Pride of Carthage (75 page)

“I'm sorry,” the Moor said, “but we have found nothing better for you. The physician was lost, perhaps captured. If possible we will get some unction from one of the other boats.”

As the man's mouth moved, the world around them took greater form and substance. Gadeer crouched below wood beams and the slight to-and-fro of his head in contrast to the beams betrayed the rocking of the sea. Mago could feel that more men stood nearby, but he did not wish to address them. One face was enough to focus on. There was a growing sensation spreading over his body that he would have disdained as well, but the swell of it was inescapable, pulsing.

“Where am I?” Mago asked. He knew that he had asked the question before, received an answer, and should remember it still, but he did not.

“Bound for Carthage,” Gadeer said. “It is night. The watch reported passing Aleria on Corsica while you were sleeping. They saw the lights. We are now in open water. I'm sorry to wake you, but we must decide. We have no physician, but all who have seen you believe that we cannot wait any longer. By the gods, we wish we could get you to Carthage first, but in truth we cannot.”

Despite the growing pressure that clenched and released his entire body, Mago understood the words the man spoke. He just did not know what they meant. They had no context. “What are you talking about?”

Gadeer drew back. His wide nose flared and relaxed. He had smooth brown skin untroubled by the passing years, freckled about the nose and forehead. “It's your leg. . . . My friend, your leg must come off.”

This was an even less substantial statement. “Speak truth! I don't understand you.”

It saddened Gadeer to hear this. “Near Genua,” he said, “the Romans pressed us into battle. They repelled our elephants. Your leg was broken in a fall—”

“Genua?”

“In the north of Italy. Our plan was bold, General, but we failed. . . .”

Gadeer went on speaking, but Mago's mind caught on those last two words. With them the horror of it all came back to him. He remembered the last few months in one complete burst. He had left Iberia for the Balearics and on landing heard the first rumor of Hasdrubal's demise. This shocked him almost to immobility, but it also made action that much more urgent. He spent a few hard weeks trying to convince any of the islanders to join his fight. He assured them that Hannibal was on the verge of destroying Roman power. He explained how the landing of one more force in the north would clinch it all. The Ligurians and Gauls would join them and they would sweep down from one direction while Hannibal roared up from the other. They would trap Rome between the two of them and squeeze it like a fat pimple between two sharp nails. Fine hyperbole, but what finally swayed them was his promise that in addition to the normal pay for the season he personally promised them an extra payment of wine and women, just as their ancestors had accepted in days of old.

Midwinter, boatloads of Moors belatedly answered his entreaties and landed on the island, offering themselves as mercenaries. They were a blessing from the gods of Africa, the obverse of Gallic grandeur: big men, lean and tall, with long-fingered hands, bulbous knuckles, and skin as dark and smooth as oiled mahogany. As Mago set about training them he tried to believe his own rhetoric and held on to a daydream in which Hasdrubal had not been killed. He was alive and fooling everyone, perhaps playing out some ploy of Hannibal's.

But like so many bursts of enthusiasm throughout the war, this one proved short-lived. Arriving in Ligurian territory, Mago found that Ligurians and Gauls alike treated him coolly, with a dismissive air verging on outright insult. It turned out that both peoples had of late suffered Roman retribution for their support of Carthage. Two legions operated from well-fortified camps throughout the spring and early summer, hammering at the tribal powers at will. The Ligurians and Gauls had grown bitter toward the Carthaginian cause: angry with Hasdrubal for dying, with Hannibal for failing to aid them, with Mago for letting so much of the summer pass before he arrived.

Again Mago found himself calling on all his powers of persuasion, a task made more difficult when the Romans made him the focus of their campaigns. They shadowed his every move, hemmed him in, blocked his chosen routes, and struck at him during any moment of weakness. They pounced on whatever people he had last visited with such fury that soon no tribe would even consent to meet him. They had him at every disadvantage, and still no word came from Hannibal. Instead he saw only confirmation of Hasdrubal's demise. Reluctantly, he decided to retreat. Maybe, he thought, they could risk sailing south and land nearer to Hannibal.

