EVENTS IN IBERIA had brought Hasdrubal little joy: neither the satisfaction of a single victory nor the hopes of any discernible change in the near future. All around him he felt whispers of discontent, vengeful scheming tended by the Romans like attentive men blowing on a kindling blaze. This Gnaeus Scipio, brother to the former consul, proved a surprising foe. Early in the spring, he ambushed Hasdrubal’s entire navy while it was beached at the mouth of the Ebro. The Romans – surely with the advantage of some traitor’s information – bore down on the sailors as they rose from slumber, driving in with the rising sun at their backs. It was no battle at all but a wild scramble, vessels rammed and stormed before they had even pushed out through the breakers. Boats not even afloat yet were grappled with hooks and towed into the water and set aflame.
On learning of the disaster, Hasdrubal imagined the far-off day when his brother would also get word of it. He beat his head with the flat of his hands so forcefully that his officers grabbed his arms to stop him. He wanted foremost to attack Emporiae and free Hanno, but Gnaeus kept him otherwise occupied. The Roman sailed south, stormed and sacked the allied town of Onusa, near New Carthage, then burned a village within sight of the city itself and destroyed crops meant for Carthaginian consumption. Hasdrubal had no choice but to retreat and protect the capital. And – as if the damage done by this single man had not been enough – the early autumn saw the arrival of his elder brother, Cornelius Scipio. Hasdrubal would have both of them to contend with from now on.
Despite these misfortunes, he did manage to hold most of the country together. He kept a firm grip on most of his Iberian allies, sending warnings sometimes veiled and sometimes graphically detailed. In many ways, he achieved the focus and breadth of vision that his brother asked of him, but he burned with the desire to be freed of this post and to carry out the next phase of Hannibal’s plan. Not even the insatiable sexual appetite of his young bride distracted him for long. He felt that he was not truly helping to win the war and, increasingly, he considered pressing Carthage for leave to march for Italy. He had made this desire known to the Council, but had received no response.
So he greeted the news of the arrival of a delegation of Carthaginian ships with eagerness. Perhaps he was finally to receive the leave he wished for. He stood on the balcony of his chambers, watching the vessels drop their sails and row between the guard rocks at the mouth of the harbour. The fleet was an impressive sight, some thirty ships of varying sizes. Oars struck the water in unison, stirring foam with each stroke, shifting the ships forward in a motion that Hasdrubal always found odd to behold. The strange, buoyant agreement between the vessel and the water never ceased to amaze him. What made that surface both solid and fluid? Supportive to some objects, deadly to others, always threatening to consume at any moment, each swell in the surf like a hunger pain rippling across the belly of a beast. He could never have been a sea captain. Better death during a raging battle on land than from the bottomless suck of the sea.
Noba walked in swiftly, several loose scrolls clipped between his fingers. ‘They bring reinforcements,’ he said. ‘Four thousand of them. Scant, really, but at least they are Libyans.’
Hasdrubal dipped one corner of his lip, and then righted it again. He sat on a short stool, with his legs wide, hands resting on his knees. The shadow of a new beard added an unkempt aspect to his face. ‘And what else?’
‘Ten elephants. Two hundred Massylii. And they have sent you a new general, Gisgo, son of Hannon. He is to serve as lieutenant governor. He is under your direction, but he will handle civil matters while you are on campaign and will be the main contact between Iberia and Carthage. This last is not good news, I think.’
‘No Hannon ever brings good news. Is there no further message for me from the Shophet or the Council?’
The squire shook his head.
‘I must take them to task for that some day. How many have they sent to Italy?’
Noba stared at him for a moment. He cleared his throat and held up one of the scrolls and contemplated it for a moment. ‘They have not sent Hannibal reinforcements yet,’ he said.
Hasdrubal jerked his head upright, rose, and strode forward, hand out to snatch away the document. ‘Are you joking with me?’
‘You know I have no sense of humour.’
After a brief glance Hasdrubal tossed the scroll away. ‘Make me understand, Noba, because I see no reason in this.’
‘Perhaps their resources are not quite as great as we imagine,’ Noba offered.
‘I can imagine much,’ Hasdrubal said, ‘but the wealth of Carthage is beyond even me. No, that is not the problem. They want him to fail, yes?’
‘Think not of how those old men conspire. What matters is what we do here. Four thousand men is more than we had yesterday.’
Hasdrubal caught sight of Bayala, who had entered at the far corner of the room. Seeing Noba, she lingered at a distance, running her hands over the fabric of a wall tapestry. Hasdrubal cut his jibe short and lowered his voice. ‘So why not give this Gisgo full control of New Carthage? He can have it. Write a despatch to Carthage for me. Tell them I am going to my brother. I will take only a few thousand men – a portion of the number they should have sent Hannibal themselves.’
Noba locked his arms across his chest. ‘The Council will not let you go. We both know that. Some would use the very fact that you made the request against you. One minute they’d say you are indispensable to Iberia; the next, they’d question your loyalty. They will reach their fingers into our business and strip away first this portion of your authority and then the next.’
‘Has Noba become all-knowing in the last few months? There was a time when you were loyal to me.’
‘Those loyal to you tell you when you are mistaken,’ Noba said. ‘This is a greater loyalty than feeding your moments of folly. You would see this if the gods had granted you wisdom as vast as your—’
Hasdrubal shot his hand out and snapped his fist closed before his squire’s face, so close that a simple thrust of his arm would have made the threat into a punch. ‘Finish that sentence and you will never know joy again.’
Noba rolled his eyes to the ceiling. Then he seemed to reconsider and said, ‘Forgive me. I misspoke. Make whatever decision you must. I will go now and greet Gisgo for you. We should dine with him tonight.’
As the sounds of the man’s steps faded in the hallway Hasdrubal closed his eyes and exhaled a long breath. He heard Bayala approaching him. He opened his eyes. She circled him for a moment, looking at him coyly, the tip of her tongue peeping out from the grip of her front teeth. Her grey eyes squinted with the mischievous look she always fixed on him as an amorous invitation. Even though he felt his sex stir, he fixed his gaze on the far side of the room. He was in no humour for such distractions. She must have sensed this, for she surprised him when she spoke.
‘Noba is right.’
‘He may be,’ Hasdrubal said, ‘but I did not ask your opinion.’
‘No, you did not. If you tell me to hold my tongue, I will, but there is no reason you should not speak to me about such things. He is a good man. You and your brothers are fortunate. You instil loyalty in those close to you. Few men achieve this as easily as Barcas.’
Hasdrubal would not look at her. ‘What do you know of it? A woman’s mind is poison to reasoned thought.’
‘In some countries women rule over men.’
‘This is not such a country.’
Bayala creased her thin lips as if pressing this reality between them. Then she released it without comment. ‘Anyway, you are needed here in Iberia. I hear things, too, husband. Women talk as much as men and often of the same matters. Many tribes await the smallest excuse to leave you. Even my father may prove fickle. He would abandon you without a thought if Fortune deserts you. To get his power he killed his older brother, you know. Some say he had a stew made of his innards and had all the family eat of him, so that they all shared in his crime. I was not yet born, but I do not doubt this story.’
A visual image of Andobales’ bulk appeared in Hasdrubal’s mind, the boarlike shape of his body, the jutting stretch of his jaw and nose. Hasdrubal did not like thinking about him, nor remembering that the object of so much of his desire sprang from him. But neither did it seem right for a daughter to tell disparaging tales of her creator.
‘So you are now a woman who speaks against her father?’ he asked. ‘I wonder what you will say of me behind my back?’
‘Nothing that I would not say on my knees before you, husband.’ Bayala slid a hand across his abdomen. Her fingers found a crease in the material and slipped through to caress his flesh. ‘You must stay here and protect your empire,’ she said. ‘You must protect your wife. I never feel safe out of your sight. Anyway, do you want so badly to leave me? Do I fail to give you pleasure?’
He almost said that there was more to life than the pursuit of pleasure, but the words died in him: first, because he wondered why she should feel endangered, and second, because he felt filled to overflowing with desire and doubted his assertion. Bayala did not seem to mind his silence. She pressed her body against his. He felt the soft weight of her breast held against his bicep. As she slid round towards his chest the breast swayed free. Something in the momentary, passing sensation of this sucked the air out of him.
‘Do you like me, husband?’ she asked.
Finally looking down at her – at the confident mirth in her eyes, the imperfect lines of her face, and the thin stretch of her lips – Hasdrubal knew that he liked her very much. More than he wished to tell her. He wondered whether any other Barca had ever felt such a weakness for a woman. A voice within him whispered that if he were not careful such emotion would be the death of him.
Imilce disliked sending Hannibal a letter written in another’s hand, but she could not yet write with the grace she wished for. She had no choice but to speak her love aloud and watch it made manifest by the subtle fingers of a scribe a few years her junior. He never looked up at her, but kept his head inches above his work. She was thankful for this and spoke slowly so that he would have no need to interrupt her.
She began, ‘Hannibal, husband, beloved both of Baal and Imilce . . . I write to you in longing and pride. I do not know where this will find you or what hardship you may be suffering at the moment you read this. I do not know, husband, if you will ever read this. But still I write in hope. The news here is that you have struck several blows at Rome, just as you said you would. This was met with great excitement, although not everyone in Carthage wishes you success. I will not put names in writing, but I now understand that beside each councillor singing your praises is another who grumbles that you are leading the nation to ruin. I would not have thought it possible for any to feel this way, but the people of Carthage surprise me in many ways.
‘This city of your birth is beautiful, rich beyond my imaginings. And – for me, at least – it is stifling, confining, like a tomb. I do not wish you to think me ungrateful. Your mother and sisters have been very kind to me, but I am nothing here without you. None here save Sapanibal have seen me at your side. None see me as I would be seen. They are kind enough, but they make me feel like a jewelled necklace sitting in a box, without the neck for which it was crafted. Are you still convinced that I should not come to you in Italy? I would happily do so, especially now as you are winning fame for us all . . .
‘Have you got all that?’ she asked the scribe.
Without looking up, he nodded that he had. He mumbled, ‘Fame for us all,’ as he finished writing.
Imilce picked up a date and tested the flesh of it against her teeth. She had seen Carthaginian women do this often, and – both consciously and not – she had adopted some of their mannerisms. On her young sister-in-law’s recommendation, she had taken to wearing Carthaginian clothing. The garments were beautiful in their own right, but she never failed to be impressed by the effect they produced when combined with the voluptuous grace of African women. Didobal epitomized this and bore it with remarkable effect: her dark skin further enriched by the bright reds and oranges of her garments, by patterns and pictures stained into the cloth. Certainly, Carthaginian men looked kindly on her, but what did they matter? It was a women’s world in which she found herself, and here she felt shockingly immature. Thinking of her mother-in-law, Imilce felt like an adolescent wrapped in adult garments, like a stick figure and not a true woman at all. Oh, she so very badly wished she could dig her fingernails into her husband’s muscled back, direct his sex inside her, and know once more that he was real and that she was truly valued and that her future was assured. It was unfortunate that she had not become pregnant again . . . But such thoughts were not for this scribe’s ears. She tossed the date back into its bowl and carried on with another line of thought.
‘I will tell you something now that struck me deeply,’ she resumed, ‘though I do not know what you will think of it. This afternoon I took the midday meal with your younger sister, Sophonisba. I am sure you have not the slightest memory of her. She is just thirteen, but her beauty is blooming daily. Her eyes are so black and large, framed by eyelashes that seem to stroke the air itself with sensuality, as if each lash were a feather in an Egyptian dancer’s fingers. How she can convey all this by simply blinking is beyond me, but the effect is quite real. It is frightening, really, how devastating she can be with that adolescent glare of hers. Grown men, soldiers and fathers and grandfathers even . . . They all crumble before her. Either that or they simper and flirt with her. She is barely more than a girl, but already the wolves are baying in the night.
‘It is Sophonisba’s mind that truly surprised me, however. She is a young woman of strong opinions. She is well informed and readily capable of discoursing on all manner of subjects. She knows the details of the campaign, and she wishes she might herself take part. She looked at me with all seriousness and said, “Had I been born a man I would avenge the wrongs done us by Rome.” She asked, “Do you not think that our women have bravery beyond that even of our men?”
‘I answered her that if she was anything to go by, then that was undoubtedly true. But she would not be so easily flattered. She was looking for something more, but she was unsure of how to say it at first. I referred to her mother, and her mother’s mother, and to all those who have bravely sent their men off to war and waited long years for their return. I did not mention myself, of course, but in listening to myself speak I did feel a certain pride at being as composed as I am in your long absence. Sophonisba did not dispute any of this, but she seemed saddened by it. She wished there were other ways to demonstrate her valour. She said, “Imilce, I am not like most girls. I do not pray for childish things. I pray that I will somehow serve Carthage in a way that would honour the Barcas.”
‘Can you imagine this? From a girl who should be dreaming simply of some foreign prince to wed . . .’
Imilce, for the first time since beginning her letter, sat down on the intricate reclining chair in her sitting room. It was a piece of furniture she still did not care for. Despite its elegant shape and its tiny zebra-skinned cushion, it was an instrument of discomfort. If she had been confident of her position she would have replaced it by now. She sat silent for a moment, pressing her back into the perfectly straight length of mahogany, listening to the scribe’s pen upon the papyrus.
She had reminded herself of Sophonisba’s suitor, Masinissa, and considered mentioning him. She had first laid eyes on him a few days before as he returned from a lion hunt, an elite event in which he was participating for the first time. At Sophonisba’s side, Imilce had stood on the wall near the city gates and watched the chariots thunder up the road. The afternoon was pleasantly cool, the surface of the road darkened by an early, light rain. Masinissa, being a Massylii, spurned the wheeled vehicles. Instead, he rode in the swarming confusion of horsemen. Sophonisba had no difficulty picking him out from the crowd.
‘There he is,’ she had said. ‘The handsome one.’
This was not, actually, a distinguishing feature among the throng of youthful warriors. Imilce nearly said as much. But then, to her surprise, she did spot a young man of more than usual grace. His dress was no different from the others’, and his tack was simple. Yet as he circled and wheeled and trilled with his companions his face shone with a regal joy that separated him from the rest. Here was a boy at play with his friends; but here, too, was a monarch who knew his place among them and wore it comfortably. Word soon spread that the young prince had slain his first lion. He had made the kill from horseback, dancing around the beast, sinking three spears before it went down. That a young man so slender could slay a lion was difficult for Imilce to accept. She wondered whether the tale had not been exaggerated to feed the prince’s pride. Though a woman, she knew as well as any man that a servant’s deeds are often claimed by his master. But when she met Masinissa, saw his face and bearing from up close, felt his unusually calm confidence, and noted the deferential smile and humility with which he received praise, she believed the story.
She would have liked to share this and more with her husband, but she already felt she was rattling on too much, speaking of matters that were not particularly important and that Hannibal might find trivial when compared with the struggles in which he was engaged. And anyway, she never managed to convey her true heart in letters. Writing them made her doubt whether she knew her true heart.
‘Perhaps your family shall have female heroes in the future,’ she dictated, ‘should your sisters be given a chance to shine like their brothers.
‘All the love Baal permits between us, Your wife, Imilce.’
When the scribe finished writing, she dismissed him, pointedly slipping the document from under his gaze so that he might not reread it to her, as he usually did. Alone a moment later, she studied the letter. She haltingly began to read it over, but then decided not to attempt the task. Though she could make some sense of the letters, she was never confident in her reading. Too many words escaped her, so that she always found her feelings incompletely rendered. The scribes never wrote one’s exact words anyway; they abbreviated; they made intricate thoughts into simple, blocky sentiments. If she let herself, she would call the scribe back and have him rewrite the thing several times. She had done this with previous letters, but this time she disciplined the urge. Instead she did something else.
Once sure the ink was dry, she parted the fabric of her gown. She lifted the papyrus and pressed it against her naked flesh. She worked each section of it with her fingertips, feeling the damp of her sweat absorbed by the dry paper. She pressed from the skin of her belly up into the hollow that fused her ribs together, out over the soft give of her breasts. She held the papyrus there for several long breaths, imagining Hannibal receiving the document, believing that he might sense her on it, might think the paper was her very flesh, might feel the longing behind the words and understand more things than she could say.
The massacre beside Lake Trasimene was unprecedented in Roman history. It was not a repeat of the Trebia disaster; it was worse. This time, 15,000 men were killed in the initial slaughter. Among them, the consul who had led them went down, run through by the spear of an Insubrian Gaul. Six thousand managed to escape the defile and flee to a nearby town, but they held out no longer than a day, giving up along with thousands of others. In addition, Geminus’ cavalry had been met by Maharbal’s superior force. The Numidians killed or captured all 4,000 of them. If the last defeat had struck each Roman a blow to the chest, this one hit the collective soul of the people like a blacksmith’s hammer. It left the citizens breathless, shocked, unsure what the limits of Hannibal’s powers were, taking nothing for granted.
Soon, word came that some of the soldiers were straggling home. The people flocked to the gates of Rome, crowding the walls, wailing at the sight before them. Women ran forth, gripping the grimy, blood-caked soldiers, gazing into their faces, calling out the names of husbands, sons, brothers, beseeching the gods to bring their loved ones home. But the gods had turned away. Rome faced the possibility that Hannibal could not be beaten. Perhaps he had trapped Fortune and kept her caged and twisted her always to his advantage. Perhaps this man was more than just a man.
Great as the panic was, lurid as the stories were, the Republic’s leaders did not waste much time in hand-wringing. In the Senate, the faction dominated by the Fabian family and their allies called for the immediate naming of a dictator. It was a stunning proposal, one that nobody wished to believe was needed. With absolute power came grave danger, but if ever extreme measures were called for, this was such a moment. And somehow it was clear to all that the leader of the Fabians’ own party was the only clear choice for the position. The grey-haired Fabius Maximus: former censor, twice consul, twice interrex, and once already named dictator, the very man who had declared war on Carthage by throwing out a fold of his toga. He was the embodiment of Roman virtue, steadfast, dogged, single-minded to a fault. He was neither fiery in speech nor quick to action, but he was vigorous once roused. He did have an affliction – his poor vision – but it was not one for which his peers thought less of him, as it came upon many men with age. He arranged for a pair of eyes to accompany him during his tenure as dictator, a young officer with eyesight rivalling the keen stare of a hawk: the former consul’s son, Publius Scipio.
As his first act in office, Fabius pronounced that the Trasimene disaster had been the result of Flaminius’ impiety and disregard for religious formality. Had nobody around him paused to notice that he began his pursuit of Hannibal on a dies nefastus, an inauspicious day, when no work should take place, during an hour when the gods looked askance at those who commenced new projects? Fabius ordered study of the Sibylline Books, hoping that the prophetic sayings of the Cumaean Sibyl would provide some direction, as they had in times past. He consulted priests and called for the immediate commencement of the rites, games, dedications and vows that they said the gods demanded. Next, he issued an edict that all country people should destroy their crops, their houses, and even their tools at the first sign of Hannibal’s approach. He ordered the call-up of two new legions to protect Rome. He sent Lucius Postumius to Cisalpine Gaul with two full legions, with the responsibility of keeping the Boii and Insubres under pressure. At best, he hoped, their armies might desert Hannibal to protect their own. At worst, Postumius could prevent them from sending new reinforcements to join the Carthaginian.
And then, just before leaving to take over Geminus’ legions, Fabius addressed the Senate and conveyed to them the surprising strategy he had developed to defeat the enemy. He said that his grand plan was actually marked by its simplicity. He would simply not fight the barbarian. An army that does not engage in battle cannot be beaten in battle, he said. When asked if he would then let the invaders ravish the countryside, Fabius answered that yes, he would.
‘Let them crisscross the land as they wish,’ he said. ‘Let the land not be burned only in their wake but also let the fires precede them. Let weeks and months pass without a decisive battle. Let them die one by one from the various hazards of life: illness and injury, or even age if they hang on long enough. By these various measures we will reduce the enemy’s limited number.’
He explained that he would not be inactive meanwhile. His army would shadow Hannibal’s, harassing them and making life difficult for them. He would make it hard for the Carthaginians to feed themselves or to replenish their arms. He would let fatigue and time wear the invaders down. Rome’s strength was that she could replenish her losses, recruit new soldiers, plant new crops. Hannibal could do none of these things – not easily, at least. This would be his undoing.
Fabius’ strategy troubled many in the Senate. One man, Terentuis Varro, rose in the silent chamber and asked, ‘What madness is this, Fabius? Are you so full of despair? Have we elected you only to learn that you believe us doomed?’
‘Hannibal cannot be beaten on the field,’ Fabius said, ‘but he can be beaten. Think wisely on this and deeply, not with vanity but with reason. Was Cornelius a lesser general than any man in here? Was Sempronius? Flaminius? And has the Roman army a history of defeat? Has any nation stood against us and prevailed? No. What we face now is the greatest challenge to our Republic since its founding. I do not know what god breathes genius into the young Barca, but we must admit that for the moment he is our superior in the open clash of arms. Friends, you did not elect me for my wit. You did not bestow this responsibility on me because my mind is so nimble as to dance around this Carthaginian. You elected me because you believed in my judgement. That is what I offer you today. By my policies we will defeat this invader. Carthage will have its day of sorrow. Be patient and trust in me. I am your dictator. Rome will be saved.’
He walked from the hushed chamber, his attendants all round him, Publius at his elbow. ‘How do you think they received that?’ he asked, once out on the streets.
‘Sir,’ Publius said, ‘birds could have built nests in their mouths and raised young, such was their shock.’
Fabius smiled and said, ‘Let us hope it strikes Hannibal the same.’
After Trasimene, Hannibal turned the army east and marched through Umbria. It was not a campaign at all but a moving feast, the whole country one great market from which they plucked goods at will. In each precinct Hannibal kept his ears open for encouraging words, for any people or city wise enough to desert Rome and join the winning cause. But people of Latin blood were a stubborn, recalcitrant lot. Several towns rejected the Carthaginian offer of goodwill and paid for it. The city of Spoletium was somewhat more formidable. It repulsed the Carthaginian attack with disdain. Foolish, that. Had Hannibal the equipment and time to besiege the city properly he would have done so, but there were other matters to see to.
In the first week of July, he settled the army in along the Picene coast and had them lay down their burdens, rest their bodies, and assess the booty they had amassed thus far. Despite their triumphs the men were in pitiable shape, wounded from battle, malnourished from the winter, tired from the march, and plagued by bouts of diarrhoea. The animals were no better off. So Hannibal gave them time to recover beside the ocean. They bathed in the warm waters, baked in the sun, and put well behind them the hardships of the winter. They slaughtered the locals’ fat lambs and cattle, ate fresh bread, and munched fruit pulled ripe from the trees.
The weeks of recovery were not spent in idle pleasure alone. Hannibal had the Libyans rearmed with the best of the captured Roman weapons. They drilled with them and soon came to favour them and to better understand the Roman technique and how to counter it. He sent the Numidians out on far-ranging raids that brought back new horses, the best of which were put into training in their style. Hannibal also sent messengers to Carthage, carrying word of his victories and asking for reinforcements. He knew even as he composed these words that some within the Council would argue against acceding to his requests. But he had to make them.
The defiance on the faces of the peasants they had despoiled had surprised him. Why had they not dropped to their knees and praised him? Why had they not even lied for the moment and claimed to support him? He knew well the manner in which most people behave in the hour of their defeat; these Italians had not followed any model he had previously encountered. And Rome, it seemed, had yet to whisper a word about coming to terms. Through Bostar, he managed to keep a steady flow of spies back and forth to the capital. None reported any mention of appeasement within the city. None even suggested that this thought occupied the senators’ private minds, much less played a hand in public policy. Instead, it seemed that Rome gave thought only to the next stage of the war.
At a meeting of his generals, Hannibal asked, ‘What does this mean, this dictatorship?’
