Pride of Carthage (41 page)

To all these questions the boy answered, simply, “Yes, I will do that, Father.”

The priest handed Hamilcar the sacrificial knife. This the father slipped into the boy's hand. Together they pressed the curved blade against the trembling creature's neck and sank it home, the young hand and the old acting in one motion. So the sacrifice was made; Hannibal consecrated and bound with Baal. Days later, he set out for Iberia, and he had known no life but war ever since.

How far he had come since that day. . . . How much he had seen. . . . The trajectory of his life surprised him sometimes—not often, for usually his mind was actively engaged in shaping the future, and the art of war at which he excelled seemed the natural way of the world. But there were rare, quiet moments when melancholy pulled more heavily on him. He sometimes woke from visions of battle and felt—in the foggy moments of transition to waking—joy at the notion that it was all a dream, that he was not truly in so deeply, that the years might not have passed as he believed they had. This was always a short-lived notion, however. His single eye always opened upon scenes of men in armor, his ears filled with the noises of camp: constant reminders that his dreams were no more than mirrors projecting back the world he had created.

He turned and withdrew to his desk. He did not savor these moments of weakness. This was not the best of him. He would return to himself soon and plan a victory for the coming season like none in history. But he had one more indulgence he wished to allow himself. He thought of calling Mago to write for him, but he decided that the emotions, the truths and deceptions he was to write were too personal, too full of portents, better left unrevealed to others. He prepared a pallet and lifted the stylus himself. He could not help himself, even if the letter was destined to go unread, to end in glowing red embers as his earlier efforts had.

“Dearest Imilce,” he wrote, “how I wish you here with me so that you could tell me of yourself and of our son, of my present and our future . . .”

For the soldiers of Hannibal's army, the spring and early summer of their third year at war passed in a haze of almost idyllic tranquillity. Instead of marching into action with the first warm weather, they planted crops under the direction of captured locals. The soldiers tended the herd animals, watched new calves born and nursed, and put themselves to practical trades such as leather working and iron smelting. They sent occasional, almost recreational, foraging parties to secure other goods from neighboring communities, but in general they were well fed on their own provisions. Their bodies returned to states of health they had not known since leaving Iberia. Late in the spring, as they pulled in the early harvest, more than one soldier joked that the commander must have taken a liking to the country and chosen to stay, content with the blooming weather and salt-tinged breeze off the ocean. But just as many voices argued that the commander had lost none of his hunger for war. Each action was calculated—even the duration of inaction. Who really doubted that the great man was concocting yet another unbeatable strategy?

Not Imco Vaca. If this was the best way to win a war, then he was all for it. Actually, though he followed orders that came to him and even on occasion delegated tasks to others, his attentions were more acutely focused on matters of a carnal nature. He had never truly recovered from the previous summer's meeting with the naked, swimming beauty. The Saguntine girl also continued to haunt him. She sat at a distance and watched his actions disapprovingly and sometimes shouted at him so loudly he was sure others would hear her. But she was nothing more than a buzzing fly compared to the torment the woman and her donkey inflicted upon him.

For months he found no trace of her. It seemed she had disappeared from the earth. Knowing this was not possible, he worried even more about what might have befallen her. He roamed the neighboring camp villages, meandered through the Gallic settlement, and even tried to win the trust of the camp followers. But it was difficult to search for someone he had seen for only a few moments, whom he knew nothing about and whom he would not describe in true detail because he did not want anyone else to know she existed. He knew many would call this search a folly unbefitting a veteran soldier, but Imco no longer knew how to separate reasonable behavior from obsession. Perhaps the insanity of war had damaged him. He thought this was likely, but so be it. He just wanted to find that girl again.

But then, as unexpectedly as the first time, she appeared. He had not even begun the day looking for her. He had accompanied a band of Numidian scouts, and as he did not know how to ride he sat behind one of the horsemen. Imco was thoroughly jarred and shaken by the experience. He would never have guessed that a horse's back was so hard, with such an array of knobs to prod at his legs and backside. Partway through the return journey he begged off the horse and set to walking.

