A Champion with a Stick: The Tape Recorder Trilogy - S2E10

(~330 - ~220 BCE · Western Europe, Northern Africa & Southern Spain)

The Narrator offers a brief summary of the First Punic War from the Carthaginian perspective to prepare listeners for the story of how he first met and became the patron of the Spanish bandit Marco, a man forgotten by history but destined for greatness.

Based on Chapter 10 of Middle by Geoff Micks.

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Credits: 

Voice Acting - Geoff Micks

Editing - Geoff Micks

Music - Dimitri Kovalchuk (MokuseiNoMaguro) through Pixabay

Additional Music - Aleksey Voronin (Amaksi) through Pixabay 

Transcript

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In 2015, a man who has been alive since the last ice age bought a tape recorder. And over the course of three days, he dictated his life story as fast as he could while waiting for a woman to visit, who he believes will finally be the death of him. Hello again, everyone, and welcome back. My name is Jeff Mix, and you are listening to season two, episode ten of the Tape Recorder Trilogy Podcast. Enjoy it. I no longer want to speak about Pythias. I hope you will forgive me. When I think of Pythias, I am happy remembering a friend who lived his dream. With my help, Pythius made his way to Britain, and under his own Aegis he went beyond that. The Baltic, I am sure, for he found the source of amber there just as he found the tin of Cornwall, and someplace so far north he saw Pacice and the never setting summer sun. Whether that was off the northern coast of Norway or Iceland, or somewhere else I could not tell you. Anyway, upon his return to Massalia, he wrote a book about his journey that was poo-pooed for five hundred years by geographers who had never gone where he had gone or seen what he had seen. Still, he lived his dream, and I helped him. I am happy when I think of him. I am unhappy at the moment, and when I am unhappy, more often than not my thoughts turn to the Romans. I have done my best not to mention them too much over the last day and a half, but we are coming up on the point in my story where I can avoid them no longer, and as I am in the mood to speak ill of someone, let me vent my spleen on them. I cannot tell you when I first heard of the Romans. Rome's earliest source of wealth was their bridge over the Tiber that allowed them to control the salt road and the flow of goods between the mountains and the sea. It is worth remembering that Rome had no port. Ostia was just an unremarkable fishing village a day's journey from Rome in those days, and so why would my normal travels ever take me inland to those seven hills destined for eternal fame? Now the Greek city states of Campania and southern Italy I visited often, absolutely, and the Etruscans to the north of Rome, certainly. Those people had goods to sell, and money to buy what I was offering. Can you imagine a good reason for me to get off my ship and walk east for a whole day to talk to a bunch of hill tribes about salt and bridge tolls? No, it was ridiculous. I had heard of Rome the way many of you dear listeners can probably tell me that Cameroon is in Africa, but nothing else, and you certainly never intend to go there. All that would change, of course, but it happened so slowly that it seemed to rush up on me all at once. One day you hear there is some kind of war going on up in the mountains of central Italy, and then your customers start telling you to pay the harbour fees to an overseer from some hick town in the back of beyond. But it does not really bother you. There is a fee either way, so what does it matter to you if you pay a dark haired Greek named Apollodorus or some red headed fellow named Ahenobarbus? Then more time goes on, and still more, and now people are talking about Rome and Italy in the same breath. But of course that is crazy. Oh, Rome got to be a biggish place for sure, but there are always seven or eight Italians for every Roman, so how is this one city on the Tiber controlling everything? Controlling everything to the point that when Rome fights a war, and by now it is always fighting one damned war or another, its Italian allies contribute at least an equal number of soldiers, similarly equipped and trained, to fight under Roman command. Well, it was decidedly odd, but it was no never mind to me. I had transformed Carthage into the wealthiest and most powerful city in the western Mediterranean. I was Canmi of the House of Canmi, so what did it matter if the Italian peninsula was learning Latin from toe to thigh and back down to the heel? If anything, that made my life a little easier. I could let my Oscan and Etruscan and Umbrian grow rusty with disuse and focus on Latin and Greek as the tongues of choice. I bought myself a bankrupt Roman who had sold himself into slavery to pay off his gambling debts. He was a terrible servant, but he taught me enough Latin to get by. It turns out his accent was of the lower classes, but that had its uses too in business negotiations. I gave him his freedom after ten years. If memory serves, he died in a bar fight over some loaded dice. Where was I? Oh yes. Romans dominating Italy was no concern of mine. Carthage ruled the waves, and we traded with anyone and everyone with a coastline, including mighty Rome and her subservient territories, when it was our pleasure to do so. All was well until Rome started looking at Sicily as her business. Let us not mince words, dear listeners. Sicily was Carthage's