The War God's Men

by David Ross Erickson

  “Africa?” Carthalo said with a start.

  “It is an invasion fleet,” Hannibal said. “According to the deserters.”

  “It is as we thought,” Adherbal said.

  Carthalo peered at Hannibal with his black eyes. “You will, of course, attack it,” he said. His demanding tone made his statement sound like an order.

  “Their fleet is over one-hundred ships—”

  “You will attack it!” Carthalo’s voice began to rise.

  “—and we have only the word of deserters!” Hannibal shouted. The guards along the walls and the servants quietly tending their business looked up at the outburst. Hannibal’s patience was coming to an end with this one, this Carthalo. He immediately began thinking of a way that he might get this boy killed.

  Adherbal and Bostar stared at Hannibal in silence. His outburst seemed to hang awkwardly in the air, condemning him. Carthalo smiled slyly, sat back again and crossed his legs.

  “If you do not accept the word of these Roman pigs, General, then how do you propose finding the truth? Surely, you will not allow the enemy fleet to pass through our waters unchallenged? Do Carthaginians now cower from Romans at sea?”

  “I merely suggest—” Hannibal began, but he was not allowed to continue.

  “You will launch your fleet, general,” Adherbal said. “You can call it a reconnaissance in force, if that makes you feel better.”

  By the gods, they are treating me as if I were some sort of Hanno! Hannibal thought. It was intolerable. Was it not he who had brought the Roman fleet to him for battle? Was he to blame for their damnable boarding bridges? How could he have known?

  “You should not underestimate the Roman skill with their boarding bridges,” Hannibal said, trying to remain calm, “the killing power of their marines. I have seen them in action—”

  “And perhaps that is to our detriment,” Adherbal said.

  “There is no place for cowards on a Carthaginian fleet,” Carthalo added, sneering.

  Hannibal looked from one to the other of them, hardly able to believe his senses. This is what his years of service had brought him, his tireless effort for the city he loved: accused of cowardice by men whose skin was as soft and white as that of a lady’s.

  Chapter 31

  The morning dawned under a heavy cloak of fog. Battle ready, Hannibal took his fleet under oar-power along the southern coast of Sardinia to meet the Romans. He had his misgivings, naturally, about the coming encounter, if there was to be one. Half of his mind was certain that he had embarked on a fool’s errand. The deserters had fed him enough information to ensure themselves of a warm meal. But the other half was equally certain that he would find the Romans at just the place where the deserters had said they would be at just the moment they had said they would be there. In either case, his report, written the previous evening, spelled out the culpability for the coming battle: Carthalo, Adherbal and Bostar. This was their battle. He detailed how they had forced his hand, how, had he been left alone, he would not have attacked except under the most favorable of conditions. If they missed the Romans or he was victorious in battle, the report could easily be destroyed. If some disaster befell them, his report would be sent to Carthage at once and he would use it to defend himself during the inevitable inquest. His foreboding was such that he felt the latter outcome unavoidable. He could not afford another Mylae, but he was not going to go down alone.

  He remembered his last encounter in the fog and hoped to avoid a similar outcome. He knew the fog favored the aggressor in any engagement. If he found the Romans, he would lay into them with all he had. If they found him, well, then, gods protect them.

  The gigantic shadowy bulk of Sardinia towered to his left. He could hear the quiet plash of oars. The other ships of his fleet, though he could see their oars moving, seemed to glide soundlessly over the water. He did not know which ship carried the venerable captains. Behind him, he could not see beyond the second ship, in any case, as the rest of the fleet was lost in the fog.

  They were not more than two hours outside of Sulci when the sudden clanging of bells and shouting voices destroyed the quiet of the advance.

  “Oh, what is it now?” Hannibal asked, rolling his eyes skyward. Perhaps a man shitting over a rail had fallen overboard. Weariness had crept into his very bones.

  Looking backward from the stern, he saw little, but the noise intensified. In an instant, he felt himself come alive.

  “Look!” his captain cried, pointing. Hannibal saw the signalman on the trailing ship, waving a flag — the flag of battle. “We are under attack!”

