Chapter 20: Battle Royal

One day later.

Time: Wednesday, May 26, 2055 11:30 PM UMT

It was two hours before dawn, but both armies had already been positioning themselves for hours. Hannibal stood with his second-in-command in the situation room deep within Urushalim Express. Around them were a number of the ship's officers, watching the displays with them. Captain Silva cleared his throat. "Hannibal, to preserve some semblance of neutrality, I'll have to ask you and Edom to leave the ship soon and return to your camp."

Hannibal nodded. "Of course. You have my gratitude captain, and the gratitude of my people."

Megan sighed as she watched the armies slowly preparing to engage. "Not the outcome I was hoping for," she mumbled.

Edom turned and looked at her. "Did you really think Ethbaal would have a change of heart after his favorite cloak was destroyed? Especially with us displaying his gross incompetence to his own troops?" Ethbaal's triangle of cloak had been conspicuously displayed for the entire day, nailed to a cross of wood and shown for all the troops of both armies to see.

"You missed the point cousin," mumbled Hannibal.

"And what was the point?"

Megan answered. "There's a story of an old king named Saul and a young warrior named David who would become the next king. Saul was jealous of David's youth and popularity with the people. He hunted David and wished to kill him. By chance or divine guidance, the king entered a cave alone to defecate, the very cave where David was hiding. Rather than kill his pursuer, David secretly cut off a piece of the king's cloak inside the cave and later showed it to Saul, proving that David did not wish to kill his king."

"Ah," said Edom. "Did it work?"

"For a very short time, yes. There was a brief reconciliation and peace. Then Saul began hunting again."

"Humph," grunted Edom. "Well, Ethbaal is not an old king. He has no wisdom ... Saul and David? Sounds like the Israelites. When I was a boy and my father a helmsman, we traded with them sometimes, traded stories too. That was one story I missed."

Megan gulped. "Uh, yeah..."

Edom added quietly. "It was on a trip south that I first met my wife..." He shrugged. "Ethbaal took your gesture as a supreme insult. The cloak was his symbol of power. You speak of defecation? Ethbaal would have chosen to defecate before laughing women rather than lose it."

Megan did not reply. She could see the bitterness in Edom's eyes. His beloved wife had been put to the sword and hung on a pole and his young daughters enslaved.

"But," said Hannibal. "The mission was not without merit. Four of his most trusted guards have been executed for suspected treason and the man is furious in his desire for revenge. Look how foolishly he has positioned his personal guard at the very front of the line. Ethbaal's emotions should make his battle decisions today more quick tempered and easier to predict." After one last study of the infrared monitors Hannibal turned to Captain Silva. "I have seen enough. I think our victory is now assured. Again captain, you have the gratitude of my people."

"Assured? Hannibal, I think the victory will fall to the army which is the most nimble and disciplined. I hope your troops have learned how strong the pike is in formation, and how weak in a melee. Your lines must not break!"

"We have been drilled. In formation I think we are invincible. If we break, we are lost. This has been the constant message to the troops for the past ten days."

The captain nodded and then gestured with his hand. "How's your arm?"

Hannibal shrugged, thinking of the physical therapy the ship's doctors had started with him. "Still quite weak. I used to be a good swordsman too."

"Your job is to command. I think your army is very fortunate you won't be tempted to join the battle."

"Oh, I'll be tempted."

Silva frowned. "But you'll resist that temptation, correct?"

Hannibal paused and then nodded. "Correct, unless our situation becomes hopeless. I would prefer to die cleanly in battle rather than slowly under Ethbaal's tender mercies."

Captain Silva paused for a second and then surprised Hannibal by saluting him. Hannibal and Edom returned the salute and headed to the ship's two flyers a moment later.

Two hours later.

Time: Thursday, May 27, 2055 1:20 AM UMT

Ethbaal and his top commanders squinted through the drizzle in the predawn light, trying to make out the enemy positions. Hannibal's army seemed fully deployed, stretched out in a single thick line of perhaps 600 cubits. There would be no element of surprise this morning. Hannibal's forces were standing facing west part way up a large hill with a long and modest upward slope to their backs, with steep rocky ravines dropping away to the north and south. Ethbaal's commanders estimated the slope at perhaps one to twelve at Hannibal's position, and gradually becoming steeper behind him.

