The King's Gambit(33)

I walked through the ancient streets, amid the familiar sights and sounds and smells of Rome, and I pondered upon what I might be missing. What did I have? Two dead men, the unfortunate Paramedes of Antioch and the wretched Sin-istrus. A great fire that might have burned the city to the ground, had the wind been from the south that night. I had Publius Claudius and his sister, and a mysterious farm overseer near Baiae named H. Ager. I had the foreign prince, Tigranes, and I had the mighty but absent General Lucullus and King Mithridates, the latter now enjoying the hospitality of the Elder Tigranes. I might even throw in the late General Sertorius, whose rebellion in Spain had brought him to a bad end. I stopped in mid-step.

What, I thought, had been the connection between Sertorius and Mithridates? They were separated by the entire width of the Mediterranean. They were united only by a dislike for Rome. One may make a distinction in the case of Sertorius, of course. He was only on the outs with the then-current government in Rome, the anti-Marian party. He had claimed to be the legitimate government of Rome, in exile, and had even cobbled together his own Senate, made up of out-of-favor malcontents.

So how had these two enemies of Rome carried on their intrigue? Why, through the only other naval power in the Mediterranean besides Rome. To wit, the pirates. To the astonishment of passersby, I stood there and cursed myself for a besotted fool. Only a few days before, young Titus Milo had mentioned his days in the navy, pirate-chasing. Had my mind been working properly, that alone should have started it working in the right direction, had it not been occupied with lubricious thoughts of Claudia. It is also the nature of young men to blame their own shortcomings on women.

Once Carthage had been the premier naval power on the sea. We had destroyed her fleet. Rather, Carthage had destroyed several Roman fleets, but we kept building new ones and sending them out until Carthage was eliminated as a naval threat. Having done that, we neglected our navy, concentrating as always on our preeminence as land soldiers.

Into this naval vacuum had slipped the pirates. They had always been there. In some coastal areas, piracy was still regarded as an honorable profession, as it was in ancient times. After all, had not Ulysses and Achilles blithely raided unoffending coastal villages as they made their way to and from Troy?

The fact was, these pirates operated freely in what we liked to call “our sea.” No shipping was safe, but shipping was not the chief victim of the pirates. Mainly, they raided coastal districts for slaves. The great pirate haven on the island of Delos had become the pivotal slave market for the whole Mediterranean world. Those nations that were not clients of Rome got no protection from the pirates. Those that were clients got very little protection anyway.

During the Servile War, Spartacus had contracted with the pirates to ferry his army of slaves and deserters from Messina to freedom somewhere, probably out at the far end of the Black Sea. Crassus had got wind of it and bribed the pirates to betray Spartacus, otherwise that splendid villain might have gotten away clean. We hated to admit it, but the pirates of the Mediterranean formed a sort of mobile nation, richer and more powerful than most land-based kingdoms.

I looked about me, and found that I was in the warehouse district near the Tiber. Each of us is given, at birth, a genius, and in that odd way that these guardian and guiding spirits have, mine had led my steps while my conscious mind was otherwise occupied, and had brought me to the site of the beginning of all my problems. Nearby rose the immense bulk of the Circus Maximus. Before me, construction was well advanced on the new warehouse that was to replace the one owned by Paramedes and destroyed by fire.

It came to me that my genius was behaving even more subtly than usual, because this was not merely the Circus and warehouse district. It was also the district where lived Rome’s small but wealthy and flourishing Oriental community. Here were to be found the Asiatics, the Bithynians, the Syrians, Armenians, Arabians, Judaeans and the occasional Egyptian. This, I suddenly realized, was exactly where I wanted to be. Here, if anywhere in Rome, I would be able to pry loose some information about the pirates.

I walked another couple of streets, until only one block of tenements and storehouses separated me from the Circus. From each shop front and storehouse came the fragrances of the whole Mediterranean world. Incense and spices were stored here, and rare, fragrant woods. The odors of fresh-sawn cedar from the Levant and pulverized pepper from even farther east mingled with those of frankincense from Egypt and oranges from Spain. It smelled like Empire.

The shop of Zabbai, a merchant from Arabia Felix, stood open, recessed beneath the arches of a shady arcade. Zabbai was an importer of the most precious commodity in the world: silk. So short is human memory that even now men will tell you that Romans first saw silk when the Par-thians unfurled their silken banners before the army of Cras-sus at Carrhae, but this is nonsense. It is true that Romans had never seen silk in such quantity or so brilliantly dyed before beholding those banners, but the cloth had been sold in Rome for at least a hundred years before that, although much adulterated and mixed with threads of lesser fabric.