The Death of Marcellus

by Dan Armstrong

  “Make your report.”

  “It was my first time observing a battle for analysis,” I said.

  “I understand. Plan to do more in future. You will learn. Tell me what you saw.”

  “Our actions seemed to support our intentions. The placement of the left flank against the walls of Numistro served us well. It gave Asellus more freedom to counter the Numidians. Our close rank and order held throughout the battle, sir. I believe your strategy proved out.”

  “Where might I make adjustments?”

  The question surprised me. “I cannot say, sir. My understanding is not great enough.”

  He nodded. “Come look at this map. I propose to line up tomorrow as we did today. Did you see anything in the lay of the land that could be to our advantage or theirs?”

  I was a third his age and had no experience in war. His questions revealed the openness of his mind. He recognized that I saw things in quite a different way than he did, and he valued that. I believe he sought to educate me in the art of war and felt that eventually, with experience, I would be valuable to him as an advisor.

  I told him I had watched from the height of a tree. I said I thought the Gauls were undisciplined and that they were the weakest element in Hannibal’s troops. The Numidians were excellent at sparring, but fared poorly when forced to fight hand to hand with our equestrians. I pointed out some low points in the valley with no suggestion as to their value or use, and I corrected the tree line that I had drawn the day before. There was nothing more I wanted to hazard.

  Marcellus stared down at the map without comment. A long time passed. He seemed to have forgotten I was there. Finally he looked up. “We did well, Timon, but it wasn’t nearly enough. There is no victory for us until Hannibal is dead or back in Africa. Observe the battle again tomorrow. Before long you will be an important asset to this army as a set of eyes. You’re dismissed.”

  As I left the tent, the phrase as a set of eyes repeated in my head. I couldn’t help thinking of the lost lens.

  It was late when I returned to my tent. The soldiers had already been told that the battle would be resumed in the morning. Five of my tentmates—Pulcher, Decius, Troglius, Seppius, and Gnaeus—sat outside the tent at a small fire. All of them but Troglius nursed some kind of wound from the battle.

  Pulcher looked up at me as I approached. His calf was wrapped in bandages. “The Greek,” he sneered. “I figured you for dead. What did you do, stay out there teaching the corpses arithmetic?”

  “That might be easier than teaching Troglius to count as high as the number of men he killed today,” deadpanned Decius.

  “Godly many,” Gnaeus said, nodding. “He’s a soldier right enough.”

  Troglius made no acknowledgment of the compliment and continued to sharpen his sword.

  I went into the tent expecting Livius and Spurius to be inside. It was too dark to tell. I knelt by my bed and heard a groan beside me.

  “Is that you Spurius?” I whispered.

  “Aye. I took it in the side today,” he muttered weakly. “It’s bad.”

  “Can I be of help?”

  “Could you get a light?” he urged, his breathing labored.

  I got a splinter from the campfire and brought the little flame up to Spurius’ bedside. He lay on his back, a round ball of a man, covered in hair except for the top of his head. He turned his eyes to me with difficulty. A bandage had been wrapped around his middle. A moist blood stain as big as both my hands darkened a patch below his ribs.

  “Does any blood show through the bandage?” he asked.

  “A little,” I lied. He looked awful. I had no idea what to do for him. Olcades, the surgeon, traveled with the army, but his time went first to the officers. The legionnaires managed for themselves.

  Spurius gasped. “It’s bad, Greek. I know it’s bad. Put out the light. Lie here is all I can do.”

  I had not gotten to know Spurius. He seemed like a good man. I wondered if he would survive the night. I lay down, but was incapable of sleep. Memories of the battle ran through my head until dawn.

  CHAPTER 36

  The soldiers ate in the dark the next morning. Spurius had moaned through the night and had now begun to heat up with fever. He didn’t get out bed. I brought him a biscuit to nibble on. He told me in a whisper that he had never wanted to be a soldier.

