David Durham - Pride of Carthage

Only then, with twelve thousand soldiers inside the city, did Hannibal order the men to draw their weapons. They poured through the night streets unencumbered, stumbling on the stones in their enthusiasm, barely able to contain the joy of it, whispering for the townspeople to hide in their homes. Their blades were bared against Rome. The two conspirators set up shouts of alarm near the Roman barracks. As the groggy-eyed soldiers emerged, they were cut down with ease.

All things considered, the devious ploy saved more lives on both sides than a full onslaught would have. The only Romans left alive were those sequestered in the citadel. Given its strong position far out on the peninsula, Hannibal quickly deemed it too formidable an obstacle to besiege. Instead he dug a trench, threw up a wall between it and the city, and left the soldiers to contemplate their fate. He knew that they could be reinforced from the sea and that the Tarentine fleet was trapped in the inner harbor. In fact, the city itself would have more difficulty receiving aid from a distance than the Romans would. But even this Hannibal overcame.

He simply lifted the fleet out of the harbor, set the ships atop wagons and sledges, pushed them through the city streets, and eased them to float again in the sea. The townspeople had never seen so strange a thing as the masts of ships traversing their narrow alleyways. Just like that, a problem other men would have written off as insoluble Hannibal solved to his advantage in days.

Within weeks, Metapontum and Thurii came over. Soon after, all the other Greek cities in the south did likewise, except for Rhegium. This brought port after port into Hannibal's hands. He could now call on Carthage to send reinforcements in through established channels. Amazing, Imco thought, that a single night's work could bear such fruit. The commander had lost none of his genius. Perhaps he was only tempering it into a finer material.

The great waves crashed along the Atlantic coast with a bulk that dwarfed anything seen in the sheltered Mediterranean. Since he had arrived at the mouth of the Tagus the previous winter, Hasdrubal had never tired of staring out at the seething expanse. It spoke to him in each plume of spray, with each rolling, slate-black ridge of water. During the winter storms he heard low grumblings that the locals told him were muffled roars of giants fighting beneath the waves. Silenus—who had accompanied him after learning that he would not be able to rejoin Hannibal soon—argued that he had heard of such noise before and believed it to be the grinding of boulders rolling forward and back on the seabed. The locals laughed at this and pulled his long ears and imitated his bowlegged gait, as if these gestures refuted any theories he might propose. Silenus, in turn, spurned their tales of deep-sea monstrosities. They told tales of creatures with jaws so great they could snap a quinquereme at its midpoint, with a hundred arms to snatch up the unfortunate crew and drag them under.

One evening—drunken, late, over a low fire in the smoky hall these people entertained in—Silenus told what he knew of a land far to the south of Carthage, well past the rolling bushland and the arid hinterland. Past the nations of Nubia and Ethiopia and Axum. Far, far to the south there lived a white-skinned people who burned so quickly beneath the sun that they never ventured out in the day. They lived in subterranean caverns that connected to others and spread all across the known world. They ate only the raw bone marrow of normal men. It was feared by many who knew of these people that they might one day take over the earth, emerging from crevices and cave mouths to wage one massive surprise attack.

His tale was met with dull, black eyes, glazed expressions of anxiety. Several of the courtesans covered their heads with snatches of triangular cloth, and a few men whispered prayers and poured droplets of wine on the floor and peered out into the dark with newfound trepidation. Only later, after several knowledgeable men had confirmed portions of his tale and one even claimed to have met such an African in Gades one night and another asked which gods one should appease to keep these creatures at bay . . . only then did Silenus double over in laughter. He had made the whole thing up! he yelled. Every word of it. Did they see now how easy it was to deceive a feeble mind? He asked them, had they heard about the blue people who live on hammocks slung between the stars? Or the race of men who urinated through the big toe of their left foot? Or the unfortunate tribe whose colorful, bulbous backsides attracted the attentions of amorous baboons?

The Greek made no friends that evening. But, truth be known, Hasdrubal began to enjoy the company of these strange people. Also, Silenus was a constant amusement who somehow brought out the humor in any situation. Life, for the first time in ages, had something of joy about it. He missed Bayala daily and sorely, but there was a sweetness even to this. He knew that she awaited him and would be his again before long. His seed had stuck inside her last autumn. Making offerings daily to Astarte, he asked for a boy child, a cousin to grow beside Little Hammer in the days after the war. Hanno and Mago roamed the country, still elated with victory, beating lessons into the Iberians that they would not soon forget. They were far-flung, yes, but the end seemed nearer than ever before.

For all of these reasons, the first news to reach him of Publius Scipio sucked the air from his lungs and left him a deflated skin of a man. In a few sentences, the messenger made reality of all the pressures and burdens and trepidations that the arrival of his brothers had so recently relieved. New Carthage gone! The heart of all their operations ripped out of them! His home, his brother-in-law's palace, his father's dream, the capital that Hannibal had entrusted to him, the wealth of his nation, hundreds of merchants, captives, aristocrats: all stolen in a single day. The Whore's Wood set ablaze; the streets stained with the blood of those who once called out to him in adulation. It was staggering.

He thanked the gods—both his and his wife's people's—that Bayala had been at her father's Oretani stronghold attending her sister's wedding when New Carthage fell. This, at least, was a blessing. The possibility that she could have been captured, defiled, possessed by Roman soldiers pressed on his head at the temples, set his heart thumping in his chest, and made his fingers tingle. Even though he knew it had not come to pass, the possibility filled him with a greater fear than he had ever known. It cast warfare in an entirely new light, made it foul in ways he had not imagined before. He realized that a husband fights differently than a bachelor. And perhaps, he thought, a father fights differently yet again. It was not a realization he had expected, but these new perspectives produced a gnawing humility. He understood something of what lay behind the faces of the men whose lives he destroyed, whose wives he ordered imprisoned and children enslaved. For the first few days of his mourning, it was almost too much to bear.

But, like so many leaders, Hasdrubal was blessed with an aide who grew stronger at the times he most needed him. Noba never acknowledged his general's grief. He never mentioned Bayala except to write Hasdrubal's correspondence to her. He spoke only of the strategic setback caused by the loss of New Carthage. Also, he served as a funnel through which reports about the Romans' new proconsul came to him. Not only was Publius Scipio's taking of the city masterful, but when dealing with prisoners he showed an astuteness of yet another sort. The Carthaginians and Libyans and Numidians he enslaved and quickly sold onward for profit. But he freed almost all of the Iberians. He protected the diplomatic hostages: children and wives of Iberian chieftains. He bade them return to their people with no animosity from Rome.