and made offerings there to the Egyptian god Bes, hoping for some of his mischievous power. He ate the meat of goats roasted on open fires and stole fruit where he could find it. Throughout this time his companions looked on with troubled eyes, for he seemed to have no direction. He did not speak to them of strategy, of tactics to regain his throne. He kept his thoughts to himself and appeared miserably content to roam the land without direction, from the mountain back down to the plains and then through the orchard lands south of Zama and from there into the scraggly hills south of Sicca, a land of mountain goats and of people who walked as if on cloven hooves themselves. They went high enough that they looked down on the flight paths of eagles and condors, creatures that could only take flight by jumping from heights onto columns of heated air rising from the plains.
To aid him his companions spoke casually with the people they met, testing their opinions. Did they mourn King Gaia's death? Did they welcome Syphax, or loathe him as he deserved? They brought Masinissa reports of all they heard. The people were afraid, they said. They despaired, but they still loved the line of Gaia.
Sometimes, huddled beside the campfire or mounted on a ridge or plucking the feathers from a rainbow- throated dove—anytime, really, for it came unannounced by an external impetus—the prince muttered aloud things strange for the men to hear. Words of praise, evocations of beauty, whole speeches of bottomless longing, Sophonisba's name pronounced so slowly that it seemed a new word added to the language, something expressing the tortured love of a man stripped of the skin of artifice: all this embarrassed his men and made them nervous.
When he spoke of his father they understood him somewhat better. He had always claimed that his father had no vision, no ambition. He was a kind man, wise and strong enough to hold together the disparate Massylii people, but Masinissa admitted to his companions that he had always been an ungrateful son, sure he could do better. He could not remember a time when he did not count the days until his father stepped from power and let him stride on to greatness. He had just woken to the fact that he knew nothing of how to be a king. He knew only what it took to be the spoiled son of one.
To this one of his companions offered, “That cannot be so. Our fathers teach us whether we listen or not.”
“A crocodile is born of an egg and never knows his parents after hatching,” the other added. “And yet he grows to be a crocodile; he cannot be anything else.”
Masinissa turned to the two men and stared at them for a long time, unsure that he even recognized them.
When they arrived at the remote council of Massylii elders a few weeks later, it seemed nothing more than a chance happening, as if they had been blown there by a random wind. The council took place at an ancient site known only to the tribal leaders and outside the range of any one elder's base of power. Masinissa was fortunate in his timing, although as yet he took no comfort from this. The council seldom needed to be held more than once in a generation, always in times of turmoil. This was such a time.
There was no structure large enough for the men to gather in so they met in the open. If they noticed Masinissa at all, they thought him one of the local herdsmen. His clothing was poor and bedraggled and his hair hung in knotted locks that obscured his features. He listened as the men—some of whom he had known from birth —spoke of the troubled times they lived in. They couched their words cautiously. It was obvious they wanted to speak frankly to each other, but none knew who among them might have turned to Syphax. They might speak their minds tonight, only to find themselves skewered tomorrow. So the conversation was roundabout and seemed to be heading for no definite conclusion. It was clear that Syphax had grabbed them all by the balls. They hated him for this and spoke with fondness of their dead king. But it was not until one of them offered a prayer of remembrance for Masinissa himself that the prince decided his time had come. It would have been unnatural to hear one's own death lamented and not speak up.
Masinissa stood and pushed his way into the group of men. They turned and looked at him. One elbowed him and another asked his business. He held his tongue until he had centered himself in their circle, and then he kept silent a little longer. He drew his hair back from his face and fastened it with a thong made of lion's hide. And then he dropped his arms, raised his chin, and met the men with his gaze. His fingers twitched as he stood there, ready to draw his dagger and take all the lives he could before he was killed, if it came to that.
He said, “Do not mourn me. The king's son lives.”
