‘What of it?’ Scipio replied, still looking at the rams.
‘Do you know what Tophet means?’
‘I don’t speak Carthaginian.’
‘It means “roasting place”.’
‘Well?’
‘The sanctuary is used to cremate and bury dead children, but in the past was used as a place of sacrifice. It hasn’t been used for that purpose for generations now, not since before the war with Hannibal. But rumour has it that in times of great duress, a sacrifice would be offered to the god Ba’al Hammon, who supposedly resides on the twin peaks of the mountain to the east. When the morning sun rises above the mountain it casts a beam of light across the Tophet, and that’s when the sacrifice is meant to take place.’
‘I don’t think sacrifice can save them now. And that first shaft of light is when I will order the assault.’
Polybius took out a bronze tube about a foot long with discshaped crystals at either end, and peered through it in the direction of the smoke. ‘There are two priests in white robes mounting the stone platform in the centre of the sanctuary, each carrying a coiled chain and wearing what look like large gloves made of leather – elephant hide I shouldn’t wonder. And that strange structure that looks like a large kiln behind is the source of the smoke. There are slaves at the bottom working bellows, stoking a fire. If you ever wondered where Hasdrubal put the olive trees he had his men cut down from the surrounding fields, there’s your answer. Piles of it behind the kiln, clearly firewood. And there are men with sledge-hammers smashing the kiln, only it’s not a kiln at all. It’s something else entirely, concealed beneath.’
He passed the eyeglass to Fabius, who squinted down it, saw only a distorted blur and passed it back. They all stared at what was being revealed. It was fire-blackened and mottled on the surface from fire, but clearly made of bronze. As the men knocked away the final sections of clay the shape came into view. It was a gigantic squatting figure, the size of several elephants, human in form but of monstrous proportions. Its huge arms were raised palms upwards, and its bearded head was set back with the mouth open wide, large enough for a man to enter. They could see the smoke issuing from the mouth, and an occasional lick of flame from a fire below.
‘Extraordinary,’ Polybius muttered. ‘It’s mentioned by the historians, but nobody really believed it. Unless I’m mistaken, it’s meant to represent the Carthaginian god Ba’al Hammon.’ He peered through the eyeglass again. ‘Hasdrubal has just arrived, and is mounting the steps to the platform where the two priests are waiting. He’s got gloves on too.’
Fabius shaded his eyes to get a better view. He remembered the first time he had seen the Carthaginian general, when he and Scipio had made their reconnaissance into the city three years before; Hasdrubal had been wearing the distinctive lionskin over his armour then too. He saw Scipio glancing at the ships and the harbour, waiting for Ennius’ signal, then looking back at the Tophet. ‘Where’s the sacrificial animal? I thought they’d have eaten everything by now, rats and cockroaches included.’
Polybius put down his eyeglass again, and spoke with the detachment of a scholar. ‘Unless I’m mistaken, we are about to witness a Carthaginian child sacrifice.’
Scipio was aghast. ‘Jupiter above. What?’
‘Child sacrifice has a long history among the Semitic peoples of the east Mediterranean, the ancestors of the Carthaginians. The writings of the Israelites tell of how their ancient prophet Abraham offered up a boy called Isaac to their god.’
A drum began to beat, slowly, insistently, from somewhere inside the sanctuary. ‘The drumbeat was originally meant to drown out the screams of the victim,’ Polybius said. ‘But I doubt whether they’ll wish to do that this time. I think what we’re about to see is mainly for our benefit, so the more screams, the better.’
A boy in a white tunic, perhaps ten years old, came walking out into the sanctuary, then mounted the stone stairs towards the three men standing at the top. As he neared the platform, Hasdrubal beckoned him, and the boy leapt up and embraced him, clinging to the arms of the lionskin. Hasdrubal put him down gently, and held his hand. The boy could not know what was about to happen. Fabius’ stomach lurched as he realized the truth. The boy was Hasdrubal’s son.
The drumbeat slowed. The two priests suddenly pulled the boy off his feet, one taking the arms and the other the legs, quickly wrapping his wrists and ankles together with chains. Down below at the base of the bronze god the slaves hung on to the arms of the bellows, ready to compress them. Hasdrubal took the boy from the priests and held him in front of the gaping maw of the beast; the heat coming from within was already visible, shimmering in the air above. Fabius could see the boy’s head on one side of Hasdrubal, looking around frantically, sensing the horror that was about to befall him. For a moment Fabius felt for the man. Somewhere beneath that lionskin, beneath the rage, the cruelty, the self-destruction, was the utter despair of a father who knew that his son loved him, had felt his embrace, and yet he had been driven to carry out the unthinkable, the worst that war could make a man do.
