Total War Rome: Destroy Carthage (17 page)

MACEDONIA

157
BC

7

Fabius pulled hard on the reins of his horse, guiding it around the mud that oozed up where an underground spring had broken through the forest path. His hunting dog Rufius leapt over the mud and loped ahead, towards the two riders who had begun to pick their way around the rocks that had been exposed where a mountain stream had cut into the slope. The depth of the stream bed showed that in spring it was a raging torrent, bringing down melt water from the mountains that rose beyond the northern fringe of the forest. They had been told by the foresters that the path had been used years before to bring out mighty oak timbers to build the tomb of King Philip, father of Alexander the Great, many
stades
away to the south on the plain of Macedon beside the sea. The foresters had come this far north to choose the hardiest trees, here on the lower mountain slopes where the oak gave way to pine and fir and cedar, before that too petered out and all that lay beyond the treeline was snow and jagged rock, a place where only a hardy few among the foresters had ever dared to venture.

Fabius and Scipio had come up here not to marvel at the oak trees, but to hunt the elusive Macedonian royal boar, a semi-mythical creature that was said to lurk in the furthest reaches of the woods on the mountain slopes. The foresters spoke of it in hushed tones, a beast as large as a bullock that could run faster than any steed, with tusks that could toss a horse and rider high into the air and a hide so thick that it would deflect all but the strongest spears. The boar had become Scipio's obsession, his ultimate prize, a chase that seemed about to take them beyond the world of men to a place where only a Hercules or a Theseus could hope to win.

They had been searching for signs of digging, for a rooting in the ground that would give Rufius a scent to follow. Rufius had grown into a beautiful dog, sleek and agile, as fast as a hare and he had become a close companion to both of them through the cold days and nights they had spent together in the forest, his black-and-white coat growing thick and shaggy as winter came on. In the three years since they had left Rome to live in the forest he had become as skilled a hunting dog as they had ever seen, adept at following the deer and bear that they had tracked through the dense undergrowth of the lower slopes, and at retrieving the pheasant and grouse that they had sometimes been lucky enough to bring down with an arrow. But up here, where the air seemed thinner and they were oppressed by a constant cold mist, Rufius seemed cowed, rarely straying out of sight even when a scent was strong. Fabius had come to rely on Rufius as his sixth sense, and he shared the dog's apprehension.

The night before, they had fortified their camp with sharpened stakes against the ravenous pack of wolves that had been trailing them for days now, keeping Rufius jittery and alert. The wolves were after the carcasses left after each successful hunt, meaning that he and Scipio and Rufius always moved on swiftly after butchering their prey, but it had been several days now since they had made a kill; the wolves were beginning to eye them more malevolently, making the hunters their quarry. Fabius had made the fire unusually large and had stayed awake for most of the night, spear in hand, Rufius by his side, watching the eyes on the edge of their clearing as they reflected the firelight. The yipping and howling had carried on intermittently through the forest since then, an unnerving sound in daylight. Perhaps the wolves too were beginning to sense that they had strayed beyond their rightful place, following Scipio as Fabius had done, on a quest that was taking them dangerously close to the realm of the gods. He looked again at the two riders ahead, at Scipio's companion. He was glad that Polybius had come. He would talk sense into Scipio, bring him back down to earth. It was time they returned to Rome.

A snowsquall swept over the trail, obscuring the riders from view. Fabius pressed his heels into his horse and it lurched forward, slipping and sliding on the wet rocks. The riders came in sight again, and he drew closer. Polybius had reached them an hour before, blowing his horn to give them warning, having come up from the foresters' camp a day's ride away after arriving in Macedonia from Rome. Polybius knew the forest like the back of his hand, having learned to hunt here as a boy more than thirty years before, but when he arrived he had seemed out of place, with his trimmed beard and expensive cloak; his years in Rome had made him appear more of a teacher and a man of letters than a warrior and a hunter. Fabius knew that Polybius would hate to hear it, remembering how much he prided himself on his toughness and military experience. Scipio, by contrast, was shaggy bearded, his shoulder-length hair tied behind his neck like a barbarian, his skin bronzed and ingrained with the dirt of the forest. He looked older than his twenty-eight years, like a gnarled war veteran, yet it was precisely because there had been no wars to fight since Pydna almost twelve years before that they were here now, fighting a proxy war against the beasts of the forest rather than against men.

