The Seven Hills (29 page)

"Is it all like this?" Arrunteius said when he could get his
breath. He looked out over the fast-growing compound, up at the train still coming through the pass.

"Oh, it's not all gold and jewels, by any means, but other
things equally valuable and portable: spices, incense, fine
weapons, ivory, works of art, wonderful cloth—I've even got
a few bolts of silk."

"Silk! I've heard of the stuff, but I've never seen it." Silk was to the Romans no more than a rumor—the magical cloth from somewhere far east that was so valuable that when it reached the West it was unwoven thread by thread
and rewoven together with common thread. Even thus adul
terated, it sold for many times its weight in gold and was owned mainly by oriental monarchs.

"It's real," Norbanus assured him. "Near Antioch we encountered some bandits who'd waylaid a caravan from far inland. We relieved them of it. It's the pure cloth, too."

He watched their stunned expressions for a while, then
said, "Now, Decimus, you really don't expect me to leave all
this here on the beach, do you?"

"What are we going to do, Titus?" Arrunteius said in a
strangled voice. "My orders from the Senate are to bring you
and your legions home at once."

"Some of this goes into the state treasury. The Senate will not thank you for impoverishing Rome at the outset of what
must be a very costly war."

"Just
some
of it?" said one of the naval officers.

"By ancient tradition," Norbanus said, "the general in charge is free to determine the division of the spoils. Some must go to the treasury, of course. The rest he may divide
among his officers and men and, of course, keep a substantial share for himself. It's been that way since the beginning
of the republic."

Arrunteius shook his head. "That's in wartime, and you haven't been given a war to fight."

"The situation is unique, I'll grant you that," Norbanus said easily. "But let me work things out with the Senate when we get back. I'm sure that I can appeal to their good sense. In the meantime, this is what I propose: My men and I will continue our march along the coast. You will accom
pany us offshore, carrying our, ah, baggage. We can move much faster with it loaded on ships. It really has been slow
ing us down. We'll proceed up the coast of Asia. At one of the major cities—Miletus or Smyrna or Ephesus—-we can arrange for transport to take the legions across to Greece. We can make a march there, just to let the Greeks know firsthand that Rome is back in earnest, then do the same thing there. It's a short hop across the strait from Greece to Brundisium." He saw the tormented look on the
duumvir's
face as he considered his duty, then looked at the huge heaps
of loot now assembling before his eyes.

"Elections are coming up," Norbanus reminded him. "This year's magistrates will be out of office when we get back, and they'll be thinking about nothing but the commands they'll be taking up. This is Roman history in the making, Decimus, and you," he nodded to the other naval
officers, "and your subordinates, can be a part of it. Think of
the glory when we return. And you'll have a part when it comes to the shareout, of course."

After a long while Arrunteius turned to his officers. "Start loading all this baggage onto our ships." They jumped to do his bidding.

Titus Norbanus, de facto proconsul and now, it seemed, de facto admiral, smiled.

"Surely this thing can never float," Zeno
said, shouting over the clangor.

"Yet they assure us it can," Izates said. "They quoted all sorts of Archimedean arcana about weights and volumes and
displacement and buoyancy. They insisted that the substance itself was immaterial."

"But ships should be made of wood!" Zeno said.

The thing that drew their incredulous attention was a
ship such as no one had ever seen or envisioned. The under
water craft had been mind-boggling enough, but this was even more unnatural. It was a ship made entirely of bronze. Its long keel and arching ribs were made of the ruddy metal, and even now long planks of the same material were
being affixed to the ribs with rivets. The din was like all the
armories in the world working full blast in one place.

They walked around the thing, which seemed to be at least three times as long as a conventional galley. The insane-looking designer of this prodigy had explained that wooden ships were limited in length by the size of trees
available to make their keels. There was no practical limit to
the size of a ship with a metal keel.

"It can't be rammed, can't be set afire and it won't rot," cried the designer. "No galley can stand against it. Once in motion, it will plow right through a wooden ship without even slowing down!"

Upon its prow, instead of the conventional ram, it had a huge, concave saw-toothed beak. Its lower, forward-
thrusting end would be far beneath the water when it was at
sea, and the upper end would tower twenty feet above the surface. It was indeed designed to cut enemy galleys clean in two instead of merely punching holes in them.

"Maybe it will float," Zeno conceded, "but will it move or merely wallow there?"

The radical vessel had no provision for oars. Instead, it
had a pair of the huge paddle wheels on its sides, also made
of bronze. These would be worked by hundreds of slaves scrambling on treadmills and hollow wheels within the hull.

"Well," Izates said, "if it won't move, someone even cra
zier will find a way to do it. That madman from Corinth, maybe." The Corinthian had an apparatus of tubs and pipes in which he boiled water and experimented with the steam that resulted. He was not discouraged, even though more than once a boiler had exploded, killing a number of slaves each time. He said it just proved that steam was powerful and swore that he would harness that power. What he would do with it was a mystery.

"Does it occur to you," Zeno asked his friend, "that these
Archimedeans tend to overdo things?"

"I suppose that is the way to test the limits," said Izates. "Kings and nations overdo things. Look at the Colossus of
Rhodes, or the Pyramids, or that great huge lighthouse out
there in the harbor. At least these men are learning something by their overambitious mistakes. It's not all just to glorify some inconsequential king."

"Still," Zeno said, scratching his head, "wood floats. Metal doesn't. It just seems unnatural."

