“A warrior indeed!” he called, laughing and trying to sheath the weapon. “A year old only, and he has already cut the flesh of a warrior. Were you so young as this when you first drew blood, Hannibal?”
The tension in Hannibal's body was slow to uncoil. Eventually, he smiled, pulled a cloth from inside his tunic, and tossed it to Lysenthus. “I do not remember the first time I drew blood,” he said. “And neither will he.”
Hannibal hefted his son and set him down on the floor. He motioned for Bostar to amuse the boy, a task the officer went at awkwardly, but well enough to permit the meeting to go on. They had already been through the long, gradual introductions to their respective positions and plans for the future. Hannibal had offered a pact of friendship with Macedon and found the king's ambassadors as receptive as he could have hoped. But the matter to which he had turned just before Hamilcar's entry was more delicate. Lysenthus returned to it in a roundabout way.
“Philip has no love for Rome,” he said. “On the contrary, he loathes the manner in which they interfere in Adriatic matters that should not concern them. He will watch your progress with interest, but Commander, he is not yet ready to join you in war against Rome.”
Bomilcar somehow managed to follow this well enough to form a response. “Philip would have us do all the work first—is that what you're saying? Then he'd join in the victory celebrations.”
Lysenthus dabbed at the cut on his nose. “Philip would take an active part in any victory over the Romans,” he said. “You might well find you need our formidable aid in achieving it, but events will have to unfold somewhat before that time comes. You have fought admirably against the barbarians of Iberia, but Rome will be an altogether different test. They will come at you, and quickly.”
“Not quickly enough,” Hannibal said. “I know much of what transpires in Roman councils. They plan a two-pronged attack: one consul and his army attacking Carthage itself, the other aimed at us here in Iberia. This is a reasonable plan, but they will find things progress in a way they cannot imagine.”
Lysenthus thought about this a moment, glanced at his aides, and then looked back at Hannibal, a new understanding etched on his features. “You're going to attack them first, on their own soil? How? You have no navy . . . no way to reach them.”
Hannibal glanced at Bostar, who seemed anxious to rise from the floor and say something, if Hamilcar had not been climbing over his knees and attempting to unlace his sandals.
“You'll forgive me, Lysenthus,” the commander continued, “if I do not reveal all the details. But do make sure that Philip watches these opening moves with close attention. He'll see what we are made of and what we can accomplish—we hope with his friendship and aid. At the very least, let us continue to correspond.”
Lysenthus assured him that this was possible and that the message would reach the king as soon as he did. With that, the meeting drew to a close. The two officers escorted the Macedonians away and off to an afternoon hunt, their last before preparing for the hazardous sea voyage back to Macedon.
Hannibal sat a moment, watching his son at play with the balls of wadded paper Bostar had improvised as toys while the men spoke. It was a joyful image, yet quick behind the joy came a tension low in his gut, almost like the anxiety of battle. He had lied in answering Lysenthus' question: In truth, he did remember the first time he drew blood. The memory was seared into his consciousness, one of his earliest, from before he came to Iberia.
He was still living in Carthage, at the family's palace on the hill of Byrsa. His father had roused him from sleep. His face was ragged and coated with sweat and filth. He smelled foul and he still wore the soiled armor of battle. “Come, I would show you something,” Hamilcar said.
The boy Hannibal's heart thumped in his chest; not only from the abruptness of his awakening, but he had not even known his father had returned from the war. Mercenaries had turned on the city and besieged it. The conflict had been brutal beyond recent memory, but under Hamilcar's leadership the Carthaginian nobles had finally driven the mercenaries out into the desert, where the traitors made their last stand. What exactly had transpired, the boy had no idea.
Nor did Hamilcar open his lips as he led Hannibal through the dark palace and out onto the grounds. They passed through several courtyards and down into the stables. A torch burned at the far end of the corridor. They moved toward it through the shadows. The horses snorted and shifted nervously, watching their progress; they seemed as aware as Hannibal that something profound was to happen.
But it was not until they had actually halted that Hannibal saw the figure to whom they were drawn. A man had been nailed to wood supports by the wrist, his body drooping, head down upon his chest. He was covered in crusted fluids and dust and had been hanging for long enough that the blood dripping from his impaled wrists had congealed into black globules. Hamilcar grasped a handful of the man's hair and yanked his head upright. The man's eyes opened, rolled up, and then veered off into semiconsciousness.
“This man betrayed Carthage,” Hamilcar said, his voice a dry rasp that he could not shake, though he cleared his throat several times. “Do you understand that? This man conspired to open the gates of our city to the mercenaries. He did it for money, for power, out of a sheer hatred that he hid behind the mask of a countryman. He almost succeeded. Had this man the power, he would yank you up by the ankles and bash your skull against the stones beneath us. He would nail me to a cross and leave me to die slowly. He'd see me a rotting, maggot-filled corpse, and he would laugh at the sight. He would slit your brother's necks and rape your mother and have her sold into slavery. He would live in our house and eat our food and rule over our servants. This is the man before you. Do you know his name?”
Hannibal shook his head, his eyes pinned to the stones and not moving even as he answered.