Hasdrubal took a step forward, and tossed the boy into the beast’s mouth. There was a tumbling and clanking sound, magnified and echoing, as the priests let out the chains and the boy rolled down. A high pitched scream rent the air, and then a terrible shriek rose from somewhere behind the walls of the Tophet, the cry of his mother, followed by a wail of lamentation that seemed to ripple through the city. The bronze god erupted in a roar of fire, as if the god himself were awakening; a sheet of flame belched out and curled up high above. Down below, the slaves worked the giant bellows, the whips of the priests slashing into their backs. The smell of burned meat began to waft across the harbour. Then the drumbeat changed, faster now, and the slaves ceased their work. The two priests on the platform began to haul on the chains, link by link, keeping to either side of the beast’s mouth to avoid the scorching heat. They pulled out their ghastly burden, and Hasdrubal took it.
He turned, and Fabius could see the charred and shrivelled body of the boy, the legs and arms contracted and the mouth stretched open, caught in a scream. Hasdrubal raised the corpse towards the twin peaks of the mountain, towards Bou Kornine. But then he turned towards the harbour, raising the body of his son as high as he could.
Fabius stared in horror. Hasdrubal was not offering his sacrifice to the god. He was offering it to them.
Polybius put a hand on his Scipio’s arm. ‘He’s taunting us. He knows that no Roman who loves his son could stand this. He’s trying to make you order the attack before we are ready. Keep your nerve.’
‘Scipio Aemilianus,’ Hasdrubal bellowed, his voice carrying across the harbour, over the ranks of legionaries who had been watching him, transfixed. ‘Carthago delenda est.’
It was the cry of those in the Roman Senate who had sent Scipio here, words now used by a man who could have no purpose left in living. Carthago delenda est. Carthage must be destroyed.
A streak of sunlight burst through the twin peaks of the mountain and lit up the Tophet, then seared through the city as if it had been struck by a bolt of lightning. A moment later there was a dull thud from one of Ennius’ catapult ships and a ball of fire rose into the air, lingering for a moment over the city like a giant burning star and then crashing down on to the temple platform, spraying gobs of fire into the streets below.
It was the signal.
Scipio turned to Polybius. ‘Hasdrubal shall have what he wants.’ He raised his left arm and held it straight out in front of him. Down below, he saw the trumpeters lift their long horns to their lips, watching him. The drumbeat had stopped, and for a moment there was silence. Fabius felt a wisp of wind on his cheek, and looked out to the horizon again, squinting now against the sun. He saw only red.
Scipio let his arm drop.
‘Unleash war,’ he snarled.
24
Twenty minutes later, Fabius stood beside Scipio in front of the first maniple of the first legion, their swords dr
awn. They had crashed through the breach made by the ram, Fabius slightly ahead, and had run up the street towards the Byrsa hill, expecting opposition behind every street block. But there had been none, and they had quickly realized that Hasdrubal and his depleted force of mercenaries and Carthaginian troops must have retreated to a defensible position close to the centre of the city, to the place that Fabius and Scipio had seen three years before near the old quarter of houses below the Byrsa. The two men had reached that place now, and stood aside while the legionaries streamed into the open area where they had seen the Sacred Band training, now stripped of its embellishments; it had clearly been used as a storage facility for the troops, with wooden grain bins around the edge that all seemed empty.
Ahead of them lay a wall of rubble hastily built to block the streets on the south side of the city; along the top was the wooden palisade they had seen three years ago above the level of the surrounding houses. As the legionaries in the vanguard surged forward and sought gaps in the barrier, a blare of trumpets sounded from the parapet and Hasdrubal appeared with a group of soldiers, all of them wearing the burnished breastplates and lobed helmets of the Sacred Band. Fabius watched in astonishment as two four-horse chariots came into view beside them, veering round and facing in opposite directions, the horses stomping and whinnying on the narrow ledge. It seemed a baffling spectacle, of no clear purpose, until he saw what was held between them: it was a man in a legionary’s armour, his head swollen and unrecognizable, his arms tied to the back of one chariot and his legs to the other. Fabius turned to Scipio, gripping his arm. ‘Hasdrubal is taunting you again. That must be one of the Roman prisoners taken during the fight for the harbour. Hasdrubal knows that the traditional way of executing traitors in Rome is to draw them between two quadrigae.’