Landing on Sicily in the spring, Publius found the island simmering like a pot of boiling water just taken from the fire. The cities of Syracuse, Agrigentum, and Lilybaeum had not watched the war indifferently. Throughout it they had swayed in their allegiance, tipped here and there by the machinations of their ambitious leaders. Many of their residents—the Greeks especially—remembered the fine times they had enjoyed under Carthaginian rule and had not found Roman dominion to their liking. They had rebelled, although with only mixed, temporary success. At the time of Publius' arrival, however, the island had returned to Roman hands. All active revolt and political ploys had been quashed by the forces stationed there, thanks, in part, to the irresolute support Carthage had provided those declaring for them. The Greek rebels in Syracuse found themselves being stripped of their wealth. Many had been kicked onto the streets, where Latin children pelted them with stones and women spat on them and men used any pretense to lash out at them.
Publius, looking at this, reckoned it hardly a stable base from which to launch the greatest military action of his life. So he set about to right things from the first day. Citing his authority as consul, he ordered Greek property returned and demanded that the people of the city live together once more as they had in the years before this recent conflagration. In as short a space of time as he could manage, he circumnavigated the island, bringing this message to all the cities. Then he called the disgraced legions from Cannae to muster. He merged them with the seven thousand volunteers he had secured before leaving Italy. Together, this formed an army of just under twelve thousand, the vast majority of them infantry.
He drilled them mercilessly. He had learned a great deal in Iberia and he tried to convey it to his men and build upon it further. Each day brought more supplies in from the stores kept throughout the island, saw new weapons crafted and honed, filled the harbors of Sicily with the sails of more vessels. The seafaring cities of Etruria laid the keels of some thirty warships, preparing them in the remarkable time of forty-five days from the moment the trees were felled until the hour they sailed for Sicily. Laelius led scouting missions along the African coastline, looking for a place to land, surveying the cities there, getting an idea of their defenses, and making contacts with likely spies. He did not go near Carthage itself, for Publius had another target in mind. The intelligence that Laelius brought him revealed that all the pieces were in place.
The morning of their departure dawned gloriously clear, pleasantly warm, with just enough breeze to buffet the forty warships and hundreds of transports that bobbed in the harbor of Agrigentum. Publius himself called for silence on the ships. When this message had been passed on to all the vessels he invoked the presence of all the gods and goddesses of land and sea. He spoke the words he had practiced for this occasion, with nothing kind in them, but a plainspoken demand that the divine forces aid them in bringing to Carthage all of the terror and suffering Carthage had unloosed on Rome. And he asked that they further be allowed to press the matter to a conclusion, so that the men of Rome and all those allied with her could return to their countries laden with treasure, with plunder enough that they could bury their chins in the bosom of it and forget the strife that had been inflicted on them. He sacrificed a cream-colored bull with a star splash of white on its forehead, slung the entrails into the sea, and watched how they floated on the surface. Finding the picture to his liking, he gave a signal to this effect. A rolling, irregular roar traveled from ship to ship, a great cacophony of voices and horns and bells that some swore must have carried all the way across the water and set the Africans trembling.
They sailed through that day on a middling wind and made slow progress through the night as a thick fog blanketed the sea. Even so, first light brought the shoreline of Africa into hazy view. So near as that, Publius thought. So near to us as that. The first point of land, the captain called the Promontory of Mercury. Publius liked this well enough, but ordered that they carry on to the west. The next morning the captain called out that he had sighted the Cape of the Beautiful One. This, the consul believed, was just the place for them, not far at all from Cirta, but at a good enough distance for him to get his troops to land and into order.
At the sight of them the peasants along the shore ran in fear, grabbing up everything they could carry and kicking their children and livestock before them. Laelius asked if they should chase them down and stop them from sounding the alarm. Publius answered in the negative. In fact, he quite wanted the alarm sounded. Let it ring all the way to Carthage, all the way across the plains of Libya, to the Atlas Mountains and back. The farther away they heard the call, the better.
With the entire army on land, they at once began to march on Cirta. Most of the troops under Publius'
