Pride of Carthage (56 page)

Hence he felt a certain amount of relief when late in the summer the commander himself met them outside Tarentum. They desperately wanted the city as an ally, with its marvelous port and protected inner harbor, its Spartan origins and position of leadership among the Greek cities of the south. As a captain Imco now sat at the fringes of councils with the great man, listening to him discourse on the value of a jewel like Tarentum. He spent many hours near enough to study his leader's features and comportment. Hannibal had certainly changed. Aged much faster than the years in passing. Imco still envisioned Hannibal as he had seen him long ago outside Arbocala, in the full bloom of youthful strength, unblemished, confident, with eyes of such glimmering intelligence that he seemed all-knowing, undefeatable. What had the years done to him?

The answer was not obvious. In fact, it was contradictory. To a person who remembered him from years before, Hannibal showed many signs of physical privation. His brows seemed to have lost their grip on his forehead. They slid down and hung like twin black cornices over his eye sockets. His blind orb sucked the vision of others into it. The clouded, scarred tissue seemed to possess a hunger fueled by its inability to look outward anymore. A welt ran from under his breastplate diagonally up his neck, and all manner of nicks, cuts, and lesions peppered his forearms and hands. Occasionally his tunic shifted far enough up his thigh to expose the edge of the ragged spear wound he had received at Saguntum.

If such injuries caught Imco's eye immediately, they also faded in consequence with each following moment. He had heard through some of his lieutenants that portions of the troops—the newest, in fact—grumbled at the slow pace of the summer, suggesting Hannibal had fallen foul of the victorious wind that had earlier propelled him. But these men did not sit so close to him. In truth, the man's single eye glinted with enough energy for two. He sat straight-backed, the muscles of his arms and shoulders taut under his skin. Though he was motionless, it was hard not to stare at him. He looked as if he might snap to his feet at any moment, draw his sword, and slice someone's head off. But this was not to say he seemed angry. He did not. He sat in complete composure. He simply seemed capable of anything, at any moment. No, Imco thought, Hannibal was still formidable. He was battered and worn by the campaign, but the mind behind the man's features had lost none of its sharpness, as he demonstrated in his assault on Tarentum.

He had been sitting outside its gates barely a week when two young men, Philemenus and Nicon, ventured from the city and swore that there was a large contingent intent on switching allegiances. Imco sat with the other officers off to one side, able to hear all that transpired. They said that the Romans had recently treated their countrymen roughly and unfairly. A group of Tarentines had been held in Rome since after Cannae. They were meant to ensure their city's fidelity, but in the previous month some of the group had escaped and made their way home. Whether there was treachery in this was unclear, but the Senate, perhaps showing its nervousness and frustration, accused them of fleeing to the enemy. They ordered the remaining prisoners scourged and then tossed them to their deaths from atop the Tarpeian Rock. The news of this act greatly stirred the Tarentines' anger. The city was still officially a fortress locked against the Carthaginians and guarded by a Roman garrison, but the two men believed that many would like to see this reversed. They wished to gain promises of Carthaginian goodwill toward them and their people. This guaranteed, they would do what they could to open the city.

Hannibal did not answer their proposal directly. He spoke through his translator, although Imco knew he did this primarily for the benefit of the monolinguals among his officers. “Just how did you escape the city, considering that it's the locked fortress that you call it?” he asked.

Philemenus, the shorter of the two and the more talkative, said, “That's easy. The Roman guards know us well. They let us out to hunt boar. Every now and then we bring them a—”

“You say you leave and enter the city often?”

“Of course. At all hours. Sometimes our hunts—”

Hannibal cut off the man's speech with a single raised hand. He let the silence linger a moment while he thought, and then said, “Friends, you were wise to come to me. Ambitious. And you've planted in me the seed of a plan . . .”

For the next two weeks, Philemenus became quite the hunter. He left the city almost daily, often returning late at night laden with deer and the occasional wild swine. As the Romans grew accustomed to this, and to gifts of fresh meat, Hannibal also let the rumor circulate that he was ill with a fever, bed-bound and in fear for his life. He then sent out a select force of ten thousand infantrymen with four days' rations and orders to march at night and hide themselves away in a ravine very near the city. On the chosen evening, Hannibal met the troops and approached one of the side gates. Inside, Nicon dispatched the unwary guards with a dagger and then let Hannibal through. The army streamed in behind him, as quietly as possible.

