It dipped suddenly, dropping to the height of the coop, but still it refused to enter and it wheeled away to continue its flight, oblivious to the annoyance of the observer below.
It was only by chance that Hamilcar had seen the bird arrive fifteen minutes before. He had been standing at the window of his room, staring at the distant hills to the east of Lilybaeum, his thoughts focused, as they had been for weeks, on the stronghold of Panormus beyond the natural divide. The carrier pigeon had caught his eye as it flew in close to the ground, a grey-white flash against the verdant background. Hamilcar had immediately raced to the battlements beneath the coop, anxious to receive an update on the siege.
The pigeon flew in close once more, but this time it landed on the protruding ledge of the coop. It stretched out its wings, the tips trembling slightly before they finally came to rest, and then the pigeon gracelessly stumbled through the entrance and out of sight. Hamilcar looked to the door at the base of the tower and a moment later the handler descended with the tiny brass cylinder that had been attached to the pigeon’s leg. He came up short in surprise as he encountered the commander waiting for him; he handed the cylinder over. Hamilcar, resisting the temptation to open it there and then, retraced his steps to his room, rolling the tiny capsule between his thumb and forefinger as he walked.
He entered the quiet of his room and closed the door. It had been more than a week since he had received news and he noticed his hand was trembling slightly as he placed the cylinder on the table. Lilybaeum, on the northwestern coast of Sicily, was only a day’s sailing from Panormus, but the Roman siege, on land and sea, had placed a stranglehold on the town. The paucity of news, most of it from ships passing at a distance from the port, made the reports carried by the pigeon all the more important. He opened the cylinder and withdrew the tiny scroll from within. The message was encrypted, an overcautious step considering the Romans were as yet unaware of the unique ability of the carrier pigeons, an ingenious method of communication that the Carthaginians had learned from the Persians a generation before, and one Hamilcar’s predecessor had brought to Sicily. He decoded the report and read it through twice, the necessary brevity of the sentence in marked contrast to its weighty content.
‘Attack on siege towers failed. Roman assault imminent. Galley captains informed of your last order.’
Hamilcar found that he was holding his breath and he exhaled. Panormus was doomed. The attack on the siege towers was a last desperate gamble that Hamilcar had ordered once he had learned of their existence, knowing the garrison commander did not have enough men for the task, hoping that Tanit, the goddess of fortune, might take a hand; but she had deserted Panormus, leaving it to its fate.
The attack on the town had been a surprise move by the Romans, in hindsight a typically aggressive and ambitious step, but one Hamilcar had not planned for. The fleet from Gadir had arrived in Sicily, but with his army under Hanno’s command in Africa, he had no effective way to lift the siege. He had hoped for more time, to realize a strategy he had already put in motion, but, sensing defeat, he had prepared for its eventuality, and his lips soundlessly mouthed the last words of the report: ‘your last order.’ He had penned it more than a week before for the galley captains, and it had read: ‘If Panormus falls, scuttle or engage, but galleys must not fall into enemy hands.’
Hamilcar knew three of the captains personally. They would consider it a grave dishonour to scuttle their own ships, but Hamilcar had wanted to give them the option, knowing the odds against them. In his heart he knew they would engage the enemy blockade. It was the course he would take in the same situation. As he reread the report he whispered a silent prayer to Baal to watch over the sons of Carthage.
He stood up and slowly rubbed the thin slip of paper between his calloused fingers, the fibres breaking down quickly. He let the remnants fall to the floor. The Romans had defied him. He had sent them an ambassador with lenient terms and they had dismissed his magnanimity, compounding that insult with an aggressive attack that had taken Hamilcar by surprise. He looked to the scraps of paper at his feet and felt the heat of indignant anger build within him. He would not be made a fool of again. After Panormus, the Romans would surely turn their attention to Lilybaeum and here, Hamilcar vowed, he would break their arrogance against the walls. There would be no more talk of peace, no more benevolent terms, and to make this decision irrevocable, Hamilcar knew there was one symbolic act that needed to be made, one superfluous element that needed to be eradicated. He strode from the room, his decision hardening with each step into cold determination.
