Pride of Carthage (55 page)

Nor was Hannibal himself slow to respond. He assessed the situation and spoke his orders rapidly. The message went out through the horns, and with them the soldiers were visibly buoyed. The commander spoke to them. They should not fear battle. This was what they were here for. He had just arranged the body of the troops into orderly formations when gates far to either side of the main one broke open. From these issued two rivers of cavalry, many with velites riding partnered behind. They moved at a full gallop, dropped the infantrymen near the fray, and then plowed into the ranks. This new strike changed the whole balance. Hannibal was hard pressed to keep his troops from panicking.

It was a quick engagement, over in a couple of hours. Only afterward did all the pieces come together. Marcellus had learned of the plot, captured the rebels, and conceived a scheme of his own. The troops on the walls were not the prime soldiers they appeared to be. Instead, they were the injured and old, boys not yet of fighting age, and even some women disguised as men. Now all of the able-bodied males were freed to fight. The great noise when the gates swung open had been produced by each and every voice of Nola, not just the warriors': a ploy to make the fighting men's numbers seem enormous. It worked. And Marcellus had placed some of his best troops at the side gates. When they fell on the flanks they inflicted serious damage and achieved the most for their efforts.

In a final gesture, once the fighting had stopped, Marcellus hung a line of bodies from the wall by their feet, a ghastly decoration but one most effective on all who beheld it. Grimulus, standing not far from the commander, let out a low groan. There was a single gap left in the line of almost fifty bodies. Grimulus recognized that space as his own.

For the first time in the war, Hannibal had been duped and beaten. He muttered to Gemel that he felt like a boy-child given the switch by a tutor. All in all, the battle had been masterfully orchestrated—the more so because Marcellus was wise enough not to press his luck. The gates closed once more behind his troops. He sat in the towers and enjoyed his success, but could not be provoked to try his luck a second time. Hannibal, considering his options, turned toward a new objective. He had all of Italy at his mercy, why waste time on one recalcitrant polis? There were others, many others.

A small jewel of a city, Casilinum perched on a narrow finger at a bend in the river Volturnus, surrounded on three sides by water. Here also there had been talk of breaking with Rome. A whole faction of the council advocated this publicly. A misstep, for they were seized by a rival party and executed for treason. Once again Hannibal arrived to find closed gates. This time, however, he was in no mood for benevolence. Nor was there a Marcellus to toy with him. His overtures rejected, he sent against them Isalca, a Gaetulian from the territories south of the Massylii who had lately risen to the post of captain. The plucky townsfolk repulsed him, taking a heavy toll in African blood. Next Hannibal had Maharbal try to scheme a way inside the city, but his reconnaissance missions fell into preset traps that took several of their number and lamed even more horses.

The evening Monomachus brought him this news, Hannibal sat at a folding field table set up at a distance from the city, with a panoramic view that took in a great swath of country. It was lovely to behold. The grass had long since baked dry beneath the midsummer sun. It covered the land like a blanket woven from a Gaul's blond hair, a stark contrast to the dark green blooms of trees that dotted the landscape, the slabs of gray stone. Insects swarmed in the near distance. They must have had silver in their wings, for they sparkled like metallic dust blown into whirling clouds. Hannibal sent out a corps of scouts to capture some of the insects and bring them back to him, a strange request that he had to repeat several times to make himself understood.

Though he did not want to admit it, he felt the weight of his old melancholy returning. His limbs hung heavy; his thoughts moved more slowly than usual, more often tending toward recollection, anchored to things from the past instead of actively shaping the future. Staring out at the lands of his wartime exile, he acknowledged how dim the memory of his homeland had become. He tried to recall the plantations to the south of Carthage, the desert leading out toward the Numidian country, the scraggly hills of the Gaetulians' land, which he had seen in passing on his boyhood voyage to Iberia, as he marched the whole stretch of North Africa with his father. He felt that these scenes resided in him still, but it was hard to call them forth. They faded in and out and mingled with the wide, dry stretches of Iberia and the mountain pastures of the Pyrenees and the Alpine lakes that dotted the mountains. No scene from the dim reaches of his memory held steady. It was as if these were not real landscapes at all but imaginary ones, formed from the bits and pieces of other lands. He suddenly thought of his brothers and how he missed them and craved word of them. He knew that Hanno lived, that both he and Mago had been ushered to Iberia, and that Hasdrubal struggled to hold the country, but otherwise his information was patchy, creating more questions than answers.

