A Choice of Destinies
Page 24
The second door leading off the upper hallway had been fitted with a new lock when the commanders began their meetings. The plate was still very shiny, conspicuous in the light from the single unshaded bulb, and the young man grimaced at it as he knocked lightly on the door. He knocked twice, then paused, and knocked again. Instantly, the door opened a fraction of an inch and the British engineer-captain peered out, his square face contorted into a suspicious frown. He recognized the newcomer at once, however, and opened the door fully, the frown easing from his face. The young man followed him inside, murmuring a greeting. The engineer-captain slammed home the last of the door’s three bolts, and returned to his place.
Maximian Brennus, the big Gaul who commanded the Third Special Auxiliaries—the Western Empire’s equivalent of the Eastern Hypaspists—said sharply, “You’re late, Dymas.”
“I’m sorry, sir,” the newcomer answered.
“Trouble?” That was Agathon son of Neoptolemus, colonel of the Third (Successor) Foot Companions, and the senior eastern officer involved in the plan.
Dymas shook his head, and took his place at the table. “No, sir. My relief was late, that’s all.”
“You’re sure it was nothing?” Agathon pursued. “You weren’t followed?”
“No, sir,” Dymas said again, woodenly. He could understand the colonel’s nervousness—they had all gone too far now to back down, and the treason laws had not been modified in any essential detail, except in the method of execution, since the founding of the empire—but he resented having his judgment questioned.
Across the table, Laurentius Sergius Catalina sighed softly and pushed himself upright in his chair. The others instantly swung ‘round in their chairs to face him, and the Roman smiled to himself. He had retired from his colonelcy of the Twentieth Legion of Foot the year before—it was either that or be cashiered by the Western Command for his unpopular, easternizing politics—but he was pleased to see he had not yet lost the knack of command.
“Gentlemen,” he said softly, “I’ve received word from my agent in Egyptian Alexandria. The emperor will fly to Syracuse tomorrow, and then head north to Rome to address the Senate.”
There was a brief murmur, half of disapproval, half of satisfaction. The engineer whistled softly, and Phraates of Susa said, with unfortunate emphasis, “Well, I just wonder what he’ll say.”
Brennus gave the Susianan a disgusted look—it was hard to remember, when enduring Phraates’s airs and graces, that the effeminate major was commander of a much-decorated squadron of the crack Persian Lancers, on long leave from the nasty job of patrolling the Euphrates border against the Islamic natives of Arabia Major—and said, “My men are ready. I’ve already been warned for escort duty.”
“Good,” Sergius said. “And you, Agathon?”
The Foot Companion commander took a deep breath. “We’re ready. All my battalion captains but one are with us in principle—the one’s an Egyptian, and you know how rabid they’ve been against the west. I didn’t think I could take the chance.” He paused to recover his train of thought. “But the rest I’m sure of. They’ll join us.”
Sergius nodded, though he would have preferred a more definite commitment from the battalion captains. “Alan?”
The engineer said, “I’ve been taking the work very slowly, like you ordered, sir. We’ll be at it tomorrow, emperor’s arrival or no.” He grinned companionably at Dymas and Phraates. “Any fences too big for your little toys, my bulldozers’ll handle.”
“I hardly think it will come to that,” Phraates said.
Sergius said, “Dymas, I’ve been reliably informed your squadron will be picked for the ceremonial escort, which will make our jobs a lot easier if it’s true.”
“I can probably get the assignment anyway,” Dymas said, thoughtfully. “Cassander will trade duties.”
“Excellent,” Sergius said. “Is everyone clear on what they are supposed to do tomorrow?” He glanced around the circle as the others nodded, one by one. “And we’re all agreed on Alexander of Rhagae as our candidate, once we’ve forced the election?”
Again, there were nods, and Brennus growled, “There’s no one else with even a chance of holding it together, Persian line or not.”
