David Durham - Pride of Carthage

He let this declaration sit a moment, then continued, inhaling a breath and gathering himself up. “So my answer is twofold. I hate Rome, yes, but I accept this war because I have no choice. We'll be fighting for nothing less than the world, my brother. Nothing less than everything there is. We chase clouds no longer. We couldn't, even if we wished to.”

The commander rose and placed a hand on his brother's shoulder and squeezed the bunched muscle there. Without another word he moved away, across the room and into the corridor. His sandals scraped across the grainy stone. The sound of them faded and Hasdrubal listened on. He knew the moment Hannibal stepped out onto the platform above the waiting army. The roar that greeted him was deafening.

In her own way Aradna had been born to war. To be a follower of war, that is. One of the ragged many who trailed behind the machinery of carnage, scavenging a life from dead bodies and burning villages and the strewn chaos of spent battlefields. She never knew her mother, but her father had been almost good to her. With the help of a single mule, he had driven a cart laden with found objects for sale, trinkets so inconsequential that soldiers in the passion of battle failed to strip them from the bodies of the slain: silver rings, shot pellets for the slingers, sandals, strips of leather, healing ointments, talismans from various countries, figures of gods significant only to the faithful of certain sects. He was a gruff man, a Greek, big-shouldered and well known among the horde. He was famous for having punched a Bythian mercenary so hard during an argument that the man was left literally speechless—he who had been a loudmouthed creature could no longer form words with his unwieldly tongue. Aradna's father might have been a warrior in his own right, but he chose to live by exploiting other men's follies, not joining them.

While he lived, Aradna's childhood was one of relative safety. He might not have known kindness and how to show it, but in his way he was soft on her. He spoke quietly at night, told her of her mother, of the small village they had fled from years ago, of the great wrong done to them that pushed them from the island he loved dearly and so wanted to return to. All this wandering was nothing, he told her. These were simply the trials he must face as an actor in the drama that was his life. He wanted only to return to Greece. He prayed daily that the writer of his story would provide the means, would make his tale a saga but not a tragedy. He watched her in the morning so that sometimes she awoke to his gaze above her and was comforted by it.

He was taken by an illness that came upon him quickly and simply killed him. She was twelve and was first raped that evening by the very man who had helped her bury him, her father's friend of many years. It was payment, the man said, and if so the bill was a large one, for he claimed her as his own and traveled with her tied to the back of the cart that had been her father's. He took her nightly, calling out another woman's name as he came and always angry with her afterward. She did not mourn when he died, taken slowly by a pinprick wound that started in his foot and ate up his leg to the center of him.

She was in farm country south of Castulo and found temporary peace in a village. She worked for an elderly man who loved to look at her but could do no more. He spoke to her as he said he could not to his own daughters. It was hard work, farming, but a far cry from the life she had thus far lived. She felt in the daily work some distant familiarity, an ancestral memory. She might have stayed on there after the old man's death but his daughters ran her from the property, fearful that their husbands would be drawn to her. She might have asked those two to think of her as a sister but she knew they could not. They were not kin, and they saw nothing in her except their own lacks.

She was fourteen then and became a scavenger once more. She left childhood behind and quickly grew hard in her woman's body. She became lean with muscle, and thick-skinned. Her mind had a sharpness of purpose that never rested, for neither did the carnivores sniffing around her. She was not the only female on the battlefields, but her face was prettier than most and her slim, androgynous form attracted men's stares. Her eyes were the color and quality of opal. Set against her tanned skin and even features they were two curses from behind which she viewed the world.

She walked from Gades to the Tagus and traversed the spine of the Silver Mountains and the whole coastline of Iberia as far as New Carthage. She was present at the fall of Arbocala and witnessed firsthand the cruel power of the Carthaginians. Everywhere she found men the same, their desires as predictable as her need to repel them. They came at her in the night and during the day and during sunrise and dusk: she fought them equally. She permanently damaged one man's sight by dragging a jagged fingernail across his eye; another she stabbed in the abdomen with a spearhead; still another she bit in the cheek and half-pulled the flesh away. For this last she was beaten insensible and raped with a retributory violence.

But for all these trials she was not defeated but tempered, fired to new strength. She was the victim, yes, but she saw within men's behavior a frailty that made them weak. Men might have been the stronger sex, but when they were filled with lust they were the more vulnerable, too. To sate themselves they must bear their naked, upraised clubs before them. Perhaps this was the final thing that defeated many women, seeing that member engorged, one-eyed and hooded like the evil serpent that it was. She had this thought during her waking hours but it came to her again while dreaming. A dead woman spoke to her and said that serpents—no matter how venomous—could be squashed beneath a well-placed heel.

When Aradna joined the train behind Hannibal's army she did so with little interest in the war's outcome. She walked behind the men but not out of devotion to them. This was simply the next campaign: either side might provide her the things she sought. She kept a treasure in a bag around her neck. She wore it like a talisman, and indeed it did contain within it the bones of an eagle taken from the egg, cloves of garlic often replaced to keep the scent strong, a single lock of hair said to have been snipped from Clytemnestra's murdered body so many years before, a tiny statue of Artemis carved from whalebone. But also within were several gold coins, the beginning, she hoped, of the small fortune she would need to buy herself a plot of land in that faraway country she had never seen but from which she had sprung. She followed Hannibal's army, but she was concerned with no destiny save her own.

Publius Scipio was much like any other young noble at the start of the war with Hannibal. He was of medium build, not bulky of musculature, but well sculpted and fit from training. His face was cut close to the bones that formed it, topped with light brown hair. Indeed, his friends often joked with him that his profile was fine enough to be minted on a coin, though why anybody would want to do that none of them could imagine. His father had already arranged for his marriage to the daughter of a prominent senator, Aemilius Paullus, a sure sign that his future shone brightly. He had every intention of honoring the distinguished family from which he sprang—through service in the Senate, through the acquisition and generous sharing of wealth, through noble comportment, and through distinguished conduct in war. He was, considering all this, quite receptive to the news of a coming conflict with Carthage. He had been schooled since boyhood that only through arduous struggle could a man truly make a name for himself. Struggle, therefore, was something to be sought out.