They lifted Juba into the wagon with the other wounded. The floor had been lined with a sheet of canvas, now almost entirely covered with blood. Not all of the wounded would make it very far; he could see that at a glance.
Gauda was about to leave him. Juba grasped his hand. Gauda leaned close over him.
“I killed the Celt,” Juba said.
Gauda nodded, unsurprised.
“A man can only die once,” he said after thinking it over for a moment, and then let go of Juba’s hand.
Part III
Captains of Repute
Chapter 29
Hannibal stood unflinching amid the laughter. Dressed in full military regalia, helmet tucked regally under one arm, he held his head high, trying to mask his contempt. The Council would not see him cower. He would not beg for favors. He stared at a spot beyond their ugly, wizened faces. He knew if he caught any man’s eye, he would scowl with hatred.
“Boarding bridges?” the contemptible Adonibaal shouted out in an infuriatingly exaggerated tone of disbelief. “A Carthaginian fleet of one-hundred-thirty ships is defeated by a few boarding bridges?”
“Scandalous!” came the cry of another of his evil faction.
Its power without bounds, the One Hundred was a fickle, murderous body. Hannibal knew he still had the residual support of Boodes’ men. Even those he did not know by sight he could pick out of the hundred by their dour expressions. They did not laugh and cry out, it was true. But neither did they forcefully counter the mob who wanted the general nailed to a cross. Without Boodes, their support was fragile. Hannibal was certain that it would soon fade away altogether.
“It is how the Romans compensate for their inexperienced crews. Because of these boarding bridges they are able to avoid our rams and bring their men quickly onto our ships, in most cases, outnumbering us—”
“So you have told us,” Adonibaal interrupted. “Do we not have the greatest fleet in the world? The ablest seamen? The most powerful ships?”
“The Romans have ships just as ours,” Hannibal said calmly and without expression.
“And are they manned by Carthaginian crews, then?” Adonibaal glared at the general. Hannibal, refusing to meet his fiery gaze, said nothing. “Well, are they?” Adonibaal asked, straining forward, his voice rising in pitch.
“No, they are not,” Hannibal relented.
“And are they commanded by Carthaginian officers?”
“Of course not.”
Adonibaal stood and looked around the gathering as if he had just won a great rhetorical victory. “And yet the Romans can overcome these deficiencies through the use of a simple boarding bridge?” His face wore a hateful, puzzled grin.
“That is exactly—”
“Silence!” Adonibaal shouted, turning on the general. “You have had your say about these boarding bridges—and I have heard enough of them! What I am proposing is nothing out of the ordinary, General, but only what is expected of any competent Carthaginian naval commander.”
Hannibal made no reply. He went back to staring at a spot above and beyond Adonibaal’s head. Not a sound rose from the Boodes men. He would not look them in the eye, either, if he could help it. His heart was black with hatred for all of them.
Adonibaal continued to look out across the gathering, enjoying his moment. Bodashtart, the suffete who oversaw the body, stood abruptly. His long gray beard made him look like a sage, though Hannibal knew there were no sages within miles of this corrupt body.
“The councilman should make his point,” Bodashtart warned. He sat back down, fingering his gavel.
“My point!” Adonibaal blustered. “My point! My point is that now that the general knows what this weapon is, perhaps he should devise tactics to defeat it—not use it as an excuse for his own incompetence.”
“Hear! Hear!” Voices rose in unison and the chamber erupted in clapping and stamping of feet. Half of it, anyway. The Boodes men sat silently, arms folded across their chests. A shiver ran down Hannibal’s spine when he realized that they were all that saved him from certain death.
He tried to block out the noise. He felt he had entered a madhouse. Throughout Carthage, there was even talk of reinstating Hanno. Hannibal had thought it a joke at first, but there was a serious effort afoot. The man seemed to shadow him. As Hannibal’s star faded, Hanno’s rose, and vice versa. Who could command under these conditions?
