She walked to the parapet and ran a palm along its polished marble. "I was struck by your exchange with the Princess Zarabel late in the banquet."
"My sister lacks tact and regards the goddess she serves as the rival of Baal-Hammon. You needn't take her words seriously."
She waved a hand dismissively. "Oh, I know all about troublesome siblings, never fear. I had to put aside a few brothers and sisters to win my throne."
"You have a refreshing directness of speech," he observed.
" 'Directness' meaning I am blunt. I agree. My tutors taught me the Greek tongue. I never learned the subtleties of innuendo and indirection. Such things are alien to the customs of my people."
"All the better."
"No, what intrigued me was one of your own replies. You said that you have no close kinswomen. Have you no sons,
either?"
"Nor wife," he said, striving for a Spartan terseness to match her own.
She nodded. "As I thought. Yet the survival of the Barca
family must be assured, must it not? The seed of Hannibal must not be allowed to die out."
"As you can see, I am not elderly yet. There is plenty of time."
She stepped closer and held his eyes with hers. "Let me be even more blunt. If you marry a Carthaginian noble
woman, she must be of one of the other great families. With a consort and in time an heir of their own blood, that family
will feel itself greater than the Barcas. Some of the great houses probably do already, is this not so?"
He nodded. "Every one of them. You studied us before making this visit, did you not?"
"I would have been a fool not to. Do I seem like a fool to
you?"
"Not at all," he said, enjoying this immensely. "In fact, I
wondered why a reigning queen wished to accompany what
amounts to a band of mercenaries. I suspect that you have a proposal for me."
"Precisely. I have no husband and am in much the same position as you. Chieftains of other clans and their sons swarm around me, pressing their suits. If I marry one of
them, he will regard himself as my master as soon as he has bred a son on me. If that happens, I will have to kill him and
then there will be trouble. I am young and can breed many
sons. You need a royal wife. In all the lands surrounding the sea there are only two royal women suitable for you. One is Selene of Egypt. I am the other. A match with Selene is un
likely."
"There would be obstacles to such a match," he said, stalling for time to think. "While the Barcas have never adopted the obscene Egyptian practice of brother-sister
marriage, wives have always come from Carthaginian fami
lies, dating from our emigration from Phoenicia."
"And no queen of Illyria has ever wed outside the ancient clans of our people. What care the likes of you and I for such
rules? They are the customs of a world as dead as that of Agamemnon and Hector. That mold was broken for good when Alexander made the world his footstool and united
West with East when he wed his best men with princesses of
the old Persian Empire."
It had been the right thing to say. It put him on a level with the greatest. It told him he was above the strictures of
ancient custom and could dictate his own rules to the world.
It was what he had suspected all his life, and it was good to hear it affirmed by a peer. Then she stared past him and pointed. "What is that?"
He turned and saw that the flickering glimmer he had noticed just before her arrival was now a discernible fire. Then a tongue of red flame shot skyward, twisting in the wind until it was a writhing, spiral pillar. All around the harbor, alarm gongs began to thunder.
Teuta stepped to the parapet and swept the jammed expanse with her gaze. "How bad is this?"
"Our firefighters are very expert. Ship fires are a common
occurrence." But he was deeply alarmed.
"It is at the northern end of the harbor and the wind is strong from that direction. Have your men ever been faced with this? Has the water ever been so packed with kindling-wood?"
"Never in living memory," he told her. "I'd better go and
take personal charge."
"I'll come with you," she said.
"I appreciate it, but you cannot help."
"I do not intend to. I just want to view the spectacle at close hand." She said it with a hint of pleasurable anticipa
tion.
This one will bear watching,
he thought as he shouted to
his servants, demanding that swift horses be brought.
With a roar, a ship erupted like a volcano. Great amphorae flew through the air, spewing liquid fire over neigh
boring vessels. An oil ship, he thought. Already this was out
of control.
Minutes later they were mounted and pelting down the wide, paved street that ran from the palace to the harbor. Before them rode guardsmen who cleared the street ahead, swinging huge whips to drive pedestrians from their path.
The hour was late and at first there were few citizens abroad,
but as they neared the harbor the crowd grew dense. The
clamor of the gongs awakened sleepers and they rushed outside to see what was happening. Word of a fire in the harbor
sent them down toward the water to view the flames.
Gawkers began to go down beneath the hooves of the guardsmen's mounts, and whips bit into flesh. The uproar
from the harbor was so loud that few heard the royal party's
approach until it was too late to get out of the way. The
smell of smoke and blood and the general uproar made even
the trained warhorses nervous, and the guardsmen resorted to using the weighted butts of their whips to drive them forward.
Hamilcar fretted impatiently. Already, the flames towered over the rooftops ahead. He looked to his side and saw Teuta, her horse under perfect control, her face ablaze. "I had not anticipated such excitement until we should see battle!" she told him. "This is proving a most entertaining journey!" Her Greek gown was not designed for riding and it bunched almost at her hips, baring her legs immodestly, but considering the density of her intricate tattoos, she looked fully clothed.
At last they burst from the streets onto the great plaza that separated the warehouses of the port from the water and the long, stone wharfs that ran far out into the harbor. The harbormaster stood atop a twenty-foot platform, shouting orders through a huge funnel of thin silver, one of the insignia of his office. Under his direction, firefighters ran along the wharfs carrying buckets of water and sand, some holding the axes and poles and long rakes used in their demanding profession. Hamilcar noted with approval their excellent discipline and courage. The men wore heavy fire cloaks of leather or linen and wide-brimmed helmets of painted rawhide.
