Hannibal's Children (21 page)

"Nonsense!" Norbanus said, jumping to his feet. "We have to return to Noricum soon, before the mountain passes fill with snow. An embassy to Egypt would entail months of delay."

"We don't all have to go back," Marcus said. "As soon as we compile our report, a party can return with it. Ten or fifteen men should be plenty. Italy is peaceful enough. The remainder can divide into two groups: one to stay here in Carthage, the other to go on to Egypt and open talks with the court. And to gather intelligence, of course."

"Why shouldn't we all go?" young Caesar asked.

"Hostages," Norbanus answered him, disgustedly. "Do you think Hamilcar will let us all go off to Egypt without leaving some of us behind for good behavior?"

"Who can blame him?" Flaccus chuckled. "If he trusts us not to double-deal with Egypt, he is a bigger fool than I take him for. It isn't as if we were old allies."

"So who goes?" Brutus said. "Assuming Hamilcar doesn't forbid the project entirely. He must be suspicious, considering he is planning a war with Egypt."

"I will lead the Egyptian expedition," Marcus said. "Norbanus will accompany me as second—"

"I will be more than happy to stay here as hostage," Norbanus said, grinning, "against your good behavior."

"I'm getting rather fond of Carthage myself," Flaccus said. "Why don't you just run off to Egypt and I'll stay—"

"Norbanus can stay here," Marcus said. "In fact, he will serve to reassure the Shofet that we're not plotting treachery. But you, Flaccus, are going to Egypt. I will need you."

"I don't suppose we might take a nice, leisurely land course along the coast? I hear the road is excellent."

"We go by sea," Marcus said. "It is faster. I'll see about getting us passage on one of the Egyptian ships when the fleet returns. You'll like them. They're much more luxurious than the Carthaginian warship that brought us here."

Norbanus clapped him on the shoulder. "Cheer up, Flaccus. This time you'll be puking into ivory buckets."

Then he told Zarabel of his plan, she seemed pleased. "You are nothing if not energetic. I think an embassy to Egypt is a splendid idea."

"Do you think your brother will see a conflict with his war plans?"

She laughed. "Didn't you notice that Egyptian fleet yesterday? Commerce and diplomacy go on despite war. He envisages a great war with him playing the role of Hannibal. But it will be fought by professionals and they will quit when they see that there is no advantage to going on. It will peter out and end up being settled at a conference table. "And frankly," she went on, "my brother doesn't see you Romans as much of a threat. He will send you on with his blessings. Of course, you will probably have to leave—"

"I've already made those arrangements," he told her. "Norbanus and some of the others will remain in Carthage."

She beamed. "Excellent."

The ship was not the magnificent flagship of the Egyptian fleet, but neither was it one of the tubby cargo vessels. Instead, it was one of the warship escort; a two-banked cruiser called a bireme. It was longer and broader than the Carthaginian ship that had brought them from Italy, with a spacious deck and sizable cabins in the stern. Its gracefully curved bow was armed with a bronze ram cast in the shape of a dragon's head, the single horn sprouting from its brow stout and sharp enough to gut an enemy vessel. Just above the waterline its painted eyes sought out a safe path through the waters. Its name was
Drakon.

As they voyaged along the African coast, they observed and made notes: Every cape and headland, every dangerous looking outcropping of rock, every town, every fort, went into their notebooks. Marcus had laid in a good supply of papyrus because they were running short of parchment.

"I don't like using this stuff," Flaccus had complained.

"No help for it," Marcus answered. "But it's a good sign. We're gathering far more intelligence than we anticipated when we left Noricum."

"It isn't smooth," Flaccus protested. "First of all, it is full of fibers. Second, these reeds or whatever they may be are laid down in strips and the joins always catch the tip of my pen. It does dreadful things to my penmanship."

"Learn to use it," Marcus advised without sympathy. "It's what we have."

Hamilcar had put no obstacle in their way when Marcus broached the subject of an embassy to Egypt. He had been most diplomatic when suggesting that a few of the more prominent members of the Roman party be left behind as his "guests." He had furnished letters of introduction and assured the cooperation of all Carthaginian officials wherever their travels should take them.

