Pride of Carthage

by David Anthony Durham

  “Are you all mad?” Hasdrubal hissed, twisting from the Greek's grip. “Why do you touch me?”

  “I may be mad,” Noba said, “but I slap you like a woman because that's what you're acting like. Mourn your beloved some other time. You'll find another tight rump before long, but right now we're about to be destroyed. Wake up and do something about it!”

  “I could kill you for speaking to me thus.”

  “You could,” Silenus said, “but do it later. I think Noba speaks harsh wisdom.”

  “She meant more to me—”

  Noba stepped close enough that his breath billowed off Hasdrubal's face. “I know. Tell me of her tomorrow. And then again next week. Then in the many years to come. But right now, call a retreat!”

  And he did. These two men served him well. Under Noba's directions, the better part of the army fled. Elephants roared down the far side of the plateau, careening through the trees. The baggage train—wagons and laden pack animals and sledges—bumped down the slope to the relative flat. The army marched a semicontrolled retreat, the very rear brawling for every backward step. It was dangerously close to a rout, but Noba again acted quickly. He shouted orders that none considered questioning. He told the camp staff to abandon the wagons and sledges. These proved temptation enough to slow the Romans, one soldier anxious lest some other get booty meant for him.

  By nightfall, Publius had pulled up. Hasdrubal pressed his troops on, putting all the distance he could between them under the light of a thin moon. He barely understood what had happened, neither why his strong position had been overturned so quickly nor what it meant to be running headlong into the night. But as motion and danger returned him to his senses, he decided one thing with certainty: He had had enough of Iberia. How many times had Iberians betrayed his people? How many times had they killed those he loved? His wife, his brother-in-law, his father . . . So many others. He cursed the land and spat on it. He could not stand the sight of it, not the feel of it brushing his toes nor the stench of it in his lungs. The next morning he sent messengers to both his brothers, begging their forgiveness, asking for their blessing. And he sent another that he hoped would eventually reach Carthage itself. He had decided; now they could only hear his will.

  Hasdrubal Barca marched for Rome.

  The boat pushed out from a small port north of Salapia just after sunrise on the planned day, signs having been provident and the winds northeasterly. They would sail through the morning and stop at the far spur of land pointing toward Greece. There they would rest, and the next dawn—conditions being favorable—they would shoot across the Adriatic in a single day. Considering the distances Aradna had traveled till now, this would not have been a very long journey. And it might have been her last, for it would have carried her and her modest wealth back to the territory of her birth, as she had so long wanted. Nevertheless, she was not aboard the vessel.

  Instead she sat on the shore, watching the small craft plunge through the waves, rising and falling. Once it was past the breakers and onto the breathing swells, the oars lifted and flapped a moment in the air, like featherless wings. The captain moved about the deck, his silhouette gilded by the glare of the new sun. Some bit of his speech careened toward her, only to be snapped back by a current of air. The rowers laid the oars down along the deck and a single square sail unfurled and snapped taut against the wind. From then on the ship's progress was steady, the fate of the passengers aboard it no longer tied to hers.

  Aradna dug her hands down into the sand and squeezed the coarse grains between her fingers. She had pulled her hair back from her face and fastened it with a strip of leather. Because she hated the things men and women saw when they looked at her she rarely exposed her face for the world to view. She had never thought of beauty as anything but a misfortune, but there was no one to see her at that moment and she needed to feel the movement of the air on her features. Her eyes shone with their accursed, startling blue; her wretched full lips tilted downward at their pouting edges. Tiny curls of dried skin clung to the curve of her nose, but these only served to verify that her face was that of an earthly being made of the same materials as all others.

  Touching her hips at either side and just behind her lay all the possessions she had in the world. One sack held the coins she had traded her stores of booty for. Another contained the simple provisions of life: food and knives, herbs and bedding and pieces of fabric and needles. The third had not been hers until a few days ago but had been bequeathed to her. A little distance away lay a dead crab Aradna had not seen when she chose this spot. Its body was longer than it was wide, with two enormous claws that the indignity of death had flung out to either side. She tried not to look at the crustacean or think of it as a comment on the decision she had made in the dead hours of the previous night.

  It had not been easy. It had not happened as she had wanted. If anything, she would have welcomed the certainty she needed to be aboard that vessel. Atneh had nearly succeeded in instilling this in her. When she had sought excuses for not leaving, the old woman shot them down like an archer pinning pigeons to the sky. “What fear of the sea?” she had asked. “As far as I can tell, you fear nothing. A little water beneath you? What is that compared with the trials life has already shown you? If the gods had wanted you dead, they would've taken you already.” When she would not come to terms with the merchants who would translate her motley finds into coin, Atneh smacked her on the back of the head and named reasonable terms for her. When she complained that none of the vessels she had seen looked seaworthy, the old woman found one that was. And when she suggested one last scavenging mission, the woman shook her head at the foolishness of it.

