by Ken Parejko
I knew little about naval warfare and had never seen a naval battle. But even as a child I'd found ships interesting, how they commanded the wind, maneuvered, and carried their own weapons and grappling devices. The outcome of a battle, I knew, could be contrary to appearances. Critical tactical advantage could sometimes be gained through an initial sacrifice.
We watched archers aboard a Sicilian bireme fix flaming arrows into their bows. As the arrows arched through the sky toward the Rhodian flagship they left a dozen smoky contrails. Half sizzled into the lake. Many of those that hit the ship were hurriedly extinguished. But several landed in the sails, which quickly caught on fire. And we watched as a fire caught hold on the deck.
Dark swirling smoke rose out of the center of the lake as the big quadrireme ignited. Men jumped from all sides of the ship, some with their clothing afire. The Sicilian flagship cut the grappling ropes connecting it to its burning twin and moved away towards safety while Rhodian soldiers were massacred and one by one their bodies kicked overboard.
There came a moment’s pause in the battle as even the combatants, locked in a life and death struggle, stopped to watch. There in the middle of the lake they stood alongside one another, astonished at the magnitude of the fire and the grisly performance they were caught up in. Then the fighting resumed. But the Rhodians seemed to have lost heart from the sight of their burning flagship, abandoned now to the spectacular blaze which consumed it. As the mast of the big quadrireme toppled into the water the ship settled deeper, extinguishing its flames in great clouds of steam and smoke. Cheers rose up from the Sicilian ships as victory fell into their hands.
Claudius stood. Enough was enough. The men had fought bravely and well. There was no need for further bloodshed. He raised his hand, signaling an end to the performance. Buglers trumpeted his orders, echoed from the Triton on the lake.
The crowd cheered again. The Sicilians had won. On the ships those still standing turned toward the imperial stand and returned Claudius’ salute.
The once-placid and clear waters of the lake were littered with bodies and broken ships and polluted with blood, ashes and the wreckage of battle. The hundred or so survivors left in the water, some missing limbs or cut fatally through, swam as best they could toward the shore while the worst of the wounded merely clung to timbers or rubble, and floated bobbing this way and that. Aboard the ships those who could climbed over the tangled wreckage and dead and wounded to take up the oars and move toward the opposite shore.
Clean-up crews began dragging the worst of the wreckage away. The burning Rhodian quadrireme had sunk. But the lake was quite shallow, and part of its bow stood forlornly above the water. The sounds and sights of the battle were over. Only the heavy smoke of the smoldering ship still hung in the air, and the smell of burning flesh it brought with it.
The crowd turned to their wine and food. People milled about, looking for acquaintances and friends. I rummaged a moment and found a loaf of bread and a small wheel of cheese we’d bought from one of the roadside vendors. Lucius sliced the cheese into small wedges. It was nutty and sweet. This was something I especially liked about travel, this being surprised by local produce. As we ate I exchanged a few pleasantries with other equites milling around us. Thin clouds had slipped in and now covered the sun, protecting us from the worst heat of the day.
A banquet had been brought onto the reviewing stand where Agrippina, Nero and others were enjoying themselves. Claudius had stepped off the opposite side of the stand and was chatting among the senators. He basked in the spectacle’s success. I watched Narcissus climb onto the stand. He side-stepped Agrippina and stopped to chat a few moments with Felix and Drusilla. He looked in high spirits. The naumachia had come off remarkably well. He headed off to find Claudius.
A moment later I saw Narcissus hurry up the shore toward the dam which separated the lake and the channel dug to drain it.
Claudius climbed the steps to the reviewing stand and turned to face the lake and crowd. He raised his hand. Another cheer, the bugles blared, and in the direction of the dam we could see Narcissus conducting last-minute preparations. A dozen tympani and the big cymbals called discos rolled. Narcissus signaled that all was ready. All eyes turned toward the dam.
Claudius dropped his arm. The music stopped. A score of men standing on either side of the dam swung heavy iron mauls. Now the sound of the mauls pounding against the wooden dam flew across the water. They pounded again and again, beating against the wedges which held the timbers in place. As we watched from a distance, we could see the mauls hitting the wood a moment before their sound flew across the lake and reached our ears. I pointed out to Lucius that sound traveled much more slowly than light, as one could also see by the flash of lightning reaching the eyes long before we heard the roll of thunder. The sound of the mauls striking the dam did resemble that of thunder rolling across the lake, as though an unseen storm had arisen in its depths.
