In the early morning of the very day of battle a courier came for Rina, sent by Barmocar. To her bewilderment she was summoned to join a party that would go into the field ahead of the Carthaginian army, to meet the Hatti leaders in a last-ditch negotiation. Her — a Northlander matron and outsider in this city, summoned to this most historic of events! But, she thought with a kind of grim pride, a Northlander should be marching with the Carthaginian army today. After all it was a Northlander weapon that might win the day for Carthage. And, short of beating out the iron carcass of an eruptor herself, in the days since her meeting with Barmocar and Carthalo she had used long-dormant skills of leadership to do as much as anybody to ensure that the project had been completed.
So she dressed quickly, donning a smart but sensible robe, and pulled a cloak over her shoulders. For walking on the rough ground outside the city, she dug out the stout boots she had worn for the journey from Northland. Here in the small town house given her by the suffetes, she had no servants to help her. She could not bear servants in her presence, not any more. Having checked her appearance in a brass mirror, she hurried out of her house and to the city gate.
The army pouring out of Carthage was an extraordinary sight. It was an army of scarecrows, Rina thought, after months of siege, all but the officers dressed in ragged uniforms and armed with rusty blades.
Fabius’ carriage was more extraordinary yet. He called it his ‘truce wagon’. The great vehicle, specially constructed, rolled on four pairs of mighty timber wheels, each hooped by iron and fixed to tremendous axles. The wagon was drawn by teams of Hatti prisoners, harnessed like oxen, but Fabius had promised them their freedom when the job was done, and so they pulled willingly. On the wagon’s bed sat a great chest, a huge wooden box nearly as tall as Rina, so long that the custom-made wagon barely fit it. The chest was covered in expensive cloths and tapestries bearing images of the city’s gods. But the most extraordinary aspect of the whole thing was what lay on top of that chest: human skulls, all lacking their lower jaws, a heap of them arranged in an orderly pyramid. You could see that most of the skulls were small, most of young children; the larger ones supported the smaller, until at the apex of the pyramid was fixed the smallest of all, tiny enough to have fit into Rina’s palm. It was the skull of a newborn, its little throat slit at the moment of its birth. This was a molk cart, and the city’s primitive sacrifice was horribly visible. And that, of course, was the point.
As the truce wagon rolled out of the gate, followed by the columns of troops, Fabius with his senior officers walked ahead. The great and the good of Carthage had been summoned to follow behind the general, and Rina hurried to join them. Here came Carthalo, following in the Roman’s wake, along with many others of the councils, even the Tribunal of One Hundred and Four whose constitutional function was to keep generals like Fabius in check. None dare resist him now. Some of Fabius’ soldiers walked beside the general, whether to protect him from Hatti or Carthaginians it was hard to say.
Barmocar, his expression dark, worked through the small crowd of dignitaries towards her. ‘So you came, madam.’
‘You summoned me. It was only courteous-’
‘Courteous? I brought you here to see what you have done, woman. The skulls, Rina — the skulls!’
She took a breath. ‘And Mago-’
He turned away from her, his face working. ‘His skull is here, on the carriage with the rest, not ten paces from where you stand. He did not die on the grisly altar of the temple, however. He died well, in combat, fighting off a Hatti raid. I hope that whatever you imagine I have done to you is now compensated.’ He leaned closer and whispered, ‘And if we live through this day I will make sure the rest of your life is blighted as mine is.’ He withdrew.
Alone, Rina walked on, trying to show no emotion.
Outside the city walls the Carthaginian army began drawing up in battle order, the men gathering in great blocks within which the men were all dressed and equipped similarly. These formations were called phalanxes, Rina had been told. The truce wagon rolled forward, accompanied by Fabius and the nobles, advancing beyond the lines. And now, Rina saw, a party of the Hatti came out to meet the Carthaginians. One man was mounted, and the rest walked under their own truce banner, of Jesus Sharruma with the crescent moon.
Rina was close enough to Fabius to hear one of his aides muttering advice to him. ‘The mounted man is Arnuwanda, their prince, chief of the armies, though it’s said it’s his aunt the Tawananna who makes the big decisions. The soldier at his side is Himuili, one of the smarter generals. The young priest — I don’t recognise him, I was expecting Angulli. .’
‘Mother?’
She whirled. She had not heard that voice in months. ‘Nelo?’
It was him, her son, a soldier in his tunic and mail and helmet, standing beside the Roman. He was armed with nothing more lethal than a crayon and his sketch paper. For a heartbeat they stared at each other, both disbelieving. Then they broke and ran to each other, regardless of the rest of the world, the two foreign armies before and behind them.
‘I didn’t know you were here,’ he stammered out at last.
‘Nor I you. I spent an awful lot of money paying for news of your progress.’ She laughed, but it was as much a sob. ‘I tried to save you, to get you out of there. It was part of the deal — I thought Barmocar had cheated me-’
Nelo glanced at Fabius. ‘His man came for me. I refused to leave. I could not leave him, Mother. The general. This is history.’
Fabius heard all this. He growled, ‘There won’t be much more history for you if you aren’t back by my side this instant, boy.’
Rina clung to him. ‘Forgive me,’ she said frantically. ‘For what happened in the beginning — it was Barmocar, again. We could not have survived here in Carthage if I had not let the army take you. Forgive me!’
Nelo shrugged. ‘I thought it had to be something like that. It wasn’t your job to protect me, I was old enough. If you’d just asked, I’d have gone anyway, to save you and Alxa.’
‘Oh, Nelo-’
He broke away. ‘Later, Mother.’
There was no more time. For now, in the middle of the field, the enemy commanders met.