They had gathered in a long-abandoned cottage that served as a makeshift headquarters. The door stood open, casting a square of the brilliant daylight across the room. It was stiflingly hot beneath the sun, so that the stools had been positioned to make the best use of the shade. Above them, lizards slid through the roof, rattling the sun-parched thatch of hay.
‘It means they are afraid,’ Bomilcar said.
‘As they should be. But how does a dictator change the struggle before us?’
‘We should strike soon and hard,’ Maharbal said.
Monomachus sucked his cheeks and spoke through the dry pucker that was his mouth. ‘I care not for delay,’ he said. ‘Our men are rested. Let us strike at the Roman heart now, while our men still remember how easy it is to split Roman flesh.’
Bostar listened to this with a pained expression. He had formed the habit of stroking the ice-scarred tissue of his cheeks while he thought. He did this now, rhythmically, and said, ‘To the commander’s question . . . The Senate approves the call for a dictator only after a great disaster. In this way, we know they acknowledge the carnage we’ve inflicted on them. Instead of their usual two consuls, each of whom controls two legions, they put in place a single, ultimate commander. This dictator controls four legions at once, for a term of six months. His power is total. Last year, as you will recall, the Romans put six legions in the field, but they never fought as a combined force. They still won’t, but with a dictator we can reasonably assume we’ll meet a larger single force than we have thus far.’
‘So they have adopted a king?’ Mago asked. ‘This means they are changing everything.’
‘Not so,’ Bostar said. ‘Romans fear monarchs more even than Athenians do. They will bear this dictator only so long as he is useful. Then they demand that he step down. The Senate chose Fabius because they believe him a prudent, humble man. They would not give this power to anyone but. If you will recall Cincinnatus—’
‘Do not start repeating the Greek’s tales!’ Bomilcar said. ‘We all know this Cincinnatus. Picked his plough out of the field and struck the enemy about the head with it, then returned the plough to the ground and carried on. Are we to fight farmers, then?’
‘One might say that, yes. Romans like to think of themselves as humble people of the land. My point in mentioning Cincinnatus is that he is the model of a Roman dictator. He was a man they could turn to in crisis, one who could be trusted completely to act with the greatest wisdom, a different sort of man from Sempronius or Flaminius.’
‘Fabius will be no fool, then?’ Hannibal asked.
Bostar nodded in such a way as to indicate that the commander had stated the matter succinctly. ‘He will be no fool, which leaves you with this question: how will a wiser leader confront you?’
Bomilcar snorted. ‘If he were truly wise, he would not confront us at all!’
A few of the others laughed, but Monomachus considered the statement as if it had been offered in seriousness. ‘There are ways that we can assure that they fight us,’ he said. He leaned towards the commander and pitched his words low enough to mean that the others had to be still to hear him. ‘Let us order the men to kill everyone in our path. Not just men, but women and children, too. How could the dictator answer that except by battle? He would rush to fight us faster even than Flaminius. Anyway, I do not see the good in leaving children to grow into men, women to push out new soldiers. This is not sound strategy. We should slay them all until they beg us on their knees to stop.’
‘Monomachus, I sometimes wonder if you would halt even at that point,’ Hannibal said. ‘As ever, there is potent logic in your suggestion. As ever, I take your words seriously. But it need not come to that. I’ve not changed my opinion in the slightest. The only way to defeat Rome is to alienate her from her allies. The people of Italy must see that we are strong, but I would not have them think us monsters. We cannot win this war if all of Italy abhors us.’
‘But if we kill them they will be dead!’ Monomachus said, spitting the last word out with the weight and resonance of a shout. ‘I fear not the anger of dead men. Ghosts are vapours. Never has one wielded a sword against living flesh.’
An uneasy silence followed this. Eventually, Mago said, ‘I second my brother on this.’ He spoke forcefully, but having done so he seemed at a loss for anything more to say. Monomachus turned his gaze on him slowly, the lower lids of his eyes rimmed with condescension bordering on malice. Mago did not meet the older general’s eyes, and he was visibly relieved when Hannibal spoke again.
‘We know nothing of what Fabius will do just yet,’ he said. ‘Let us be direct. We will offer battle whenever we can. Perhaps Fabius will accept. One more victory should loosen Rome from her allies. This is how we will proceed. But we do not yet need to kill women and children.’
The frivolity with which small-minded people spent money always amazed Silenus. Diodorus’ chambers were lavish in the style of one new to affluence – in the manner, actually, of a public servant spending the wealth of others on trinkets: ostrich feathers, vases modelled on Eastern designs, cushions encrusted with glass bits meant to pass as precious stones, a few pieces of gold-inlaid furniture. It had been some time since the Greek had witnessed such an attempt at urban splendour. He did not miss it, and, despite the show of luxury, Silenus noted just enough signs of imperfect workmanship and garish design to indicate that the magistrate was not quite as prosperous as he wished to pretend.
Fresh from disembarking at Emporiae and on land for the first time in a week, Silenus had yet to accustom himself to the immobility of life on solid ground. His head swayed on his shoulders, still keeping the rhythm of the waves. Dried seawater crusted his face. He had formed the habit of absently drawing his fingers across his cheeks and down to the tip of his tongue, where he tasted the tang of salt. He was doing this when Diodorus finally appeared.
Silenus had only met the magistrate once, and that was years ago in Syracuse – when Diodorus became engaged to his sister – but he recognized in an instant that he had put on weight, around the torso and in the thighs, as a woman might in her mature years. His mouth was as wide as Silenus remembered and his eyes, conversely, as close together. The least appealing aspect of his appearance was that he wore a garment resembling a toga, not quite the genuine article but close enough to betray his aspirations.
‘Silenus,’ he said, ‘my brother, I did not believe my ears when they told me you were here. By the favour of the gods, you look in good health! If I did not know better I would think you a warrior.’
The two men embraced, quickly, and then drew apart. ‘And if I did not know better I would think you a Roman,’ Silenus said.
‘Oh, not yet, but who knows how the gods will order things in the future? Sit. Sit and drink with me.’
Silenus did so, and for a few minutes the two shared pleasantries. Silenus asked after his sister. Diodorus admitted that she made an adequate wife. Although, he explained, he much preferred the pleasures to be had from virgins. It was unfortunate that they were so hard to come by and expensive to purchase. Such delights were a constant strain on his resources. Silenus nodded at this, smiling despite himself.
Diodorus was also willing to speak at length of the tumultuous path of his political life. Through the luck of others’ misfortunes – a few fevers, a tribal war, and a rapidly advancing dementia had cleared a path for his ascent – he had moved up from a petty official of the city to one of its leading magistrates in just a few years. Unfortunately, just as quickly he had seen his stature reduced by the machinations of his peers. The only difficulty was that he was never sure which god favoured or despised him. To be safe he offered tribute to them all – a time-consuming task.
Eventually, when Diodorus seemed to have talked himself out, Silenus addressed his true purpose directly, thinking to be most forceful thus. ‘I come with a message from Hannibal Barca,’ he said, ‘the commander of the Carthaginian army of Iberia and Italy.’
Diodorus nearly choked on his wine. He spat a portion of it back into his goblet, rose from the couch, and through his coughing managed to say, ‘You what? Hannibal, did you say?’
Silenus fought a smile. ‘He bade me speak to you of a prisoner you hold here. You will know of whom I speak: his brother, Hanno Barca. Emporiae was not wise to let the Romans keep him here. Hannibal never called you an enemy and begs that you not name yourself as one.’
‘Wait one moment,’ Diodorus said. ‘You come to me as a representative of Carthage? You, a Syracusan? When did you throw in with the Africans? And now you come here into my home to demand—’
‘Please,’ Silenus said. ‘This is a serious business; speak calmly with me, as my kinsman.’
Diodorus cast his eyes about the room, checking that nobody was lingering to hear. ‘The truth is I’ve no quarrel with Hannibal,’ he said. ‘I want him neither as an enemy nor as a friend. This business of keeping his brother is no pleasure to me, but some things are unavoidable.’
‘Nothing is unavoidable except death, Diodorus. Is Hanno in good health?’
One corner of the magistrate’s lips twitched nervously at the question. ‘You could say that,’ he said. ‘I mean . . . I believe so, but I’ve only seen him a few times.’
‘Have you considered your fate when Hannibal wins this war?’
‘When? Has it been ordained by the gods already?’
Silenus did not dignify this with anything except a smirk. He leaned forward and set his hand on the other’s hairy wrist for a moment. ‘Diodorus, I did not join Hannibal’s campaign because I believed he would win, or because I cared either way. It was a form of employment, an adventure, a tale I could spend the rest of my life telling. And it has been all of these things. But I cannot deny what my own eyes have witnessed. I’ve never seen a man better suited to command. Everything Hannibal wants, he achieves; everyone he opposes, he defeats. That is the simple truth. I pray you will not make an enemy of him.’
Diodorus pulled his arm away. He sat back, somewhat smugly, and studied Silenus as if noticing him for the first time. ‘Has he so won you over? Tell me, does he share your bed as well? They say that Hasdrubal Barca has a stallion’s shaft. Is the same true of the eldest?’
Silenus did not dignify this with a response. He reached down into his travelling satchel, fished out a small leather pouch, and tilted it onto the table. Gold coins.
‘What?’ Diodorus asked. ‘Do you think me poor? Perhaps you have not looked around . . .’
‘You are not poor, I know, but nor are you as rich as you would like. This gift is just a token. The riches he promises you for this favour will exceed your wildest dreams. This is why I know it is safe to show this to you. Accept it, and much more will come to you. Deny it, and you deny much more than you can imagine.’
Diodorus, for the first time, forgot his look of haughty refusal. His eyes lingered on the coins. ‘But the reach of Rome . . .’
‘By next year, Rome’s reach will be no longer than the space from your shoulder to your fingertips.’
‘Do you really believe that? That this African . . .’
‘If you knew him you would not doubt him,’ Silenus said. ‘Think with all of your wisdom on this. When the war is concluded, Hannibal will control the Mediterranean. He will not forget those who aided him. How would you, Diodorus, like to rule Emporiae as your own domain? Hannibal will call you his governor; you, of course, may think yourself more like a king, with access to as many virgins as your penis can service, among other pleasures. This is what Hannibal offers you.’
‘But what you wish I cannot deliver. I am only one magistrate among many, and the Romans do not bow to our wishes, anyway. Their guards answer only to their leaders—’
Silenus interrupted. ‘My mind is devious, brother. Say yes to this in principle and together we will think of a way to achieve it.’
Diodorus thought for a long time. ‘How can it be,’ he finally said, ‘that you sit before me speaking of these things? It’s madness, and my answer is no. I cannot do what you ask.’
Imco had hardly thought about the Saguntine girl for months before the dreams started, but once they began they were a constant torment. He saw her as she had been on the day Saguntum fell. He would relive the few moments after he had found her. Again and again he agonized over her fate, wishing he could turn away and flee but never able to do so. Before long, she began to appear in camp, in his tent, at his feet as he slept, becoming more solid with each encounter until she seemed to be flesh and blood and she began to speak to him. She had walked this far, she said, to ask him what right he had had. Was he a god? Who had given him dominion over her?
He tried to explain that he had slit her throat not as a punishment, not out of cruelty or malice, but just the opposite. A gift, considering the circumstances in which he had found her. He had saved her from greater suffering. At this, the girl just rolled her eyes, rolled them and then set her gaze back on him again and pinned him. Then she would show him the scar and ask him whether it looked like a present she should be grateful for. She became bolder with the passage of time, grew to know him better and despise him more – which seemed a twisted progression to him, for surely the opposite should be true. He had killed her out of mercy, but the thanks he got was ghostly torment. Just his luck.
Perhaps because of her presence, the respite by the coast passed almost unnoticed, certainly unappreciated. When the word came that the army would be marching to intercept the new dictator, Imco groaned. He had just thrown down his burdens! Barely caught his breath. His vision had only recently returned to normal. His teeth had settled down in their gums once more, and his arms and belly were fleshed out a little better each day, but he was still a wisp of his former self and he told his squadron leader as much. He also noted that he still carried a chest full of phlegm, that his genital lice tortured him incessantly, and that his feet were tender with a rot from the marshes that had yet to heal. He also mentioned that his vision was impaired and that he was not sure he would be able to tell friend from foe on the battlefield – a small lie in the scheme of things. It might have been the one that saved him.
Much to his surprise, his squadron leader waved him away, telling him to stay, then, and join the guards watching over the occupied town and the stores of booty. After he had watched the tail of the army disappear over the horizon a few days later, it occurred to Imco that he was actually one of a relatively small company, made up partly of camp followers and slaves, charged with protecting a rather large treasure, surrounded by countless unseen natives who were naturally disgruntled at having been ousted from their homes. The first few days passed in tense appraisal of every puff of dust in the distance and every vessel appearing on the sea. Throughout the day, Imco stewed beneath the unrelenting summer sun, nagged by the growing suspicion that he was not fortunate at all to have won this duty. He was expendable – that was more like it. He even spent an anxious evening turning over the idea that the army might never return. This new dictator might, in fact, defeat them. And if that happened it would be only a matter of time before the Romans found them out and made captives of them all.
But the next morning dawned as quiet as the one that preceded it. Cavalry units came and went, scouring the neighbouring countryside and depositing their gains at the camp. The soldiers kept watch through a rota system. One day passed into the next with little change and no news of a major battle. Sitting in the sparse shade of a stone pine on the shore side of camp, Imco found in the quiet sights a peace that he had not known for some time. The smell of the salt air, the thrum of waves collapsing on the shore, the view of fishing boats pulled up against the sand, the nimble movements of the shorebirds darting along the tide line: it was almost too tranquil to believe, in the light of the more violent scenes he had been part of over the last few years. His situation verged on bliss, except that with fewer people around, the girl completed her emergence into the physical world. She escaped the confines of his dreams, visited him in the full light of day, and now felt free to pester him about a variety of topics.
He first discovered this one afternoon. He had noticed a stray dog patrolling the camp in wary fits and starts. He moved around cottages and shacks as if he knew the place well, but his gaze suggested that nothing was as he remembered any more. The dog had one ear chewed off. He was dusty, his hair rubbed down to the flesh in spots. His pink tongue lolled constantly from the left side of his jaws. Imco found something humorously endearing in the dog’s nervous movements about the camp. He called after him and tried to wave him over with benign gestures. But when the dog would come nowhere near him, he had a change of heart and threw a stone at it instead. ‘Pathetic creature.’
Just after he mumbled this, a voice beside him asked, ‘Who are you to call another being pathetic?’
It was the girl, squatting beside him in the shade. She pointed out that he had chosen not to march with the others out of simple fear. Did not that make him more pitiable even than a dog? He went from moment to moment complaining about his fate in life, always fearing the next battle, the next injury or illness. If he hated war so much, why did he not take his own life as he had taken hers? She told him she would rather have been pierced by the lust of a warrior than spared by the trembling hand of a half-man. He had not allowed her that choice, had he? She had never known a man more hypocritical than he, she claimed. He could kill when the killing was easy, but really any act of valour he could claim was simply an act of cowardice turned on its head. Did they not call him the Hero of Arbocala?
‘What a farce,’ she said.
By the end of the first week she was even following him through the midday sun, accosting him in view of other soldiers, who ignored her out of respect for him and, perhaps, empathy with his situation. It was most disconcerting, listening to her. She seemed to know his innermost thoughts. She understood him, in fact, with a clarity that baffled him. How had she come to know so many details of his life? To act as if she had spoken to his sisters and mother back in Carthage? He shot these questions back at her, but she answered that the dead have ways unknown to the living. Cryptic nonsense, he thought.
One afternoon the girl so harassed him that he lost his way while walking to the river he had grown accustomed to bathing in. Bathing was the only way to escape the stifling heat, and he preferred the fresh water to that of the sea. He cursed her for distracting him with a whole litany of questions about how various family members would view his cowardice throughout the campaign. The day was oppressively hot. The sun beat down like burning fingers massaging his flesh. He stripped off his tunic and walked naked with the garment flung over his shoulder. He spent some time struggling through the undergrowth before he finally reached the riverbank. But the point at which he reached it was all wrong. He was looking down upon a bend in the river from high above. He would have to walk a good distance upstream to find a route down. Resigned to this, telling himself that the sweat he would work up in the effort would make the swim that much more enjoyable, he turned to walk on. That was when he saw her.
She squatted on the pebbles of the far bank, scrubbing garments in the water. At first Imco took her for an adolescent, maybe one of the displaced townspeople camped on the outskirts of their former home. A little distance away, a donkey munched quietly on the sparse grass. Imco found the sight of the donkey strangely disturbing, but he did not wish to address this at that moment. He turned his eyes back to the young woman. He could make out no more of her features, huddled and low as she was.
He was about to move on when she rose and stood, stretching her neck, rolling her shoulders, and stretching out her arms to either side. Her tunic was thin and worn to begin with, but it had also been splashed with water so it clung to her chest and belly. The sight of this was like a divine revelation. Imco felt the air sucked out of his lungs, such was the impact of the contours of her body upon his. He had been weeks without sex, and he felt his penis stiffen. Imco patted it down and inched forward a little through the underbrush.
She was no girl at all, but a woman. And by the gods, she was beautiful! As if toying with him, she stripped off her tunic and waded into the stream. Imco pressed forward, feeling his way through the vegetation with quiet toes. The woman walked out into midstream and sank down into the water. This made her no less exciting, however, as the water was perfectly clear, revealing her body through pale blue highlights. She rolled over, ducked her head, and came up with her curls pressed to her scalp, and then dived forward so that her backside broke the surface for a fleeting moment.
It was all too much for Imco. His penis throbbed. Its scream for attention was not to be ignored. Imco obliged. Perhaps he should not have touched it, for in doing so he took his hand away from a grip among the bushes and took hold of a less useful anchorage. His attention was not on his footing, as it should have been. On the first stroke he gasped. On the second his eyes rolled back in his head. On the third his left foot slipped from beneath him. His body twisted just enough to dislodge his other foot. He reached out vaguely with his free hand, not yet realizing what was happening. His fingers touched only dry leaves and slender branches unable to hold him. He slid forward, grinding his bottom along the ground for a moment, fast reaching the edge of the embankment. He burst into mid-air amidst a rain of dust and debris.
He landed on a small beach along the near shore. The impact on his backside was painful enough, but his erection smacked against the sand with the full force of his fall. He would have doubled over in agony, but the woman stood up. She did not flee from him. Instead she strode directly towards him, kicking up a spray of water before her. She halted just a few paces away and spouted a fount of verbal abuse. As she stood berating him in a language he could not understand, he realized that her beauty, from up close, was even more astonishing than he had imagined. It radiated from her very skin. It floated off her like a fragrant oil. It reached out towards him as if her spirit contained arms separate from the thrashing limbs that threatened him. Her beauty was not simply a collection of parts placed favourably beside each other, although he did not fail to notice these parts in great detail. Her hair fell over her face as if it had a mind of its own and meant to toy with her. Her breasts jiggled wildly with her harangue. The muscles of her torso stretched and flexed with each step. Her upper thighs were as firm and smooth as an adolescent boy’s, and the triangle of hair at her midpoint was dripping wet. Even in that moment of pain and outright trepidation, despite the immediacy of the confrontation and his embarrassingly excited nudity: still the image came to him fully formed of his mouth against the woman’s sex, drinking the moisture dripping there as if from a sacred spring.
New images might have followed upon this one, but the woman closed her discourse by pointing at his own sex, spitting, and tossing her head with complete scorn. Then she turned, snatched up her clothes, and strode away. The image of her naked bottom would haunt him afterwards. Somehow, the behind of the donkey following her only made his pain more acute. The creature fell into step a few paces after her, as if he were an ungrateful and unworthy husband, a four-legged barrier between her and a truly devoted suitor. They disappeared into a crease in the landscape, leaving him alone in the gurgling quiet of the afternoon.
Imco managed to rise. Once upright, however, he reconsidered. He placed a knee on the ground, then the other knee, then he lowered himself to all fours. This was not quite enough, either. Eventually, he lay on his side in the sand, his knees pulled up to his chest, his arms wrapped round them. In this posture he came to grips with the stomach-churning agony of his groin injury. This could not have been a chance encounter, he told himself. The hand of a gentle god had propelled him here. He did not question whether it was the same hand that had shoved him into mid-air at Saguntum, for the point seemed irrelevant. He had found a new purpose in life. A new destiny. He had to learn her name. He was – true to the unacknowledged poet inside him – in love.
Before long, he heard the approach of familiar footsteps. The Saguntine girl squatted in the sand a little distance away and said, ‘Have I used the word “pathetic” already? You give new meaning to it.’
How strange, Imco thought, that in such a short space of time two women should enter his life, each a torment of a different sort. Nothing was ever easy.
Fabius Maximus held his troops back like leashed hounds baying for blood. He stood with a hand on Publius Scipio’s shoulder, listening to the soldier’s description of the land below them and the punishments Hannibal had inflicted upon it. Publius had an even, measured voice, intelligent and thorough. He knew what the dictator wished to learn before Fabius even asked the questions and he always laid out the most pertinent features of the landscape first. With his aid, Fabius layered his mind’s created images on top of the evidence of his eyes. The merging of the two developed a picture he believed to be clearer than one rendered through sight alone, nuanced with more detail and depth.
Perhaps the delay caused by this careful elucidation served as the foundation for the dictator’s famous patience. He rejected the Carthaginian’s offer for battle, first at Aecae, and then again each day afterwards. He had the army trail the enemy through Apulia, keeping to the high ground so as to avoid the Numidian cavalry. He harassed them with quick raids, making small war, allowing atrocity after atrocity by the foe but evading open battle at all costs. Fabius’ men were well provisioned, so he destroyed any supplies he suspected to be within his enemy’s reach. He put special effort into picking off parties of foragers, staying ever vigilant, always near enough to spot the parties and send detachments to rout them. Even news of a single Massylii unhorsed was pleasant to his ears. Two Balearic slingers captured as they took target practice on a herd of sheep, a Gaul left behind due to a gangrenous leg, summarily tortured and nailed to the gnarled trunk of an olive tree: each of these came as an additional verification that his strategy was sound and would succeed over time.
Terentius Varro, his master of horse, champed and foamed at the bit, muttering that Hannibal had arrived before them and they should vanquish him without delay. They could not keep to this policy of inaction! Perhaps it had sounded reasonable when he had dreamed it up in the safety of Rome, but here in Apulia they could see that it was not working. Italy was burning. Their allies were killed and raped daily. What sort of policy was this? It rejected the long history of Roman warfare. Rome had not risen to power by letting an enemy run wild in their country. Rome had always attacked first, promptly, directly, decisively.
Fabius listened to his ranting and answered with all the dignity he could muster. Varro had not been his choice for his main lieutenant. Actually, the Senate had appointed him because he had spoken out against the Fabian policy. This rankled with him – that even as they appointed him dictator they burdened him with a high-ranking officer who did not share his views. Varro was a man of the people. His father had been a butcher, successful enough financially to set the stage for his son’s career. Fabius always found men of such new blood to be of questionable character too. Despite the young man’s early achievements, he seemed better suited to the work of a labourer, to alleyway brawls, to taking orders, not giving them. He was, actually, something of a nuisance. Fabius restated his chosen tactics, held to them, and reminded Varro which of them had been given the title of dictator. Varro could not answer this except by fuming.
By Fabius’ orders, they followed the Carthaginian army up and over the Apennines into the territory of the Hirpini, a land of rolling uplands interrupted by great, slanting slabs of limestone, a beautiful country planted with wide fields. Hannibal turned his army this way and that. He broke camp in the middle of the night and tried to outflank Fabius, or to surprise him with sudden proximity, or to vanish from sight.
Fabius watched anxiously as the city of Beneventum repulsed the Carthaginian attack. He sent a messenger to them with the promise that they would be rewarded for their loyalty later. On the other hand, he failed to anticipate Hannibal’s strike at Telesia. The African took the town with ease and found vast stores of grain hidden hastily within it. Again, Varro shouted in his superior’s ear, as if his hearing were in doubt as well as his sight. But the dictator was as determined as the invader. He held to his chosen course.
