Pride of Carthage (13 page)

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.

He spent twelve years as a slave to Rome, sold from one master to another three times before finding a permanent place with a traveling merchant of middling wealth. In those twelve years he had lived a lifetime that almost negated the years before. Almost, but not quite. That was why he grasped for freedom several times, finally achieving it one night not far from Brundisium. He had escaped with a pouch full of coins that the drunken man foolishly left resting in his open palm. He used them to pay for a single, extortionately priced passage to Africa.

In his homeland nothing was the same, neither in the sights he saw nor in him, who perceived them. There was no one left to call family. Tusselo found a miserable cluster of hovels more like a leper colony than the thriving town of his birth. He sat down on a hill facing north and looked out on the grassy plains and ragged woodland that flowed toward the sea. It was a beautiful country. It had a largeness different from the land of his enslavement. It pained him that he had to think of that place so often, and yet he could not stop. Every memory his homeland brought to mind had at its back the shadow of how slavery had destroyed it. He had hoped that his hard-won freedom would end some portion of his suffering, but this was not the case. He had been robbed of so many things—how completely, he understood only as he gazed out across a land that pained him with memories and offered no solace. He was an exile in his own country: that was why he had left it to join Hannibal. And it only seemed right that the journey he embarked on should aim back to Italy.

On the day that Tusselo spotted that lone rider near Saguntum—after tracking Hannibal's army on foot—he had not been atop a horse in thirteen years. Nor had he immediately remedied this. He spent months at Saguntum as little more than a laborer, accepting whatever task fell to him. He worked with a more reverent obedience than he had ever shown a master, and he kept always in the company of his countrymen, remembering their ways. He stayed with the victorious army when it returned to New Carthage, and he made sure his desire to mount and fight again was well known.

It had been his master's custom to keep all of his slaves' heads shaven. As he was a slave no longer, Tusselo freed his hair to run its course. He did not remember when he stopped dragging the honed edge of his knife over his scalp, but his hair soon grew long enough that he could take fingerfuls of the curly stuff and twirl them into matted locks. He rarely caught sight of his own reflection—it had never before mattered to him—but now he took to pausing and studying himself in still pools of water, in the circlets of pounded metal shields, or in the dull reflection on the flat of his knife. He took some joy in what he saw. It was a different self than he had known for some time, an earlier incarnation. His hair was black, thick. It sprang from his head with pent-up aggression, as unruly as Medusa's crown of snakes and no less impressive. It framed his face and gave his features a new completion, a solidity, a strong Africanness that he welcomed. Perhaps that was why his master had shaved him, to deprive him of these things and to leave him ever a stranger to his own reflection, so that he would forget himself and remember only the slave. No longer. He had his hair back, and in midwinter he also regained his identity as a horseman.

The day he was assigned a mount he stood weak-kneed, his throat tight and fingertips tingling. The army horses were Iberian mostly, pulled in from a variety of tribes and regions of the country, schooled by different techniques from African mounts, and all with varying perceptions of their role in relation to man. They were somewhat larger than the fleet-footed creatures of North Africa, in a myriad of colors and temperaments, with a wild energy that flared up as Massylii riders cut individuals from the herd to examine them more closely. It was a wonder to watch and Tusselo, having lived many of his years away from his homeland, was struck with awe at the horsecraft he had been born into.

The Numidians cinched their legs around their horses' backs and spoke to them. They sent signals through touch, sometimes with a stick, but often with their fingers. They shifted their body weight accordingly and flapped their arms from their shoulders as if this motion translated into speed in the horses' hooves and called sudden, surprise maneuvers. The mounts seemed to understand them completely and to take joy at slicing through the Iberian horses, dividing them and circling and dizzying them till the Iberians stood dazzled. Tusselo remembered it now, but he had seen no such skill during the years he spent in exile. It almost shamed him to have gotten so used to how Romans handled horses, with no art, no joy but simply mastery of man over beast.

When his turn came to receive a mount he did not hesitate to take it. He had to move with confidence, he knew, for these men would spot any awkwardness as a lioness sees weakness in her prey. He approached the horse from the side, one arm flat against him and the other raised just slightly, fingertips extended as if he were brushing them across stalks of tall grass. And yet there was no guile in his approach, no stealth. He walked toward the horse as if to do so were the most natural thing in the world. He spoke words of encouragement to her, not shy, but like one friend to another on meeting again.

