Masters of the Sea Trilogy: Ship of Rome, Captain of Rome, Master of Rome

Marcus ordered his maniple to regroup while he surveyed the aftermath. The enemy had left maybe a dozen or more of their number dead or dying on the field, while the Roman casualties were perhaps half that number amongst the cavalry, plus the two legionaries who had been crushed by the Carthaginian horse. Smoke was once again rising over four of the twenty laden supply wagons, but the fire guard was working efficiently and the threat was soon extinguished. The centurion counted eight oxen dead in their traces, the equivalent of an entire team for one wagon.

In the five days of attacks, Marcus estimated they had lost nearly twenty-five per cent of their entire supply train. They were ten days out from the castra hiberna at Floresta, which meant they were approximately four days short of the first besieged city of Makella. Four days, Marcus thought; four days before they could set up a more permanent defensive palisade as they worked to lift the siege of Makella. Four more days of attacks on the supplies before they could be properly protected. If things continued as they were, they would arrive at their first destination with half the supplies they had set out with. They would be able to resupply from the city once the siege was lifted, but only in terms of food and some basic equipment. Everything else was lost for good – irreplaceable until the blockade was lifted.

‘Form up!’ he commanded, echoing a similar command up and down the line as the last of the fires was extinguished and the depleted oxen were once again redistributed by their drivers. The IV maniple formed up behind the standard held high by the signifer. It had been singed in an attack two days before and the sight of the battered standard brought pride to Marcus’s chest, a fitting symbol of the fighting men of his command and a defiant reminder of the nine men he had lost over the previous five days.

The legions would reach Makella, of that there was no doubt, but the cost was high. The enemy knew where to hit them and how. They had attacked suddenly, with a ferocity born from sensing the closeness of the kill, the scent of a weakened and desperate enemy cut off from home. The legions would reach Makella but Marcus suspected they would go no further, the open marching column too easy a target for the focused attacks. At Makella they would make their stand, lifting the siege while being besieged themselves. Not by a visible enemy who offered battle, but by an unseen foe who snapped at their heels and sapped their strength.

‘March,’ Marcus shouted, his subconscious mind picking up the ripple of command as it fed down the line, his thoughts on the dark future ahead of them. His attention was brought back to the moment by the whip crack of the ox drivers. The men around them involuntarily started at the loud crack, their nerves strained to breaking point as they waited for the next cry of attack, knowing that the day was far from over.

‘Come.’

Atticus opened the door and entered the small office in the north wing of the castrum at Ostia. He was followed by Septimus, and the presence of the two men made the enclosed space seem claustrophobic. Publius Cornelius Lentulus, master shipbuilder of the Roman fleet, sat behind the desk poring over a scale model of a trireme made from light balsam timber. Parchments were strewn all around him, covering the desk and the wall-mounted shelves, many lying on the floor where they had fallen from the overloaded spaces. The master shipbuilder was an older man with thinning hair and a greying beard. He glanced up with a mild look of surprise on his face, as if he seldom received visitors in his office.

‘Yes?’

‘Captain Perennis and Centurion Capito of the Aquila,’ Atticus said by way of introduction.

‘Ah yes,’ Lentulus said genially as he stood up to greet the men, ‘my Carthaginian experts.’

Atticus smiled at the description. ‘Experts’ was stretching the description of their knowledge a little too far.

Lentulus led them out of his small office into a larger room down the corridor. This room also seemed to be in chaos, but the disorder was confined to a large table in the centre of the room. The table was surrounded on all sides by chairs, four of which were occupied by Lentulus’s team of junior craftsmen, each one an apprentice of the master. They stood as Lentulus entered but he signalled them to be seated with an impatient wave of his hand, as if the courtesy was not sought.

‘This is Captain Perennis and Centurion Capito of the Aquila,’ he announced. The four apprentices looked at the officers with intense interest. They had never seen a Carthaginian warship, and their natural curiosity for all things nautical fuelled their interest in the men; they would normally have considered them to be mere ballast on the magnificent ships they designed.

Lentulus chaired the conversation but he allowed his apprentices to ask the majority of the questions. Atticus described the ships he had encountered in detail, from their speed and manoeuvrability, to their size and draught. Septimus offered confirmation of the enemy’s deck layout and hatch placement from his memory of the fight aboard the Carthaginian galley, the upper features of the deck giving some indication of the hidden framework beneath. The questions were thorough, and in many cases Atticus did not have the answer the craftsmen sought, his knowledge limited to the sailing capabilities and his thoughts on the design merely subjective. Any unanswered questions sparked fierce debate amongst the competitive apprentices, and on two occasions the debate nearly erupted into blows before Lentulus intervened and brought the discussion back to order.

