of the Barcas, a merchant, pallid-skinned from hours inside at long accounts and reckonings.
The Sacred Legion was some 6,000 strong. To their number Haggith decreed all able-bodied citizens should be added. Each morning as the cocks crowed they lined up along the Mappalia for drill with lance and sword. Haggith was everywhere about the city, the arsenal, the treasury, the lighthouse, the corn bins and the cisterns, checking, ordering, disposing. He had the elephants from the city walls prepared. Their bronze breastplates were re-cast, their tusks gilded, their towers renewed and strengthened. I saw all this as each day I walked about the city and wondered: when will my father come?
Haggith was ready, his force prepared. Abdolonim was going with them, captaining a cohort, and so it was not with my father that I first saw the standard of the Barcas going off to war. The mercenaries were now divided into three armies, one beseiging Utica, one Hippacritae and the third encamped still upon the landward plain. Each, it was thought, was of some 20,000 men.
Haggith’s force was only half of that. He put his trust in our elephants, knowing that my father had had none in Sicily and that the mercenaries would be unfamiliar with their lethal ways. The Council had determined that Haggith should first relieve the siege of Utica, a morning’s march across the Gulf of Carthage. In Utica were galleys which we needed to bring fresh supplies and troops.
All of us who stayed behind crowded onto the wall above Khamon’s Gate to see the force depart at early dawn. To reach Utica, they would first have to face the mercenary army on the plain. Haggith’s army formed into one long line three deep and marched upon the mercenaries. The Sacred Legion formed the first line, the household slaves and servants, armed with slings, on the flanks. Next came the heavy infantry, their long pikes waving in the air. Amongst them were the city’s freedmen, unacquainted most with war but bristling like porcupines with arms – a lance, an axe, a club, two swords. Last came the elephants in five squadrons, the camp followers in between, and flanking them on either side the Numidian cavalry on nimble short-legged garrons, the riders bearing but a shield of hide and scimitar.
They had surprise at least to help them. As they came near the mercenary camp – we could see all now in strengthening light – at Haggith’s command the last line of the elephants and cavalry, he amongst them, his purple litter rocking like a ship at sea, held back. The Legion and the infantry marched on to a great sudden din of tympani and trumpets, assbone flutes and drums.
Action stirred across the mercenary camp like a dog fresh from water. Horns were sounded and the mercenaries came out, their slingers to the fore. They began the slaughter. Before their volleys of clay pellets and lead bullets the Legionaries fell, first one, then two, then twenty, scores. The forces were perhaps 200 strides apart when, on the run, hard at the Legion’s centre, the giant Spendius in the van, a wedge-shaped syntagma of mercenaries armed with long Etruscan swords burst through the Legion’s line and fell upon the freedmen and the merchants in our centre.
Encumbered by their gear, unable to go forward or go back, tripping over dead and dying, blinded by their own blood, the Legion and the infantry of Carthage fell in piles of limbs and lances before the mercenary swords. Spendius swung, as if a flail, a giant axe, and heads and arms and hands were littered on the sand. Beside me on the wall, Baalhaan groaned and turned away.
The mercenaries began to sing a song of victory, ululating through the dust and smell of blood. But then a new sound came, a searing, soaring trumpeting of elephants, a sound of madness and of rage. In one single line, Haggith himself brandishing a pike and mounted on a great bull, the sixty elephants of Carthage charged upon the press of mercenaries and our shattered troops.
The elephants’ tusks were gilded, their ears painted blue, their trunks daubed with red lead. Each had a spear fitted to its chest, a sabre to its trunk, a cutlass on each tusk, circles of sharp spikes around each lower leg. Blood flowed over their great ears from the goading of their drivers who sat and screamed from towers of leather on the elephants’ backs. Behind each driver rode two archers, now showering their arrows on the host, on friend and foe alike. Armoured in bronze, the elephants broke upon the battle.
Men were choked by trunks, decapitated by cutlasses and sabres, disembowelled by tusks. Human entrails hanging on their heads and trunks and tusks, the elephants raged, trampled, hacked and gored, rearing on their hind legs, smashing men to pulp, tearing limb from limb, wheeling, turning, deadly, mad. One had a mercenary impaled on its chest’s great spear, and shook as to be finished with the cadaver. The beast turned, trumpeting, possessed, back towards Carthage, ripping with its trunk parts off the body, a lower leg, a forearm, then a head, throwing them aside along its charging way.
Another, maddened by a mercenary arrow in its eye, threw off its tower and ran on bellowing to the camp, straight through the stockade wall, mowing down the tents and huts of grass, passing on from sight.
The frenzy passed, though several of the beasts ignored their drivers and stood, pounding with their feet at piles of dead, making a mush of what had once been men. The mercenaries that survived had fled.
I went out with the Sufet and his guard to greet the victors, those that lived. Then pouring from the city came the people, most with knives in their hands, flocking to have their revenge upon the mercenaries. In groups of four or five, some were still defiant and alive. These the people killed like mad dogs, from a distance stoning them. Some were stabbed and stabbed again by women, children, slaves. Haggith sought the corpse of Spendius to have, he said, the head mounted on a pole and carried on to Utica. It could not be found.
It grew hot. The people of Carthage worked with bare arms, reapers, murdering the dying. Baalhaan had rounded up the hundred or so mercenaries who, though wounded, could still stand. The elephants’ work was not yet done.
The prisoners were led down to a flat place by the river. At Baalhaan’s command, ten elephants followed. I did not go to watch. The screams of men and trumpeting of elephants, that was enough. Then, at first in ones and twos, and then in a black crowd, the ravens came to settle on the dead and dying, pecking out by choice the eyes and exposed guts.
Haggith re-formed his force and went on to relieve Utica. His messengers brought news that the mercenaries had not opposed him. He was in the town. All was well.
But into their town the Uticans had admitted only Haggith and some few. The elephants, the army had stayed outside the walls. That night, the mercenaries returned in force, led by Mathos and, it was said, by Spendius. Not for nothing had they served with Hamilcar Barca in Sicily.
They dealt simply with the elephants. Rounding up a herd of pigs and sheep, the mercenaries covered them with pitch. They set light to the animals and drove them blazing through the dark to where the elephants were tethered. Terrified, the great beasts fled into the night, but not before they had wreaked havoc on the men about them. What the elephants began, the mercenaries finished, slaughtering many, seizing arms and gear before they stole away as they had come.
One thing they did they must have planned with care. At next daybreak by the main gate into Utica, Haggith found some forty of the elephants’ drivers, lying ordered, tongues protruding, faces blue and nostrils oozing slime. Each wore round his neck a bowstring cord.
At dusk, Haggith slipped away from Utica and found in the hills the remnants of his army. Marching only at night, hiding by day in olive groves and orchards, he made his laborious way back to Carthage. Of all this he gave at least a true account to the Elders, of how at Gorza and then three times more he might have fallen on the mercenaries, but he was afraid. Perhaps his honesty won him his life. He could feel the cross that was his due. He had lost sixty elephants, 3,000 men, corn and baggage, gold and silver. He asked for poison in his shame. The Elders would decree. Then my father came.
He had been
