Pride of Carthage (72 page)

He called for a servant of the house and asked the startled man if his old master had had any poison. He had, of course, and this was duly fetched. A few moments later he held within his hand a tiny vial, ornately worked. But looking at the vial he knew he could not do it. He was not a normal man. He was king. He had promised a whole nation of people that he would lead them into the future. He had rescued them from tyranny. He could not abandon them; what would become of them? Would not Rome turn against them in rage at his betrayal? And what of all the greatness he wanted to achieve in honor of his father? This had become the new duty of his life. He had to make up for all the years that he had been youthfully ignorant of his father's wisdom. He simply had to live.

And with that thought he decided. He called to his manservant. When he appeared, he spoke calmly. “Take this to my wife. Tell her that I'm keeping my promise to her. She will not fall into Roman hands, but I cannot be her husband. Ask her to drink this.”

The man took the vial without comment. Once he was gone, Masinissa tried to shift his attention to something else. He thought of Maharbal and hoped that he was still the commander of Hannibal's cavalry. He would have to speak to Publius about him, for he had of late conceived a plan that might aid them greatly, if Maharbal was still loyal to the Massylii. He began to rehearse what he would say. With this victory he could raise another ten or fifteen thousand men from his own people. For that matter, he could probably recruit from the Libyans—those not burned to cinders . . .

And just like that, the manservant was back. No time at all had passed. Masinissa was sure that the vial had not been delivered. The Romans had turned him around; the servant could not find her; he came to ask Masinissa to reconsider.

The man said, “She has received the gift, my king.”

“What said she? Tell me exactly. Exactly!”

“She said that she accepted it, but that it saddened her. She said that she would have died a better death if she had not married the same week as her funeral. She said to remind you of the tale of Balatur. She'd wanted to believe it, but truth was as she had said, wasn't it? No Massylii was ever true to a single woman. She said to tell you that she only ever loved you . . . only you, singly out of anyone in the entire world. And she drank the poison. She drank all of it without hesitation, and then she handed the vial back.”

The man held it out for the king to take. Masinissa had already been in tears, but seeing the bottle he crumpled to the floor. The servant left him writhing on the marble, as if he sought to melt into the surface and become one with the stone, to go as cold and hard as it was and to feel no more.

It was glorious to behold. Hannibal calculated every move of their new campaign. For the first few weeks it seemed he pulled the strings to which the workings of the entire world were tethered. He put melancholy behind him. He yoked his sorrow so that it might pull him forward behind it. He marched from Tarentum to Metapontum, picked up the bulk of Bomilcar's former soldiers—who brought their numbers to just above thirty-four thousand troops—and then turned north, following the river into Apulia. The army of Livius Salinator shadowed them, but they were no more trouble than a swarm of gnats. They crossed the spine of the peninsula through the valley of the Aufidus and caused great panic as they threaded between Nola and Beneventum. They moved at a leisurely pace, scouring the country to both sides with an almost festive attitude. It was early summer and the land bloomed all about them. As ever, it was a joy to pluck from it at will. He knew that Monomachus was stealing children from the locals and sacrificing them to Moloch. This troubled him more than he would admit, but for the first time he gave way to another's certainty. Perhaps Moloch did want a greater share of the blood they were spilling. So be it.

Joining the Via Appia they trudged through daylong waves of showers, drenched one minute and dry the next, chilled by the rain and then warmed by the sun, then chilled again. Hannibal asked his men how they liked this ritual purification. It was a blessing offered by the gods themselves to anoint the campaign to follow, he said. Approaching Capua, they slowed just enough for Hannibal to gather intelligence as to the situation there. Three armies held the city pinned down—those of Claudius Nero, Appius Claudius, and Fulvius Flaccus, nearly sixty-five thousand men in all. They had completed the circumvallation of the city and built outer fortifications. Any attack on them would be a siege in and of itself. Hannibal hesitated for a moment. His brother's killer was close, and his desire to avenge Hasdrubal burned within him, but he held to plan.

