The Princess and the Pirates(33)

The timekeeper, whose flute gave the rowers their pace, slowed his fluting as the leadsman in the bow dropped his weighted line and called out the depth of water beneath the keel. When we were almost alongside the rickety little wharf built out into the water, Ion ordered down oars. The rowers plunged their blades into the water, braking the ship’s way so that we halted alongside the wharf, the ram barely nudging the gravel of the beach. My other three vessels ranged themselves just offshore.

“Well,” someone said, “that’s a pretty sight.”

The village had once been a fairly attractive and decent place by the remaining evidence: mud-brick houses with whitewashed walls and thatched roofs; a temple the size of a small Roman house dedicated to some local god; a line of boatsheds by the water; long, horizontal poles supported on posts for drying nets; big, wooden racks for drying fish.

It had probably been home to about two hundred poor-but-not-starving people before it was destroyed almost as thoroughly as Carthage. The thatch was ashes, collapsing most of the mud-brick walls in the heat of their burning. The boat sheds were cinders, and the boats splinters of wood. The drying racks, even the nets themselves, had gone onto the bonfire built inside the little temple.

And there were bodies, some of them impaled on the posts that had supported the net-drying poles. Others just lay on the ground or smoldered within the houses, many of them dismembered. The stench was appalling; but if you have lived through battle, siege, and the more dis-reputable Roman streets, it takes a lot of stink to turn your stomach.

“They’ve been thorough all right,” Ion said, a touch of wonder in his voice. This was unexpected. “Why such destruction? They couldn’t have put up any sort of fight.”

“That thought has crossed my mind as well. Ion, call everyone ashore. Beach the ships, nobody is going to come on us unawares here.”

“Let me send Triton around the island first before we bring the ships in. It won’t take an hour. It’s not likely, but someone could be hanging about on the other side.”

“You’re right. Best to be cautious. Order it so, and tell them to be on the lookout for survivors. There are always survivors in my experience, and I’d like to question any such.”

While the ship went about its mission, I walked through the village, Hermes close by me. A brief survey confirmed my first impression: all the dead were old, crippled, or looked like they had tried, pathetically, to put up a fight.

“They made off with all the good slave material,” Hermes observed. “Raiders usually do,” I affirmed. I saw Ariston looking bemusedly at the ruined temple and called him over.

“Is this how they commonly behave?” I asked him.

He shook his head vehemently. “Never saw anything like it. It makes no sense. You don’t kill sheep you don’t intend to eat. You shear them.”

“Exactly. They took everything of any use to them: food, wool, women, the young to sell, and able-bodied men who showed no fight. Then they went through this unnecessary butchery and burning. It merits some thought.”

A short while later Triton returned and reported no ships lurking about and no survivors visible from offshore. I had everyone, sailors and marines, assembled where I could address them.

“I want this island scoured,” I told them. “Bring me anyone you find alive. These unfortunate people,” I waved an arm, taking in the ruined village and its late inhabitants, “must be given burial and funeral rites, lest their shades follow our ships and bring us bad luck.” Actually, I rather doubted the power of the dead to do mischief to the living, but it is the custom and would make me feel better at any rate. “Get to it!”

There wasn’t enough wood left on the island to make a decent funeral pyre, so the men scraped a shallow grave in the sandy ground and the bodies were placed in it and covered over. Atop the grave a small cairn was built, and with Cleopatra’s assistance I performed a burial rite and poured offerings of flour, wine, and oil over the cairn.

The princess was sickened by the stench, but the sight of all the carnage did not terrify her as I might have expected. I commented upon this.

“The women of my house are schooled in controlling their emotions. Among the descendants of Alexander, great rage is the only emotion that may be displayed on public occasions.” The founder of her line, Ptolemy Soter, had married a sister of Alexander. Her name, not coincidentally, had been Cleopatra.

“Is this what war looks like?” she asked.

“Sometimes,” I said. “But this is very extreme. Sometimes we Romans destroy a town as thoroughly, but only to make an example, as when people who have accepted our terms treacherously repudiate a treaty and attack us.”