Tempt Me by K.A. Tucker EPUB & PDF – eBook Details
- Name of Author: K.A. Tucker
- Language: English
- Formats Available: PDF / EPUB
- Status: Available for Download
- Genre: Fiction, Suspense, Mystery, Thrill, Romance, Horror, Fantasy, Drama,
- Series: None
- No. Of Pages: 300
- File Size: 2 MB
- Price: Free
HANNIBAL
AND ME
If you can meet with Triumph and Disaster And treat those two impostors just the same…
—Rudyard Kipling, “If”
Shivering but rapturous, the warrior stood in the snow on a wind-beaten
pass in the Alps. His olive skin was chapped and his eyes were watery
from the icy wind. But he felt no discomfort. As he looked across the white
peaks, he saw faint green plains in the distance. Those plains were Italy, and
the twenty-nine-year-old warrior, named Hannibal, had been dreaming about
this moment since he was nine years old.
That was when, in his home city of Carthage in northern Africa, today’s
Tunisia, Hannibal had gone with his father to a temple and sworn an oath to
conquer Carthage’s enemy, Rome. Now, twenty years later, in the early
winter of 218 BCE, Hannibal was commander in chief of the armies of
Carthage, one of the great powers of the ancient world. As he stood on the
Alpine pass, the young man felt that he was physically and symbolically at
the threshold of his life dream, of an adventure that would change world
history. For he knew that down there, on those green plains, he would find
and fight the legions of Rome.
Behind Hannibal, on the long and winding slopes ascending to the pass,
was an army of tens of thousands of soldiers, mules, horses, and even twenty-
seven elephants. These men and beasts looked otherworldly in the snow and
hoof-trodden, excrement-brown slush.
Their faces, weapons, and armor, their animals and language—everything
about them looked alien in this place. The officers were Carthaginian, like
Hannibal. Carthage had once been a colony of the Phoenicians, a people from
what is today Lebanon. The rest of the army was a motley and Babel-tongued
amalgam of tribes.
Many of the horsemen, riding without stirrups, saddles, or
even reins, as though they were fused with their mounts, were Numidians
from northwestern Africa, the ancestors of the Berbers, with leathery skin,
aquiline noses, and bright green eyes. On foot were masses of Iberians and
Celtiberians from the land now called Spain, each band speaking its own
tribal tongue. There were Gauls, somewhat paler and with brown or reddish
hair, wrapped in thick, checkered wool scarves. There were Greeks, Libyans,
and others from the Mediterranean world. All were now mercenaries of the
richest city in the western Mediterranean, Carthage. But none had ever
expected to stand on the white roof of the world.
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