Carthage

  Praise for Ross Leckie and Carthage

  ‘Leckie has created a highly contemporary novel, making what might be seen as a series of dusty dates relevant to our modern lives. Leckie’s knowledge of the period is profound, and his manoeuvring of that history effortless, as he solders fact and fiction to create a novel with real historical depth.’ The Times

  ‘A well-imagined, insightful reconstruction.’ Sunday Telegraph

  ‘A vivid, well-researched novel. Time and again we feel we are there, in the state rooms of senators and princes, or sailing the Mediterranean in a small, swift boat, or walking the streets of the great city itself.’ Sunday Herald

  ‘Leckie’s writing is as clear as spring water, and as refreshing.’ Independent

  ‘Full of wonderful scenes: cosmopolitan, chaotic Carthage – an ancient incarnation of New York – heaving with people from all corners of Africa … What was once cold history with echoes of adventure becomes full-bodied adventure with echoes of history.’ The Times

  ‘Leckie’s Rome is certainly alive and kicking … a fine achievement, a thoughtful and stylish piece of historical fiction.’ Daily Telegraph

  ‘In Leckie’s descriptions it’s possible to smell the stench of sweat and fear, hear the roars of warhorses and elephants, see the blood-stained armour. Informative and utterly compelling.’ The Times

  ‘Enthralling … The politics of Hannibal’s makeshift alliances, the corrosion of his humanity and the ghastly mechanics of war, are brilliantly described.’ Independent

  ‘Leckie brings the battle-tactics and manoeuvres almost cinematically alive and the sense of blood and sweat, chaos and horror linger powerfully on … utterly gripping.’ Scotsman

  CARTHAGE

  ROSS LECKIE

  Edinburgh • London • New • York • Melbourne

  Conticuere omnes intentique ora tenebant.

  inde toro pater Aeneas sic orsus ab alto:

  infandum, regina, iubes renovare dolorem,

  Troianas ut opes et lamentabile regnum

  eruerint Danai, quaeque ipse miserrima Uidi

  et quorum pars magna fui. quis talia fando

  Myrmidonum Dolopumve aut duri miles ulixi

  temperet a lacrimis? et iam nox umida caelo

  praecipitat suadentque cadentia sidera somnos.

  sed si tantus amor casus cognoscere nostros

  et breviter Troiae supremum audire laborem,

  quamquam animus meminisse horret luctuque refugit,

  incipiam.

  They all fell silent, each face turned intently towards him. Then from his couch high up, father Aeneas began: ‘You bid me, O queen, revive an unutterable sorrow; how the Greeks erased Troy and its magnificence, ever worth mourning. I saw that tragedy myself, indeed I was at its core. No one, not even a Myrmidon or a Dolopian, not even some soldier of unpitying Ulysses could tell this tale and fail to weep. Well, the damp air of night is falling swiftly from the sky. The setting stars remind us that we too must sleep. But if you really want to learn what befell us and to hear the gist of Troy’s last trial, even though I shrink from the memory and can barely face its pain, yet I will begin.’

  virgil, Aeneid ii, 1–13

  CONTENTS

  Prologue

  CARTHAGE

  Epilogue

  Chronology

  PROLOGUE

  I am Polybius, a prince, a Greek, but I write this in Rome. We came back here from Carthage, and destruction. Scipio, whom I serve, still wakes at night, sweating, screaming at the memory of what we have seen – and been. Not even in Sofonisa, his wife, can he find the succour that he seeks.

  What we have been? I should say ‘he’. It was Scipio who allowed Cato to force him to war, to lead the Roman army, to root out Carthage like an old olive tree in the way of a new road. Now Scipio cannot bear what he has done.

  Such is the way of history, implacable as night and ineluctable. I should know, for though born to high estate I am now an historian and scholar, writing the history of Rome’s rise, of Carthage’s fall in the same year as Rome also destroyed the once-great Greek city of Corinth. I fought the Romans once. It no longer seems a prudent thing to do. We Greeks lost at the battle of Pydna, twenty-two years ago, and I was brought, a hostage, in chains to Rome. After years of misery, Scipio rescued me. I had been working as a clerk and translator in the archives of the Senate, a slave of inventories, depositions, deeds. But Scipio saw my promise. I––. Enough of me. I do not need to record that. My works will be sufficient for memorial.

