Vale Aida

“He won’t let me look at his eye,” said Sosylos.

“I just saw him. Cantered up front to see if the guide was still alive.”

Hannibal had put Mago in the vanguard with the cavalry, where the horses would not be hindered by slow-moving men on foot. Behind them were the infantry and the baggage train, the wagons getting their wheels stuck every few paces; then the camp followers, the soldiers’ wives and whores and cooks and soothsayers that trailed an army in the thousands wherever it went. Sosylos’s salt-and-pepper brows went up. “When was that?” 

“Just now,” said Mago. “This morning. Might have been last night.”

They had gone on long past sundown, eating as they went, since there was no solid ground even to stop and rest. Mago dozed a few hours in the saddle, then dismounted to let some exhausted infantryman have a turn on his horse, and went to trudge on foot with the Iberians in the middle of the column. At some point the sun had come up again, daylight filtering through the foliage to cast spiderweb shadows on the murky face of the river. Time had grown strange and dilated, as it did when one stopped sleeping.

“I had to make him sit down,” said Sosylos. “He nearly rode into a tree.”

“Maybe he thought it was a Roman.”

The old Greek’s mouth thinned into a flat line. “Did you march all the way to Italy to crack jokes? Are you a general or a child?”

The frown was a familiar one. So had Sosylos frowned when Arishat concussed herself climbing something she shouldn’t, or Hannibal got so caught up in a book he forgot to eat. When Hasdrubal showed up to lessons with his eyes kohled and his chiton reeking of jasmine. When Mago, it seemed, did anything at all. “All right,” he said. “All right. I’ll see if I can whack some sense into him. Where’s he gone?”

His feet were stuck in the mud again. This time it was his right sandal that got left behind. He hobbled after Sosylos to the rear of the column, swatting aside branches, stepping over mudpools and ankle-breaking roots. The ground was much softer after twenty thousand sets of feet and hooves had passed, and in some places the rearguard had to wade through mud up to their knees. They passed a heap of corpses, and then another, and another: cairns of limbs and hair and sagging mouths that served as makeshift ledges for the sick and weak to lie down and sleep above water, until the swamp claimed them too, and so the piles grew.

Hannibal was sitting on an overturned wagon near the very end of the column, screened from view by Surus’s enormous grey rump. The mahouts had clearly done some quick thinking. If the troops heard that their rab was ill, even the strongest of them would give up and go home. “Can’t he ride?” asked Mago.

“I can,” said Hannibal.

“He can’t,” said Sosylos.

Surus gave a solicitous swoosh, his trunk dripping slimy pulp from a melon the mahouts had been feeding him. Hannibal looked worse than ever. His eyelid was a mottled burgundy-red, uglier than any bruise you could get from sparring or practising pankration or putting eel sauce in Hasdrubal’s hair, and the raised inflammation was creeping down his cheek like a wine-stain. Mago tried not to look at it. “He got us over the Alps. He can get on his horse.”

“That’s what he wants you to think,” said Sosylos.

“I,” said Hannibal, “am right here.”

His sweat-limp curls were plastered to his forehead, his good eye glazed and unfocused. “The swamp air’s going to his head,” said Sosylos. “It’s bad for the infection.”

Mago scrubbed a hand over his face. “All right. You’re getting on Surus. Can you stand?”

“I most certainly can,” said Hannibal.

“He can’t,” said Sosylos.

“And I am not about to”—Hannibal made sweeping, thought-gathering motions—“ride an elephant while my men slog on foot.”

“You’re not riding,” said Mago. “We’re tying you to a litter and tying the litter to Surus.”

Surus honked again, slopping pulp down the back of Mago’s tunic. Hannibal fixed them with an asymmetrical glare. “I can stand.”

He did so, quite admirably, for the span of a breath. Mago reached to steady him, found himself supporting Hannibal’s whole weight, and nearly staggered into the river. The overturned wagon gave a sad gloop and submerged itself entirely.

“I can stand,” said Hannibal, his arm around Mago’s neck. Under the sticky sheen of sweat, his skin was blazing hot. “I’m standing.”

“Sure you are,” said Sosylos. “Now get on your elephant and let me do something about your eye.”

Mago flailed, recovering his balance. “Like what? I’d sooner push him in the Arno. I’ll write to Rome, all, we dropped our general in your swamp, war’s cancelled now, so long, hope you enjoyed.”

Sosylos kneaded the bridge of his nose. “I wish,” he said, “I could drop all four of you in a swamp.”

The slaves hauled up a litter. Getting Hannibal to lie down was another ordeal altogether: Mago sort of tipped him onto the litter, and recited Homer to distract him while Sosylos strapped him down. Sing O Muse of the wrath of Achilles, who was sick of Troy, and wanted to go home and take a dump in his own sweet shitter. Shut up. That’s not how it goes. Even delirious with fever, Hannibal guarded his poetry as if all the hordes of Rome were trying to take it from him.

“He’ll have to have the eye out,” said Sosylos in an undertone, as the mahouts got Hannibal secured on Surus’s back.

“What?” said Mago. “Rubbish, can’t you save it?”

“You know I can’t. Look at him.”

Hannibal had subsided to a muttering delirium on his litter, probably in Homeric Greek. Mago had acquired six new mosquito bites, and even the rearguard had long passed them by. “Can’t do it in this damn swamp, anyway,” said Sosylos. “I’ll keep him quiet. You better take charge and get us out of here while there’s still anyone left alive.”

“Me?”

The Spartan’s gaze was part exasperated, part pitying, all tender. “If he dies, who’s going to end up commanding this mob? There’s only one other son of Hamilcar Barca I see here.”

Mago heard all this, but only registered the first bit. The sun was climbing the sky, the spring rains had burst the Arno’s banks, and in his stomach everything had gone cold, cold, cold. “If he dies.”

“If,” said Sosylos.