David Durham - Pride of Carthage

New images might have followed upon this one, but the woman closed her discourse by pointing at his own sex, spitting, and tossing her head with complete scorn. Then she turned, snatched up her clothes, and strode away. The image of her naked bottom would haunt him afterward. Somehow, the behind of the donkey following her only made his pain more acute. The creature fell into step a few paces after her, as if he were an ungrateful and unworthy husband, a four-legged barrier between her and a truly devoted suitor. They disappeared between a crease in the landscape, leaving him alone in the gurgling quiet of the afternoon.

Imco managed to rise. Once upright, however, he reconsidered. He placed a knee on the ground, then the other knee, then he lowered himself to all fours. This was not quite enough, either. Eventually, he lay on his side in the sand, his knees pulled up to his chest, his arms wrapped around them. In this posture he came to grips with the stomach-churning agony of his groin injury. This could not have been a chance encounter, he told himself. The hand of a gentle god had propelled him here. He did not question whether it was the same hand that had shoved him into midair at Saguntum, for the point seemed irrelevant. He had found a new purpose in life. A new destiny. He had to learn her name. He was—true to the unacknowledged poet inside him—in love.

Before long, he heard the approach of familiar footsteps. The Saguntine girl squatted in the sand a little distance away and said, “Have I used the word ‘pathetic' already? You give new meaning to it.”

How strange, Imco thought, that in such a short space of time two women should enter his life, each a torment of a different sort. Nothing was ever easy.

Fabius Maximus held his troops back like leashed hounds baying for blood. He stood with a hand on Publius Scipio's shoulder, listening to the soldier's description of the land below them and the punishments Hannibal had inflicted upon it. Publius had an even, measured voice, intelligent and thorough. He knew what the dictator wished to learn before Fabius even asked the questions and he always laid out the most pertinent features of the landscape first. With his aid, Fabius layered his mind's created images on top of the evidence of his eyes. The merging of the two developed a picture he believed to be clearer than one rendered through sight alone, nuanced with more detail and depth.

Perhaps the delay caused by this careful elucidation served as the foundation for the dictator's famous patience. He rejected the Carthaginian's offer for battle, first at Aecae, and then again each day afterward. He had the army trail the enemy through Apulia, keeping to the high ground so as to avoid the Numidian cavalry. He harassed them with quick raids, making small war, allowing atrocity after atrocity by the foe but evading open battle at all costs. Fabius' men were well provisioned, so he destroyed any supplies he suspected to be within his enemy's reach. He put special effort into picking off parties of foragers, staying ever vigilant, always near enough to spot the parties and send detachments to rout them. Even news of a single Massylii unhorsed was pleasant to his ears. Two Balearic slingers captured as they took target practice on a herd of sheep, a Gaul left behind due to a gangrenous leg, summarily tortured and nailed to the gnarled trunk of an olive tree: each of these came as an additional verification that his strategy was sound and would succeed over time.

Terentius Varro, his master of horse, chomped and foamed at the bit, muttering that Hannibal had arrived before them and they should vanquish him without delay. They could not keep to this policy of inaction! Perhaps it had sounded reasonable when he had dreamed it up in the safety of Rome, but here in Apulia they could see that it was not working. Italy was burning. Their allies killed and raped daily. What sort of policy was this? It rejected the long history of Roman warfare. Rome had not risen to power by letting an enemy run wild in their country. Rome had always attacked first, promptly, directly, decisively.

Fabius listened to his ranting and answered with all the dignity he could muster. Varro had not been his choice for his main lieutenant. Actually, the Senate had appointed him because he had spoken out against the Fabian policy. This rankled him—that even as they appointed him dictator they burdened him with a high-ranking officer who did not share his views. Varro was a man of the people. His father had been a butcher, successful enough financially to set the stage for his son's career. Fabius always found men of such new blood to be of questionable character too. Despite the young man's early achievements, he seemed better suited to the work of a laborer, to alleyway brawls, to taking orders, not giving them. He was, actually, something of a nuisance. Fabius restated his chosen tactics, held to them, and reminded Varro which of them had been given the title of dictator. Varro could not answer this except by fuming.

By Fabius' orders, they followed the Carthaginian army up and over the Apennines into the territory of the Hirpini, a land of rolling uplands interrupted by great, slanting slabs of limestone, a beautiful country planted with wide fields. Hannibal turned his army this way and that. He broke camp in the middle of the night and tried to outflank Fabius, or to surprise him with sudden proximity, or to vanish from sight.

Fabius watched anxiously as the city of Beneventum repulsed the Carthaginian attack. He sent a messenger to them with the promise that they would be rewarded for their loyalty later. On the other hand, he failed to anticipate Hannibal's strike at Telesia. He took the town with ease and found vast stores of grain hidden hastily within it. Again, Varro shouted in his superior's ear, as if his hearing were in doubt as well as his sight. But the dictator was as determined as the invader. He held to his chosen course.

One evening as Fabius returned to his tent from relieving himself, Publius spoke out of the darkness. He said that he could not sleep for thinking about the suffering Hannibal was inflicting upon the people. Fabius searched out his cot with his foot and lowered himself to it. Once comfortably situated, he gave the young Scipio a moment's thought. He had thus far not voiced a personal opinion of the campaign. Unlike Varro, he had been raised well, by a revered family and by a father who took his son's upbringing seriously. Considering this, he decided to dignify Publius with a brief response.

“Our charge requires that we must sleep,” he said, “so that we may better work to free them on the morrow.”

“You are right, of course,” Publius said, “but do you not think of them at all? Do you not see them in your dreams?”

“No, I do not.” Fabius spoke firmly, in a tone meant to end the conversation.

But the younger man said, “Their suffering is like a scene painted upon a thin curtain through which I see the world. I still see beyond them, but I cannot forget their present turmoil for even a moment. I see faces of individual men and women, of children, so clear it seems they are people known to me, even though they are not. They ask me to remember them, to realize fully that each of them has only one life, like fragile glass crushed beneath Hannibal's foot.”

Fabius rolled irritably to his side. “You dream of poets, not of peasants.”

“At times, simple people seem much the same.”

“Such dreams do not serve you well. You should stop having them. It is not for a leader to think in specific terms: neither of strangers, nor of his own family. This is what the young do not understand. I consider a larger vision than you are capable of. Now go to sleep. You are my eyes, not my mouth!”

A few days later, the Carthaginian made another daring move. Hannibal departed Telesia. He snaked his army through the mountains not far from Samnium, crossed the Volturnus, and descended onto the plains of Campania. This country was in the full bloom of summer, as rich as the Nile delta, so far unscathed by the war and unprepared for its sudden arrival. Fabius did his best to send messengers ahead in warning, but he knew this effort was largely in vain. Hannibal had the whole of the Falernian plain at his mercy. If that were not bad enough, this move put him for the first time within striking distance of Rome itself.