"We are learning that many things we thought we knew about nature were unwarranted assumptions." Izates was already speaking in the jargon of the Archimedean school with its terms such as "evidence," "observation," "experimentation" and "proof." At one time he would have
thought these concepts unworthy of a philosopher. Seeing a
man fly was enough to unsettle one's old beliefs about such things.

In the palace, Marcus Scipio found that he could no longer take his customary delight in the work of the Museum. For more than two years it had consumed his days
and he was fascinated by every new discovery, every new invention. He had taken endless pleasure in finding new ap
plications, most of them warlike, for the outlandish devices the philosophers of the Archimedean school dreamed up.

But now it was different. Now Rome had suffered a defeat.

Flaccus tried to jolly him out of it. "A trifling defeat!" he insisted. "Rome suffered far worse defeats in the past. How about Cannae and Trebbia and Lake Trasimene? How about the Caudine Forks? Entire consular armies were lost in those
disasters. You knew Aemilius as well as I did: a plodding, uninspired commander. That's why they gave him green legions and sent him north where they never expected him to tangle with a first-rate Carthaginian general with an army twice the size of his. As it turned out, he was the first Roman commander to have that experience. It was just bad luck."

"We've been sitting here amid incredible luxury, playing
with our toys, while real Roman soldiers have been dying by
the thousands," Marcus said glumly.

"You don't sound like yourself. You've told everyone else
that it's going to be a long war and everyone will have a
chance at winning glory. Why all of a sudden do you not be
lieve it yourself?"

"Glory? I don't care about glory!" He shrugged. "Not
much, anyway. No more than most Romans. But I've been a
soldier all my life, from a long line of soldiers, and it galls me to be sitting here in Alexandria wearing gilded armor and a helmet with ram's horns while Roman armies are being defeated and Sicily is being overrun and Hamilcar is preparing to strike back. And Norbanus!" He threw a handful of papyri toward the ceiling and watched them drift back down.

This was more like it. "Ah, our old friend and colleague Titus Norbanus, now bruited about as the greatest thing since Alexander. That bothers you, does it?"

"Do you think I'm jealous of the likes of Titus Norbanus?" He slammed a hard palm onto his desk. "Did you hear that they're thinking of allowing him to stand for consul? At his age and without having held an aedileship, much less a praetorship?"

"I heard. I read the same dispatches that you do. In order to do that he has to get back to Rome first. Last we heard he was preparing to cross over from Ephesus to Greece."

Marcus made a rude noise. "Greeks! What are they going
to do about someone like Norbanus and his four legions?
Can you imagine what those soldiers must be like by now?
They were first-rate when they were here in Egypt. Now they've made a march like something from an ancient hero tale, fighting much of the way. Those have to be the toughest, saltiest legionaries Rome has ever fielded by now, and they clearly worship Norbanus."

"Envy ill becomes you, Marcus. But up to now they've
faced only the disorganized Judeans and the tottering, decadent Seleucids and primitive pirates and tribesmen, the sort of trash a Roman legion brushes from its path. Forget the Greeks. When he enters Greece, he's in Macedonian ter
ritory, and they're a different proposition entirely, as you well
know."

"I don't mean that I want to see another Roman army de
feated!" Marcus protested.

"But it would be nice to see Titus Norbanus humbled just a little, wouldn't it?"

"He needs some taking down. A proconsular command, a whole army and now even a navy! Plus he's making his own foreign policy in the East, building up a clientage among foreign kings; it's outrageous!"

"Marcus, Marcus," Flaccus said crooningly, "there are people back in Rome who say exactly the same thing about
you, and you know it. They say you are making yourself de
facto king of Egypt, that Selene never makes a move that you don't direct, that you have imperial ambitions."

"I wish Selene was that biddable. The woman has been getting damned independent lately. She forgets who put her shapely backside on that throne." He glowered at the gaudy helmet on its stand upon his desk. "She's the one who manipulates me, if truth were known. Dressing me up like one of her strutting guardsmen, making me a centerpiece at her endless banquets."

"And you are complaining? Oh, come now, Marcus. She's
making everyone grant you divine honors, and your pres
ence at her banquets tells all those foreign dignitaries where
her power lies." He spread his hands expansively. "You are
the greatest man in Egypt, and here you are feeling sorry for yourself because you've missed a couple of brawls."

"Brawls! Aulus, you are not a military man!"

Flaccus grinned. "I admit it freely."

Scipio leaned back in his chair, musing. "Hamilcar must have his fleet restored and reprovisioned by now. Why is he waiting?"

Flaccus nodded. This was better. His friend was thinking
strategically again. "Does it occur to you, as it does to me, that perhaps Hamilcar has a new advisor?"

"Selene's spies in Carthage say that the shofet spends a lot
of time with a foreign queen, an Illyrian named Teuta. Is it
conceivable that Hamilcar is actually listening to a woman?
When we saw him, he would scarcely listen to any of his
own generals. He was not a man inclined to taking advice."

"Since we last saw him, he has been defeated before the
walls of Alexandria, forced to retreat, had Italy and Sicily
taken from beneath his nose, and had much of his fleet and
most of his invasion materiel destroyed by fire. It's enough to make most men change their ways." He paused. "And this Teuta may be an extraordinary woman. What do we know about her?"

"Nothing. Illyria is just across the Adriatic from Italy, but we know more about Spain. It's as remote as Britannia and Hibernia."

"How can we find out about the woman and her country?" Marcus asked.

Flaccus's eyebrows went up. "Find out? The Museum and
Library contain all the knowledge in the world."

"That will take too long and involve talking with a lot of dusty old scholars who have no grasp of military matters or politics. I have a better idea." He seized his helmet from its stand.