One evening as Fabius returned to his tent from relieving himself, Publius spoke out of the darkness. He said that he could not sleep for thinking about the suffering Hannibal was inflicting upon the people. Fabius searched out his cot with his foot and lowered himself to it. Once comfortably situated, he gave the young Scipio a moment’s thought. He had thus far not voiced a personal opinion of the campaign. Unlike Varro, he had been raised well, by a revered family and by a father who took his son’s upbringing seriously. Considering this, he decided to dignify Publius’ comment with a brief response.
‘Our charge requires that we must sleep,’ he said, ‘so that we may better work to free them on the morrow.’
‘You are right, of course,’ Publius said, ‘but do you not think of them at all? Do you not see them in your dreams?’
‘No, I do not.’ Fabius spoke firmly, in a tone meant to end the conversation.
But the younger man said, ‘Their suffering is like a scene painted upon a thin curtain through which I see the world. I still see beyond them, but I cannot forget their present turmoil for even a moment. I see faces of individual men and women, of children, so clear it seems they are people known to me, even though they are not. They ask me to remember them, to realize fully that each of them has only one life, like fragile glass crushed beneath Hannibal’s foot.’
Fabius rolled irritably to his side. ‘You dream of poets, not of peasants.’
‘At times, simple people seem much the same.’
‘Such dreams do not serve you well. You should stop having them. It is not for a leader to think in specific terms: neither of strangers, nor of his own family. This is what the young do not understand. I consider a larger vision than you are capable of. Now go to sleep. You are my eyes, not my mouth!’
A few days later, the Carthaginian made another daring move. Hannibal departed Telesia. He snaked his army through the mountains not far from Samnium, crossed the Volturnus, and descended onto the plains of Campania. This country was in the full bloom of summer, as rich as the Nile delta, so far unscathed by the war and unprepared for its sudden arrival. Fabius did his best to send messengers ahead in warning, but he knew this effort was largely in vain. Hannibal had the whole of the Falemian plain at his mercy. If that were not bad enough, this move put him for the first time within striking distance of Rome itself.
Varro raged yet again, but still Fabius stood upon the hills staring out, firm in his resolve, ears attuned to the youth speaking softly beside him. It was Publius who casually mentioned that Hannibal’s forces were now within a natural boundary, and that that could be used against them. Fabius pulled in his blurred gaze and focused on the soldier standing beside him, almost as if seeing him for the first time, though they had now been inseparable for weeks. He asked Publius to explain this notion. And the young soldier did, much to the older one’s interest.
The situation became clear to Hannibal well before the body of his joyous army paused to consider it. They were afoot and unbeaten on Italian soil, enjoying the bounty of Campania, elated by their victories, fat from fine food, and sated with conquerors’ sex. Most of the army had slaves they called their own in the train behind them, and these were laden with all they could carry and more: weapons and jewels; coins and tools and sacred items. Behind them followed hundreds of cattle, some newly slaughtered each evening, the scent of their roasting adding a pleasant air to camp. While they were constantly aware of the army following their every move, the Roman cowards did not dare engage with them. Hannibal several times set the army on a field perfect for battle and invited Fabius to engage, but the Roman sat on his hands and did nothing. None of the army of Carthage had ever imagined their lot could be this good. Campania had been a blessing to them; this Fabius had been less a foe than an escort. But Hannibal saw a problem stalking them, as gradual and inevitable as the change of seasons.
He called a meeting of his generals and opened it by asking them to study the charts of their current position, paying close attention to his notes detailing the best information he had on the Roman positions. They had entered the plain through the narrow pass of Callicula. Fabius took this pass shortly after, leaving a detachment of 4,000 men sitting tight within it. The dictator then sent his master of horse to the defile of Terracina, where the mountains came down to the sea and the Via Appia could be easily held. He strengthened the garrison at Casilinum and lined the hills hemming in the plain with troops awaiting any weakness, easily called to arms, with a daylight view of all the Carthaginians might undertake.
‘In short,’ Hannibal said, ‘we are trapped. This plain is a joy for summer raiding, but it will not sustain us through a winter. Nor would it be wise to stay here with nearby cities like Capua and Nola still hostile to us. Fabius knows it. That is partly why he watched us and did not engage, so that we might confine ourselves to winter in a depleted land. What thoughts have you each?’
As was their custom each general spoke in turn, each espousing a different course of action, if not from conviction then from custom, for Hannibal always asked to hear all reasonable alternatives before settling on the best. Bomilcar argued in favour of fighting through the pass; Maharbal suggested a dash towards the Via Appia, double time, to beat the season and reach some more favourable place; Bostar suggested, though doubtfully, that they might ford the Volturnus; Monomachus was adamant that they could easily survive the winter, for they carried with them more than just cattle to eat.
Hannibal was silent. If he disagreed with any proposal he did not say so at once; nor did he have to, for Mago found the faults of each. The Romans held all the positions of advantage. The toll the Carthaginians would suffer in dead if they tried to fight up through the pass would leave them fatally weak. They would be no wiser than the Persians at Thermopylae, and unlike the Persians, they did not have thousands of lives to waste. They could run for the south, but this would spread them dangerously thin. The men would have to abandon their booty; this would damage morale, cost them much of what they had gained thus far, and betray a measure of fear that would give the Romans heart. The river itself posed a formidable barrier, hard to cross at any time and certainly no favourable route with an army ready to pounce on them.
Mago tossed the dagger he had been using as a pointer down upon the table. ‘Trapped! Fabius has all of Latium and Samnium and Beneventum to call upon for supplies. They will get fat while we starve. This plain of bounty will be the death of us.’
Hannibal spoke light-heartedly, looking at Mago with a crooked grin on his lips. ‘My brother has a soldier’s fire in his soul,’ he said. ‘And yet there’s still some of the poet in him. It is my joy to see him grow this way.’
Mago snapped his head up and stared at his brother, searching for sarcasm. Instead he saw a wry humour written on his face, like one who has thought of a joke and is about to share it. Mago had seen this look before. He smiled and shook his head at his own outburst. ‘Tell us, then,’ he said.
On that prompting, Hannibal explained how they were to proceed.
In the days that followed, the sprawling army marched back towards the ridge of mountains barring entry into Apulia. The plain they crossed stretched right up to the base of the mountains, and the peaks rose in one thrust. They could make out the dispositions of Fabius’ army, clinging to the heights, waiting, watching. The glow of their fires stood out in the night, showing by their size the various routes through the mountains. The widest pass had the largest contingent of soldiers, but Fabius left no possible route unguarded. Small units held the smaller openings against spies or messengers or any who might seek solitary escape. Though many among the army groaned at their situation, Hannibal saw only the conditions he had anticipated.
The men ate quickly that evening. They made tight bundles of their weapons and supplies. They secured what supplies they could to the backs of horses and donkeys and even cattle. Men rushed out under the dying light of day and gathered all the wood they could find: fallen branches and decaying trees and twigs of all sizes right down to finger thin. These they placed in a pile near the edge of camp. Beside it they collected a hundred select steers in one mass of uneasy bovine life. For this task, Hannibal wanted only the largest from the herd they had gathered over the summer, the ones with wide horns and the strength to endure the ordeal he planned for them.
Mindful of the gods and of his men’s morale, Hannibal asked Mandarbal to sanctify the proceedings. The robed priest went to his task with a surly belligerence, uttering the sacred words that were his province. He explained little to the nervous eyes watching him, but moved among the beasts cutting nicks in their shoulders and necks. He grasped at invisible objects, snatching them down and pressing them into his heart and rubbing them along the shaft of his dagger. He slapped away the hands of any who were touching the steers so that none fouled them during his ritual. By the time he concluded, all believed the method of their hoped-for escape had somehow been married to a great offering: a religious sacrifice and their own deliverance, at once.
Once Mandarbal retired, Hannibal himself oversaw the next phase of preparations. With his own hands, he tugged one of the animals away from the rest and towards the woodpile. He picked pieces of wood and placed them between the creature’s horns, balancing them carefully. He called for twine to secure them. Soon the creature wore a headdress of sticks and branches woven through and tied to its horns and smeared with the pitch used to fuel torches. Hannibal stepped back and studied the wary, dejected creature, head heavy beneath its load.
Standing beside his brother, Mago said, ‘This is a singularly strange undertaking.’
Hannibal did not disagree. He ordered that all the steers be similarly dressed.
The moon was thin and cast little light as the army left camp. They crept towards the base of the mountains and then up across their toes. For now, they went by the light of a few torches only. Fast behind them, herders drove the cattle forward. The rest of the army followed, awkward beneath their burdens, prodded by the feet nipping their ankles. Camp followers scampered in the rear, nervous about this whole venture but seeing no means to avoid it.
The route led some distance up towards two of the passes, the main way and a lower, narrower gap that was a plausible enough choice for Fabius to have positioned a small company there. When he could see the Roman fires in both camps, Hannibal whispered the agreed-upon command. The bearers of the few torches turned and offered them to those waiting near with unlighted wands. First one and then another and then many new flames sprang to life. In an instant they gave up all notion of stealth and watched one another’s faces and bodies appear in wavering, warm yellow light. And then, before the beasts had time to panic, they were set on fire. The torch carriers moved among them, touching flame to the fuel carried on their horns. A moment later the herders shouted them into motion.
The cattle, unsure what was happening to them, sprang forward and ran upward, ducking their heads and weaving around trees and shrubs as if they might escape the flames through speed and footwork. The army trailed behind them. Though the beasts bellowed and snorted and filled the night with frantic sounds, the men moved as quietly as they could, coughing into their hands and shading their eyes against the smoke and trying to breathe through their mouths.
The Roman guards looking down from the main pass upon this weaving herd of lights were mystified. They had seen nothing like this and could make no sense of the size of the fires, or of the way they moved, or of the eerie sounds carried by the night air. They woke the tribune in charge. He sent a messenger to Fabius, but he knew that he would not receive a reply in time to avert whatever mischief was afoot. He had to act. For lack of a better explanation, the tribune concluded that the Carthaginians were making a rush on the lower pass. Of course they were. That was the type of bold manoeuvre this African would attempt, to attack the weaker camp and push through with brute force. The tribune ordered the bulk of his men to speed across and down and reinforce the small contingent there. This manoeuvre would not be easy in the dark, but he had been warned of Hannibal’s underhandedness and had no desire to be made a fool of.
Hannibal had, of course, counted on just this move. When he saw Roman torchlight leaving the main pass, he gave the order for the main body of the army to follow him. They moved away from the flaming cattle and proceeded, stealthily, towards the high pass, the one now being hastily deserted.
By the time the animals reached the Romans in the other pass, they were wailing like monsters under the torture of hide and flesh aflame. They came at the Roman infantrymen, a horde of beasts sent forth by the will of Baal himself, stepping from the dark frenzied, driven by smoke and flame. They shook their heads and raked them on the ground and bumped into one another and climbed in this chaos. A few Romans loosed their spears. One or two raised their swords as if to do combat. Most retreated, calling to one another, each asking the one beside him to explain this sight. None understood that at that moment Hannibal and the better part of his army were taking the high pass nearly unchallenged.
A few hours later the sky lightened just enough to reveal their grey forms. Fabius, watching through the eyes of the young Publius Scipio, saw the last of the Carthaginian army disappear over the pass. The remaining guards pulled up from their posts and bid the plains of Campania farewell. The whole army slipped out of sight, like the tail of a serpent into its den.
Sapanibal flew into a silent rage each time she heard of the Council’s refusals to aid Hannibal. It was intolerable that so much time was passing without his receiving a single token of support from the country for which he fought. Even now, with the commander so close to victory, they had no vision. The mood of the Council bore no resemblance to the unwavering enthusiasm of the populace. The common people knew Hannibal for the hero that he was. They sang songs to praise him. Poets crafted verses that dramatized his deeds. Children play-acted the parts of him and his brothers in the streets. Even slaves, it seemed, took some pride in his accomplishments. He belonged to the entire nation and exemplified the best of them. At least, this was true of all except a powerful group of councillors, centred around the elected leader of the Council, the Shophet Hadus, and fuelled by the Hannons’ old hatred. No matter what Hannibal achieved, they found fault with him. Out of necessity, they praised his accomplishments briefly, but it was clear the words withered and turned bitter on their tongues.
Sapanibal was above all a reasoning woman, tempered by long years of sacrifice, not inclined to show her emotions in the public sphere or behave in ways unsuited to her sex. She had never before felt inclined to voice her thoughts outside her familial home, but the men of Carthage were on so misguided a course that they might end up losing everything. She decided her brother’s enemies needed to be challenged. She had no faith that her allies in the Council were doing this with the necessary force. So she would have to see to it herself, and she knew just the setting in which to address the subject, to make a scandal of it, and through that to get tongues wagging. She attacked them where they spent most of their lives: the councillors’ baths.
Sapanibal strode past the attendants at the entrance before they could think to stop her, before they had fully even comprehended her presence. The room was warm, pungent with stewed herbs and thick with the haze of incense and pipe smoke. Special torches on the wall and small fires attended by nude boys dimly lit the chamber. The room’s high ceilings gave no feeling of lightness but instead intensified the gloom. Every inch of the walls had been painted with murals of war scenes and illustrations of carnal stories and images of black-faced gods, masks that added to the sinister air.
She found the men she was looking for lounging at their leisure. Hadus saw her from a distance and rolled his eyes. He did not adjust his position at all, but sat with his weak chest exposed, his genitals just barely covered by a fold of his gown.
‘What are you doing here?’ a councillor behind the Shophet asked. ‘This is not a place for women.’
‘Nor is it a place for cowards,’ Sapanibal said. She looked at Hadus. ‘Shall we leave together?’
Hadus furrowed his brow. He was a thin man given to wrinkles and this expression made his face almost unrecognizable. ‘What is this?’ he asked. ‘You enter our place of leisure to offend me? Barca women are just as arrogant as the men.’
‘Why did you speak against Hannibal this afternoon? He would not request help unless he needed it, and unless he knew it would bring victory. Do you want him to fail so much that—’
‘What do you know of these things, woman?’
‘I know that my brothers are the greatest wealth our nation has. I know that Hannibal’s brilliance has brought victory where none of you believed victory was possible. I know it was here in Carthage that this war was declared, but that you are too cowardly or envious to see it through. What do you fear that you tie my brother’s hands?’
‘Someone take this bitch away before I lose my head,’ Hadus said, looking around as if he were addressing someone in particular but could not find him. ‘I’ve half a mind to smack her down and give her a good humping. She is no beauty, but rather that than hear her rattle on.’
‘Not even you could get away with that,’ Sapanibal said, dry and as composed as ever.
Hadus glanced around at his companions, his face puckered into an expression of utter, dismissive contempt. He did not look at Sapanibal when he spoke. ‘For my own part,’ he said, ‘I grow tired of talk of Hannibal. Never has Carthage known a man more presumptuous and vain. With the exception, of course, of the father who came before him. Only he surpassed his son in greed.’
‘You are mad to say such things!’ Sapanibal said. ‘Everything that Barcas do, we do for Carthage. Hearing you, I know that Carthage does not do likewise for Barcas.’
‘Is that so? Where, then, is the tribute of his successes? Why has he sent none home to us to prove his allegiance?’
Sapanibal’s jaw hung in disbelief. ‘Allegiance? How could he send anything to us when he must pay and feed his troops? He has borne the entire—’
Hadus interrupted her. ‘You say that the Council declared this war, but in truth the Council had little choice. The Barca brood was already running wild. They stirred Rome from its slumber. Had we denied that Hannibal was ours, Rome would have grasped for him and robbed us of our possessions. You cannot be expected to understand this, but our acceptance of the war was a defensive action. Unfortunately, your brother set off on his mad march without consulting us. He has brought no end of trouble upon himself and upon us. That is the real truth of it.’
The servants had been active at the margins of the chamber since she entered. Thin creatures, they seemed offended by Sapanibal’s intrusion but afraid to approach her. They had obviously sent for help, however. Two eunuchs entered the room with a purposeful walk. Sapanibal did not follow them with her eyes, but she was aware of their progress along the far wall, out of her view, and then approaching from behind her. She heard the pad of their bare feet pause.
‘Be under no illusion, Sa-pa-ni-bal,’ Hadus said, stretching out the syllables with calm contempt. ‘If I had my way we would call Hannibal home and strike that genius of a head from its body. That is how I would save Carthage and assure my sons a future. What a gesture that would be to Rome. As it is not within my power at the moment, I will just have to let him hang himself. And he will. He will. No man can reach for the sun without being burned.’
Sensing the eunuchs moving closer, Sapanibal snapped, ‘Do not permit them to touch me!’
Her voice was so sharp that several of the men winced. The eunuchs froze, eyes on Hadus for direction.
‘I will leave as I entered,’ Sapanibal said. ‘Hadus, hear me now and recall my words later. The time will come when my brother’s deeds exceed all others in grandeur. The time will come when he returns to Carthage victorious. I would not wish to be you at that moment. You will need eyes in the back of your head, for you shall have no future before you but will only look back on the things that might have been.’
She turned, yanked her elbow from the reach of one of the eunuchs, and exited the chamber with all of the straight-backed grace she could muster. She knew that she had spoken the truth, and she took some pleasure in cutting Hadus down as if she were an equal, but she also feared she had done nothing for her brother’s cause. And there was something else. Though she had given no indication of it throughout the exchange, her quick glance had noticed another man among the company: Imago Messano. He sat, bare-chested, towards the wall at the far end of the room. Carthage was a den of enemies, each one of the cowards scheming a way to become a lion killer. Why had she never seen this fully before?
Silenus lived from week to week in Emporiae. Each day he sought out and met with Diodorus. He tried to speak wisdom to him, to convince him to shake loose of his Roman rulers and accept the future that Hannibal offered. All he had to do was help a single prisoner to escape. That was all, and for it he would become as wealthy as a minor king. Like a man who takes sexual pleasure in being denied gratification, Diodorus heard his brother-in-law out each day. He teetered in his loyalties but never swayed fully to either side. At times he visibly licked his lips at the riches Silenus described to him in luxurious detail, but he would not consummate with action. He could not afford to make Rome an enemy. So Hanno’s imprisonment went on.
Silenus called upon his sister to ask her help, but quickly learned that she would offer little. In keeping with Greek custom, her authority was limited to the hidden world of the home. She would not even speak to her husband on the issue of Hanno’s release. After a few weeks, Silenus had stopped visiting her. Looking in her round woman’s face, he realized that they had little to unite them, only the memory of parents long dead. Of what significance was that in a world swirling with the currents of war?
Silenus, having no other mandate, simply persevered. As an anonymous Greek in a Greek settlement, he was as free as any in the occupied city. He walked among Romans in the streets and listened to their banter. He cocked his ear at news of their war in Iberia. He sat beside them in the baths, so close that he could have reached out a hand and touched their bare flesh. Thus he learned of Hasdrubal’s defeats and small victories, of his marriage, and of Roman schemes to press the conflict conclusively during the coming year. More than once he found himself the object of hungry, unsubtle stares. Romans knew little about amorous decorum. Like any men, they lusted, but they rushed into sex like four-legged creatures, humping quickly as if the chore were beneath them. Silenus rejected their overtures with all the disdain he could get away with.
Fortunately, not everyone in the city was an enemy of Hannibal’s or a. friend to the Romans. Many among the Greeks found the haughty Roman attitudes unpleasant, their arrogance that of cowherds drunk on the strange whim of Fortune that had brought them success. Silenus never showed his hand, but he did move from one circle to another, seeking out individuals with the deepest antipathy to Rome. Thus he chanced upon a group of Turdetani living in the city, in the lowest rungs of society, each and every one of them seething at the indignities done to Hanno, each of them wishing to see the Romans fail. Hannibal had attacked Saguntum to protect them, they believed, and they felt a loyalty to him unusual among Iberians. Silenus believed these men – coarse criminals that they were – might be just the actors for the play he had in mind. But Diodorus still denied him the fruits of his mission, even when he put forth a complete plan of action, argued with all his powers of persuasion.
‘I have the men,’ he explained. ‘They will do the bloody work of dealing with the guards. All you have to do is plan the rescue with me, gain all the details of where and how he is detained, the best routes to him, the rotation of his guards. Provide us the key to unlock his cell and chains. These are not difficult things for a man in your position.’
‘We will be found out,’ Diodorus said. ‘You may fly away with Hanno, but I’ll be left to suffer the Romans’ wrath.’
Silenus moved forward suddenly and grasped one of the man’s hands between his. ‘Listen. Just before we spring our plan, I will announce to one of the Turdetani just which magistrate is aiding us. I’ll give whatever name you give me. They will whisper of it to a few others. Think about that. An hour after the escape is known, the entire population will be tongue-wagging, and none of them will think to say your name. In the fury of rumour, you will be one of many to denounce that other man. He will take your punishment; you will, eventually, take the city. You are a creature of political life. Surely you have an enemy you’d like to see crucified.’
Though this speech was forcefully made, Diodorus clung to his indecision. Silenus wished he could communicate his efforts to Hannibal, but he knew that any letter would doom him if it were intercepted. Instead he prayed for some change of fortune. He called on gods he did not even believe in, asking them to prove themselves by divine intervention, promising that he would withdraw his complaints if they only showed themselves and acted on his behalf.
One day in the early autumn, something just as improbable happened; it changed nothing in his thoughts about the gods, for Silenus could name a man as its author. He waited in the morning outside Diodorus’ chambers, his head muddled from wine consumed the night before. He had drunk too much of it and it was too cheaply made, but the young student with whom he had shared it was more than worth the trouble. The night’s events were a clouded jumble of images and snatches of conversation, but still he knew he had prosecuted his conquest with rare skill. Later in the day, he hoped, he might pick up where he had left off.
When finally called in, he found the magistrate seated as always, with scrolls and documents spread before him. Everything was as it had been many times before, except that when Diodorus glanced up he seemed instantly ill at ease. His eyes quivered with a timorous energy and his hands moved like nervous birds across the paperwork, shifting and sorting and then undoing what they had just done.
Silenus began for the hundredth time. He stated again the generosity of Hannibal’s offer, the simplicity of his request. He recounted Hannibal’s victories, one example after another that he was superior to Rome. Two of them so far and counting. He began to name them, but Diodorus stopped him.
‘Two, you say?’ he asked.
‘Ticinus . . .’
‘Ticinus? You name Ticinus?’
‘Yes, I do. It’s a small victory but not to be ignored. Along with it, the Trebia . . .’
Diodorus interrupted him. ‘Why toy with me? We both know that the world has changed and everything in it has been cast in doubt.’
Silenus had not been aware of any such thing, but he answered coolly, as if he were in fact toying with the man. ‘Yes . . . and how was that achieved?’
‘You know full well how it was achieved. That madman you call master . . . He’s made a butcher’s block of all Italy. I know you rejoice over Trasimene, but don’t treat me as a fool.’
‘Trasimene?’
Diodorus stared at him. At first he fixed him with a slack-jawed expression of loathing. But the longer he stared, the more this faded into incredulity. Silenus could not hide his confusion completely and the politician’s eyes homed in on this. ‘You truly are ignorant of Trasimene?’
Silenus barely knew the name of the place, but he did not like to be found wanting by this man. ‘I’m ignorant of few things that pass in the world, my brother by marriage, but some things come to me slowly.’ He hesitated a moment. ‘Perhaps you have details that I do not.’
‘What do details matter? Either you know of it or you don’t. Granted, it is hard to believe what I’ve been told. Somehow, your commander made a trap out of the land itself. He slaughtered Flaminius and his entire army like hens gathered together in a pen. I never imagined I’d live to hear of this.’