Monomachus came upon him as he contemplated all of this. He stood just off to the left, in the blank space created by the commander's blind eye. Hannibal remembered his father once saying that Monomachus had been like a rabid wolf when he first appeared in the army. It had taken considerable molding to shape him into a soldier. He had first to be tamed. Tamed enough, at least, that his ferocity could be managed. And Maharbal had once told him that Monomachus claimed never to let a day pass without killing someone. Hannibal had not probed into whether this was true, but he had no reason to doubt it.

“What do you think, then?” Hannibal asked.

“We should go no further than this city until our swords are sated,” Monomachus said. “We'll look fools otherwise. If I commanded this army I would lay waste to this city.”

“You do not command this army. Answer me as what you are, not what you would like to be.”

The officer grunted low in his throat. “As a warrior, I give the same advice. Offer their children to Moloch. The god is hungry and we have not honored him fully.”

“These people are of no use to us dead,” Hannibal said. “Whatever we do here must speak our cause to other people.”

“Blood also speaks.”

Hannibal fought the urge to turn his head and bring the man into better view, but there was something strategic in his placement, something to be lost by responding to it. He knew what Monomachus looked like, anyway. “All right, you have my permission,” he said. “Besiege them. Blockade them. Starve them. Drop rotten corpses in the river upstream of them. Build what machines we need. Do whatever you must, but make this town ours.”

Monomachus did not speak. He did not nod or show emotion in any way. And yet Hannibal knew that he was pleased. Never in his life had he met a man more drawn to blood. This man gnawed at the bone of suffering like no other. He was indeed a wolf, Hannibal thought as he watched him move off, turning, at last, to study him. But his father had been mistaken. Such creatures can never truly be tamed.

Imco Vaca was confused. He had been since the aftermath of Cannae, and the months since had done nothing to order his mind. In some portion of his consciousness that day's slaughter never actually ended. It went on in a place just behind his left ear, as if he saw out of a rent in his skull that looked back to that field of slicing and stabbing and trodden gore. In his dreams, he found himself swimming in a shallow sea of bodies, pushing through arms and legs and torsos. It seemed that he might never truly end that day, never forget it, never see the world without a stain across it, never take a breath without sensing the fetid taint that clung to the hairs high up in his nostrils. How was it possible that such a day could somehow be entwined with his memory of a creature of sublime beauty?

He dreamed daily of the camp follower. She seemed less a real person now and more a divine being, a goddess or nymph, a healing deity who had pulled him out of that putrid carnage and nursed life back into him. He saw no sign of her in the days after he awoke and could learn nothing of her whatsoever. He took to whispering prayers in her behalf. He called her Picene because that was where he had first set eyes on her. He made offerings at each meal, a portion of his food, a sip of his water. He pleaded with the gods to lead the girl back to him, to offer some explanation so that he might find satisfaction. He yearned only for enough anonymity to allow him to slip away to some other life altogether. What if he just abandoned the military life and went in search of Picene? He was not a poor man. He had distinguished himself. His faraway family was actually prospering! Not that he had yet reaped the rewards of his efforts. If he could find Picene and convince her to live quietly with him, a life of the simple things: farming, food, warm bedding at night, and sex, definitely sex . . . In a field under the white sun, in a shed with hay caught in her hair, from behind as she cooked for them, his face buried between her legs at the day's end, the perfect fit and give of her breast held between his thumb and forefinger . . . It nearly drove him insane thinking about it, even more so because he was so uncomfortably surrounded by men. He feared that somehow they might discover his secret thoughts and foul them. He tried not to think about her, but only did so with even more urgency.

