The War God's Men

by David Ross Erickson

  The silence of the city was replaced by the blood-curdling cries of his men as they were cut down where they stood.

  “Treachery!” Aderbal cried. “We have been betrayed!”

  Men turned and fled for the doors, but could not get them open. Archers now lined the battlements and filled the guard towers and they loosed volley after volley of arrows into the mass of men. Aderbal’s soldiers fell in entire ranks and the enemy had to vault over the dead to pursue the panic-stricken survivors.

  Aderbal had drawn his own sword. Only his youth and athleticism had saved him during the first moments of the attack, as he dodged one killing thrust after another. He worked his way into the center of the mass of his men as they huddled against the doors. Arrows continued to rain down on them. He could see the door bulge inward as the remaining soldiers of Hamilcar’s army hammered at them from outside.

  “Open the gates!” Aderbal cried at the top of his lungs. His voice was almost lost in the screams of the dying and the wild bloodlust of the Thermaeian garrison.

  His men heeded his call. Some were crushed against the doors as others, responding to their leaders’ exhortations, rushed forward to work free the massive latch that secured the doors. Aderbal was among them as they lifted the heavy timber. Almost at once, the doors inched apart and then were burst open by the four-thousand men of Hamilcar’s army, heaving from the outside.

  Aderbal was relieved, his thoughts instantaneously transformed from the mindless animal survival that had possessed him. Now he considered a different sort of survival — to survive retribution for his foolishness. His name would indeed be on the lips of Carthage, but now this idea filled him with fear.

  Instinctively, he raised his sword. He would lead his men back into battle. He would fight bravely, perhaps heroically. But the crush of Hamilcar’s four thousand had taken Aderbal’s survivors by surprise. They were swept aside. Some of their leading elements were hacked apart by Hamilcar’s men in the frenzy of their attack. The rest rushed for safety, many of the men, Aderbal among them, trapped in a rib-cracking crush against the wall. Aderbal tried to shout, but was filled only with pain and he had no breath. His eyes began to see red and the last thing he remembered was collapsing amid a forest of trampling feet.

  When the doors opened a crack, Hamilcar’s men wasted no time. They lowered their shoulders against their shields and pushed. The mighty doors burst open under the weight of the 4,000, and Hamilcar led his grimly determined, angry men inside the deceitful city.

  Hamilcar himself fought in the front rank of the leading thousand. The soldiers within sight of his billowing scarlet helmet plume and flowing cloak took heart and killed with enthusiasm. With his sword, Hamilcar hacked indiscriminately any man that appeared before him. His men swept the thoroughfare clean of enemy troops. Those who begged for mercy received none. The Carthaginians rushed up the steps onto the walls and guard towers and slaughtered the helpless archers where they stood.

  In a few short moments, the battle was over. The Carthaginians pursued survivors down the narrow streets, and Hamilcar listened with pleasure to the distant screams of the Thermaeians when they were caught.

  Silence once again fell over the city but for the pitiful cries of the wounded. The Carthaginians lit torches and sought them out, showing the enemy wounded no mercy when they found them. Hamilcar’s face and armor were smeared with blood. His soldiers gathered around him in awe. The cheers of the victorious began slowly and then rose to a mighty crescendo. Hamilcar silenced them, and went to examine the dead of Aderbal’s command. There were countless hundreds of them.

  “Where is the man?” he bellowed into the sweat-streaked faces of a cluster of Aderbal’s surviving soldiers. The soldiers cowered in fear. “Where is he?” He grabbed the nearest man by the collar and flung him like a soiled tunic where he landed in the street among a mass of his dead fellows.

  One of the men found the courage to speak. “He is there,” he said, pointing to a spot near where his companion had landed among the dead.

  Hamilcar walked over and saw the dead Aderbal. He turned his body onto its back with his foot. He had nothing but contempt for the glory-seeking fool. He was glad he was dead, but he wished he had had the opportunity to kill him himself. For his father’s sake, he would have the body sent back to Carthage. The rest of the men would be dumped in a hole outside the city, in disgrace.

