Pride of Carthage (45 page)

An hour later his arms felt like ropes of molten lead and his legs only supported him by finding footing among the dead below, wedged into the crook of an arm or jammed under someone's crotch. He had no idea how many he had killed. Nor could he gauge which side was winning the battle. For him the contest was smaller than that, decided moment by moment between him and one other. He kept reminding himself that he was still alive. He knew he could respectably retreat. Part of him almost wished to go on, but he could barely lift his sword. He stepped backward and shouted over his shoulder and another man stepped into his place. A few moments later he knelt in the filth with others from the front, panting, gasping for breath, spitting blood, calling for water. In this way, he found a few moments of rest, although no water appeared.

Imco might have stayed there indefinitely except that the giant named Bomilcar fell upon the resting men with orders that they rejoin the mêlée. “Rome dies this day!” he yelled. “Right now, this moment! This moment!” He roared through them, kicking men to their feet and slamming others with the flat of his hand and even knocking a few across the helmet with his sword. He was a strange sight, simultaneously furious and joyful. “Keep your blades wet! Let none of your weapons go thirsty!”

He picked Imco out from the group at random. He clapped his hands down on his shoulders and lifted him to his feet in one heave. He demanded to know Imco's name. On hearing it he asked, “Is your sword dry?” Imco turned to check, but the giant grabbed him by the chin. “A man does not have to check. He knows. A dry sword is like a limp penis. A limp penis never fucks. If you never fuck you are like a woman: you get fucked instead. Understand me?”

Imco barely followed a word the man said, but he nodded.

Bomilcar grinned wide enough for two men. “Imco Vaca, we are winning this. Live through the day and Hannibal will hear of your bravery.” He turned Imco around, shoved him toward the battle, and carried on yelling.

When Imco returned to the front line something had changed. He felt little fear. His body did not jerk and bounce in defensive maneuvers. He carried a new calm within him, and he knew he was not the only one. The men on either side of him possessed it too. They moved not so much like skirmishing soldiers as like a slow tide enveloping the enemy. Perhaps they
were
winning. His blade increasingly found its way into the bellies and necks and through the arms of the men facing him. He thought less about each action. He wondered if his beauty would approve of this. Maybe he could find her a gift among the dead, a ring or medallion, perhaps a jewel-encrusted helmet. He could tell when he hit bone and stuck on it, or when the blade slipped between two ribs. He could capture her by surprise, wrap his arm around her belly, and drape her head in soft loops of rope. He began to feel he could sense just which organs he was slicing through by their different textures, by the way the tissues parted before or resisted his blade. Maybe he would buy her something someday, perhaps a string of pearls, in a place far from here, different altogether. His weapon became an extension of his hand, a sharp finger that shredded all that it touched. A quiet island, a single great rock rising up from an azure sea, a tree-covered home to sheep and goats, fig trees and olive groves . . .

At some point his exhaustion bypassed even this merging of gore and fantasy. His head pounded with tight-wrapped pain that appeared from nowhere. He did not retreat to rest this time. He just sat down on the tangle of the dead and half-dead before him, ignoring the stench of blood and viscera and feces. Without knowing he was going to—or that such a thing was even possible on a battlefield—Imco drifted off into a short slumber. He awoke with his face pressed against that of a Latin, their lips linked as if in passion. Of all the sensations he felt that day, the one that would linger with him the longest and haunt him most was the rough scratch of the man's beard against his cheek and the taste of the man's saliva on the tip of his tongue, the knowledge that he could name the very foods this stranger had breakfasted on.

The fighting still raged somewhere. He could hear it, but he had not the strength to seek it out. The world moved. The haze above shifted and thickened and dispersed. Cries broke the air occasionally, although a lower, more muffled anguish hung beneath them now. Looking down at his body he could not tell where his parts ended and another man's began. He was entwined with all of them. Together they created a new organism, an enormous being composed of dead and dying flesh, a thing that shifted with a million tiny, almost imperceptible motions. Squelching, sliding, settling, liquids pooling, eyes glazing. The struggles of wounded men translated through hundreds of bodies, all touching as they were, interwoven into some ghastly stitch, part of the carpet of Cannae.

