weapon held in two hands and drove it toward abdomen or groin. Others hefted the spear up and thrust it single- handed into face or chest. Lightly armored, they danced away as the soldiers charged them, waiting for openings into which to drive their spearheads home. They retreated only when the sheer numbers of soldiers on the shore pressed them back.
Sempronius called his men to order yet again. He gave the instructions to form up for battle and proceed. He was still focused and confident. He loathed the unmanly tactics of his enemy and shouted as much so that all would know his disdain. And yet some part of him felt that something was amiss. He tried not to acknowledge it. Tried to recover from each successive surprise and shape his men into the disciplined ranks he knew to be unbeatable. But when he heard the trumpeting of the pachyderms, saw the raging bulk, witnessed the power with which a single creature swatted four soldiers and left them broken pieces of men—then, for the first time, he felt a knot low in his abdomen, a ball of fear that pulsed with the possibility that events were not about to unfold as he wished.
Though he was pressed to the ground—still and chilled as he had been since the dark hours of the night— Mago's heart pounded in his chest as if he were already in the battle. He saw it all happening and wanted to believe that all was as it should be, but he kept reminding himself not to let his expectations get ahead of events. He waited as the first Romans fell on the riverside. Watching through plumes of his own breath, he saw the legions mass and engage his brother's main forces. He recognized their attempt at order, the way the velites came to the fore to throw their missiles. They staggered forward, some already weaponless, many dropping before the slingers' pellets. Those who could hurled their weapons with remarkable accuracy, but they never launched their single, massive volley. Mago could find no fault with their efforts. It was simply that, from the first moments, the battle proceeded on Hannibal's terms, not on theirs.
Soon the elephants churned through the ranks, trumpeting and bellowing as their drivers smacked their skulls and urged them on. In the confusion men were trampled and swatted into the air or impaled on tusks. The Romans feared these animals, as any sane men would, but they did not give way. They aimed their sword thrusts at their eyes, hacked at their trunks, and jabbed their blades into their flanks. More than one mahout was jerked from his post at the point of a spear.
Despite these stampeding boulders, despite the sleet and the spray kicked up from the ground, the Romans still managed to form and re-form their ranks. They still inflicted damage. Their style of battle was tight and organized. They leaned forward, closely guarded by their shields, and cut down the wildly swinging Gauls particularly well, jabbing their short swords into their unprotected abdomens and pulling back and then jabbing the next. They ate steadily through the Gallic center of the Carthaginian forces, fighting with surprising efficiency considering the circumstances. But still the pieces came together against them. The Numidian cavalry rode circles around their Roman counterparts and soon had them on the run, pushed clear of the legions' edges and leaving their flanks open.
This, Mago recognized, was where he came in. He nodded to the soldier beside him, who snapped himself to his feet and bellowed out the call to the rest. They peeled themselves from the ground, stiff from the long wait, many of them chilled beyond shivering. They hefted their swords and shields and began shouting out, grunting and chanting, each invoking his favored gods, whispering prayers to them. Mago strode forward. He did not look back but trusted that the rest were behind him. For the first few steps, he barely felt his legs working beneath him. He smacked his feet down as heavily as he could to ensure his footing, and soon warmed to the work. He heard the clink of their armor and the thump of their feet against the semi-frozen ground. Initially there was something ghostly in the noise, but as they drew closer to the battle the men found further voice. Their jaws loosened, bodies fired with sudden heat. The discordant tongues blended as they ran, and became a wild bellowing that was beyond words, rooted in something earlier and deeper in the brain than language. The distance they had to cover was considerable and in the running their fury grew. Individuals picked out their targets and envisioned the damage they were about to inflict.