Fabius hoped against hope that Polybius had brought tidings of a new conflict, of a summons to arms in Rome that would draw Scipio back. He rode up to the two men, keeping a horse's distance behind but close enough to hear them talk. Polybius had been examining Scipio's bow, and handed it back to him. He had clearly been casting a critical eye over their hunting equipment, and he gestured towards the quiver of boar spears that Scipio carried in a leather pouch ahead of his saddle, angled backwards along the shoulder of the horse so that they were out of his way when he rode yet accessible for quick deployment. ‘Have you ever killed a man with a boar spear, Scipio?'

‘I've never had the opportunity. And perhaps never will. War seems a thing of the past.'

‘Don't be too sure of it. And as for the boar spear, one day after a battle when we have deserters to punish I'll show you how it's done. The flat iron head of the spear is too wide to twist within the body, so you force it all the way through, twist it outside the body, and then pull it back and out. It's a weapon ideally suited for cavalry in a melee, when the horse is nearly stationary and the rider has the chance to lunge forward and then twist and withdraw forcibly. The key to the blade is its symmetrical shape, like a willow leaf, with a razor-sharp edge at the back as well as the front of the leaf.'

Scipio grinned. ‘You've always been a mine of wisdom, Polybius. A true mentor for a young Roman aristocrat. You taught me about ethics in war, about strategy and about how to kill. And most importantly for me right now, you taught me to hunt. There could have been no better education.'

‘That's what I've come to talk to you about, Scipio. About what you're doing with your life. But first, I have a question.' He peered closely at the spears. ‘What on earth is that wood? It's segmented, like the stem of a Nile reed. I've never seen anything like it.'

Scipio pulled out one of the spears and passed it to Polybius, who hefted it and stared at it keenly. ‘Extraordinary,' Polybius murmured. ‘So lightweight, and yet so strong. And it is columnar, with each segment the same width as the last, not tapering like a normal tree branch. Am I correct in thinking it's hollow?'

Scipio nodded enthusiastically. ‘Do you remember at the academy how Ptolemy and I used to ride out from Rome along the Appian Way in the evenings and hunt wild pig in the Pomptine marshes?'

‘I remember Ptolemy all too well,' Polybius replied pensively. ‘Do you know, in Egypt they now call him
philometor,
“lover of his mother”? But it's not his affection for his mother that's his biggest problem, it's his marriage to his scheming sister Cleopatra. I told him when he was a boy always to remember that he was a Macedonian by lineage, that just because his family had ruled Egypt since Alexander's time it didn't mean they had to behave like pharaohs and marry their own siblings. He's come running to Rome with his tail between his legs twice since taking over Egypt, first when his erstwhile friend Demetrius of Syria invaded him, and then when his own brother usurped him. That's
twice
Rome has had to bail him out. And Demetrius hasn't fared much better in Syria. The problems of those kingdoms are a lesson in how
not
to leave an empire: no structure, no administration. Alexander's legacy was as if the wealthiest man in the world had died but left no will. Ptolemy and Demetrius are only there still because they're allies of Rome and it's more convenient to keep it that way than to annex Egypt and Syria as provinces, yet propping them up will soon prove more of a headache than invading them. A Roman general – a conqueror of Carthage, let's say – could look east and see a succession of kingdoms that could fall before him like the columns of a temple in an earthquake.'

‘Carthage still seems an impossible dream. The Senate is too self-absorbed to order an assault, or to sanction a standing army that would deal with the threat. Rome is becoming weak.'

‘It is not the older generation that would fight Carthage, but your generation, a generation who must play the game and become legates and consuls. The best of that generation have forsaken Rome, and if they stay away too long they will never be allowed back.'