He marched the army in a hooked route that brought them up to their old camp on the slope of Mount Tifata. From there, they swept down toward the city. They clashed throughout the afternoon with Fulvius, and then pulled back as if to prepare for another engagement the next day. They did not, in fact, prepare a full camp, but only went through the motions until the light faded. In the darkness, Hannibal dispatched a messenger sure he could get inside the city, telling them not to fear his sudden disappearance, because it was part of a greater scheme.

The whole army shouldered their burdens and marched north, past Casilinum, across the Volturnus, around Cales and Teanum. They came to the Via Latina and followed it toward Rome. They burned bridges behind them, set fire to growing crops, fanned the country into a state of terror like that after Cannae. This was all as Hannibal wished, for his intentions were twofold: through terror in the capital, he hoped to see the blockade of Capua abandoned, and—knowing the shallowness of support for the consul's actions—he prayed that the Senate might recall Publius from Africa. Surely, the Rome he had thus far encountered would look to its own interests firsts. Of course it would.

They cut across to the Anio River and camped there, Rome just a morning's march away. Hannibal waited another day, letting the Numidians range within sight of the city; each passing day, he believed, would fill the enemy with more anxiety. Indeed, he learned that the city was in greater turmoil than ever. Though forbidden to disturb the peace, people poured out into the streets and into the shrines of the gods, wailing at their impending doom, convinced that their tormentor had finally come to settle this long dispute. Women loosed their hair and swept it across sacred altars and beseeched the gods with upraised hands, growing louder in the process as each tried to project her call with a force that would get her heard. A slave of African origin seen running through the streets early one morning caused a nervous citizen to declare that the enemy had entered the city, setting off a tumult that took the greater part of the day to dispel. Guards shot out to every possible post: along every section of the walls, in the citadel, on the Capitol. Men went armed even to the baths, and sentries around the city waited to sound the alarm. The panic was so great that all former consuls and dictators were summarily reinstated to their posts, an undertaking that must in itself have been a grand confusion. And then a report came in that Fulvius had pulled up from Capua and made for Rome on the Via Appia, just as Hannibal had hoped. With the news of Fulvius' move, Hannibal believed one of his objectives might well have been met, but he could not come so close to Rome without offering up a challenge.

He addressed the troops early the following morning. The trees and grass dripped with dew, but the sky was so clear as to be a brilliant white. He strode through the gathered throng with a chicken under one arm and a fistful of grain in the other, his voice booming out as he went. He asked how many among them had come with him across the Alps four years before? How many had seen the Ticinus, Trebia, Trasimene, and Cannae? Surely there were a few left among them who had been beside him the whole time. He clambered up onto the bulk of a felled tree, half of which had been sawed into sections for chopping. Enthusiastic soldiers jostled each other to hear him; a few jumped up onto nearby portions of the tree and fought to keep their balance as their fellows shoved and yanked them. He said that they would use a Roman method to determine the favors of the day. So saying, he tossed out the handful of grain. Men had to jump back to clear a space for it. He grasped the fluttering chicken with both hands and released it. The bird flapped its wings frantically for a moment, but then, seeing the mass of men all around, thought better of a long flight. It dropped down into the circle of bare ground and began strutting the space with nervous head bobs.

As he watched the bird, Hannibal said, “You've slaughtered Romans until your swords bent and dulled on the flesh and bone of them. You've seen them run before us like children fleeing before monsters of the night. You've looked in the face of the impossible a hundred times and laughed. Haven't you?”

They answered that they had.

“And so you'll be rewarded for it. By the gods, you'll be rewarded for it. What army on earth ever deserved victory more than ours? This will not go unnoticed—”

“The bird eats!” a man cried. “The Persian fowl eats!”

As this message fanned out through the crowd, Hannibal said, “Through the bird, the gods tell us the day will be ours. We, too, will feed upon our prey. This very day you'll set eyes upon the hated place itself. I know all of you have been impatient for this from the start. Now the time has come. Let's go call on Rome!”

He mounted one of the last surviving elephants from the shipment they had received after Cannae, seeming to take great pleasure in the vantage it provided him. Around him men and animals moved across the countryside, through fields and farms, leaping across irrigation ditches, ducking beneath trees, rising and falling with the slow undulations of the land. The Numidians rode out in front. Some soldiers, taken with enthusiasm, jogged before the main force like children anxious to behold something long promised them. Hannibal called for a sack of dates and munched on them as he rode, rocking with the elephant's slow gait.

