The Princess and the Pirates(6)

“Hermes,” I said, on our first day at sea, “if any of these degenerates gets too close behind me, lay him out with a stick of firewood.”

“Never fear,” he answered. Hermes took his bodyguarding duty seriously, and he had dressed for the role. He wore a brief tunic of dark leather girded with a wide, bronze-studded belt that held his sheathed sword and dagger. At wrists and ankles he wore leather bands, gladiator fashion. He looked suitably fierce, and the sailors gave him a wide berth.

We saw no pirates, but there was plenty of other shipping, most of it consisting of tubby merchantmen with their short, slanted foremasts, triangular topsails, and swan-neck sternposts. It was the beginning of the sailing season, and the whole sea was aswarm with ships full of wine, grain, hides, pottery, worked metal and metal in ingot form, slaves, livestock, textiles, and luxury goods: precious metals, dyestuffs, perfumes, silk, ivory, feathers, and other valuable items without number. Ships sailed bearing nothing but frankincense for the temples. From Egypt came whole fleets loaded with papyrus.

With all these valuable cargoes just floating around virtually unguarded, it was no wonder that some enterprising rogues simply couldn’t restrain themselves from appropriating some of it. There was no way that a slow, heavily laden merchantman with a tiny crew could outrun or out-fight a lean warship rowed by brawny, heavily armed pirates. Best simply to lower their sails, and let the brutes come aboard and take what they wanted.

Lucrative as this trade was, though, the pirates committed far worse depredations on land. They struck the coastlines, looted small towns, and isolated villas; carried off prisoners to ransom or sell in the slave markets; and generally made themselves obnoxious to all law-abiding people. There were countless miles of coastline, and only a fraction of it could be patrolled by coast guards.

I suppose this nefarious trade had been going on since the invention of the seagoing vessel. If we are to believe Homer, piracy was once a respectable calling, practiced by kings and heroes. Princes sailing to and from the war in Troy thought nothing of descending upon some unsuspecting village along the way, killing the males, enslaving the women and children, sopping up the wine, and devouring the livestock—all just a fine bit of sport and adventure for a hero back in the good old days. Perhaps these pirates I was to chase weren’t really criminals. Perhaps they were merely old-fashioned.

Anyway, we didn’t see any of them, which doesn’t mean that they didn’t see us. They would never attack a warship, even a small one. That would mean only hard knocks and no loot. So they kept to their little coves, their masts unstepped, all but invisible from a few hundred paces away.

Another thing I didn’t see were warships. Much of the Roman navy was tied up ferrying supplies and men to Caesar in Gaul, of course, but I had expected to see the ships of our numerous maritime allies in evidence. Rhodes still had its own fleet at that time, for instance. It looked as if everyone had decided that, since Rome was grabbing all the land, Rome might as well do all the coastal patrolling as well.

From a line of mountain peaks, Cyprus grew into a recognizable island, and a pretty fair one, though not as beautiful as Rhodes. Its slopes were cloaked in fir, alder, and cypress, and probably myrtle and acanthus as well. At least, that is the sort of vegetation the poets are always going on about. It looked fine to me at any rate. Put me at sea long enough and a bare rock looks good.

The harbor of Paphos lies on the western coast of the island, and it proved to be a graceful city of the usual Greek design, which is to say that it conformed perfectly to the shape of the land, with fine temples on all the most prominent spots. Here, at least, the Ptolemies had restrained their usual love for outsized architecture and kept the temples beautifully scaled, like those on mainland Greece and in the Greek colonies of southern Italy.

Coming in past the harbor mole, we passed a naval basin surrounded by sheds for warships of all sizes, but these were empty. The commercial harbor, on the other hand, was full of merchant shipping. Cyprus lies within a great curve of the mainland with Lycia, Pamphilia, Cilicia, Syria, and Judea each but a short sail away. This convenient location made it a natural crossroads for sea traffic, and it has prospered greatly since the earliest settlements there. Before the Greeks the Phoenicians colonized the island, and Phoenician cities still exist.

“Bring us in to the big commercial dock,” I told Ion. “Then take the ships to the naval basin.”

“Looks like we’ll have our pick of accommodations there,” he observed.

The rowers brought us smoothly alongside the stone wharf, which jutted out into the harbor for at least two hundred paces. I climbed a short flight of steps to the top of the wharf, and sailors carried up our meager baggage, all under the watchful gaze of the inevitable dockside idlers. Aside from these there was no reception party, official or otherwise. Ordinarily the arrival of Roman vessels with a Roman senator aboard brought the local officials running to the harbor with their robes flapping. But then, Cyprus was now a Roman possession, so perhaps the governor thought that I should call on him rather than the other way around.