  I was present at Carthage’s final fall. Scipio had me search the city’s citadel for papers, and in particular for anything that might confirm the duplicity of Cato. What if anything that will achieve, if proved, I do not know.

  I found a great deal. Hanno, it seemed, had ordered much of Carthage’s archive moved to the citadel for safety. What I found germane in that is here. But what I read led me to seek out more, not only here in Rome but also in Capua, Neapolis and elsewhere.

  Romans love their records. Theirs is a race that needs to feel secure. It is a custom of this people that on his death all a man’s extant correspondence must be lodged, in the appropriate office, with his will. So I have had many archives on which to draw, all catalogued and sound.

  And, thanks to Scipio, I have had unimpeded access to the records of the Republic, the speeches of the Senate, all of Cato’s papers and even what used to be his room in the Curia. It has been preserved as what I can only call a shrine. There are still boxes of unread papers there. This book is the result of my researches. Here, principally, is Hanno, the bastard son of the great general Hannibal who so nearly destroyed Rome. Here too is the man who once was mapmaker to Hannibal, then secretary to Scipio Africanus and finally guardian of Hanno. Bostar of Chalcedon’s life is a strange one, even in the myriad ways of men.

  His journal was written in rather elegant Greek. I hope to have done it justice, but then Latin is not an easy language into which to translate Greek. It lacks the elasticity, the fecundity of the queen of tongues. Hanno’s memoir he wrote in Punic, the language of the Carthaginians. It is inflected and testing, but fortunately a language I have known all my life. From its foundation, my home city of Megalopolis in Arcadia plied rich trade with Carthage. My nurse, Salambo, was Carthaginian, and I learned Punic first from her.

  For Rome, albeit in the shadows here, is Scipio, son of the great Scipio Africanus who saved Rome but could not save himself – I should add bastard son, for the Scipio I serve is as Hanno was: two bastards doomed in life to seek each other’s death. Who needs the fictions of the poets when we have such facts as these?

  Here also is Cato, self-made man, senator and later Censor and, for reasons apparent or not from what follows (that judgement being yours), opponent with his every breath of the Scipios – and Carthage. I have added the occasional note of explanation or exegesis, and there are many other voices here. The selection is mine, idiosyncratic, and seeks only to replicate life. – ‘Strange wonders are many,’ says Sophocles in his play Antigone, ‘but none is stranger than man.’ So what follows is not history. That is the study of forces which shape the world, for all man’s attempts to hew it other ways. The formal history I am writing tells that Carthage fell. Let this book, its ghosts and dreams and voices, tell how and why. Let it be a companion to my history, and even bring to historiography something new: ‘pragmatic history’, involving the study of contemporary documents and memoirs, we might call it.

  But if the questions of how and why are simple, the answers are complex. That is because they lie of course in people: in their aspirations; fears and fickle foibles; fatal flaws; in, above all, the ambiguity of action. As I believe this work shows, it is by a series of mistakes that some states thrive and others
fall. There is no visionary’s plan. There are only the disasters some people spawn, though why we cannot tell, and others’ dreams. States emerge from in between, and Rome is not expanding. It is realising. It is an inalienable fact of history that some get in her way.

  So, a medley, a mosaic; tesserae would be the Latin word for what is here. It is a story that has entered now the labile mists of memory. As Aristotle urges us of drama, ‘suspend your disbelief.’ Expect no consistency, no disciplined chronology here. Most of these lives are ended. Only marks on wax or parchment prove that they have ever been.

  From Hanno’s memoir, found among his papers in the

  citadel of Carthage

  We are surrounded now. They have broken through the walls, and possess the city, bar this citadel where I am; I, Hanno, son of a legend and a slave; Bostar, bent with years, who has been my guardian, mentor and friend, father I never had; Fetopa, my wife, whom I have learned to love in as many ways as rain comes.