  “I will die before today is over,” he said. “I knew I wasn’t cut out for this. My mother told me as much when I was a child. When I left Rome, I told her not to expect my return.” Tears formed in his eyes. “Maybe one needs to be more confident to survive.”

  When I went back out to the campfire, Pulcher informed us that Livius, whom I had noted as missing, had been killed. I thought about his family waiting for him back in Rome. Like Spurius, I knew that I had not been cut out for this cult of death called war.

  The nightmare of darkness punctuated by shrieks from the surgeon’s tent gradually eased with the break of day. The officers gave out instructions for battle, and the first line, then the second, marched from camp to assemble in formation. The Twentieth legion and the levies from Aesernia made up the first line. The Eighteenth and the levies from Fregellae formed the second. When all were in position, it was evident that our numbers had been reduced by several thousand.

  Marcellus sat on his beautiful white charger between the lines and stared out at Hannibal’s camp. Compared to the anticipation I had felt the first day, this second day felt dull and pointless. Instead of an open battlefield and hope for a destiny to be fulfilled, the field between the camps was a graveyard of dead bodies and feasting vultures. I wondered how the troops could fight amid the clutter of corpses. Our formation could conceivably be shifted to the west into open ground, but the walls of Numistro were necessary to our defense.

  I went to the west side of the battlefield to find the tree I had marked with an “x.” The man I had killed lay in the high grass where I had left him. Corpses from both sides were scattered across the forest floor. The wounded who had lived through the night, but had no strength to crawl back to their camps, groaned or called for help.

  Instead of climbing the tree, I got down on my hands and knees to search for the lost lens. I crawled around on the ground as long as I dared and didn’t find it. Frustrated, I climbed the tree and found a comfortable perch from which to watch.

  Much like the first day, Hannibal’s soldiers didn’t immediately come out of their camp. The morning became interminable with the anxiety of waiting.

  Hannibal never answered Marcellus’ challenge.

  When the sun stood directly overhead, and the warmth of day brought the ripening of human flesh and more vultures, Marcellus ordered the front line to advance past the wreckage of the day before. With the first line standing guard, the second gathered weapons and armor from the dead. I was included in this gruesome detail to keep an inventory.

  Stripping the dead of armor and weapons was a detail of mixed blessings. The booty was valuable, but after twenty-four hours the swollen corpses were sickening to dig through, smelling of stomach rot, urine, and feces expelled by men amid the terror of battle. Bits and pieces of men and horses were scattered everywhere. Four dead elephants lay on their sides amid the mess, impossible for us to move.

  We stumbled onto men who were not quite dead, men whose wounds were not enough to kill them, but too severe for them to do anything but lie in the refuse of the battle. More than once men simply rose up out of the piles of bodies, waking from a blow to the head or on occasion actually hiding in the gore. Several times fights broke out with these undead. I witnessed many mercy killings, men of both sides so badly wounded that death was a better fate.

  Once stripped of military gear, we stacked our dead on the west side of the valley and burned them in a huge pyre, piled so high we had to climb up over the bodies to heap the corpses on top. I struggled badly with this duty. Early in the afternoon I found Livius. His belly had been sliced open and his entrails lay over him like a nes
t of snakes. I lost all of what little was in my stomach.

  By the day’s end, the dead were no longer people, just odds and ends of soft, bloody muck. I think some part of me died that day, perhaps carried away by the spirits of the dead. I saw the whole thing, the battle and the burning of the bodies, as a peculiarly Roman ritual, a sacrificial gesture to an apathetic if not entirely imaginary set of gods.

  Late that afternoon, when the soldiers began to trudge wearily back to camp, grateful for the break from battle, I returned to where I had dropped the crystal lens. While I was on my hands and knees, Troglius walked up. The bulky ape of a man watched me for some time before speaking, always in as few words as possible.

  “What’d you lose?” he asked with one eye looking at me, the other staring off in some other direction.

  The light was fading. I weighed finding the lens against revealing my secret. “A clear crystal,” I answered, wondering if he would know what that was.