Zarabel had given them letters of her own to deliver and had arranged for passage on the Egyptian warship. The fleet, she explained, would be another month finishing its unloading and reloading and refitting for the journey home, while the warship was ready to carry dispatches or passengers at any time.

They were, in short, entirely too helpful and Marcus knew that they were playing their own games. That was only to be expected. He had a few games in mind as well. He knew far better than to trust barbarians, no matter how civilized they might seem to be. Just before the ship sailed, she gave him some parting advice.

"Be sure to deliver my letter, in confidence, to Queen Selene at your earliest opportunity. She is the ruler of Egypt and will be the only person at court whose word you can trust."

"Selene? I thought the ruler of Egypt was Ptolemy XIV."

"In name only. Ptolemy Alexander Philadelphus Eupator is Selene's brother and husband. He is seven years old, so you won't be doing any serious business with him."

He mused upon this as he watched the coast drift leisurely by. As a Roman, he found the concept of hereditary monarchy rather laughable to begin with. That a great nation would acknowledge a child as its ruler was doubly absurd. Such a child-monarch, not reared by a stern father, must inevitably be the creature of his ministers. Romans had severe standards for the upbringing of youth and he doubted that any such standards were applied by the royal house of Egypt.

Between bouts of contemplating politics and monarchy, he discussed naval tactics with the skipper of the
Drakon.
Use of the ram turned out to be less obvious than it first seemed.

"You have to gauge your target vessel carefully," the man explained. He was a Cypriote named Aeson. The great island of Cyprus had for centuries been a province of Egypt. For incomprehensible dynastic reasons the ruler of Cyprus was a brother of the king of Egypt. At the moment a royal minister ruled the island, since the current king had no living brothers.

"By what standard do you gauge them?" Marcus asked.

"Size and structure, mostly. The ram is a tricky thing, and can sink your own ship as effectively as an enemy's. For instance, if you're going after a light vessel, a one-banker, you put on all speed. That's for two reasons: They're fast ships and you need speed to catch them, and if you have enough speed built up and ram them just right, you can break them in two, capsize them, run right over them. Their sides are too thin to resist the weight of a two-banker. You don't want to try that with another two-banker and certainly not against a really big ship."

"Why not?" Marcus asked. "I would think that to ram such a ship you would want all the speed at your disposal."

"No. Those ships have heavier hulls and keels. Ramming is a terrible shock to a ship no matter if you're on the giving or receiving end. It stresses the planks and springs leaks. Worst of all, you could hole the enemy vessel and get stuck there. Then the enemy drags you under as she sinks."

"So what is the answer?"

"You have to maneuver so she can't get away, then as you're almost on her, you down oars and hit her dead slow, not much more than a walking pace. With the whole weight of your ship behind the ram, it'll smash in the side of the enemy without actually penetrating. Then you back oars and get away fast, because the men on that ship will get really anxious to board."

He spoke of other tactics, how ships could approach almost bow to bow, then swerve. If your timing was right, you could haul in your oars while the enemy ship's were still out, shearing them away like a scythe going through wheat. The flailing oar-butts inside the enemy vessel would reduce the rowers on that side to blood-soaked carcasses. An enemy thus crippled could then be destroyed at leisure.

He showed how stone-hurling engines, cleverly operated at close range, could be used to smash the enemy's steering oars. There was even a way to use oars offensively, when your vessel was higher in the water than the enemy's. When the ships drew alongside, the lower bank of oars were drawn within the hull and the upper bank raised as high as possible, then dropped. As the ships dragged past one another, the oars could sweep the enemy deck clean of men, hurling them overboard, crushing limbs and skulls.

"Yours is highly skilled work," Marcus said.

"It is that," the skipper agreed.

"The warships I have seen seem to carry few marines. Do you not favor boarding?"

The Cypriote snorted. "That is for lubbers who can't make a ship fight for them. Marines are there to operate the engines. And," he allowed, "they repel boarders when we have an enemy fond of such tactics, like pirates. Boarding is a pirate specialty because they prefer capturing ships to sinking them."

