Two days later, the armies came in sight of each other. For the three days after that, they assembled. Both forces marched down out of the tree-dotted ridges on which they camped and approached almost to within shouting distance of each other. There the troops waited, the generals taking stock of the opposition, skirmishers exchanging volleys. They sweated under the sun and chewed strips of dried meat and swatted at flies, but otherwise rested as well as they could. Neither side broke this strange truce, and in the evening the Carthaginians withdrew first.
Mago and Hanno spent each night talking through what this might mean, trying to learn something new for the following day. Having assembled a force of all their remaining allies, they outnumbered the enemy, numbering fifty thousand to the Romans' forty. Perhaps this was working on the Roman consciousness, paralyzing them with fear, softening them for the onslaught they knew was coming soon. Publius positioned his various units in the same formation each time: legions in the center, Iberian mercenaries on either wing. Each time the Carthaginians met this in kind, with their Libyans in the center, their strongest soldiers to oppose his. They divided their twenty elephants evenly on both wings, hoping to use them as giant stabilizers to hold the army in formation. The two brothers considered changing the arrangement, but no matter how they thought it through, the deployment seemed sound. Publius might have been looking for a weakness, but each day Mago believed a little more that all they presented was strength.
But in the first gray light of the morning of the fourth day, the Roman cavalry pounced on the forward Carthaginian outposts. A few riders managed to escape to sound the alarm. But just afterward the entire Roman force slipped into view like a slow river in flood, through the trees and out onto the flat plain. The Carthaginians had no choice but to rise groggy from bed and grab up arms and rush to form up ranks. Mago shouted all the things he knew the men expected of him. “This is the day!” he said. “The enemy is trying to surprise us, but early rising alone will not win this battle.” None could say that he had not learned from his brothers' example, but inwardly he realized something was happening over which he had no control, something he still could not predict. For the first time he understood how an enemy must feel facing Hannibal across a battlefield.
The approaching army was still some way out, but Publius' deployment had changed. Skirmishers trotted in a weaving crisscross of confusion, like so many ants. His Roman legions now made up the wings; the Iberians held the center. The Barcas worked frantically through what this might mean and how to combat it, but there was no time for them to order a change in their own lines. The men were in enough confusion just trying to form up. Why had Publius put his weakest fighters against their strongest, and vice versa?
As soon as they were into the flat the Romans picked up their pace. A little farther on, they fell into a trot. As they drew nearer still, the Roman wings—hearing the horn signal—kicked their pace into a wolf-lope. Mago thought that at that rate they would be out of breath by the time the two armies met. Their armor must have weighed heavily on them. But as he watched, he realized they had trained for such a run. Their lungs billowed to meet the demand and nothing about them suggested fatigue. Their legs moved them forward, sure of step, determined. Meanwhile, the Iberians in the center kept to their slower pace and soon fell behind. After launching their fistfuls of missiles, javelins, and darts, the skirmishers withdrew through the ranks. They slipped out of sight and emerged behind the legionaries, regrouped, and fell into step behind them. They pulled swords from sheaths secured to their backs, drew daggers from their belts, or snatched up pikes that the rear infantrymen dropped for them. With so many of their helmets covered in animal skins, they looked like an unnatural pack of hunters—lions beside wolves beside bears and foxes—chasing the army forward, nipping at their heels.
When the two sides finally met, the Roman front line looked like a horseshoe. The two prongs of the veteran legions smashed into the Carthaginians' Iberian allies and from the first moments made quick work of them. The skirmishers fanned out and around and swept in on the Carthaginian flanks. Meanwhile the Libyans stood in confusion, glancing from side to side, waiting for orders, their spears to hand but useless. The front line of Iberians that should have met them did not do so. On a single horn-blasted order they all stopped. They hovered out a distance, just too far to engage, but near enough so that the Libyans could not turn away from them for fear of being pounced on. The Libyans could neither aid their dying allies nor rush forward, because to do so would break formation and lead to all manner of chaos. They just waited, panting and impatient, as men near them fell to the Romans' cut and thrust.
