David Durham - Pride of Carthage

Though he did not want to admit it, he felt the weight of his old melancholy returning. His limbs hung heavy; his thoughts moved more slowly than usual, more often tending toward recollection, anchored to things from the past instead of actively shaping the future. Staring out at the lands of his wartime exile, he acknowledged how dim the memory of his homeland had become. He tried to recall the plantations to the south of Carthage, the desert leading out toward the Numidian country, the scraggly hills of the Gaetulians' land, which he had seen in passing on his boyhood voyage to Iberia, as he marched the whole stretch of North Africa with his father. He felt that these scenes resided in him still, but it was hard to call them forth. They faded in and out and mingled with the wide, dry stretches of Iberia and the mountain pastures of the Pyrenees and the Alpine lakes that dotted the mountains. No scene from the dim reaches of his memory held steady. It was as if these were not real landscapes at all but imaginary ones, formed from the bits and pieces of other lands. He suddenly thought of his brothers and how he missed them and craved word of them. He knew that Hanno lived, that both he and Mago had been ushered to Iberia, and that Hasdrubal struggled to hold the country, but otherwise his information was patchy, creating more questions than answers.

Monomachus came upon him as he contemplated all of this. He stood just off to the left, in the blank space created by the commander's blind eye. Hannibal remembered his father once saying that Monomachus had been like a rabid wolf when he first appeared in the army. It had taken considerable molding to shape him into a soldier. He had first to be tamed. Tamed enough, at least, that his ferocity could be managed. And Maharbal had once told him that Monomachus claimed never to let a day pass without killing someone. Hannibal had not probed into whether this was true, but he had no reason to doubt it.

“What do you think, then?” Hannibal asked.

“We should go no further than this city until our swords are sated,” Monomachus said. “We'll look fools otherwise. If I commanded this army I would lay waste to this city.”

“You do not command this army. Answer me as what you are, not what you would like to be.”

The officer grunted low in his throat. “As a warrior, I give the same advice. Offer their children to Moloch. The god is hungry and we have not honored him fully.”

“These people are of no use to us dead,” Hannibal said. “Whatever we do here must speak our cause to other people.”

“Blood also speaks.”

Hannibal fought the urge to turn his head and bring the man into better view, but there was something strategic in his placement, something to be lost by responding to it. He knew what Monomachus looked like, anyway. “All right, you have my permission,” he said. “Besiege them. Blockade them. Starve them. Drop rotten corpses in the river upstream of them. Build what machines we need. Do whatever you must, but make this town ours.”

Monomachus did not speak. He did not nod or show emotion in any way. And yet Hannibal knew that he was pleased. Never in his life had he met a man more drawn to blood. This man gnawed at the bone of suffering like no other. He was indeed a wolf, Hannibal thought as he watched him move off, turning, at last, to study him. But his father had been mistaken. Such creatures can never truly be tamed.

Imco Vaca was confused. He had been since the aftermath of Cannae, and the months since had done nothing to order his mind. In some portion of his consciousness that day's slaughter never actually ended. It went on in a place just behind his left ear, as if he saw out of a rent in his skull that looked back to that field of slicing and stabbing and trodden gore. In his dreams, he found himself swimming in a shallow sea of bodies, pushing through arms and legs and torsos. It seemed that he might never truly end that day, never forget it, never see the world without a stain across it, never take a breath without sensing the fetid taint that clung to the hairs high up in his nostrils. How was it possible that such a day could somehow be entwined with his memory of a creature of sublime beauty?

He dreamed daily of the camp follower. She seemed less a real person now and more a divine being, a goddess or nymph, a healing deity who had pulled him out of that putrid carnage and nursed life back into him. He saw no sign of her in the days after he awoke and could learn nothing of her whatsoever. He took to whispering prayers in her behalf. He called her Picene because that was where he had first set eyes on her. He made offerings at each meal, a portion of his food, a sip of his water. He pleaded with the gods to lead the girl back to him, to offer some explanation so that he might find satisfaction. He yearned only for enough anonymity to allow him to slip away to some other life altogether. What if he just abandoned the military life and went in search of Picene? He was not a poor man. He had distinguished himself. His faraway family was actually prospering! Not that he had yet reaped the rewards of his efforts. If he could find Picene and convince her to live quietly with him, a life of the simple things: farming, food, warm bedding at night, and sex, definitely sex . . . In a field under the white sun, in a shed with hay caught in her hair, from behind as she cooked for them, his face buried between her legs at the day's end, the perfect fit and give of her breast held between his thumb and forefinger . . . It nearly drove him insane thinking about it, even more so because he was so uncomfortably surrounded by men. He feared that somehow they might discover his secret thoughts and foul them. He tried not to think about her, but only did so with even more urgency.

The girl from Saguntum found this more than a little amusing. “You've barely got the sense of that ass of hers,” she said. She was ever present now, beside him even during intimate moments. Should his hand in thinking about Picene reach down to stroke his penis, he would hear her chuckle and offer some gibe. What was that he was going to scratch? she would ask. Had a scorpion stung him down there, or did his thing often swell so? He had of late concluded that nobody else could see or hear the girl. This suited him fine. He redoubled his attempts to ignore her, but she was as persistent as she was sarcastic.

For all the torment these two women caused him, they were only at the fringes of his daily hardships. He was so constantly in motion that he felt himself propelled forward by an unseen hand. The troop numbers shrank and swelled with a rhythm he could not comprehend. Last he had heard they numbered just over forty thousand, but this included new recruits from Samnium and Capua, the same type they had slaughtered so completely the year before. Hardly the sort to cement one's confidence, a strange bunch with their Latin customs, their absurd language and superstitions.

It only took a quick glance around to verify that he was in the company of the vilest men. The army was entirely different from what it had been in the early days. That period now resided in his memory cloaked in a heavy nostalgia. Whatever happened to the one named Gantho, who always slapped him on the back and called him the Hero of Arbocala? He disappeared after the Trebia, dead probably, though none could confirm it. What about the one called Mouse? He had been quite a character, perhaps not completely sound of mind, but who was? He had carried a pet—his namesake—in a bag he wore over his shoulder. He fed the pink-nosed creature from his own rations, and was known to converse with it freely. He was head-addled, but Imco liked him well enough, until Mouse was speared in the groin at Trasimene and died slowly, writhing in agony. One of the units' cooks had been kind enough to often allow Imco extra rations, saying he needed it more than most. And a Libyan named Orissun had always been good company. He had a hose as long and wrinkled as a stallion's, a fact that he made clear each time he lifted his tunic. All of these men were long gone now. Viewed through the haze of distance, they seemed venerable creatures, far better than the new rabble that surrounded him, with their Latin customs and dress.