Pride of Carthage

by David Anthony Durham

  Syphax studied on the question. He twirled a massive ring around his thumb, tugged on it, and twirled it again. “Yes. He was my superior in many ways. In most things, really, all but one very important thing. He wasn't my father's son. So on the day that I stepped in to rule my people I had Marcor beheaded. I impaled his body on a stake and set it to rot outside the city. Vultures pecked at him and then hyenas and jackals, and within a few days there was not even flesh left for maggots to eat. So I would say that in the end I tripped him after all.”

  “I'm sure there is a lesson in this,” the consul said.

  “Moral?” Syphax asked. “Lesson? Perhaps. Perhaps not. It's just something that happened. Many things happen, don't they?” He dropped the subject and turned to Hanno. “How's that sister of yours? I trust she grows in health?”

  “Sapanibal?”

  The king laughed through his nose. “No, not that one. The beauty, Sophonisba. Why am I asking you, though? You've not been home in years.” The king leaned forward. He motioned Hanno closer with his fingers, his hand like a cat's paw. “I caught a glimpse of her the last time I visited your homeland. Several years ago, this was. She was just a girl, really, but she wore a woman's gown. Her breasts were firm like fruit just about to ripen. Her face . . . Her face was like . . . It was something you could stare at and stare at. I mean no offense to your family, but had I the chance I'd fuck that one till her legs bowed. A mystery of beauty like that should be possessed.”

  Syphax broke off and flopped back against his cushions. He seemed drunker now than he had just a moment before. Without a thought to his guests he scratched his groin, lingered a moment on the stirring there. He looked up and fixed his gaze on Hanno, the first time that evening that he had looked at him with particular import. “Truly, Sophonisba could drive a sane man crazy. Remember that I mean no disrespect, friend. But she's been in my dreams, waking and sleeping. I've seen bits and pieces of her in other women, but never the whole. Never has a bitch stirred me like she does. I'd even marry her if that's what it took.”

  Out of the corner of his eye Hanno could tell that Publius, just having gotten the translation of the king's words, was shifting his gaze between the two of them. He knew that the artery on his forehead was beating visibly. There flashed before him the sudden image of him clamping one hand around Syphax' neck and bashing his face in with the other. He wanted to look away, but he held the man's bloodshot gaze for as long as he had to.

  Syphax broke away. He moved his chin to the side, toward Publius. The rest of his face seemed to follow a moment after. “But he wouldn't know about this, would he?” he asked the Roman. “She is his sister. He's not an Egyptian, after all. . . .”

  Syphax cupped his large hands over his knees. At the gesture, Hanno realized that the tattoos were a stylized rendering of lion's claws, the pattern they made on wet soil. The king rose, saying he needed a woman. They would talk more on the morrow, he promised. They would talk much more.

  But in his three days in Cirta, Hanno never had more than a few moments alone with the king. They met briefly in the mornings and in passing in the afternoons; both he and Publius shared the man's table for the main meal, required to sit across from each other, to speak politely, neither one wanting to show his hand or to flare up in frustration. He was not sure whether the consul managed any more genuine discussion himself, but still he could barely contain the simmering anger this kindled in him. Syphax, a petty king, was exploiting the situation to feed his own pride. He seemed to have forgotten the strength of Carthage and to be ignoring the old history of Roman treachery, living in the short glow of his own self-importance. He was a fool, Hanno thought, but he kept this opinion decidedly to himself.

  By the time Syphax escorted the two guests out toward the harbor to depart, Hanno still was not sure where his nation stood in relation to Libya. Were they allies or not? It seemed that both sides had tacitly agreed not to press the issue while in each other's company, and as far as he could tell, neither had either of them gained anything certain. Syphax seemed as he had when they arrived—an amused, neutral party. Not wanting to discourage the Roman's departure, Hanno decided to pretend to leave, and then to circle back as soon as he could. He hoped the consul would not attempt the same.

  “We have concluded our business, then?” Syphax asked.

  Hanno nodded. “As ever, you have the best wishes of Carthage,” he said. “May we always be brothers.”

  Syphax smirked at this. “Fine. Fine. Take my blessings to your countrymen, and to the women of your family.”

  Hanno half-turned, one arm vaguely pointing toward the docks. It was an invitation for Scipio to precede him, but the other did not do so. The consul scanned his face quickly, and then stepped close to Syphax. He spoke softly, but with no real attempt at secrecy.

  “Good king,” he said in the Libyan tongue, “since your business with Carthage is now concluded, I would speak to you of a few more matters. Just a few moments of your time in private. You will find interest in what I have to say.”

  Hanno, fuming, watched the men ascend toward the palace, the Roman close beside the Libyan, their heads bent in toward each other. He almost set out after them, but he had already been beaten, in diplomacy as in the field. Before he sailed, though, he composed a letter to the king. He stated his wishes in the clearest of terms and alluded to all manner of grand rewards for his friendship. He admitted that he had no power to agree to anything on his own, but he assured Syphax that his nation valued his friendship above all others. Staying true to it could only serve Syphax' people, and make the king rich beyond his present imaginings, and as powerful as he had the capacity to become. Carthage would give him anything he asked. Anything it was within the city's power to give. He wrote that he would dock near Hippo Regius.

  Only a few days later, a messenger brought word of the possibility that—despite the generous overtures Rome had made to him—Syphax would become an ally to Carthage once more. Little was needed to secure the bond, because they were two nations with roots deep in the same land. Theirs was a partnership to be nurtured, to be enlarged, to be sanctified. They were old friends, but they could be more. There were just two things he must have in return. First, he wanted a guarantee that Carthage would recognize his dominion over the Massylii. King Gaia was ill and sure to die soon. Syphax wanted his nation as his own, and Carthage must acknowledge him over Masinissa.

  This was bad enough, but as he read the second demand Hanno felt his pulse through the fingers that touched the parchment. There was one sure way to unite them, Syphax wrote. One way that they could truly merge their two peoples forever.

  Each morning, Imco awoke with a start. As soon as his eyes fluttered the world into existence and his conscious mind recalled the dream of a life he had been living for some weeks now, he flung himself upright. He cast around, searching for the woman to confirm that she was real. If she lay nearby he would stare at her in awe. He would move closer, trying not to wake her, his gaze roaming over her long, muscular legs, over the gentle curve described by her hip; he would imagine the weight of her breast so innocently resting on the soft skin of her inner arm. He would study the fall of her dark hair over her golden skin, the intake and exhalation of her breathing, the flecks of sunburned skin on her nose, the tiny ridges of her lips. Then, as her stillness always made him nervous, he would jab her with a finger until her eyes opened, slowly, clear in their opal grandeur from the first moment, as if she had never truly slept but had simply rested in imitation of slumber. If—as on several occasions already—she was not inside his tent, he was on his feet in an instant. He charged outside—clothed or naked, it did not matter—calling the name she had mouthed for him with her own precious lips. Aradna. Aradna!

  The simple truth was that he did not fully believe in her. Did not trust that he had actually found her or that she was anything other than a phantom created in his own wandering mind. It had all come from his walk behind the donkey. The creature took him up on
to a ridge of wooded hills, down along a lentil field. For a time they walked one each in the two ruts of a wagon road, and then they crossed a flat, fallow field. At times it seemed the donkey stood just near him; at other moments he realized the creature was far away, hurrying him on. He lost sight of it several times, only to find it again. When he stopped at the edge of a settlement and could not see the donkey he had the feeling that he had reached whatever it was the creature was leading him to.

  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.