Publius had orchestrated the impossible. He had encircled an army larger than his own, simply by moving his various troops about in unexpected ways. The Libyans in the center were as dead on their feet as all of the Romans trapped shoulder to shoulder at Cannae.
Yet the matter was decided not by men but by four-legged creatures. The elephants—which had been stung again and again by the skirmishers' javelins—spun and careened in toward the center of the army. In pain and fury, the creatures moved heedless of which men they trampled, which they swatted out of the way with tusks and trunks. The drivers atop them smashed them about the head and yanked their ears and roared at them to change course. But it was no good. The elephants turned as if by common agreement and each cut a swath of grisly death toward the Carthaginian heart. With this, the battle collapsed. From then on Publius commanded a rout.
Mago stared and stared at what he saw, so long and intensely that he was saved only when one of his guards jabbed his horse in the rear with a spear. As he hurtled off on his bucking horse he called for a retreat to be sounded. With that the troops gave up all semblance of discipline. They turned and fled, Romans fast behind them. The sky opened above them in a sudden outburst of rain. This slowed the Roman advance. Mago fought to keep the army moving through the night, but the distance they covered in the stumbling dark was not enough. In the morning the Romans followed on their heels, leaving corpses like wayposts marking their path. Despite all Mago's dismay at the fact, eventually he, Hanno, and five thousand mounted soldiers—Massylii and Libyans mostly—dashed before the body of the army in undisguised flight.
For much of the long summer, Imco found himself standing just behind Hannibal's shoulder, watching as Fortune favored one side and then the other. Marcellus became the sharpest thorn in Hannibal's side, single-handedly trying to undo all he had accomplished. Only a fortnight after Hannibal left Casilinum, he had retaken it through siege and treachery. Capuans had garrisoned the city—not the best of troops but, considering its natural defenses, even they should have held it. But they lost their nerve, scared, no doubt, by Marcellus' growing reputation. They struck a deal with the Roman for their surrender, in return for which they would be allowed to return to their city unmolested. But when they strolled through the gates the waiting Romans pounced on them and hacked them beyond recognition, punishment for crimes that they believed predated this betrayal.
Casilinum was not the only setback: Fabius Maximus retook Tarentum, Claudius Nero mauled a band of five hundred Numidians, Livius Salinator surprised a Carthaginian admiral off the coast near Neapolis, frightening the cautious sailor back to Sicily. But more often the Roman foolishness flared so brightly that it left Imco shaking his head in amazement. There was Tiberius Gracchus, for example. Overconfident after his rout of Bomilcar's forces, Gracchus marched too close to Hannibal. His guides, perhaps having mistaken their route in all innocence, abandoned him the moment they spotted Numidian riders. This set the slave army in turmoil, a situation easily exploited. Watching this from the height where his troops stood in reserve, Imco was struck by the thought that battles were won or lost on the basis of a single factor that each and every soldier controlled. Not the hand of any god, not the cunning of any one leader, not superiority in arms or training: none of these mattered as much as the bravery of individual men. Perhaps slaves could be expe
cted to understand that least of all. They panicked, all at the same moment. The matter was decided, and Tiberius Gracchus perished in the ensuing rout.
Soon after Gracchus' death, the Romans fell under the spell of a centurion named Centenius Paenula. Some recalled that on the day of his birth considerable prodigies had occurred. Another scholar connected clues from several of the ancient texts and announced that the young soldier's name was destined to sound in glory throughout the ages. Striking in appearance, tall and fine-featured, he did not have to do much to convince the Senate that he was just the one chosen by the gods to strike a blow at Hannibal. With the remnants of Gracchus' army and a horde of enthusiastic volunteers, he marched into Lucania, met Hannibal, and promptly offered up all eight thousand of his force for sacrifice. They were slaughtered down to the last man. Centenius Paenula, it turned out, was not a name that would ring down through the ages.