The magistrate rose and fetched a jug of wine and a glass. It was early in the day, yes, but Silenus found himself thirsty as well. He motioned for the jug and drank directly from it, deeply enough to ensure that he would feel the effects. Diodorus took the jug from him and refilled his glass. A few moments passed like this, the two of them shuttling the jug back and forth, each captured by thoughts of his own.
Diodorus was the first to raise his eyes. ‘Does your commander’s offer stand?’
Four days later, in the afternoon, the two men walked quickly through corridors in the lower reaches of the fortress. Diodorus had at last found his motivation. He went at the task with a nervous, jerky intensity that surprised Silenus, but it proved a fine thing. The plan had unfolded just as Silenus had imagined, although he witnessed the aftermath rather than the event. The assassins had done their work, and they had suffered for it. Judging by the carnage in the hallway, the five Roman guards had each killed at least three Turdetani. The surviving Iberians were nowhere to be seen, having slunk away into hiding.
Stepping over and round the bodies, careful on the blood-slicked floor, Diodorus warned Silenus to prepare himself for the sight of the prisoner. The Romans had treated him harshly. Diodorus described the tortures they had used, and Silenus winced as he heard them. They had had a thousand questions for Hanno. He had answered none of them.
‘So they abused him,’ Diodorus said. He stood before the door of Hanno’s cell and fumbled to find the correct key, his hand jerking at the wrist, making the simple task difficult. Each jingle of the keys echoed down the hallway. ‘They did no permanent damage. He still has all his limbs and digits, but he has suffered. Have no illusion about that.’
Silenus touched Diodorus’ shoulder. ‘You say he did not answer their questions?’
‘Not one word of betrayal escaped his lips,’ Diodorus whispered. ‘They threatened him with things to make a man’s penis shrivel and his hair go white on the spot, but he uttered not a single word they wished for. He lives up to his family name.’
The magistrate found the right key and rammed it home. He leaned to twist it round and then shouldered the iron-framed door open. Silenus followed him into the cell reluctantly. Diodorus’ wide torso blocked out the view. Silenus conjured images of disfigurement, of nudity, of the various postures they might have bound Hanno in, but when he finally laid eyes on the second eldest Barca brother it was not at all what he had imagined.
Hanno sat on the floor in the corner, like a child suffering some long punishment. He was wrapped in a long cloak, hooded. His head drooped towards the stone floor. He did not move at all upon their entering. Silenus, thinking he must imagine them to be his tormentors returning, struggled for the words to greet him. He stepped forward reluctantly, one arm outstretched to touch the prisoner’s knee. ‘Hanno Barca,’ he whispered in Carthaginian. ‘Hanno, I’ve come with the blessing of—’
Diodorus pushed past him. He scooped his hands under one of Hanno’s arms and indicated that Silenus should do the same. Seeing the alarm on Silenus’ face, he said, ‘Make your speeches later. Come, let’s do this without delay.’
They dragged the warrior’s body between them, laid him in a wagon, covered it, and negotiated the back lanes of the city. Diodorus parted company with them near the docks, pressing upon Silenus all forms of praise for Hannibal, pledges of secret friendship, asking again and again for confirmation of the wealth coming to him. He walked away muttering under his breath, testing the inflection with which to answer the questions soon to be put to him, trying to find which lies best flowed from his tongue.
Silenus and his charge fled the city that evening, aboard a small vessel that cut through the waves with dangerous speed. Silenus, after so much waiting, found himself suddenly free of the land and in motion. The wind behind them some might have called a gale, but he considered it a blessing. The poor trader who captained the ship knew without asking that their mission was covert and perilous. He kept the sail unfurled and rode the back of the sea as one might sit atop a raging bull.
In the boat’s small shelter, the two men huddled against the night chill and sea spray. Hanno awoke with the rocking of the waves. He fixed his eyes on the Greek and studied him earnestly, as if searching for him in some dim portion of his memory. Silenus tried several times to bring him into conversation, but Hanno chose his own time.
Eventually, in the darkness of full night, Hanno said, ‘Out of the clutches of one Greek . . .’
Silehus filled in the pause. ‘. . . and into the hands of an old friend. By the gods, you must have fared all right if you leave that chamber with humour on your tongue. Are you hungry? I brought food, for I feared they’d starved you.’
Hanno shook his head. ‘Romans believe meat and rich food make a man soft. So they gave me meat instead of the plain food they favour.’ A fit of coughing choked out his words. He was silent for a moment and then whispered, ‘They fed me so that I would be stronger for their questions.’
‘Think no more about it,’ Silenus said. ‘It’s over. Done. You’ve left that dungeon and none need speak of what went on there. I’ll never betray you, as you never betrayed your country. That’s all anybody need know.’
Hanno looked as if he might try a weak smile but he did not. He just gazed into the other man’s eyes with an intensity that was statement and question and silence all.
Silenus had to turn away. ‘And to think,’ he said, ‘at one time I thought we were just a few words away from becoming lovers.’
Hanno closed his eyes as if this thought pained him.
The air above Rome hummed with a wild, bickering energy, with resentment and anger, with possibility and passion, with fear of the gods, and with the fervent hope that divine forces would soon smile on the Roman people. In alleyways and baths and markets, Romans spoke of nothing save the situation they found themselves in and how to remedy it. Few opinions sat easily next to one another, but the tone of the discourse had shifted. The shock of the Trebia now lay a distant memory; gone was the desperation following Trasimene; forgotten the notion of Hannibal’s invincibility. In place of these, the Roman people stoked the fires of indignant rage. Under Fabius’ leadership they had wasted an entire season pretending to be cowards. They had suffered humiliation after humiliation. When the old man finally seemed to have the African within his grasp he let him escape by a cheap, cowardly ruse. Things had to change, at all levels, decisively and soon.
The dictator received a cold reception on his return to Rome. He walked the streets with the decorum he had long nurtured, with his faithful around him. He showed not the slightest diffidence, gave no hint that he viewed his strange campaign with regret. He handed his dictatorship back into the trust of the Senate without a word of apology. This apparent indifference to public criticism united the people against him. A senator’s wife dubbed him Fabius the Delayer. The name took. Children taunted him in the streets. They threw out insults that were rarely intelligible – spoken as they were on the run, with fear and laughter both garbling the words – but the sight of young ones darting to and fro through the dictator’s entourage had a detrimental effect on his stature. So much so that a street player could get away with depicting the dictator as completely blind, a feeble creature who complained that his testicles had somehow fallen out of the sacks that held them. By the end of the performance – to the hilarity of ever-growing crowds – the actor was down upon his knees, searching with his hands for the missing baubles. The audience laughed all the harder because mirth had been absent from the capital for so long. With its return, however, a new future seemed possible. The elections only verified this.
Terentius Varro stepped first into the fringed toga of consul. He who had so chafed against the dictator’s delaying tactics easily became the popular choice. He wrapped the garment round his thick torso and walked with one arm clenched at an angle that highlighted the bulge of his bicep. Though he was not exactly of the people, he knew how to play to a crowd, boasting with an earthy bravado that his family had once been butchers. He knew that citizens both rich and poor wanted action. It was not simply a matter of honour, of national pride, or even of revenge for lives lost. The fact was that people were going hungry. Food was in short supply. Goods normally transported across the country had been long held up. Italy, so rightly the object of Roman hegemony, was out of balance. Varro pledged to right all this by the age-old method of the Roman people – war on the open field. In his speech accepting the consulship he reminded the Senate that he had once before looked into Hannibal’s foul face, some years back, in his city of New Carthage. He swore that the next time he caught sight of him would be the African’s last day in command. He would do battle that very hour and bring this matter to a close.
The people greeted all this with enthusiasm. But Romans had embedded deep within them a cautious core, a twin who always wished to calm the passions of his brother. Thus the second consul elected was Aemilius Paullus, already a veteran of the office: he had commanded previously in Illyria. The family line of this more seasoned choice nowhere converged with that of butchers. He was a friend to the brothers Scipio and had apprenticed under Fabius himself. Indeed, it was rumoured that on the evening after the election Aemilius supped at the former dictator’s house, listening to the older man’s counsel and taking within himself a portion of his views. But if this was true, he was prudent enough not to admit it.
The Senate, having appointed these two men with a war mission, did not fail to support them. In addition to the four legions already in the field, they called up four more. They increased the number of men in each to 5,000, and they demanded that their allies provide matching forces. More than 100 senators left the Senate to serve in the coming year’s army. Though they were going to war, the people felt propelled by an almost euphoric wave of enthusiasm. They would field an army such as the world had never known – a full 80,000 soldiers for Rome. The destiny of their people was again within reach. They had only to seize it forcefully. They were Romans, after all.
Another point of interest in the new year’s elections – an event hardly noticed in the consular turmoil – was the rise of Publius Scipio to the position of tribune. He was thereby entrusted with protecting the lives, property, and well-being of the people. The young man, son of the former consul, saviour of his father at the Ticinus, whisperer in the dictator’s ear, held to a path of quiet ascendance.
Hasdrubal found the Scipio brothers a constant nuisance, a two-headed viper that threatened to stir the whole of Iberia into rebellion. Word of Trasimene must have reached the Scipios quickly, for their tactics changed somewhat late in the summer. They became cautious. They turned their talents to political intrigue. The two sides played a game of strategic moves, one pressing round the side of the other, flanking and counterflanking, skirmishing at the fringes of their might but not clashing head-on. Both sides courted the various tribes, each vying to play the native people against one another, or against other Iberians, whichever seemed more expedient. It was an intricate game that ill suited the young Barca. He could barely keep track of who was loyal to whom, who an enemy of whom, and why, or which double or triple betrayal was in the works at any one time. Had it not been for Noba, with his labyrinthine memory, he would have overturned the game board in frustration long ago.
In the autumn, frustrated by the lack of direct action and warily feeling that the contest was turning against him, Hasdrubal pushed for a decisive military clash. His army was divided – half of his forces patrolled the far south, staying vigilant lest any portion of the empire grow rebellious – but he drew upon a fresh reserve of troops gathered from the Tagus region, mostly of the Carpetani. They were raw recruits, numerous but not entirely happy with their lot in life since Hannibal’s rout of them a few years before. They might not want to fight, but like all men they would do so for their lives. If they were flanked on either side by the best of his troops, the Africans, then simple self-preservation would transform them into something useful.
When the opportunity came to surprise the Scipios, at an unremarkable spot near Dertosa, Hasdrubal snatched at it. At least, he thought he was surprising them. They drew up into their orderly ranks with amazing efficiency, and with the first volley thrown from the Roman velites his Carpetani troops broke ranks. Many of them grumbled against being pressed into the fight, and they all found the sight of Rome’s ordered butchers too much to bear. They shifted in confusion, one line inching nervously back into the next and that pushing still further ranks into disorder. A tumult of confusion passed from man to man. The African troops held solid, briefly. They watched as the Roman front flowed in on the Iberians like a river pressing against an untried dam. They might have fallen upon the enemy’s side to great effect, but such was not the mood of the day. Instead they turned and executed a quick retreat. Just like that the battle was decided.
Hasdrubal shouted orders that his signallers conveyed to the troops as well as they could. But fear can drench men faster than a downpour of rain. Hasdrubal had heard of such things but never witnessed them. The Romans that day did not so much fight as slaughter. The Africans, though retreating, had not actually panicked, so most of the Roman fury focused on the Iberians. They dashed forward, hacking and stabbing at the backs of the fleeing conscripts, slicing at the tendons in their calves, stabbing into the soft tissue behind their knees.
More than 10,000 Iberians died at Dertosa. Only a few hundred Africans perished, but this small good fortune was as nothing compared to the ill will it inspired throughout Iberia. The Ilergetes of northern Iberia shrugged off any pretence of impartiality. They went over to Rome completely, sealing the alliance with the severed heads of the Carthaginian delegates in their midst. The Vaccaei – distant though they were, to the northwest – announced their defection to Rome. Even the Turdetani, for whom Hannibal had attacked Saguntum, were known to be corresponding with the Scipios. Andobales pledged that the agreements between Carthage and the Oretani still held, but Hasdrubal heard Bayala’s cautioning words behind everything the man said, and did not trust him. Unfortunately, he had no choice but to go on as if he did.
Word came of another rebellion too symbolically important to ignore. The Carpetani, hearing of their losses at Dertosa, rose again, declaring their independence from both Carthage and Rome. Hasdrubal remembered the conversations he had with Hannibal as they marched towards these same people just a few years earlier. The memory was almost painful to him: the two of them mounted and conversing, a whole army behind them. At that time, Hasdrubal had not yet fully imagined the burdens of leadership. Even considering the bloody violence of the work, it was a memory of innocence.
But remembrances are of no use unless they inform the present. With that in mind, Hasdrubal acted – not in passion this time, but with cold determination. His southern troops had just returned from their duties. He stirred them from their short rest, met them at a double-time march, and in consultation with Noba planned to meet the Iberians’ treachery with an even greater one.
The Carpetani greeted the approaching army in their usual form: as a raucous swarm propelled more by courage than by strategy. Hasdrubal timed the approach of his army in such a way that they came within sight of the horde towards the close of the day. They made camp, apparently to await the next day’s coming battle. As Hannibal had done during their last encounter, Hasdrubal put his men into motion in the dead of night. But this time he had the bulk of his infantry back several miles, far enough to ensure that the Iberians would not be able to press battle the next day. At the same time he sent the full force of his cavalry on a mission under Noba’s direction. He knew a good deal about this area, and he put that knowledge to use in navigating through the night.
At dawn, the cavalry swept down not upon the Carpetani horde but upon their unprotected wives and children some miles away. They breached the main town’s defences with ease and poured through the humble streets, slaughtering men of dangerous age. Hasdrubal had ordered the capture of all females of childbearing age. Quite a number this made. They were bound and sent on their own feet towards New Carthage, captives to seal the Carpetani to a new loyalty.
All this was a day’s work. The men on the battlefield did not learn of the situation until the close of the day, at which point they could not vent their fury. Instead they spent the night in anguished confusion. Many, desperate to learn of their families’ fates, slipped away during the night, hoping to find their wives and daughters safe. Meanwhile, Hasdrubal moved his infantry forward into position again. With the next dawn he fell on the disheartened remnants of the Carpetani. The butchery was fast and easy. That evening he accepted an invitation to parley with the Carpetani chieftain, Gamboles. In fact there was little parleying. Hasdrubal’s diatribe was made more vicious by his fatigue and resentment and distaste for his own tactics. The women, he said, would not be harmed so long as the two peoples were friends. But should Carthage find itself betrayed, then each and every one of them would be pumped full of Carthaginian seed, to bear a half-breed army of the future.
‘Do you understand me?’ he asked. ‘The Carpetani must never rise again. You have been beaten beyond hope of future victory. Do not be a fool. Do not harbour plans for vengeance in your hearts. Do not walk from here with malice. Instead, understand that I’ve been more generous than you deserve. Tell this to your people. Speak plainly so that they may understand and hear your voice one last time before you come with me to be my guest in New Carthage. Do exactly as I say, because I promise you, Gamboles, if I hear one whisper of stirring, your women will suffer for it. As will you. I’ll sever your head from your shoulders and shove it nose first up your arse. Thereafter, your people will each and every one of them eat a diet of shit.’
Hasdrubal rode away with all the promises he asked for. Not terribly satisfying, but certainly the best he could manage in the circumstances. He had never thought of cruelty like this before. He had no wish to see any of these punishments come to pass, but neither could he allow his father’s empire to crumble on his watch. All things considered it was one of his more successful ventures, though he felt little pride in it and had no true faith that Fortune had joined his cause.
With the work done, he headed for New Carthage. The ten days it took to reach the capital passed in a blur, a tumult of motion and fretting and gut-deep longing to see his wife again and to feel her legs straddled round his hips. On arriving, he attended no business but went straight to his private chambers. Entering the outer room he called out, ‘Wife, come to me now! I need to pierce you!’
He dropped his sword unceremoniously on the stone floor, cast his cloak over a chair, and snatched up a waiting pitcher of wine. He did all this at a brisk walk and was therefore well into the room before he saw the two figures lounging on his couches. He stared at them for a long moment, open-mouthed, with all the mystification he would have shown upon seeing ghosts. He held the pitcher halfway to his mouth, dripping wine upon the floor.
Silenus glanced at Hanno and said, ‘That’s a strange greeting.’
It was almost too much to bear thinking about, but Imilce could not help but do so again and again each day. She was ever being reminded that young Hamilcar was approaching his fourth birthday and that it had been three long years since his father had last seen him. She remembered how the two of them had looked the day before he departed. Hannibal had stood holding the boy in his muscled arms, looking down on him and whispering close to his face, telling him things he said were for the child’s ears only. The boy’s legs dangled beneath his father’s grip, plump and lovely; his features were still rounded, his fingers chubby. The child had listened to the man patiently, for a few moments at least. Then he squirmed free and ran off to play. Hannibal looked up at her, shrugged and smiled and said something she could not now remember, though she always imagined him with his mouth moving and wished that she could step closer to the recollection and place her ear against his lips and feel them brush against her.
It pained her to think how changed they both were now, how days and months and years had pushed in between that moment and this one. She knew her husband had suffered injuries that would mark him for life. She knew he had lost the sight in one eye and endured hardships she could barely imagine. He might be a different man entirely the next time she saw him. Likewise, Little Hammer would be almost unrecognizable to Hannibal. He had sprouted like a vine reaching for the sky. He no longer teetered on wobbly legs, but darted through their chambers like a cheetah. She realized her son thought of Carthage as his first home. He reached for Sapanibal and Sophonisba with complete comfort and unquestioning love. They luxuriated in this, even as they joked that they must treasure the few years the boy had left to spend in the company of women. Even Didobal softened in the boy’s company.
Imilce had spoken to him over the years of his father, as had many others. The child was constantly reminded whose son he was and how much was expected of him. But lately she had begun to fear that her words found no purchase in his memory. As she spoke he stared absently into the distance. When she concluded, he moved away from her, always polite enough, always nodding when he was supposed to, speaking when asked to – but she knew the child had a blank space in his centre. Hannibal had actually been present just one year of the boy’s four: no time at all. In Hamilcar’s mind, his father could only be a creature built of words, a fancy like a character from old stories. Not so removed from the gods: like them, a part of every day, unseen and believed in mostly without evidence.
She was pondering these things one afternoon when Sophonisba called on her. Imilce reclined on the sofa at the edge of her chamber, looking out over the gardens. As usual she had nothing to occupy her, no responsibilities. Hamilcar was engaged in some activity that did not require her supervision. Sophonisba came in behind the maid who escorted her. She did not wait as the servant announced her with the usual formality of Carthaginian households, but pushed past the woman and plopped down on the sofa beside her sister-in-law. The maid tried a moment to continue the introduction, but then gave up. She withdrew, annoyance flashing on her face. Seeing this Imilce nearly chastised her on the spot. No servant should ever comment upon the actions of her masters. But Sophonisba was too eager to talk.
‘If you are good to me,’ she said, ‘I will tell you a secret. You must promise to keep it, though. If you betray me, I’ll never forgive you. You’ll have an undying enemy for the rest of your life. Do you promise?’
Imilce looked at her with more seriousness than she intended. The proposition struck her with an unreasonable amount of fear. She could not survive in this place with Sophonisba as an enemy. The introduction of secrets brought with it both camaraderie and the awareness that somebody else was being excluded. Her heart beat a little faster, even though she knew it was silly to find anything ominous in this. The young woman’s face was all mirth and welcome. Her threat was nothing but banter between two friends.
Imilce said, ‘Of course. Tell me.’
‘I spent the night in the wilds with Masinissa,’ the young woman said. She paused for dramatic effect, her lips pursed, eyes mischievous and painfully beautiful. She explained that she and her fiancé had stolen away from the city the previous evening, with her sitting before the prince on the bare back of his stallion. They rode out through a side gate, cut through the peasants’ town, out past the fields, and on into the rolling orchards. The sky was clear from horizon to horizon. It was a screen of the darkest blue, alive with numberless stars. The land itself seemed endless, thrown out in ripples stretching deep into the heart of the continent. They sometimes passed campfires of field workers, or saw the signal fires of soldiers, but mostly the night was theirs alone.
Imilce chided her for the risk she had taken – not to mention the damage she might have done to her reputation and to the very union. They had only just become engaged, after all, and it was meant to be some time before they were wed. But Sophonisba laughed at both these points. As for the danger, when she said she rode alone with Masinissa, she meant ‘alone’ in princely terms. A guard of fifty horsemen shadowed them.
As for reputation, nothing mattered to her mother more than the power of her familial connections; and nothing mattered to Gaia, Masinissa’s father, more than the security of his kingdom. Everyone wanted them wed. So, she was sure, anything could be overlooked. And, anyway, there were stories that Didobal herself had been as mischievous as a jackal in her youth. Sophonisba had a few secrets to pressure her with, things she had not even divulged to Imilce, sister though she was.
‘Should I tell you what happened then?’ Sophonisba asked. ‘Or need I find a different confidante?’
Imilce shut her lips in a tight line, keeping up the look of reproach for as long as she could. But her façade masked very different feelings. She was always amazed at how Sophonisba occupied and acted in the world. It was not just that she flouted tradition and decorum on occasion; it was the casual confidence with which she accomplished it. Imilce, staring at her, wished for a portion of this young woman’s strength; with it perhaps she, too, would find a way to act boldly to answer the things that troubled her.
Eventually Sophonisba overcame the unanswered question and proceeded. Though he rode fast to impress her, and seemed to dash from feature to feature on the landscape at whim, Masinissa did have a destination in mind. They stopped at a strange structure set at the top of a gentle crest, with views of the country to either side. They dismounted and walked past a crumbling wall that squared a courtyard, no larger than a pen for a few horses. A tower rose from one corner, although it too was damaged at what must have been its midpoint. Blocks littered the ground.
‘This is Balatur’s watchtower,’ Masinissa had said. ‘Many times I’ve come here and thought about my future, about the world I will shape and the woman who will stand beside me as I do.’
Sophonisba could tell she was supposed to be impressed, curious. So she showed neither sentiment. ‘Where is this Balatur?’ she asked. ‘He should be chided for the state of this place.’
Masinissa said that Balatur no longer was. He had died many years ago. The tale went that he had been an officer of much repute. While on a campaign against a tribe to the south, he had met a princess of the dark people there. He fell in love with her so completely that his life as a mercenary for Carthage seemed of little value any more. He believed that she loved him as well, and yet he would not desert the army. He returned to Carthage after the campaign, but he never forgot her. He thought of her always, day and night, and with such hunger that he felt a portion of flesh had been ripped from him. He came to believe that she had bewitched him and that his failure to forget her meant she wanted him just as much. Eventually, he had himself assigned to this watchtower. He sent word to her that if she would come and meet him here, they could be together. If she, too, pledged her love they could flee together and find a life elsewhere. He swore that he would be mercenary or beggar, fisherman or carpenter: anything and anywhere, so long as he could be with her. From the tower he looked day and night to the south, waiting for a messenger from his princess. He did this for a full forty years. She never came; he died in waiting.
‘Such is the tale of Balatur,’ Masinissa had said, finishing his story with sombre theatricality.
Sophonisba burst into laughter and admonished him to speak no more nonsense. ‘Of course she did not come to him,’ she said. ‘What princess would abandon her people to join a man who wished to be a beggar? Such devotion is not at all attractive. Anyway, never was there born a Massylii that loved one single woman.’
The prince took exception to all of this. He dropped to his knees and said that he was another Balatur, a man possessed of a love so complete it eclipsed all others, as the sun does the stars. When they were joined, their love would be a tale for the ages. After he helped Carthage to defeat Rome, he would become king. Sophonisba would be his queen and together they would rule an empire second only to Carthage in its glory. He reminded her that he was no mere boy. He was the son of King Gaia and he would soon prove himself worthy of the Barca family. He promised this with his very life.
