David Durham - Pride of Carthage

“I never thought I would see that look on your face,” Atneh said.

“What?” Aradna asked. She felt her cheeks flush and she turned her face away.

“We women are all fools in our youth. I was. My mother was before me. The gods wish it, so that they may sport with us. Men are fools as well, but that is different. . . . Women more often grow to wisdom. I had hoped that was true of you. I see I was mistaken.”

“I don't know what you speak of.”

“Yes, you do. Don't lie to me. It's useless and insults us both.”

Aradna said, “Aunt, it's just that his face isn't like other men's. In sleep he looks like a boy I would choose as a son, as a brother.”

This did not move the old woman. “Leave him,” she said. “Tomorrow we go; he doesn't. Who can judge a man by his face? Better to judge him by his genitals and be wary of what hangs there. This one will bring you nothing but trouble. Do you hear? Leave him and carry on toward your goal. What is it you want of life?”

“Very little,” Aradna said.

“But say it to me. What do you want? What are the things you told me in confidence? Say them again.”

Aradna shook her head. “Very little,” she repeated. “I want to go home to Father's island. I want to herd goats on the hills and watch boats pass at a distance. I want a quiet corner of the world away from all of this. Every day I want a little less. . . . Aunt, I just want peace.”

The old woman nodded through this, solemn, her eyes fixed on the young woman and full of sadness. “Tell me, then: What place has this murderer on that island? Hmm? Do you truly think this killer of Romans, this African, would allow you the peace you have earned? Be no fool, dear one. Leave this man. He lives. That's more than he deserves.”

Aradna could not dispute any of this. She knew Atneh was right, and yet she could not help making one last protest. “Aunt, several times already I have met this man. Twice before and now yet again. What does it mean that I found him a third time?”

The old woman answered quickly, struggling to her feet in the process. “It means you should have no doubt. He's more devious than he looks. Perhaps he's entrapped you in a spell. Either way, leave him.”

And so she did. The next morning, she dragged away everything that she could from Cannae on a sledge harnessed to her back. They were to return to the coast, where, she believed, she would arrange passage across the sea to Greece. She was going home. Only a fool would do otherwise. It wasn't until late that day that she realized she did not know the man's name. Three times now, Fortune had brought them together, but she could not think of him by name.

Hannibal made sure that the body was tended in a manner commensurate with the quality of the man. He helped the attendants lay him out on the beam. He wound ribbons of white cloth around his ankles and across the groin, over the arms at the elbows and across his forehead, securing him into a rigid, disciplined posture. An officer's body should not be seen to flop about like others. He deserved better than that. That was why his innards had been scooped up from where they had escaped him, cleaned, replaced, and sewn into the cavity that housed them. Hannibal watched as the priests anointed his flesh with fragrant oils and tucked a small charm bag beneath the fold of cloth near his hands. Mandarbal entered once all this had been concluded and spoke his strange words over the corpse. He dotted the man's forehead and shoulders, hands and feet with his warm blood, drawn just moments before from a slit in the priest's wrist.

After Mandarbal departed, the commander dropped to his knees and rested his forehead against his friend's chest and murmured the man's name. Bostar. He repeated it softly, over and over again, a single word made into a prayer and a speech, a confession and an apology. He spoke as if he were alone with his deceased secretary, but his remaining officers rimmed the walls of the council tent. The last twenty-four hours had been filled with revelry at their victory, but the aftermath of the battle provided no respite from toil. There had been, and still were, a thousand different matters to attend to. This pause to mourn the passing of one of their own provided for most of them the first hushed moment for reflection.

Each of them had been wounded in some way. Maharbal had been hacked down to the bone of his lower leg with a dullish sword. He could barely stand, but claimed that he did not notice the injury when mounted. Bomilcar bore a gash across his forehead where a passing spear point had carried away a strip of flesh. He would wear the scar of it ever after, the first point on his massive visage that any newcomer's eyes settled on. He joked that he could tap the bone of his skull directly to clear his muddled head. Monomachus' arms were battered with bruised, oozing wounds, and he wore a cloth wrapped around his left hand, the material tainted a reddish brown where he had received the point of a dart thrown at close range. Carthalo lay on a cot in his tent, a spear wound in his thigh. Several lesser officers stood or sat about the chamber as their injuries allowed.

Mago watched his brother with a pained expression that had nothing to do with the physical. By the grace of Baal, he had survived the battle largely unscathed. He and his handful of attendants had fought near the front ranks of Gauls. His voice was still raw from all the yelling, from his crazed attempt to manage the wild energy of barbarians, to control their retreat and stay alive and watch Hannibal close the jaws of his trap. In the hours of battle, moment after chaotic moment passed as if it might be his last, each instant laced with a hundred ways for him to die. He had personally killed more men than he could count. He had stepped back, always at the edge of the retreat, receding before the Roman line as it trod over his soldier's bodies.

One of his guards had been impaled beneath the chin by a Roman spear. The weapon struck so hard that Mago, standing just beside him, heard the vertebrae snap under the pressure and saw how strangely the man's head hung from the spear point, attached to the body by tendrils of flesh but no longer connected to the framework hidden beneath. He still carried the sickening image in his head, ready to impose itself on any person walking past, any face he looked at. Nor was it the only disturbing image. He tried to flush these out with reasoned thought and celebration, but as ever he hid within himself the strange duality of character he had always found in battle. He was both inordinately skilled at it and absurdly haunted by it afterward. Strangely, it was he and Hannibal—the two most slightly injured—who seemed most troubled.

Hannibal was still whispering the dead man's name when Gemel stepped into the tent. He had assisted the commander for some years now, but he seemed nervous in his new role as Bostar's replacement, clumsy in it and hesitant in his speech. He lowered his head and stood in silence.

But Hannibal must have sensed his presence. Without lifting his head he asked, “What do we know for certain?”

Gemel glanced around at the others, but they all knew whom the commander addressed and with what question. “We can be sure of little, sir,” he began. “The Gauls suffered most. They are still counting, but they may have lost more than four thousand. We cannot account for two thousand Iberians and African troops, and we lost at least two hundred from the combined cavalry. Commander, I am sure of none of these figures. This is just the best we could gather throughout the day.”

“And of the enemy?”

“Your estimate, sir, would surpass mine in accuracy. We've captured a full twenty thousand—many of them wounded and dying—and taken both their camps. Some hid in Cannae itself. We are still rounding them up. A few escaped to Canusium and Venusia—”