The Princess and the Pirates(5)

“You’d rather go back to Gaul?” That silenced him. “Pack up.”





2


THE TRIP TO CYPRUS IS AN EASY SAIL when the weather is good, and ours was perfect. At Tarentum I had made a more than generous sacrifice to Neptune, and he must have been in an expansive mood because he repaid me handsomely.

From Italy’s easternmost cape we crossed the narrow strait to the coast of Greece, then south along that coast, stopping every evening at little ports, rarely straying more than a few hundred paces from shore. Even Hermes didn’t get seasick. We put in at Piraeus, and I took the long hike up to Athens and gawked at the sights for a few days. I have never understood how the Greeks built such beautiful cities and then could not govern them.

From Piraeus we sailed among the lovely, gemlike Greek islands, each of them looking as if it could be the home of Calypso or Circe. From the islands we crossed to the coast of Asia, then along the Cilician shore, keeping a close watch there for Cilicia was a homeland for pirates. From the southernmost coast of Cilicia we crossed to Cyprus, the longest stretch of open water on the voyage. Just as the mainland disappeared from view behind us, the heights of Cyprus appeared before us, and I breathed a little easier. I have never been able to abide the feeling of being at sea with no land in sight.

One reason that I dawdled was that Milo had not met me at Tarentum. I hoped that he was close behind and would catch up soon. I already had a feeling I was going to need him.

The problem was my flotilla, its sailors and marines, and my sailing master, one Ion. The deeper problem was that I was a Roman, and they were not.

For a Roman, service with the legions and service with the navy were as unalike as two military alternatives could possibly be. On land we were supremely confident, and over the centuries we had become specialists. Romans were heavy infantry. We held the center of the battle line and were renowned for feats of military engineering, such as bridge building, entrenchment, fortification, and siege craft. Roman soldiers, when they weren’t doing anything else, passed the time by building the finest roads in the world. For most other types of soldiery: cavalry, archers, slingers, and so forth, we usually hired foreigners. Even our light infantry were usually auxiliaries supplied by allied cities that lacked full citizenship.

At sea we were, so to speak, over our heads. Everyone knows how, in the wars with Carthage, we created a navy from nothing and defeated the world’s greatest naval power. The truth is, we accomplished this by ignoring maneuvers, instead grappling with their ships, thus transforming sea battles into land battles. We were still wretched sailors and kept losing entire fleets in storms that any real seafaring people would have seen coming in plenty of time to take action. And the Carthaginians repaid our presumption by raising the most brilliant general who ever lived: Hannibal. And don’t prattle to me about Alexander. Hannibal would have destroyed the little Macedonian dwarf as an afterthought. Alexander made his reputation fighting Persians, whom the whole world knows to be a wretched pack of slaves.

Anyway, our navy consists of hired foreigners under the command of Roman admirals and commodores. Most of them are Greeks, and that explains the greater part of my problems.

My first run-in with Ion occurred the moment I stepped aboard my lead Liburnian, the Nereid. The master, a crusty old salt dressed in the traditional blue tunic and cap, took my Senate credentials without a greeting or salute and scanned them with a barely repressed sneer. He handed them back.

“Just tell us where you want to go, and we’ll get you there,” he said. “Otherwise, keep out of the way, don’t try to give the men orders, don’t puke on the deck, and try not to fall overboard. We don’t try to save men who fall overboard. They belong to Neptune, and he’s a god we don’t like to offend.”

So I knocked him down, grasped him by the hair and belt, and pitched him into the water. “Don’t try to fish him out,” I told the sailors. “Neptune might not like it.” You have to let Greeks know who the master is right away or they’ll give you no end of trouble.

My other two Liburnians were the Thetis and the Ceto. Liburnians are among the smaller naval vessels, having only a single deck and two banks of oars, usually forty or fifty oars to a side, with only a single rower at each oar. I suspect that the ships of Ulysses were very similar, for it is an antiquated design and a far cry from the majestic triremes with their three banks of oars and hundreds of rowers. The small ram at the prow, tipped with a bronze boar’s head, seemed to me more like a gesture of defiance than a practical weapon.

These three little ships with their tiny complement of sailors and marines seemed totally inadequate even for the humble task of hunting down a pack of scruffy pirates, and I hoped to secure reinforcements as I traveled. Ion curbed his insolence, but he remained abrupt and churlish. I was a landlubber and he was a seaman and that was that. The common sailors were little more respectful. The marines were the scum of the sea, hoping to win citizenship by twenty years of sea service. I suspected that some of them had been expelled from the legions and degraded from citizenship for immorality, and you have to know the sort of behavior that was tolerated in those days to appreciate the magnitude of such an offense. With such men at my back, the pirates ahead of me held little to fear.