Uriah the Hittite did not like what he was seeing. The king however was full of joy. "Look at their numbers! They must have everybody with them, the slaves too." He took a deep breath. "We have them all! This will be a great day of slaughter!"

Uriah nodded respectfully and then tried to point out some of his concerns. "We will be racing uphill to attack, and it will be very difficult to flank the enemy. The slope falls away sharply on both sides."

"Uriah, why should I flank?" the king asked in a puzzled tone. "We don't have the archers for that anyway. But the beast is right before us. A direct thrust is what's needed here, swift and lethal, a blow to the head, and then a thrust into its heart. We will attack the heart of the enemy as soon as we have more light. And our swords won't rest until the heart stops beating!"

Uriah studied the tight enemy formation. "Nice of them to gather themselves so neatly for their own butchering, don't you think?" He was trying to be sarcastic and get the king to think about why Hannibal would chose such a location and dense configuration for his stand. His army had a very poor escape route. Once Ethbaal engaged with his superior forces, Hannibal's army appeared positioned to be sliced and then shredded with no place to run. But why would the man pick such a spot? It just didn't make sense.

The commander's sarcasm went completely unrecognized. "Yes! Indeed I do!" the king shouted to Uriah's earlier comment. "And look Uriah, no cavalry at all! Do you detect a single warhorse?"

The king had been a cavalryman himself in his youth, and Uriah conceded the point. "No, I do not, and they have no place to hide cavalry either. The enemy is all on foot." The Hittite commander then turned and looked at Ittobaal nearby for some help with his concerns, but the king's Right Hand averted his eyes, silently keeping his own counsel.

The king enthusiasm would remain unchallenged. "A great day for slaughter then Uriah, you must agree."

"A great day, my king." Uriah sighed. Yesterday had been a very difficult day. He was forced to execute four men he had known and trusted for years, the four royal guards entrusted with guarding the king's bed chamber. Uriah still didn't understand what could have happened. To think that all four fell asleep was preposterous. To think they were all traitors seemed equally ridiculous. Yet what other explanation was there?

And now this huge battle. Uriah's instincts were screaming at him that he didn't understand the mind of his enemy. From that fact alone, on his own he would have called off the attack against his enemy's apparently hopeless position. But it was not his decision to make.

The grayness of the predawn brightened a bit and the king started laughing hysterically. "Do my eyes deceive me Uriah?! Are those javelins the Hannibal scum are carrying?"

Uriah's own eyes went wide with astonishment. "Yes! The gods! Look at their length!" he blurted out. "A full eight cubits at least!"

"Yes! What a joke! What would you do Uriah, if you had such a spear and I attacked you with a sword?"

"Run away of course. But my king, surely the rebels must have some logic for choosing this absurd weapon."

The king was having none of it. "Ridiculous! We will soften them with a melee, and then my horses and swordsmen will be a great scythe in their retreat. What sport it will be, to watch their ridiculous spears fight against my fine swordsmen! A day of glory is before us Uriah! We will be harvesters of men!"

"My king," Uriah started, but it was too late. A large pole was being raised just behind the enemy lines. On it was stretched a large triangle of purple cloth. The king was speechless for a moment, and then went livid. "Full attack Uriah, and sixty shekel weight of gold to the man who brings me Hannibal's head and cock!"

A moment later across the valley...

"Looks like they're giving the final attack orders," commented Edom.

Hannibal nodded and gave an arm signal to a beater. Here on the narrow slope, he would be directing his army with a drum. The moment of judgment had arrived. A stray prayer to Yamm crossed his mind, god of the sea and judge of the dead. If Hannibal did fall in battle today, he prayed the Madeirans would at least find his effort worthy and noble. Hannibal was sure they were watching this battle from all perspectives, and perhaps in ways beyond his imagination. And he was perfectly correct.

From numerous high-resolution bluebirds colored gray and flying in the mist above, the Madeirans had a view of everything in fine detail. What they saw was a great dichotomy, forces separated not just by the valley below but also by two thousand years in equipment and tactics. Captain Silva did not want Hannibal to feel cocky, but he also shared the leader's confidence that with correct decisions and discipline, Hannibal should be the victor. Silva also knew that after the chaos of war, the words "should" and "should have" were the words of the vanquished, not the victors.

Ethbaal's army was one of the largest armed forces assembled anywhere on Earth in the six years since the plague. The king had virtually stripped his country of all the adult citizen males. He had a single battalion of 600 men bluffing the Philistines not to attack at Tyre and another single battalion barely keeping the slaves from revolting in the other towns along the Canaanite coast. Except for the mentally feeble and old, almost every other man was here.

