She was about to withdraw when Sophonisba jerked her head around. Viewed straight on, her face struck Sapanibal with the force of a ceremonial mask. The dark makeup with which she etched the edges of her eyelids had run. Black lines streaked down her cheeks in the trails that dipped into the corners of her mouth. She stared at Sapanibal for a moment, then twisted her lips and asked, “Why do you look at me that way? I am not the first woman to wed for the sake of Carthage. Is that what you're going to tell me? Remind me of your own marriage and all the good it did our family? Say it, if you like. You must've waited many years to.”
Sapanibal closed her eyes. When she opened them a moment later tears burst from them. The harsh expression fell from her face completely, replaced by a trembling chin, flushed red cheeks, a ridged and quivering forehead. Several times she tried to say something, but the words bumbled around behind her teeth and nothing came out but sobs of hot air. That was not what she was going to say. Not at all.
Sophonisba stood and moved forward, lifted her arms, and pulled her sobbing sister into her embrace. “What's becoming of us?” she asked.
It was a day that Masinissa would always remember, a moment of decision that shaped everything in the life that was to follow. He began that fateful day trying to find a way to convince Mago not to quit Iberia. They need not be beaten yet, he argued to himself. He could send to his country for more horsemen. Carthage might provide another installment of infantry. Up to that moment, he had found it inordinately easy to kill Romans. He still believed he could accomplish all the tasks set before him and return to Numidia on his own terms. Though he had not mentioned it to the Barcas, he had even rejected envoys from Scipio the previous summer. The Roman had offered him friendship in return for his abandoning the Carthaginian cause. Scipio promised him Carthaginian lands as his own, with gifts from the wealth of their treasury, with numberless slaves, and with permission to rule Africa as he saw fit. It was a lot for a single agent of Rome to offer; this Scipio was bolder than his father. But still, it was of little importance. He rejected the offer with contempt and went on killing them. Who were the Romans to offer him anything other than their blood to wash his spear?
It all changed in a single moment, when a messenger whispered in his ear. What he heard stopped his breathing, blocking his throat so that for some moments his lips opened and closed uselessly, neither speaking nor drawing in air. This happened just after first light of the morning. Before the sun had reached a quarter height he arrived at Mago's camp. He entered at full stride, speeding past the two surprised guards and kicking the tent flap open with his foot.
“How long have you known?”
Mago looked up from the correspondence he had been reading. His first answer was a frown, his eyes nervous and—the Numidian thought—deceitful. “What news have you heard?”
“You know what I've heard. I've been told the sky is falling and my head is uncovered.”
This seemed to confuse the Barca. His frown deepened for a moment; then he dropped the pretense. “The news comes to me just this day as well. By the gods, Masinissa, I had no part in this. Syphax saw an opportunity and he grasped for it. But do not be rash. We can yet mend this.”
“How? How, when everything has been taken from me? My father is dead! I am no longer a son, and I am not a father. Now another man takes my Sophonisba to his bed and fucks her full of my enemies. Instead of my children she will push out Libyans, beasts that will bark for my blood. How can this be mended? Things done cannot be undone. There is only one way forward. I resign my command in your army; I leave Iberia—”
“You cannot!” Mago said, up on his feet now and coming toward him. “Don't be a fool, Masinissa. I know your blood is hot. I'm sorry they have done this. It was done without my knowledge. Nor would Hanno betray you, or Sophonisba herself. This is the work of the Council. Fight on with me, brother, and we will one day set things right again.”
“Again I ask you, how? Would you have me fight for you still, when you are allied to the man who has grasped my kingdom as his own? Have you not understood?” Masinissa blinked his eyes furiously. The conflicted reality of the situation flashed across his face in bursts, as if he were still being pelted by new realizations, continuously putting together how one thing rebounded against another. “All along I've been played for a fool. Sophonisba . . . Sophonisba herself trapped me. She made me a dog, leashed by Carthage. . . .”
