CARTHAGE BAKES. In Megara a palm tree lies where it has fallen across a stone staircase; lizards sun themselves in the dried fountains and from his window he can read obscenities scrawled in dried excrement on the walls of his neighbour’s villa. Everyone is blaming each other for this.
In the Parliament the Hundred howl at each other like dogs across the speaker’s staff. Dignitaries with oiled beards and long ringlets curse each other for fools. Militiamen doze beneath makeshift awnings.
They are making swords in the temples. At night he lies awake and listens to the hammers. He has packed his crate of dress uniforms ready to depart. His study, once so precise he had been complimented by a visiting mathematician, is now piled with discarded maps, dispatches and letters.
The Council thought themselves secure behind their triple walls, even after the army was defeated. But Alexander has not even tried to breach them. He has built his camp, cutting off their land route and crucifying anyone who tries to break his blockade. But instead of trying to breach the unbreachable, he has secured the isthmus to the south and begun construction of a mole to block the harbour mouth.
At first it seemed impossible. The townspeople had stood on the walls and jeered at his efforts to fill the sea. It is a hundred, two hundred paces from the beach to the harbour walls, Tyrian galleys could pass each other abreast there. The channel is too deep, too wide to ford; their mathematicians calculated that it would take ten years, twenty to fill it.
Six weeks later Alexander is halfway there. It seems that ‘impossible’ is not a word that Alexander knows, or it has never been successfully translated for him in any language from the Indus to Africa.
Grass seeds drift across the inner harbour where a rusted iron chain is mirrored in the black water. Rubbish is piled up in huge mounds along the docks. A green slime has attached itself to the sea wall.
Once it was the busiest port in the whole world, a forest of masts, three deep with corn ships. Now look what one man has done.
The last of the blockade runners are gone, sunk by Alexander’s warships or wrecked on the chain he has thrown across the harbour mouth of the Coton. The masts and sternposts of sunken ships rise above the water. Even the fishermen are gone; it is safer for them to sell their fish to the soldiers in Alexander’s camps on the other shore.
The heat mirage makes it appear that Alexander’s navy is floating in the sky. Another miracle; the man has one for every day of the week.
A line of ox carts, laden with stone, trundles out to the deepwater channel. Another load crashes into the water. He has almost completed the causeway along which he can bring his troops and siege equipment to batter the harbour fortifications.
Huge wooden towers edge out, taller than the city walls. If you raise a helmet on a stick above the parapet wall it invites a hail of stones and bolts from his slingers and archers. The helmet will go spinning across the barbican in a shower of sparks, damaged beyond all repair.
Their onagers – huge stone throwers – have left the ancient wooden lighthouse a sprawled ruin. Round artillery stones as large as a man lie everywhere; one monstrous boulder lies embedded in the paving outside the corn warehouse, some poor wretch leaking from under it.
The rolling siege towers loom larger every day. Men crawl across them like ants. They have started hurling burning pitch over the walls.
The city is full to bursting with refugees swarming in from the countryside. Alexander is burning all the coastal towns, murdering as he goes.
The man is pitiless. The whole world is not enough for him.
Catharo walks in and stands there, looking around as if he is expecting a fight. He doesn’t look much like a brawler at first glance, for he is scarcely taller than a child. It is only on closer examination that he appears terrifying. His head looks as if it’s been kicked about in the yard by small boys. On first meeting people think he is black; it is just the tattoos on his face. The only bit of his face not inked in are his eyeballs.
He waits for his orders. Get a goat from the market, strangle someone, it’s all the same to him.
Hanno goes to the window. Those who can get out are already gone, several of the city fathers among them, just after they expressed full confidence in his ability to save Carthage. We’ll organize a great ceremony for you, a great honour! Then: where’s my slave with the baggage and the boats?
Catharo has been his creature for many years now. Every general needs men like this, someone out of the chain of command whom you can trust with grubby details. He is unswervingly loyal; a hard thing to come by in any age.
Catharo peers at the chart spread open on the table. ‘Is this your battle plan?’
Anyone else and he would have them tied to a cartwheel and whipped for their insolence. Instead he joins him at the table.
‘What’s this?’ Catharo says. ‘And this? And this?’
‘This is Alexander’s army. This is the isthmus. Th is is Carthage. Here is the Coton, the military harbour, there the outer harbour. It is called a map. What you would see if you were a bird and could fly above it.’
‘If I were a bird I’d shit on Alexander’s head.’
He laughs. ‘I should like to see it. But we need more than bird shit to save us now.’
‘There’s the temple. There’s the Parliament.’ Catharo has the delight of a child in finding things for himself. Finally: ‘What’s this square here?’
‘His war elephants.’
‘Where does he get elephants?’
‘From India. He brought a squadron back with him. I hear he has been training with them all through the last winter in Babylon.’
‘I have never fought elephants.’
‘Nor will you now. I have a different job for you. One that is much more important.’
He rests a hand on Catharo’s shoulder. He rarely touches his men; this is an honour. ‘This will require all of your ingenuity. It concerns my daughter, Mara.’
‘She’s become a priestess.’
‘Yes, she has dedicated her life to the goddess Tanith. She refuses to leave the temple, though I have told her she is not safe there.’
‘You want me to get her out?’
‘You are to go there and watch over her. Perhaps fortune will smile on me and I will find a way out of this mess. Who knows? If not, then you are to save her life any way that is necessary. No one and nothing is to stop you.’
‘It will be done.’
Other men may have raised objections. But I will be defiling the temple; but how might it be done if Alexander defeats you and decides to lay waste the city; what if she refuses my protection? Not this one.
‘We may not see each other again.’
‘When do my orders terminate?’
‘When your last breath leaves your body. Until then, I charge you with her life.’ He gives him a purse containing a fortune in gold. Enough for Catharo to buy himself a house and set himself up as a money lender in Syracuse.
No more is said. Catharo bows and leaves. He’ll do it too, he thinks. Another man might wait to see the way the wind blows before deciding whether to risk his life and the money. Not this one.