Sergius nodded himself, looking around the table a final time. Dressed as they all were in civilian clothes to avoid notice, the officers looked oddly uncomfortable rather than unmilitary. Brennus’s checked trousers and Dymas’s gaudy African-striped shirt did nothing to disguise their military bearing. But the same thing could be said about Sergius’s Persian coat and trousers, and the ex-colonel was well aware of it. He straightened himself anyway, and said, “So, gentlemen, it’s settled. We will seize the emperor tomorrow at the airfield, force him to abdicate and call an election, and throw our support unanimously behind Alexander of Rhagae.”
Put so baldly, the plan sounded like the treachery it was. The easterners, still under the spell of Alexander I and III and his obsession with absolute fidelity, looked away, unable to meet each others’ eyes. Even Sergius, who prided himself on being a hardheaded Roman, felt the same twinge of guilt. To exorcise it, he said, “Our duty is to the empire—all the empire. This is the only way to preserve what the Great Alexander built. I will not say that he would have approved, no man can know that. But I will say he would respect our motives.”
“The Great Alexander would never have let things get like this,” Dymas said, bitterly.
“Alexander of Rhagae has the charisma,” Agathon said. “He can—he will pull things together again.”
Phraates smiled and said, “You had better pray to all the faces of God that he can, my friend. Or the empire splits, and then everything will fall apart.”
Sergius nodded in spite of himself. “Gentlemen,” he said aloud. “Until tomorrow.”
A Choice of Destinies
Chapter 11:
Italy, summer (Loios), 31 imperial, to Carthage, summer (Loios), 32 imperial (325/324 B.C., 428/429 A.U.C.)
Antipater proved surprisingly reasonable about releasing the latest levies for the Carthaginian campaign: clearly, he and Theagenes had matters well under control in Greece. The ships carrying the new men sailed from Macedon at the end of Gorpiaios, landing at Metapontium a week later. Their officers marched them north in easy stages, joining the main army just in time to witness the king’s marriage to Cassius’s sister. Philip had taken a new bride with each new war; the levies accepted this Roman marriage without dissent, and their commanders began the winter-long task of fitting them into the phalanx and the cavalry squadrons.
Throughout the late summer and the autumn, Fabius and his fellow consul fought to secure the consulship for Ptolemy. The election proved more difficult than the grant of citizenship had been. Fabius pushed his friends and political allies, called in favors done nearly twenty years before, and managed to produce a more than respectable following for the Macedonian brigadier during the inescapable ritual of the campaign. Ptolemy did his part with a good grace—he had a sharp sense of the ridiculous and knew perfectly well what he looked like in a chalk-smeared toga, courting the voters in the Forum—but after some weeks of campaigning against an increasingly vocal opposition, even he began to show the strain. As the election approached, the less obligated of Fabius’s supporters found excuses not to send their dependents to wait on Ptolemy in the Forum, and the consul, correctly diagnosing those signs of defection, grew gaunt with worry. But, in the end, there was no need for his concern. His influence held firm, the bought voters stayed bought, and Fabius’s rivals, already discredited by the army’s defeat, were unable to muster a workable coalition. Ptolemy was chosen as one of the consuls by a reasonable margin, and Fabius himself was reelected.
Alexander expressed his formal pleasure at the results of the election, and the rest of the Friends teased the brigadier unmercifully. The Senate, having heard some of the cruder jokes, became unexpectedly stubborn, and only the combination of Fabius’s most outrageous threats and
blandishments kept the senators from repudiating the second part of the treaty. As it was, the Senate voted to fund only a single legion to accompany Alexander against Carthage, and Fabius’s opponents managed to get Caius Domitius Mela appointed as one of the two military tribunes who would have command under Ptolemy. Cassius Nasidienis was to be the other, but Fabius still braced himself to report that failure to Alexander.
To the consul’s surprise, however, Alexander accepted both the small number of troops and Domitius’s appointment with equanimity. In private, the king was positively delighted by the turn of events: he had the hostages he wanted, in the persons of the Roman officers, and Domitius’s presence gave him good reason to mistrust the Roman levies.
