Pride of Carthage (74 page)

Isalca used the silence after this announcement to spit vitriol on the Council. As a Gaetulian fighting for Carthage by choice, he owed them no blood allegiance. In this order he found an opportunity to condemn all of the Council's earlier failures, the broken promises, the troops not sent, the support not given. If they had not been petty fools, the war would have been won; instead, it was ruined. He was not sure that he would obey. He would have to speak to his men, but he knew that many would feel as he did: that the best battles of this war had already been fought, and that it had been won or lost at some point that was now behind them.

“There are not so many of us left, anyway,” he added, glancing at the commander.

Hannibal heard all this with his eyes closed, just breathing. Nor did he comment when Maharbal asked to have the messenger brought in and interviewed. The Numidian was particularly interested in the power struggle between the Massylii and the Libyans. What, exactly, had happened? The messenger explained. The blood drained from Maharbal's face. He asked no more. Imco Vaca was in attendance as well. But, like Tusselo, he kept his thoughts hidden.

For some time, the men sat in silence, none touching their food; the only noises were Isalca clearing his throat, Gemel rubbing his fingers over his chin beard, Imco shifting uncomfortably and then settling again. Tusselo realized that at some point the commander had opened his eyes.

When Hannibal spoke, it was a comfort just to hear his voice, for that was the same as ever it had been, only gentler, softer, there being no need to project his words in this small chamber. “The One Hundred,” he said, “did not even mention sadness at my brother's death. They tell me Hanno Barca is dead, but they spare not a word to admit that I might be grieved by this. He's only another failed general, best forgotten. I've always loathed this about my nation. If dead generals are all failed generals, then what is the Carthaginian legacy except a catalog of failures? We are all dust eventually. Nations should have memories. Even if people forget, a nation should not.”

Isalca asked, “Will you obey them?”

Hannibal fixed him with his gaze and stared, just stared until the Gaetulian lowered his eyes. “First I'll pray for my brother. And then, yes, I will go home to save my country. What kind of man would I be if I did not?”

Later that night, Tusselo packed his few things and rode out of camp, thinking parting words and wishing them out to the sleeping men, asking the commander for forgiveness and offering thanks for the gift of time they had spent together. It had not been easy to decide to leave, but neither was the decision a sudden one. He had suspected for some time that his journey might not end the way he had imagined when he first joined Hannibal's army, years before, still fresh from winning his freedom and trying to find his place in the world. He had seen so much. He had watched genius at work and witnessed a mighty, hated nation being humbled. He had had some joy. But none of this had changed who he was, or healed the scars, or returned to him the most precious things that had been stripped from him. So he framed a new vision of the statement he might make, and now he determined to see it made real.

Not far out of camp, he sat his horse atop a shallow hill and looked north across the heaving knots pushed up in the landscape. The month had just passed the Nones by the Roman calendar. The moon hung in a cloudless sky, so clear that he could see the weathered skin of it, cracked and pitted and pale like an old Gaul. It would flesh to fullness in a handful of days, on the day called the Ides in the Roman tongue. It was already bright enough that he could make out fields and huts and the ruts of roads. He could even distinguish a few thin streams of smoke that rose from fires. The signs of man were all across the land. It would be no easy task to map his way through it, alone over much the same territory he had just traversed as one among a great host. But so be it. This was his journey. He aimed to reach Campania under the full moon and work his way steadily north through the rest of the month. By the Kalends he would be at the heart of his goal. He would announce the new month in his own special way. The Kalends, the Nones, the Ides . . . he knew too many of their words. They came too often to his head. He had tried to expel them, but this was not as easy as Hannibal believed. No matter. It would all be undone soon enough. He touched his mount on the neck. She stepped forward and the two of them began the slow descent, toward the north, back toward Rome.

