SPQR IX: The Princess and the Pirates Read online

  “I’ll take a fast Liburnian as soon as I can,” I told her. “That means I’ll have such luggage as I can wrap up in a spare toga and sleep on deck. I’ll take Hermes.”

  “I am not sleeping on any deck,” she said.

  “The grain fleet sails for Egypt next month. Those ships are huge, and they have plenty of passenger space. They always stop at Cyprus before proceeding on to Alexandria.”

  “And what will you be doing for a month?” she asked ominously. “Why, chasing pirates,” I answered, innocence oozing from every pore. Somehow, rumors of that German princess had reached her. We weren’t even married at the time, but that made little difference to Julia.

  “Does your family have any hospitium connections in Cyprus? I’m sure mine don’t.”

  “I doubt it,” I said, “but I’ll look through my tokens just in case. We have hospitia just about everywhere else in the Greek world, but I don’t believe any of my family have ever visited Cyprus. Of course, it’s the birthplace of your ancestress, so the place must be littered with your cousins.”

  “I’ve warned you,” she said, ominously. The Caesars traced their descent from the goddess Venus who was, of course, born on Cyprus, just off the coast of Cyprus at any rate. Her uncle Caius Julius traded heavily on this supposed divine connection, to much mirth from the Romans. It infuriated Julia when I tweaked her for this bit of Caesarian bombast, but anything to get her mind off that German princess.

  While she was busy with her preparations, I called in Hermes. He was just back from the ludus, where he trained with weapons most days. I was training him in all the skills of a politician’s assistant, which in those days included street brawling.

  “Draft me a letter,” I ordered, and he sat at the desk, grumbling. With a fine career ahead of him, with freedom for himself and, perhaps, sons of his own in the Senate some day, he would have preferred the life of a common gladiator. He loved the fighting part, hated the writing. Well, there were days when I would have preferred a life in the ludus myself. At least there your only worry was surviving your next fight, and your enemy always struck from in front.

  “To Titus Annius Milo from his friend Decius Caecilius Metellus the Younger, greetings,” I began. I saw Hermes’s eyebrows go up. He liked Milo. “I have been posted to Cyprus to chase pirates. I am a total dunce at sea and need your help desperately. Cyprus isn’t Gaul, which alone makes it a desirable place to be. There is a chance for some real money in this, and, besides, we’ll be away from our wives and have loads of fun.”

  “I heard that!” Julia said, from deep in the house. The woman had ears like a fox.

  “By the time you receive this,” I went on, “I will be on my way to Tarentum. If you have not arrived by the time I sail, I will leave orders that you are to have a fast Liburnian. I know you are bored to death in Lanuvium so don’t bother to pretend otherwise. We could both use some moderately safe excitement in agreeable surroundings. I look forward to seeing you in Tarentum or, failing that, on Cyprus.”

  “Sea service?” Hermes said unhappily. He was even more nautiphobic than most Romans.

  “Just a bit of coastal sailing,” I assured him. “We shouldn’t have to spend a single night at sea or ever sail out of sight of land. You’re an accomplished swimmer now; you’ll be perfectly safe.”

  “I don’t mind the sea,” he said. “It’s being out on it in a ship I don’t like. The waves make me sick, storms can blow you to places where Ulysses never sailed, and even in good weather you’re in the middle of a bunch of sailors!”

  “You’d rather go back to Gaul?” That silenced him. “Pack up.”

  2

  THE TRIP TO CYPRUS IS AN EASY SAIL when the weather is good, and ours was perfect. At Tarentum I had made a more than generous sacrifice to Neptune, and he must have been in an expansive mood because he repaid me handsomely.

  From Italy’s easternmost cape we crossed the narrow strait to the coast of Greece, then south along that coast, stopping every evening at little ports, rarely straying more than a few hundred paces from shore. Even Hermes didn’t get seasick. We put in at Piraeus, and I took the long hike up to Athens and gawked at the sights for a few days. I have never understood how the Greeks built such beautiful cities and then could not govern them.

  From Piraeus we sailed among the lovely, gemlike Greek islands, each of them looking as if it could be the home of Calypso or Circe. From the islands we crossed to the coast of Asia, then along the Cilician shore, keeping a close watch there for Cilicia was a homeland for pirates. From the southernmost coast of Cilicia we crossed to Cyprus, the longest stretch of open water on the voyage. Just as the mainland disappeared from view behind us, the heights of Cyprus appeared before us, and I breathed a little easier. I have never been able to abide the feeling of being at sea with no land in sight.

  One reason that I dawdled was that Milo had not met me at Tarentum. I hoped that he was close behind and would catch up soon. I already had a feeling I was going to need him.

  The problem was my flotilla, its sailors and marines, and my sailing master, one Ion. The deeper problem was that I was a Roman, and they were not.