Mago saw the infantryman he wanted from a hundred strides out and homed in on him. He took the man with a swinging blow that cut his neck to the spine. A warm spray of blood coated Mago's clenched fist at the sword hilt and splashed up his arm. The man never knew what hit him. Nor was he alone. Mago's group drove into the side of the legions like famished locusts, stepping over the bodies they had slain to get to more. The legionaries in the center could not yet have known what had happened, but they must have felt the shifting press of the men on both sides of them and with it the first hints of panic. Their forward progress ground to a halt. Instead of slicing through unarmored Gauls, the front ranks were now toe to toe with the spears of the Libyan veterans, soldiers fresh from the fires, well oiled and salivating for Roman blood and urged on by Bomilcar, whose voice boomed above the din.
For Mago, the battle lasted no more than a few blurred moments. His arms lashed and thrust, his legs stepped over bodies, his ankles stiffened to steady him on the earth or on the abdomens or backs or necks of those beneath him. He turned and ducked and screamed at the top of his lungs, all at a speed beyond thought. A primal fury took hold of him completely and rendered him, for a few moments, a furious agent of death. He would remember afterward that he sliced open the unprotected belly of a velite with a right-handed stroke. On some impulse previously unknown to him, he punched a fist into the man's abdomen and ripped out the warm, steaming loops of viscera. He flicked them from his fingers and pushed the man from his path and carried on. He would later find images like this troubling, but in the heat of those short moments he was his father's son and Hannibal's brother, gifted at death, fighting not with his deliberative mind but with pure instinct.
He was among the first to drive the Romans into the river. He felt the euphoria of blood but the work was no clear rout. The Romans managed some order in their retreat. He was ankle deep in the crimson water when he realized Hannibal had called the battle to a halt. He stood panting, watching the remnants of the legions retreat behind the screen of falling sleet, which was turning gradually to snow. When he turned and looked upon the carnage, it took his breath away, not in elation or even relief. He knelt as if to pray and, thus disguised, spat chunks of his breakfast into the river.
His first true battle was behind him.
Waiting in the dank cell in Emporiae, Hanno had hour after slow hour to think about the mistakes that had led to his capture. But he did not consider the tactical maneuvers that Gnaeus Scipio had so easily countered. Instead he could not shake the memory of his hands' trembling in the hours leading up to the battle. He had first felt it as he lay awake in the predawn hours. He knew something was wrong with his hands, although he could not tell what. They alternately felt as if they were being pricked by thousands of tiny needles, or as if they crawled with ants, or as if they had been submerged in icy water and had turned blue with cold. He slid them under his buttocks and stilled them with the weight and warmth of his body, but after he rose the tremble continued, gaining strength.
At his meeting with his generals he tried to disguise the trouble, but they clearly noticed that he did not reach for the charts offered him, that he had one of them draw out the lay of the land with a stick instead of doing it himself, that he sat with his hands wedged between his knees. After he dismissed them, he stayed inside his tent and banged his hands against the table before him. This changed nothing. He bashed them on the hard floor of his tent. He sat on them, his mind roiling with fury that his own body spurned him so. None of these methods changed anything, and as he rode out to battle he could only still his hands by making sure they were always clenched on something: his helmet, the creases of his breastplate, the hilt of his sword, which he prayed would be drenched with Roman blood before the day waned.
This, however, was not to be. He knew it from the moment he saw the Romans on the field before him. The battle was a blundering fiasco. He tried to push it from his mind, unsure how he could even learn from such a jumbled collage of images, none of them making any sense, none offering him any alternative to help him escape the outcome. It was as if he had looked over a game board and made the move of ordering his men forward, only to discover that he had already fallen into some classic mistake—recognized immediately by his opponent—and that nothing now could avert his failure. He lost his entire army of ten thousand. Most of them were killed. Many were captured. He could not even be sure how many, because he himself was seized. His guards fought to the death with the swarm of Romans that surrounded him. But when he tried to goad them into murdering him they would not. Instead they worked toward him slowly, in vast numbers, pressing in on him from behind their shields until he was so boxed in that he could not even move. They disarmed him and bound him and kicked him before them in stumbling indignity, a prisoner, a Barca in chains, denied even a mount, so that he eventually entered Emporiae as an amusement for the astonished faces of the Greek townspeople. He would so very much rather have died.
Instead he found himself shoved into a tiny subterranean room, dim and wet from groundwater and
