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.
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.
FOUR
70
71
The Hatti negotiating party was to be met by Barmocar at the Byrsa gate.
Pyxeas and Rina had been invited to join the official Carthaginian response as representatives of Northland in exile, and as embodiments of the knowledge and power that had crushed the morale of the Hatti siege forces. Rina insisted that Nelo should attend too, to see the end of the story that had had such an impact on his own young life.
So Nelo met his mother and great-uncle at the gate. Waiting for the Hatti, they were all wrapped in their winter cloaks for, despite the arrival of another spring, it was a cold, blustery morning, with flakes of snow driven on a swirling wind. This was a part of Carthage Nelo rarely visited, much too grand for Northlander exiles, even now.
And Fabius still dangled from his cross high above the gate, bones and flesh and cartilage, wrapped in his cloak of Roman purple.
Carthalo of the suffetes was here too, waiting with Rina. He regarded Nelo blankly. ‘You are the soldier boy who scribbled at the whim of the Roman.’
Pyxeas flared. He was an old man, bent, weary from the long journey from which he would likely never recover, yet he straightened with dignity to face Carthalo. ‘A boy who was ready and willing to fight in the army that defended this city. Perhaps he deserves a little respect, sir.’ He glanced up at Fabius. ‘And perhaps the Roman does too. I’m sorry if it troubles you, Nelo, to see him abused like this.’
Nelo shrugged. ‘I’ve seen worse on the battlefield. Fabius is gone. His people believe that when you die you cross a dark river to the next world.’ But you needed coins to pay the ferryman, and Nelo knew that some of Fabius’ soldiers had sworn that when the body was finally cut down they would bury it with Roman honours, with coins on his eyeless sockets. ‘That’s not Fabius up there.’
‘No,’ came a wheezing voice. ‘Not Fabius, but a symbol of him. And that’s what counts, isn’t it?’
They turned, and saw that the party of Hatti dignitaries was approaching, processing up a cobbled street towards the gate. The party was small, just a handful of Hatti nobles in their brightly coloured court robes, with one senior military officer, flanked by an escort of wary Hatti and Carthaginian soldiers. The street had been cleared for
