Pride of Carthage (58 page)

In the middle of one night, Atneh awoke Aradna by tugging at her wrist. She wanted Aradna to promise that when she died she would not become a fool but would remember her words always. Aradna tried to tell her she was not dying, but the old one scorned her with a look that Aradna could feel through the darkness. She asked Aradna to describe again the quiet life they would have. For some time the old woman listened, rustling uncomfortably, shaken by her coughs.

Aradna thought her words might be soothing her somewhat, but then, unexpectedly, Atneh said, “I can't see anything!”

“That's because it's dark, Aunt. It's night.”

The old woman was silent for a moment, then said, “That's what you think.”

The next morning, Aradna and the rest of their band buried Atneh deep enough in the sandy dunes that no creatures would disturb her. They bought and sacrificed a goat and offered it up to Zeus and killed hens to fly to Artemis and poured out wine to ease her entry into the next world. The others had assumed she would either stay with them or continue on the journey she had planned with the old woman, but Aradna became unsure of either route. She had long dreamed of the soldier from Cannae, but in the light of day she had banished him into the mists. Now this became increasingly hard to do.

She sometimes awoke with the suspicion that he had visited her. She thought she could remember his smell, although this seemed improbable. He had been covered in filth, in blood and dirt and unnamed stink. How could she scent the essence of the man underneath all that? But then she awoke from another dream with the memory of washing his flesh clean with a cloth, kneeling forward and touching his skin with her nose, breathing him in. Whether this was done in dream alone or had actually happened, she was not sure. There was an intimacy in her thoughts of him that embarrassed her. It made no sense that she—who had avoided men for the plague they were, who had once snapped an erect penis between two stones and had often protected herself with knives and gnashing teeth—so longed for this man. She wanted to sit near him and maybe touch him and hear his voice and speak slowly so that they could understand each other. She had many questions for him. Why had their paths crossed three times in the midst of the chaos that was this war? Something like that is not simple chance. Perhaps the gods wished them together. She had never even stopped to hear the man out. Perhaps he brought her a message. . . . These lines of thinking left her breathless with the possibilities. This man might have an unimagined place in her life, and she might have been spurning the gods when she turned away from him.

Aradna was still sitting on the beach, watching the now empty sea, when something caught her eye. A shape cut the surface of the sea out in the middle distance, a solid object as dark as basalt against the water, moving to the south. It vanished and then appeared again, a little farther on. A moment later it appeared yet again, but farther out, and then the backbones of sea creatures broke into the air at a hundred different points. Aradna's toes clenched tight around the sand. She did not like this sighting. She took it as an omen, but as ever with such things she knew not how to interpret it. One of the men at the camp was skilled at such things, but she hated his stare and the way he touched her, as if he were a blind man who needed to feel to see, even though everyone knew his eyes were as keen as a child's. Instead she closed her eyes and tried to believe those passing beasts had import for someone else's life, not hers.

She found the spot in the dead of night. She could barely see at all under the light of a thin moon. At first she dug with a pointed stick to loosen the soil. She squatted down on her knees and reached in with her hands. Eventually, she lay down with the rim cutting into her abdomen, knees dug in as anchors, her backside tilted to the sky, scooping up dirt and pebbles with a flat clamshell, yanking at roots and fighting with the debris that sought again and again to slide back into the hole.

She did not so much decide she was satisfied with the hole as just give up on going any deeper. Her arms were only so long, anyway. She placed the various parcels in it, making sure their wrappings stayed in place. She refilled the hole quickly, then spent some time shifting stones and tugging at fallen branches and arranging pine needles to hide her work.

She did not finish until the thin light of morning. She gazed around her long enough to verify her solitude and register the landmarks in her mind, and then she walked away without looking back. She no longer led the donkey with a tether. In her own silent way she turned her back on the creature and offered him the possibility of a life without her. But he fell in behind her.

A little time later she stepped over the back of the near hills and saw the land rise up to meet her, the whole breadth of it: the farmlands on the plain below, the jagged serrations that rose in the distance, like the backs of those sea beasts but captured in rock. She did remember the old woman's words. She thought of them with every stride she took, and she spoke her respect to the woman. Atneh was wise, but no single person held all inside them. Aradna followed her nose. No matter that reason said otherwise; she could smell that soldier over the distance and she had no choice except to find him and see this through.

