David Durham - Pride of Carthage

Regardless of all he had witnessed at Hannibal's side, or perhaps because of it, Imco was surprised almost to fright when the commander invited him to sleep out with him on the ridge of hills to the east of camp. He said they would slumber on the open ground, like boys, and talk beneath a canopy of stars. Just why Hannibal chose him for this honor, Imco could not say. They had sat together often enough at meetings throughout the summer, but they had not yet spoken on such intimate terms. In fact, whenever Imco opened his mouth in council he had the feeling that the commander was gazing at him with a certain amount of mirth. He was not even sure that the other remembered their first meeting, back at Arbocala, when Imco had begun the great deception that was his military career.

As they climbed up from the camp, Hannibal carried nothing except his cloak and a small sack. Imco slipped his somewhat more elaborate bedroll under his arm, embarrassed, for suddenly it seemed like a luxury out of character with Hannibal's invitation. Atop the ridge, the glorious burning colors of sunset were just starting to dim. The rim of earth that cut the sun's passing went a deeper and deeper red, bloody and congealed, as if the roof of the sky would be tacky to the fingers, if one could reach so high. The country below hulked off in all directions. Imco thought the hills looked like a hundred shoulders shrugging their way into the distance, curves of muscle and bone captured in the soil itself. He could have studied the view for some time. Though it struck him as beautiful, there was also something ominous in the creeping shadows that he half thought he should keep an eye on.

And these were not the only shifting forms that kept him ill at ease. The guards of the Sacred Band flanked them on all sides. They formed an eight-pronged star, each of them black-cloaked and solemn. They never spoke or looked at their master directly, and yet they followed every move and kept their formation as much as the lay of the land allowed. Though they carried various daggers in their belts, their main arm was a spear in the Spartan style. They planted the staff of the weapon like a third leg each time they halted, and then stood so still as to be made of stone.

This, for Imco, was a troubling illusion. He could not help but look askance at them. Of course he had seen them before and noted their fierce aspect, but he had never stayed so long at the center of their focus. He also realized that the Saguntine girl was nowhere to be seen. Perhaps these men unnerved her as well.

“My lord,” he said, “must they follow you everywhere and never speak a word?”

“Why should they speak?” Hannibal asked. “I never talk to them or they to me. They each know how they are to serve me, and they do it. It's strange that you mention them. Myself, I barely notice them. From the day I first set out for Iberia with my father, the Sacred Band has shadowed me.”

Hannibal tossed out his cloak and dropped onto it. From a pocket in his cloak he produced a handful of apricots. He spread them out beside him and motioned that Imco could help himself. After a time, he said, “Look at this country, Imco. Sometimes I understand why Romans fight so stubbornly for it, though I doubt many of them notice its beauty. Some men look upon such things and see only trees and earth, the bare materials only. Are you one such as this?”

“No,” Imco said, “I see rocks as well. Some shrubs . . .”

Thankfully, the commander laughed at this. He seemed in a jovial mood. Perhaps it was the warm light, but his face held little of the brooding solemnity with which he oversaw meetings. Even his blind eye did not look so awful. It moved now like the other, still filmed over but lively enough that Imco almost suspected the commander could actually see out of it once more. But he might only have grown used to it. He no longer kept the eye closed and it did not ooze the yellow liquid that had so long plagued him.

Hannibal spoke of his boyhood, of his early years in Iberia. “By the gods, it was a time of marvels,” he said. His father and brother-in-law still alive, the whole peninsula before them, one nation after another against which to test themselves. They were so far from the meddling hand of the Council that they wielded the power of kings. And yet it was the simple things from that time that he remembered most fondly. Long discussions with his father came foremost. He thought happily of his life among the soldiers. He was younger than any of them, but known by all. He was gifted with thousands of uncles. He would wander out each night and toss himself down anywhere among the thronging army and talk late into the night with whoever he landed near. It was there that he learned of different men's customs, of their gods and the things they ate and their desires. He could greet men of a hundred nations in their native tongues, with the gestures of respect they would each recognize. Truly, that time was the foundation of his education.

He was silent for a few minutes, chewing the golden fruit. The grin at the side of his lips indicated that he was remembering something fondly. He said that as a youth he had not been so soft as he was now. He had slept without a bedroll at all. He had simply cast himself down and accepted the contours of the earth. There had been a time when he had even made a project of sleeping on bare rock. He learned to find comfort within the hardness, the cracks and crevices and irregularities. “Stone is much like the human body,” he said, “but it took some training to discover this.”

Imco pursed his lips and almost admitted that he preferred the soft beds of Capua to anything he had otherwise experienced, but he deemed this best kept to himself.

“We told many stories in those days,” Hannibal said. “The histories of the gods.”

“Do you remember them still?” Imco asked.

“Of course. I could speak tales all night if asked. Do you remember El? You will recall that he went out to sea on a reed boat in the early moments of the world—”

“Why?”

Hannibal had fallen into the cadence of a storyteller. Imco's interruption brought him up short. “What?”

“Why did El go to sea? As a fisherman? A merchant?”

“Do you know nothing of the gods?”

Imco said that he knew something, but still the tales he had heard thus far called up more questions than they gave answers.

“Imco, at times you are like a child,” Hannibal said. “I like this about you. Talking to you is like speaking to some grown version of the man I imagine my son might become. But it doesn't matter why El went to sea. The god went to sea. That's all there is to it. Would you ask whether he rowed his boat or sailed? Whether he went alone or had a crew? Would you ask how he could have a boat in the time before the world was fully created? Don't answer me, Imco—I'm sure you would ask all those questions. But don't. There are some things you ask questions about. What is for breakfast? Is it raining or snowing? But when I'm telling a story of El, you don't ask; you listen.”

The captain held his tongue. His head still rang at the magnitude of the casual compliment the commander had just uttered. This, more than anything, quieted him.

Hannibal began at the beginning, reminding Imco that El was the Father of the Gods, the Creator of Created Things. He was called the Kindly, and he loved the quiet of peace above all else. When he was young, he decided for some unknown reason to go to sea. Far out on the water he met two beautiful women, Asherah and Rohmaya. Taken with them, El killed a bird flying overhead with his spear. He roasted it and—blocking it from the women's view—sprinkled the flesh with drops of his semen. When he fed the flesh to them, they took his seed inside them and were charmed by it. He asked them whether they would stay with him, and whether they would rather be his wives or his daughters. They chose to wed him, just as he had hoped. They bore him two children, Shachar and Shalim, the dawn and the dusk, and so the world began to take the form we now know, measured by the passage of days, shared between the old one's children. In the ages to follow, Asherah became the more prolific mother of the two women, giving birth to more than seventy offspring, all of the many divine ones who live in the world beyond human awareness.