shuddering halt, on firm ground on the very edge of the mire.
The centurions bawled another order: ‘Defensive positions.’ The leading men squatted down and drove the base of the pila into the ground, angling them forward towards the enemy and grasping them firmly with both hands. Between them the next line of men held their pila at the horizontal, tightening up to present a bristling wall of spears, their legs planted apart and flexed to withstand the coming onslaught. Behind them the third line stood with their pila poised to throw and their swords drawn, ready to cut down any who made it through.
Scipio had caught up with Fabius and they both stood ahead of the line, panting hard, every muscle in their
bodies tense, swords held hard. Fabius’ calculation had worked: it was too late for the Celtiberians to stop. Their chieftain could only stir his men up even further, to increase the momentum of the attack so that they might make it through the mire before it bogged them down.
The centurions bawled again: ‘Steady! Hold your positions!’ The lines of pila seemed to quiver in unison, shaken by the thunderous approach of the enemy. Individual warriors could be made out more clearly now as they hurtled down the slope, the swifter ones running ahead screaming and waving their shields, then discarding them so that they could sprint even faster. Some were wearing old Corinthian helmets and Roman cuirasses taken in past battles, others nothing more than rough woollen tunics, but all of them held javelins or the curved double-edged Celtiberian sword. The shrieks and screams became a steady roar again, pummelling Fabius’ ears, and as they neared the mud he could feel a chill on his face, as if the war god were sweeping in his chariot down across the mire and brushing them with the cold wind of death.
He could barely breathe. He gripped his sword as tight as he could, trying to keep his nerve. Then the first warrior flew into the mud, slipped forward and lunged wildly, running straight into one of the pila a few feet to Fabius’ left, breaking it as the tip passed through his neck and falling in a spray of blood. Another followed, and then another, each of them speared and then hacked to death by the rear line of legionaries. A javelin narrowly missed Scipio but struck the upper thigh of the primipilus, severing the artery and causing blood to gush out in a pulsing fountain, soaking Scipio and Fabius. The primipilus fell with a grunt, his hand pressing on the wound, and his place was taken by the second centurion of the cohort, who turned and bellowed at the rear line of legionaries. ‘Make ready with your pila.’ He watched for the main mass of Celtiberians to reach the mud, and then bellowed again: ‘Let fly.’ The pila swished through the air over Fabius like arrows, some of them bouncing off armour, but others finding their mark, bringing down dozens of warriors in a tumbling pile that tripped up many who came behind. The whole mass seemed to slide forward across the mud and crumple against the Roman line, the warriors writhing and shrieking as the legionaries hacked to death any who had not been killed by the pila of the front line.
Fabius felt his heart race. The time had come to go forward. Scipio roared, and plunged into the morass. The front two lines of legionaries dropped their pila and followed, swords drawn. Then Fabius was in the mire himself, slogging ahead with mud up to his knees, hacking and stabbing. A Celtiberian with braided red hair flew at him just as he was withdrawing his sword from a body, and he slashed upwards with all his might, catching the man under the chin and slicing his entire jaw off through to his forehead, leaving a mass of blood and mucus and brain where his face had been. The man fell with a shriek and Fabius lurched forward, thrusting his sword into another man’s head and then slashing the tip across an exposed neck, the jugulars exploding in a sheen of blood that sprayed over his face and into his eyes. He blinked hard, slashing his sword blindly, and as his vision cleared he saw that the legionaries had already moved forward, following Scipio as he ploughed through the slew of mud and blood towards the far slope.
Suddenly a horn blew, a deep, resonating sound, not a Roman trumpet, but from somewhere in the Celtiberian lines. The warrior Fabius had been stalking quickly backed off, and he saw others do the same to his right and left. The legionaries who had surged forward to engage the enemy were left reeling and panting, staring at the retreating Celtiberians, some of them red-faced and spitting and others pale with the shock of combat. It had lasted for only a few minutes, but dozens of bodies lay jumbled in the mud, most of them Celtiberian but the glint of Roman armour visible here and there among them. Fabius felt his left hand, noticing for the first time that it was sliced across with a sword cut, and then looked up again. The centurions were bawling down the line, ordering the men who had gone forward to return to firm ground, and those who had stayed in the line to tighten up and take up their pila again, in readiness for another onslaught.
But instead a single warrior came forward, an older man with flowing grey-flecked hair who had not yet taken part in the combat, his armour and weapons still gleaming and clean. He was wearing a muscled cuirass that looked Etruscan, and his helmet was like the Greek ones that Fabius had seen carved on the Parthenon in Athens. He remembered that many of the Celtiberians had served as mercenaries during times of peace at home, fighting for Carthage in the last war, and that battle scars and looted armour were all the pay they wanted. This man was not old enough to have served Carthage, but he could have been among the mercenaries on the Macedonian side at Pydna; his left eye socket was empty and he had a livid weal across his face that must have been caused by a savage blow decades ago, when he was a young man. Behind him an emaciated boy held the great curved cow horn that had signalled the retreat. Fabius realized that the man must be the chieftain. He had stopped at the edge of the mud, resplendent in his armour, his feet planted apart in defiance, looking at the Romans and then focusing his gaze on Scipio, who was standing dripping in the mud a stone’s throw away and watching him intently
The man pointed at him. ‘You are Scipio,’ he bellowed hoarsely, speaking in heavily accented Latin. ‘My grandfather fought a Scipio at Cannae, and now I will fight a Scipio at Intercatia.’
