‘Centurion,’ Ennius said, his voice quavering.
‘And then when he became praetor, general of the army, he put me in command of his personal troops, the Praetorian Guard. And then before he departed to the afterlife he chose me to look after you boys. There were so many Greeks teaching here that they started to call me strategos. The name stuck.’
Polybius cleared his throat. ‘It has an honourable pedigree. Think of the heroes of Thermopylae, of Marathon, of Alexander the Great and his generals, of Perseus and his Macedonian phalanx.’
The old man snorted. ‘When I am back in the village of my forefathers I am called centurion. That is what I will be called when I retire.’
‘You will only retire when the gods call you to Elysium, centurion. You were born a soldier, and you will die a soldier.’
Petraeus snorted again, but looked pleased. Polybius knew how to flatter him. And the centurion had not got where he was solely by brawn: he was a skilled tactician who could see Polybius’ unusual ability as a strategist, despite the posturing that always came before they entered the arena. ‘Enough of this,’ he said gruffly, as if on cue. ‘There is only one way to win a war, and that is to do what we Romans do best: killing at close quarters, with the spear, with the sword, with our bare hands. All this talk of strategy is making you soft. It is time we went below to help Brutus execute criminals.’
‘Ave, centurion.’ They all stood loosely to attention, waiting for him to bang his staff and lead the way. But before he could do so, Scipio advanced a few steps and stood in front of him, addressing him formally. ‘Gnaeus Petraeus Atinus, tomorrow I must go to the family tomb of the Scipiones on the Appian Way to honour my ancestors. From there I march three days down the coast to Liternum, to the tomb of my adoptive grandfather Publius Cornelius Scipio Africanus. You know that he chose to end his days and be buried away from Rome because he felt forsaken by the Senate, by those who were envious of his fame and refused to heed his advice. Now, fifteen years after his death, the consuls have finally allowed the full lustratio to be carried out at his tomb, to accord him the highest honour as a Roman.’
Petraeus snorted. ‘So they say. I do not trust the Senate. And Scipio Africanus will only rest easy once Carthage has been destroyed.’
Scipio reached into a bag he was carrying and took out a folded white garment with purple borders. ‘When my father Aemilius Paullus stood before my adoptive grandfather’s deathbed, Scipio Africanus told him that there was a place for you in his tomb, that you would hold the standard for him in the afterlife just as you did in this world. My family would be honoured if you would wear this toga praetexta and perform the lustratio at his tomb, the sacrifice of purification. As a centurio primipilus who has won the corona obsidionalis, you are allowed by law to perform the rite.’
The centurion stood stock-still, but Fabius could see that his lips were quivering with emotion. He gripped his staff hard, then held out his right hand stiffly, taking the toga. He cleared his throat. ‘Publius Cornelius Scipio Aemilianus, I accept this honour. I served your grandfather, in this world, and will do so in the next.’ He held the toga against his breastplate, then eyed Scipio. ‘Liternum is only an hour’s march from the Phlegraean Fields, where Aeneas visited the underworld. You know who lives there.’
There was silence, a sudden uneasy tension. The centurion banged his staff. ‘Come on, out with it, one of you. She’s just an old hag in a cave.’
‘The Sibyl,’ Polybius said quietly.
The centurion grunted. ‘Old hag she may be, but she speaks the words of Apollo in her riddles. Fifty years ago I went there with Scipio Africanus, when he was a boy like you and I was his bodyguard. The Sibyl foretold of a day when the god would reveal himself to another Scipio, on the Ides of March, 585 years ab urbe condita. That is four days from now, and on that day Scipio must await her in the cave.’
It was Scipio’s turn to stare. ‘You mean me?’
‘It was foretold.’ He paused. ‘One other will have been there before you, stopping off on his ride south towards Brundisium, he who bears the mark of the eagle.’
Scipio stared at him. ‘You mean Metellus?’