From midsummer, Nearchus had been hard at work in Syracuse, assembling another fleet large enough to carry the Macedonian army to Africa. By the beginning of winter he reported that he was ready, down to the merchant ships that would carry the siege machinery and the extra supplies. He also expressed his willingness to turn over the Syracusan command to anyone the king cared to name, in order that he himself might command the invasion fleet. Alexander promptly appointed Coenus regent in the admiral’s place, and ordered the protesting brigadier to turn his brigade over to his son Amyntas. That silenced Coenus’s protests briefly, until the king announced that he intended to sail for Africa at the beginning of the spring sailing season. All of the Friends raised loud objections at first—even Coenus was moved to quote Hesiod’s description of the unsuitability and general foulness of the early sailing season—but Alexander gradually won them over, pointing out that such an early crossing would earn them the advantage of surprise and, more important, would probably trap a good part of the dangerous Carthaginian fleet in its winter harbor. As soon as the weather began to moderate, Nearchus brought his fleet from Syracuse to the newly founded port of Ostia. The Macedonian army, now supplemented by a single Roman legion, made its sacrifices to Poseidon—Hephaestion in particular, made a magnificent gift in hopes of an uneventful voyage—then filed aboard the ships. At the end of Xandikos, the fleet sailed for Africa.
The crossing was not an easy one, though luckily there were no major storms. In good weather the voyage took four or five days, though a fast merchant ship could make the journey in three. It took the Macedonians seven days to make the crossing, their ships delayed by adverse winds and a series of squalls that held the fleet almost motionless for a day and a half. As the weather moderated again, Nearchus slowly regained contact with his ships. The warships, all sturdy quinquiremes, had survived the storm, but two of the supply ships had vanished completely, without any witnesses to say whether they had been sunk or merely forced by some accident to turn back to Sicily. Nearchus sent one of the quinquiremes back along the fleet’s course to search for wreckage but, after battling the waves for hours, the ship returned with nothing.
Near noon of the seventh day, the leading warship spotted familiar landmarks on the African coast, and the fleet hove to, to check their bearings. Despite the storms, they were not too far from their planned landfall, the headland opposite the city of Carthage itself. As planned, Nearchus split the fleet, taking most of the warships toward Carthage in hopes of trapping the Carthaginian fleet at anchor. The great ships turned ponderously, pitching against the waves so that the bronze rams alternately showed clearly and were buried in the foam. As the ships steadied to their new course, the drumbeat quickened: the Carthaginians had surely seen the fleet by now, and would be struggling to bring their own ships out of the harbor to meet it.
As the leading ships of Nearchus’s fleet approached the entrance to the harbor, they shifted formation to line abreast, just as the first Carthaginian ship emerged from the narrows. Two more Carthaginians followed in single file. Without waiting for a signal from the flagship, Proteas son of Andronicus, whose quinquireme was on the left of the Macedonian line, ordered his drummers to sound the battle cadence. The ship leapt forward, sailors running to secure the mast and sail—never abandoned until the last moment, to give as much speed as possible at the moment of impact—while the marines ran forward to man the three bow catapults. The soldiers got off two shots before the ships closed, but did little damage.
The Carthaginian ship fought to turn away, out of the line of the ram, and was half successful. The two ships scraped past each other, snapping oars and throwing the lower decks into confusion, before Proteas ordered his steersman to sheer off. The damage was worse aboard the Carthaginian ship; Proteas was able to bring his own ship around to ram before the Carthaginian captain was able to recover control of his vessel. The Macedonian ship struck the enemy squarely amidships, locking the two vessels together. The marines, mostly Greek mercenaries, poured forward, dropping over the curving bow onto the enemy deck. The Carthaginian soldiers, also including Greek mercenaries, were waiting for them. There was a short, fierce fight before it became clear that the Carthaginian ship was sinking under them, and Proteas sounded the recall. The marines fought their way back aboard their own ship, then cut free the last of the grapples that held the ships together. As the drum sounded a new cadence, the Macedonian ship slowly began to move backward, disengaging itself from the mortally wounded Carthaginian.
