Pride of Carthage

Despite the almost fatal circumstances of his early years, Masinissa was a young man full of certainty. In infancy he had been threatened by an unnamed illness. A few years later, a smallpox outbreak took away his elder brother, several cousins, and many of his childhood companions: this was his earliest memory. A year later he fell sick with yet another contagion. Headaches and rashes plagued him. Stomach cramps doubled him over. He vomited whatever he swallowed, and other substances that came from deep inside him. Eventually, he lay unable to rise, feverish, his sheets stained pink by the blood escaping through his skin. Priests and physicians alike labored over him. Around them he watched the play of other creatures, small, half-human things that only he could see. These demons set their tiny hands on him and tugged, trying to lift him from his pallet and drag him off to some foul place. It took all of his will to fight them back. He was never sure just how he prevailed over them, but he emerged from his ailment with a quiet conviction in his own destiny. The illness had been a test; he had passed.

He was not tall, but his father had always told him that the best men were compact, hard as close-grained wood. There were so many possible substances from which a man could be made, but quality was hard to come by. His line, King Gaia had told him, was of unblemished mahogany. Looking at his reflection in polished iron, Masinissa found the comparison apt enough. His body was such that each muscled portion of it clung to his frame in just the right place. There was no fat; a lean coating of skin wrapped him like wet leather dried to form by the sun.

He had been a horseman since before his memory began, and he could do everything as well mounted as on foot. He smoked his pipe on horseback, ate many a meal, even pissed off to the side occasionally, joking with his companions about the strength of his hose. He sometimes dreamed of mounted sexual conquests, although this art did not come as easily in the waking hours. As for combat, he could hurl missiles at full gallop, pierce birds in flight, squirrels at dead runs. Larger creatures just made easier targets, none more so than the wide breasts of men.

When he sailed for Iberia, he promised Sophonisba he would return to her a hero. He meant it, and it pained him that she looked at him with such amusement, as if his words were no more than bluster. He hungered for her. It was not so much pleasure that she gave him as it was the awareness of the richness of pleasure denied him. She was exquisite and cruel: the combination was irresistible. After his father's death, he would make her the queen of his empire, and then he would extend his domain in new directions. Even as Carthage ruled the Mediterranean, the Massylii would extend their dominion to the west and bring the Gaetulians and the Moors into submission, not to mention the Libyans. He would squash Syphax beneath the heel of his right foot, and then he would turn southward. He would forge new bonds with Audagost and Kumbi, cities he knew little of except that they belonged to rich and prosperous, ancient cultures. With them as partners, he would control the flow of trade between inland Africa and the Mediterranean. What a world he would create then! He would heap treasures of gold and ivory, beads and cloth and dyes upon his bride. She would see in the years to come that he was no boy to be laughed at, but a man to be remembered by the ages. Of all this, he was certain. He had only to make it happen.

With the first few months on the ground in Iberia he proved himself the warrior he claimed to be. He knew that the best way to wage war changed with circumstance. Romans were slow to understand this, but Numidians were at their best when their minds and strategies shifted and darted as quickly as their mounts. His men once surprised a Roman reconnaissance mission as it was returning northward. He knew not what they had learned, but whatever it was died within their throats, each and every one of the fifty of them. He led raiding parties far up into Catalonia, blazing into villages with torches in hand, leaving them flaming pyres of despair.

He had no personal ill will toward these people, but they were traitors to Carthage, friends to his enemies. He tried to make the Scipios feel that they had no control over their territory, could offer no protection to their allies. He could strike at will, wherever he pleased. As far as he was concerned, he could keep this up indefinitely. He was new to war, yes, but he already felt a mastery of it pumping in his veins. With his aid, the Barca brothers must prevail. He reminded them of his skills often. They laughed to hear his boasting, but clearly it pleased them. They clapped him on the back and hugged him roughly and pulled on his hair and called him younger brother. Hasdrubal once shot back, “True enough, prince, may you never be an enemy. May Fortune never betray us so completely!” Even Hanno, who he knew had suffered at Roman hands and who was generally a taciturn man, warmed to him.

Late in the summer of his first season in Iberia, both of the Carthaginian armies were in the field. It so happened that Hasdrubal's movements brought him near to the Scipio brothers at Amtorgis. Hanno, who had resumed command of an army, was nearby but separated by miles of hilly terrain. The Romans had apparently tired of skirmishing and wished for a real battle before the season's end. They were on the offensive, just as they believed their countrymen were in Italy. For a moment the situation looked dire for Hasdrubal's army, separated as he was from his brother. But instead of attacking him with their full force, the Romans split into two armies. Gnaeus marched north to hedge off Hanno, while Cornelius set himself right next to Hasdrubal, separated from him by little more than a river.

At first glance, both of the Roman forces were considerable, each numbering some thirty thousand. But from his wide-ranging scouts, Masinissa learned that Cornelius' numbers were made up predominately of Celtiberians. Only a third were Romans. In answering this news he spoke a gibe against the Celtiberians, but a moment later he stopped in his tracks, stunned by what he had uttered. It was a simple idea, but it had a certain sublime beauty. When the generals met at the midpoint between their armies for a hastily called council Masinissa could not help but begin the meeting with his idea.

“Listen to me,” he said, speaking with his customary rapidity, starting before the group was completely settled. “Those Iberians have no joy in their hearts. They don't look forward to this battle, nor do they love Rome. We have silver. Why don't we just pay them?”

Hasdrubal dropped onto his stool, shaking his head. “They won't fight against Rome. They're too bound to them; and they've been too foul to us to expect our friendship.”

“I didn't say they should fight against Rome,” Masinissa said. “There need be no question of that. Pay them, but not to fight for us. Just pay them not to fight.”

“Not to?”

Masinissa searched for the words to explain himself further, but then realized he had stated his position well. He just nodded.

Gnaeus Scipio had had more than enough of Masinissa. From the moment he started his northerly march, the whelp plagued his every move, barking at his heels, darting in again and again with attacks so rapid his men had barely time to muster into formations to face them. Masinissa's force would appear just long enough to hurl their spears, to slice a few baggage handlers in the neck or upraised forearm, to drop a flaming torch into a wagon, or to spook horses into revolt. Then they would vanish, crouched low, galloping at breakneck speed beneath the branches of the pine trees. These were a coward's tactics, but each raid cost him dearly in lives, supplies, and pride.

That was why Gnaeus ordered the silent march to commence at midnight. He knew that Indibilis and his Tartesians—Carthaginian allies—were afoot only a few miles to the east. Masinissa's harassment might be a ruse to keep him distracted as the Iberians marched to join forces with Hanno. He decided on an action to stir the matter, praying that when the dust settled he would find himself to have gained advantage. He left a lagging corps of men to man the campfires and sound the passing of the night's quarters and generally make themselves out to be more numerous than they were; then he and the bulk of his force slipped away unmolested, no mean feat for an army of twenty-five thousand. If this went as he envisioned, he would make quick work of the Tartesians and then turn back to face the greater threat. He was quite sure that Indibilis would pull up his red-fringed tunic and crap stones when he realized the numbers marshaled against him.

The march commenced perfectly, the men keeping good order, making almost the time they would have in the daylight. Dawn found them within sight of the Iberians, just as his scouts had foretold. He forced them into battle, a loose affair spread throughout the rolling, wooded hills. His men had to fight singly, like so many gladiators in a great contest. This would have proved difficult for most legions, but Gnaeus had trained them for just such a possibility. From the start, he gained the upper hand. The Iberians stepped backward with each thrust or parry.

But when he heard the first shrill, stammering Numidian calls, his blood went cold. A moment later Masinissa's horsemen carved into them from both sides, African furies let loose like an army one of the Numidian gods might have spat out of its great, rotten mouth. But even this did not decide the matter. The blood that was icy one moment burned red hot the next. Gnaeus shouted for his men to tighten up their formations. The horn beside him bellowed out instructions, turning the men at either flank out to the side to meet the marauders, halting the advance into the Tartesians and alerting each man to take a managed defensive position. Once some amount of order had been achieved, the Roman forces began to retreat.

All this was skillfully done, but other powers conspired against him that day. A horseman churned up to him with the last ill blow of Fortune: Hanno fast approached. The Romans had been so distracted that they had not noticed their advance until they saw them walking in great columns through the dappled light beneath the pines. The general's gaze flew out toward the tree-lined ridges the scout indicated. It might only have been an illusion caused by the wind up there, but the spires of the pines trembled and swayed as if buffeted by the soldiers shouldering through them. He told the horseman to gather a small band and ride for Cornelius' camp to beg whatever aid he could provide. As his messenger spurred his horse away, Gnaeus knew the effort was in vain.

Message dispatched, he issued new orders. The Roman soldiers stopped in their tracks and set about building fortifications. They ignored the normal order of a defensive camp. Gnaeus rode from point to point, throwing out instructions as suited the landscape. Velites and camp staff dug trenches in the crumbly soil. Men hacked down trees and set them falling in a pattern that knitted one into the next to form a perimeter just behind the trenches. They strung the wall between elephant-sized boulders and tried to use the land's contours to their advantage.

All the while missiles fell among them. The signaler beside Gnaeus went down in twisted, silent anguish. A javelin punctured his chest at the lung and pierced him, emerging on the far side. He seemed to have no idea how to respond to such an injury, so he just lay down. Moments later, five Numidians jumped clear over the trunk of a fallen tree and engaged at close quarters with the general's staff. Gnaeus himself drew his sword and struggled to get close enough to split one of them open at the skull. But they were gone before he even swung a blow.

Then Hanno's army arrived. There was no way to count them in the broken, tree-covered terrain, but they numbered in the tens of thousands. Hanno's forces fanned out in an encircling maneuver. They intermingled with the Tartesians, who greeted them with cheers and horn blasts. They surrounded the Romans both bodily and with a wall of sound and wide-eyed, bloody lust. Gnaeus shouted courage to his men, although he could not quite keep his voice from betraying the nearness of death. He took some pride in the next few moments. His men fought with complete devotion. He saw not a crack of panic in any of them. He asked Jupiter to allow someone to live through this and tell the tale. After this prayer he did not think anymore. He got down from his mount and waded into his troops. Beside them he met the horde pouring over the fallen trees.

Four days after his brother began his northerly march, the Suessetani with Cornelius Scipio awoke and broke camp hurriedly. They tore down their tents and piled supplies onto their pack animals' backs. When Cornelius sent a translator to ask what they were doing, they answered flatly that a disturbance in their own country demanded their presence. Hearing this, the proconsul went to their chief men himself and tried to reason with them. He implored them to stay on, hinting vaguely that they would be rewarded for doing so. He was only a hair's breadth from actually offering them pay, but his pride cut off the words before he uttered them. Finally, he rebuked them for their treachery and accused them of scheming with the enemy. He reached forcefully for one of their chieftains and found himself poised between two bristling fronts of spears: the Celtiberians before him and his own behind. He almost shouted for the capture of their leaders, then he realized that he had no such power. The Suessetani outnumbered them two to one.

The sight of them strolling away in a loose, casual herd let loose a shiver of fear low in his back. Cornelius knew he had been betrayed. He turned around and started to count his men with his eyes, but stopped himself. He knew the numbers and what they meant. He called for his officers and with them decided to fly in pursuit of his brother's force. There were four days between them, yes, but if they sent out swift messengers immediately and strode out at all haste they might manage to converge in less than a week. Their smaller number would speed them, anyway.

Hasdrubal's force crossed the river behind them and shadowed about a day's march behind. Occasionally over the first two days, skirmishers from the Carthaginians harassed the Roman baggage train. On the morning of the third day, one of the original messengers rode into camp on a lathered horse, a creature dead on its feet from the moment it stopped moving. The man himself had nearly lost his left hand from a sword blow to the wrist. His horse's side and his own leg were spattered with blood. Streaks of brown cut across his face where he had tried to wipe away sweat. Cornelius had received fair news from worse-looking messengers before, but the first words out of the man's mouth proved such was not the case in this instance.

The route north was alive with Numidians, he explained. They were everywhere, roaming at will. The others of his party had been lost. He had escaped only because his horse took him down a sliding gravelly slope so steep nobody would follow. They had better prepare, because the Numidians would be on them any moment.

Cornelius bent close to the man, who was now seated, having his injured arm dressed and gulping down water between sentences. “Are you sure of what you saw?” he asked. “Is it not just that the Numidians trailed behind my brother's army? If they are so close, then Gnaeus is close as well. Perhaps they are pinned between us.”

The messenger shook his head. “Sir, when we met them they weren't in pursuit of your brother. They faced south. They're coming for us.”

The land to the east was barren and, to the Romans, largely unknown. There were no important settlements, so the area had been largely ignored. But it was not very wide a stretch. In five days they could be at the coast; another two and they would be among allies. This was no easy choice to make. Cornelius did not know whether some catastrophe had befallen his brother. He could not tell whether pressing forward would reunite them or lead him into annihilation. All he could do was make decisions based on what he knew. His ten thousand were no match for the Carthaginian forces now. There was an army behind him, and marauding Africans in front of him. He ordered the dash for the coast.

They left behind their wagons and the camp supplies that needed to be dragged by pack animals, keeping only enough food to get them through a week. They made good time that day. They did not halt until after dark and were up again before the dawn. Cornelius demanded the strict rationing of water, but the second day took them through a terrain so parched it seemed to suck fluids mischievously from their skins and gourds. The sun perched in a cloudless sky, blistering from above, scalding as the fury of it bounced up from the sand. The heavens gave no sign that they remembered the approaching autumn and the rains the season always brought.

The third afternoon they passed through an area of cave dwellers. They were a strange people with no military might who watched the Romans from gaping black mouths in the rock. They seemed to know who was in danger here, for they showed little fear. Children clustered about the adults' legs, staring, chatting, pointing at the strange sight of a Roman army in full flight. Cornelius ordered water requisitioned from the peasants, but not a drop of the stuff could be found. How they scraped out an existence in that craggy land was a complete mystery.

On the fourth day, the Numidian cavalry attacks—which had been sporadic and light—picked up. The horsemen appeared at their sides. By midday they began to attack before the Romans. As the sun finally tilted toward the horizon, scouts brought Cornelius the worst possible news: They believed Masinissa himself directed the cavalry attacks. And to the west they had seen a cloud of dust rising from the ground, catching the red fire of the setting sun: It could only indicate a large host. Hasdrubal's troops alone could not account for such a sign. The Barca brothers' armies must have joined.