If the Council saw events unfold in Sicily as Hannibal did, perhaps it would behave differently. He had begun to suspect Hamilcar of over-caution, largely dictated, Hannibal supposed, by his fear of the Council. After a promising start, he had accomplished little against a single Roman army. Yet it was Hannibal who stood under the scrutiny of the withered old fools. It was maddening.
Throughout the remainder of the inquest, Hannibal said little. He was fully prepared to allow matters to lie as they fell, and when he was finally dismissed, he honestly did not care what would be the outcome of their noisy deliberations.
The next morning the sun was already high in the sky when his eyelids finally fluttered open. He rose with a start before remembering that he was at home and not at his headquarters in Panormus. He laid his head back. His rest had been black and joyless, the sleep of a truly exhausted man, and it was his impulse to resume it, to sleep the day away if he could.
But he could not.
He rose, bathed and dined with his wife, Valeria, and youngest son, Hannibal, a newly minted officer in the army, serving in Libya. The lad’s skin was brown from the sun. Valeria once again urged Hannibal the elder to retire and embark on his political career in the city, as he had long promised.
“It is your time,” she said. “Let someone else run the war for a change.”
“Mother,” Hannibal the younger said. “Please—”
Hannibal held up his hand. “It is fine,” he said. “Your mother only wants what is best—and I daresay this time she is right. I should resign. I may have no choice.” He saw a smile spread across Valeria’s face, and added quickly, “But I cannot.”
Her smile vanished. “But after Acragas—” she began.
“The Romans are campaigning in Sardinia even as we speak, Valeria,” Hannibal said. Hannibal the younger looked up with interest. “If I am reinstated, I must take the fleet there and destroy them.”
“They are going after the naval bases that threaten the Italian coast,” the young Hannibal said.
Hannibal smiled and nodded. The boy had a promising career. “And how is the frontier these days?”
“The Numidians are unhappy,” the young officer said.
Hannibal rolled his eyes. What else was new? “You think Numidians are troublesome? You should try commanding Celts.”
A servant appeared at Hannibal’s shoulder and whispered into his ear. Boodes men had arrived.
“Men from the Council are here.”
He excused himself and met them in the andron where they sat on couches placed along the walls.
“You are being reinstated,” one of the men told him. These three were the most affable of Boodes’ men, his strongest supporters. “You are taking back with you one-hundred-twenty more ships, in addition to the eighty already in the fleet.”
“More are being built.”
“The Council expects this new Roman fleet to be destroyed.”
“The Romans attack Corsica and Sardinia now. We suspect they will follow with another attempt on Lipara. If unchecked, we think they will attack Africa.”
Hannibal started. “Africa?”
“We have it on good authority. First, they put an end to our raids on Italy. Then, they think they can drive our armies from Sicily by invading Africa. That is why we must destroy their fleet.”
“Boarding bridges or no.”
“Crews have been recruited from Aspis and Hadrumetum. Not as experienced as the ones…umm…the ones that were lost.”
“Marines should be taken from your army. We assume you will be manning them similarly to the
Romans?”
“The Romans put more than one hundred soldiers on each of their ships,” Hannibal said. “I cannot put half of my army on the fleet.”
“Then you will have to get by however you see fit. The Council has approved no more soldiers for army or fleet.”
Hannibal sighed. He was used to the Council’s impossible expectations. Always the demands without the resources to back them up. He could imagine the wailing he would hear from Hamilcar if he tried to remove twenty-thousand men from his army. It was an impossible task.
To be reinstated to his command had at first seemed an agreeable outcome. Upon further reflection…
“There is one more thing,” one of the men added. The three of them glanced at one another uncomfortably.
“What?” Hannibal asked. No oars for the ships? Nothing would surprise him.
“The Council has ordered that some our foremost naval officers accompany you back to Sicily.”
The man who had spoken looked away. The other two did not meet Hannibal’s gaze as he looked from one to the other of them. This did surprise him. He felt his face become hot, could feel it reddening. He clenched his teeth and said nothing.
“Our most celebrated commanders,” one of the others explained. “You should not be offended.”
