It was the signal.
Scipio turned to Polybius. ‘Hasdrubal shall have what he wants.’ He raised his left arm and held it straight out in front of him. Down below, he saw the trumpeters lift their long horns to their lips, watching him. The drumbeat had stopped, and for a moment there was silence. Fabius felt a wisp of wind on his cheek, and looked out to the horizon again, squinting now against the sun. He saw only red.
Scipio let his arm drop.
‘Unleash war,’ he snarled.
24
Twenty minutes later, Fabius stood beside Scipio in front of the first maniple of the first legion, their swords drawn. They had crashed through the breach made by the ram, Fabius slightly ahead, and had run up the street towards the Byrsa hill, expecting opposition behind every street block. But there had been none, and they had quickly realized that Hasdrubal and his depleted force of mercenaries and Carthaginian troops must have retreated to a defensible position close to the centre of the city, to the place that Fabius and Scipio had seen three years before near the old quarter of houses below the Byrsa. The two men had reached that place now, and stood aside while the legionaries streamed into the open area where they had seen the Sacred Band training, now stripped of its embellishments; it had clearly been used as a storage facility for the troops, with wooden grain bins around the edge that all seemed empty.
Ahead of them lay a wall of rubble hastily built to block the streets on the south side of the city; along the top was the wooden palisade they had seen three years ago above the level of the surrounding houses. As the legionaries in the vanguard surged forward and sought gaps in the barrier, a blare of trumpets sounded from the parapet and Hasdrubal appeared with a group of soldiers, all of them wearing the burnished breastplates and lobed helmets of the Sacred Band. Fabius watched in astonishment as two four-horse chariots came into view beside them, veering round and facing in opposite directions, the horses stomping and whinnying on the narrow ledge. It seemed a baffling spectacle, of no clear purpose, until he saw what was held between them: it was a man in a legionary’s armour, his head swollen and unrecognizable, his arms tied to the back of one chariot and his legs to the other. Fabius turned to Scipio, gripping his arm. ‘Hasdrubal is taunting you again. That must be one of the Roman prisoners taken during the fight for the harbour. Hasdrubal knows that the traditional way of executing traitors in Rome is to draw them between two quadrigae.’
Hasdrubal bellowed; there was a swish of whips and the two chariots leapt forward along the parapet, almost immediately tumbling off the side into a tangled mess at the base of the wall, the horses shrieking and neighing. As they did so the man tied between them was torn in half, his upper torso springing forward like a slingshot, spraying his innards over the legionaries watching in horror below. There was a collective howl of anger, and a surge forward that the centurions struggled to control.
But worse was to come. Four wooden poles were quickly raised where the horses had stood on the parapet, and four more prisoners appeared, shackled and naked except for their helmets. Hasdrubal bellowed again, and they were tied to the poles and dangled over the legionaries below. A giant Nubian slave appeared, wearing only a loincloth, with metal hooks where his hands should have been. He clashed them together, and then tore at the nearest prisoner, ripping a jagged chasm across his midriff and pulling out his intestines. He sauntered over to the next one, jeering at the Romans like a circus clown, and then with both hooks gouged the man’s eyes out and ripped his cheeks open. He spun around and slashed his hooks over the third man’s groin, ripping off his genitals and flinging them out over the legionaries below. He stood in front of them, beating his chest and howling. Fabius felt sick, and he saw Scipio swallow hard. The other legionaries, the comrades of the men on the platform, looked stunned with horror, unable to move.
‘Enough of this,’ Scipio said to Fabius. ‘However we do it, we need to get onto that parapet.’
‘No need.’ Fabius had caught sight of someone familiar out of the corner of his eye. There was a swooshing sound over the men, and the Nubian reeled and then fell forward, an arrow in his forehead. Enraged, Hasdrubal drew his sword and chopped the legs off the fourth prisoner, leave him to bleed out copiously over the parapet, and then he hastily moved out of sight. The legionaries in the square parted to make way for Gulussa and Hippolyta, who had been with their cavalry on the plain outside the city but had led a dismounted party up from the breach that had been made in the landward walls. Hippolyta was wearing the skin of a white tiger beneath a Roman cuirass, and her red hair was bound in a tight knot behind her helmet. She held her bow with another arrow ready, and looked over at Scipio. The four prisoners on the poles were groaning, terribly mutilated. The senior centurion of the first maniple turned to her, his voice hoarse with emotion. ‘Put them out of their misery,’ he said. ‘They will thank you for it.’ Scipio nodded, and Hippolyta raised her bow and in quick succession shot an arrow into the heart of each man, killing them quickly and mercifully. Fabius closed his eyes for a moment, trying to forget the scene. He could see the legionaries looking restless, uncertain. It was essential that they regain the momentum of their charge up from the harbour, or else they would falter and be cut down as they followed the side alley up towards the Byrsa that he and Fabius had seen on the reconnaissance three years before.
It was his job as primipilus to take the initiative in situations like this, to restore discipline. He leapt up on a stone grain bin and turned to address the men. ‘Legionaries,’ he bellowed. ‘Our comrades watch us now from Elysium. They wear full armour and are decked with the dona militaria of heroes. Now we go forward. There is a way up the alleyway to the acropolis. Our comrades will be avenged.’ He looked at the senior centurion of the first maniple. ‘Form the testudo,’ he bellowed.
The centurion ran out in front of his men, turned to face them and raised his shield above his head. Instantly the first line copied him, locking their shields together to form a solid mass above their heads, and then on down the ranks as the cry of ‘Testudo’ went up from the other centurions until the entire force formed one continuous mass of shields. The centurions ran to the front and the rear and joined the formation just as the Carthaginians began pouring boiling olive oil down on them from the parapet, causing grunts of pain but no disorder in the line. Ahead of them the alleyway was clear of defenders for at least two hundred paces, but Fabius knew that the mercenaries on the walls and the warriors of the Sacred Band would come down and attack once they realized that the testudo was all but impregnable to anything they could drop on it.
Fabius and Scipio raised their shields above their heads and ran forward. Behind them they could hear Brutus pounding along the stones, and he soon overtook them. After about fifty paces they saw the first of the enemy in the alleyway, a mixed lot of mercenaries with the armour and weapons of half a dozen nations, Latins among them. Brutus charged headlong into them, his huge curved sword slashing to the left and right, slicing men in half and spraying their innards over the walls. The first victim of his fearsome cross-stroke was a Celtiberian who made the mistake of standing his ground. Brutus paused for a moment, eyeing the man up and down, and then with shocking speed swept his sword through the man’s exposed midriff, cutting him in half, and then up between the man’s legs to quarter him, drawing the sword right up through the neck and head. Fabius had seen it once before in practice on a prisoner but was still horrified by the result, an indescribable mess in the narrow confines of the alley. Ahead of him the mercenaries who had seen Brutus at work turned and retreated, bunching up together and inadvertently making themselves easier for him to kill, while others darted away on either side in a suicidal run towards the advancing legionaries; they would know they had no chance of survival, but could hope for a less gruesome end than the one being experienced by their comrades further up the alley.