David Durham - Pride of Carthage

Noticing this, Hannibal asked, “Do you feed my son as well as sport with him?”

“Yes, my lord. But only on occasion. Your wife feeds him well.”

“You must have a child of your own, then?”

“A girl.”

“And how does she fare? Does she not want for your milk?”

The maid seemed uncomfortable with the line of questioning, but she answered, “No, lord: As I give milk to your son, so another gives hers to mine.”

Hannibal almost asked about that woman's child, but he had already shared more words with her than he usually did with servants. At some point, he knew, somebody's child might well perish so that his son was fed richly. He did not want to linger too long on this thought. He dismissed the maid with a motion of his head. “I will care for the boy,” he said.

When Imilce entered the room, father and child were seated on the floor. Hannibal was trying to position marble soldiers in a particular formation, but Hamilcar kept interrupting him, picking up first one soldier and then another, bringing them to his mouth as if he were a giant who would solve the dispute by chewing off their heads. Imilce paused a moment, taking the scene in, and then walked in without expressing whatever thought she entertained about them.

“A strange thing happened this morning,” she said, motioning with her fingers that she would not sit on the stone floor. Hannibal rose and cast himself onto the bed. Imilce joined him, continuing with her story. Apparently, the cook preparing the afternoon meal in honor of the small delegation from the Insubrian Gauls had been blinded in one eye. It was the oddest of accidents: He had simply plunged a ladle into a vat of boiling oil to test its consistency. But at the touch of the utensil, the oil spat up a single droplet. It hit the cook's open eye and sent him stumbling away in pain. On hearing of this, Hanno was quite upset. He had called for Mandarbal but he had been informed that the seer was ill with a fever and could not attend him. “This distressed him even more,” Imilce said, “for it seemed a doubly ominous warning.”

Hannibal listened with little interest, commenting that his brother was too inclined to find ill omens in the simplest of things. “One should be attentive to the gods,” he said, “but not paralyzed in all matters. A drop of oil is hardly a sign from Baal. I trust the man can cook with a single eye just as well as with two.”

As he spoke he moved closer to his wife, caressing first the smooth skin on the back of her hands and then the joint of her knee and then the pale stretch of her inner thigh. “I've decided a position for Hanno in this conflict,” he said. “I will inform him of it soon, though I've no doubt he will find something of ill-fortune in my decision.”

“And what of your family?” Imilce slipped her hand over Hannibal's, simultaneously caressing it and slowing its upward progress. “What fate have you assigned us?”

“The best and only course for you is that which is safest,” Hannibal said. “So, you, my love, will finally see my homeland. Sapanibal will escort you and introduce you to my mother and my younger sister and to Carthage itself. I am sure you will find them all most welcoming. You'll wait out this war in the embrace of more luxury than you've yet tasted.”

“If that is your wish,” Imilce said. “But I had held some hope that I might go with you.”

Hamilcar rose to his feet and pulled a bowl of olives from the serving table. Imilce half-rose to attend him, but was stayed by her husband's arm. She watched the child spill the fruit and roll it beneath his palms.

“You would ride with me into battle?” Hannibal asked, squinting as if the thought of this bewildered him. “I knew not that you were of the Amazon race.”

“Do not joke at my expense. I wish to travel with you, so that I might see you at times and so that your son need not forget you. I am not so feeble as to be a burden. Hasdrubal schooled me well in riding last year.”

“Did he teach you to hurl a javelin as well? Did he teach you of the parts inside a man's body and how best to destroy them?” Imilce began to respond, but Hannibal continued, his voice edged. “Life on campaign would ill suit you. What would become of you should I die? Should the Romans lay their hands on you they would dishonor you. They might well form a train behind you and each of them—hundreds of them—push their seed inside you and so punish me as well. This is no idle threat but the way of war, the nature of hatred. What if they captured my son? What might they do with him? The thought is unimaginable.”

“You misunderstand me,” Imilce said, though her voice was chastened and had lost its playful timbre. “I meant only that we be near. You might capture a city early and we might come to it and live in safety, in a fortress you thought of as a home within their—”

Hannibal pushed her caressing hand away, kicked his legs off the bed, and rose. “And when word got out that Hannibal's beloved wife dwelled in that city? It would soon become a target. If I were at the gates of Rome with my hands upon the ram and word came to me that you were in danger, what would you have me do? No, the very idea is absurd. You would create in me a weakness where there need not be one.”

“If it came to that, I would die before—”

“You would be fortunate to be allowed death,” Hannibal said. “No. That is my answer. You go to Carthage with all that is precious to me. Let us talk of it no more.”

Though her eyes were cast aside and her visage tight with things unsaid, Imilce nodded. She rose and scooped up her son and started to move away.

“What are you doing?”

In answer, Imilce clicked her tongue twice on the roof of her mouth. The boy's maid appeared, took the boy, and slipped away with him. Imilce turned back toward her husband. Reaching to loosen her hair, she said, “Perhaps the commander would like a second child. If so, we should not waste time.”

The men gathered for the meeting with a nervous, expectant air. Hannibal was finally to set all the pieces of his plan before them and each would learn his own position within it. Though they had attended councils throughout the winter and most had even spoken privately with the commander, this meeting marked a new stage, the moment at which preparation met the bridge into action. They sat on cushions around a low table, at ease for the moment but not slouching or leaning back as they might while at leisure. Mago and Hasdrubal, Bostar and Bomilcar, Maharbal and Carthalo, Monomachus and Vandicar: all men of importance in the campaign to come, each a representative of components of the army serving under them. Hannibal disdained clutter at meetings such as these. Instead he trusted in the generals beneath him to hear his desires and to carry them through.

Hanno, taciturn as ever, took a seat at the edge of the low table, his cushion pushed back a little way so that those next to him had to look almost over their shoulders to address him. He had long dreaded this meeting. He felt the fear now in the pulsing of the arteries in his hands. Whether he clenched them into fists or held them loose or laid them flat on his thighs, in each position his heart seemed to be contained within them and to thump, thump, thump. It was most distracting, all the more because he had to concentrate to think past it, to brace himself for the role he would soon be assigned. Which would be worse, a position of prominence from which to err yet again in decision-making, or a demotion to some lesser role that would indicate to all that Hannibal found him wanting?

The arrival of the historian roused Hanno from his thoughts. Silenus entered laden with the writing supplies with which he would keep a record of all of Hannibal's accomplishments. He took a seat near Hanno, greeting him with a smile that the Barca returned coldly. He had grown no fonder of the Greek than when they first met. Silenus was silent enough as he prepared his writing utensils, but once readied he looked about the group and immediately found a jumping-off point in some quadrant of the conversation. He said, “Which puts me in the mind of the story of Titus Manlius and his son. Has anyone heard of this?”