The Princess and the Pirates(13)

“Well, I’ve work for you now. I’m here with three ships—” He snorted loudly. “Ships! I saw them yesterday. Senator, your ships are cockleshells, and your crews are scum. Go sacrifice to Poseidon and ask him to keep a wide stretch of water between your little fleet and those pirates.”

“I’ve already sacrificed. I asked for good cruising weather, and Neptune is cooperating so far. I’ll be needing arms and provisions, so if you’ll kindly unlock your storehouses I will inspect what you have.”

“That won’t take long,” he grumbled, getting up and lurching back into his house. He returned with a ring of massive, iron keys. He had straightened his clothing somewhat and now wore a patch over the ruin of his left eye. Fully awake and walking steadily, he looked more like my idea of an old salt relegated by age to shore duty.

“As you might imagine,” he said, as he strolled toward the smallest of the storehouses, “our squabbling generals got most of the stores as well. I didn’t want to be totally stripped, so I hid some of my stores on a farm inland. That way I’d have a little something should we have to deal with an emergency.”

He twisted a key in one of the large, double doors and tugged it open. “I mean, if you have to, you can press a merchantman into service, even build a serviceable ship in a few days out of green wood if you’ve the carpenters for it. But try to come up with one of these on short notice.” He slapped a hand down on a massive bronze object that rested waist-high on wooden supports. It was molded in a rough semblance of Neptune’s trident, but it probably weighed four or five hundred pounds. It was a ship’s ram, and there were ten more like it, each of a different shape: boar’s head, eagle, thunderbolt, crocodile, and so forth, each of them capable of ripping a great hole in a ship’s hull and sending it to the bottom.

“This is the arsenal. Shields are over there on that wall.” He pointed to a wall covered with perhaps two hundred shields. “They used to cover all the walls and the ceiling beams. Swords are on those racks in the back. Bows and arrows are stored in chests in the rear room, along with barrels of lead sling pellets.”

“Catapults?” I asked. “Ballistae?”

“Not a one. Gabinius got the last of them.” He shrugged. “Those things deteriorate fast in storage anyway. Best to build new ones for each season’s fighting.”

The next building held spars, masts, oars, and other woodwork; another held sails and awnings; another chains, ropes, and other cordage. The whole lot: arms, wood, cloth, rope, and iron work would have fit easily into one of the buildings and left plenty of room to spare.

“What about provisions?” I asked, without much hope.

“Not a bite. What the generals didn’t get, the mice did. Not so much as a sack of raisins left. I’ve plenty of good jars, but you’ll have to fill them with wine, water, oil, and vinegar yourself. There are plenty of ship’s victuallers in the town. I can tell you which of them are the least dishonest.”

“I was afraid of this.” As I pondered my dismal situation, I noticed a small storehouse separated from the others by some distance. “What’s in there?”

“Pitch, paint, and naptha,” Harmodias said. “That’s why it’s kept at a distance. One spark in there and the whole harbor could go up.”

“Let’s have a look at it.”

“Whatever you say, Senator.” We walked to the small storehouse. Like the others it was stoutly built of massive stone, roofed with red tiles, its small windows covered with bronze grates. Even before the Greek got the door open, I could smell the contents. Even the pungency of the pitch and paint was overwhelmed by the powerful odor of naptha.

“Is the naptha for making fireballs?” I asked.

“Right. That’s what these are for.” He walked past the huge jars to a wooden bin, reached in and pulled out something that looked like a wad of hair the size of a man’s head. “This is tight-packed tow, specially made in Egypt, where they grow all the flax. It’s already had a light soaking in pitch. Just before you row into a fight, you soak it in naptha, put it in the catapult basket, touch it with a torch, then let fly. It really blazes in the air, a very pretty sight. Hit your ship right, and you can set it ablaze from stem to stern.” He dropped the thing back in the bin, which held several thousand of them.

“You’re fully supplied with these,” I observed, “and with naptha, to judge by the smell. Why didn’t Gabinius or one of the others take all this?”