Total War Rome: Destroy Carthage (32 page)

Rome had allowed herself to become complacent. Only one man stood in the way of this new world order, and that was Scipio Aemilianus. Yet Scipio's own future, his ability to lead an army to destroy Carthage and swing the pendulum back towards Rome, hung in the balance. And few in Rome knew as well as Fabius how precarious Scipio's own loyalty was, and what he might do if one day he were to stand on the burning ruins of the temple that towered above them now.

The last Carthaginian walked past them, wiping his mouth and flicking droplets of blood on the ground. Fabius stared Scipio in the eye, and then nodded at him.

His mind flashed back to the men they had killed beside the harbour. They were only two, but they would be the first of many. Scipio would return to this city.

They turned down the alley where the two Thracians were waiting for them, and began to run.

17

Near the Numidian border, five months later

Fabius reined in his horse and came to a halt, watching the solitary rider with the crested helmet framed against the early morning light on the escarpment ahead. In the months since their covert mission to Carthage and return to the Roman headquarters encampment, he and Scipio had devoted themselves relentlessly to Gulussa's cause, helping to muster and train Numidian cavalry in the plains and semi-desert scrubland far to the south of Carthage. Fabius had relished proper soldiering again, but this morning he was tired and hungry, caked in dust from their ride through the night; he knew that as soon as he lay down with the others in the wadi below he would go out like a snuffed candle, and sleep for hours.

Gulussa reckoned that they still had five days' hard ride ahead before they reached the dried-up marshland below Carthage, their final stretch after weeks spent trawling the outer limits of his father's kingdom for men to join the cavalry force that he and Hippolyta were readying to counter further Carthaginian incursions into the territory of Numidia. They were all here now, over a thousand men with their horses, teeming in the wadi below, their breakfast fires dotting the edge of the shallow stream where they had watered the animals and would sleep through the heat of the day. Coming to the wadi had been a diversion of a few hours to the west of their main route, but Scipio had planned at the outset to visit this place; Fabius himself had been given strict instructions by Polybius to write down everything he saw. Polybius had yearned to come himself, but his return to Rome to report to Cato on their reconnaissance into Carthage had kept him there for months longer than expected, lobbying hard in place of the increasingly ailing Cato, now well over ninety years old. Despite their overwhelming evidence of Carthaginian war preparations, the argument had continued to be an uphill struggle against those who dismissed the importance of Africa in favour of Greece and the east, and who even argued for withdrawing support from Masinissa in his attempt to defend the integrity of his kingdom against the resurgence of Carthage. Fabius knew that Polybius had kept their most potent ammunition until last, the evidence for the complicity of Roman senators at the highest level with Carthaginian plans, fearing that a premature attempt to expose the culprits would be disbelieved and count against them unless they had a majority of the Senate already in their camp. But they also knew that time was running short, that this waiting game could not go on much longer while Carthage continued to rearm. Polybius would have to play his cards soon, risking censure and proscription for himself as well as Scipio, if there was not movement in their favour very soon in the Senate.

Fabius took a swig from his water skin, and then poured water over his horse's mane, leaning back as it shook its head and neighed. Soon they would be back at the watercourse, and the horse would be able to drink its fill. He watched Gulussa ride up the ridge from the wadi to join him, still wearing his cloak against the chill of the night, and together they made their way further up the rocky ground to the figure on the escarpment. For Scipio, coming to Zama was a personal pilgrimage: it was here that his adoptive grandfather Scipio Africanus had won his greatest glory almost sixty years before, when two armies had come to this place on the edge of the unknown to decide whether Carthage or Rome would hold sway as the greatest power the world had ever seen.

