“I am yet composing it,” Silenus said. “It will be a tale of winter madness. You'll have a part in it, my friend. Be sure of it: the Goliath of the peaks.”
“Your tongue knows no fatigue,” Bomilcar said. “If your limbs fail you, perhaps your tongue will sprout legs and run you up these peaks.”
Silenus seemed to find the image amusing. He might have said more, but Bomilcar kept trudging on and was soon receding into the white expanse above them. The Greek whispered to Mago, “I'd wager he has been perfecting that line since the Rhône.”
In the almost-warm hours of the midafternoon, they trudged their way ahead at the rear of a long line of men. Though not as heavily laden as Bomilcar, Mago also chose to walk, an offering of sweat and labor to the common soldiers around him. And it was quite an offering. The irregular snowfalls, the cool nights, and the strong sun of the clear days created layers of slush beneath the surface snow, divided by skins of ice that tricked one into thinking they provided adequate support. A foot would punch through the top layer, the man's weight driving him down through the slush till he found purchase. Carefully, he would take one step and then another, finding security in the movement, believing he would go no farther down. But then, on a sudden whim of the living ice, he would break through again, first sinking to ankle depth and then up toward the knee and eventually as high as the waist. The pack animals, struggling against the stuff, sometimes sank so deep that only their frantic heads thrust out above the snow.
Thanks to a slightly larger ration than the common soldier's, Mago could function better than most. At first he tugged at men and dug away the snow with his hands, cut the white flesh with the blade of his sword, and slapped the men and beasts back into movement. Later—his hands too numb to hold his sword properly, too frozen even to scoop the snow—he shouted encouragement, orders, curses to keep them moving. This went on for hours, unchanging moments passing one into the next, each step like the one before it. The face of one man merged with the face of the man before him. The half-buried body of any individual looked like all the others. The glazed eyes, the cracked lips, the mumbled entreaties, the stiff limbs jutting up from ice: it no longer had a beginning and seemed to have no end. It was just the way of the world, and the things that had been life before made no sense anymore.
He could not count the number of times he believed he had reached the summit only to discover that he had mounted a lump in the mountainside, a protrusion, a ledge, beyond which new heights stretched. It was maddening. He was sure the landscape altered itself with malignant intent. It sprouted higher and higher each time he looked away. And the foul thing of it was that the world never betrayed its trickery. It always sat still and impassive under his scrutiny, like a great beast with its shoulders hunched in innocence.
At some point that he did not recognize at the time or remember later Mago gave up on the others and moved past them in silence. He lost Silenus, but such was this climb—now you passed a man; a little later, he passed you. That was just the way it had to be, he realized. Each had to just struggle on—he just like the others. His extra rations were not enough to set him apart. His body was feeding upon itself. He could feel the process draining him, dissolving the tissue beneath his skin, sucking the fluids from his muscles and leaving them leathery cords, striated bands stiff in movement and slow to answer the instructions he willed upon them.
He was on all fours—scraping them forward inch by inch—when a burst of air hit his face with a force that nearly shoved him back down the slope. The air was sure to have been cold, but he felt the force more than the chill. At first he cursed it and ducked beneath his elbow, thinking he had reached yet another rise, with yet another view up toward the insurmountable. He felt his breath rushing back from the bitter cold just before his face. There was no warmth in it, and he wondered if he had begun to go cold on the inside. First his feet and then his hands, his knees and forearms, perhaps now his chest itself: all the parts of him were slowly freezing solid and becoming one with the mountains. He found this a pleasant thought. He could lie motionless and no longer struggle. He could remember stillness. It was possible to stop laboring and rest. The Greek was right. Such heights as this were not meant for mortal men. Why fight this truth when one could sleep instead? It was not so hard to give up. It was only hard to carry on.
And so Mago might have stayed if the voice had not reached him. He lifted his head and, squinting into the wind, realized why it buffeted him so forcefully. There was nothing above him but sky. To the south, a patchwork of clouds drifted across a blue screen. Mago rose to his feet and stumbled forward. The ground beneath him was suddenly bare rock, marbled by windswept currents of snow. The mountains dropped all the way to the valley floor before them. He could almost make out the flat plain and its imagined lushness. He was at the summit!
A madman stood atop a boulder, no more than a stone's throw away. It was the madman's voice that stirred Mago: He pointed out and shouted to the passing soldiers that the goal was in sight. “Look,” he said, “the rich land of Italy! See it here, the rewards for your labors. We've brushed our heads against the roof of the world and need go no higher. The way is down from here. The hard work is behind you! Carry on quickly and lay your head to sleep on flat ground!”
Mago hardly recognized the shouting figure. His beard bristled wildly about his face, grown uneven and unkempt, the hairs laden with ice, even as his forehead dripped with sweat. A crust of reddish black clung to his cheeks. The man pulled off his helmet and waved it above him in triumph, revealing a mass of woolen hair pressed to his scalp in a rough impression of the headgear. He was a wholly wild creature, garments flapping about him, like some mad prophet yelling into a gale. But Mago knew exactly upon whom he was gazing. He could hear him plainly now, and he saw in his brother's eyes a sparkling enthusiasm like none he had seen before. Mago drew close enough to reach up and grasp his foot.