  Here with me also are our four children Fetopa holds as a hen her chicks against the deepening of the dark; Artixes, a doctor and man learned in many things; Halax, rich in the lore of plants and animals, a hunchback but my friend; Tancinus, once a Roman, now no man; some hundred of my people who have come with me to the farthest reach of hope and of endurance. And I have the sacred books, the soul of Carthage.

  High on the sacred mountain Jebel-bou-Kournine, still our beacon burns. I will see its light tonight, and our strength will be renewed. We will mock the Romans. The walls girding us are thick and strong, built, our legends tell us, not by any man but by Tanit-pene-Baal, great goddess of the moon and of forgetfulness. We have time, water, food. None of the Romans, not even Scipio, whoever helps him, can know of all our secret stores and cisterns, deep hewn from rock when Rome was only huddled huts squatting by the Tiber. So let them seek the ruins’ shelter from this summer sun that beats and pounds and sears the brain.

  I can see the sea from here, hear the water’s sounding, ceaseless sibilance. And from the sea, help may come before I do that which otherwise will be done. The wood is seasoned, dry. The pyre stands by. Meanwhile, let me write – and others too – of how it came to be that, once again, Rome confronted Carthage.

  I begin that which now is almost ended. I go back, back. To Macedonia, and to a boy waiting, waiting for his father, Hannibal. Yes, let that be where I begin. I shut my eyes against my people’s noise. Blind, I see. Eyes open again, sweat plopping off my forehead from the heat, the stench of many people and no wind, eyes only on the vellum here before me and the goose-quill’s point, I write.

  Letter from Cato’s papers, preserved in the archives

  of Rome

  To Marcus Porcius Cato, Censor, in Rome; Quintus Vitellius Tancinus, special legate, sends greetings from Sicily. I have followed your orders to the letter. Leaving Rome, and satisfied that no persons matching your description of them had sailed from Ostia, I enquired at all the harbours of the south-western littoral: Misenum, Neapolis, Posidonia, Elea and Rhegium. I could find no trace of them. So I assumed that this Bostar and the bastard Hanno had not, as you feared, gone south to Carthage.

  Still, I crossed to Sicily and, using your warrant and your gold, asked at Panormus and Messana. Nothing. At Agrigentum and Gela. Nothing. Only in Syracuse did I find good – and expensive – news. A galley called the Apollodorus, double-oared and fast, its master one Trimalchio, a Ligurian. This Bostar chartered her some five months ago. Trimalchio did not leave an itinerary with the harbourmaster as he should have done. But all my sources are agreed: the Apollodorus sailed east, with enough provisions for a long journey. I questioned the port’s quartermaster. He remembered the transaction clearly. Among other strange things, this Bostar insisted on a large package of that strange gum, bdellium. Where have they gone? To Achaea, Epirus or Macedonia? Asia, Lycia or even Bithynia where, they say, that savage Hannibal hides? If you want me to search in the east, I suggest I take ship to Athens. You say this Bostar is a philhellene. Wherever he has gone he will have wanted, I believe, to refill the ship’s water barrels there. I await your orders. By the hand of him who bears this, send them to me at the house of Pollius by the harbour wall – and send me more gold.

  From Hanno’s memoir

  On the eastern edges of the sea I saw a sudden ship’s sails shimmer in the dying of the light. Sitting at my supper on the terrace of our villa, I knew that it was him. I dropped my spoon, wrenched back my chair. I must have knocked over a cup. I heard the tinkle of its breaking on the mosaic of the floor. Ignoring our servant Arxes’ cries of protest, heart pounding, mind racing, I ran across the hall, out of the door, slipping, skidding on the road’s mossed stones, bursting towards the little harbour and the shore.

  There was nothing there. From where I had stopped, the pier’s legs reached into dark. Hurrying home, three pigeons crossed the sky above me. Out to sea, a gull sped along the undulating, listless waves and gave its ululating call. A eulogy, an elegy, I do not know. I never have liked gulls. Sailors say they are departed souls.

  Wind stirred the hillside’s trees and they whispered to themselves like lovers, lost in what they believe. On the susurrating shingle, with a sudden shiver against the cooling air of evening, I sat down. My father, my father. I had waited already for so long.

