Pride of Carthage (11 page)

The envoy sailed in surprisingly good weather, nothing ominous in the sky or upon the sea itself. It did not seem that nature was aware of the import of the debate to come. Fabius suffered from arthritis on damp days, and his eyesight was not what it used to be. One shoulder sat a bit higher than the other—the result of damage to his left leg years before—but he hid this well when not within the confines of his own home. The black hair of his youth had gone prematurely gray. After a few years of fighting it, he now wore this badge of maturity proudly. It was his age that gave depth to his authority. It was one of many reasons that he was chosen to head the embassy, charged with the responsibility of asking one question and responding to it as appropriate.

They were met by the Carthaginians and offered the city's hospitalities with all courtesy. These Fabius turned down, asking only for an audience with the Council. Fabius wasted little time. He moved carefully to the center of the chamber, which was a dimmer space than the Roman equivalent, lit not by the sun but by large torches jutting out of the walls. It was damp and fragrant from bubbling vats of herbs and sticks of incense. With his fading vision, Fabius could barely make out the men he was to address, and the smells assaulted his nose. But he stood straight-backed and feigned the most direct of gazes. He asked whether Hannibal had acted upon his own folly in attacking Saguntum, or whether he was a true representative of the will of Carthage.

Cries went up from several quarters, not in answer to the question but with questions and assertions of their own. Fabius waited.

One Imago Messano quieted the others and rose to speak. He responded politely: The question was not so much whether Hannibal had acted upon state orders or upon his own whims. Rather, it was one of law and precedent. Saguntum had not been in alliance with Rome when the treaty between Rome and Carthage was made. And later, the agreement made with Hasdrubal the Handsome could not truly be considered binding because it was concluded at a distance from the Council and therefore had no official sanction. This being so, Carthage had no responsibility to bow to Rome's wishes.

“This matter with Saguntum,” Imago said, smiling, “is an internal affair and should be respected as such. That is our position.”

Fabius chose to proceed simply. He clasped a fold of his toga in his fist and looked about at the stern faces surrounding him and made sure that all saw his gesture. He gripped so firmly that his knuckles went white with pressure. “In this hand I hold war or peace,” he said. “I offer either as a present to the Carthaginian people, but it is up to you to decide which you would rather receive.”

Imago, gazing about him for his fellows' approval, answered with a shrug. “We accept whichever your Roman heart prefers to give.”

And so Fabius opened his hand and released the folds of his toga in a manner that made it clear which the Roman heart preferred. As he spun to leave, the Carthaginians spoke in one voice, declaring their acceptance of the gift and their devotion to fight it to the end. Thus was the second war between Carthage and Rome agreed upon by cordial means.

During the winter following the siege of Saguntum, Hannibal released his Iberian troops to enjoy their families for the season, with the order to return in the spring to embark upon a journey to immortal fame. But for the commander himself and those who served him most intimately, there was little rest. To his family, it sometimes seemed that Hannibal had not returned from campaign at all. He was gone on exercises for days or sometimes weeks. When he was at home his time was filled morning to night with meetings and counsels, with planning sessions, with dictating letters to foreign leaders and collecting information from spies. The project he now had before him was a massive puzzle of matters military, geographical, cultural, monetary, issues as diverse as supply trains and political ramifications, topics as varied as naval routes and the physical constitution of elephants.

He drilled his Libyan veterans beyond any of the soldiers' expectations. They were up before the winter dawns, sent on far-ranging marches in full gear, with food and animals and siege weapons. They prowled the high mountains, going so high as to press through knee-deep snow, scaling rock faces, and rigging rope systems to aid the pack animals, coating their bare limbs with grease and marveling at the way their breath made ghosts before their mouths. He had new supplies of elephants shipped across from Carthage, mostly the native variety from the wooded hills of North Africa. They were not so large as the specimens found farther south, nor even did they stand as tall as the Asian variety, but each was a four-legged juggernaut. With a skilled mahout behind their ears they could mow down the enemy. Just the sight of them might clear a path through the barbarians who stood between them and Rome. Hannibal also called up new corps of Balearic slingers, for he had come to admire the pinpoint accuracy of their strikes, the way they turned the tiniest of stones into missiles that flew at blurred speed. He made arrangements to transfer some of his Iberian troops to defend Carthage, while bringing Africans over to protect Iberia in his absence. He hoped to assure their loyalty by keeping each group far from their homes, away from the enticement to desert, and dependent on their Carthaginian masters. And he sent emissaries to the tribes whose territories they would have to cross, rough Gaelic and Celtic peoples with whom he preferred friendship to war.

