Pride of Carthage (79 page)

As he stood waiting his heart beat at an ever more furious pace. He called for water and someone brought him some. He drank deeply, but felt bloated suddenly, decided he hated water, and tossed the gourd to the ground. When he looked up again, the guard was leading the boy down the slope toward him. Hannibal could only stare. They seemed to approach so quickly. In an instant they were in front of him. The guard presented him, saying, “Commander, here is your son, Hamilcar.” The man stepped away and then the father stood, weak-kneed, before the child.

Hamilcar was not as he had been before. He was tall, lean, and as finely formed as a father could have wished. He wore a gown of Eastern silk, light green, upon which a bird had been embroidered with blue thread, its wings flecked with gold. He stood with his arms pressed down to either side, a posture that accentuated the lines of his collarbones and the thinness of his shoulders. Hannibal could see the contours beneath the fabric and he wanted to place his hands atop them. His ears jutted out from his head, visible even though his hair hung in loose curls around his face, ringlets just the size to slip around a finger. Most of his features were entirely unfamiliar, nothing like they had been. They needed to be memorized anew. All except his eyes . . . His two large, bright eyes contained both the mother and the father in them: brown at the center, grayish along the outer rim. They sheltered beneath a strong brow line, like his, and yet the shape of them was all Imilce. He was magnificent.

Thinking so, Hannibal was completely unprepared for what happened next. The child's lower lip began to quiver. His chin flexed and convulsed as if tiny creatures writhed below the skin. His nostrils flared, his eyebrows twitched, and it began: the boy cried. Hannibal realized all of sudden what the boy must see. While he was looking on the child's beauty the boy was gazing at a beast. A gape-mouthed ogre with a single eye, with blistered skin and cracked lips, with great hands scarred by battle, pockmarks in the flesh of his knuckles, his hair wild about him like the mane of a dying lion, his beard unkempt, bearing bits of debris in it. The blood of millions tainted him and he must have smelled of it, a stench of such magnitude that no bathing would ever cleanse him completely. He loomed over the boy, casting him in shadow, worse than any demon of Moloch. He reached for him, wanting to bring his goodness close to him, but the boy flinched and took a half-step back.

“No, no, don't cry, Little Hammer. Don't cry. I . . . I am your father returned to you. It's all over.”

The boy's face twisted into a mask of misery at this. Tears poured down his cheeks. Hannibal scooped him up in one arm and tried to comfort him with the other. He felt the boy go stiff against him, tense and sobbing even more, twisting as if he would reach out to someone for salvation but feared to. Hannibal began to ascend the ramp. He supported the child with a single arm, the other swaying at his side as a countermeasure to his careful steps. He murmured as softly as he could to ease the child's fear, asking him not to cry, saying that he was not the monster he seemed. “There is no need to cry,” he said, over and over again, speaking the truth and lying at the same time, unsure which was which anymore.

All the while his eye stared fixedly at his wife. He watched the distance between them close and inside, silently, he asked for forgiveness.

A
radna had many gifts to thank the goddesses for. She had escaped war. Scenes of death haunted her dreams, but they were no longer the fabric of every waking moment. She had found her way to the island she had known only by name, and on landing she discovered the remnants of her father's family, an uncle who barely remembered his brother, several cousins, and a sister-in-law who—magically—welcomed her without question. Boys from the village laughed at the strange accent she spoke Greek with, but clearly they liked her company. They helped her build a hut of stone and clay, with a wood-framed roof of clay tiles. In a pen beside it she raised Persian fowl. She helped her reclaimed family harvest their olives and tend their pistachio trees and repair fishing nets for the village fleet. She helped an old man from the town raise edible dormice. This particularly gave her joy, for the squirrel-like creatures were shy and quiet, with trembling noses and bulbous black eyes and fur so soft she marveled. True, they all eventually went into pots to fatten and were sold live at the weekly market, but still it was a gift to watch them born, to hold them in hairless infancy and see them grow. Nobody hungered to rob or rape her. Her small fortune was hardly even necessary, and yet was a comfort buried deep beneath the earth floor of her dwelling. She set her donkey loose to roam the nearby hills, though the creature never wandered far from her. Was this not happiness?

Not quite. That was why every day since her arrival Aradna had climbed up to the old ruin at its summit. The first few times, she followed a goat trail part of the way, but she soon found this course too circuitous for her liking. By the late autumn she had carved her own path straight up a gully, out of which she rose so abruptly that she scrambled for a time on all fours, and then onto a ridge that took her the rest of the way. Considering the distances she had covered during her life as a camp follower this hike was a small exercise that hardly even broke a sweat on her, no matter how hot the day. The goats watched her with skepticism, standing big-bellied and recalcitrant, flicking their ears as if to comment on her disregard for protocol. She sometimes told them what she thought of them, but in fact she enjoyed the company of peaceful beings and she knew that her compulsion to gain the hill daily did actually verge on absurd.

Once into the labyrinth of aged white walls she found a certain peace. The ruin had once been the rambling estate of an Athenian exiled to the island for reasons of political intrigue. It had been abandoned many years ago, although just why Aradna never learned. As no single flat space existed to serve as the base of the house, it meandered through several terraced levels, stone walls blending in and out of the vegetation, as if the designer had bent to nature's plans and constructed the buildings not to offend it. In this regard it was strangely modest, despite its size and wonderful placement.

