Libertas by Alistair Forrest

Author:Alistair Forrest
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: sicily, spain, mediterranean, romans, caesar, julius caesar, roman army, pompey, agrippa, eagles, roman galleys
Publisher: Alistair Forrest

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The Watchers returned from the staging posts at intervals during the day, riding hard in twos and threes. Turon was last in from the north, his face lined and drawn from the strains of looking after his men while being daring enough to observe the enemy as closely as possible. He had guessed that something had happened to our men at the first staging post, as messages from us had abruptly ceased.

‘Did Lizard not report to you?’ I asked him. ‘I sent him to you after the first post was slaughtered…’

‘No, we did not see him.’ There was pain in his eyes. ‘We knew nothing of the attack, but then one of my men observed you riding with Sextus, which gave us relief that you were alive – though we feared for the others.’

I put a gentle hand on his shoulder. ‘I am afraid there is worse to come, but for now tell me what else you have observed. The generals want to know everything.’

Quietly, true to his calm spirit, he reported how Caesar’s advance scouts, led by the murderous Arsay One-Eye, had scoured the hilly terrain looking for Optimates stragglers and, though he had not found any of the staging posts since the first, he had wiped out several innocent communities on the basis that they could be spies. None had been left alive, not even children.

My heart fell when I heard that our attempts to offer bundles of the poisonous oleander branches for the army’s cooking fires had failed as Arsay knew about its effects – he had slaughtered the peasants who had stockpiled the fuel, but not before he had made them test the drinking water and the food stores they had hidden in their homesteads. Caesar had chosen his chief scout well.

The gloom deepened, though I tried not to show it, when Turon reported the arrival of King Bogud with an army of his Mauretanians, perhaps as many as fifteen thousand men, many of them mounted on swift horses transported across the sea from Africa’s coast. These were a mix of Roman and Carthaginian blood, descended from the ancient Phoenician race – the same people as me and my family.

And now they were the enemy.

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