Now the mauls no longer struck their targets equally, and the sound they made became random and less rhythmic. It stopped completely for a few moments as Narcissus examined the wedges holding the dam together. The most critical of the wedges seemed to be stuck.
The crowd was becoming restless. Claudius sat. Agrippina whispered in his ear. I could only imagine she was slathering insults on Narcissus’ incompetence.
The pounding of the mauls began again, then suddenly took effect. As the timbers gave way the men on the dam jumped aside. With a great crack and groan the dam collapsed under the gushing water.
The roar of the crowd joined that of the water. We watched the front of the advancing lake-water approach then disappear into the tunnel cut through Monte Salviano.
As the lake receded, slow inch by slow inch, and as timbers, torn sails, and floating bodies were caught up in the current and carried towards the dam, the sunken Rhodian quadrireme was slowly being exposed. A man’s body, caught in the timbers of the ship as it sank, came into view. His left arm was missing.
I glanced towards Claudius. The emperor watched the draining of the lake carefully, relieved that the dam had finally given way. Beside him Agrippina stood silently. Drusilla, seated behind her, leaned forward and pointed to the flow of water making its way over the dam.
I followed her gesture, and Agrippina’s eyes. Though barely noticeable, the gush of water seemed diminished. I watched more closely, paying particular attention to the height of the water in the channel beyond the dam, which instead of growing deeper seemed to be receding. I found a rock sticking out of one side of the channel, and used it as a gauge. I could see that the water’s flow had just barely lessened. Now I looked back over the lake. Though the shoreline had spread lake-ward by twenty or thirty paces, half of the sunken Rhodian ship was still under water. Crowds of men, women and children were running out into the smelly mud to gather the flopping fish and exposed clams which would make their evening’s meal. But the lake remained half full.
Now came a guessing game. Was the channel deep enough to drain the lake, or not?
Though water still gushed over the dam, and the channel carried it into the open mouth of the distant tunnel, as each moment passed it seemed more and more clear that the lake would win this battle.
In a quarter hour’s time that was clear to everyone. The gush of water had slowed significantly, yet nearly half the lake remained.
Another fifteen minutes and what had been a flood was a gentle trickle. Agrippina stood tall beside the diminutive, suddenly older Claudius. Nero stepped between them. Mother and son were masters of the moment.
Narcissus, with Claudius’ collusion, had gambled on a great naval spectacle, to be followed by an even greater marvel, the draining of the lake. Claudius’ off-hand witticism had delayed the start of the naumachia, a small blunder forgotten in the excitement of the battle. But as the water of the lake stopped receding and only a trickle ran over the dam, what was to be the most shining marvel of all became instead a smelly, anticlimactic debacle.
> Claudius climbed unceremoniously off the reviewing stand and disappeared among a circle of close confidantes. The crowd began to disperse. I stood to stretch my legs.
As I waited for Lucius to bring our horses around I was hailed by a Praetorian who handed me a note. It was, to my surprise, from Agrippina herself, asking me to join her at the villa her entourage was retiring to. I swung myself onto Lightning and followed the courier up around the lake, dismounted and left Lucius to care for the horses. From the villa’s atrium I could hear a loud argument. I was shown in just as Agrippina’s rancor broke in a great flood over Narcissus.
Agrippina, seated in an elegant ivory chair, still wearing her fabulous golden dress, dominated a diorama which included, alongside her, Pallas, Felix and Drusilla. Claudius stood looking out a window over the fields and vineyards and beyond them the muddy exposed shores of the lake where a remnant few people could be seen still walking up and down through the mud, searching for fish or mussels. The lake had shrunk but it was still there, embarrassingly there. Shallower than ever, neither a real lake any more nor yet usable land, it had become a watery grave for hundreds of men and simultaneously of Claudius’ grandest dream.
"But this was humankind's greatest engineering challenge,” Narcissus begged, not noticing my entrance, “Even your great-grandfather Augustus backed away from it.”
Agrippina fixed Narcissus with a cold glare. "That is because my great-grandfather had a brain, and knew how to use it." She turned her gaze to me, her eyes ablaze with anger. She turned again to Narcissus. "But you," she poured out her scorn, which seemed to me directed at Claudius as well as Narcissus, "you can never do anything right can you. You never have, and you never will." It seemed to me Narcissus was in real danger of losing not only imperial favor but his head as well.