  “Casilinum?” Atneh had asked. “Forget it. What's one more city? You have enough already. Don't let me see you become a fool. I see what this is about, and it's nothing to do with a few more coins. You know, don't you, that the gods sometimes play us as toys? Think about that. Imagine yourself with a string pinned to your heart. If you feel that string tug you in one direction or another, know it for what it is—the whim of the foolish ones. It can do you no good. Remember my words. Anyway, I'm an old woman. You mustn't leave me to make this journey myself.”

  So Aradna had taken Atneh's certainty inside herself and set her sights across the sea. But just when she thought her path lay before her as clear as ever it had . . . just as she lifted her foot to step upon it with prayers that it was the right one and would lead her to the happiness she sought and the future Atneh assured her was awaiting them both . . . at just that moment the old woman fell ill. She could not name what had laid her on her back but she said she could feel it eating at her from the inside. It was a pain in her two breasts that radiated into her whole chest and interlocked its fingers in the gaps between her ribs. She found it difficult to breathe and within a few days she could only manage shallow inhalations. By the end of a moon's cycle she had developed a cough that tortured her. It came as regular as breathing, one painful shock after another.

  In the middle of one night, Atneh awoke Aradna by tugging at her wrist. She wanted Aradna to promise that when she died she would not become a fool but would remember her words always. Aradna tried to tell her she was not dying, but the old one scorned her with a look that Aradna could feel through the darkness. She asked Aradna to describe again the quiet life they would have. For some time the old woman listened, rustling uncomfortably, shaken by her coughs.

  Aradna thought her words might be soothing her somewhat, but then, unexpectedly, Atneh said, “I can't see anything!”

  “That's because it's dark, Aunt. It's night.”

  The old woman was silent for a moment, then said, “That's what you think.”

  The next morning, Aradna and the rest of their band buried Atneh deep enough in the sandy dunes that no creatures would disturb her. They bought and sacrificed a goat and offered it up to Zeus and killed hens to fly to Artemis and poured out wine to ease her entry into the next world. The others had assumed she
would either stay with them or continue on the journey she had planned with the old woman, but Aradna became unsure of either route. She had long dreamed of the soldier from Cannae, but in the light of day she had banished him into the mists. Now this became increasingly hard to do.

  She sometimes awoke with the suspicion that he had visited her. She thought she could remember his smell, although this seemed improbable. He had been covered in filth, in blood and dirt and unnamed stink. How could she scent the essence of the man underneath all that? But then she awoke from another dream with the memory of washing his flesh clean with a cloth, kneeling forward and touching his skin with her nose, breathing him in. Whether this was done in dream alone or had actually happened, she was not sure. There was an intimacy in her thoughts of him that embarrassed her. It made no sense that she—who had avoided men for the plague they were, who had once snapped an erect penis between two stones and had often protected herself with knives and gnashing teeth—so longed for this man. She wanted to sit near him and maybe touch him and hear his voice and speak slowly so that they could understand each other. She had many questions for him. Why had their paths crossed three times in the midst of the chaos that was this war? Something like that is not simple chance. Perhaps the gods wished them together. She had never even stopped to hear the man out. Perhaps he brought her a message. . . . These lines of thinking left her breathless with the possibilities. This man might have an unimagined place in her life, and she might have been spurning the gods when she turned away from him.

  Aradna was still sitting on the beach, watching the now empty sea, when something caught her eye. A shape cut the surface of the sea out in the middle distance, a solid object as dark as basalt against the water, moving to the south. It vanished and then appeared again, a little farther on. A moment later it appeared yet again, but farther out, and then the backbones of sea creatures broke into the air at a hundred different points. Aradna's toes clenched tight around the sand. She did not like this sighting. She took it as an omen, but as ever with such things she knew not how to interpret it. One of the men at the camp was skilled at such things, but she hated his stare and the way he touched her, as if he were a blind man who needed to feel to see, even though everyone knew his eyes were as keen as a child's. Instead she closed her eyes and tried to believe those passing beasts had import for someone else's life, not hers.

  She found the spot in the dead of night. She could barely see at all under the light of a thin moon. At first she dug with a pointed stick to loosen the soil. She squatted down on her knees and reached in with her hands. Eventually, she lay down with the rim cutting into her abdomen, knees dug in as anchors, her backside tilted to the sky, scooping up dirt and pebbles with a flat clamshell, yanking at roots and fighting with the debris that sought again and again to slide back into the hole.

  She did not so much decide she was satisfied with the hole as just give up on going any deeper. Her arms were only so long, anyway. She placed the various parcels in it, making sure their wrappings stayed in place. She refilled the hole quickly, then spent some time shifting stones and tugging at fallen branches and arranging pine needles to hide her work.

  She did not finish until the thin light of morning. She gazed around her long enough to verify her solitude and register the landmarks in her mind, and then she walked away without looking back. She no longer led the donkey with a tether. In her own silent way she turned her back on the creature and offered him the possibility of a life without her. But he fell in behind her.

  A little time later she stepped over the back of the near hills and saw the land rise up to meet her, the whole breadth of it: the farmlands on the plain below, the jagged serrations that rose in the distance, like the backs of those sea beasts but captured in rock. She did remember the old woman's words. She thought of them with every stride she took, and she spoke her respect to the woman. Atneh was wise, but no single person held all inside them. Aradna followed her nose. No matter that reason said otherwise; she could smell that soldier over the distance and she had no choice except to find him and see this through.