And still he could not say who would win the day. Indeed, he found it quite possible that they had all lost, living and dead of whatever nation. He did not know whether he should be proud or disgraced, whether he had fought well or like a coward. It all seemed the same, a single nightmare named differently by different men but the same in substance. He wanted badly, very badly, to see his beauty again.

How surprised he was when she eventually appeared.

On the Roman side, the signs should have been obvious from the start. Usually the manipular formation of the legions allowed them amazing fluidity. They held together like a weave of men at just the right distance apart, with spaces enough for fatigued soldiers to retreat and allow the waiting replacements to come forward into the fray. But from the moment Varro ordered the maniples drawn together this give-and-flow vanished. The momentum of the army was so great and the soldiers packed together so tightly that anyone who sank down beneath injury was soon trodden on, first by a single foot and then another and then countless others. They died a suffocating death, feet grinding against the backs of their ankles, up their legs, and over their torsos, the flesh and bone of them pounded into the soil they were defending.

Publius Scipio would never forgive himself for not realizing sooner that the whole conflict was a choreographed sacrifice of massive proportions. He spent the early parts of the battle mounted, shouting courage to his infantrymen, himself taking strength from the resolute expressions on their innumerable faces. At some point his horse went lame from an unseen injury, refusing to move farther and shifting from foot to foot as if standing on a giant, red-hot skillet. Publius dismounted. To his surprise, the horse bolted, churning through the mass of men in a crazed effort to flee.

From then on, the tribune was one with his men. His legion was near the center of the Roman army. He took up a position near the rear of the soldiers entrusted to him, from which he could follow the flow of events and issue orders if necessary. With each passing hour, he found himself nearer and nearer to the front. The forward progress of the army continued, but instead of pressing through the foe they increasingly seemed to disappear into them. By the middle hours of the afternoon, the whole legion ahead of his had vanished. His men became the front and, unable to retreat, they fought like wild animals with their backs to a wall.

The fighting was beyond all norms. There seemed to be no pauses in the enemy's attack. The blond giants came at them like the demons of the bitter north that they were. They were all motion, roaring, white skin splattered with blood, their swords swinging in wild arcs. His men—compact, tight, disciplined—cut them down in great numbers. But where the Romans were packed tight, the Gauls were just the opposite. They were a mob as tumultuous as the sea in storm, always throwing new waves of men and sucking back others to rest. Against this, his men could only fight until they fell from pure exhaustion.

Caught up in the conflict, shouting orders and rallying his men, Publius forgot about the danger he himself was in and how his position required more caution. He fought in the ranks as he had been taught in boyhood, so savagely for so long that he could not lift his eyes to the bigger picture for some time. Publius might have died in the fray if his companion, Laelius, had not jammed his fingers down the rim of his breastplate and yanked him back. For a moment he stumbled backward, arms grasping the air before him. A most undignified display. When he finally regained his footing, he turned to give Laelius a tongue-lashing, but the man would have none of it. He pulled Publius up onto a hillock surrounding an old tree stump. He clamped his fingers across the tribune's jaw and indicated that he should look forward, above the mêlée, at a figure in the middle distance, among the enemy.

This man was raised above the rest by almost his full height, standing perhaps on a pile of bodies or an overturned cart. Several guards ringed him, lower than he but each with a shield and spear at the ready. For a few moments he surveyed the scene before him. Then, unexpectedly, he burst out with a barrage of words. Publius could not make them out, but he almost thought he heard the boom of them cut through the din. A moment later, his vision lifted again and took in the whole scene before him. Publius knew without a doubt that this was Hannibal.

“A pilum!” the tribune yelled. “Give me a pilum!”

“Do not be stupid!” Laelius said. “You're not Achilles; you'd never reach him. Don't look at him, Publius; look instead at what he sees!”