This much Imco saw with his own eyes, but at the city's far gate Philemenus—shadowed by a thousand Libyans—served as does the smaller of a crab's two pincers. He shouted up to the guards to let him in and quickly, for he was burdened with an enormous boar. They admitted him through the wicket gate, along with three soldiers disguised as herdsmen aiding him with the corpse. The guards had bent to gawk at the beast, and this became the last thing they ever did as living beings. Soon the main gate was opened and the Libyans strolled in.

Only then, with twelve thousand soldiers inside the city, did Hannibal order the men to draw their weapons. They poured through the night streets unencumbered, stumbling on the stones in their enthusiasm, barely able to contain the joy of it, whispering for the townspeople to hide in their homes. Their blades were bared against Rome. The two conspirators set up shouts of alarm near the Roman barracks. As the groggy-eyed soldiers emerged, they were cut down with ease.

All things considered, the devious ploy saved more lives on both sides than a full onslaught would have. The only Romans left alive were those sequestered in the citadel. Given its strong position far out on the peninsula, Hannibal quickly deemed it too formidable an obstacle to besiege. Instead he dug a trench, threw up a wall between it and the city, and left the soldiers to contemplate their fate. He knew that they could be reinforced from the sea and that the Tarentine fleet was trapped in the inner harbor. In fact, the city itself would have more difficulty receiving aid from a distance than the Romans would. But even this Hannibal overcame.

He simply lifted the fleet out of the harbor, set the ships atop wagons and sledges, pushed them through the city streets, and eased them to float again in the sea. The townspeople had never seen so strange a thing as the masts of ships traversing their narrow alleyways. Just like that, a problem other men would have written off as insoluble Hannibal solved to his advantage in days.

Within weeks, Metapontum and Thurii came over. Soon after, all the other Greek cities in the south did likewise, except for Rhegium. This brought port after port into Hannibal's hands. He could now call on Carthage to send reinforcements in through established channels. Amazing, Imco thought, that a single night's work could bear such fruit. The commander had lost none of his genius. Perhaps he was only tempering it into a finer material.

The great waves crashed along the Atlantic coast with a bulk that dwarfed anything seen in the sheltered Mediterranean. Since he had arrived at the mouth of the Tagus the previous winter, Hasdrubal had never tired of staring out at the seething expanse. It spoke to him in each plume of spray, with each rolling, slate-black ridge of water. During the winter storms he heard low grumblings that the locals told him were muffled roars of giants fighting beneath the waves. Silenus—who had accompanied him after learning that he would not be able to rejoin Hannibal soon—argued that he had heard of such noise before and believed it to be the grinding of boulders rolling forward and back on the seabed. The locals laughed at this and pulled his long ears and imitated his bowlegged gait, as if these gestures refuted any theories he might propose. Silenus, in turn, spurned their tales of deep-sea monstrosities. They told tales of creatures with jaws so great they could snap a quinquereme at its midpoint, with a hundred arms to snatch up the unfortunate crew and drag them under.

One evening—drunken, late, over a low fire in the smoky hall these people entertained in—Silenus told what he knew of a land far to the south of Carthage, well past the rolling bushland and the arid hinterland. Past the nations of Nubia and Ethiopia and Axum. Far, far to the south there lived a white-skinned people who burned so quickly beneath the sun that they never ventured out in the day. They lived in subterranean caverns that connected to others and spread all across the known world. They ate only the raw bone marrow of normal men. It was feared by many who knew of these people that they might one day take over the earth, emerging from crevices and cave mouths to wage one massive surprise attack.

His tale was met with dull, black eyes, glazed expressions of anxiety. Several of the courtesans covered their heads with snatches of triangular cloth, and a few men whispered prayers and poured droplets of wine on the floor and peered out into the dark with newfound trepidation. Only later, after several knowledgeable men had confirmed portions of his tale and one even claimed to have met such an African in Gades one night and another asked which gods one should appease to keep these creatures at bay . . . only then did Silenus double over in laughter. He had made the whole thing up! he yelled. Every word of it. Did they see now how easy it was to deceive a feeble mind? He asked them, had they heard about the blue people who live on hammocks slung between the stars? Or the race of men who urinated through the big toe of their left foot? Or the unfortunate tribe whose colorful, bulbous backsides attracted the attentions of amorous baboons?

