by Ross Leckie
From Hanno’s memoir
For me those were halcyon times. I was enjoying my days at the school of the Spartan, Nicomachus. I loved the wrestling in particular, and became quite an adept of the javelin and spear. But what Bostar did not know is that, on my way home, I was seeing Fetopa, whose house was near.
An unusual question led me to understand all was not well, beyond my narrow mien. I had just returned. It was raining, and thunder cracked across the sky. I was wet. Bostar heard me close the door, I suppose, and came out from his room into the hall.
‘Hanno,’ he asked me, straight out, ‘is there anything wrong with your penis?’
I blushed, confused. ‘My penis? What do you mean?’
‘Stop blushing, for heaven’s sake!’ Such curtness was not like him. I looked slowly at him, at his tight and furrowed brow. ‘I am circumcised,’ he went on. ‘You are circumcised. Correct?’
‘Correct, Bostar. But what do you mean?’
‘I mean, Hanno, that we urinate straight into the hole. Is that not so?’
I should explain that Bostar was fastidious about these things. When we first took our house, it had the usual plain long drop. You squatted to defecate, or stood above it to urinate, often splashing the tiles. Bostar had a carpenter build a seat above it, with a lid. It would keep, he said, the flies away or down. It did.
‘I’m sorry, Hanno,’ he went on, his face relaxing. ‘It has been a long day – and night. Xetha made our supper earlier. It’s ready. Come and sit down, and I will tell you what I know.’ Throwing my wet cloak into a corner, I followed him into the dining room and sat down on a couch. Its hessian scratched my dripping knees.
‘Brr-h,’ Bostar exclaimed. ‘It’s time we lit a fire. But let me explain. Someone, a man, has been here.’
‘How do you know?’
‘Urine. Round the base of the latrine. From a man with a foreskin, or an inflammation, which made him dribble. You and I, as it were, shoot straight. He didn’t. I’m sorry, that’s why I asked you.’
‘But weren’t you in all day?’
‘No. I was out with Tancinus this afternoon.’
‘When Xetha was off.’
‘No. She wasn’t here. At least she was, but she went home early. She has a heavy cold.’ He sank his face into his hands, and rubbed his eyes with the heels of his hands. ‘So, Hanno, there is the urine. And, though I can’t be sure, I think someone has been at my desk, reading my journal, going through my papers.’
‘What makes you think that?’
‘A hunch, a sense, Hanno – a smell.’
‘A smell?’ I asked, bemused.
‘Yes. When I came home, in my room I’m sure I smelled the faintest whiff of bergamot.’ He sucked his teeth and rubbed his brow. Then Bostar brightened. ‘But it’s probably the lemon trees in our yard. Anyway, there’s nothing wrong with me that won’t be fixed by a good plate of Xetha’s broth. The hearth should still be lit. Go and warm our soup, will you?’
Letter preserved in the archives of Neapolis
Labienus to Curtius. Thanks to your good offices and the help of Flaccus, it is done. Scipio took ship yesterday for Baetica. A tribe called the Darconi have rebelled for the fourth time in as many years. Under the proconsul Germanicus, our garrison at Corduba is to exterminate them, and Scipio is bound for there. He leaves late in the year. His crossing will be stormy, but frankly I think it will be good for him to be seasick for a few days. It will clear his blood of accumulated wine. I will shut up your house here and return, with some relief I must confess, to mine in Capua where in time I hope to be able to greet Scipio, by then we trust a wiser and a better man, fulcrum of our hopes and of our dreams.
From Hanno’s memoir
It was the cisterns that did it. That is where we walked and talked and played in private, Fetopa and I, when she was done with her diurnal duties in the High Sufet’s palace and I had finished with my school. She knew a secret entrance, down a vennel by her house, and there we would sneak to raise the wooden hatch, climb down the mossed and ancient ladder, walk the miles of tunnels, play with the echoes of our voices, talk – and touch.
