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But World Enough




The Gods sell all that they give.

Fernando Pessoa



The one-eyed man sat at the table and rolled the knuckle bones of the sacrificed ox. Outside, the wind blew from the mountains, and the dry and cold Winter of Bythinia settled upon the land. Hannibal Barca's house was deserted. Hannibal had made his way down from his bedroom, with its wide balcony and easy point of access to the vast, empty kitchen, where he sat at the much-scrubbed pine table and rolled his knuckle bones by the light of the dying fire. And still he couldn't get an answer.

He'd sent the servants out, long ago. No reason to endanger them as well as himself. At any rate, they were foreigners, who could not speak the Punic language and who had no personal loyalty to this man, but served him only for coin.

And yet, it seemed like yesterday that Hannibal had commanded the loyalty of crowds, multitudes, of armies and followers. If he closed his eye now, he could almost see behind it Carthaginians and Africans – and Celts and Greeks too – marching side by side, in massed ranks, a hundred thousand of them marching with horses and elephants over the Alps, attempting the impossibly daring feat of conquering Rome itself.

Was it the echo of their footsteps he heard when he rolled the knuckle bones and heard them hit the scrubbed pine table with a hollow sound? Was it the sound of their shouts in the wind?

No. He pulled his cloak tighter around himself. He knew his hair was streaked with more white than black, his once-sharp features made blurry by age and wrinkles. And he knew his arms could no longer hold the sword throughout endless combat. And his legs would no longer allow him to ride over half a continent....

And yet, he thought, frowning into the dying fire in his fireplace. And yet, the gods had promised him a great empire. How could he achieve it now? What did it all mean?

He rolled the knuckle bones and stared in confusion at the result. The combination of bones, the way they'd fallen, meant nothing. Or nothing he could understand.

He gathered them again into their ivory cup, and flung them once again onto the table. Tanit had promised. And now she must answer him.

***

"Hannibal," Hamilcar's voice echoed, anguished, somewhere above his nine year old son.

Hannibal felt his father's calloused hand on his arm. The emotion in his father's voice shook him. He fought back from the intense light and confusion in his mind, struggled for control of the legs that had given out under him. He held onto his father's hand; he drew himself up. He opened his eyes.

And faced the sacrifice – a young bullock that the priest of Tanit had butchered upon the altar. The altar was in a courtyard, where the whitewashed walls of the other rooms of the temple – the reception room, the holy inner room, the priest's area, formed three sides of it. The other side was open, on the side of the mountain that faced the city of Carthage.

Brilliant sunlight of summer shone from whitewashed wall upon whitewashed wall of the great African city, making it glare like a shameless jewel. Amid the houses, people moved, dark-haired and light of limb. Farmers and merchants and scholars. Phoenician and Lybian and Carthaginian and half a dozen other nationalities.

Beyond the city, in the sparkling blue bay, boats of many lands sat at anchor, come to sell and buy and trade with the greatest traders on Earth.

In that moment, a great engulfing love for Carthage came to Hannibal. He understood just enough, dimly, to know it wasn't his, but the love of something...something that linked to him, that was in his mind, that made him long for Carthage as men longed for women, as a hungry child might long for a sweet. All this, a voice in his mind said. All this might have been lost. And more.

It wasn't a voice, really, more of a buzz, a tension, a feeling like...like what happened when thunderbolt threatened and your hair stood out from your head. Hannibal's head seemed to vibrate with it, to become filled by it. And his legs failed him again.

"Hannibal," his father, Hamilcar, said. This time he was grasping his son by both arms, trying to make him stand.

As from a great distance, Hannibal heard the priest speak. "It will be demons. You didn't have a child pass through the fire and now demons will take your oldest son. You mark my words."

Nonsense, the voice-feeling in Hannibal's mind buzzed. Nonsense. Not demons.

Things that Hannibal's too-young mind – more schooled, as well-born Carthaginians were, in the traditions of Greece than in those of his own people – had never known flooded him, as he looked around as through a dazzling light shining behind his eyes; and his head pounded with an ache that wasn't an ache.

This morning he'd come to the sacrifice glad only that his father thought him old enough to go with him. Now he knew everything about it in a way he could never have dreamed. They were here to offer sacrifice and beg the lady to grant his father, Hamilcar, and his brother-in-law Hasdrubal a good start to their new colonies – what they hoped would be their new empire – in Spain. Hannibal had just been admitted to the rites, though perhaps a little too young for them.

