The beast in the labyrin.., p.40
The Beast in the Labyrinth, page 40
“And where do you propose to send them?” Hieron asked. “I want those ships back, Dion.”
“My King, I thought we should split them up, and send three or four to each of the smaller ports along the Carthaginian coast. Hopefully, they’ll be able to leave again, before the local authorities understand what’s happening and try to seize them.”
“Very well, Dion,” Hieron croaked. “I think by now our meat should be tender enough for the plate. Send your men back into North Achradina. Seal up the district. You can begin the deportations tomorrow.”
“What should I tell the Carthaginians, my King?”
“Whatever you like.” He waved his hand in dismissal.
*
I briefed my horrified officers. Within two hours, I had over three hundred men back in North Achradina. I sent Leander to see Tabnit again, to warn him privately what was going to happen the following day. The young lieutenant looked at me accusingly, but said nothing.
The mob stayed away that night, deterred by the presence of my men, and in the morning, we began clearing the district, street by street. The Carthaginians boarded their ships meekly enough. It seemed the food situation had become quite desperate, with market traders not daring to enter the quarter, and families not daring to leave it. The realisation that they were neither going to starve nor be murdered was sufficient to ensure the pathetically grateful compliance of most of the residents.
There were a few ugly scenes, of course, mainly over slaves to whom their owners had formed an attachment. We explained that there was insufficient space for everyone on the ships, but told the families that their slaves would be sent on later. With a bit of luck, we said, they would all be able to come back to Syracuse soon, when things had calmed down. I set a limit of one sack for each adult, but I forbade my men to search the sacks. Hieron had told me to make sure no family left with more than ten silver pieces, but I trusted Tabnit to have spread the word, and I dare say that as the ships sailed away, one after the other, they all sat just a little lower in the water than they should have done.
They left from the Trogilus Port to the north of the city, which directly adjoined the warehouse district where the fire had started. I had put Xeno in charge of the embarkations, while I supervised the evictions, but at some point in the afternoon, he sent word that I was needed at Trogilus. It seemed news of the expulsions had spread across the city, and a large crowd had gathered along the wharf to jeer and spit at the Carthaginians as they boarded their ships. Xeno was worried.
The fierce old lieutenant was not a man to ask for help if he didn’t need it, so I rode over as fast as I could and ordered a company of my men to come running after me.
Two hundred or so Carthaginians had formed a queue just inside the gate tower that gave access to the wharf from north Achradina. Small children were crying and clinging to their parents’ legs. It seemed that Xeno had been escorting the families from the gate to their ships in batches. Beyond them, a dozen of my men had formed a line across the gateway. But it wasn’t the Carthaginians they were blocking; they were facing out towards the port.
“Make way,” I ordered as I rode up behind them. “What’s going on?”
A young sergeant turned to look up at me with obvious relief.
“Out there, sir. Looks like Lieutenant Xeno’s got into a bit of trouble. What should we do?”
I rode past the men onto the wharf. About a hundred yards from me, I could see a group of maybe eighty Carthaginians. They were surrounded by a thin cordon of my men, who had lowered their spears to try to hold back the baying mob. I guessed there must have been a thousand people or more pressing in around them. Xeno stood in the centre of the line, clutching his sword in his only hand. The families had their backs to the sea and could neither reach their ship nor retreat into Achradina. Xeno was shouting something but he was drowned out by the catcalls of the surrounding throng.
Five days’ worth of fermenting frustration welled up inside me. It seemed to cascade through every vein and muscle in my body. I didn’t even try to control it.
I snarled and dug my heels into the horse’s side, jerking back hard on the reins at the same time. It was a well-trained animal and obediently reared up, pawing at the air with its front legs and neighing loudly. That got the attention of several men at the back of the crowd.
“You fucking turds,” I roared at the top of my voice.
I forced the horse to rear up a second time. Its whinnying shrieks scythed across the wharf. I am a heavy man and need a strong mount, but that black stallion was a monster. As its iron-shod hooves crashed back down onto the cobbles, its eyes bulged and swivelled like a crazy thing and it began shaking its head and snapping its teeth. Two or three hundred members of the mob now seemed to have transferred their attention to me. They were gawping.
I drew my sword and transferred it to my left hand.
“Fuck you all!” I bellowed at them.
And then I charged them.
At first they just stared at me incredulously, but as I closed the distance, those in my direct line started to shout and throw their weight against their neighbours to try to get out of my path. Two or three of them stumbled and fell over. Within a matter of seconds, their fear had rippled out and men began to break away and scatter.
I was still thirty feet from them but now a space was opening up in front of me. The crowd seemed to be dissolving like mist. The horse careered into the gap, craning its neck forward as it tried to bite the people scrambling to avoid it. Suddenly, there was no one between Xeno’s men and me. I turned the horse’s head to gallop along the line of their spears, swinging my sword out and forcing the mob to recoil and push back on itself. One man was too slow to evade my reach and I managed to slash him across the face before racing past. A moment later, I reached the far end of the line and made the horse rear once more. Its front legs flailed wildly and the terror-struck faces in front of me cringed, turned and fled, pushing each other over and tripping themselves up in the chaos.
