Gisco knocked the man’s javelin aside, and he stumbled back onto one knee.
‘He could have killed you!’ the sergeant screamed in Nelo’s ear. ‘That javelin missed your stupid melon of a head by a thumb’s width. If not, you’d be lying in the dirt already, Northlander. Dead! Everything that you are, have ever been, or ever might have been, spilled out into the Dark Earth for all eternity, for that’s where bad soldiers end up, believe you me, never mind what the Jesus botherers will tell you. All because of him! That man in the dirt, who never saw you before today! And now he’s trying again. Are you going to stand there and let him? Are you, aurochs? Are you?’
It was Gisco’s screaming that drove him forward as much as the shock.
Still the fallen warrior fumbled with his gear. This time Nelo knocked the javelin aside with the shaft of his own spear. The man fell back on the ground and raised his sword, but Nelo, remembering his training at last, fell on him, straddling his torso and pinning the man’s sword arm with his own gloved fist. For one heartbeat his eyes met his enemy’s. The man was dark, even darker than most Libyans. Nelo smelled blood, and dust, and sweat, a richer stink of horses and cattle and hay. He looked older than Nelo. His face was lined and heavily weathered, as if he’d spent much of his life out of doors. He was strong, Nelo could feel it in the way the man struggled in his grip, but he was too exhausted to break free. All this in a heartbeat.
Nelo swept his sword across the man’s throat. Skin and cartilage resisted, but he dragged the blade through. Blood spurted, shockingly bright, and the man choked and spewed blood from his mouth. Still he stared at Nelo.
‘Again!’ yelled Gisco. ‘Again and finish it!’
Nelo swung his sword once again, this time a chop as if he was severing an ash branch, and he felt the sword cut into the bone of the neck. The man shuddered once, and his eyes rolled, and he lay still. Nelo’s sword was stuck in the bone. He had to drag at it to release it.
Then, suddenly filled with revulsion for the bloody corpse under him, he scrambled to his feet.
‘There.’ Gisco clapped Nelo on the back. ‘You did it, aurochs! You took a life. No worse than sticking a pig in training, was it? And now you’ve done it once you can do it again, you’ll see, it gets easier every time. And look at this.’ He leaned over and with a brisk chop of his own sword he severed the man’s right hand. Gisco lifted the hand by its little finger, almost delicately, as its stump dripped blood. There was a fine leather strap around the first two fingers. ‘See those loops? To help him throw his javelins. Libyans don’t do that. This isn’t a Libyan bastard, he’s an Iberan bastard. This is what Iberans are good for.’ He threw down the severed hand. ‘All they’re good for. Now, we use Iberan mercenaries for they’re useful in specific situations, but we don’t expect the ungrateful bastards to start chucking javelins at us, do we?’
‘No, sir.’
‘But here he is.’
‘I suppose they are hungry in Ibera as well, sir.’
‘I suppose you’re right. The whole world’s hungry, and they’ve all come here to pinch our grub, the Iberan bastards from across the strait, and the Libyan bastards who live around the corner, and the Hatti bastards who are on their way across the Middle Sea. But they aren’t going to succeed because we’re going to fight them and stop them and kill them, aren’t we, aurochs?’
‘Yes, sir.’
‘Right, there’s still a few Libyans left. Get stuck in. If you find a helmet that fits you take it; that acorn shell on your head looks ridiculous.’ For a moment he glanced down at the mutilated Iberan, at blood-splashed Nelo. ‘An Iberan and a Northlander, fighting to the death on a scrap of Carthaginian soil. I don’t suppose either of you wanted to be here, and we don’t want you here, but here you are, and this is the way it has to be.’
‘Yes, sir.’
‘You’re still on a charge. Go, go!’
Nelo ran off, after the fleeing Libyans and his own jubilant comrades. Already the crows were gathering overhead. Even the crows were hungry this spring.
51
Nelo’s force got back to camp at noon the next day.
The army of Carthage, swollen by levies, conscripts and mercenaries, was gathered on the plain to the west of the city’s landward walls. The camp wasn’t much to look at, just tents, a few buildings of mudbrick or sod. The ground was scored by drains and pitted with latrines, a system Nelo had come to know very well, for digging out the latrines and emptying them was the kind of detail that devolved on units like his own.
Still, Nelo had already been a Carthaginian soldier long enough to witness the changes that had come upon the camp since Fabius the Roman, the favoured general of the moment, had taken command. Once it had been a dusty shambles. You couldn’t even have told where it began and ended, and traders and whores had come and gone unchallenged, along with a few Libyan assassins. Now defensive ditches and barriers marked the camp’s boundaries, and Fabius had had stubby watchtowers built and manned, and sent patrols riding far out into the country beyond. In the camp, on a day like today after a bit of action, you could hear the blows of the smiths as they fixed battered armour and weapons in their workshops, and the cries of the wounded as the surgeons tended to their injuries, and the multilingual chatter of this force gathered from many nations: the mostly Carthaginian officers, tough black warriors from the southern empire of Mali, pale blond men from as far north as Scand, and men of the Middle Sea from Ibera and Gaira to the west, the Muslim kingdoms to the east. It was a mixed-up army in a mixed-up world, Gisco would say, shaking his head.
Sergeants like Gisco applauded Fabius’ competence. The men grumbled at the extra work he created, and were annoyed when a change meant they suddenly found themselves downwind of the latrine trench rather than up. But then, Nelo was learning, soldiers always grumbled, if things stayed the same or if they changed, at the prospect of action or the lack of it. And the wise old heads predicted it could all change again when the suffetes or the Tribunal of One Hundred and Four decided that Fabius was nothing but an upstart Roman after all, and kicked him out in favour of some other strutting tin hat who would turn everything upside down once more.
For Nelo the best part of each day was the evening, when the soldiers gathered by their fires in the open air and prepared their bread for the evening. Following an ancient tradition Carthaginian armies on the march carried grain, not finished bread, and every unit had its own grinding stone. Fabius had insisted on the same discipline in camp, even though they were not far from the walls of the city itself. So you would grind out your barley by hand — and it was always barley these days, though this was looked down on by proper Carthaginians who preferred wheat — and you would knead up the meal in a scrap of leather with a little wine or oil if you had it, then flatten it into wafers. You roasted it quickly on the fire, and ate it quicker, for it was unleavened and would set hard as rock if you left it to cool. But the fresh, hot bread at the end of the day on an empty stomach, along with a little meat or cheese and wine if you were lucky, was always delicious, and the soldiers, gathered around their fires, kneading and roasting and eating their own bread, were at their most companionable. Even Suniatus tonight, who sported a ridiculous plumed helmet he had looted from the corpse of a Libyan officer, left Nelo alone for a while.
After the meal, as the dusk drew in, Nelo took himself off to a corner by the wall of a barracks house, dug his paper and crayons out from his satchel, and started to sketch. Soon the face of the Iberan he had killed took shape on the paper. The grimacing mouth, the eyes oddly defiant though he must have known death was near. Nelo had long ago given up his formal experiments, though when he drew larger scale scenes he still tried out his look-deep techniques. Now he just tried to capture the immediacy of the moment. The extraordinary experience of risking one’s life, and taking another man’s.