Sophonisba’s voice had taken on a passionate urgency as she recalled the prince’s words. She breathed them in and out so that they had a husky quality, as if heated with desire. But when she finished this portion of her story, she laughed and let the emotion drop from her face, like a mask lowered by the hand that held it.
‘Can you imagine such a show?’ she asked. ‘I almost burst into tears there and then. Tears of laughter, that is.’
‘Sophonisba!’ Imilce said. ‘Are you so cruel? Never has a man spoken to me thus. Not even my husband!’
‘And in that is a measure of my brother’s truthfulness,’ she answered. ‘You see, I did not tell you that during all of this poetry the young prince managed to move next to me and take me in his arms. He bade me look out at the sky and the land and wonder at it – as if he’d created it all for me! And all the time he was trying to rub himself against me. He pretended that he was not, but I could feel his stiffness. He is truly a man of two parts: one of them a poet and the other a serpent with searching tongue. Yes, his words were fine, but fast upon them he was breathing in my ear, begging me for a taste of our wedding night, saying I cannot possibly keep him waiting till then. I told him I could do just that, and that I’d have him hunted down and quartered if he took me against my will.’
‘Sophonisba!’
The girl laughed. ‘That is just what he said. “Sophonisba!” He looked ready to cry. He would have, I am sure, except that I did him a small favour.’
She let this statement linger, waiting for Imilce to rise to it. ’What sort of favour?’
‘I touched it,’ Sophonisba said, showing with an outstretched finger how gentle and innocent the gesture had been. ‘I asked him to show me the length of his love, and when he did I gave it a touch. Just a fingertip and he shot his praise to the gods.’
Imilce did not know how to configure her face. It wavered between amusement and incredulity and outright reproach. Eventually, she said, ‘Sophonisba, hear me and believe me: you cannot play with men’s affections this way.’
‘You should not fear, Imilce, he is only a boy, not yet a man. Though enthusiastic, yes. And handsomely gifted, if you understand me . . . Think of it, sister! The future king of Numidia, brave Masinissa, who says he’s going to join Hasdrubal in Iberia this spring – conquered by the touch of a finger! Boys are such strange creatures.’
‘Boys grow to men quickly,’ Imilce said. ‘As do girls to women.’
‘Yes, yes.’ Sophonisba poured herself a drink of lemon-flavoured water. She drained the glass in a few long draughts, as quickly as any thirsty worker. But when she glanced up, her face was again a beguiling conglomeration of features. Imilce realized that the trick of her beauty was that her face was always surprising. Somehow, each time one saw her she seemed newly created, as if her features were still wet from the touch of a sculptor’s fingers. It took Imilce’s breath away and filled her with warmth just because of their proximity. Masinissa did not stand a chance.
On a morning early in the spring, Hannibal found the letter waiting for him like any other piece of mail. It lay upon his desk among several other scrolls: despatches from Carthage; inventories and figures compiled by Bostar; non-committal missives from several Roman ally states, whose chiefs were willing to speak secretly with him but as yet gave him nothing; and a document from the king of Macedon. Compared to these, it had the least authority on a commander’s desk, but his eyes settled on it alone out of all the rest. He recognized the size of the papyrus and the emblem on the seal. His own.
Hannibal dismissed his secretaries with instructions that he not be disturbed. Alone in the small cottage, he took a seat, plucked up the scroll, and wiped the others to the side with his forearm. He dug under the seal with his fingernail and rolled out the brittle material. It crackled under his fingers, ridged and imperfect, an ancient fabric born of the most aged of lands.
The words had been written upon it by a passionless hand, precise, formal, looking as official as any correspondence from the Council itself. But the words were Imilce’s. They drew him with all the force of a witch’s incantation. He heard her greeting as if she were whispering in his ear. He mumbled aloud in response to her questions of his safety, reassuring her of his health. Just the mention of his homeland’s names brought forth a host of memories, images not dimmed by time. The mention of perfidy in the Council touched him with anger, reminded him that he never had to hide his emotions completely from this woman. Had she been with him he would have cursed the old men, the misers, those jealous of him and thwarting their own success because of it. How he would have liked to speak of these things with her, naked, in bed, sated and moist from being inside her.
The reading was over all too quickly. The space of minutes it took to finish the document was painfully insufficient, and the letter left too much unanswered. There was no mention of Little Hammer, not a word of how he grew, whether he spoke now, whether he remembered his father and still looked so much like him. And who was this Sophonisba? His sister, yes, but a person wholly unknown to him. He could not imagine her at all. He had lived apart from her almost all of her life, a strange thought now that she was nearly an adult. Stranger still that he wished to protect her, to meet this young prince, Masinissa, for himself and judge him as men do each other. And no, he was not sure of the wisdom of his decision to send Imilce to Carthage. Of course he wanted her with him, but how could he be the man he must be with her near at hand, drawing emotions out of him that he would have no other man witness? Surely, separation was the best course.
Not yet ready to roll the papyrus away, he lifted it, absently, to his nose and inhaled. The scents were faint at first, reluctant and shy. The longer he breathed in, the more he found traces of fragrances beyond the papyrus’s dry flavour. Something of his mother’s fragrant oils came to him. Something of Carthaginian palms. A taste of sea air and of dust blown high and far-travelled on desert winds. And there was Imilce. Her scent was the last to come to him. When it finally revealed itself it was the most potent. It filled him with a longing so painful that he pulled himself forcibly from it. He threw the letter on the table and stared at it as if he expected it to rise and attack him. He had searched for her scent, but having found it he knew that such passions had no place in a commander’s chambers. They were more dangerous than Roman steel or cunning.
He called Gemel and ordered the letter rolled and stored away. ‘Put it somewhere safe,’ he said. ‘Safe and distant.’
This done, he sorted through the other scrolls with an absent hand. Nowhere among them was the one he wished for, the one from Rome itself. Such obstinate fools they were. Other races would have conceded the war already. They could have come to terms, as strong peoples always had. Though he knew Romans were shaping themselves into a different sort of nation – that was why this war was necessary, after all – it still confounded him that they did not behave in accordance with age-old practice. He tried to imagine the men of Rome, the senators in the chamber, the citizens in their homes throughout the city, the allies in all their various forms. He even spoke inside himself in their language, trying to divine what their hearts told them. Over the years he had done this time and again with different races, sometimes with his focus on individual persons. It was a technique his father had schooled him in. To know the mind of the enemy was to defeat him, Hamilcar had said. Many times this wisdom had proved to be true. With the Romans, however, he was never at ease with what he imagined.
He paced the room absently. He moved to the doorway and looked out over the fields, just beginning to bud in the strengthening sun. Something in the smell of the air reminded him of riding through the Carthaginian spring with his father, surveying the family’s lands. He had believed, in his early years, that his father was chief among the men of the world, wiser than any, stronger, braver. Almost as early, he understood that with these traits came responsibilities. That was why his father was called upon to put down the mercenary revolt so harshly. That was why he went to Iberia to carve out an empire. That was why he could never forgive Rome for its crimes against Carthage. This had all been completely right to him, undeniable certainties.
He thought of an incident he had not recalled for some time. It was in his ninth year. He had just learned that his father was to leave Africa for Iberia for a long campaign. Perhaps because Hamilcar had been absent for so much of his childhood, hearing this cut him with new agony. He accosted his father in the public square and begged to be taken with him. He grasped at his legs and swore that he was man enough for it. He was strong and could throw a spear and knew no fear of war.
Hamilcar had at first swatted him away, but the more the boy spoke the bolder his claims became and the more the man began to listen. Eventually, he grabbed the boy by the wrist and dragged him to the temple of Baal, shouting as he entered that the priest should prepare a sacrifice. In Carthage the custom of infanticide was an ancient one, rarely practised at that time but prevalent a little earlier. Hannibal, staring at the altar of the god for a few stunned moments, believed his father had had enough of him and was about to offer him up.
But then he heard the baying of the goat led in by the priests. The animal was solid white, its eyes pinkish in hue and horns so pale they seemed almost translucent. They had brought a fine animal, unblemished and likely to please the god. The priests were like all such that he had seen since, often deformed, men strange in one way or another from birth and suited to the priesthood because of this.
His father knelt next to him. He felt the gnarled strength of his hand clasped over his, the skin of his palm like rough stone. ‘Listen to me,’ Hamilcar said. ‘I am not a priest, but you are my son. I hold the right to tell you the history of our gods. In a time long ago the father of gods, El, mistakenly decided to place Yam, the Sea-River, above all other gods. Yam revelled in this and became a tyrant and imposed his will upon all others. No other god had the courage to fight him. All thought him too mighty, even El who had blessed him. To appease him, Asherah, the wife of El, offered herself to Yam, so that he might learn joy and treat them all more kindly. When Baal heard this he was furious. He, alone among the gods, knew that Yam was an impostor who would never treat them justly. He made two great weapons – Yagrush, the chaser, and Aymur, the driver. With them, he strode towards Yam. He struck him in the chest with Yagrush, but this did not slay the god. So he smote him on the forehead with Aymur. Yam fell to the earth. So balance was restored to the world, with Baal as the supreme, yet just, deity.’
Hamilcar turned his son to face the goat. He knelt close behind him and with one arm pulled the boy against his chest. ‘Understand me now. Carthage is the servant of Baal; Rome is like those who followed Yam. Rome has been placed above us now by a mistake of Fortune, but it will not remain so. You and I, we can be Yagrush and Aymur, the chaser and the driver. I do not claim that we are divine. This is a human affair, based more on justice than on the gods’ favour. I do not ask you to hate without reason. I do not condemn Rome simply because it is full of Romans. It is Rome’s actions I hate. It is the way Rome seeks to make slaves of all the world. So, I ask you now, will you swear your life to avenge the wrongs done us by Rome? Will you stand beside me as I take justice to them? Will you devote your life to seeing them brought down, as Baal brought down Yam?’
To all these questions the boy answered, simply, ‘Yes, I will do that, Father.’
The priest handed Hamilcar the sacrificial knife. This the father slipped into the boy’s hand. Together they pressed the curved blade against the trembling creature’s neck and sank it home, the young hand and the old acting in one motion. So the sacrifice was made; Hannibal consecrated and bound with Baal. Days later, he set out for Iberia, and he had known no life but war ever since.
How far he had come since that day . . . How much he had seen . . . The trajectory of his life surprised him sometimes – not often, for usually his mind was actively engaged in shaping the future, and the art of war at which he excelled seemed the natural way of the world. But there were rare, quiet moments when melancholy pulled more heavily on him. He sometimes woke from visions of battle and felt – in the foggy moments of transition to waking – joy at the notion that it was all a dream, that he was not truly in so deeply, that the years might not have passed as he believed they had. This was always a short-lived notion, however. His single eye always opened upon scenes of men in armour, his ears filled with the noises of camp: constant reminders that his dreams were no more than mirrors projecting back the world he had created.
He turned and withdrew to his desk. He did not savour these moments of weakness. This was not the best of him. He would return to himself soon and plan a victory for the coming season like none in history. But he had one more indulgence he wished to allow himself. He thought of calling Mago to write for him, but he decided that the emotions, the truths and deceptions he was to write were too personal, too full of portents, better left unrevealed to others. He prepared a pallet and lifted the stylus himself. He could not help himself, even if the letter was destined to go unread, to end in glowing red embers as his earlier efforts had.
‘Dearest Imilce,’ he wrote, ‘how I wish you here with me so that you could tell me of yourself and of our son, of my present and our future . . .’
For the soldiers of Hannibal’s army, the spring and early summer of their third year at war passed in a haze of almost idyllic tranquillity. Instead of marching into action with the first warm weather, they planted crops under the direction of captured locals. The soldiers tended the herd animals, watched new calves born and nursed, and put themselves to practical trades such as leather working and iron smelting. They sent occasional, almost recreational, foraging parties to secure other goods from neighbouring communities, but in general they were well fed on their own provisions. Their bodies returned to states of health they had not known since leaving Iberia. Late in the spring, as they pulled in the early harvest, more than one soldier joked that the commander must have taken a liking to the country and chosen to stay, content with the blooming weather and salt-tinged breeze off the ocean. But just as many voices argued that the commander had lost none of his hunger for war. Each action was calculated – even the duration of inaction. Who really doubted that the great man was concocting yet another unbeatable strategy?
Not Imco Vaca. If this was the best way to win a war, then he was all for it. Actually, though he followed orders that came to him and even on occasion delegated tasks to others, his attentions were more acutely focused on matters of a carnal nature. He had never truly recovered from the previous summer’s meeting with the naked, swimming beauty. The Saguntine girl also continued to haunt him. She sat at a distance and watched his actions disapprovingly and sometimes shouted at him so loudly he was sure others would hear her. But she was nothing more than a buzzing fly compared to the torment the woman and her donkey inflicted upon him.
For months he found no trace of her. It seemed she had disappeared from the earth. Knowing this was not possible, he worried even more about what might have befallen her. He roamed the neighbouring camp villages, meandered through the Gallic settlement, and even tried to win the trust of the camp followers. But it was difficult to search for someone he had seen for only a few moments, whom he knew nothing about and whom he would not describe in true detail because he did not want anyone else to know she existed. He knew many would call this search a folly unbefitting a veteran soldier, but Imco no longer knew how to separate reasonable behaviour from obsession. Perhaps the insanity of war had damaged him. He thought this was likely, but so be it. He just wanted to find that girl again.
But then, as unexpectedly as the first time, she appeared. He had not even begun the day looking for her. He had accompanied a band of Numidian scouts, and as he did not know how to ride he sat behind one of the horsemen. Imco was thoroughly jarred and shaken by the experience. He would never have guessed that a horse’s back was so hard, with such an array of knobs to prod at his legs and backside. Partway through the return journey he begged to be set down and started walking.
Thus he came upon a cluster of dwellings belonging to some camp followers, a community he probably would not have noticed from the back of a galloping horse. Not having known there were camp followers living here, he thought he had come upon locals displaced by the army. But a few moments observing them marked them as foreigners from a variety of nationalities. They seemed to have a life of bare subsistence. The settlement huddled between the saddle of two hills, on a slope dotted with small trees. In this stood a humble conglomeration of tents and skin shelters. On the far hills, a herd of thin goats cropped the grass. In the centre, a large cooking fire burned in preparation for the evening meal. An old woman sat weaving. Two men debated the best way to erect a sun shelter. A baby cried briefly and then hushed. A young woman bent to fasten a rope round the back legs of a recently slaughtered goat—
Imco’s head turned as if to move on to the next object, but his eyes stayed anchored to the woman. For a moment his pupils seemed to stretch and contract: into focus and then out and back in, as if something had gone wrong with his eyes. He felt a part of himself fly out of his sockets and hiss across the distance and touch the girl’s backside. He darted behind a tree for fear that she could feel this touch physically. But she just kept at her work.
She ran the rope from the goat’s bound legs up over the crook of a branch and back to the ground again. Using her body weight, she tugged until the creature swung, dripping blood. She worked up close to it, slashing at the hide with practised strokes of what must have been a very sharp tool, spinning the corpse this way and that, each gesture cool and efficient. Next, she slipped her fingers beneath the goat’s skin and began to peel it free. She pulled so hard that the creature hung taut for a moment, at an angle to her, before finally relinquishing its hide and dangling, naked now, utterly defeated.
It was brutal work, and there was no mistaking the butcher’s identity. Her legs were just as slim and muscular as he remembered. Her calves stood out with an almost masculine definition. The thin summer shift followed the curve of her hips and even revealed the depression that split her backside into two round portions. Her arms were bare to the shoulder and her hair had grown considerably. It flowed down her back in a black tumult of curls. And if all this was not enough, there was the donkey, standing a few yards from the woman, somewhat dejected, neither watching her nor eating nor doing anything save supporting itself on the four feeble posts of its legs.
The woman spun on her bare heel and moved away from the carcass. He pressed himself against the prickly ground and followed her with his eyes. She first spoke to the old woman, then shouted something to the men, and set off climbing into the hills. Imco was on his feet a moment later. He backed away from the camp and then circled it widely and walked quietly through a stand of pine trees. He lost the woman for a few moments and grew frantic. He tried to divine her destination from the lie of the land so that he could follow her from hiding, but no sooner had he begun this than he lost faith in the strategy. He dashed a short distance and then froze, tilting his head to catch any betraying sound, but he heard nothing except the wind shouldering its way through the trees. He ran on again, along the near side of a long ridge, through a confused jumble of boulders, then over the rise and down the pine-covered slope at a headlong run.
He burst into the open in a panting explosion, realizing too late that he had bounded out onto a path a few strides in front of the woman and the donkey, which trailed behind her. The woman pulled up in mid-step. She froze and stared at him for a shocked few breaths. But her surprise did not last long. With the fingers of one hand she grasped a handful of hair from high on her head and raked it forward, covering her face. She said something to him in a Celtiberian dialect. She parted the screen of black curls just enough to spit, and then began to scramble up the embankment from which he had descended.
Imco saw the spit fan out on the air and shift away on the breeze. Before his gaze had even shifted to follow her, the donkey was occupying the space she had vacated. How the creature got there so quickly, he could not say, for it now stood completely still. It was a pitiful animal to look upon, ragged of coat, with ears tattered as if shredded by the teeth of some carnivore. Though it was faithful to the woman, she seemed to pay it no heed whatsoever.
‘Do not forget your ass!’ Imco called.
The woman paused in her tracks. She slowly turned round and took a few tentative steps down towards him. ‘What?’ she asked. Her Carthaginian was heavily accented, but he could not from the single word guess what her first language might be.
‘Do not forget your ass,’ Imco repeated. ‘Your donkey, I mean.’
The woman cocked her head to the side and studied him. He could just barely make out her features through her hair. He thought he saw something written on them that was other than anger. It was a deep bafflement, but this was something he believed he could build upon. When she spoke, however, her voice was venomous and resolute. Unfortunately, she had reverted to the Iberian dialect and Imco could not understand a word of it.
She must have known this, for she concluded by making her point visually concrete. Her hands grasped something like an imaginary twig, snapped it, and tossed the two ends in different directions. Having made herself clear, the woman turned and scrambled up the bank and away. Imco stood for a moment staring at the spot over which she had vanished. Half of him wanted to chase after her, but what would he do upon reaching her again? He did not have the cold heart of a rapist. And anyway, he had accomplished something with the encounter. He knew that she lived safely in the arms of a small community. As he turned back to the camp, he realized that the donkey was no longer in sight. It had not scrambled up the bank, but must have found some other route by which to follow the girl. Would that he were as fortunate.
But he was not. Instead, he marched out with the body of the army a week later. He could find no valid reason to exclude himself and, it seemed, Hannibal wanted each and every able body. They marched at half-speed, angling to the south of the old consuls’ forces, crossed the River Aufidus, and – with barely a grumble of protest – seized a Roman grain depot near an old settlement called Cannae.
It did not take long for rumours of the Roman approach to spread. First a few long-riders brought word of a great mass of men on the march, an army innumerable to the human eye, like a horde of Persia spilling across the land. And then spies brought in further details. The two new consuls were marching towards them at full speed. They whipped before them a massive army, thousands upon thousands of well-armed soldiers, both Roman citizens and legions from the allied cities. If the Carthaginians stayed where they were and met this force, they would not just be fighting the arrogant men of Rome; they would be clashing with all Italy.
Imco had many times before questioned Hannibal’s wisdom only to see the commander’s judgements proved right. But this did not stop him from doubting once more. No one man can harness Fortune indefinitely. So prolonged a war could not have been what he wanted, and now, perhaps, the winds of fate had shifted to blow the Romans forward to victory. Imco, in his foreboding at the coming conflict, could not help but ask for news and opinions from any man near at hand. It was because of this that he first met a young soldier who claimed to have overheard a conversation between the commander and his brother.
The soldier swore his tale was true, and he told it as he shared Imco’s supper beside the fire. He had stood within listening distance, he said, assigned as a guard to the storehouse that the commander happened to check on personally. He had stood as unobtrusively as he could, straight-backed and still as a pillar. The two paid him no heed whatsoever. When Mago voiced anxiety about the Roman contingent’s size, Hannibal said it was as it should be. He said he had recently heard voices inside his head. No, not as a madman does, for he understood that the voices came not from without but were born inside him. Sometimes the voice was recognizable as his own; at other times it was his father’s, or the low grumble he believed to be the language of the gods. But they all told him the same thing. They all came to him with a single message . . .
The young soldier paused here and contemplated the fire, seeming for all the world to have nothing more to say. Imco nudged him on.
‘It is coming.’
‘What?’ Imco asked. ‘What is coming? It is no secret they are coming. Is this—’
The soldier, forgetting the silent drama of a moment before, raised his voice. ‘That is what he said. “It is coming.” He said, “The coming battle determines everything. We look upon a space of hours that lead up to the moment I was born for.” That is what the voices tell the commander is coming: the moment he was born for. And you and I will witness it.’
The soldier resumed his portentous air, but Imco clicked his tongue on the roof of his mouth and turned away. What sort of tale was this? One of the teller’s own invention, probably. He would not flatter the fellow with questions. So he thought, but instead he found within himself a chorus of questions and answers. What is the moment he was born for? So vague a statement, like something an oracle would say. Did it indicate a day of glory? But was not the most obvious sense always the wrong sense when interpreting oracles? Perhaps the day he was born for meant the day of his death. Was that not the only certainty in all beings’ lives? Had the commander seen his own demise? If so, why did he not flee it? For a moment this thought gave Imco comfort, but then he recalled how stubborn a character Hannibal was. Perhaps he planned to defy death, to spit in its eye and push it out of the way.
When Imco lay down that evening, sleep eluded him completely, like a creature that knows it is being tracked. He tried to think only of his beautiful camp follower, but when she looked at him he heard her voice repeating the message he wished to avoid.
‘It is coming. It is coming . . .’
During the first two weeks of the march from Rome, the consuls shared a single intention. They had to cover the distance quickly, make contact with Hannibal, and find the right occasion on which to bring him to battle. There was no debate on this much, at least. But as they came nearer, the strains of their duelling commands began to show. Varro believed that they should pour forth over the Carthaginians in one great wave, unstoppable. He argued that the location and terrain had no strategic importance, considering the overwhelming shock the enemy would feel on the first sight of them. He imagined their wide-eyed horror, the slack mouths, and the thumping in their chests as they beheld their doom striding towards them in a cloud of dust. That was the true strength of the army they commanded. They should use it to best effect, wherever they found the invader hiding.
Paullus held a different view. If they were to learn but one thing from the lessons of the Ticinus, of Trebia, of Trasimene, it must be caution. They were marching towards Hannibal; and he appeared to be simply waiting for them. Paullus found something disquieting in this. They should approach slowly. They should carefully assess just what the enemy might have planned for them. They should learn beforehand everything they could as to the lie of the land and Hannibal’s current numbers and the morale of his troops and their state of health and supply. All these things should weigh in their decisions. War was not as straightforward as Varro seemed to think it was.
In keeping with this, on Paullus’ days in command he slowed the pace of the march and sent out scouts and surveyors to detail the features of the land around Cannae. What he learned troubled him. He was sure Hannibal’s chosen spot was not a favourable place for battle. The land was too open. Apart from the rise atop which Cannae sat, the land stretched for flat miles in all directions, dotted sparsely with brush and stunted trees and cut by shallow, easily fordable rivers. It favoured the African cavalry in every way. He spoke cautiously of this with his fellow consul, for it was hard for a Roman horseman to acknowledge the supremacy of any other. But Paullus believed they had to do just that. The last few years had proved that the Africans, especially the Numidians, were superior to them when astride a horse. He proposed that they move elsewhere.
‘Listen to me,’ he said. He sat facing Varro in the war tent, between them the tribunes and officers of the horse and various others. Paullus had called the meeting towards the end of one of his days in command. He had opened it with his now familiar arguments and listened to the equally well-known rebuttals. But as he was giving up power on the morn he wished to do all he could to sway his fellow consul’s opinion. They were so close to the Carthaginians now that any mistake could doom them.