If this were so, Cornelius knew, Gnaeus might well have perished. He spent the night wrapped around this possibility and rose not having slept at all. The Numidians allowed them no peace from the moment the sun rose. They found no water that day. Instead they stumbled across dry riverbeds. In resting moments he saw men clutching their heads, their lips dry and cracking, their eyes receding into their skulls. Some of the horses refused to walk. A few collapsed from exhaustion, toppling their riders to the ground. They only needed another day, Cornelius believed. Only another day of running. But he knew as the sun fell for the fifth time that they must live through a long night before then, and the territory they had to do it in was so barren as to beggar belief.

They paused on the only feature of note on the land around them, a bald hill that fell gently in all directions, nothing more than a pimple on the landscape. The full ten thousand men barely fit on its slope. It offered none of the many things needed to build a fortified camp. There was no timber for stakes. No turf to slice and peel up to build walls. They could not even pierce the stony soil to dig a trench. The proconsul hesitated only long enough to confirm all this for himself. He looked ahead and verified that the land offered only more of the same everywhere he could see.

He formed the infantry into a circle around the hill with orders to beat off the enemy's cavalry charges, which started even as he uttered the words. Inside this barrier of men, all the others stripped saddles from mounts, packs from supply animals, gear of any and all sorts. These they tossed into a heap that formed a second line of defense. They hefted stones into place. They slaughtered fifty mules and hefted their bodies up onto the wall of debris. Soon after, they dispatched the rest as well, for what use would they be to dead men on the morrow?

By the time this was accomplished, the Carthaginian forces had appeared in their full might. They spread across the land like a river of congealing blood, their armor a hardened skin that pearled the fading glow of the carmine sky. The Numidians drew back to consult with them and Cornelius ordered his infantry inside the strange fortress. They sealed the entry. Cornelius set sentries all around the ring and had lookouts climb to vantage points to keep watch on the enemy. This having been done, a silence settled over the army. There was nothing more to do. They stood panting, grimy, so dehydrated that many of them could no longer sweat. Cornelius instructed them to rest, to share water if they had any, to keep weapons close at hand, and to remember their gods and the nation they served. They were here for noble reasons and not one of them need regret it. Not one of them need meet what was to come with anything but bravery.

The night blackened and then grew lighter as the moon rose and the stars fired to brightness. Around them was nothing but silence. Occasional wisps of African words carried on the breeze, but they gave no true indication of the sea of animosity that surrounded them. Cornelius sat on a simple stool, ringed by his officers. They spoke quietly around him. They recounted aspects of the day, pondered the night ahead, and optimistically proposed strategies for defense. But to the elder man at their center their words were children's chatter. Alone inside himself, he prayed that the Carthaginians would wait the night out. They will delay, he said silently to himself. They will rest. No army presses an attack at night. He wanted to stand on the mound and yell this to them in case they did not know it. Night maneuvers were folly. Wait till the dawn. Wait till the dawn! But even as he wished for this, he recognized that the Carthaginians would be fools not to finish them that night. And Barcas were not fools.

Cornelius tried to find some reason why the gods would have blessed the enemy so suddenly. The night marked the Nones of the Wild Fig. The day was meant to honor serving women for once defending Rome. There was nothing at all portentous in it. He had never understood the reasons behind the teetering rise and fall of Fortune, and his age had only made this stranger to him. No matter that others could always explain away success or failure. To him it had never seemed that people understood even a portion of the gods' inclinations. He had never wavered in worship, never failed to offer tribute, never let his vigilance in service wane for even a moment. So why had Fortune not been as constant toward him?

Though he had expected it, the shout when it came jarred him so much that he visibly flinched.

“There!” a sentry called. “They're coming!”

The white walls of Carthage simmered under the sun's glare, glorious, blinding, like structures cast in silver and polished to brilliance. Mago remembered how much he adored this place. He set foot once more on African ground, inhaled African air, and looked upon his countrymen. News of his arrival had preceded him. People accosted him on the street as he made his way up from the harbor. He was hugged and kissed by women, grasped and patted by men, praised and questioned by both. But he would not speak of the rumors they had heard, not just yet. The Council summoned him a few hours after his arrival, but he delayed them some time and ordered a series of crates brought up from the ship.

He sped home to his mother. In public she received him with all the dignity of her position, but inside the privacy of their grounds she hugged him to her in the manner of a mother. He did not fight against her. He told her everything he could. She heard it all, smiled and frowned as appropriate, and passed her reasoned judgment on the campaign with all the authority of an old warrior. Like Hannibal, she accepted the victories as natural enough and looked past them to how to end the war. Mago found it strange listening to her. There was a cadence in her voice that reminded him of his father. He had not noticed this before.

Sapanibal greeted him with more enthusiasm than usual. She pressed close to him and touched his face with her fingers and began to ask him details of where the campaign stood, how damaged they had been by the lack of reinforcements, what Hannibal thought of marching on Rome. . . . If Didobal was an old warrior, Sapanibal was the younger equivalent, a roiling cauldron of schemes and ideas.

Sophonisba rescued him from her. She launched herself at him as if she were still a girl, landing on him with her legs wrapped round him, pecking his face with kisses. He was as shocked by her as he was pleased. Astarte had been hard at work on this one; or was she the creation of the Greek goddess Aphrodite? She was no longer a girl, even if she played at being one. Though her brother, he recognized the stunning beauty of her face and form. His awareness of this made him instantly uneasy. Pray that war never comes to this land, he murmured on his breath.

This thought was still in his mind as he met Imilce. She alone approached him with the reserve demanded by Carthaginian decorum. She bowed before him and greeted him with praise and rose only when he begged her to do so. She asked after Hannibal demurely, matter-of-factly, as she might have inquired about the weather. He answered only in the vaguest of terms, speaking not of her husband but of the victorious commander. He certainly had no desire to speak of the damage to his brother's body, of the trials they had seen and the changes Fate had sculpted in the man. Only Hannibal himself should convey such things. Mago did slip her the scroll that his brother had entrusted to him. Of all the documents he had arrived with, this alone he hand delivered. He could see by the urgency in Imilce's eyes that she wished desperately to read it. But she did not. She only nodded acceptance of it and handed it to a servant.

When he finally presented himself to the Council, the clamor of their questions rang through the dark, smoky chamber, which was lit by the rippling, orange glow of torches. Mago did his best to quiet the men with his upraised hands. He said he had come to them bearing proof of the greatness of Hannibal's exploits, proof that he would lay before them in just a moment. First, though, he wished to recite his brother's accomplishments to make sure that all understood their magnitude. He described the geographic obstacles they had overcome. He named the battles they had fought and numbered the enemy dead from each. He said that so far Hannibal had been responsible for the death of nearly two hundred thousand Roman soldiers. He had captured and ransomed over forty thousand more, and sent countless Roman allies home to their people to sing the praises of a just Carthage. He spoke at length, saying nothing openly disparaging to the Council but letting them know that all these things had been accomplished with the most limited of resources.

He went on to outline Hannibal's plan for the continuation of the war. Let it be a multi-pronged strategy. Send reinforcements to Italy, yes, but also redouble efforts to hold Iberia, attack Sicily and win back the old allies, and send aid and support to Philip as he strove to end Roman influence in Illyria. If Carthage could keep Rome stretched thin and struggling in the outer circle, Hannibal would drive home his attack in the inner circle. He would strip the Romans of her allies one by one until she stood alone and naked among enemies. Carthage, in a year's time, would be the first nation of the world, the single greatest power, with no impediment to expanding beyond all far horizons.

When he concluded his address, one councillor, Gisgo, shouted above the others who had started to question him. Mago could not help looking to the ceiling with mild annoyance. Gisgo had been his father's enemy of old, and by the look on his thick face he was still an enemy to all things Barca.

“You talk grandly of your brother's victories,” Gisgo said, “but you speak with a double tongue. If Hannibal has won such great victories, why has he not sacked Rome already? If you are to be believed, not a single man of fighting age is left in all of Italy. Does Hannibal need help in fighting women and children, then? Is it old men he's afraid of? You name victories, and then you ask for more, more, more. Explain this to me, for I am confused.”

Mago's face lost none of its cool composure, although he was taken aback. He had expected some resentment in this chamber, but it amazed him that the first questions posed were so openly hostile. Hannibal was right again. They were responding just as he had assured him they would, almost as if his brother had put the words in their mouths. So many years distant, but still he knew his people perfectly.

Mago let his surprise take on the outward expression of humor. “Councillor,” he said, “I'm not sure that any amount of explaining could cure your particular confusion.”

“Do not insult me!” Gisgo shouted. He struggled to his feet, a difficult task for him as he was quite heavy and he bore the weakness of old injuries. “You are not a prince standing before us. Your brother is no king. Answer me with answers, not with wit. Or I will see your wit nailed to a cross!”

Other voices murmured vague approval, although few seemed pleased by the outright threat. Somebody said in a more reasonable voice that it did seem strange that a victorious general was constantly begging for assistance. Another voice, one of the younger Hannons', added, “Your brother did not ask our guidance when he began this war; why now seek our help to finish it? This war is not truly even Carthage's doing. This is Hannibal's fight, and the outcome rests on his head alone.”

“Does all the glory go to him in victory then?” Mago asked.

The answer came from another section of the chamber. Hadus did not rise. He spoke softly, but somehow his voice carried all the authority it needed. “Hannibal will get what's Hannibal's,” he said. “But let us not speak out of turn. You said you brought proof, young man. Show it to us.”

Mago seemed to debate this a moment, but then nodded that the time was right enough. He tilted his head and projected his words high. “Honorable sirs. You are quite right. I will show you what I've brought. I'll do just that. I bring you a present from my brother, Hannibal Barca, son of Hamilcar, pride of Carthage!”

His voice rose toward the end of the sentence so that he shouted these words. This was obviously a signal, for a moment later there was a commotion in the foyer just outside the Council courtyard. Several men, slaves naked from the waist up and each of them lean and well-formed, pushed and tugged a heavily laden cart into the center of the Council. It was covered in a thick cloth that hid the contents, hinting only that it was piled high with some sort of booty. Mago paced around the cart a moment, running a hand over the cloth.

“When we report to you the greatness of our victory at Cannae I hear many questions. Some doubt the facts as have been relayed to them. Some ask for numbers, for proof, for some way that you here in the safety of Carthage can understand what Hannibal's army has accomplished in your name. But how to bring the reality of our victories from the field to this chamber? And how to name with certainty the number of enemy dead? Who but Baal knows the exact number? I've yet to count them myself, but honorable men, if you would know the number, feel free to count these, taken each from the hand of a dead Roman citizen! A gift from Hannibal and the field of Cannae!”

With theatrical grandeur Mago yanked the sheet from the wagon. Almost simultaneously, the slaves tilted it from the back. The contents poured onto the stone slabs in a clattering avalanche. At first it was hard to tell what the objects were in the unsteady light. They shimmered and bounced on the stones, rolling, skipping, and sliding. Strangely enough, it was a single item out of all those thousands that made it clear. It rolled forward away from the others, an erratic path that took it near to the councillors' benches before it turned ever so slightly and arced back. Mago, with quick fingers, snatched it up and held it aloft. It was a gold ring. One of thousands. Roman rings, so many that the sight was unbelievable.

The councillors were silent. The hush was strangely pronounced after the clattering of the rings. Mago stood beaming, watching the surprise and awe and dawning understanding on the men's faces. He forgot the sense of reserve his brother so often exemplified. He could not help himself. He grinned from ear to ear.

Nor did he stop smiling for several days, not until the Council ordered him to return to the field with a new army. But, despite all that he had revealed to them, they refused to let him return to Hannibal in Italy. Instead, they sent him to Iberia, where he could build on his brothers' successes. Hannibal, they told him, would manage without him for a little longer.

The autumn after Cannae passed in a strange, gluttonous haze, as if the battle had been some enormous festival and each living participant was left spent and reeling. The Carthaginian forces floated on a tide of euphoria, fed each week by new bits of good news. The first major Latin municipality to declare for them was Capua. Long a rival to Rome, the Campanian city had chafed in its subordination. The city turned on Rome by popular consent, but not without a certain amount of subterfuge. Given a warning that the people were turning against them, Roman officials and their supporters were tricked into gathering in the baths for security. The doors were barred and the whole lot of them were steamed to a blistered and bloated death. Afterward, their families were dragged from their homes and stoned. Thus did the people of Capua seal their union with Carthage in blood.

The terms they set out for peace with Carthage declared them the preeminent city in Italy, no longer a subject of Rome, but also outside Carthaginian jurisdiction. These were strong terms, which perhaps overreached the reasonable, but Hannibal was not inclined to look unkindly on the gift.

Other cities followed. Calatia and Atelia came over to his side. The tribes of the south revolted: the Hirpini and Lucani and Bruttii. Ligurians from the northwest agreed to fight for pay. Unlike their Gallic neighbors, these men were slight of build, quick foot soldiers and fine skirmishers who fought without armor, in woolen tunics that they wore regardless of the season. In addition to this, news issued from the north, a strange tale that was a joy to hear.

Members of the Boii tribe of Gauls had flown north from the battlefield of Cannae on triumphant wings. They had finally seen clear proof that Hannibal would deliver on his promises. They took this news to their countrymen, along with trinkets from the Roman dead, jewelry and weapons, knucklebones and teeth. It was not hard to convince the populace to rise in earnest against the Romans, who still patrolled their territory, slapping them down at every opportunity. Though the Boii were a strong, proud, and warlike tribal people they were not known for tactical insight and coordination. But they had among them an enemy they now knew could be beaten. For once, they conceived a plan of organized attack that seemed to each man so inspired as to deserve his complete devotion.

They knew that a mass of the enemy was to march on a route through a stretch of forest they called Litana. The Gauls chose a thickly wooded section for their trap. Ancient pines lined the narrow route, trees of great girth and height. The Boii went to work with axes and toothed saws. Before the Romans reached the area, hundreds of trees had been left balancing on the barest remainder of uncut wood. They looked, to the passing eye, like a forest in full growth. The Gauls set their long swords down at their feet and crouched in the ferns beside the wounded trees and waited.

Lucius Postumius led his Roman force unknowingly into this wood. He had two legions under his control, and beyond that allied troops drawn from the coast. They numbered some twenty thousand of them, so they were a long time winding their way into the wood. Once they were all in, the Gauls rose from hiding and pushed over the trees farthest from the path. They had levers prepared for this purpose and ropes attached to some, while others they just sent over with a push. One tree fell against its neighbor. Both fell against their neighbors and so on, until the two forests of falling timber met in a crosshatched confusion, the Romans caught in the center of it. Columns of wood blocked out the sky. Beams cut down men and horses and shattered wagons. The air was a wild stir of sound and leaves and dust, through which birds tried frantically to rise.

