Fortune's Favorites (101 page)

“I don't dislike the taste,” said Caesar, “but I detest the sensation of losing my wits, and I notice that even half a cup of watered wine takes the edge off them.”

“But when you wake up, that's as good as you're going to feel all day!” cried Polygonus.

Caesar grinned. “Not necessarily.”

“What do you mean?”

“For instance, my dear fellow, I will wake completely sober and in my normal robust health on the morning of the day I sail in here with a fleet at my command, capture this place, and take all of you into my custody. I can assure you that when I look at you in chains, I will feel infinitely better than I did when I woke up! But even that is relative. For on the day I crucify you, Polygonus, I will feel as I have never felt before!”

Polygonus roared with laughter. “Caesar, you are the most entertaining guest I've ever housed! I love your sense of humor!”

“How terribly nice of you to say so. But you won't laugh when I crucify you, my friend.”

“It can't happen.”

“It will happen.”

A vision of gold and purple, hands loaded down with rings and chest flashing with necklaces, Polygonus lay back on his couch and laughed again. “Do you think I didn't see you standing on your ship watching the shore? Rubbish, Caesar, rubbish! No one can find his way back!”

“You do.”

“That's because I've done it a thousand times. For the first hundred times I lost myself over and over again.”

“I can believe that. You're not nearly as intelligent as I.”

That cut: Polygonus sat up. “Clever enough to have captured a Roman senator! And to bleed him of fifty talents!”

“Your egg isn't hatched yet.”

“If this egg doesn't hatch, it will sit here and rot!”

Shortly after this spirited exchange Polygonus flounced off, leaving his prisoner to find his own way back to his rooms. There a very pretty girl waited for him, a gift very much appreciated-after Caesar sent her to Demetrius to make sure she was clean.

For forty days he remained in the pirate hideout; no one restricted his freedom to wander where he willed, talk to whomsoever he fancied. His fame spread from one end of the place to the other, and soon everyone knew that he believed he would sail back after he had been ransomed, would capture and crucify them all.

“No, no, only the men!” said Caesar, smiling with great charm at a party of women come to quiz him. “How could I crucify beauty such as I see here?”

“Then what will you do with us?” the most forward female asked, eyes inviting.

“Sell you. How many women and children are here?”

“A thousand.”

“A thousand. If the average price you fetch in whatever slave market I send you to is one thousand three hundred sesterces each, then I will have repaid my ransom to those obliged to find it, and made them a small profit. But you women and children are far more beautiful than one usually finds in a small town, so I expect an average price of two thousand sesterces each. That will give my ransomers a fat profit.”

The women dissolved into giggles; oh, he was lovely!

In fact, everyone liked him enormously. He was so pleasant, so jolly and good-humored, and he never displayed the slightest sign of fear or depression. He would joke with everyone, and joked so often about crucifying the men and selling the women and children into slavery that it became almost a constant entertainment. His eyes twinkled, his lips twitched, he thought it as hugely funny as they did. The first girl talked of his prowess as a lover, which meant that many of the women cast lures in his direction; but it didn't take the men long to find out that he was scrupulous about the women he selected-never a woman belonging permanently to someone else.

“The only men I cuckold are my peers,” he would say in a lordly voice, looking every inch the aristocrat.

“Friends?” they would ask, guffawing.

“Enemies,” Caesar would answer.

“Well, and aren't we your enemies?”

“My enemies, yes. But not my peers, you low collection of absolute scum!” he would say.

At which point everybody would fall about laughing, loving the way he insulted them with such affectionate good humor.

And then one afternoon as he dined with Polygonus, the pirate chieftain sighed.

“I'll be sorry to lose you, Caesar.”

“Ah! The ransom has been found.”

“It will arrive with your freedman tomorrow.”

“How do you arrange that? I must presume he will be guided here, since you say the place cannot be found.”

“Oh, he has had some of my men with him the whole time. When the last talent was in the last bag, I received a message. They'll be here tomorrow about noon.”

“And then I can go?”

“Yes.”

“What about my hired ship?”

“It too.”

“The captain? His sailors?”

“They'll be on board. You'll sail at dusk, westward.”

“So you included my hired ship in your price.”