  “Turn about,” Hannibal said, not knowing how serious the threat was. Then he saw it. Coming out of the fog around a headland. A Roman ship, approaching at speed, its boarding bridge held upright, ready to pounce. More ships behind it, still more alongside. From beyond the veil of fog, he heard the crack of distant rams, the now-familiar crashing down of the spiked bridges, shouting, screaming, and the clashing of weapons. He saw that it was a full-scale attack. “Those deserters, the Roman pigs!” Hannibal shouted. “They have led us into an ambush!”

  The captain looked at him in confusion. “Sir?”

  “Attack speed, captain. Signalman, line abreast. Prepare to attack!”

  The great ship began to turn at once. At that instant, it occurred to the general that he had never gone into battle except from the deck of his septireme. But the King of Epirus was gone. He did not have 150 marines onboard, but fewer than fifty. He did not know how many Roman ships were out there, but, by the gods, he did not care. He was not running this time. This time he would fight to the death, to the last man. Other ships filed in alongside the flagship, rowing at speed. He paused to allow the line to form. He would not rush into battle haphazardly as before.

  “Prepare your marines to repel boarders,” he shouted to the marine commander. “To the bow.” The officer turned and began shouting orders. But before he could take a step, Hannibal grabbed him. “No Roman sets foot on this deck,” he shouted into the officer’s face. The man’s eyes were wide. His troops were mostly green recruits. “Do you understand me? We fight to the death! To the last man!” Hannibal flung him away, and he ran off to organize his men.

  Ships had peeled off to the left and right, finally forming a line with Hannibal at the center. In unison, the ships began rowing toward the largely unseen enemy.

  The attack, he soon saw, had come from two sides. The landward squadron had struck first, appearing from behind a headland where the Sardinian coast swept away to the north. The first surprise attacks had been with the ram. Hannibal could see several of his ships listing dangerously as the Roman attackers backed away from them. He also saw several bridges in place and men fighting across them.

  The seaward squadron had attacked next, fixing the Carthaginian fleet in a deadly vice. The new men were terrified when they saw the corvi plunging onto the decks of their victims. The Romans streamed across them, screaming. The Carthaginian ships that were not sunk outright were rapidly falling to capture by Roman boarding parties.

  Seemingly, of a single mind, Hannibal’s squadron suddenly began to veer away from the Roman ships.

  “What are you doing?” Hannibal cried. Other ships of his fleet — those on the far side of the Romans — were turning in crazy disarray. Even though Roman broadsides presented themselves to the Carthaginian rams, they turned away from the attack. “They are retreating! They are fleeing! On whose orders?” Hannibal looked around furiously.

  His own ship maneuvered to avoid the Romans as well.

  “Captain, you will attack!” Hannibal cried. But the captain said nothing. Hannibal pushed the smaller man aside and doing the same to the helmsman, grabbed the tiller. Before he could guide the ship back into the fight, he was seized. Men grasped his arms and dragged him away from the steering oar. He was forced onto his back. He felt a blade at his throat and stopped struggling.

  “You will hang for this,” he said to the captain. �
��You will all hang! I will see you on rows of crosses!”

  The captain did not say a word, and the men held him until they arrived back at Sulci. The men were convinced that the Roman fleet pursued them.

  Hardly slowing as they approached land, they docked with a crash, spilling men all over the deck. At once, marines scrambled to their feet, leapt off the ship and began streaming madly into the city. Oarsmen stormed up the stairs from below deck, filling the ship with terrified men running in all directions. Hannibal looked around him in confusion. Other ships had already docked and more rowed frantically into the harbor. It was the most disgraceful thing he had ever witnessed.

  He saw some soldiers standing on shore. He ran up to them.

  “Arrest these men!” he cried, vaguely indicating his fleeing crew. Most of them were long gone by now. “They are mutineers! Arrest them!”

  The soldiers made no move. They gazed at Hannibal as if he were speaking an unknown tongue.

  “Where are the deserters?” he demanded. “The Romans? The treacherous bastards! Where are they?”

