Fortune's Favorites

by Colleen McCullough

  But they were good men and ably served by good centurions, those veteran Roman legions Pompey led; they fought back bravely, though their mouths gaped from lack of water and a terrible dismay had filled their hearts because someone had outgeneraled their lovely young man, and they hadn't thought there was anyone alive could do that. So Pompey and his legates managed in the end to form their square, and somehow even to pitch a camp.

  At dusk Sertorius drew off, left them to finish the camp amid mountainous heaps of dead. And amid jeers and boos which now came not only from Sertorius's soldiers, but also from the citizens of Lauro. Pompey couldn't even escape to weep in private, found himself too mortified to throw his scarlet general's cape over his head and weep beneath its cover. Instead he forced himself to move here and there with smiles and encouraging words, cheering the parched men up, trying to think where he might find water, unable to think how he might extricate himself from shame.

  In the first light of dawn he sent to Sertorius and asked for time to dispose of his dead. His request was granted with sufficient generosity to enable him to shift his camp clear of the reeking field, and to a site well provided with potable water. But then a black depression descended upon him and he left it to his legates to count and bury the dead in deep pits and trenches; there was no timber nearby for burning, no oil either. As they toiled he withdrew to his command tent while his uninjured men-terribly, terribly few-constructed a stout camp around him to keep Sertorius at bay after the armistice was ended. Not until sunset, the battle now a day into the past, did Afranius venture to seek an audience. He came alone.

  "It will be the nundinae before we're finished with the burial details," said the senior legate in a matter-of-fact voice.

  The general spoke, equally matter-of-fact. "How many dead are there, Afranius?"

  "Ten thousand foot, seven hundred horse."

  "Wounded?"

  "Five thousand fairly seriously, almost everybody else with cuts or bruises or scratches. Those troopers who lived are all right, but they're short of mounts. Sertorius preferred to kill their horses."

  "That means I'm down to four legions of foot-one legion of which is seriously wounded-and eight hundred troopers who cannot all be provided with horses."

  "Yes."

  "He whipped me like a cur."

  Afranius said nothing, only looked at the leather wall of the tent with expressionless eyes.

  "He's Gaius Marius's cousin, isn't he?"

  "That's right."

  "I suppose that accounts for it."

  "I suppose it does."

  Nothing more was said for quite a long time. Pompey broke the silence. "How can I explain this to the Senate?" It came out half whisper, half whimper.

  Afranius transferred his gaze from the tent wall to his commander's face, and saw a man a hundred years old. His heart smote him, for he genuinely did love Pompey, as friend and overlord. Yet what alarmed him more than his natural grief for friend and overlord was his sudden conviction that if Pompey was not shored up, not given back his confidence and his inborn arrogance, the rest of him would waste away and die. This grey-faced old man was someone Afranius had never met.

  So Afranius said, "If I were you, I'd blame it on Metellus Pius. Say he refused to come out of his province to reinforce you. I'd triple the number of men in Sertorius's army too."

  Pompey reared back in horror. "No, Afranius! No! I could not possibly do that!"

  "Why?" asked Afranius, amazed; a Gnaeus Pompeius Magnus in the throes of moral or ethical dilemmas was an utter unknown.

  "Because," said Pompey in a patient voice, "I am going to need Metellus Pius if I am to salvage anything out of this Spanish commission. I have lost nearly a third of my forces, and I cannot ask the Senate for more until I can claim at least one victory. Also because it is possible someone who lives in Lauro will escape to Rome. His story will have credence when he tells it. And because, though I am not a sage, I do believe that truth will out at exactly the worst moment."

  "Oh, I understand!" cried Afranius, enormously relieved; Pompey was not experiencing moral or ethical scruples, he was just seeing the facts as the facts were. “Then you already know what you have to explain to the Senate," he added, puzzled.

  "Yes, yes, I know!" snapped Pompey, goaded. "I simply don't know how to explain it! In words, I mean! Varro isn't here, and who else is there with the right words?"

