David Durham - Pride of Carthage

In the mild, damp weather of early spring, Imilce earned the honor of braiding the older woman's hair. She had been in training for this throughout her time in Carthage. The intricacy of Carthaginian headdresses was wholly new to her, influenced, she heard, by the ways of people far to the south. On odd days of the week, she met Didobal in her quarters, in a small chamber whose walls were hung with layer upon layer of colorful cloth. The room was always warm, heady with incense and full of threat. Oil lamps stood on stands all around the floor: tiny flames, but so many that they gave off an almost even light. Imilce once singed her gown negotiating them. Another time she knocked two over with a single misstep. Servants dashed in with wet blankets to squelch the fire. Didobal did not comment on either incident.

One morning, weeks after her aborted journey, Imilce ran her fingers from the top of the woman's head down through her tresses. Didobal's hair was thick in her fingers, dark and heavy. It did not fall limply around her, but had a wavy, tensile strength in each strand. Imilce combed the hair into strips measured by fingers. With the aid of an assistant, she began to treat them separately. Some she sprinkled with an oil fragrant with cinnamon. Into others she combed dust flecks of silver. Still others she bound in ribbons of seaweed. Today she was to fashion her mother-in-law's hair in imitation of a certain bust of Elissa, a design of tight plaits low across the back of the head, building a platform into which to set the gold headpiece that would anchor two great curving horns of hair.

As happened too often, Imilce found herself speaking to fill the nervous silence. Words issued from her mouth of their own accord: an observation about the rising level of water in the cisterns, a recollection of her dream from the previous evening, a question—which went unanswered—about the fate of Tanit's veil, that holy relic so beloved of the goddess. And then, without knowing she was about to say it, she commented on the pain of being separated from her husband for so long. It was unfair, she said, that he fought so far away that he could not return for the winter as most soldiers had throughout history.

Didobal cleared her throat. She touched her assistant with her eyes. The girl stepped back, turned, and moved away. The other servants followed suit. They retreated into the folds of fabric on the walls; their faces went blank, eyes glazed and unfocused, still as statues. All this, Didobal accomplished with a single look. Imilce feared the woman was about to dismiss her, but instead she asked, “You feel a great passion for my son?”

“Yes,” Imilce said.

“Such as few women feel for their husbands?”

“I don't know what other women feel, but I think of him always.”

“By your tone, you suggest that I know nothing of this. Do you think you are the only one who has loved her husband almost to foolishness?”

“No. No, I did not mean . . .”

“I did not know what to make of you when we first met,” Didobal said. “I did not trust you. Forgive me, but it's hard for a mother to watch his son give his affection to another woman. A mother always feels that she came first: the first womb, the first breast between their teeth, the first unreasoning love . . .”

The woman turned her head slowly, tugging the thick braids from Imilce's hands. Her eyes were large, the whites slightly yellowed, deep-veined and very dark in the iris, a brown that at the moment looked solid black. She said, “I'm sure you understand this.”

She turned back and again showed the younger woman her face in profile. “Because of this I couldn't help but receive you warily,” she continued. “I had you watched. It's shameful—but, Imilce, you have hardly done a thing while in Carthage that I did not know of minutes later. Why did I do this? Because a person proves who they are not with their mouth but through the accumulation of actions over time. Were you in my household purely for our riches? Did you care for the fate of your husband, and did you honor his people's traditions in your secret moments? Did you partake in the diversions this city offers even to women of our class? Did you simper and smile beneath the gazes of powerful men? Forgive me, but I had many anxieties.”

Throughout this discourse Imilce attempted to carry on with her work. She set pins to keep the lower plaits in place. Then she picked up an ivory comb to work on the mass of higher hair, somewhat wild now, chaotic compared to the close weave at the back of the neck. But she slowed down as Didobal spoke and, eventually, stood with the comb in hand, held out to the side, inlaid pearls pressed tight between her white fingers. What a set of questions, Imilce thought. For all the world at that moment she could not imagine the answers the woman might have received. She had been watched! All this time . . . In a strange way it made sense. It explained much of her discomfiture. All this time . . .

“Hamilcar was as hard not to love as Hannibal now is,” Didobal said. “They are of the same mold, those two. We who live near to their fire are as blessed as we are cursed. It seems also that you and I are not so different as we seem. During the Mercenary War, I couldn't bear to be separated from my husband. I did what you—with greater wisdom—did not do. I followed him into the desert when he chased the mercenaries away. I caught up with him two days after the battle at Leptis Minor. He was victorious, but never had I seen him so, caked in blood and filth, eyes reddened and skin peeling from him as if he'd been burned. I expected him to be angry, and I was afraid, but he said not a word of reproach. Instead he took me as he never had before, like a lion, growling at me. His passion was beyond words and he did not speak to me through the act at all. He did me no kindness, left me red with the stains of war.

“It was horrible, Imilce, but I thought, that night, that if this was my husband's ardor on campaign, then it was well I should be there, for who but me should receive him like that? The next day he took me by the hand and led me over the ridge and down into the valley where they had fought. He showed me the battlefield. He walked me through the high-piled mounds of bodies. Imilce, it was a sight you should never wish to see. Three days in the heat, and the bloated bodies belched gases and shivered as if life still resided in them and came to them in spasms. Some burst as if boiled too long. They sent up the foulest of scents. Scavenging birds blackened the sky, long-necked creatures that flew in from all directions, bald demons.

“And that was just the beginning. I spent the week at my husband's side. He made me watch everything. They spent days tilting up crosses to crucify the captured leaders. Other prisoners they set free without their hands. Some had their feet severed at the ankles and were left to fight off the hyenas. Others they blinded and sliced out their tongues, cut off their manhood, fed live to captured lions. The war had been brutal beyond imagining, and Hamilcar—my husband—answered earlier barbarities in kind. All these years later, these sights are as alive in me as they are real somewhere. Somewhere in this war such scenes are being repeated. The men we love are their architects, or their victims. That is why I chose never to trouble my husband again. I left him to his work, not as a sacrifice, but because I hated the way it made me look at him. I hated—and never understood—how such a man could perform such horrors. Because of this I spent the larger part of my married life away from him. I loved him; and therefore I could barely stand to be with him.

“I'm not sure if this makes sense to you, but do not seek the ways of war, Imilce. Do not wish to understand it. Take your husband in his quiet moments, when he's in your arms and when he looks upon your child with love. You must do this, for if you know too much of a warrior's work you'll grow to hate him. And I would never have you doubt my son.”