Hasdrubal bellowed; there was a swish of whips and the two chariots leapt forward along the parapet, almost immediately tumbling off the side into a tangled mess at the base of the wall, the horses shrieking and neighing. As they did so the man tied between them was torn in half, his upper torso springing forward like a slingshot, spraying his innards over the legionaries watching in horror below. There was a collective howl of anger, and a surge forward that the centurions struggled to control.
But worse was to come. Four wooden poles were quickly raised where the horses had stood on the parapet, and four more prisoners appeared, shackled and naked except for their helmets. Hasdrubal bellowed again, and they were tied to the poles and dangled over the legionaries below. A giant Nubian slave appeared, wearing only a loincloth, with metal hooks where his hands should have been. He clashed them together, and then tore at the nearest prisoner, ripping a jagged chasm across his midriff and pulling out his intestines. He sauntered over to the next one, jeering at the Romans like a circus clown, and then with both hooks gouged the man’s eyes out and ripped his cheeks open. He spun around and slashed his hooks over the third man’s groin, ripping off his genitals and flinging them out over the legionaries below. He stood in front of them, beating his chest and howling. Fabius felt sick, and he saw Scipio swallow hard. The other legionaries, the comrades of the men on the platform, looked stunned with horror, unable to move.
‘Enough of this,’ Scipio said to Fabius. ‘However we do it, we need to get onto that parapet.’
‘No need.’ Fabius had caught sight of someone familiar out of the corner of his eye. There was a swooshing sound over the men, and the Nubian reeled and then fell forward, an arrow in his forehead. Enraged, Hasdrubal drew his sword and chopped the legs off the fourth prisoner, leave him to bleed out copiously over the parapet, and then he hastily moved out of sight. The legionaries in the square parted to make way for Gulussa and Hippolyta, who had been with their cavalry on the plain outside the city but had led a dismounted party up from the breach that had been made in the landward walls. Hippolyta was wearing the skin of a white tiger beneath a Roman cuirass, and her red hair was bound in a tight knot behind her helmet. She held her bow with another arrow ready, and looked over at Scipio. The four prisoners on the poles were groaning, terribly mutilated. The senior centurion of the first maniple turned to her, his voice hoarse with emotion. ‘Put them out of their misery,’ he said. ‘They will thank you for it.’ Scipio nodded, and Hippolyta raised her bow and in quick succession shot an arrow into the heart of each man, killing them quickly and mercifully. Fabius closed his eyes for a moment, trying to forget the scene. He could see the legionaries looking restless, uncertain. It was essential that they regain the momentum of their charge up from the harbour, or else they would falter and be cut down as they followed the side alley up towards the Byrsa that he and Fabius had seen on the reconnaissance three years before.
It was his job as primipilus to take the initiative in situations like this, to restore discipline. He leapt up on a stone grain bin and turned to address the men. ‘Legionaries,’ he bellowed. ‘Our comrades watch us now from Elysium. They wear full armour and are decked with the dona militaria of heroes. Now we go forward. There is a way up the alleyway to the acropolis. Our comrades will be avenged.’ He looked at the senior centurion of the first maniple. ‘Form the testudo,’ he bellowed.
The centurion ran out in front of his men, turned to face them and raised his shield above his head. Instantly the first line copied him, locking their shields together to form a solid mass above their heads, and then on down the ranks as the cry of ‘Testudo’ went up from the other centurions until the entire force formed one continuous mass of shields. The centurions ran to the front and the rear and joined the formation just as the Carthaginians began pouring boiling olive oil down on them from the parapet, causing grunts of pain but no disorder in the line. Ahead of them the alleyway was clear of defenders for at least two hundred paces, but Fabius knew that the mercenaries on the walls and the warriors of the Sacred Band would come down and attack once they realized that the testudo was all but impregnable to anything they could drop on it.