They reached the crest of the escarpment and reined in beside Scipio. Ahead of them the ground dropped into a plain like a shallow bowl, bounded to the south and west by further ridges. They knew that the Roman camp had been just below them now, and the Carthaginian one a mile or so away below the opposite ridge to the west. There was little to see – just a wasteland of scrub and rocky ground, a goatherd and his few desultory animals making their way across the centre of the depression in the distance – nothing to suggest that one of the most decisive events of history had taken place here only two generations before. Over the far ridge lay the frontier of Masinissa's realm, not with another kingdom but with the African desert, a vast tract that extended from Egypt to the Atlantic shore and south into the unknown. Fabius remembered riding with Scipio and Polybius ten years before in the Macedonian forest, and Polybius sketching out Eratosthenes' map of the world; they had been close to the northern edge then, and now they were at the south. Whether they reached the other extremities, to west and to east, would depend on what happened here in Africa, on whether Scipio would be able to stand above a vanquished city and see through the haze of war to horizons far beyond the restricted world that the senators in Rome had mapped out for themselves.

Fabius spoke the word under his breath:
Zama.
It was a name the veterans had come to call this place, after a nearby Berber settlement, and it was one that Fabius had grown up hearing on the lips of drunken old men in the taverns and crumpled up begging on the streets around the Forum. It was a place that few in Rome who had not fought here could have envisaged, so far was it removed from the landscapes of Italy. At the academy Polybius had said that North Africa was the perfect terrain for set-piece battles, and Fabius could now see why. There was little human settlement to hamper large-scale army manoeuvres, or high mountain ranges or complex coastlines to hinder transport and communications. Hannibal and Scipio Africanus had chosen this battle site, a place where the terrain would afford neither side a clear tactical advantage and everything would depend on the nature and disposition of the formations: infantry, cavalry, elephants. It was the nearest equivalent he had seen in real life to a war game played out on a flat board, the type of abstract exercise that the boys had started with in the academy before moving on to dioramas representing real battles where terrain and topography were important variables.

Scipio spurred his horse and they followed him towards the centre of the battlefield. Along the way they passed the piled-up rocks and thorny branches that delimited the site of the Roman encampment, still visible after more than sixty years, and then the scorched rock strewn with blackened bone fragments that marked the place where the Carthaginian prisoners had been made to mound up and burn the dead. Further on, over the battlefield itself, Fabius looked among the scrub and dust and saw detritus that had escaped the scavengers of battle, some of it perhaps buried for years and recently uncovered by the desert wind: the rusty heads of spears, a broken Celtiberian sword, a mass of rusty mail with the mummified skin and toenails of an elephant's foot still attached. Gulussa pointed to the bleached leg-bones of a human skeleton, denuded of weapons and armour with the skull crushed, the ribs already pulled apart by the wild dogs and foxes that would undoubtedly finish the job here as they had in the past for any other human remains that emerged from the dusty terrain.

They picked their way forward until they were in the centre of the depression, and then Scipio stopped and turned his horse around so that he was facing the Carthaginian lines, just as his grandfather Africanus must have done. Fabius did the same, and then closed his eyes for a moment, hearing only the breathing of the horses and a faint westerly wind that brushed the low-lying scrub, making the horses turn their heads towards it. He remembered his father, who had fought here as a young legionary and then been one of those old veterans in the taverns, telling the same stories of battle to the few who would listen. Fabius had been one of those, and opened his eyes. His father had told how the Carthaginian war elephants had charged, eighty of them, like nothing the Romans had ever seen. Hannibal and his elephants had gone down in history, but in the years since he had led them over the Alps the Romans had learned their weaknesses, and Africanus had used a technique he had learned from ivory hunters: a herd of elephants will always go for gaps if they can see them, refusing to charge into a dense mass of men. At Zama they had been channelled into spaces that opened up in the Roman line and then been hacked down one by one as they charged into the trap, all of them dying behind the Roman lines. After that, Masinissa's cavalry and the Roman
alae
on the flanks had charged, routing the Carthaginian cavalry and chasing them off the battlefield, leaving the infantry to slog it out. Only with the return of the Roman cavalry was the day finally decided, forcing Hannibal down on a bended knee before Scipio and leaving thousands of dead and dying strewn over the battlefield.

