David Durham - Pride of Carthage

One evening, Aradna met him outside his tent. She stalked up to him proudly and, through an enormous smile, spoke a single sentence in Carthaginian. “You are handsome.” She grinned at herself, proud as a cat, and Imco knew for a divine certainty that he had never seen anything more beautiful. The only flaw in all this was that he worried constantly that she would leave him, or that he would die in the next battle, or that her beauty would draw trouble. It astonished him that her disguises fooled anyone, but she rarely attracted the type of attention Imco feared. When the next blow—the first great blow—fell, it had nothing to do with their love affair. It was completely unexpected, and it woke him to the unpredictable world they both still inhabited.

He heard the commotion while in his tent. He was watching Aradna's fingers as they plucked strips of goat meat from the hot stones lining their fire pit. Outside the horns sounded a call he could make no sense of. Feet tramped by; people yelled unintelligible things to each other. Imco was up in a moment. He spoke over his shoulder to Aradna, saying that he would just be gone a moment, and then he joined the growing crowd moving toward the command tent. Eventually, he had to shove and claw his way through, frantic now, for something evil was in the air and he could make no sense of the bits and pieces and exclamations he heard.

When he finally broke through the circle around the front of Hannibal's tent he saw the commander on his knees, a shocking sight in itself. His arms hung limp at the sides, palms out, fingers quivering. Before him lay a round object that at first made no sense. It seemed to be a head, clasped between two hands held in place with twine. Imco stepped closer, blinking. It was a head clasped between two hands held in place with twine. The man's face was barely visible, bruised and battered, rotten, bluish and reddish and brown all at once. Ghastly. And yet Hannibal had no difficulty recognizing who the person had been.

“What have they done to you?” he asked. “Hasdrubal, what have they done?” He bent closer to the head, but his attention focused on the hands. He touched the knuckles with his fingers. “These are not his hands!” he said, drawn in like a madman clutching at a tendril of fantastic possibility. “They are not his!”

If these are not his hands, Imco saw him thinking, perhaps this is not his head. Maybe it is all a lie. Several of the other officers drew closer. Gemel reached out as if to touch Hannibal's back, but he did not do so. He studied the severed limbs, and then he whispered in the commander's ear. The news he gave sapped all hope from the man. Hannibal, as if angry at whatever Gemel had said, scooped the head up and cradled it against his torso. He strode silently into his tent. The flap fell shut and all who remained stared about in dumb silence.

Gemel whispered something to a few of the other officers, and then, seeing Imco, he approached him. “We must all meet at once,” he said. “There is much to discuss. What you see is true. That was the head of Hasdrubal Barca, thrown down outside of camp by a band of Roman horsemen.”

“And the hands?”

“We cannot know for sure, but the horsemen, as they left, shouted the name of the scribe Silenus.”

Hannibal wanted to rage. From the moment he recognized Hasdrubal's features, wrath stirred within him. He felt it twisting him. He heard the roar of it in his ears, a force such as one hears facing into a fierce wind, a noise that takes from the world the variations that differentiate sounds and leaves only the pure cry that is noise and silence at the same instant. He wanted to rampage. He felt Monomachus clutching his elbow, clawing at him, begging to be allowed free rein to spread his terror a thousandfold in retribution. He knew that he muttered consent to the man, but he did not do so with the full measure of his sorrow. He did not know where to direct his anger. Rome was the obvious target. He would never say otherwise in his life. But a man has quieter demons to contend with and these spoke more softly than the wraiths. They asked who was truly to blame. From whose hand dripped the most blood? And also they answered: Hannibal's. Hannibal's.

Trapped between these feuding choruses, he could barely move for days after receiving the terrible gift. Like a man punched so hard in the gut that he cannot respond, cannot speak, cannot strike back, Hannibal doubled over the head that had once been atop his brother's marvelous shoulders and he simply held it. He did not care that the stench thickened the air in his tent. He ignored the decay. Yes, it sickened him so much that he heaved dryly, convulsively, trying to expel whatever was in him. Skin peeled roughly off the skull and the very touch of it on any object left a malignant stain that he could feel as much as see and smell. All this was true, but still this was his brother. These were the eyes he had once used to see; the mouth he had spoken with; the ears through which he had heard the world. He rubbed away the grime crusting his dry orbs and tried to look inside. It was impossible that Hasdrubal no longer resided somewhere behind those eyes. He placed his lips against the rotten flesh and whispered to him. Words tumbled from him, never long thoughts, but simple sentences like those spoken to a child. He told him that it was all right. It was fine. It would be all right. Oh, but his mother loved him. His mother thought him the handsomest. All women thought so. His father knew him to be the bravest, the strongest. He would take him home, he promised. Home to Carthage. He would leave that very day. Come. Together they would see the city jutting up from the Byrsa hill and they would smell the lemon trees and watch sparrows darting overhead in the fading light of evening. They would run out to the obelisk on the point overlooking the sea and they would stand with their chests pressed to the marble, gazing up at the long stretch of stone piercing the sky, awed that the clouds above slid by untouched.

He had been so young when he left Carthage, but now the place called to him somberly, offering him the past reborn, assuring him that what had been might be again. By going back they would find a new way forward, a different future wherein Hasdrubal lived on. And Imilce was there. His son lived in that place. Hanno and Mago could be called home. Mistakes could be undone. What madness was it that he was not with them at that very moment, all together, in health, beneath an African sun, sheltering within palm groves, walking the innermost gardens of his family's palace?

Hannibal's stunned sorrow and longing did not leave him in the days and weeks that followed. He did not, of course, bear Hasdrubal home to Africa; he had no choice but to sow him in Italian soil. Mandarbal undertook the monumental task of sending his soul on into the underworld despite the damaged vessel that he was. The smoke of incense clouded the air; bells tolled for days; priests called out their sacred words unremittingly into the day and night, uttering rites that none understood but that all cowered before, walking nervously, living quietly, afraid lest some new horror be released by all of this. Eventually, Mandarbal answered the lack of a body by beheading a Roman prisoner whom he deemed suitable to provide Hasdrubal's double. With this man's limbs and organs acting as his own, the general finally lay down to search for peace. Hannibal took no joy in any of this. It provided little comfort, but it had to be done. As so much else did.

He had a war to prosecute. In meeting with his generals, he acted as if nothing of personal significance had happened. Hasdrubal's death mattered only because a skilled leader had been eliminated. An army had been routed and scattered, leaving Hannibal's force once again alone on the peninsula. None of the news his generals brought was good. He learned, finally, detailed versions of all that happened the previous year in Iberia. The loss of New Carthage was tremendous, but Baecula, Ilipa, and now Scipio's preparations to attack Carthage . . . The defeats themselves meant staggering losses. And, what was most important, he saw in the young soldier's actions signs of military genius previously absent from the Roman side. No Roman's mind had yet moved so nimbly, with such cunning, using brilliance tempered with humility. He wondered if this, too, was his fault. Perhaps in taking so long to win this war he had allowed for the maturing of a student, a protégé who was unfortunately aligned against him. He wished that he could somehow draw Publius to stay in Italy, but the news of his intentions reached him too late for that.