Sunbird (72 page)

^{Mago smiled. 'Speaking of wine, Holiness. I have a few amphorae of wine that I am sure will give no offence even to a palate as knowledgeable as yours Will you dine with me this night?'}

^{'I look forward to it with the keenest anticipation,' Huy assured him.}

^{The wine was drinkable, and after the meal Huy and Tanith sang together for the guests. It was a fanciful piece of pornography of Huy's composition, a love duet between Baal and Astarte. Tanith sang the part of the goddess in a sweet and true voice, rendering the more suggestive and ambiguous lines with modestly downcast eyes, that had the guests shouting with laughter and pounding the board with their wine bowls. Huy ignored the pleas for an encore, and setting his lute aside, he became serious. He spoke of the impending battle, warning Mago and his officers not to judge the enemy too lightly.}

^{'I nearly paid dearly for that mistake,' he told them. 'I was tempted to probe their centre in strength, and I found it as soft as freshly kneaded dough. I sensed a quick rout, a chance of victory at a single stroke. With their centre collapsing I would drive through them and split them.' Huy paused, and made the sun sign. 'Praise unto Baal, but a moment before I gave the order to commit and change the probe to a full frontal attack I was warned by an impulse from the gods.' The company assumed expressions of suitable religious solemnity, and a few of them made the sun sign as Huy went on. 'I looked to the enemy's flanks which, naturally, overlapped mine, and I saw how firmly they stood. It seemed to me that the enemy's steadiest and best troops were posted there, and I remembered Cannae. I remembered how Hannibal had enmeshed the Roman Consul.' Huy broke off suddenly, and an expression of revelation dawned upon his face.}

^{'Cannae! Hannibal!' Clearly he remembered the clay box with the battle counters of Cannae set out upon it. He remembered his own voice lecturing, and a black face intent and listening. 'Timon!' he whispered. 'It's Timon! It must be! '}

^{Around him lay his army, a vast agglomeration of black humanity, hungry and afraid and restless in the night. The fires blossomed like a flower garden upon the southern bank of the great river, and the night sky glowed orange. The fires were for warmth alone, there was no food. There had been no food for two days now, not since they had burned his baggage.}

^{Timon moved silently amongst them, and saw how they huddled about the fires. Hunger had made them cold, and they whispered and moaned, so the sound of his camp was murmurous, a sibilance like the hive sound of wild bees.}

^{He hated them. They were slaves, weaklings. One in fifty of them was a man, one in a hundred was a warrior. When he had longed for a war spear in his hands, they had been a rotten twig. They were slow and clumsy in response to the lightning sallies of the enemy. Fifty of them were no match for one of the splendid warriors that opposed him. He longed for the men of his own tribe, longed to teach them what he had learned, to imbue them with his own sense of purpose, his own dreams of destiny and retribution.}

^{On the bank of the river he stood and looked across the slick black flow of water. The reflection of the stars danced upon the surface, and at the shallow place of the ford there were whorls and eddies, a disturbance, as though some monster swam deep.}

^{Three hundred paces out, halfway across the river, was a small islet. The flood waters would cover it, and it was thick with driftwood and mats of stranded papyrus. This was the first stage of the ford. It was here that he would anchor his lines of twisted bark that his men were plaiting now. He would rig the lines at dawn, and attempt to make the crossing in a single day. He knew how heavy his losses must be. They were weak with hunger and wounds and exhaustion, the bark ropes were unreliable, the current was swift and treacherous, and the enemy was as swift and unrelenting.}

^{Timon moved away downstream, passing amongst his sentries, talking quietly with them, stopping to examine the huge coils of bark rope that were laid ready upon the bank, and at last he came to the perimeter of his camp.}

^{Downstream was the garrison of Sett, 1,000 paces away, a Roman mile as Timon now thought of it. There were torches burning upon the walls and Timon could see the sentries moving vigilantly
in
the light.}

^{Out on the river, anchored in a deep placid pool were the galleys of the river patrol. With oars shipped and sails furled they were saurian in shape, and Timon watched them uneasily. He had never seen warships in action and he did not know what to expect of them. When Huy Ben-Amon had spoken of the great sea battles of the Romans and Greeks and Carthaginians, he had paid scant attention. He regretted it now. He wished he could form some estimate of the threat that these strange craft afforded his crossing.}

^{The sound of voices came faintly to him across the water, and though he could not recognize the words, yet the familiar modulations of the Punic language fanned his hatred. He listened to them and he felt it come up out of the pit of his belly. He wanted to hurl himself upon them, and destroy them. He wanted to destroy every trace, every memory of this grotesque light-skinned people with their skills and strength and strange gods and monstrous cruelties.}

^{Standing in the darkness and staring at the distant fortress, hearing their voices in the night, he remembered the body of his woman sliding and bouncing over the rough ground, he remembered the slaves wailing in the compounds of Hulya, he remembered the slave smell, the sound and kiss of the lash, the jangling weight of the chains, the searing heat of the rock, the voices of the slave-masters, the thousand other memories burned and branded into his brain. He massaged the thickened chain callouses at his wrist, and stared at his enemies, and from the core of his soul his hatred bubbled and boiled, threatening to flood his reason like the red-hot lava of an active volcano.}

^{He wanted to swing his army about and fall upon them. He wanted to destroy them, destroy every last trace of them.}

^{He found with surprise that he was shaking, his whole body shuddering with the force of his hatred, and with an immense effort of his will, he controlled himself. Sweat poured down his face and chest in the night cool, the rank-smelling sweat of hatred.}

