Hannibal's Elephant Girl Chapter 5

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Hannibal’s Elephant Girl


by

Ariion Kathleen Brindley



Chapter Five

On my way back to Yzebel’s tables, I watched for Tendao but didn’t see him anywhere along the trails.

I came to the tent of Lotaz. It was illuminated inside and I could see the woman’s silhouette fluttering with the flame from her lamp--a fuzzy shadow against the fabric. Someone was with her; the dark shadow of a tall man, rigid in posture, standing very close to her. His shadow also fluttered back and forth as if he was uncertain whether to approach or back away from her. He wore a strange hat, high in the front and low in the back.

I walked along the opposite side of the trail, staying far away from the tent. I could feel the eyes of the woman’s slave upon me. He must be concealed somewhere in the darkness outside the tent, watching.

At the fork in the path I paused to gaze down Elephant Row. A light breeze collected the fallen leaves and whispered them along the trail. I heard only muted rumbling from a few of the animals--a marked contrast to earlier in the day when I had sent the whole herd into an uproar. A few hanging lamps swung on tree limbs and some of the animals munched the last of their hay, but most of them were settling down to sleep or dozed on their feet. A lone water boy still worked at his task.

When I turned away from Elephant Row I wondered how Obolus slept. Would he kneel down, resting his great weight on his knees or would he turn onto his side? Surely his ribs would crack under his great bulk. Perhaps he slept in a standing position, but then he might topple over in the night. I decided to go there some night, to see how he rested.

Soon I came to the place where the slave girl had worked at spinning yarn earlier, but I didn’t see her. The tent was dark inside.

The noise from Yzebel’s tables came to me before I rounded the last turn in the trail. I guessed it must be the soldiers, joking and laughing while eating their supper. I shuddered at the thought of them making fun of me again. But even more, I dreaded the look on Yzebel’s face when I confessed about my accident with the wine.

One of the soldiers announced my arrival before I had a chance to speak to Yzebel. He turned his hairy face to me when I passed the first table. “Give me some of that bread, girl!” he shouted. “How do you expect me to eat this stew without bread?”

Yzebel turned at the sound of the soldier’s voice and almost dumped a bowl of hot contu luca into a man’s lap. Her expression was a mixture of surprise and irritation, but it soon changed to a look of relief. Then she glanced at Jabnet with an I-told-you-so glare. He stood at the first table, pouring wine into a drinking bowl held out to him by one of the soldiers.

I watched Jabnet staring at me with his eyes wide and his mouth open.

“Blast you, boy!” yelled the man with the drinking bowl when the purple wine spilled over the rim and ran down his arm. “Get away before I knock you down.”

I set my bundle on the end of a table and began untying the knot. One of the men grabbed a loaf from inside the cloth before I could get it undone. He tore a chunk from the loaf and passed it along to another man. The soldier sitting opposite him also took one and tossed it to the next table. He grabbed another and threw it into the waiting hands of a man at the fourth table.

Soon only one loaf remained. The man reached for it, but I yanked it away--that one belonged to me and I had no intention of giving it up without a fight. The man glared at me and I thought he might hit me, but one of his comrades threw a chunk of bread at him. It bounced off his nose and fell into his bowl. He grabbed the bread, gave me a gap-toothed grin and went to work on his stew.

All along the tables, the soldiers noisily sopped up their stew juice and wolfed it down like a pack of wild animals.

I hurried to the fire and put my bundle down beside the hearth.

“Here,” Yzebel said, shoving a heavy wooden vessel into my hands. “Fill any bowl that’s empty with this contu luca unless they tell you otherwise. Then do the same with the stew from the pot on the fire.”

“Yes,” I said and went to work. The delicious aroma of the food reminded me that I was hungry, but I would wait until the soldiers were fed. When I started along the first table, filling any bowl held out to me, I saw Yzebel take Jabnet by the arm and pull him aside. She gave him some strong words and shook her finger in his face, but I couldn’t hear what she said.

At the third table, a man had one entire side to himself. Across from him, five men crowded together and gobbled their food, sometimes taking bites from their neighbor’s bowl. This one man sat quietly, his eyes following every movement around him. I liked his features--wide-set eyes, strong jaw line and squarish chin. His long hair was thick and dark. Most of the other soldiers were older than him, however, I thought he behaved in a more mature manner than any of them.

I held the wooden spoon over his empty bowl to fill it with the steaming durum and mutton, but he waved my hand away.

“No more,” he said. “But I will have another half bowl of your wine.” He held his empty drinking bowl out and glanced at me for the first time. “If you please,” he added.

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I didn’t know if it was his politeness, his neat and clean appearance or his eyes--they held an expression I could only describe as calm strength--but my young heart performed some new trick within my chest. His scent brought to my mind the smell of new leather and strenuous exertion. On a lesser man, it might have been unpleasant.