Publius did as requested, first looking again at the commander, then trying to follow his gaze back over the Romans, out on either side. Doing this, he realized almost instantly what Laelius must already have gathered. The near edge of the army showed it clearly, and, though he could not make out the other edge, the signs he could see indicated that the situation there was just the same. They were hemmed in on at least three sides. The struggle now was not one for ultimate victory. It was a fight to survive.

The next few hours passed in a singular effort at odds with the collective mind of the army. Publius tried to turn as many men as he could toward the wings, to have them punch a hole out the side of the column instead of through the front. Hannibal's troops could not be that deep. The tribune could not find a signaler to issue orders by horn, so instead he yelled himself hoarse. He elbowed his way through the throng, shoving soldiers, punching them to get their attention. He grasped men by the shoulders and shouted right into their faces.

With Laelius at his side, echoing his orders, Publius did manage to lead a turn among the troops. He slowly began to feel a shift in the collective body. The late hours of the afternoon found him at the head of the new movement, cutting a bloody path through a line of Iberians three deep. For a moment in the fighting Publius was taken by a vision of beauty—that of the splashes of blood on the Iberians' white tunics, every possible variety of swirl and slash, a million variations on red and brown and dark almost to black. He had a notion that he would like to keep one of these tunics as a souvenir, a wall hanging to be viewed at leisure, a story to be read through close study.

They poured forward, slashing and screaming, for a good distance thinking they were still fighting the enemy, only slowly realizing that their way was clogged not by enemy warriors but by dead bodies piled three and four deep. It was such an overwhelming relief to be freed that Publius believed the whole of the army would gush out after him. He found rising ground in the distance and set out for it. He tried to sheathe his sword but found he could not do so. It was bent twice along its length, in different directions, no straighter than any stick he might have snatched up from the ground. He ran with it in hand.

Small bands and lone Numidians plagued them much of the way, tormenting them for the pleasure of it. When he reached the slope, Publius turned around and viewed the chaos he had fled. He had not drained the center, as he had hoped to do. Indeed, the breach his men had created was all but sealed now. The entirety of it was finally clear to him, painfully, tragically obvious. Hannibal had planned it all. Each and every thing the Roman forces strove to do had played into his hands. As they had planned, they punched through the Gauls and Iberians in the middle; but Hannibal had wished for just that move. He had cleared the cavalry from either side of them so that as the wedge pushed forward his most veteran troops swung in upon either side. Then, once the Carthaginian cavalry had vanquished their counterparts, they returned and fell upon the Roman rear. And that was it. After that it was just butchery. A series of masterstrokes. An army of ninety thousand had been completely surrounded by a lesser force in the space of a few hours. They were immobile, the vast mass of them stuck in the middle, able to do nothing but await the moment when their lives were cut out of them.

Varro rode toward him at a canter, his closest attendants mounted and close behind him, many of them glancing again and again over their shoulders, as if they feared the whole of the enemy's army would turn to follow them. The consul gave no indication that he planned to speak to the tribune, but Publius darted in front of him, snatched his horse's reins, and stopped him.

“What news of Paullus?” he asked. “Where is the other consul?”

Varro fixed on him a momentary gaze of utter loathing. “Where do you think? He's back on that field. Dead. As is Rome's future. Out of my way!”

Publius jumped back as the consul swatted at him. He let the man ride away, shocked as much by his words and attitude as by anything he had seen that day. He looked back at the battlefield and, amazingly, all was as it had been before. Men still died in their hundreds and thousands. It took all of his discipline to move him on into action. Nothing could be done for the men trapped in the death circle, though he would have given his life to save them. He shouted to those who had escaped with him and those who trailed behind. He directed them toward Canusium.

They reached the town late that evening, finding it alight with torches and open to them. The guards native to the place stood nervously, looking out beyond the straggling line of soldiers in the clear-eyed dread they all felt—fear of Hannibal's pursuit. Battered soldiers occupied every available inch. Laelius went off to locate other officers. Publius never even paused to catch his breath from the long march. He moved straight in among the men, speaking to them with what cheer he could muster, commending them for surviving the day, asking after their leaders.