SPQR IX: The Princess and the Pirates Read online

  “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 t
o 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.

  “They made off with all the good slave material,” Hermes observed. “Raiders usually do,” I affirmed. I saw Ariston looking bemusedly at the ruined temple and called him over.

  “Is this how they commonly behave?” I asked him.

  He shook his head vehemently. “Never saw anything like it. It makes no sense. You don’t kill sheep you don’t intend to eat. You shear them.”

  “Exactly. They took everything of any use to them: food, wool, women, the young to sell, and able-bodied men who showed no fight. Then they went through this unnecessary butchery and burning. It merits some thought.”

  A short while later Triton returned and reported no ships lurking about and no survivors visible from offshore. I had everyone, sailors and marines, assembled where I could address them.

  “I want this island scoured,” I told them. “Bring me anyone you find alive. These unfortunate people,” I waved an arm, taking in the ruined village and its late inhabitants, “must be given burial and funeral rites, lest their shades follow our ships and bring us bad luck.” Actually, I rather doubted the power of the dead to do mischief to the living, but it is the custom and would make me feel better at any rate. “Get to it!”

  There wasn’t enough wood left on the island to make a decent funeral pyre, so the men scraped a shallow grave in the sandy ground and the bodies were placed in it and covered over. Atop the grave a small cairn was built, and with Cleopatra’s assistance I performed a burial rite and poured offerings of flour, wine, and oil over the cairn.

  The princess was sickened by the stench, but the sight of all the carnage did not terrify her as I might have expected. I commented upon this.

  “The women of my house are schooled in controlling their emotions. Among the descendants of Alexander, great rage is the only emotion that may be displayed on public occasions.” The founder of her line, Ptolemy Soter, had married a sister of Alexander. Her name, not coincidentally, had been Cleopatra.

  “Is this what war looks like?” she asked.

  “Sometimes,” I said. “But this is very extreme. Sometimes we Romans destroy a town as thoroughly, but only to make an example, as when people who have accepted our terms treacherously repudiate a treaty and attack us.”

  “Clearly, that was not the case here.”

  “No, and I intend to learn why this was done.” The search party returned; and as I had expected, they brought in survivors: Three women and two men, all of them too stunned to feel terror. They did not look like Greeks but rather like some archaic survival of an earlier age, dark of skin with ink black hair that fell in snakelike locks to the shoulders of the men, to the waists of the women. Their clothes were filthy and ragged, their skins bruised and scratched. They had broad faces and might have been handsome had it not been for the brutish stupefaction of their expressions.

  “What happened here?” They said nothing, did not indicate that they so much as heard my words. A marine began to handle them roughly, but I put a stop to it. “No. They’ve suffered enough. Let them rest. Give them food and drink; let them know they will come to no harm. No further harm anyway. I’ll question them later. Ion.”

  “Yes, Senator?”

  “It’s too late to return to Cyprus. We’d be overtaken by nightfall. We’ll stay here the night and go back at first light.”

  Soon cooking fires were burning and sails were turned into tents for the men. The sights of the day had turned everyone somber, and there was little of the usual chatter. The sailors, who had worked the hardest, ate in silence, then turned in and slept like exhausted dogs. The marines, charged with security, sat up longer and conversed in low voices.

  Cleopatra had brought her own tent, naturally, complete with all its furnishings. It was ringed with guards who stood at attention, spears erect as if this were a parade ground in Alexandria.

  “Come join me, Senator,” she said, and I was nothing loath. Before the tent a fly was stretched and beneath this I sank into a folding chair with a seat and back of leopard skin. Cleopatra reclined luxuriously on a couch that was furnished with plump cushions. From what I could see, the tent was furnished with equal lavishness, and under it all were splendid carpets. I accepted a cup of wine from one of her slave girls. The cup was solid gold; I could tell by the weight.

  “To hold all this,” I commented, “Your ship must be bigger on the inside than on the outside.”

  She smiled. “It’s all in knowing how to pack.” She turned serious. “So have you come to any conclusions about this?”

  “I am entertaining some possibilities. I would like to talk with those survivors before I try any conclusions.”

  “Join me in some dinner. Maybe soon they’ll be recovered enough to tell us what happened.”

  Cleopatra’s larder was decidedly superior to anything available on a Roman warship. It was not opulent, but everything was of the highest quality, and it included items such as honeyed figs and dates, fine seedcakes, and ducks brought that day from Cyprus and prepared by her amazingly efficient cooks.

  “Take some of this over to those poor people,” she ordered a slave. The man loaded a tray with delicacies and disappeared.

  “They’ll eat better than they have in their lives,” I said, “but it is a dear-bought meal.
”

  “How lost they must be,” she said. “Their whole world was destroyed.” When our dinner was finished, it was fully dark. Cleopatra and I rose and went to where the survivors sat at a little fire. Four of them were eating, but from the look in their eyes it was an automatic action. They did not even know what they were doing. Ion and a couple of the marines stood by watching. The shipmaster pointed to the woman who was not eating. She sat a little apart.

  “A little while back that one went down to the shore and washed her face and arms. She must be coming out of it.”

  With her face scrubbed clean of soot, dirt, and tear streaks, I could see that the woman had vertical lines tattooed from her lower lip to her chin, and a circle within a circle in the center of her forehead.

  “Woman, can you understand me?” I asked, as gently as I could. Romans are not trained in gentle speech, but after what she had been through I was unlikely to terrify her. She looked up at me, so at least she was aware of her surroundings. She spoke a few words in a language unlike anything I had ever heard.

  “Ion, do you think any of the men might know this language?” I asked. He frowned. “I have sailors from all over, but an earthquake wouldn’t wake them, what with the way you worked them today.”

  “I can understand her,” Cleopatra said.

  I turned to gape at her. “Princess, your linguistic skills are renowned, but I’ll wager the tongue this woman speaks is unique to this island.”

  “It’s spoken all over the world,” she said. “It’s Greek. But it is the most archaic dialect I have ever heard spoken. This tongue was ancient when Homer composed his poems. I think it’s a variant of the Cycladic language, dead for a thousand years. I’ve only seen it written in some very ancient texts, and those copied from earlier writings.”

  Cleopatra could always surprise you.

  “Ask her to describe what happened.”