were encamped again across the isthmus, cutting Carthage off. Hamilax it was who woke me in the very early light. “Hannibal, your father bids you go to him.” Hamilax looked older, drawn.
“My father! Where?”
“He says that you will know.”
Without thinking I dressed, ran from the house and to the wall and found the stone and slipped inside and climbed. He stood there, gazing out to sea. Without turning, “Am I in time, Hannibal?” he asked. I shivered in the morning chill. I did not know. “Yes!” he cried, and turned and strode across the battlement to me. “I have come in time. Carthage called and I am here. Remember that, Hannibal.”
“But Father,” I spluttered, “Gisco, Haggith …”
“I know, I know. Come and sit down.” We moved to a bench in the lee of the wall.
“Is Carthage in such peril, Hannibal? Let me tell you of the Nysalles, a tribe who once inhabited deep inland the Libyan desert. The south wind dried up the water in their storage tanks. They were left with no water whatsoever. And so the Nysalles declared war on the wind and marched out to defeat it. The wind blew, and covered them with sand. They were wiped out, and now the Nasamones hold their land.
“Do you understand? The mercenaries have declared war on Carthage. They might as well have declared war on the wind. But I have much to do, and you will help me. This will be for us rehearsal for a greater war. Come.”
So for the next weeks I accompanied my father everywhere as he prepared for war. The classroom was forgotten. I hardly saw Silenus or my mother or my siblings. This was learning of a different kind.
The campaign of Hamilcar Barca against the mercenaries began not in the shrill of trumpets nor the clash of arms, but at a desk, early, morning after morning. Everything was recorded, tabulated, planned, the stocks of men and arms and horses, elephants. “I cannot fight them – yet,” my father often said. By the middle of each morning we were all about the city, my father kind and brusque, gentle and harsh by turns as occasion demanded.
The blacksmiths had no bronze. My father took it, for all the extravagant protests that he met, from the Elders’ treasury. The armourers had no gut for bow-strings. The hair of all the city’s female slaves was shorn and used instead. When that proved not enough, my father turned to freedmen’s wives.
He drew 300,000 gold kikars from the Syssitia, the company of merchants, and imposed a tax of 200 gold xthets on the rich. If one refused to pay or claimed he lacked the means, his household goods were sold at public auction, my father himself a leading bidder. A thing unparalleled, he even demanded money of the priestly colleges – and got it. Who could deny a Sufet who had himself contributed 160 sets of armour, 2,000 xthets, 3,000 gommors of wheat and much else besides?
He sent Hamilax by ship – the mercenaries had no fleet at least – to Liguria for 3,000 soldiers, all to be paid a full year in advance at sixteen copper xthets a day. He reformed the Sacred Legion, those 3,000 who had returned with Haggith or remained behind as garrison, dismissing and replacing officers, forbidding wine or women, compelling them to train all day and sleep at night on the ground within the public squares.
He drilled his growing army. The infantry were given shorter swords and lighter shields and ash sarissae, lances thirteen cubits long. To the heavy cavalry of the Sacred Legion he added 800 men he picked himself from Malqua, a thing unheard of, training them relentlessly, equipping them with bows and light double-edged axes, tunics of leather and caps of weasel-skin. From even slaves and artisans he chose 300 men as slingers. His was an absolute command, and yet each week he sent accounts to the Elders.
Two months passed, three. The people grew anxious, sullen when we passed. “Barca is afraid,” they said. “Barca is a quartermaster, not a general. Will he never march?” Across the plain beyond the pit where Gisco’s and the others’ corpses rotted, the mercenary camp was once more full and threatening. Round it now and right across the isthmus to the river ran a wall of mud and stakes, topped by thorns. At intervals along its length, the mercenaries had set up strange and chilling scarabim and sorceries, chevrons and charms. Dead eagles, human foetuses, heads of lions, strangled ravens passed their stench into the breeze.
Still my father waited and prepared. Several times he woke me in the night. Alone we slipped out of the city through the wicket by Khamon’s Gate and walked west across the sand to where the river Macaras wound into the lagoon that guarded Carthage’s side.
Fast and full of menace flowed the river, strong and silent through the night. We combed the banks among the marshes looking for firm ground and placing markers when we found it. I threw a branch into the water and, by the moonlight, saw it carried swift away. How could an army ford this? My father knew what I was thinking. “Tomorrow, I will show you, Hannibal.”
The next evening, we climbed the western wall. The wind we call a chthon was blowing, relentless from the west, as it always did at certain times each month. My father pointed to the river mouth. “Now watch, Hannibal, watch!” The wind coursed over the dunes of soft and drifting sand, picking up clouds of it as it passed over the river. Gradually, the flow of water slowed. The river mouth was silting up. In growing dark, it closed. “By morning, the channel will be clear again. We will cross, Hannibal, this time next month – if the wind blows,” and he smiled. “Now go and sleep, my son.” I left my father standing with his plans.
The next morning my father told me to go with Hamilax and five slaves to the workshops of the carpenters, collect eighty mallets and long chisels he had ordered and take them to the yard where his elephants were being quartered and equipped. He was there before us. He had the eighty drivers of the elephants form one line four deep. “You all know what happened to the elephants before Utica. The mercenaries may try something similar again. If your elephant runs amok, kill it” – and he bent down to pick up a mallet and a chisel – “with these. You know the spot – between the ears. But strike hard and quickly, at the first sign of trouble.”
I was dozing in a chair beside my father late at night. He and Hamilax were talking. I woke up at the unfamiliar name, “Naravas”. “Go to him, Hamilax. Tell him to await the signal. Give him” – and my father took from out the chest before him a great ring of gold and onyx – “this.” Hamilax took the ring and nodded, left the room.
“Father, who is Nava, Nara … ?”
“Naravas, Hannibal. Do not forget that name. Carthage has few allies, even fewer friends. He is both. You will meet him when he comes. Now, let’s both go to bed.”
It was the second evening of the month of Ziph. The river Macaras was silting up. My father had sound the call to arms. Suddenly Carthage was astir. Soldiers armed themselves as women wailed against their chests. Horses reared, protesting at their bits. The Elders came in litters to attend, the priests and acolytes to bless. They showered the way before the gate with pine cones, symbols that the mercenaries should be as pine trees which, once cut down, are destroyed forever.
With muffled arms in silence in the dark we passed through Khamon’s Gate, my father leading on his speckled bay, I beside him on my pony. We came to the river. As had been planned, half the elephants were led a hundred yards upstream into the river, their bulk checking the river’s flow. The other forty formed a wall downstream to stop any men or gear swept away.
The mercenaries’ campfires burned on as we crossed. We marched along the further bank and then re-crossed the river. We camped in silence on the plain behind the mercenary host. No fires were lit. Salted beef was passed. At first light by whispered word we assumed order and marched.
It
