“Velites,” Hannibal said. “Let us see whether these pups have teeth.”
The young soldiers moved not like men but like half-beasts, agile. They wove through each other, barking courage and yelling curses at the Carthaginians. They wore helmets draped in animal skins: the heads of wolves mostly, some bears, and a few mountain cats. At first, they were frightening to look upon, as if the animal world had united with humans and fought on the Romans' side. They came armed with several javelins each, which they hurled with all the strength their bodies could muster, sending them high into the air in deadly arcs. So it seemed to Mago, but Hannibal saw them differently.
“They are tentative,” he said. “Afraid. Look, Mago, they seem to step forward boldly, but they come only near enough to loose their weapons. Then they retreat to gather up courage to repeat the maneuver. They have taken on the skins of warriors but not the hearts.”
Mago had not realized this at first, but soon he saw that Hannibal was right. The velites were not so impressive after all. Their inexperience left them no match for veteran skirmishers. Balearic slingers swirled their tiny missiles into the air almost casually, picking out velites at will, breaking arms and ribs and occasionally dropping one when a stone broke a velite's head.
This went on for an hour or so, until Hannibal signaled that the slingers should be called back. They pulled up, shouted last taunts at the Romans, and withdrew into the body of the infantry. The Romans did the same. The velites vanished through the snake scales so that within a few minutes all motion stopped, save for the struggles of the wounded left on the field.
At about the same time, both sides began to move forward toward each other. The Romans accelerated to a trot and held it. Watching them, Mago found his insides knotted so intensely that he almost pitched forward in the saddle. He knew to look past the tricks of visual intimidation: the swirls and patterns and animal features painted on their shields, the high feathered plumes that rose up from their helmets to make them seem taller, the layered wall of shields and upright pila and glinting metal and legs beneath, shifting steadily forward so that from a distance they seemed not individuals at all but rather a single force eating up the land. Knowing these tricks did not make it any easier to watch the advance. The Romans moved in more skillful unison than even the Libyans, and there was no trickery in the amazing mass of them.
More than any of the visual drama, what struck the young Barca was the silence, the awful, unearthly hush of the oncoming enemy. They spoke not a word, no chant or instructions or shouts of rage. No sound came from them at all but the rhythmic pounding of their feet and the thrum of their swords upon their shields. This was noise, yes, but devoid of emotion. Mechanical. Frightening, for it seemed to be the beat of death. The various contingents within the Carthaginian army yelled and chanted and spurred themselves to fury by releasing deep-bellied roars. The Gauls sent forth a tremendous racket through their horns, the tall, animal-shaped heads of these stretching high into the air above them. It should have been ferocious cacophony, but the answering silence proved even more unnerving. It was as if Carthage had thrown a punch at a visible target but missed it and cleaved only the air. If the Romans felt any fear they did not show it, and the best the Carthaginian troops could do was to scream louder.
Mago knew what came next, but still it was a shock when it happened. The Roman vanguard—at some signal or position known only to them—all hefted their pila up and hurled them in the same instant. Two, three thousand missiles suddenly flew through the air. Several hundred soldiers went down, twisting, shouting in pain or silenced. From where Mago sat beside his brother, he saw whole portions of the front ranks buckle forward and disappear.
“As it should be,” Hannibal said. “There will be a second wave. And then a third, remember that. This is what we've come for. We've prevailed previously through good fortune and Roman foolishness. Today we face them on their own terms. This is all as I would have it be. Take your position and remember everything I've taught you. Go now. And do not forget your name!”
With that, Hannibal slipped from his horse and joined the lieutenants and messengers and guards who would be around him throughout the battle. They headed off through the ranks down corridors left clear for them. Mago heard a soldier call to him, telling him they were awaiting him. He dismounted and handed his horse to a keeper and joined with the contingent of men sworn to protect his life. Something happened in him as he felt the earth beneath him and his feet moving him across it. He stopped trying to fight the passing of time, stopped wishing for more moments to process and think through the things he faced. He stepped into the present and felt an enormous rush of energy push him forward. He was about to fight as he never had before. The forces at play in the world had finally converged. He strode forward behind his lieutenants, growing more into his skin at every step. He was a Barca, after all.