^{'My time is not now,' he thought. 'But it will come.'}

^{There was a presence beside him in the darkness and he turned to it.}

^{'Zama?' he asked, and his lieutenant answered softly.'}

^{'The dawn is coming.'}

^{'Yes.' Timon nodded. 'It is time to begin.'}

^{With loving attention Tanith braided his beard, and then twisted it up under his chin and clubbed it out of the way where it would not catch in Huy's breastplate nor afford a grip for a desperate enemy.}

^{She whispered endearments as she worked, the endearments of a childless woman, speaking to him as though he were her infant. Huy sat quietly on his couch, delighting in the deft and gentle touch of her hands, the soft words and the loving tone of her voice; all this contrasted so violently with what the day would bring, and when Tanith rose from the couch and went to fetch his heavy breastplate, he felt a sharp sense of loss.}

^{She helped him to arm, kneeling to buckle the straps of his greaves, fussing with the folds of his cloak, and although she smiled, he could hear the fear in her voice.}

^{He kissed her awkwardly, and the iron crushed her breast as he held her. She made a small movement of protest, half pulling away, then she surrendered to his embrace and, ignoring the pain, pressed herself to him.}

^{'Oh Huy,' she whispered, 'my lord, my love.'}

^{The old priestess pulled aside the hanging reed mat and stepped into the chamber. She saw the two of them clinging to each other, oblivious of all else. Aina stared at them through rheumy old eyes, then her mouth sagged open into a tooth-less grin and she drew back silently and let the reed mat fall into place.}

^{Tanith drew away at last. She went to the wall against which the vulture axe leaned beside Huy's couch, and she took it up and untied the soft leather sheath from the blade. She came to Huy, standing before him, and she lifted the blade to her lips and kissed it.}

^{'Fail him not!' she whispered to the axe and handed it to Huy.}

^{In the pre-dawn darkness there was an eager group of officers on the ramparts of the fort staring upstream to where the slave army was encamped. They were all armed and were eating the morning meal as they stood. They greeted Huy and Tanith with boisterous high spirits, and Tanith watched and listened as they discussed the day. She found it difficult to understand how they could face the possibility of dealing or receiving death with the enthusiasm of small boys for a piece of mischief.}

^{Tanith felt herself excluded from this mysterious male camaraderie, and she was startled by the change which had come over Huy. Her gentle poet, her solemn scholar and shy lover was as inflamed as any of them. She recognized all the signs of his excitement in his fluttering hand gestures, the hectic spots of colour in his cheeks and the high-pitched giggle with which he greeted one of Bakmor's sallies.}

^{'This is the day. Enough waiting,' Huy declared, as he stared upstream into the dawn gloom. There was a heavy mist upon the river, and the smoke from 10,000 camp fires obscured the field. He paced restlessly. 'A curse upon this mist! I cannot see if they have strung their lines across the ford yet.'}

^{'Shall I order one of the galleys upstream to investigate?' Mago asked.}

^{'No,' Huy waved the suggestion aside. 'We will know soon enough, and I don't want to draw attention to the galleys yet.' Huy crossed to the parapet on which the food was spread. He poured a bowl of hot wine sweetened with honey and raised it to the company. 'A bright edge to your swords!'}

^{Huy sang the greeting to Baal as the sun came up over a red and smoky horizon, and then standing bareheaded he drew the attention of the gods to the fact that he intended fighting a battle this day. In strong but respectful terms he pointed out that though the men he commanded were the finest, yet the odds were high, and he would need assistance if the day was to be carried. He relied on them for their cooperation. He made the sun sign, and then turned briskly to his staff.}

^{'Very well, you know your stations and duties.' As they dispersed, Huy led Bakmor aside. 'You have a man to attend the priestess?'}

^{Bakmor beckoned to a grizzled old infantry man who stood a short way off, and the man came forward.}

^{'You know your duties?' Huy demanded, and the soldier nodded.}

^{'I will remain with the priestess through the day '}

^{'Never letting her out of your sight,' Huy cautioned him.}

^{'Should the enemy triumph, and it seem that she will fall into their hands, I will--'}

^{'Good,' Huy interrupted him gruffly. 'If it is necessary, make the stroke swift and sure.'}

^{Huy could not look at Tanith, he turned away quickly and went down to where a small boat waited to row him out to the largest of the two galleys.}

^{Huy stood on the castle of the galley and waited. The sun was well up now, and the mist was dispersed. The galley was singled up to a bow anchor, and she faced into the current. The rowers were at their benches, their shields and weapons at their feet, the oars feathered and ready.}

^{The slave army was committed to its crossing. Twenty lines had been strung from the south bank to the mid-stream island, and now they were laying the lines from there to the north bank.}

^{The ford was congested with a great struggling mass of humanity. Clinging to the bark ropes, they were wading steadily across towards the island. Only their heads showed, long lines of black dots around which the water swirled and creamed. Already there were fifteen or twenty thousand slaves in the water, and the number increased steadily as the horde on the south side filed down the bank and took to the ropes.}

^{It was happening just the way that Huy had known it would. The party on the south bank would dwindle to a size which would be a fair match for Bakmor's impatient warriors Huy smiled as he imagined how Bakmor must be chafing at this delay. He had longer to wait, Huy decided, as he watched the first slaves emerge from the green waters and scramble thankfully out onto the island with their black skins shining wetly in the morning sunlight.}