John Roberts - The Princess and the Pirates

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.”

“You’re right. Best to be cautious. Order it so, and tell them to be on the lookout for survivors. There are always survivors in my experience, and I’d like to question any such.”

While the ship went about its mission, I walked through the village, Hermes close by me. A brief survey confirmed my first impression: all the dead were old, crippled, or looked like they had tried, pathetically, to put up a fight.