The linen robe they'd made him wear, so different from the Greek chiton he normally wore at home, seamless and long-sleeved, had made him feel stupid when they'd walked to the temple. It no longer did. He knew it was proper to wear Punic attire to address a Punic goddess, come to Carthage from ancestral Phoenicia with Queen Dido centuries ago. And he knew the voice in his head was the goddess addressing him – him, personally.

He would have been overwhelmed by the honor, only the goddess didn't seem to be trying to honor him. She, whose image was so sacred that she was usually represented by a circle with two lines for upraised arms, had a message for him. A message she'd been trying to convey when, as the bull lay dying, she'd entered his mind and made his legs weak and his head spin.

But the message wasn't real words, and Hannibal had to struggle to make them words. It was, Hannibal suddenly understood, the problem of an eternal being trying to speak to a mortal one.

"Now he'll twist in a fit," the priest said. He was a small, bald man, his eyes narrow and spiteful. "And he'll forever be possessed by demons."

"Not ... demons," Hannibal managed. The words seemed to take up his whole breath, and he had to struggle for more.

"... too young for this," Hasdrubal, Hannibal's brother-in-law said. "He's just too young."

And no doubt, Hannibal thought, running his gaze over his brother-in-law's black-bearded countenance, middle-aged and already running to fat, it would suit Hasdrubal very well if I were too young. It would suit him even better if I were truly in the grip of a demon. Because Hannibal was the oldest son of the great general Hamilcar. The real heir to the great fortune of the Barca family. His brother, Hanno, was but an infant, and yet subject to the many forms of demon likely to take a baby suddenly, in the night. Until their late births, Hasdrubal, handpicked by Hamilcar to marry his oldest daughter, had been Hamilcar's right hand and stood in place of an heir to him.

This Hannibal knew, suddenly, without surprise, though there should have been surprise. Up till now, it had never occurred to the boy that Hasdrubal would benefit by having him out of the way. He'd always thought Hasdrubal merely a kindly older man, with sons already close to Hannibal's age.

Now, as he struggled for breath under the weight of revelations, Hannibal looked at his father, Hamilcar – an older man, tanned and beaten by a thousand storms, a million battles. Hamilcar had fought the endless, punishing war against the Romans. And he'd come home to quell a military revolt which had cost him the life of his second in command and best friend, Gisgo. Now, his hair white, his eyes burning with bitterness amid a nest of wrinkles, he looked at his oldest son, the hope of his old age.

Hamilcar was setting out, away from Carthage, away from the senate of Carthage which had thwarted his campaign against the Romans with insufficient funds. The senate, which had caused the mercenaries to revolt by trying to cheat them of their pay at the end of the war.  He was setting out, at an age when most of his peers would be settling into contented senescence, cradling grandchildren in their arms, to try yet again to create a place where he could stand free and defend himself without the constraints of the week-kneed senate.

And Hannibal knew what the goddess had told him, in the words that were no words. You must go to Spain with your father. You must not leave him. You must learn from him the art of war. You must attack Rome, relentlessly.

"Why?" he asked the clear air, the voice inside his head, the terrace-built houses of Carthage. "Why?"

Because you will create a great empire, an empire that will mold all of the future, the voice in his head said. Because you will be remembered forever. Immortal. Like Dido.

"Why?" the boy asked again – even as his elders looked at him, with varying degrees of amusement and shock. The priest was babbling something about speaking to no one.

Because it is your fate, the voice said.

And on that, Hannibal's mind and eyes cleared, his legs stood beneath him, his once more. And he looked at his brother, at his father, at the still-babbling priest.

"Quiet," he said to the priest. His voice echoed with the steel and fire of battle, with the command of a great general. It was his father's voice in the piping tones of a young boy. The priest stopped, mouth, agape. Hannibal turned to his father, whose hands still held Hannibal's shoulders, holding him up. "I am well, father, it is only that in the moment the sacrifice died I knew my fate."

"Your fate?" Hamilcar asked, letting go of Hannibal's shoulder.