business. It had been since the days when Rome was ruled by kings, and not particularly rich kings at that. I had put a lot of work into Sicily, and by the third century before Christ, the western half of Sicily owed fealty to Carthage outright, and the eastern half, while independent and contentious as only Greek city states can be, certainly looked to Carthage whenever there was a squabble to be settled amongst them. Then Rome stuck her nose in. Rome, who did not even have a reliable means to get soldiers from the toe of Italy to Sicily, decided to back a group of bandits who feared the justice of Greek Syracuse, and who knew Carthage would not support them against Greek Syracuse's righteous cause. I will not recount the whole sad tale for you here, but somehow from those small beginnings, Rome and Carthage found themselves locked in a life and death struggle. I do not imagine I am spoiling the ending by telling you they won. You would have never heard of Rome if they lost. This would be the first of three wars between our peoples, and they beat us so thoroughly, history does not even remember what my kind called the struggle. The Romans called them the Punic Wars, for the citizens of Carthage were the Punici to a Latin speaker, a corruption of the Greek phenici, red man. The Romans used the nickname much more as a slur than the Greeks ever did. They taught their children to think of us as the perfidious Punici, and the Pernitious Punici, and the Pugnacious Punici, but I tell you truly from my perspective, it was the Romans who were perfidious, pernicious, and pugnacious. In fact, let me put aside their high sounding verbiage and use good Anglo Saxon words instead. The Romans were liars. The Romans were wicked. The Romans loved to fight. They told the world Carthage was all these things, but my people could not hold a candle to the raging bonfire of Rome's crimes against honesty, goodness, and peace. For the record, we called the first conflict the Sicilian War, we called the second conflict the Great War, and we called the last war simply our doom. But I am getting ahead of myself. Let me begin by acknowledging that some of you may well wonder how I have not died in some war by now. To tell you the truth, I have done as little fighting as possible. I often had the option to leave when trouble was still on the distant horizon, and from time to time when events did take me by surprise, I have found a few lines over the years that usually quell even the most patriotic hearts. Friends, I would say with passion, for few are so dear to me as an angry press gang demanding I join their cause. As you know, I am not from this place, but I am for this place. That always paused them for a moment, for it contained a rhetorical flourish that promised a show, and public oratory had been a popular form of entertainment since Nat and Dro told their stories around the fire in the Jazo's winter cave. Next I would say, Though I am from far away and support a family there that relies upon me, I cannot stand by in your time of need. There were often murmurs at this. Was I making excuses or was I volunteering? I muddied the waters further by saying, My family relies on me, but I am still prepared to sacrifice for the friends who have been so good to me. Now the objections might begin. Did they not all have families? What was all this talk about? If I was with them, then my answer was yes. Who was I to say no to them? I put them off further. My friends, I will pay for the hire and equipping of ten men to take my place in your ranks, trained veterans all who will stand shoulder to shoulder with you in the line against the foe. I will also make a mighty sacrifice to our gods, for your swift and total victory in this just cause. If the war was to be fought on land, that almost always shut them up. Ah, but what about at sea, you ask? And of course with all the time I spent on the waves, you have every right to ask that. It is true that a captain is not likely to be allowed to sail away with his ship when a war breaks out, so in the times where I captained my own vessel in a foreign harbour, and did not get out before trouble arrived, I joined without a murmur, was paid the going rate for my ship's services, and if there was a battle, there was rarely pitched battles on the sea in those days, I often had the skill to handle my ship and crew well enough to either win or escape. When I did not, almost all battles were fought within sight of land, and I swim like a fish. Washed ashore destitute does not set you back that far if you plan to live forever. As a simple oarsman I had it even easier. In the odd instance where my master's ship was rammed or burning, I pushed my oar out through the oarlock and jumped over the side. A man holding on to his oar in the water after a battle is always picked up, because ships lose oars, and trained oarsmen are not to be wasted. If there were losses on both sides, I would speak the language of whichever side picked me up, and that was that. I would live to avoid fighting another day. I suppose this all makes me a coward, but if you could live forever, would you be careless with your life? If you had already lived hundreds of lifetimes, would you be swept up in the young man's folly that is war? Very few wars ever changed anything in the long run anyway. Do you remember who won at Medigo or Alaila, or Manzikart? Those battles were sung about and wailed about in their day, but now I do not doubt they are just random syllables to most of