David Durham - Pride of Carthage

And so Mago might have stayed if the voice had not reached him. He lifted his head and, squinting into the wind, realized why it buffeted him so forcefully. There was nothing above him but sky. To the south, a patchwork of clouds drifted across a blue screen. Mago rose to his feet and stumbled forward. The ground beneath him was suddenly bare rock, marbled by windswept currents of snow. The mountains dropped all the way to the valley floor before them. He could almost make out the flat plain and its imagined lushness. He was at the summit!

A madman stood atop a boulder, no more than a stone's throw away. It was the madman's voice that stirred Mago: He pointed out and shouted to the passing soldiers that the goal was in sight. “Look,” he said, “the rich land of Italy! See it here, the rewards for your labors. We've brushed our heads against the roof of the world and need go no higher. The way is down from here. The hard work is behind you! Carry on quickly and lay your head to sleep on flat ground!”

Mago hardly recognized the shouting figure. His beard bristled wildly about his face, grown uneven and unkempt, the hairs laden with ice, even as his forehead dripped with sweat. A crust of reddish black clung to his cheeks. The man pulled off his helmet and waved it above him in triumph, revealing a mass of woolen hair pressed to his scalp in a rough impression of the headgear. He was a wholly wild creature, garments flapping about him, like some mad prophet yelling into a gale. But Mago knew exactly upon whom he was gazing. He could hear him plainly now, and he saw in his brother's eyes a sparkling enthusiasm like none he had seen before. Mago drew close enough to reach up and grasp his foot.

Hannibal looked down and smiled, joy written in the creases of his forehead and curve of his mouth. He spoke so quietly that Mago had to read the words on his lips. “Rome will be ours,” he said. “Rome will truly be ours.”

Mago nodded an agreement he did not feel. He wanted to share Hannibal's enthusiasm, but nothing was yet complete. The way was indeed down, but it was not to be easy. In many ways, the worst of the mountain crossing awaited them. The altitude that it had taken them days and miles to climb to was to be descended in only a portion of the distance, making the route almost unnavigably steep. Looking down from beside Hannibal's boulder, Mago wondered if the Allobroges had not led them to the most terrible pass in the Alps. The bastards might yet defeat them.

Imco Vaca had known no joy since leaving northern Iberia. Not a moment of happiness. Not an instant of pleasure. He felt as if he had been transported here and dropped down in the mountains by some creatively spiteful being intent on seeing poor Imco suffer. It made no sense otherwise. Ice and snow? Ridge upon ridge of jagged rock teeth? The small finger on his left hand black and hard as a twig? This must be somebody's idea of a joke. The fact that he could remember every step of the way, from sunny Iberia, up through the Pyrenees, into the Rhône valley, and all the way across the Alps explained nothing. Nor did it matter that he passed within spitting distance of the commander. Yes, Hannibal spoke encouraging words, but he was such an insane-looking creature that Imco would have crossed the street to avoid him had they met in some civilized city of the world. He walked past him without a word, determined to get down from these heights and fast.

But he was somewhere in the middle of the line, and the trail the scouts found twisted and turned down the mountainside. The snow he had to walk along had been softened in the sun and then compressed beneath thousands of feet into a sheet of rutted, dirty ice. Each step had to be taken with the greatest of care, but this was not possible in such fatigue, at the edge of starvation, on frostbitten feet, laden with heavy packs. Imco saw several of the men below him lose their footing. They clutched and struggled for purchase as they began to slide down the slope. They called out for help, naming men and then gods, and then as they blurred into unimaginable speed their cries became sound alone, distorted and echoing through the mountains.

The sight of the elephants was constantly baffling. The paths seemed impossibly narrow, but somehow the creatures moved forward as steadily as the men. He once spied a cow elephant negotiating a tiny shelf of rock. She balanced in such a way that her feet fell in a nearly straight line. It was a dainty move, something fit for a circus of curiosities, but she pulled it off with a finesse that Imco wished he possessed.

Toward the end of the second day he had to traverse a path that bent at an angle about fifty yards in front of him. Beyond the corner, yet another precipice, empty space stepping off into nothing. He could see the signs of thousands of feet already gone past. Though the way was clear in front of him, he saw two men stumble near the bend, one taking out the knees of the other and then the pair clutching each other, lucky not to have slid over the edge. Be careful when you reach that area, Imco thought.

Just then, he spotted a garment on the snow a few steps away, discarded in someone's sliding haste earlier in the day. He decided to fetch it up and sling it around his neck and present it to some unfortunate later. He lifted a foot toward it, but knew in an instant that this move had been misguided. His other foot slipped out from him as if he were kicking a ball. He landed on his outstretched hands and the heels of his feet. For a moment he held still, but then, slowly, painfully, he felt the four points of his limbs slithering over the ice. He tried to dig his fingers in and slam the soles of his feet for purchase, but he slid on, speeding up. He tried to think himself lighter, to rise up off the ice with the power of his mind and find purchase on the air itself. When this did not work he flipped over and embraced the slope for all he was worth, feeling the contours slide beneath him, each footprint and divot and ripple. He was sure the surface would drop away from him at any moment. He yelled his anger and fear right into the ice, his teeth so close to the surface he could have bit it. He might have done so, but even in such a state he knew his teeth should be protected. They were one of his best features.

He was not sure why he stopped moving. He only realized it because his yelling became the only noise in a silent world. The two men he had seen stumble were gazing at him from a few strides away. He had slid all the way to the bend. The precipice yawned just beyond his feet. He looked at the men, shook his head, and conveyed by rolling his eyes the depths of his impatience with all this; then he rose, very slowly, and moved on. He did not reach for stray garments again.

The third day was even worse. He first understood this when a groan of exasperation flowed up the line. An avalanche had wiped out a portion of the path below. It was a particularly steep section, offering no alternative routes. They would have to clear the slide. This was bad enough, but then he learned that many of the boulders mixed in with the snow and ice were too large to be moved even with the help of the elephants. They would have to break them into smaller pieces. Someone—whose expertise on this matter Imco doubted—suggested that they build a great fire around the rocks in question, making them red hot so that they could then be drenched with water and vinegar. The change in temperature, this man said, would split the stones and make them more manageable. It sounded dubious.

Imco spent the day hewing trees and dragging them through the snow to the fire. It was absurdly difficult work, as dangerous as battle. Stuck up to the waist in snow, hacking at the base of a tree that was so hard it did more damage to his ax than the blade did to it, Imco found himself crying. This was not exactly out of fear. He was not sure what he had to be afraid of anymore. The tears were not quite the product of sadness, nor of fatigue, nor of anger: he had felt all these things long enough that they were just part of his being now.