Total War Rome: Destroy Carthage (21 page)

‘Should we leave the body exposed? To conceal it might be to delay others on our trail.'

Scipio mounted his horse and shook his head. ‘No. We will use two timbers cut and left here by the foresters, and we will crucify the corpse in the middle of the trail. Anyone coming this way expecting to find our bodies will know never to cross the path of Scipio Aemilianus.'

Polybius gestured at Fabius. ‘Or his bodyguard.'

Scipio's horse reared up, smelling something that Fabius knew could have been the boar, and Scipio pulled hard on the reins until it pawed the ground, snorting and whinnying like a cavalry horse about to charge. He brought it under control again, and then looked at Fabius, nodding acknowledgement. ‘You have done a deed of valour today, Fabius Petronius Secundus, and I will not forget it. When I lead a Roman army, you will be
primipilus
of the first legion.'

Fabius squinted at him and shook his head. ‘Make me a centurion if I earn it, but I'd rather stay your bodyguard. Someone needs to watch your back while you two talk about strategy and the best way to use a boar spear to kill a man.'

Polybius grinned and put his hand on Fabius' shoulder. ‘I am sorry about your dog. He will await you in Elysium. And you will remain Scipio's bodyguard, whatever rank he gives you, I will see to that. One day Rome will realize the value of men like you, and she will create a professional army that will conquer the world.' A bitingly cold wind swept down from the mountain slope, ruffling the manes of the horses, and he pushed away from Fabius' horse and pulled up his hood, turning to Scipio. ‘Winter is upon us. We need to leave. To Rome?'

Scipio gave him a steely look, watching Fabius mount up, and then kicked his heels into the flanks of his horse. ‘We will crucify the man who killed our dog first. Then to Rome.'

PART FOUR

INTERCATIA, SPAIN

151
BC

10

An eagle swooped low over the hills, its cry resounding down the valleys, the beat of its wings harsh and hard in the damp air. Fabius looked up from his work, breathing deeply, tasting the sweat that had been coursing down his face all morning. He eased off his helmet, wiped his stubble with the back of his hand and tilted his face to the sky, for once enjoying the cool wetness of this place. It had begun to drizzle again, the perennial rain that seemed to have shrouded these low hills for the entire three months since he and Scipio had disembarked from Rome, a permanent low cloud in the lee of the towering mountains to the north that divided Spain from Gaul. He had convinced himself that he actually liked it; to feel the sun again would only be to remind him of the last time he had seen Eudoxia and their little boy, born a year ago now, playing beside the sparkling waters of the Mediterranean. He looked up the slope at the walls of the
oppidum,
the enclosed citadel of the Celtiberians. There were women and children in there, too, but he had not yet seen them, only their husbands and fathers when they had sallied forth, wild-haired and screaming, brandishing the double-edged swords that struck fear into all but the most battle-hardened enemies.

The catapult a few yards behind him released its load with a jarring shudder, sending a fireball high over the wall into the
oppidum
beyond. It had been like that for a week now, day and night, one every hour, raining down death and destruction and slowly grinding the enemy into submission. Before that it had been solid stone shot, battering the wall until a breach had been made that had allowed the legionaries in, forcing the enemy back to their secondary line of defence in front of their huts and houses. Taking the wall made the work they were doing now seem redundant, digging a ditch below the outer slope of the
oppidum.
But Ennius knew how to keep his
fabri
happy, men recruited from the building trade in Rome who liked nothing better than to dig ditches and erect palisades, and to work siege machines that reminded them of the great counterpoise cranes beside the river Tiber that were used to swing blocks of marble out of ship's hulls. Fabius had been all too willing to pitch in and help, remembering the hours he had spent as a young recruit building practice fortifications on the Field of Mars, and how the old centurion had told him that building was just as much the job of the soldier as fighting. And, despite his discomfort in the ditch, it still sent a course of satisfaction through him to be wearing the armour of a legionary again, whatever the task at hand. It had been seventeen years since Pydna, and even after weeks of hard slog since they had arrived in Spain, he still felt the novelty and excitement of bearing arms for Rome that he had first experienced as a young recruit in Macedonia all those years ago.

There was a great grunt of satisfaction beside him, and a splash. The two elephants that had worked hard at the wall all morning lay slumped in the mud pool at the bottom of the ditch, cooling off and using their tails to flick away the flies that swarmed around them. Higher up the slope the third elephant was toiling away under the watchful gaze of its Numidian master, using its trunk to tear rocks away from the ragged edge of the breach and clear rubble to make an easier passage for the assaulting troops. After breaching the wall and forcing the defenders back within the
oppidum,
Scipio had consolidated his gains, quickly opening the main entrance to let more men inside; but once he had seen the secondary defensive line, a wooden palisade across the centre of the
oppidum
some five hundred yards ahead, he had decided not to go further, instead withdrawing his troops to the breach and leaving the open space ahead as a killing ground for whenever the enemy should choose to sally forth.

They had been waiting for almost a week now, a week during which the Celtiberians had endured yet more starvation and misery, pelted by the hail and rain that had turned the place into a soggy mire, and by the fireballs that Ennius' artillerymen had been lobbing over the walls into the houses, where even in the rain the burning pitch and oil had ignited the thatched roofs of the houses and forced the people out into the open, unprotected from the elements and the ballista balls. It seemed hardly credible that they had held out for so long, but Fabius had been hearing from the other legionaries of the Celtiberian endurance and how a siege like this could last until every person inside had died of starvation or by their own sword.