  “The Romans are gone,” one of the dullard soldiers said, in a tone of mild amusement.

  “Escaped,” said another, leaning placidly on his spear.

  Men continued to stream past them. Hannibal looked down the shoreline and saw the three captains striding purposefully toward him, Carthalo in the lead. Their usual contingent of guards surrounded them.

  Hannibal drew his sword and rushed toward the man. The little bastard! He would give him cold steel!

  “Arrest this man!” Hannibal cried as he drew near. “Arrest them all. They have caused the destruction of my fleet!”

  The guards did not flinch.

  “Take him,” Carthalo said. The guards rushed forward, grabbing Hannibal’s arms just as he was about to strike the young captain. Someone forced the sword from his hand, and once again, he was forced to the ground.

  Carthalo gazed down at him. “In the name of Carthage, I place you under arrest for gross incompetence. I sentence you to death by crucifixion.”

  “The Romans are landing their legions!” Juba heard one of the men cry. He lifted himself from the deck where he had fallen. Amid the churning legs of panicked men, he scrambled to retrieve his javelin, which had been sent skidding across the deck. Jostled by fleeing marines and crew, he stood and looked back at the harbor entrance. There were no Roman ships, only Carthaginian. Quinqueremes filled the horizon as they flooded into the harbor, seeking the nearest landfall, their oars beating frantically. Juba did not know how many ships had been lost — fifty or more, if he had to guess — but it was clear that the survivors fled from phantoms. The rumor of Roman pursuit had begun almost at once and the men could not be disavowed of it. Now they scampered like rabbits.

  Juba leapt onto the dock. He heard a great crash, a ghastly cracking of timbers. He turned his head in time to see a ship barrel into another that had beached itself beyond the line of docks. The ship had neither slowed nor veered an inch. The force of the impact almost lifted it out of the water. It shuddered to a halt and men began spilling from it, jumping into the surf.

  Juba ran onto shore and stood like a rock amid the torrent of men streaming past him into the city. He looked around for the flagship, the ship of Hannibal Gisgo. He knew he would find it here, and not among the sunken and captured. Now was the time for Juba to take him, in the chaos of the disgraceful rout. He even began to think that he might be able to escape in the confusion, the first he had dared to entertain a thought of his own survival.

  Then he spotted him. He was hard to miss — the burly, dark man, his face enraged. Struggling against the tide of the rushing crowd, Juba started toward him. The general was arguing with some men; he seemed to spit at them in his awesome fury. For an instant, his overwhelming presence gave Juba pause. Confronting an anonymous Celt was one thing. But the commanding general of the entire Carthaginian war effort? That was quite another. Looking at the general’s face, Juba thought of the day in Acragas when he and Masinissa had made their report of the approach of the Romans. It seemed like a lifetime ago, and he wondered if the general remembered him. “We have drawn first blood…” He recalled his own words with embarrassment. Now, he would draw the last. If the general did not remember him, he would soon get a pointed reminder. Indeed, he would also remember Gervas. Juba would make sure of that. Thoughts flooded his mind as if he were a dying man. Javelin in hand, he reared back to make a throw.

  Suddenly, the general turned his back to Juba and drew his sword. With a start, the would-be assassin stayed his hand as he saw the three strange officers from his own ship approach. Without a moment’s hesitation, their guard disarmed the general and took him down. Juba blinked in confusion and a crowd began to gather, shouting curses at the general.

  The guards soon had Hannibal back on his feet. He bellowed wildly as they whisked him toward the city. Juba stood aside as they passed. He thought that, certainly, he had caught the general’s eye. He saw hatred and fear, but no recognition, and no realization that he had just gazed upon the man who short moments before had been going to kill him. In amazement, Juba watched them go by and then filed in behind the crowd and followed the group into the city.

  “Stone him!” Marines, soldiers, oarsmen and crewmen all cried in unison. “Stone him!” Townspeople watched from the side streets in disbelief. People shuttered themselves inside their homes, letting the murderous procession pass them by.