  "I think," said Afranius delicately, "that your own words are probably the right words for news like this. The connoisseurs of literature in the Senate will just assume that you've chosen a plain style for the plain truth-that's how their minds work, if you ask me. As for the rest of them-they're not connoisseurs, so they won't see anything wrong with your words anyway."

  This splendidly logical and pragmatic analysis went far toward cheering Pompey up, superficially at least. The deeper and more cruelly lacerated layers, incorporating as they did pride, dignitas, confidence, and many complicated images of self, would be slow to mend; some layers would mend maimed, some layers would perhaps not mend at all.

  Thus Pompey sat down to begin his report to the Senate with his nostrils assailed by the perpetual stench of rotting flesh, and did not spare himself even by omitting his rashness in sending heralds to cry to the citizens of Lauro, let alone his mistaken tactics on the battlefield itself. He then sent the draft, written with a stylus upon wax smeared and gouged by many erasures, to his secretary, who would copy it in fair script (with no spelling or grammatical errors) in ink upon paper. Not that he finished the missive; Lauro wasn't finished.

  Sixteen days went by. Sertorius continued his investment of Lauro while Pompey did not move out of his camp. That this inertia could not last Pompey was well aware; he was rapidly running out of food, and his mules and horses were growing thinner almost as one looked at them. Yet he couldn't retreat-not with Lauro under siege and Sertorius doing exactly as he liked. He had no choice but to forage. Upon pain of threatened torture his scouts swore to him that the fields to the north were entirely free of Sertorian patrols, so he ordered a large and well-armed expedition of cavalry to forage in the direction of Saguntum.

  The men had not been gone for two hours when a frantic message for help came: Sertorius's men were swarming everywhere, picking off the troopers one by one. Pompey sent a full legion to the rescue, then spent the next hours pacing up and down the ramparts of his camp looking anxiously northward.

  Sertorius's heralds gave him the verdict at sunset.

  "Go home, kid! Go back to Picenum, kid! You're fighting real men now! You're an amateur! How does it feel to run up against a professional? Want to know where your foraging party is, kid? Dead, kid! Every last one of them! But you needn't worry about burying them this time, kid! Quintus Sertorius will bury them for you, free of charge! He's got their arms and armor in payment for the service, kid! Go home! Go home!"

  It had to be a nightmare. It could not truly be happening! Where had the Sertorian forces come from when none of those who had fought on the battlefield, even the hidden cavalry, had moved from the siegeworks before Lauro?

  "These were not his legionaries or his regular cavalry, Gnaeus Pompeius," said the chief scout, shivering in dread. “These were his guerrillas. They come out of nowhere, they ambush, they kill, they vanish again."

  Thoroughly disenchanted with his Spanish scouts, Pompey had all of them executed and vowed that in future he would use his own Picentines as scouts; better to use men he trusted who didn't know the countryside than men he couldn't trust even if they did know the countryside. That was the first lesson of warfare in Spain he had really absorbed, though it was not to be the last. For he was not going home to Picenum! He was going to stay in Spain and have it out with Sertorius if he died in the effort! He would fight fire with fire, stone with stone, ice with ice. No matter how many blunders he made, no matter how many times that brilliant personification of anti-Roman evil might run tactical rings around him, he would not give up. Sixteen thousand of his
soldiers were dead and almost all his cavalry. But he would not give up until the last man and the last horse were dead.

  The Gnaeus Pompeius Magnus who retreated slowly from Lauro at the end of Sextilis with the screams of the dying city echoing in his ears was a very different one from the man who had strutted south in the spring so full of his own importance, so confident, so careless. The new Gnaeus Pompeius could even listen with a look of alert interest on his face to the stentorian voices of the Sertorian heralds who dogged his footsteps detailing to his soldiers the hideous fate in store for the women of Lauro when they reached their new owners in far-western Lusitania. No other Sertorian personnel even bothered about his footsteps as he hastened north past Saguntum, past Sebelaci, past Intibili, across the Iberus. In less than thirty days Pompey brought his exhausted, half-starved men into their winter camp at Emporiae, and moved no more that awful year. Especially after he heard that Metellus Pius had won the only battle he had been called upon to fight-and won it brilliantly.

