Ally of Carthage

by Rob Edmunds

  He was meaning to leave the introduction there, but a little bit of mischief grabbed hold of him and wouldn’t let him go, and he fired out a line of mock conceit. Preening a little and arching an eyebrow for comic effect he added, “You may have heard of me.” He half-regretted his cocky adjunct.

  However, he needn’t have, as, immediately, Ari roared with laughter and clapped his hands. “Ah, so I have the honour of meeting the new incarnation of Hercules. Hercules! Hercules! I’ve heard of you, dreamboat. The girls I know yearn for you and put up with me. You really put a crimp in my action sometimes, big guy.”

  For a moment, Masinissa stood there stunned. He was used to a little banter from time to time, but this definitely exceeded the usual boundaries. A stiffer personality would no doubt have considered it gross impertinence, but Masinissa didn’t and learnt something about himself in the process.

  He smiled, accepting the backhanded compliment in its intended spirit. “Sorry, mate, I really didn’t mean to mess with your lady business, but how can you dumb this down?” He swept his hands from the top of his head to his toes, topping it off as he brought his hands back to his hips with an elongated, “Aaaaall this!”

  He tried to hold the pause, but the joke’s reaction took over, and Ari and Massiva, who had seen a few versions of the self-parody before, both gave him wincing looks and raced each other to get the first pin in his pomposity. Massiva was the first, with an imitation of the “Aaaaall this!” top-to-toe gesture, and then Ari, stumped for a better riposte, doubled down with an even more extravagant version of his own. Masinissa cracked too, and a little fraternity was formed with its first shared catchphrase.

  It was one of those comic interludes, however, that didn’t have much momentum. The opportunity to bond and purge was there, and they took it and would remember the moment as much as anything on that day, but more sober matters needed attention.

  Awkwardly, all the men turned a little quiet and still, until, finally, Ari asked the others, “Will you help me?” as he glanced towards the dead man closest to him, and the others who were at various points in the inadequate barricades they had erected hastily.

  Masinissa and Massiva did their part of the digging, but let Ari take care of the removal of the bodies and the parts that were detached. It was harrowing for the observers, and Masinissa wondered how such a young man could cope with such a distressing undertaking. He felt a little voyeuristic watching Ari as he looked at the empty heads, cradled the skulls and ruffled the hair of some of the corpses. He saw Ari nuzzle and whisper into the face of one of the dead men, then take his knife and cut a lock of his hair before wrapping him in one of the sheets he had taken from the pack of the closest camel.

  When the earth was piled over the graves they had made for the bodies, all three joined in prayers to Baal Hammon, Tanit and Melqart; the shrieks of the griffon vultures defied the peace of their short vigil. During the moment when their movements were limited to the quiet murmurs of their lips, Masinissa thought of the expression that he had seen on Ari’s face when he held the corpse of the last man. The slightly glazed expression, and the mingle of love, confusion and grief was very moving. He wondered if the man had ever witnessed any of those emotions on Ari’s face whilst he was alive. Masinissa knew we can condition even our eyes to conceal our feelings, and being able to see right through to the soul’s emotions was such a luxury. He remembered a woman, a very young woman really, whom he had spent a few months with; she would burrow into him and look up at him as he held her after he had taken her, and the expression on her face was searingly sweet. He could tell that she loved him without the need to hear the words or feel the touch. Her eyes shone with affection and devotion. It kept him with her longer than he had really wanted, but it was hard to abandon such an obvious love. No doubt they would have been a happy couple, as she was also funny, mischievous and mature for her age, but his loving gaze was reserved for another. She could see it too, despite herself. He gave her no mirror to her emotions, and she understood, through tears, that her look and him as her lover had no future.

  Almost unconsciously, Masinissa and Massiva moved away from Ari, leaving him to a few moments of private grief.

  Massiva whispered to Masinissa, “Well, you’ve picked up a stray there. Now you’ve got to look after him, and he’s gonna need a little looking after.”

