Pride of Carthage (39 page)

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 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 around 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 around 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 toward 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 . . .”

Silenus 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 humor 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 favor.” 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. Enough 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 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 around 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 honor, 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 rumored 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 five thousand, and they demanded that their allies provide matching forces. More than one hundred 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 eighty thousand soldiers for Rome. The destiny of their people was again within reach. They had only to remember themselves and seize it. 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, savior 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 around 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 each other, 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 signalers 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 panicked conscripts, slicing at the tendons in their calves, stabbing into the soft tissue at the back of their knees.