  It was after Metellus Pius had seen Balbus Senior and read Memmius's letter that he began to think about how he might extricate Memmius from his incarceration in New Carthage. There had been changes in the man Sertorius dismissed as an old woman too, changes wrought by the crushing blow to his pride the Senate had dealt him in bestowing an equal imperium upon Kid Butcher, of all people. Perhaps nothing less than this monumental insult could have stripped away sufficient layers of the Piglet's defensive armor to allow the metal inside to show, for the Piglet had been cursed-or blessed-with an autocratic father of superb courage, incredible haughtiness and a stubbornness that had sometimes amounted to intellectual imbecility. Metellus Numidicus had been cheated of his war against Jugurtha by Gaius Marius, cheated time and time again-or so he had seen it-by that same New Man. And in turn cheated his son of anything more than a reputation for filial devotion in piously striving to have his hugely admired father recalled from an exile inflicted by Gaius Marius. Then just when the son might have congratulated himself that he stood highest in Sulla's estimation, along came the twenty-two-year-old Pompey with a bigger and better army to offer.

  His punctilious attention to what was the proper thing for a Roman nobleman to do forbade Metellus Pius the satisfaction of trying to make his tormentor, Pompey, look insignificant by any underhanded means. And so without his realizing it a new and better general was busy jerking and tugging himself free of the Piglet's tired old stammering skin. To make Pompey look small by winning more battles more decisively was unimpeachable, a fitting revenge because it emerged out of what a Roman nobleman could be when he was pushed to it by a Picentine upstart. Or an upstart from Arpinum, for that matter!

  Having learned that particular lesson very early on, he chose his scouts from among the ranks of his own Roman men and the men of Phoenician Gades who feared the Spanish barbarians far more than they did the Romans. So it was that Metellus Pius had learned the whereabouts of Lucius Hirtuleius and his younger brother not very long after they had sat themselves down with the Spanish army in the neighborhood of Laminium, in south-central Spain. With one of his new sour smiles, the Piglet leaned back and appreciated this strategy to the full before flicking a mental obscene gesture in the direction of Laminium and vowing that ten years would not see him fool enough to venture up the headwaters of either Anas or Baetis. Let Hirtuleius rot from sheer inactivity!

  He had ensconced himself on the Anas fairly close to its mouth, thinking that it was wiser to let the Lusitani see how well prepared he was to deal with them than to reside more comfortably along the Baetis, a hundred miles to the east. But he had busied himself to such purpose by June that he felt the defenses of his province were in good enough state to resist the wall of waiting Lusitani without his personal presence on the Anas-and without more than two of his six remaining legions to garrison his fortifications.

  By now the old woman of the Further province knew perfectly well who were Sertorius's informants; so he proceeded to put his new policies about intelligence into practice, and leaked in the most innocent way to these men the news that he was moving away from his position on the lower Anas. Not up the headwaters of the Anas or the Baetis-and thus into the arms of Lucius Hirtuleius at Laminium-but to relieve Gaius Memmius in New Carthage. He would (the informants were telling Hirtuleius not many days later) cross the Baetis from Italica to Hispalis, then move up the Singilis River toward the massif of the Solorius, cross it on its northwestern flank at Acci, proceed thence to Basti, and so down onto the Campus Spartarius through Eliocroca.

  In actual fact this was the way Metellus Pius might have gone; but what was important to him was that Hirtuleius should believe it. The Piglet was well aware that Herennius, Perperna and Sertorius himself were thoroughly absorbed in teaching Pompey a much-needed lesson, and that Sertorius reposed full confidence in the ability of Hirtuleius and the Spanish army to pen the Piglet up inside his own provincial sty. But New Carthage was a way out of his own provincial sty that could possibly lead to a northward march from New Carthage to relieve Pompey at Lauro; the five legions the Piglet would have were a possible tipping of the balance from Sertorius's way to Pompey's. The march of Metellus Pius could therefore not be allowed to happen.