Thus he came upon a cluster of dwellings belonging to some camp followers, a community he probably would not have noticed from the back of a galloping horse. Not having known there were camp followers living here, he thought he had come upon locals displaced by the army. But a few moments observing them marked them as foreigners from a variety of nationalities. They seemed to have a life of bare subsistence. The settlement huddled between the saddle of two hills, on a slope dotted with small trees. In this stood a humble conglomeration of tents and skin shelters. On the far hills, a herd of thin goats cropped the grass. In the center, a large cook fire burned in preparation for the evening meal. An old woman sat weaving. Two men debated the best way to erect a sun shelter. A baby cried briefly and then hushed. A young woman bent to fasten a rope around the back legs of a recently slaughtered goat—

Imco's head turned as if to move on to the next object, but his eyes stayed anchored to the woman. For a moment his pupils seemed to stretch and contract: into focus and then out and back in, as if something had gone wrong with his eyes. He felt a part of himself fly out of his sockets and hiss across the distance and touch the girl's backside. He darted behind a tree for fear that she could feel this touch physically. But she just kept at her work.

She ran the rope from the goat's bound legs up over the crook of a branch and back to the ground again. Using her body weight, she tugged until the creature swung, dripping blood. She worked up close to it, slashing at the hide with practiced strokes of what must have been a very sharp tool, spinning the corpse this way and that, each gesture cool and practiced. Next, she slipped her fingers beneath the goat's skin and began to peel it free. She pulled so hard that the creature hung taut for a moment, at an angle to her, before finally relinquishing its hide and dangling, naked now, utterly defeated.

It was brutal work, and there was no mistaking the butcher's identity. Her legs were just as slim and muscular as he remembered. Her calves stood out with an almost masculine definition. The thin summer shift followed the curve of her hips and even revealed the depression that split her backside into two round portions. Her arms were bare to the shoulder and her hair had grown considerably. It flowed down her back in a black tumult of curls. And if all this was not enough, there was the donkey, standing a few yards from the woman, somewhat dejected, neither watching her nor eating nor doing anything save supporting itself on the four feeble posts of its legs.

The woman spun on her bare heel and moved away from the carcass. He pressed himself against the prickly ground and followed her with his eyes. She first spoke to the old woman, then shouted something to the men, and set off climbing into the hills. Imco was on his feet a moment later. He backed away from the camp and then circled it widely and walked quietly through a stand of pine trees. He lost the woman for a few moments and grew frantic. He tried to divine her destination from the lay of the land so that he could follow her from hiding, but no sooner had he begun this than he lost faith in the strategy. He dashed a short distance and then froze, tilting his head to catch any betraying sound, but he heard nothing except the wind shouldering its way through the trees. He ran on again, along the near side of a long ridge, through a confused jumble of boulders, then over the rise and down the pine-covered slope at a headlong run.

He burst into the open in a panting explosion, realizing too late that he had bounded out onto a path a few strides in front of the woman and the donkey, which trailed behind her. The woman pulled up in mid-step. She froze and stared at him for a shocked few breaths. But her surprise did not last long. With the fingers of one hand she grasped a handful of hair from high on her head and raked it forward, covering her face. She said something to him in a Celtiberian dialect. She parted the screen of black curls wide enough to spit, and then began to scramble up the embankment from which he had descended.

Imco saw the spit fan out on the air and shift away on the breeze. Before his gaze had even shifted to follow her, the donkey was occupying the space she had vacated. How the creature got there so quickly, he could not say, for it now stood completely still. It was a pitiful animal to look upon, ragged of coat, with ears tattered as if shredded by the teeth of some carnivore. Though it was faithful to the woman, she seemed to pay it no heed whatsoever.

“Do not forget your ass!” Imco called.

The woman paused in her tracks. She slowly turned around and took a few tentative steps down toward him. “What?” she asked. Her Carthaginian was heavily accented, but he could not from the single word guess what her first language might be.

“Do not forget your ass,” Imco repeated. “Your donkey, I mean.”