He looked across at Scipio, who was hunched over a tactical diorama that he and Ennius had created using mud and stones from the riverbank. Scipio was almost thirty-five years old now, his face craggier than it had been the last time they had gone to war together, his stubble and short-cropped hair flecked with grey. It was six years since they had left Macedonia, six years that Scipio had devoted with reluctance to the law courts and debating chambers of Rome – a burden they had managed to ease by spending months every year hunting in the foothills of the Apennines and on the high slopes of the Cisalpine mountians to the north, and in Rome working out daily with the gladiators to keep themselves fit and battle-ready. Unlike his contemporaries in Rome who had succumbed to self-indulgence, Scipio was as muscular and sinewy as the
fabri
who toiled around them now, as comfortable pitching in with ditch-digging as he was at joining the wrestling matches and swordplay that kept the legionaries in shape while they waited for the siege to wear down the Celtiberians and force them into battle again.

Scipio's battered breastplate was shaped like the musculature of a human torso, a legacy of the Aemilii Paulli that had once been a splendid example of Etruscan metalwork but was now pocked and dented by war. It had been worn by Scipio's father as a young tribune in the war against Hannibal and by his grandfather in the war before that, the first great clash with Carthage over a hundred years ago. War with Carthage was never far from their thoughts, even out here. They were only fighting now because the Celtiberians had sided with Hannibal in his trek through Spain towards Rome more than sixty years before, and since then had proved an obstacle to Roman attempts to reach the gold-mining districts further to the north-west. War had flared up three years earlier and been put down by the Romans only after an arduous campaign in these desolate foothills, sapping the energy of attacker and defender alike. But then with peace in the offing Lucullus had been elected consul and had decided to raise a new legion and go out to finish the job in Spain in his own terms, reneging on the promises that had been made to the Celtiberians by his predecessors. Everyone knew that the campaign was a way to an easy triumph, the first opportunity in almost two decades for a consul to lead a victory parade through Rome, and that the Celtiberians had been treated with a contempt that angered those who had fought against them and learned to respect their sense of honour as warriors.

Scipio had been privately scornful of Lucullus, a boorish
novus homo
with little military background, and had thought the renewed war in Spain a distraction from the imminent threat of Carthage. But Scipio had just been made a senator and had seen his future trapped in Rome, with no other chance of attaining the military reputation he would need to be appointed to command a legion or an army when the time came for an assault on Carthage. For once Polybius had been absent, away in Greece advising the Achaean League on its military organization, and Scipio had been forced to mull over the question on his own, weighing his own ambition and sense of destiny against his conscience over joining a dishonourable war. Then, a few days before Lucullus and his legion were due to depart from Rome, word had reached him that a group of older senators who opposed Cato and were suspicious of anyone with the name Scipio were engineering an appointment for him as aedile in Macedonia, a post that would have been a welcome break from Rome except for the fact that the new provincial governor was his arch-rival Metellus. He had discussed it with Fabius, and the die was set. They had remembered what had happened in the forest of Macedonia six years before, and had no wish to end their days with a knife-thrust in some back alley of Pella.

Scipio had gone to Lucullus as he was forming up the legion on the Field of Mars and volunteered. He had accepted appointment as a military tribune, not among the young men who led the maniples and cohorts, but as an officer on Lucullus' staff, to act as an emissary when the time came to discuss terms again with the Celtiberians. Lucullus was trading on Scipio's reputation for
fides,
for keeping his word, a role that Fabius knew would batter Scipio's conscience given Lucullus' duplicity towards the Celtiberians. Scipio and Fabius were only here at Intercatia while they waited for the rains to abate and the road to the coast to become passable again, having marched into the camp ten days before with a reduced century from the
oppidum
of Cauca where Lucullus was encamped with his legion. Ennius was already here, commander of the small besieging force, and had deferred to Scipio because he knew how much Scipio yearned to see action, and honouring his seniority in the academy years before. Ennius' main force was a cohort of
fabri
who were meant to complete the fortifications before the arrival of Lucullus' legion, at which point Lucullus expected the
oppidum
to capitulate and another victory to be added to his basket without any need to risk his own skin leading his men into battle.

Fabius watched Scipio stand upright and peer at the walls. He was not wearing the silver
phalera
disc that his father had awarded him for valour at Pydna. Scipio had told Fabius that Pydna had been fought when most of the legionaries here were boys, and would have been an old war story told by their fathers. They all knew that he was the son of the legendary Aemilius Paullus and adoptive grandson of Scipio Africanus; they all knew that princes often wore decorations bestowed on them by kings, even when they had never seen action. He would not rest on past laurels, but would earn their respect before their eyes. And he had done it a week before, storming the walls at the head of the legionaries, the first to stand atop the rubble and see the Celtiberian warriors fall back on their second defensive position, the wall across the centre of the
oppidum
that enclosed the huts and wooden halls of their settlement. The scars that gleamed fresh on Scipio's breastplate from those few moments of ferocious fighting on the walls had far greater meaning to him than any decoration that Rome might bestow. And out here, where set-piece battles were never going to happen, where war meant tedious days and weeks of sieges punctuated by terrifying moments of violence when the Celtiberians sallied forth, individual combat was the key to a man's reputation. No general was ever going to lead a fully formed legion into battle in this part of Spain, where the terrain of hills and confined river valleys only suited small-unit action by maniples and cohorts led by centurions and tribunes, or where action only took place during sieges in places where the Celtiberians themselves were prepared to give fight, on sloping ground below the
oppida
or in confined spaces within the curtain walls that were more like arenas for gladiatorial duels than battlegrounds for armies.