Pride of Carthage (36 page)

Much to his surprise, his squadron leader waved him away, telling him to stay, then, and join the guards watching over the occupied town and the stores of booty. After he had watched the tail of the army disappear over the horizon a few days later, it occurred to Imco that he was actually one of a relatively small company, made up partly of camp followers and slaves, charged with protecting a rather large treasure, surrounded by countless unseen natives who were naturally disgruntled at having been ousted from their homes. The first few days passed in tense appraisal of every puff of dust in the distance and every vessel appearing on the sea. Throughout the day, Imco stewed beneath the unrelenting summer sun, nagged by the growing suspicion that he was not fortunate at all to have won this duty. He was expendable—that was more like it. He even spent an anxious evening turning over the idea that the army might never return. This new dictator might, in fact, defeat them. And if that happened it would be only a matter of time before the Romans found them out and made captives of them all.

But the next morning dawned as quiet as the one that preceded it. Cavalry units came and went, scouring the neighboring countryside and depositing their gains at the camp. The soldiers kept watch through a rota system. One day passed into the next with little change and no news of a major battle. Sitting in the sparse shade of a stone pine on the shore side of camp, Imco found in the quiet sights a peace that he had not known for some time. The smell of the salt air, the thrum of waves collapsing on the shore, the view of fishing boats pulled up against the sand, the nimble movements of the shorebirds darting along the tide line: it was almost too tranquil to believe, in light of the more violent scenes he had been part of over the last few years. His situation verged on bliss, except that with fewer people around, the girl completed her emergence into the physical world. She escaped the confines of his dreams, visited him in the full light of day, and now felt free to pester him about a variety of topics.

He first discovered this one afternoon. He had noticed a stray dog patrolling the camp in wary fits and starts. He moved around cottages and shacks as if he knew the place well, but his gaze suggested that nothing was as he remembered anymore. The dog had one ear chewed off. He was dusty, his hair rubbed down to the flesh in spots. His pink tongue lolled constantly from the left side of his jaws. Imco found something humorously endearing in the dog's nervous movements about the camp. He called after him and tried to wave him over with benign gestures. But when the dog would come nowhere near him, he had a change of heart and threw a stone at it instead. “Pathetic creature.”

Just after he mumbled this, a voice beside him asked, “Who are you to call another being pathetic?”

It was the girl, squatting beside him in the shade. She pointed out that he had chosen not to march with the others out of simple fear. Did not that make him more pitiable even than a dog? He went from moment to moment complaining about his fate in life, always fearing the next battle, the next injury or illness. If he hated war so much, why did he not take his own life as he had taken hers? She told him she would rather have been pierced by the lust of a warrior than spared by the trembling hand of a half-man. He had not allowed her that choice, had he? She had never known a man more hypocritical than he, she claimed. He could kill when the killing was easy, but really any act of valor he could claim was simply an act of cowardice turned on its head. Did they not call him the Hero of Arbocala?

“What a farce,” she said.

By the end of the first week she was even following him through the midday sun, accosting him in view of other soldiers, who ignored her out of respect for him and, perhaps, empathy with his situation. It was most disconcerting, listening to her. She seemed to know his innermost thoughts. She understood him, in fact, with a clarity that baffled him. How had she come to know so many details of his life? To act as if she had spoken with his sisters and mother back in Carthage? He shot these questions back at her, but she answered that the dead have ways unknown to the living. Cryptic nonsense, he thought.

One afternoon the girl so harassed him that he lost his way while walking to the river he had grown accustomed to bathing in. Bathing was the only way to escape the stifling heat, and he preferred the fresh water to that of the sea. He cursed her for distracting him with a whole litany of questions about how various family members would view his cowardice throughout the campaign. The day was oppressively hot. The sun beat down like burning fingers massaging his flesh. He stripped off his tunic and walked naked with the garment flung over his shoulder. He spent some time struggling through the undergrowth before he finally reached the riverbank. But the point at which he reached it was all wrong. He was looking down upon a bend in the river from high above. He would have to walk a good distance upstream to find a route down. Resigned to this, telling himself that the sweat he would work up in the effort would make the swim that much more enjoyable, he turned to walk on. That was when he saw her.