“Certainly, captains of repute, all,” the third said.
“Who?” Hannibal asked.
“Bostar, Adherbal, and…”
“And Carthalo.”
“In an advisory capacity only. You surely understand.”
Hannibal thought for a moment. Bostar, the aging sea captain. Adherbal, one of the new golden boys of the Council. That had a Hanno-esque ring to it that troubled him. Carthalo he had never heard of. That also troubled him.
“Bostar is an honorable man,” Hannibal said with a sigh, resigned to his fate.
“Indeed he is,” one of the Boodes men said with a smile.
“And the others, as well,” added a second.
When they had concluded their business, the men stood to leave. The Boodes men paused and looked at one another uncertainly. Finally, one of them spoke up.
“Be careful of these men, General. It was all we could do—”
Hannibal held up his hand, cutting the man off. Enemies aplenty, Boodes! It was practically the last thing he had ever said to his friend. He did not need reminding.
He rested for several more days while the fleet was outfitted and crews assembled. He said his good-byes to his family and made his way down to the war harbor. It was bristling with two hundred quinqueremes, a stirring sight for an old warhorse like Hannibal Gisgo. There he met the naval officers, the captains of repute. They chatted amiably, like old friends. But when Hannibal boarded his flagship for the journey back to Panormus, he felt like a condemned man.
Chapter 30
The first time Juba heard of the Roman weapon, it had seemed plausible and ordinary. “A boarding bridge,” the man had called it. Along with the rest of the marines on board the ship, Juba had shrugged his shoulders. “So what?” But when he began describing the spike and offering his impressions — that was when the new recruits lost hold of the thing. Rumors spread quickly.
“The Romans can call down a giant raven. It stalks Carthaginian ships at sea and tears them apart with its beak.”
The veterans who could not restrain themselves snickered behind their hands. Others leaned forward breathlessly, urging the recruits on.
These recruits were mainly lowborn Sicilians and the veterans preyed on them mercilessly. After Mylae, few in the army would volunteer for marine duty and the army commanders jealously clung to their soldiers, offering little. Juba’s ship was manned by only thirty marines. Most of them had never wielded a weapon.
“I have heard that the Romans have all sorts of strange devices: grappling hooks that lift entire ships out of the water.”
“Tell us more of this raven,” one of the veterans said. The recruits looked on wide-eyed. For them, it was one horror after another. Clustered together amidships, they sat on the bench that lined the gunwale. Some leaned far forward to peer at the speakers; others knelt on the heaving deck to get a better angle. A dagger sheathed at the belt of one of the recruits was lifted without him even noticing. The new men’s belongings were a rapidly vanishing commodity.
The recruits began to speak again of the raven, recounting what they had heard. But one of the veterans quieted them. He looked into their eyes with an expression of awestruck wonder.
“Beyond Sardinia,” he began, “the sea is full of floating stones. Great boulders that thrash about in the waves, crushing any ship that encounters them.”
The remark hung in silence for a heartbeat. Then one of the veterans burst out laughing. The recruits looked at him in anger, confusion, and bewilderment. The sheer variety of reactions caused more of the veterans to double over in laughter.
Juba did not share in the merriment. He was neither veteran nor recruit. Most of the men were afraid of him because of his taciturn manner and the ugly scar on his face, a jagged white welt that started on his forehead, divided his eyebrow and continued down his cheek. That he had not lost his eye to the Iberian falcata was a miracle little appreciated by his fellow marines. When they also noticed that one of his ears was gone, they assumed that the Carthaginians had sunk so low as to begin recruiting marines from the ranks of the condemned. Often speaking in his own strange tongue, Juba only heightened the men’s suspicion of him.
He was not interested in forming bonds with his shipmates, for he knew he was only going to be with the fleet long enough to kill Hannibal Gisgo.
They were bound for Sardinia, out of the sight of land and under full sail for the two-day journey. It was the farthest most of the men had ever traveled out to sea and while the new recruits could be frightened by tales of monsters and strange killing machines, Juba knew from his time training in Panormus that the veterans feared the Romans with equal intensity.
