move swiftly,” he said. “Let's stick the Romans and draw a taste of blood.”
As he rose, Hannibal grasped up the unfinished letter, smashing the flat of his palm against it and then pinching his fingers together like talons. He tossed the crumpled note into the small fire. He watched long enough to assure that all of it wilted in the heat and burst into flame. It had been a mistake, anyway. The musings of a tired mind at a weak moment. But that was behind him already. He stepped out of his tent into the damp chill of the morning, calling out orders as he walked.
And so it was only a few hours later that he set eyes on the Roman contingent. For the first time Hannibal saw a Roman consul's standard on the field before him. He thanked the gods for allowing this moment, and then he set about to please them through action. He took in the land and knew in an instant how he would proceed.
Cornelius Scipio had seen many battles. He had always fought well and believed he would until the hour he died. But in the days after the skirmish beside the Ticinus he lay twinging, haunted by nightmares and struggling to understand just what had occurred and how. The battle had started too quickly, changed too suddenly, and been decided too rapidly. The mounted Carthaginians appeared before them; the velites hurled their missiles; the two forces met; a sword slipped into the soft spot beneath his upraised arm; the Africans fell upon them from the rear. As quickly as that, the battle became a wild scramble. Someone jerked him from his mount. He struggled in the mud as shapes moved above him and horse hooves fell from the sky and battered him. He took the blows in the face and chest, his upraised arms, and his skull. Three teeth were knocked clean out and the whole of his jaw became a drooping joint of pain. He had his surgeon wrap it tightly and refused to talk. He gave orders only in writing and by nods or shakes of the head.
Two days passed before he understood just how his life had been saved and whom he had to thank. Publius. The younger Scipio was fighting near his father when the wind of the battle shifted. He saw his father take the sword point and topple from his horse into the melee below him. The young man rode as near as he could, hacking at anyone remotely foreign looking. When he could go no nearer on horseback, he slid off and scrambled through the horses' churning legs. He stabbed an African straight through one eye and sliced deep into the hamstring of another. He stepped upon the man as he fell, pressing his heel to the back of the man's neck, aware of the moment the man's scream of rage was silenced with a mouthful of mud. An Iberian nearly took his head off with a sweep of his curved sword, but Publius shifted his feet so quickly that they came out from under him. He dropped straight down, the sword cleaving the air above him. He looked up for the following blow but the Iberian was gone in the confusion.
Publius was on his knees when he reached his father. He beat away a Roman horse that stood dangerously close to him and cradled the man's battered head in one crooked arm. He held his sword waving above him and shouted orders in the clipped, strong Latin that his father used in battle. A small band of soldiers heard the cries. Soon they had formed a ring around the fallen consul. Publius lifted his father onto his back and stumbled from the field, a ring of soldiers close around him. They made it back into Roman protection and away.
Such was the story conveyed to the consul. He was thankful for his life and proud that the rescue cast a ray of glory upon his son, but he hated to learn of events from others' mouths. In those first feverish days, he also listened as his generals tried to explain the events of the skirmish; their conflicting accounts further confused him. The first true clarity came from a scout who described the events as he had seen them from high in the hills to the west, whence he had been returning from a solitary patrol.
The two forces had met with equal vigor, he explained, though the Carthaginians greatly outnumbered the Roman party. After the initial chaos of the horsemen cutting into each other's ranks, they dismounted and fought among their horses' legs. Nothing seemed unusual until a group of Numidian cavalry near the rear of the enemy force turned from the field. They surged off toward the south as if abandoning the battle, but then veered back a moment later, riding to the west, in a thin line heading toward the Roman rear. The main melee raged on with little change, save that the Carthaginian forces stretched the line of battle by rolling out along the northern edge of the Roman forces, as if individual riders were attempting to flank on that side. The Roman line stretched to resist this, forming a bent, thin front.
Watching that desperate struggle, the scout temporarily forgot about the detached cavalry unit. When he turned to seek them again, they had ridden into a set of hills behind the Roman contingent. They weaved into the trees and bunched together near the ridgeline, gathering like a swell thrown up onto a shore. Then they roared down through the trees in a tight wedge that caught the unsuspecting Romans from behind.
