Clouds of War

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After their stunning victory over more than eighty thousand Romans, Hannibal had let his soldiers rest for a night and a day and another night. It was as well, thought Hanno, studying the faces of the assembled officers and chieftains, some fifty-odd men. They were Carthaginians, Numidians, Iberians and Gauls. Their faces and arms had been cleansed of blood, and they might have caught up on some sleep, yet to a man they looked shattered. Exhausted. Drained.

Hanno, a lean young soldier with black hair, felt the same way. How could he not? The fighting at Cannae had lasted all day under a burning summer sun. Even when the tide had turned against the Romans, the killing had gone on, because the legionaries had been surrounded. The unrelenting slaughter had finished only when darkness fell, when the Carthaginian soldiers were covered in gore from head to foot, when their horses had been crimson from the bottoms of their necks to their hooves. Gone were the fields of stubble that had been there at dawn; in their place, the fighting had left fields of blood.

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