you. Anyway, when war broke out between Carthage and Rome, I did what I always did. I paid for mercenaries to fight on my behalf. I was not the only Carthaginian to do so, for I had made it the way of my people that we hired fighters to do our fighting for us. Oh, the people who wanted to play soldier could join Carthage's elite infantry and cavalry units. If they had the money and the talent, they could also be elected to lead our mercenary armies. Someone always wants to be the general, even with the understanding that we reserved the right to crucify the incompetent ones who wasted our mercenaries' lives. Beyond that we did very little of our own fighting on land, and I was among the very least likely to throw myself into that sort of fray. Who would expect the patriarch of the House of Canmi to be so careless with his own life when there was business to be done? And I should stress business was good. War has always been good for business if you make supporting war your business. My mercantile empire was put at the disposal of the state, and the state is never a miser when it comes to winning a war. I did from time to time take my ship, as a ship's master, to show everyone I was as great a patriot as any of them. It was a fairly risk free gesture during the Sicilian War. The Romans had no understanding of the sea. Why would they? If they wanted to go somewhere, they walked. Well, you cannot walk from Italy to Sicily, or Sardinia, or Corsica, or Africa, and our ships went back and forth, keeping the Romans' clumsy sea craft and clumsier seamen from reinforcing their allies. They lost hundreds of ships, and thousands of men. It is true their ship designs got better. I have read from their own histories that one of our Carthaginian triremes was driven onto an Italian shore during a storm, and the Romans eagerly copied it plank by plank, with an industriousness I can admit I admire. Still, they had to practice rowing on benches set up on land, for they did not even control their own coastal waters enough to train a crew upon the sea. In battle after battle, the expertise of Carthage smashed the fleets of Rome like setting a cat among the pigeons. And then the Romans figured out how to win. If they could not beat us at sea, they would take the land with them wherever they sailed. I was in Carthage for the Battle of Mile, and after it happened I never volunteered to command a warship of Carthage again. It was too dangerous. The Romans had us figured out. You see, naval battles for at least the last thousand years up to this point, had been about well trained crews of rowers bringing their ship in close to the enemy, to ram them with a bronze beak mounted on the bow, or shearing off a bank of oars to leave the enemy helpless, or bringing a small number of archers and marines in close enough to shoot arrows, javelins, slingstones, and flammables into the enemy craft. Romans, hopeless novices that they were, could not win these naval battles, and so they changed the game with a device they called the Corwus, the crow. It was an enormous gangplank, half the length of their ship, hoisted up into the air with a great weight of bronze shaped into a spike at the top end. If any of our ships got close enough, the Romans would cut the rope suspending the Corwus, and it would come crashing down, burying its bronze beak into our vessel, creating a bridge wide enough for four men with swords and shields to walk abreast on. They created land over the water. Every Roman was a trained soldier, every one of them put to sea with their weapons and armor. With the ships locked together, the Roman rowers set down their oars, picked up their swords, and formed a column of infantry amidships as neat as on any parade ground. On our ships, meanwhile, a few marines and archers were equipped for proper fighting as part of the role, but the rest of the crew? No, it was a slaughter. The Romans marched from their ships to ours and barely needed to slow their pace as they cut our men down, Carthaginian citizens all. It was one thing to lose an army. We could always hire more Libyans, more Numidians, more Iberians and Celtiberians and Celts, more Balaric slingers and Cretan archers, more Greek phalangites and Illyrian skirmishers. To be honest, we sometimes hired the new armies with the wages promised to the dead. Why not? Who would complain? Not so with the battles of Mile, or the battles of Sulki, Tyndaris, and Cape Acnomus that followed. That last may have been one of the biggest naval battles in history, almost seven hundred ships crewed by three hundred thousand men, tens of thousands of whom died, or were captured and sold into slavery. Every Carthaginian family lost a son, a brother, a father, a grandfather, and because our families were so intertwined, that was also our nephews, our cousins, our uncles, our great uncles. I grieved as much as any of my people, and when they asked who I had lost, I would say my uncle and cousin, but my nephew, young Canmi, still lived, watching over the family business in Malacca, or Abusus, or some similar out-of-the-way place. He had always paid to mention the house of Canmi's heir at a time like that, a time people would remember. Anyway, I said I would not linger on the first war between Carthage and Rome, so I will finish by saying they wiped us from Sicily so thoroughly that I captained many a broad bellied merchantman to and from that benighted isle to evacuate our cities there one by one. The Romans massacred anyone we left behind. A last