Those in the Senate whom Scipio despised, those who represented the social order that had caused him such personal anguish, had not been instrumental in his success. It was his standing as a soldier’s soldier among the legionaries and the veterans and their families that had forced the Senate behind him, even including his enemies, who had feared that not supporting him might lead to a popular uprising and the installation of Scipio as dictator. They included the senators whom Scipio and Polybius knew were traitors to Rome, who had conducted secret negotiations with Carthage to line their own pockets and who looked to the rise of Metellus in Macedonia and Greece as the driving power of a new Rome in the east. In the event, Scipio and Polybius had not needed to expose these men to get Rome behind their cause, but it was a trump card, should there be any hint of the Senate withdrawing support. For now, he was secure in his power base; his regard for his legionaries had paid off in the support that the plebs had given him, and he in turn would provide those men with the glorious victory and future that would more than repay their trust in him.
Fabius looked back over the vast expanse of the Roman fleet anchored behind him, and the encampment of the legions in the plain to the south. There had been another reason for the emergency election of Scipio to the consulship. War with Carthage had been openly declared more than two years before, ending the period of shady conflict in which Rome had officially only been providing training and advisers for her ally Masinissa in his attempt to counter Carthaginian incursions into Numidian territory. With the arrival of the legions, the Carthaginian stronghold at Utica had been taken, Carthage had been forced to relinquish all territorial gains and there had even been a Roman breakthrough into the northern suburbs of the city itself, albeit quickly repulsed. But the campaign had not gone as hoped. Carthage had become a city besieged, but the war had quickly become a stalemate. There had been a danger of Roman resolve plummeting, the support of the people fading and the next elections producing consuls who were appeasers rather than warmongers. That further lobbying by Polybius had made the election go the other way had put the onus on Scipio to bring the siege to a head, a task that he had taken on with huge relish. In six months of extraordinary activity he had brought the full might of Rome to bear, mustering the largest assault force ever seen. It was now no more than a matter of days, possibly less then twenty-four hours, before the final signal would be given. No army had ever been better prepared to end a siege, one that could change the course of history.
Fabius glanced at the plume on his helmet. Scipio had been true to his word, given five years ago when he had promoted Fabius to centurion after the siege at Intercatia; on being made consul he had promoted Fabius to primipilus, chief centurion, not of a particular legion but on his headquarters staff, meaning that Fabius was the senior centurion of the entire army under Scipio’s command. It was a huge responsibility, giving him de facto authority even over the junior tribunes, as the man the legionaries looked up to as much as they did to Scipio. Fabius had remembered the old centurion Petraeus on his promotion; he had returned to the farm in the Alban Hills to collect the ashes that had been buried in a jar by Brutus after the terrible night when Petraeus had been murdered, and he had taken them to the tomb of Scipio Africanus in Liternum as he had promised Petraeus that he would do, fulfilling Africanus’ own request. Part of him was still in awe of the grizzled old centurions that he saw among the legions before Carthage, and he had to remind himself that he too was now over forty and would have looked just as gnarled to the young legionaries here today. He was one of the dwindling cadre still in the army who had served under Aemilius Paullus at Pydna, the last great set-piece battle fought by a Roman army, but his memories were shared in the mess tents only with other centurions, not with the new recruits. His job as senior primipilus was to maintain discipline in the army, and he could no longer commingle with the men and tell stories of past wars by the campfire; that would be for their fathers and uncles in the taverns of Rome, veterans who would tell of Pydna just as their fathers had of Zama, and as those here today who survived would of the final siege in a conflict that had soaked up Roman blood and treasure for over a century now.
He remembered going with Scipio to the cave of the Sibyl on the eve of their departure for war in Macedonia more than twenty years before, when they had been little more than boys. There had been a smell there too, a reek of sulphur rising from the underworld, and the fragrance of leaves she threw on the hearth that made his head reel. He was meant to have stayed outside while Scipio entered, but had secretly run into the cave for a few moments after the others had left. She had touched him, a wizened finger extending from the darkness, and had spoken in riddles that he knew pointed to his destiny, to the destiny of Scipio and Rome, though he still did not know what they meant. All he knew today was that they were near the endgame in a war that had ravaged Rome for generations and bled out the best of her manhood on fields of battle across half the civilized world.
He remembered standing in front of a map of the Mediterranean in the academy in Rome a few days before that visit, while the old centurion Petraeus traced out Hannibal’s march over the Alps more than fifty years before, showing where they had fought in Gaul, in Italy, in North Africa, but his pointer always coming back to unfinished business: to the city of Carthage itself. Fabius stared out over the city now, a mass of flat-topped buildings and narrow streets leading up to the great temple on the Byrsa hill, the place where Queen Dido of Tyre had staked her claim almost seven hundred years before, centuries that had seen Carthage rise from a Phoenician trading post to the most powerful city in the west, with colonies in Sicily and Sardinia and Spain and ambitions that had nearly eclipsed Rome itself.
The tower he was standing on had been constructed by Ennius and his engineers on the admiral’s island in the centre of the circular harbour, where the Carthaginian fleet had once been housed in shipsheds radiating from the shore. The harbour had been taken after savage fighting a few days earlier, leaving the foreshore drenched with blood and heaped with Carthaginian dead, their bodies still smouldering on the funeral pyres outside. It was only a toehold into the city, but it meant that Carthaginian naval might was smashed for all time. Scipio had ordered his legionaries to go no further, but instead to consolidate their position so that they could exploit the weakness now exposed in the Carthaginian defences behind the harbour, to make sure that when he gave the order the largest amphibious and land assault in history would sweep through the city like a tidal wave.
The enemy killed in the harbour had been soldiers, mostly mercenaries; ahead lay thousands of civilians, men, women and children, terrified and cowering in their homes, counting down their final hours. The night before, on their ship offshore, Polybius had read them passages from Homer’s The Fall of Troy and the playwright Euripides’ The Trojan Women, wanting them to remember the cost of war. Looking across from the ship towards Carthage, the moonlight sparkling off the waves as they lapped the shore, they had listened to the story of Astyanax, the brave son of Hector, Prince of Troy, a little boy who had been hurled off the walls of Troy by the victorious Greeks a thousand years ago, his mother weeping as she was led into slavery. For a while Fabius had let the play affect him, and had thought of his own wife Eudoxia in Rome, of their young son. But now, in the cold light of dawn, compassion seemed a weakness. Now, death, all death, whether to soldier or civilian, was just a calculation of war.