In the days just before the Mediterranean winter loosed its grip on New Carthage, Hannibal received his most detailed map yet of the territory through which his route to Rome lay. Alone in his chambers, he spread it out across his table and bent to study it. On the map the Alps were little more than a single jagged line of peaks, like a strange scar across the land. The document suggested routes through several different passes, but it provided no details, no indication of height or terrain or forage. There was little here from which he could choose a course. What to make of tales of peaks that pierced the sky, of yearlong ice and earthquakes wherein snow and rock flowed in torrents that were like water one moment, then set like cement the next? He wondered how the elephants would fare in those conditions. Some sources suggested that elephants would perish in the cold. Others argued that their thick hides would protect them. He had heard of the bones of mighty pachyderms found trapped in the ice of northern places. Giants, they said these were. If those creatures grew so large there, perhaps the climate would suit his elephants more than people knew.

If this were not confusion enough, the names of the tribes stood out among the depiction of the natural features: Volcae, Cavares, Allobroges, Triscastinii, Taurini, Cenomani . . . What peoples were these? Some of them were known to him; some channels of communication had long been open. Some of the tribes, like the Insubres and Boii, were actively hostile to Rome and interested in his plans. But others were only names shrouded in rumor and speculation. Blond creatures who lived in regions so frigid as to change their natural skin color, making them pale as marble statues, taller than normal men, and fierce as wolves. They drank the blood of slain heroes and made ornaments from bones and teeth and adorned their hovels with the bleached skulls of their foes. They fought with a wild abandon that had no order to it save the desire for personal glory. He understood they went into battle naked or nearly so, and that they often went clothed only in trousers that covered their legs like a second skin. Such a strange notion: to rarely see the muscles and flesh and hair of one's own thighs. It was hard to know just how accurate these tales were, and yet he did not doubt that any errors were deviations from even stranger truths.

Standing over the chart he felt a flush of blood tint his face. For all the information, the map was terribly inadequate, the detail etched by a man's pen, pushed by a single hand and mind. It was not the real world but only a vague, incomplete outline of it. The day would come when these mountains and these people were real before him, when he would feel the sharp rocks through his sandals and look upon the barricade of mountains receding before him in solid fact, when he would see these peoples' eyes and smell their breath and grasp their hands in friendship or spill their blood in enmity. Strange that thousands of lives depended on the plans he made now, pulled from the air in calm solitude. He wished his father were beside him so that they could share this, but he pushed the thought from his mind with a resolve long practiced. Uncertainty was the shackle that constrained normal men.

As he bent staring at the map, his sister appeared in the corridor opening. Sapanibal stood a moment in silence, then stepped through the threshold, nodding to the door servant as she did so. The slave bowed his head and slipped from the room, leaving the two siblings alone for the first time in nearly a year.

“My brother,” Sapanibal said, “I trust I am not disturbing you.”

Hannibal looked up from the chart. Seeing her, his face went through a quick transformation. At first he met her with the stern visage of a general. This faded almost to the half-grin of a brother, and fast behind this came the honest, tired expression with which he addressed few people in the world.

“Many things disturb me, sister, but you are a welcome visitor.”

“I come, actually, as an emissary of your beloved. She is worried about you. Thinks you're sure to catch a consumptive illness with this winter training.”