  His thoughts turned to the gatekeeper. They found him the next day hiding in the dungeon under the palace. The Carthaginians kept him there under lock and key until they could prepare crucifixes outside the city along the Panormus road. The new garrison of Carthaginian troops watched him hanging there for three days until he finally succumbed alongside the officers of Aderbal’s thousand.

  Hamilcar had his victory. He left a garrison and went back to his camp at Macella with a thousand men fewer than when he had left. A few days later, not wanting to be caught with his army divided, he abandoned the camp and joined the siege of Segesta. There he would await the Roman response.

  Chapter 20

  As the two lines of ships surged towards each other, the captain of the Roman flagship, occupying the center of the ten-ship line, regarded the enemy with a feeling of confusion. They were moving so slowly. But why?

  The urgency of the rowing cadence of his own ship, hammered out by the time-beater below, accompanied by the frenetic splash of the oars was mocked by the implacable, steady advance of the enemy. He wondered if his own anxiety heightened his impression of the enemy’s competence.

  Perhaps.

  But there was more to it than that. The plash of the oars was a sound, which during peaceful times set his spirit to soaring. Now, he was filled with dread as he realized that the sound that filled his ears was not the calm, sonorous music of oars, but something more akin to the desperate thrashing of a drowning man. As he peered first one way and then the other from the foredeck of his flagship, he saw that not only did the oars of his own ship beat unevenly, but those of the rest of his fleet were equally ragged. They rose and fell individually or in mere clusters of cohesion in an ugly random flogging of the water.

  Furthermore, the line of his fleet was uneven and becoming more so with each clumsy beat of the oars. He could clearly see that more than a few of his ships were not running parallel and would eventually foul in one another’s oars given enough time. Where the spaces between ships narrowed in some places, they widened in others.

  His feeling of impending doom grew as he realized that that was precisely what the enemy was doing—giving his untried fleet the rope to hang itself. The closer they approached, the wider became the gaps between his ships. He tried flagging his captains. But the enemy quinqueremes were bearing down, the cat-eyes painted on their prows glared across the waterline with a more disarming menace than he thought possible. The enemy oars rose and fell in perfect, hypnotic unison.

  Now was the vital moment. He called down to the rowing officer. He called for a spurt and a hard left.

  “Prepare to ram!”

  The time-beater hammered the cadence, thirty strokes a minute. The rowing officer shouted his orders. Enemy ships approached on each side of the captain, the oar-shearing horns towering above him, so close he felt he could touch them.

  “Hard left! Hard left!” he shouted.

  Nothing happened. When the officer shouted his orders and the time-beater changed his cadence, all rowing had ceased.

  Just for an instant — but, by the gods, rowing had ceased!

  He watched with rising horror as the enemy ship to his left, the one he had intended to ram, began to backwater on the nearside while quick-rowing on the far. Its bow turned sharply towards him, the cat-eyes seeming to burn with hatred. He braced himself, but the shuddering crack of the enemy ram knocked him from his feet and threw him helplessly across the deck of his stricken ship.

  Scipio stared in dumbfounded silence at the horizon. He could not bear even to look at his fleet. The attack was a complete disast
er.

  “I count no survivors,” the plain-speaking Syracusan admiral, Diokles, said. “I have scored all ten ships sunk, with none of the enemy taken in return.”

  The two opposing fleets—one Roman, the other Syracusan—sorted themselves out sluggishly, like two sparring gladiators lifting themselves from the ground where they had fallen. The Syracusan ships made a wide circle around the little Roman fleet, rowing back to their starting positions. The Roman ships were all in a jumble in the center of the harbor, bows pointing in every direction. All rams had been removed prior to the start of the mock battle, so no actual damage had been done—save to the pride of the Roman crews.

  “What kind of tactics were those?” Scipio demanded. His impulse was to cry foul. How could his entire fleet have been sunk to the loss of none of the enemy except by a ruse of some sort?

  “Nothing more than the same tactics you will find the Carthaginians employing against you,” Diokles said, irritably. “In fact, this was the simplest of attacks, I’m afraid.”

