David Durham - Pride of Carthage

But when he heard the first shrill, stammering Numidian calls, his blood went cold. A moment later Masinissa's horsemen carved into them from both sides, African furies let loose like an army one of the Numidian gods might have spat out of its great, rotten mouth. But even this did not decide the matter. The blood that was icy one moment burned red hot the next. Gnaeus shouted for his men to tighten up their formations. The horn beside him bellowed out instructions, turning the men at either flank out to the side to meet the marauders, halting the advance into the Tartesians and alerting each man to take a managed defensive position. Once some amount of order had been achieved, the Roman forces began to retreat.

All this was skillfully done, but other powers conspired against him that day. A horseman churned up to him with the last ill blow of Fortune: Hanno fast approached. The Romans had been so distracted that they had not noticed their advance until they saw them walking in great columns through the dappled light beneath the pines. The general's gaze flew out toward the tree-lined ridges the scout indicated. It might only have been an illusion caused by the wind up there, but the spires of the pines trembled and swayed as if buffeted by the soldiers shouldering through them. He told the horseman to gather a small band and ride for Cornelius' camp to beg whatever aid he could provide. As his messenger spurred his horse away, Gnaeus knew the effort was in vain.

Message dispatched, he issued new orders. The Roman soldiers stopped in their tracks and set about building fortifications. They ignored the normal order of a defensive camp. Gnaeus rode from point to point, throwing out instructions as suited the landscape. Velites and camp staff dug trenches in the crumbly soil. Men hacked down trees and set them falling in a pattern that knitted one into the next to form a perimeter just behind the trenches. They strung the wall between elephant-sized boulders and tried to use the land's contours to their advantage.

All the while missiles fell among them. The signaler beside Gnaeus went down in twisted, silent anguish. A javelin punctured his chest at the lung and pierced him, emerging on the far side. He seemed to have no idea how to respond to such an injury, so he just lay down. Moments later, five Numidians jumped clear over the trunk of a fallen tree and engaged at close quarters with the general's staff. Gnaeus himself drew his sword and struggled to get close enough to split one of them open at the skull. But they were gone before he even swung a blow.

Then Hanno's army arrived. There was no way to count them in the broken, tree-covered terrain, but they numbered in the tens of thousands. Hanno's forces fanned out in an encircling maneuver. They intermingled with the Tartesians, who greeted them with cheers and horn blasts. They surrounded the Romans both bodily and with a wall of sound and wide-eyed, bloody lust. Gnaeus shouted courage to his men, although he could not quite keep his voice from betraying the nearness of death. He took some pride in the next few moments. His men fought with complete devotion. He saw not a crack of panic in any of them. He asked Jupiter to allow someone to live through this and tell the tale. After this prayer he did not think anymore. He got down from his mount and waded into his troops. Beside them he met the horde pouring over the fallen trees.

Four days after his brother began his northerly march, the Suessetani with Cornelius Scipio awoke and broke camp hurriedly. They tore down their tents and piled supplies onto their pack animals' backs. When Cornelius sent a translator to ask what they were doing, they answered flatly that a disturbance in their own country demanded their presence. Hearing this, the proconsul went to their chief men himself and tried to reason with them. He implored them to stay on, hinting vaguely that they would be rewarded for doing so. He was only a hair's breadth from actually offering them pay, but his pride cut off the words before he uttered them. Finally, he rebuked them for their treachery and accused them of scheming with the enemy. He reached forcefully for one of their chieftains and found himself poised between two bristling fronts of spears: the Celtiberians before him and his own behind. He almost shouted for the capture of their leaders, then he realized that he had no such power. The Suessetani outnumbered them two to one.

The sight of them strolling away in a loose, casual herd let loose a shiver of fear low in his back. Cornelius knew he had been betrayed. He turned around and started to count his men with his eyes, but stopped himself. He knew the numbers and what they meant. He called for his officers and with them decided to fly in pursuit of his brother's force. There were four days between them, yes, but if they sent out swift messengers immediately and strode out at all haste they might manage to converge in less than a week. Their smaller number would speed them, anyway.

Hasdrubal's force crossed the river behind them and shadowed about a day's march behind. Occasionally over the first two days, skirmishers from the Carthaginians harassed the Roman baggage train. On the morning of the third day, one of the original messengers rode into camp on a lathered horse, a creature dead on its feet from the moment it stopped moving. The man himself had nearly lost his left hand from a sword blow to the wrist. His horse's side and his own leg were spattered with blood. Streaks of brown cut across his face where he had tried to wipe away sweat. Cornelius had received fair news from worse-looking messengers before, but the first words out of the man's mouth proved such was not the case in this instance.

The route north was alive with Numidians, he explained. They were everywhere, roaming at will. The others of his party had been lost. He had escaped only because his horse took him down a sliding gravelly slope so steep nobody would follow. They had better prepare, because the Numidians would be on them any moment.

Cornelius bent close to the man, who was now seated, having his injured arm dressed and gulping down water between sentences. “Are you sure of what you saw?” he asked. “Is it not just that the Numidians trailed behind my brother's army? If they are so close, then Gnaeus is close as well. Perhaps they are pinned between us.”

The messenger shook his head. “Sir, when we met them they weren't in pursuit of your brother. They faced south. They're coming for us.”

The land to the east was barren and, to the Romans, largely unknown. There were no important settlements, so the area had been largely ignored. But it was not very wide a stretch. In five days they could be at the coast; another two and they would be among allies. This was no easy choice to make. Cornelius did not know whether some catastrophe had befallen his brother. He could not tell whether pressing forward would reunite them or lead him into annihilation. All he could do was make decisions based on what he knew. His ten thousand were no match for the Carthaginian forces now. There was an army behind him, and marauding Africans in front of him. He ordered the dash for the coast.

They left behind their wagons and the camp supplies that needed to be dragged by pack animals, keeping only enough food to get them through a week. They made good time that day. They did not halt until after dark and were up again before the dawn. Cornelius demanded the strict rationing of water, but the second day took them through a terrain so parched it seemed to suck fluids mischievously from their skins and gourds. The sun perched in a cloudless sky, blistering from above, scalding as the fury of it bounced up from the sand. The heavens gave no sign that they remembered the approaching autumn and the rains the season always brought.

The third afternoon they passed through an area of cave dwellers. They were a strange people with no military might who watched the Romans from gaping black mouths in the rock. They seemed to know who was in danger here, for they showed little fear. Children clustered about the adults' legs, staring, chatting, pointing at the strange sight of a Roman army in full flight. Cornelius ordered water requisitioned from the peasants, but not a drop of the stuff could be found. How they scraped out an existence in that craggy land was a complete mystery.