The interview lasted over two hours, and when Atticus and Septimus finally emerged from the room the sun had slipped below the western horizon. They walked to the Aquila in silence, both drained from the intense conversation. Atticus had not been given the opportunity to ask any questions of his own, particularly about what kind of schedule Lentulus envisioned for the completion of the fleet, although the master shipbuilder and his team didn’t seem to be wasting any time. Design and concepts were one thing, he thought; it was a whole other problem to implement those ideas and actually build a vessel.

The following morning Atticus woke as usual just before dawn. He dressed in a light tunic and went on deck. The morning was crisp with a cool breeze that held no cold and a promise of warmer spring weather as the sun rose in the eastern sky. The trading docks beyond the castrum were already busy, the half-light of the pre-dawn sufficient for the ships to manoeuvre to the dockside to begin the process of unloading, the shouted calls of their commanders muted as the sound carried over the harbour. Atticus ordered one of the crew to bring him some food, and he settled down on the aft-deck to eat. Septimus joined him half an hour after sunrise and they set off to Lentulus’s office once more.

They arrived there to find the master shipbuilder packing some of his hurried designs and supply manifests into a shoulder bag. He escorted the two officers to a coastal barge that was preparing to sail, explaining that they were heading to the coastal town of Fiumicino, two miles north of Ostia at the mouth of a small river that gave the town its name. The three men boarded and the barge immediately shoved off, passing the Aquila as she went, the trireme now the only galley tethered to the docks. The news of the Carthaginian fleet in the south had spread throughout Ostia and Rome and the traders had frantically called for extra escorts, the hidden danger beyond the horizon made terrible by wild rumour. The Senate had immediately agreed, fearful of a panic that would drive the traders from Rome’s shores, and so the entire Ostia fleet was now constantly at sea.

The coastal barge cleared the harbour with ease, the sea-lanes relatively quiet in the dawn light. Lentulus quizzed Atticus on some of the finer details of his experience with the Carthaginians, the master shipbuilder having been up for most of the night with his apprentices and having discovered further unknowns in the Carthaginian design. Atticus answered what questions he could. The two men were still deep in conversation when the barge came in sight of Fiumicino.

The coastal town was small and unremarkable, a fishing village that had changed little over the generations, its proximity to the centre of a mighty republic having little effect as the trade routes, on both land and sea, simply passed by on either side, the village a tiny island in the middle of a fast-flowing river of humanity. The beach stretched flat and wide north and south from the village, the sand an unusual black from the high level of ferrous deposits on the shoreline. There were two large trading barges beached on the shore immediately north of the mouth of the small river. Atticus counted four more holding station half a mile offshore.

As the coastal barge drew level with the beached traders, Atticus noted the frenzied activity on board and around the slightly tilted vessels, their broad, almost flat keels resting on the compacted sand. The ships were unloading timber, huge logs of oak and pine, which were being lowered onto waiting wagons to be hauled and pushed above the high-tide mark. The barge beached fifty yards beyond the northernmost trader and all disembarked, jumping down the eight feet into the ankle-deep waves. Atticus noticed immediately that the ground beneath his feet was rock solid and, although he had jumped from a height, he left no footprints in the black sand.

The tide was two hours from full and the aft section of the beached traders was already under three feet of water, the slaves and crew of the ship working frantically to unload the last remaining timbers. At high tide the vessel would float once more, the added buoyancy of an empty hull assisting the re-launch. Once away their place would be taken by the four traders waiting offshore.

The unloaded timbers were being sorted on the beach, the slaves’ activities commanded by two of Lentulus’s apprentices. One was working with the stockpile, separating oak from pine and further separating these in terms of length, girth and approximate age. The other apprentice was meticulously checking each timber, looking for signs of rot or fungal infection, rejecting even vaguely suspicious timbers to leave only the solid. For ones so young they worked with confidence and efficiency, their entire adolescent lives having been dedicated to their craft.

The men of the Aquila followed Lentulus above the beach, cresting a wind-formed dune to view the flatlands beyond. Both Atticus and Septimus stopped at the sight before them. A veritable city of tents had been erected directly behind the drift line of the dunes, the white canvas peaks stretching a mile northwards from the fishing village on their right. Everywhere men moved with purpose between the tents, many carrying the tools of their trade: carpenters, ironmongers, shipwrights and more. How long had it been, Atticus wondered in awe, forty-eight hours? Two days since the Senate formally announced the decision to build the fleet? The city had moved with incredible speed, the logistics seemingly effortless for a society as ordered as that of Rome. For the first time Atticus felt a creeping confidence about the task ahead.