Before he could break for the sea, a third Roman army appeared. How the Romans could still field new armies confounded him, as did the bold vigor with which they attacked and the underlying events that made the attack possible. That was why he finally came to do battle with all three of them. He was near enough that he could smell the sea, but he had no choice but to turn and fight. His fifteen thousand were vastly outnumbered, low in morale. Mago was caught in the center of this, shouting what direction he could from horseback, and his mount had indeed caught a thrown pilum in her chest. The horse had reared just as in the dream. He had been pinned beneath her on a sharp ridge of rock. But that was where any resemblance to his dream ended. The impact snapped his femur and the pain exploded out of him in a howl of animal intensity. His men rallied around him and pried the horse up using pikes. Someone tugged on him too quickly, before his ankle was free. The thick muscles of his thigh contracted and the leg bone folded. As they dragged him from the field the jagged end of his femur seemed to snag on anything and everything. All manner of debris caught in the wound, dirt and filth, bits of leaves and other men's blood. Each contact sent him into convulsions of pain.

He had sweltered for two evil days in a hut along the shore before a messenger found them with the recall from the Council. He was carried aboard a vessel and had been in its hull since, feverish, in physical anguish, awash in the wine they poured down him and the urine and sweat that drenched the bed, only vaguely understanding that Hannibal too must have been ordered to leave Italy and that the dreaded Publius Scipio was on African soil.

All of this came back to him with Gadeer's admission of their failure. He remembered his wound too vividly to look down at it again, but the pain of it had come back to him fully. It was the center of his being. It was from his left thigh that his heart beat, and each contraction propelled pain through him.

He realized that Gadeer had left him sometime during these musings and was just now returning. Another man followed him, also a Moor. This man carried a sword he had sometimes seen Moors wield. It was similar to the Iberians' curving falcata, except heavier, thicker. It was a weapon to be swung in sweeping arcs with the intention of doing lethal damage with a single blow. Seeing the direction of Mago's eyes, the man carrying it seemed embarrassed and moved the sword out of view.

Gadeer held out a halved gourd. “Drink this. It's an infusion from my people. It won't stop you from feeling pain, but it will prevent you from caring about it. A man jumped across from one of the other boats to bring it. We all want very much for you to be well.”

Mago took the cup between both his quivering hands and craned his neck forward. He managed to get most of the liquid in his mouth, although some poured down into the creases below his chin. The concoction was bitter, grainy, and filled with floating bits of leaf that stuck in his teeth and to the roof of his mouth. But it was cool. It was other than wine. From the moment his head flopped back against the bunk he believed it might help him. If he could only breathe through the pain and pass on to someplace else. . . . Then everything would be better. He felt the promise of someplace else dissolving into the room around him, fizzing in the air like bubbles in water. He closed his eyes and tried to listen to air and think only of breathing, but Gadeer would not let him be.

“This is Kalif,” the Moor said. “He is a strong man. He'll cut clean, with all his force. Two or three strokes at the most and he'll be through. His blade is very sharp . . .”

“Don't do it,” Mago said, eyes shut tight, shaking his head.

“There is no other way.”

“I said don't do it.”

“We clamped your artery to stop the bleeding. The leaking was killing you. Instead you live, but your lower leg is already dead. It's rotten, Mago. It's eating up into you. Let us do what we must. I cannot arrive in Carthage with you dead, not without having done everything to save you.”

“But I said no. You must obey . . .” Mago did not finish the sentence. The effort sapped his energy. “The sun was black,” he said. He knew this would sound strange, but he felt a need to explain it while he could.

“That may have been,” Gadeer said cautiously. “I did not notice that, but it may well have been so.”

