Iron Winter

59

The Third Year of the Longwinter: Midsummer Solstice

This time the Hatti raiding party tried to get into Carthage from the north-west, near the suburb of Megara. Gisco was given a corps of men and ordered to stop them.

The Hatti were probing at an acknowledged weak point in the ancient defences of the city, Gisco knew, where the land wall approached the shore and cut eastward to follow the line of the coast. The shore itself was protected by barricades of tremendous growstone blocks on the land, and nasty hull-ripping traps underwater — but there was no assistance from the Carthaginian navy, which had been bottled up since early in the siege, when the Hatti had blocked Carthage’s main harbour with their mole across its mouth. Even so it had cost the Hatti a lot of lives to land on that lethal shore. But land they had, according to the Carthaginian scouts, and had immediately begun burrowing under the city wall.

Gisco had no way of driving the Hatti off from the seaward side of the wall, or of stopping them tunnelling. So instead he formed up his own men to dig counter-tunnels under the Hatti workings, the idea being to come up from below and attack them. Gisco joined in the digs himself, it seemed only right.

They couldn’t be sure where the Hatti were digging, and had to proceed by guesswork and surveys. Every hour or so the officers would have the men stop work, and listen for the thud and hammer of the Hatti. Gisco knew these intervals of silence would always be vivid in his memory, the gaunt, hungry men stripped to the waist in the light of the candles and oil lanterns, the muscles of their arms like knotted rope, panting, filthy, hot, hearing the scurrying of the Hatti above, like huge mice in a loft.

In the end the climax came unexpectedly.

One moment the Carthaginians were digging calmly — the next the roof fell in with a roar, and earth, broken timbers and struggling soldiers and slaves tumbled down on them. The lamps were extinguished immediately, and Gisco found himself in the pitch-dark, in a compressed mass of men, slipping on mounds of earth and rubble. And a huge, heavy man fell right on top of him, arms and legs splayed, knocking him to the ground. Gisco could smell the horse stink of the man’s sweat, and the tang of some kind of bread on his breath. The man seemed briefly stunned, shocked. The Hatti must have had no warning of the collapse.

So Gisco raised his steel dagger and slammed it into the man’s neck.

The blade scraped on bone. The man convulsed and spewed hot blood, and inadvertently butted Gisco, his forehead slamming into Gisco’s nose. Gisco’s face became a mask of blinding pain, and he swore out loud. Enraged, he hauled out his knife and dragged the blade through soft tissues and cartilage, cutting the man’s throat. The man quivered and died, not having landed a single conscious blow.

Gisco shoved him aside, and on he fought. At first, in the dark, he could only tell who was friend or foe by subtle signals, by muttered curses in an exotic language, or prayers to Teshub or Jesus. He tried to bring his men together, calling out, ‘With me, Carthaginians! With Gisco! With me!’

Then the Hatti workings collapsed altogether, with another rush of earth. The pit was opened up to the night sky, where a half-moon hung, tinted orange by the dusty air of this dry summer. Even by moonlight the men looked alike, all half-naked, none of them wearing uniforms or much in the way of armour. It didn’t help that such a variety of races fought on either side, the Carthaginians with their Libyan levies and Iberans and Balearic herdsmen, and on the Hatti side Scand. They were men from across the known world dumped in a pit to struggle for their lives, like playthings of some malevolent god.

But gradually, Gisco perceived, the Carthaginians were prevailing. They had had the marginal advantage of knowing what to expect; it must have been a great shock for the Hatti when the floor fell out from under them.

Finally a Hatti officer cried out in his own tongue, and repeated the word in Carthaginian. ‘Yield! Yield!’ For a time the killing went on, of its own momentum, and Gisco thought he heard the officer himself take a blade in the chest.

But at last it was done.

Gisco, panting hard, slippery with blood and sweat, tried to organise his surviving men to round up the captives and see to the wounded.

A man came up to him with a lantern. It was Suniatus, a grinning brute. Blood leaked from a long cut on his forehead into his eyes, but he didn’t seem to be aware of it. ‘Good scrap, sir.’

Gisco clapped the man on his bloody shoulder. ‘It was indeed, Suni. Carthage is saved, for now.’

Suniatus turned and whooped. ‘Hear that, boys? We’re heroes. The tarts in Megara are going to take some punishment today! Even from you, sir, despite the mess some bugger has made of your face.’

Gisco reached up to touch his imploded nose, and a wave of agony convulsed his face. ‘Yes, all right, Suni-’

There was a tremendous groaning crack from above ground, and the earth shuddered as if massive weights had tumbled down. The men started shouting. What now?

‘A ladder, Suniatus. Quickly, man!’

Gisco worked his way up the ladder to the level of the Hatti digs. He had time to be briefly impressed by how well constructed the Hatti tunnels were, the walls and roof of packed earth, the tunnel wide and spacious. There was even timber to prop up the roof, although widely spaced, for timber was desperately scarce. But he reminded himself that his own more modest mole runs had done their job in the end. He clambered on up above the Hatti works to ground level.

When he emerged into the air he was surprised to find how close he was to the city wall, still within its protection on the Carthaginian side, but he was no more than twenty paces from its massive base; his surveyors had got that wrong, and not for the first time. But the Hatti digs, or maybe a combination of their work and the Carthaginians’ own counter-digging, had undermined the wall. It slumped visibly, and the cracking he heard had been the beginning of a tremendous split that looked as if it cut right through the wall’s fabric. Massive facing stones, blocks half his own height, had fallen away to slam into the ground, leaving a looser core of rubble that was shattering and spilling as he watched.

And he saw a helmeted head pop up over the widening breach: a Hatti scout. Gisco flung a dagger, and the head ducked back down.

In the runs below Gisco, Suniatus and another ladder-bearing friend stood looking up. Gisco kicked the second man on the shoulder. ‘You. Run to the next watchtower and tell them to get a message to the commanders.’

‘What message, sir?’

‘What message?’ Gisco was maddened by the pain of his smashed face. ‘What message do you think? Oh, tell them Sergeant Gisco wishes the great General Fabius a restful night. Tell them about the wall breach, man! Go, go.’ The man ran off. ‘As for you, Suniatus, the thighs of those whores in Megara are going to have to remain untroubled a little longer, for until reinforcements arrive it’s going to be you and me and whoever’s left alive down there to hold off the Hatti that are soon going to be coming over that wall.’

‘The prisoners-’

‘Oh, slaughter them. Just get the men up here.’

A single arrow came arcing over the wall. Gisco ducked into the dirt. The arrow thudded harmlessly to the ground to his right. Dawn was breaking. This was midsummer day, he remembered. More arrows hailed down.

‘Suniatus! Get your arse up here!’