‘The Sibyl foretold it, of the one who would bear the mark of the sun, the symbol of the Scipiones, and the other the eagle. She said that you were to be two young warriors of Rome, and Metellus is the only one among you who bears such a mark.’
‘And what else did she foretell?’
‘In some way your future is bound up together, but in a way that only the Sibyl will tell.’
Scipio looked away pensively. His future was already bound up with Metellus through Julia, and he knew too well that he was the one who was going to lose out. Fabius knew that he would not want to travel all the way to the Phlegraean Fields to hear an old hag speak an obscure riddle that would be interpreted by some as evidence that he had no future with Julia, a fact that the Sibyl could easily have surmised from her network of spies in Rome, feeding her with information that she used to convince the gullible that she had some kind of clairvoyance. But then Fabius looked at the old centurion and remembered Polybius that morning, telling them that soldiers should be allowed their superstitions. Petraeus knew better than any of them that wars were won by strategy and tactics, not by divine oracles, but like many who had survived battle, he had come to believe that there was more to it than chance and skill, that luck was divinely bestowed. And for Scipio to visit the Sibyl would mean more than that to Petraeus; it would be part of a pilgrimage to honour the memory of the revered Africanus. It was Scipio who had invited Petraeus to Liternum, and now he was going to have to indulge him.
Ennius spoke up. ‘Can the rest of us come? To the tomb of Scipio Africanus, to the rite of purification?’
The centurion glared at him, and then sniffed exaggeratedly. The distinctive odour of elephant dung had been wafting over them from the window for some time now. ‘After what you’re about to do this evening for old Hannibal, there’ll be no chance of purification for you, Ennius, in this world or the next.’ His face cracked into a rare grin, and the others laughed, the tension eased. He put a hand on Ennius’ shoulder. ‘Your time will come. It will come for all of you. You will know your destiny soon enough. There is war in the air.’
A clanking sound of chains came up from the arena, the swoosh of whips and cries of pain as the prisoners were brought in. The centurion leaned his staff against his chest, held up his hands and examined them theatrically, his eyes gleaming. ‘But meanwhile there is work to do. Look, the blood on my hands from that slave this morning has dried. It’s time I got them wet again.’ He slapped Polybius on the shoulder, clasped the pommel of his sword and took up his staff again, banging it down. ‘Are we ready?’ he bellowed.
They all answered as one. ‘Parati sumus, centurion. We are ready.’
* * *
Four days later Fabius stood among the steaming fumeroles of the Phlegraean Fields near Neapolis, tasting the tang of sulphur and wishing he were in the fresh air a few miles away below Mount Vesuvius in the town of Pompeii, where he had cousins. He and Scipio had been accompanied from Rome by Gaius Paullus, who as a distant scion of the gens Cornelia had been sent to represent his family at the lustratio for Scipio Africanus; he was with them now, looking pale and exhausted. It had been rough going for him from the outset. The old centurion had made up for his show of sentiment on being invited by Scipio to Liternum by treating the trip south as an army route march, making them each carry a sack of rocks on their backs equivalent to a legionary’s pack. Gaius Paullus was only sixteen and small for his age and had suffered the most, with Petraeus hounding him mercilessly and frequently flicking his whip across the back of the boy’s legs. By the time they reached Liternum after three days and nights on the road, stopping only for the odd hour of sleep before Petraeus roused them again, the boy could barely stand. During the ceremony at the tomb Fabius and Scipio had wedged him between them to stop him from collapsing and dishonouring both hi
s family and Petraeus, who had been resplendent in toga praetexta as officiating priest in a ceremony to perpetuate the memory of a man he regarded as something akin to a god.
The route march had been bad enough, but it had been punctuated by an experience that was etched in Fabius’ memory. On the Appian Way a few miles outside Rome, beyond the family tomb of the Scipiones, they had come across a line of wooden crucifixes being set up on the edge of the road. There had been a slave revolt in a travertine quarry to the east of the city, and the culprits were paying the penalty. They had seen the progression of death by crucifixion as they marched alongside, from those nearest the city who had been hoisted up first to the ones being set up that day: from the grey dangling corpses to the men still struggling for breath, their eyes wide open with fear, no longer with the strength in their arms to hold their chests up and prevent themselves from drowning in their own fluids, their legs and the post below streaked with faeces and urine and blood.