“His name is Tamar. Some call him the Blessed, others the Foul. Some call him friend. Some father. Some lover. Do you understand? He has other names also: Alexander. Cyrus. Achilles. Khufu. Yahweh or Ares or Osiris. He is Sumerian, Persian, Spartan. He is the thief in the street, the councillor who sits beside you, the man who covets your wife. You choose his name, for he has many, as many names as there are men born to women. His name is Rome. His name is mankind. This is the world we live in, and you'll find it full of men like this.”
Hamilcar released the man's head and placed his hands on his son's shoulders. He pulled him close and let the boy rest his forehead against his cheek. Hannibal did this willingly, for he did not want to look at the man about whom they spoke. “Son,” he said, “there was a noose around our neck and to cut it I had to kill many men most horribly. You are a child, but the world you were born into is no kind place. This is why I teach you now that creation is full of wolves aligned against us. To live in it without falling into madness, you must make of yourself more than a single man. You love with all your heart as a father and son and husband. You wrap your arms around your mother and know the goodness of women. You find beauty in the world and cherish it. But never waver from strength. Never run from battle. When the time comes to act, do so, with iron in your hand and your loins and your heart. Unreservedly love those who love you, and protect them without remorse. Will you always do that?”
Against his father's chest, the boy nodded.
“Then I am proud to call you my firstborn son,” Hamilcar said. He pulled away and stood up straight and yanked a dagger from the sheath on his ankle and pressed the handle into his son's hand. “Now kill this man.”
Hannibal stared at the blade in his small hand, a dagger nearly as large as the toy swords he practiced with. He closed his fingers around the handle slowly, felt the worn leather, the rough weave of it and the solidity of the iron beneath it. He raised his eyes and moved toward the man and did as his father ordered. He did not lift the man's head, but he slipped the blade under his chin and cut a ragged, sloppy line that yanked free of his flesh just under the ear. He fell against the dead man's body f
or a moment. Though he sprang back, the touch still stained his nightclothes with the man's newly flowing blood. He was just eight years old that night. Of course he had not forgotten that moment. Nor would he. It would be with him on his deathbed, if the moment of his passing allowed for reflection.
Both he and young Hamilcar were roused from their thoughts by the chatter of maids in the hall. Beyond them the sharp urgency of Imilce's voice betrayed her concern. Hannibal rose, snatched his son up, and held him high, staring at him as the boy struggled and reached out to pat his father's face, not sure now whether to play or call for his mother. The child's eyes were indeed a striking gray, hair touched with some of Imilce's fairness. But his nose and mouth and stocky build were nothing if not Barca. He had such smoothness of skin, no blemish upon it, with a fragrance that was like nothing, for few things are as pure. His lower front teeth stood perfectly straight, close-fitted like a tiny phalanx of four warriors. Drool escaped the infant's lips and collected on his chin, bunching in preparation for a fall. Hannibal, in one quick gesture, licked the spittle clean.
“By the gods,” he said, “you are the sum of me, of all that came before. You are all that ever I can be.”
He placed the boy on the stone floor and watched as he spun away and tottered off, first randomly, then toward the sound of his mother's voice, just outside in the corridor now.
Watching him, full of love, the father whispered, “Our lives are torture.”
Camped outside New Carthage for the winter, Tusselo had time to look back on the two periods of his life now concluded and to consider the new one just dawning. As a child he had been on horseback from as early as he could remember. He had been one of many in his village, from a large family, all speaking the same language, tied to the same gods, and living by the same customs. He had thought himself master of his young world and faced his coming manhood with eagerness.
But one evening he went to bed a free person, a Massylii Numidian, a horseman; when he awoke, the curved blade of a Libyan knife at his throat was whispering that all of that was done. Dawn found him shuffling along in chains, driven by slavers who cared not that his blood was much like theirs. Within a week, they reached the shore. There a Roman captain bought him and carried him for the first time out into open sea. He had just reached an age when his thoughts turned kindly toward the girls of his clan, but on the first day at sail these thoughts had been forever made a punishment by his captor. With the quick slice of a knife, his immortality vanished. Tusselo doubled over, clutching at his groin, awed and pained beyond all reckoning, amazed to hear the laughter of the man who had emasculated him and listening, despite himself, to the man's jokes that he might now play the woman on occasion but would never again inflict his manhood on any other. It was an absolutely unimaginable act, a change in fortune so profound that he refused to believe it even as he writhed across the deck in a puddle of his own blood. Unfortunately, he was to live through many days thereafter that made it clear human cruelty was never to be underestimated, always to be believed in, much more constant then the favor of any god.
He spent twelve years as a slave to Rome, sold from one master to another three times before finding a permanent place with a traveling merchant of middling wealth. In those twelve years he had lived a lifetime that almost negated the years before. Almost, but not quite. That was why he grasped for freedom several times, finally achieving it one night not far from Brundisium. He had escaped with a pouch full of coins that the drunken man foolishly left resting in his open palm. He used them to pay for a single, extortionately priced passage to Africa.
