Pride of Carthage (64 page)

He entered the settlement nervously. The hair on the back of his neck flexed and quivered. He felt himself walking into an ambush, although he knew this did not make sense. What bandits employ donkeys to lure their prey? He slid a hand down his side and fingered the hilt of his sword. It was a group of camp followers. A poor lot of mixed race. There were tents in the Carthaginian style, but there were also skin structures, hovels made of sticks, lean-tos covered over in hides. The place smelled of human waste, of dogs and unwashed people. Smoke from numerous low fires drifted up in the still air like columns stretching to the sky. From around the fires hostile faces glared. A group of men stood and watched him, a few of them picking up sticks and axes. A woman snatched up a running child by the hair and then slapped him as he began to cry. Others went about their work without seeming to have noticed him, but he still suspected devious intention in their erstwhile endeavors.

In his alertness to danger he must have looked everywhere except just in front of him, for suddenly a woman stood and her torso rose into view. Just then noticing him, she spun around and froze facing him, holding in her arms the sticks she had just gathered. Just like that. She stood before him, near enough that if they had both stretched out their arms they could have touched. Her face drained of color as she stared at him.

She was exactly as he remembered. Well, not exactly. Her hair jutted up from her head in several matted plaits. Black lines of dirt clung to the creases of her forehead and under her chin. A sore glistened red and painful at the corner of her lips. The simple gown she wore had no shape whatsoever. It was caked in mud and spotted with oil stains and with a thousand shades of brown. Imco took all of this in but none of it mattered. Behind the disguise he recognized her as clearly as if she stood before him naked and dripping with cold, fresh water. Picene.

He almost called her by the name he had given her, but he had not taken leave of his senses completely. Not knowing what else to do, he motioned for her to take a seat. The only spot available in their immediate vicinity was the mangled stump of a felled tree. Realizing this, Imco flushed with embarrassment. He looked about for another seat, but as he was doing so the woman sat on the stump and watched him, sticks balanced on her knees. It then took him a few moments to decide to sit on the bare ground. Having done this, he was again at a loss. He heard himself speaking before he really knew what he was saying. He told her his name, his rank in the army, and the unit he ran. He suspected vaguely that this was an absurd way to begin but he could not stop himself and went on blabbering until the woman shook her head. She said something in a language he found familiar, but he did not catch her meaning.

“I can't understand you,” he said, shocked by this realization, and by the unexamined difficulties it signified.

The woman smiled, and Imco saw the humor as well. They had both said that they did not understand the other in languages that the other could not understand. Imco thought this a serious problem, but the woman's smile hinted that it might not be. She said something else to him. It seemed friendly enough, but he had no idea of her meaning, and his bewildered face showed it. The woman seemed to find further amusement in this. She spoke on. From the stream of words he at least gleaned that she was speaking Greek. As the Carthaginian army used Greek for battle commands he knew a few words of the language, but hardly enough for this type of conversation. The woman solved this temporarily.

Motioning that he should stay where he was, she set down her bundle of sticks and moved off quickly. A few moments later she returned, accompanied by a girl of no more than ten years. She was thin as a stick, and blond. To Imco's surprise, however, she spoke Carthaginian. From the flashes of quick anger in her eyes, it seemed best not to ask how she came by this language.

She sat between the two of them and translated. Her interpretations were rough, presumably inexact, but they both listened as if every word mattered. Imco did not have the earlier difficulty of stating the irrelevant. Instead he said the things he actually meant. He said that he had thought of her ever since he first saw her. He meant her no harm, but he had dreamed of her often. He had been plagued with anxiety for her, wondering where in the world she was, how she fared amid the turmoil of a land at war. A woman should not be alone in a place like this. She was alone, right? She was not bound to a man, for example?

In answer to all of this, the woman said she fared just fine. A cold answer, Imco thought, although this might have been a product more of the translator than the speaker. She did not address the issue of whether she was bound to anyone, but she admitted that she had not forgotten him either. She wanted to understand why their paths had crossed three, and now four times. This was more than chance, she believed. Was he hunting her? Imco swore that he was not. He never had. Not, at least, until the donkey came and got him. It was the donkey that led him to—

“What?” the girl asked, for herself and with no prompting from the woman.

