David Durham - Pride of Carthage

Imilce looked around from one tower to the next and then out to the horizon, waiting for someone to end the alert, to explain away the banner as a prank or a misunderstanding. It had to be, for no enemy army should be approaching them now. Hanno had assured her they had everything in hand. Either the Romans would make a peace, he said, or the Libyans would rout them with their superior numbers. She tried to think of some way that either possibility could lead to this new development. Perhaps the peace had been concluded, and the approaching force was friendly—

Sophonisba whispered again. “The gods are punishing me still. It's him.”

It took Imilce a moment to pick him out amid the throng of men, but there he was. Masinissa. Imilce glanced at her sister-in-law but could read nothing in her profile. It was stony and cold and distant: all strange words to describe such rich features. Sophonisba's lips parted. “Let us go closer.”

It took a few moments to leave their quarters, walk through the palace, and cross the courtyard. The men might have barred them from scaling the gate tower, but none yet knew what to make of Sophonisba. She might be only a girl, or she might be a tyrant queen with the power of life and death over them: they were not sure which. They parted before her, and the two women soon found a vantage point overlooking the city's main entrance.

“Look at him,” Sophonisba said. “Just look . . .”

Indeed he was something to behold. Gone was the lithe adolescent figure Imilce had last seen frolicking with his friends after a lion hunt, gone the roundness of his boyish features and the handsome innocence of his eyes. Masinissa rode as a man at the head of a mass of men. He wore a royal garment, a vibrant sweep of indigo cloth wrapped around his body and up into his hair to form a headdress. He approached the gates of the city with utter confidence, his legs and feet bare. The vibrancy of his dress made him the center of attention outside the walls. Those behind him seemed a dusty, sunbaked manifestation of the continent itself: dressed in many hues but all beginning and ending in shades of brown, clothed in animal hides, tattooed, with knotted manes of hair, lion teeth dangling around their necks, spears clenched in knotted fists.

Masinissa shouted that the gates had best be opened. The city's new monarch had arrived; he was thirsty and hungry, for meat and for the pleasures of his office.

The magistrate in charge in Syphax' absence answered that he opened the gate for no man but his king. He joked that the young prince had been sent to the wrong destination. The city was sealed against him, he said. That was plain to see. Perhaps the prince was ignorant of the army awaiting him on the plains. If he wished to win the city, he must first turn and face its king.

Masinissa grinned wide enough to show the ivory of his teeth. Alas, the magistrate was mistaken in many ways. First, he was no longer a prince. And second, the battle on the plain had already been fought, and won by the Roman-Massylii alliance. Syphax' army was in ruins. Dead and burned already. As this was so, debate was of no use. Simply open the gates and all inside would be treated fairly.

“The battle is concluded,” he said. “Let us shed no more blood today. We are all of Africa here. Now open!”

At a shout from an officer, the spearmen along the entire wall facing him lifted their weapons up to the ready. Masinissa was within spear range and could easily have found himself a cushion stuck by a hundred points. His soldiers called for him to retreat somewhat, but he lifted his fingers and snapped them—one loud pop—in the air above his head. A moment later, in answer, two mounted guards led a bound man forward. He sat straight-backed atop a silver horse, his hands chained behind his back, his head bare to the heat of the sun, dressed like the simple prisoner he now was.

“Behold your former king,” Masinissa said.

Sophonisba inhaled sharply, a breath like a child who has just stopped crying. She must have recognized her husband immediately. The magistrate, however, did not. He shouted down that never had this man been his king. The Massylii laughed at this. A guard at one side of the man in question shoved him savagely with the butt of his spear. The man gripped the horse with his legs, but not tightly enough. He tumbled off, landing hard upon his shoulder. His cheek pressed against the parched soil, and his neck bent dangerously. The horse did not move. It simply blew air through its nostrils and waited for its rider to fall completely free. Having done so, the man stayed curled on his side, in a fetal pose, deaf to Masinissa's calls that he rise.

For a moment, the scene grew chaotic. Masinissa's men wrestled the man up from the ground, kicking and cuffing him and demanding that he stand. He made himself deadweight, then bared his teeth and nipped the flesh of one guard's cheek. At Masinissa's direction, one of the Massylii clamped his hands around the man's head and tilted it toward the sun, showing first one profile and then the other. They ripped his tunic down the chest, as if this would identify him. And then they held his hands up for inspection, pointing at the lion track tattooed there. The magistrate could have no question now. It was Syphax.

Masinissa dismounted and strolled near enough to the wall that he hardly even had to raise his voice. “Fortune has turned,” he said. “I wouldn't be here before you now, except that your king seized my father's domains a few months ago. We who were blameless he dishonored. We who were proud were made to bow before him. But all has been set right again. I'm not here to harm you. Why would I, when you are now my servants? All that Syphax took from us I reclaim; and all that was previously Syphax' I now call mine. You will find me a kinder master than he. So open!”

But still the magistrate hesitated. He argued with his advisers and thought up new questions to ask the young king, who grew more and more annoyed. What had become of the Carthaginian leader? Hanno Barca was dead, flown into the air as ashes. He was a memory. If they knew Publius Scipio, Masinissa said, they would not doubt him. The consul had lost barely any men in the battle, such as it was. Publius had sent him to pacify the city through offers of peace, as a brother, but if the gates stayed closed then Cirta—with no army in all of Africa to call on—would find herself besieged by the might of Rome.

One of the officers saw a chance to throw a gibe and did so: Was Masinissa truly a king? He sounded more like a bed partner to the Roman. The laughter along the walls flared and died quickly, nervously. In answer to it Masinissa kissed his hands and pushed the air in front of him out with the palms of his hands. He swore that his offer of mercy ended in the next few moments. “If the gates do not open now I will commit myself to the slaughter or imprisonment of the entire population, the mutilation and torture of the magistrates . . .”

He began to detail the methods he would use, but Imilce did not hear him. Sophonisba grabbed her by the arm and dragged her through the soldiers, pushing and cursing her way down off the battlements and into the crowd below. The young woman's grip was bruising, but Imilce did not care. She was hardly aware of the people around her. She was not thinking about what was to happen to her next, or about the turn of fortune in the war, or about Hanno's death, or how she might survive the next few hours. Instead, she thought of her son. Ideas came at her like darts zipping in from unseen attackers. Hamilcar was safe in Carthage! What a joy that he was safe in Carthage! But the next moment, Imilce realized she might never see him again, might not know what became of him. He might forget her in the coming years and call some other woman mother. She thought of Didobal caring for him, and this struck her as both a relief and as a sadness. She had a momentary fantasy that Tanit would feel her distress and lift her up and fly her home to Carthage. She closed her eyes, even as she stumbled forward, asking the goddess to let her touch him again, let her cradle that boy in her arms and kiss him and kiss him and kiss him . . .