At first he backtracked down the wide, barren road Hannibal's withdrawing army had made. He covered as many miles as he could at night and rested in secluded spots through the daylight hours. Twice he roused packs of dogs that chased him to the outskirts of their towns. Once he had to call on all his skills as a horseman to outrun a Roman patrol. And another time he had to chase, capture, and subdue a Campanian boy who stumbled across his daytime hiding place. The boy could not have been more than ten, but Tusselo had to beat him soundly to shut him up. He even explained to the boy in Latin that he meant him no harm. The wide-eyed, frightened youth did not seem to understand a word he said, although the language should have been familiar enough to him.

Two days away from the capital he released his horse and walked away from her. She followed him for some time, until he threw stones at her and frightened her with upraised arms and shouts. That evening he sheltered beneath an overhang of rock, in a moist hollow dripping with springwater. He squatted over the thin stream and, taking a knife he had honed especially for this task, he hacked at the long locks of his hair. The stuff came away in great clumps. He measured the tangled weight in his palms, surprised by it. The knots bound within them moments of his history. He felt them floating free into the air with each new cut. It seemed each day of the last five years had somehow been trapped in there: the essences of different countries, the scent of horses, of flowers budding and leaves bursting with the change of seasons, drying and crumbling. He smelled pine forest in there, the dust of Saguntum, the water of the Rhône, the residue of melting ice, tiny drops of other men's blood flung into the air during battle. He thought of eating fried fish with the old man on the seashore in Iberia. He recalled the frozen morning near the Trebia River when he spat insults at the Roman camp to wake them for the day's conflict. He remembered the Arno swamps, the mists pulling back from Lake Trasimene, the great cloud of dust the Romans sent up as they approached Cannae. There was so much to remember.

It had been good to own his hair again and feel it growing thick around him. But it was good to be free of it also. He pressed the blade against his flesh and slid it carefully across the contours created by his skull, drawing blood here and there, once getting the angle wrong and slicing up a ribbon of flesh. But these were tiny wounds compared to others he had suffered. He had never known that the air had fingers. He felt them that night, gentle pressure against the new skin of his scalp, like the spirits of his ancestors reaching out to caress him. Strange as it was, he felt comforted by the touch.

The next day he traded a large Tarentine gold coin for a farmer's old mule. And the following day he bought a fresh-killed boar, a female and no great burden strapped to the mule's back. He secured his spear beneath the load in such a way as to make it look more like a tool and less like a weapon. He gave his other meager possessions to any field workers who acknowledged him as he passed: a few more coins to this one, his dagger to another, random articles of booty to still others. By the time he reached the city he carried nothing on his person but a long cloak that fell back off his shoulders. He had long ago learned that much of one's identity as a slave was revealed in the eyes. He cast them down in the manner he remembered as he entered the Colline gate. If the guards noticed him at all they kept it to themselves.

Again he was within Rome. It was as it had ever been. The bustle and stench were the same; the noise and clatter of wagons and confusion of tongues had not changed in the slightest. He remembered the route to his old master's home, but he did not take it. This mission was less personal than that. He wound through the cramped streets, down the ridge of the Esquiline hill. He led the mule behind him, lowering his eyes whenever he noticed someone watching him. He did not need to look up often, for he knew this city as if he had never left. There was nothing he needed to see again.

He did not even truly look up when he reached the edge of the Forum. He hung back near the wall of an adjacent building, as if waiting for his master. People thronged the place. He heard their talk and smelled their perfumes and the bodies the fragrances disguised. He even felt the heat radiating off their skin and the cool seeping up from the marble of the flooring and out of the pillars and statues adorning the place. He still did not look up. He did not need to study people's faces to know the expressions they would bear. He could see the wrinkled faces of the old women in his mind as clearly as any around him, the prominent noses of senators, held high. He knew he would catch glimpses of matrons' thighs, of young men's hairy torsos, of children at play in a world of their own.

