to her, but it filled her with affection just to know Imilce was near and that she was not yet totally alone in the world.
They did not travel far that night, just out of sight of Cirta, really; then they cut in and anchored off a fishing village. That evening the crew stripped all distinguishing trappings from the vessel. They furled both the flag of Carthage and the Barca lion. They tossed watered-down excrement onto the sail, for it was far too white to go unnoticed. They pried the golden eyeballs of Yam off the prow and scratched at the face painted there with hooks to make it look old and ill maintained, and they piled fishing nets into heaps at visible points on the deck.
In the dead of night, they lifted anchor and moved on. They tried to go slowly, for the coast was not without dangerous shoals, but they were passing the Roman landing point and had no wish to dally either. Indeed, at first light they spotted an entire fleet of Roman vessels beached along the shore. Hundreds of them. And there were more coming. The captain had thought to pass at half-sail, but spotting several ships moving in from the north, he gave the order to bend all the sails and fly behind the wind. Fortunately, the gods favored them again. They passed unnoticed, or at least without piquing the enemy's interest.
Later that day a Roman quinquereme came upon them at an angle heading toward the shore. The warship passed within shouting distance, a lean craft four times their length. Oars, stacked three rows high and numbering almost three hundred, dipped into the water, sliced up into the air, and splashed back down, all to the beat of a great drum that even from a distance thudded against Sapanibal's temples. The vessel dwarfed theirs completely. It cut the sea into two foaming curls, interrupted by the lifting and submerging of the prow through the waves, an armored prong that looked like the head of an angry whale each time it broke the surface. Had it rammed them it would have splintered their boat into pieces and plowed through them without losing the slightest momentum. But the quinquereme did not turn toward them. It just rowed on, some of the crew peering over long enough to inspect them in passing, uninterested, on other business they deemed more important.
They sailed on into the night, turned the point of Cape Farina the next morning, and steered straight for Carthage across a frothy sea, the glass-clear water whipped into foam by the same wind that carried them home. That afternoon, the captain approached the two women where they sat behind a shelter toward the rear of the boat. He walked steadily, even though the boat heaved with their progress, and he stood before them, body swaying to adjust to the boat's pitching. He did not look at them at first, but just remained nearby, kneading the coarse hairs of his beard with his thick fingers.
“It's ill news that we carry home with us,” he said finally. “It's likely we'll be the first back with word of Hanno's defeat. The Council won't look on this kindly at all. Perhaps you should report the news in your brother's name.”
“You fear they'll kill the messenger?”
He squatted and looked at Sapanibal. His eyes were a remarkable blue, as if they held the sea. “They wouldn't harm you, but me or one of my men?” He pinched the air and flicked his fingers, as if tossing sand into the wind. “Tell them to call Hannibal back, if they haven't done so already. Nothing else can save us now. Without him, Rome will grind us like wheat beneath a millstone . . .”
“Is this the state of Carthaginian manhood?” Sapanibal asked, scornfully. “You ask a woman to do your work, and then despair of the nation in same breath. Have you no pride?”
Under his sunburn the captain flushed, but he answered calmly, so firm in his reasoning that anger was not necessary. “If I speak out of turn, please silence me before I offend. But think of Troy, my lady. Think of Thebes. And there are other cities whose names are no longer spoken. If Rome seeks a pretext to wipe us off the earth they have only to look into the past. Only a fool believes that a victor knows mercy.”
“So you know the future as well as the past? No one yet wears the crown of victory in this war.”
“Just so,” the captain said. “This is why the Council must call Hannibal home. I pray they already have.”
Once the captain rose and moved off Imilce said, “Carthage will not perish. My son's life will never turn on such catastrophe. I must believe this, or lie down and die of grief right now.”
Imilce stopped short, glancing sideways, inhaling through her nose to indicate that perhaps she was being foolish. But in a few moments she lifted her eyes. “Do you love no one, sister?” she asked. “No one who makes you imagine the best of the coming world?”