  Moving his face into his cousin’s ear Masinissa replied, “That’ll go both ways; the looking after, that is.”

  “Sure, but that kid’s trauma hasn’t started yet.”

  The forceful opinion irritated Masinissa. “I wouldn’t bet on that. You saw the doll. The kid’s got history. If he hadn’t, he’d be dead or quivering in a pathetic heap right now. He’s got grit.” He looked hard at Massiva. “More than you have!”

  Massiva bridled, knowing that Masinissa’s scorn held other consequences for him.

  Masinissa continued, but he stopped looking at Massiva, and it was more as if he was working it out for himself. “You know that, when we are kids or when we’re happy or settled, we don’t want change. We want to stay exactly as we are. Why risk something new? We’re not caterpillars. We don’t turn into butterflies. Usually, change is darker; sometimes only just a little, but the shade of change can be much darker for a man when he becomes a man, goes to war or loses a friend or a part of himself. You’ve read The Odyssey right? Everybody’s got to read Homer. You can lose yourself when change happens. Like the Kimmerioi, or the Cimmerians, those people on the edge of the world and on the brink of Hades, who were stuck in fog and darkness. You’ve got to get out of it somehow. Ari’s doll is his line back to his other self. I don’t blame him. He’s had that mist fall on him and held on to a little part of the person he used to know, who he used to be. The unknown is scary, especially when the unknown is your own self. Do you think that, if you come back from the war, you’ll recognise the person that you were? Who you are now?”

  Massiva looked at Masinissa when the question hit him, and then looked down, shrugged a long, slow breath, and answered the only way he could, “I don’t know. I hope so; some, at least.”

  *

  After a while, the kneeling figure of Ari returned to them, and he was more composed than Masinissa had expected: quiet and reflective, but without tears and with some of the humour with which their acquaintance had begun earlier. The three spent the next few hours regathering what they could, and reorganising the camels and the caravan. There was a lot of booty, and it was little wonder that lives were staked on its capture. The griffons soon realised that they had been left more than scraps, and hopped around and into the corpses. It was not pleasant watching their beaks go into soft flesh, the jelly of the eye and the brain in particular, but all of them shared a little battlefield schadenfreude and let the birds act as the agents of their contempt.

  Wishing to get back to the city before darkness fell, they retrieved as much as they could, leaving a little for the vultures of human variety who might be lucky enough to stumble on the raggedy end of the train. The most valuable items they abandoned were the weapons of their enemies. Some were well made, but Masinissa’s and Massiva’s were better. Ari took the best falcata from the pile, but the rest they left to the sands. His new blade was lovely, and Masinissa had a slight tug of jealousy when Ari tied it neatly on to his waist, nudging his doll slightly closer to his midriff. The handle had a grip of gold and ivory, and a carved figure of a horse shielding the knuckles of the hand. It also included a wooden sheath wrapped in burgundy leather, and a smaller knife wrapped in another leather pocket protruding from the outside of the sheath. It was a beautiful object, really too nice to stick into the body of another person, but Masinissa knew that it must already have performed that function and, in all probability, would do so again. It definitely had been a spoil of plunder, and he wondered a little about its provenance. Maybe it’s from a rich uncle of one of the bastards I have to take orders from,
he speculated, a little hopefully.

  As they left, he gave the pile of metal they were leaving a perfunctory last glance. Maybe the shepherds in the area could better protect their flocks in the future. As the camel train was still quite long, they let Massiva take position at the front, and he and Ari took the rear and flanks, just in case there was a need to bring any of the beasts back in line. They were quite biddable camels, however, and there was little need to harass them. They just trudged forwards in Massiva’s wake.

  For most of the way back, all three men were separate from each other, although Ari rode closer to Masinissa as they drew closer to the fringes of Carthage and seemed to be hinting that he was keen to be more sociable.

  “You don’t look it, but I have the impression you’re a pretty tough kid, with today being a strong hint at that obviously,” Masinissa commented, breaking the silence with a compliment.