He said, ‘Let us turn the column and march for more broken ground to the west, with hills enough to hamper the enemy’s horsemen. We need somewhere not of Hannibal’s choosing but of our own instead.’
Varro could barely contain his loathing of this line of thinking. ‘If Hannibal is so brilliant,’ he said, ‘how do we know that he is not hoping for just such a move? Perhaps he anticipates such cowardice. If we do as you say, we might simply be turning into another of his traps.’
‘I do not think so,’ Paullus said. He spoke gravely, with the fingers of both hands massaging his temples. ‘Varro, I beg you to temper your vigour with wisdom. Fabius fought hard to avoid situations that—’
‘Fabius fought?’ Varro asked, cutting in with a raised voice. He cocked his head at an angle, as if his hearing troubled him. ‘Fought? Never has that word been so misused. I was there beside Fabius and I can tell you that he never raised a hand against the enemy. Fighting is not in that man’s nature. And now you, Paullus, would do the same as he. You’re nothing more than the old man’s puppet. You think not for yourself but do his bidding – just as he does Hannibal’s. Do you really believe Rome could survive another year like the one Fabius inflicted upon us? He made us out to be fools, cowards, sheep trembling at the sight of an approaching wolf. Perhaps you are those things, but I am none of them. We have let half the summer pass already. Believe me, if we do not strike now we will start losing allies. It will take just one defector for them all to crumble. But why am I telling you these things? You know them already. You only lack the heart or courage to grasp them and act!’
Paullus had gone red under this barrage of insults. He glanced at the officers around the chamber, all of whom shifted uncomfortably, eyes lowered to suggest no particular allegiance, faces as expressionless as possible. ‘We should speak privately,’ Paullus said. ‘It is not seemly for—’
‘I don’t care what is seemly!’ Varro shouted.
‘And I will not commit our troops to disaster!’ Paullus roared back at him, his anger bursting out so suddenly that several of the officers started. ‘Truly, Terentius Varro, you’re worthy of the butchers from whom you’re descended. Would that your people had kept to their labours and left important matters to those suited to them!’
Varro shot to his feet; Paullus mirrored the motion. They stepped towards each other, first tentatively, and then, as if at some choreographed signal, they fell towards each other like two rams in the season of rut. The room was a flurry of motion. Some jumped back against the tent walls. A few sat frozen. More than one cowered as if the consuls’ anger was meant for them. Only one person wedged himself between the two.
Publius Scipio was faster on his feet than either consul. He stepped forward and took the full brunt of the impact, Varro at his back, Paullus against his chest. He shouted to them to find reason. He batted their arms down and twirled to separate them with his shoulders. Heartened, others grappled the men and tried to calm them. Publius managed to get a hand to either consul’s chest and push them to the full length of his outstretched arms.
‘If you two were not the most important Romans in all of Italy at this time I would sit and watch one of you overman the other,’ he said. ‘But there is no place for duelling now. Rome depends on you; be worthy of her. By the gods, find your senses! Our enemy lies outside this tent, not within.’
Publius’ fellow tribunes looked between him and the two senior officers, unsure just how his outburst would be received and therefore uncertain how they would comment on it. He was the youngest among them and had up until that moment been the quietest. Varro seemed to be deciding just how best to take off Publius’ head, but when Paullus withdrew a halfstep he did likewise.
‘The young tribune is imprudent, but he speaks some truth,’ Varro said. ‘You call me rash, but will you hear my plan?’
‘You have a plan?’
‘I am not a fool, Paullus.’
‘Tell me, then. I’d love to hear sensible words from your mouth.’
Varro glared at him a moment, then motioned that they should all sit again. ‘We command the largest army Rome has ever fielded,’ he said, ‘perhaps the largest ever mustered by any civilized nation. This is our strength, and Hannibal will know it. We should show him from his first sighting of us that we are a hammer, and he the nail that we will drive into the soil of Cannae. We must use the full overwhelming grandeur of our numbers to best effect. To do this, we reduce the frontage of each maniple by a third and shrink the intervals between them. This will stretch the line so that the enemy will look out at an unending river heading towards him. Hannibal’s men will shake at the sight of us, and some will run. Imagine it, Paullus. Remember that this is the first time we will meet them face to face and in the full light of day. You and I will command the cavalry on either wing. This is the weak point, but we need not defeat our counterparts. All we have to do is hold them for a time, keep them from flanking long enough to let the body of our infantry drive through. By then it will be too late for their horse to matter. We’ll punch right through their centre, divide them into two smaller forces, and attack each at will.’
Paullus stared at his fellow consul with an intensity that made the edges of his eyes quiver. ‘You may be right,’ he said, ‘but I do not know that it is wise to modify our formations like this without first practising it.’
‘Impossible,’ Varro said. ‘We are engaged already. And this plan works precisely because the troops are raw. Just as the enemy will see their uncountable numbers, so the troops in the front will take heart from the lines of men behind them. They will see that they are undefeatable. As a whole, they will become braver than they could be in thin ranks. This formation makes it impossible for cowardice to sway the battle. A man in the middle of this river will have nowhere to flee but forward, over the bodies of the enemy. Paullus, refrain from finding fault and be one with me.’
‘I am unsure,’ Paullus said, sincerely and without a trace of malice. Though they talked late into the night, he could offer no more than that.
As the day dawned the consuls were not exactly at odds, but neither were they of a single mind. Varro – in control – broke camp and moved even closer to Hannibal, so close, in fact, that it would be impossible for Paullus to retreat even if he wished to. He set up camp on the near side of the River Aufidus and ordered a small deployment to claim a spot on the far bank. He sent out units to harass the Carthaginian foragers, but ended the day more exasperated than vindicated. Numidian raiders ambushed the Roman water carriers instead, launching their spears at them so that the workers had to drop their jugs and run. And yet Varro had accomplished his main objective. He was locked in the preliminary stages of the struggle. The following day Paullus received word that the enemy was moving as if to offer battle, but he did not answer them. He shifted troops from one place to another, hesitating, trying to think of a way to better their position, knowing that on the morrow control went back to Varro. Wriggle as he might, he was pinned to the spot as surely as if his fellow consul had speared him through the foot. There was nothing to be done. The clash would come with the rising sun. Their fate was in Varro’s hands.
Mago had already been up for hours by the time he met with Hannibal and a mounted contingent of his generals atop the rise of Cannae. Together they watched the armies assemble upon the wide plain. The sight approaching them was like nothing any of them had ever imagined. Mago had learned from his brother to approximate numbers of men by visual clues, to weigh on internal scales the density of troops and the area of land they covered, and to account for the receding scale of distance. But the number of Romans now before him was beyond his reckoning. Eighty thousand? Ninety? One hundred thousand? He could not possibly count them, and the exact number would have seemed arbitrary. What mattered was that the Romans’ front line stretched to fill the entire field, so wide it would have daunted even the best of runners to sprint from one edge to the other. It was completely uniform, no portion lagging behind or preceding the others. This was all formidable enough, but it was the depth of the ranks that truly stunned him: they came row upon row with no end in sight, fading into the dust and distance so that it seemed they were marching out of the haze, an army born of the landscape itself.
‘They have the wind in their eyes,’ Hannibal said. A simple statement, acknowledged with nods and a few grunts. ‘And more of the sun’s glare than we do. I like this advantage.’
Mago never ceased to be amazed by his brother’s calm. Looking at him, he felt buoyed by his confidence. If Hannibal believed they would win this conflict, then who was he to doubt it? The previous day, the commander had presented his multiple strategies with calm, reasoned assurance. Even when he proposed the most improbable of manoeuvres they sounded like testimony given after the event and not a plan suggested before. He had traced the bowed line the first ranks were meant to form, a convex front made up entirely of Gauls, headed by Mago and Hannibal himself. With this he intended to meet the first lines of the enemy. ‘We must keep this crescent from breaking,’ he had said. ‘Let it not snap but instead slowly manage a retreat. So carefully that the Romans are fooled into feeling themselves winning. So gradually that the Gauls are not frightened into fleeing.’
When Mago questioned whether the Gauls would rebel against setting themselves up for slaughter, Hannibal answered, ‘You do not understand the Celtic mind, brother. These people do not conceive of the world as you and I do. Consider that they believe creation to be a balance between two worlds. Death in this one means rebirth in the other. Thus they mourn at a newborn’s birth and celebrate upon that man’s eventual demise. They have no fear of dying tomorrow; they run to death, headlong.’
Mago had sworn that he would do everything Hannibal instructed, but after a sleepless night the immensity of the day’s challenges left him staring in awe. Even the cloud of dust stirred by the Romans’ feet filled him with dread. It was a great brown shadow that rose up into the heavens and stretched so far as to all but obscure the horizon.
‘Look at them,’ he said. There was a tight quaver in his voice, as that of a man who has been punched in the abdomen but is trying to speak through the pain of the blow. ‘I never imagined there were so many of them.’
Hannibal straightened in his saddle. He spoke without a hint of irony. ‘Yes, they are many, but not one among them is my brother. Not one is named Mago.’
The others laughed, but it took a moment for this cool statement to roll over in Mago’s mind, revealing its humour.
Monomachus was the first to respond, dry of voice, giving no indication that he spoke in jest. ‘They have among them few who would eat human flesh.’
‘What is more,’ Maharbal added, ‘they are not commanded by a man named Hannibal. I am sure this fact troubles them.’
‘And, unless I am mistaken,’ Bostar said, ‘nowhere among them is there a Bomilcar or a Himilco or even a Gisgo, not a single Barca, not one of them who prays to Baal or Melkart, none who were pushed through the thighs of an African mother. Truly, never have I seen so many unfortunate men gathered in a single place.’
Hannibal’s stern expression gave way to a grin. ‘I see your amazement, Mago, and I understand your point: we should have issued the men with two swords each, one for either hand to make the killing faster.’
Mago ducked his head and ran the palm of his hand over his horse’s neck and then looked up again. Just listening to them humbled him. Who had ever been as fortunate as he, to learn warfare from men such as these? He searched for a jest of his own to add to theirs, but jesting before battle was not a skill he had learned yet.
Soon the generals parted company, each riding off to lead different contingents of the troops, each with a different purpose in the coming battle. Mago stayed a little longer with Hannibal. They were to command quite near each other and did not need to separate until the battle was well begun. Even with the armies facing each other – paused with a wide gap between them – there were manoeuvres to go through before the bulk of them met in earnest. The enemy’s forward line glistened in the glare of the sun, armour reflecting the light in thousands of tiny bursts. At first their shields seemed as tightly wedged together as the scales on a snake’s belly, but there were gaps enough between them to allow their skirmishers forward. These poured through onto the field. This battle would open in the manner that suited the Roman style, just as Hannibal had predicted.
‘Velites,’ Hannibal said. ‘Let us see whether these pups have teeth.’
The young soldiers moved not like men but like half-beasts, agile. They wove through each other, barking courage and yelling curses at the Carthaginians. They wore helmets draped in animal skins: the heads of wolves mostly, some bears, and a few mountain cats. At first, they were frightening to look upon, as if the animal world had united with humans and fought on the Romans’ side. They came armed with several javelins each, which they hurled with all the strength their bodies could muster, sending them high into the air in deadly arcs. So it seemed to Mago, but Hannibal saw them differently.
‘They are tentative,’ he said. ‘Afraid. Look, Mago, they seem to step forward boldly, but they come only near enough to loose their weapons. Then they retreat to gather up courage to repeat the manoeuvre. They have taken on the skins of warriors but not the hearts.’
Mago had not realized this at first, but soon he saw that Hannibal was right. The velites were not so impressive after all. Their inexperience left them no match for veteran skirmishers. Balearic slingers swirled their tiny missiles into the air almost casually, picking out velites at will, breaking arms and ribs and occasionally dropping one when a stone broke a velite’s head.
This went on for an hour or so, until Hannibal signalled that the slingers should be called back. They pulled up, shouted last taunts at the Romans, and withdrew into the body of the infantry. The Romans did the same. The velites vanished through the snake scales so that within a few minutes all motion stopped, save for the struggles of the wounded left on the field.
At about the same time, both sides began to move forward towards each other. The Romans accelerated to a trot and held it. Watching them, Mago found his insides knotted so intensely that he almost pitched forward in the saddle. He knew to look past the tricks of visual intimidation: the swirls and patterns and animal features painted on their shields, the high feathered plumes that rose up from their helmets to make them seem taller, the layered wall of shields and upright pila and glinting metal and legs beneath, shifting steadily forward so that from a distance they seemed not individuals at all but rather a single force eating up the land. Knowing these tricks did not make it any easier to watch the advance. The Romans moved in more skilful unison than even the Libyans, and there was no trickery in the amazing mass of them.
More than any of the visual drama, what struck the young Barca was the silence, the awful, unearthly hush of the oncoming enemy. They spoke not a word, no chant or instructions or shouts of rage. No sound came from them at all but the rhythmic pounding of their feet and the thrum of their swords upon their shields. This was noise, yes, but devoid of emotion. Mechanical. Frightening, for it seemed to be the beat of death. The various contingents within the Carthaginian army yelled and chanted and spurred themselves to fury by releasing deep-bellied roars. The Gauls sent forth a tremendous racket through their horns, the tall, animal-shaped heads of these stretching high into the air above them. It should have been a ferocious cacophony, but the answering silence proved even more unnerving. It was as if Carthage had thrown a punch at a visible target but missed it and cleaved only the air. If the Romans felt any fear they did not show it, and the best the Carthaginian troops could do was to scream louder.
Mago knew what came next, but still it was a shock when it happened. The Roman vanguard – at some signal or position known only to them – all hefted their pila up and hurled them in the same instant. Two, three thousand missiles suddenly flew through the air. Several hundred soldiers went down, twisting, shouting in pain or silenced. From where Mago sat beside his brother, he saw whole portions of the front ranks buckle forward and disappear.
‘As it should be,’ Hannibal said. ‘There will be a second wave. And then a third, remember that. This is what we’ve come for. We’ve prevailed previously through good fortune and Roman foolishness. Today we face them on their own terms. This is all as I would have it be. Take your position and remember everything I’ve taught you. Go now. And do not forget your name!’
With that, Hannibal slipped from his horse and joined the lieutenants and messengers and guards who would be around him throughout the battle. They headed off through the ranks down corridors left clear for them. Mago heard a soldier call to him, telling him they were awaiting him. He dismounted and handed his horse to a keeper and joined with the contingent of men sworn to protect his life. Something happened in him as he felt the earth beneath him and his feet moving him across it. He stopped trying to fight the passing of time, stopped wishing for more moments to process and think through the things he faced. He stepped into the present and felt an enormous rush of energy push him forward. He was about to fight as he never had before. The forces at play in the world had finally converged. He strode forward behind his lieutenants, growing more into his skin at every step. He was a Barca, after all.
The two cavalry units – one composed of Numidians, the other a mixed company of Carthaginians, Iberians and Gauls – took up positions on either wing of the infantry. Their general orders were clear: attack the opposing Roman horse. Hit them, hard and fast. Break them in the first moments of the struggle, wipe them from the field, and strip the main body of the Roman infantry naked on either flank. A good part of Hannibal’s strategy depended on this. But not only on this. He also chose to fracture and confuse the enemy in smaller ways. That is why Tusselo and 400 other Numidians went out on a specific mission. They understood that there was a danger in it greater than that of straightforward combat. It required both military prowess and cunning. They took up the arms customary to them, but each also carried an extra sword hidden beneath his tunic, wrapped in oddments of cloth to protect its wielder from the honed blades.
They rode in the wake created by Maharbal’s cavalry, which was quite a trail to follow. They moved in a great, trilling herd at full gallop, launching their spears once, twice, and yet again before they even reached the enemy. By the time they collided with them, many of the Romans had already dropped, impaled by cool iron, and then pummelled beneath a barrage of hooves. Other horses wheeled and darted in confusion, their riders suddenly gone limp. Tusselo watched Maharbal sword-stab a wounded Roman under the arm and pull a spear from the man’s thigh in something like a single motion. He planted this new spear in another’s throat. He stabbed the weapon forward and back. The pierced Roman grabbed it desperately, jerked this way and that by a playful hand, recognition of his coming death splattered across his face with the stain of his own blood. Maharbal finally yanked the spear free and left the man slumped over his horse’s neck. Without another thought, he surged towards a new target.
Tusselo lost sight of their captain, but he was only one among many. All the others were similarly engaged. That was the way it was with Numidians. They should have made easy targets, unarmoured as they were, with only hide shields and no saddles to secure them to their mounts. Instead they moved without fear, so swiftly that it seemed there was no interval between their thoughts and the movements of their horses. The Romans had to yank on reins and fight with their mounts to control them before they could attempt a strike. They might have been skilled by their own standards, but that was not enough to help them here. The Numidians anticipated the spears to be thrown at them before they were even launched. They batted away the sword points aimed at close quarters, because they saw the preparations a Roman had to go through to ready himself for the thrust, and they always managed to be exactly where the Romans wished they were not because they recognized the flow of this mounted dance before the Italians ever could. They functioned on an entirely different scale of speed and dexterity.
The Romans pulled back, re-formed, and charged again. A repeat of the initial slaughter met them. They dismounted in an attempt to make the battle into an infantry contest. To their surprise, the Africans did not join them on the dirt but rode among them, darting them with even greater ease. Moments later all the Romans who could scrambled up into their saddles again, before any order to do this had been issued. And in this remounting was the first seed of panic. Such a seed germinates in an instant, grows, and flowers. The Romans turned and fled. The Numidians paused long enough to retrieve spears and to wipe their bloodstained palms. A few grabbed up pieces of treasure too appealing to leave behind. Then they set out after their quarry, smiling and joking with one another, like huntsmen on the trail of their favourite prey.
The time had come to make real the plan Tusselo had set forth to Hannibal several days earlier. Hannibal had initially found it improbable that the Romans would believe the deception it depended on, but Tusselo knew them better. He pointed out that the Romans far back in the army’s rear would know little of how their cavalry fared against the Africans. They would have no true picture of the whole of the battle and would – in their arrogance – find it easy to accept what he proposed. And it would work because no Roman could conceive of such a deception; therefore neither would they recognize it in the actions of others. Having won the commander’s trust, Tusselo set out to deserve it. He reminded the others to follow his lead and have faith.
With that, he and the 400 pressed north. They rode parallel to the rows and rows of Roman legions, out at a distance beyond missile range. They progressed largely unhindered. There were few horsemen left to confront them, and the legions ignored them, so focused were they on their advance. When he saw open space behind the army, Tusselo turned towards the Romans. Once he was sure the Numidians had been sighted, he spoke the first order loudly. His comrades obeyed. They slung their shields behind their backs. A little farther on he shouted again. They each tossed their spears out upon the ground, swords and daggers also, small darts. They advanced as unarmed men, with arms held out to either side, professing harmlessness.
Alarmed by their approach, a company of soldiers held in reserve fanned out to meet them. Tusselo took his position and ran over the words he would soon utter in the language he had not used in years now. He rode at the vanguard of the group and was therefore the first to be unhorsed. A legionary reached up for his outstretched hand, grabbed it, and nearly yanked his shoulder from its socket. He hit the ground on his back, hard enough to knock the air out of him. The soldier stood him up and punched him square in the mouth. He unsheathed his sword and made as if to run him through, but a nearby officer strode in, took the weapon from him, and pressed the point up under Tusselo’s chin with enough pressure to pierce his flesh and release a thin stream of blood that ran down the blade.
‘Why do you come to us?’ he demanded. ‘Give me reason not to kill you all right now!’
Poised atop the sword, Tusselo did not know if he could speak. He bit back the pain of the iron point grinding into his jawbone and managed to say, ‘You will win this day. Our gods . . . gave us signs of this. Hannibal ignored them. He walks towards death. We want no part of it any more. You are the greater power.’
The officer stared at him a moment in surprise. He had not expected an African to speak perfect Latin. Judging by his face this seemed to unnerve him. ‘How do you come to speak Latin?’
‘I am an educated man,’ Tusselo said.
The Roman seemed unsure what to make of this. His face held firm, but the point of the sword drooped. Tusselo, feeling an opening, carried on. ‘Spare us,’ he said. ‘We are not cowards. I am a prince among our people. By my word, the Massylii will desert Carthage in your favour. You, master, can bring Rome the Numidian people. And we can bring all of Africa.’
‘You do not look royal to me,’ the Roman said, his eyes on Tusselo’s knotted mass of hair.
‘Our people are different from yours, but I am as I’ve said. Ask any of the men who follow me.’
For the first time the Roman wavered visibly. He looked up and found in the solemn faces of the mounted warriors enough to stay his death threat. He released Tusselo and stepped back. ‘You are wise to realize our superiority,’ he said. ‘Perhaps cowardly as well, but you will live at least a little longer for it.’ The legionary who had hit Tusselo began to object, but the officer spoke over him. ‘The Roman army still takes prisoners! We are not barbarians who kill men who come to us in defeat. Captured is just as good as dead, in some ways even better. Think what good slaves these will make.’
Though he spoke this forcefully he seemed to doubt it a moment later. He muttered, ‘I would not want to act mistakenly here, would you? Find a tribune, at least. But in the meantime get them off their horses and keep them under guard.’
They forced the Numidians to dismount and march between a company of armoured guards who smacked them with the flats of swords, poked them with the butts of spears, taunted and threatened them, insulted the bitch creatures that had birthed them, and ridiculed the commander who had led them to their enslavement. Finally – collected in a tight group on a flat stretch of barren, sun-baked ground – they were told to sit on their black backsides and not to move.
Few of them spoke. They looked at one another with their sombre eyes, and this sufficed as communication. The man in front of Tusselo looked over his shoulder and offered him a strip of dried meat. Tusselo nodded in affirmation of the man’s calm, but refused the food. He still tasted the Roman legionary’s sweat on his sore lips. This reminded him of things he wished to forget, and yet something in him wanted to remember what he wished to forget. He thought that if ever a race of people shared an identity it was the Romans, even down to the consistency and taste of their sweat.
Tusselo alone among his countrymen spoke the enemy’s language. He listened as reports came in, each more optimistic than the last. Word passed from man to man that Varro believed victory was theirs. Apparently, they were punching right through the Gallic centre. They were a moving point of iron that Hannibal was powerless to stop. The plan was progressing so perfectly that Varro ordered men pulled from the wings to the centre, to make them narrower yet and to drive the wedge further into the Carthaginians.
The man beside Tusselo nudged him, ribbed him, and then hissed in his ear, asking what the Romans were saying. Tusselo slammed him with his elbow and spoke from the side of his mouth. ‘They say the hour of their death approaches,’ he said.
This was spoken with cold force and fully convincing, but in truth the Roman news filled him with dread. Yes, he knew Hannibal had said as much would happen, but what if he was wrong? Despite all his faith in the commander, it did seem impossible that they could combat the Roman numbers. If only a quarter of the enemy managed to kill or wound an opponent, Hannibal’s cause was lost. He realized that – strange as it seemed – he alone among the army at that moment was balanced between allegiances. To betray Hannibal, he need do nothing but sit where he was. He gazed out at the distant rear of the Roman army, all those many backs turned towards him. Nearer, before and behind them, swarmed the non-combatants, camp followers, horse boys, and slaves, all engaged in various tasks in support of the army. So many slaves. What people on the earth had ever so thrived, or ever would, on the suffering of others?
Tusselo chose his moment at random. Deserting was no real possibility. His loyalty was not simply to Hannibal, not even simply to his people. His loyalty was first to himself, and he knew his enemy better than anyone. He rose to his feet. He dusted himself off and stretched his neck from side to side. One of the guards shouted something at him and walked towards him, hand on the hilt of his gladius in threat. Tusselo uttered a single word, a clipped syllable that let loose a flurry of motion.
