The Princess and the Pirates (11 page)

“And if we catch them on land?”

“For a shore raid they may use heavier weapons and armor. Some of them have fought in the armies and know how to do it right. But on shore, if it looks like they’re losing, they’ll think maybe they can run and hide. They may not fight as desperately.”

“What real advantages do they have?”

He thought for a moment. “First off, numbers. You have four Liburnians. They have six to ten most times. And, ship-for-ship, their numbers are still superior because every man aboard’s a fighting man. Rowers and sailors are all armed, and all fight when boarding time comes. Your
corvus
and Roman boarding tactics may tip the balance, but maybe not.”

“Because their leader is a Roman and knows what to expect.” He nodded. “Spurius. He’d’ve made a good skipper in the old days when we were a floating nation.”

“Tell me about him.”

“I’ll tell you what I know, but it’s not all that much. I wasn’t close to him, not even in the same ship. I saw him on shore from time to time and sat in on the councils. Pirates aren’t organized like a navy, you know.” He spread his nostrils and took a deep breath of the sea air. “It’s a band of equals and everyone has a say. The leaders are just the toughest fighters, the best sailors, or the ones who are smartest about finding prey and getting safely away with the loot.”

“Which of those was Spurius?” I asked, fascinated by this look into a life so foreign from anything I was used to.

“Well, he’s no great seaman, as you might expect, being a Roman. But as a fighter he’s qualified to go up against the best of them, toe-to-toe, and come out with his enemy’s blood on his sword and none of his own on the ground.”

“That’s praise, coming from your mouth.”

He smiled with satisfaction. “I was taught young, and I was taught right. Anyway, some say Spurius was a Roman deserter who threw in with Spartacus and got away before the end came. I don’t know about that.”

“How old would you judge him?”

“About forty would be my guess.”

I thought about it. “The Slave War began in the consulship of Clodi-anus and Gellius twenty-one years ago and ended two years later. It’s conceivable, if he deserted as a young recruit. Anyway, go on. Tell me what he looks like.”

“Tall for a Roman, about your height, but wider built. Strong as an ox and quick as a cat. He wears a full beard and lets his hair grow long. Maybe he doesn’t want to look like a Roman, with your clean-shaven faces and short hair.”

“I don’t suppose you’d know how to distinguish our regional accents? It might help to know if he’s from Rome itself or some other part of Latium.”

He shook his blocky head. “Never heard him speak Latin anyway, just Greek and some Aramaic.”

“Aramaic? Did you go ashore in Syria or Judea?”

“We went there to sell loot once. I think that’s where I heard him speak it. Greek will get you by almost anywhere, but Aramaic is handy to know in the eastern parts.”

“Did he speak it well?”

“Better than me. Sounded as fluent as he is in Greek, and he speaks Greek like an Athenian. Why?”

I gazed off across the calm water. My weather luck was holding. “I’m just trying to build a picture of the man. I don’t want to be fighting a total stranger when we’ve drawn swords on one another. Many commanders just assume things about their enemies and leave it at that. They tend to die with looks of great astonishment on their faces.”

“That’s shrewd.”

“What is he like as a planner?”

“The best. He knows the trade routes, he keeps up on whose fleet is where, he knows the value of everything, and when, say, a load of fine glassware will fetch a better price in Berytus than in Jaffa. He’s been called a small-minded merchant for it, but never to his face.”

“Does he have regular contacts—shore-based merchants, for instance, who take his loot off his hands?”

“Certainly. But he always deals with them in private. It’s one way he hangs on to his leadership.”

“How did he get to be leader?”

“He organized one of the first crews, so he had his own ship going in. Any pirate may challenge the chief to a fight for leadership. I imagine that’s how he got to be top dog in the first place. I saw him deal with two such challengers myself. It didn’t last long either time.”

“He sounds like a formidable man.”

“He is that.”

“Does he have a second? Anyone close to him?” He shook his head again. “There’s no second in a pirate fleet—just the chief and the individual skippers. As for friends, he acts like every man of the fleet is his brother, but I never saw anyone who seemed closer to him than the rest.”

“Does he have a woman or women? Boys?”

“He takes a woman sometimes, after sacking a town. Never more than one and never keeps her more than a day or two, then passes her on to whoever wants her. I never heard that he fancied boys.” He shifted, catlike, to a roll of the ship. “And now, Senator, you know as much as I do about Spurius. He’s not a chummy sort, and I doubt anyone knows more than I just told you.”

“You are a gold mine of information, Ariston. I will be quizzing you further, but that’s enough for now. If you should remember anything else about Spurius, even a tiny detail, please tell me at once, even if it seems unimportant.”

He nodded and sauntered off, moving easily with the motion of the ship, which was beginning to make me uncomfortable. My short stay ashore had already robbed me of much of my seaworthiness.

Ariston paused for a second, then turned back. “One other thing: his ship is the
Atropos.
”

That was something to mull upon. There are three Fates: Clotho, Lachesis, and Atropos. Clotho, with her spindle, spins the thread of each man’s life. Lachesis, with her rod, measures it. Atropos, with her scissors, cuts it. Atropos is known as “She Who Cannot Be Avoided.”

Ion came up to me. “We’ll be running out oars soon.” He looked at Ariston’s retreating back. “Where on Poseidon’s great domain did you find that one?”