The girl from Saguntum found this more than a little amusing. “You've barely got the sense of that ass of hers,” she said. She was ever present now, beside him even during intimate moments. Should his hand in thinking about Picene reach down to stroke his penis, he would hear her chuckle and offer some gibe. What was that he was going to scratch? she would ask. Had a scorpion stung him down there, or did his thing often swell so? He had of late concluded that nobody else could see or hear the girl. This suited him fine. He redoubled his attempts to ignore her, but she was as persistent as she was sarcastic.

For all the torment these two women caused him, they were only at the fringes of his daily hardships. He was so constantly in motion that he felt himself propelled forward by an unseen hand. The troop numbers shrank and swelled with a rhythm he could not comprehend. Last he had heard they numbered just over forty thousand, but this included new recruits from Samnium and Capua, the same type they had slaughtered so completely the year before. Hardly the sort to cement one's confidence, a strange bunch with their Latin customs, their absurd language and superstitions.

It only took a quick glance around to verify that he was in the company of the vilest men. The army was entirely different from what it had been in the early days. That period now resided in his memory cloaked in a heavy nostalgia. Whatever happened to the one named Gantho, who always slapped him on the back and called him the Hero of Arbocala? He disappeared after the Trebia, dead probably, though none could confirm it. What about the one called Mouse? He had been quite a character, perhaps not completely sound of mind, but who was? He had carried a pet—his namesake—in a bag he wore over his shoulder. He fed the pink-nosed creature from his own rations, and was known to converse with it freely. He was head-addled, but Imco liked him well enough, until Mouse was speared in the groin at Trasimene and died slowly, writhing in agony. One of the units' cooks had been kind enough to often allow Imco extra rations, saying he needed it more than most. And a Libyan named Orissun had always been good company. He had a hose as long and wrinkled as a stallion's, a fact that he made clear each time he lifted his tunic. All of these men were long gone now. Viewed through the haze of distance, they seemed venerable creatures, far better than the new rabble that surrounded him, with their Latin customs and dress.

The attrition of the original army had effects on more than just his melancholy. Each day that he survived, he rose to greater prominence. Bomilcar had not forgotten him after Cannae. It took him a week to find him, but after Imco reported back to his captain the giant sought him out. He came upon him when Imco was huddled over a bowl of beef stew. He had barely touched it, steaming hot as it was, but he knew the broth would be tasteless and the meat stringy, without passion or zest. Food was plentiful for once, but the preparation still painfully primitive. He was still sore, every inch of him, from the fighting. That was why he yelled out so when the general clamped his massive hands down on his shoulders. It felt as if some great eagle had pierced his flesh and was about to carry him aloft. The next moment it felt as if a hyena had clamped down on his genitals—but this was an effect of his own stew, which he had spilled in its entirety onto his lap. He screamed in agony, and for this Bomilcar took to calling him Imco the Howler.

For his bravery at Cannae, the general had Imco's rank raised to captain and put him in charge of a unit of five hundred men. He instructed him to manage their circuitous march south, as Bomilcar was taking his ten thousand to hold the lower reaches of the peninsula. Imco tried to talk his way out of this, but Bomilcar laughed off all his complaints as if they were jokes. It was clear that the man only heard what he wanted to and that for some reason he wanted to make Imco into a fool in the public eye. He was sure this would be obvious to all, but strangely enough when he gave an order the men generally followed it. Despite his doubts, he did know how to imitate authority. When he needed to utter a command, the words came to him. He knew the proper order of march and could measure distance with surprising accuracy.

He got his first taste of battle command against Tiberius Gracchus at Beneventum. The fighting was savage, especially because Gracchus' army was made up of debtors and slaves who had been promised freedom in exchange for victory. They had been instructed to prove themselves by retrieving the heads of the men they killed. This they did, to gruesome effect. Bomilcar conceded defeat and withdrew, quickly, not even pausing to break camp but backing right through it and on. Brave and powerful as he was, the big man was no Hannibal, not even a lesser Barca. To make things worse, Imco was quite sure that the Romans had decided to fight only where Hannibal was
not.