  What Metellus Pius hoped was that Hirtuleius would decide to leave Laminium and come down onto the easy terrain between the Anas and the Baetis. Away from the crags in which any Sertorian general was likely to be victorious, Hirtuleius would be easier to beat. No Sertorian general trusted the peoples of the Further province east of the Baetis, which was why Sertorius had never attempted to invade that area. So when Hirtuleius heard the news of Metellus Pius's projected march, he would have to intercept it before Metellus Pius could cross the Baetis into safe territory. Of course Hirtuleius's most prudent course would have been to travel well to the north of the Further province and wait to intercept Metellus Pius on the Campus Spartarius itself, this certainly being country friendly to Sertorius. But Hirtuleius was too canny to make this logical move; if he left central Spain for a place so far away, all the Piglet had to do was to double back and romp through the pass at Laminium, then choose the quickest line of march to join Pompey at Lauro.

  There was only one thing Hirtuleius could do: move down onto the easy terrain between the Anas and the Baetis, and stop Metellus Pius before he crossed the Baetis. But Metellus Pius marched more quickly than Hirtuleius thought he could, was already close to Italica and the Baetis when Hirtuleius and the Spanish army were still a hard day's slog away.

  So Hirtuleius hurried, unwilling to let his prey slip across the broad deep river.

  The month was Quinctilis and southern Spain was in the grip of that summer's first fierce heat wave; the sun sprang up from behind the Solorius Mountains fully armed to smite lands not yet recovered from the previous day's onslaught-and only slightly relieved by the breathless, humid night. With extraordinary solicitude for his troops, Metellus Pius gently inserted them into big, airy, shady tents, encouraged them to hold cloths soaked in cold spring water to brows and napes of necks, made sure they had drunk well of that same cold spring water, then issued each man with a novel item of extra equipment to carry into battle-a skin full of cold water strapped to his belt.

  Even when the merciless sun was glinting off the forest of Hirtuleius's spears rapidly approaching down the road from the north, Metellus Pius kept his men in the shade of their tents and made sure there were enough tubs of cold water to keep the cold compresses coming. At the very last moment he moved, his soldiers fresh and keen, chattering cheerfully to each other as they marched into position about how they would manage to help each other snatch a much-needed drink in the middle of the fight.

  The Spanish army had tramped ten hard miles in the sun already. Though it was well provided with water donkeys, it had not the time to pause and drink before battle was joined. His men wilting, Hirtuleius stood no chance of winning. At one time he and Metellus Pius actually fought hand-to-hand-a rare occurrence in any conflict
since the days of Homer- and though Hirtuleius was younger and stronger, his well-watered and well-cooled opponent got the better of him. The struggle carried them apart before the contest came to an end, but Hirtuleius bore a wound in his thigh and Metellus Pius the glory. Within an hour it was over. The Spanish army broke and fled into the west, leaving many dead or exhausted upon the field; Hirtuleius had to cross the Anas into Lusitania before he could allow his men to stop.

  "Isn't that nice?” asked Metellus Pius of his son as they stood surveying the diminishing dust to the west of Italica.

  "Tata, you were wonderful!" cried the young man, forgetting that he was too grown up to use the diminutive of childhood.

  The Piglet swelled, huffed. "And now we'll all have a good swim in the river and a good night's sleep before we march tomorrow for Gades," he said happily, composing letters in his mind to the Senate and to Pompey.

  Metellus Scipio stared. "Gades? Why Gades?"

  "Certainly Gades!" Metellus Pius shoved his son between the shoulder blades. "Come on, lad, into the shade! I'll have no man down with sunstroke, I need every last one of you. Don't you fancy a long sea voyage to escape this heat?"

  "A long sea voyage? To where?"

  "To New Carthage, of course, to relieve Gaius Memmius."

  "Father, you are absolutely beyond a doubt brilliant!"

  And that, reflected the Piglet as he drew his son into the shade of the command tent, was every bit as thrilling to hear as the rousing volley of cheers and the shouts of "Imperator!" with which his army had greeted him after the battle was over. He had done it! He had inflicted a decisive defeat upon Quintus Sertorius's best general.