great battle off the Edgadi Islands saw what was left of our fleet smashed, and after twenty three grueling years, Carthage was all punched out. When we finally made peace, the terms bankrupted us, such that we could not pay our surviving mercenaries. They rebelled, as was their right, and so we had to fight another war to drive the wronged soldiers from our homeland. While that was happening, Rome broke the terms of their own peace treaty and snatched Sardinia and Corsica from us as well when we were too weak to protect what they knew was ours by right. And they have the temerity to call us perfidious. There was nothing to be done, of course, we were a humbled people, truly, but that was not to last. A prominent Carthaginian family, the Barcas, got it into their heads that we could replace all we had lost in Sicily, and Sardinia, and Corsica, and then some, by conquering Spain in the same way Rome had conquered Italy. They never really had the full support of Carthage's council of elders, but they found success, and sent tribute home regularly enough to restore our city's finances. Well, Carthage had become such a sad place, and I was due to sail away as one man and return a decade later as another anyway, that I resolved to go to Spain myself, full time for a number of years. That's where I met Marco. But I am getting ahead of myself. I was speaking of the house of Barca. The Barcad clan could trace their line back to among the first settlers of Carthage. Oh, they had not been with us on Zembra, but as soon as Iarbus gave us the beach and Hyde Hill, Elishat had me on a ship back to Tyre and Sidon and Biblos, recruiting new settlers. The founder of the Barcad line was a Mason just finishing up his apprenticeship in some fly speck of a place that did not even boast a good harbor. It took very little convincing on my part to persuade him that a Mason in a new city on the north shore of Africa would do very well for himself. He proved a hard worker, and he quickly gained the reputation for his thunderous hammer blows. He took the name Barca, lightning as his personal brand, and many was the cornerstone of a building in Carthage that bore the zigzag chisel marks of a thunderbolt for his signature. By the time of the Sicilian War, the Barkids were old money nobility in Carthage, with a penchant for military exploits. They commanded many of our armies, including the ones that lost us Sicily. Dear listeners, I will leave it for those of you who are interested to look up whether Hamilcar Barca was a good general or a bad general, whether we in Carthage did all we could to support him or not, and whether there was anything he could have done to win an unwinnable war against an enemy with the bottomless resources of Rome. For my own part, I will say I always liked him. I liked him even more when he took his three sons, Hasdrabal, Hannibal, and Mago, to the temple of Baal on the brow of the Bursa, and made those little boys place their hands upon the altar. Swear to me you will never be a friend to Rome. They swore, and they never forgot their oath. Hamilcar sailed to Spain with his sons, and his brother in law, Hasdrabal the Fair, and he carved out a kingdom mightier than anything Carthage had boasted in Sicily and Sardinia and Corsica combined. As he had promised the elders of Carthage, all that we had lost could be made up in Spain. He did not make himself a king there, because he was a patriot of Carthage, just as I was. It was enough for him that we allowed him to rule what he conquered in our name. I was grieved, deeply grieved, when he died in a minor skirmish somewhere in the Spanish hills. Hasdrabal the Fair took over and continued the conquests until he too was cut down in his prime. Fortunately, Hamilcar's Barkid boys had grown up to be princelings in their own right by then, and I shifted my support to them gladly. Hannibal was the eldest and the leader of the three, but Mago and the younger Hasdrabal were equal partners of his in those days, and together they could be in three places at once, where their father and uncle had only managed one apiece. The conquest of Spain accelerated faster than you would believe with those three in command. This is where my story resumes, and I finally get to talk about my future friend Marco and the day he threatened to kill me up in the same Spanish hills where General Hamilcar had been slain. I was in Malacca on Spain's southern coast when the courier found me. The letter was sealed in wax stamped shut with the thunderbolt seal of the house of Barca. It came very close to ordering me to use every one of my connections and spare no expense to obtain as much horse tack as I could, and then proceed inland, post haste, to the siege of a small hill town named Well, I've forgotten the name. The name is not important. The Barkids were always besieging some hill fort or another in those days. Anyway, it seemed Mago had captured more than a thousand good cavalry mounts that were grazing in a distant pasture as the Carthaginian army surrounded the rebellious tribe in its ancestral stronghold. Now Hannibal wanted to convert this windfall into a force of mounted warriors by offering free horses to poor second and third sons of minor nobility who otherwise would have to walk shamefully to war. The trouble was Mago only had the horses, not the gear to go with them. When the current siege ended, the next rebellion to suppress was towards the coast in the wrong direction from the poorest Celt Iberians of the inner plateau of