Pride of Carthage (6 page)

Only the wind did, smacking hard across the citadel with three strong gusts. Hasdrubal had known this was coming, but the simple statement of it stunned him. The words seemed to come so easily to his brother's lips. They seemed so reasonable, despite the fact that they introduced the first official mention of a massive endeavor. He wondered if any would object, but from the generals and advisers all was silence until Monomachus said, “None question you.”

Hannibal nodded and said, “This goal is for our closed council only. The mass of men need not know my intentions; neither should the spies of Rome be given warning. But I will not keep secrets from you. This coming year we are still the Carthaginian army of Iberia. Next year they will be calling us the Army of Italy. Come, let's begin. There is everything to do.”

The Numidian spent the last of his silver on the passage to Iberia at the Pillars of Hercules. He traveled solitary, aligned with no city or king or general. Though a horseman by birth, he stood and walked on his own two legs. His head was shaved clean, with skin the color of oiled mahogany. He dressed simply in an earth-colored tunic, with a leopard skin flung across his shoulder and secured before him, a garment and blanket and bedding all in one. His arms bore tattoos, fine lines that were not words but were intelligible to those who knew how to read them. He had a strong hook of a nose and thin facial hair that clung in small curls just under his chin. His eyes were as clear now as they had been in his youth, though at twenty-nine he had seen things that meant the better portion of his life was behind him and now only dimly remembered. His name was Tusselo.

On disembarking in Iberia he began to search. The many signs were not hard to follow. The land had been trodden thin by the feet of so many thousands of men. It was scarred by horse hooves, flattened by the round, padded footfalls of elephants, cut by the wheels of carts and by the myriad other objects that seemed to have been dragged or pushed or somehow conveyed along the ground in a manner that left deep gouges. The farmland to either side had been stripped of its summer harvest. Many of those he passed still smarted from the inconveniences of the earlier horde and by no means was this lone traveler looked upon kindly. He was barred from settled places often, whether city or town or village it did not seem to matter. An old woman in Acra Leuce spat at him in the street and cursed his gods as weaklings. A man in an unnamed town cut him with an Iberian dagger, a clean slash across his forehead that bled profusely but was no real threat. It was a strange encounter, for having cut the Numidian the man just stood back and watched him walk away without further molestation. He was once followed by a band of young avengers who would have punished him for other men's crimes. They came upon him late at night, but he was ready for them and was more a man than they and left them smarting with the awareness of this. He carried a spear for a reason, and he explained this to them at close quarters.

Nor was nature disposed to aid him. The sun burned daylong in unclouded skies. Shade was thin and hard to come by and the landscape filled with hulking shapes in the distance. Once he traveled a barren stretch of land cut by dry rivers, some of enormous girth that might have funneled torrents but now lay parched beneath the summer sun. Later, he traversed a wide, shallow sea, the liquid so potent that it crystallized on his feet and coated them with a crust. Around him little thrived save for thin, delicately pink birds, creatures that stood on one leg and then the other and gestured with their curved beaks as if engaged in some courtly dance. On occasion his passage disturbed them; and the birds rose in great waves, thousands upon thousands of them, like giant sheets whipped by the breeze and lifted into the air. He never forgot the sight of them. Nor of the opal sea in the morning. Nor of a stretch of white beach as smooth as polished marble. Nor the white-winged butterfly that awoke him with a kiss upon his forehead.

He began to despair that he would succumb to some mishap before reaching his goal, but then he crossed the river Sucro and knew that he was close. He spent the night in a village by the sea and found that the people were not unkind to him, stranger though he was. He would always remember eating roasted fish on the beach, served up by an old man with whom he could not communicate in words but who seemed a friend nonetheless. The two sat on the sand near each other and scooped up the flaky white fish with their bare fingers. Tusselo tried to pay the man, but he refused, his hands raised before him and vertical so that no object could be placed upon them. In parting, Tusselo walked away a short distance and then turned to wave a good-bye. But the old man had turned his back to him and was kicking the sand to cover the spot upon which they had sat. Tusselo found something disquieting in this.