He placed his fingers on the clasp that held his cloak fastened at the neck. He did not loosen it immediately, for to do so was to change everything that could be changed in his life. He did not feel the fear he might have expected. Neither did he feel the hatred that he had harbored for so many years. Instead, each passing breath filled him with a new portion of something like euphoria. For the first time in his adult life, he felt he had complete control of his place in the world. He understood that the crimes Rome had done to him could never be escaped, never mended, never made right or forgotten; they could only be faced and cleansed through blood and oblivion, and through release from memory. There was no defeat in this. Instead, it was the ultimate revelation, a complete refutation of the single thing that had bound him to slavery—the fact that his own mortality had trapped him. Free of that, he would be free of all the chains that weighed him down.

It was a religious moment, one that must be sanctified with an offering. With that in mind, he loosened his spear and tugged it free of the mule. He smacked the creature on the bottom and watched it trot away. Still, nobody paused to note him, but that was about to change. He unclipped the clasp and yanked the robe from his shoulders. He tossed it high into the air with a snap of his wrist and strode toward the center of the crowd.

“Rome!” he yelled, speaking Latin. “How do you live without my black heart to beat for you?”

He punctuated this by thumping his knuckles against his chest. For a moment all around him he watched images of the world slowing from motion to stillness: the tail end of words spoken fluttered away on the breeze, laughter fell to silence, his cloak rumpled onto the stones, a hundred Roman faces turned and stared at him. He swung his spear into a two-handed grip, squatted slightly, stretched his eyes open wide and frantic, quick as those of a hunting leopard. Already he saw soldiers converging on him from several directions.

Good, he thought. Good. Tusselo will be a slave no longer.

To his amazement, Mago discovered that the sun had turned black. That was why he paused on his mount, turned sideways, and stared at it. He could not take his eyes off it. The black orb pulled at him as if it were a deep well and he were tumbling toward it. It did not matter that battle raged around him. The Romans who had boxed them in for days now had sprung their trap and the full brute force of three legions slammed into him from as many sides. His face was wet with blood that had sprayed up from a man some distance from him whose head had been severed from his standing body, making him a momentary fountain. His lieutenant was screaming that they must withdraw, but for a few seconds none of this mattered as much as the fact that the sun had gone black.

He heard a voice call his name. It was urgent, moist, and close to his ear, a whisper that somehow penetrated the din. As if injured by the impact of the voice, Mago's horse shuddered. He felt its forelegs buckle and thought he was going to fly over its head. He was still staring at the sun, however, and instead of toppling forward the mount kicked out twistingly and tilted to the side. Mago saw the sun flare and thought the orb smiled maliciously. Then the horse smashed against the ground. The impact drew his complete attention. He saw the pilum jutting out of the mare's chest, and saw her kicking and struggling to rise, and realized that his leg was trapped all the way up to his groin. It amazed him that he had not been injured; he felt no pain, although he was aware that the animal's weight was grinding him against an exposed rib of gray rock.

“Mago? General, you must wake for a moment. . . .”

He snapped at the speaker, saying he was not asleep. He was trapped! Help him! But the man would not and Mago had to twist and squirm and shove at the horse. The mount looked back at him, neck bent unnaturally, her eyes like those of a mistreated dog, offended, disappointed. Mago kicked her off with his free leg and rose to survey the scene. But what was this? There was no sign of his army at all, not even of the speaker. Instead he was alone among the enemy host. They encircled him, approaching from all directions, stepping slowly, menacingly, pila pointed at him like thousands of erect, deadly penises. Their helmets caught and reflected the black glow of the sun. He realized that his mouth was awash with wine. It was an evil taste. He exhaled it on each breath and had the momentary thought that blood was the same as wine. Perhaps he had already been pierced. He looked down to find the wound and in the anxiety of the moment his vision blurred and darkened. He realized that his eyes were closed and he pried them open.

One view of the world peeled over another. He looked up into the face of a man named Gadeer, a Moor, one of his captains. Gadeer tilted the mouth of a skin to his lips and tried to pour more wine into him. Mago twisted his head away, cursing.