central Spain, who would gladly join the Barcat army in exchange for a horse to die on. The letter ended Hurry, Canmi, we know we can rely on you, and then the name Barca, flanked by two thunderbolts, was scrawled across the bottom of the missive to show both brothers were asking this of me. They knew a good Carthaginian patriot such as I understood my hopes for my country's future lay with their family. I could refuse them nothing. To be fair to them, they usually had the good grace not to rely on my sympathies to the point of becoming a nuisance. This request was venturing into nuisance territory, to be honest. Honest with you. I am a very happy sailor, but I am a very poor caravanier, especially on the Iberian Peninsula. The Spanish countryside has almost always been full of bandits, and bandits often lack the good manners to ask if you were worth ransoming before they slip your throat. No, much better to deal with pirates on the water than take a stroll through the Spanish hills. Still, into those hills I was asked to go, and there was no way around my task. All I could do was take precautions. I hired guards, or perhaps I was assigned them. I forget now. Either way, they were Libyan spearmen newly arrived and planning to make their own way to Hannibal's army as reinforcements for one of his war bands, so if I did hire them, they would have come cheap. With a bodyguard assembled, I prepared my caravan. The Barkheads had chosen the right man to finance their little expedition, even if I did not want to lead it. Once I said the House of Barca and the House of Canmi would pay good shekels for any horse tack available, and no friend of those houses should hold back, every merchant who had ever so much as looked at a horse made me offers. I refused no one. Warehouses opened up, ships went out in the morning and returned the next day from neighboring cities with goods for my consideration. I took new, I took second hand, I took fancy, I took plain. The only thing I did not want was cheaply made. I wanted the good stuff, and when that news went out among the traders and dealers, they were all smiles and generosity. It was nice to have a customer who appreciated quality and was prepared to pay for it. I hired mules and muleteers, and then I supervised as we bundled up the gear, saddles, saddle blankets, bridles, halters, reins, bits, harnesses, martingales, combs, brushes, crops, spurs. Anything and everything relevant to fitting out a man who wanted to ride, but did not have his own kit. All of it went into neat packages that were stacked in ridiculous mounds upon the backs of our sure footed Spanish mules. On the side of each package I drew the zigzag thunderbolt of Barca in black paint, so men watching our mule train pass would know whose goods I carried. I hoped that would keep me safe, for who would dare interfere with the supply chain of the barked war machine? Only a fool or a mad Spaniard looking to make a name for himself. I met Marco in one of those ubiquitous ravines the Spanish hills seem to breed for their own amusement when no one is looking. How I loathed those deep valleys. The hair on the back of my neck stood up every time I committed my caravan to one. It was true that I was working for Hannibal and Mago, but I was not a proper military supply convoy with mounted scouts I could throw out in all directions to look for trouble. The best I could do was ride ahead myself to see the end of a given ravine before waving back at my waiting men to start walking towards me. My Libyan spearmen walked on either side of the mule train, their eyes on the slopes above us. We tiptoed through each one of those choke points as if we expected the very rocks around us to transform into bandits. I will give Marco credit. He had too much pride to hide behind a rock. When I met him he was standing in the middle of the trail at the far end of the canyon we had just entered. He seemed alone and completely at ease, although I was sure neither could be true. He had a proper sword with a horse head pommel sheathed in a scabbard at his side, but the weapon that really drew my eye was an oak stave he held behind his neck with either end held in the palm of a hand like he was carrying a yoke. The stave must have been a yard long, maybe more, and I swear Marco's shoulders seemed almost as wide as the stave was long. A thousand years before he was born, the Greeks used to draw human figures on their pots, and the men always had enormous shoulders hovering over tiny waists. Marco could have modeled for one of those potters. He only stood up to my collarbone, but with his elbows out so his hands could rest on the stick behind his neck, he seemed almost as wide as he was tall. However short or tall he was, every inch of him was muscled and fit and tanned and coated in thick black hair. Before he turned to banditry, I imagine he must have been a mason or a blacksmith with a body like that. Of course that is assuming he was not some kind of bear trained to walk on his hind legs. Good day to you, the bear man called out to me cheerily as my caravan made its way towards him. Good day to you, my friend, I said. Do you know what time it is? he asked. Now in an age before clocks, this was not as common a question as you might first think. Still, I took his question at face value. I would say it is a little before noon. If you care to join our group, we shall be through this gorge by the time the sun is at its highest. Would you join us for our midday meal? We will make a camp at