  Fear and loathing had taken hold of the entire gathering. Their bloodlust only grew as the guard paraded Hannibal through the streets and out the gate on the opposite side of the city. Hannibal shouted curses at the top of his lungs. His eyes bulged as he strained uselessly against his captors.

  Led by the three officers, the crowd stopped on a rocky hillside, scattered about with stone markers and clusters of pitched-roofed tombs. Many of the markers and low walls lay nearly concealed in the tall, dry grass like scavenger-picked bones. The necropolis was a place of death and execution. Three crosses stood empty on one side of the hill. A group of guards rushed up to them. Heretofore unseen, a flock of black birds rose and scattered with a loud beating of wings. The men lowered one of the crosses and forced the general to lie upon it, arms spread wide.

  The crowd shouted and cheered. Some threw stones. The guards held them back with their spears. Hannibal cried out, by turns furious and pleading. A shiver ran down Juba’s spine as he noticed the sneering expression on the young officer’s face. The other two, the ancient one and his companion, conferred together quietly while the general fumed and begged.

  “In the name of Carthage…” Juba heard the young officer shouting as he raised a hand, making some sort of pronouncement.

  Juba found himself recoiling in disgust, not only from the sneering hatred exhibited by the young officer but the calm detachment of the elders in the midst of such madness.

  For madness it undoubtedly was.

  Juba winced as the first nails were driven into the general’s hands. His curses became screams of pain and fear. The crowd grinned and stones continued to rain down on the condemned man. The guards’ faces grew serious and angry as they pushed at the surging crowd, threatening them. But above all the din was the hammering of the spikes and the screaming of the general. Juba clenched the shaft of his javelin until his knuckles turned white.

  Finally, the guards raised the cross upright. Screaming in pain, the general seemed not to even notice the stones that struck him on the head and face.

  “Stop!” A man in the crowd threw his hands up, cautioning the stone-throwers. “You might kill him. He will be up there for a day or more in his suffering.”

  “The bastard has it coming,” a stone-thrower said, and he opened his hand, letting the last of his stones fall by his side.

  Juba found himself breathing hard. He looked from the sneering officer and his devious companions to the merciless crowd and back again. He saw laughing faces; he saw hatred and evil. He saw cow
ardice. All of them, without exception, cowards, all.

  The general was now alone in his suffering, removed by a thousand miles of pain from the crowd that milled below him. He fell silent for a moment and then gasped, losing his breath. He tried to lift himself by his impaled hands and forearms and cried out with renewed passion, his face lifted skyward. At once, his mind a blank, Juba found himself holding his javelin aloft. He reared back and with all his might hurled the spear. It flew on a line like a bolt of lightning and struck the general in the center of his stomach. Juba could hear the muffled thunk where the spear point entered the timber upright, the force of Juba’s throw driving the missile all the way through the man’s body. A bright crimson stain spread on his tunic where the shaft protruded from him. The general was dead within a heartbeat. His chin dropped to his chest.

  A stunned silence descended over the crowd. Heads turned to see where the javelin had come from. The men nearest Juba turned and gazed at him murderously, their fists clenching. But when they saw Juba’s face, their expressions fell and they said nothing and made no move.

  Juba turned and began running. He had killed Hannibal Gisgo. The crowd parted for him and let him go.

  Chapter 32

  High above Panormus, Gauda and Juba sat their horses on a ridge and spied the surrounding landscape. The other members of the troop waited at the bottom of the hill. They remained mounted, their horses shuffling and snorting quietly, as the men spoke softly amongst themselves.

  Juba looked down at the nine men of his troop. He saw Hannon and Tabat smiling, sharing some humorous remarks. He felt as though he had been gone for ages. He was astonished to see that they were men now, Hannon and Tabat, boys no longer. Like the Eagles, he had trained them up from nothing, from sheepherders and wild boys of nomads. He had trained Gauda as well, the dour and fierce warrior, a born leader of men. After Masinissa had gone home, General Hamilcar had put Gauda in command of all the Numidians in the army. Juba had heard from his men that the news of Gauda’s ascension had been greeted by the thousands of Numidian horsemen with cheers that could be heard for miles.