“Certainly not!” said Polygonus, astonished. “The captain raised ten talents to buy back his ship and crew.”

“Ah!” breathed Caesar. “Another debt I must in honor pay.”

As predicted, Burgundus arrived at noon the following day, the fortieth of Caesar's imprisonment.

“Cardixa will allow me to continue being the father of her sons,” said Burgundus, wiping the tears from his eyes. “You look very well, Caesar.”

“They were considerate hosts. Who raised the ransom?”

“Patara half, Xanthus half. They weren't happy, but they didn't dare refuse. Not so soon after Vatia.”

“They'll get their money back, and sooner than they think.”

The whole pirate town turned out to see Caesar off, some of the women openly weeping. As did Polygonus.

“I'll never have another captive like you!” he sighed.

“That's very true,” said Caesar, smiling. “Your career as a pirate is over, my friend. I'll be back before the spring.”

As always, Polygonus found this exquisitely funny, and was still sniggering as he stood on the sandy little beach to watch the captain of Caesar's hired ship maneuver its bow into the west. Of light there was little.

“Don't stop, Captain!” the pirate leader shouted. “If you do, you'll have my escort up your arse!”

And out from behind the mountain flank to the east it came, a hemiolia capable of keeping up with any craft that sailed.

But by dawn it wasn't there, and the river upon which stood Patara lay ahead.

“Now to soothe some financial fears,” said Caesar. He looked at the captain. “By the way, I will repay you the ten talents you had to outlay to ransom your ship and crew.”

Obviously the captain didn't believe it lay in Caesar's power to do this. “An unfortunate voyage!” he mourned.

“I predict that when it's over you'll sail back to Byzantium a very happy man,” said Caesar. “Now get me ashore.”

His visit was very quickly over, he was back and waiting to leave on the following day before all the horses and mules had been loaded aboard. With him was the rest of his entourage. He looked brisk. “Come, Captain, hustle yourself!”

“To Rhodus?”

“To Rhodus, of course.”

That voyage took three days, calling at Telmessus on the first night and Caunus on the second. Caesar refused to allow his animals to be off-loaded in either place.

“I'm in too big a hurry-they'll survive,” he said. “Oh, my luck! Favored by Fortune as always! Thanks to my career as a raiser of fleets, I know exactly where to go and whom to see when we reach Rhodus!”

He did indeed, with the result that he had collected the men he wanted to see not two hours after his ship had tied up.

“I need a fleet of ten triremes and about five hundred good men,” he said to the group of Rhodians congregated in the offices of the harbormaster.

“For what reason?” asked the young admiral Lysander.

“To accompany me back to the headquarters of the pirate chief Polygonus. I intend to capture the place.”

“Polygonus? You'll never find his lair!”

“I'll find it,” said Caesar. “Come, let me have the fleet! There will be some rich pickings for Rhodes.”

Neither his enthusiasm nor his confidence persuaded the men of Rhodes to agree to this wild scheme; it was Caesar's authority that earned him his ten triremes and five hundred soldiers. They knew him of old, and some of Vatia's clout still clung to him. Though King Zenicetes had burned his eyrie on top of Mount Termessus when Vatia arrived to capture it, Rhodian respect for Vatia had grown a thousandfold; unperturbed at what seemed the loss of untold plunder, Vatia had simply waited for the ashes to cool, then sieved the lot, and so retrieved the melted precious metals. If Vatia could do that, then his erstwhile legate, Caesar, might be likely to have some of Vatia's style. Therefore, the men of Rhodes concluded, Caesar was worth a bet.

At the mouth of Patara's river the fleet moored on the last night before the search for Polygonus's lair would begin; Caesar went into the city and commandeered every empty merchantman to follow in the Rhodian wake. And all the next day he stood on the poop of his hired ship, eyes riveted on the cove-scalloped coast sliding by for hour after hour.

“You see,” he said to his captain, “before Polygonus left Patara I knew enough from listening to the pirates talk to have an idea what the coves were going to look like. So in my mind I set a definition of what I was going to call a cove, and what I would not. Then I simply counted every cove.”

“I was looking for landmarks-rocks in the sea shaped like this or that, an oddly shaped mountain-that sort of thing,” said the captain, and sighed. “I am lost already!”