Imco went on: He had been living his soldier's existence with no real aim except to survive. It had come as pure shock to him each time they bumped into each other. The fact that she found him on the battlefield of Cannae stunned him with disbelief every day. Nor did the way he found her this time seem any more probable. He had followed the donkey he recognized as hers and here he was. He knew this would sound strange, but it was not the strangest true thing that he could disclose. The dead Saguntine girl who had been following him, for example. She had been no end of annoyance—

This was the last straw for the girl translating. She stood up abruptly. Forces were at work here that she did not understand, and she thought them better kept at a distance. She warned them not to bother her again and she stalked off.

Again, in the silence after her departure, Imco thought the whole venture in danger of failing, which would be so much more terrible now, unthinkable, tragic. Nothing in the world mattered more than the proximity of this beautiful woman. He was still amazed by her presence, her nearness, the radiance that lay under the grime and that knotted hair. He gazed at her as she drew a little nearer, watched her place a hand to her chest, and studied her lips as they pushed out these syllables: “A-rad-na.”

“Aradna?” he asked. When she smiled and nodded, he went through the same motions to tell her his name. For a time the two of them sat near each other, each intoning the other's name, testing it as if searching for answers in the sounds themselves. A little later, Aradna took coal from a neighbor's fire and started her own. She did not tell Imco to leave, and he did not offer to. She roasted a squash by burying it at the edge of the flames, reaching in occasionally and spinning it with her bare hands. Imco brought strips of dried beef out of his satchel, along with heavily watered wine. The two ate in the dying glow of the autumn day. It grew cool quickly, but Imco welcomed this because it brought them nearer to the fire, to each other. Aradna talked freely, conversationally, without the slightest regard for the fact that he could not understand her. She made it seem that the most complicated sentences were understood between them. It was only the simple things that called for gestures and grunts: offering more food, reaching for the wine jug, pointing to a wolf-skin blanket.

He did not notice at just what moment they had moved close enough to touch. At some point they were simply side by side, sharing warmth from the hide, Aradna speaking up into the night sky. He fell asleep watching her profile and woke later to the amazing revelation that the woman's body was curled just next to his and that her hand had slid up under his tunic and was touching his sex. Noticing that he had woken, Aradna drew her hand back. He lay for a long time considering this, and then, nervously, he let his own hand crawl toward her. He touched her at the knee and then slid his fingers up the crease between her thighs. He paused there and might have proceeded no further except that one leg lifted to allow him in. She was both wet and hot and the sensation of her pubic hairs against his fingertips was the most erotic thing he had ever experienced.

He was still in awe of this when she moved, so quickly that he started. She climbed on top of him. He gasped as if in pain. Her warmth as she slid down onto him was overwhelming, complete, the center of his world, and just as hot as if he were pinned to a sun. He could not believe this was happening. She pressed him to the ground and grabbed his lower lip between her teeth and would not let go. He simply could not believe that his life had led to such an utterly, completely exquisite moment.

The next morning he awoke to the smell of her sex on his fingertips. If he had not known what the scent was he would have thought it unpleasant, but because it was proof of their intimacy he inhaled it with pleasure. He could not get enough of it. It did not linger long enough in his nostrils, so throughout the day he again and again placed the back of his nails under his nose. He returned to the camp followers' settlement as often as he could over the next week, until he convinced her to go with him back to the main camp. Though they still could barely speak to each other, neither one considered parting. The army was to be largely stationary for the winter, and no one thought twice about Aradna's presence. Most of them had slaves or servants or captives to keep them warm, if not wives. They simply thought of Aradna as one of these, and Imco kept the truth to himself. She was not a sideline to his daily life; she was the center of it and all else revolved around her. He found that he could say things to her that he had never considered saying to another person. He sometimes feared the Saguntine girl would overhear him, but since Aradna's arrival he had neither seen nor heard from the girl.

One evening, Aradna met him outside his tent. She stalked up to him proudly and, through an enormous smile, spoke a single sentence in Carthaginian. “You are handsome.” She grinned at herself, proud as a cat, and Imco knew for a divine certainty that he had never seen anything more beautiful. The only flaw in all this was that he worried constantly that she would leave him, or that he would die in the next battle, or that her beauty would draw trouble. It astonished him that her disguises fooled anyone, but she rarely attracted the type of attention Imco feared. When the next blow—the first great blow—fell, it had nothing to do with their love affair. It was completely unexpected, and it woke him to the unpredictable world they both still inhabited.