  He tipped his large square head, then scratched his chin. He reached down into the grass and dug around with his thick fingers. “This it?” He held up the lens.

  “Yes, yes!” I exclaimed. “Thank you, Troglius. I thought I’d lost it for good.”

  “What is it?” he asked, handing it to me.

  I was reluctant to say, but he had just done me a huge service. I took his hand and held the lens over his palm so he could see the magnifying power.

  He peered through the lens at the detail of creases and lines. His mouth opened in awe. “Magic,” he said.

  Rather than explain, I nodded and slid the lens into the pouch hanging from my neck. We walked back to camp together. The talk among the soldiers that day revealed that Troglius was one of the most capable of our soldiers and by rough count had killed more of the enemy than any other legionnaire. It was easy to believe. He appeared immensely strong, and though seemingly not sharp of wit, was unusually spry for his size and awkward shape.

  At dinner that night the mood in camp had improved. Statorius had already passed the word that we would again assume battle formation in the morning, but many felt combat the next day was unlikely.

  “I don’t think Hannibal will come out tomorrow,” said Decius, a half-eaten biscuit in his hand. “He knows that we are his match.”

  “I heard that Hannibal was badly wounded,” said Gnaeus, spitting on a stone beside the fire.

  We all watched the wet spot sizzle and disappear.

  “Don’t get your hopes up,” Pulcher said. “I’d say he’s just as likely to be ready for us in the morning as gone. Don’t try to figure him out. Just be ready to fight. Hey, Troglius, you ready?”

  Troglius looked up from the fire and peered at the sub-centurion with his left eye, while his right appeared to stare at me.

  Pulcher nodded. “Troglius is ready. You can see it in his eyes.”

  Decius laughed. “Eyes? Which is the one that really works?”

  Pulcher glared at him. “Tell him, Troglius. They both work. Why do you think he’s such a good fighter? He can see in two directions at once.”

  “That’s impossible,” snapped Decius. “It’s one eye or the other. And I can’t tell which.”

  “Let’s test that,” said Seppius. He had taken a bad blow to the temple the day before and had a bandage wrapped around his head. “What do you think, Troglius? You willing?”

  Troglius looked at Seppius as though he didn’t understand the question.

  “Sure,” said Decius, sitting across the fire from Seppius. “Hold up a finger. I’ll hold up mine.”

  Seppius held up a single finger. Troglius continued to stare at him with his right eye. The left seemed to be aimed at Decius.

  Decius winked at Seppius. “Troglius, which of us is wiggling his finger?” They both wiggled their fingers.

  Troglius frowned. “Both,” he said without moving his head. He stood up and left the group.

  “See there,” said Pulcher. “We’ve got a genius among us—and it’s not the skinny Greek.”

  I left the campfire and took a bowl of wheat gruel into the tent for Spurius. He was bad off. His body nearly flamed with fever. I offered to feed him the gruel. Without the strength to speak, he simply shook his head no.

  Later that evening I went out to the back of the camp where the horses were gathered in a corral. Despite the stench of death, it was a beautiful evening. The sky was clear, and the stars so plentiful they seemed to be smeared across the heavens.

  While I stood out in the open, Marcus came up behind me. He had fared well the first day. Although I had only spoken to him briefly, I had heard from others in our cohort that his command had been sure and his gladius deadly.

  A large red welt swelled below his right ear, but there were no deep cuts, no sign of the surgeon’s rough stitching or cauterizing brand.

  His face held that peculiar deep sense of sobriety that comes in the aftermath of a battle. His smile was in his eyes only. He would always feel like an older brother to me, but never more than at this moment. It seemed, though, that I was always measuring these moments for what I meant to him. The orphan in me, I suppose, hoping to find a family.

  “We showed resolve, Timon. Hannibal’s reluctance is respect. If respect from the enemy means anything, we have achieved it.”

  “Word is you accounted well for yourself.”

  “If killing men is accounting well,” he muttered. “I did my share. Did you watch?”