Hannibal nodded. "My fate is to go with you to Spain, to learn to command your army from you. And when I'm a man, I shall make war on Rome. Rome shall never know peace while I live. And I shall make Carthage a great empire that will echo to the end of history and make men remember..." He realized suddenly what moved his father, and he smiled. "…your name forever."

There was a moment of silence, and Hamilcar looked at his son, eyes wide. For just a moment, Hannibal wondered if his father was going to order him put to the fire – his throat slit, his body burned, his ashes buried in the shrine of goddess – as was often done to children who proved defective. They were given as sacrifice, to keep the other children healthy.

But then Hamilcar threw his head back and laughed, an uproarious laughter rare in the man who had spent his entire life battling ruthless enemies, and half within his own city. "The goddess has given you a grand fate, has she not, Hannibal?" he said.

Hasdrubal huffed, impatiently. "He is but a child," he said. "And we are not taking him to Spain with us. He will stay here, with his mother, learn the traditions of Carthage, and become a proper man before he joins us.

And by then, Hannibal thought, Hamilcar would be dead, Hasdrubal would have seized control of the colonies in Spain, and he would be Hamilcar's heir for good.

"No," he said, the force of his new knowledge behind him. "No. You will take me."

And his father, a smile playing on his lips, looked at Hasdrubal. "Do not forget," he said, "who is the head of the family and the general of all-mighty Carthage.” Then he smiled at his son. "I think I will take you with me, Hannibal, I think I will."

Hannibal bowed solemnly. "Then I can promise you I'll always be an enemy of Rome," he said. As he spoke, he could feel the goddess withdrawing from his mind, leaving behind the feeling of a job completed.

***

"You are out of your head," twenty-five-year-old Hannibal told Hasdrubal. "To be accepting Roman treaties."

They were in Hasdrubal's house, a broad house, built of stone and whitewashed, like the houses of Carthage – with a vast terrace open to the breezes of the Mediterranean.

Hasdrubal sat on this terrace, upon a low-slung chair with broad arms. He wore Greek clothing – as did they all except when addressing the gods – which in his case consisted of a very fine chiton of what seemed like a most delicate peach color and – from the bit showing on the left shoulder – either silk from the Orient or the finely-spun byssos from the isle of Amorgos, for which the ladies of Greece pined and swooned. The himation was of just-as-fine stuff and embroidered all over in tiny, red flowers.

He'd been reading a scroll when Hannibal stormed in, and now he let the scroll fall from his fingers, and looked up at Hannibal with the half smile with which an adult might indulge the tantrum of a spoiled child. "Hannibal," he said, in a voice of soft censure.

Hannibal threw his head back and squared his shoulders. "No, answer me this, brother.” The title which, under the law he was supposed to use for his brother-in-law dripped from his lips laced with sarcasm, reminding Hasdrubal that however close to the family he might be, he was no Barca. "I heard you received Roman envoys. And you agreed to conquer nothing north of the river Ebro. Why are you accepting limitations from the Romans on your building of your own empire, brother?"

Hasdrubal sighed. He rose from his chair in a jangle of the silver bracelets on his arm. He pulled the himation looser over his broad pouch. "Hannibal," he said. "You are young."

Hannibal glared. He could feel the glare burning out of his eyes. "I might be young, but I'm my father's son," he said. "My father would not want us to deal with the Romans. Ever."

"Your father," Hasdrubal said, speaking softly, "dealt with the Romans, Hannibal. He signed the treaty of Catulus, ending the war."

"But you would sign a treaty without even warring.” Hannibal paced in front of his brother-in-law, who stood, stock-still and watched him, frowning. "You signed the treaty in vile submission before anyone demanded that you submit."

"Hannibal," Hasdrubal said, and put his hand on Hannibal's shoulder where his chalmys – a short soldier's garment – fastened, leaving his skin uncovered and his shoulder and arm free to wield the sword. "We have enough of an army to worry the Romans. We have enough of an army that they're not demanding we leave Spain. That, I know, is in great part your doing. You've trained them. You've led them. And the Romans are not trying to attack us. They merely want assurances we will not attack their precious Saguntum, the city they consider a friend of Rome; all else, we're free to do. Unspoken in the treaty is the understood fact that we're allowed to control all of the territory south of the Ebro. They will not hinder us in this. And then, perhaps we can strike at Rome. Or perhaps simply squeeze her out for commerce."