She squatted on the pebbles of the far bank, scrubbing garments in the water. At first Imco took her for an adolescent, maybe one of the displaced townspeople camped on the outskirts of their former home. A little distance away, a donkey munched quietly on the sparse grass. Imco found the sight of the donkey strangely disturbing, but he did not wish to address this at that moment. He turned his eyes back to the young woman. He could make out no more of her features, huddled and low as she was.

He was about to move on when she rose and stood, stretching her neck, rolling her shoulders, and stretching out her arms to either side. Her tunic was thin and worn to begin with, but it had also been splashed with water so it clung to her chest and belly. The sight of this was like a divine revelation. Imco felt the air sucked out of his lungs, such was the impact of the contours of her body upon his. He had been weeks without sex, and he felt his penis stiffen. Imco patted it down and inched forward a little through the underbrush.

She was no girl at all, but a young woman. And by the gods, she was beautiful! As if toying with him, she stripped off her tunic and waded into the stream. Imco pressed forward, feeling his way through the vegetation with quiet toes. The woman walked out into midstream and sank down into the water. This made her no less exciting however, as the water was perfectly clear, revealing her body through pale blue highlights. She rolled over, dunked her head, and came up with her curls pressed to her scalp, and then dove forward so that her backside broke the surface for a fleeting moment.

It was all too much for Imco. His penis throbbed. Its scream for attention was not to be ignored. Imco obliged. Perhaps he should not have touched it, for in doing so he took his hand away from a grip among the bushes and took hold of a less useful anchorage. His attention was not on his footing, as it should have been. On the first stroke he gasped. On the second his eyes rolled back in his head. On the third his left foot slipped from beneath him. His body twisted just enough to dislodge his other foot. He reached out vaguely with his free hand, not yet realizing what was happening. His fingers touched only dry leaves and slender branches unable to hold him. He slid forward, grinding his bottom along the ground for a moment, fast reaching the edge of the embankment. He burst into midair amidst a rain of dust and debris.

He landed on a small beach along the near shore. The impact on his backside was painful enough, but his erection smacked against the sand with the full force of his fall. He would have doubled over in agony, but the woman stood up. She did not flee from him. Instead she strode directly toward him, kicking up a spray of water before her. She halted just a few paces away and spouted a fount of verbal abuse. As she stood berating him in a language he could not understand, he realized that her beauty, from up close, was even more astonishing than he had imagined. It radiated from her very skin. It floated off her like a fragrant oil. It reached out toward him as if her spirit contained arms separate from the thrashing limbs that threatened him. Her beauty was not simply a collection of parts placed favorably beside each other, although he did not fail to notice these parts in great detail. Her hair fell over her face as if it had a mind of its own and meant to toy with her. Her breasts jiggled wildly with her harangue. The muscles of her torso stretched and flexed with each step. Her upper thighs were as firm and smooth as an adolescent boy's, and the triangle of hair at her midpoint was dripping wet. Even in that moment of pain and outright trepidation, despite the immediacy of the confrontation and his embarrassingly excited nudity: still the image came to him fully formed of his mouth against the woman's sex, drinking the moisture dripping there as if from a sacred spring.

New images might have followed upon this one, but the woman closed her discourse by pointing at his own sex, spitting, and tossing her head with complete scorn. Then she turned, snatched up her clothes, and strode away. The image of her naked bottom would haunt him afterward. Somehow, the behind of the donkey following her only made his pain more acute. The creature fell into step a few paces after her, as if he were an ungrateful and unworthy husband, a four-legged barrier between her and a truly devoted suitor. They disappeared between a crease in the landscape, leaving him alone in the gurgling quiet of the afternoon.