the next spot of shade we see and wait out the hottest part of the day. I believe my guards have some of last night's lamb wrapped up in a cool damp cloth. Sliced with some olives and some bread, it should make for a wonderful snack. Marco shook his head. That is not what time it is. His tone was confident. What time is it then? I asked, knowing I would not like the answer. It is time for you to get down off your horse, gather your men, and walk back the way you came. You will leave all the animals and all your belongings here. That is the only way you get out of this alive. But of course you knew that, didn't you? You knew what time it was as soon as you saw me, yes? His smile was pure Spanish machismo. I knew he had friends watching us from the hills to either side of us. He was putting on this show for them, and by his performance I imagine they viewed him as their hero. Well, I had dealt with heroes before in my time. What is your name? I asked. Heroes always want you to know their name. I am called Marco. I am the finest swordsman in all of Iberia, and I am sure it is your pleasure to make my acquaintance. When you get back to wherever you came from, your friends and loved ones will gather around you to hear you tell of the day you met Marko. Please be sure to tell them how courteous I was. I regret that we are meeting under these circumstances, but a man must eat, and the lamb and the olives you mentioned sound delicious. Marco took the stick from behind his neck and gave me a low bow with it in his hand, as if it was a sword. I have offered you the lamb and olives as my guest. Why rob me of them? I asked. What you have on the backs of those mules will keep me and mine and lamb and olives for a long time, he said. Well, that's true, if you can find anyone to buy them from you. It's all horse tack, Marco. Every seller of horse gear in southern Iberia knows I just bought this caravan of goods for the Barkids. You do know who the Barkids are, don't you? Asking a Spaniard if he knew of the Barkids was like asking how many suns there are in the sky. You would need to live under a rock not to know the answer. Marco seemed unimpressed with my statement. He shrugged a magnificent Spanish shrug with his big shoulders. It was poetry in motion. You march through my hills with foreign guards and mules loaded down with bags marked with thunderbolts. You had better be on Bark of business. I will take my chances with Hannibal and his brothers. I have no hill for it for them to besiege. I am Marco. I go where I please. It was very well said. He must have known as soon as he saw us that we were not your normal everyday band of merchants wandering through bandit country. Mentally I rounded up how many men he must have brought with him. I needed to shake that supreme Spanish confidence. You have not asked me my name, Marco. Forgive me. What shall I call you, friend? Please do not say dead man. That would grieve me more than you would believe. With that he barked a laugh that echoed off the hills to either side of my people. I drew myself up straight in my saddle. My name is Canmi. There are many Canmes in the world, but I am the patriarch of the house of Canmi. Does that mean anything to you? Marco shrugged again. That man's shoulders were born to shrug. It was like watching two mountains dance. I continued. That is too bad. This is a more impressive speech when someone else has already told you who I am. I am one of the largest landholders in all of Carthage. I have an estate in every city in the world with a temple of Melkhart. There is a warehouse and dock space for my exclusive use in every port in the world not run by a Greek or a Roman, and the Greeks and Romans usually work with me too once my people talk to their people. Let me summarize all this by making it about you, Marco. If you mean to murder me, understand that the Barkids will make it their business to crucify anyone who you have ever met in front of you. When you are all alone in the world, only then will they walk over you with an elephant until you are just brown paste in the dust. I thought it was a very good speech, and I guess Marco did too. He tipped his head back and laughed and laughed and laughed. Meanwhile, the head of my guard had grown impatient with all this talk, and I can only surmise he was not thinking about the hidden men in the hills above us, so much as he was thinking the fool blocking our way had not drawn his sword. As I think about it further, I suspect the Libyans spoke no Iberian, and so our conversation was a mystery to him. Whatever he was thinking, he strode past me while Marco laughed, and he brought up his spear to perform the overarm killing stroke he had practiced all his adult life. Marco sprang into action like he was performing a choreographed dance. You would think a dancing bear would be an awkward shuffling affair, but Marco was pure hairy grace. His stick knocked aside the spearhead coming towards him. He twisted along the outside of the Libyan's outstretched arm, and then he gave a lightning fast smack with his stave to the back of the Libyan's knee and where his neck met his shoulder. The head of my guard stumbled to the ground, and the spear flew from his fingers as his whole arm went numb. Marco looked up at me and laughed again. Is that what passes for a bark of guardsman these days? I tell you what, Canmi, if the rest of your guards combined can make me draw my sword, I will let you and your mule train pass through my ravine without further trouble. Then