The Greek made no friends that evening. But, truth be known, Hasdrubal began to enjoy the company of these strange people. Also, Silenus was a constant amusement who somehow brought out the humor in any situation. Life, for the first time in ages, had something of joy about it. He missed Bayala daily and sorely, but there was a sweetness even to this. He knew that she awaited him and would be his again before long. His seed had stuck inside her last autumn. Making offerings daily to Astarte, he asked for a boy child, a cousin to grow beside Little Hammer in the days after the war. Hanno and Mago roamed the country, still elated with victory, beating lessons into the Iberians that they would not soon forget. They were far-flung, yes, but the end seemed nearer than ever before.

For all of these reasons, the first news to reach him of Publius Scipio sucked the air from his lungs and left him a deflated skin of a man. In a few sentences, the messenger made reality of all the pressures and burdens and trepidations that the arrival of his brothers had so recently relieved. New Carthage gone! The heart of all their operations ripped out of them! His home, his brother-in-law's palace, his father's dream, the capital that Hannibal had entrusted to him, the wealth of his nation, hundreds of merchants, captives, aristocrats: all stolen in a single day. The Whore's Wood set ablaze; the streets stained with the blood of those who once called out to him in adulation. It was staggering.

He thanked the gods—both his and his wife's people's—that Bayala had been at her father's Oretani stronghold attending her sister's wedding when New Carthage fell. This, at least, was a blessing. The possibility that she could have been captured, defiled, possessed by Roman soldiers pressed on his head at the temples, set his heart thumping in his chest, and made his fingers tingle. Even though he knew it had not come to pass, the possibility filled him with a greater fear than he had ever known. It cast warfare in an entirely new light, made it foul in ways he had not imagined before. He realized that a husband fights differently than a bachelor. And perhaps, he thought, a father fights differently yet again. It was not a realization he had expected, but these new perspectives produced a gnawing humility. He understood something of what lay behind the faces of the men whose lives he destroyed, whose wives he ordered imprisoned and children enslaved. For the first few days of his mourning, it was almost too much to bear.

But, like so many leaders, Hasdrubal was blessed with an aide who grew stronger at the times he most needed him. Noba never acknowledged his general's grief. He never mentioned Bayala except to write Hasdrubal's correspondence to her. He spoke only of the strategic setback caused by the loss of New Carthage. Also, he served as a funnel through which reports about the Romans' new proconsul came to him. Not only was Publius Scipio's taking of the city masterful, but when dealing with prisoners he showed an astuteness of yet another sort. The Carthaginians and Libyans and Numidians he enslaved and quickly sold onward for profit. But he freed almost all of the Iberians. He protected the diplomatic hostages: children and wives of Iberian chieftains. He bade them return to their people with no animosity from Rome.

In the weeks after his victory the proconsul made allies of Edeco, Indibilis, and Mandonius, three of the most powerful chieftains of the peninsula. Once again the various tribes of Iberia were like so many balls thrown in the air. Hasdrubal could not possibly catch them all, so which should he grasp for and which let fall? With Noba's calm voice speaking in his ear, Hasdrubal pulled his army up by the roots and headed inland. They had to stanch the bleeding away of allies without delay. They sent riders ahead with orders for several tribes to gather at Oretani. This also meant Hasdrubal would see Bayala again.

The army moved quickly, without hostile incident, although not without discomfiture. On the third day, they came upon a town that none had heard of before. The place was a conglomeration of stone huts spread out across a wide valley, huts that from a distance looked inhabited. Some even claimed to have seen smoke drifting up from cook fires. But as Hasdrubal's force marched by the settlement, they saw the tattered roofs of the buildings, the tumbling decay, the silent interiors, the fire pits so long undisturbed that the charred scars had been washed clean long ago. Not a person to be seen among the structures, no animal or fresh food or any sign of life save that left there by the ancients. It was a strange place that all were relieved to see recede into the distance. From then on Hasdrubal saw messages written everywhere on the land: in the wavering rusty stains dripping down from rock faces; in the form of a great boulder the size of a fortress, cracked into four equal parts, as if some giant had dropped it to the earth; in the strange cloud formation that appeared above them one evening, a fish scale pattern complete in its perfection from one horizon to the other. But these were not signs he could interpret, only greater mysteries that filled him with a rising dread.