A moment later the scout saw the consul's standard falter and disappear. After that, he had watched no more. He rode at a gallop down toward the field to be of what aid he could. He saw no more from that high vantage, but he did have more to tell. The scout had wondered why the flanking cavalry had gone unnoticed. It seemed a mystery, and he feared that the hand of a god had hidden them for those few important moments. Only on inspecting the field the following day did he realize that the Numidian riders had conducted their maneuver on the far side of the ridge. They had moved through a narrow depression just deep enough to hide them. The lay of the land could not have been designed any better for the ploy; nor could the enemy commander have recognized it and played it to his advantage any more precisely.
Cornelius broke camp in the dead of night and forced a march to Placentia, destroying the bridge over the Padus in the process. Hannibal followed, constructed a new pontoon bridge, and within a few days mustered his troops in the open field once again. He called the consul to battle, but Cornelius would have none of it. Not on that day, nor on the days that followed as he waited, writhing and uncomfortable, for his fellow consul and the aid he would surely bring. He did not have to wait long.
Sempronius Longus arrived in a gale of motion, panting from his forced march, claiming that he had already clashed with a company of Numidian cavalrymen and thoroughly routed them. He had seen nothing but the backside of the Africans' horses, fleeing, the so-called soldiers showing their true nature when confronted by a superior force. His men had cut down more than a few and left them as feed for wild beasts.
“Already we have the bastard on his back foot,” Sempronius said. “Another thrust and we'll topple him.”
Studying his face, Cornelius saw all the features he knew so well: the familiar black bristling of his hair, the eyes set close together, the jagged scar from a childhood injury across his chin. But these features were pushed out of place, jostled, by the indignant anger in his brow, by pride in the smirk of his lips. Most of all, naked ambition gleamed in Sempronius' eyes. Instead of the joy he had expected to feel in his colleague's arrival, Cornelius discovered another form of trepidation, which only grew with subsequent meetings.
News came to them in pieces and none of it was good. They learned that the Roman depot of Clastidium had accepted four hundred pieces of gold for its surrender, thereby making a gift to the Carthaginians of its well-stocked granary. Several more of the local Gallic tribes quit their wavering and went over to Hannibal. Then word came that a contingent from the Boii to the east had arrived, swelling the Carthaginian's force further. Sempronius fed on all of this as a hungry wolf chews leather.
Watching him, Cornelius barely recognized his old friend anymore. He sat up in his sickbed and preached patience to his fellow consul. He argued that the Gauls now flocking to Hannibal would desert him in midwinter. Rome's cause would suffer gravely from a defeat, but would not gain equally from a victory. “Let Hannibal fight the winter,” he said. “We can drill the army into true readiness and meet him at advantage in the spring.”
But Sempronius would have none of this. He sat tracing his facial scar with his fingers, unmoved by the injured man's reasoning. He even offered the opinion that Cornelius' judgment had been clouded by the mauling he had so recently received. Sempronius wanted action, swift retribution, before Hannibal truly found his footing. Each hour the African spent on the soil of their land was an insult to the gods of Rome. He argued that the only right course was the direct course. Such was, after all, the Roman way.
Throughout these debates, the army shifted camps and marched and jostled for position with the Carthaginians, who seemed to own the land now and rarely left them in peace. As was the custom when two consuls joined forces, they shared command by alternating ultimate authority from one day to the next. On Cornelius' days, he backed and showed caution; when Sempronius held command, he moved forward, eventually setting up a new camp along the river Trebia. It was there, one dawn, that he got the battle he believed would bring him glory.
Following the orders received directly from Hannibal the day before, Tusselo and the other Massylii rose in the hours before dawn. This was no easy feat, for the night was the coldest he had yet experienced in his life, worse even than in the mountains. The air was raw enough that a dusting of frost covered the earth, but it was also heavy with a wet chill that thickened the very texture of the ether. As quickly as he could, he found one of the camp's raging fires and huddled next to it. He feasted on strips of meat from a sheep slaughtered the night before.