That first time was when the workmen almost caught us. Of course the cisterns and their connecting walkways had to be kept scrupulously clean. But dirt and rubbish fell in from the grilles in the streets above that let in light and air. It was this that these men were sent to take away. Fetopa heard them before I did.
‘Quick, Hanno,’ she said. ‘There are people coming. Down here!’ She pulled me after her, down a dark, damp passage to our left. It led nowhere. The cleaners, or they might have been inspecting engineers, were almost alongside. Fetopa pressed right back against the wall and tugged me to her, deep into the dark. That is when I felt her breasts, yielding and reforming against my back. The men passed. In my loins and in my belly, longing stirred. I turned, and pressed against her, my right hand reaching, lifting up her smock of cotton and tracing the curves of her buttocks, her hip, my fingers glancing on the undulations of her ribs until the thrilling, safe softness of her breast, my thumb on nipple, cupped home in my hand. She quivered, her head sinking onto my shoulder, and I hugged her to me with my left arm, to a sense of solace, to a sense completely sure.
The drip surprised me, condensation from the roof above us falling right onto my forehead. The spell was broken, but we both laughed as I wiped the water away. Fetopa shivered. ‘Let’s go, Hanno,’ she said softly. ‘It’s damp in here.’ We did go, but not before she reached up and kissed me, then I her, on nose and eyes and cheeks, my tongue running along her scar. We rejoined the world above us, and I ran home, rejoicing, sure that a covenant had been conceived.
Letter preserved in the military archives
of Rome
Fistulus Aemelius Germanicus, proconsul in Baetica, to Claudius Metellus Pulcher, consul in Rome. Your Scipio has joined us. He drinks too much, and pines for Rome. But already the soldiers love him, and not just for his father’s name. So do most of my officers, and not just for the imaginative games of dice he plays. Yesterday, we came upon a camp of the Darconi six days’ march west of Corduba. You will be familiar with this type of fortification. They call them crannochths. Protected by a high wooden palisade, this was as strong a one as I have seen, a real vipers’ nest, on an island a good eighty paces out in the middle of a fast flowing river, accessible only by a ford wide enough for one man at a time. But I could not leave it in our rear. The Darconi taunted us, and wounded three of my hastati with fusillades of stones – you will remember the deadly slings they use. I tried fire arrows but, the Darconi having no shortage of water, to no discernible avail. Then I lost six men, one to spear (he got the closest) and five to arrows on the ford. It proved impossible, being so narrow, for a testudo to be formed.
Resigning myself to the inevitable, I gave the order for circumvallation on both sides of the river, called, for the information of your cartographers, the Gabro. My quartermaster assured me we had enough munitions for a three-week siege, assuming we availed ourselves of the plentiful local hares – not a prospect, for you know my distaste for the rank meat of that rodent, that I enjoyed. Still, I comforted myself with the thought that these barbarians rarely prepare themselves beyond the needs of a few days. Assuming they were not cannibals, having satisfied myself of the advice of one of my centurions, a freshriver fisherman himself before he served, that the river flowed too fast to afford the Darconi any chance of catching fish with which to feed themselves, having checked our pickets were alert to attack from our rear and having tested myself our system of signals from these pickets to my centurion, I retired to my tent and, having eaten the regulation millet bread and dried pork with, for my first time some relish after many years in the field, given my aforesaid aversion to the prospect of jugged hare [I cannot resist this one interspersion. This is Latin for you, dense and constipated and always tripping on its own toes. I thank Hera I am bound for Corinth – or at least for that of it which is still there – and G
reek, a language which inhales.], I unrolled my copy of Ennius’ Annales. Do you know it? He actually tutored Scipio, I am told, and is said to be composing a panygeric on Africanus. I am of course too polite to enquire. Anyway, I recommend his hexameters as every bit as good as Homer’s, I should say.
But no sooner had I settled to my Ennius than the flap of my tent opened. Scipio appeared. ‘Forgive me, sir, but it’s the mosquitoes.’
‘The mosquitoes, tribune? Have you been drinking – again?’ I replied.
‘Unfortunately not, sir. But you must have noticed.’
