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and know that all the Mediterranean world is yours to shape. How many men can say that to their wives and mean it? Would you like that to be so?”
    Imilce squeezed herself further under him, until he rose up and she could wrap her legs around him. She looked at him frankly, long, as if she might disclose some secret to him. But then she smiled and stretched up toward him and brushed her lips across his and touched him gently with her tongue.
             
    Hanno Barca began the day with clearer eyes than most. Though he had reveled with the rest, he rose before the dawn and busied himself at self-assigned tasks. Mounted on one of Hannibal's stallions, he rode bareback through the city streets. The quiet lanes were awash with debris, bits and pieces of material without form in the morning light, metal fragments that might have once been armor but which had been torn apart during some segment of the evening's ritual. Hanno might have questioned this waste of military hardware, but there was little use in that. Such was the army of Carthage that it gathered soldiers from any and all the strange corners of its empire. Who knew all of their customs? And what did it matter, anyway? Somehow, Hannibal welded them into a whole, and that whole had made a custom of success.
    The fountain in the main square had been drunk dry. The bowl overflowed with limp bodies: persons clothed and unclothed and in all states between, stained the ruddy brown of spilled wine, greasy with leftover food, bits of bone still clenched in some hands, grease yet moist on mouths thrown open to the chill morning air. The fires had died down from their raging heights, but they still smoldered, giving the whole scene a surreal aspect. It seemed Hanno was looking not upon a festive city but at a conquered one. Strange, he thought, that the two opposites had so much in common to the unprejudiced eye. Missing were only the wretched of the war trains, poor folk who would have been picking through the bodies for what small treasure they could find among the dead. Even such as these must have had their fill the night before.
    In the stables he kicked grooms from their drunken slumbers and prodded them to work. The horses in their care needed them despite their hangovers. Then he called on the priests of Baal. Rites of thanks and propitiation had been going on since the army's return. Hanno had made offerings to the gods as appropriate the previous afternoon, but he was anxious lest more be in order. He dismounted and approached the temple holding his sandals in his hands and feeling the chill slap of his feet on the marble stairway leading up to the main entrance. He moved slowly, out of reverence, but also because he had no choice. The steps were set at a shallow angle that made it hard to mount them quickly. One had to place each foot carefully, a process that heightened the sense of awe and foreboding at approaching the god's sanctuary.
    At the mouth of the temple, however, Hanno learned that the head priest, Mandarbal, would not see him. He was engaged in high matters and could not break off at that moment. Nor was his present ceremony one for outsiders to observe. Hanno was forced to withdraw, stepping backward down the god's steps, uneasy, for in this snub he felt a rebuke he did not deserve. After all, he was the most devout of all the brothers, the one most mindful of the gods, the first to call on them for aid, the one who praised them for every success. He had even confessed to Mandarbal once that he might have joined the priesthood if he had not been born Hamilcar Barca's son. To this, the priest had just grunted.
    A few hours later, Hanno stood on the terrace overlooking the exercise ground reserved for the elephants. He watched the trainers tending the animals for some time, moving about beneath the beasts, talking to them with short calls and taps of their sticks. He thought several times that he would descend and walk among the creatures and run his