his sword, horns blasted, and a ripple of commands spread out through the Carthaginian army.
Sergeant Gisco grinned and raised his thrusting spear. ‘Our turn, lads! After them and finish them off!’ The men of Nelo’s phalanx surged forward after the fleeing Libyan survivors, running across a field already strewn with corpses.
But Nelo didn’t have a chance to move before a hefty shove in the back pitched him onto his face. Suniatus, of course. The big man peered down at him. ‘Too slow, aurochs!’ And he gave him a kick in the head for good measure, and ran on.
Naturally, in the midst of the advance, Gisco saw this and pointed his sword tip at Nelo. ‘Northlander! You’re on a charge! Get to your feet!’
Nelo struggled up, shook his head, hefted his sword and stabbing spear, and ran with the rest.
As Gisco never failed to remind them, the men of this unit were the dregs of the conscripts and levies the suffetes, the executive officers of the city, had raised to swell out the Carthaginian army, as rumours swirled of the advance of the Hatti horde by land and sea. Even Suniatus was a poor soldier for all his bullying: strong, fearless, but evidently too stupid to obey the simplest order. But the men around Nelo seemed keen enough as they charged — keen to get among the killing at last, especially if it could be against an opponent already beaten and demoralised, and keener, perhaps, to get their hands on some booty.
Already they closed on the Libyans.
The Carthaginians descended with a roar. Sergeant Gisco himself went in with sword swinging, cutting down rebels like a sickle in a field of wheat. Suniatus threw himself on the back of a fleeing Libyan, forcing the man to the ground and stabbing him brutally in the side of the face with his sword, over and over as the man writhed and blood spilled. Nelo had got used to the noise of battle, or so he thought, but he had always been out of it before, held back from the fray. Now he was in the midst of it, and the noise of men screaming in anger or pain all around him was astonishing. It was like an abattoir.
Suddenly there was a hiss, a blur, and something shot past his ear. A javelin!
Shocked, heart hammering, he turned to see an enemy warrior, wounded, blood streaming from his leg, but with a round wooden shield in one arm, sword in wooden scabbard. He wore a crude leather tunic as a herdsman might wear, but he had no protection at all for his bare arms or legs or face, and if he’d ever had a helmet it was long lost. He hardly looked like a soldier at all. But he had some kind of loop of leather around his fingers, which he was fitting into a notch on another javelin. He was fumbling, pale from loss of blood.
Gisco knocked the man’s javelin aside, and he stumbled back onto one knee.
‘He could have killed you!’ the sergeant screamed in Nelo’s ear. ‘That javelin missed your stupid melon of a head by a thumb’s width. If not, you’d be lying in the dirt already, Northlander. Dead! Everything that you are, have ever been, or ever might have been, spilled out into the Dark Earth for all eternity, for that’s where bad soldiers end up, believe you me, never mind what the Jesus botherers will tell you. All because of him! That man in the dirt, who never saw you before today! And now he’s trying again. Are you going to stand there and let him? Are you, aurochs? Are you?’
It was Gisco’s screaming that drove him forward as much as the shock.
Still the fallen warrior fumbled with his gear. This time Nelo knocked the javelin aside with the shaft of his own spear. The man fell back on the ground and raised his sword, but Nelo, remembering his training at last, fell on him, straddling his torso and pinning the man’s sword arm with his own gloved fist. For one heartbeat his eyes met his enemy’s. The man was dark, even darker than most Libyans. Nelo smelled blood, and dust, and sweat, a richer stink of horses and cattle and hay. He looked older than Nelo. His face was lined and heavily weathered, as if he’d spent much of his life out of doors. He was
Nelo swept his sword across the man’s throat. Skin and cartilage resisted, but he dragged the blade through. Blood spurted, shockingly bright, and the man choked and spewed blood from his mouth. Still he stared at Nelo.
‘Again!’ yelled Gisco. ‘Again and finish it!’
Nelo swung his sword once again, this time a chop as if he was severing an ash branch, and he felt the sword cut into the bone of the neck. The man shuddered once, and his eyes rolled, and he lay still. Nelo’s sword was stuck in the bone. He had to drag at it to release it.
Then, suddenly filled with revulsion for the bloody corpse under him, he scrambled to his feet.
‘There.’ Gisco clapped Nelo on the back. ‘You did it, aurochs! You took a life. No worse than sticking a pig in training, was it? And now you’ve done it once you can do it again, you’ll see, it gets easier every time. And look at this.’ He leaned over and with a brisk chop of his own sword he severed the man’s right hand. Gisco lifted the hand by its little finger, almost delicately, as its stump dripped blood. There was a fine leather strap around the first two fingers. ‘See those loops? To help him throw his javelins. Libyans don’t do that. This isn’t a Libyan bastard, he’s an Iberan bastard. This is what Iberans are good for.’ He threw down the severed hand. ‘
‘No, sir.’
‘But here he is.’
‘I suppose they are hungry in Ibera as well, sir.’
‘I suppose you’re right. The whole world’s hungry, and they’ve all come here to pinch our grub, the Iberan bastards from across the strait, and the Libyan bastards who live around the corner, and the Hatti bastards who are on their way across the Middle Sea. But they aren’t going to succeed because we’re going to fight them and stop them and kill them, aren’t we, aurochs?’
‘Yes, sir.’
‘Right, there’s still a few Libyans left. Get stuck in. If you find a helmet that fits you take it; that acorn shell on your head looks ridiculous.’ For a moment he glanced down at the mutilated Iberan, at blood-splashed Nelo. ‘An Iberan and a Northlander, fighting to the death on a scrap of Carthaginian soil. I don’t suppose either of you wanted to be here, and we don’t want you here, but here you are, and this is the way it has to be.’
‘Yes, sir.’
‘You’re still on a charge. Go, go!’
Nelo ran off, after the fleeing Libyans and his own jubilant comrades. Already the crows were gathering overhead. Even the crows were hungry this spring.
51
Nelo’s force got back to camp at noon the next day.
The army of Carthage, swollen by levies, conscripts and mercenaries, was gathered on the plain to the west of the city’s landward walls. The camp wasn’t much to look at, just tents, a few buildings of mudbrick or sod. The ground was scored by drains and pitted with latrines, a system Nelo had come to know very well, for digging out the latrines and emptying them was the kind of detail that devolved on units like his own.
Still, Nelo had already been a Carthaginian soldier long enough to witness the changes that had come upon the camp since Fabius the Roman, the favoured general of the moment, had taken command. Once it had been a dusty shambles. You couldn’t even have told where it began and ended, and traders and whores had come and gone unchallenged, along with a few Libyan assassins. Now defensive ditches and barriers marked the camp’s boundaries, and Fabius had had stubby watchtowers built and manned, and sent patrols riding far out into the country beyond. In the camp, on a day like today after a bit of action, you could hear the blows of the smiths as they fixed battered armour and weapons in their workshops, and the cries of the wounded as the surgeons tended to their injuries, and the multilingual chatter of this force gathered from many nations: the mostly Carthaginian officers, tough black warriors from the southern empire of Mali, pale blond men from as far north as Scand, and men of the Middle Sea from Ibera and Gaira to the west, the Muslim kingdoms to the east. It was a mixed-up army in a mixed-up world, Gisco would say, shaking his head.
Sergeants like Gisco applauded Fabius’ competence. The men grumbled at the extra work he created, and were annoyed when a change meant they suddenly found themselves downwind of the latrine trench rather than