Hannibal glared at Hasdrubal and shook Hasdrubal's hand from his shoulder. He could understand the truth of his brother-in-law's statement. He could understand the facts behind his talk. In some ways what Hasdrubal proposed was more of a Punic way. To slowly strangle the enemy with commerce. To reduce the enemy to dependence with smart bargaining.

But it was not what Hannibal wanted. And it did not accord with what he remembered of the goddess inside his head. You will create a great empire, she'd said. Your name will be remembered.

If they went with Hasdrubal's plan they would, undoubtedly, eventually win out. Or, at least, perhaps they would. The Romans were in many ways a plodding people, less flexible and certainly less adept at winning the loyalty of those in whose lands they had colonies.

Carthage stood at least an even chance of taking over all of Spain, of colonizing the vast land and converting the Greeks and Celts already living here to the Carthaginian way of living and Carthaginian culture.

But by the time that soft victory came, Hannibal would be long dead, his name forever forgotten. "It is not what my father would want," Hannibal said. "It is not what my brothers would want. My brothers and I–"

"Your brother Hanno is sixteen, Hannibal, and your brother Mago is twelve and still with his teachers. What can they have to do with this?"

And now Hannibal lost the temper he had long held back, and stomped hard with his sandal-clad foot upon the polished rock of Hasdrubal's terrace. "They are sons of Hamilcar, as I am. And they know he would want us to make incessant war upon the Romans."

"No," Hasdrubal said softly. "No, Hannibal. You want that. Your father never did. And Hannibal," Hasdrubal drew himself up, pulling himself so that despite his growing corpulence he affected a military and proud bearing. "I am the commander of the armies, by election. And you are just my younger brother-in-law."

Hannibal took a good five breaths, in offended silence, before he could collect himself enough to fling himself out of Hasdrubal's house, in a temper.

***

The temper carried him all the way into his own house, where he ignored the soft voice of his wife, Imilce, calling his name, and ran up the stone stairs to his own quarters, his own room. There he took deep breaths, to calm himself, but in vain.

 Instead, he started pacing, hands clenched. He'd made the army. He'd made it what it was. An amalgamation of mercenaries, of Lybians, of recruits from nearby friendly Celtic tribes, it stood at near to forty thousand men, and it was far from the rag-tag mercenary force his father had once commanded against the Romans. These men knew Hannibal, had seen him grow up and trusted him – were loyal to him with their own lives.

He'd always thought that was the gift of the goddess to him, that he had the ability to attach men's hearts and souls, to win them to his side with his words, to follow him with his enthusiasm. He certainly was better than his father at it.

And yet the one man that Hannibal couldn't persuade was Hasdrubal. And Hasdrubal had been elected to command the army when Hamilcar had died, because Hannibal had been only seventeen and too young to be in charge. Now Hasdrubal was in charge until he died. And though he looked older, and going to fat, he was only twenty years older than Hannibal. By the time he died, if he lived long, Hannibal himself would be well advanced in middle age, and not in the state to do any of the war on Rome he'd promised the goddess he would do.

Leaning on the cool wall of his chamber, he pressed his closed fists hard against his temples, where pain burned as though something were trying to burrow in. Or his anger were trying to crawl out. He pushed his hands hard, knuckles biting into his skin. Please, he thought. Please. Lady. I want but to serve you. But how can I when this... soft merchant bars my way and would barter away our chances at empire? 

From outside the house came a sound of screaming, a sound that grew nearer. Someone pounded on the front door. It was opened, then closed again, hurried steps upon the stairs. Imilce screaming, a short scream and then, "I'll tell him."

His room door open. "Hannibal, Hannibal," Imilce said. "Your brother Hasdrubal is dead."

Hannibal opened his eyes and brought his hands down. "Hasdrubal?” Hasdrubal had looked no more likely to die soon than he'd looked likely to take flight. "Dead?"

"A Celt killed him," Imilce said, dark her eyes brimming with tears, her dark hair disheveled as though she'd torn at it, though she'd had little contact with Hamilcar and had little reason to mourn him. "With a silver knife."

"Hasdrubal?" Hannibal asked again. "Dead?” In his mind he thought of the goddess reaching out her powerful arm. Now Hannibal would be the commander of the armies. And he could do her will.

