know him, Regulus, the Roman consul we defeated and captured when he invaded our own Africa ten years ago. We should perhaps have crucified him. Yet we sent him to Rome to treat for peace on condition he would return. For what have we ever sought of the Romans, we who knew the bounds of the world before they were even a people, than that they should leave us in peace? When have we ever sought out war, unless when these vipers, these conquerors and colonisers of greed tamper with our trade and seize our lands? Three times has Carthage made solemn treaties of peace with Rome. Three times have the Romans broken their word. As we must, we resist them.”
A murmur of agreement, of anger, rose and died away, as hiss of pebbles on the shore when wave recedes.
“This Regulus we sent to Rome. And what did he urge on their Senate? Why, not peace but more war. Then war he shall have. As Sufet of Carthage I speak for the Council of Elders and I say: let that which is customary be done.”
It was as all had expected. Two men came forward and seized Regulus by the arms. A third gave to my father a short sharp knife and turned Regulus towards us. In one swift movement my father seized the Roman’s long nose with the thumb and finger of his left hand. With the knife in his right he cut it off. Regulus screamed and sank to the floor. The pool that gathered in the dust beside him was my first sight of Roman blood. I felt nothing. Mago beside me began to sniffle. My mother grabbed him by the hair and made him watch.
Next my father knelt. The Roman was pinned down on his back. I knew as my father began to reach out. I was to cut out tongues myself in years to come. The Roman’s screams were drowned in his own blood. My father rose, said: “Send him again to Rome. Then will he treat for neither peace nor war,” and left.
My mother sent us to our room. Mago cried. I lay on my bed. I did not understand. I understood somehow that I did not need to. The door opened. My father was there, washed, in clean clothes. I sat up, quickly. “Hannibal, Mago,” he said, “you are young. But what you learn today you cannot learn too soon. Come in, Hamilax.”
Hamilax was my father’s High Steward. How long he had served our house, I do not know. But he was old, his face deep-lined. “My sons,” said my father, “there are many things that words cannot capture. What you have seen today is one. Here is another. Hamilax, take off your tunic.”
Standing before us, Hamilax took off his shirt. From the waist up his skin was angry, red and rippled, like the surface of the sea when the wind ruffles it in a dying sun. He turned. His back was the same, but for the welts that crossed it. We looked. “Thank you, Hamilax. You may go,” commanded my father. I saw the Steward wince as he knelt to pick up his tunic. His skin, I saw, was stuck to his ribs.
“The Romans did this to him.” My father sat down on my bed. “He served my father Hasdrubal before me and was captured fighting the Romans at the great sea battle of Mylae. My father offered an exchange: ten of them for Hamilax. They agreed. When the ship bearing him came to Carthage, I was with my father waiting at the docks. But we could not see Hamilax standing on the deck. He was carried ashore on a litter.
“Understand this: yes, the Romans had released him, but first they had flayed him with red-hot sand. It was to be weeks before we knew if he would live or die. This, I learned, is Roman faith. What you saw done to Regulus was right. The gods demand it. Do not forget.” Then he was gone. There was only the creak of the great wheel which carried water through the palace, turning, turning.
As I grew, I felt alone not least because my father was so seldom with us. He was away, fighting the Romans in Sicily. He would come when he could, perhaps three times each year, sometimes for a night and a day, sometimes for more. Even then, he had no time. Strange men would arrive, borne to our palace on rich litters. They and my father would talk and argue late into the night. I heard snatches of discussion about trade, about money, for I slept in a room above that in which they met. One I came to know as Gisco was always loud. “Let the Romans have Sicily, yes, and Sardinia too. All we need from them is freedom to trade as did our fathers’ fathers’ fathers. Let us look south, to Africa.”
“And will the Romans stop,” my father scoffed, “with Sicily? What about Spain and our mines there?”
“They can have all that, if they leave us Africa …”
I slipped into a fitful sleep.
It was during one of these visits – was I four, five? – that my father woke me. It was still dark, but from the garden I heard the calling of the storks that marked each dawn and, through the window, carried on a gentle breeze, the sound of Eschmoun’s horses, safe in their sacred glade, whinnying towards the sun. “Hannibal, get up.” Shivering, I rose, slipped on my tunic, sandals. “Come with me.”
Through the sleeping house I followed my father down. We passed through the great front doors of porphyry, on down the staircase of ebony, the prow of a defeated galley in the corner of each step. On the main path of black sand mixed with powdered coral we went along the avenue. The double rows of cypresses swayed softly in the breeze. In the garden, past the orchards of fig trees and pomegranates, white-tufted cotton shrubs, roses and vines, we walked, on beyond the fish ponds and the great pits where the elephants, smelling us, stirred.
The wall, the great wall of Carthage where I was forbidden to go, rose up from the darkness. It was, I knew already from Silenus, a marvel of the earth. Of dressed stone, forty feet high and thirty feet thick, the wall ran for twenty-two miles round Carthage. Double-storeyed, it held within its bulk the stables for 300 elephants with stores for their caparisons, their tethers and their food. Above were more stables for 4,000 horse, their harness, gear. There were barracks too for 20,000 soldiers and 4,000 cavalry. A city within a city above which soared up towers, each of strong battlements, shrouded in bronze shields. My servants said it was the work of our god Baal, but I knew that man had made it.
Reaching forward in the darkness, my father felt the great smooth stones. He paused and heaved. One swung open, startling me. He stepped forward, into the wall. I followed. He turned and pulled shut the stone behind us. “This is a way, Hannibal, known only to me and to Hamilax. You will tell none of it.” In the dark, I followed him, as I was to follow through much greater darknesses to come.
Pushing up another stone, my father climbed onto the rampart, I behind. No sentries called. We were on a stretch of wall defended by the sea, impregnable. “I have brought you here, Hannibal, to look and to learn. Be silent now, and see.”
In the east, pink light swelled. White foam girdled the peninsula and the sea was still. Dogs barked. Birds called. As the light grew, the water-courses of Megara in the city below unwrapped their white coils, serpents against the greenery of the gardens that they served. Houses grew, taking shape and massing from the darkness amid the lengthening, empty streets. On the roofs, water tanks caught the brimming sun and shone like stars. The lighthouse on the promontory of Hermaeum grew pale. Baal Hammon was pouring over Carthage the golden rain of his veins.
Now I could make out below the wall the rampart of turf and, beyond that, a great ditch, deep and wide and dark. In the shadow of the rampart was Malqua, the sailors’ and dyers’ quarter, a place of dirt and ugly hovels. About it lived the Un-named, people of no Punic blood but of unknown race and origin, eaters of porcupines and shellfish, hyenas, snakes. Their huts of seaweed and slime clung to the cliff like nests. They had lived so, without rulers or religion, execrated, naked, sickly and wild, as long as the memory of man.
Turning, I looked over the city within the wall on which I stood. Cube-shaped houses rose in tiers towards the Acropolis. Public squares stood levelled here and there. The greenery of temple precincts broke up the uniformity of grey. First the golden tiles of Khamon’s roof caught the rising sun, then the coral of Melkarth’s. My eye was drawn on, up to the Acropolis