  “From afar.”

  “Did you see how it is? You must knock your man down first. Killing him might take another twenty blows.”

  “But you’re not badly hurt?”

  “No.”

  “How’s your father?”

  Marcus breathed in slowly. There was considerable tension in him. “I’ve just come from headquarters. He’s frustrated that Hannibal didn’t answer to him today. He wants victory right away.”

  “That’s the only way a general can be, Marcus. You’ve said this yourself. Nothing short of victory.”

  “Yes, but he wants it too much, Timon. We were fortunate Hannibal didn’t accept our challenge today. Our men are tired, just as his are. There was no good reason for us to stand out in the sun while Hannibal’s men rested.”

  “Do you think that’s what it was? Not that something might have happened to Hannibal or that he was surprised by the strength of our troops?”

  “With Hannibal, there is only one way to think about it. Until proven otherwise, everything he does is on his own terms.”

  “How does your father see it?”

  “He understands this as well as anyone. It’s possible Hannibal will be in the field when we awaken tomorrow morning, even harassing our gates with his Numidians before dawn.” He reached into his tunic and produced a carrot. He whistled for Euroclydon. That was why he was there, to visit his horse.

  Marcus turned to the south. From the height of the rise we were camped on, the Carthaginian camp was visible as a silhouette. Their campfires were burning and all looked peaceful. He faced me. “Maybe this is how my father fulfills his destiny. He gets elected consul, musters his men, and sets out after his adversary with tunnel-like focus. I can understand that, but I think he’s pushing too hard. He’s taking chances with an opponent where nothing can be left to chance.”

  Euroclydon ambled out of the mass of horses and up to the rope barrier where we stood. She nuzzled Marcus’ shoulder, knowing he had something for her.

  “He seems unusually cautious to me, Marcus. I don’t know as much as you about soldiering, but even I have noticed how carefully he manages our marches—how much scouting he does. He surely put discipline to practice in the best way possible yesterday. He may be pushing hard, as you say, but I don’t think he’s taking chances.”

  “I hope you’re right, Timon.” He stroked Euroclydon’s muzzle, then fed her the carrot. “It would be mutiny if I expressed these thoughts to anyone but you.”

  They were carrying Spurius out of our tent when I returned t
o the unit. He had died during the time I had been with Marcus. I cried in bed that night for a man I had hardly known.

  CHAPTER 37

  Hannibal was gone the next morning. Thin trails of smoke from the previous night’s campfires filtered upward into the morning mist above the Carthaginian camp, but it was empty. Hannibal and his entire army had left immediately after dark the day before. The fires had been left to burn all night to give the impression that the army was bedded down. Marcellus took the news with his usual stoic calm.

  I saw him on his white horse in front of our camp shortly after the news raced through the soldiers. He stared out at the vacant camp across the field like a lone gladiator in an empty arena. He had expected the fight of his life, but there was no opponent, only the local beggars and wandering poor picking through the rotting Carthaginian corpses for whatever they might find of value.

  Again rumors circulated that Hannibal had been wounded and that he had stolen off in the night like a dog with its tail between its legs. There was a sense of elation in the men as they broke down the camp.

  Marcellus entertained no such hope. We would head out after Hannibal as soon as the train was ready. The advance scouts had already been dispatched.

  Marcellus saw me walking along the column as it formed and called to me from his horse. He dictated a letter to me for the Senate.

  Veturius Pollio rode up as I completed my notes. He was headed to Numistro to confer with the city officials. He was staying behind to move the badly wounded into the city and upgrade the garrison. He glanced out at the empty camp across the way.

  “Sir, there are many rumors passing through the officers about why the Carthaginians have declined battle. I can’t help but ask what your assessment is.”

  Marcellus took so long to respond that I wondered if he would say anything at all. Finally he turned slowly on his horse and faced the man.

  “Hannibal does not like to fight if he has no advantage, General. We gave him too fair a battle the other day. He has moved off to lure us to a location more to his liking.”