He was distracted from these pleasant musings by a glimmer far out in the darkness of the harbor. It was brighter than the oil lamps used to illuminate ships at night. The reflection of one of the beacons on polished metal? It seemed to flare brighter with each gust of wind from the north.
"Shofet?" said a feminine voice. He turned to see one of his banquet guests, Queen Teuta of Illyria.
"Please use my name," he said, smiling. "Fellow monarchs need not observe the formalities while sharing a roof. Could you not sleep? Is there anything you require? Please regard me as your personal servant." He could be as gracious and urbane as any Athenian with his peers, even this rather primitive queen of a barbarous land.
She smiled, a strange sight because it made her facial tattoos writhe. She wore a proper gown of Greek design, but it left head and neck, arms, shoulders and the upper surface of her breasts exposed. Every square inch of visible flesh was covered with exquisitely rendered designs of twisting vegetation and bizarre, elongated animals in vivid colors.
"I lack for nothing, Hamilcar. In fact, I never knew the meaning of abundance until this visit. No, the night is fair and I am not tired and I thought that this might be an opportunity for us to speak candidly." Her accent was heavy, but her Greek was excellent. There were a number of prosperous Greek colonies on the coast of her nation, and where there were Greek cities, there were Greek teachers of language and rhetoric. It annoyed Hamilcar that the eternal rival of Carthage had such a monopoly on culture, but it was certainly convenient that all educated people had a common language.
"Then this is my good fortune. Will you sit?" He gestured toward the fine table and chairs in the center of the terrace, pure Carthaginian in their drapings of precious fabrics and exotic animal skins.
"Thank you, but I come of a people more at home in tents than in palaces. We are always on horseback or afoot, surveying our herds. I think and converse better while walking."
"Excellent. I, too, find myself pacing when I have anything serious to ponder." Idly, he wondered what this chieftainess might have on her mind. He knew little about her people save that they were largely nomads, that some had founded settlements but only in recent generations, and that they seemed to be a mixture of Thracian, Scythian and perhaps Gallic in blood heritage. The woman herself was tall, strongly built and had abundant hair as white-blond as he had ever seen. Her face was handsome, with broad cheekbones, and her brilliant blue eyes had a distinctive tilt that hinted of Eastern ancestry. As for her complexion, he had no idea.
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 noblewoman, 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 unlikely."
"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 families, 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 anticipation. 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 neighboring 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.