  For a Roman, service with the legions and service with the navy were as unalike as two military alternatives could possibly be. On land we were supremely confident, and over the centuries we had become specialists. Romans were heavy infantry. We held the center of the battle line and were renowned for feats of military engineering, such as bridge building, entrenchment, fortification, and siege craft. Roman soldiers, when they weren’t doing anything else, passed the time by building the finest roads in the world. For most other types of soldiery: cavalry, archers, slingers, and so forth, we usually hired foreigners. Even our light infantry were usually auxiliaries supplied by allied cities that lacked full citizenship.

  At sea we were, so to speak, over our heads. Everyone knows how, in the wars with Carthage, we created a navy from nothing and defeated the world’s greatest naval power. The truth is, we accomplished this by ignoring maneuvers, instead grappling with their ships, thus transforming sea battles into land battles. We were still wretched sailors and kept losing entire fleets in storms that any real seafaring people would have seen coming in plenty of time to take action. And the Carthaginians repaid our presumption by raising the most brilliant general who ever lived: Hannibal. And don’t prattle to me about Alexander. Hannibal would have destroyed the little Macedonian dwarf as an afterthought. Alexander made his reputation fighting Persians, whom the whole world knows to be a wretched pack of slaves.

  Anyway, our navy consists of hired foreigners under the command of Roman admirals and commodores. Most of them are Greeks, and that explains the greater part of my problems.

  My first run-in with Ion occurred the moment I stepped aboard my lead Liburnian, the Nereid. The master, a crusty old salt dressed in the traditional blue tunic and cap, took my Senate credentials without a greeting or salute and scanned them with a barely repressed sneer. He handed them back.

  “Just tell us where you want to go, and we’ll get you there,” he said. “Otherwise, keep out of the way, don’t try to give the men orders, don’t puke on the deck, and try not to fall overboard. We don’t try to save men who fall overboard. They belong to Neptune, and he’s a god we don’t like to offend.”

  So I knocked him down, grasped him by the hair and belt, and pitched him into the water. “Don’t try to fish him out,” I told the sailors. “Neptune might not like it.” You have to let Greeks know who the master is right away or they’ll give you no end of trouble.

  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 bronz
e 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.

  There is this to be said for a small, colonial city like Paphos: you never have to walk far to get where you are going. The Temple of Poseidon was a graceful structure of the simple Doric design, and I made a mental note to sacrifice there as soon as possible in gratitude for my safe arrival and wonderful sailing weather.

  The residence of Silvanus was a two-story mansion of a size available only to the wealthiest in crowded Rome. The slave at the door wore fine Egyptian linen. He called for the major-domo, and this dignitary proved to be a cultured Greek of impeccable dress and grooming.

  “Welcome, Senator,” he said, bowing gracefully. “Senator Silvanus was not expecting a visit from a colleague, but I know he will be overjoyed and will be stricken that he was not here to greet you personally.”

  “Where is he then?” 1 asked, annoyed as always by domestics whose manners are better than my own.

  “He visits today with his friend, the great General Gabinius, whose villa is just outside the city. He will return this evening. In the me
antime please allow me to put his house at your disposal.” He clapped his hands and a pair of slaves took charge of our bags while Hermes tipped the porters from the wharf.

  “While your chambers are prepared, please avail yourself of some refreshment in the garden. Or perhaps you would rather bathe first?”

  This was a bit of luck. Usually, the worst house is better than the best inn. This did not look like the worst house in town.

  “I’m famished. First something to eat, then a bath.”

  “Certainly. I trust your voyage was not too arduous?”

  I prattled on about the trip as he led us through the atrium and into a large, formal garden completely surrounded by the house, the way a gymnasium surrounds the exercise yard. Houses were not built this way in Rome. In the center was a lovely, marble-bordered pond with a fountain in its middle. It looked as if I had lucked into prime accommodations.

  “We entertain several distinguished guests today,” said the major-domo. “No person of note comes to Paphos without enjoying the hospitality of Silvanus.”

  “Admirable,” I murmured. Everywhere, fine tables sat beneath beautifully tended shade trees, and roses bloomed in big, earthen pots. At one such table sat a young woman dressed in a simple but gorgeous gown of green silk. The dress would have bought a good-sized estate in Italy. Her hair was reddish brown, not at all a common color, and her skin was an almost transparent white. Strangest of all, she was writing in a papyrus scroll and had several others stacked beside her. Standing around her were a number of learned-looking fellows with long beards and dingy robes.

  She looked up at me, and I was transfixed by a pair of astonishing green eyes. She asked, “Do Germans sing?”

  I had seen those eyes once, years before, in a child’s face, but one does not forget such eyes. “Princess Cleopatra! I was not expecting to find you here! Nor to encounter so odd a question.”

  “I perceive that the senator and the royal lady know one another,” said the major-domo.