Where had childhood gone? Mago asked himself this one sweltering afternoon a few weeks after Hasdrubal's defeat at Baecula. He walked solitary along a low ridgeline. Guards shadowed him at a distance, but he ordered them to stay out of his sight. He needed a few moments alone. He longed for even a short break from the incessant maneuvering of war. The question about childhood came to him fully formed when he looked up into great pine trees surrounding him. Their branches did not start till high above the ground, but they were so straight and strong that they interwove with those of other trees, like men standing with their arms locked over each other's shoulders. Had he seen such a sight as a child, he would have called to have a rope brought to him. He would have climbed up into those branches, pushing through the needles, sap gumming his palms. He would have sought the highest point he could reach and looked for the creatures that lived there and gazed out at the world from that vantage, imagining himself an owl or a hawk or a great eagle.

How strange to think that there was a time in his life when he had wished for turmoil instead of study, noise and clash of arms instead of quiet conversation with his tutors, sparring with his companions, the embraces of his mother and sisters. He had once spent whole days listening to the epic tales in Greek, lost in the adventures of men who had lived centuries before, who had communed with the gods and touched greatness time and again. His study of war had once been an exercise of the mind, played out with carved granite soldiers that patrolled miniature battlefields. They were silent, emotionless, bloodless figures, animated only by his fingers or knocked off balance by the pebbles he tossed at them in their mock battles. There was a time when such boyish games comprised the sum total of his experience of war. And yet he had yearned to grow up in an instant so he could experience mayhem for real. He had wanted to be the hand that drove home spear points, that slashed heads from shoulders, that ordered this man killed and that spared. What boy upon the earth has not dreamed of such things?

But those times were long gone now. No longer had he playmates to set up pieces against. Instead he spent his days walking among a throng of killers, men of many nations who were united only by the hunger for slaughter and spoils. It was not exactly that he bemoaned the change or could imagine what other lot in life to yearn for. It was just that he did not understand how he could contain within himself both that child and the soldier he now was. At Hannibal's side, he managed to maintain his faith in the grandeur of war. Their feats had seemed to be the very essence of legend; their victories, majestic moments smiled upon by the gods. For a while his work with Hanno and Hasdrubal had also filled him with joy. They had been touched by the same greatness, it seemed. Finally, they could all believe they had a place beside Hannibal's brilliance.

But that was before Publius Scipio. One man, a few months, two battles: everything changed. It was not just the strategic realities that troubled Mago. In Hannibal's absence, the first shifting winds of defeat blew away a mask that he had not even realized he was wearing. It had been like a helmet that blocked portions of his vision and limited the world he perceived. He had acknowledged only the things that confirmed the realization of his childhood fantasies. The last few weeks, however—with the mask removed—the unacknowledged images bombarded him unhindered. He could not help but recall the faces of orphan children, the suffering in the eyes of captured women, the sight of burning homes, the cold glances of people being robbed of grain and horses and, indirectly, of their lives. He heard their wailing in some place beyond sound, high to the right and back of his head. Everywhere were signs of the barbarous nature of conflict, ugly to behold. Nowhere was it possible to avoid these things. It suddenly seemed to him that such scenes were the full and true face of war. What place had nobility in this? Where was the joy of heroes? Why could he no longer recite the lines with which epic poets enshrined the greatness of clashing men? It was weak of him to think this way. He knew it, but he could not shake free of the mood. He thought briefly of the melancholy that sometimes took hold of Hannibal. He never explained it. . . . But, no, it could not be the doubt that he now felt. Hannibal was as certain of his place in the world as if he had created it himself.

Hanno trudged up toward him, quietly, for the pine leaves cushioned his steps. He wore a shimmering garment of scale armor, silvered metal that caught the speckled light like the moving skin of fish. Glancing at his face, Mago saw his mother in his features. He winced to think of her and the high spirits he had last shared with her in Carthage. How foolish to be joyful at one moment, forgetting that the wheel of life turns, so that he who looks at the sun at one moment soon finds himself crushed against the hard earth.

Hanno stood beside him for a time, not speaking, looking out through the trees toward the plain in which their army fidgeted in nervous expectancy. The branches were so thick that he could not possibly see through them any more than Mago could, but still he waited a long time before he spoke. When he did, Mago heard a quality that again reminded him of their mother. The part of Didobal in him seemed to be the strongest portion, the firmest in its resolve to confront the future.

“Come,” Hanno said, “we can wait no longer. It will be at Ilipa.”

Having said this, the older sibling retraced his steps beneath the trees, just as silently as before. When he faded out of view, Mago heard the rapping of a woodpecker, a loud barrage of thuds and then silence, a loud barrage and then silence. There was no way back to that other time; there was only forward through the world he now inhabited. Only onward into the clash that had to come. His brother had named the place. Mago followed him down toward it.

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.