Carthage

by Ross Leckie

  Scipio took one step forwards. Hanno shook his head and screamed: ‘Rome, I curse you!’ He held out a dagger to the sinking sun. As Scipio rushed forward, Hanno slit his throat, left to right. Falling first to his knees, rich red bubbling from his mouth he slumped, blood spraying, cadaver convulsing.

  Fetopa did not move. She stared at us and looked down at her dying husband. I may be wrong, but I would say she sneered. Then she raised her head, flicked back her hair, turned and darted back into the citadel, moving like a dancer, light upon her toes. Scipio stepped forwards. He grappled with and picked up Hanno, flailing in his death throes, and, grunting, slung him over his shoulder. I saw Hanno’s blood pump wet down Scipio’s back and legs, oozing everywhere. I heard Scipio cry out to Jupiter. I saw his tears.

  Following, picking my way carefully up the bloody steps, even through the swelling smoke I smelled the cloying sweetness. I heard the sawing buzz of many thousand flies, feasting on putrescence. I too entered the citadel. I saw the very many, throats all cut, lying in their brown and spreading blood.

  That room gave way to a wide outside terrace, an extended battlement high above where the temple of Eschmoun had been. Ferocious, there the pyre burned. There Scipio and I saw Fetopa, three hundred paces away, take a rough wooden ladder from the wall and throw it against the raging pyre. Then she climbed, her hair and clothes first singeing, then flaring to the flame. She did not scream. We stood transfixed as she moved upwards, step by step, through the licking blaze, the roaring fire. Just for a moment, she stood, a human torch, at the top. She faced us, her arms spread wide. In defiance, one historian would say, in supplication another; valediction, a third. For me, I do not know. But I have known war for thirty years. I have seen men die defiant, delirious, mad, or defecating at the dark. I have never seen such courage.

  Scipio was on his knees, weeping silent tears. Wide-eyed, the bloody torso of Hanno was on its back before him. They say that blood is red. It is many colours. But I had, like Scipio, to watch. Holding a fold of my cloak across my face against the pyre’s heat, I moved forward beyond Scipio. I stepped over Hanno. I am, after all, an historian. ‘Historia’ means ‘enquiry’ in Greek. I do not know what that is in Punic. I will find some Carthaginians in Corinth and ask them – if there are any there or, if so, any spared.

  Fetopa’s hair was burned now. Her flesh was gone, her ribs and thighs and knees and shins were white against the red, against the black, and still the fire rose up against the death of mutilated Carthage. I saw the skin on Fetopa’s face becoming incandescent, blister, bubble and drop down like blobs of wax. Her lower lip fell off intact and sizzled on fierce faggots. I saw her cheekbones, her jaw, her skull appear, and still she stood, a living skeleton in sepulchre. When does life end? Where does it go? What, to such a death, are the postulates of philosophy? The arms of what had been Fetopa dropped down. Smoke enshrouded her. With a sparkling, crackling crash, she fell. All was smell, the stench of charring flesh, and seasoned flames as when you roast a mallard over cherry wood, or over oak spit beef.

  A sharp sound to my right caught my attention. Cutting through the pyre’s compelling cacophony, I heard the screech of a chair’s legs on floor. On the far side of that necropolis, there, by a window, I saw a man, sitting, looking out to sea. He turned towards us. Again, I knew who it had to be. He of Chalcedon, Bostar.

  Over the weeks that followed, I tried many times to speak to him in his tent pitched, on Scipio’s express orders, next to ours. Silent, he simply stared, sometimes chewing his beloved bdellium. Until, one evening when the rain was lashing and the wind came sheer from the sea, I looked in on him as usual. He was utterly impassive. I was turning to leave. ‘You are Polybius,’ he said suddenly: a statement, not a question.

  ‘I am,’ I replied.

  ‘I have three favours to ask of you,’ he went on, staring through me, past me, to some place beyond my head.

  ‘And they are?’

  ‘One, for a stylus and parchment, or a wax tablet, if you prefer.’

  ‘Of course. And the second?’

  ‘That you have what I write delivered, if you can.’

  ‘I will try,’ I said. ‘The third?’

  For the first and last time he looked at me, into me. I sensed a soul racked with pain. ‘Tell Scipio,’ he faltered, and cleared his throat. ‘Ask Scipio to––. Ask Scipio to forgive me. Tell him the answer is at the lake, on the island where we buried his father, where the water laps and herons raise their young. He should go there. He will understand, if he tries.’ With that, Bostar closed his eyes and, through his nose, inhaled.

  ‘Bostar, may I ask you one thing?’ I said, pulling the tent’s flap back against the wind and rain.

  ‘Yes,’ he replied. ‘What is it?’

  ‘You sit here, day after day, and move only to go to the latrines. What do you do?’