In his homeland nothing was the same, neither in the sights he saw nor in him, who perceived them. There was no one left to call family. Tusselo found a miserable cluster of hovels more like a leper colony than the thriving town of his birth. He sat down on a hill facing north and looked out on the grassy plains and ragged woodland that flowed toward the sea. It was a beautiful country. It had a largeness different from the land of his enslavement. It pained him that he had to think of that place so often, and yet he could not stop. Every memory his homeland brought to mind had at its back the shadow of how slavery had destroyed it. He had hoped that his hard-won freedom would end some portion of his suffering, but this was not the case. He had been robbed of so many things—how completely, he understood only as he gazed out across a land that pained him with memories and offered no solace. He was an exile in his own country: that was why he had left it to join Hannibal. And it only seemed right that the journey he embarked on should aim back to Italy.
On the day that Tusselo spotted that lone rider near Saguntum—after tracking Hannibal's army on foot—he had not been atop a horse in thirteen years. Nor had he immediately remedied this. He spent months at Saguntum as little more than a laborer, accepting whatever task fell to him. He worked with a more reverent obedience than he had ever shown a master, and he kept always in the company of his countrymen, remembering their ways. He stayed with the victorious army when it returned to New Carthage, and he made sure his desire to mount and fight again was well known.
It had been his master's custom to keep all of his slaves' heads shaven. As he was a slave no longer, Tusselo freed his hair to run its course. He did not remember when he stopped dragging the honed edge of his knife over his scalp, but his hair soon grew long enough that he could take fingerfuls of the curly stuff and twirl them into matted locks. He rarely caught sight of his own reflection—it had never before mattered to him—but now he took to pausing and studying himself in still pools of water, in the circlets of pounded metal shields, or in the dull reflection on the flat of his knife. He took some joy in what he saw. It was a different self than he had known for some time, an earlier incarnation. His hair was black, thick. It sprang from his head with pent-up aggression, as unruly as Medusa's crown of snakes and no less impressive. It framed his face and gave his features a new completion, a solidity, a strong Africanness that he welcomed. Perhaps that was why his master had shaved him, to deprive him of these things and to leave him ever a stranger to his own reflection, so that he would forget himself and remember only the slave. No longer. He had his hair back, and in midwinter he also regained his identity as a horseman.
The day he was assigned a mount he stood weak-kneed, his throat tight and fingertips tingling. The army horses were Iberian mostly, pulled in from a variety of tribes and regions of the country, schooled by different techniques from African mounts, and all with varying perceptions of their role in relation to man. They were somewhat larger than the fleet-footed creatures of North Africa, in a myriad of colors and temperaments, with a wild energy that flared up as Massylii riders cut individuals from the herd to examine them more closely. It was a wonder to watch and Tusselo, having lived many of his years away from his homeland, was struck with awe at the horsecraft he had been born into.
The Numidians cinched their legs around their horses' backs and spoke to them. They sent signals through touch, sometimes with a stick, but often with their fingers. They shifted their body weight accordingly and flapped their arms from their shoulders as if this motion translated into speed in the horses' hooves and called sudden, surprise maneuvers. The mounts seemed to understand them completely and to take joy at slicing through the Iberian horses, dividing them and circling and dizzying them till the Iberians stood dazzled. Tusselo remembered it now, but he had seen no such skill during the years he spent in exile. It almost shamed him to have gotten so used to how Romans handled horses, with no art, no joy but simply mastery of man over beast.
When his turn came to receive a mount he did not hesitate to take it. He had to move with confidence, he knew, for these men would spot any awkwardness as a lioness sees weakness in her prey. He approached the horse from the side, one arm flat against him and the other raised just slightly, fingertips extended as if he were brushing them across stalks of tall grass. And yet there was no guile in his approach, no stealth. He walked toward the horse as if to do so were the most
natural thing in the world. He spoke words of encouragement to her, not shy, but like one friend to another on meeting again.
Before she knew it, he was beside her. And as she cocked her head to follow him he leaped, a smooth motion that somehow draped him over her back as a blanket might fall. He wrapped his arms around her and spread his weight across her and continued his string of words. He had thought that gladness was a thing of the past for him, and perhaps this was so, but there was something stirring in him now and it was not the slow simmering he had carried for so many years. He knew already that he could be nearly his whole self with this horse. Astride her, he could again learn to ride like a whirlwind. He could again belong to a people and fight with a purpose. This horse would never question his manhood, would never taunt him for the damage done to him by his old master. And that was a great blessing. In return he would be kind to her, and feed her well, and not ride her too hard, and lead her only into sensible battle. Together they would see wondrous things. No portion of the earth would hold either of them in bondage. These were some of the things he told her, and, Iberian though she was, she soon calmed to listen.
As his mare was not versed in the Massylii manner of riding, the headman of the cavalry gave Tusselo leave to train her, to care for her as his own. He had seen all he needed to in Tusselo's actions to confirm he belonged among them. Tusselo rode up into the hills beyond New Carthage that very evening, the horse powerful beneath him, her hooves pounding the earth and tearing up divots, the speed of it intoxicating to one so long cursed to the pace of his own legs.
Pride of Carthage Page 11