The Hatti prince dismounted. With the general and the young priest, and trailed by aides and wary soldiers, he walked boldly towards Fabius.
‘Roman,’ Arnuwanda said. ‘We meet again.’
Fabius bowed. ‘I am honoured to be in your presence again, sir, My Sun, whose integrity is known to all the world.’
They both spoke Hatti and Carthaginian, and aides murmured translations.
Arnuwanda grunted. ‘I don’t deserve that title, and Crown Prince Uhhaziti won’t have it, not until this day is won. Why are we speaking? Why are we not fighting? And what is that grisly contraption? What are you going to do, pelt us with skulls?’ He was rewarded with a ripple of laughter from his own men.
Fabius waited patiently until they were quiet. ‘I am a Roman. But I work within the traditions of my adopted city. And these poor bones represent one of those traditions. It is the molk, the sacrifice. In this lore the gods’ favour is won by the sacrifice of children.’
Arnuwanda paced. ‘What barbarism is this?’
Some of his men were disturbed, and they muttered prayers, and made the symbol of Jesus Sharruma, the crossed arms over the chest. Every eye was fixed on the heap of skulls, which, Rina knew, was its true purpose, to distract.
‘Not barbarism, Prince,’ said Fabius evenly. ‘If I had a son myself I would have given him up willingly, to the gods of the city.’
‘Well, our gods will have something to say about how effectual that has been. What else, Roman?’ He peered at the huge covered casket on the wagon, on which the skull heap stood. ‘I yield to curiosity. What is in the box?’
Fabius smiled. ‘Another tradition of the Carthaginians, sir. A gift. They are a trading people, remember; they would always rather trade than fight. So here is this offer — a gift for you, after the receipt of which, they hope, your will to fight this day will be eliminated.’
‘Are you trying to buy us off? Is it gold, silver, jewellery? Is it so banal? My men can’t eat gold. And besides, every coffer in Carthage will be open to me by the end of the day.’
‘Not that.’
The Roman seemed to be enjoying the game, Rina thought uneasily, and she prayed he wouldn’t push his luck too far. Already some of the men behind Arnuwanda looked suspicious.
Now one tough-looking soldier stepped forward and grabbed Arnuwanda’s arm. ‘There’s something wrong here. Sir, step back-’
‘Oh, be still, Kassu-’
Fabius roared, ‘Now, Gisco!’
In an instant Carthaginian soldiers leapt at the cart and hauled aside the drapes, scattering the skulls carelessly on the dusty ground, to reveal the wooden crate. With a few tugs on rope loops the walls of the crate fell away — and the eruptor was exposed to the air. It was a great bulb of cast iron, reinforced with bound hoops, and with a gaping mouth pointing straight at the Hatti lines. Men huddled around the eruptor, blinking in the sudden daylight; they too had been hidden with the weapon inside the crate. One of them was a young man called Thux, a Northlander engineer who had once worked the pumps on the Wall. The rest were Carthaginian soldiers.
Already they were in action. Rina had witnessed endless rehearsals with this team since the casting of the barrel, and she knew that the loading must already be complete, the powdery fire drug itself shovelled into the barrel and rammed home, the muddy loam paste pushed in after it, and then the stone, a rock roughly chipped into shape. And the wick, a tube of paper filled with the drug, would have been pushed into a hole drilled into the eruptor’s metal flank. Now Thux himself approached this wick with a lighted candle.
Arnuwanda and the Hatti stood and stared. ‘What is that?’
‘A thunderbolt from Jupiter,’ snarled Fabius in Latin. ‘Now, Northlander!’
As Thux lowered the candle to the powder tube, Rina screamed to her son. ‘Get down, Nelo! Oh, get down!’
Kassu saw the iron contraption, and the flame, and the scattering Carthaginians. This was a weapon. And he stood right before it. He was nowhere near the prince — Himuili had already dragged Arnuwanda away — but Kassu stood beside Palla. He grabbed the priest and hurled him to the ground.
The eruptor exploded.
That was what it felt like, sounded like. He glimpsed a dark mass flash from its mouth in a plume of fire and smoke, with a noise like thunder — it seemed to brush his foot even as he fell over Palla — and then it plummeted into the Hatti lines, and scattered the men, and he saw a kind of bursting of blood and bone.
When the roaring was over he found himself down on the ground, on top of the priest, Palla’s face below his. Smoke billowed around them. Men were screaming, but it felt as if his ears had been stuffed with cloth. He looked around. The central phalanx had been scattered, men lying smashed and broken. The statue of Jesus was gone too, shattered, only a stump remaining. And high on the walls of Carthage he saw dark mouths, more eruptors, aimed at the Hatti lines.
Then the pain hit him, a great wave from his right leg. He looked down. The leg was gone, from beneath the knee. Oddly no blood spurted. Perhaps the heat of the stone had cauterised it.
The priest beneath him grinned. ‘You’re crippled.’
‘Your god is dead.’ He had to shout to hear himself.
‘You should have killed me while you had the chance.’ And the priest drove a blade into Kassu’s side, under his mail coat.
More pain, exploding in him like the Carthaginian weapon. The priest twisted his blade, and Kassu could feel it pierce his muscle and pull his guts, feel it as it scraped on his backbone.
But Zida was here. He rolled Kassu aside. ‘This story ends now.’ He brought his axe chopping down on the priest’s neck.
Kassu, lying on his back, tried to speak. ‘Pimpira. . I leave my estate to Pimpira, not to that whore of a wife. To Pimpira. .’ But he saw no more, heard no more, save a rush like thunder that rose up and enveloped him.