A week later he caught sight of scavenging parties sent out to supply the army. He avoided them for a day, but the next afternoon a lone horseman spotted him. The rider sat a rise a little distance away, contemplated him, and then rode forward into a dip. When he emerged Tusselo knew him for what he was, Massylii, slim and dark and so at one with his mount that he rode bareback and without reins. Tusselo raised his hand in greeting, knowing that his solitary travel was over. The rider stopped a short distance away and asked the stranger his business.

Knowing the man's warm tongue, Tusselo responded in kind. He came bearing knowledge the commander might find valuable, he explained. He had come to serve. He had come to fight for Hannibal.

The siege of Saguntum began early in the spring of the year following the defeat of Arbocala. It went on unabated, week after week, as spring gave way to summer. The city perched on the edge of a rocky plateau, high enough to afford a view of the surrounding hills and out toward the sea. It was well fortified, walled completely, in differing heights and thicknesses as suited the varying landscape. There were towers spaced along the walls at intervals, of such stout proportions that one might have thought the city perfectly defended. Hannibal was intent on proving this belief mistaken.

Under his direction a mass of men blanketed the ground all around the city, working in a hundred ways to break through the skin of the place and climb inside. One section of wall collapsed during the first weeks in a chaos of dust and debris and falling bodies, creating a great wound in the city's defenses that extended the whole length from one tower to the next. The Saguntines stanched it before the invaders could pour in, building a new shell from the rubble, working ruined homes into the fabric of the wall, throwing up barricades in all gaps, and using whatever materials came readily to hand. Some fought to keep the invaders at bay even as others ran between the defenders, working in stone and wood and earth. The wound remained, scabbed over and livid, yet the city had protection for another day.

The Saguntines received Hannibal's terms each time he offered them, but they refused to accept them. He knew the source of their resolve was threefold. There was simple loathing of defeat and the indignities it entailed. The stubborn bravado natural to all the Iberians he had yet encountered. And, of course, the Saguntines looked daily to the sea-horizon for salvation. From spies, Hannibal knew of three envoys who had escaped the city to renew their entreaties for Roman aid. He might have intercepted them with ease, but it suited him that they reach their goal and state their case in the Senate. He wanted the Romans to roil and fume. If they stirred to action against him, so too would he against them.

But despite all his planning, the siege threatened to carry on indefinitely. That was why, one sweltering morning in mid-June, Hannibal decided something must be done. He knew as well as any other that his actions verged on foolhardy, but he awoke to the knowledge that a lethargy had taken hold of his men. The heat of the summer day threatened to stew them slowly and would perhaps turn them upon themselves in surly frustration. He could not allow this to happen. Although he could not break through walls by himself, a lone man can inspire a mass to greatness beyond the power of an individual. His father would have done so, and as he was gone the responsibility fell to the first son.

He mounted the stallion that had of late become his favorite and rode out onto the debris-laden field between the city's walls and the mass of his fatigued, bored men. He shouted them to action. They looked up at him from the dust and grime. They saw his figure through the wavering haze cast by the heat and thought him a madman or an annoyance. Then they realized who he was and began to make sense of his words. Those who spoke no Carthaginian understood him only when he spoke in Greek, or in Celtiberian or Numidian. Some spoke still other languages and received his message through translation or by inference. He began simply anyway.

Get up and be men, he told them. Get off your lazy backsides and follow me through the walls of this city and through to the orgy of a lifetime. He told them they had everything they needed to storm the city that very hour. All the manpower and the machinery, the weapons and the opportunity. They needed only the balls to make it happen. They had been spurned and spurned again by the smug gluttons of Saguntum. Right now they were being laughed at and humiliated. Even the women and children of the city must think them pathetic, worth neither friendship nor obedience nor even a fuck.

He rode into a corps of Celtiberians, the big horse unwary of stepping on them. The soldiers jumped up and peeled back to allow his progress. They were pale of complexion, some with dustings of gold in their hair. Many of them were seeing their leader close up for the first time and they stared at him with slack jaws.

