David Durham - Pride of Carthage

She was exactly as he remembered. Well, not exactly. Her hair jutted up from her head in several matted plaits. Black lines of dirt clung to the creases of her forehead and under her chin. A sore glistened red and painful at the corner of her lips. The simple gown she wore had no shape whatsoever. It was caked in mud and spotted with oil stains and with a thousand shades of brown. Imco took all of this in but none of it mattered. Behind the disguise he recognized her as clearly as if she stood before him naked and dripping with cold, fresh water. Picene.

He almost called her by the name he had given her, but he had not taken leave of his senses completely. Not knowing what else to do, he motioned for her to take a seat. The only spot available in their immediate vicinity was the mangled stump of a felled tree. Realizing this, Imco flushed with embarrassment. He looked about for another seat, but as he was doing so the woman sat on the stump and watched him, sticks balanced on her knees. It then took him a few moments to decide to sit on the bare ground. Having done this, he was again at a loss. He heard himself speaking before he really knew what he was saying. He told her his name, his rank in the army, and the unit he ran. He suspected vaguely that this was an absurd way to begin but he could not stop himself and went on blabbering until the woman shook her head. She said something in a language he found familiar, but he did not catch her meaning.

“I can't understand you,” he said, shocked by this realization, and by the unexamined difficulties it signified.

The woman smiled, and Imco saw the humor as well. They had both said that they did not understand the other in languages that the other could not understand. Imco thought this a serious problem, but the woman's smile hinted that it might not be. She said something else to him. It seemed friendly enough, but he had no idea of her meaning, and his bewildered face showed it. The woman seemed to find further amusement in this. She spoke on. From the stream of words he at least gleaned that she was speaking Greek. As the Carthaginian army used Greek for battle commands he knew a few words of the language, but hardly enough for this type of conversation. The woman solved this temporarily.

Motioning that he should stay where he was, she set down her bundle of sticks and moved off quickly. A few moments later she returned, accompanied by a girl of no more than ten years. She was thin as a stick, and blond. To Imco's surprise, however, she spoke Carthaginian. From the flashes of quick anger in her eyes, it seemed best not to ask how she came by this language.

She sat between the two of them and translated. Her interpretations were rough, presumably inexact, but they both listened as if every word mattered. Imco did not have the earlier difficulty of stating the irrelevant. Instead he said the things he actually meant. He said that he had thought of her ever since he first saw her. He meant her no harm, but he had dreamed of her often. He had been plagued with anxiety for her, wondering where in the world she was, how she fared amid the turmoil of a land at war. A woman should not be alone in a place like this. She was alone, right? She was not bound to a man, for example?

In answer to all of this, the woman said she fared just fine. A cold answer, Imco thought, although this might have been a product more of the translator than the speaker. She did not address the issue of whether she was bound to anyone, but she admitted that she had not forgotten him either. She wanted to understand why their paths had crossed three, and now four times. This was more than chance, she believed. Was he hunting her? Imco swore that he was not. He never had. Not, at least, until the donkey came and got him. It was the donkey that led him to—

“What?” the girl asked, for herself and with no prompting from the woman.

Imco went on: He had been living his soldier's existence with no real aim except to survive. It had come as pure shock to him each time they bumped into each other. The fact that she found him on the battlefield of Cannae stunned him with disbelief every day. Nor did the way he found her this time seem any more probable. He had followed the donkey he recognized as hers and here he was. He knew this would sound strange, but it was not the strangest true thing that he could disclose. The dead Saguntine girl who had been following him, for example. She had been no end of annoyance—

This was the last straw for the girl translating. She stood up abruptly. Forces were at work here that she did not understand, and she thought them better kept at a distance. She warned them not to bother her again and she stalked off.

Again, in the silence after her departure, Imco thought the whole venture in danger of failing, which would be so much more terrible now, unthinkable, tragic. Nothing in the world mattered more than the proximity of this beautiful woman. He was still amazed by her presence, her nearness, the radiance that lay under the grime and that knotted hair. He gazed at her as she drew a little nearer, watched her place a hand to her chest, and studied her lips as they pushed out these syllables: “A-rad-na.”

“Aradna?” he asked. When she smiled and nodded, he went through the same motions to tell her his name. For a time the two of them sat near each other, each intoning the other's name, testing it as if searching for answers in the sounds themselves. A little later, Aradna took coal from a neighbor's fire and started her own. She did not tell Imco to leave, and he did not offer to. She roasted a squash by burying it at the edge of the flames, reaching in occasionally and spinning it with her bare hands. Imco brought strips of dried beef out of his satchel, along with heavily watered wine. The two ate in the dying glow of the autumn day. It grew cool quickly, but Imco welcomed this because it brought them nearer to the fire, to each other. Aradna talked freely, conversationally, without the slightest regard for the fact that he could not understand her. She made it seem that the most complicated sentences were understood between them. It was only the simple things that called for gestures and grunts: offering more food, reaching for the wine jug, pointing to a wolf-skin blanket.

He did not notice at just what moment they had moved close enough to touch. At some point they were simply side by side, sharing warmth from the hide, Aradna speaking up into the night sky. He fell asleep watching her profile and woke later to the amazing revelation that the woman's body was curled just next to his and that her hand had slid up under his tunic and was touching his sex. Noticing that he had woken, Aradna drew her hand back. He lay for a long time considering this, and then, nervously, he let his own hand crawl toward her. He touched her at the knee and then slid his fingers up the crease between her thighs. He paused there and might have proceeded no further except that one leg lifted to allow him in. She was both wet and hot and the sensation of her pubic hairs against his fingertips was the most erotic thing he had ever experienced.

He was still in awe of this when she moved, so quickly that he started. She climbed on top of him. He gasped as if in pain. Her warmth as she slid down onto him was overwhelming, complete, the center of his world, and just as hot as if he were pinned to a sun. He could not believe this was happening. She pressed him to the ground and grabbed his lower lip between her teeth and would not let go. He simply could not believe that his life had led to such an utterly, completely exquisite moment.

The next morning he awoke to the smell of her sex on his fingertips. If he had not known what the scent was he would have thought it unpleasant, but because it was proof of their intimacy he inhaled it with pleasure. He could not get enough of it. It did not linger long enough in his nostrils, so throughout the day he again and again placed the back of his nails under his nose. He returned to the camp followers' settlement as often as he could over the next week, until he convinced her to go with him back to the main camp. Though they still could barely speak to each other, neither one considered parting. The army was to be largely stationary for the winter, and no one thought twice about Aradna's presence. Most of them had slaves or servants or captives to keep them warm, if not wives. They simply thought of Aradna as one of these, and Imco kept the truth to himself. She was not a sideline to his daily life; she was the center of it and all else revolved around her. He found that he could say things to her that he had never considered saying to another person. He sometimes feared the Saguntine girl would overhear him, but since Aradna's arrival he had neither seen nor heard from the girl.