***

"There are Romans," Imilce told Hannibal as he returned, muddied and bone-tired from his campaign north, as far as the river Douro, to consolidate his holdings and solidify his domain over the loose confederation of tribes that occupied that wild land.

It was fall now and the steady-falling rain of that region, with the bone-chilling cold that accompanied it, had got into Hannibal's body so much that even the week back to his more southerly domains, as he approached Carthage, hadn't seemed to dispel the chill. Indeed he'd ridden back faster than he surely should, more desirous of warmth than even of his wife's company.

Now he stood in the entrance room to his house, his brother Hanno just behind him, still chilled and covered in mud. He wanted his bath and his bed. He wanted Imilce and calm. Instead there was this.

"Romans?" he asked.

"A delegation of them. All very proper," Imilce said. "Important people."

"What want they with me?" he asked. That the Romans might be alarmed at his relentless campaigns since Hasdrubal had died, he didn't doubt. That they might find this sudden Carthaginian obsession with war and fighting – when before they'd been all ready to deal – disquieting, Hannibal could well imagine. But why would they send him a delegation? Did they not know – was it not the word everywhere? – that he was a sworn enemy of Rome?

"They will wait," he said, "until I've had my bath.” He walked past Imilce before she could object, and all the way up the stairs to his chambers, where the servants had set warm water and oils and his clothing.  He unwound his cloak from his chilled body and bathed, with the aid of two body-servants.

When he was done, he rejected the clothes laid out for him – a chiton and soft himation, which he might very well have worn in the house. In their place he demanded just the rough wool chiton which he wore in battle, and which he fastened to his shoulder and side with a serviceable fibula. He'd go to see these Romans dressed as a soldier.

Outside his door, already bathed and similarly dressed, Hanno waited.

Together they went to face the Romans, who looked like fat merchants and who introduced themselves as Publius Quintus Sanguntinus and Marcus Illius Sextus.

Imilce, ever the housewife and hostess, had served them olives and pomegranates in dishes made from silver mined in the region. One of the romans had dripped pomegranate juice down the front of his tunic, staining it purple.

"You wish to see me," he said, sitting down.

"Yes my lord," Sanguntinus said. "We come with a charge of the Roman people."

"The Roman people will always have my ear," Hannibal said. And said it without irony. After all, hatred was, much like love, a devotion, a constant attention to the other.

Sextus fidgeted. "We would like to request, milord, that you not…that you leave Sanguntum in peace. For it is a friend of Rome."

Sanguntum. Through Hannibal's mind, several thoughts ran, discordant. Sanguntum was, after all, on the south side of the Ebro, and Hasdrubal had said that the contract left that to the Carthaginians. And the Romans were asking for peace for Sanguntum. That meant that they believed he would be within his rights to attack it.

He stood up and smiled. "I will grant you, gentlemen, that I've not in the least changed my intentions towards Sanguntum this last year."

One of the Romans opened his mouth, as though to ask what those intentions were, and what it all meant, but Hannibal was smiling, the smile so broad on his face that it almost made his features crack. "But you've waited long, and you're probably tired. Let me call my wife, and she will make sure slave girls bring you wine and food and whatever else you desire." 

They couldn't ask while he was being hospitable, and in two hours they were too drunk to ask. By the time they sobered all they would remember was that Hannibal had been welcoming, and therefore that he cannot possibly mean to attack Roman interests. They would only remember he was a friend.

"And what mean you to do about Sanguntum?" Hanno asked while he and Hannibal walked amid Hannibal's olive trees.

"I mean to take it," Hannibal said. "It is to the south of the Ebro, and even by Hasdrubal's dealing, ours to take."

Hanno gave Hannibal a worried look. "The Romans aren't likely to take it calmly."

"The Romans," Hannibal said, "can take it as they will."

***

"Carthage has been given an ultimatum by Rome," Hanno said, breathless, coming into Hannibal's study, where Hannibal was playing with his year-old-son Hamilcar. "They said they can let fall from their breast either war or peace."

Hannibal scarcely looked up. His decision, if such it was, had been made long ago, when the goddess had told him that he must always be an enemy of Rome and that it was his fate. "Well, then we'll snatch at the war and let the peace go.” He positioned Hamilcar on his knee, and bounced him up and down gently, in a motion like horse riding. The baby smiled, letting a thin tendril of drool fall, which Hannibal wiped on the back of his hand.

