Storm Chasing: Filia Punica (2)
Title: Storm Chasing: Filia Punica (2)
Author: clodia_metelli.
Rating: K+
Characters: OC, War.
Summary: The world was full of good chaps in those days...
Disclaimer: I do not own Good Omens and I make nothing from this except my own entertainment.
Word Count: 652
Italy, Pyrrhus, Carthage (x3), Macedon (x2), Antiochus | Pyrrhic Victories | Mater Punica | Catch Up Over Coffee | Filia Punica (1) |
~ filia punica (2) ~
Practically a full house today, which obviously surprises Professor Plum, given the weather. Most students walk everywhere, though, so it’s mostly just a problem for the staff. Outside on the green, they’re rebuilding the marquee for the Christmas Market, which collapsed yesterday amid bad omens. Someone is shovelling snow somewhere, the metal edge scraping rhythmically on stone.
The Second Punic War (2) stands at the top of this week’s handout. War can’t be bothered to check the lecture list to see if next week’s going to be The Second Punic War (3). Chances are, it will. That was a good one, by any standards, and very few classically imbued scholars can resist tricola anyway.
Professor Plum is talking quinqueremes and naval numbers. They’re wrong, of course, but numbers always do get screwed up in transmission. The proportions are pretty much right, at least: Romans in the lead, their ships crammed with citizens and Italian allies and even the odd freed slave in those dark days after Cannae, while Carthage scrambled for anyone who’d take money to row.
Carthaginians and their mercenaries! She’d laughed in Famine’s face when he’d seen his precious merchants spilling their silver at her feet.
“The numbers told,” Professor Plum is saying and War grins her perfect scarlet grin, because in her experience, numbers almost always do.
Hannibal, now.
He was good. He was very good, and she’d liked him, and she’d liked him more after Cannae. He’d ravaged Campania and plundered the countryside and ridden against Spoletium, even though she’d wanted him to have a hack at Rome. She’d smiled at him and seen bonfires reflected in his eyes. Professor Plum says, “Shades of Pyrrhus,” and War thinks: yeah.
How vast she’d been in those days! She’d towered over Italy, over Spain where Gnaeus Scipio was eating Hannibal’s former conquests away in bites and chunks. He’d smashed through the Carthaginians at the River Ebro and cut them off from Spain, and War had smiled at him too, because all said and done, she likes men who win and win hard. Her bronzed legs had straddled the sea and both sides had polished her boots.
“After Ebro, Carthage never tried to contest Rome for overall naval domination,” Professor Plum is saying. “There’s an article on last week’s handout by Ed Bragg, who I used to know at Oxford - good chap -”
Good chap. Ha.
Good chaps go out to bleed in the dust and bleed other good chaps dry. The world had been full of good chaps in those days. They’d chased her and lusted after her and sometimes, just sometimes, they’d walked away...
Marcus Marcellus. Now he’d been a good chap. Yeah.
There’s a picture. Professor Plum gestures happily. “There’s the philosopher sketching on the ground,” he says, “and he’s about to get his head cut off.”
He times his pause precisely, then raises his hands. “Not that I have anything against philosophers!”
What a siege that was, thinks War, and almost licks her lips. What a sack! Sure, he’d been scolded for it afterwards, but what did anyone think was going to happen? Syracuse had held out too long, and long sieges make the sacking all the bloodier. She’d waded through the pyres of burning houses and seen them carrying off the mathematician’s orreries and she’d laughed, because Archimedes had built catapults for her and that made him a good chap too.
And back in Rome, they’d called in the Magna Mater, Cybele (“A baetyl,” says Professor Plum, “probably a meteorite”), and sacrificed extravagantly and expiated more omens than anyone could count. “They managed to convince the rest of Italy that they could beat Hannibal,” the professor’s saying, “and that the gods wanted them to -”
- and War remembers Hannibal flagging and the Roman ships setting out for Carthage, and how she’d grinned when he’d had to follow them home, because by then she’d decided they were probably right.
On to Filia Punica (3)
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