Some men managed to elude that horror and flee, but not one of these escaped alive. The Boii stood waiting. The bewildered soldiers stumbled upon them and were cut down like stuffed figures set up for their amusement. The Gauls wielded their great swords in sweeping, grandiose arcs that sliced more than one Roman head clean from the shoulders that carried it. Postumius himself was stripped and humiliated. The Boii then severed his head and peeled away the skin. They liquefied the brain and drained it out. They gilded this shell and made a ghastly drinking cup to offer libations to their gods.

Hannibal sent the Boii messengers who told this story home with new gifts and praise. Soon after, he moved the army to Capua to winter in comfort none of the men had seen in years—with luxuries that some had never experienced in all their lives: rich food pulled from the sea, flowing wine, warm beds, and women happy to pleasure them in return for portions of their battle-won riches. He released his men to roam the alleys and dens of the city, and then he withdrew to his host's villa and tried to focus on the coming year.

It was there, surrounded by sprawling opulence, that he received the news of the Scipios' demise in Iberia. And, just days later, yet another welcome envoy arrived.

Lysenthus entered the room at a brisk walk. His hair hung long and dark and his features were all as Hannibal remembered, hawklike, strong. At seeing the commander, he stopped in his tracks and called out, “By the gods, Hannibal, you are a man of ages! Your name will not soon be forgotten. Let me not call you a man: You are a deity in the making! I bow to you and to your children and your children's children.”

The Macedonian bent from the waist, then touched one knee to the ground as if he would prostrate himself. Hannibal grabbed him, pulled him upright, and embraced him. He had not planned the gesture, but the man's enthusiasm infected him instantly. The sight of him brought back memories of their last meeting—so long ago, it seemed, in the innocent days when this whole venture was just a plan, when his brothers were all around him and Bostar still among the living.

“So you are impressed, then?” he asked, grinning.

“I am, but more important, my king is. Philip hangs on any phrase that begins or ends with the name Hannibal. He believes that any such utterance is guaranteed to sound the death knell of Rome. Someone could say to him, ‘Hannibal pricked his finger on a thorn,' and he would shout for joy! He would say, ‘Did you hear that? Hannibal pricked his finger on a thorn; Rome is doomed!' I will tell you all the many things my king has planned, but give me drink. Commander, you would not believe the trials I've been through to reach you. Water me, and I will tell the tale.”

By “water,” of course, the Macedonian meant wine. Hannibal rarely drank it, but Lysenthus' thirst seemed to inspire his own. He seemed to feel completely at home in the Greek's company and sat listening to his tale with a merry glimmer in his eye.

A storm had come upon them off the Picene coast, Lysenthus said. The vessel was near to sinking, the rim of the deck sometimes dipping beneath the surface, the whole craft waterlogged. They survived only to be boarded by a patrol off Salapia, and held in that city for five days as the local magistrate tried to figure out what to make of them. Fortunately, they carried with them papers expressing Philip's sympathy for Rome's plight and his desire to be of aid. Pure nonsense, of course, but the documents reassured the magistrate and he let them go. Shortly thereafter, their ship began to take on water. In trying to get to land they ripped the hull apart on a reef and were literally tossed to shore.

“That was truly a black night,” Lysenthus said. He paused to spill a bowl of wine into himself. Some of it trickled into his beard and splattered on his breastplate, but this seemed almost intentional, as if he considered a certain amount of disarray necessary to heighten enjoyment. He went on to tell of the land voyage they then embarked on, breaking up into smaller parties, wearing disguises, twice stealing horses, and once riding in the back of a merchant's wagon, often walking from sundown to dawn to get to where he now sat.

“All this to bring me here to you,” Lysenthus said. “As I've said, my king is impressed. You have placed yourself in the company of the great.”

“You honor me, Lysenthus of Macedon.”

Lysenthus waved this away. He was only speaking the truth, he indicated. He then grew somewhat more somber, looking from his own scarred hands up at the commander's face and down again. “I see the tale I heard was true,” he said. “This war has taken a piece of you. I understand such losses, friend. May Rome take nothing further . . .”

Hannibal nodded.

“To business now. I come with a proposal for a treaty between our nations. Philip wants the scourge of Roman domination removed from the Adriatic. Macedon will unite with you to defeat Rome. He will fight mostly in Greece, but he will bring the battle here also. In the spring of next year, he promises to appear on the Roman shore with two hundred ships, enough to make the Romans piss themselves.”

For a moment after he took this news in, Hannibal was too pleased to respond. He saw the warships clearly in his mind's eye, and the sight quickened his pulse. The pieces of his plan were truly coming together.

Ever since she had spied Imago Messano in the conspiratorial, bare-chested company of Hadus and several of the Hannons, Sapanibal had shunned him as a traitor. He, in turn, campaigned to convince her that he was true to her and to the Barca cause. By custom, Sapanibal had almost no choice but to receive him when he called on her, which he did often, making his case with all the passion of a man arguing before the Council. Of course he spent time in the company of those base creatures! he explained. How could he not? They were of the same class. Apart from war matters, he had to conduct a whole variety of business dealings with them. A man such as he was invited to functions. More than once, he had swayed entrenched opinions while returning from a hunt or overseeing some religious ceremony. He was often at his most convincing during the late hours of the night, with his tongue loose from wine and entertainment. Imago found leverage in being on close terms with Hadus, an access to information denied those he thought of as staunch enemies. None of this changed his heart. Nor did it sacrifice any of his dignity.

Sapanibal listened to all this with narrowed eyes. He could do what he liked with whomever he liked, she responded, but he could no longer expect to receive her full trust. She could tell this indifference hurt him more than her anger. He recoiled as if from a red-hot poker. This she liked, for through such romantic torture she might just gain valued information. This was exactly what happened in the summer after the year of Cannae. Imago confided in Sapanibal a piece of clandestine news: something not yet public, and sensitive, for it undermined the newfound enthusiasm for Hannibal at home. And also, he saved the family from what she believed could have been a grave error of judgment.

They met as they had ever since Imago's alleged betrayal, not in the inner garden but on the couches in the exterior welcoming chamber, a dim, solemn place. The room had a stifling heaviness. The tall pillars stood like so many silent soldiers, the play of torchlight shifting over them, creating shadows that were ever in motion. Imago chafed at the formality with which they now met, but he accepted it with a resigned expression that yet seemed to say he would not put up with it indefinitely.

“I heard some troubling news this morning,” he said. “News from Rome . . . It seems that your brother sent the cavalry officer Carthalo to the city, along with representatives of the Roman prisoners from Cannae. He was to set a price for their ransom and organize the transfer. The Senate barely deigned to receive him. When they did, they rejected all payment outright. They even forbade the men's families from buying them free themselves.”

Sapanibal thought about this. She wore her hair pulled back from her face so tightly that the skin of her forehead was a smooth, taut sheet. It made her features more rigid than usual. “Clever,” she finally said. “And foolish at the same time.”

Imago nodded his agreement, although he seemed unsure just what she meant. “But no disgrace marks those soldiers except that they had a foolish leader who took them to slaughter. In Carthaginian tradition it's the generals who are nailed to a cross for failure, not their men. But Rome doesn't see it that way. So they deny themselves thousands of soldiers out of pure spite. They are a strange people. When Hadus hears of this he'll claim it proves Hannibal has not been very successful.”

“What does he know of anything?” Sapanibal snapped. “He says black is white one moment, and white is black the next. It's his doing that Mago must go to Iberia instead of returning to Hannibal. If I were to write my brother, I'd tell him to ask the Council for the opposite of what he desires; only then might they, in their spite, be tricked into acting reasonably.”

Imago absently bit a hanging flare of fingernail and ripped it free. It was a rough gesture for a normally gentle man. He seemed to notice this. He flicked the bit of nail away and covered the offending hand with the other. “Strange that you don't pile rage on the Romans as you do upon your own.”

“There's nothing I can do to affect the Roman Senate; I save my spite for targets closer to home. Is there anything else, or are we finished?”

“There's another matter, also. Perhaps more urgent . . .”

Imago inched forward until his bottom rested on the edge of the couch, his heels bouncing as if he were a boy anxious to be somewhere else. He stretched his arms out, palms upward, as if indicating that the matter in question was best transferred to a woman's hands. “It concerns your family. Your sister, to be precise . . .”

Imago hesitated, but Sapanibal said, “Proceed.”

As he did, she listened from behind her tense façade, showing no sign that the story affected her except perhaps in her eyes, which seemed to want to recede into her skull. It was hard to believe what he said, but—despite her show of indifference—she knew that he would not lie to her about things that mattered.

A short time later the two moved toward the front door. Imago stepped slowly, speaking in faster time. “Sapanibal, one day I will call you my dear Sapanibal. I want that very badly, and I know you are too wise for me to disguise my longing. I do wish that you were not so cold to me. I am a mature man with many choices. If I choose you, it is because I find in our conversations a depth of life I've never experienced with a woman. Don't shun me forever, Sapanibal.”

The two stopped walking at the edge of the courtyard. A servant stepped out of the wall—not actually, but with such a complete appearance of this as to make it a fact—and stood waiting to let the guest out. Sapanibal gave no indication that she had heard his speech. She only said, “Thank you for the news you've brought me. I'll act on it in a manner that aids the nation. Farewell.”

Imago said his parting words, rehearsed phrases spoken with emotion befitting a poet. Sapanibal's face did not crack. Nothing about her suggested the least concession to his ardor. And yet, as he moved away, she brushed her fingers across his upper arm. He turned as if to question this, but she had already begun to walk away, cursing herself for the gesture.

It was no easy work verifying Imago's story. State law and custom provided no excuse for an aristocratic woman to traffic with merchants and seamen. But she had no choice. She was not willing to allow Imago any further role in this. Nor could she entrust the task to a servant. And yet still it had to be done. She went hooded, with a bare-chested guard trailing behind her, a eunuch naked from the waist up and burdened by heavy muscles that hung loosely from his frame. She made her way down to the docks, through the crush of naked slaves, around beasts of burden hauling crates. Woven sacks sat on the stone, swelled to bursting with their burden of fish, the smell of them thick in the air.

Imago had given the time scheduled for the voyage to Capua. He named the vessel, and the captain who had accepted the unusual passengers. She asked several freedmen about the captain and finally found him. He was not an altogether unsavory sort; in fact, he had a councillor's confident bearing, a strong jaw, and a smile set off by several missing teeth. Sapanibal met him before a steaming warehouse. She did not disclose her identity, but she was confident her stature would speak for itself. She told him that the journey would not be going forward with the special passengers. She would double the price he had already received, so that his troubles would not go without reward. But for this she demanded one thing.

The ship itself was a modest vessel. Its wood glinted bone white, silvered by the cloudless days and salt spray. It was a sailing craft but also had slots for oars and rows of benches, well worn, the impression of the unfortunate rowers' backsides cut in the wood. The single chamber used to carry passengers sat at the rear of the deck, a small hut that seemed an afterthought, built of different wood, secured by large wooden pegs nailed through the planks into the deck. The captain had to jerk the door several times to open it. Inside was a tiny, dank chamber, full of stained wood, a pile of rope, and unrecognizable debris.

Seeing the look of revulsion on Sapanibal's face, the captain said, “She did not ask for much. Nor did I promise it. Stay as long as you like.” He grinned, gap-toothed, and said, “But not too long. I put out in the morning. So unless you wish to find a new life at sea . . .”

Sapanibal did not dignify that with an answer. She and the eunuch climbed inside the small chamber. She took a seat on the benchlike structure and he stood off to the side, stooped, for the roof was low. And that was it. She waited.

It was hot, stifling like the baths but foul-smelling instead of pleasant. It was clear that livestock had recently been transported aboard the ship. As her eyes adjusted she began to make out pictures drawn on the rough boards, the coarse work of men of many nations. There were several sexual images, simple drawings that differentiated male from female by exaggerating their sex organs, by their postures of submission or aggression. Why did men's minds always turn to such crudities when left ungoverned? Was a single one of them worth the power and faith women bestowed upon them?

She thought of her husband. Following so fast upon her observation, the recollection hit her with surprising force. It struck low in the abdomen, a longing akin to nostalgia. Hasdrubal the Handsome was so very different from Imago. His physical beauty was much more obvious than the councillor's: features bold and yet sharp, like shapes cut with quick swipes of a blade through smooth clay. His gifts: a quick and sinuous tongue, a smile that melted the unwary of both sexes, a mind for intrigue, a memory that stored minute facts like scrolls in a library. She had been a fool for him entirely. He could suck the very breath from her lungs with a wink.

At least, so it had been to begin with. Once their marriage was official he gave up all pretense of ardor. It was a business transaction concluded favorably. He was wed to the Barcas; that was all it meant to him. The words with which he had wooed her were barely off his lips before he turned from her. He rarely came to her at all, and when he did he fucked her quickly, with his face far from hers, as if he found her very smell repugnant. And yet she had seen him with other women many times, pleasuring in them in more ways than she could have imagined. These were far from being chance encounters: he made her watch him. He brought others to her chambers at night and woke her to laughter and moans and lewd incantations. At times he frolicked with men as well. He had all the qualities of a degenerate, but he managed to keep these entirely separate from his public responsibilities. He was ever within Hamilcar's favor. After Hamilcar's death, he carried out the revenge raids with great skill and then managed Iberia with a silver touch. Through all the petty tortures he inflicted upon Sapanibal, he kept a hold over her and never quite let go—had not let go even now, so many years after his death.

Imago Messano would never treat her as Hasdrubal had. Sapanibal knew it, and the knowledge pained her the more because she wanted badly to answer his declarations with her own. But she did not know whether she could stretch her emotions between two such different men. Try as she might, the girl inside her had yet to fall out of love with that dead lecher. She still carried the pain he caused her draped over her neck like a necklace made of a slave's chains. How could she ever look at Imago except with fear? He might carry the keys to unlock her and set her free; or he might simply wish to add more links to her burden.

She was still staring vacantly at the obscene pictures when she heard noise outside the door. She snapped upright, hands folded across her lap, legs crossed. The door opened roughly, lifted first and then swung back on its leather hinges. Blinding light flooded in. Sapanibal fought the urge to block the sun with her hand until a shape stepped into the portal and cut the glare. Imilce. Her son stood at her hip, peering in at his aunt in complete bewilderment.

Sapanibal rose and stared into the young mother's shocked face. She had had words in mind for this moment, but they sat like stones inside her. She held Imilce's gaze, conveying as much as she felt she needed to, and then she said, “Let us go now. There's nothing in this ship for us.”