  “The crews just require more training, Consul,” King Hiero said. Up until this point, he had remained diplomatically silent. Standing beside him, Archimedes remained lost in thought. “Given time, they will master the required tactics.”

  “Time I do not have!” Scipio snapped.

  The four men stood on the terrace of Hiero’s palace overlooking the Great Harbor of Syracuse. Since Scipio had arrived with his twenty ships, the entire area surrounding the harbor had been cordoned off as the training of the Roman fleet was carried out with the utmost secrecy. While the first ten ships had engaged Hiero’s fleet in mock battle, the other ten practiced rowing in unison and executing simple fleet maneuvers. Now, they would switch places and the second ten would engage Hiero’s ships.

  Scipio did not know if he even wanted to watch the battle, whose outcome, he felt, was assured. He had witnessed the second ten attempts to form “line abreast” from “line astern” and if the results had not been so disheartening, he might have fallen over from laughing.

  It had been his idea to see his men in action against a trained fleet. He needed to know what lay in store for him when he met the Carthaginians. Now, he almost wished for a return to ignorance. For how could he lead this fleet into action knowing he was sending it to its death?

  The cheers of the proud workmen in Ostia now mocked him.

  “Your ships are slow,” Diokles said.

  Scipio saw Hiero wince.

  “Please, King, let your man speak,” he said. “I must know the truth, painful as it is. It is why I came here.”

  Hiero closed his eyes and nodded. Diokles continued.

  “As I understand it, your fleet entered the water less than sixty days from the tree,” he said. “It is a magnificent feat, Consul, a truly marvelous example of the famous Roman efficiency. But as a consequence, your ships are constructed of green timber, making them heavy and slow.”

  “That was unavoidable,” Scipio said.

  “I noticed the sluggishness of the quick-rowing,” Archimedes agreed, the first words he had uttered all day. “A problem not accounted for by the splashing about of the oars.”

  “Indeed!” Diokles said. “Even a “beaten together” crew could not compete with the speed of the Carthaginians in these ships.”

  Scipio raised his hands. “Yes, yes,” he said. “The problems are quite clear, gentlemen. I suggest we now try to work out solutions. The ships are slow and the crews inexperienced. Now, how do we overcome these deficiencies?”

  “What is worse,” Diokles said, “is that while our men are experienced seamen, they are not Carthaginians, who are the best in the world. I don’t see these men putting a ram to a single ship of the enemy, I’m afraid. I would not take them into battle anytime soon, Consul.”

  “But I am taking them into battle,” Scipio said in anger. “I am asking for solutions, admiral. I need answers!”

  “That is my answer, Consul. My answer is that there is no solution,” Diokles snapped. “Not from what I have seen here today.”

  “Well, the speed issue can be solved, at least partially, by stripping the ships of all unnecessary crew and marines,” Hiero said hopefully. “Can it not? What say you, Archimedes? You have been awfully silent on the matter.”

  “The speed of these ships is a lost cause,” Archimedes said.

  Scipio threw up his hands and began pacing in frustration. He was surrounded by defeatists who tremble at difficult tasks! No wonder these men were at the beck and call of Rome and not the other way around.

  “But surely, Archimedes, you have an idea!” Hiero put his arm around Scipio’s shoulders, guiding him back to the group.

  “You have not allowed me to finish,” Archimedes said sternly.

  “Well, out with it then, young man!” Scipio said, although, truth be told, he had already judged the man too young to be of much use to him. Hiero seemed to defer to him in all things, though, so he would listen, but without expectations.

  “You are thinking in the wrong direction,” Archimedes said. “The idea is not to overcome your deficiencies…” Archimedes paused, staring at a spot somewhere above Scipio’s head. “Not to overcome them,” he went on thoughtfully, in a quiet voice, “but to embrace them.” A smile began to spread over his face. “Yes…” he said, and abruptly he turned and began running across the terrace towards the palace.

  Scipio threw up his hands again. “Where is he going?” he asked.

  “I need some time in my workshop,” Archimedes shouted, without looking back, and disappeared into the palace.