As it happens, I had. My inspection of the pickets at sundown had been, I can confess to you in confidence as my late uncle’s friend, perfunctory. Great clouds of the damn brutes followed me like fog and clogged my nostrils and my ears. The legionaries lacked, we being under marching orders and short of gear and summer being the time of year, the luxury of a tent to exclude mosquitoes and were bedded under stars.
‘They are intolerable, sir,’ Scipio went on. ‘We need to move to higher ground, away from water.’
‘Brilliant, tribune,’ I replied acidly. ‘And leave the Darconi here?’
‘Certainly not, sir. I have a plan.’
I put my Ennius aside. ‘Come in, tribune,’ I said, ‘and sit down.’
His proposal was audacious, but straightforward. He had clearly thought it through, and wanted only twenty men, of his choosing, to effect it. He wanted to attack the camp of the enemy, there and then, in the dark.
‘I will cross first, sir, taking a rope. I will secure that on the other side, and the men will use it to guide their way across.’
‘And if you slip off the ford?’ I asked him.
‘Then, sir, my plan will have failed.’
‘And if the Darconi see you?’
‘I don’t know,’ he replied, ‘but I should think the same applies. I wouldn’t have suggested this were it not a moonless night.’
I sat back and crossed my arms. Could I afford to lose him? These things happen in war. Could I afford to lose another twenty men? With the mosquitoes as many as they were, there was every probability of fever killing even more.
‘Very well, tribune,’ I said. ‘Proceed.’
From the shelter of some scrub, squatting with his team of men, their armour off, their arms muffled, I saw Scipio leave, the rope around his waist. After a tense wait, the rope tugged. One of the soldiers tied our end to a tree and off they went, one by one, the last carrying no arms but a light ladder strapped to his back.
Scipio scaled the palisade with that, he reported later, cut the throat of one sleeping guard, opened the gate and let his men in. I had heard nothing, what with the river running and the mosquitoes buzzing in my ears. But then I smelled the smoke and saw the fires.
Covered in blood, Scipio first, all the men returned. As they came splashing, cheering to the bank, Scipio reported calmly: ‘Mission complete, sir. No casualties on our side, but thirty-one Darconi dead.’
‘You took no prisoners?’
‘No, sir.’ He stood at attention before me in the dark, his face illuminated by the burning camp. ‘At least, no men, sir. But we did bring this.’
He gestured, and I saw the young woman, bedraggled, sobbing, sullen, her hands tied, the nipples of her pert breasts stiff under her wet shift. ‘She has a little Latin, sir. Her name is Sophonisa, and she says she is a princess of these people. I thought she would make a useful hostage––’
‘You thought, tribune, you thought!’ I replied. ‘I don’t want to treat with the Darconi. I want to wipe them out! Now we’re going to be encumbered by a bloody girl!’
‘Begging your pardon, sir, but she is a woman. And I will assume full responsibility for her, proconsul. And, sir?’
‘Yes? What is it?’
‘May I assume that, in the morning, we move camp to higher ground?’
Such, Pulcher, is the Scipio you have sent me. Anyway, as you will I am sure think right, I have awarded him the corona vallaris, the crown for conspicuous courage in scaling a camp wall under assault – which he didn’t, but he would have done. Kindly inform the Senate that more honours have fallen to an illustrious line.
From Hanno’s memoir
They came for me at dawn, two servants of the Sufet, mute and deaf but, as I was to find out, fit. I had not eaten, as I had been told. The litter left us at the inner western gate. We walked from there, through the next gate, across the walkway that bridged the moat then through the final wall. As we moved along the causeway and the road that began at the end of the lagoon, I regretted the thick, clumsy boots I had been told to wear. When we veered off it into the low hills of scree, I began to understand. The sun grew hot. Ahead of me, the servants did not check. Acarpous shrubs and short, spiny trees chafed at our legs. I would have welcomed a breeze.
We were almost round the side of Carthage, having swung west and south to avoid the marshes into which a man could sink and not be seen again. Across the bay before us rose the foothills and the peaks of Jebel-bou-Kournine.
