The Emperor's Elephant(62)

Eager to stretch my legs, I decided to go ashore myself and explore. The dock was a mean, poor place. There was no sign of any cargo waiting to be loaded, though spilled crystals of salt crunched beneath my feet as I walked across open ground towards a collection of small shacks. Several mangy-looking dogs slept in the hot sunshine, slumped against their door posts, and there was no sign of human activity. Flat countryside stretched to the horizon in every direction, bare and bleached. When I peered into the darkness of one of the huts, I found that it was abandoned and empty and there was a musty smell. I wondered where the occupants had gone and if they would ever return.

I jumped as a voice behind me said, ‘Protis here is willing to take us to Rome.’

I swung round to find Abram with a slightly built young man whose dark skin and jet-black hair spoke of Mediterranean ancestry. The faint line of a carefully trimmed moustache emphasized that he was not yet old enough to have grown a full beard.

‘Protis is the captain of the ship tied up at the dock,’ Abram continued. ‘He missed the last salt cargo of the season. Last-minute repairs to the hull delayed him.’

‘It was just a minor leak, and it’s now fixed,’ the young man asserted. His self-confident manner more than made up for his youthfulness. ‘Your dragoman tells me that you are looking to charter a vessel for the voyage to Rome.’

His Frankish had a heavy accent and he was visibly relieved when I answered in Latin: ‘You’ve seen the cage containing the big ox on our boat, can you get it aboard your ship?’

Protis drew himself up to his full height of scarcely more than five feet. ‘My ancestors taught the world how to use levers and pulleys. I can construct a machine to raise your beast in its cage and place it on my deck,’ he declared.

With a quick, amused glance in my direction Abram intervened, soothing wounded pride. ‘Protis’s people are Greeks from Massalia. They settled there before Rome was even founded.’

‘And,’ added the young captain, ‘the citizens of Rome would have starved time and again if my forebears’ ships hadn’t delivered the grain they needed.’

I refrained from asking how many centuries his own ancient vessel had been afloat. Instead I asked him to show me around.

Even to my inexperienced eye, the ship was barely seaworthy. There were a great many patches where the timber had been clumsily replaced. The ropes were frayed and whiskery with age, and the canvas sails were threadbare. I peered into the open hatchway and saw the glint of deep bilge water in the bottom of the hold. Several times during our tour of inspection, sailors, of whom there must have been at least a dozen, hauled up buckets of evil-smelling, dirty water and tipped them over board.

Finally, I took Abram to one side. ‘Are you sure the ship is safe? She seems to be ready to founder.’

‘We could wait here and hope for another vessel to show up. But that’s unlikely this late in the season,’ he answered. ‘And there’s no guarantee that the next vessel will be any better.’

I scratched at an itch on the back of my neck, one of many welts that covered every square inch of my exposed skin. The biting insects of the lower river were ferocious, far worse than anything we had suffered previously. They feasted on us, both day and night. We smeared ourselves in rancid fat from the ice bears’ food supplies, and our boatmen built smudge fires to discourage them, but it did little good. Our faces and hands were blotchy and swollen with insect bites. I flinched at the prospect of spending days being eaten alive while waiting at the dock for a vessel that might never come. As if in agreement, the aurochs let out an angry bellow. Bloody trickles ran down its flanks and neck, where it had been bitten by a local breed of voracious fly, the size of my thumbnail, which thrived on cattle.

‘Very well,’ I said to Abram, ‘arrange the charter. Just make sure that we get on our way as quickly as possible.’

Protis made good his boast when it came to devising a way of lifting the aurochs and its cage. He and his sailors took a short, stubby mast from near the bow and repositioned it to project out over the side of the vessel. With a complicated web of ropes and pulleys they succeeded in hoisting the great animal, still in its cage, and placing it on deck just behind the main mast. The ice bears in their cage followed soon afterwards and were set down on the foredeck. In another of the young captain’s inspirations he then had his men cut the smallest of our river ferries in half and one section brought aboard. His ship’s carpenter built up the sides with extra planks, blanked off the open end, and re-caulked the seams. It transformed the vessel into a water tank for our menagerie. Meanwhile Abram’s men had been scouring the countryside for supplies. Several cartloads of grass and fodder were delivered to the dock, along with crates of live chickens for the bears, gyrfalcons and dogs. When all was ready, Abram paid our river boatmen their final wages and the three remaining ferries towed Protis’s venerable ship out into mid-river. There, her large, threadbare mainsail was let loose to catch the breeze. We began slowly to head towards the waiting sea, looking and smelling like a farmyard and leaving a trail of hay wisps on the murky surface of the river.