They were at the south side of the sprawling suburb of Megara. Their barracks was actually an old warehouse, requisitioned when the army corps had had to abandon their camp and move inside the safety of the city walls, a transfer that had made Carthage even more crowded, even more tense, even more dangerous. It was barely dawn, and Nelo smelled the tang of desert sand in the air. Another dust storm must have blown over in the night, but at least it muffled the stink of the ever-burning funeral pyres.

The alarm had been raised. As they hurried to the gate they had to push through crowds running the other way: men and women, mothers carrying infants, old folk, the ill and feeble being helped or carried along, and in a city riddled with disease and hunger there were plenty of them. Gisco’s troop had to push their way through the fleeing mob.

Then they turned a corner – and Nelo was confronted with the sight of enemy troops, inside the city, standing and fighting before the half-open gate. But they weren’t Hatti. These towering men, fighting knots of hastily assembled Carthaginian troops, were Rus or Scand, with long tunics over baggy trousers and leather boots, and caps and coats lined with fur. They wore their red hair, beards and moustaches long, and any exposed skin was dense with tattoos, intricate scribbles over faces, hands, bare arms. Some of them fought with barbed stabbing spears, some threw javelins. But the most ferocious of all used axes, each longer than a man’s arm and fitted with a single crescent-shaped blade tapered to widen back from the edge, a design that made it horribly efficient in its function. Nelo, staring, saw one man get in a clean blow at his Carthaginian opponent, a single downward swipe that cut through the man’s mail coat and tunic and splayed open his breastbone and ribs, lodging in a mass of intestines before he fell forward.

Before such warriors, wave after wave of Carthaginian troops pressed forward only to fall in their turn, and the cobbles already ran with their blood. A horrific battle, taking place within the walls of Carthage itself. Was the city lost already?

Suniatus and some of the others would have dashed straight into the fray, but Gisco roared commands. ‘Not here! Not yet! You’ll do no good to be cut down like these poor lads. Follow me, and we’ll win the day. This way, this way!’