Aradna's destination was always the same. She climbed to the very peak of the island, which was a lumpy rise within the estate's crumbling walls. There, beneath the ancient olive trees, with the grainy soil crackling beneath her sandals, she would turn and take in the panoramic, circular view of the sea as it stretched out in all directions. On a clear day, of which there were many, she believed she could see everything that floated within a day's sail. And it was for just this that she came, day after day. She waited through the slow dying of autumn and even through the winter, when ship traffic slowed. She would just sit on the blustery heights and watch the hand of the wind drag its fingertips across the waves. She would think of the first time she saw the soldier, naked and aroused, falling from midair down to the sandy riverbank near the Picene coast. She would marvel at how they had met again and again in the chaos of a war-torn country. She would recall bathing his naked body beside a great battlefield and think of his strange claims that he conversed with a slain Saguntine girl. She would remember that he had a gentle mouth. For a few moments she would feel ashamed that she had parted with him angrily, calling him a fool for journeying back to Africa with his commander. But she did not chastise herself too much. He
was
a fool. There was no disputing that.

But he also had a destiny that she knew would not be decided on a battlefield. That was why she climbed here every day, because she would eventually see the sails of the ship bearing him home. One way or another, Imco Vaca would find her again. She was sure of this. Of course he would. It was only with this possibility that any of her life made any sense. So she chose to believe it.

H
ISTORICAL
N
OTE
                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                  

Following the close of Hannibal's war, the treaty between Carthage and Rome formally held for fifty years. The Carthaginians paid the yearly indemnities on time or early, and before long the city began to prosper once more. Hannibal was elected Shophet (or Suffete) in 200
B.C.,
largely with the support of the populace against the power held by the oligarchy. Holding supreme power for five years, he implemented a number of democratic and financial reforms. But his old enemies within the Council conspired against him. They sent word to Rome that he was planning new hostilities against them. He was forced to flee the city to avoid capture by the Romans and spent the rest of his life as a mercenary general in largely unsuccessful wars against Rome's eastward expansion, first for the Syrian king Antiochus III and later for Prusias I of Bithynia (northern Turkey). It was in Bithynia, at the age of sixty-four, that Hannibal decided to stop fighting and to stop running. He committed suicide by taking poison. His last words are reported to have been “Let us now put an end to the anxiety of the Romans who could not wait for the death of this hated old man.”

Even with Hannibal dead, Rome feared Carthage's power. By 191
B.C.,
the Council offered to pay off all the tribute scheduled for the next forty years. Such wealth may have been as alarming as any military prowess. In 149
B.C.,
Rome declared war once again, this time on a pretext stemming from a dispute between Carthage and the aged, prospering King Masinissa. Carthage fell after a three-year siege and her citizens were killed. A door-to-door slaughter left only fifty thousand survivors out of an estimated seven hundred thousand. Buildings were knocked down, burned, obliterated. Carthaginian culture, literature, art, and customs were systematically erased from the world's historical legacy. Having destroyed its greatest rival, Rome went on to build a vast empire.

A
CKNOWLEDGMENTS
                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                  

For their kindness in reading early portions of this work I would like to thank Laughton and Patricia Johnston, Nick Armstrong, Beth Johnston, Jim Rankin, Gordon Eldrett, Helen Harper, Jamie Johnston, Sorley Johnston, and Jane Stevenson. Everything in these pages had to survive the prior scrutiny of my wife, Gudrun—and this was a good thing. I thank my children for filling the workdays with joyful interruptions. Especially, I am indebted to my son, Sage, for inspiring one of the novel's characters. You will know the one I mean. Thanks to Sloan Harris for continuing to represent. And thanks to all the folks at Doubleday and Anchor for their faith, especially Gerry Howard, Bill Thomas, Steve Rubin, and Alice Van Straalen. Special acknowledgment must go to Deborah Cowell, my first editor and the undeniable reason that this book is in your hands right now. I also appreciate it that the folks at the Birnam Institute in Birnam, Scotland, provided me the luxury of a chair with a view and good coffee. Much of this novel was written in that corner, looking over the gardens.

This book is a work of fiction and should only be read as a novel. It was inspired by real figures and events, but I have taken many liberties to arrange the material into a workable narrative. For those interested in a historian's take, there are many sources to consult, beginning with the ancients themselves: Polybius and Livy. Among the many more recent texts I considered, I wore a few thin and ragged: Lesley and Roy A. Adkins'
Handbook to Life in Ancient Rome;
Nigel Bagnall's
The Punic Wars;
Ernle Bradford's
Hannibal;
Brian Caven's
The Punic Wars;
Leonard Cottrell's
Hannibal: Enemy of Rome;
Gregory Daly's
Cannae;
Theodore Ayrault Dodge's
Hannibal;
Florence Dupont's
Daily Life in Ancient Rome;
Peter Berresford Ellis'
The Celtic Empire;
Gustave Flaubert's
Salammbô;
Adrian Goldsworthy's
Cannae;
Victor Hanson's
Carnage and Culture;
B. H. Liddell Hart's
Scipio Africanus;
Serge Lancel's
Hannibal;
J. F. Lazenby's
The First Punic War
and
Hannibal's War: A Military History of the Second Punic War;
John Peddie's
Hannibal's War;
John Prevas'
Hannibal Crosses the Alps;
Frank M. Snowden's
Blacks in Antiquity;
John Gibson Warry's
Warfare in the Classical World;
and Terrence Wise's
Armies of the Carthaginian Wars, 265–146
B.C.