“Landmarks are deceptive, a man's memory of them treacherous. Give me numbers any day,” said Caesar, smiling.

“What if you've missed your count?”

“I haven't.”

Nor had he. The cove wherein the five hundred soldiers from Rhodes landed looked exactly like every other. The fleet had lain all night to the west of it, undetected, though as it turned out Polygonus had set no watches. All four of his war galleys were drawn up inside the hidden bowl; he deemed himself safe. But the sun had scarcely risen before he and his men were standing in the chains they had used to confine their slaves.

“You can't say I didn't warn you,” said Caesar to Polygonus, wearing a stout set of manacles.

“I'm not crucified yet, Roman!”

“You will be. You will be!”

“How did you find this place?”

“Arithmetic. I counted every cove between Patara and here.” Caesar turned, beckoning to the Rhodian admiral Lysander. “Come, let's see what sort of fortune Polygonus has salted away.”

Many fortunes, as it turned out. Not only were the granaries almost full, but of other foodstuffs there were enough to feed all of Xanthus and Patara for the rest of that winter and spring. One big building was crammed with priceless fabrics and purples, with citrus-wood tables of rarest grain, with golden couches and the finest of chairs. Another building contained chest after chest of coins and jewelry. Much of the jewelry was Egyptian in make, rich with faience, beryl, carnelian, sard, onyx, lapis lazuli and turquoise. One small chest when opened revealed several thousand ocean pearls, some of them as big as pigeon's eggs, others in rare colors.

“I'm not truly surprised,” said Lysander. “Polygonus has been raiding these sea-lanes for twenty years, and he's a well-known hoarder. What I didn't realize was that he must also have been raiding the shipping between Cyprus and Egypt.”

“Because of the ocean pearls and the jewelry?”

“One doesn't see such stuff elsewhere.”

“And the Alexandrians on Cyprus had the gall to tell me that their shipping was safe!”

“They dislike outsiders knowing their weaknesses, Caesar.”

“That, I soon understood.” Caesar huffed, pleased. “Well, Lysander, let's divide the spoils.”

“Strictly speaking, Caesar, we are your agents. Provided you pay us for the hire of men and ships, the spoils belong to you,” said Lysander.

“Some but by no means all, my friend. I want no questions asked of me in the House that I cannot answer with an unmistakable ring of truth. So I will take a thousand talents in coin for the Treasury of Rome, five hundred talents more in coin for myself, and a handful of these pearls if I may choose whichever ones I fancy. I suggest that the few remaining coins and all the jewelry go to Rhodes as her share. The warehouse of furniture and fabrics you can sell, but I would like the sum realized used to build a temple in Rhodus to honor my ancestress, Aphrodite.”

Lysander blinked. “Most generous, Caesar! Why not take the whole chest of pearls for yourself? It would keep you free from money worries for the rest of your life.”

“No, Lysander, I'll take just one handful. I like wealth as much as the next man, but too much might turn me into a miser.” Caesar bent to run his hands through the pearls, picking out this one and that: twenty the dark and iridescent colors of the scum on the Palus Asphaltites in Palestina; a pearl the size of a strawberry that was the same color and shape as a strawberry; a dozen the color of the harvest moon; one giant with purple in it; and six perfect silver-cream ones. “There! I can't sell them, you know, without all of Rome wondering where they came from. But I can give them away to certain women when I need to.”

“Your fame will spread, to be so unavaricious.”

“I want no word of it spoken, Lysander, and I do mean that! My continence has absolutely nothing to do with lack of avarice. It has to do with my reputation in Rome, and with a vow I made that I would never lay myself open to charges of extortion or the theft of Rome's property.” He shrugged. “Besides, the more money I have, the faster I'll throw it away.”

“And Patara and Xanthus?”

“Receive the women and children to sell into slavery, plus all the food stored here. They should get back far more than they had to find to ransom me from the slave sales, and the food is a bonus. But with your permission I will take ten more talents for the captain of my ship. He too had to pay a ransom.” One hand on Lysander's shoulder, Caesar guided him out of the building. ' The ships from Xanthus and Patara will be here by dusk. May I suggest that you put Rhodus's share on board your galleys before they arrive? I'll have my clerks catalogue everything. Send the money for Rome to Rome under escort.”