“Saguntum,” he said, voice not nearly loud enough to carry to them all but reaching many. “Does this task seem daunting, my friends? Does it tax you and strain your patience and will? So it should. This is a great city, whose foundations run deep, whose walls are thick, and whose inhabitants are thickheaded and vain. These months of work have pained us all—me as well as you—and yet we are here for a goal of undeniable worth. We came here at the bidding of our friends the Turdetani, those good people who suffered beneath the repression of the city behind me.”

A shout went up, which must have been the Turdetani responding to the mention of their name. Hannibal acknowledged them with a nod and spurred his horse in their direction. “There are issues of right and wrong to be discussed,” he said, “a dispute best handled by an impartial party. That is why I offered to be a judge in the matter. But rather than discourse like honorable men, these Saguntines called upon Rome to clap its mighty palm down on us. This before we'd chosen sides and taken up arms. Romans came to my fortress and stood before me and told me, Hannibal, what I could do and what I could not do. They told me that I was a child and all of you my bandy-legged playmates. Is that how you see yourselves?”

Hannibal kicked his horse into a gallop that sent infantrymen diving out of his path. The translation took a moment. As the various precincts understood his question, the answer rolled back like claps of thunder during a storm, some loud and some far and some near at hand, some sharp and others grumbling, in increasingly angry tones as if this insult was more than they could bear, something they had not considered before but which touched them sorely. In many languages, the men replied in the negative. They were not playmates; Hannibal was no child.

When the commander spoke again he did so from deep within a host of Libyan mercenaries. The soldiers reached up and touched his legs as he passed. They were copper-skinned men, noses and chins like features carved in granite and left rough-edged. In many ways they were the core of his army, battle-hardened veterans whose families had fought for Carthage for several generations. The relationship between the two peoples was not a formal alliance; Carthage was not sworn to protect the Libyans, nor was their king, Syphax, bound to her. But Syphax had continued the long-standing tradition of allowing his men to hire themselves out as mercenaries in the Carthaginian army, especially as a portion of their pay went to him in one form or another. The Libyans around Hannibal did not speak as he passed, but each stomped one foot in a throbbing rhythm.

“Who are the Saguntines to call another our master? Does that sound like the action of a people to be pitied? Nor shall they be pitied. Not for the injustice that began this conflict, nor for the months of labor they have caused, nor for your brothers who have been sent on to the next world. Just in the last few days I detailed to them through one of their citizens my terms for their surrender. Even at this date Hannibal conceded the possibility of mercy. But I went spurned.”

He paused at the edge of the Libyans, facing a company of mounted Massylii Numidians, these men easy on their horses, dark and tattooed as was their custom, with matted ropes of hair brushing their shoulders, eyes that sat deep and moved heavily. These men were also paid for their services, but they had been offered to the Carthaginian army by their king, Gaia, who made it clear he longed for an official, lasting union with Carthage.

When the various translations ceased and the crowd hushed, Hannibal spoke in rhythm with the throbbing beat still kept by the Libyans. “So let this now be known: That city, when it falls, goes to the men who capture it! What booty may be found there, in gold, in coins and jewels and weapons. In men and children. In women. Hannibal claims none of it. We will send some tribute to Carthage, so that the people may understand our work, and portion some to fund this great army. But beyond that Hannibal gives it all to those brave enough to take it, to do with it what they please. This siege has gone on long enough, my friends—let us now raze this place and be done with it!”

He did not have to await translation to get the men's roar of approval. Those who understood his Carthaginian shouted their immediate pleasure. Others joined in, perhaps not understanding completely but knowing that something unusual was being offered to them and willing to express joy and get the details later. They fell on Saguntum that day with an enthusiasm that must have rocked the defenders. The motley soldiers of Carthage threw their bodies at the walls as if they could claw through the stone itself. The Saguntines in return hurled down their spears and stones. Bodies were impaled and burned, skulls shattered and limbs snapped. But each man that fell was stepped upon by another willing to climb over his body and get for himself a portion of the city's riches. And perhaps each man was aware that the body he climbed over made one fewer to divide the treasure with.