The centurion saluted and marched away as the harbour bustled back to life again. A great siege ballista creaked along the shore, drawn by two lines of Nubian slaves, its counterpoised timber tottering precariously on a loose lashing. Ennius saw it, shouted at the slave-driver to stop and ran over to supervise. Fabius put his hand on his sword hilt and stood alongside Scipio. ‘How did it feel?’ Scipio asked.
Fabius drew his sword again and looked at the blade, its doubleedged design copied from the Celtiberian swords they had taken from the battlefield at Intercatia, but retaining the short thrusting shape of the Roman gladius. ‘It slides in easily, and doesn’t bend. It will serve well as a slashing sword too. It felt good.’
‘Well, Fabius,’ Scipio said, peering up at the defences of Carthage. ‘Shall you be first on the walls of Carthage, or shall I?’
‘You are the general, Scipio Aemilianus. I am a mere centurion.’
‘But I already have the corona muralis, for Intercatia. It is time for another to take the glory.’
Fabius thought for a moment, and then reached into a leather pouch on his belt. ‘Well then, we should toss a coin for it, soldier to soldier.’
Scipio cracked a smile. ‘I should like that.’
Fabius took out a shiny silver denarius, and raised it up. On one side was the head of the goddess Roma, straight-nosed and clear-eyed and wearing a winged helmet, with the name ANTESTIUS along the edge. On the other side was the word ROMA and above it two galloping horsemen with spears, a dog leaping up on its hind legs below them. He handed the coin to Scipio. ‘This is fresh from the mint, given to me by my friend the moneyer Antestius just before I embarked at Ostia. He wanted me to throw it into the ruins of Carthage, in memory of his grandfather who fell at Zama. But I reckon if we toss it and leave it here, that’ll do the trick.’
Scipio turned the coin in his hand. ‘Six hundred and eight years ab urbe condita, in the year of the consulship of Lentulus and Mummius,’ he murmured. ‘I wonder if history will remember this year in that way, or as the year in which Carthage fell?’
Fabius was quiet for a moment, and then pointed to the horsemen on the coin. ‘If you were to ask Antestius, he would say that those are the Dioscuri, Castor and Pollux,’ he said. ‘But Antestius sketched this design in the tavern after I’d come back from Macedonia and told him about our hunting exploits together, and the goods times we’d had before my dog Rufius was killed.’
Scipio peered at it closely, shaking his head and smiling. ‘Who needs to conquer cities when a mere moneyer in Rome can give you immortality like this?’
‘Antestius told me something else about that coin. He said that one day when he was a boy he passed the most beautiful girl he had ever seen, walking with you in the Forum. It was Julia, of the gens Caesares. When he came to design that image of the goddess Roma, it was really Julia that he was depicting.’
Scipio stared at the coin, his voice hushed. ‘That’s her?’
‘Antestius said that the people no longer want gods and goddesses on their coins, but real men and women, those who are shaping Rome and her future, in our lifetimes and those of our children and grandchildren.’
Scipio swallowed hard, and his lips quivered. He held the coin up against Carthage as a backdrop, and then turned to Fabius, his voice hoarse with emotion. ‘I gave her up for this, you know. So that I could stand before the walls of Carthage with an army, about to order its destruction.’
‘You gave her up for Rome, and for your destiny. And Julia lives on with you now in your son.’
Scipio looked at the image on the coin again, and held it ready to toss. ‘If that’s Julia, she’s my call, then.’
‘And mine’s Rufius.’
Scipio flicked the coin on his thumb and it spun high into the air, flashing silver in the sky, then falling and bouncing on the stone pavement of the harbour front, the horsemen and the dog facing up.
Scipio turned and peered at him. ‘Rufius it is. You will lead the first maniple through the breach in the wall. You will finally have a chance at that crown.’
Fabius kicked the coin into a crack between the stones, and turned to Scipio, standing to attention. ‘Ave atque vale, Scipio. Until we meet again, in this world or the next.’
Scipio slapped him on the shoulder. ‘Ave atque vale, Fabius. Go now and gird yourself for war.’
23
A quarter of an hour later, Fabius stood with Scipio and Polybius again on the tower. He could feel the tension in the air, the edginess as they knew the time for action was approaching fast. Polybius pointed along the foreshore to the west, where the Roman fleet stood just out of bowshot range from the walls. ‘The wind is still coming from the south. Ennius is worried that it will blow the flames back over our own ships. You must give the order before the wind picks up much more.’
‘That’s exactly why I don’t like him messing with fire,’ Scipio grumbled. ‘I’ve been telling him that for twenty years. I wish he’d stick to catapults and battering rams.’
‘The die is cast, Scipio. And as for battering rams, he’s got those in place too. Look, they’re already swinging.’
Fabius peered down at the Carthaginian defences just inside the city from the edge of the harbour. Out of sight to the south, beyond the great wall that protected the city from the isthmus, Ennius’ cohort had spent several weeks building a battering ram of conventional design, a huge timber made from a single cedar of Lebanon shipped over specially for the purpose, capped with a bronze ram in the shape of a boar’s head taken from one of the triremes anchored offshore. It took more than a thousand men to wield it, and it would be the only way they could hope to break through the massive southern gateway.
But here beside the harbour it was a different matter: the walls blocking the streets had been hastily constructed by the Carthaginians in the past few weeks when they knew the Romans were coming. Ennius had spotted the structural weakness of the masonry, built in the Carthaginian manner with tall upright stones a few paces apart, the spaces between filled with courses of smaller blocks. The pillars had strength, but a ram aimed between them could easily break through. The Carthaginians had realized this and placed the walls at angles in the streets where they thought a ram could not be brought to bear, where the open space before the wall was too small for the run-up needed to punch a hole big enough for an assaulting force to break through.
But they had been wrong; they had not counted on Roman engineering genius. Ennius had demonstrated his invention on an abandoned villa with walls built in this fashion just outside the city, and Scipio had been convinced. He could see Ennius’ machines now, poking above the flat rooftops, triangular wooden frames that had been pushed on wheels close to the walls, with rams a hundred feet long suspended from ropes like pendulums. Ennius had built them using material his men had salvaged from the ruined warships in the harbour, from masts, ropes and iron rams, turning the last vestiges of Carthaginian naval might against the city, while the Carthaginians themselves had been reduced to using women’s hair to make rope for catapults. And these rams did not take thousands of men to operate, only a few dozen each; those men were specialized marines from the galleys, trained to help the slaves row in the final assault on an enemy fleet, and then as they struck home to leap off their benches and surge forward into the attack. Once the men swinging the rams had breached the walls and crashed through, the massed legionaries waiting behind would follow and the city would be open to conquest.