The Steel of Hispalis

Two empires at war. A man without a homeland. A loyalty forged in blood.In 218 BC, the Mediterranean burns. As Hannibal Barca drives his elephants towards the Alps, the prosperous city of Hispalis becomes the board of a deadly game. Batenor, a young Turdetanian of humble origins, watches his world crumble when he is forcibly conscripted by the Punic hosts. Torn from the arms of Athenais, the daughter of a Greek merchant to whom he swore he would return, Batenor must survive abuse and barbarity beneath the banner of Tanit.But fate has other plans. After a desperate escape, he falls into the hands of the legions of the Scipios. There, amid the dust of Roman camps and the gleam of the gladius hispaniensis, the former forced recruit discovers a new way of fighting. His rise is meteoric: from simple soldier to the trusted shadow of a young and brilliant general, Publius Cornelius Scipio, who will turn him into his ’hidden hand’ for missions that official history never dared to record.From the conquest of Carthago Nova to the tactical carnage of Ilipa, Batenor will fight for a name, for a plot of land in the newly founded Italica, and for the dream of reuniting with the woman who never stopped waiting for him. Yet glory has a price, and the final victory in the sands of Zama will demand a sacrifice that will mark his destiny forever.The Steel of Hispalis is the spectacular beginning of the pentalogy Heirs of Hispania, a series of independent chronicles that traverse the centuries of Roman rule in the Peninsula. A novel where historical rigour blends with an unbreakable love story, reminding us that, sometimes, the greatest men are those whose names were erased by time.