Imco managed to rise. Once upright, however, he reconsidered. He placed a knee on the ground, then the other knee, then he lowered himself to all fours. This was not quite enough, either. Eventually, he lay on his side in the sand, his knees pulled up to his chest, his arms wrapped around them. In this posture he came to grips with the stomach-churning agony of his groin injury. This could not have been a chance encounter, he told himself. The hand of a gentle god had propelled him here. He did not question whether it was the same hand that had shoved him into midair at Saguntum, for the point seemed irrelevant. He had found a new purpose in life. A new destiny. He had to learn her name. He was—true to the unacknowledged poet inside him—in love.

Before long, he heard the approach of familiar footsteps. The Saguntine girl squatted in the sand a little distance away and said, “Have I used the word ‘pathetic' already? You give new meaning to it.”

How strange, Imco thought, that in such a short space of time two women should enter his life, each a torment of a different sort. Nothing was ever easy.

Fabius Maximus held his troops back like leashed hounds baying for blood. He stood with a hand on Publius Scipio's shoulder, listening to the soldier's description of the land below them and the punishments Hannibal had inflicted upon it. Publius had an even, measured voice, intelligent and thorough. He knew what the dictator wished to learn before Fabius even asked the questions and he always laid out the most pertinent features of the landscape first. With his aid, Fabius layered his mind's created images on top of the evidence of his eyes. The merging of the two developed a picture he believed to be clearer than one rendered through sight alone, nuanced with more detail and depth.

Perhaps the delay caused by this careful elucidation served as the foundation for the dictator's famous patience. He rejected the Carthaginian's offer for battle, first at Aecae, and then again each day afterward. He had the army trail the enemy through Apulia, keeping to the high ground so as to avoid the Numidian cavalry. He harassed them with quick raids, making small war, allowing atrocity after atrocity by the foe but evading open battle at all costs. Fabius' men were well provisioned, so he destroyed any supplies he suspected to be within his enemy's reach. He put special effort into picking off parties of foragers, staying ever vigilant, always near enough to spot the parties and send detachments to rout them. Even news of a single Massylii unhorsed was pleasant to his ears. Two Balearic slingers captured as they took target practice on a herd of sheep, a Gaul left behind due to a gangrenous leg, summarily tortured and nailed to the gnarled trunk of an olive tree: each of these came as an additional verification that his strategy was sound and would succeed over time.

Terentius Varro, his master of horse, chomped and foamed at the bit, muttering that Hannibal had arrived before them and they should vanquish him without delay. They could not keep to this policy of inaction! Perhaps it had sounded reasonable when he had dreamed it up in the safety of Rome, but here in Apulia they could see that it was not working. Italy was burning. Their allies killed and raped daily. What sort of policy was this? It rejected the long history of Roman warfare. Rome had not risen to power by letting an enemy run wild in their country. Rome had always attacked first, promptly, directly, decisively.

Fabius listened to his ranting and answered with all the dignity he could muster. Varro had not been his choice for his main lieutenant. Actually, the Senate had appointed him because he had spoken out against the Fabian policy. This rankled him—that even as they appointed him dictator they burdened him with a high-ranking officer who did not share his views. Varro was a man of the people. His father had been a butcher, successful enough financially to set the stage for his son's career. Fabius always found men of such new blood to be of questionable character too. Despite the young man's early achievements, he seemed better suited to the work of a laborer, to alleyway brawls, to taking orders, not giving them. He was, actually, something of a nuisance. Fabius restated his chosen tactics, held to them, and reminded Varro which of them had been given the title of dictator. Varro could not answer this except by fuming.

By Fabius' orders, they followed the Carthaginian army up and over the Apennines into the territory of the Hirpini, a land of rolling uplands interrupted by great, slanting slabs of limestone, a beautiful country planted with wide fields. Hannibal turned his army this way and that. He broke camp in the middle of the night and tried to outflank Fabius, or to surprise him with sudden proximity, or to vanish from sight.