Hannibal caught his first glimpse of the city as he rode through the saddle between two hills. If he had been on his own feet instead of mounted, he might well have stopped in his tracks, such was the way he drew up. For a moment the expression of mirth faded from his face and his single good eye became the center of his being. It was most dramatic, complete, and undeniable, the way the hilly farmland and pastoral view ended abruptly at the capital's mighty walls. Compared with the green landscape around it, the city was a raised scar inflicted on the land by the hands of men. The walls stood ten times a man's height and stretched in a strong, curving line, towers evenly spaced, the stone so smooth it almost glowed in the bright light. Even from a distance, it was clear that the populace crowded the walls. The upper rim was lined with staring people, with the bristle of soldiers' spears, the curve of archers' bows. And behind them hulked the city itself. All the famous hills, the Quirinal and Viminal, the Esquiline and Caelian and Palatine and Aventine, the Capitoline: Hannibal found himself ordering them in his mind. Stone structures crowded every space, temples beside palaces, the reddish roofs scaled like fishes' backs, steaming as the last of the night's moisture evaporated beneath the sun. Narrow lanes cut between the buildings; tufts of trees crowned some rises; the mixed scent of sewage and food, feces and incense—the stink of humanity—just touched them as the breeze blew into their faces. The writhing line of the Tiber shimmered as if it flowed liquid silver.

Rome. Finally, Rome.

The soldiers catching their first glimpse of the place slowed and hesitated, bumped into each other as they stared. They might have stopped completely except that Hannibal, on his elephant, carried on. After a few moments of hush, generals, captains, and bold men remembered themselves. Numidians trilled and surged forward on their mounts. Gauls bellowed that they had returned to finish the sacking they had started years before. They and Iberians blew on their horns, a ruckus like a thousand stags in rut. And the Latin contingents strode forward singing. Thus Hannibal led the enemies of Rome to the city's very walls.

He halted the advance on the clear ground an arrow's shot from the walls. Here he turned the elephant and progressed along the walls, commenting on the craftwork and calling out to the enemy. Just who was in charge here? Might one in authority announce himself? Was Fulvius in there, the cunning creature? To whom should he direct his terms? Or would they come out and settle this dispute like warriors? His own men were outnumbered, but they were not against a hard day's work. No? If not today, then on the morrow, perhaps? As an aside he offered fair prices on plots of land in the Forum, if any of them were interested in getting in on the transaction early. He did not discriminate. He would even accept Roman coins as fair tender.

He had surveyed the entire distance between the Colline and Esquiline gates when a sudden barrage of arrows sailed into the air. They did not quite reach Hannibal, but sank squelching into the ground nearby. The commander seemed to find humor in this. He pointed at an individual on the wall, blinked his good eye, and grinned at him, as if the two of them had shared a joke and Hannibal was weighing his rebuttal. A few moments later a missile ripped through the men not far from the commander, shot from a ballista, a mechanically strung bow of great strength. The bolt pierced straight through the soft of one man's neck, severing the artery in an expulsion of blood. It ricocheted off a Bruttian's round shield and caught a Capuan with an upward trajectory that pinned him by the torso to the flank of a mule. The man was dead on the spot, but the beast set up a wheezing cry and threw a series of lopsided kicks. Men laughed at this and commented on Roman spite, asking what the mule had ever done to offend them. They made light of it to demonstrate their fearlessness, but nevertheless they withdrew a short distance.

And so the day passed. Hannibal seemed content to sit on his elephant, munching dates, spitting seeds to the ground like a boy, and chatting with whatever men were near him. The soldiers had come by now to know that half of war is in the waiting. And so they took their lead from their commander's mood; they stoked their fires and roasted animals newly snatched from the local farmers. Those who had musical instruments brought them out and played into the night, so that surely the Romans huddled inside their walls heard a strange chorus of festivity: bone whistles and hand rattles and bells played on the fingers of camp followers or slave women. The complicated rhythms of African drums went on the longest, like the heart of the army beating so loud so that all inside the city would know that Hannibal's army lived, prospered, waited for them.