Gaius Paullus had turned away and retched, and the old centurion had pounced on him, pulling him up by the collar of his tunic and snarling into his face. ‘You can fight all the wars you want in the dioramas and sandpits of the academy. But you will never fight a real war unless you learn to love the sight of death. Breathe it all in. Learn to relish it. Otherwise you may as well go back and join the spotty youths in the Forum learning oratory and social niceties. Give me a girl like Julia in my legion any day over any of them.’ He had dragged Gaius Paullus along to the front of the line of crucifixes, stripped him of his load and spoken with the centurion commanding the execution party, who had gladly handed over the hammer and nails and ropes to the boys to carry on with the job. They had spent the next several hours hoisting and nailing prisoners to the crosses, enduring their writhing attempts to break free and the screams of pain as they knocked the foot-long spikes through their wrists and feet. Fabius had been sickened and knew that Scipio felt the same too, but there was nothing they could do to ease the agony for the prisoners; many were muscular giants captured in the Macedonian wars who should have been recruited as mercenaries to fight for Rome instead of being wasted in the quarries – another failing of Roman policy that Scipio Africanus had railed against but which for now they could do nothing to change.
At the end, Scipio and Gaius Paullus had stood in front of Petraeus while he addressed them. ‘I want you to become tribunes whom I would serve under,’ he had said. ‘That’s what Scipio Africanus told me to make of the students in the academy. Make them or break them, he said. And if I break you, you’ll feel the pain and the shame for all your lives. So you’d better learn what I’m telling you now. One day you are going to have to order men to be executed, some of them superb warriors like these slaves, some of them men you have fought alongside and loved like brothers. You will have to be able to do it in front of their comrades, without flinching, and without mercy. Now get back to the road, pick up those sacks of rocks and march. You’ve got thirty seconds or you’ll feel the lick of my whip.’
* * *
Fabius followed Scipio and Gaius Paullus down the rocky path into the crater, followed by Petraeus. Somewhere ahead of them in the smoke lay the Sibyl’s cave, and near that the crack in the earth that was said to lead to the underworld. As they reached the bottom of the slope they passed fissures stained yellow that reeked of sulphur, just like Ennius’ concoction in the academy. The base of the crater was an expanse of glassy rock as flat as a lake, wreathed in smoke that swirled up and obscured the sun, making the way ahead seem dark and forbidding. At the edge of the crater the rock bulged up in forms that looked like half-finished giants, borne of the earth but trapped in the rock before they could fully emerge. Polybius had told Fabius how he had been high up the volcano in Sicily and seen bulbous shapes like these as they were being formed, solidified from rivers of molten rock. He had said that the Phlegraean Fields truly were an entrance to the underworld, a place where the rock they stood on was a mere crust over the fiery chaos within, but that it was an entrance to Hades only inasmuch as those who lingered too long near the smoke or slipped into the molten streams were certain to die. Out of earshot of Petraeus he had said that those who came here were deluded, people whose desperation to know the future or to meet the shade of a loved one had tricked them into seeing visions, their minds fogged by the fumes and by the intoxicating leaf that the servants of the Sibyl burned on her fire; it was a leaf that Polybius himself knew was not some special gift of the gods but had been shipped from India by way of Alexandria, along with the drug known as lachryma papaveris, poppy tears. It was said that the priests of the Sibyl gave out these drugs freely to any of those who came to see her, and that those who brought gold were given especially large doses and were the ones who kept coming back for more, some of them wealthy aristocrats who had moved their homes from Rome to Neapolis and nearby Cumae just to be close to the source of the drugs that had begun to consume their minds.