“About where you’d expect. Why? Don’t you like him?” He shrugged. Greeks shrug a great deal. “He’s a sailor all right. But hard as it may be to credit, he’s too rough even for my pack of villains. I plan to sleep lightly while he’s on my ship.”

“I’m glad to hear it. I want everyone to sleep lightly from here on. I want to get these pirates, and I don’t want to waste a lot of time at it. Once we’re under oars I want to begin formation training with the other ships. While you’re seeing to that, I’ll be drilling the marines on deck. And I want a sharp lookout kept. It’s unlikely we’ll spot the pirate fleet so soon, but stranger things have happened, and I won’t spurn any gifts the gods throw my way. It’s a sure way to draw down their wrath.”

“As you command, Senator.” He walked away, barking orders. Now I had some idea of whom my enemy was. How strange to be coming all the way out here, into alien waters, and be facing a fellow Roman. If he was a Roman. It would not be that difficult to fake among foreigners. But somehow I had a feeling that the man was the real thing.

He kept himself aloof from the rest and trusted no one close to him. It was only wise, considering his murderous companions. I allowed myself a moment of identity with him. I, too, was surrounded by people whose loyalties were suspect even where hostility was not absolutely certain.

But what else could be made of him? Fluency in languages is no uncommon accomplishment. But “Greek like an Athenian”? That could be the mark of a Roman of the better classes. Almost everybody knows some Greek, and a traveler or trader has to know it well; but common trade Greek is very unlike the polished language taught in the rhetoric schools, and that is invariably the Athenian dialect. It was something to ponder.

Aramaic is the language of Judea, Syria, and the surrounding territories, a merging and simplification of several related languages spoken in that part of the world, rather as the old dialects of Faliscian, Sabine, Marsian, Bruttian, and so forth have in recent generations merged into the Latin spoken today. Anyone who lives or trades between Antioch and Egypt needs to be proficient in that tongue.

The full beard and long hair could be a disguise, making him nearly unrecognizable to any who knew him in his earlier life. It could mean as well that he hoped someday to return to that life, rich with ill-gotten loot, and settle down into respectability. Get rid of the hair and beard and nobody would know him as the terrible pirate chief. I myself had seen a number of hirsute Germans who had come over to the Roman side. Shorn of their shaggy locks and decently barbered, they looked exactly like normal human beings, except for their odd coloring.

And his past? A blank. I dismissed the tale of his having fought beside Spartacus. Any prominent, enigmatic man who refuses to divulge any information about his history invariably has one invented for him. Always, it will be lurid and colorful and will often associate him with famous personages. We had done the same with Spartacus himself: he was the disgraced son of a fine Roman family; he was an allied chieftain who had learned the Roman art of war and turned it against us; he was a renegade son of that old bugger, Mithridates; and so on.

In truth, nobody knows who Spartacus was. In all likelihood he was born a slave, or was some Thracian sheepherder drafted into the
auxilia,
deserted, and sold into a
ludus
in Capua to fight in the games. The fancied history is always far more gratifying than the commonplace reality.

At least, now, my enemy had a face.

For a few hours we had the men sweating at the oars, practicing fleet maneuvers, changing swiftly from the cruising formation, with the ships one behind the other, to the battle-line formation, in line abreast, or in a shallow crescent. There are many other formations, but I wanted this single maneuver mastered right away.

I had been doing a good deal of reading about naval tactics on the journey to Cyprus and was happy to learn that some of what I had read actually worked in practice. While the rowers practiced their evolutions, I drilled the marines on the ballistae: crew-served crossbows that shot a heavy iron dart with enough power to skewer three armored men like quails on a spit.

We did not have nearly enough of these weapons. I had counted on getting more from the naval stores at Paphos, which shows how inexperienced I was in this regard.
Never
count on resupply at your destination, even if it means passing heroic bribes at the Ostian or Tarentine naval depots before setting out. It would be several days before the new ones I had arranged for would be completed.

Some of the men professed to be expert archers, but I never met a soldier who professed to be less than expert at anything that involves killing people. Only five had arrived at the hiring with bows, and there were a few more bows and some crates of arrows aboard my ships. The problem was I could not hold archery practice at sea, where the arrows would all be lost. That would have to wait.

We saw the smoke before we saw the island.

In midafternoon the watch at the masthead called out that he saw a cloud of smoke in the distance, and the helmsman adjusted his steering oar at Ion’s order. The yard had been lowered against the unfavorable wind, and the watch clung to the top of the mast like a monkey, with nothing but a twist of rope about the mast to help support him. He seemed perfectly comfortable though. I suppose you can get used to anything if you do it long enough.

Within the hour we saw the island, a low hump of brown and green, undistinguished and in no way as lovely as the Aegean islands. Its name meant nothing to me, which was a good indication that nothing was produced there that was marketed in Rome. Most islands produce at least a local wine, an exceptional type of pottery, marble of a special color, something of the sort for which it may be famed. Not this one.

“What do the people here do?” I asked Ion, as we drew near enough to distinguish the remains of the village.

“Fish, farm a little, and raise sheep, last I heard. I suspect they do nothing at all now if the raiders have been thorough. In all my years of sailing, I was here only once, to take on some dried fish. And they trade a little wool. They are poor even for island people.”

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.”