Even while doing it, he was aware that his brother had stopped, unnaturally still, like a statue. 

"But," Hanno said, "you can't mean it. We've lost two wars against Rome. We are not prepared...."

Hannibal smiled. "But we are. I've had it all planned a long time. We will do what no one has ever done. We will attack Rome marching into Italy."

"Into Italy?" Hanno asked. "What ships will take us there?"

"None. We will march by land, over the mountains."

"You are mad, brother."

Hannibal looked up. "If madness is greatness, then I am. But the Celts cross the mountains all the time, to raid the northern part of Italy. Don't fret. It can be done.” He grinned wide. "We shall do it with elephants."

Hanno backed up blindly, to sit on a chair near Hannibal. "With elephants?" he said.

Hannibal laughed at his tone of surprise, and – on his knee – Hamilcar giggled, the rounded giggle of a contented baby.

My son will be master of an empire, Hannibal thought. The goddess had promised, and he trusted.

***

Hannibal crossed the mountains, with horses and elephants, and forty thousand followers. Some elephants and some men had died in the crossing, but Hannibal could hardly regard it as important. His decision had been made and long ago, and if the goddess was with him, then these losses were inconsequential.

As though to prove his blessing from Tanit, almost immediately men from nearby tribes attached themselves to him. They more than compensated for the ones he'd lost. He pushed on.

In the marches of the Arno, he lost an eye to a chill that became a raging fever. This too, though marring forever the countenance that his wife had loved, meant nothing. He must continue. It was his fate.

He plundered Arretium. The city of Capua, second only to Rome in glory, deserted to Hannibal's field. Latins, Umbrians, Sabines and Picentines stood against him in vain. 

In Rome, human sacrifice was practiced for the first time in centuries – two Gauls and two slaves killed to appease the gods. It meant nothing. They could not stand against the power of Tanit.

In the shores of Lake Trasimene, he won a great victory and near Cannae in early August – with Magus's help – he defeated the Roman legions and cut them to pieces.

But the Romans were in Spain now, and laying waste to the careful empire that Hannibal had started building there. And Hannibal didn't have enough men. Never enough men.

It was then that he started using the knuckle bones, from an animal sacrificed to Tanit. He would roll the bones, and read the result.

Since the goddess was no longer in his head, he had to roll the dice to find what she meant him to do.

He rolled the dice when, early one summer, news came to him that his wife and son had been killed by a fever – a result of the confusion of war reigning in Spain. And the knucklebones told him to press on. He expounded to the goddess on his lack of men, on the fact that not enough Celts were crossing over to his side and that the Italianite tribes remained deaf to his appeals.

But the knuckle bones said, Press on.

He rolled them again when Syracuse rebelled and aligned itself with Carthage. And again when news of his brothers' deaths reached him. And again when the pestilence swept the Carthaginian camp and destroyed their fighting force, leaving Hannibal with yet fewer men.

And he rolled them, yet again, when, trying to protect Capua he attempted to divert troops from laying siege on his allied city by making sorties on Rome itself, with elephants. This failed. The Roman Senate apparently knew that the walls were far too strong to be breached.

At long last, bitter at heart, Hannibal left Italy. He left it to defend Carthage itself. The knuckle bones could not be lying. As they could not be lying when they told him that he must sue for peace, after the defeat.

Hannibal hadn't understood – he still didn't understand – but he knew the goddess could not deceive him.

An enemy of Rome, not forgotten by the wrath of her people and her rulers, he moved from principality to principality, trying to hide, trying to live a little longer, trying to spy an opportunity from which to charge again. Because it was his fate to make war on Rome and to win and to create a name for himself.

***

In Bythinia, at the end of the world, the winters were as cold as the summers were parched, and before the snows fell, blanketing the mountains, the wind came, carrying just a few flakes, biting to the bone of the old man Hannibal had become.

For a couple of years – he, himself, disdained to count the years of his exile – he'd lived here, with his comfortable house that contained nothing of himself, served by men who worked for the money alone and did not know, nor could they care, whom they served.

And then there had been rumors of Romans. Romans had tracked him down and with Bythinian complicity or indifference paving their way, they had gathered in the nearby city. One by one they'd trickled up, over the last few days. There was a veritable detachment of them, surrounding his home.