  Ari revelled a little in the praise, but turned somewhat contemplative. “You know what helps with that? What helps with trying to make it as a tough guy?”

  “Nope, help me out. I’m aspirational where that quality is concerned.”

  “Denying reality. Getting by in this life – or my life, to be more accurate – is all about denying the facts, and forgetting the truths and the things that have happened to you. My friends used to tell me that some of their memories would haunt them in the night and wake them from their sleep. For me, it’s different. It’s not my memories that haunt me. It’s what I have forgotten, am trying to forget or am blanking out as best I can. My shadows and spectres.”

  “I guess I’ve got a bit of that to do in the future. I know what I want to keep in my thoughts, anyway. I hope I can keep the painful stuff at bay. Don’t beat yourself up.”

  Masinissa didn’t really know what to add, or how to counsel a younger man who must have already seen much more of the brutalities of the world than he had. He let the conversation drop, and they rode the final league to the stables in silence. As they tethered their horses, slaves swarmed over the camel train and started to unload the wares from the animals. Masinissa gave them instructions and even hinted that if a little of it disappeared, he wouldn’t notice. He also gave his instructions to Ari, giving him directions to quarters where he could get food and lodgings, and telling him where to report for his new duties. He told Ari to just get his bearings on the following day. He had other matters to attend and he gave a cryptic nod in the direction of Massiva.

  As they parted with a warm embrace not befitting of the clear disparities in their social standings, Ari made a final remark. Evidently, he had been reflecting a little on what it took to be a tough guy. “You know another thing that helps with tough-guying your way through life?”

  “Feel free to enlighten me further,” responded Masinissa.

  Ari raised his palms forwards in a gesture that prefaced his comments with a little “hold on, just go with me on this” reassurance. “OK, this may sound a little crazy, and it’s not a religious or spiritual belief or anything, although I do believe in the gods, including Tanit and Baal Hammon, but I don’t believe in death.”

  Masinissa gave him a derisory look and said, “Well, we dealt with the fact of that most of today, either making it or clearing up after it.”

  Ari winced a little. “OK, I need to be clearer. I don’t believe in my own death. That’s not to say I’m immortal. It’s just that, when it happens, I don’t think I’ll know about it. I might, Tanit willing, go peacefully or I might bleed out in mounting agonies, but, in that final moment, I don’t think I’ll know. If I emerge in some paradise moments after, then great, but I’ll be different. I’ll have missed that moment of transition. I don’t remember my birth and I don’t think my soul is equipped to contemplate its rebirth either. You’re not the audience to yourself, right? When you see people die, it kinda helps to believe that you won’t know that moment yourself, even if it seems peaceful in some cases.”

  Masinissa looked at him. He was a traumatised boy trying to work things out on a day when he’d lost so much and dodged something he was declaring so stridently that he was trying to hide from. Masinissa stated, “Sometimes, it’s best not to try to work things out or try to convince yourself of stuff. I’m too beat up to open up a line on philosophy or ontology. Get a little wasted, find some tail if you can, and get some rest. Death’s as tired as us right now. You might not believe in death, but believe in life, huh? It’s the antidote for what’s running round in your head right now.”

  Ari smiled, bowed and let Masinissa give him a little avuncular hug before he headed out into the night to follow Masinissa’s advice.

  The Crucible

  After the brush with the Masaesylian bushwhackers, Masinissa realised that perhaps Massiva was still a little raw. He certainly had been spooked by their charge, and, if not for the intervention of Ari’s unerring rocks, the enemy riders might have outflanked them and cut them both down. This was a matter that needed attention, even from a purely selfish perspective. Never mind preserving Massiva’s life, he needed to preserve his own, and therefore his nephew better have enough about him to be able to have his back a little better than he had demonstrated so far.

