command.
A number of Gaius’ soldiers, mostly his newest recruits, could not stand the sight or the smell as they dropped from their horses, and puked their guts out. A few men leaped down from their animals and helped those few that couldn’t bear to look at the carnage any longer, as more than a few of them were openly crying now.
Gaius paid little attention as he continued forward, eventually leaping down from his horse as the animal could not go further through the thick carped of dead men.
He looked around him, barely sure of where he could go. There were so many bodies that he couldn’t avoid stepping on pieces of men, entrails and globs of blood that had pooled, soaking into the earth before drying under the baking sun.
He hated the faces of the dead. Most, nearly all had their eyes open, mouths wide as the look of share terror had filled their expressions, before they had died, slowly, painfully, clumped together with the men before them, beside them, and behind them. Many of the dead were naked. The Carthaginians and their allies would have picked the lifeless clean of anything useful: armor, weapons, coins, jewels, even body parts such as tattoos and heads to be displayed as trophies.
Gaius had a rough estimate where Antony would have been positioned. He needed to move forward and find him. He knew it was impossible to find one man among the countless thousands. It did not matter — he had to try.
He could see, as he worked his way deeper into the body laded ground a few hundred people also walking among the corpses. Most of them were women, and all were sobbing openly. Gaius knew that these women would have been the wives, mothers, sisters and other relatives who had followed the army. They would sift through the remains of the dead looking for a familiar face of a loved one, hoping that they could find them so that they might give them a proper burial. It was morbid and a tedious task, but these women would stay here for as long as they could — weeks, even months picking through the stacks of dead, trying as hard as they could to find those men they had loved; only now, most of the dead looked alike.
A number of other people were also among the dead. These people were mostly men, and were human scavengers. Their task wasn’t as mournful as the women whom he saw. They searched through the bodies looking for whatever they could take, at least what the Carthaginians had overlooked. It appalled Gaius; these people were the filth of the earth, but it wasn’t illegal either. They were common when any army of size marched to battle. They would stay miles behind the lines, just waiting to see who won the fight, and then, would move in and pick clean the dead of anything remotely valuable.
“I never thought I would live to see such a thing,” Maurus, who stood behind Gaius, said as he gazed across the battlefield.
“Send a rider back to Canusium and inform Valerius of what happened here. In addition, start breaking the men into teams of four. Have them search among the dead and try to find any survivors if they can,” Gaius spoke, but not looking back towards his young officer.
“How long do we look?” Maurus asked.
Gaius only glanced back at him. “For as long as we can.”
“And what about you? Where are you going?” Maurus asked, but Gaius did not answer as he started making his way deeper into the sea of broken and bloodied bodies.
A few minutes later as he glanced down at the various faces, most if not all staring up at him, eyes glazed over with death. He saw what looked like a large pile of hands, arms and fingers that had been collected into a dozen stacks, each nearly five feet high. For a moment, he wondered, as he looked at the gory scene, why the Carthaginians would have done this; what purpose it might have meant. Then, it dawned on him, as he looked closer, many of the appendages that had been cut off ring fingers. Each officer, tribune, legate, quaestors and senators, they all wore rings. There were hundreds of them, if not thousands in the army before the battle had started. Gaius realized that Hannibal had probably had each ring collected and cut off from its owners’ hands, dead or alive. The wealth alone would make any one man rich for the rest of his life.
After a few hours, long after the sun had gone down and night had filled the sky, Gaius finally gave up his search. He didn't find Antony, his body nor his head. He could see how the battle had gone as he stood, alone, on top of a sloping hill as his men continued with their work, lit by torchlight, as they worked their way in a grid pattern through the carnage below.
He had found survivors, a few dozen so far, and that he was thankful for. Valerius was sending a cohort of men and wagons, which would take all night to arrive, but at least these men wouldn’t die among their brothers. However, as he stared down at the flickering fires that guided his men’s morbid work, trying to find signs of life among the many dead, he broke, finally.
He failed; he failed to find Antony, his oldest and dearest friend. All he could think about at the moment was, how little time they had spent together, how much he wanted to say to him but never had the courage to say before.
He didn’t know what he was going to say to Julia, how he could possibly tell her that both her brother and father were dead, slaughtered nearly to the man, and by a weaker army no less.
He cried, not only for Antony, not just for Julia, or for his own father, or the men down below, and those that had died in the past year alone. No, he cried for them all, letting out years of built-up anger, sorrow and pain flow out of him.
From this day, on, Gaius, the boy who had dreamed great things once — believed in the superiority of his beloved Republic, was a different man any longer. He had grown up, forever changed by what he has seen, and lived through. Above all, he craved justice for what had happened to his people, and as the gods as his witness, he would see it served.
CHAPTER THIRTY-TWO
The Senate was empty, save for one man who sat alone on one of the stone benches that ran around the two marble seats that represented the chairs of the consuls of Rome. It amazed Fabius Maximus how meaningless this place was; how utterly quiet it was. The bulk of the senators who would have typically spent the afternoon debating without end, were in the field. Only a few dozen remained behind, leaving much of the city’s affairs to him, as the elected People’s Tribune. He wished he was out there now, with the army, which he had received reports had discovered Hannibal at Cannae.
Now, he waited like the whole city for word of the victory that was certain to come. However, Fabius’ mind was lost; adrift upon a sea of doubt; left to govern a body that stood frozen with fear to the possibilities of just
That question plagued Fabius from day one. He didn’t want his fears and frustrations to get the better of him, so he didn’t act on his thoughts and call to question the Republic's chances of survival if indeed, Hannibal was victorious.
His mind still drifted to the past. How many different ways this conflict could have been avoided if he had the chance to lead; he did not seek any grand title, of course, a rarity among his own countrymen, not to mention his family. However, he wondered what choices he could have made differently but the past could not be changed. It was the future that mattered now.
Fabius turned his head as he heard a far door open, followed by the soft footsteps of another man, a fellow senator by the name of Marcus Brutus Nero, walk towards him.
Fabius stood to his feet and watched the elder statesman as he slowly approached him with uncertainty in his stride.
Fabius could see the parchment in his right hand, which was held down low by his side as Nero’s eyes wavered, as he neared the tribune.
“Word from Cannae?” Fabius asked eagerly as Nero stopped just before him and raised his hand, holding it