“No, that's not so. I know my sister's heart is true to you. I saw her with you. I saw the flush of her cheeks and the joy you kindled in her. If she betrays you, it's with a knife to her throat and no other choice. Tell me you believe me, and we can make anything possible.”
The emotion in his heart was too much for Masinissa to bear showing another man. He gripped Mago and pulled him in so forcefully that the solid impact of their chests took away his breath. He pressed his cheek against the rough grain of Mago's neck. “I wish I could believe you,” he said, “but this morning a veil has been lifted from my eyes and I see everything differently.”
“I cannot be your enemy,” Mago said.
“And I cannot be your brother,” Masinissa whispered. “I loved you, but think of my position. I am a king without a kingdom and a husband without a bride. I don't know about the bride, but I must at least claim my nation back.”
As he walked away he counted each step toward his horse, listening for the call, the shout for him to halt, the order for the soldiers of the Sacred Band to rise up and grapple him to the ground. But the shout never came. Perhaps this was a last act of brotherly affection; perhaps it was a sign of weakness. Either way, he was soon up on a high ridge, riding with his guards around him. With the wind in his face and his horse beneath him he thought most clearly. He sent a messenger to the Romans the next day. He swore allegiance to them on the terms Publius had earlier offered, with the new condition that Rome would help restore his kingdom to him and help him make war against Syphax. It was strange to make promises to Romans. It meant, of course, that he was now at war with Carthage, but it could be no other way. He was a Massylii. With his father's death he had become a king. Strange that he had not heard of this for several weeks. Strange that someone had to whisper in his ear for him to know the whole world had changed.
Telling the Romans that he was returning to his country to raise an army, Masinissa departed Iberia with two hundred of his most loyal horsemen. He could have pulled more of his men if he had the time or ships to aid him, but he did not. Only his friendship with Moorish traders made his flight possible. He considered sending word to Maharbal in Italy, asking him to forsake Hannibal and return to Numidia, but he had not the resources to do this. Not yet, at least. Perhaps he also feared the answer he might receive. Maharbal did not know him. Who was to say he would even acknowledge him as his king? He had first to make sure any of his people would.
The events that unfolded from the moment his feet touched African soil came so fast and furious that the prince barely rested. He slept no more than a quarter of the night's cycle and yet still the waking moments were so full of shifting providence that he felt a lifetime passing in what should have been weeks. He landed on a barren stretch of beach east of Hippo Regius. His men disembarked beneath the light of a waxing moon, the world cast in bone highlights, full of shadow and light, with little gradation in between. They rode their horses right from the transports into the water. They churned up onto the shore in a froth of spray, propelled by bubbling rows of waves. The mounts neighed and tossed their heads and kicked sand into the wind. Not a soul moved on this lip of the continent except for them. This was as it should have been. Masinissa hoped to arrive home unannounced.
But Syphax, he soon learned, had anticipated him. As soon as he received confirmation from Carthage, he had shouted his men to arms. He called in soldiers from throughout his vast empire, making the usual promises: riches and women and the rule of all North Africa. He sent multiple armies marching into Massylii territory, a many-pronged attack that
took the city of Thugga with barely a fight and stormed Zama with great violence and cast a net of terror over the plains of the upper Tell. He had King Gaia's grave identified and dug up. He set his corpse aflame and erased all monuments to the ruler's reign and set about placing his own name on all that had been Gaia's. The Massylii were a brave people but without a unifying leader they could not withstand such onslaught; without Carthage's blanket of protection they suddenly seemed a small nation. Syphax pressed them beneath his heel and took joy in it, for to do so had been his hunger all his life long. The summer was not yet half over, but he retired to Cirta to await his new wife and the pleasures he was sure she would provide him.