The group of horsemen moved slowly through the deserted street, the unnatural silence broken only by the occasional sound of iron-shod hooves hitting random stones beneath the loose straw that was strewn across the hard-packed soil of the road. The horses were skittish and they snorted nervously, sensing the mood of their riders. The group closed ranks, keeping to the centre of the street.
Ahead they spotted the crumpled body of a woman on the road. She was naked below the waist, her legs twisted grotesquely, and she had been savagely beaten, the pool of blackened blood beneath her drawing a swarm of glistening bluebottle flies. Her face was hidden by her matted hair, making her age difficult to guess, but she had the slender lines of a younger woman and the riders looked away as they passed, their own faces pale with shock.
Further on a man was hanging by the neck from an upper storey window, his face blackened from the fire that had consumed his clothes and scorched his flesh. His body twisted slowly in the gentle wind. Beneath him the door of his house stood open and the riders peered in as they passed, unable to resist the animal instinct that compels a man to gaze with morbid fascination upon the very thing that he abhors. The room was mercifully dark, obscuring the fate of the family the man had tried to protect, but the meagre light reflecting off the naked flesh of tiny limbs created a terrible scene in the mind’s eye and again the men looked away in horror.
A sudden shriek broke the near silence and the tribune beside Scipio jumped with fright, his mount darting forward ten yards before the young man could bring it under control. Scipio scowled at the officer, a silent admonition, although he too had been startled by the sound. Panormus resembled the far bank of the Styx, a cursed place where the damned lay awaiting their passage to the inner depths of Hades. It had been forty-eight hours since the walls had been breached and the carnage was absolute. No inhabitant had been spared and the outnumbered garrison had been butchered to a man.
Scipio had allowed the men to gorge themselves on the town, wanting to set an example to every other town in Sicily, but even he was shocked by the level of savagery to which the legionaries had descended. In his youth, when he’d served his time as a tribune, Scipio had witnessed the brutality of close-quarter fighting, the fury men displayed in battle when the instinct to survive overrode all others, and where barbarity separated the living from the slain. But never before had he seen that fury unleashed on a civilian population. Although Scipio had long since hardened his heart to the plight of his enemy, he knew that few deserved the fate meted out to the inhabitants of Panormus.
That morning Scipio had ordered in the remainder of the Second Legion to take charge. These men, an unneeded reserve, had not taken part in the assault. They had marched through the open gate in disciplined ranks, tasked with gathering up the scattered legionaries within the walls and ensuring no enemy strong points remained. They had taken to the task with a ruthless efficiency, many of them no doubt angry that they had missed the spoils of victory, and within hours every legionary had been banished from the town, save a garrison force that now occupied a barracks near the docks.
Scipio spurred his horse to a canter and his tribunes came up to match his pace, following the slight downhill slope that led to the docks. They quickly reached the wide expanse of beaten earth that straddled the shoreline and Scipio reined in his mount, his gaze sweeping across the bay. Nearby, a group of legionaries stood guard as Carthaginians, brought ashore from the captured trading ships, gathered up the corpses that lay about the ground, loading them on to carts to be taken outside the town walls, where they would be cremated in an effort to stave off the dreaded pestilence that followed on the heels of every battle.
Scipio ignored them, focusing instead on the galleys anchored fifty yards from the docks. He instinctively searched for the Greek’s ship, looking for the prefect’s masthead banner; his eyes narrowed as he spotted the Orcus in the midst of the fleet. Their losses had been heavy, nineteen galleys in total, although the blockade had been a success and no enemy ships had escaped, vindicating Scipio’s decision to leave the Greek in command. He smiled coldly, remembering a story his father had told him as a child of how Dionysius II of Syracuse had demonstrated the precariousness of life by suspending a sword over the head of a retainer, held by a single horse hair. It was an appropriate image, although in this case the Greek was totally unaware of how immediate the threat was.
He turned his back on the fleet and looked again to the town that straddled the shoreline. It was a rich prize, the Carthaginians’ main port on the northern coast, and Scipio had already dispatched instructions to his wife in Rome to hire orators to spread the news of his great victory across the entire city. From out of the corner of his eye
