Having said this, the older sibling retraced his steps beneath the trees, just as silently as before. When he faded out of view, Mago heard the rapping of a woodpecker, a loud barrage of thuds and then silence, a loud barrage and then silence. There was no way back to that other time; there was only forward through the world he now inhabited. Only onward into the clash that had to come. His brother had named the place. Mago followed him down toward it.
Two days later, the armies came in sight of each other. For the three days after that, they assembled. Both forces marched down out of the tree-dotted ridges on which they camped and approached almost to within shouting distance of each other. There the troops waited, the generals taking stock of the opposition, skirmishers exchanging volleys. They sweated under the sun and chewed strips of dried meat and swatted at flies, but otherwise rested as well as they could. Neither side broke this strange truce, and in the evening the Carthaginians withdrew first.
Mago and Hanno spent each night talking through what this might mean, trying to learn something new for the following day. Having assembled a force of all their remaining allies, they outnumbered the enemy, numbering fifty thousand to the Romans' forty. Perhaps this was working on the Roman consciousness, paralyzing them with fear, softening them for the onslaught they knew was coming soon. Publius positioned his various units in the same formation each time: legions in the center, Iberian mercenaries on either wing. Each time the Carthaginians met this in kind, with their Libyans in the center, their strongest soldiers to oppose his. They divided their twenty elephants evenly on both wings, hoping to use them as giant stabilizers to hold the army in formation. The two brothers considered changing the arrangement, but no matter how they thought it through, the deployment seemed sound. Publius might have been looking for a weakness, but each day Mago believed a little more that all they presented was strength.
But in the first gray light of the morning of the fourth day, the Roman cavalry pounced on the forward Carthaginian outposts. A few riders managed to escape to sound the alarm. But just afterward the entire Roman force slipped into view like a slow river in flood, through the trees and out onto the flat plain. The Carthaginians had no choice but to rise groggy from bed and grab up arms and rush to form up ranks. Mago shouted all the things he knew the men expected of him. “This is the day!” he said. “The enemy is trying to surprise us, but early rising alone will not win this battle.” None could say that he had not learned from his brothers' example, but inwardly he realized something was happening over which he had no control, something he still could not predict. For the first time he understood how an enemy must feel facing Hannibal across a battlefield.
The approaching army was still some way out, but Publius' deployment had changed. Skirmishers trotted in a weaving crisscross of confusion, like so many ants. His Roman legions now made up the wings; the Iberians held the center. The Barcas worked frantically through what this might mean and how to combat it, but there was no time for them to order a change in their own lines. The men were in enough confusion just trying to form up. Why had Publius put his weakest fighters against their strongest, and vice versa?
As soon as they were into the flat the Romans picked up their pace. A little farther on, they fell into a trot. As they drew nearer still, the Roman wings—hearing the horn signal—kicked their pace into a wolf-lope. Mago thought that at that rate they would be out of breath by the time the two armies met. Their armor must have weighed heavily on them. But as he watched, he realized they had trained for such a run. Their lungs billowed to meet the demand and nothing about them suggested fatigue. Their legs moved them forward, sure of step, determined. Meanwhile, the Iberians in the center kept to their slower pace and soon fell behind. After launching their fistfuls of missiles, javelins, and darts, the skirmishers withdrew through the ranks. They slipped out of sight and emerged behind the legionaries, regrouped, and fell into step behind them. They pulled swords from sheaths secured to their backs, drew daggers from their belts, or snatched up pikes that the rear infantrymen dropped for them. With so many of their helmets covered in animal skins, they looked like an unnatural pack of hunters—lions beside wolves beside bears and foxes—chasing the army forward, nipping at their heels.
When the two sides finally met, the Roman front line looked like a horseshoe. The two prongs of the veteran legions smashed into the Carthaginians' Iberian allies and from the first moments made quick work of them. The skirmishers fanned out and around and swept in on the Carthaginian flanks. Meanwhile the Libyans stood in confusion, glancing from side to side, waiting for orders, their spears to hand but useless. The front line of Iberians that should have met them did not do so. On a single horn-blasted order they all stopped. They hovered out a distance, just too far to engage, but near enough so that the Libyans could not turn away from them for fear of being pounced on. The Libyans could neither aid their dying allies nor rush forward, because to do so would break formation and lead to all manner of chaos. They just waited, panting and impatient, as men near them fell to the Romans' cut and thrust.