Fabius caught sight of human forms huddled behind the rocks, staring at them. These were not aristocrats but were people who had fallen away from society, emaciated forms with faces and hands blackened by the smoke. It was said that they included a sect of Jews who believed that one day their god would come to them in this place; most, though, were escaped slaves and other fugitives from the law, those at the end of their tether who had come to spend their final days here before the fumes overcame them, hoping for some kind of salvation. One of them scurried up now, a filthy wretch clothed only in a loincloth, his eyes glazed over as if drunk, gesticulating wildly and pointing down a line of rocks laid across the floor of the crater. Scipio tossed him a coin and he scurried away, and then stopped and looked back at Petraeus for confirmation. He nodded, pointing forward, and they turned and made their way along the line of rocks, their feet crunching on the glassy surface of the crater. Fabius could feel the heat underneath and was glad for the thickness of his sandals, but Gaius Paullus was hopping and grimacing, the leather of his sandals smouldering. After what seemed an age they came to the other side of the crater and a tumble of rock that had fallen from the rim, in the middle of which was a jagged black hole the size of a temple entrance; in front was a hearth, tended by two black-robed forms who disappeared among the rocks as soon as they came close.
They had reached the cave of the Sibyl. They made their way up a well-worn path towards the hearth, the rocks smoothed by the countless supplicants who had clambered this way before. A few paces from the hearth they stopped, smelling the sweet odour that rose from the embers, and stared into the yawning blackness beyond. ‘They say she’s three hundred generations old,’ Gaius Paullus whispered, staring in awe. ‘They say she was old before Aeneas stood here, and is now so shrunken and wizened that she hangs in a little cage in the darkness, fed and tended by her priests like a pet monkey.’
‘Be careful what you say,’ Petraeus growled. ‘The god Apollo himself will hear you, and mete out his punishment.’ He turned to Scipio. ‘Her attendants have seen you, and she knows you are here. You must go forward alone into the cave.’
Scipio gave Fabius a wry look, took a deep breath and strode forward, walking around the hearth and disappearing out of sight into the blackness beyond. For a few minutes there was silence, and Fabius tensed, hating to see Scipio go out of his sight. And then a strange noise issued from the cave, indiscernible, like the muffled sound of a priest’s incantation in the back cella of a temple. A few moments later Scipio reappeared, stumbling towards them, his face flushed and running with sweat. He passed the hearth and then turned back to peer at the cave, breathing heavily.
‘Did you see her?’ Gaius Paullus whispered, his voice tremulous.
‘I don’t know.’ Scipio’s voice was hoarse with the smoke, and he passed his hand over his face, leaning with the other on Fabius for support. ‘The fumes from the hearth were very strong, a sweetness that made me feel light-headed. It must be the weed that Polybius warned of. I’m not sure what I saw, but there might have been somethi
ng in the darkness, hanging there, and I felt an exhalation that wafted the leaves over the fire, making them crackle and burn. When that happened there was a voice, a deep voice but that of a woman, ancient and cackling. I nearly fainted when I heard it.’
‘Well,’ Gaius Paullus asked, his voice hushed, ‘what did she say?’
Scipio shook his head. ‘I’m not sure. It was a verse, a riddle. All that I heard was this: The eagle and the sun shall unite, and in their union shall lie the future of Rome.’
‘What on earth can that mean?’
Fabius led Scipio back down a few steps to where Petraeus had been waiting for them, and thought hard. ‘If the eagle means Metellus and the sun represents the Scipiones, then your joint destiny is to take Rome forward.’
‘Metellus in the east, Scipio in the west,’ Petraeus growled. ‘That’s what the Sibyl foretold when Scipio Africanus and I came here all those years ago. She said that one with the name Scipio would conquer Carthage and have the world at his feet.’
‘It cannot be me, then,’ Scipio said, pushing Fabius away, stumbling against the rocks and then standing without assistance, blinking in a shaft of sunlight that came through the smoke. ‘The Senate is too cautious to declare war, and Carthage will remain unfinished business.’
Total War Rome: Destroy Carthage Page 7