The Shipyard at Carthage's End
A Novel of the Final Siege

About this book:

The Romans have burned Carthage's fleet, blockaded its harbor, and begun building a stone wall across the sea gate to starve the city into dust. Inside the walls, the admiralty has ordered fifty warships built in forty days—from the roof beams of temples, the floorboards of villas, and the hair of every woman in Carthage, shorn at knife-point to twist into rope.

Master shipwright Hamilcar has two hulls sound enough to float, a yard full of starving apprentices and conscripted scribes who have never held an adze, and a magistrate who thinks green cypress and optimism can replace seasoned oak and iron. His partner Gisgo is seventy-five and coughing up the dust of three wars. The general Hasdrubal pays them in gold that buys nothing, promises estates in valleys already held by Roman legions, and watches from the citadel as Scipio's mole grows longer each dawn.

But the Cothon—the great circular harbor, secret heart of Carthaginian naval power—still holds water. And in its slipways, beneath the Ionic columns where admirals once reviewed three hundred ships, the keels are going down. One by one. Frame by frame. Caulked with boiled sludge and human hair, fastened with nails pulled from burned warehouses and bolts softened by fire. They will not win the war. They only have to reach the harbor mouth before the mole closes it forever. The sea remembers what the city was. The question is whether the city still remembers how to sail.