Total War Rome: Destroy Carthage by David Gibbins Read Free Book Online Page B

pain from his vine staff will be greater than anything Brutus might be likely to mete out. Now get on with it.’
    In the silence that followed, Fabius scanned the room. Most of them were sixteen or seventeen years old, on the cusp of manhood, several a year or two younger. When the trumpets of war sounded, when the centurion deemed them ready, they would be appointed as military tribunes in the Roman army, the first rung in the ladder that might lead those who survived to command legions, to lead armies, even to the consulship, the highest office in the Republic. They were scions of the greatest patrician families of Rome: the gens Julii, the gens Junia, the gens Claudia, the gens Valeria, and Scipio’s adopted branch of the gens Cornelia, the Scipiones. In their sprawling houses on the Palatine were shrines filled with wax busts of ancestors who had gained glory in war, some dating back to the time of Romulus and the foundation of the city almost six hundred years before, and many from the succession of devastating wars that Rome had fought in recent centuries: against the Latin tribes and the Etruscans near to Rome, against the Celts to the north, against the Greek colonies of Italy and Sicily, and above all in the titanic struggle against Carthage, a conflict that had begun almost a hundred years before and still haunted them all, a war that should have ended with the Battle of Zama if the senators had allowed the act of destruction that would have secured Rome’s dominance in the west Mediterranean and allowed her to focus her whole might on Greece and the riches of the east.
    And they were not all men. Fabius let his eyes linger on a dark corner of the room and saw her, taller than any of them except Polybius, watching everything intently, her eyes briefly catching his. Her red hair was woven into a long tail behind her head, and she had dark kohl rings around her eyes. In the arena she took off her gold neck torque and bracelets and fought without armour, wearing only a white tiger skin wrapped tightly around her midriff and chest. They had been astonished at the tattoo on her back, an eagle with wings outstretched from shoulder blade to shoulder blade. They knew her by her Greek name, Hippolyta, meaning ‘Wild Mare’, but the centurion had told them before she arrived that her name in her own language was Oiropata, meaning ‘Killer of Men’. They had scoffed at it, but everyone had gone silent when she had walked through the door and they had seen her physique. She was a Scythian princess, the daughter of a client king from the steppe lands to the north of the Black Sea, and the centurion had explained that there were more of them, expert female horse riders and archers, and that one day she might lead an ala of Scythian cavalry alongside a Roman army. Polybius spoke her language and had questioned her at length about Scythian history, and had helped to improve her Latin. The others kept their distance, fearful of being singled out by the centurion to fight her in unarmed combat and endure the humiliation of almost certain defeat.
    And then there was Julia. She was from the Caesares branch of the gens Julia, the daughter of Sextus Julius Caesar who had fought as a tribune at Zama. She was no warrior princess like Hippolyta, but she had a shrewd tactical mind and would have swept the floor that day with her knowledge of the battle that had made her father’s name. Fabius had seen how Julia had made Scipio’s pulse quicken, how when she was watching him in the arena fighting he was possessed by a force that seemed to come from the gods. Fabius himself had felt a stab of pain when he first saw Julia’s affection for Scipio, casting his mind back to that night when she had come to him in the servant’s quarters, but it had quickly passed. He remembered the look that Metellus had given Scipio. Fabius knew that Scipio had been dreading the arrival of Metellus, and welcoming it at