Total War Rome: Destroy Carthage Read Online Free PDF Page B

far more important things to do.’
    Scipio shook his head, then wiped his face with his hand. He suddenly looked terribly tired.
    â€˜You need water,’ Fabius said. ‘And that wound needs to be tended.’
    â€˜You too are wounded, on your cheek.’
    Fabius reached up with surprise and felt congealed blood from his ear to his mouth. ‘I didn’t feel it. We should go to the river.’
    â€˜It runs red with Macedonian blood,’ Aemilius Paullus said.
    â€˜It’s everywhere.’ Scipio looked at the drying blood on his hands and forearms and on his sword. He squinted at his father. ‘Is this an end to it?’
    Aemilius Paullus looked over the battlefield towards the sea, and then nodded. ‘The war with Macedonia is over. King Perseus and the Antigonid dynasty are finished. We have extinguished the last remnant of the empire of Alexander the Great.’
    â€˜What does the future hold for us?’
    â€˜For me, a triumph in Rome like no other in the past, then monuments inscribed with my name and the name of this battle of Pydna, and then retirement. This is my last war, and my last battle. But for you, for the others of your generation, for Polybius, for Fabius, for the other young tribunes, there is war ahead. The Achaean League in Greece to the south will need subduing. The Celtiberians in Spain were stirred up when Hannibal took them as allies, and will resist Rome. And, above all, Carthage remains – unfinished business even after two devastating wars. It will be a hard road ahead for you, with many challenges to overcome, with Rome herself sometimes seeming an obstacle to your ambitions. It was so for myself and for your adoptive grandfather, and will be ever thus as long as Rome fears her generals as much as she lauds their victories. If you are to succeed and stand as I am victorious on a field of battle, you must show the same strength of determination to remain true to your destiny as you have shown strength on the field of battle. And for you, the stakes are even higher. For those of your generation, for those of you who are young tribunes today, those whom we in Rome concerned for the future have nurtured and trained, your future will not be to stand on a battlefield as we are today at Pydna or as your grandfather did at Zama, to see the glory of triumph and then retirement. Your future will be to look away from Rome, to see from your battlefield a horizon that none of us has seen before, and to be tempted by it. The empire of Alexander the Great may be gone, but a new one beckons.’
    â€˜What do you mean?’ said Scipio.
    â€˜I mean the empire of Rome.’

PART ONE

    ROME
    168 BC
    Three months before the Battle of Pydna

1
    Fabius Petronius Secundus strode purposefully down the Sacred Way through the old Forum of Rome, the Capitoline temple behind him and the aristocratic houses on the slope of the Palatine Hill to his right. He was carrying a bundle containing the bronze greaves that his master Scipio Aemilianus had forgotten to take that morning to the Gladiator School, where the old centurion Petraeus was due shortly to supervise training for the young men who would be appointed as military tribunes later that year. Scipio was the oldest of the pupils at the school, almost eighteen now and in charge of the others while the centurion was absent, so it would be double the humiliation, and more than double the punishment, if the centurion found that he was missing any of his equipment.
    But Fabius knew the old centurion’s movements exactly. Every morning with military precision he spent half an hour in the baths, an amusing indulgence for a hoary old soldier, and Fabius had seen him enter his favourite bathhouse behind the Temple of Castor and Pollux only a few minutes before. It was not the first time that Fabius had saved Scipio’s skin, and Fabius knew the value of becoming indispensable. But his feelings towards Scipio were those