Fabius and Scipio raised their shields above their heads and ran forward. Behind them they could hear Brutus pounding along the stones, and he soon overtook them. After about fifty paces they saw the first of the enemy in the alleyway, a mixed lot of mercenaries with the armour and weapons of half a dozen nations, Latins among them. Brutus charged headlong into them, his huge curved sword slashing to the left and right, slicing men in half and spraying their innards over the walls. The first victim of his fearsome cross-stroke was a Celtiberian who made the mistake of standing his ground. Brutus paused for a moment, eyeing the man up and down, and then with shocking speed swept his sword through the man’s exposed midriff, cutting him in half, and then up between the man’s legs to quarter him, drawing the sword right up through the neck and head. Fabius had seen it once before in practice on a prisoner but was still horrified by the result, an indescribable mess in the narrow confines of the alley. Ahead of him the mercenaries who had seen Brutus at work turned and retreated, bunching up together and inadvertently making themselves easier for him to kill, while others darted away on either side in a suicidal run towards the advancing legionaries; they would know they had no chance of survival, but could hope for a less gruesome end than the one being experienced by their comrades further up the alley.
A Carthaginian of the Sacred Band appeared suddenly in front of Fabius, breathing heavily, his sword at the ready. There was a sound like a rope snapping in the wind and the soldier lurched forward and swayed, a look of incomprehension on his face. Out of the corner of his eye Fabius saw something like a snake’s tail slither back down the stone steps of the alleyway. The Carthaginian dropped his sword with a clatter and his neck erupted with blood, spraying Fabius’ breastplate and face, and the man then tumbled and fell, the blood pumping out of his body and streaming down the cracks between the stones. Fabius glanced back and saw Gulussa coiling his whip for another strike. He remembered the day in Rome when King Masinissa had presented Gulussa with the rhino-skin whip, a memento of his time fighting alongside the elder
Scipio that he had hoped his son would use once again in war with Carthage. That time had come but, fifty years on, the whip was meaner, more vicious. Gulussa had taken it back to Numidia and had his craftsmen splice razor-sharp steel blades into the tip, and then had honed his skills deep in the desert, fighting on camelback, in dust storms, in places that seemed to Fabius barely imaginable. He had returned to Rome with his skill perfected: the ability to use the whip to ring a man’s neck at twenty paces and slice through both jugular veins at once.
The whip flicked out again like a lizard’s tongue, uncoiling slowly at first and then lightning quick, this time striking a Carthaginian on the base of his helmet and slicing through his lower jaw. The man screamed in agony, dropped his sword and held his severed jaw to his face, spitting and spraying blood. Scipio leapt forward for the kill, thrusting his sword hard under the man’s kilt, pushing up from the groin as far as it would go and then twisting and pulling it out, jumping back while the man vomited blood and fell to the ground, dead. Fabius slipped on the slew of blood and bile that pumped out between the man’s legs and then righted himself and ran forward behind Scipio. Hippolyta was beside him now too, pulling arrow after arrow from her quiver, using her double-curved Scythian bow to place shots expertly in the neck where the enemy armour left them most vulnerable. Body piled upon body, yet still the Carthaginians came. Ahead of them Brutus scythed his way forward, leaving mutilated bodies and body parts on either side, bloody hunks of meat that piled against each other in the gutters as if they had been swept down from some butcher’s shop in a mighty deluge of blood.
They were coming to the end of the alleyway now; the walls on either side were funnelling them towards the cluster of tightly packed houses, the old quarter of the city at the foot of the acropolis. Word had reached Ennius on the ships to halt the creeping barrage of fireballs ahead of the legionaries while they were advancing so quickly, but now the signallers had instructed him on Scipio’s command to renew the barrage and pulverize the old quarter of the city before they reached it. The fireballs landed with renewed ferocity, the first ones so close that they made the ground shudder, others landing further ahead among the houses as the observers signalled back to correct the range. Above them on the walls, the Carthaginians were still flinging down rocks, pottery vessels, burning oil, anything they could get their hands on, but most of the missiles were bouncing harmlessly off the testudo formation as the legionaries moved inexorably forward, their shields interlocked over their heads. Behind them Hippolyta’s Scythian archers were finding their mark, felling the Carthaginians on the wall and adding even further to the mounds of corpses that littered the alleyway. Still the legionaries marched on, relentlessly, the clanging of their armour punctuated by the hoarse shouts of the centurions, the testudo narrowing to a width of only four or five shields as they approached the end of the alley, their swords drawn and ready.
Total War Rome: Destroy Carthage Page 30