We stopped at midday to drink sweet water from a spring. Apart from that grove of lime and pine, the land was flat and bare, the beach now to the north of us long and clean. My sweat dried, but not for long. Soon, we began to climb. Although the path was clear, the trees above and around it meant we often had to stoop and even crawl. Monkeys chattered. Ibics hooted. Mosasaurus lizards lay languid then darted, green and red and grey. I saw one black viper scuttling away. Plants of vervain studded the sward, and sycamine clustered on any open ground.
Puffing, panting, legs aching, I followed the servants, moving like gazelles. Mid-afternoon. A clearing. A rivulet and very welcome water. Far behind, below us, through the trees, across the blue and silver sea I saw Carthage, and the pall of cooking fires hanging over her on a still windless day. We climbed on, the mountain now so steep I was on hands and legs, boots slipping, stones sliding down the precipitate way. The mountain narrowed. We went up and up a vertiginous ridge, the twin, curling peaks above it clear before me, even through my sweaty, dusty eyes.
At the top, just as the sun was fading, the servants left me to go down. I sat where they pointed and waited, my stomach grumbling, looking round. I could see far over the dot of Carthage, way beyond her to Cap Bon and beyond that, or was it just a shadow, the mass of Sicily looming in the darkening sea. But my eyes kept returning to the narrow path before me, snaking round the first of the peaks to a paved circle, on which stood a low hut of stones and beyond that to the unlit beacon before the second peak, and after that a sheer drop to below.
The sun set. I must have slept. I woke up, shivering, trembling to the beacon blazing above me and belching acrid smoke that stung my throat and lungs. Then I heard the drum, deep and pulsing, around, before, behind me, smoke and nausea and sound. It stopped. I looked forwards to the circle, squinting in the fickle firelight to be sure. An old, grimalkin of a crone, stooped and haggard, hair dishevelled, shoeless, stood there, waving at me to come on.
I stood up, felt my legs weak and sore beneath me. Swaying, uncertain, I edged my way along the narrow path, knowing the death on either side, until I stood before her and she raised her head and cackled to the sudden wind. Sparks and smuts flew all around us as her laugh grew shriller still. It stopped as suddenly as if a demon had stolen it. Lisping, lilting, eyes rolling, ‘You are Hanno Barca?’ she wailed.
‘I am.’
‘Take off your shirt.’
I did, and threw it, saw it wafting on the winds. Then, I only glimpsed it coming, she hit me with a headed stick. I felt the tearing cross my chest, the ripping of a lion’s claws, knew the pain exploding in my brain.
The rest I cannot remember. Only fragments, flashes. Swinging, flailing, crying, imploring, pleading, refusing, fighting, begging death to take me in. Lightning streaking, figments falling, Capua, my father who would never come.
The sun, sun, burning, burning, forcing me to open up my eyes. The flies, flies, buzzing, buzzin
g at the blood dried and drying down my chest, smearing my thighs. That is what I woke to, what my conscious memory tells me of the Passage of Ordeal. I was slumped at the base of the still-blazing beacon. Through each of my breasts there ran a wooden spike, and a rope led up from both ends of these. I strained to follow the four ropes’ lines, threading into one that ran up to a bracket and the sort of pulley builders use. I was suspended there, I thought, swinging between the sacred peaks. Then, fleeing the pain, I returned to the shadows of Eschmoun.
I saw visions. People visited me, ghosts and spectres from beyond the River of Forgetfulness, Ashroket in our Punic tongue. I was with my grandfather, Hamilcar, as he died in Spain, his last words to my father ‘Rome! Rome!’ I was with my father as he cut his throat, naked and alone in a room in Bithynia, rather than submit to Rome. I saw the sadness, the suffering in his eyes. I reached out to him to staunch the blood – but he was gone and I was with him and my mother as they made me. I felt my father’s loneliness, my mother’s taking it to her. I saw her crying as my father moved up and down in her, but I knew her tears were tears of joy, not pain.