Under the command of Hannibal Gisgo, the eighty-ship fleet sailed for its new base at Sulci, an island city in the southwest of Sardinia. From there, it would seek out the Romans operating in those waters. The rest of the undermanned fleet remained at Panormus.
The flagship’s sail had been dyed red, so it was easy to spot at the head of the column. Hannibal’s ship. There was a little chop on the water, a favorable wind filled the sails, and the ships rode the waves gracefully. Sunshine was harsh, unhindered by clouds. Juba could feel the heat on his head and shoulders. The deckhouse, the only refuge from the sun on the main deck, was full of officers. A large contingent of their guards hovered outside, perhaps a couple dozen of them in all. They were Africans and from the time they had come on board, they kept to themselves, never mingling with marines or crew.
Juba had noticed an unusually large number of high-ranking officers accompanying the small fleet, three of them on his ship alone. One was an old man, another quite young, and even though Hannibal commanded the fleet, Juba could discern no distinctions in rank. Back in Panormus, the officers had spoken with Hannibal easily, with a familiarity not possible between junior and senior officers. In Hannibal’s absence, the three men conferred together often. Juba did not know what it meant, except that, perhaps, with so many generals on hand, the Sardinian fleet would soon meet the Romans in battle. Even though he doubted their prospects for success in any encounter, he did not care. Once they landed at Sulci, he truly did not believe he would ever leave it again.
The day after the fleet’s arrival at Sulci, three Romans rowed ashore in a small open boat. They wore simple tunics, sported beards of several days’ growth and were very thin. They clambered out of their boat and prostrated themselves before the first Carthaginian they could find.
“They are calling themselves deserters,” Hannibal Gisgo said.
“And what tales do they tell?” Carthalo asked. He was the youngest of the three. He had dark eyes, almost black. Hannibal had never heard the man speak without at best a sarc
astic tone.
“You believe them?” Hannibal asked.
“We did not talk to them.” Carthalo looked inquiringly at his companions, a darkly humorous look. His manner made Hannibal clench his fists. This was one of Carthage’s great captains? He had more of the bearing of a city-bred aristocrat. The man could stand a good flogging. Adherbal merely shrugged. He at least was of respectable age. Bostar alone was worthy of respect.
“Let’s hear what they had to say,” Bostar said.
Hannibal swallowed hard as the three officers stared at him from the shadows. They sat in comfortable chairs in a corner of the palace’s main reception room. Torches flickered on the walls, reflecting off shiny surfaces of floor and pillars, the room only dimly lit. After his audience with the deserters and his own lieutenants, Hannibal had approached them through a forest of ornate marble columns. He knew they were back there the whole time, and he knew they could hear every word. They made him nervous, for they constantly watched him judiciously. Their own personal guards were many, lining the walls nearby. Carthalo sat with legs crossed, elbows on the backrest, drinking from a silver goblet. His eyes never left Hannibal’s, even when he raised his cup to his face.
“The legions have overrun Corsica,” Hannibal began, “and now threaten northern Sardinia.”
Carthalo leaned forward in his chair and spoke in his mocking tone. “We don’t need deserters to tell us this.”
“And the Roman fleet,” Hannibal continued unabated, “is working its way down the coast of eastern Sardinia—”
“We know this,” Carthalo said. “Why do you think we have come here?”
Bostar held up a hand. “Let him continue,” he said.
Hannibal bowed to the old man. “Down the eastern coast of Sardinia” — Carthalo sat back in his chair with a loud sigh. Hannibal raised his voice — “until it reaches the southern extremity from where it will embark for Africa.”
All three of the men’s heads turned with interest. Perhaps they had not heard, after all. They were constantly conferring with one another, speaking in low tones. They had probably heard nothing, Hannibal decided. He was not certain how much interest they had in Romans and deserters; that did not seem to be the focus of their thoughts, in any case.
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