  “Any other ideas, King?” Scipio asked.

  “Ah, we need but one idea, Consul,” Hiero said, smiling. “And Archimedes has it!”

  After the fiasco of the ramming exercises, practice at boarding tactics went much better than expected. The rowers of the twenty Roman ships showed some improvement over the three-day period of their training in Syracuse. They proved to be at least capable of rowing to within grappling distance of the enemy, although not often without being rammed first.

  The marines on board the ships initially had some difficulty making the leap onto the enemy deck, especially under mock fire of blunt javelins. But soon all eight-hundred of the marines of Scipio’s little fleet proved reasonably adept at boarding. Once on the enemy ship, the advantage belonged to Rome as the naval battle was transformed into a battle of sword and shield where the Roman soldiers were unmatched.

  But the Roman ships were still falling under the waves of Diokles’ scoring tablet with depressing regularity. Still, when Scipio finally left for Messana with seventeen of his ships — leaving three behind for further training at Archimedes’ request — he did so buoyed by the fleet’s improving performance.

  Diokles thought the consul’s spirits unreasonably high.

  “He greedily seized upon his men’s slight improvement as though they had suddenly become the equals of the Carthaginians,” he told Hiero after the consul had left, shaking his head.

  Diokles had advised him to use boarding tactics only should he encounter the enemy, but Scipio was no longer listening to anyone. When Hiero urged him to await Archimedes’ reemergence from his workshop into which he had disappeared three days ago, Scipio had stalked away with a dismissive wave of his hand. Claiming he needed to make preparations for the arrival of the rest of the fleet, he sailed away to Messana at the head of his seventeen ships.

  “I don’t suppose we will ever see them again,” Diokles said.

  “Well, I will go down to Archimedes’ workshop and see if we can’t save the Roman fleet yet,” said Hiero.

  “We must save it from the Romans!” Diokles called after him.

  Archimedes’ workshop was remarkably neat and tidy; very different from the last time Hiero had visited. On the far wall was a worktable upon which were laid neat rows of tools. A canvas shroud covered some awkwardly jutting object on the table. Opposite was a desk stacked with oversized flat parchments, with scrolls tuc
ked away in the small niches of a wooden cabinet. The man himself was slumped over an additional table, working by the light of a flickering lamp.

  “Ah, Hiero!” Archimedes cried. “Come in! Come in!” He laid the object of his concentration down on the table and stood to greet the king, rubbing his eyes at the light that flooded the room as he entered.

  At first, Hiero was puzzled as he thought he had glimpsed some kind of puppet on the table — strings and appendages that fell limp when Archimedes put the object aside. Hiero dared not pry. One day not too long ago, he had been startled to realize that in the back of his mind he was actually afraid of Archimedes. He expected to some day enter the workshop to find that the man had gone mad.

  “See what I have done, Hiero!” Archimedes cried in triumph. “You have come at the perfect time. You will be the first to see my device. Where is the consul?” Archimedes turned his head left and right and craned his neck to look towards the open door behind the king.

  “The consul has gone to Messana,” Hiero said.

  “He left me three ships, though, did he not?” Archimedes asked, his eyes growing wide.

  “Yes, he left you three of his ships and crews. He did not ask why. But I do: Why do you need the three ships?”

  “Ah! That is in case I destroy two of them, I will still have one to work with,” Archimedes said. “Here! Come, look!”

  He led Hiero to his worktable and showed him his device. With relief, Hiero saw that it was not a puppet but a working scale model of some sort of mechanism.

  “What in Hades is that thing?” Hiero asked.

  “Behold! The ‘equalizer’,” Archimedes announced proudly. It was unusual for him to name a device except as it perfectly described its function. This was different, so Hiero felt that he must have great hopes for the thing. He held the object upright on the tabletop, and untangled its string. He pulled the string and moved what looked like a miniature boarding bridge up and down. The string went through a tiny pulley at the top of a long pole. “This will make the Roman seafarer’s the equal of the Carthaginians.” He grinned as he repeatedly raised and lowered the bridge.