‘Do you challenge me?’ Scipio bellowed back.
‘On my command my warriors will return and fight to the death, and many more Romans will die. Or the contest can be finished with a single combat.’
‘What are your terms?’
‘That my men should be allowed to leave their arms and go free, that the woman and children of Intercatia should be left unmolested with their remaining houses unburned, and that they should be fed. I have heard that the word of a Scipio is a word of honour. Is that so?’
Scipio squinted up at him. ‘It is so.’
‘Do you give me your word?’
‘I give you my word.’
‘Then let the contest begin.’ He dropped his shield, shoved his sword into the ground and removed his helmet, taking a thong offered to him by the boy and tying his hair back. The boy undid his cuirass and took it from him. He was wearing nothing beneath it except his kilt, revealing a torso that had once been finely muscled but was now showing his age, the scars of many wars standing out as red weals against his pale skin. Scipio stripped off his own armour as the chieftain picked up his sword and limped towards the mud, dragging one leg behind him. Fabius could see why the man had not joined the melee earlier: he would have found it virtually impossible to stand upright. As his warriors closed up in a semi-circle behind him, Fabius sensed that they had done this before, watching duels for honour and women and power in this very place, contests that the chieftain in his younger years had undoubtedly walked away from many times victorious. This time it would be different. The contest with Scipio could only have one outcome, and they all knew it. The terms did not even allow for the chieftain’s victory, and if it came to it he could not afford to deal Scipio a death blow; if he did so it could only result in the Roman soldiers going on a rampage and massacring his people, whose future therefore depended on Scipio surviving and keeping his word. The chieftain was sacrificing himself for his women and children, in a time-honoured fashion that would also leave his warriors satisfied that honour had been done and their own rituals observed.
Fabius turned and looked at Scipio, at his hardened torso and his sword held ready by his side, his face grim and emotionless. He could guess the thoughts that were running through his mind. As boys they had dreamed of war as glorious contest, as battles between armies and warriors where the best fights were the most evenly matched, not just for Rome and glory but tests of manhood where the victor could walk away uplifted by killing an opponent who could as easily have won the day. But the reality of war was rarely like that. It was uneven, and messy. There might be honour in Scipio’s word, in his fides, but there would be no glory for him in thi
s fight. Scipio was doing what he had to do to allow the enemy warriors to walk away with dignity, a decision that might make them more likely to be Rome’s allies in future, and to save his legionaries from dying unnecessarily. But this would be little more than an execution, the chieftain’s fate as certain as the deaths of the deserters they had watched being mauled by lions at the triumphal games after the Battle of Pydna. After years of yearning to return to war, Scipio was in at the ugly end, and Fabius knew he would be steeling himself to show utter resolve in what he had to do.
He knew that Scipio would not sham a fight, that he would respect the old warrior’s pride by fighting him man to man with his full strength for however long it lasted. The chieftain limped into the mud and stood a few feet from Scipio, his legs apart and his sword held in front of him with both hands, the blade down. Scipio nodded, and the man suddenly swung his blade like a scythe in front of Scipio’s chest, nicking the skin and making him fall back, staggering slightly. The man still had strength in his arms and a lifetime’s skill with the Celtiberian sword, its slashing blade longer than the Roman gladius but less versatile at close quarters. His weakness lay in his poor mobility, and Scipio was going to have to get around him and under the arc of the blade, deflecting it and going for a thrust. Scipio edged forward, crouched down this time with his sword held at the ready, just raising it in time to parry another vicious sweep by the chieftain that nearly sent Scipio’s gladius flying. He backed off again and crouched lower, suddenly springing to the side and catching the chieftain off-balance as he tried to twist his body round to confront him. Scipio darted in and thrust his sword hard into the man’s good leg, pulling it out of the calf just in time to avoid another sweeping blow. The man shifted, nearly toppling over, the mud beneath him shiny with fresh blood from the wound, steaming on the cool ground.
The chieftain had shown his skill and courage in front of his warriors, but now they would expect no more. At the next swing Scipio parried the blade, deflecting it, and then leapt forward and this time thrust his own blade into the man’s abdomen, running him through to the hilt and then holding him close, swaying together with him in the mud. The chieftain retched, throwing up yellow bile streaked with blood, and then Scipio pushed him back and heaved the sword up and down, slicing open a huge wound from the man’s pelvis to his ribcage. He withdrew the sword and the chieftain fell back, staggering and twisting, and as he did so the wound gaped open and his intestines spilled out, blue and red and steaming, dripping with blood. He looked down with his one eye, his face sheet-white, his expression uncomprehending. His intestines had dropped in a loop to the ground and he tripped over them, sprawling forward and then raising himself on his knees, scooping them up with his hands in the mud and trying to put them back inside.
Total War Rome: Destroy Carthage Page 18
