Pride of Carthage

by David Anthony Durham

  He indicated this with the edge of his hand, cutting the air before him. Then, remembering the body of his friend, he pulled his hand back. “This talk is pounding my head to pain. Gemel, have they found the slain consul yet?”

  “No. He may've been stripped by camp followers already.”

  “Keep looking for him. He deserves an honorable burial, even if he was a fool. And see to it that the allied prisoners aren't mistreated tonight. I'll speak to them tomorrow morning. I want to send them home to their people friends instead of enemies. Have special presents sent to the Gauls, along with wine and heaps of praise and the cuts of meat they most favor. And Gemel, have careful counts for me before the dawn.”

  As the secretary withdrew, Monomachus said, “The gods, too, deserve praise for our victory. We should offer sacrifice. With your permission, I'll select a hundred Romans from the prisoners. We should torture them in the old ways, and offer sacrifices—”

  “No. We offered enough sacrifices yesterday. And what is this man lying before me if not a sacrifice?”

  This did not move Monomachus. “You know I'm sworn to Moloch. I can feel his hunger. This battle did not sate him.”

  “Don't talk to me of this.”

  “In your father's time, we—”

  “Stop!” Hannibal snapped to his feet. “Have all my generals gone mad? There will be no sacrifice! We will not march on Rome and this is not my father's time! You are my councillor only as long as I tolerate you and that may not be much longer. Leave me now. All of you. Go!”

  Monomachus turned away without comment and filed out with the others. Mago started to leave also, but Hannibal stayed him with a glance.

  Alone with his brother, the commander asked, “Why is my heart so troubled? I should rejoice, but instead I feel a new weight draped over my shoulders. I should honor my generals with praise; instead, I only find fault with them. I craved Roman blood for so many years; yet I do not want another victory like this. Mago, when I looked upon Bostar's face it was as if I were looking at yours, or at my own.”

  “I know,” Mago said, “or I upon yours.”

  “This victory was not worth his life. I would undo it all to have him back. How strange, my brother, that a man like me, who wants only to defeat his enemy . . . How strange that in mourning I would trade everything that this companion might live.”

  “No good can come from talking so,” Mago said. “You will not have to look upon a field like Cannae again. You will not have to bury your brothers. Surely, this is the end of war. Never will the world see another day like this. That is what you have accomplished. Bostar would reverse nothing that happened here.”

  Hannibal placed his fingers on the wood of the funeral table and pressed till his fingertips went white. “I know nothing of what Bostar thinks now. By the gods, I want to win this! It is all the work of my own hands, but at moments I look down and realize that I'm seated on a monster fouler than anything I could have conceived. Sixty thousand of them dead? Sometimes I wonder who is more bound to Moloch—Monomachus, or myself.”

  Hannibal dismissed the thought with a tic that upset and then released the muscles of one side of his face. Mago had noticed this tic several times in the past few weeks. He did not care for it, for during it Hannibal's face was briefly not his own. It was an ugly mask, similar to his, but different in disturbing ways. One of the torches began sputtering, a few loud bursts of oil combusting. Mago turned and watched it, wary lest an accidental blaze disturb the solemnity of the chamber. “You surprise me, brother,” he said. “Do you pity yourself now, at the moment of your greatest glory?”

  “I do not pity myself,” the commander said. “I know no pity. Neither do I yet have the word for what I feel. Even the gods in whose names we fight remind us not to think of war always. Think of Anath. After the defeat of Yam she hosted a feast in Baal's honor. When the gods were all assembled, she slammed the doors closed and began to slay everyone. She would have killed them all, for they had all betrayed Baal in the earlier war. You remember who stopped her?”

  “Baal himself. He convinced her that the bloodshed had gone on long enough and that a time of peace and forgiveness was needed.”

  “Just so . . .” The tic disfigured Hannibal's face again. He closed his eyes and for some time seemed to focus only on his breathing. Watching his visage grow calm, Mago was reminded of the clay masks street players wore during the winter months. They were vague, almost featureless faces that hinted at human attributes without rendering the details. They betrayed no emotion, and one could tell the tenor of the play only by listening and watching that much more carefully. Even as a child he had found it strange that the same mask could at one moment indicate mirth, and in the very next embody sorrow. He was, then, both surprised and not surprised by what his brother said next.

  “Let us forget this conversation,” Hannibal said, opening his eyes and straightening to his full height. “It does nobody any good and we've much to attend to. Here is what we do, brother. You must go to Carthage on my behalf. . . .”

  Never before had Rome endured so dreadful an hour. Each of the previous battles had struck its blow, but Cannae beggared belief. For days after the first news of the disaster trickled in, the people had no clear understanding of any of it. Just who had been killed, who captured, and who spared? Was there an army left? Was Hannibal already beating a path toward them with gleaming eyes? Was he truly, truly unstoppable? Questions multiplied with few answers rising to match them. Rome's people knew only that every aspect of their lives had been altered; now everything was at risk of imminent destruction. The streets and the Forum became roiling sluiceways of despair. The living and the dead were mourned simultaneously, in a jumble, for there seemed no way of separating the two.