An African seated near the passing Roman pulled a sword from beneath his tunic. He struck the man with a swinging blow to the back of his knees. By the time the Roman fell to the dust the whole 400 were on their feet: first a commotion of brown skin and tribal garments; then a bristling flurry of cloth-covered blades. They cut down all the guards, hacking them to death with the advantage of surprise and pure numbers. They then stood staring at the various non-combatants, some of whom just gawked, most of whom turned and fled in all directions.
Tusselo, knowing he needed to keep the men focused on combat instead of plunder, clucked his tongue and began walking. The others followed him. As they walked they stripped the remaining stray bits of material from their weapons and dropped them to flap and skitter across the ground, propelled by a dry wind. A little way on they came to their shields and picked them up, and most of them managed to regain their horses, which had been hastily abandoned by the boys handling them.
So it was that, 400 strong, they fell upon the Romans’ rear. Not one of the Romans turned to look at them. Not one expected the attack about to come. Tusselo was only a few feet away from his target when that Roman soldier turned his young face round in sudden, short-lived terror.
Before the battle commenced, the commander had sent out a message, in every possible language and to each quadrant of his army, to all the men of his army’s many nations. He said, ‘We are the enemies of Rome, all of us from races beleaguered by the men of the Tiber. Today Hannibal asks you to honour your ancestors with offerings of Roman blood. Follow his call and you cannot help but prevail. When the Gallic horns blast, know that in them is the voice of your commander shouting to you. When you hear cries of anger from any tongue, recognize Hannibal’s roar within them. Know that the clamour of arms clashing is Hannibal’s will transmitted through iron. Even when an enemy opens his mouth, it is our commander whom you will hear. If he yells at you in threat, he is reminding you of your duty. If you twist an enemy on the point of your sword, it is Hannibal’s praise that spurts from his mouth. It is his joy at your deed and his order that you step over the corpse and carry on. Hear the Lion of Carthage in everything, and this day will be ours. Whenever men speak of war in the future, they will speak of today. Let it be your names they utter in awe.’
Fine words, Imco thought, but bravery is more easily spoken of than demonstrated. Perhaps Hannibal contained within himself such brutal confidence, but Imco cared more that morning about saving a life – his own, that is. The years in the army had shaped him into a skilled warrior, often against his will and without his consent. His hands and body and mind moved nimbly during combat, faster than his thinking mind, with instincts of their own. His eyes found weaknesses to press home attacks. Only he knew that he fought simply for self-preservation, so that he might live while some other died in his place. He knew this was not entirely noble. Was it not better to kill for the pure joy of it, fearlessly? That was the type of man the gods rewarded and bred in abundance.
Imco gazed at the veteran killers milling around him. Already the bowed front ranks of the centre of the army were engaged with the enemy, but these soldiers stood about cool and seemingly unconcerned with the chaos soon to descend upon them. They chatted among themselves and calmly stretched. They tested the fit of their armour, scratched absently at their scruffy beards. One man urinated where he stood; another pulled up his garments and squatted to defecate. A few kicks and jibes discouraged him from this. He stood and cursed them, but then agreed to wait and crap on a Latin corpse instead. Many of them were outfitted as Roman legionaries, from captured gear that made them a grotesque parody of their enemies. Some ran their hands up and down their tall spears; a few hefted these and practised the overhand thrust with which they struck; still others tested the feel of the Roman swords in their hands. Imco felt as he had high up in the Alps: as if some mistake had been made a long time back and never corrected. He did not belong in this company. He was sure that the world never had created a more reluctant soldier than he. Never had Fortune played so mischievously with an individual, time and time again placing him in the maw of human folly.
The din grew as the minutes passed. Carthalo’s horsemen galloped past on their way to meet the eastern wing of the Roman horse, a confusion of hooves and battle cries that soon faded into the haze. Still Imco’s company waited. It was nearing the noon hour and the heat of the late-summer sun pressed down upon the heavy air. Clouds of dust blew over them, propelled by blistering gusts, foul-scented like breaths from some giant, rotten-toothed mouth. Sweat poured first from Imco’s armpits, soon after from his forehead, his groin, his feet and hands. The moisture found its way into his eyes and they, in turn, dripped salty tears. From somewhere behind, a shout came for them to tighten up. They did so, each man measuring the small space around him, fitting himself in close to the man beside him, testing the position of their shields. Few spoke now; none stretched or joked; but still they waited.
When the shout came, Imco could not quite make out the order. He felt a press at his back and saw the man before him shift forward. He stepped into the space thus vacated. For a moment, that was all there was to it. He stared at the dented iron of the man’s helmet and saw in it his own reflection. It was too dim to provide details, just a shadow in human form. Then a series of horn blasts finished their orders, driving them into a forward march. Still he did not fully understand. There was nothing in front of them, just a flat stretch off to the side of the main battle, but the horns were insistent. Like the others, he took short, shuffling steps, barely lifting his feet. Forward into nothing. For five minutes and then nearing ten. Forward farther.
Then the horns spoke once more, some turning manoeuvre. Again, Imco did not know how to interpret it. Fortunately, others did. The whole block of men, thousands strong, wheeled around in a slow pivot, one side stationary, the other in full motion, as if swinging on the hinges of a great door. The man behind Imco savaged his heels, stepping on them every few moments. Imco was about to turn and curse him when a horn blasted a halt.
They all stopped in a single breath. Armour clattered to silence. Only then, peering round the man in front of him, did Imco see their goal. They had completed the turn. Before them, less than 100 strides away, ran the long, exposed flank of the enemy army. By their dress it appeared they were not actually Romans but an allied legion. They were tightly packed, part of one tremendous body. Not one of them was turned outward. All had eyes forward. They had no idea they had suddenly become targets of Hannibal’s finest infantrymen. The next order was easy enough to understand. They charged.
Few of the Roman allies seemed to notice the approaching Africans until the last moments. The ones most exposed tried to re-form, but the soldiers next to them were pieces of a much larger formation and they held to their positions. Imco did not know what people these were but he would always remember the sunlike emblem embossed in red upon their white shields. The Carthaginians hit them not at a dead run, but at a slow jog, with a weight of impact that sent shock waves echoing through the close-packed men.
With the moment of first contact all ordered movement ceased. From then on it was pure blood work, different even from what they had trained for. Instead of the phalanx formation – shields locked, thrusting overhand in a deadly bristle of spears – they instantly spread out. Everyone already seemed to understand that this was no ordinary battle. The Latins almost refused to turn and face them, leaving open vulnerable spots at the side of the neck, down the arm, on the outer thigh, portions of the face. There were so many spots to strike and so many targets to choose from that the attackers fanned out in ravenous chaos, each man searching for the best place to enter the fray. Thus Imco was presented with his first enemy more quickly than he might have been otherwise.
There were men all around him, but he and a Latin spotted each other and both knew destiny asked them to contest their lives. Imco – not yet in full possession of his courage – let his spear fly. The man batted it down with his shield and stepped over it. It would not be that easy. Imco’s early swordplay was tentative. He found it hard to find a place to strike. The Latin’s shield was heavy and tall, the sunburst on it most distracting. It covered almost all his body. The high crown of his helmet looked impenetrable. Imco struck small blows, aiming at the face, at the man’s sword arm, at the sword itself, trying to knock it free of his hand. For each attack he made he had to parry one in return, staying close behind his shield, taking a blow that nearly knocked his helmet off, receiving a thrust that just nicked his shoulder blade. He could not help but notice that the man’s cheeks trembled spasmodically and that he closed his eyes each time he struck and that he seemed to suck in more air than he ever expelled. He realized that he might well be duelling with the single soldier more frightened by all of this than he.
At that moment something so strange and questionable happened that Imco would never afterwards tell it to anyone, not even when they praised his murderous prowess. Hot air seemed to gather in a swirl beneath his legs, sweep up under his tunic, and enter him through his arse. His chest billowed, his head hummed, his arms and legs trembled with the power of it. He would later believe that it was a breath of fury sent to him by the beautiful woman, a blessing for poor Imco, a command to prove himself worthy and to live, to live.
Almost by accident – as his own body convulsed away from a thrust – the point of his sword sliced up from the tip of the man’s chin, through both his lips, and on to split his nose into two equal portions. The man howled in anguish, spraying blood over Imco’s head. He ducked beneath it and drove his sword up under the Roman soldier’s chin. He felt it catch in the vertebra at the base of the head and he felt the snap as this gave way and let the blade drive up into the lower portion of the man’s brain. Imco yanked the sword free and watched the man collapse, stunned that he had prevailed, amazed at the way a body lost all dignity in a single instant. The man hit the dirt, eyes opened but staring at the worst of possible views. But Imco was not to contemplate him for long.
Another Latin came at him, shield-smacked him, and sliced at his head. Imco punched him with his own shield, slammed a heel down on his foot, and struck until his blade bit the man at the neck. He then struck several more times just out of rage, until the soldier’s helmet slipped up over his head and Imco’s blade split the man’s skull. Two deaths down and he had warmed to the work. The next one died even faster.
An hour later his arms felt like ropes of molten lead and his legs only supported him by finding footing among the dead below, wedged into the crook of an arm or jammed under someone’s crotch. He had no idea how many he had killed. Nor could he gauge which side was winning the battle. For him the contest was smaller than that, decided moment by moment between him and one other. He kept reminding himself that he was still alive. He knew he could respectably retreat. Part of him almost wished to go on, but he could barely lift his sword. He stepped backward and shouted over his shoulder and another man stepped into his place. A few moments later he knelt in the filth with others from the front, panting, gasping for breath, spitting blood, calling for water. In this way, he found a few moments of rest, although no water appeared.
Imco might have stayed there indefinitely except that the giant named Bomilcar fell upon the resting men with orders that they rejoin the mêlée. ‘Rome dies this day!’ he yelled. ‘Right now, this moment! This moment!’ He roared through them, kicking men to their feet and slamming others with the flat of his hand and even knocking a few across the helmet with his sword. He was a strange sight, simultaneously furious and joyful. ‘Keep your blades wet! Let none of your weapons go thirsty!’
He picked Imco out from the group at random. He clapped his hands down on his shoulders and lifted him to his feet in one heave. He demanded to know Imco’s name. On hearing it he asked, ‘Is your sword dry?’ Imco turned to check, but the giant grabbed him by the chin. ‘A man does not have to check. He knows. A dry sword is like a limp penis. A limp penis never fucks. If you never fuck you are like a woman: you get fucked instead. Understand me?’
Imco barely followed a word the man said, but he nodded.
Bomilcar grinned widely enough for two men. ‘Imco Vaca, we are winning this. Live through the day and Hannibal will hear of your bravery.’ He turned Imco round, shoved him towards the battle, and carried on yelling.
When Imco returned to the front line something had changed. He felt little fear. His body did not jerk and bounce in defensive manoeuvres. He carried a new calm within him, and he knew he was not the only one. The men on either side of him possessed it too. They moved not so much like skirmishing soldiers as like a slow tide enveloping the enemy. Perhaps they were winning. His blade increasingly found its way into the bellies and necks and through the arms of the men facing him. He thought less about each action. He wondered if his beauty would approve of this. Maybe he could find her a gift among the dead, a ring or medallion, perhaps a jewel-encrusted helmet. He could tell when he hit bone and stuck on it, or when the blade slipped between two ribs. He could capture her by surprise, wrap his arm round her belly, and drape her head in soft loops of rope. He began to feel he could sense just which organs he was slicing through by their different textures, by the way the tissues parted before or resisted his blade. Maybe he would buy her something some day, perhaps a string of pearls, in a place far from here, different altogether. His weapon became an extension of his hand, a sharp finger that shredded all that it touched. A quiet island, a single great rock rising up from an azure sea, a tree-covered home to sheep and goats, fig trees and olive groves . . .
At some point his exhaustion bypassed even this merging of gore and fantasy. His head pounded with tight-wrapped pain that appeared from nowhere. He did not retreat to rest this time. He just sat down on the tangle of the dead and half-dead before him, ignoring the stench of blood and viscera and faeces. Without knowing he was going to – or that such a thing was even possible on a battlefield – Imco drifted off into a short slumber. He awoke with his face pressed against that of a Latin, their lips linked as if in passion. Of all the sensations he felt that day, the one that would linger with him the longest and haunt him most was the rough scratch of the man’s beard against his cheek and the taste of the man’s saliva on the tip of his tongue, the knowledge that he could name the very foods this stranger had breakfasted on.
The fighting still raged somewhere. He could hear it, but he had not the strength to seek it out. The world moved. The haze above shifted and thickened and dispersed. Cries broke the air occasionally, although a lower, more muffled anguish hung beneath them now. Looking down at his body he could not tell where his parts ended and another man’s began. He was entwined with all of them. Together they created a new organism, an enormous being composed of dead and dying flesh, a thing that shifted with a million tiny, almost imperceptible motions. Squelching, sliding, settling, liquids pooling, eyes glazing. The struggles of wounded men translated through hundreds of bodies, all touching as they were, interwoven into some ghastly stitch, part of the carpet of Cannae.
And still he could not say who would win the day. Indeed, he found it quite possible that they had all lost, living and dead of whatever nation. He did not know whether he should be proud or disgraced, whether he had fought well or like a coward. It all seemed the same, a single nightmare named differently by different men but the same in substance. He wanted badly, very badly, to see his beauty again.
How surprised he was when she eventually appeared.
On the Roman side, the signs should have been obvious from the start. Usually the manipular formation of the legions allowed them amazing fluidity. They held together like a weave of men at just the right distance apart, with spaces enough for fatigued soldiers to retreat and allow the waiting replacements to come forward into the fray. But from the moment Varro ordered the maniples drawn together this give-and-flow vanished. The momentum of the army was so great and the soldiers packed together so tightly that anyone who sank down beneath injury was soon trodden on, first by a single foot and then another and then countless others. They died a suffocating death, feet grinding against the backs of their ankles, up their legs, and over their torsos, the flesh and bone of them pounded into the soil they were defending.
Publius Scipio would never forgive himself for not realizing sooner that the whole conflict was a choreographed sacrifice of massive proportions. He spent the early parts of the battle mounted, shouting courage to his infantrymen, himself taking strength from the resolute expressions on their innumerable faces. At some point his horse went lame from an unseen injury, refusing to move farther and shifting from foot to foot as if standing on a giant, red-hot skillet. Publius dismounted. To his surprise, the horse bolted, churning through the mass of men in a crazed effort to flee.
From then on, the tribune was one with his men. His legion was close to the centre of the Roman army. He took up a position near the rear of the soldiers entrusted to him, from which he could follow the flow of events and issue orders if necessary. With each passing hour, he found himself nearer and nearer the front. The forward progress of the army continued, but instead of pressing through the foe they increasingly seemed to disappear into them. By the middle hours of the afternoon, the whole legion ahead of his had vanished. His men became the front and, unable to retreat, they fought like wild animals with their backs to a wall.
The fighting was beyond all norms. There seemed to be no pauses in the enemy’s attack. The blond giants came at them like the demons of the bitter north that they were. They were all motion, roaring, white skin splattered with blood, their swords swinging in wild arcs. His men – compact, tight, disciplined – cut them down in great numbers. But where the Romans were packed tight, the Gauls were just the opposite. They were a mob as tumultuous as the sea in storm, always throwing new waves of men and sucking back others to rest. Against this, his men could only fight until they fell from pure exhaustion.
Caught up in the conflict, shouting orders and rallying his men, Publius forgot about the danger he himself was in and how his position required more caution. He fought in the ranks as he had been taught in boyhood, so savagely for so long that he could not lift his eyes to the bigger picture for some time. Publius might have died in the fray if his companion, Laelius, had not jammed his fingers down the rim of his breastplate and yanked him back. For a moment he stumbled backwards, arms grasping the air before him. A most undignified display. When he finally regained his footing, he turned to give Laelius a tongue-lashing, but the man would have none of it. He pulled Publius up onto a hillock surrounding an old tree stump. He clamped his fingers across the tribune’s jaw and indicated that he should look forward, above the mêlée, at a figure in the middle distance, among the enemy.
This man was raised above the rest by almost his full height, standing perhaps on a pile of bodies or an overturned cart. Several guards ringed him, lower than he but each with a shield and spear at the ready. For a few moments he surveyed the scene before him. Then, unexpectedly, he burst out with a barrage of words. Publius could not make them out, but he almost thought he heard the boom of them cut through the din. A moment later, his vision lifted again and took in the whole scene before him. Publius knew without a doubt that this was Hannibal.
‘A pilum!’ the tribune yelled. ‘Give me a pilum!’
‘Do not be stupid!’ Laelius said. ‘You’re not Achilles; you’d never reach him. Don’t look at him, Publius; look instead at what he sees!’
Publius did as requested, first looking again at the commander, then trying to follow his gaze back over the Romans, out on either side. Doing this, he realized almost instantly what Laelius must already have gathered. The near edge of the army showed it clearly, and, though he could not make out the other edge, the signs he could see indicated that the situation there was just the same. They were hemmed in on at least three sides. The struggle now was not one for ultimate victory. It was a fight to survive.
The next few hours passed in a singular effort at odds with the collective mind of the army. Publius tried to turn as many men as he could towards the wings, to have them punch a hole out of the side of the column instead of through the front. Hannibal’s troops could not be that deep. The tribune could not find a signaller to issue orders by horn, so instead he yelled himself hoarse. He elbowed his way through the throng, shoving and punching to get the soldiers’ attention. He grasped men by the shoulders and shouted right into their faces.
With Laelius at his side, echoing his orders, Publius did manage to lead a turn among the troops. He slowly began to feel a shift in the collective body. The late hours of the afternoon found him at the head of the new movement, cutting a bloody path through a line of Iberians three deep. For a moment in the fighting Publius was taken by a vision of beauty – that of the splashes of blood on the Iberians’ white tunics, every possible variety of swirl and slash, a million variations on red and brown and dark almost to black. He had a notion that he would like to keep one of these tunics as a souvenir, a wall hanging to be viewed at leisure, a story to be read through close study.
They poured forward, slashing and screaming, for a good distance thinking they were still fighting the enemy, only slowly realizing that their way was clogged not by enemy warriors but by dead bodies piled three and four deep. It was such an overwhelming relief to be freed that Publius believed the whole of the army would gush out after him. He found rising ground in the distance and set out for it. He tried to sheathe his sword but found he could not do so. It was bent twice along its length, in different directions, no straighter than any stick he might have snatched up from the ground. He ran with it in hand.
Small bands and lone Numidians plagued them much of the way, tormenting them for the pleasure of it. When he reached the slope, Publius turned round and viewed the chaos he had fled. He had not drained the centre, as he had hoped to do. Indeed, the breach his men had created was all but sealed now. The entirety of it was finally clear to him, painfully, tragically obvious. Hannibal had planned it all. Each and every thing the Roman forces strove to do had played into his hands. As they had planned, they punched through the Gauls and Iberians in the middle; but Hannibal had wished for just that move. He had cleared the cavalry from either side of them so that as the wedge pushed forward his most veteran troops swung in upon either side. Then, once the Carthaginian cavalry had vanquished their counterparts, they returned and fell upon the Roman rear. And that was it. After that it was just butchery. A series of masterstrokes. An army of 90,000 had been completely surrounded by a lesser force in the space of a few hours. They were immobile, the vast mass of them stuck in the middle, able to do nothing but await the moment when their lives were cut out of them.
Varro rode towards him at a canter, his closest attendants mounted and close behind him, many of them glancing again and again over their shoulders, as if they feared the whole of the enemy’s army would turn to follow them. The consul gave no indication that he planned to speak to the tribune, but Publius darted in front of him, snatched his horse’s reins, and stopped him.
‘What news of Paullus?’ he asked. ‘Where is the other consul?’
Varro fixed on him a momentary gaze of utter loathing. ‘Where do you think? He’s back on that field. Dead. As is Rome’s future. Out of my way!’
Publius jumped back as the consul swatted at him. He let the man ride away, shocked as much by his words and attitude as by anything he had seen that day. He looked back at the battlefield and, amazingly, all was as it had been before. Men still died in their hundreds and thousands. It took all of his discipline to move him on into action. Nothing could be done for the men trapped in the death circle, though he would have given his life to save them. He shouted to those who had escaped with him and those who trailed behind. He directed them towards Canusium.
They reached the town late that evening, finding it alight with torches and open to them. The guards native to the place stood nervously, looking out beyond the straggling line of soldiers in the clear-eyed dread they all felt – fear of Hannibal’s pursuit. Battered soldiers occupied every available inch. Laelius went off to locate other officers. Publius never even paused to catch his breath from the long march. He moved straight in among the men, speaking to them with what cheer he could muster, commending them for surviving the day, asking after their leaders.
He did all this in a fog, however. He barely heard the soldiers’ responses. He functioned as if another being altogether propelled him, something intelligent enough to move his body and form words with his mouth. But the true Publius Scipio occupied a more confused space. He saw again images of the day’s bloodshed superimposed on the world before him. He heard in the din the voice of his father and remembered the many lessons his father had tried to teach him in preparation for his manly duties. To think of those quiet moments now cut him with a pain more acute than any of the numb aches of his body. What a child he had been! Up until this very morning he had known nothing! Even now he knew nothing! The great awakening that hammered at his head was the simple knowledge of his ignorance; the awesome possibility that the world might never be as he imagined and that he could never again occupy it with a child’s vain authority.
Barely had the tribune dropped for a moment of rest when he was called again, with news that woke him from his stupor.
Laelius ran to him panting. ‘They’re talking of abandoning the country.’
‘Who?’
‘The younger Fabius Maximus, Lucius Bibulus, Appius Pulcher . . . All the tribunes I could find. They’re talking of turning to the sea and seeking refuge—’
Before he could finish, Publius jumped to his feet. ‘Take me to them.’
The officers had gathered in a hall used for public debates. Publius strode into it without a plan. In his first glance at the gathered officers he saw the defeat in their faces, the shame of conspiring men. He still carried his battered sword unsheathed. With the weapon upraised, he shouldered through the company towards the centre. The former dictator’s son was speaking, but Publius silenced him by shouting his name. The words that followed came out of him before thought, propelled by a strange mixture of fury and calm. Despite all the defeat and death he had seen that day, he felt a throbbing serenity inside him. In seeing these men’s faces he was reminded that nothing mattered now save the certainty of honour. There was so little else that one could rely on in the world.
‘Fabius Maximus!’ he said. ‘I worked under your father. I know his greatness despite all those who malign him. Do you think he would ever consider the plan you here devise? Have you all forgotten yourselves? If so, then Rome truly died today. We are no more than the corpse; your words, the first stink of decay.’
The younger Fabius began to explain himself, but Publius brought his sword hand down and punched him square on the mouth. The man dropped like a deadweight, unconscious.
‘I swear to you all,’ Publius said, ‘that I will allow no man to abandon our country, nor will I betray it myself! I swear a dying oath to Rome. If ever I fail it, may Jupiter bring down upon me a shameful death. May he destroy my family honour and cast all I possess into the hungry mouths of my enemies. I swear this; who among you swear with me? And who among you die on my sword?’
Having spoken, he stood surrounded by a room full of mutinous officers, his single blade raised against them. Laelius flanked him, his hand in a white-knuckled grip round the hilt of his sword. But the others did not attack. Instead they each and all lowered their eyes. As he listened to first one man and then another take the oath, Publius told himself that this was not the end, not of the war, not of his nation. The sun would rise tomorrow. The war would carry on. Publius Scipio had not died at Cannae as he might. Instead he recognized his life’s greatest challenge. He would meet Hannibal again. He was sure of it.