The ram pulled free with a great shriek of tearing wood, and the Carthaginian ship began to break up, wallowing deeper and deeper in the waves, surrounded by an ever-widening ring of wreckage. Lines trailed over the side into the water, and bodies, Macedonian and Carthaginian alike, littered the deck. There were swimmers in the water already, and the surviving oarsmen fought their way out of the sinking hull to join them. On deck, a gang of soldiers fought to work the single remaining catapult. Seeing that, the Macedonian mercenaries’ commander ordered his archers forward and offered a prize for the best shot. Disputing among themselves, the bowmen began to pick the Carthaginians off one by one. As the third man fell, the others abandoned their attempt and dove overboard. The stern of the ship was already underwater. As the Macedonians watched, the bow lifted even further, the bronze ram rising toward the sky, and then the entire ship sank abruptly beneath the waves.
That scene was repeated all along the Macedonian line: though the Carthaginian fleet more than equalled the Macedonian ships both in numbers and in seamanship, Nearchus had caught them in the harbor mouth, before they could maneuver to match his formation. The Carthaginians recognized the situation and recalled their fleet, leaving three wrecks wallowing in the wave-troughs. Nearchus had lost a ship as well; he moved in to pick up its survivors, and then to rescue any surviving Carthaginians. The first Carthaginian aboard did his best to knife the man who rescued him, and was himself thrown back like a fish. The Greek mercenaries were less fanatical, but after that the Macedonians were less eager to rescue them, and several hundred drowned.
As planned, Nearchus left half of his ships on station, where they could dominate the harbor entrance, and sailed south and east across the bay to establish a base for the rest of his fleet. From there he could supply and refit the blockading ships and still respond to any major threat of a breakout.
The rest of the fleet, escorted by a few quinquiremes under the command of Pnytagoras of Cyprus, pushed deeper on into the bay, landing some forty stadia to the south of the city. There was no opposition waiting, but Alexander drove his men hard, unloading the ships and drawing them well up onto the beach, then constructing a crude palisade to defend the new camp. Only when the first rough walls were in place did Pnytagoras put to sea again to rejoin Nearchus, leaving only a pair of warships to help defend the campsite.
The Carthaginians did not make a sortie against the Macedonian camp until the following day, and by then the Macedonians were ready for them. The Carthaginian party was repulsed with heavy losses, which would have been heavier had the horses been fit for the pursuit. Alexander increased his own perimeter guard, even though that meant that it would take longer to unload the merchant ships, and sent the first scouting parties inland to assess the Carthaginian walls.
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From the doorway of the king’s tent, the assembled Friends could just see the first of the warships pulled up on the beach, its scarred paint bright against the dark line of trees that ringed the campsite. A gang of sailors were still working around it, some unloading the last of its cargo while others took aboard fresh supplies. The presence of the ships gave the camp a strange, Homeric look emphasized by the temporary palisade on the inland side.
The Homeric echoes made Hephaestion uneasy, and he was glad that most of the army would soon be abandoning the campsite. He waved away the bowl offered by an attendant page—the oily stew still turned his stomach—but accepted a half-loaf of bread from one of the other boys. Craterus glanced up from his own well-stocked plate and gave the cavalry commander a contemptuous smile.
The royal engineers, Charias and Diades, bent over the unbalanced table, comparing the notes scribbled on wax tablets in their own illegible abbreviated script. “I think this is all,” one of them said at last, putting aside the tablets.
Alexander nodded. “And?” It was Diades who had spoken, though sometimes it was difficult to tell the two men apart. It was not so much that they looked alike—they were of similar height and build, but Diades was going bald, while Charias was missing two fingers since the siege of Tyre—but rather that they shared inflection and gesture, the similarities bred into them during their long apprenticeship under Philip’s master engineer.
“The damage isn’t as bad as we first thought.” This time the speaker was Charias. The maimed right hand made an abortive movement, an eloquent gesture quickly suppressed. “Most of it we’ve been able to repair—”
“Though the wood here isn’t of the best quality,” Diades interjected, and his partner nodded.
“As for the catapults, we can take replacements from the fleet,” Charias went on. “They throw a lighter weight than the ones we lost, but I think we can compensate. The biggest problem is the supply ships that were lost. About half the cast ammunition for the catapults—bolts and light darts—and most of the shaped stones for the larger machines are gone.”