“Captain,” shouted a sailor, “we’re taking on water!”
“What!” Ion and I shouted at once. Then we saw. Water was bubbling up through the stones that ballasted the ship’s hull.
“Impossible!” Ion said, wonder tinging his voice. “I’ve seen to every inch of this hull! There’s no rot, and we’d have felt it if we’d scraped a submerged rock.”
“Senator,” shouted one of the other shipmasters just a few paces to our starboard, “we’re shipping water! We have to beach before we sink!” The skipper just beyond him reported the same problem.
Cleopatra pulled up to our port side, and she came to the rail. “What is wrong?”
I knew that my face was flaming as purple as a triumphators robe. “We’ve been sabotaged! Our hulls have been bored through and we’re sinking! Clearly you are not. We have to get these tubs on shore and repair them before it is too late. You will have to cover us while we retreat.”
“There are three of them and one of me, Senator,” she said. “I am not the one who left his ships abandoned all night! Queen Artemisia had a way out of this sort of situation, remember?”
I remembered all too well. Artemisia of Halicarnassus and her ships had been attached as allies to the fleet of Xerxes. When she saw that the Greeks were going to win the battle of Salamis, she rammed and sank a Persian vessel so that the nearby enemy would think her ships were Greek. As soon as she saw a way clear, she hoisted sail and fled from the battle.
I was not going to argue with a subordinate officer, which was what she had wanted to be. “Keep between us and those ships until we are safely beached. Then you can pull for Paphos. If your rowers are as good as you say they are, you’ll have no trouble outdistancing them.”
Ion began a brisk series of orders, and our rowers got to work. In the bows of the ships, men with long poles probed the bottom, feeling for submerged rocks. All the rest, sailors and marines, bailed frantically with buckets of wood or tarred leather, with cooking pots and with helmets. The pirate ships drew closer, but Cleopatra stayed with us. When the poles touched bottom, Ion turned the ships so that our rams were seaward, and we began backing water, moving sluggishly now as the hulls filled. The men with the poles moved to the sterns by the steering oars and began calling off the depth as we neared shore.
“Rocky bottom, rocky beach,” Ion groused. “I’d never go ashore in this place except the alternative is to sink.”
“Captain,” Ariston said, “they may have their main strength ashore. We’ll be vulnerable as we leave the ships.”
“We’ll have to chance it,” I told him.
The blue ships held off, just out of catapult range, grinning faces lining the rails. I looked for a large, long-haired figure, but there were several such, and I could spot no man I might positively identify as Spurius. Seldom in my life had I felt so frustrated and mortified. It did, however, beat being drowned.
With a teeth-rattling grate, our stern crunched onto the stony bottom. We were within twenty feet of dry land, a bit of luck. The prospect of leaping full-armored into chest-deep water and wading a hundred yards to shore has been known to cool the combative ardor of the bravest soldiers.
“Swing the corvus around,” I ordered, “and drop it onto the beach. No man should have to get his shoes wet. I am going to take half the men ashore and set up security. When I’ve done that, we can unload the ships and haul them ashore for repair.” I ordered the archers and catapult handlers to stay in the bows, just in case the pirates should try to attack us, and lined up the rest of the marines to rush ashore.
The ponderous gangplanks swung around and dropped, their bronze spikes crunching into the rocky beach, the ships shivering with the impact. Immediately the marines double-timed down the planks and ashore. They fanned out and established a semicircular defensive perimeter, shields to front, spears slanting outward.
“They’re leaving,” Ion remarked. I saw the yards ascend the masts of the blue ships, the sails dropping to hang slack for a moment, then filling with wind, billowing like pregnant bellies as the pirates laughed, hooted, and cheered.
“Anyone inland?” I called. A few curious goats studied us from the rocks, but nobody saw so much as a single human form. I was so frustrated that I almost wished for an attack. No one, however, wanted to oblige me. “Ariston, Hermes, take some men and scout inland. Raise a shout if you see anyone. Everyone else, stand to arms until they come back.”
I sat on a convenient rock, already sure they would find nothing. Spurius did not want to trap me. He wanted to humiliate me. Trust a Roman to know that men of my class preferred death to ignominy. Actually I could take quite a bit of humiliation before I considered death preferable, but this could mean the end of my political career. Beached on Cyprus by a pack of scruffy criminals who never had to shoot a single arrow my way.