David Durham - Pride of Carthage

Hamilcar let his son drape the armor over his shoulders. “Another day coming on outside this tent,” he said, “another opportunity for the fates to side with or against us. It is strange to remember that all men do not likewise gamble their lives each day. Do you recall the councillor Maganthus? His estate is in the rolling hills and pastureland south of the city. Do you know how he passes his days out there? He has thousands of slaves who work the fields surrounding him. But he has one special slave, a Thracian, I think he was. This slave's task is to search among the fields each morning and bring to him a young woman or girl. Maganthus sits naked on his patio, looking out over his workers while the woman takes his penis in her mouth and stimulates him to climax. The Thracian stands to the side, sword unsheathed and at the ready, should the woman try to damage their master. The combination of the girl's mouth upon him and the slaves in the field and the young Thracian with his sword unsheathed . . . the danger and the power of it all, that is where he finds his pleasure. He told me this himself, as if he were proud of it. What do you make of him?”

“He's a slave himself,” Hannibal said, “to his body's desires.”

“That was never a difficulty for you, was it?”

“You have always shown me how a man controls his desires.”

“I've tried, yes, but this control has come more easily to you.” The old soldier paused a moment as Hannibal clipped the buckles snug around his battered chest. It must have pained him, for he closed his eyes and drew his breath in slowly. The muscles beneath his tear-shaped scar twitched a few times, then settled.

“Maganthus is a perverse wretch,” Hamilcar said, “but it's not his desires that interest me. It's the delusion he lives under. He told me that each girl who services him gives him proof of her loyalty to him. Any one of them could clamp down and end his pleasure forever. The fact that they don't proves to him that they love him. He disregards the sword in the Thracian's hand. That to him is no honest deterrent. If her life were miserable, she would give it up. So the fact that she neither harms him nor gives away her own life proves to him that all is as it should be.”

Hannibal had finished with the breastplate and now stood with his father's helmet in his hands. “Maganthus forgets that the gods created us to love life without reason, even in the face of torture.”

Hamilcar motioned that he would not have the helmet on yet. “That makes it seem as if the gods destined us to be slaves,” he said. “Slaves to life, at least.”

Hannibal smiled. “That's how it has to be, but a true man is a slave to nothing else, right? Not a slave to another man. Nor to desires for sex or fear or drink or riches . . .”

“What about to the bondage of marriage? You have no idea, my young son, how much of my time is spent in silent conversation with your mother. She has been a splendid wife to me, given me strong children, and raised them in health. But she doesn't approve of what I—of what we—do. You'll never hear her say so, but I know this to be true. I did something once that I always regretted afterward. I showed her my work. I let her see my bloody masterpiece—a battlefield piled high with mercenary dead. I wanted to shock her with it. I wanted her to see my work, to understand the wrath of Hamilcar Barca and see that I—a lone man—could dominate many others. I should never have done this.”

“Why? Did she not understand what she saw?”

“No,” Hamilcar said, “just the opposite. She understood it completely. She's loathed me ever since.”

“You're joking,” Hannibal said. “Mother never once spoke ill of you.”

“What do you know of it? You were nine years old when we left Carthage. Do you think she would've spoken of such things to you? Didobal did not stop loving me; but she loathes me at the same time.”

“If that's how she feels, she is wrong,” Hannibal said. “Honor comes from battle with formidable opponents. The mercenaries had Carthage on its knees. Only you could save them. No woman can know what that means. So she shouldn't judge.”

Hamilcar placed a hand on his son's shoulder. There was gentleness in the touch, though the hand was callused and misshapen by years of violence. “Don't speak with that tone when you speak of your mother. You believe you have all the answers, I know. But this is a sickness of youth. We get other illnesses in old age, but in youth, when our bodies are strong, we suffer from one thing only—certainty. When I was younger I too had few doubts about my purpose.”

“Do you now?”

“No. You know my goal. I've never wavered from it. I still don't. Despite all my old man's dithering, few know their calling as clearly as I do. I don't truly question the rightness of my deeds in the world. Your mother is a creator; I am a destroyer. There is balance in this.”

The old warrior stepped away and tested the fit of his breastplate again. Resigning himself to the armor, he dropped his arms and looked again at his son. He said, “I do, however, question the rightness of the world itself.”

Hannibal, lying on his cot in his tent of grief, realized he was just now learning to understand the man. How was it possible that conversations of years before could speak to him now in such a different way? He wished he could ask his father what wisdom the intervening years had provided him for his own old questions. But one cannot make new queries of the dead. If there were answers to be found, they must be in the scripts already written. “The rightness of the world itself,” the old man had said. That was what he doubted. Ten years on, Hannibal was beginning to understand Hamilcar. In some ways, he was becoming him.

But the next morning, when he spoke to his assembled generals, he focused on one portion of his father's words and pushed aside this last proclamation. It might have been true, but what use was doubt to those who still breathed air and lived? Doubt undermined; it offered no help to those still slaves to life. When he issued his decision on their opening move of the season, the entire council looked at him in disbelief. Gemel asked him to repeat himself. Hannibal did. There was one way to tie all of these disparate problems together in a single action. They were to strike camp by the end of the week and march north.

“But not to Capua,” he said. “Our target is Rome.”

Word of Hasdrubal's death preceded Hanno's arrival by a scant few days. The Barca family was still in mourning, though they did so in a strange way that angered Sapanibal. The priests, with their fickle wisdom, deemed that Hasdrubal's death should not be marked in the normal manner. They decreed that he had done something to invoke the ill will of Moloch. His failures in Iberia, his flight toward Italy, and his defeat proved it. Because of this the family could show no grief. They could not wail or cut their hair. They could not go veiled. They could not utter his name without speaking it down toward the ground. They could not prick their fingers with pins or cut their veins at the wrist to bleed until they were weak and faint. Instead, the priest forbade them to eat meat for the month. They could make their own offerings to the gods throughout the day, but in the evening all the Barca women were made to bow their heads as the priests offered sacrifices to cleanse the nation of Hasdrubal's sins.

This galled Sapanibal. They should be praising the man and easing his way into the afterworld. In typical Carthaginian fashion, they betrayed him instead. Hers were a petty people, she thought, who neither reward a man for his successes in life nor honor him in death. Sapanibal raged against this in her private chambers, with only her servants to hear her. In public, she kept her thoughts to herself. Neither Sophonisba nor Imilce showed anything on her face but the fear she expected from them. Even Didobal seemed to accept the advice of the priests. She swore to herself that if one of them looked at her with an inkling of rebellion in her eyes she would rise up and decry the priests' orders. But they did not. Not that she could see, at least.