David Durham - Pride of Carthage

When asked about his health, his thoughts on the situation they found themselves in, the coming year, the state of the men's morale, the best way to communicate with Hannibal, the prospect of negotiating the Alps in early spring—when asked anything—Hasdrubal, if he responded at all, answered with the same phrase.

“Bears sleep in winter,” he said.

Silenus found no comfort at all in this answer, even apart from the wild smile that accompanied it, the great bulbous swell of his eyes, and the way he chewed on one corner of his lips with teeth that—in the dim light—seemed inordinately large. Asked to explain the statement, Hasdrubal merely repeated it. Then he grunted a few times, as the creature might. Silenus stopped asking questions. Instead, he reminisced about the things he had seen with Hannibal and conjectured with willed optimism about what the future held for them all. He tried to remind Hasdrubal that a world of possibility lay beyond this Gallic hell: people and places and joys yet to be discovered.

He was not sure whether he succeeded in these attempts, but with the first thawings of spring the bear stirred into motion. Hasdrubal gathered together the ragged remainder of the troops he had escaped Baecula with. All told, just over eleven thousand of them had survived the winter, far fewer than Hannibal had at his command at the same geographical point. None of them looked eager to fight, but all wanted out of that cold place and they knew they had mountains to cross no matter what. So they accepted their general's lead.

Hasdrubal pushed the army across the upper Rhône, where the river was narrow and posed only a moderate obstacle. He moved ready for trouble, his lookouts vigilant and his soldiers marching with spears at hand. Silenus had sworn that he could be of no aid in negotiating the Alps, but this was mostly because he wanted no responsibility for errors. In actuality, he managed to have an opinion every step of the way. For some time Hasdrubal joked with him that his only aim was to avoid any route that even remotely resembled the one he had taken with Hannibal. Silenus did not dispute it. Actually, he was happy to see the Barca find humor again. Perhaps his winter-long concern had been unnecessary.

The Gauls, remembering the first passing horde, greeted this new one with curiosity instead of fear. And perhaps with a measure of pity, for Hasdrubal's men looked none too impressive. Even the wild people who perched on the crags offered little trouble: stolen livestock, a camp follower snatched here and there, an occasional trap set more for amusement than to do real damage. The Allobroges would undoubtedly have proved more menacing, but the Carthaginians avoided them.

And they had chosen their route well. The crossing was—by Silenus' reckoning—blissfully uneventful. Much happened, certainly. Avalanches; days spent trekking into dead-end valleys. A blizzard howled over them for three days straight, then vanished. Stores of grain were ruined by damp; a pack of wolves that had a taste for human flesh attacked stragglers. But there was nothing to match the epic struggles he remembered from Hannibal's venture. They just progressed. Up and up. And then, at some point subtle enough that Silenus failed to notice it, they began their descent, at a moderate incline, via a different pass altogether. Before he dared to believed it they were out of the mountains and onto blessedly even terrain.

On arriving in the region of the Padus River, Hasdrubal sought to correspond with Hannibal. He did not know exactly where his brother was, or in what condition, but above all he wanted to unite their forces. He dictated a longer letter than Silenus would have expected. It seemed, actually, that he had more to discuss than just the logistics of war. He had been so long without his brother that he wished to explain everything that had passed in the years that separated them. So he did. Silenus transcribed it faithfully for him.

This completed, Hasdrubal gave orders for the dispatch of a group of skilled riders. They were to ride south at all haste, to weave their way secretly through the long stretch of Italy, through Apulia, and on into the region of Tarentum, where they hoped to find Hannibal. As soon as the riders thundered out of camp—their horses throwing up divots of soil—Hasdrubal ordered the march commenced.

They approached Placentia as if to lay siege to the place, but as they had no siege equipment the display was really for show. Instead they sat outside the city, taunting the Romans, who refused to climb down from the battlements and fight them. The greater show he made of spoiling for a fight, the more the local Gauls felt the call of war in their blood. Representatives trickled in at first, testing the possibilities for new alliances with the Carthaginians, new promises. Hasdrubal made grand projections about the coming year. He had left Iberia, he said, to join his brother and finish this war. In the ports to the south, he would be joined by tens of thousands of reinforcements from Carthage. He would unite with Hannibal to crush Rome itself. He would drench the streets in blood, a hundred killed for each wrong he could recall: each soldier unjustly killed, each woman raped, each treaty disregarded, every pompous Latin word. He would see the city in flames, loot the place, and drag Roman women through the streets by fistfuls of their hair.

By the time he left, fifteen days after he had arrived, a horde of thirty thousand Cisalpine Gauls trailed behind him. Apparently, they liked what they heard. Outside Mutina, they picked up guides who claimed to know all the best routes south and how to connect one to another for maximum devious effect. With them in the fore, they marched south. At first, the guides hardly seemed worth their pay: The army simply trotted down the Via Flaminia, a road like none any of them had ever beheld. So wide and flat, the stones set with such precision. Initially, they made almost double their normal time, so enthused were the men by their progress, by the fact that the enemy's own handiwork was helping them on. They passed Ariminum undisturbed. The townspeople gathered on the fortifications and watched their progress. The soldiers of the garrison held their positions, pikes jutting up into the sky. But they stayed shut behind the town's gates, so Hasdrubal carried on toward his goal. They followed the coastal road past Fanum Fortunae. The guides had them cross the Metaurus River and proceed along the relatively open ground toward Sena Gallica.

It was here, finally, that they discovered the Romans were not going to let them stroll on indefinitely. An army under Livius Salinator waited for them, encamped in a wide valley mostly cultivated with grain. For four days the two armies sat assessing each other. Cavalry units skirmished on a couple of occasions. The Romans shifted the position of their camp, although it was unclear what advantage this offered them. By his assessment, Hasdrubal's forces slightly outnumbered the enemy's. With so much of his force composed of unruly Gauls, however, he hesitated to engage on such open terrain. He tried to find traps hidden in the land, but the position was not one suited to wily tactics. It favored open battle. Noba volunteered to lead the Libyans on a night march to circumnavigate the Romans and surprise them from the rear at an agreed-upon moment. But as they debated this an individual arrived who changed everything with the news he bore.

This spy had barely escaped the Roman camp with his life. Indeed, a sentry had noted his solitary departure. Before he had made contact with Carthaginian forces he had found himself running from a band of Roman cavalry. He was bashed about his helmeted head with a sword, cut on the shoulder. He swatted away a flying javelin with one hand, gashing his palm in the process. He escaped by plunging down a ravine too steep for his mounted pursuers. The fall was nearly vertical. He bounced from rock to rock, ricocheted off the trunks of trees, and ended his flight suspended in a clump of shrubs so thick that he only broke free of them with some difficulty. For all this, the Roman cavalry was still chasing him when he sprinted into sight of the Carthaginian outposts. The Romans drew up at the last moment, considered the view of the amused Carthaginians and of the Numidians riding out from the main camp. And then they bolted, suddenly recalling that there was a more substantial threat to their safety than anything that lone man might represent.