Hannibal smiled and shook his head. “She is afraid for me now, while I'm simply practicing for war? You women are strange. Happy to send me off into battle, but fearful that a cold might fell me.”

“Small things are sometimes the death of great men. I do not think Imilce is alone in fearing that you tax yourself.”

“Tax myself?” Hannibal asked. “If only you knew, sister. To see this coming war into being requires an unending vigilance. This is just the calm; come and see the makings of the storm.” He waved her closer to the table. “For all its art, this map is a crude thing, filled with empty spaces, dotted with deaths yet to be written. You know my plans?”

“No one has invited me to council,” Sapanibal said. “The things I've heard I dismiss as speculation only.”

Hannibal doubted her knowledge was so limited, but he said, “A land attack. Since the Romans destroyed our navy during our last war, they've believed themselves safe in their own land. The physical barriers have always seemed insurmountable. An army cannot swim the sea. Nor can an army climb the heights of mountains like the Alps and Pyrenees. So the Romans believe, at least. Our spies report they think they'll fight this war on their own terms. They expect me to entrench here in Iberia and wait to defend myself. On this they are mistaken.”

He paused for a moment and studied the map. Sapanibal, dryly, asked, “Has the commander changed the map of the world to suit him?”

“The map can remain as it is,” Hannibal said. “We will march along the Mediterranean coast this spring, cross the Pyrenees in early summer and the Rhône at midsummer, and traverse the Alps before the autumn. This will be a long and difficult march, but I do not accept that it is impossible. It only means that we will be the first. Think of the things Alexander achieved by again and again attempting the unimaginable. What do you think of this?”

Sapanibal laughed. “Hannibal asks a woman's advice on matters of war?”

Hannibal watched her and did not answer but awaited hers. She was the eldest of Hamilcar's offspring and though she was a woman she was easily Hannibal's equal in wisdom: they both knew it. She had made sure he knew it from his earliest memories of her. There was a time, in fact, when she was his physical superior. Her strong, long-legged form had thrown his often during the wrestling matches of their youth. A twelve-year-old girl, in the quick bloom of early womanhood, is in no way inferior to her nine-year-old brother. Hannibal had never forgotten this. It hung behind all discourse between them. So yes, he would ask a woman's advice, and he knew she would give it.

“Your plan is the best possible one,” she said. “Father would be proud. And what of the rest of us? What fates have you assigned your siblings?”

Hannibal stepped back from the desk and rolled his shoulders for a moment, as if his day's training had just caught up with him. He sat down on a nearby stool and rotated his head to ease some tension in his vertebrae. The bones made an audible crack, but judging by the commander's grimace this provided no relief.

“Everyone has a part to play,” he said, “though I've yet to settle everyone's role exactly. I will do so soon. But for your part, I ask—”

“I will escort your wife to Carthage,” Sapanibal said, “and introduce her to our mother and Sophonisba and bring her more fully into our country's ways.” After a short pause she added, “If that is your wish, brother.”

“You have learned no fondness for my wife, have you?”

“What has that to do with it?” Sapanibal asked, with her usual flat frankness. She stood and circled her brother and pushed his hand from his neck with her palm. She stood a moment with her fingers on the firm wings of his shoulder muscles, then she squeezed and released, squeezed and released. “I respect her,” she said. “That is what matters. I understand the value of your union with her here in Iberia. She is beloved of her people, and this is a good thing for Carthage. And, too, brother, I acknowledge your passion for her.”

Sapanibal pressed her thumbs into Hannibal's back with a force that surprised him, as if the two digits were formed on gnarled tree roots. He almost turned around to check, but her hands held him.

“If the marriage had been mine to arrange,” she continued, “I might have found you an equally useful, yet somewhat more homely bride. A man should value the bond with his wife and honor her accordingly, but a commander should not mix duty with ardor. Better to respect your wife and stick your penis in some pretty camp follower.”

Again Hannibal almost turned, for it seemed to him that his sister was speaking with doubled significance about her own marriage. But she stopped any movement with an admonishing click of her tongue.