‘What happened to the senator Sextius Calvinus, by the way? I know he died soon after we left Rome. My father sent word.'

‘A terrible accident. Brutus saw it, by chance. He was run over by a bullock cart, and then gored by the bulls. His body was mangled beyond recognition.'

‘That sounds like Brutus.'

‘Those who were against you, Sextius Calvinus among them, were fired up that night of the triumph by the ascendency of your father Aemilius Paullus, by the sudden popularity of your
gens
among the plebs and the threat those senators saw of an imminent takeover, perhaps of dictatorship. Some of them may genuinely have been moved by constitutional fears, but most of them were simply protecting their own vested interests in the established order. Petraeus was seen as the rock that held you and the other young tribunes loyal to your cause together, and getting rid of him was a way of loosening those bonds and reducing the threat without going to the extreme of political assassination, of murdering a fellow patrician. Your departure may have persuaded them that they have won, but there are others, rivals of yours, who will still see you as a threat. That will never go away, and you must always be on your guard, even out here.'

‘Rome when I left was enervated by lack of direction, only able to look ahead to the next consular elections, to which marriage will tie which
gens
to another.'

Polybius cast a penetrating eye on Scipio, and then looked ahead. ‘I'd love to know more about those spears. You were going to tell me about Ptolemy.'

Fabius knew what Polybius was doing. He was drawing Scipio out, talking passionately about topics that he knew were close to Scipio's heart, yet which Scipio had professed to disdain when he went into self-imposed exile in the forest. Polybius might be the only one who could snap him out of his melancholy, but he was going to have to play him carefully if he wanted them to ride out of this forest together for Rome.

Scipio pulled out another of the boar spears from his quiver, showing its flexibility as it bounced in his hand. ‘Ptolemy was passionate about hunting too, and perhaps that was his undoing.'

Polybius eyed Scipio keenly. ‘It has been the undoing of many men, some because success in the hunt gave them delusions of grandeur, others because they were destined for greatness but frittered away all of their energy in the hunt.'

‘You always said it was ability, and not destiny, that made a man great. The joy of the hunt is that it is entirely about ability, and there is nobody burdening you with expectations of destiny, of forefathers held proud or betrayed by your course of action. Here, in the forest, the hunt is like a battle, where you live for the moment, where all depends on your courage and individual prowess, not on destiny.'

‘Tell me about Ptolemy. About the spears.'

‘He sought me out at my father's funeral games three years ago. He invited me to join an expedition to the upper reaches of the Nile at the cataracts, where crocodiles of huge size are said to live, beasts shrouded in myth like the royal boar we seek today. I told him that after I'd succeeded here and sent him a pickled boar's head to prove it, I'd take ship to Alexandria and join him. Meanwhile, he sent me some of his spears, and I replaced the thin iron spike they use to penetrate a crocodile's hide with the leaf-shaped head of our boar spears. As for the curious wood, he says it comes from an island called Taprobane, far out in the Erythraean Sea.'

‘Taprobane,' Polybius said, astonished. ‘That's to the south of India, a prodigious distance away.'

‘Ptolemy said that the Egyptians have been receiving goods from there since the time of the pharaohs, shipped in native craft across the Erythraean Sea to the coast of Egypt and then taken across the desert to the Nile. They even bring goods from a distant empire called Thina, including
serikon,
a fine fabric woven from moth cocoons. This wood they call
mambu.
It has incredible strength for its weight, so that lengths of twelve or fifteen feet are as light as our throwing javelins. If the iron tip breaks off, the wood shatters into razor-sharp shards that are held in place by the strength of the next segment below it, meaning that the shaft can still be used as a spear in its own right. And finally, because the air in each segment is closed off from the adjoining segments, lengths of
mambu
thrown into a fire will explode as the air inside heats up and expands, sending lethal shards everywhere. The native warriors in those parts use them when they clear villages and towns, throwing
mambu
into burning buildings to kill and maim any occupants still left inside.'