“Two paces forwards!” I heard Xeno shout behind me. I turned in the saddle to see his little line advance with their spears levelled. There were only about fifty of them, but that was the end of it. The central mass of the crowd broke. Gripped in an unthinking collective panic, they ran, scrambling through the charred remains of the warehouse district like a plague of rats.
I patted the horse’s sweating neck and whispered my thanks in its ear, then sheathed my sword and dismounted.
“Hold him,” I said, handing the reins to one of Xeno’s soldiers. He was staring at me as though I had two heads.
A dazed-looking ruffian nearby was on all fours and trying to stand. I took a running kick at him, catching him in the ribcage with my iron-tipped sandal. He spun through the air to land on his back a few feet further away. He curled into a ball, clutching at his side, and began wailing.
Another man was coming unsteadily to his feet close by. He watched me dumbly as I strode over to him, unsure whether to run or not. He should have run. I punched him hard in the stomach and he fell to his knees and vomited violently. He groaned feebly and wiped his mouth with the back of his hand, not daring to look up at me as he tried to catch his breath. I grasped the collar of his tunic in my left hand and dragged him, flailing and wriggling, across the cobbles towards the sea.
“Let go,” he squealed. “I’m sorry, noble sir. Please let go. I’m begging you, please…”
I ignored him and tossed him over the edge of the wharf. He screamed briefly as he somersaulted the twenty feet through the air to splash headlong into the water.
Xeno came up and stood by my side, and for a few moments we watched together in silence as the man flapped around desperately below us.
“Do you think he can swim?” I asked indifferently.
Xeno shrugged.
“Not very well, by the looks of it, sir.”
“A Greek who can’t swim. Who’d have thought it?”
“It’s a disgrace, sir.”
We turned and headed back towards the families. Apart from the whimpering of some small children, they had fallen silent. I rested my hand on Xeno’s shoulder as we walked.
“I’m sorry, old friend,” I said. “I should have given you more men. My mistake. There’s a company on the way.”
Xeno chuckled.
“Oh, I’ve been in worse scrapes, sir.” He held up the stump of his forearm and smiled grimly. “Besides, I doubt I’ll be needing them now. Those arseholes won’t be back… And thank you for what you did. It’ll certainly be something to tell my grandson.”
I grunted.
“This is a shitty business, Xeno.”
“It is indeed, sir.”
His men had gathered together in a loose group beside the Carthaginians. Most were grinning and, as we approached, they parted to make way for us and started pounding the ground with the butts of their spears.
“Alright, alright,” I said, gesturing with my hand for them to quieten down. “That’s enough…” I took the reins of my horse back from the man who had been holding him for me.
“What shall we do with this one, sir?”
Two of Xeno’s troops were supporting the man whose face I had slashed. He sagged between them. His eyelids were flickering and he was making a faint, wet hissing noise as he tried to breathe. Part of his shattered cheekbone had been laid bare and nothing much remained of his nose. The cavity was bubbling and oozing blood over his lips and chin.
“Kill him,” I said. “Mount his head over there.” I nodded towards the piles of rubble.
The man’s feet trailed limply behind him as they dragged him off. It was probably a mercy.
“Xeno, I’ll see you later. I suppose you’d better get these families onto their ship now. I imagine they’ve had their fill of Syracuse.”
I led my horse back towards Achradina. The line of men blocking the gate hadn’t moved.
“That was unbelievable, sir,” said the young sergeant breathlessly as I drew up in front of him.
“And you just stood by and watched, while our men got cut off?” I said.
“But, sir, Lieutenant Xeno told us to stay here.”
“You’re stripped of your rank. Now get of my way.”
It took a week to complete the embarkations, but there were no more incidents. Although he had citizenship, I heard Tabnit chose to sail with his people on the last ship to leave. I suppose the prospect of being free to start burning children again was too strong a lure to resist.
*
My men’s work was not yet done. We still had to clear the houses of all the slaves who had been left behind. They were in a sorry state, having had little food for several days. They were escorted in batches to the agora, where the stewards of the noble families haggled and struck deals with each other as they divided them up between our households. Andranodoros had provided a schedule as to how the windfall should be apportioned, based on our individual landholdings in Upper Tyche, and I eventually found myself with forty more mouths to feed. Once they had been restored to a saleable condition, I had them all auctioned off.
When North Achradina was finally empty, we began repopulating it with the families of homeless citizens from the streets of Temenites and Neapolis. We crammed them in, allocating just one room to each family. To everyone’s relief, we found that there would be no need to billet anyone in our own villas. Within a matter of months, North Achradina was transformed from one of the city’s prettiest districts into the new slum quarter. Its replacement residents seemed feral. They threw their rubbish out of their windows, leaving it to rot on the streets, and undertook no maintenance of the buildings in which they had been resettled. Before long, the Tyche gangs had become the North Achradina gangs.