  First faint, then full: ‘Boom, boom!’ sounded through the silence. I looked up. No wind at all, a barely heaving sea. A drum. The steady drum for rowers’ strokes. Of course, the wind had failed. That is why he had been so long. It was almost dark. The western sky still held low, palisading light. Then I heard the plashing, sucking, creaking of the oars. ‘Hanno!’ ‘Hann-o!’ I heard Arxes’ plaintive voice far behind me, up the hill. Looking back, I saw his lamp. I stood up. Carefully, because the pier’s planks were cracked and sere, I made my way along.

  I sensed the ship’s shape before I saw it, massing in the dark. ‘Deck one, ship oars!’ came the mate’s cry. ‘Deck two!’ Gliding silently, the galley was almost alongside. I waved with both arms. ‘Father!’ I shouted, ‘Fath-er!’ And then, in one light leap a man was on the pier beside me, holding me in his arms and, if he could have seen them, there were tears in my eyes.

  But his was a smell I knew. My head muffled in his shoulder, I came to understand, wanted to shout ‘No! No!’ But with anger, I felt hope. I couldn’t breathe. My hands on the man’s shoulders, I pushed myself away and, in the light of a row of torches now burning along the galley’s thwarts, looked up to see the face. It was not of the man I had dreamed and hoped for. But it was that of my, and my father’s, dearest friend.

  ‘Bostar? Bostar?’ I whispered.

  I saw it in his eyes, those deep, dark pools that had followed my father into the Alps and had already seen my half-brother die and, and – His face was set. His eyes were grave. His mouth was pinched. He opened it to speak.

  ‘Your bags, Bostar of Chalcedon?’ From our voyage to Macedonia I recognised the voice of Trimalchio, the shipmaster.

  Still with his arms around me, ‘What do you think, you fool!’ Bostar snapped.

  I started. I had never heard him speak like that before.

  ‘Have them taken to the house, Trimalchio,’ he went on. ‘And see me in the morning.’ There was a weariness, a sadness in his voice. It comes, I know now, of suffering.

  Bostar turned towards the shore. ‘Come, Hanno,’ he said quietly.

  ‘But my father, Bostar? My father?’

  ‘Not now, Hanno, not now. Come.’

  I thought then he was cruel. Now I think otherwise.

  I saw Arxes’ lamp come bobbing towards the pier. I followed Bostar, the porter and Arxes home. Perhaps it was clouds, or wind, or some far-off squall of rain. But as I walked back, I swear by Moloch, in the spreading sky above me I saw the stars set, one by fading one.

  That was many years ago. I was a boy. Now I am a man, and so must leave the things of a child. I have known the joy of loving, and have not been afraid. Is that because I have know
n also the paths of pain?

  Bostar declined Arxes’ offer of a bath and, with barely a nod to me, went straight to his room bearing, it seemed, the weight of wordless fears. Arxes asked me if I wanted to finish my supper. I said no. He grunted, and I also went to my room. I did not sleep. I heard the barking of the dog fox, the bullfrog, the cricket and the hooting of the owl. I thought of my mother Apurnia, of my childhood in Capua, of how a strange, dark man came and took me from there. Of what he had told me, and taught me, of how he had tried. I dozed. I dreamed of falling, falling, and of being rescued by a huge white swan. I woke, sweating, to a sullen dawn and the smell of cookfires rising from the beach.

  I asked Bostar over breakfast. He shook his head. ‘Eat first,’ he said. There were dark hollows above his cheekbones, and new lines crinkling the skin around his eyes.

  ‘I’m not hungry.’

  ‘Eat.’ I did as I was told.

  Arxes cleared the plates. Bostar fixed his great, luminous eyes on me, his pupils black, his irises white but raced with red. I noticed how his beard was streaked with new grey. He drew a deep breath, exhaled and, back straight, put his hands out flat on the table in front of him. I heard Arxes close the kitchen door.

  ‘Hanno,’ he said quietly but distinctly, his voice neutral, measured. ‘Your father Hannibal is dead.’

  What did I feel? I can’t remember. ‘How?’ I managed. Bostar closed his eyes, and continued in a monotone.

  ‘Naked, alone in a room in the palace of Prusias in Sinope, he took his own life, rather than submit to Rome.’