‘In the academy it was the other way round, Gulussa. We envied you. We knew that Masinissa was constantly at war with his neighbours, and we thought you had a glorious future in store.’
Gulussa gave him a tired smile. ‘Not glorious, Scipio. That’s not exactly the right word. Twenty years of raiding, of chasing down marauders and brigands in the desert, of retaliation against desert villages for housing fugitives. I’ve killed often enough, hundreds of times, but rarely with any glory, and it’s only with Carthage now encroaching on our land that I’ve led my cavalry for the first time against a proper enemy, in skirmishes and chases. I’ve lived my life planning for it, but I’ve not yet been in a proper battle.’
‘Your time will come, Gulussa. You will follow in your father’s footsteps.’
‘My father Masinissa gave me an interesting piece of advice that day. It was something he’d been trying to get to grips with through more than sixty years of experience in war, and witnessing numerous battles. He’d been schooled as a boy in Carthage with a Greek mathematician as one of his favourite teachers, and that made him think that there might even have been a formula to his observation.’
‘Go on.’
‘He had seen enough battles with very similar starting conditions go very differently from each other to observe that one small alteration of a variable at the outset could change the entire course of events, resulting in certain victory becoming resounding defeat. There would sometimes be no apparent logic to it, no obvious sequence of effects from that one change, but instead — at a certain point in the battle — the whole structure would seem to collapse. Because small variables are changed all the time, such as the movement of a century or a cohort in the order of battle, he had become doubtful that battles could ever be forecast at all, that beyond ensuring that your line-up was strong enough to put up a good fight, everything was in the lap of the gods. But then he began to observe a very interesting thing. The more uniform your force — the more homogeneous — the less likely a small change was to produce a catastrophic outcome. The more varied your force, the more heterogeneous, the more likely you are to be in trouble. He said Scipio Africanus was lucky to win that day at Zama, because his force had precisely that weakness.’
Scipio leapt off his horse, smoothed down an area of ground and unsheathed his sword, using the tip to inscribe three parallel lines in the dust. He glanced at Gulussa, his face flushed with excitement. ‘That fits perfectly with what I argued when we simulated Zama at the academy. This is Scipio’s order of battle for each legion: hastati in the front rank, principes in the second, and triarii in the third, with velites on the flanks. Everyone who’s studied that battle knows that the balance was nearly tipped against us when the hastati were thrown back after the initial Carthaginian attack. But the weakness that Masinissa identified was in the overall division of forces: in the line of battle, the legions were not homogeneous. Why do we persist in organizing our legions in this way, with divisions that go back to the days of individual citizen warriors, when their weapons and armour and their role in battle were based on their own personal wealth? We claim to have done away with the wealth test, now that all recruits have access to basic arms and equipment, but we still maintain these divisions in training and in battle order based on age and experience. How can it be sensible to put all of the inexperienced men in one division, the hastati, and put them up at the front as if they are no more than a human buffer, expendable and practically useless?’
‘The centurions have been grumbling about it for years,’ Fabius said. ‘Like the disbandment of legions after each campaign, it’s something that prevents the experience of veterans from filtering down to the new recruits. Unless you mix them up in the same units, the recruits have to learn everything the hard way by themselves and the generals have a much less effective fighting force.’
‘Precisely.’ Scipio kicked away the lines in the dust and slapped his sword against the palm of his hand, staring out at the battlefield. ‘Rome needs a professional army. It is the only solution.’
‘You would have a hard time persuading the Senate of it,’ Gulussa said. ‘Those with no experience of battle, and that’s most of the Roman Senate these days, would look at Zama and say that the existing army organization was good enough to beat Hannibal, so why change it? And stronger, more cohesive legions would make stronger armies and produce stronger generals who might return to Rome with their eye on dictatorship, or more. That’s what really frightens them.’
Scipio sheathed his sword and mounted his horse, then took up the reins. ‘We’ll see about that. To take Carthage is either going to require a professional army, or a general who will already be seen as a threat by those in the Senate who oppose change.’
‘There’s something else my father told me,’ Gulussa said. ‘Hannibal was an honourable man who accepted defeat. But Hasdrubal is different. In Spain you experienced the resilience of the Celtiberian chieftains, those who would die rather than dishonour themselves by surrender. Hasdrubal is more than that: he has a huge grudge against Rome, and he’s obsessively defiant. That’s a far more dangerous thing. There will be no honourable way out for him, no single combat as you fought with the chieftain at Intercatia. Hasdrubal will fall only when the city of Carthage falls. That is something else that the Senate in Rome must understand. The surrender of Hannibal does not provide a foretaste of what is to come if Carthage were to be besieged now. This new war, if it happens, can only end in the utter destruction of Carthage and of Hasdrubal.’
‘Let’s hope that Polybius has luck in his mission,’ Scipio said grimly. ‘But, for now, we must honour those who fell here that day, whose shades watch us from Elysium. There is one who must join them, whose wishes I must now fulfil. On his deathbed I promised that I would one day return to Zama, and that I would see that their general would rejoin his beloved legionaries for all eternity. I must ride along the lines of battle, and they must see that Scipio Africanus has returned. Leave me now.’
Fabius had seen the sealed alabaster cremation canister in Scipio’s saddlebag, something he had rarely let out of his sight. As long as Rome lasted, Scipio Africanus would be honoured by his gens in his family lararium and at the tomb on the Appian Way, but his spirit would be here, alongside those he honoured the most. Fabius thought of his own father, and of the old centurion Petraeus, both men who had been here on this battlefield alongside Africanus, and both now among those shades too. Fabius swallowed hard, closed his eyes and spoke their two names under his breath, then spurred his horse and followed Gulussa, who was already part-way up the ridge. He could hear Scipio galloping away across the plain behind him, but he did not look back. In a few minutes the sun would break through the haze, and he wanted to return to the watercourse to let his horse drink and then to find a rock to sleep behind. He was dead tired, and they still had a long hard slog ahead of them before they reached the Roman camp on the plain outside Carthage.