As she brushed past Imilce she slipped an arm over Little Hammer's shoulder and placed her palm against the flat area at the bottom of his neck. She turned him with a slight pressure and led him away, bending low to prattle with him. She felt the coldness of all this: Imilce's awful silence, the way her face drained of color, the brevity of her own words, and the fraction of time it took to pull Imilce's plans out from under her. She felt something like satisfaction. And something that was very much the opposite: the bitter joy that is the pain of seeing loved ones hurt, of knowing they suffer just as much as you.

Still, some things were necessary. Some things were for the greater good. Imilce would see her husband again after the war, but not until then, on his terms and not on hers. A wife could not go to her husband during war; he could only return or not return to her. Imilce would accept this eventually.

Publius Scipio first heard the announcement of his father's and uncle's deaths in the Senate, surrounded by hundreds of eyes that turned to study him. There had been such confusion in Iberia and so much preoccupation in Rome that the news took many months to reach them. He wanted to jump from his bench and grab the messenger by the throat, call him a liar, and demand that he prove the death he had just proclaimed. But he would have disgraced his father with such a show. He had no choice but to set his jaw and listen unflinchingly. He fought to make sure his face betrayed no inkling of his emotions, and then to stand and lead the chamber in remembering the two men.

Later, alone in his father's home, he dropped to his knees in the center of the atrium and clasped his head in his hands and wept. Waxen images of his prominent ancestors hung on the walls around him. The faces were hidden behind the façades of miniature temples, each etched with inscriptions detailing their achievements: offices held, honors won. The last time he had seen his father they met in just this spot. Cornelius, for some reason, had spoken of Publius' mother, who had been dead for as many years as her son had lived. Cornelius said that that woman was still precious to him. His love for her had been undignified, far beyond the terms of their marriage contract. He had adored her like some Greek poet his muse. Should she have lived, he might well have become an absurd creature. Senators would have called him effeminate, too much a slave to a woman's love. And they would have been right. Perhaps that was why Fortune took her from him on the day she gave him a son.

“But don't look at me like that,” Cornelius had said. “You're too old to despair over such things. Your mother wanted you born, so much so that when the birth went wrong she begged the surgeon to cut her open and bring you forth. Our lives are only passing events. The things we do or fail to do are not ours to own; they belong to the honor of the family. Perhaps the gods will see fit to allow me to return to this home again. But perhaps not. This is not for me to say. So I must remind you that all I am, all I have accomplished, I pass on to you. In your turn, you must add to our glory and pass the spirit of the Scipios on to your sons. We are all links in a chain. Be as strong a link as I know you can be, and raise your sons to be even stronger.”

To think of this speech now troubled Publius. His father had been speaking to him as if from beyond the grave, and from now on he always would. He could not find fault with the sentiments Cornelius had spoken. Indeed, it gave him pride to remember them. They lodged at his center beside his unshakable faith in the right of Rome. And yet something about the sincerity of his father's declarations shamed him. He did not know whether he could live up to them. He did not know that he was yet worthy of the man who had been his father. He could not say for certain that his path in life had thus far proved the man's faith well founded.

Recruiting and training new troops kept him in Rome, though he had pleaded to return to the field. All day long he focused his mind on war. He marched the new soldiers—farmers and slaves, tradesmen and merchants—through the midday swelter. He pored over chronicles of earlier wars. He interviewed those who had already suffered from Hannibal's cunning stratagems, absorbing what he heard, taking it in and reworking it, digesting it, making it part of the fabric of his consciousness. He largely kept his opinions to himself as yet, but he inquired much of others and listened to any man with a mouth willing to use it. He set about studying Carthage itself. And he meditated long and hard on the man: Hannibal. No man could be unbeatable, Publius believed. No man. Not even the gods were without weaknesses. He was fond of things Greek, had been since he first bloomed into early manhood. He thought of Homer's aged tale of Achilles. Splendid, beautiful, peerless warrior that he was, even he possessed a weakness. Hannibal must, as well. He must.

Submerged so fully in martial matters, he often drilled his men well past the ninth hour without knowing it. He would find the midafternoon sun slanting into remission, shadows lengthening, men staring at him with veiled questions behind their eyes. More than once his lieutenant had to pull him aside and remind him of the time of day. Even in wartime, he was reminded, a Roman must still be a Roman. He should not forget the day's divisions: the portions of the day set aside for work, and those for leisure.

Waking from the world of his thoughts, Publius was always surprised that the normal workings of Roman life went on undisturbed. Strolling into the Forum in the early evening, head full of military violence, he would look up to find his countrymen's faces turned congenial. Though he invariably wore his toga, the people of the night dressed in bright tunics, reds and yellows and blues, garments embroidered with gold, the hooded cloaks that were the fashion that summer. Perhaps it was the freedwomen who took the most pleasure from these pageants, widows who eyed the limbs and torsos and backsides of young men and giggled like girls with their servants. The air was alive with sounds of merriment, with storytellers plying their trade, with the smells of roasted sausages and fragrant honey cakes. And after all this, the evening meal, the cena, tempted everyone to give in to food and wine and rest.

Most evenings Publius ate reclining, talking quietly with his companion, Laelius. He took joy in these moments, but it was a strange joy. Laelius was the only person he could confide his sadness to. He found it hard to understand how people could go on seeking small pleasures. Were they so forgetful? Were they deceived or overly proud? Or was there a testament to the Roman spirit in this? People had no choice but to live until they died. So it always had been. Perhaps the children of Rome, the prostitutes and lusty matrons and wine-soaked senators, knew this better than he. Perhaps there was wisdom in what seemed like folly.

Even if this were true, there were other moves afoot that Publius could not find virtue in. Terentius Varro still commanded the Senate's respect. No man in history was responsible for the death of more brave Romans than he, and yet few seemed to notice this. Publius bore him no unfair ill will, but he did fear that Rome would not learn from the man's blunders unless they recognized them as such and said so publicly.

On the other hand, aspersion after insult after curse was thrown upon the thousands who had surrendered to Hannibal at Cannae. They were seen as so disgraced that the Senate refused the ransom Hannibal demanded and forbade the men's relatives from paying the sum themselves. Better that they should languish in the enemy's hands. Publius—who had only just escaped disgrace himself—bridled at the insult to those men. Never before had so many soldiers been abandoned by the state.

Eventually, most of them trickled home. Hannibal gained nothing from them monetarily, so he released them and set them walking through a country that no longer wished to claim them. Many considered it an insane gesture, but Publius saw reason in it in terms of striking blows at the nation's heart. On the other hand, he despised the Senate's reaction. They sent the bulk of the men to Sicily, to serve Rome's cause on foreign soil, where the sight of them need not offend the eye. Surely this was madness. Publius, imagining the men's shame, knew that they would make valiant fighters yet. Who more than they had cause to prove themselves? And Publius knew that any survivor of Cannae had stared a particular horror in the face, a vision of hell unlike anything in living memory. This bound them together and made them special, even if other men's petty understandings suggested otherwise.

In the Senate, on the Ides of the new year, he rose to speak. He invoked his father's presence and asked for his blessing on what he was about to propose. And then he said out loud, “My countrymen, if ever you valued my father and called him and his brother heroes of the nation, then give me what I ask of you now. Let me go to Iberia and take up my father's command. The Scipios left their task unfinished there, and I would dearly love to see it through.”

The chamber was silent for some time. Then, gradually, various senators posed questions. A few debated the issue of Publius' youth. Still others suggested that he need not sacrifice himself out of mourning. The truth was that with several enemy armies roaming Iberia some in the Senate were whispering that they should write the place off for the time being. But this was just talk. In the end, the senators, knowing that no one else wanted the assignment, acquiesced to the young man's wishes. He would not have a great army. He would not have the full resources of the state. And the task was formidable. But if he wanted it . . .

Sapanibal never spoke a word to Imilce about her attempt to sail to Italy. She never explained how she found out about her plan, never chastised her for the foolishness of it. To Imilce, this silence became an even greater admonishment. Hers had been too absurd an idea even to merit reproach. She could not explain it herself. It had just come upon her suddenly: the knowledge that Hannibal wintered near Capua, the desire to fly to him. What might she have found, arriving unannounced in some foreign port? Would Hannibal have welcomed her? Would he even have recognized her, or she him? And what if she had been captured by the enemy?

She still believed Sapanibal a coldhearted creature, but with each passing day Imilce felt herself more and more in her sister-in-law's debt. One of the strange things about the family she had married into was that there was something about each of them that made Imilce crave their approval. This was not usual for her. Most people, she had learned long ago, are not worthy to judge others. She had found that many wore their avarice in the motion of their hands, their lust in the pout of their lips, their insecurities on their tongues, their petty minds behind the flutter of their eyelids. Not so with Barcas. Each was an island of stillness to her. Sapanibal had taken inside herself the discipline of her family name and demonstrated it in the only ways possible for a woman of their class. Even Sophonisba—for all her chatter and gossiping—contained strength unusual for her age. And Didobal awed Imilce with every motion: every word said or not said, each gesture, the placement of her gaze and the tilt of her head and the flare of her nostrils in breathing. Their encounters were tense affairs, during which the matriarch rarely uttered more than the polite minimum.

In the mild, damp weather of early spring, Imilce earned the honor of braiding the older woman's hair. She had been in training for this throughout her time in Carthage. The intricacy of Carthaginian headdresses was wholly new to her, influenced, she heard, by the ways of people far to the south. On odd days of the week, she met Didobal in her quarters, in a small chamber whose walls were hung with layer upon layer of colorful cloth. The room was always warm, heady with incense and full of threat. Oil lamps stood on stands all around the floor: tiny flames, but so many that they gave off an almost even light. Imilce once singed her gown negotiating them. Another time she knocked two over with a single misstep. Servants dashed in with wet blankets to squelch the fire. Didobal did not comment on either incident.

One morning, weeks after her aborted journey, Imilce ran her fingers from the top of the woman's head down through her tresses. Didobal's hair was thick in her fingers, dark and heavy. It did not fall limply around her, but had a wavy, tensile strength in each strand. Imilce combed the hair into strips measured by fingers. With the aid of an assistant, she began to treat them separately. Some she sprinkled with an oil fragrant with cinnamon. Into others she combed dust flecks of silver. Still others she bound in ribbons of seaweed. Today she was to fashion her mother-in-law's hair in imitation of a certain bust of Elissa, a design of tight plaits low across the back of the head, building a platform into which to set the gold headpiece that would anchor two great curving horns of hair.

As happened too often, Imilce found herself speaking to fill the nervous silence. Words issued from her mouth of their own accord: an observation about the rising level of water in the cisterns, a recollection of her dream from the previous evening, a question—which went unanswered—about the fate of Tanit's veil, that holy relic so beloved of the goddess. And then, without knowing she was about to say it, she commented on the pain of being separated from her husband for so long. It was unfair, she said, that he fought so far away that he could not return for the winter as most soldiers had throughout history.

Didobal cleared her throat. She touched her assistant with her eyes. The girl stepped back, turned, and moved away. The other servants followed suit. They retreated into the folds of fabric on the walls; their faces went blank, eyes glazed and unfocused, still as statues. All this, Didobal accomplished with a single look. Imilce feared the woman was about to dismiss her, but instead she asked, “You feel a great passion for my son?”

“Yes,” Imilce said.

“Such as few women feel for their husbands?”

“I don't know what other women feel, but I think of him always.”

“By your tone, you suggest that I know nothing of this. Do you think you are the only one who has loved her husband almost to foolishness?”

“No. No, I did not mean . . .”

“I did not know what to make of you when we first met,” Didobal said. “I did not trust you. Forgive me, but it's hard for a mother to watch his son give his affection to another woman. A mother always feels that she came first: the first womb, the first breast between their teeth, the first unreasoning love . . .”

The woman turned her head slowly, tugging the thick braids from Imilce's hands. Her eyes were large, the whites slightly yellowed, deep-veined and very dark in the iris, a brown that at the moment looked solid black. She said, “I'm sure you understand this.”

She turned back and again showed the younger woman her face in profile. “Because of this I couldn't help but receive you warily,” she continued. “I had you watched. It's shameful—but, Imilce, you have hardly done a thing while in Carthage that I did not know of minutes later. Why did I do this? Because a person proves who they are not with their mouth but through the accumulation of actions over time. Were you in my household purely for our riches? Did you care for the fate of your husband, and did you honor his people's traditions in your secret moments? Did you partake in the diversions this city offers even to women of our class? Did you simper and smile beneath the gazes of powerful men? Forgive me, but I had many anxieties.”

Throughout this discourse Imilce attempted to carry on with her work. She set pins to keep the lower plaits in place. Then she picked up an ivory comb to work on the mass of higher hair, somewhat wild now, chaotic compared to the close weave at the back of the neck. But she slowed down as Didobal spoke and, eventually, stood with the comb in hand, held out to the side, inlaid pearls pressed tight between her white fingers. What a set of questions, Imilce thought. For all the world at that moment she could not imagine the answers the woman might have received. She had been watched! All this time . . . In a strange way it made sense. It explained much of her discomfiture. All this time . . .

“Hamilcar was as hard not to love as Hannibal now is,” Didobal said. “They are of the same mold, those two. We who live near to their fire are as blessed as we are cursed. It seems also that you and I are not so different as we seem. During the Mercenary War, I couldn't bear to be separated from my husband. I did what you—with greater wisdom—did not do. I followed him into the desert when he chased the mercenaries away. I caught up with him two days after the battle at Leptis Minor. He was victorious, but never had I seen him so, caked in blood and filth, eyes reddened and skin peeling from him as if he'd been burned. I expected him to be angry, and I was afraid, but he said not a word of reproach. Instead he took me as he never had before, like a lion, growling at me. His passion was beyond words and he did not speak to me through the act at all. He did me no kindness, left me red with the stains of war.

“It was horrible, Imilce, but I thought, that night, that if this was my husband's ardor on campaign, then it was well I should be there, for who but me should receive him like that? The next day he took me by the hand and led me over the ridge and down into the valley where they had fought. He showed me the battlefield. He walked me through the high-piled mounds of bodies. Imilce, it was a sight you should never wish to see. Three days in the heat, and the bloated bodies belched gases and shivered as if life still resided in them and came to them in spasms. Some burst as if boiled too long. They sent up the foulest of scents. Scavenging birds blackened the sky, long-necked creatures that flew in from all directions, bald demons.

“And that was just the beginning. I spent the week at my husband's side. He made me watch everything. They spent days tilting up crosses to crucify the captured leaders. Other prisoners they set free without their hands. Some had their feet severed at the ankles and were left to fight off the hyenas. Others they blinded and sliced out their tongues, cut off their manhood, fed live to captured lions. The war had been brutal beyond imagining, and Hamilcar—my husband—answered earlier barbarities in kind. All these years later, these sights are as alive in me as they are real somewhere. Somewhere in this war such scenes are being repeated. The men we love are their architects, or their victims. That is why I chose never to trouble my husband again. I left him to his work, not as a sacrifice, but because I hated the way it made me look at him. I hated—and never understood—how such a man could perform such horrors. Because of this I spent the larger part of my married life away from him. I loved him; and therefore I could barely stand to be with him.