“Like the eye of a beast before it kills,” Mago said. Having said that, he felt some amount of completion. The world fizzed around him and the pain was not so important now and he thought he might just fall asleep. He heard Gadeer talking with the others. They were debating whether to bow to his wishes or to treat him. He was no longer a part of the discussion. He was curious and tried to follow them, but his mind would not stay put. He thought of an old man who used to sweep the steps leading into the Council chambers in Carthage. For all he knew, the man was dead. He had hardly ever shared words with him in life, but as a youth he sometimes tossed him coins for his trouble and listened to his toothless mouth give profuse thanks. Why did he think of a man he hardly knew? Why not have visions of Hannibal? Of Hasdrubal and Hanno, of his sisters, of his mother? He could not remember the details of what the man said to him. The old one might have claimed to be a veteran. He might have had wisdom to ease him through this transition. Might have, but he could not remember now.

And then he thought of the Roman senators' rings from Cannae clattering on the floor of the Carthaginian Council chamber. Perhaps the old veteran had commented on this. He had been so proud at that moment, so gleeful at the great killing that Cannae had been. He remembered the way he had grinned as the circles rolled out across the stones, and he regretted his mirth. That grin seemed foul. Of all the things done and undone in his life, he wished he could take back that grin.

Eventually he heard Gadeer say, “All right, let us do it now as he fades.”

He sensed the other man step forward and felt several hands on his body, moving him this way and that. He knew, without looking, at just what moment Kalif raised his sword and he understood why and it saddened him beyond comment. When the blade struck the first time it felt as if a club had hit him. How could the blade be so dull? The second blow was the same. The third and fourth as well. Really, he thought, they were not very good at this. And it was useless, anyway. He felt death coming toward him, no matter these men's efforts.

Most generals would have considered the task of withdrawing an army entrenched throughout southern Italy to be a deadly difficult operation, the kind of test presented to a leader once in his career, a chore for an entire summer, requiring careful planning, fraught with risks equal to those of any offensive campaign. To accomplish it successfully within a month, as Carthage demanded, was impossible, as Hannibal's generals warned him. But if it was, it was simply the latest of many such impossibilities to challenge his leadership.

The commander was, of course, tired now in a way he had never been before: suffering the physical ills of campaign, mentally drained by years of constant leadership, spiritually wrecked by the deaths of his brothers and friends, by the slipping away of a dream so nearly realized. He felt as if the world pulled him toward the ground with twice the normal force. The old falarica injury from Saguntum plagued him with phantom pains, as if the wound were still raw and new, the spear point still probing his flesh. His thoughts came more slowly than they once had. Each idea was somewhat unwieldy now. It had to be rotated in his mind, turned over and identified and set in place. Rest did little to refresh him. Indeed, he dreamed of fatigue, of constant motion, unending hikes. He planned routes in countries far from this one, fought segments of old battles, merging one conflict with another so that they all raged on in him at once, a grand confusion that never came any nearer to an end.

But even in this state he moved through the world looking every bit the commander he had always been. He still managed to accomplish the impossible. Hemmed in as he was in the southern regions of the peninsula, he bade the whole long stretch of Italy farewell in a style befitting his long dominance. He backed his troops in swift, orderly formations, directing his generals to march at night, to move unexpectedly, to survey the land they traversed so that no Roman army might catch them in a trap. He took everything he could from the region, stripped the land of grain and vegetables, beans and livestock. He did not hold these in reserve but instructed his men to feed themselves heartily. He told them to put on weight if they could, to sate themselves now, because they might never see this land again and because they needed strength for the fight to come.

He was not sure what sort of troops he would find waiting for him in Africa. He stirred the Gauls by painting pictures in their minds of the riches to be granted by his grateful nation. On the other hand, he pointed out, if they remained in Italy they would be far from home and with no ship to remove their feet from hostile land. And they would be at the mercy of the vengeful legions. He reminded the Campanians still with him that concluding the war successfully would benefit their people in the long run. He harangued the Lucanian and Bruttian towns about the requirements of friendships; he lured peasants with promises, dragged some from their homes forcibly. He needed men, even if only to stand before his veterans and blunt Roman swords. He drained the foot of Italy of everything he could. At Croton he met the ships dispatched from Carthage, and he put Italy behind him.