John Roberts - The Princess and the Pirates

My other two Liburnians were the Thetis and the Ceto. Liburnians are among the smaller naval vessels, having only a single deck and two banks of oars, usually forty or fifty oars to a side, with only a single rower at each oar. I suspect that the ships of Ulysses were very similar, for it is an antiquated design and a far cry from the majestic triremes with their three banks of oars and hundreds of rowers. The small ram at the prow, tipped with a bronze boar’s head, seemed to me more like a gesture of defiance than a practical weapon.

These three little ships with their tiny complement of sailors and marines seemed totally inadequate even for the humble task of hunting down a pack of scruffy pirates, and I hoped to secure reinforcements as I traveled. Ion curbed his insolence, but he remained abrupt and churlish. I was a landlubber and he was a seaman and that was that. The common sailors were little more respectful. The marines were the scum of the sea, hoping to win citizenship by twenty years of sea service. I suspected that some of them had been expelled from the legions and degraded from citizenship for immorality, and you have to know the sort of behavior that was tolerated in those days to appreciate the magnitude of such an offense. With such men at my back, the pirates ahead of me held little to fear.

“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.

“Where is the residence of Governor Silvanus?” I demanded of one of the louts. He just blinked, so I repeated the question in Greek.

He pointed up a gentle slope behind him. “The big house across from the Temple of Poseidon.” I could barely understand him. The Cyprian dialect differs from the Attic as radically as the Bruttian from Latin.

“Come, Hermes,” I said. A couple of porters leapt to take our bags, and we strode along the wharf, picking our way among the boxes, bales, and amphorae that crowded every available foot of space. Everywhere lay stacks of brown metal ingots in the shape of miniature oxhides. Since the time of the Phoenicians the copper mines of Cyprus had been a major source of the metal, and it remained the basis of the island’s prosperity.

Above the pervasive sea smell twined the scents of herbs, incense, and spices, along with an occasional vinegary reek where some ham-fisted porter had let an amphora drop and smash, wasting perfectly good wine. This gave me a thought.

“Hermes-”

“Yes, I know: find out where the good wineshops are.” I had trained him well.