Masinissa had landed in a country in turmoil. He was branded a bandit from the moment he arrived, a wanted man, treasure to the killer who severed his head and offered it to Syphax, a greater fortune to the man who brought him in alive for the king's amusement. Scouts roamed the shoreline in competing bands. Though he missed him by a day, a Libyan captain named Bucar spotted signs of Masinissa's arrival and set out after him. He ambushed the young king's men a few days later, on the flatlands outside Clupea; he swept down on their riverside camp, trapping the small band between a force of two thousand horsemen and four thousand foot soldiers. There could be no contest between such numbers, so Masinissa's men simply struggled to escape the tightening vise. They fled the horsemen but everywhere found pikes aimed at them from the ground, javelins flung at them in numbers and thickness like a school of barracudas.
By the time they sprung clear of the foot soldiers they numbered less than fifty. In the daylong running skirmish they killed three times as many as they lost, but this was a losing equation. To their honor, his men protected Masinissa with their own lives. That was why there were only four of them alive when Masinissa led them at a full gallop into the river Bagradas. The current lifted them and tumbled them in the brown, silt-laden water. They slid obliquely past their pursuers, at a steady speed faster than the horsemen could make over the irregular terrain, gnarled and choked as it was with bushes. Some of Bucar's men plunged in after them, but three of these went under and disappeared. Seeing the same happen to at least two of Masinissa's men, Bucar pulled up the chase. The prince learned later that he had declared him dead and ridden for Cirta to bring Syphax the news.
But Masinissa did not die. The river spat him to shore at a constriction in its great girth, on a patch of sand so fine and soft that it reminded him of otter fur. His two remaining men found him and together they sat contemplating the desolation that had overtaken them. They had been no great force that morning, but now they had only two horses to share between them, and one of those was lame. How could this have happened? Masinissa asked himself silently, again and again as if the answer would come with dogged persistence. He had accomplished nothing, nothing at all, and now he feared he could not.
One of his companions tugged at his elbow and urged flight. Villagers from a nearby settlement had spotted them and were suspiciously watching from the opposite bank. They could sail for Rome, his companion proposed. They would enlist in the Roman army and return later to set these matters to rights. But these men, brave and true as they were, were not leaders of nations. Masinissa knew that if he arrived in this condition in Rome his life would be worth no more than the price of his skin, the value of his bones and of the jewelry that clung to them.
Instead, he turned from the plains and ascended into the Naragara highlands of his father's territory. He traded his tattered royal garments for a humble disguise. He wore no emblem of sovereignty and shared the two horses fairly with his guards, taking his turn afoot when it came. They dressed the same as he and, to onlookers, occupied no different station in life. In the guise of a holy pilgrim, he sheltered with the peasants of Mount Bellus and made offerings there to the Egyptian god Bes, hoping for some of his mischievous power. He ate the meat of goats roasted on open fires and stole fruit where he could find it. Throughout this time his companions looked on with troubled eyes, for he seemed to have no direction. He did not speak to them of strategy, of tactics to regain his throne. He kept his thoughts to himself and appeared miserably content to roam the land without direction, from the mountain back down to the plains and then through the orchard lands south of Zama and from there into the scraggly hills south of Sicca, a land of mountain goats and of people who walked as if on cloven hooves themselves. They went high enough that they looked down on the flight paths of eagles and condors, creatures that could only take flight by jumping from heights onto columns of heated air rising from the plains.
To aid him his companions spoke casually with the people they met, testing their opinions. Did they mourn King Gaia's death? Did they welcome Syphax, or loathe him as he deserved? They brought Masinissa reports of all they heard. The people were afraid, they said. They despaired, but they still loved the line of Gaia.
Sometimes, huddled beside the campfire or mounted on a ridge or plucking the feathers from a rainbow-throated dove—anytime, really, for it came unannounced by an external impetus—the prince muttered aloud things strange for the men to hear. Words of praise, evocations of beauty, whole speeches of bottomless longing, Sophonisba's name pronounced so slowly that it seemed a new word added to the language, something expressing the tortured love of a man stripped of the skin of artifice: all this embarrassed his men and made them nervous.
