Asimov’s, July/August 2026
An aging Archimedes, kidnapped from newly-fallen Syracuse, is dragged into Hannibal’s war camp in Italy in 212 BC. Hannibal has no interest in siege engines—his is a war of movement, he explains, and Saguntum taught him that sieges are slow and costly. Instead he wants a tutor for his ten-year-old son Haspar, whose previous Greek tutor Hannibal disemboweled for whining. Archimedes, seventy-five and bone-tired, agrees, mostly because refusing seems unwise.
Haspar proves to be a spoiled, violence-hungry brat who wears his father’s features without his father’s competence, and who Archimedes suspects engineered his predecessor’s death. Their lessons lurch between geometry and interrogation, as Haspar demands the gory details of Syracuse’s fall. Archimedes recounts how Roman soldiers destroyed his orrery before Carthaginian agents killed them and spirited him away in a vegetable cart. Over months of marching through Italy, the two settle into an uneasy rapport: Archimedes builds odometers and improves Hannibal’s pathetic maps, needles Haspar out of his casual cruelty, and, in one prickly exchange about hatred, women, and the cook Hannibal brought from Spain, actually gets the boy to consider that other people are real.
Archimedes also earns a strange intimacy with Hannibal himself—close enough to ask about his ruined eye, close enough to be handed wine from the same flask. When he discovers Hannibal has been sending military intelligence to his brother Hasdrubal unencrypted, he angrily teaches the general about ciphers, saving the army from exposure and, not incidentally, securing the reinforcements that had been slipping away. Privately, in his journal, Archimedes confesses what he can admit to no one aloud: he does not hate Rome, he fears it, and he wants nothing more than to die at home in Syracuse rather than in this camp reeking of elephant dung.
The Numidian commander Maharbal presses Archimedes to talk Hannibal into finally marching on Rome, arguing that Hannibal knows how to win victories but not how to use them. Archimedes realizes the only way home may run through Rome itself, and orchestrates the idea so that it appears to come from Haspar. Father and son together, he argues, don’t need to sack the city—only prove its walls can be breached. Hannibal agrees, and Archimedes’ siege engines—towering platforms, oil-hoisting cranes, wrecking-ball catapults, incendiary bombs—shatter the Servian Wall in five places while Hannibal’s veteran army crushes Rome’s depleted legions on the Campus Martius. Rome sues for peace, ceding Sicily and southern Italy, surrendering its fleet, and paying crushing tribute; the Republic is broken.
Walking the wreckage afterward with Haspar—the old man leaning on a spear, the boy supporting him—Archimedes sees only horror in what he’s built, while Haspar sees glory and his own future. In the story’s final turn, Archimedes decides not to return to a Syracuse that no longer feels like home, but to travel onward to Carthage with Haspar, hoping to still be alive when the boy becomes a man, and hoping he might yet be shaped into a builder rather than a destroyer.
Alternate history enthusiast and two-time Sidewise Award-winner Alan Smale is the author of the Clash of Eagles trilogy, featuring a Roman invasion of Mississippian America, and the Cold War alternate space race series Apollo Rising. His previous tales for Asimov’s have explored the wilds of Mongolia and deepest, darkest England, the windy dunes of Kitty Hawk, and the bloody Colosseum in Caracalla’s Rome.