Imco was in the very room at Herdonea when Hannibal met with a foolish magistrate who dared to drink his wine and accept his gifts, but begged more time to decide whether he could deliver his people to Hannibal's side. The commander nodded at all of this and spoke graciously. Of course, he said, more time was reasonable. He was, after all, only prosecuting the greatest war the Mediterranean had ever seen. If the magistrate needed to think this over, he could do so, by all means. Hannibal and his entire army would wait on him. The magistrate might or might not have recognized the irony in the commander's voice, but when he stood to leave Hannibal made all clear. The magistrate could have as long as he needed to decide, except that he must do so before the wine he had just drunk escaped his body. The man looked at him in mystification.
“You see,” Hannibal said, “I happily give wine to my friends, but a man who drinks my wine and then rejects my friendship is a thief. I'd like to know which you are before you piss my goodwill onto the ground. Take as long as you want, but before you loose your bladder I must know what you are to me. Perhaps you should sit down again.”
Herdonea was soon his. As was Caulonia. For a time that city's magistrates and officers held out in the citadel with their families, refusing to surrender: They were well provisioned and believed that Nero—with yet another Roman army—would soon come to their aid. Hannibal, however, conceived of a way to stir them from the nest. Some bored Balearics had come across a shallow cave teeming with snakes, hundreds or thousands of them. Hannibal had the creatures gathered up and placed in large urns. In the gray light just before dawn one morning, he had these hurled into the citadel with catapults. Most of the urns smashed against the walls, but several landed atop the structure. They exploded into jagged shards of writhing, slithering life.
The Caulonians, waking to this commotion, cried out that Hannibal's gods had called upon them a plague of serpents. Women took up the shout, and children wailed with fright. Stumbling and running through the half-light inside the cramped citadel, the people panicked. Guards jumped from the top of the tower, thudding dully against the dew-licked turf. One leaped in a different direction than the rest and fell in straight-legged horror, so stiff that his legs anchored him in a mound of dirt thrown up by the diggers. His ankles snapped at the impact, but he sank to the thighs and stood trapped there, howling. The Balearics, arguing that this was all their doing and that therefore to them went the sport, used the man for target games. They slung their tiny pellets at the swaying figure, battering his chest, knocking out his teeth, and bashing in an eye and tearing chunks of flesh from his biceps. The man died shortly after they began betting on who could shoot into his scrotum in a way that left the missiles sitting in the sacs, twins to the balls naturally at home there.
The magistrates, after receiving assurances of fair treatment, gave up the citadel. Reasonable behavior, Imco thought. If Hannibal could make the sky rain vipers, what chance did they have against him?
Not even Marcellus could last forever. He and Crispinus both perished near Venusia in an episode surprising only in its anticlimactic result. The two generals had each encamped on the far side of a growth of knobby hills. Hannibal, on approaching them, noticed the hills and sent Numidians out in the night to secure them. This they managed, while also keeping their presence secret. The Romans, however, soon noticed the same feature. The two generals, believing themselves safe, rode out to inspect the territory personally. The Numidians recognized them at once and sprang a trap that killed Marcellus on the spot. Crispinus died days later from his spear wounds.
Regardless of all he had witnessed at Hannibal's side, or perhaps because of it, Imco was surprised almost to fright when the commander invited him to sleep out with him on the ridge of hills to the east of camp. He said they would slumber on the open ground, like boys, and talk beneath a canopy of stars. Just why Hannibal chose him for this honor, Imco could not say. They had sat together often enough at meetings throughout the summer, but they had not yet spoken on such intimate terms. In fact, whenever Imco opened his mouth in council he had the feeling that the commander was gazing at him with a certain amount of mirth. He was not even sure that the other remembered their first meeting, back at Arbocala, when Imco had begun the great deception that was his military career.
