David Durham - Pride of Carthage

He was still living in Carthage, at the family's palace on the hill of Byrsa. His father had roused him from sleep. His face was ragged and coated with sweat and filth. He smelled foul and he still wore the soiled armor of battle. “Come, I would show you something,” Hamilcar said.

The boy Hannibal's heart thumped in his chest; not only from the abruptness of his awakening, but he had not even known his father had returned from the war. Mercenaries had turned on the city and besieged it. The conflict had been brutal beyond recent memory, but under Hamilcar's leadership the Carthaginian nobles had finally driven the mercenaries out into the desert, where the traitors made their last stand. What exactly had transpired, the boy had no idea.

Nor did Hamilcar open his lips as he led Hannibal through the dark palace and out onto the grounds. They passed through several courtyards and down into the stables. A torch burned at the far end of the corridor. They moved toward it through the shadows. The horses snorted and shifted nervously, watching their progress; they seemed as aware as Hannibal that something profound was to happen.

But it was not until they had actually halted that Hannibal saw the figure to whom they were drawn. A man had been nailed to wood supports by the wrist, his body drooping, head down upon his chest. He was covered in crusted fluids and dust and had been hanging for long enough that the blood dripping from his impaled wrists had congealed into black globules. Hamilcar grasped a handful of the man's hair and yanked his head upright. The man's eyes opened, rolled up, and then veered off into semiconsciousness.

“This man betrayed Carthage,” Hamilcar said, his voice a dry rasp that he could not shake, though he cleared his throat several times. “Do you understand that? This man conspired to open the gates of our city to the mercenaries. He did it for money, for power, out of a sheer hatred that he hid behind the mask of a countryman. He almost succeeded. Had this man the power, he would yank you up by the ankles and bash your skull against the stones beneath us. He would nail me to a cross and leave me to die slowly. He'd see me a rotting, maggot-filled corpse, and he would laugh at the sight. He would slit your brother's necks and rape your mother and have her sold into slavery. He would live in our house and eat our food and rule over our servants. This is the man before you. Do you know his name?”

Hannibal shook his head, his eyes pinned to the stones and not moving even as he answered.

“His name is Tamar. Some call him the Blessed, others the Foul. Some call him friend. Some father. Some lover. Do you understand? He has other names also: Alexander. Cyrus. Achilles. Khufu. Yahweh or Ares or Osiris. He is Sumerian, Persian, Spartan. He is the thief in the street, the councillor who sits beside you, the man who covets your wife. You choose his name, for he has many, as many names as there are men born to women. His name is Rome. His name is mankind. This is the world we live in, and you'll find it full of men like this.”

Hamilcar released the man's head and placed his hands on his son's shoulders. He pulled him close and let the boy rest his forehead against his cheek. Hannibal did this willingly, for he did not want to look at the man about whom they spoke. “Son,” he said, “there was a noose around our neck and to cut it I had to kill many men most horribly. You are a child, but the world you were born into is no kind place. This is why I teach you now that creation is full of wolves aligned against us. To live in it without falling into madness, you must make of yourself more than a single man. You love with all your heart as a father and son and husband. You wrap your arms around your mother and know the goodness of women. You find beauty in the world and cherish it. But never waver from strength. Never run from battle. When the time comes to act, do so, with iron in your hand and your loins and your heart. Unreservedly love those who love you, and protect them without remorse. Will you always do that?”

Against his father's chest, the boy nodded.

“Then I am proud to call you my firstborn son,” Hamilcar said. He pulled away and stood up straight and yanked a dagger from the sheath on his ankle and pressed the handle into his son's hand. “Now kill this man.”

Hannibal stared at the blade in his small hand, a dagger nearly as large as the toy swords he practiced with. He closed his fingers around the handle slowly, felt the worn leather, the rough weave of it and the solidity of the iron beneath it. He raised his eyes and moved toward the man and did as his father ordered. He did not lift the man's head, but he slipped the blade under his chin and cut a ragged, sloppy line that yanked free of his flesh just under the ear. He fell against the dead man's body for a moment. Though he sprang back, the touch still stained his nightclothes with the man's newly flowing blood. He was just eight years old that night. Of course he had not forgotten that moment. Nor would he. It would be with him on his deathbed, if the moment of his passing allowed for reflection.

Both he and young Hamilcar were roused from their thoughts by the chatter of maids in the hall. Beyond them the sharp urgency of Imilce's voice betrayed her concern. Hannibal rose, snatched his son up, and held him high, staring at him as the boy struggled and reached out to pat his father's face, not sure now whether to play or call for his mother. The child's eyes were indeed a striking gray, hair touched with some of Imilce's fairness. But his nose and mouth and stocky build were nothing if not Barca. He had such smoothness of skin, no blemish upon it, with a fragrance that was like nothing, for few things are as pure. His lower front teeth stood perfectly straight, close-fitted like a tiny phalanx of four warriors. Drool escaped the infant's lips and collected on his chin, bunching in preparation for a fall. Hannibal, in one quick gesture, licked the spittle clean.

“By the gods,” he said, “you are the sum of me, of all that came before. You are all that ever I can be.”

He placed the boy on the stone floor and watched as he spun away and tottered off, first randomly, then toward the sound of his mother's voice, just outside in the corridor now.

Watching him, full of love, the father whispered, “Our lives are torture.”

Camped outside New Carthage for the winter, Tusselo had time to look back on the two periods of his life now concluded and to consider the new one just dawning. As a child he had been on horseback from as early as he could remember. He had been one of many in his village, from a large family, all speaking the same language, tied to the same gods, and living by the same customs. He had thought himself master of his young world and faced his coming manhood with eagerness.

But one evening he went to bed a free person, a Massylii Numidian, a horseman; when he awoke, the curved blade of a Libyan knife at his throat was whispering that all of that was done. Dawn found him shuffling along in chains, driven by slavers who cared not that his blood was much like theirs. Within a week, they reached the shore. There a Roman captain bought him and carried him for the first time out into open sea. He had just reached an age when his thoughts turned kindly toward the girls of his clan, but on the first day at sail these thoughts had been forever made a punishment by his captor. With the quick slice of a knife, his immortality vanished. Tusselo doubled over, clutching at his groin, awed and pained beyond all reckoning, amazed to hear the laughter of the man who had emasculated him and listening, despite himself, to the man's jokes that he might now play the woman on occasion but would never again inflict his manhood on any other. It was an absolutely unimaginable act, a change in fortune so profound that he refused to believe it even as he writhed across the deck in a puddle of his own blood. Unfortunately, he was to live through many days thereafter that made it clear human cruelty was never to be underestimated, always to be believed in, much more constant then the favor of any god.