He heard the commotion while in his tent. He was watching Aradna's fingers as they plucked strips of goat meat from the hot stones lining their fire pit. Outside the horns sounded a call he could make no sense of. Feet tramped by; people yelled unintelligible things to each other. Imco was up in a moment. He spoke over his shoulder to Aradna, saying that he would just be gone a moment, and then he joined the growing crowd moving toward the command tent. Eventually, he had to shove and claw his way through, frantic now, for something evil was in the air and he could make no sense of the bits and pieces and exclamations he heard.

When he finally broke through the circle around the front of Hannibal's tent he saw the commander on his knees, a shocking sight in itself. His arms hung limp at the sides, palms out, fingers quivering. Before him lay a round object that at first made no sense. It seemed to be a head, clasped between two hands held in place with twine. Imco stepped closer, blinking. It
was
a head clasped between two hands held in place with twine. The man's face was barely visible, bruised and battered, rotten, bluish and reddish and brown all at once. Ghastly. And yet Hannibal had no difficulty recognizing who the person had been.

“What have they done to you?” he asked. “Hasdrubal, what have they done?” He bent closer to the head, but his attention focused on the hands. He touched the knuckles with his fingers. “These are not his hands!” he said, drawn in like a madman clutching at a tendril of fantastic possibility. “They are not his!”

If these are not his hands, Imco saw him thinking, perhaps this is not his head. Maybe it is all a lie. Several of the other officers drew closer. Gemel reached out as if to touch Hannibal's back, but he did not do so. He studied the severed limbs, and then he whispered in the commander's ear. The news he gave sapped all hope from the man. Hannibal, as if angry at whatever Gemel had said, scooped the head up and cradled it against his torso. He strode silently into his tent. The flap fell shut and all who remained stared about in dumb silence.

Gemel whispered something to a few of the other officers, and then, seeing Imco, he approached him. “We must all meet at once,” he said. “There is much to discuss. What you see is true. That was the head of Hasdrubal Barca, thrown down outside of camp by a band of Roman horsemen.”

“And the hands?”

“We cannot know for sure, but the horsemen, as they left, shouted the name of the scribe Silenus.”

Hannibal wanted to rage. From the moment he recognized Hasdrubal's features, wrath stirred within him. He felt it twisting him. He heard the roar of it in his ears, a force such as one hears facing into a fierce wind, a noise that takes from the world the variations that differentiate sounds and leaves only the pure cry that is noise and silence at the same instant. He wanted to rampage. He felt Monomachus clutching his elbow, clawing at him, begging to be allowed free rein to spread his terror a thousandfold in retribution. He knew that he muttered consent to the man, but he did not do so with the full measure of his sorrow. He did not know where to direct his anger. Rome was the obvious target. He would never say otherwise in his life. But a man has quieter demons to contend with and these spoke more softly than the wraiths. They asked who was truly to blame. From whose hand dripped the most blood? And also they answered: Hannibal's. Hannibal's.

Trapped between these feuding choruses, he could barely move for days after receiving the terrible gift. Like a man punched so hard in the gut that he cannot respond, cannot speak, cannot strike back, Hannibal doubled over the head that had once been atop his brother's marvelous shoulders and he simply held it. He did not care that the stench thickened the air in his tent. He ignored the decay. Yes, it sickened him so much that he heaved dryly, convulsively, trying to expel whatever was in him. Skin peeled roughly off the skull and the very touch of it on any object left a malignant stain that he could feel as much as see and smell. All this was true, but still this was his brother. These were the eyes he had once used to see; the mouth he had spoken with; the ears through which he had heard the world. He rubbed away the grime crusting his dry orbs and tried to look inside. It was impossible that Hasdrubal no longer resided somewhere behind those eyes. He placed his lips against the rotten flesh and whispered to him. Words tumbled from him, never long thoughts, but simple sentences like those spoken to a child. He told him that it was all right. It was fine. It would be all right. Oh, but his mother loved him. His mother thought him the handsomest. All women thought so. His father knew him to be the bravest, the strongest. He would take him home, he promised. Home to Carthage. He would leave that very day. Come. Together they would see the city jutting up from the Byrsa hill and they would smell the lemon trees and watch sparrows darting overhead in the fading light of evening. They would run out to the obelisk on the point overlooking the sea and they would stand with their chests pressed to the marble, gazing up at the long stretch of stone piercing the sky, awed that the clouds above slid by untouched.