When he spoke of his father they understood him somewhat better. He had always claimed that his father had no vision, no ambition. He was a kind man, wise and strong enough to hold together the disparate Massylii people, but Masinissa admitted to his companions that he had always been an ungrateful son, sure he could do better. He could not remember a time when he did not count the days until his father stepped from power and let him stride on to greatness. He had just woken to the fact that he knew nothing of how to be a king. He knew only what it took to be the spoiled son of one.
To this one of his companions offered, “That cannot be so. Our fathers teach us whether we listen or not.”
“A crocodile is born of an egg and never knows his parents after hatching,” the other added. “And yet he grows to be a crocodile; he cannot be anything else.”
Masinissa turned to the two men and stared at them for a long time, unsure that he even recognized them.
When they arrived at the remote council of Massylii elders a few weeks later, it seemed nothing more than a chance happening, as if they had been blown there by a random wind. The council took place at an ancient site known only to the tribal leaders and outside the range of any one elder's base of power. Masinissa was fortunate in his timing, although as yet he took no comfort from this. The council seldom needed to be held more than once in a generation, always in times of turmoil. This was such a time.
There was no structure large enough for the men to gather in so they met in the open. If they noticed Masinissa at all, they thought him one of the local herdsmen. His clothing was poor and bedraggled and his hair hung in knotted locks that obscured his features. He listened as the men—some of whom he had known from birth—spoke of the troubled times they lived in. They couched their words cautiously. It was obvious they wanted to speak frankly to each other, but none knew who among them might have turned to Syphax. They might speak their minds tonight, only to find themselves skewered tomorrow. So the conversation was roundabout and seemed to be heading for no definite conclusion. It was clear that Syphax had grabbed them all by the balls. They hated him for this and spoke with fondness of their dead king. But it was not until one of them offered a prayer of remembrance for Masinissa himself that the prince decided his time had come. It would have been unnatural to hear one's own death lamented and not speak up.
Masinissa stood and pushed his way into the group of men. They turned and looked at him. One elbowed him and another asked his business. He held his tongue until he had centered himself in their circle, and then he kept silent a little longer. He drew his hair back from his face and fastened it wit
h a thong made of lion's hide. And then he dropped his arms, raised his chin, and met the men with his gaze. His fingers twitched as he stood there, ready to draw his dagger and take all the lives he could before he was killed, if it came to that.
He said, “Do not mourn me. The king's son lives.”
Landing on Sicily in the spring, Publius found the island simmering like a pot of boiling water just taken from the fire. The cities of Syracuse, Agrigentum, and Lilybaeum had not watched the war indifferently. Throughout it they had swayed in their allegiance, tipped here and there by the machinations of their ambitious leaders. Many of their residents—the Greeks especially—remembered the fine times they had enjoyed under Carthaginian rule and had not found Roman dominion to their liking. They had rebelled, although with only mixed, temporary success. At the time of Publius' arrival, however, the island had returned to Roman hands. All active revolt and political ploys had been quashed by the forces stationed there, thanks, in part, to the irresolute support Carthage had provided those declaring for them. The Greek rebels in Syracuse found themselves being stripped of their wealth. Many had been kicked onto the streets, where Latin children pelted them with stones and women spat on them and men used any pretense to lash out at them.
Publius, looking at this, reckoned it hardly a stable base from which to launch the greatest military action of his life. So he set about to right things from the first day. Citing his authority as consul, he ordered Greek property returned and demanded that the people of the city live together once more as they had in the years before this recent conflagration. In as short a space of time as he could manage, he circumnavigated the island, bringing this message to all the cities. Then he called the disgraced legions from Cannae to muster. He merged them with the seven thousand volunteers he had secured before leaving Italy. Together, this formed an army of just under twelve thousand, the vast majority of them infantry.
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