Hamilcar and Teuta dismounted at the base of the platform and dashed up its steps. "How far has it spread?" Hamilcar shouted.
"The northeast quadrant is ablaze," the harbormaster said. He was a white-bearded man of many years' experi
ence. He did not bow to his shofet or even look in his direc
tion. At this moment his authority in the harbor was absolute. It was a law enacted before the days of Hannibal. Hamilcar stood behind him and to one side and motioned for Teuta to stay near him.
"Can the balance of the shipping be saved?" Hamilcar asked.
"We'll be lucky to save the harbor itself. If we do, you may thank your ancestors who decreed that only stone be
used for construction here. We have enough firefighters to
handle a fire perhaps one-tenth this size. Even that would be
a large fire. This is unimaginable."
"How did it start?" Hamilcar asked grimly.
"It may have been an overturned lamp, or a cooking fire
that burned after dark in violation of the law." Now he turned and looked at Hamilcar. "But if that is the case, it
happened at the very worst time, and in the very worst spot,
that it could have: among ships laden with oil and pitch, at the very spot where the wind would sweep the flames over the harbor."
"Then it was deliberate?"
"Either that or the gods are angry with Carthage. If it
was set by an enemy, we will know in the morning. I know
what to look for." Then a new battalion of firefighters arrived, their capes dripping from recent soaking, and the harbormaster turned away to shout his orders at them.
Through the night they watched as the immense flames
roared across the water. A very few skippers managed to get
their vessels out of the harbor before the fire cut off escape in that direction. Flames leapt from ship to ship, and in time the heat grew so intense that vessels burst into flame before they were actually touched by fire. At that point, all effort at control had to be given up. The plaza itself had to be abandoned and the shofet and the harbormaster went atop the great wall, where the population had assembled to gape at the unprecedented sight. The surviving firefighters were sent to the naval harbor to prevent the fire from spreading there. Above all, the military fleet had to be preserved.
Toward morning, the flames became a single column of fire, sucking into the center of the harbor whatever re
mained to burn. The fire drew a great gust of wind down the
streets of Carthage, pulling leaves from the trees, scraps of papyrus, wicker furniture, domestic fowl, even a few scrawny beggars into the great central inferno. After that, the fire itself died swiftly.
The sun rose to reveal a harbor that was nothing more than an expanse of floating charcoal and ash. Charred corpses and the pale undersides of innumerable boiled fish
provided variety, and for hours the stones of the wharfs were
too hot to tread. In the late afternoon Hamilcar accompanied the harbormaster to the northeastern end of the harbor along the great seawall that separated the sheltered harbor from the open sea. The heat still rising from the stones was intense but bearable. The stench of burned wood, oil, pitch and bodies was bad, but no worse that the usual sacrifices. Teuta came with them, and both monarchs held sachets of perfume and spices beneath their nostrils.
"It began here," the harbormaster said. A row of bodies lay stretched upon the wharf. There were twelve of them looking half-cooked, their arms and legs drawn up and inward in the usual fashion of burn victims. "They were the
crew of an oil ship named
Dagon-Gives-Abundance,
from
Tyre. It was anchored between other oil ships and pitch and bitumen carriers, here next to the seawall. The wind blew inland, so these bodies were spared the intense heat that would otherwise have reduced them to ashes.
"They did not leave the ship when they lost control of the fire," Teuta noted. "That is what sane men would ordinarily have done."
"Quite true, Your Majesty," the harbormaster said.
"These men could not go overboard because they were already dead when the fire started. If you will come closer you
will see how they died."
Hamilcar and Teuta bent low and examined the charred
bodies without revulsion. Both of them were accustomed to far worse. Cruelty was a commonplace, and both war and re
ligion demanded it.
"As you can see," said the harbormaster, lecturing like a
schoolmaster, "the necks of some are cut deeply. Others have large wounds in the chest, probably made by sword or spear. These men were asleep on the deck. The throats of sleeping men were cut easily. Some awoke, and they were stabbed or speared. Three or four skilled men could have accomplished
this efficiently, making very little noise. If any on other ships heard," he shrugged, "it would have meant nothing to them. Drunken brawls among sailors are frequent."
Hamilcar and Teuta straightened. "What do you think, Shofet?" she asked. "Was it the Egyptians or the Romans? Or have you other enemies who would profit by this?"
Hamilcar thought for a while. This woman had impressed him greatly, and she clearly was able to follow his thoughts. Whether or not she was a suitable bride for him, she was a valuable ally and possibly a sagacious counselor.
He could not be seen taking advice from a woman, not even
an allied queen, but he was already thinking himself above these old customs.
"Please come aside with me, my lady," he said. They strolled to the sea side of the wall, where it was cooler and
the salt-smelling breeze carried the offensive smells away
from them. She waited for him to speak first.
"I am at war with Egypt and with Rome," he began, "but
any king with imperial ambitions has an abundance of ene
mies, some of them posing as allies or as neutrals."
"That is very true," she said.
"Such a king also has enemies within his own land, within his own family and household."
"These are my own thoughts."
"The might of Carthage is based upon sea power. Our fleets, both merchant and naval, dominate the waters from the Gates of Melkarth to the Euxine Sea. Attack my fleet, and you attack my greatest power. Egypt, which is also a maritime power, has much to gain by such an act and understands this. Rome, a landlocked power until recently, likewise has a great interest in forcing me to confront them on land, where they fancy themselves unbeatable."