Hannibal looked down and smiled, joy written in the creases of his forehead and curve of his mouth. He spoke so quietly that Mago had to read the words on his lips. “Rome will be ours,” he said. “Rome will truly be ours.”
Mago nodded an agreement he did not feel. He wanted to share Hannibal's enthusiasm, but nothing was yet complete. The way was indeed down, but it was not to be easy. In many ways, the worst of the mountain crossing awaited them. The altitude that it had taken them days and miles to climb to was to be descended in only a portion of the distance, making the route almost unnavigably steep. Looking down from beside Hannibal's boulder, Mago wondered if the Allobroges had not led them to the most terrible pass in the Alps. The bastards might yet defeat them.
Imco Vaca had known no joy since leaving northern Iberia. Not a moment of happiness. Not an instant of pleasure. He felt as if he had been transported here and dropped down in the mountains by some creatively spiteful being intent on seeing poor Imco suffer. It made no sense otherwise. Ice and snow? Ridge upon ridge of jagged rock teeth? The small finger on his left hand black and hard as a twig? This must be somebody's idea of a joke. The fact that he could remember every step of the way, from sunny Iberia, up through the Pyrenees, into the Rhône valley, and all the way across the Alps explained nothing. Nor did it matter that he passed within spitting distance of the commander. Yes, Hannibal spoke encouraging words, but he was such an insane-looking creature that Imco would have crossed the street to avoid him had they met in some civilized city of the world. He walked past him without a word, determined to get down from these heights and fast.
But he was somewhere in the middle of the line, and the trail the scouts found twisted and turned down the mountainside. The snow he had to walk along had been softened in the sun and then compressed beneath thousands of feet into a sheet of rutted, dirty ice. Each step had to be taken with the greatest of care, but this was not possible in such fatigue, at the edge of starvation, on frostbitten feet, laden with heavy packs. Imco saw several of the men below him lose their footing. They clutched and struggled for
purchase as they began to slide down the slope. They called out for help, naming men and then gods, and then as they blurred into unimaginable speed their cries became sound alone, distorted and echoing through the mountains.
The sight of the elephants was constantly baffling. The paths seemed impossibly narrow, but somehow the creatures moved forward as steadily as the men. He once spied a cow elephant negotiating a tiny shelf of rock. She balanced in such a way that her feet fell in a nearly straight line. It was a dainty move, something fit for a circus of curiosities, but she pulled it off with a finesse that Imco wished he possessed.
Toward the end of the second day he had to traverse a path that bent at an angle about fifty yards in front of him. Beyond the corner, yet another precipice, empty space stepping off into nothing. He could see the signs of thousands of feet already gone past. Though the way was clear in front of him, he saw two men stumble near the bend, one taking out the knees of the other and then the pair clutching each other, lucky not to have slid over the edge. Be careful when you reach that area, Imco thought.
Just then, he spotted a garment on the snow a few steps away, discarded in someone's sliding haste earlier in the day. He decided to fetch it up and sling it around his neck and present it to some unfortunate later. He lifted a foot toward it, but knew in an instant that this move had been misguided. His other foot slipped out from him as if he were kicking a ball. He landed on his outstretched hands and the heels of his feet. For a moment he held still, but then, slowly, painfully, he felt the four points of his limbs slithering over the ice. He tried to dig his fingers in and slam the soles of his feet for purchase, but he slid on, speeding up. He tried to think himself lighter, to rise up off the ice with the power of his mind and find purchase on the air itself. When this did not work he flipped over and embraced the slope for all he was worth, feeling the contours slide beneath him, each footprint and divot and ripple. He was sure the surface would drop away from him at any moment. He yelled his anger and fear right into the ice, his teeth so close to the surface he could have bit it. He might have done so, but even in such a state he knew his teeth should be protected. They were one of his best features.
He was not sure why he stopped moving. He only realized it because his yelling became the only noise in a silent world. The two men he had seen stumble were gazing at him from a few strides away. He had slid all the way to the bend. The precipice yawned just beyond his feet. He looked at the men, shook his head, and conveyed by rolling his eyes the depths of his impatience with all this; then he rose, very slowly, and moved on. He did not reach for stray garments again.
The third day was even worse. He first understood this when a groan of exasperation flowed up the line. An avalanche had wiped out a portion of the path below. It was a particularly steep section, offering no alternative routes. They would have to clear the slide. This was bad enough, but then he learned that many of the boulders mixed in with the snow and ice were too large to be moved even with the help of the elephants. They would have to break them into smaller pieces. Someone—whose expertise on this matter Imco doubted—suggested that they build a great fire around the rocks in question, making them red hot so that they could then be drenched with water and vinegar. The change in temperature, this man said, would split the stones and make them more manageable. It sounded dubious.
Imco spent the day hewing trees and dragging them through the snow to the fire. It was absurdly difficult work, as dangerous as battle. Stuck up to the waist in snow, hacking at the base of a tree that was so hard it did more damage to his ax than the blade did to it, Imco found himself crying. This was not exactly out of fear. He was not sure what he had to be afraid of anymore. The tears were not quite the product of sadness, nor of fatigue, nor of anger: he had felt all these things long enough that they were just part of his being now.