“I'm not sure if this makes sense to you, but do not seek the ways of war, Imilce. Do not wish to understand it. Take your husband in his quiet moments, when he's in your arms and when he looks upon your child with love. You must do this, for if you know too much of a warrior's work you'll grow to hate him. And I would never have you doubt my son.”

“Nor would I,” Imilce whispered.

“Then hold on to your ignorance. Men's follies are better left as mysteries to us.”

“Do you think it is all for nothing?”

“All for nothing?” Didobal pursed her lips. “No, I wouldn't say that. The world thrives on the strife of those living in it. As food nourishes the body, so does turmoil feed the gods. One creature must prevail over another. I would not wish our country to be used like a slave woman, so I pray daily for our victory. What else can we do? On the day this war ends, a new one will begin. It's dreadful, but so it always has been. There is no reason to believe it will change.”

“So we can never live at peace?”

Didobal answered flatly, “Not until the gods are dead. And as we both know, they are immortal. The gods will ever make us dance for them. That is what it means to be born of flesh. In truth, Imilce, I feel the gods are restless with this war. I do not know what will happen, but it's coming quickly, like a storm from the north. Like a tempest blown down from the heavens. Let us keep all of my sons in our prayers.”

Didobal lifted her arm and held her hand out to her daughter-in-law. Imilce took it and felt the woman squeeze her fingers, her regal hand heavy with rings. Something in the pressure made her feel like a child holding a giant's hand. “Forgive my earlier deception,” Didobal said. “I like you very much, daughter.”

Publius sailed from Ostia at the head of a fleet, carrying ten thousand infantrymen and another thousand cavalry, the full measure that Rome allowed him for the year. Barely had his men's feet touched solid ground at Emporiae when he had them exercising to regain the strength the journey had sapped from them. He gathered the battered remnants of the existing army and with them left behind the distractions of the Greek city. They marched to Tarraco, where Publius set up his headquarters and began interviewing anyone and everyone with knowledge he considered useful. He had never been busier. He had never directed so many men, faced such challenges, held such complete responsibility. He knew Rome was too far away to rely on for any guidance, so Iberia was his to win or lose. Only the constant motion kept him from pausing long enough to weigh the staggering gravity of this.

Within seven days, he had sent out invitations to all the tribes aligned with Rome already, and even to a few still with Carthage. The delegations came to him with varying degrees of enthusiasm, with more complaints than promises, with wary eyes that took in this youthful new leader skeptically. Was this truly the best Rome could do, to send a boy with barely a hair on his chest? What could he hope to achieve that his father and uncle had not, especially now that the situation was even worse? Cornelius and Gnaeus had been skilled commanders with years of experience, two armies, and a force of allies it had taken years to win. But they had been destroyed. Now, with Mago Barca having arrived over the winter, the Carthaginians had three armies in Iberia. They roiled across the land, storm clouds hurling down bolts of retribution for earlier betrayals. Hanno had hammered the chieftain of the Vaccaei to a cross and sent five hundred of his people's daughters to New Carthage as prisoners. Hasdrubal burned a scorched path along the river Tagus all the way to the Great Sea, enslaving whole tribes, burning villages, twisting their leaders on the burning spit of fright as only Carthaginians knew how to do. Mago laid new levies on the southern tribes and daily built his army into a great horde clamoring to become the second wave to march for Rome. Considering all this, more than one envoy asked, what assurance could Publius give that Rome's cause was not dead and rotten like the corpses of his predecessors?

Strangely, Publius found something calming about staring into these belligerent eyes. As the translators conveyed their messages he took in their foreign features, their varying dress and demeanor. The more disrespect the Iberians showed him, the stronger the set of his jaw, the more steady his gaze, the more fluid the motions of his hands. He promised nothing in exact detail, he said, for no one individual ever decided such complex matters. But he did pledge to fight the Carthaginians as they had never been fought before. He reminded them that never yet had Rome uttered one conciliatory word to the Africans; such was their certainty that the long war would eventually swing their way. They had made mistakes. They had been hasty when they should have been patient, honest when they should have been devious, restrained when they should have exploded with fury. In many ways, they had fought the war unwisely up to this point. Yes, he admitted, even his father had made errors of judgment, but none of these need be repeated.

These speeches met with mixed receptions, but each time he spoke them Publius believed his words a little more. He was discovering traits in himself that he had not known before, but he had little time to pause and consider these things. Laelius, like a twin beside him, did not speak a thought not directly related to the war, so he did not do so either. He trusted no other officer as completely as he did his companion. With him alone, he laid out all the charts and information he had about Iberia. On their hands and knees, they crawled across the marble floor, talking through each piece of information, from the obvious to the most complex. They both believed that they must strike, and soon. They could rely on no reinforcements from Italy and, for all they knew, Hannibal might soon strike another great blow there that would further complicate matters for them. They could win the confidence of old allies and secure new ones only through a victory. A winner always had company.

Such was Publius' thinking on an afternoon two months after his arrival, well into the dry heat of early summer. His period of grace with his men was short. Already he felt them murmuring their doubts. Each passing day suggested hesitation. Had this new commander any plan at all? The truth was that he did not, but he woke and slept and ate and shat with the belief that he was at the verge of revelation, that the key to unlocking Iberia was within his grasp if he just knew how to reach for it.

He entered his war room to find Laelius stretched out atop the charts, writing notes directly onto the parchment. His body covered the circles that marked the three Carthaginian armies. His left ankle hid Hasdrubal's base at the mouth of the Tagus; his right foot lay flat across the Pillars of Hercules, where Mago resided; his torso entirely covered the center of the peninsula, where Hanno based his operations. The single marked spot of importance that was visible fell in another area entirely, one that suddenly appeared to Publius as what it was: completely isolated, lightly protected, vulnerable.

“We've been thinking only of the hounds, but not of the sheep they guard,” Publius said. “Laelius, what do you see when you look at this from on high?”

Laelius stood and peered about. He began by restating his earlier argument that they should seek out Hanno's force first, as he was reportedly having trouble managing his Celtiberian troops. “We could gather at—”

Publius touched him at the wrist. “Friend, think. Remember when you saved me at Cannae? You raised my outlook so that I saw with my enemy's eyes. I learned from you that day, and I'm alive because of it. Now you must use such foresight as a matter of course, each day that passes, each moment until this is concluded. The Barcas don't fight like normal men, and neither will we. Look at these charts and answer me. What is the weak point? What holds all of this together and yet lies exposed?”

It took Laelius only a moment to grasp Publius' meaning. His face shifted from perplexity to mute understanding, and then the left corner of his lips lifted.

When they departed for the south a fortnight later, they traveled in haste, troops marching double time, Laelius and the ships shadowing them offshore, cavalry riding out in small units, hunting any who might betray their movements. Publius had yet to reveal their goal to any but a select few, no more than the fingers on a hand. He was so intent on secrecy that he refused to tell the twenty thousand men of his army anything more than necessary to get them through the day. If his plans for Iberia were to succeed, this first effort must not fail. He left nothing to chance, but this did not stop him from mingling with the men daily. He rode up beside his troops during marches and harangued them from the saddle. Everything was about to change, he declared. The gods themselves had told him so. Never again would they make small war in Iberia. Never would they fight skirmishes for no real gain. Never would they divide their forces and rely so heavily on Iberian honor. They would strike only decisive blows, well timed, perfectly placed, and so effective that the brothers Barca could not recover even from the first attack. Hannibal might have rewritten the rules of warfare; now it was their turn to take up the stylus and inscribe the rest of this history.

They marched around Acra Leuce without a sideways glance, forded the river Segura, and strode out onto the cape of Palus. There were seven days like this, but still they were each of them stunned when they caught their first glimpse of the city. None of them believed it a reasonable destination, so they sought some other explanation for why their route took them close to it. More than one of them sat down to behold the madness that had brought them to the teeth of the enemy's maw. They had marched to New Carthage.

Their arrival caught the inhabitants by complete surprise. Shepherds rose up from drowsing no more than a stone's throw from the advance guard. It took them only a glance to know that these troops were not their own. They ran, but not one of them escaped the cavalry's darts. Slaves looked up from the near fields and dropped their work where they stood. Soon the watchtower sounded a great horn that drew everyone into the city like rabbits scurrying to their burrows. Just before the gates slammed shut, a band of six horsemen galloped out. Messengers. Each curved off in a different direction, gone to cry warning to the Barcas. Publius quietly ordered patrols to fly out after them, with simple orders:

“Hunt and kill them,” he said. “Let none of them get through.”

That evening they camped at the base of the isthmus and Publius spoke to his assembled troops. “The city behind us stands as the greatest monument to the rule of the Carthaginians in Iberia,” he said. “Out of it flows all the wealth of the continent; into it, the desires of its far-reaching masters. Inside are whole chambers piled high with silver, with amber and gold, storerooms of weapons and siege engines, warehouses of raw iron and the great furnaces that fire it into tools of war. Inside stretch palaces worked by servants, fountains that flow with wine on festival days, temples where they sacrifice to their dark gods, and an ancient wood filled with exotic animals imported from Africa. There are many thousands locked within those walls, but there are merchants and sailors and aristocrats, priests and magistrates, Iberian prisoners, slaves, the old, the young—not fighting men. And there are women, a great many of them. Isn't Hasdrubal himself rumored to keep a court of a thousand beauties?”

Publius had made up this last detail on the spot but enjoyed the effect it caused and spoke into the building enthusiasm. “All this inside that city,” he said. “But who protects it? I'll tell you—a scant thousand soldiers. Yes, one thousand alone. This may seem impossible to you, but consider their thinking. They'd never have imagined that we'd aim for this target, just as many of you never did. They've been safe here and taken their destruction elsewhere for so long that they do not see their vulnerability. They're like Achilles, who had only a single weakness but went to war with it exposed to his enemy's arrows. Where is the wisdom in that? Why not fashion greaves to cover the spot, and therefore become invincible? There is, of course, one reason. We're not alone in our struggles here but act on the small stage overseen by the gods, and the gods have never yet allowed any single people perfection. I believe that Apollo offers us this city as a gift. Tell me this is not so. Tell me you do not care to dine!”

Laelius later commented that Publius had a growing gift for oratory. To which the commander smiled and said that Laelius had a growing knack for noting the obvious.

They were two days at planning and shifting troops and reconnoitering the land and outer bay, the reefs in the shallow water, and the breathing of the tides into and out of the inner harbor. Publius spent the whole of the second day alone with a fisherman who had once called New Carthage home but had fallen foul of a few important people and been cast out. He had reason to despise the city, and an intimate knowledge of details Publius was very interested in.

The attack began on the fourth morning, much as any might have guessed. The bulk of the Roman troops rose early and clamored out onto the isthmus, laden with tall ladders. They walked forward flanked by archers who set up a steady barrage of arrows, many of these set aflame and aimed far beyond the walls themselves. A detachment from the city poured out the front gate to meet them, but pulled back just as quickly, no match for what they saw coming toward them. Publius strode with the front ranks of soldiers, protected by three shield bearers and to all appearances completely unafraid. He urged his men on from right in among them. He shouted reminders of their duty, but also fed their desire for revenge. It was in this city that Hannibal had grown into a man. Here he planned the murder of Roman men, the rape of Roman women, the conquest of their homeland . . . it was inside these very walls that he had dreamed of making them all into slaves!

The citizens of the city, however, had no intentions of making this easy. What they lacked in soldiers they made up for by enlisting all able bodies. Over the walls they tilted giant logs that wiped whole ladders clean. They dropped rocks the size of ostrich eggs, heavy enough to dent helmets, knock men unconscious, crush fingers, snap limbs, and dislocate shoulders so that men clung to the ladder one-armed, howling with pain and able neither to ascend nor to retreat. The walls themselves were smooth and in many places taller than the ladders placed against them, a fact that some of the anxious soldiers only discovered at their upper reaches. Other ladders snapped under the attackers' weight and crashed down in a jumble of fractured wood and broken bodies.

The defense of New Carthage was furious. If not for Publius' presence, his men might well have broken. Few of them believed they could win the city this way—but that was not their young commander's intention. What none of them knew was that as soon as the frontal attack began, Laelius with several ships had entered the harbor. The transports maneuvered as close as they could to the shallow shelf of rock and coral that distinguished the bay from the open current of the sea. The boats perched on the vast blue water, but next to it the men could see the stones they were meant to walk upon, clearly visible and solid, but submerged almost to a man's height in water. Laelius shouted his orders, but for some moments the soldiers did not understand the apparent madness of what was being asked of them. They knew they were meant to be the first inside the city, but they knew no more than that.

As the boats pitched on the swells, the captains added their voices to Laelius' and got the men off quickly, for the rocks threatened to gouge in the hull and end this for all of them at any moment. Few of them could swim, so it was an act of faith or courage or—for some—resignation to step from the boat, falling through the stilled oars, splashing down into the water, heavy in their armor. They fought to keep their heads above the surface. Some fell into depressions and dropped their weapons and clawed at the feet of their companions until they were lifted up. Two of their number were unfortunate, jumping at the wrong moment in the boat's pitch and missing the rocks. They slipped into the depths, clawing for purchase on the water, fading into the blue until they were swallowed by the color and lost. More than one imagined the jaws of some beast rising up from the depths beneath the boat and clamping down on them, and many would say afterward that the hardest part of the day had been that first hour of waiting.

The last objects off the boats were a few ladders, tossed atop the men's heads by the anxious crew. What they were supposed to scale with these, they could not say. They were not near the city at all. It sat some distance away, protected by a long stretch of water, most of it too deep to walk. Somebody whispered that perhaps Publius had placed them here as an offering to Poseidon. He said it as a joke, but none of those who heard him laughed.

When the change came it was with a shift of the wind, so that it seemed a divine force was involved. Gusts of air whipped across the water, blowing spray into the soldiers' faces, causing them to turn away and shade their eyes. They looked up only in short glances but these put together created an accelerated version of events. They felt the water draining from around them, the tug hard enough that they had to lean forward to maintain their balance. The tide was shifting. Rocks soon projected into the air, round heads of coral draped in translucent sea grass. Soon whole stretches lay bare to the sun, a path bridging the distance to the city, dotted with shallow pools alive with crabs and tiny fish that the men kicked out of the way as they scrambled forward, slipping and unsure but growing confident with each step.