  His eyes opened, and he smiled. He blinked once, twice, and closed his eyes. ‘I think, Polybius,’ he said very slowly, ‘of synonyms for the adjective “naïve”.’

  As it happens, we had no tablets left, nor parchment. Other matters concern the quartermasters of a sack and siege. The notes I was making were in my mind. So I gave Bostar the Carthaginian equivalent, a dried leaf of the talipot palm. I had found a box of them amid the wreckage. Bound together, the Carthaginians make them into books, like wide rulers drilled and strung together. They call them ola books. I have several in my library here. Some are very beautiful, their ends of ivory inlaid with gold. Theirs is a craft the world will see no more.

  So Bostar wrote his message on a talipot and gave it to me. But all our couriers were away. So I kept Bostar’s palm. In the light of what happened, it did not seem appropriate to pass it to a courier, even when we got to Rome. I still have it here, and now we are about to leave for Corinth I will give it to a courier – for all the good that will do. The talipot says, in perfect Latin: ‘Bostar of Chalcedon, to Trimalchio, master of the Apollodorus at Ostia, or at home in Liguria. I am where you left me. Come for me.’ That is all.

  Bostar never spoke to me again, nor answered my questions. Then one day, he wasn’t there. No one had seen him leave. I asked Scipio to order a search for him. He laughed, and shook his head. In a world of many mysteries, the disappearance of Bostar troubles my mind.

  But that was later. Having seen to the burial of the bloated bodies from the citadel, Scipio supervised the beginning of the destruction of what remained of Carthage, stone by bitter stone. Astylax the Carthaginian played a pivotal role. Scipio was an automaton. He washed and scrubbed himself when he was not working. ‘Blood, blood, blood,’ in his dreams he muttered from the tent that we still shared. He complained of constipation. I recommended the juice of prunes, but he preferred to suffer. I only wished that he would do so in silence. Dust filled our every orifice. Smoke stung our smarting eyes. Its smell filled our clothes, our beds, our souls. The city’s baths were broken up. We stank. We itched. We grew fallow in our own reek.

  One night I awoke, troubled, sweating, sure that something was wrong. By the light of the lamp that Scipio insisted was kept burning, I could see that his billet was empty. I got up, put on my sandals and wrapped a cloak about me. Our tent flap was untied. The guard outside snapped to attention. ‘Where is Scipio?’ I asked him.

  ‘I don’t know, sir,’ he replied. ‘He went that way,’ the soldier said pointing, ‘to the city.’

  ‘Or to what’s left of it,’ I mumbled, rubbing my eyes.

  ‘What’s that, sir?’

  ‘Nothing, soldier, nothing. As you were.’ I walked off towards the smoking, smouldering remains of Carthage.

  I found Scipio, eventually. He was standing on the pile of stones that marked where the temple of Eschmoun had been. Through scudding clouds a half moon lit the melancholy scene. If he saw me or heard me, Scipio gave no sign. He was muttering to himself. I could not hear.

  ‘What are you saying, Scipio?’ I called out, as gently as I could. His eyes turned to me. He
saw me, as if for the first time. He raised his voice, and I caught the rhythm of Homer’s hexameters, repeated again and again:

  A day will come when Ilium, that holy city, will perish And Priam also will perish, and his people, skilled in

  handling the spear.

  I listened to the elegy of Scipio for Carthage. I thought of Aristotle, and how if first we fear for Carthage, then we fear for ourselves. But Rome still stood, and Scipio was born to serve her. I rubbed my face and scratched my beard. ‘Come, Scipio, come,’ I said, interrupting his recital. ‘Bed, and then Corinth, call.’

  Three days later, Scipio handed command to a young proconsul, Gaius Calpurnius Piso. I regard it as a fitting irony that, when he began his career, Piso was a client of Cato’s patronage. He had arrived with three more legions and a further thousand pioneers, his orders to leave nothing but the wind. The augurs and priests of Rome had come as well with their rituals, their extispicy and imprecations – and a plough. They were to cut one furrow round where the walls of Carthage had stood, and cast salt into it, so that nothing would ever grow again, and curse the site to execration in the memory of man. Carthage was to be barren, void, perished as though it had never been, mute memorial to the plenipotence of Rome.

  I have it on good authority, being as I have said an historian, that this is now so.

  The evening Scipio and I left Carthage, the two of us, alone, before we went back to Rome and then on to another siege, another city, the sky was sullen. No stars shone. Past what must have been the great seaward wall of even Dido’s city, from our cart we walked the last two hundred paces to our galley waiting in the inner, naval harbour, like the outer soon to be destroyed. From the middle of the rubble, I heard an infant’s cry, a mewling in the stones. I checked, and cupped an ear. The sound had gone. Perhaps it was the wind, or some sleight of my mind. I walked on, and we cast off, away, out into nascent night.