Marco brought up his stick to point at me square in the face. For one long moment I thought back to when I was a field slave, and the young master had given a sawed off shovel handle to a slave boy so he could practice his sparring. The boy had been a natural, but he had died all the same, for a slave could never be a swordsman. Here I faced a real swordsman, offering to spar with just a stick. Despite our current circumstances, I found myself rather liking the hairy little bandit. I made a decision. I will make you a better offer, Marco. Beat all my guardsmen with your stick, and I will give you your heart's desire. Just do not kill them. No one dies today, and everyone leaves happy. Is that a fair offer? I asked. Marco ran his tongue around the inside of his mouth before nodding. That is an interesting thought, Canmi. We will discuss it further in a moment. Then he gave a sharp whistle, and I watched the hills come alive around us as a hundred men and more rose up out of the scrub and brush and boulders to get a better view of their hero fighting an honorable duel. None of them were much older than Marco that I could see. They were all in peak physical condition too. That meant he had recruited them, rather than inheriting a clan's warriors from his elders. Our Marco really was making his own way in the world. I decided even as I was waving my guards forward that I would help him with his life's desire, win or lose. I said in Libyan, Drop your spears, swords only. If he yields, spare him. The men ran forward. I honestly do not remember how many of them there were. Was it a dozen? A score? However many it was, we were hopelessly outnumbered if Marco's men descended to butcher us. Still, whether it was twelve or twenty or a few more or a few less, Marco stood alone against a horde. I will point out the sword was not the Libyan's preferred weapon. They were trained to fight in a formation as spearmen. With that said, if you gave a comfortable number of professional soldiers their sidearms and told them to take care of a man with a stick, you would expect them to prevail, would you not? I was not asking the world of them. Asking the world would have been expecting them to hold off Marco's friends after they bested him. Fortunately it never came to that. Marco the Bear Man had called himself the greatest swordsman in Iberia, and even with the head of my guard in the dust, I had taken Marco's boast as just the kind of bluster to be expected from a bandit king on the rise. I was wrong, of course. Marco was an artist. My friend Deddy was a great magician. My friend Daedalus was a great inventor. My friend Pythias was a great explorer. Marco was a great swordsman. He moved through the space of that dirt path at the bottom of a ravine like he had all the time in the world. It was crowded with men, but he had all the room he needed. There was a flurry of motion, but he wasted not a single step or swing. The Libyans howled together, but he made not a single sound. I suppose that is not true. It would be fair to say he made no sound from his mouth. I distinctly remember a steady succession of sharp noises, something like thump, flack, thump, flack, flack, clack, crunch, thump, and then a couple of smacks for good measure. When it was done only four of my guardsmen remained on their feet and armed, and now they circled him warily, trying to spread out and surround him so he could not face all of them at once. Their friends lay or sat in the dust, rubbing the welts he had raised on their wrists and elbows and shoulders and knees. A few who had taken blows to the head snuffled and groaned in the dust. Tell them if one of them can get this stick out of my hand, I will give him twenty shekels, Marco asked me. Bored with our original bet, he wanted to up the ante. I repeated his words in Libyan, as one they tried to rush him. He somehow managed to both parry and repost all of them in less time than it takes me to say it. He even caught one Libyan sword on another's. The only blood drawn in the whole fight was when that block skittered down the blade, skipped over the hilt, and sliced a Libyan's forearm. That man was still on his first howl when Marco had the other three in the dust. The last bleeding guard took a knee rather than wait for the stick wielding Spaniard to beat him down. Well done, Marco. Well done, I said from atop my horse. He looked up at me, his blood hot from exertion. I notice you don't do your own fighting, he shouted up at me. Would it do me any good? I asked. It might save your life, he snapped. No, my life is quite safe, Marco. I am about to make your dreams come true, I said easily. What do you know about my dreams? he snarled. Oh he was angry when I said that. Wherever he was from, whatever his story was, his dreams were his own, and how dare I look down on him from the back of my horse and say it was within my power to give him everything he ever wanted. My men were flat on their backs with him standing over them. His dreams were his for the taking, because he earned them, and damn me for a fool for talking sense when all he wanted to do was listen to his heart instead of his head. We would know each other for the rest of his life, and that was the only moment I am sure my talented friend wanted to gut me like a hog. He had asked me a question, and now it was for me to answer. What did I know about his dreams? I looked at the men on the hills above me. Those men had awoken that morning intending to rob me. Marco had gathered them to