David Durham - Pride of Carthage

When he was done, Hannibal said nothing. Indeed, he had hardly listened at all. He kept walking. Monomachus rode along beside the commander for some time, and then, as if it had just occurred to him, he asked if Hannibal had need of a horse.

“The way would be much quicker mounted,” he said. “If we are to fight on perhaps we should make haste.”

“The war is over,” Hannibal said, uttering the first words to escape his parched lips in days. “The only fight left in me is the fight for peace.”

“Moloch abhors peace,” Monomachus said.

“And I abhor Moloch,” Hannibal snapped. “He's your god; not mine. Not anymore.”

Monomachus—stunned, angered, frightened by the blasphemy, all of these—yanked his horse to a halt and sat on the creature immobile as the crowd issued around him.

Hannibal walked on.

Late in the morning, he paused to stare at the full grandeur of his native city, its great walls, the thick foundations, the hill of Byrsa upon which Elissa had first laid claim to this blessed and accursed portion of Africa. Had that beautiful Phoenician queen known what she was starting when she landed here?

By midday he walked down an avenue hemmed in by throngs from the city: young men jostling for position, laborers who had dropped their tasks, women of the lower classes who managed to watch every move he made while simultaneously keeping their eyes lowered, priests looking on from beneath the hoods that hid them from the light of day, slaves and children, aged crones who greeted him in the old way, kneeling on the ground with their wrinkled foreheads against the dust. Vendors sold food, offered water from gourds. Even dogs peered out between legs, curious in their own way.

It was both wonderful and sad to see their many faces, so different in features and skin tone, persons born in this land and those drawn here, some with black curls tight to their scalps, or locks flowing in waves, or hair straight and fine as silk. These were his people. They were the embodiment of all the nations of the world.

Several times councillors stepped out of the crowd and approached him with an air of importance, wearing the robes and the stern faces of their rank. He passed them by, but not out of malice. He would speak to them soon, but first he had other business.

He saw the figures standing on the walls from a long way out, and those gathered at the top of the main ramp leading into the city. He was calm until the moment he saw his family banner hoisted. The Barca lion. It marked the place where his family stood. At the foot of the granite incline he paused and squinted his single eye. He squeezed the figures up there into better focus. There stood his mother, cloaked in a purple robe, her hair bound up into an intricate crown rising above her head. Beside her Sapanibal, touching at the shoulder with a man whom Hannibal could not name just then, an old friend of his father's. It took him a moment to pick out Imilce from among the numerous household servants. But she was there, and before her stood a boy. Her hands rested on his shoulders and though he bore no resemblance to the two-year-old he had left five years ago, Hannibal knew who the boy must be. He hesitated for a few moments, and then he turned to one of the Sacred Band. He sent the man up with a message.

As he stood waiting his heart beat at an ever more furious pace. He called for water and someone brought him some. He drank deeply, but felt bloated suddenly, decided he hated water, and tossed the gourd to the ground. When he looked up again, the guard was leading the boy down the slope toward him. Hannibal could only stare. They seemed to approach so quickly. In an instant they were in front of him. The guard presented him, saying, “Commander, here is your son, Hamilcar.” The man stepped away and then the father stood, weak-kneed, before the child.

Hamilcar was not as he had been before. He was tall, lean, and as finely formed as a father could have wished. He wore a gown of Eastern silk, light green, upon which a bird had been embroidered with blue thread, its wings flecked with gold. He stood with his arms pressed down to either side, a posture that accentuated the lines of his collarbones and the thinness of his shoulders. Hannibal could see the contours beneath the fabric and he wanted to place his hands atop them. His ears jutted out from his head, visible even though his hair hung in loose curls around his face, ringlets just the size to slip around a finger. Most of his features were entirely unfamiliar, nothing like they had been. They needed to be memorized anew. All except his eyes . . . His two large, bright eyes contained both the mother and the father in them: brown at the center, grayish along the outer rim. They sheltered beneath a strong brow line, like his, and yet the shape of them was all Imilce. He was magnificent.

Thinking so, Hannibal was completely unprepared for what happened next. The child's lower lip began to quiver. His chin flexed and convulsed as if tiny creatures writhed below the skin. His nostrils flared, his eyebrows twitched, and it began: the boy cried. Hannibal realized all of sudden what the boy must see. While he was looking on the child's beauty the boy was gazing at a beast. A gape-mouthed ogre with a single eye, with blistered skin and cracked lips, with great hands scarred by battle, pockmarks in the flesh of his knuckles, his hair wild about him like the mane of a dying lion, his beard unkempt, bearing bits of debris in it. The blood of millions tainted him and he must have smelled of it, a stench of such magnitude that no bathing would ever cleanse him completely. He loomed over the boy, casting him in shadow, worse than any demon of Moloch. He reached for him, wanting to bring his goodness close to him, but the boy flinched and took a half-step back.

“No, no, don't cry, Little Hammer. Don't cry. I . . . I am your father returned to you. It's all over.”

The boy's face twisted into a mask of misery at this. Tears poured down his cheeks. Hannibal scooped him up in one arm and tried to comfort him with the other. He felt the boy go stiff against him, tense and sobbing even more, twisting as if he would reach out to someone for salvation but feared to. Hannibal began to ascend the ramp. He supported the child with a single arm, the other swaying at his side as a countermeasure to his careful steps. He murmured as softly as he could to ease the child's fear, asking him not to cry, saying that he was not the monster he seemed. “There is no need to cry,” he said, over and over again, speaking the truth and lying at the same time, unsure which was which anymore.

All the while his eye stared fixedly at his wife. He watched the distance between them close and inside, silently, he asked for forgiveness.

Aradna had many gifts to thank the goddesses for. She had escaped war. Scenes of death haunted her dreams, but they were no longer the fabric of every waking moment. She had found her way to the island she had known only by name, and on landing she discovered the remnants of her father's family, an uncle who barely remembered his brother, several cousins, and a sister-in-law who—magically—welcomed her without question. Boys from the village laughed at the strange accent she spoke Greek with, but clearly they liked her company. They helped her build a hut of stone and clay, with a wood-framed roof of clay tiles. In a pen beside it she raised Persian fowl. She helped her reclaimed family harvest their olives and tend their pistachio trees and repair fishing nets for the village fleet. She helped an old man from the town raise edible dormice. This particularly gave her joy, for the squirrel-like creatures were shy and quiet, with trembling noses and bulbous black eyes and fur so soft she marveled. True, they all eventually went into pots to fatten and were sold live at the weekly market, but still it was a gift to watch them born, to hold them in hairless infancy and see them grow. Nobody hungered to rob or rape her. Her small fortune was hardly even necessary, and yet was a comfort buried deep beneath the earth floor of her dwelling. She set her donkey loose to roam the nearby hills, though the creature never wandered far from her. Was this not happiness?