Facing Hannibal were nine full battalions of Ethbaal's citizen army, 5400 men armed with axe, knife, and mace and even a few swords. At the very front were forty professional swordsmen from first battalion, first platoon, pulled from the king's personal guard. The main army had cheered these great warriors as they took their frontline positions just before the charge, taking the gesture as a measure of supreme confidence from their king that they would be victorious. They did not realize the placement was a punishment for allowing Ethbaal to be humiliated through his torn cloak.

When at full strength, the king's first battalion consisted of ten platoons of professional soldiers of sixty men each. First platoon was his personal bodyguard, and then three platoons each of archers, swordsmen, and cavalry. But in the horrible battles of two weeks ago, two platoons of archers and one platoon of swordsmen had been completely annihilated by the strange and awful magical arts of the Madeirans. It had taken two weeks of timid probing for the king to decide that the magicians would not attack again.

Ethbaal's battle plan was simple and correct for the era. With an army far superior in both numbers and fighting skill, he should seize the opportunity to crush his concentrated and inferior foe. The primary mission of the citizen battalions was to mix with Hannibal's forces and create a chaotic melee, thousands of individual contests. Through the turbulence Ethbaal's cavalry and swordsmen would move at will, slaying their opponents in great numbers. And when the pain and loss became too great and the enemy broke and ran, their doom was sealed. More men were typically killed in the disorganized retreat than in the initial battle itself. Hannibal's army would be slaughtered.

There was a large division in the occupational backgrounds of the two citizen armies. Ethbaal's battalions were comprised mostly of town folk, both fishermen and tradesmen who practiced warfare with blade and mace. There were comparatively few archers in their ranks, and Ethbaal was a firm believer of a war saying his father had taught him, that at close range an archer is an unarmed man.

The mission of the shock troops was to rush through the lethal range of Hannibal's arrows as quickly as possible and engage his forces with axe and mace. Ethbaal definitely did not want his citizen army to get bogged down in a long-range shootout with Hannibal's superior archers, and then leave it to his precious swordsmen and infinitely precious cavalry to bridge to gap.

Based on this thinking, Ethbaal had purposely stripped the few archers in his main army of their bows. The army must have no choice but to sprint across a volley or two of arrows and then overwhelm Hannibal's archers. Ethbaal's sole force of archers was the tenth platoon of his professional army. He had split the force into two groups of thirty and assigned them the minor task of staying at the sides of the battle once the melee started. Their job was to shoot and kill deserters, anyone from either army trying to flee down the steep sides of the ravines to the north and south.

Hunting was an important activity for many of the farmers in the Baka valley, providing the meat of various small mammals and many species of migratory birds for their families. Half of Hannibal's freemen were so good at archery that it was their first choice of weapon for battle.

Nearly every other freeman and all the slaves had become pike men and had trained with the weapon for the last two weeks. They were positioned in a classic Tercio formation, six to seven ranks thick of pike men three hundred files across, stretching across the sloping hill from one ragged ravine to the other. The front face of the line was incredibly strong against anything except projectile weapons.

The classic points of weakness of the Tercio were the two ends of the line. The problem was well recognized by medieval times, and many solutions had been tried. Among the most common solution was the "pike and shot" checkerboard formation, anchoring the edges of the pike line with as many musketeers and bowmen as possible in order to prevent a flanking attack on the line's vulnerable sides.

Hannibal had spread his archers in back of the entire length of the pike line, with extra concentrations at both ends near the ravines. Armed with bow, mace and axe, the archers had perhaps the most complex job of the force. They had drilled that their first priority was to protect the pike men from attack after a breach in the line. The pike men's job in such an event was not to fight the penetrators but to work to restore the pike line. The archers would swarm and engage the enemy with all their weapons. If the pike men failed to seal a major breach before the cavalry arrived, Hannibal's army was doomed.

Without a breach, the archers were free to stand above and behind the pike men on the hilly slope and fire at will into the opposing army held at bay. If possible, they were instructed to fire at targets near the edges of the line, as extra protection against a flanking attack. It was Hannibal's great hope that a decisive blow could be delivered to his opponent before the attackers realized their situation, stopped their charge and retreated. The pike would be a surprise weapon for only one battle.