David Durham - Pride of Carthage

Loading the beasts onto the floating islands was no easy task. Cow elephants led the way, calmer than bulls and more inclined to faith in humans. Behind them a few bulls followed nervously, testing the ground and finding it questionable and expressing as much with loud bellows and flapping ears. Vandicar cursed them in his Indian tongue. The chief mahout seemed to have no fear of the beasts whatsoever. He smacked them on the bottoms and yanked on their tusks and even seemed to spit in their eyes when he was truly angry.

These actions went uncommented upon for a while, but then one of the young males took exception to it. He cocked his head. It was not an angry motion, but it was swift enough to catch Vandicar off guard. The elephant's tusk nudged him in the shoulder. One of the man's feet got tangled in the other. He reached out for support from a sapling that had no roots and therefore was no support. A moment later he landed in the river: flat-backed, arms out to either side, mouth an oval of surprise. This seemed to confirm the suspicions the young bull had. He pivoted and bolted back onto solid ground, bringing in his wake the rest of the elephants, male and female alike. When it came down to it none completely trusted the mad fellow, certainly not now that he was climbing out of the water looking much like a drenched rat.

Eventually though, the creatures were brought across—some afloat and some swimming—and the army departed again. They kept the Rhône to their left and followed it northward. Hannibal knew that at some point it would curve up into the Alps and that in being farther from the coast they were farther from the Romans. Though he had been tempted to engage with Scipio's legion, he preferred to gain Italian soil, then do battle in the Romans' own country, where any victories could be quickly followed up. Also, they were nearing the greatest natural challenge of the journey. Already he sensed the growing buzz of anxiety in the army. They had put more than a normal season's trials behind them, but it was the unknown test of stone and ice that now kept the men awake at night, murmuring around the campfires. Hannibal saw all this, for his eyes were quick and his fingers touched each segment of his host like those of a physician who probes a patient's body in places far removed from the perceived point of illness.

Thus it was no oversight but a conscious decision not to enforce his expulsion of the camp followers. It would have been hard to implement the order in any event, but also Hannibal knew that a portion of his fighting men would slip away with the expelled. Among them a few of the officers hid slaves and concubines. Even some of the paid foot soldiers employed the followers, to carry out their foraging duties, to secure food and comforts. Many, of course, answered sexual needs. Men in a conquering force are rarely without some spoils, coins or weapons or jewelry; the camp followers provided entertainments on which to spend these trinkets. A few among the Libyan veterans had acquired slaves from among the Gauls. As Hannibal knew these men took seriously their right to the spoils of war, he said nothing about this. Perhaps, also, even the many with no direct stake in the camp followers were encouraged by the normality they suggested. If women could journey into these wildlands, along with thin-armed children and men older than battle age and even goats and pigs . . . then surely men in the prime of health were suited to it. Hannibal knew this line of thinking and allowed it for the time being, though he also knew it for a delusion. None but the strongest had any true place in this venture.

He was surprised, in fact, that the noncombatants held on as well as they did. The marching had never been easy, and now they were crossing territory with no roads worthy of the name. They forced their way through forest and over ridges and across rivers with all the order they could muster in the broken terrain. And this was not much. It was not winter yet, but already the chill hours just before dawn were hard on those from warm climes. Increasingly, they awoke to damp mornings and a low mist that was cool to the touch and hung among them a little longer each day. Stepping out of his tent one hushed morning, Hannibal looked over a camp dusted with frost, sparkling in the pure, early light. The thin threads of ice melted quickly, but all the army recognized them as harbingers of the coming season.

Hannibal paused the march long enough in the region of the Cavares to hear a dispute between two brothers, each of whom laid claim to the chieftaincy of their clan. Occupied with their own turmoil, they showed the Carthaginians no hostility. Instead, they asked for Hannibal—as a foreigner with no personal stake in the affair—to judge. They agreed that they would honor his decision. Hannibal wasted no time. He heard them out and promptly deduced that the matter was one of the younger brother's might overthrowing the elder's right. He sided with the elder brother, as age is the determining factor in such matters. In pronouncing his decision, he cited the precedent of thousands of years of history.

The Carthaginians marched out with no inkling of whether the decision would hold, but serving as arbitrator had served their cause well enough. The older brother provisioned the army handsomely from their autumn supplies. He sent them off with an escort force that flanked them through a rolling landscape that began to give way to ever higher vistas, all the way into the foothills of the Alps.

The Cavares turned back at the Druentia River, a vicious, multichanneled torrent, rock-strewn and swirling. It was a nasty, frigid confusion and an ordeal to cross. It was now—as they were left friendless at the foot of the mountains, bunched up against the banks of these spiteful waters—that the men's grumbling grew truly audible. None carried his complaints directly to the commander, but Hannibal heard enough through his generals. The men wondered whether this mountain crossing was truly possible, especially so late in the season. Did the commander not see, as they did, the decrepit huts of the straw-haired peasants? The shriveled cattle, the sheep shivering with cold, rivers tumbling and frothing? This was no land for civilized men. Did Hannibal wish to be famous for marching an entire army up into white oblivion? Delegations of soldiers proposed new plans to their officers: they should winter where they were; they should attack Massilia; they should retreat to Iberia with the considerable booty of the long campaign.

Hannibal heard all these complaints but answered them, for the time being, with silence. He was personally among the first to succeed in crossing the Druentia, visible to many as he balanced on the slippery back of a hewn pine. He wrenched his way through the branches, jumped from the trunk to a boulder, and then dove, flat-bellied, into a stretch of moving water. He finally emerged on the other side, dripping and frigid. He looked back at the waiting army with an accusation etched in his stare. The others, grumbling, could not help but follow his example.

Soon after, a delegation arrived from the tribe into whose lands they were about to enter, the Allobroges. It was a small group, five elders, each with a few warriors in support of him. Monomachus—trusting no people as little as he did Gauls—escorted them into camp personally, his handpicked corps flanking the party, strong armed Libyans who shared their general's lust for carnage. Hannibal granted the Allobroges an audience before his tent. He sat on the plain three-legged stool he always brought with him on campaign. It had been his father's, as he explained to the delegates through his translators. After exchanging the customary pleasantries and accepting the gifts the Gauls offered—most notably, the enormous gilded skull of a stag—he asked them their business.