Publius had orchestrated the impossible. He had encircled an army larger than his own, simply by moving his various troops about in unexpected ways. The Libyans in the center were as dead on their feet as all of the Romans trapped shoulder to shoulder at Cannae.
Yet the matter was decided not by men but by four-legged creatures. The elephants—which had been stung again and again by the skirmishers' javelins—spun and careened in toward the center of the army. In pain and fury, the creatures moved heedless of which men they trampled, which they swatted out of the way with tusks and trunks. The drivers atop them smashed them about the head and yanked their ears and roared at them to change course. But it was no good. The elephants turned as if by common agreement and each cut a swath of grisly death toward the Carthaginian heart. With this, the battle collapsed. From then on Publius commanded a rout.
Mago stared and stared at what he saw, so long and intensely that he was saved only when one of his guards jabbed his horse in the rear with a spear. As he hurtled off on his bucking horse he called for a retreat to be sounded. With that the troops gave up all semblance of discipline. They turned and fled, Romans fast behind them. The sky opened above them in a sudden outburst of rain. This slowed the Roman advance. Mago fought to keep the army moving through the night, but the distance they covered in the stumbling dark was not enough. In the morning the Romans followed on their heels, leaving corpses like wayposts marking their path. Despite all Mago's dismay at the fact, eventually he, Hanno, and five thousand mounted soldiers—Massylii and Libyans mostly—dashed before the body of the army in undisguised flight.
For much of the long summer, Imco found himself standing just behind Hannibal's shoulder, watching as Fortune favored one side and then the other. Marcellus became the sharpest thorn in Hannibal's side, single- handedly trying to undo all he had accomplished. Only a fortnight after Hannibal left Casilinum, he had retaken it through siege and treachery. Capuans had garrisoned the city—not the best of troops but, considering its natural defenses, even they should have held it. But they lost their nerve, scared, no doubt, by Marcellus' growing reputation. They struck a deal with the Roman for their surrender, in return for which they would be allowed to return to their city unmolested. But when they strolled through the gates the waiting Romans pounced on them and hacked them beyond recognition, punishment for crimes that they believed predated this betrayal.
Casilinum was not the only setback: Fabius Maximus retook Tarentum, Claudius Nero mauled a band of five hundred Numidians, Livius Salinator surprised a Carthaginian admiral off the coast near Neapolis, frightening the cautious sailor back to Sicily. But more often the Roman foolishness flared so brightly that it left Imco shaking his head in amazement. There was Tiberius Gracchus, for example. Overconfident after his rout of Bomilcar's forces, Gracchus marched too close to Hannibal. His guides, perhaps having mistaken their route in all innocence, abandoned him the moment they spotted Numidian riders. This set the slave army in turmoil, a situation easily exploited. Watching this from the height where his troops stood in reserve, Imco was struck by the thought that battles were won or lost on the basis of a single factor that each and every soldier controlled. Not the hand of any god, not the cunning of any one leader, not superiority in arms or training: none of these mattered as much as the bravery of individual men. Perhaps slaves could be expected to understand that least of all. They panicked, all at the same moment. The matter was decided, and Tiberius Gracchus perished in the ensuing rout.
Soon after Gracchus' death, the Romans fell under the spell of a centurion named Centenius Paenula. Some recalled that on the day of his birth considerable prodigies had occurred. Another scholar connected clues from several of the ancient texts and announced that the young soldier's name was destined to sound in glory throughout the ages. Striking in appearance, tall and fine-featured, he did not have to do much to convince the Senate that he was just the one chosen by the gods to strike a blow at Hannibal. With the remnants of Gracchus' army and a horde of enthusiastic volunteers, he marched into Lucania, met Hannibal, and promptly offered up all eight thousand of his force for sacrifice. They were slaughtered down to the last man. Centenius Paenula, it turned out, was not a name that would ring down through the ages.
Imco was in the very room at Herdonea when Hannibal met with a foolish magistrate who dared to drink his wine and accept his gifts, but begged more time to decide whether he could deliver his people to Hannibal's side.