  Where had childhood gone? Mago asked himself this one sweltering afternoon a few weeks after Hasdrubal's defeat at Baecula. He walked solitary along a low ridgeline. Guards shadowed him at a distance, but he ordered them to stay out of his sight. He needed a few moments alone. He longed for even a short break from the incessant maneuvering of war. The question about childhood came to him fully formed when he looked up into great pine trees surrounding him. Their branches did not start till high above the ground, but they were so straight and strong that they interwove with those of other trees, like men standing with their arms locked over each other's shoulders. Had he seen such a sight as a child, he would have called to have a rope brought to him. He would have climbed up into those branches, pushing through the needles, sap gumming his palms. He would have sought the highest point he could reach and looked for the creatures that lived there and gazed out at the world from that vantage, imagining himself an owl or a hawk or a great eagle.

  How strange to think that there was a time in his life when he had wished for turmoil instead of study, noise and clash of arms instead of quiet conversation with his tutors, sparring with his companions, the embraces of his mother and sisters. He had once spent whole days listening to the epic tales in Greek, lost in the adventures of men who had lived centuries before, who had communed with the gods and touched greatness time and again. His study of war had once been an exercise of the mind, played out with carved granite soldiers that patrolled miniature battlefields. They were silent, emotionless, bloodless figures, animated only by his fingers or knocked off balance by the pebbles he tossed at them in their mock battles. There was a time when such boyish games comprised the sum total of his experience of war. And yet he had yearned to grow up in an instant so he could experience mayhem for real. He had wanted to be the hand that drove home spear points, that slashed heads from shoulders, that ordered this man killed and that spared. What boy upon the earth has not dreamed of such things?

  But those times were long gone now. No longer had he playmates to set up pieces against. Instead he spent his days walking among a throng of killers, men of many nations who were united only by the hunger for slaughter and spoils. It was not exactly that he bemoaned the change or could imagine what other lot in life to yearn for. It was just that he did not understand how he could contain within himself both that child and the soldier he now was. At Hannibal's side, he managed to maintain his faith in the grandeur of war. Their feats had seemed to be the very essence of legend; their victories, majestic moments smiled upon by the gods. For a while his work with Hanno and Hasdrubal had also filled him with joy. They had been touched by the same greatness, it seemed. Finally, they could all believe they had a place beside Hannibal's brilliance.

  But that was before Publius Scipio. One man, a few months, two battles: everything changed. It was not just the strategic realities that troubled Mago. In Hannibal's absence, the first shifting winds of defeat blew away a mask that he had not even realized he was wearing. It had been like a helmet that blocked portions of his vision and limited the world he perceived. He had acknowledged only the things that confirmed the realization of his childhood fantasies. The last few weeks, however—with the mask removed—the unacknowledged images bombarded him unhindered. He could not help but recall the faces of orphan children, the suffering in the eyes of captured women, the sight of burning homes, the cold glances of people being robbed of grain and horses and, indirectly, of their lives. He heard their wailing in some place beyond sound, high to the right and back of his head. Everywhere were signs of the barbarous nature of conflict, ugly to behold. Nowhere was it possible to avoid these things. It suddenly seemed to him that such scenes were the full and true face of war. What place had nobility in this? Where was the joy of heroes? Why could he no longer recite the lines with which epic poets enshrined the greatness of clashing men? It was weak of him to think this way.
He knew it, but he could not shake free of the mood. He thought briefly of the melancholy that sometimes took hold of Hannibal. He never explained it. . . . But, no, it could not be the doubt that he now felt. Hannibal was as certain of his place in the world as if he had created it himself.

  Hanno trudged up toward him, quietly, for the pine leaves cushioned his steps. He wore a shimmering garment of scale armor, silvered metal that caught the speckled light like the moving skin of fish. Glancing at his face, Mago saw his mother in his features. He winced to think of her and the high spirits he had last shared with her in Carthage. How foolish to be joyful at one moment, forgetting that the wheel of life turns, so that he who looks at the sun at one moment soon finds himself crushed against the hard earth.

  Hanno stood beside him for a time, not speaking, looking out through the trees toward the plain in which their army fidgeted in nervous expectancy. The branches were so thick that he could not possibly see through them any more than Mago could, but still he waited a long time before he spoke. When he did, Mago heard a quality that again reminded him of their mother. The part of Didobal in him seemed to be the strongest portion, the firmest in its resolve to confront the future.

  “Come,” Hanno said, “we can wait no longer. It will be at Ilipa.”

  Having said this, the older sibling retraced his steps beneath the trees, just as silently as before. When he faded out of view, Mago heard the rapping of a woodpecker, a loud barrage of thuds and then silence, a loud barrage and then silence. There was no way back to that other time; there was only forward through the world he now inhabited. Only onward into the clash that had to come. His brother had named the place. Mago followed him down toward it.