The Seven Hills(75)

"Elections are coming up," Norbanus reminded him. "This year's magistrates will be out of office when we get back, and they'll be thinking about nothing but the commands they'll be taking up. This is Roman history in the making, Decimus, and you," he nodded to the other naval officers, "and your subordinates, can be a part of it. Think of the glory when we return. And you'll have a part when it comes to the shareout, of course."

After a long while Arrunteius turned to his officers. "Start loading all this baggage onto our ships." They jumped to do his bidding.

Titus Norbanus, de facto proconsul and now, it seemed, de facto admiral, smiled.





CHAPTER THIRTEEN


"Surely this thing can never float," Zeno said, shouting over the clangor.

"Yet they assure us it can," Izates said. "They quoted all sorts of Archimedean arcana about weights and volumes and displacement and buoyancy. They insisted that the substance itself was immaterial."

"But ships should be made of wood!" Zeno said.

The thing that drew their incredulous attention was a ship such as no one had ever seen or envisioned. The underwater craft had been mind-boggling enough, but this was even more unnatural. It was a ship made entirely of bronze. Its long keel and arching ribs were made of the ruddy metal, and even now long planks of the same material were being affixed to the ribs with rivets. The din was like all the armories in the world working full blast in one place.

They walked around the thing, which seemed to be at least three times as long as a conventional galley. The insane-looking designer of this prodigy had explained that wooden ships were limited in length by the size of trees available to make their keels. There was no practical limit to the size of a ship with a metal keel.

"It can't be rammed, can't be set afire and it won't rot," cried the designer. "No galley can stand against it. Once in motion, it will plow right through a wooden ship without even slowing down!"

Upon its prow, instead of the conventional ram, it had a huge, concave saw-toothed beak. Its lower, forward-thrusting end would be far beneath the water when it was at sea, and the upper end would tower twenty feet above the surface. It was indeed designed to cut enemy galleys clean in two instead of merely punching holes in them.

"Maybe it will float," Zeno conceded, "but will it move or merely wallow there?"

The radical vessel had no provision for oars. Instead, it had a pair of the huge paddle wheels on its sides, also made of bronze. These would be worked by hundreds of slaves scrambling on treadmills and hollow wheels within the hull.

"Well," Izates said, "if it won't move, someone even crazier will find a way to do it. That madman from Corinth, maybe." The Corinthian had an apparatus of tubs and pipes in which he boiled water and experimented with the steam that resulted. He was not discouraged, even though more than once a boiler had exploded, killing a number of slaves each time. He said it just proved that steam was powerful and swore that he would harness that power. What he would do with it was a mystery.

"Does it occur to you," Zeno asked his friend, "that these Archimedeans tend to overdo things?"

"I suppose that is the way to test the limits," said Izates. "Kings and nations overdo things. Look at the Colossus of Rhodes, or the Pyramids, or that great huge lighthouse out there in the harbor. At least these men are learning something by their overambitious mistakes. It's not all just to glorify some inconsequential king."

"Still," Zeno said, scratching his head, "wood floats. Metal doesn't. It just seems unnatural."

"We are learning that many things we thought we knew about nature were unwarranted assumptions." Izates was already speaking in the jargon of the Archimedean school with its terms such as "evidence," "observation," "experimentation" and "proof." At one time he would have thought these concepts unworthy of a philosopher. Seeing a man fly was enough to unsettle one's old beliefs about such things.

In the palace, Marcus Scipio found that he could no longer take his customary delight in the work of the Museum. For more than two years it had consumed his days and he was fascinated by every new discovery, every new invention. He had taken endless pleasure in finding new applications, most of them warlike, for the outlandish devices the philosophers of the Archimedean school dreamed up.

But now it was different. Now Rome had suffered a defeat.

Flaccus tried to jolly him out of it. "A trifling defeat!" he insisted. "Rome suffered far worse defeats in the past. How about Cannae and Trebbia and Lake Trasimene? How about the Caudine Forks? Entire consular armies were lost in those disasters. You knew Aemilius as well as I did: a plodding, uninspired commander. That's why they gave him green legions and sent him north where they never expected him to tangle with a first-rate Carthaginian general with an army twice the size of his. As it turned out, he was the first Roman commander to have that experience. It was just bad luck."