Memories brought the tears, the recollection that he had once been the child of a mother, that there was a woman living in the world who had slapped his bottom and wiped his mouth when he was sick and fed him bread dipped in olive oil. Everything about this seemed impossibly tragic. So much so that he did not even cheer with the rest when the rocks exploded amid plumes of steam and flying debris. What a silly thing to find joyful, he thought. Cracked boulders. More hiking. More cold. How did these things compare to the embrace of the fat woman who had created you? He could not help thinking all these men were mad, not only the leader.
Then something unexpected happened. He awoke one frigid morning at the foot of the Alps, four days after they had begun the descent. Italian soil lay beneath him. The awareness that they had done the impossible dawned on him as gradually as the brightening day. The army that had left New Carthage numbered upward of a hundred thousand. Now, they were down to a dejected, battered, and emaciated remnant of that. Perhaps thirty thousand, perhaps fewer. They had lost thousands of horses. And the elephants, though all still lived, were gaunt versions of their former selves. The rich train of booty and the thriving community of camp followers were, as far as he could tell, no more.
But on that morning, even knowing all this, Imco peered out his tent flap and looked up at the clear white-blue Italian sky. They were here. Despite it all, they were not defeated. He swelled with a sudden, long-absent enthusiasm. Things might yet look up. There might still be rewards awaiting him, pleasures that his mother's image had no place beside. Once again, Imco remembered himself, the soldier he had become and the mission he was part of. They were a storm about to break over Italy. What army could possibly stop them now?
Aradna considered herself blessed to have found the dead man. Though she had seen many corpses in her time, she would never forget the way he sat upright with an arm stretched out before him, like a blind beggar beseeching pity from unseen passersby. Perhaps it was because of this posture that so many had ignored him. Aradna, however, could not help but notice him when a raven perched on his shoulder, looked about, pecked at the man's lip, and looked about again. His features were those of an Iberian Celt, and he was older than most warriors. His eyes were open, lips crusted and peeling, cheeks blackened by frostbite prior to his death.
But it was not enough to deter her from reaching out and touching the garment draped over his shoulders, a thick cloak of wolf fur that might well have been cured earlier on the march. She wondered for a moment that a man could freeze with such a garment on him, but then she noticed his other hand. It pressed against a brown stain on his tunic, fingers stuck either side of an arrow shaft. His death must have been slow, his upraised hand an entreaty for medical attention that never came. It was not exactly easy to pry the cloak off him, but Aradna managed it. She trudged away wrapped in it and renewed in her belief that Artemis looked kindly upon her.
Such thoughts were truly acts of faith considering the hardships of the past weeks. The soldiers complained of their lot, but they knew nothing of true privation. She walked the same ground they did, through the same ravines and over snowy passes and across rivers cold as liquid ice. But she got no rations. The people she marched with held few supplies in trust and each harbored a deep suspicion of any person's actions toward them, kind or cruel. They had been cut to ribbons in the gorge, their numbers halved in that single afternoon and dwindling ever since. The loose order that had bound them to the army vanished. Supplies were abandoned to the Allobroges. Men and women were cut down and robbed of their possessions, some captured alive and deprived of their very freedom.
One evening the stragglers' camp she slept in was raided by local brigands. She had jumped to her feet at the first sound of confusion, but a man grabbed her wrist and began to drag her away. She yanked so hard against him that her upper arm popped out of its joint. The strange sensation this gave her attacker provided her a quick moment of confusion. She bashed his foot beneath her heel and fled. Her loose arm blinded her with pain, but the movement of running shifted the joint home and the pain was gone in an instant.
For a time after that she traveled alone, mingling wi
th the rear of the army, scavenging on the debris left in their wake. She took even more care to attract no attention. Like the others, she had not bathed in weeks now. But she made sure that she was filthier than most. She caked her face with dirt and grease. Her hair grew into thick knots, hung with twigs and bits of rubbish. She strung a dead mouse around her neck. She ran her fingers through the stink of her armpits and then pressed the scent onto all her garments. She considered the fumes that met her nose when she squatted and thought that she might smear this scent on her outer garments as well. It was a short-lived idea, however. One could never tell what might stir a man's loins. She had heard of stranger things.
But even filthy and disheveled and starving, Aradna was a beauty. Men could not help but notice. A Gaul stopped her one clear morning at the foot of a scree slope. He was upon her suddenly, long sword in hand. He stepped from behind a tree as if he had lain in wait for some time and had chosen this moment for the fineness of the crisp air and the quiet solitude they found themselves in. He indicated with a thrusting pelvis the activity he had in mind. She spat at him. He ignored this, calming her with his weaponless hand, patting toward her to indicate that it would not hurt. Just a small thing, he seemed to be saying. Just a moment of your time. He never lowered the upraised sword. She hissed at him and gestured with her hands that he should pleasure himself and leave her out of it. But behind the bold rejection, she knew the threat he posed. He was a strong man in his prime who would happily injure her to have her. He might lop off an arm to punish her, or beat her senseless and carry her into slavery.
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