Laelius mounted the wall at the top of the first ladder and stood gazing at the city before him. No one opposed them. No one even imagined them. Men clambered by him on either side. They finally understood it all and moved with grunting hunger, with a thirst for vengeance they had not felt just moments before.

The city was theirs within a bloody hour.

Hannibal's spies in Rome kept him remarkably well apprised of events in the city's distant chambers. There was a delay of a few weeks as the news traveled to him, but he learned quickly enough that the consular elections had brought Tiberius Gracchus and Claudius Marcellus to power. Because he was a veteran warrior known for his steadfast martial outlook, many believed Marcellus to be the coming man of this war. But Fabius Maximus, a greater power than ever now that his whole philosophy of avoidance had been justified, disagreed. He found a technical error in the elections and had Marcellus dismissed. Fabius was then kind enough to step into the post himself and proceed to restore reason and purpose to the populace.

Under him the course was set for the coming year. Of generals in command of their own armies there would be several: Tiberius Gracchus, of course, alongside Claudius Marcellus, Quintus Crispinus, Livius Salinator, and Claudius Nero. The Senate doubled the war tax. Call-ups went into effect with the goal of creating twenty-five legions in the coming years. Rome's leaders strove to make every available man into a warrior. They told boy-children to early put away knucklebones; they should pick up sword and shield instead. The age of enlistment was lowered to seventeen years, but many even younger than that found their way into the newly formed legions. The city bought eight thousand slaves from their owners at public expense. They were armed and set to training. Temples and private homes were stripped of ornamental weapons, of souvenirs from past wars; these trinkets returned to their original function. Nothing would be the same in Rome again, the spies reported. Cannae had changed everything in an afternoon.

Hannibal heard this news with a mixture of pride and reservation. He imagined the delight his father would have felt to know that his son's victory had set the people of Rome trembling. Such had been his aim, and now it was achieved. On the other hand, he could not help but wonder what lay behind the Romans' strategy. He had thought they might revert to avoiding combat as under Fabius, but instead they were investing in an even more colossal army. He still welcomed this, but it was disconcerting to hear that they could produce such numbers so quickly. They had set a goal that meant they believed they could create one hundred and twenty-five thousand fighting men from nothing, just like that. If this was true, then slaughter was not as effective against them as one would think.

And how were they managing to pay for this? Hannibal knew that the death of so many citizens must have cut Rome's wealth significantly. The destruction of field after field, farms and supplies and surpluses, would have brought lesser nations to their knees. Husbandless families surely struggled to keep their farms and businesses going; their daily lives must be a misery in a variety of ways. He listened for signs that a heavier tax burden was being levied on the allies, but if it was, they accepted it and did not think of revolt. Though Hannibal struggled with doubts upon waking each morning, he held fast to his belief that he had been correct in his actions after Cannae. The Romans' continued stubbornness proved that they would not have surrendered the city if he had marched on it.

As the new year began it took some effort to drag the men away from the gluttonous bounty of Capua. He prodded them on with promises of even greater things to come. He sent Bomilcar with ten thousand men to patrol the southern cities, to recruit troops and generally solidify the Carthaginian presence there. Then he turned the rest of the army west and moved into Campania, hoping to press his advantage further by bringing more cities to his side early. He chose as his first target Neapolis, important enough that her defection would do much to influence others along the coast. And she had a beautiful harbor, well situated to serve as a funnel through which to bring in reinforcements from Carthage. He approached her with a thronging army of veterans at his back, but he had every intention of offering the city peace on fair terms. Why should they fight, he would ask, when they were not enemies? Indeed, the truth was that they had a common foe: Rome. Hannibal planned to point out to the Neapolitans that nothing in his actions so far belied this. Had he ever attacked a city that welcomed him? Had he not spared allied prisoners and released them time and again to fly home to their cities? Had Rome ever treated them with the mildness that Carthage displayed?

The Neapolitans, in their pride, did not even bend an ear to hear him pose these questions. They sent the full power of their cavalry out on the offensive. A foolish move. Maharbal ambushed, routed, and massacred them in a single day. But still, when Hannibal set his gaze upon the city, its gates were locked. The towers and walls bristled with defenders. They would not hear the envoys he sent bearing terms for peace. Instead they threw down all manner of missiles, tossed stones, and even slung bags of rotten fish.

Monomachus argued that an all-out siege was in order, a punishing, rapacious slaughter to answer this haughty belligerence. Hannibal dismissed the suggestion with a gesture. Taking the city by force was no way to endear the people to them, he said. It would unify others against them. Better to let time do the work. The Neapolitans simply needed to let the meaning of Cannae sink in. They were in shock and had yet to sort out the new order of things. Also, the Carthaginians had no siege equipment.

Monomachus said that such things could be constructed. Adherbal was still on hand, with no projects to test his skill. Within a few weeks they could be pounding Neapolis' walls to rubble. But these arguments did not convince the commander. They controlled Italy through mobility, he said. To tie themselves to a siege made them a sitting target. Instead he ordered a withdrawal and marched on Puteoli. He had some success with securing a large part of the city, but he failed to take the port—his whole objective—and gave up the attempt for the time being. He sent Monomachus before the main body of the army to ravage the territory around Neapolis. Then he darted quickly toward Nola, whence he heard rumors that he might be warmly received.

On his arrival, however, he learned that the proconsul Claudius Marcellus had beaten him to the city. Hannibal knew Claudius' name well enough, although this was their first encounter. As a young officer, Marcellus had fought against Hamilcar in Iberia. Later he commanded campaigns in Gaul. His record was as varied as that of any man at the mercy of fate, but as a soldier he seemed steadfast and resourceful enough. Like Fabius, he was no fool; unlike Fabius, he was a man of the blade, as Hannibal soon learned.

Even with the Roman legion garrisoning the town, an embassy from citizens friendly to Hannibal still managed to slip out of the city, bearing messages of continued support. Grimulus, the leader of the group, even came up with a plan: They would bar the gates of the city behind the Roman army if ever the bulk of it could be enticed out to battle. Then, trapped against the walls, they could be butchered at Hannibal's leisure, with no retreat or source of support. It was a simple plan, base and devious, the kind of plot the Romans had never mastered. Grimulus—standing beside Hannibal, narrow-shouldered, with eyes shadowed beneath a gnarled outcrop of brow—positively salivated at the proposal and the turn of fortune he believed it would offer him. Hannibal did not care for the man, who took too much pleasure in betraying his city. But the plan had its merits.

For several days after coming to agreement with Grimulus, Hannibal arrayed his army and offered Marcellus battle. He simply drew his forces up into ranks and announced via his horns that he would happily wait while the Romans came out and formed up. It was a traditional enough gesture, an enticement that often proved too great for an ambitious general to pass up. But the gates stood dumb, immobile, like a child who purses his lips to keep from revealing a secret. The soldiers clung to their posts on the towers, looking down but not tempted to action.

Two days passed in this standoff. On the morning of the third day, Hannibal decided to press the issue, stir the reluctant soldiers into motion, goad them to act in some way, any way. He ordered Monomachus to advance behind a screen of light troops. The Balearic slingers in particular seemed to view this assignment as sport. They unwrapped their mid-range slings from their foreheads and set them with stones. This load was heavy and unwieldy, but given room the men managed to whirl their weapons into motion. They picked out individual targets as they approached and set the stones hurling through the air as hard and fast as from a light catapult. The whole army could tell when they successfully dislodged a defender from the walls. The entire body of them would shout, joke, or applaud or brag.

Behind the cover of the slingers, Monomachus marched with his sword drawn—a purely symbolic gesture, for the enemy was not yet around. The men around him carried makeshift ladders, hastily constructed but sufficient for the city's modest walls. They wore full helmets jammed down tight on their heads, and each bore a heavy shield to deflect the missiles that would likely fall on them.

The foremost ladders had just touched the walls when the doors moved. They rocked once as if struck by a stone. All eyes turned. All motion ceased. The soldiers standing before the doors had little time to consider and act on what this might mean. A moment later the doors swung open, propelled by a hundred hands, and behind those, thousands of warriors. Romans rushed out with a roar, so loud that even horses at the rear of Hannibal's forces started and skittered nervously. They poured out at a full run, shields wedged close together. They hit the surprised Carthaginians with their shields, knocking men from their feet, tipping them off balance, and then stabbing at whatever exposed skin their swords could find. From behind the vanguard a barrage of javelins sailed, cast high, cutting arches that ended far back in the Carthaginian force.

Initially, men flew past Monomachus in stumbling retreat, but the general held his ground and steeled the others by striding forward toward the enemy, his face like an ancient's mask, mouth gaping, eyes in black shadow beneath his brow and helmet. He spoke not at all but dove into the fray, so conspicuous that others could not help but remember themselves and their skills.

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.

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.

As he neared the lands of the Oretani, a messenger approached him with instructions he claimed to have received from Bayala. Hasdrubal was not to enter Oretani land. Instead, he should meet his wife in Baecula, to the southeast. Hasdrubal exchanged glances with Noba. The Ethiopian sucked his cheeks and muttered that he did not favor this. He asked the messenger to explain himself. And where was Andobales? Their business was that of men. This army did not turn at the whim of any woman, even Bayala. Did the other tribes not await them?

The messenger said that everything would be explained at Baecula. It was only three days' march away. Noba still had questions and he framed them one after another, so intensely that the messenger finally looked away from him and addressed Hasdrubal simply. “Bayala calls for you, Commander,” he said. “You know Baecula is loyal to you and has been since your father's time. Bayala is there and she begs you to make haste to her. You will understand the rest when you see her.”

But at the gates of Baecula the messenger approached Hasdrubal again, stopped him, and said he had one last message to convey. “It is meant for your ears alone,” he said. Once Hasdrubal had sent the others onward and had his guards back up a few steps, the messenger said, “Andobales says you are no longer his son.”

Hasdrubal stared at him dumbly a moment. Then scowled. Then grinned and then scowled again. “How? How? Did I not marry his daughter? Does she not have my child in her? He hasn't turned to embrace this Scipio, has he? Andobales is not such a fool! Go back and tell him to be no pawn to Rome. I am his family, now and forever. We are wed by blood.”

The messenger took this barrage silently. Like all the Oretani, he wore a leather band around his forehead, into which he slipped the feathers of certain birds. Hasdrubal, in his sudden exasperation, ripped this from the man's head. This insult got no response. When Hasdrubal concluded, the man said, “Sit with this news and you will come to understand it. But—have no doubt—you are Andobales' son no more.” Without waiting for dismissal, the man mounted and galloped back along the marching army. Hasdrubal watched him for a few moments, confounded, filled now to the crown of his head with unease.

This grew worse as he walked into the city. A band of ten mounted Oretani surged past him without so much as a glance. And inside the palace reserved for the Barcas, he did not receive the usual welcome but found only a chattering confusion among the servants and city officials. He heard Noba yelling. Guards of the Sacred Band rushed past him in a clatter of armor and unsheathed weapons and black cloaks. Silenus, who had entered early to summon Bayala, met him with outstretched arms. He grasped the commander and repeated something over and over again, though Hasdrubal did not listen to him. He threw the Greek off. Moments later he had to elbow through his men, who for some reason barred him from Bayala's chambers.

A crowd of women servants sprung from their hunched grouping around the central bed and scattered. Bayala lay supine on the platform, her arms cast out to either side, her shift high on one thigh. For a moment he was mystified—why would she lie in such a position in a crowded room? The thought had not fully matured before it was silenced. He moved nearer, calling her name, even though he knew already that she could not answer. Again he knew the Greek was at his side, trying to pull him away. He could have swatted the bowlegged man to the far side of the room. But one glimpse of the gaping crescent carved in Bayala's neck stole all anger from him. He crumpled and crawled forward across the floor and clawed his way up onto the blood-drenched bed. She was still warm. She was still warm! He yelled this as if somehow it was the key to everything. Then he felt himself enveloped, first by Silenus' arms, soon after by Noba's. He knew both men were speaking to him. Did neither of them realize that she was still warm?

To say Hasdrubal mourned his wife's death puts a complex thing too simply. He beat his chest and pounded his fists against his eyes and shouted curses into the night sky. He wished he had listened to her and never trusted her father. He wished he had cut Andobales' head from his shoulders when he had the chance. He wished that he had never met her, that he had no memories of her, that he was not cursed to recall a thousand different pleasures now turned around and revealed as tortures.

His first impulse was to fall on the Oretani. Although the messenger who had led him to Baecula escaped, the Sacred Band did catch the fleeing assassins. Only three of the ten survived to become prisoners. One of these proved impervious to torture, but the other two spoke before they died. They swore that Bayala had been murdered on her father's orders. It was meant to be an irreversible declaration: Andobales severed all bonds with Carthage. He was an ally to the young Roman now. Hasdrubal hated the chieftain with blinding ferocity. It seemed he had always loathed Andobales but only now understood how completely. He was a waste of the life breathed into him. He was vermin. He was a murderer. He had killed his future and killed beauty and killed a child as yet unseen by human eyes. He had slit a most perfect neck. He had split flesh that should never have known pain. He had coldly ordered the blood drained from her body. The shock she must have felt . . . The fear in those last moments . . . Andobales deserved the worst possible of deaths and Hasdrubal ached to bring it to him.

Noba, however, convinced him that Romans were too near for him to risk engaging with Iberians. The council he had called would never come. Everyone, it seemed, was anxious to befriend this Publius. To attack when fueled by passion would surely be to blunder; it must have been what Andobales hoped for. So he could not give it to them. The two men argued long about this. At times they even came to blows, each man leaning into the other and pounding his frustrations into the other's torso, jolts that would have doubled lesser men over in pain.

In the end they moved the army to a wide plateau near Baecula, a high tilted table atop two terraced steps that rose out of the plains below. Hasdrubal watched as Publius' army approached and offered battle. The Carthaginian held fast, not venturing out to meet them. He did not budge for a week. Perhaps, vaguely, he was awaiting his brothers, hoping they would converge on the Roman force. But he did not send messengers to speed this along. The world around him and the threats it offered paled next to the storm inside. This is why he did not think twice about the troops skirmishing on the lower terrace. His forces had just met the climbing soldiers when another force emerged on the right. He sensed the peril in this, but he was slow to understand.

Noba awakened him from his stupor. He strode up from the second terrace and, without a word, slapped Hasdrubal openhanded across the cheek and temple. He was a strong man and the blow nearly knocked the general off his feet. Silenus, who had been standing just beside him, had to catch the commander by the arm to stay him from drawing his sword.

“Are you all mad?” Hasdrubal hissed, twisting from the Greek's grip. “Why do you touch me?”

“I may be mad,” Noba said, “but I slap you like a woman because that's what you're acting like. Mourn your beloved some other time. You'll find another tight rump before long, but right now we're about to be destroyed. Wake up and do something about it!”