  His solution was simple. He would toughen Massiva up a little. Horseplay and javelin throwing were all well and good as training exercises, but there needed to be a little more iron and grit in his young protégé, and he needed a few specialists for that. A few years earlier, when Masinissa was in the middle of an only mildly obstreperous adolescence, Gala had assigned a couple of his tougher henchmen to guide his son. They had been perfect for him. They were tough old hands, who had been initially as stern and fierce as drummers on a galley, but had yielded a more affectionate and fraternal side as Masinissa proved himself capable and worthy of the emotional kinks in their armour. Massiva was even more amiable and even-tempered than Masinissa had been at his age, but there was a moment during youth to introduce the crucible, and that time had come for Massiva.

  Masinissa had gone into the Numidian barracks the previous day to talk to them and give them their instructions. There would be hours of drills and runs, and the usual trials out in desert ahead, but he felt that it would be useful to break Massiva first. Massiva was an avid equestrian. No doubt, in the future, if he had pause for reflection, he would appreciate Masinissa’s imminent behaviour through that prism.

  Both of Masinissa’s ranking men had colourful pasts, and these were reflected in their names and their attire. The first, the larger and more senior, went by the name of Big Pun. The name had developed as a comical endearment as much as a reflection of his status as the disciplinarian in the barracks. He was a large man, hence the “big”, and he would be the person who made the routine decisions in relation to punishments, hence the diminutive “pun”. He commanded the respect of all the riders under Masinissa’s command, and he was renowned for his fairness as well as his severity. He could be the embodiment of the Numidian concept of anaia, and be merciful and compassionate, but he could also be relentlessly demanding of his men, and leave them without a drop of energy or sweat left in their bodies. Those who took a dimmer view of him hadn’t survived, but had been shipped back to the mountains or had found service in one of the irregular militias, who survived on a fraction of the pay of Masinissa’s elite cavalry. His appearance was three-quarters haughty and one-quarter comical, with a little companionability thrown in. That side of him was chipped away from his haughtiness as you grew to know him a little better and had started to earn his respect, which was only surrendered grudgingly. His most striking idiosyncrasy was the cap he wore, which was distinctive. It was a soft, round and flat-crowned woolly hat of a kind that most of the men surmised was of Etruscan origin. It certainly seemed as if it would be more appropriate on the head of a shepherd rather than that of a large, bowlegged dragoon. It was hard to say if it was an affectation or a practical adaptation to spending long hours on horseback or in th
e field. It certainly protected his head, and could be yanked to shield his eyes depending on which side of his head the sun was blazing. Even when they were mustering for battle, he was notorious for sticking to it and demurring on the offer of a standard issue helmet. A curio on his cap, which he had attached to a ridge that he had raised on the front of it, was a gift that he had been given from Gala, as a token of gratitude for helping transform his son into a man. It was a silver brooch, which was not as grand or ornate as the ones in the possession of Gala and Masinissa, but it was a fine piece of jewellery for a man not of the nobility and one that added a little patriotic sparkle to his appearance. It depicted the symbols of Numidia and the Massyli – the charging horse set against a palm tree – and served as a warrant for his position and an obvious patriotic totem for his men who had, to a man, turned their resentment of Big Pun into a veneration bordering on devotion.

  The other man commanded somewhat less devotion than Pun, but there were patently obvious reasons why. He was the regiment’s lasher, and – as much as he could share a joke around the fire – given that it was his bullwhip that would tear into your back for major or minor misdemeanours, most men kept him at arm’s length. To get too close would be viewed as a sign of sycophancy amongst the ranks. He was also a veteran of Hannibal’s marches, had fought at both Cannae and Lake Trasimene, and carried a few of those ghosts with him. He had done a circuit of the Mediterranean, up through Iberia, past Massalia, across the Cisalpine passes, down the spine of Italy, and back across to Russicada and North Africa, in a small vessel hijacked by a number of the Numidian veterans who had become disillusioned by Hannibal’s apparent vacillation before re-enlisting in Gala’s cavalry.