The two cavalry units—one composed of Numidians, the other a mixed company of Carthaginians, Iberians, and Gauls—took up positions on either wing of the infantry. Their general orders were clear: Attack the opposing Roman horse. Hit them, hard and fast. Break them in the first moments of the struggle, wipe them from the field, and strip the main body of the Roman infantry naked on either flank. A good part of Hannibal's strategy depended on this. But not only on this. He also chose to fracture and confuse the enemy in smaller ways. That is why Tusselo and four hundred other Numidians went out on a specific mission. They understood that there was a danger in it greater than that of straightforward combat. It required both military prowess and cunning. They took up the arms customary to them, but each also carried an extra sword hidden beneath his tunic, wrapped in oddments of cloth to protect its wielder from the honed blades.
They rode in the wake created by Maharbal's cavalry, which was quite a trail to follow. They moved in a great, trilling herd at full gallop, launching their spears once, twice, and yet again before they even reached the enemy. By the time they collided with them, many of the Romans had already dropped, impaled by cool iron, and then pummeled beneath a barrage of hooves. Other horses wheeled and darted in confusion, their riders suddenly gone limp. Tusselo watched Maharbal sword-stab a wounded Roman under the arm and pull a spear from the man's thigh in something like a single motion. He planted this new spear in another's throat. He stabbed the weapon forward and back. The pierced Roman grabbed it desperately, jerked this way and that by a playful hand, recognition of his coming death splattered across his face with the stain of his own blood. Maharbal finally yanked the spear free and left the man slumped over his horse's neck. Without another thought, he surged toward a new target.
Tusselo lost sight of their captain, but he was only one among many. All the others were similarly engaged. That was the way it was with Numidians. They should have made easy targets, unarmored as they were, with only hide shields and no saddles to secure them to their mounts. Instead they moved without fear, so swiftly that it seemed there was no interval between their thoughts and the movements of their horse. The Romans had to yank on reins and fight with their mounts to control them before they could attempt a strike. They might have been skilled by their own standards, but that was not enough to help them here. The Numidians anticipated the spears to be thrown at them before they were even launched. They batted away the sword points aimed at close quarters, because they saw the preparations a Roman had to go through to ready himself for the thrust, and they always managed to be exactly where the Romans wished they were not because they recognized the flow of this mounted dance before the Italians ever could. They functioned on an entirely different scale of speed and dexterity.
The Romans pulled back, re-formed, and charged again. A repeat of the initial slaughter met them. They dismounted in an attempt to make the battle into an infantry contest. To their surprise, the Africans did not join them on the dirt but rode among them, darting them with even greater ease. Moments later all the Romans who could scrambled up into their saddles again, before any order to do this had been issued. And in this remounting was the first seed of panic. Such a seed germinates in an instant, grows, and flowers. The Romans turned and fled. The Numidians paused long enough to retrieve spears and to wipe their bloodstained palms. A few grabbed up pieces of treasure too appealing to leave behind. Then they set out after their quarry, smiling and joking with each other, like huntsmen on the trail of their favorite prey.
The time had come to make real the plan Tusselo had set forth to Hannibal several days earlier. Hannibal had initially found it improbable that the Romans would believe the deception it depended on, but Tusselo knew them better. He pointed out that the Romans far back in the army's rear would know little of how their cavalry fared against the Africans. They would have no true picture of the whole of the battle and would—in their arrogance—find it easy to accept what he proposed. And it would work because no Roman could conceive of such a deception; therefore neither would they recognize it in the actions of others. Having won the commander's trust, Tusselo set out to deserve it. He reminded the others to follow his lead and have faith.
With that, he and the four hundred pressed north. They rode parallel to the rows and rows of Roman legions,
