David Durham - Pride of Carthage

He picked Imco out from the group at random. He clapped his hands down on his shoulders and lifted him to his feet in one heave. He demanded to know Imco's name. On hearing it he asked, “Is your sword dry?” Imco turned to check, but the giant grabbed him by the chin. “A man does not have to check. He knows. A dry sword is like a limp penis. A limp penis never fucks. If you never fuck you are like a woman: you get fucked instead. Understand me?”

Imco barely followed a word the man said, but he nodded.

Bomilcar grinned wide enough for two men. “Imco Vaca, we are winning this. Live through the day and Hannibal will hear of your bravery.” He turned Imco around, shoved him toward the battle, and carried on yelling.

When Imco returned to the front line something had changed. He felt little fear. His body did not jerk and bounce in defensive maneuvers. He carried a new calm within him, and he knew he was not the only one. The men on either side of him possessed it too. They moved not so much like skirmishing soldiers as like a slow tide enveloping the enemy. Perhaps they were winning. His blade increasingly found its way into the bellies and necks and through the arms of the men facing him. He thought less about each action. He wondered if his beauty would approve of this. Maybe he could find her a gift among the dead, a ring or medallion, perhaps a jewel-encrusted helmet. He could tell when he hit bone and stuck on it, or when the blade slipped between two ribs. He could capture her by surprise, wrap his arm around her belly, and drape her head in soft loops of rope. He began to feel he could sense just which organs he was slicing through by their different textures, by the way the tissues parted before or resisted his blade. Maybe he would buy her something someday, perhaps a string of pearls, in a place far from here, different altogether. His weapon became an extension of his hand, a sharp finger that shredded all that it touched. A quiet island, a single great rock rising up from an azure sea, a tree-covered home to sheep and goats, fig trees and olive groves . . .

At some point his exhaustion bypassed even this merging of gore and fantasy. His head pounded with tight-wrapped pain that appeared from nowhere. He did not retreat to rest this time. He just sat down on the tangle of the dead and half-dead before him, ignoring the stench of blood and viscera and feces. Without knowing he was going to—or that such a thing was even possible on a battlefield—Imco drifted off into a short slumber. He awoke with his face pressed against that of a Latin, their lips linked as if in passion. Of all the sensations he felt that day, the one that would linger with him the longest and haunt him most was the rough scratch of the man's beard against his cheek and the taste of the man's saliva on the tip of his tongue, the knowledge that he could name the very foods this stranger had breakfasted on.

The fighting still raged somewhere. He could hear it, but he had not the strength to seek it out. The world moved. The haze above shifted and thickened and dispersed. Cries broke the air occasionally, although a lower, more muffled anguish hung beneath them now. Looking down at his body he could not tell where his parts ended and another man's began. He was entwined with all of them. Together they created a new organism, an enormous being composed of dead and dying flesh, a thing that shifted with a million tiny, almost imperceptible motions. Squelching, sliding, settling, liquids pooling, eyes glazing. The struggles of wounded men translated through hundreds of bodies, all touching as they were, interwoven into some ghastly stitch, part of the carpet of Cannae.

And still he could not say who would win the day. Indeed, he found it quite possible that they had all lost, living and dead of whatever nation. He did not know whether he should be proud or disgraced, whether he had fought well or like a coward. It all seemed the same, a single nightmare named differently by different men but the same in substance. He wanted badly, very badly, to see his beauty again.

How surprised he was when she eventually appeared.

On the Roman side, the signs should have been obvious from the start. Usually the manipular formation of the legions allowed them amazing fluidity. They held together like a weave of men at just the right distance apart, with spaces enough for fatigued soldiers to retreat and allow the waiting replacements to come forward into the fray. But from the moment Varro ordered the maniples drawn together this give-and-flow vanished. The momentum of the army was so great and the soldiers packed together so tightly that anyone who sank down beneath injury was soon trodden on, first by a single foot and then another and then countless others. They died a suffocating death, feet grinding against the backs of their ankles, up their legs, and over their torsos, the flesh and bone of them pounded into the soil they were defending.

Publius Scipio would never forgive himself for not realizing sooner that the whole conflict was a choreographed sacrifice of massive proportions. He spent the early parts of the battle mounted, shouting courage to his infantrymen, himself taking strength from the resolute expressions on their innumerable faces. At some point his horse went lame from an unseen injury, refusing to move farther and shifting from foot to foot as if standing on a giant, red-hot skillet. Publius dismounted. To his surprise, the horse bolted, churning through the mass of men in a crazed effort to flee.

From then on, the tribune was one with his men. His legion was near the center of the Roman army. He took up a position near the rear of the soldiers entrusted to him, from which he could follow the flow of events and issue orders if necessary. With each passing hour, he found himself nearer and nearer to the front. The forward progress of the army continued, but instead of pressing through the foe they increasingly seemed to disappear into them. By the middle hours of the afternoon, the whole legion ahead of his had vanished. His men became the front and, unable to retreat, they fought like wild animals with their backs to a wall.

The fighting was beyond all norms. There seemed to be no pauses in the enemy's attack. The blond giants came at them like the demons of the bitter north that they were. They were all motion, roaring, white skin splattered with blood, their swords swinging in wild arcs. His men—compact, tight, disciplined—cut them down in great numbers. But where the Romans were packed tight, the Gauls were just the opposite. They were a mob as tumultuous as the sea in storm, always throwing new waves of men and sucking back others to rest. Against this, his men could only fight until they fell from pure exhaustion.

Caught up in the conflict, shouting orders and rallying his men, Publius forgot about the danger he himself was in and how his position required more caution. He fought in the ranks as he had been taught in boyhood, so savagely for so long that he could not lift his eyes to the bigger picture for some time. Publius might have died in the fray if his companion, Laelius, had not jammed his fingers down the rim of his breastplate and yanked him back. For a moment he stumbled backward, arms grasping the air before him. A most undignified display. When he finally regained his footing, he turned to give Laelius a tongue-lashing, but the man would have none of it. He pulled Publius up onto a hillock surrounding an old tree stump. He clamped his fingers across the tribune's jaw and indicated that he should look forward, above the mêlée, at a figure in the middle distance, among the enemy.

This man was raised above the rest by almost his full height, standing perhaps on a pile of bodies or an overturned cart. Several guards ringed him, lower than he but each with a shield and spear at the ready. For a few moments he surveyed the scene before him. Then, unexpectedly, he burst out with a barrage of words. Publius could not make them out, but he almost thought he heard the boom of them cut through the din. A moment later, his vision lifted again and took in the whole scene before him. Publius knew without a doubt that this was Hannibal.