  On the suggestion of Fabius Maximus, horsemen rode out along the Via Appia and Via Latina to gather what news they could from the battered survivors—if any could be found. The gates to the city slammed shut behind them. All believed that Hannibal would come for them now. What object could there be but the destruction of Rome itself? The death of her men, the despoiling of her women, the theft of her riches: what greater temptation for the monsters of Carthage? For a people so buoyed by their enslavement of others, it was easy to imagine the trials ahead for them should the barbarians breach the gates. Masters crouched beside servants and wept with them and made declarations never heard before and whispered apologies previously inconceivable. All awaited the coming tempest.

  Amazing, then, barely believable, mysterious . . . that Hannibal did not appear on the horizon. Yes, the details that reached them were horrendous, the death toll shocking, no portion of the news fair or welcome . . . but Hannibal did not come. He did not come. And with the passing of days into weeks and more weeks, people's thoughts turned from impending doom to other matters. Amid the fervor of war and hope in the city as Paullus and Varro marched out, none had taken note that prodigies had been occurring with unusual frequency. In the sealed, waiting city these events were recalled.

  There had been lightning strikes at the Atrium Publicum in the Capitol, as also upon the shrine of Vulcan and the temple of Vacuna and upon the stones of the road in the Sabine district. This latter had left a gaping hole at the center of a crossroads, inside which a child found the handle of an ancient's dagger. There had been other strikes on lonely spots that set the hills on fire. In a village in the far south, a flaming goat ran through the street calling out, “Hurrah, hurrah!” It was assumed that the creature had likewise been the victim of a malicious lightning strike, though there were no witnesses to this.

  All of this had taken place the previous year. As the new year dawned, the land seemed rife with signs. The earth split and peeled and offered up amazements that proved time and again that the natural order had been reversed. At Mantua there was a swamp that captured and held the overflow from the river Mincius. It was a foul place even in the best of times, damp and smelling of decay, rich in substance and yet somehow rank with dea
th as well. All this was of nature's own design. But a man chanced upon the place one twilight to find that the waters had turned to blood: not just in color but also in substance, thick and congealed and metallic in his nostrils, as if the earth itself bled like humans.

  At Spoletium, a woman awoke one day changed into a man. At Hadria, white forms were seen floating in the sky. Great numbers of dead fish washed ashore near Brundisium. And some said that the tunic on the statue of Mars at Praeneste protruded each sunset under pressure from the god's great, granite erection. Rumors to explain this flew as fast and chaotic as bats in the night sky. Some said the god was instructing them to procreate. Still others suggested that they should look to a leader endowed with a similar length and regularity. Before long the notion took hold that the local whores had sold themselves into the employ of Carthage. They had taken to servicing the god to distract him from the war effort. Reliable persons, however, never confirmed this, so this tale was best considered with skepticism.

  For augury it was an abundant season, and the results fueled the deepening suspicion that the gods abhorred the Roman cause. The city had forgotten to honor them properly. That was why this Carthaginian conqueror prevailed so easily against them. The people responded according to the advice of the magistrates and priests. An edict was issued for a period of prayer to all the gods of Rome, lest one go neglected and feel slighted. Lambs were sacrificed, fat ones with fine coats and handsome faces. Their blood ran freely to appease the gods. Their entrails betrayed more omens too bleakly numerous to detail, so the priests looked to still darker measures. Two Gallic slaves were publicly beheaded in an elaborate offering to Apollo. It was rumored that even older rites were enacted across the Tiber at night, but what went on over there had no place in the public record. Some people even turned to soothsayers—unusual for a Roman as such a practice was more Greek in nature—and these questionable persons produced all sort of varied and contradictory advice. Some people hammered nails into sacred objects and offered them at the gods' temples; others left food outside their houses for certain animals or washed with a single hand only, refrained from saying certain words, or pricked their skin with needles and licked the blood clean.

  Though some believed that these practices improved their fortunes, others found that unnatural incidents proceeded unabated. It was truly a volatile time, in which reason was hard to come by and quiet voices seldom heard. Two of the Vestal Virgins were discovered in unchaste acts. One killed herself with a dagger; the other had not the courage to take her own life but was instead buried alive by a raging mob. Gangs of youths swarmed the streets, flagellating beggars and rooting out poor souls they named as spies for Carthage. For weeks after the news from Cannae, the soldiers' widows walked the streets in tears, dragging their fingernails across their faces and arms and chests. Their mourning was so disruptive that the Senate roused itself to action. They banned any display of sorrow, calling it treasonous and un-Roman, and conscripted the raucous youths to police the ban.

  And yet through all this turmoil and distress not a single voice of prominence suggested settlement. Rome sent no envoys to treat with the Carthaginian, nor did the city receive his messengers with anything but scorn. Without even discussing the matter, the citizens of Rome chose ultimate war over a compromised peace. They would live by their own rules, or they would perish.