“I could kill you for speaking to me thus.”

“You could,” Silenus said, “but do it later. I think Noba speaks harsh wisdom.”

“She meant more to me—”

Noba stepped close enough that his breath billowed off Hasdrubal's face. “I know. Tell me of her tomorrow. And then again next week. Then in the many years to come. But right now, call a retreat!”

And he did. These two men served him well. Under Noba's directions, the better part of the army fled. Elephants roared down the far side of the plateau, careening through the trees. The baggage train—wagons and laden pack animals and sledges—bumped down the slope to the relative flat. The army marched a semicontrolled retreat, the very rear brawling for every backward step. It was dangerously close to a rout, but Noba again acted quickly. He shouted orders that none considered questioning. He told the camp staff to abandon the wagons and sledges. These proved temptation enough to slow the Romans, one soldier anxious lest some other get booty meant for him.

By nightfall, Publius had pulled up. Hasdrubal pressed his troops on, putting all the distance he could between them under the light of a thin moon. He barely understood what had happened, neither why his strong position had been overturned so quickly nor what it meant to be running headlong into the night. But as motion and danger returned him to his senses, he decided one thing with certainty: He had had enough of Iberia. How many times had Iberians betrayed his people? How many times had they killed those he loved? His wife, his brother-in-law, his father . . . So many others. He cursed the land and spat on it. He could not stand the sight of it, not the feel of it brushing his toes nor the stench of it in his lungs. The next morning he sent messengers to both his brothers, begging their forgiveness, asking for their blessing. And he sent another that he hoped would eventually reach Carthage itself. He had decided; now they could only hear his will.

Hasdrubal Barca marched for Rome.

The boat pushed out from a small port north of Salapia just after sunrise on the planned day, signs having been provident and the winds northeasterly. They would sail through the morning and stop at the far spur of land pointing toward Greece. There they would rest, and the next dawn—conditions being favorable—they would shoot across the Adriatic in a single day. Considering the distances Aradna had traveled till now, this would not have been a very long journey. And it might have been her last, for it would have carried her and her modest wealth back to the territory of her birth, as she had so long wanted. Nevertheless, she was not aboard the vessel.

Instead she sat on the shore, watching the small craft plunge through the waves, rising and falling. Once it was past the breakers and onto the breathing swells, the oars lifted and flapped a moment in the air, like featherless wings. The captain moved about the deck, his silhouette gilded by the glare of the new sun. Some bit of his speech careened toward her, only to be snapped back by a current of air. The rowers laid the oars down along the deck and a single square sail unfurled and snapped taut against the wind. From then on the ship's progress was steady, the fate of the passengers aboard it no longer tied to hers.

Aradna dug her hands down into the sand and squeezed the coarse grains between her fingers. She had pulled her hair back from her face and fastened it with a strip of leather. Because she hated the things men and women saw when they looked at her she rarely exposed her face for the world to view. She had never thought of beauty as anything but a misfortune, but there was no one to see her at that moment and she needed to feel the movement of the air on her features. Her eyes shone with their accursed, startling blue; her wretched full lips tilted downward at their pouting edges. Tiny curls of dried skin clung to the curve of her nose, but these only served to verify that her face was that of an earthly being made of the same materials as all others.

Touching her hips at either side and just behind her lay all the possessions she had in the world. One sack held the coins she had traded her stores of booty for. Another contained the simple provisions of life: food and knives, herbs and bedding and pieces of fabric and needles. The third had not been hers until a few days ago but had been bequeathed to her. A little distance away lay a dead crab Aradna had not seen when she chose this spot. Its body was longer than it was wide, with two enormous claws that the indignity of death had flung out to either side. She tried not to look at the crustacean or think of it as a comment on the decision she had made in the dead hours of the previous night.

It had not been easy. It had not happened as she had wanted. If anything, she would have welcomed the certainty she needed to be aboard that vessel. Atneh had nearly succeeded in instilling this in her. When she had sought excuses for not leaving, the old woman shot them down like an archer pinning pigeons to the sky. “What fear of the sea?” she had asked. “As far as I can tell, you fear nothing. A little water beneath you? What is that compared with the trials life has already shown you? If the gods had wanted you dead, they would've taken you already.” When she would not come to terms with the merchants who would translate her motley finds into coin, Atneh smacked her on the back of the head and named reasonable terms for her. When she complained that none of the vessels she had seen looked seaworthy, the old woman found one that was. And when she suggested one last scavenging mission, the woman shook her head at the foolishness of it.

“Casilinum?” Atneh had asked. “Forget it. What's one more city? You have enough already. Don't let me see you become a fool. I see what this is about, and it's nothing to do with a few more coins. You know, don't you, that the gods sometimes play us as toys? Think about that. Imagine yourself with a string pinned to your heart. If you feel that string tug you in one direction or another, know it for what it is—the whim of the foolish ones. It can do you no good. Remember my words. Anyway, I'm an old woman. You mustn't leave me to make this journey myself.”

So Aradna had taken Atneh's certainty inside herself and set her sights across the sea. But just when she thought her path lay before her as clear as ever it had . . . just as she lifted her foot to step upon it with prayers that it was the right one and would lead her to the happiness she sought and the future Atneh assured her was awaiting them both . . . at just that moment the old woman fell ill. She could not name what had laid her on her back but she said she could feel it eating at her from the inside. It was a pain in her two breasts that radiated into her whole chest and interlocked its fingers in the gaps between her ribs. She found it difficult to breathe and within a few days she could only manage shallow inhalations. By the end of a moon's cycle she had developed a cough that tortured her. It came as regular as breathing, one painful shock after another.

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.

When the two sides finally met, the Roman front line looked like a horseshoe. The two prongs of the veteran legions smashed into the Carthaginians' Iberian allies and from the first moments made quick work of them. The skirmishers fanned out and around and swept in on the Carthaginian flanks. Meanwhile the Libyans stood in confusion, glancing from side to side, waiting for orders, their spears to hand but useless. The front line of Iberians that should have met them did not do so. On a single horn-blasted order they all stopped. They hovered out a distance, just too far to engage, but near enough so that the Libyans could not turn away from them for fear of being pounced on. The Libyans could neither aid their dying allies nor rush forward, because to do so would break formation and lead to all manner of chaos. They just waited, panting and impatient, as men near them fell to the Romans' cut and thrust.

Publius had orchestrated the impossible. He had encircled an army larger than his own, simply by moving his various troops about in unexpected ways. The Libyans in the center were as dead on their feet as all of the Romans trapped shoulder to shoulder at Cannae.

Yet the matter was decided not by men but by four-legged creatures. The elephants—which had been stung again and again by the skirmishers' javelins—spun and careened in toward the center of the army. In pain and fury, the creatures moved heedless of which men they trampled, which they swatted out of the way with tusks and trunks. The drivers atop them smashed them about the head and yanked their ears and roared at them to change course. But it was no good. The elephants turned as if by common agreement and each cut a swath of grisly death toward the Carthaginian heart. With this, the battle collapsed. From then on Publius commanded a rout.

Mago stared and stared at what he saw, so long and intensely that he was saved only when one of his guards jabbed his horse in the rear with a spear. As he hurtled off on his bucking horse he called for a retreat to be sounded. With that the troops gave up all semblance of discipline. They turned and fled, Romans fast behind them. The sky opened above them in a sudden outburst of rain. This slowed the Roman advance. Mago fought to keep the army moving through the night, but the distance they covered in the stumbling dark was not enough. In the morning the Romans followed on their heels, leaving corpses like wayposts marking their path. Despite all Mago's dismay at the fact, eventually he, Hanno, and five thousand mounted soldiers—Massylii and Libyans mostly—dashed before the body of the army in undisguised flight.

For much of the long summer, Imco found himself standing just behind Hannibal's shoulder, watching as Fortune favored one side and then the other. Marcellus became the sharpest thorn in Hannibal's side, single-handedly trying to undo all he had accomplished. Only a fortnight after Hannibal left Casilinum, he had retaken it through siege and treachery. Capuans had garrisoned the city—not the best of troops but, considering its natural defenses, even they should have held it. But they lost their nerve, scared, no doubt, by Marcellus' growing reputation. They struck a deal with the Roman for their surrender, in return for which they would be allowed to return to their city unmolested. But when they strolled through the gates the waiting Romans pounced on them and hacked them beyond recognition, punishment for crimes that they believed predated this betrayal.

Casilinum was not the only setback: Fabius Maximus retook Tarentum, Claudius Nero mauled a band of five hundred Numidians, Livius Salinator surprised a Carthaginian admiral off the coast near Neapolis, frightening the cautious sailor back to Sicily. But more often the Roman foolishness flared so brightly that it left Imco shaking his head in amazement. There was Tiberius Gracchus, for example. Overconfident after his rout of Bomilcar's forces, Gracchus marched too close to Hannibal. His guides, perhaps having mistaken their route in all innocence, abandoned him the moment they spotted Numidian riders. This set the slave army in turmoil, a situation easily exploited. Watching this from the height where his troops stood in reserve, Imco was struck by the thought that battles were won or lost on the basis of a single factor that each and every soldier controlled. Not the hand of any god, not the cunning of any one leader, not superiority in arms or training: none of these mattered as much as the bravery of individual men. Perhaps slaves could be expected to understand that least of all. They panicked, all at the same moment. The matter was decided, and Tiberius Gracchus perished in the ensuing rout.

Soon after Gracchus' death, the Romans fell under the spell of a centurion named Centenius Paenula. Some recalled that on the day of his birth considerable prodigies had occurred. Another scholar connected clues from several of the ancient texts and announced that the young soldier's name was destined to sound in glory throughout the ages. Striking in appearance, tall and fine-featured, he did not have to do much to convince the Senate that he was just the one chosen by the gods to strike a blow at Hannibal. With the remnants of Gracchus' army and a horde of enthusiastic volunteers, he marched into Lucania, met Hannibal, and promptly offered up all eight thousand of his force for sacrifice. They were slaughtered down to the last man. Centenius Paenula, it turned out, was not a name that would ring down through the ages.

Imco was in the very room at Herdonea when Hannibal met with a foolish magistrate who dared to drink his wine and accept his gifts, but begged more time to decide whether he could deliver his people to Hannibal's side. The commander nodded at all of this and spoke graciously. Of course, he said, more time was reasonable. He was, after all, only prosecuting the greatest war the Mediterranean had ever seen. If the magistrate needed to think this over, he could do so, by all means. Hannibal and his entire army would wait on him. The magistrate might or might not have recognized the irony in the commander's voice, but when he stood to leave Hannibal made all clear. The magistrate could have as long as he needed to decide, except that he must do so before the wine he had just drunk escaped his body. The man looked at him in mystification.

“You see,” Hannibal said, “I happily give wine to my friends, but a man who drinks my wine and then rejects my friendship is a thief. I'd like to know which you are before you piss my goodwill onto the ground. Take as long as you want, but before you loose your bladder I must know what you are to me. Perhaps you should sit down again.”

Herdonea was soon his. As was Caulonia. For a time that city's magistrates and officers held out in the citadel with their families, refusing to surrender: They were well provisioned and believed that Nero—with yet another Roman army—would soon come to their aid. Hannibal, however, conceived of a way to stir them from the nest. Some bored Balearics had come across a shallow cave teeming with snakes, hundreds or thousands of them. Hannibal had the creatures gathered up and placed in large urns. In the gray light just before dawn one morning, he had these hurled into the citadel with catapults. Most of the urns smashed against the walls, but several landed atop the structure. They exploded into jagged shards of writhing, slithering life.

The Caulonians, waking to this commotion, cried out that Hannibal's gods had called upon them a plague of serpents. Women took up the shout, and children wailed with fright. Stumbling and running through the half-light inside the cramped citadel, the people panicked. Guards jumped from the top of the tower, thudding dully against the dew-licked turf. One leaped in a different direction than the rest and fell in straight-legged horror, so stiff that his legs anchored him in a mound of dirt thrown up by the diggers. His ankles snapped at the impact, but he sank to the thighs and stood trapped there, howling. The Balearics, arguing that this was all their doing and that therefore to them went the sport, used the man for target games. They slung their tiny pellets at the swaying figure, battering his chest, knocking out his teeth, and bashing in an eye and tearing chunks of flesh from his biceps. The man died shortly after they began betting on who could shoot into his scrotum in a way that left the missiles sitting in the sacs, twins to the balls naturally at home there.

The magistrates, after receiving assurances of fair treatment, gave up the citadel. Reasonable behavior, Imco thought. If Hannibal could make the sky rain vipers, what chance did they have against him?

Not even Marcellus could last forever. He and Crispinus both perished near Venusia in an episode surprising only in its anticlimactic result. The two generals had each encamped on the far side of a growth of knobby hills. Hannibal, on approaching them, noticed the hills and sent Numidians out in the night to secure them. This they managed, while also keeping their presence secret. The Romans, however, soon noticed the same feature. The two generals, believing themselves safe, rode out to inspect the territory personally. The Numidians recognized them at once and sprang a trap that killed Marcellus on the spot. Crispinus died days later from his spear wounds.

Regardless of all he had witnessed at Hannibal's side, or perhaps because of it, Imco was surprised almost to fright when the commander invited him to sleep out with him on the ridge of hills to the east of camp. He said they would slumber on the open ground, like boys, and talk beneath a canopy of stars. Just why Hannibal chose him for this honor, Imco could not say. They had sat together often enough at meetings throughout the summer, but they had not yet spoken on such intimate terms. In fact, whenever Imco opened his mouth in council he had the feeling that the commander was gazing at him with a certain amount of mirth. He was not even sure that the other remembered their first meeting, back at Arbocala, when Imco had begun the great deception that was his military career.

As they climbed up from the camp, Hannibal carried nothing except his cloak and a small sack. Imco slipped his somewhat more elaborate bedroll under his arm, embarrassed, for suddenly it seemed like a luxury out of character with Hannibal's invitation. Atop the ridge, the glorious burning colors of sunset were just starting to dim. The rim of earth that cut the sun's passing went a deeper and deeper red, bloody and congealed, as if the roof of the sky would be tacky to the fingers, if one could reach so high. The country below hulked off in all directions. Imco thought the hills looked like a hundred shoulders shrugging their way into the distance, curves of muscle and bone captured in the soil itself. He could have studied the view for some time. Though it struck him as beautiful, there was also something ominous in the creeping shadows that he half thought he should keep an eye on.