CHAPTER EIGHT (#ulink_ce986710-9c12-5434-aa14-ed3ba54a2537)

Hannibal Gisco watched the Romans’ activity from the heights above the city of Makella, having arrived from Panormus two days before, covering the twenty miles in one ride. He had witnessed the last of the attacks on the Romans’ supply train as they completed the remaining miles of their march. The ambushes were near ineffectual in themselves, the Romans’ anticipatory preparations and defence blunting the cavalry charge. And yet Gisco had noted minor damage to the supply column, a fallen ox, a burning wagon, as his cavalry retreated to the safety of the surrounding hills. When the Romans had resumed their march they had left a small pile of smouldering supplies in their wake, a mere drop of blood from a wounded beast, but when taken in combination with all the attacks of the past days, Gisco was sure those same wounds ran deep.

Gisco was joined on the summit ridge by Hamilcar, the initial uneasy truce between the two men having now developed into a more tactical alliance. Gisco, an admiral by rank and a sailor by nature, relied on Hamilcar’s greater experience on land and he had learned to trust the younger man’s instincts. Gisco also saw an advantage in forging a friendship with the heir of the Barca family, an ancient line that claimed a direct link to Queen Dido herself, the legendary founder of Carthage. The Barca clan had a permanent seat on the Council of Carthage, a seat now occupied by Hamilcar’s father, and Hamilcar often alluded to the close relationship he enjoyed with his father, a relationship Gisco planned to use to his own ends.

‘Prisoners in charge of their own prison.’ Hamilcar smiled at the sight of the last of the column unwinding into the rectangular palisade.

Gisco smiled in return at the description. It wasn’t far from the mark. Hamilcar had persuaded Gisco to abandon the siege of the city below, arguing that the prize was no longer necessary. The Romans were welcome to Makella, and Hamilcar was sure that the price they had exacted for the city’s freedom was more than the Romans had bargained for.

Marcus’s maniple was one of the last to ford the River Eleuterio before climbing the gentle slope into the palisade beyond. The countryside around him was quiet, the terraced vineyards unattended, the walled city of Makella – less than half a mile away – tranquil in the late evening light. The centurion’s eyes were drawn upwards to the surrounding hills, the tallest rising a thousand feet to the north. He was sure the enemy were somewhere nearby, watching their every move, and he hated the sensation.

The IV of the Ninth was no longer a frontline maniple, not on paper at least. The last nine days had cost Marcus fifteen dead and twenty-six wounded, fifteen of whom were walking and in the ranks. The other eleven were buried somewhere in the supply train on a wagon. Marcus had personally checked on the wounded men himself that very morning and he had come away bitter and angry, knowing he was going to lose at least four more before the day was out, their wounds mortal. The maniple would be stood down until replacements could be found, replacements that Marcus knew would never come, not from Rome at least. Now one of two scenarios would unfold: either another maniple would fold before his and he would be given the remnants, or his maniple would be broken up to feed others. For a proud fighting man it was a bitter coin toss.

From his tent in the centre of the encampment, Lucius Postumius Megellus, commander of the Second and Ninth, heard the shouted order for the gate to be closed. The sound gave him a profound sense of relief and he immediately chastised himself for the feeling, cursing the Carthaginians who had hounded his column for the past nine days and chased them like wolves until, now, Megellus only felt safe within the confines of a perimeter wall.

The camp was temporary only, built with the six-foot-long pointed oak sudis stakes that travelled with the column. The lead maniples had begun the camp three hours before dusk, laying out the boundaries of the rectangular encampment before beginning the digging of a trench, ten foot wide by five deep, the earth thrown inwards to form a rampart, on top of which the sudes were implanted and intertwined with lighter oak branches. The camp had been built each night on the march and dismantled each morning with an efficiency born out of repetition and training, the hard labour of construction forgotten each new day as the column marched onwards.

Megellus would now change the nature of the camp. He would order it transformed into a castra stativa, a standing camp. The walls would be made more solid. Stone would be gathered from the nearby river and added to the vulnerable points of the wall around the gates. Towers would be built on the four corners of the castrum to warn of any approach by the enemy.

The legate bit back the bile of disappointment that had emerged so soon in the campaign. Scouts had returned from the city with reports that the enemy had fled at the sight of the advancing column, although Megellus suspected they had simply withdrawn rather than offer combat to an enemy that would be defeated in time anyway, and with a lot less Carthaginian blood spilt.

The legate would confirm the reports in the morning by sending ten maniples to the city gates. The show of force would impress the Council of Makella and imbue in them a sense of victory, justifying their decision to support Rome and not Carthage. Megellus would then split his command and send the Second forward to cover the three days’ march to the city of Segeste, again to lift the siege that the legate was sure would be already lifted when they arrived. The enemy would attack their supplies on the march and again there would be losses, the quartermaster estimating that already nearly half of their original equipment was gone.