But it was not the tactics and the course of the battle that Fabius found himself trying to envisage. It was the moments of combat that his father had described: periods of a few minutes each of unparalleled savagery, hacking and stabbing, punching and biting. The infantry at Zama had been like two equally matched beasts engaged in mortal combat, clashing and retreating, over and over again, wearing away each other's reserves but never faltering. For his father, those minutes of combat had shaped his life; he had never been able to shake them off. They were memories that had kept him awake and sweating at night, that he had only been able to control with the drink and violence that had destroyed his life and made his family fear him. Fabius had hated him for it, had derided him and walked away when the same old slurred stories were repeated to him, but years after his father's death, when he himself was a soldier, he had bitterly regretted it – after Pydna, when he had experienced the maelstrom and horror of battle and had begun to understand what his father had gone through.

Fabius had learned at Pydna that only those who have experienced battle can ever truly understand what it is like. But here at Zama, even as a combat veteran, he felt an interloper. This place belonged to those who had fought and died here, and its history was locked up with them. Polybius could write all he liked about the grander scheme of the battle, about its tactics and the lie of the land, but the truth of it lay with individual experiences that could never be told, or were only half remembered by those few still alive who had endured the shadow of that day. In the dust and rock of this place were imprinted deeds of valour and desperate last stands that would remain forever here, known only to the gods who presided over this battle just as Scipio and the others had presided over the war games in the academy in Rome.

Gulussa drew up alongside them, and Scipio turned to him. ‘Your father Masinissa must have brought you here. Zama was the scene of his greatest triumph, as well as that of Scipio Africanus.'

‘We came here after I returned from the academy in Rome, when you and the others were appointed tribunes for the war against Macedon. I told my father how envious I was of you going into battle, and he brought me here to try to show me what it was like. Back then, there was much more to be seen, human bones and the collapsed and desiccated carcasses of elephants that had failed to burn fully in the funeral pyres. It was a bleak scene, and I learned that even the greatest of battles can be forgotten at a whim, and leave little trace. My father told me that battles are only worthwhile if you use them to destroy an enemy, or they are doomed to be repeated. He was right: here we are again, confronting Carthage just as we were before Zama.'

‘In the academy it was the other way round, Gulussa. We envied you. We knew that Masinissa was constantly at war with his neighbours, and we thought you had a glorious future in store.'

Gulussa gave him a tired smile. ‘Not glorious, Scipio. That's not exactly the right word. Twenty years of raiding, of chasing down marauders and brigands in the desert, of retaliation against desert villages for housing fugitives. I've killed often enough, hundreds of times, but rarely with any glory, and it's only with Carthage now encroaching on our land that I've led my cavalry for the first time against a proper enemy, in skirmishes and chases. I've lived my life planning for it, but I've not yet been in a proper battle.'

‘Your time will come, Gulussa. You will follow in your father's footsteps.'

‘My father Masinissa gave me an interesting piece of advice that day. It was something he'd been trying to get to grips with through more than sixty years of experience in war, and witnessing numerous battles. He'd been schooled as a boy in Carthage with a Greek mathematician as one of his favourite teachers, and that made him think that there might even have been a formula to his observation.'

‘Go on.'

‘He had seen enough battles with very similar starting conditions go very differently from each other to observe that one small alteration of a variable at the outset could change the entire course of events, resulting in certain victory becoming resounding defeat. There would sometimes be no apparent logic to it, no obvious sequence of effects from that one change, but instead – at a certain point in the battle – the whole structure would seem to collapse. Because small variables are changed all the time, such as the movement of a century or a cohort in the order of battle, he had become doubtful that battles could ever be forecast at all, that beyond ensuring that your line-up was strong enough to put up a good fight, everything was in the lap of the gods. But then he began to observe a very interesting thing. The more uniform your force – the more homogeneous – the less likely a small change was to produce a catastrophic outcome. The more varied your force, the more heterogeneous, the more likely you are to be in trouble. He said Scipio Africanus was lucky to win that day at Zama, because his force had precisely that weakness.'