spear and tugged it free of the mule. He smacked the creature on the bottom and watched it trot away. Still, nobody paused to note him, but that was about to change. He unclipped the clasp and yanked the robe from his shoulders. He tossed it high into the air with a snap of his wrist and strode toward the center of the crowd.
“Rome!” he yelled, speaking Latin. “How do you live without my black heart to beat for you?”
He punctuated this by thumping his knuckles against his chest. For a moment all around him he watched images of the world slowing from motion to stillness: the tail end of words spoken fluttered away on the breeze, laughter fell to silence, his cloak rumpled onto the stones, a hundred Roman faces turned and stared at him. He swung his spear into a two-handed grip, squatted slightly, stretched his eyes open wide and frantic, quick as those of a hunting leopard. Already he saw soldiers converging on him from several directions.
Good, he thought. Good. Tusselo will be a slave no longer.
To his amazement, Mago discovered that the sun had turned black. That was why he paused on his mount, turned sideways, and stared at it. He could not take his eyes off it. The black orb pulled at him as if it were a deep well and he were tumbling toward it. It did not matter that battle raged around him. The Romans who had boxed them in for days now had sprung their trap and the full brute force of three legions slammed into him from as many sides. His face was wet with blood that had sprayed up from a man some distance from him whose head had been severed from his standing body, making him a momentary fountain. His lieutenant was screaming that they must withdraw, but for a few seconds none of this mattered as much as the fact that the sun had gone black.
He heard a voice call his name. It was urgent, moist, and close to his ear, a whisper that somehow penetrated the din. As if injured by the impact of the voice, Mago's horse shuddered. He felt its forelegs buckle and thought he was going to fly over its head. He was still staring at the sun, however, and instead of toppling forward the mount kicked out twistingly and tilted to the side. Mago saw the sun flare and thought the orb smiled maliciously. Then the horse smashed against the ground. The impact drew his complete attention. He saw the pilum jutting out of the mare's chest, and saw her kicking and struggling to rise, and realized that his leg was trapped all the way up to his groin. It amazed him that he had not been injured; he felt no pain, although he was aware that the animal's weight was grinding him against an exposed rib of gray rock.
“Mago? General, you must wake for a moment. . . .”
He snapped at the speaker, saying he was not asleep. He was trapped! Help him! But the man would not and Mago had to twist and squirm and shove at the horse. The mount looked back at him, neck bent unnaturally, her eyes like those of a mistreated dog, offended, disappointed. Mago kicked her off with his free leg and rose to survey the scene. But what was this? There was no sign of his army at all, not even of the speaker. Instead he was alone among the enemy host. They encircled him, approaching from all directions, stepping slowly, menacingly, pila pointed at him like thousands of erect, deadly penises. Their helmets caught and reflected the black glow of the sun. He realized that his mouth was awash with wine. It was an evil taste. He exhaled it on each breath and had the momentary thought that blood was the same as wine. Perhaps he had already been pierced. He looked down to find the wound and in the anxiety of the moment his vision blurred and darkened. He realized that his eyes were closed and he pried them open.
One view of the world peeled over another. He looked up into the face of a man named Gadeer, a Moor, one of his captains. Gadeer tilted the mouth of a skin to his lips and tried to pour more wine into him. Mago twisted his head away, cursing.
“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
