when the mercenaries’ sentries saw us. Their trumpets sounded. The mercenaries poured out to form one long line. With screams and shouts they ran towards us. We held formation. I had seen my father draw this in his hall with Hamilax and again with his commanders before we left Carthage, again and again and again until tempers frayed but everyone understood. Our elephants were first, light infantry and slingers in between them. Our second rank, ten strides behind, was heavy infantry, and then our third, cavalry and bowmen.
Five hundred strides before the forces would have met, my father’s trumpet rang out. As one man, our army stopped, our elephants turned round and passed through the soldiers in the second row who followed in their turn. With cries of scorn – they are running away already! – the mercenaries rushed towards us, their spearmen, bowmen, slingers throwing as they came.
They met one straight and solid line, now longer than theirs. I was kept to the rear, beside my father and his trumpeters and Hamilax. Our infantry had formed syntagmata, solid and impenetrable squares with sixteen men two ranks deep on all four sides, pikes protruding, shields reaching to the ground. An elephant was stationed to the left and right of each syntagma, the heavy cavalry behind. The mercenaries broke against this wall. They were impaled upon the pikes, unable to break through, their line too thin, their men too tired by running.
Inexorably, our centre holding firm, our wings began to close. If the mercenaries also had a plan, I could not tell it. Through the dust I saw only mercenaries hacking at our syntagmata. From the elephants’ towers, our bowmen shot. Above the noise there was the screaming of the elephants, some enraged by arrows in their sides, but held steady by their drivers. Before each of our syntagmata there grew a wall of dead and dying. A group of mercenaries broke away, running to the east. My father sent cavalry after them. I saw scimitars flash, the mercenaries fall.
Some were braver. A group of perhaps sixty Sicilians, clad in leather, armed only with short swords and shields, stood resolute before a syntagma. Three of them slipped beneath an elephant as it trumpeted and reared. They cut at the animal’s girth until its tower fell and then, bawling, it fell too, its belly hanging from the cuts of many swords. Its dying bulk was a further wall beyond which the mercenaries could not pass as my father’s slingers from behind kept up their murdering rain.
The mercenaries now were bunched, our circle closing and then closed upon them. The elephants advanced, as I had seen them under Haggith, pounding, tearing, rage released at last. We sat and waited, watching. Only Spendius and some forty with him cut their way through. Hamilax turned his horse to follow. “Let them go, Hamilax,” my father said. “We’ll settle with them later. Meanwhile, they can be our messengers.”
At last, exhausted, the elephants withdrew. Another trumpet, and the syntagmata broke up, laying down their pikes and man to man addressing such resistance as was left. Many mercenaries just put down their arms, holding up their necks for the sword’s cut. Others put their sword hilts in the sand as spikes and sheltered behind their shields. They were killed by lances from behind.
A battle is like lust. The frenzy passes. Consequence remains. The fighting was over by mid-morning, but the aftermath continued through the day. We had lost only some 600 men. Two elephants were dead. The mercenaries’ losses were enormous and all that day our soldiers moved among the dead and the dying, stripping armour, collecting arms, throwing corpses onto piles.
We took 2,000 prisoners. Five hundred were taken to a stand of eucalyptus trees by the river. Hamilax saw to their disembowelling. They then were tied by their own guts to trees.
The mercenary camp was next, the huts and hovels fired, the women and campfollowers rounded up. They were marched up to the outer southern wall of Carthage. The archers took their time in killing them for sport, drawing then relaxing bows, laughing, hitting first a thigh, an arm until their victims bristled from the arrows and bled, moaning, to death.
Gisco’s pit my father ordered covered with earth. By evening we were ready again to march. Alone, my father and I walked up-river to bathe in the Macaras. We came upon a trail of blood. A wounded mercenary had dragged himself away for water. We found him near the bank. Ravens had taken his eyes, but he was alive. Without a word, my father drew his sword, cut off the mercenary’s head and kicked it into the river.
We marched first to Utica. The mercenaries, under Zaracas the prisoners said, had abandoned their siege. We went on to Hippocritae only to find the same. My father, Hamilax and Haggith conferred. Haggith was sent with 4,000 to besiege Tunis, held it was said by Mathos. We were to find and destroy the forces of Spendius and Zaracas and then join Haggith at Tunis.
In the months that followed we sought an enemy we could not find. There were skirmishes in plenty, alarms in the night as mercenaries attacked our pickets, then withdrew. My father remained calm. “See how well I have taught them, Hannibal! Hamilax, warn Naravas.”
We followed the mercenaries into the inland hills and then the mountains. Our food grew scarce, our lice fat. My father ordered the tents of all the officers to be burned. We slept on the ground among the men. The closeness of an army is a thing of love. I found it first among the mountains of Marazzana.
For months more we marched and skirmished. We came to a plateau, ringed with peaks. “It will be here,” my father said. That moonless night the dark was suddenly ablaze with light. In a ring, around, above us, burned a thousand fires. Our elephants, uneasy, trumpeted their alarm. My father simply slept.
He gave his orders in the half-light. “Beef, Hamilax, as much as they can eat, and all the dried figs too. Send me the commanders,” and to them my father gave his plan. With stomachs full, our army formed into one square. The syntagmata and elephants were its outer rank all round. The cavalry and slingers were within. When the sun rose, we were ready.
They came in silence from the peaks above, very many, four or five to each of us, ordered this time, menacing. Their slingers shot. Our shields were raised. Their first charge was exploratory, by light-armed men. They lacked the heavy cavalry or elephants which could have breached our line. Our slingers killed or wounded many as they came. The next was far more serious, of heavy infantry behind high Roman shields, pressing hard upon our eastern side. A second force attacked us from the north. A third approached our southern side. Well out of shot, the mercenaries were forming for the charge in ranks upon our eastern side. They began to run, a wave of men towards us, three deep, greater by 200 strides than was our length.
In unison, our trumpets rang. My father was chewing calmly at a fig. From the east, the sun behind them, banners waving, arrow-shaped, a host of cavalry rolled towards us in a cloud of dust.
“Nar-a-vas, Nar-a-vas.” Hamilax began the shout which all the ranks took up. The horsemen caught the main mercenary line, cut through it cleanly, wheeled and cut again. Of its own volition our square became a charging line and I was among them on my pony by my father in the dust and blood and noise. A bearded Gaul ran to me. In one sweep my father’s sword cut off his swinging arm. His blood sprayed me. I gloried in the battle and since that day I have loved to fight and know no fear.
I still see now my father embrace Naravas when, hours later, all was done. Together they themselves cut off the arms of Spendius, using his own sword. Zaracas too we captured, wounded but alive. We saw to one elephant, its trunk cut off, its entrails hanging. Hamilax killed it with a chisel between the ears.
We left the carnage to the lions and the vultures. Spendius, his stumps bandaged, was thrown over a horse. Zaracas was dragged behind. Late in the evening, ten days’ hard march later, we came to Tunis. Approaching across the plain, we had expected to see Haggith’s campfires burning. “Perhaps he has already taken the city,” Hamilax said.
“Perhaps,” my father replied.
In