I blinked when a hairy fist pounded a nearby table where an unwelcome newcomer yelled for food.

It took only a glance from the man beside me to shut the other one up. With the exception of Tendao and Bostar, all the men in camp seemed ugly, boisterous and obnoxious. This man was none of those things. He was young; his beard just coming in. His eyes were a deep brown and his demeanor strong but not overbearing. His skin was darker than mine by a few shades of tan--the color reminded me of a feather from a hawk’s wing.

“Yes,” I finally said and put my serving bowl on the table. I took the drinking bowl from his hand. “I’ll fetch your wine.”

I hurried to where Jabnet poured wine at the last table. After grabbing the wine jug from him, I filled the man’s drinking bowl halfway and then thrust the jug into Jabnet’s hands.

Back at the man’s table, I set the drinking bowl before him. “Would you like more stew? We have some on the fire.”

He shook his head slightly and took up the drinking bowl, dismissed me with a casual hand motion. All this happened so smoothly that if he had spoken, he might have said, “No, thank you. You may go now and be about your duties.”

I did go on with my work, taking the bowl of contu luca to serve the other men. At the end of the fourth table, my serving bowl was empty. I went to the hearth and began filling it from the pot. Yzebel stood by the fire, dipping out the last of the stew.

“Who is that man?” I whispered to Yzebel.

“Which one?” Yzebel also whispered.

“That one.” I nodded my head backwards, but didn’t look his way. “Sitting by himself.”

Yzebel took a quick glance over my shoulder. “Why, that’s Hannibal. Son of General Hamilcar himself.”

I remembered Hannibal’s name being mentioned by Tendao at the river.

Yzebel leaned toward me, still whispering, “I hope these men fill their bellies soon, this is the last of the stew.”

“And the contu luca.” I scooped up the remaining durum and meat with the wooden spoon.

Yzebel gave me a wink. “Well, let’s see what happens. Spread it out, giving each man only a little.”

“We still have one loaf of bread.” I nodded toward my bundle on the ground by the fire. “If they get mad at us, we can throw it out on the trail and they’ll all run to tear into it like a horde of jackals.”

Yzebel’s face brightened and I thought she would laugh, but she didn’t.

“Come now,” Yzebel said with a smile, “let’s get back to work.”

##

Sometime after midnight the last of the soldiers left. They had licked every bowl clean.

I was glad to see them go.

Jabnet began to clear one of the tables, but Yzebel stopped him, saying he could leave it until morning. The three of us collected all the coppers and trinkets the men had left on the tables and put them together on the end of the first table. Jabnet and I sat across from Yzebel and watched her sort through the items.

“Silver,” she said, holding a large shiny coin to the lamplight.

“I think Hannibal left that one,” I said.

“Really?” Yzebel turned it over to look at the other side. “It’s Roman.”

“Roman?”

She handed the coin to me. “They’re the people across the sea. The ones who defeated General Hamilcar in the last war.”

“It looks really old. Is that a horse with wings?”

“Yes,” Yzebel said. “The Romans call him Pegasus. Crazy people, thinking horses can fly.”

I turned the coin over to see a outline of a man’s face and some words around the edge. “Who is this?” I handed the coin back to Yzebel.

“Some dead Roman.” She tossed the coin back into the pile.

“I’m hungry,” Jabnet said.

Yzebel glanced around at all the empty bowls and then at the pots by the fire--they were also empty. “So am I,” she said. “But they ate everything.”

“No, they didn’t.” I ran to get my bundle from the hearth. I brought it back to the table and pulled out the last loaf of bread. “I saved this one.”

Yzebel laughed and took the loaf. She broke it, giving each of us a large piece of the bread, and then she reached for a jug on the table. She shook the jug and found it still contained a little wine. I took three drinking bowls from another table and Yzebel poured the wine into them, dividing it equally between the three bowls. “Jabnet, bring me the waterskin.”

He slid off the bench and slouched toward the hearth, mumbling something about the wine.

When he returned with the waterskin Yzebel watered down the wine; Jabnet’s and mine much more than hers.

We ate our bread while Yzebel examined a pair of earrings with large gold loops and an ivory comb.

I had almost worked up the courage to tell Yzebel about the wine I spilled on Elephant Row when she picked up a ring from the pile of trinkets and gave it to Jabnet.

He studied it and then tried to put it on his thumb, but it wouldn’t fit. After slipping the ring on his little finger he said, “That’s all I get?”

Yzebel ignored the boy and continued to sort through the jewelry while munching on her bread. Finally she picked up another item, looked it over for a moment, and then handed it to me.

My eyes widened and I caught my breath. “For me?” I whispered.




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