him and provided for them. Why? How? A man who could do what I had seen with a stick would be a once in a generation talent with a sword. Why was he not serving his chieftain as a champion in some little hilltop fort? What did he want? I got down off my horse and spread my arms wide to show I was unarmed. In my experience, warriors who think they are good people do not cut down unarmed men in the middle of a conversation. Marco, you have gathered together a small army already, but when I look up at these men, I do not see gold torques at their throats or on their arms. Your tunic is hemmed in Tyrian purple, but only half of your men have any color at all. You are on the start of a journey to wealth and riches, and you see yourself one day with power and prestige. Men will sing songs of you, women will tell their daughters of you, boys will fight with sticks in the field and dream of you. All that is in front of you. Let me ask you, though, do you want to start as a bandit who the Barkids will need to hunt down in the next year or two or as a general in their army? Marco blinked at me, still hot blooded. What? War is coming, Marco. A real war, bigger than anything you have ever seen or heard about. Hannibal and his brothers are putting their foot down on Iberia now because they intend to march on Rome with their empire safe behind them when they go. In the next year or two, they will sweep all of Spain south of the Ebro of anyone who would raise a sword against them. You may not have a hilltop, but you have people who depend upon you. You can only move as fast as your camp followers. The Barkids will find you where you sleep one day, and even the greatest swordsmen in the world can't defeat an entire army. That said, these people you already have could be the beginning of your own war band. I am on my way to deliver equipment to the Barkids. This horse tack is to equip a new wing of Celt Iberian heavy cavalry. Money means nothing to the Barkids. They will pay you whatever it costs. Come with me. I will make you one of their generals, and I will commit the wealth of my house to your army. Hire who you like, pay them what you like, equip them how you like. The house of Canmi will pay for all of it, and it will be money well spent. Instead of a bandit here in Iberia, you will go with Hannibal and his brothers to Italy. You know what the Barkids are capable of, and you will lead all of their Iberian infantry in time. You will never have to worry about how to pay for anything. You can focus on being great. When the war is done, you will come home, the most famous man in Spain, and you will not even need my money anymore. What you win in Italy with your sword and your men will make you wealthier than I will ever be. I said it, and I meant it, and Marco could see that I meant it. Marco looked up to his men in the hills, men who had committed their lives to his destiny, even knowing the road would be rocky. I could see him rolling it around. Bandit or general Bandit or general. I suppose my life depended on whether the Barkett's had ever wronged him in the past. General Marco, he said it aloud, testing the sound. Call yourself whatever you like. Just know you go from being a bandit with a hundred men to a chieftain with as many men as you want with the next words you say, I said. He weighed my words in his mind. My guards were pulling themselves to their feet behind him, and one of them was cursing savagely at some injury he had sustained. Without turning, Marco pointed his stick at the man's face, and the Libyan fell silent without further prompting. If my next word makes it so then my next word is yes, he said. He smiled at me, and then threw one strong arm around my neck when that was not enough for his Spanish heart. His men started cheering on the hills above us. They had not heard every word, but their leader hugging the leader of the caravan they meant to rob seemed a good sign. Marco decided their enthusiasm needed guidance. He stepped back from me, holding his arms up and turning around until everyone was silent. These spearmen do not know these hills as we do, my brothers. From now on we escort this man and his goods to Hannibal Barca and the Carthaginian army. When we get there there will be he looked over at me mischievously, ten silver shekels for each one of you, plus a new tunic in good Iberian colours. Any man who needs a new sword or buckler shall be provided. Every man shall have new sandals. Let the word go out to your kinsmen. Marco has a patron. He is going to war, and any man who wants to follow him is welcome to apply. The cheering echoed up and down the gorge for a long time, and then they descended en masse to line up on either side of my mules and muleteers. I think if Marco had asked it of them, they would have taken the bundles from my mule's back and carried them on their own backs via tump line. In that moment he could do no wrong in their eyes. How I wish it had all worked out for them. First, if you are enjoying it, tell someone about it. Audio dramas live and die on word of mouth, so please help spread the word. Second, please like it, review it, and subscribe to it wherever you find your podcasts. We want to teach the algorithm that this show is worth people's time. Third, this podcast is based on the novels Beginning, Middle, and End by Jeff Mix, available on Amazon. If you want to read ahead or just have a copy of this story on your shelves, that would be so appreciated. 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