“Hannibal, stay with me a moment as I prepare for this day,” he said.
“Gladly,” Hannibal said. “Should I help you with your armor?”
“That would please me.”
Hamilcar waved away his attendant. The servant ducked out of the tent, though they both knew he was within earshot. Hannibal picked up where the other had left off, bent below his father to lace his sandals. He left the bands of leather loose around the joint of the ankle for mobility, but a little higher up he tugged the hide snug against the flesh like a second, thicker skin.
Hamilcar was an old warrior, past his fortieth year. Every part of his body bore the damage to prove it. A livid scar dripped from his left eye, a curving incision made during the mercenary revolt, as if the artist who drew it had wished to place a permanent tear on the man's cheek. His right hand had been shattered beneath a chariot wheel his first year in Iberia. He thought the injury fortunate, as he favored his left. Ribs cracked the year previous had healed at an off angle and had left his chest cavity asymmetrical when seen without armor.
When he spoke, he almost seemed to have been spurred by a musing on his injuries. “Do you know why I chose this life?”
Hannibal almost responded glibly, thinking for a moment that his father might be leading into a joke. But looking up, he saw the distant look on the older man's face. The wrong word might silence Hamilcar even before he answered his own question, so he pursed his lips and carried on with his work.
“I did not have to make war my life,” Hamilcar said. “My father fought, but I could have chosen another pursuit. I could have taken our riches and built upon them in truly Carthaginian style. I could have lived a soft and luxurious existence and never known the danger of battle or the pain of being far from the ones who complete you. There is some good to be had in such a life, but I could not honestly have chosen it.”
Hannibal finished with the sandals and began to fit greaves over his father's shins, pounded iron infused with a red dust that gave them a color akin to blood. “We are richer now than your father could ever have imagined,” the young man said. “Is that not true?”
Hamilcar considered the point, cocked his head, and looked off again. “Yes. I rule a vast empire now. I bend hundreds of thousands to labor for my benefit. My father would not have imagined that. But as to my earlier question, I chose the sword because it seemed the only honest pursuit available to me. Only with the blade, through a contest of wills in which one measures gains and losses against the value of one's own life . . . only this have I found to be truly honest. Do you understand what I mean? That I can be honest and yet lie time and again to achieve my aims? The honesty is in the simple fact that any and all who treat with me know the lengths to which I will go to achieve my goals. If I tell one of these Iberian chiefs that I will have his allegiance and his tribute by his permission or over his mutilated body, he knows I am a man of my word. To fulfill that word I may kill innocents or bribe his friends. I may fight on the open field or set a trap for him. I may not fight with him at all, but might find a willing slave close to him to slit his neck in sleep. I may, to prove a point, unleash an orgy of bloodletting and lust that erases his people from existence. All this I may use to achieve my ends. Do you think that I can still call this an honest profession?”
“Yes. You are honest in your goals. You deceive no man about them.”
“And what right have I to demand anything of another?”
“The right of capacity. Does the rain ask our permission to fall upon us? Or the seas to drown ships? You do because you can. All of nature is the same.”
“But the seas and rains are elements controlled by the gods. They are beyond our question, beyond our justice.”
Hannibal paused in his work and looked up, a smile at the edge of his lips. “Father, are we not tools of the gods as well?”
“Yes, yes,” Hamilcar conceded, waving his son away as he tested the fit of his sandals and shin guards. “Blessed be Baal, perhaps I am only a sword in his hand. Simple vanity makes me sometimes believe I am the hand instead. I say I choose this life, but who is to say it was not chosen for me?”
Hannibal rose from his knees and found his father's breastplate. It was a heavy piece of iron, intricately molded. The portion that protected the abdomen bore an image of Elissa, she who had founded Carthage in the dim past. She had fine, strong features, even lips, and a headdress. This was a crown of sorts, and yet it had a martial appearance, as if she might wear it into battle. Her hair curled upward in two thick braids, like the curved horns of a ram. But—a strangely intimate detail—locks of hair escaped at her temples and fell down in wavering ribbons that framed her face. It was an ancient piece, artwork melded with the needs of war. He had always admired it. The only fault was in the hollow orbs of her large eyes. As beautiful as it was, this blind stare always troubled him. Why had the artist not gifted her with sight?
Hamilcar let his son drape the armor over his shoulders. “Another day coming on outside this tent,” he said, “another opportunity for the fates to side with or against us. It is strange to remember that all men do not likewise gamble their lives each day. Do you recall the councillor Maganthus? His estate is in the rolling hills and pastureland south of the city. Do you know how he passes his days out there? He has thousands of slaves who work the fields surrounding him. But he has one special slave, a Thracian, I think he was. This slave's task is to search among the fields each morning and bring to him a young woman or girl. Maganthus sits naked on his patio, looking out over his workers while the woman takes his penis in her mouth and stimulates him to climax. The Thracian stands to the side, sword unsheathed and at the ready, should the woman try to damage their master. The combination of the girl's mouth upon him and the slaves in the field and the young Thracian with his sword unsheathed . . . the danger and the power of it all, that is where he finds his pleasure. He told me this himself, as if he were proud of it. What do you make of him?”
“He's a slave himself,” Hannibal said, “to his body's desires.”
“That was never a difficulty for you, was it?”
“You have always shown me how a man controls his desires.”
“I've tried, yes, but this control has come more easily to you.” The old soldier paused a moment as Hannibal clipped the buckles snug around his battered chest. It must have pained him, for he closed his eyes and drew his breath in slowly. The muscles beneath his tear-shaped scar twitched a few times, then settled.
“Maganthus is a perverse wretch,” Hamilcar said, “but it's not his desires that interest me. It's the delusion he lives under. He told me that each girl who services him gives him proof of her loyalty to him. Any one of them could clamp down and end his pleasure forever. The fact that they don't proves to him that they love him. He disregards the sword in the Thracian's hand. That to him is no honest deterrent. If her life were miserable, she would give it up. So the fact that she neither harms him nor gives away her own life proves to him that all is as it should be.”
Hannibal had finished with the breastplate and now stood with his father's helmet in his hands. “Maganthus forgets that the gods created us to love life without reason, even in the face of torture.”
Hamilcar motioned that he would not have the helmet on yet. “That makes it seem as if the gods destined us to be slaves,” he said. “Slaves to life, at least.”
Hannibal smiled. “That's how it has to be, but a true man is a slave to nothing else, right? Not a slave to another man. Nor to desires for sex or fear or drink or riches . . .”
“What about to the bondage of marriage? You have no idea, my young son, how much of my time is spent in silent conversation with your mother. She has been a splendid wife to me, given me strong children, and raised them in health. But she doesn't approve of what I—of what we—do. You'll never hear her say so, but I know this to be true. I did something once that I always regretted afterward. I showed her my work. I let her see my bloody masterpiece—a battlefield piled high with mercenary dead. I wanted to shock her with it. I wanted her to see my work, to understand the wrath of Hamilcar Barca and see that I—a lone man—could dominate many others. I should never have done this.”
“Why? Did she not understand what she saw?”
“No,” Hamilcar said, “just the opposite. She understood it completely. She's loathed me ever since.”
“You're joking,” Hannibal said. “Mother never once spoke ill of you.”
“What do you know of it? You were nine years old when we left Carthage. Do you think she would've spoken of such things to you? Didobal did not stop loving me; but she loathes me at the same time.”
“If that's how she feels, she is wrong,” Hannibal said. “Honor comes from battle with formidable opponents. The mercenaries had Carthage on its knees. Only you could save them. No woman can know what that means. So she shouldn't judge.”