This, too, Marcus filed carefully in his memory.

Military matters were not all that concerned the Romans. Marcus explained to his companions about the peculiar situation at the court of Alexandria.

"I never thought when we set out," Flaccus said, "that we would be dealing with women, first Zarabel, now Selene. I shall have to brush up on my seductive skills."

"You will need all your arts of dissimulation if that is your idea of diplomacy," Marcus told him. He drew out his purse and searched among its contents, selecting a broad silver coin. It was an Alexandrian tetradrachm, splendidly struck, bearing a portrait on one side and an eagle on the other. He tossed it to Flaccus. "Here's what she looks like."

Flaccus studied the portrait, dismayed. The other Romans crowded around and burst into laughter. The coin showed a hatchet-faced matron, her beetling brows and wattled neck displayed in a clean-cut, merciless profile.

"I hereby appoint you official seducer of the Roman delegation," Marcus said.

"Is it possible such a hag has a seven-year-old brother?"

"They are probably half-siblings," Brutus said. "The Ptolemies have degenerated into oriental potentates. The last king probably bred the child off a fifteen-year-old granddaughter when he was an old man."

"Disgusting," said young Caesar. He came of a famously straitlaced family.

"Our mission is not to assess or judge the moral tone of the Alexandrian court," Marcus reminded them. "It is to make the best use of whatever opportunities we find there to the advantage of the Republic. I warn you not to underestimate any of the powerful people we meet there. To us they may be ludicrous buffoons, but these are the descendants of Alexander and his generals, and they have kept control of tremendous power and riches for a very long time. Even if they are not hardened warriors, they understand their own world far better than we."

"This court, these half-Greeks," Brutus said. "Are they really Egypt? The native population must be vast to make the country so productive. What of them?"

"A good question," Marcus said. "I intend to find out. We Romans have subdued native peoples far more numerous than we, but we have not truly remained a separate people. We absorb our conquests and turn the people into Romans. They breed sons for the legions and in time become full citizens.

"The Carthaginians, as you all observed, are different. Wherever they go, they remain conquerors in an alien land. Subject cities ten miles from Carthage are still natives with differing language and customs. The Alexandrians may be something like that, or they may be something else entirely."

"We would do well to remember," Flaccus pointed out, "that the Ptolemies are not truly Greek, but Macedonian. The real Greeks regarded the Macedonians as little more than barbarians. When Philip conquered Greece, he forced them to acknowledge him as a Greek and his son Alexander made it his life's work not just to conquer the world, but to spread the light of Greek culture wherever he went. When he died, his generals divided his conquests among themselves and ruled as Greek monarchs in foreign lands, but they remained Macedonians and the backbone of their armies was always Macedonian troops.

"These were not the sort of Greeks to swoon over the plays of Sophocles or chat about philosophy beneath shaded porticoes. They were tough mountain tribesmen and superb soldiers."

"Men much like our own ancestors," Marcus said. "It would be best to keep that in mind."

By the time
Drakon
was waling along the coast of Cyrenaica, the Romans were almost accustomed to the rolling motion of the vessel and even Flaccus was no longer pale-faced and shaky. Despite the volume of coastal traffic, the sea was immense and they often sailed or rowed for hours without seeing another vessel. This changed abruptly as they rounded a rocky cape and found two lean, predatory ships waiting for them on its far side. The instant
Drakon
came into view, the smaller ships, both single-bankers, began rowing toward her at speed.

Drakon
was under sail with a favorable stern wind, headed straight for the others. Immediately, Aeson shouted for the sail to be furled, the yard lowered, the mast unstepped and the oars run out. The Romans marveled at the lively efficiency with which this complex set of orders was carried out. Sailors scrambled to the mast as rowers unshipped their oars and marines sprang to the war engines.

"Who are they?" Marcus demanded.

"Pirates!" Aeson said. "But what can they want with us? They never attack a warship unless they're cornered, and I'm not pirate hunting. Now get away and let me fight my ship."

Marcus beckoned the Roman party to him. "Arm yourselves. There is going to be a fight."