The woman cocked her head to the side and studied him. He could just barely make out her features through her hair. He thought he saw something written on them that was other than anger. It was a deep bafflement, but this was something he believed he could build upon. When she spoke, however, her voice was venomous and resolute. Unfortunately, she had reverted to the Iberian dialect and Imco could not understand a word of it.

She must have known this, for she concluded by making her point visually concrete. Her hands grasped something like an imaginary twig, snapped it, and tossed the two ends in different directions. Having made herself clear, the woman turned and scrambled up the bank and away. Imco stood for a moment staring at the spot over which she had vanished. Half of him wanted to chase after her, but what would he do upon reaching her again? He did not have the cold heart of a rapist. And anyway, he had accomplished something with the encounter. He knew that she lived safely in the arms of a small community. As he turned back to the camp, he realized that the donkey was no longer in sight. It had not scrambled up the bank, but must have found some other route by which to follow the girl. Would that he were as fortunate.

But he was not. Instead, he marched out with the body of the army a week later. He could find no valid reason to exclude himself and, it seemed, Hannibal wanted each and every able body. They marched at half-speed, angling to the south of the old consuls' forces, crossed the river Aufidus, and—with barely a grumble of protest—seized a Roman grain depot near an old settlement called Cannae.

It did not take long for rumors of the Roman approach to spread. First a few long-riders brought word of a great mass of men on the march, an army innumerable to the human eye, like a horde of Persia spilling across the land. And then spies brought in further details. The two new consuls were marching toward them at full speed. They whipped before them a massive army, thousands upon thousands of well-armed soldiers, both Roman citizens and legions from the allied cities. If the Carthaginians stayed where they were and met this force, they would not just be fighting the arrogant men of Rome; they would be clashing with all Italy.

Imco had many times before questioned Hannibal's wisdom only to see the commander's judgments proven right. But this did not stop him from doubting once more. No one man can harness Fortune indefinitely. So prolonged a war could not have been what he wanted, and now, perhaps, the winds of fate had shifted to blow the Romans forward to victory. Imco, in his foreboding at the coming conflict, could not help but ask for news and opinions from any man near at hand. It was because of this that he first met a young soldier who claimed to have overheard a conversation between the commander and his brother.

The soldier swore his tale was true, and he told it as he shared Imco's supper beside the fire. He had stood within listening distance, he said, assigned as a guard to the storehouse that the commander happened to check on personally. He had stood as unobtrusively as he could, straight-backed and still as a pillar. The two paid him no mind whatsoever. When Mago voiced anxiety about the Roman contingent's size, Hannibal said it was as it should be. He said he had recently heard voices inside his head. No, not as a madman does, for he understood that the voices came not from without but were born inside him. Sometimes the voice was recognizable as his own; at other times it was his father's, or the low grumble he believed to be the language of the gods. But they all told him the same thing. They all came to him with a single message. . . .

The young soldier paused here and contemplated the fire, seeming for all the world to have nothing more to say. Imco nudged him on.

“It is coming.”

“What?” Imco asked. “What is coming? It is no secret they are coming. Is this—”

The soldier, forgetting the silent drama of a moment before, raised his voice. “That is what he said.
‘It is coming.'
He said,
‘
The coming battle determines everything. We look upon a space of hours that lead up to the moment I was born for.' That is what the voices tell the commander is coming: the moment he was born for. And you and I will witness it.”

The soldier resumed his portentous air, but Imco clicked his tongue on the roof of his mouth and turned away. What sort of tale was this? One of the teller's own invention, probably. He would not flatter the fellow with questions. So he thought, but instead he found within himself a chorus of questions and answers. What
is
the moment he was born for? So vague a statement, like something an oracle would say. Did it indicate a day of glory? But was not the most obvious sense always the wrong sense when interpreting oracles? Perhaps the day he was born for meant the day of his death. Was that not the only certainty in all beings' lives? Had the commander seen his own demise? If so, why did he not flee it? For a moment this thought gave Imco comfort, but then he recalled how stubborn a character Hannibal was. Perhaps he planned to defy death, to spit in its eye and push it out of the way.