And these were not the only shifting forms that kept him ill at ease. The guards of the Sacred Band flanked them on all sides. They formed an eight-pronged star, each of them black-cloaked and solemn. They never spoke or looked at their master directly, and yet they followed every move and kept their formation as much as the lay of the land allowed. Though they carried various daggers in their belts, their main arm was a spear in the Spartan style. They planted the staff of the weapon like a third leg each time they halted, and then stood so still as to be made of stone.

This, for Imco, was a troubling illusion. He could not help but look askance at them. Of course he had seen them before and noted their fierce aspect, but he had never stayed so long at the center of their focus. He also realized that the Saguntine girl was nowhere to be seen. Perhaps these men unnerved her as well.

“My lord,” he said, “must they follow you everywhere and never speak a word?”

“Why should they speak?” Hannibal asked. “I never talk to them or they to me. They each know how they are to serve me, and they do it. It's strange that you mention them. Myself, I barely notice them. From the day I first set out for Iberia with my father, the Sacred Band has shadowed me.”

Hannibal tossed out his cloak and dropped onto it. From a pocket in his cloak he produced a handful of apricots. He spread them out beside him and motioned that Imco could help himself. After a time, he said, “Look at this country, Imco. Sometimes I understand why Romans fight so stubbornly for it, though I doubt many of them notice its beauty. Some men look upon such things and see only trees and earth, the bare materials only. Are you one such as this?”

“No,” Imco said, “I see rocks as well. Some shrubs . . .”

Thankfully, the commander laughed at this. He seemed in a jovial mood. Perhaps it was the warm light, but his face held little of the brooding solemnity with which he oversaw meetings. Even his blind eye did not look so awful. It moved now like the other, still filmed over but lively enough that Imco almost suspected the commander could actually see out of it once more. But he might only have grown used to it. He no longer kept the eye closed and it did not ooze the yellow liquid that had so long plagued him.

Hannibal spoke of his boyhood, of his early years in Iberia. “By the gods, it was a time of marvels,” he said. His father and brother-in-law still alive, the whole peninsula before them, one nation after another against which to test themselves. They were so far from the meddling hand of the Council that they wielded the power of kings. And yet it was the simple things from that time that he remembered most fondly. Long discussions with his father came foremost. He thought happily of his life among the soldiers. He was younger than any of them, but known by all. He was gifted with thousands of uncles. He would wander out each night and toss himself down anywhere among the thronging army and talk late into the night with whoever he landed near. It was there that he learned of different men's customs, of their gods and the things they ate and their desires. He could greet men of a hundred nations in their native tongues, with the gestures of respect they would each recognize. Truly, that time was the foundation of his education.

He was silent for a few minutes, chewing the golden fruit. The grin at the side of his lips indicated that he was remembering something fondly. He said that as a youth he had not been so soft as he was now. He had slept without a bedroll at all. He had simply cast himself down and accepted the contours of the earth. There had been a time when he had even made a project of sleeping on bare rock. He learned to find comfort within the hardness, the cracks and crevices and irregularities. “Stone is much like the human body,” he said, “but it took some training to discover this.”

Imco pursed his lips and almost admitted that he preferred the soft beds of Capua to anything he had otherwise experienced, but he deemed this best kept to himself.

“We told many stories in those days,” Hannibal said. “The histories of the gods.”

“Do you remember them still?” Imco asked.

“Of course. I could speak tales all night if asked. Do you remember El? You will recall that he went out to sea on a reed boat in the early moments of the world—”

“Why?”

Hannibal had fallen into the cadence of a storyteller. Imco's interruption brought him up short. “What?”

“Why did El go to sea? As a fisherman? A merchant?”

“Do you know nothing of the gods?”

Imco said that he knew something, but still the tales he had heard thus far called up more questions than they gave answers.

“Imco, at times you are like a child,” Hannibal said. “I like this about you. Talking to you is like speaking to some grown version of the man I imagine my son might become. But it doesn't matter why El went to sea. The god went to sea. That's all there is to it. Would you ask whether he rowed his boat or sailed? Whether he went alone or had a crew? Would you ask how he could have a boat in the time before the world was fully created? Don't answer me, Imco—I'm sure you would ask all those questions. But don't. There are some things you ask questions about. What is for breakfast? Is it raining or snowing? But when I'm telling a story of El, you don't ask; you listen.”

The captain held his tongue. His head still rang at the magnitude of the casual compliment the commander had just uttered. This, more than anything, quieted him.

Hannibal began at the beginning, reminding Imco that El was the Father of the Gods, the Creator of Created Things. He was called the Kindly, and he loved the quiet of peace above all else. When he was young, he decided for some unknown reason to go to sea. Far out on the water he met two beautiful women, Asherah and Rohmaya. Taken with them, El killed a bird flying overhead with his spear. He roasted it and—blocking it from the women's view—sprinkled the flesh with drops of his semen. When he fed the flesh to them, they took his seed inside them and were charmed by it. He asked them whether they would stay with him, and whether they would rather be his wives or his daughters. They chose to wed him, just as he had hoped. They bore him two children, Shachar and Shalim, the dawn and the dusk, and so the world began to take the form we now know, measured by the passage of days, shared between the old one's children. In the ages to follow, Asherah became the more prolific mother of the two women, giving birth to more than seventy offspring, all of the many divine ones who live in the world beyond human awareness.

After Hannibal fell silent, Imco asked, “Do you think, then, that El is the greatest of gods?”

“No. No, I don't believe that.”

“But without him all that came after wouldn't have been possible.”

“Perhaps. Or perhaps someone else would've achieved the things he did in his place. You cannot say that without El there's nothing; in truth, without El there's something else. As to his greatness . . . Just as with a man, there are aspects of his character to admire; others not to. In his love of peace, he was at times a coward. His own son Yam had the old one trembling with fear. Through threats alone, he forced El to assign him a position over Baal. I would never pattern myself on him. Baal laughed at him for his fearfulness. I would've done the same. Peace is blessed; but first comes the sword; and then the sword must be held aloft to slay any who would take advantage of the calm. This is simply the true way of life.”

“But Moloch of the Fire defeated Baal in battle.”

Hannibal looked at Imco and grinned, as if the young soldier had just betrayed something about himself that he found pleasing. “The greatest do not always prevail. Often the strongest is defeated. Moloch is not all-powerful; Anath tracked Moloch across the desert and cracked his skull with a staff.”

“Then Anath is the greatest? A woman!”

“Imco, things are not as simple as you would like,” Hannibal said. The edge in his voice suggested an end to the conversation, but another question appeared in Imco's head and he could not help but ask it.

“Why do you think the gods are so quiet now?”

“They're not,” Hannibal said. “It's just that not all of us can hear them.”

This kept the younger soldier silent for some time. He wondered whether Hannibal was referring to the priests. Just a few days before, the commander had stood beside Mandarbal as he carved up a yellow bull and read the signs written in its guts. He knew that the man had often predicted the future correctly, but he thought it unfortunate that the intermediaries to the gods were always such unpleasant creatures. Mandarbal's breath was so rank it seemed to fall from his mouth and slink across the ground in search of prey. His jutting teeth and leather gloves and the strange shape of his lips . . . With all the beauty to be found in the world, why did the gods so often depend on the likes of Mandarbal to make their will known?

Thinking that the commander had drifted to sleep, Imco said, “Sometimes, Commander, I question whether this warrior's life suits me.”

To his surprise, Hannibal turned and studied him. Incredulity etched his forehead in thin, moonlit lines. “Why would you say such a thing? You are a blessed man, Imco Vaca, a natural warrior. Otherwise you wouldn't have lived through the things you have. You won honor way back at Arbocala. I haven't forgotten that. And Bomilcar—who is a good judge of fighting men—says you have a gift. Perhaps you're beloved of a god who wards off the arrows meant for you, blocks sword swings and spear thrusts. If this is so, then who are you to question it?”

Imco thought about the time he had caught an arrow in the palm of his hand, but this was a small wound that would hardly refute the commander's statements. “Bomilcar thinks too much of me.”

“I, too, am a good judge of men,” Hannibal said. “There is something in you that I much admire, though I cannot name it. Stay the course until you discover your destiny. It will come to you when the time is right.”

“Have you truly never known doubt?”

Hannibal settled himself back against the earth and closed his eyes. “My father in his later years had many doubts. He questioned everything about the life he'd led. He wondered why the gods had ever created the world we know. He marveled at the chaos that seemed to reign just behind it all. In some ways, I believe he wished he'd lived an entirely different life. But at the same time he pushed forward with the many things entrusted to his care. He could not be other than he was. As they say, a lion cannot shed its skin and take on another's.”

Imco waited a moment in silence, until it was clear Hannibal was finished speaking. “But, my lord,” he returned, “it was you I asked about.”

“Why should I know doubt now? The season is matured and closing for winter. We have both won and lost this summer, but for us that is ultimate victory. Think of it this way: We may have suffered in Iberia, but perhaps now the Council will change its ways. They'll bemoan their riches lost, but they'll finally reinforce me, the only hope of finishing off the war. The Romans, believe me, will harness this young Scipio and set him against me here in Italy. And this is what I want more than anything. I hope they are as confident in him as they were in Varro before Cannae. My brother is on his way to us. Surely, you've heard this report as I have. Perhaps Mago and Hanno will soon do the same. Would you bet against the four of us, free to finally end this conflict? In one set of defeats we've been freed for a greater victory. Afterward all that was lost can be gained again. And I hope that the spring will see the fleet of Macedon lining the Adriatic. Carthalo will return with them. I'll finally see Lysenthus in battle. . . . These are the many reasons I look favorably on the future. What place has doubt, considering these things? Now, Imco, let us be silent. As ever, there are many things I must think over, and there is noise enough in my head without your questions.”

And that was that. Imco lay beside the commander for some time, unable to sleep, worrying about the things he had said and how the man might interpret them, listening to his breathing and knowing that he was not asleep either. He felt uncomfortable for some time. And then he did not, although this may have just been the calm of approaching slumber.

It happened three days later. He had just eaten a breakfast of boiled eggs and smoked fish and roasted squash, a meal prepared for him by the Tarentine boy assigned to him as a servant. As he rose from the meal, stretching and scratching his groin, his eyes touched on the creature. He had turned and begun rolling his bedding before the image ordered itself in his mind and slowed the work of his hands. It could not be.

He spun around. The spot where he had seen the creature was now empty but for a dilapidated hut and a bit of fencing that had been once a pen. Imco, however, was quite sure his eyes had not deceived him. He let his gaze travel slowly, up along the narrow road, out toward the fringes of camp, and then up along a goat track to the crest of a narrow ridge. There the donkey stood, big-eared and potbellied and knock-kneed. Pathetic in its worn coat, glazed in expression, tail drooping. It could be no other.

Imco looked around for the Saguntine girl. She must be playing a trick on him. This could not be the animal he thought it was. He had been so long at war, so far from home, so tormented by longing and the slow gnawing of dread that he had simply lost his senses. He should be careful, or he would soon be one of those lunatics raving along city streets. If Hannibal knew even a fraction of the absurdities that went on in his mind, he would have him flogged and sold as a slave.

He paced so fast that his feet stirred up dust. A passing group of old Italian women looked at him with more than the usual distaste. They muttered something in their language, an insult surely. The Tarentine boy wrinkled his brow and pretended not to notice him.

Something in the boy's dismissive look broke his resolve. Damn reason. Damn sanity! Both were overrated and daily trumped by the world. If he was insane, perhaps he could be happily so. When would he again have the chance to follow a figment of his imagination in pursuit of the great love of his life? Such moments come rarely and are best seized at once. So Imco told himself as he gathered up a minimum of supplies and walked casually away, nodding to the men in his charge as if he were just going off on some mundane errand. But once he was well away, he picked up his pace and turned to follow the ass's arse.

It would have been inappropriate to offer such a young leader as Publius Scipio an official triumph. After all, he had never held the office of consul. The blood of his battles was barely dry. The news of Ilipa preceded him by only a few weeks and had yet to be considered in detail. Despite his string of victories the great peninsula of Iberia was far from pacified. Some thought him foolish to leave his post before his assignment was completed. Considering all this, the Senate decided that on his return to Rome Publius Scipio should pause outside the city, at the Temple of Bellona on the far bank of the Tiber. There, beneath a chill drizzle from a slate-gray winter sky, he made sacrifices in praise of the gods. He humbled himself before the divine forces and gave a full account of his campaign to the gathered senators, many of whom sat with their arms crossed, searching the proconsul's face for the first signs of hubris.

Publius did not try to justify himself too boldly, but he did suggest that his return was only a product of his continuing duty to Rome. He believed he had accomplished most of what he could in Iberia. As the first Roman general to defeat Carthaginian forces so far, he thought he should bring news of his tactics home and aid in planning future moves. They needed a new thrust to end the war for good, a strike like his move on New Carthage, an attack that bypassed Hannibal's armor and struck at his weakness instead of at his strengths.

Having said only this much, he entered the city to a roar of welcome from the people made more impressive by the lack of an official celebration. Men shouted their support on the street, from windows and rooftops and bridges. Women tossed trinkets of affection at him, reached to touch him, called him their savior, their hero. Girls pouted with painted lips and smiled and swooned as he passed. Children greeted him wearing headdresses meant to suggest a Numidian's curly locks. Some wore shifts like the red-rimmed Iberian tunics or sported tufts of donkey hair stuck to their chins to look like Hannibal's guards. They ran from the proconsul in mock panic, looking over their shoulders, never truly disappearing but instead looping back toward him again and again so that they could renew their cries.

The people believed his Iberian victories to be a sign of things to come. Some said that Publius conversed in person with Apollo and had thus devised his ingenious tactics for success. Others, thinking of champions from the past, pored over their records, concluding that Publius had accomplished more than they had at his age. Priests—never far from the current of public opinion—found in their augury sign after sign that favored Publius. Mass opinion was so clearly in his favor that he was voted into the coming consulship, making him the youngest person ever to hold such an honor.

But if rumor and enthusiastic chatter helped buoy him into office, so, too, did they stir the ire of his peers. Someone had heard him declare that his consulship bestowed upon him a mandate to prosecute the war to completion, as he saw fit, calling on no counsel save that of his own inclination. Others said that he had already begun preparations for a mission so secret even the Senate had no say in it. Or that he had dismissed his fellow consul, Licinius Crassus, as irrelevant. And a few swore that he had offered to meet Hannibal himself in individual combat and so decide the issue with his own blood.

Publius heard these tales with a smile. He had said none of those things. He did have a plan, but he kept it sealed within the close circle of those he trusted most. Once, Laelius' body had pointed out New Carthage as a target; this idea, too, came to Publius through his companion. Shortly before they left for Rome, as they shared wine and hashed over recently arrived details of Hannibal's campaigns in Italy, Laelius said that they should offer thanks to the elders of Carthage.