As they climbed up from the camp, Hannibal carried nothing except his cloak and a small sack. Imco slipped his somewhat more elaborate bedroll under his arm, embarrassed, for suddenly it seemed like a luxury out of character with Hannibal's invitation. Atop the ridge, the glorious burning colors of sunset were just starting to dim. The rim of earth that cut the sun's passing went a deeper and deeper red, bloody and congealed, as if the roof of the sky would be tacky to the fingers, if one could reach so high. The country below hulked off in all directions. Imco thought the hills looked like a hundred shoulders shrugging their way into the distance, curves of muscle and bone captured in the soil itself. He could have studied the view for some time. Though it struck him as beautiful, there was also something ominous in the creeping shadows that he half thought he should keep an eye on.
And these were not the only shifting forms that kept him ill at ease. The guards of the Sacred Band flanked them on all sides. They formed an eight-pronged star, each of them black-cloaked and solemn. They never spoke or looked at their master directly, and yet they followed every move and kept their formation as much as the lay of the land allowed. Though they carried various daggers in their belts, their main arm was a spear in the Spartan style. They planted the staff of the weapon like a third leg each time they halted, and then stood so still as to be made of stone.
This, for Imco, was a troubling illusion. He could not help but look askance at them. Of course he had seen them before and noted their fierce aspect, but he had never stayed so long at the center of their focus. He also realized that the Saguntine girl was nowhere to be seen. Perhaps these men unnerved her as well.
“My lord,” he said, “must they follow you everywhere and never speak a word?”
“Why should they speak?” Hannibal asked. “I never talk to them or they to me. They each know how they are to serve me, and they do it. It's strange that you mention them. Myself, I barely notice them. From the day I first set out for Iberia with my father, the Sacred Band has shadowed me.”
Hannibal tossed out his cloak and dropped onto it. From a pocket in his cloak he produced a handful of apricots. He spread them out beside him and motioned that Imco could help himself. After a time, he said, “Look at this country, Imco. Sometimes I understand why Romans fight so stubbornly for it, though I doubt many of them notice its beauty. Some men look upon such things and see only trees and earth, the bare materials only. Are you one such as this?”
“No,” Imco said, “I see rocks as well. Some shrubs . . .”
Thankfully, the commander laughed at this. He seemed in a jovial mood. Perhaps it was the warm light, but his face held little of the brooding solemnity with which he oversaw meetings. Even his blind eye did not look so awful. It moved now like the other, still filmed over but lively enough that Imco almost suspected
the commander could actually see out of it once more. But he might only have grown used to it. He no longer kept the eye closed and it did not ooze the yellow liquid that had so long plagued him.
Hannibal spoke of his boyhood, of his early years in Iberia. “By the gods, it was a time of marvels,” he said. His father and brother-in-law still alive, the whole peninsula before them, one nation after another against which to test themselves. They were so far from the meddling hand of the Council that they wielded the power of kings. And yet it was the simple things from that time that he remembered most fondly. Long discussions with his father came foremost. He thought happily of his life among the soldiers. He was younger than any of them, but known by all. He was gifted with thousands of uncles. He would wander out each night and toss himself down anywhere among the thronging army and talk late into the night with whoever he landed near. It was there that he learned of different men's customs, of their gods and the things they ate and their desires. He could greet men of a hundred nations in their native tongues, with the gestures of respect they would each recognize. Truly, that time was the foundation of his education.
He was silent for a few minutes, chewing the golden fruit. The grin at the side of his lips indicated that he was remembering something fondly. He said that as a youth he had not been so soft as he was now. He had slept without a bedroll at all. He had simply cast himself down and accepted the contours of the earth. There had been a time when he had even made a project of sleeping on bare rock. He learned to find comfort within the hardness, the cracks and crevices and irregularities. “Stone is much like the human body,” he said, “but it took some training to discover this.”
Imco pursed his lips and almost admitted that he preferred the soft beds of Capua to anything he had otherwise experienced, but he deemed this best kept to himself.
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