Before she knew it, he was beside her. And as she cocked her head to follow him he leaped, a smooth motion that somehow draped him over her back as a blanket might fall. He wrapped his arms around her and spread his weight across her and continued his string of words. He had thought that gladness was a thing of the past for him, and perhaps this was so, but there was something stirring in him now and it was not the slow simmering he had carried for so many years. He knew already that he could be nearly his whole self with this horse. Astride her, he could again learn to ride like a whirlwind. He could again belong to a people and fight with a purpose. This horse would never question his manhood, would never taunt him for the damage done to him by his old master. And that was a great blessing. In return he would be kind to her, and feed her well, and not ride her too hard, and lead her only into sensible battle. Together they would see wondrous things. No portion of the earth would hold either of them in bondage. These were some of the things he told her, and, Iberian though she was, she soon calmed to listen.

As his mare was not versed in the Massylii manner of riding, the headman of the cavalry gave Tusselo leave to train her, to care for her as his own. He had seen all he needed to in Tusselo's actions to confirm he belonged among them. Tusselo rode up into the hills beyond New Carthage that very evening, the horse powerful beneath him, her hooves pounding the earth and tearing up divots, the speed of it intoxicating to one so long cursed to the pace of his own legs.

He stopped the horse on a hill. Behind him, New Carthage smoldered, as cities always do, cloaked in a blanket of haze. To the south the sea swelled and receded against the land. To the west and the north the land rolled away to the horizon. None of it seemed beyond him. He was free for the first real time since his boyhood. And—if the gods had finally chosen to smile upon him—he would soon return to business unfinished in Rome, not alone this time, but with an army.

There are some men whom the gods curse by birth into times of war; there are others for whom this is a blessing. There are some who crave nothing more than chaos, who eat their pain and revel in that of others. Such a man was Monomachus, and such was the gift bestowed upon him that he could daily take the base materials of life and open them to air and search out the root of human emotion and twist it into knots of anguish. It was no secret that he had devoted his military labors to Moloch, the Devourer, but many speculated that he communed with even earlier deities. Some said that he was of Egyptian origins and that he walked the modern world as an incarnation of the lost gods of that aged place. Others said the source of his barbarism could be found within the span of his singular life, if one were bold enough to search for it. Still others refused to speak of him or even utter his name. And a few were loyal to him as to no other and served only under him.

Hannibal chose this man to lead the delegation that would introduce Carthage to the Gauls. A strange choice, perhaps, but the commander wished to make certain things clear to those coarse men from the start. Monomachus stood before the Gauls like the seething pulse of enmity. His cheekbones were high and feline, so prominent that the rest of his face hung shadowed beneath them. He was so devoid of fat that his body seemed little more than a skeleton wrapped in striated cords of muscle. When the Gauls beheld him they knew that even by their own standards this was a creature not wisely crossed. Most of them were glad they did not have to cross him. For, despite the simmering intensity in his stare, he offered friendship. He lavished presents of gold and silver on the chieftains. He unsheathed finely crafted Iberian swords and offered them up, blade held between his fingers. He talked of the power of Carthage and the benefits of friendship. And he said that he had been sent only to guarantee safe passage through their lands as the forces of Carthage marched toward Rome. Should the Gauls choose to join in the great war, they would be welcome as comrades, with the bounty of Italy shared among them all. He found most tribes eventually proved amenable.

But when he reached the Volcae things changed somewhat. These were an even rougher sort of barbarian tribe than most, warlike and primitive, caring little for the outside world. Monomachus found his translator having difficulty communicating with them. They took the gifts readily enough, but they saw no need to bow to these foreigners' wishes. There were only a few of them, after all, and the Volcae were a numerous people. The Carthaginians presented their gifts and called councils, and all the while more of the Volcae slunk out of the foothills in seemingly endless small bands. Their camp grew around the envoys, and the Carthaginians sensed the whispered malice multiplying minute by minute.

The group spent one sleepless night in these people's company. It was a frigid winter and none of the warm-blooded Africans fared well in it. They heard movement around them all through the night; by morning it seemed their host had doubled in size yet again. The party of twenty-five stood steaming in the morning air, talking among themselves in whispers that crystallized before their faces. One man whispered to another that they would not leave this place alive, but Monomachus punched the young man and told them what he had learned in the night, for he had not been idle. Their interpreter had managed to gain this information through bribes: this day would indeed be their last. The chieftain was to invite them to his hut to receive more presents, but once inside they would be seized. Then the masses outside would attack the rest of the contingent. They would be killed by various tortures. Their heads would be cut from their bodies and used for sport. Their skulls would later adorn the entrances to Volcae homes, or roll upon the floor as toys for children.