The Second would take Segeste but would go no further. They would build a second standing camp, a second island in a sea of hostility. The campaign would grind to a halt, the army forced onto the defensive in an effort to protect and hoard its valuable, now irreplaceable supplies. This was no way to fight a war, Megellus thought bitterly, a man used to fighting aggressively and offensively.

The legate walked out of his tent and observed the hurried activity around him as the army prepared to bed down for the night. It was becoming dark and Megellus watched the vigilae, the night guard, take their posts on the walls, their eyes searching the darkened surrounding countryside for the unseen enemy. There will be no attacks this night, Megellus thought sarcastically, for why would the Carthaginians attack the now inert Roman army. Only two weeks before Megellus had informed his men that the campaign would continue as before, as if the blockade did not exist, but the Carthaginians’ tactic of specifically targeting the supplies had thwarted the legate’s intentions. The Punici had drawn their blades and used them to deadly effect. The legions were now hamstrung, crippled and cut off from home.

At the forefront of Megellus’s thoughts were the vital questions of how long the legions could now hold out in hostile territory, for without resupply they would eventually have to turn back – and how far they would need to withdraw. On the first question, only time would tell. The second? If the legions did finally withdraw, the Carthaginians would pursue them, of that there was no doubt, the enemy gaining strength and confidence as the legions bled those same resources into the sand. With a dread feeling Megellus answered this second question in his mind. If the tables were turned he knew what he would do. He would pursue the enemy to the bitter end. The Punici would employ the same determination they had shown over the previous nine days. The legions would be pursued past the territorial dividing line of the last campaign. They would be pursued past their winter camp and, finally, if the Carthaginians were not checked, the Second and Ninth would be pushed into the sea itself.

Atticus crouched down and scooped a handful of seawater from the shallow surf, splashing the water onto his face in an effort to clear the exhaustion from his mind. One hundred yards away the Aquila rested gently against her anchor line, the setting sun reflected in the wave tops thrown up as the shifting current broke against her hull. Atticus stood up and turned his back on the shoreline, walking slowly up the gentle slope of the beach at Fiumicino, arching his back as he went to stretch his tired muscles. He glanced over his shoulder one last time to see the two crewmen who had rowed him ashore already asleep in the bottom of the small skiff. After another sixteen-hour day training raw recruits, Atticus couldn’t begrudge them the rest, and he silently cursed the late hour of the summons from the camp prefect which kept him from his own cabin.

Atticus had asked to see Tuditanus five days before, the same day the training schedules had been issued to the galleys, the Aquila amongst them, tasked with training the new sailing crews arriving daily at Fiumicino. Atticus had instantly come ashore to see the camp prefect but his request for a meeting had been denied, as had every repeated request since. Until now.

Walking up the beach, Atticus was once more struck with awe by the activity surrounding him. For the past week he had watched as barge after barge, marching column after marching column arrived at the coastal village, to fill the beach with raw materials and the tented city with sailors and soldiers. Fiumicino was now home to some ten thousand people, half of them craftsmen, who laboured every daylight hour to turn rough raw timber into graceful spars and frames for the developing fleet, and so now, as Atticus crested the dunes at the head of the beach, the skeletal frames of twenty triremes stood tall on the sand above the high-water mark.

The camp prefect’s tented quarters stood apart from the main camp, enclosed within a palisade on a patch of raised ground overlooking the village of Fiumicino. Atticus identified himself at the gate before being ushered in, his arrival expected by the guards. He ducked under the awning of the tent and stood to attention, his eyes rapidly adjusting to the gloom of the interior. Tuditanus sat silently behind his desk poring over a series of scrolls, murmuring quietly to himself before he raised his head to acknowledge Atticus. A former manipular centurion and veteran of the Pyrrhic War, Tuditanus now held the highest rank an equestrian could achieve in the legions, and his attitude was one of a man completely at ease with his station in life.

He held Atticus’s gaze for a full minute before standing up and circling around to the front of his desk.

‘You asked to see me, Captain Perennis?’ Tuditanus said impatiently.

Atticus instantly bit back the words that rushed to his lips. ‘Yes, Camp Prefect,’ he answered evenly. ‘It’s about the training schedule issued to the galleys.’

‘Go on …’ Tuditanus said slowly, irritation in his voice.

‘I believe the approach ordered is wrong,’ Atticus said in a rush, his course set. ‘The new crews can’t be trained to ram in the time we have. We need to teach the crews how to steer a galley for boarding and make that our priority.’

‘You believe a Roman sailor cannot be taught how to ram?’

‘No, Camp Prefect, not in the time we have.’

‘The time we have?’