The Princess and the Pirates (2 page)

My aedileship had won me great popularity, but it had been incredibly burdensome and expensive. I was heavily in debt and would be for years if I didn’t do something about it. Caesar had offered to cover all my debts, but I would not be indebted to him. He had covered a portion of them, ostensibly as a gift to his niece, Julia, but in reality because I had extricated him from some difficulties, so we were even there. I owed him no political favors. A quick, profitable campaign against these pirates might just solve all my fiscal problems, if I could avoid drowning or death in battle in the course of it.

And I was tired of Rome. The place was quiet for the first time in years. With the death of Clodius and the exile of Milo, the powerful gangs that had enjoyed aristocratic support were leaderless. During his near-dictatorial sole consulship Pompey had scourged the City of its disorderly elements, setting up courts of savage disposition. The thugs quickly
heeded the attractions of faraway places or took refuge in the gladiatorial schools from which most of them had come in the first place. The ones too slow to take the hint found themselves testing their pugnacity unarmed against lions, bears, and bulls in the Games.

Almost for the first time in my memory, Romans walked the streets in safety and nobody went armed. People went about their business in an orderly fashion, obeyed the rulings of the curule aediles, and were even polite to one another. Foreign merchants arrived in unprecedented numbers, knowing their lives and goods would be safe.

For years I had complained of the disorder of the City, and now that it was gone, I found that I missed it. All the peace and quiet seemed unnatural. I did not expect it to last. My fellow citizens were, after all, Romans; and we have always been an unruly, obstreperous lot. Forget the pretty myths about Aeneas and the brothers Romulus and Remus. The sober fact is that Rome was founded by outcasts and bandits from a dozen Latin tribes, with a few Etruscans, Sabines, and Oscans thrown in for good measure if the names of some of our older families are anything to go by. Our power and fortunes have waxed mightily, but time has done little to improve our disposition.

Getting across the City was a slow process for me because I was extremely popular and had to stop and exchange greetings from citizens every few steps. Romans felt no awe toward their ruling classes in those days, and some of the more old-fashioned sort were liable to run up and plant a big, garlicky kiss on your face if they were especially fond of you. This was a major failure of the well-known Roman gravitas.

I was pleased to note that the last signs of the rioting that had followed the funeral of Clodius were gone. The fires had been extensive, and the whole City was smudged and stank of soot for months afterward. Rome wasn’t to see its like again until Antonius delivered his famous rabble-rouser over the corpse of Caesar many years later. Roman funerals were livelier than most peoples.

My mind was occupied with the usual problems that came with a foreign posting: what to take, what business to settle, how to break the news to my wife, that sort of thing. She should be happy enough about this, I thought hopefully. I wasn’t going to a province at war, so I could take her along. Cyprus was reputed to be a beautiful place. It had, until recently, been home to a royal court, so she would find company congenial to her patrician station. Surely Julia would be happy with this posting.

Julia was not happy.

“Cyprus?” she cried, with a mixture of incredulity, scorn, and disgust. “After all you’ve done, they’ve sent you chasing pirates in Cyprus? They owe you better than that!”

“An ex-aedile is owed nothing at all. Technically, the office isn’t even on the
cursus honorum.
”

She made an eloquent gesture of dismissal. “That old political fiction! Everyone knows the aedileship makes or breaks a political career. Yours should have earned you a dictatorship! Cyprus! It’s an insult!”

We were so alone in the triclinium you’d never have guessed that the house was packed with slaves, hers and mine. They knew to keep their distance when she was in one of these moods. She was a Julian and a Caesar, and at times like this it showed.

“If you can’t stand immediately for praetor, you ought to return to Gaul. It’s there that reputations are to be made.”

“Caesar’s officers tend to get killed for the sake of Caesar’s reputation,” I pointed out.

“Caesar likes you. He would make you a
legatus.
”

“The Senate has to approve
legati,
not that Caesar cares much about Senate approval these days. And it would make me an enemy of Labienus, which I don’t need. He’s an unforgiving man.”

“Labienus is nothing. Caesar is a far greater man, and soon he will be the only man who counts for anything. You should be with him.”

I didn’t like the way this conversation was going. “In Cyprus,” I said, “there’s an opportunity to accumulate some real wealth.”

“That would be nice for a change,” she admitted. “We could clear off all our debts.” Her brow unfurrowed as the advantages began to sink in. Like all her family she was intensely political, but the charms of solvency made a powerful lure. “And Cyprus does have a famed social life.”

“And with this service behind me, with a tidy treasure to boot, I’ll stand for praetor next elections, You’ll be a praetor’s wife for a year, then I’ll be posted to a really valuable province like Sicily or Africa. Wouldn’t you like that?” Plus I’d be staying out of the legions. But I didn’t say that. She would have thought it unworthy of a Roman official.

“Well, if it’s unavoidable.” Then she turned to the practicalities. “How are we to arrange travel? I’ll need to take my personal servants, no more than five or six, and my wardrobe, and—” this went on for some time.

“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.”

T
HE TRIP TO
C
YPRUS 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 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.