Sapanibal's first impulse was to answer scornfully. Did the question suggest that she was unlovable? But looking into Imilce's eyes she knew otherwise. They were a wonderfully light gray, flecked with streaks of metallic brilliance, set against a white background almost clear of blemish. They stared at her with such naked kindness that she wanted to reach out and kiss each orb. Why was her instinct always to calculate her place in the world as if in combat? She had to put such thoughts behind her. And how could she have thought herself superior to this woman? Sapanibal knew nothing more than Imilce did. She was no wiser. No stronger. She answered honestly.
“There is a man,” she said.
“Is there? And do you love him truly?”
“I've never told him so,” Sapanibal said, “but perhaps I do. He fills me with fear, but it's not only fear . . .”
“Such is the one cruelty of Tanit,” Imilce said. “She binds together love and loss so that one always lies beneath the skin of the other. But you must tell him. Go to him at the first opportunity. We have so little, Sapanibal. All around us things come and go. People live and die. We kill each other for petty things. We make such a great noise across the world, and why? Who is ever happy because of any of this? Who? Have you ever been happy?”
One of the sailors shouted that he had spotted Carthage. The two women rose and looked out over the water.
“There were times when I thought I was,” Sapanibal said, “but those were delusions.”
Sapanibal felt the other woman's thin fingers grip her wrist. “No! No, those moments were the truth. It's all the confusion we make that's the delusion. I know this for sure. I asked Hannibal to bring me the world. I wanted to be queen over all that I could, but that was the fancy of a child. If he delivered the world to me now, I would hand it back. I would ask, At what cost, this? What I want most now is to make new memories like the old ones that I cherish. Like birthing Little Hammer and putting him to my breast the first time. Like lying cradled in the hollow of my husband's back. Hannibal once fed me grapes by putting them first into his mouth so that I took them from his lips to mine. That was truth. Sister . . . why do you cry?”
Sapanibal shook her head fiercely, and then swiped at the tears with her fingers. “The salt water stings my eyes. That's all.” And a moment later—as she found herself thinking of Imago Messano and the best route from the harbor up to his villa—she said, “Please continue, Imilce. Tell me more of what you've found to be truth.”
For several days after arriving in Cirta, Masinissa felt near to bursting with bliss. He had solved the two great problems of his life: his enemy was defeated; his love his to possess. And not only had Syphax been crushed; he was virtually forgotten. That first afternoon in the courtyard, Sophonisba had dropped to her knees and looked up at him from behind the amazing beauty that was her face. Tears hung at the rims of both her eyes. Her lips glistened from the moisture of her tongue. Two maroon swipes of color flushed across her cheeks. She swore to him that she had never stopped being true to him. She said she loved him and only him, and would love only him her entire life. Each time Syphax touched her, she had cursed the fact that she had skin. Each time he pushed inside her, she felt pain and revulsion instead of pleasure and love. She asked the gods to change her from a woman into some other creature. She said she would rather be a vulture, a frog, or a crocodile or a scorpion. She said that each night she would break a vase of Grecian clay and hold the jagged shards to her skin and pray for the power to sink them home and cut her face to shreds. She wanted him to know—no matter what fate held for her—that she had only ever wanted to be his wife. That was why it saddened her so to know that instead she would be ravaged by Roman soldiers. In a few days they would shove her onto a ship and sail her into slavery. They would take everything that she had wanted to give him and twist it into torturous retribution.
By all the gods, she was a revelation. The fascination he had felt for her in his youth was simply boyish infatuation compared with the ardor that gripped him as he looked down on her. And she spoke the truth! Clearly, she spoke the truth, both about her feelings for him and about the danger she now faced. And as this was so . . . Well, he could not let it be so. He did not have to. He was the king of all Numidia. Nothing that he wished to see done was impossible.
He lifted her to her feet and before the magistrates of the city, before even the eyes of the former king, with the hasty blessings of Syphax' own priests, as his army continued to pour in through the gates, without asking her views, in the space of a few moments . . . he married her. And then began his bliss. For the next few days, he
