One of these opened. I heard a harsh command. My father’s quinquereme leapt into our sight and swept across the basin to its quay marked by two columns, the scorpion of our house on each, the horns of Ammon on their capitals. He vaulted over the thwart and was with us, taking first my mother then each of us in his arms. Only when he embraced Hamilax could I see him fully, tall and lean, a full hand taller than Hamilax, strong. It was his eyes, though, that held us all, clear, deep brown on purest white. He smiled. “Come, let us go home,” he said, and led the way to the wagon waiting by the quay.
I hoped to hear it all from him in time: the fires, the legions, Eryx, Sicily, the years of battle. I hoped for time. I knew that at first he would be deep in council and seeing to affairs. But the war was over. There would be time. That was not to be. The Truceless War began.
Leaving Sicily, my father’s orders were that our troops should return gradually to Carthage. They had not been paid for several years. Huge sums we did not have were due. I knew my father’s mind, for I was with him when he admitted Gisco and other Elders who had come to our house. “I have fought for nearly seven years in Sicily,” my father said, “and now you have peace. Give me mine. I must see to my own affairs. Pay the soldiers as you can. They are to trickle back, not flood.”
“Pay them, Hamilcar, with what?” cried Gisco.
“Why, the jewellery you wear itself would pay a squadron, Gisco,” my father joked, leaving the room. But he had every confidence in Gisco. “He may be no soldier,” my father said, “but as an administrator he has no equal.”
Several days later, my father left Carthage with Hamilax and four trusted slaves on a tour of his estates, his forests of oak at Zartana, his granaries at Chozeba and Tirzah, his summer house at Issachar and farms of sheep and goats at Marephath. He was to be gone for several months. We were all to wish he had not gone at all.
We became aware of the mercenaries’ returning almost imperceptibly in the months my father was away. Their camp was to the city’s rear upon the plain that stretched away and round the gulf to Tunis. I saw it grow as, each afternoon, I went for my ride with Abdolonim. The Ligurians had been first to return and pitch their ordered tents of skin upon the sand. Then came the Lacedaemonians, a race apart, who slept upon the ground within the ditch that they had dug. Soon the Balearics came, slingers from the Spanish isles, who formed no order like the rest but mingled, ate and slept wherever they could. Darytians from Gaetulia next put up their shelters of dry grass and waited in the wind.
A month passed and returning Iberians set their marquees of canvas with the rest; the Gauls made shelters out of planks, the Libyans out of stones. The Negroes and Numidians slept in trenches in the sand. The camp grew. There were 10,000 there, then 20,000 and Abdolonim would not let me near and a sense of menace grew around the camp as strong as was the reek and stench of this great host, the mercenaries of Carthage.
From the city to the camp plied traders, pedlars, women, boys. The women were of every nation on the earth, brown as dates, sallow as olives, yellow as melons, white as alabaster; women sold by sailors, seized by soldiers, stolen from desert caravans, captured at the sacking of cities, worn out by the penises and practices of many men when they were young and beaten when they were old, left to die among the donkeys and the dung. All moved and mingled in the camp, women of Cappadocia with gold plates in their hair, of Gaul with wolfskin on their breasts. Those of Cyrenaica, wreathed in violet gauze, vermilion-faced, sang songs of sadness where they sat on mats of rush. Amongst the clamour and the smell and smoke of many fires moved Lusitanians, with necklaces of sea-shell and pendulous naked breasts, gathering for fuel the droppings of the animals to be dried in a strengthening sun.
So much I could see for myself. But by the month of Eloul, in mid-summer, I began to hear from the servants and the slaves and from Silenus of merchants unpaid for their wares, of women for their services. Sellers of oil and water, tailors, moneylenders, bakers all complained of accounts ridiculed. For a sheep, the mercenaries offered the price of a pigeon; for three goats that of a pomegranate. The soldiers, it was said, had begun to drink wine, a thing forbidden on pain of execution in a Punic army. Prowlers were abroad at night and from the city there came complaints of thefts and rapes and pillagings. With the summer heat there rose a tension that afflicted all. Even Silenus found no consolation in his scrolls, in his philosophies.
Still my father was away. Still Gisco waited. I felt for the mercenaries, unpaid still, and knew that they must dream of many things that might have been and some that might yet be. One would buy a farm, one a ship, returning to their native lands with that of value from their years of war for Carthage. So did I imagine them dozing in the sun, counting up their years of service and their gear lost, their arms and shields and horses. Now, they had nothing, save their wounds and scars and grumblings. Carthage replied with barred gates and doubled watch and silence.
At last Gisco acted. I was at Khamon’s Gate to see him depart in his purple litter, bunches of ostrich feathers at each corner, crystal chains and ropes of pearl swinging to the movement that it made.
Behind him went twenty dromedaries, their bags heavy with gold, the bronze bells around their necks clanging as they lurched along. Around them rode the horsemen of the Sacred Legion, armoured in golden scales, astride their snorting stallions from Hecatompylus, the plumes of their bronze Boeotian helmets soaring to the sky. Then came the clerks on donkeys, with the tablet and the abacus for reckoning what was owed. With them went Silenus, unadorned as was his way, in simple cotton shift. Last in litters came the Twelve Interpreters, skilled in desert tongues, each with parrots tattooed on both arms, their headdresses of peacock plumes swaying softly in the breeze.
That struck me at the time, that Gisco knew at least he must communicate with many men who had no common tongue. Some dekadarchoi, some captains, Silenus had told me, would know Punic, but he was to speak the words of Gisco to the Dorians and Spartans, the Boeotians and the other Greeks. The Twelve would deal with the Libyans and Numidians. As for the rest, the Gauls and the men of the west beyond the Pillars of Herakles, Silenus did not know.
It had, I knew, always been a policy of Carthage to keep its army polyglot. So would insurrection be more difficult. But if this worked in war, it did otherwise in peace. The Truceless War began, as Silenus said, not from principles nor passion, but because people could not communicate. I have made it my business from that time up to this to learn the tongues of those around me.
Arriving at the mercenary camp, Gisco and his entourage were soon surrounded by men clamouring for the pay that was their due. Two heralds sounded silver horns, the noise died down and Gisco spoke, standing on a table of the clerks. First he told, Silenus said, of the Republic’s gratitude to its soldiers for the service they had lent to Carthage. “We want our money, not your gratitude!” cried back someone who spoke Punic. Gisco ploughed on. Times, he said, were hard. Carthage was now poor – “But you are not!” came voices from the back – “and if a master has only three melons, is it not right that he should keep two for himself?” The indemnity to Rome was crippling. The treasury was empty, the purple fisheries exhausted, the farmland abandoned in the war producing nothing. Carthage would have to sell its silphium reserve and further tax the trading towns. “Why, only yesterday,” said Gisco, “I had myself to pay for a bath-slave what a year ago would have bought me an elephant, no” – he must have thought they would appreciate his wit – “a virgin from Bithynia.”
So Gisco went on. “Excuses are like arseholes,” came a voice in Greek from the back of the crowd. “Everybody’s got one!” Those that understood – not Gisco – laughed.
By now the crowd was thousands strong and pushing hard against the circle around Gisco formed by the the Sacred Legion. “You will be paid, all