They thought – and he wouldn't say they were wrong – that he had been encouraging the king of Bythinia to rebellion.

And now there were dozens of them outside. Dozens to kill an old man.

Hannibal had sent his servants away. A great general, as he remembered his father teaching him, risked men when risk was necessary. And the rest of the time, he tried to save the lives of those who served him. Even if their service involved lighting fires and cooking meat, and their loyalty was to gold and not to him.

All alone here, in his empty kitchen, he rolled the knucklebones. And he got no answer. Or no answer that he could understand. The symbols the bones formed on the scrubbed pine were always the same. The symbol for completion. The image of something done.

Hannibal shook his head. He wasn't done. If he were done Rome would be defeated and Carthage would be the power in the world. Or at least that offshoot of Carthage which was his beloved Cartagena in Spain.

But he wasn't. He got up and got wine from a flagon hanging on the wall of his kitchen and poured himself a cup. It tasted sour, and not like the wine he'd drunk in Italy while he commanded his troops. But he drank it, anyway, against the bone-biting cold.

Without the goddess and her promises, he would have stayed in Cartagena, by the Mediterranean sea. He could imagine it now – even in this season – bathed by mild breezes and the warm waters of the ocean. He could imagine the terraced houses – which might now be all destroyed by the Romans – reflecting the sunlight. And children running and playing in the dusty streets.

If he hadn't undertaken to fulfill his promise to the goddess, his son might have been one of those children. But no. By now Hamilcar the younger would have had children, and perhaps given his father a cloud of grandchildren to play with and bounce on his aged knee.

Hannibal surveyed his knee where it showed, bony and scarred beneath his chiton. He drank another cup of wine and tossed the knuckle bones again.

And again the symbol was for "completed.” And for accomplishment. He'd accomplished nothing. From outside, he could hear the steps of the enemies and voices calling, as they walked around the shuttered house, seeking entrance.

Was that the front door giving, as they applied shoulders to it? And how long till they decided to fire the house and roast their old enemy alive? And what could the goddess mean by all of it.

I mean you're done, a voice said. And well done. You have fulfilled your fate, Hannibal Barca.

His head hurt. As it had those many years ago in Carthage, his eyes seemed blinded by a light that shone behind them. "I have done nothing," he said, his voice reedy and wavering. "I have done nothing, save cause the loss of Carthage and of all my family."

The light resolved itself into a figure. A female figure, the draperies enveloping the voluptuous curves, the arms raised as the arms of the goddess were in the only, sketchy representations of her that Carthage allowed.

Hannibal's mouth felt dry and tight. The wine, he thought. One of the hired servants poisoned my wine. It was such a Roman trick to buy the demise of enemies by bribing their servants that he could almost have laughed. Only he couldn't laugh past the tightness at his throat, and it was too late, and his chest hurt when he inhaled.

Oh, but you have done everything I told you, Tanit said, her voice sweet and soft in Hannibal's years like the voice of his Imilce in the too short years of their living together. 

He tried to shake his head, though it hurt him. He fought with all his might against the workings of the poison in his body. He wouldn't die. He didn't have an Empire. He was not ready to die.

By your actions Carthage was lost, Tanit said. By your actions Rome learned the power of final conquest, of total destruction of an enemy. It has shown them how to be ruthless. And how to win. From now on, nation after nation will fall under the heel of Rome. And Rome will last long enough to forever be part of the civilization of men.

In Hannibal's mind's eye, he saw Roman statues, Roman clothing, Roman poetry in lands beyond those he could even imagine. He saw many languages from the Latin.

"But you promised I...," he said as he could no longer talk.

I promised you would never be forgotten. And you won't. Wherever Rome is mentioned, so will be the name of her greatest enemy.

Hannibal wanted to laugh or cry or scream at the depth of his betrayal. But his mind, working fast, and with all it had left, reminded him that he was Carthaginian. Carthaginians were first of all merchants. In any deal, you had to watch that you were getting what you thought you were.

Hannibal and Carthage itself, Hannibal now realized, had been nothing but a sacrifice in the gods' games of power.

But if he'd lost a bargain, he'd lose it like a Carthaginian. He shrugged off his flesh like an ill fitting cloak and crossed over to the arms of the radiant goddess, laughing at his own foolishness.

He'd got exactly what he'd bargained for.



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