*
Gelon ended up allocating the City Guard three hundred men who had been made homeless by the fire. They were a rough and ill-disciplined crowd, even though all were citizens who had completed their military training. They had all been recalled to serve with the fleet and at first they tended to swagger around a little, pretending to be heroes, much to the irritation of my men. My criminal half-brother, Dionysius, was not among those who were assigned to my command. I felt I ought to try to do something for him or his family, if he had one, and so I sent a message to the army clerks at Plymmerium, asking if he was with any of the Shield divisions. When they replied to say they had no record of him, I entrusted Agbal with a bag of coins and sent him to the makeshift camp on Epipolae to ask around there. He returned to tell me that no one appeared to want my money. Whenever he mentioned my half-brother’s name, people lost their tongues. It seemed Dionysius had disappeared. I wasn’t entirely surprised.
Castor and I formed our new men into two additional companies, to which I transferred some of my tougher sergeants. We garrisoned them all in the large and ancient Labdalum fortress. Labdalum predates my ancestor’s great triangle of walls, but fortuitously sits almost exactly at the centre of them, being more or less equidistant from the city’s north and south gates and from the Euryalus citadel. Its own walls were low and weak and, as a stronghold, it was next to useless, but it was the obvious place to station a contingent of reserves. More to the point, the new camp on Epipolae lay only a few hundred yards away, and I wanted to make sure that I had enough men close by to maintain order there.
I put Xeno in command of Labdalum, with instructions to start getting the new companies into shape. When he had softened them up a little, I intended to swap them over with two of the palace companies and take over their training myself. I moved Leander to Labdalum too, to command one of the new companies. The lad had sent me a handsome letter of apology for his all-too-obvious disapproval of my handling of the Carthaginian expulsions. I had a soft spot for Leander, but I was still unsure whether he had the stomach for soldiering. Decency is the virtue of losers.
It was not till two weeks after the deportations that I was finally able to make time to take the barge across to Plymmerium to visit Sosis. I got there shortly after sunrise to find the parade ground already bustling with companies of the Shield divisions going through a variety of exercises. The army had taken on some three thousand men from Upper Tyche and Gelon was clearly trying to integrate them as quickly as possible. As I threaded my way across the parade ground, I was met with salutes and smiles and, to my embarrassment, even some cheering. I felt a fraud. When the fleet had sailed, I had stayed safely at home. When my friends had marched to their deaths in Italy, I had stayed safely at home. And yet it seemed I was being greeted as some sort of hero. I jogged most of the way to try to escape the attention.
There were a hundred cots ranged against the long walls of the infirmary, and I never thought I would have wished to see them all filled, but only about a quarter were occupied and that was an even grimmer reminder of the scale of the slaughter at Cannae. Some of the men were sleeping but most were sitting up, gazing silently across the aisle at each other with empty eyes. Half a dozen slaves were quietly changing dressings or feeding those too weak to eat their breakfasts by themselves. Two others supported a man by the arms as he squatted over a bucket.
Sosis wasn’t there. A sergeant who had lost both his feet told me that the captain had recovered sufficiently to return to the cottage that had been my home before it became his. I spent about an hour with the wounded men, moving from one bed to another. Although there were a few new trainees whom I didn’t recognise, the rest had all previously served under me and I knew them by name. I asked after Dinomenes’ son, but they could only tell me that he had not been among Hannibal’s prisoners. Two of the men who remained unconscious were groaning intermittently. Their wounds smelt, so I imagined they were not long for this world.
By the looks of their injuries, fewer than half a dozen of the men in the infirmary would be able to return to duty with the Gold Shields. When they had recuperated, the rest would be discharged with five silver coins as a token of the kingdom’s gratitude. Those who were too broken to find employment for themselves would probably be given light work on the estates or in the family businesses of the division’s officers. The sight of crippled veterans begging in the streets was something the army preferred to avoid.
I promised to visit them all again when I could, and headed towards the door. When I reached it, I turned, stood to attention and saluted them. Before the injured men could recover from their surprise at the gesture, I had ducked out of the room and was striding away, my sense of shame more acute than ever.
I found Sosis sitting on a comfortable chair on the porch of the cottage. A thick bandage smeared with honey and herbs covered half his face. I don’t know if it was helping the wound to heal, but it certainly seemed to be attracting the flies. Half a dozen buzzed around his head unrelentingly.
“I’ll be as ugly as you now, Dion,” he said weakly, trying to smile, as I grasped his hand in greeting.
His elderly camp slave brought me out a stool and we started to talk about what had happened in Italy. Sosis was a cool-headed man, the sort of person whose brain works in precise and deliberate clicks. Perhaps it was the wound that was agitating him, but when he spoke of Hannibal, his poise dissolved.
“We threw everything at the centre of his line, Dion,” he whispered, his remaining eye wide with apparent awe. “That was where Hannibal was himself. We thought they were breaking, but he was just drawing us into his trap. They fell back, step by step, and as we pressed forward, they slowly wrapped themselves around us, and then from nowhere their cavalry suddenly appeared behind us. It was like nothing in any of the books. The plan, the discipline… We were crushed in on ourselves. I couldn’t breathe or move my arms. There was no space to move, and no direction to move in. He drowned us in our own numbers, Dion… Pray that he never comes to Sicily. We’re lost if he does.”
