enticed out to battle. Then, trapped against the walls, they could be butchered at Hannibal's leisure, with no retreat or source of support. It was a simple plan, base and devious, the kind of plot the Romans had never mastered. Grimulus—standing beside Hannibal, narrow-shouldered, with eyes shadowed beneath a gnarled outcrop of brow— positively salivated at the proposal and the turn of fortune he believed it would offer him. Hannibal did not care for the man, who took too much pleasure in betraying his city. But the plan had its merits.
For several days after coming to agreement with Grimulus, Hannibal arrayed his army and offered Marcellus battle. He simply drew his forces up into ranks and announced via his horns that he would happily wait while the Romans came out and formed up. It was a traditional enough gesture, an enticement that often proved too great for an ambitious general to pass up. But the gates stood dumb, immobile, like a child who purses his lips to keep from revealing a secret. The soldiers clung to their posts on the towers, looking down but not tempted to action.
Two days passed in this standoff. On the morning of the third day, Hannibal decided to press the issue, stir the reluctant soldiers into motion, goad them to act in some way, any way. He ordered Monomachus to advance behind a screen of light troops. The Balearic slingers in particular seemed to view this assignment as sport. They unwrapped their mid-range slings from their foreheads and set them with stones. This load was heavy and unwieldy, but given room the men managed to whirl their weapons into motion. They picked out individual targets as they approached and set the stones hurling through the air as hard and fast as from a light catapult. The whole army could tell when they successfully dislodged a defender from the walls. The entire body of them would shout, joke, or applaud or brag.
Behind the cover of the slingers, Monomachus marched with his sword drawn—a purely symbolic gesture, for the enemy was not yet around. The men around him carried makeshift ladders, hastily constructed but sufficient for the city's modest walls. They wore full helmets jammed down tight on their heads, and each bore a heavy shield to deflect the missiles that would likely fall on them.
The foremost ladders had just touched the walls when the doors moved. They rocked once as if struck by a stone. All eyes turned. All motion ceased. The soldiers standing before the doors had little time to consider and act on what this might mean. A moment later the doors swung open, propelled by a hundred hands, and behind those, thousands of warriors. Romans rushed out with a roar, so loud that even horses at the rear of Hannibal's forces started and skittered nervously. They poured out at a full run, shields wedged close together. They hit the surprised Carthaginians with their shields, knocking men from their feet, tipping them off balance, and then stabbing at whatever exposed skin their swords could find. From behind the vanguard a barrage of javelins sailed, cast high, cutting arches that ended far back in the Carthaginian force.
Initially, men flew past Monomachus in stumbling retreat, but the general held his ground and steeled the others by striding forward toward the enemy, his face like an ancient's mask, mouth gaping, eyes in black shadow beneath his brow and helmet. He spoke not at all but dove into the fray, so conspicuous that others could not help but remember themselves and their skills.
Nor was Hannibal himself slow to respond. He assessed the situation and spoke his orders rapidly. The message went out through the horns, and with them the soldiers were visibly buoyed. The commander spoke to them. They should not fear battle. This was what they were here for. He had just arranged the body of the troops into orderly formations when gates far to either side of the main one broke open. From these issued two rivers of cavalry, many with velites riding partnered behind. They moved at a full gallop, dropped the infantrymen near the fray, and then plowed into the ranks. This new strike changed the whole balance. Hannibal was hard pressed to keep his troops from panicking.
It was a quick engagement, over in a couple of hours. Only afterward did all the pieces come together. Marcellus had learned of the plot, captured the rebels, and conceived a scheme of his own. The troops on the walls were not the prime soldiers they appeared to be. Instead, they were the injured and old, boys not yet of fighting age, and even some women disguised as men. Now all of the able-bodied males were freed to fight. The great noise when the gates swung open had been produced by each and every voice of Nola, not just the warriors': a ploy to make the fighting men's numbers seem enormous. It worked. And Marcellus had placed some of his best troops at the side gates. When they fell on the flanks they inflicted serious damage and achieved the most for their efforts.