  Despite the almost fatal circumstances of his early years, Masinissa was a young man full of certainty. In infancy he had been threatened by an unnamed illness. A few years later, a smallpox outbreak took away his elder brother, several cousins, and many of his childhood companions: this was his earliest memory. A year later he fell sick with yet another contagion. Headaches and rashes plagued him. Stomach cramps doubled him over. He vomited whatever he swallowed, and other substances that came from deep inside him. Eventually, he lay unable to rise, feverish, his sheets stained pink by the blood escaping through his skin. Priests and physicians alike labored over him. Around them he watched the play of other creatures, small, half-human things that only he could see. These demons set their tiny hands on him and tugged, trying to lift him from his pallet and drag him off to some foul place. It took all of his will to fight them back. He was never sure just how he prevailed over them, but he emerged from his ailment with a quiet conviction in his own destiny. The illness had been a test; he had passed.

  He was not tall, but his father had always told him that the best men were compact, hard as close-grained wood. There were so many possible substances from which a man could be made, but quality was hard to come by. His line, King Gaia had told him, was of unblemished mahogany. Looking at his reflection in polished iron, Masinissa found the comparison apt enough. His body was such that each muscled portion of it clung to his frame in just the right place. There was no fat; a lean coating of skin wrapped him like wet leather dried to form by the sun.

  He had been a horseman since before his memory began, and he could do everything as well mounted as on foot. He smoked his pipe on horseback, ate many a meal, even pissed off to the side occasionally, joking with his companions about the strength of his hose. He sometimes dreamed of mounted sexual conquests, although this art did not come as easily in the waking hours. As for combat, he could hurl missiles at full gallop, pierce birds in flight, squirrels at dead runs. Larger creatures just made easier targets, none more so than the wide breasts of men.

  When he sailed for Iberia, he promised Sophonisba he would return to her a hero. He meant it, and it pained him that she looked at him with such amusement, as if his words were no more than bluster. He hungered for her. It was not so much pleasure that she gave him as it was the awareness of the richness of pleasure denied him. She was exquisite and cruel: the combination was irresistible. After his father's death, he would make her the queen of his empire, and then he would extend his domain in new directions. Even as Carthage ruled the Mediterranean, the Massylii would extend their dominion to the west and bring the Gaetulians and the Moors into submission, not to mention the Libyans. He would squash Syphax beneath the heel of his right foot, and then he would turn southward. He would forge new bonds with Audagost and Kumbi, cities he knew little of except that they belonged to rich and prosperous, ancient cultures. With them as partners, he would control the flow of trade between inland Africa and the Mediterranean. What a world he would create then! He would heap treasures of gold and ivory, beads and cloth and dyes upon his bride. She would see in the years to come that he was no boy to be laughed at, but a man to be remembered by the ages. Of all this, he was certain. He had only to make it happen.

  With the first few months on the ground in Iberia he proved himself the warrior he claimed to be. He knew that the best way to wage war changed with circumstance. Romans were slow to understand this, but Numidians were at their best when their minds and strategies shifted and darted as quickly as their mounts. His men once surprised a Roman reconnaissance mission as it was returning northward. He knew not what they had learned, but whatever it was died within their throats, each and every one of the fifty of them. He led raiding parties far up into Catalonia, blazing into villages with torches in hand, leaving them flaming pyres of despair.

  He had no personal ill will toward these people, but they were traitors to Carthage, friends to his enemies. He tried to make the Scipios feel that they had no control over their territory, could offer no protection to their allies. He could strike at will, wherever he pleased. As far as he was concerned, he could keep this up indefinitely. He was new to war, yes, but he already felt a mastery of it pumping in his veins. With his aid, the Barca brothers must prevail. He reminded them of his skills often. They laughed to hear his boasting, but clearly it pleased them. They clapped him on the back and hugged him roughly and pulled on his hair and called him younger brother. Hasdrubal once shot back, “True enough, prince, may you never be an enemy. May Fortune never betray us so completely!” Even Hanno, who he knew had suffered at Roman hands and who was generally a taciturn man, warmed
to him.

  Late in the summer of his first season in Iberia, both of the Carthaginian armies were in the field. It so happened that Hasdrubal's movements brought him near to the Scipio brothers at Amtorgis. Hanno, who had resumed command of an army, was nearby but separated by miles of hilly terrain. The Romans had apparently tired of skirmishing and wished for a real battle before the season's end. They were on the offensive, just as they believed their countrymen were in Italy. For a moment the situation looked dire for Hasdrubal's army, separated as he was from his brother. But instead of attacking him with their full force, the Romans split into two armies. Gnaeus marched north to hedge off Hanno, while Cornelius set himself right next to Hasdrubal, separated from him by little more than a river.

  At first glance, both of the Roman forces were considerable, each numbering some thirty thousand. But from his wide-ranging scouts, Masinissa learned that Cornelius' numbers were made up predominately of Celtiberians. Only a third were Romans. In answering this news he spoke a gibe against the Celtiberians, but a moment later he stopped in his tracks, stunned by what he had uttered. It was a simple idea, but it had a certain sublime beauty. When the generals met at the midpoint between their armies for a hastily called council Masinissa could not help but begin the meeting with his idea.