Pride of Carthage by David Anthony Durham

Author:David Anthony Durham
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780307276995
Publisher: Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group
Published: 2006-01-02T16:00:00+00:00

It was almost too much to bear thinking about, but Imilce could not help but do so again and again each day. She was ever being reminded that young Hamilcar was approaching his fourth birthday and that it had been three long years since his father had last seen him. She remembered how the two of them had looked the day before he departed. Hannibal had stood holding the boy in his muscled arms, looking down on him and whispering close to his face, telling him things he said were for the child's ears only. The boy's legs dangled beneath his father's grip, plump and lovely; his features were still rounded, his fingers chubby. The boy had listened to the man patiently, for a few moments at least. Then he squirmed free and ran off to play. Hannibal looked up at her, shrugged and smiled and said something she could not now remember, though she always imagined him with his mouth moving and wished that she could move closer to the recollection and place her ear against his lips and feel them brush against her.

It pained her to think how changed they both were now, how days and months and years had pushed in between that moment and this one. She knew her husband had suffered injuries that would mark him for life. She knew he had lost the sight in one eye and endured hardships she could barely imagine. He might be a different man entirely the next time she saw him. Likewise, Little Hammer would be almost unrecognizable to Hannibal. He had sprouted like a vine reaching for the sky. He no longer teetered on wobbly legs, but darted through their chambers like a cheetah. She realized her son thought of Carthage as his first home. He reached for Sapanibal and Sophonisba with complete comfort and unquestioning love. They luxuriated in this, even as they joked that they must treasure the few years the boy had left to spend in the company of women. Even Didobal softened in the boy's company.

Imilce had spoken to him over the years of his father, as had many others. The child was constantly reminded whose son he was and how much was expected of him. But lately she had begun to fear that her words found no purchase in his memory. As she spoke he stared absently into the distance. When she concluded, he moved away from her, always polite enough, always nodding when he was supposed to, speaking when asked to—but she knew the boy had a blank space in his center. Hannibal had actually been present just one year of the boy's four: no time at all. In the child's mind, his father could only be a creature built of words, a fancy like a character from old stories. Not so removed from the gods: like them, a part of every day, unseen and believed in mostly without evidence.

She was pondering these things one afternoon when Sophonisba called on her. Imilce reclined on the sofa at the edge of her chamber, looking out over the gardens.

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