In a final gesture, once the fighting had stopped, Marcellus hung a line of bodies from the wall by their feet, a ghastly decoration but one most effective on all who beheld it. Grimulus, standing not far from the commander, let out a low groan. There was a single gap left in the line of almost fifty bodies. Grimulus recognized that space as his own.
For the first time in the war, Hannibal had been duped and beaten. He muttered to Gemel that he felt like a boy-child given the switch by a tutor. All in all, the battle had been masterfully orchestrated—the more so because Marcellus was wise enough not to press his luck. The gates closed once more behind his troops. He sat in the towers and enjoyed his success, but could not be provoked to try his luck a second time. Hannibal, considering his options, turned toward a new objective. He had all of Italy at his mercy, why waste time on one recalcitrant polis? There were others, many others.
A small jewel of a city, Casilinum perched on a narrow finger at a bend in the river Volturnus, surrounded on three sides by water. Here also there had been talk of breaking with Rome. A whole faction of the council advocated this publicly. A misstep, for they were seized by a rival party and executed for treason. Once again Hannibal arrived to find closed gates. This time, however, he was in no mood for benevolence. Nor was there a Marcellus to toy with him. His overtures rejected, he sent against them Isalca, a Gaetulian from the territories south of the Massylii who had lately risen to the post of captain. The plucky townsfolk repulsed him, taking a heavy toll in African blood. Next Hannibal had Maharbal try to scheme a way inside the city, but his reconnaissance missions fell into preset traps that took several of their number and lamed even more horses.
The evening Monomachus brought him this news, Hannibal sat at a folding field table set up at a distance from the city, with a panoramic view that took in a great swath of country. It was lovely to behold. The grass had long since baked dry beneath the midsummer sun. It covered the land like a blanket woven from a Gaul's blond hair, a stark contrast to the dark green blooms of trees that dotted the landscape, the slabs of gray stone. Insects swarmed in the near distance. They must have had silver in their wings, for they sparkled like metallic dust blown into whirling clouds. Hannibal sent out a corps of scouts to capture some of the insects and bring them back to him, a strange request that he had to repeat several times to make himself understood.
Though he did not want to admit it, he felt the weight of his old melancholy returning. His limbs hung heavy; his thoughts moved more slowly than usual, more often tending toward recollection, anchored to things from the past instead of actively shaping the future. Staring out at the lands of his wartime exile, he acknowledged how dim the memory of his homeland had become. He tried to recall the plantations to the south of Carthage, the desert leading out toward the Numidian country, the scraggly hills of the Gaetulians' land, which he had seen in passing on his boyhood voyage to Iberia, as he marched the whole stretch of North Africa with his father. He felt that these scenes resided in him still, but it was hard to call them forth. They faded in and out and mingled with the wide, dry stretches of Iberia and the mountain pastures of the Pyrenees and the Alpine lakes that dotted the mountains. No scene from the dim reaches of his memory held steady. It was as if these were not real landscapes at all but imaginary ones, formed from the bits and pieces of other lands. He suddenly thought of his brothers and how he missed them and craved word of them. He knew that Hanno lived, that both he and Mago had been ushered to Iberia, and that Hasdrubal struggled to hold the country, but otherwise his information was patchy, creating more questions than answers.
Monomachus came upon him as he contemplated all of this. He stood just off to the left, in the blank space created by the commander's blind eye. Hannibal remembered his father once saying that Monomachus had been like a rabid wolf when he first appeared in the army. It had taken considerable molding to shape him into a soldier. He had first to be tamed. Tamed enough, at least, that his ferocity could be managed. And Maharbal had once told him that Monomachus claimed never to let a day pass without killing someone. Hannibal had not probed into whether this was true, but he had no reason to doubt it.
“What do you think, then?” Hannibal asked.
“We should go no further than this city until our swords are sated,” Monomachus said. “We'll look fools otherwise. If I commanded this army I would lay waste to this city.”
“You do not command this army. Answer me as what you are, not what you would like to be.”
The officer grunted low in his throat. “As a warrior, I give the same advice. Offer their children to Moloch.