  To seek in unmixed wine a black and fatherless oblivion, Scipio went below. I stayed on deck, savouring the first clean air that I had known for weeks, craning my neck to the breeze, feeling the lice scuttle in my beard. Halfway across the bay, the captain swore loudly. I took a step across the creaking deck towards him. ‘What’s wrong?’ I asked.

  ‘Damn! That’ll slow us till we’re round the point,’ he muttered, shoving the rudder hard away and bringing the galley, sharply and shuddering, about. ‘Plumblines and watch, on deck!’ he roared, swinging his head down into the mouth of the hold. Turning to me, ‘Look,’ he whispered.

  My eyes followed his pointing arm. I looked at the mass of Jebel-bou-Kournine, Carthage’s sacred mountain. I could just make out its double horns against the lighter dark. In Rome, I thought, they will be lighting festive fires. But the light of Carthage burned no more.

  EPILOGUE

  I am Niarchos, an Athenian, but a clerk to Polybius here in Rome. My master has gone to Corinth, leaving us, as he has said, to bind these tesserae together. But before we transcribe them onto one roll – I think one will do, for this is not a long work – I will add these two more letters. They come from the pile of papers Polybius had gathered together, but has not read. Now, I suppose, he never will. When he returns, his mind will be on the last siege, the next sack. And anyway, his History awaits.

  Letter found in the archives of Rome

  Quintus Fulvius, harbourmaster at Ostia, to the quartermaster of the fleet, Titus Quinctius, in Rome. The transports have all arrived from the sack of Carthage, and disembarked their cargoes. The sale into slavery of those Carthaginians they carried will begin tomorrow and last for six days. But, as you know, seventy thousand Poeni were to be brought. That is why you ordered, and I released, two hundred transport ships to bring them here. Well, I have just completed the log. Only one hundred and seventy-three transports are moored here in the harbour. Where are the missing twenty-seven, and the cargo they carried?

  Letter found in the archives of Rome

  Titus Quinctius to Quintus Fulvius. You are quite right that twenty-seven transports have not returned from Carthage. I congratulate you on your acuity and diligence. It cannot have been easy to identify so small a discrepancy. Acting under orders, duly sealed and notarised and now lodged in the archives of the Senate, the ships in question were loaded with the Carthaginian wounded, sick, deformed and ill – some nine thousand of the survivors of the siege and sack. Their holds were battened down, their crews were taken off, and these said ships were sunk at sea. But I took great pains to ensure we used the oldest vessels only, those that were leaking, in need of caulking or well wormed. So do not distress yourself about the cost. Look forward, instead, to your share of the proceeds of the sale. Pray to Jupiter for sound teeth, and high prices. Ten times over will the Republic’s share replace the value of some rotting hulks. We will replace the transports if need be. Or are there no more Carthages left for us to burn?

  CHRONOLOGY

  814 bc Foundation of Carthage

  753 Foundation of Rome

  509 Expulsion of the kings; birth of the Roman Republic

  496 Latins crushed by Rome at battle of Lake Regillus

  338 Campania incorporated into the Roman state

  310 Roman advance into Etruria

  280–275 Pyrrhus of Epirus invades Italy; defeated

  264–241 First Punic War between Rome and Carthage

  247 Hannibal Barca born in Carthage

  236 Publius Cornelius Scipio, later known by the honorific ‘Africanus’, born in Rome

  234 Marcus Porcius Cato, later known as ‘the Censor’, born in Tusculum

  218–202 Second Punic War

  216 Romans defeated at battle of Cannae

  202 Battle of Zama in Africa; Hannibal defeated

  200 Rome declares war against Macedon and King Philip V Polybius born in Megalopolis

  197 Battle of Cynoscephalae – Philip defeated

  184 Cato elected Censor

  Publius Cornelius Scipio Aemilianus Africanus born in Rome

  182 bc Death of Scipio Africanus and Hannibal

  168 Macedonians defeated by Romans at the battle of Pydna

  167 Death of Cato the Censor Third Punic War

  148 Fourth Macedonian War

  146 Carthage destroyed Corinth destroyed Macedonia becomes a Roman province Roman republic at its zenith

  129 Death of Publius Cornelius Scipio Aemilianus Africanus (by then also Numantinus, an honorific for his conquest of Numantia)

  118 Death of Polybius

  Also by Ross Leckie

  Hannibal

  Scipio

  Copyright

  First published in Great Britain in 2000

  by Canongate Books Ltd,

  14 High Street, Edinburgh, EH1 1TE

  Paperback edition first published in 2009

  by Canongate Books Ltd

  This digital edition first published in 2009

  by Canongate Books Ltd

  Copyright © Ross Leckie, 2000

  The moral rights of the author have been asserted

  British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data

  A catalogue record for this book is available on

  request from the British Library

  ISBN 978 1 84767 551 4

  Typeset by Palimpsest Book Production Ltd,

  Grangemouth, Stirlingshire

  www.meetatthegate.com