Aradna would have forgotten about the young Carthaginian soldier if she had not stumbled upon him in the festering, open-air graveyard of Cannae. She and her band and other bands of camp followers rose before the dawn and greeted the sun at the edge of the battlefield. Usually, they would have swarmed through the dead at the first tentative light, but the sight before them was an unusual horror. The carnage of the day before was past belief. Looking upon the great, jutting, tangled, shadowed devastation, none of them dared enter. Moans filled the air with a low, unnatural tone of anguish. Even the least superstitious among the camp followers feared to tread carelessly among so many soulless creatures. The various afterworlds to which these men hurtled headlong could only hold so many new souls. Surely many of them lingered on this plain, angry at their lot and dangerous to the living.
Aradna, standing to the east of the field, felt the heat of the sun touch the back of her head and slant down her shoulders. She watched as the first touches of gold illuminated portions of the dead and crept down into crevices and gashes, across faces and private parts alike. The human form lost all reason in the jumble. Arms and legs twisted at angles impossible for the living, reaching up from the piles of corpses three, four, and sometimes even more bodies deep. Wounds lay open to flies. Slivers of bone jutted into the air. Flesh had taken on infinite coloration: shades of blue and purple, white as bright ivory, yellow and brown and sometimes strangely crimson. On several occasions Aradna’s eyes tricked her into believing that among the human forms were the half-roasted carcasses of swine. But this was, of course, not the case. It was just that some men, in death, failed to look human. The view was no better in the light than before, save that now the carnage was betrayed for what it was – nothing ghostly, just the barbarous work of men on a scale never seen before. This, at least, was something the camp followers understood. They began their labour.
Why she stopped above the young soldier she could not later say, except to explain that she often had to pause that day and steady herself and take shallow breaths. He was buried to mid-torso in the arms and limbs of others. They propped him up so that he was almost vertical, with his head tilted back. Grime caked his face, sweat and blood and dirt commingled into a mask all men shared alike. His mouth gaped open to the air like so many others. A fly buzzed about the cavity, landing on his teeth, crawling over his lips and around the rim of his nostrils. Recognition crept into her slowly. She stared at his face so long that the strange, naked soldier she had met twice and still thought about occasionally emerged from beneath the mask. His features slowly aligned themselves into shapes and contours she recognized. She bent close to him, thinking him dead and feeling no threat from a dead man, touched by curiosity and the slightest notion of sadness.
The soldier grunted, stirred a little, and raised an arm partway up from the muck. That was the first indication she had that he lived. She set down the sack she had already stuffed full with items of jewellery and coins and sacred tokens, jewelled daggers and gilded bits prised from helmets and armour, anything that struck her as valuable in relation to its weight and size. She sat on top of her treasure and reached out a hand towards the man. The flesh at his neck was warm to the touch. She found a pulse and felt it beat beneath her fingers. He might have been unconscious, but the life inside him still seemed strong. She pulled her hand away and sat a while longer, studying him. Already she felt a strange intimacy between them. She had touched his flesh. She stared at him now as he really was, unconscious of her. What, she asked herself, could she learn of this man from his sleeping face?
She did not have time to consider this for too long. The surviving soldiers were up now, moving in small groups across the battlefield. They scavenged also, but they went armed. Judging by the occasional cries of pain, she knew they were despatching the wounded: the enemy certainly, but also some of their own if they believed them beyond mending. What might they make of the soldier before her?
Aware that she could only do what she wanted to if she did not think about it fully, Aradna put the consequences out of her mind and searched out the men of her band. With their bewildered aid, she wrenched the soldier free from the rest and dragged him to their camp. They did not question her; each in his own way loved her. In this they were more like family than anyone she had known since childhood. She thanked them and said no more and with her gestures warned them to be still if they wished to stay near the light of her favour.
That evening she sat beside the soldier beneath her hide shelter. He still slept soundly, snoring now that he was on his back.
‘Never has a man been so tired,’ she muttered. ‘Only men can sleep so deeply.’
She unbuckled his armour, lifted it from him, and set it to the side. She peeled his tunic away from his flesh. The fabric was stiff with dried sweat and grime, with blood, though she did not know whether it was his or other men’s. She probed him with her fingers, searching for wounds. And there were many: cuts all over his arms and legs, a piercing wound under his collarbone, a gash in one of his nostrils. Bruises bloomed over every inch of him. These blood wounds must have drained his soul force terribly, but to her eyes none seemed fatal.
Aradna snatched the torch up and held it between them. His eyes cracked open and seemed to focus on the hide above him. She believed she saw conscious thought in his gaze, but perhaps this was not so. He closed his eyes again and the rhythm of his slumber returned.
She carried on with her work. She dipped a cloth in herbed water and gently touched it to his face. She held the fabric there for a moment. When he did not react, she drew it across his forehead, wiping away the grime to reveal the rich, sun-browned skin beneath. As she peeled away the concealing layers, the soldier’s face emerged. He had a small mouth, a somewhat wide forehead, and a perfectly formed nose, evenly placed and uniform, save for the scab of the small cut. His eyes pressed against the thin skin of their lids in such a way that she believed she could make out their character. She had to lean close to verify her impression, so near that she held her breath for fear that he would feel it brushing against his moist skin. Still she saw the same thing. His eyes, they were gentle.
During this process the old woman, Atneh, had come over to the shelter and peered in several times. On each occasion she turned away without speaking and sat by the fire. Aradna knew Atneh had asked that the men stay near in case the soldier woke up in a rage. She fed them a soup she cooked on occasion, made from ingredients she did not name and about which they did not ask. They all sat quietly and talked over their departure on the coming morning. They were loaded beyond their capacity; best to make for the coast and on to whatever destination they chose after that. Eventually, Atneh squatted beside the younger woman and watched her for some time in silence.
‘I never thought I would see that look on your face,’ Atneh said.
‘What?’ Aradna asked. She felt her cheeks flush and she turned her face away.
‘We women are all fools in our youth. I was. My mother was before me. The gods wish it, so that they may sport with us. Men are fools as well, but that is different . . . Women more often grow to wisdom. I had hoped that was true of you. I see I was mistaken.’
‘I don’t know what you speak of.’
‘Yes, you do. Don’t lie to me. It’s useless and insults us both.’
Aradna said, ‘Aunt, it’s just that his face isn’t like other men’s. In sleep he looks like a boy I would choose as a son, as a brother.’
This did not move the old woman. ‘Leave him,’ she said. ‘Tomorrow we go; he doesn’t. Who can judge a man by his face? Better to judge him by his genitals and be wary of what hangs there. This one will bring you nothing but trouble. Do you hear? Leave him and carry on towards your goal. What is it you want of life?’
‘Very little,’ Aradna said.
‘But say it to me. What do you want? What are the things you told me in confidence? Say them again.’
Aradna shook her head. ‘Very little,’ she repeated. ‘I want to go home to Father’s island. I want to herd goats on the hills and watch boats pass at a distance. I want a quiet corner of the world away from all this. Every day I want a little less . . . Aunt, I just want peace.’
The old woman nodded through this, solemn, her eyes fixed on the young woman and full of sadness. ‘Tell me, then: what place has this murderer on that island? Hmm? Do you truly think this killer of Romans, this African, would allow you the peace you have earned? Be no fool, dear one. Leave this man. He lives. That’s more than he deserves.’
Aradna could not dispute any of this. She knew Atneh was right, and yet she could not help making one last protest. ‘Aunt, several times already I have met this man. Twice before and now yet again. What does it mean that I found him a third time?’
The old woman answered quickly, struggling to her feet in the process. ‘It means you should have no doubt. He’s more devious than he looks. Perhaps he’s entrapped you in a spell. Either way, leave him.’
And so she did. The next morning, she dragged away everything that she could from Cannae on a sledge harnessed to her back. They were to return to the coast, where, she believed, she would arrange passage across the sea to Greece. She was going home. Only a fool would do otherwise. It wasn’t until late that day that she realized she did not know the man’s name. Three times now, Fortune had brought them together, but she could not think of him by name.
Hannibal made sure that the body was tended in a manner commensurate with the quality of the man. He helped the attendants lay him out on the beam. He wound ribbons of white cloth round his ankles and across the groin, over the arms at the elbows and across his forehead, securing him into a rigid, disciplined posture. An officer’s body should not be seen to flop about like others. He deserved better than that. That was why his innards had been scooped up from where they had escaped him, cleaned, replaced, and sewn into the cavity that housed them. Hannibal watched as the priests anointed his flesh with fragrant oils and tucked a small charm bag beneath the fold of cloth near his hands. Mandarbal entered once all this had been concluded and spoke his strange words over the corpse. He dotted the man’s forehead and shoulders, hands and feet with his warm blood, drawn just moments before from a slit in the priest’s wrist.
After Mandarbal departed, the commander dropped to his knees and rested his forehead against his friend’s chest and murmured the man’s name. Bostar. He repeated it softly, over and over again, a single word made into a prayer and a speech, a confession and an apology. He spoke as if he were alone with his deceased secretary, but his remaining officers rimmed the walls of the council tent. The last twenty-four hours had been filled with revelry at their victory, but the aftermath of the battle provided no respite from toil. There had been, and still were, a thousand different matters to attend to. This pause to mourn the passing of one of their own provided for most of them the first hushed moment for reflection.
Each of them had been wounded in some way. Maharbal had been hacked down to the bone of his lower leg with a dullish sword. He could barely stand, but claimed that he did not notice the injury when mounted. Bomilcar bore a gash across his forehead where a passing spear point had carried away a strip of flesh. He would wear the scar of it ever after, the first point on his massive visage that any newcomer’s eyes settled on. He joked that he could tap the bone of his skull directly to clear his muddled head. Monomachus’ arms were battered with bruised, oozing wounds, and he wore a cloth wrapped round his left hand, the material tainted a reddish brown where he had received the point of a dart thrown at close range. Carthalo lay on a cot in his tent, a spear wound in his thigh. Several lesser officers stood or sat about the chamber as their injuries allowed.
Mago watched his brother with a pained expression that had nothing to do with the physical. By the grace of Baal, he had survived the battle largely unscathed. He and his handful of attendants had fought near the front ranks of Gauls. His voice was still raw from all the yelling, from his crazed attempt to manage the wild energy of the barbarians, to control their retreat and stay alive and watch Hannibal close the jaws of his trap. In the hours of battle, moment after chaotic moment passed as if it might be his last, each instant laced with a hundred ways for him to die. He had personally killed more men than he could count. He had stepped back, always at the edge of the retreat, receding before the Roman line as it trod over his soldiers’ bodies.
One of his guards had been impaled beneath the chin by a Roman spear. The weapon struck so hard that Mago, standing just beside him, heard the vertebrae snap under the pressure and saw how strangely the man’s head hung from the spear point, attached to the body by tendrils of flesh but no longer connected to the framework hidden beneath. He still carried the sickening image in his head, ready to impose itself on any person walking past, any face he looked at. Nor was it the only disturbing image. He tried to flush these out with reasoned thought and celebration, but as ever he hid within himself the strange duality of character he had always found in battle. He was both inordinately skilled at it and absurdly haunted by it afterwards. Strangely, it was he and Hannibal – the two most slightly injured – who seemed most troubled.
Hannibal was still whispering the dead man’s name when Gemel stepped into the tent. He had assisted the commander for some years now, but he seemed nervous in his new role as Bostar’s replacement, clumsy in it and hesitant in his speech. He lowered his head and stood in silence.
But Hannibal must have sensed his presence. Without lifting his head he asked, ‘What do we know for certain?’
Gemel glanced around at the others, but they all knew whom the commander addressed and with what question. ‘We can be sure of little, sir,’ he began. ‘The Gauls suffered most. They are still counting, but they may have lost more than four thousand. We cannot account for two thousand Iberian and African troops, and we lost at least two hundred from the combined cavalry. Commander, I am sure of none of these figures. This is just the best we could gather throughout the day.’
‘And of the enemy?’
‘Your estimate, sir, would surpass mine in accuracy. We’ve captured a full twenty thousand – many of them wounded and dying – and taken both their camps. Some hid in Cannae itself. We are still rounding them up. A few escaped to Canusium and Venusia—’
Hannibal lifted his head. ‘Just give me numbers, Gemel, a simple tally.’
‘The best figure I can give this morning comes from the Romans themselves. They say they were ninety thousand strong. Twenty thousand of these we captured. Perhaps another ten thousand escaped us. So . . . This field may well be the death of sixty thousand of them.’
Maharbal could not help but speak up. ‘Do you hear that, Hannibal? Think of it – sixty thousand! And the figure may be higher than that! Let me do what I proposed earlier. My men could ride before the dawn. Do not consider me injured—’
‘I’ve already answered you, Maharbal,’ Hannibal said. He touched on the horseman with his one-eyed gaze, briefly. ‘I rejoice that you are so hungry to sack Rome. But he is a fool who does not place himself within a framework of other men’s actions. We are not the first to conquer Roman legions on their own land. The Gauls sacked the city of Rome and had their way with her as if she were a whore. They left loaded with plunder and stories of their own greatness. But what did it come to? Rome went on. The Romans crept back into their city and built it again and spread their power and now have little to fear from the Gauls except annoyance.’
‘We are not barbarians,’ Maharbal said. ‘Their story is not the same as ours.’
‘Pyrrhus of Epirus did battle here—’
‘Nor are you Pyrrhus!’ Maharbal cut in. ‘He knew how to win a victory, but not how to use one. Do not make a different form of the same mistake.’
Hannibal glanced up at him again, studying him as he might a stranger who had spoken out of turn. But after a moment he seemed to find the man he recognized and spoke to him with tired patience. ‘Pyrrhus defeated Rome on the battlefield,’ he said, ‘a deed that earns him my respect. Again and again he emerged victorious, but still he gained no foothold. Though he won, he lost. Rome replaced its soldiers like the Hydra replacing heads. That’s what Pyrrhus never understood. Rome always has more men. Not because their women push them out of the womb any faster, but because they use the wombs of others. If they run low, they call upon their municipal cities, upon the colonies, and, beyond that. upon the allied states. It is that that gives them power. Sever those heads, and the picture is very different. That is something Pyrrhus never succeeded at. He never isolated the Romans. That is the key, to cut them off from the outside world, hack at her bonds with her neighbours. This done, Rome is just a city like any other. And then any city – not only Carthage – may deal with her as she deserves. Rome will find herself the most hated creature the world has known. This, Maharbal, is as true today as when I first explained it to you. I know my mind on this. I will strike Rome not with the greatest force, but with just the right blows to find vulnerable flesh.’
He indicated this with the edge of his hand, cutting the air before him. Then, remembering the body of his friend, he pulled his hand back. ‘This talk is pounding my head to pain. Gemel, have they found the slain consul yet?’
‘No. He may’ve been stripped by camp followers already.’
‘Keep looking for him. He deserves an honourable burial, even if he was a fool. And see to it that the allied prisoners aren’t mistreated tonight. I’ll speak to them tomorrow morning. I want to send them home to their people friends instead of enemies. Have special presents sent to the Gauls, along with wine and heaps of praise and the cuts of meat they most favour. And Gemel, have careful counts for me before the dawn.’
As the secretary withdrew, Monomachus said, ‘The gods, too, deserve praise for our victory. With your permission, I’ll select a hundred Romans from the prisoners. We should torture them in the old ways, and offer sacrifices—’
‘No. We offered enough sacrifices yesterday. And what is this man lying before me if not a sacrifice?’
This did not move Monomachus. ‘You know I’m sworn to Moloch. I can feel his hunger. This battle did not sate him.’
‘Don’t talk to me of this.’
‘In your father’s time, we—’
‘Stop!’ Hannibal snapped to his feet. ‘Have all my generals gone mad? There will be no sacrifice! We will not march on Rome and this is not my father’s time! You are my councillor only as long as I tolerate you and that may not be much longer. Leave me now. All of you. Go!’
Monomachus turned away without comment and filed out with the others. Mago started to leave also, but Hannibal stayed him with a glance.
Alone with his brother, the commander asked, ‘Why is my heart so troubled? I should rejoice, but instead I feel a new weight draped over my shoulders. I should honour my generals with praise; instead, I only find fault with them. I craved Roman blood for so many years; yet I do not want another victory like this. Mago, when I looked upon Bostar’s face it was as if I were looking at yours, or at my own.’
‘I know,’ Mago said, ‘or I upon yours.’
‘This victory was not worth his life. I would undo it all to have him back. How strange, my brother, that a man like me, who wants only to defeat his enemy . . . How strange that in mourning I would trade everything that this companion might live.’
‘No good can come from talking so,’ Mago said. ‘You will not have to look upon a field like Cannae again. You will not have to bury your brothers. Surely, this is the end of war. Never will the world see another day like this. That is what you have accomplished. Bostar would reverse nothing that happened here.’
Hannibal placed his fingers on the wood of the funeral table and pressed till his fingertips went white. ‘I know nothing of what Bostar thinks now. By the gods, I want to win this! It is all the work of my own hands, but at moments I look down and realize that I’m seated on a monster fouler than anything I could have conceived. Sixty thousand of them dead? Sometimes I wonder who is more bound to Moloch – Monomachus, or myself.’
Hannibal dismissed the thought with a tic that upset and then released the muscles of one side of his face. Mago had noticed this tic several times in the past few weeks. He did not care for it, for during it Hannibal’s face was briefly not his own. It was an ugly mask, similar to his, but different in disturbing ways. One of the torches began sputtering, a few loud bursts of oil combusting. Mago turned and watched it, wary lest an accidental blaze disturb the solemnity of the chamber. ‘You surprise me, brother,’ he said. ‘Do you pity yourself now, at the moment of your greatest glory?’
‘I do not pity myself,’ the commander said. ‘I know no pity. Neither do I yet have the word for what I feel. Even the gods in whose names we fight remind us not to think of war always. Think of Anath. After the defeat of Yam she hosted a feast in Baal’s honour. When the gods were all assembled, she slammed the doors closed and began to slay everyone. She would have killed them all, for they had all betrayed Baal in the earlier war. You remember who stopped her?’
‘Baal himself. He convinced her that the bloodshed had gone on long enough and that a time of peace and forgiveness was needed.’
‘Just so . . .’ The tic disfigured Hannibal’s face again. He closed his eyes and for some time seemed to focus only on his breathing. Watching his visage grow calm, Mago was reminded of the clay masks street players wore during the winter months. They were vague, almost featureless faces that hinted at human attributes without rendering the details. They betrayed no emotion, and one could tell the tenor of the play only by listening and watching that much more carefully. Even as a child he had found it strange that the same mask could at one moment indicate mirth, and in the very next embody sorrow. He was, then, both surprised and not surprised by what his brother said next.
‘Let us forget this conversation,’ Hannibal said, opening his eyes and straightening to his full height. ‘It does nobody any good and we’ve much to attend to. Here is what we do, brother. You must go to Carthage on my behalf . . .’
Never before had Rome endured so dreadful an hour. Each of the previous battles had struck its blow, but Cannae beggared belief. For days after the first news of the disaster trickled in, the people had no clear understanding of any of it. Just who had been killed, who captured, and who spared? Was there an army left? Was Hannibal already beating a path towards them with gleaming eyes? Was he truly, truly unstoppable? Questions multiplied with few answers rising to match them. Rome’s people knew only that every aspect of their lives had been altered; now everything was at risk of imminent destruction. The streets and the Forum became roiling sluice-ways of despair. The living and the dead were mourned simultaneously, in a jumble, for there seemed no way of separating the two.
On the suggestion of Fabius Maximus, horsemen rode out along the Via Appia and Via Latina to gather what news they could from the battered survivors – if any could be found. The gates to the city slammed shut behind them. All believed that Hannibal would come for them now. What object could there be but the destruction of Rome itself? The death of her men, the despoiling of her women, the theft of her riches: what greater temptation for the monsters of Carthage? For a people so buoyed by their enslavement of others, it was easy to imagine the trials ahead for them should the barbarians breach the gates. Masters crouched beside servants and wept with them and made declarations never heard before and whispered apologies previously inconceivable. All awaited the coming tempest.
Amazing, then, barely believable, mysterious . . . that Hannibal did not appear on the horizon. Yes, the details that reached them were horrendous, the death toll shocking, no portion of the news fair or welcome . . . but Hannibal did not come. He did not come. And with the passing of days into weeks and more weeks, people’s thoughts turned from impending doom to other matters. Amid the fervour of war and hope in the city as Paullus and Varro marched out, none had taken note that prodigies had been occurring with unusual frequency. In the sealed, waiting city these events were recalled.
There had been lightning strikes at the Atrium Publicum in the Capitol, as also upon the shrine of Vulcan and the temple of Vacuna and upon the stones of the road in the Sabine district. This latter had left a gaping hole at the centre of a crossroads, inside which a child found the handle of an ancient’s dagger. There had been other strikes on lonely spots that set the hills on fire. In a village in the far south, a flaming goat ran through the street calling out, ‘Hurrah, hurrah!’ It was assumed that the creature had likewise been the victim of a malicious lightning strike, though there were no witnesses to this.
All this had taken place the previous year. As the new year dawned, the land seemed rife with signs. The earth split and peeled and offered up amazements that proved time and again that the natural order had been reversed. At Mantua there was a swamp that captured and held the overflow from the River Mincius. It was a foul place even in the best of times, damp and smelling of decay, rich in substance and yet somehow rank with death as well. All this was of nature’s own design. But a man chanced upon the place one twilight to find that the waters had turned to blood: not just in colour but also in substance, thick and congealed and metallic in his nostrils, as if the earth itself bled like humans.
At Spoletium, a woman awoke one day changed into a man. At Hadria, white forms were seen floating in the sky. Great numbers of dead fish washed ashore near Brundisium. And some said that the tunic on the statue of Mars at Praeneste protruded each sunset under pressure from the god’s great, granite erection. Rumours to explain this flew as fast and chaotic as bats in the night sky. Some said the god was instructing them to procreate. Still others suggested that they should look to a leader endowed with a similar length and regularity. Before long the notion took hold that the local whores had sold themselves into the employ of Carthage. They had taken to servicing the god to distract him from the war effort. Reliable persons, however, never confirmed this, so this tale was best considered with scepticism.
For augury it was an abundant season, and the results fuelled the deepening suspicion that the gods abhorred the Roman cause. The city had forgotten to honour them properly. That was why this Carthaginian conqueror prevailed so easily against them. The people responded according to the advice of the magistrates and priests. An edict was issued for a period of prayer to all the gods of Rome, lest one go neglected and feel slighted. Lambs were sacrificed, fat ones with fine coats and handsome faces. Their blood ran freely to appease the gods. Their entrails betrayed more omens too bleakly numerous to detail, so the priests looked to still darker measures. Two Gallic slaves were publicly beheaded in an elaborate offering to Apollo. It was rumoured that even older rites were enacted across the Tiber at night, but what went on over there had no place in the public record. Some people even turned to soothsayers – unusual for a Roman as such a practice was more Greek in nature – and these questionable persons produced all sorts of varied and contradictory advice. Some people hammered nails into sacred objects and offered them at the gods’ temples; others left food outside their houses for certain animals or washed with a single hand only, refrained from saying certain words, or pricked their skin with needles and licked the blood clean.
Though some believed that these practices improved their fortunes, others found that unnatural incidents proceeded unabated. It was truly a volatile time, in which reason was hard to come by and quiet voices seldom heard. Two of the Vestal Virgins were discovered in unchaste acts. One killed herself with a dagger; the other had not the courage to take her own life but was instead buried alive by a raging mob. Gangs of youths swarmed the streets, flagellating beggars and rooting out poor souls they named as spies for Carthage. For weeks after the news from Cannae, the soldiers’ widows walked the streets in tears, dragging their fingernails across their faces and arms and chests. Their mourning was so disruptive that the Senate roused itself to action. They banned any display of sorrow, calling it treasonous and un-Roman, and conscripted the raucous youths to police the ban.
And yet through all this turmoil and distress not a single voice of prominence suggested settlement. Rome sent no envoys to treat with the Carthaginian, nor did the city receive his messengers with anything but scorn. Without even discussing the matter, the citizens of Rome chose ultimate war over a compromised peace. They would live by their own rules, or they would perish.