Agrippina rose from her chair and came toward me. At that moment it was as though there was no one else in the room, and this monstrous event which had shaken the principate to its core was to her but a moment's distraction, a fly buzzing about her head.
"Gaius Plinius," she said, smiling. I'd heard she was a beautiful woman. At thirty-seven, she still was. Her eyes were the most intense I’d ever encountered. They seemed to fix you, unclothe you and reduce you to your bare soul, to allow her to do as she liked with you. I’d heard of this power of hers, but experiencing it was like nothing I’d imagined. I found myself throwing up a make-shift shield around myself, but knew immediately it was too little, too late. She’d already insinuated herself into my soul, shared my most intimate thoughts and feelings. She took me by the arm, turned me around and whisked me out of the room.
"Let's leave them to their misery," she said as we whisked down the hallway. "Maybe they’ll have learned something from all this... though I doubt it."
She steered me into a nearby room.
"Do I frighten you?" she asked, turning to face me.
Did she frighten me? What could I say?
"Yes, a little," I admitted. But knights were not supposed to be frightened by a woman.
She smiled, raised her eyebrows. "But my dear Pliny. I’m only a woman."
I couldn’t imagine what it was like for her growing up with the elder Agrippina, whose manipulative cruelty was legendary, as a mother. Of watching her father Germanicus’ ashes, amid great public grieving, brought home from Syria. Of being torn from her mother, who’d run up against Tiberius and exiled to the island of Pandateria to be tortured and murdered.
After all that, a life at the peak of power when her brother Gaius became emperor, the Gaius Caligula whose sexual desires ran unimpeded across every layer of Roman society. Had brother and sister bedded? I had no way of knowing. Then, with Gaius’ assassination, the fall into oblivion out of which by sheer force of will she’d clawed her way once again into the seat of power.
At last I answered. "Why do you frighten me? I don't know. I'm only an equite," I confessed.
“You just an equite? Don't be silly. You’re no ordinary knight. Your career has already been remarkable. An officer on the frontier, highly lauded, and add to that the books you've written.” She smiled. “Oh yes, I know all about you. I know too that my grandfather appeared to you in a dream."
I was surprised. "Yes. It was because of him I wrote my History."
She sighed, smiled condescendingly. “I know. I know...You may assume I know everything, dear Pliny, because it’s nearly true.” She ran her hands down her side, caressing her golden dress. “Isn’t it delightful?” she asked, rhetorically. “I’d dreamt as a child of a golden dress, and now I have one.”
She turned and stepped away from me. “I don’t suppose I’ll ever wear it again,” she said, and peered out a small window that opened onto the peristyle of the house. She saw something interesting there, and for a moment seemed to have forgotten I existed. Then she spoke to the window. “Well, my friend, what I want to know is should I bother to read your history or not.”
“I would be pleased if you did.”
“Would I be pleased if I did?”
“I would hope so.”
“Have you treated my grandfather well, and my father?”
“Your father Germanicus and your grandfather Drusus were heroes, and in that I've told the truth.”
She turned and looked into my heart. Satisfied with what she saw, she smiled. “It’s all I ask. My father was more than a hero, you know. He was an artist. A great playwright. Did you know that Claudius, on my request, went down last year to Naples' Sebasta to direct one of my father’s plays?”
“Yes, I’d heard that.”
“It was a great success.”
“As I've heard Claudius was too, the audience greatly impressed by his Greek.”
She closed her eyes a moment, sighed. “And like both my father and Claudius, you went deep into the German wilderness. You went there to find the site of Varus' defeat.”
"Yes. We were very near it, I think, when we were ambushed and had to leave.”
"So you too know the taste of failure," she said. “Life’s best tutor.” She lifted a small terracotta Heracles from a nearby table, turned it in her hand, ran her fingers over its gentle surface. "Tell me something you’ve learned from your failures."
I was nonplussed. "I haven't given it much thought," I admitted. My failure at finding the battlefield had bothered me, but I hadn’t lingered on it, had turned from it back to writing my history.
"Failure is a fire which either consume us, or tempers us," she said, “depending on what we're made of.” She raised the small Heracles, held it above her head for a moment, then threw it to the floor. It bounced, settled onto the tile. The sound of its impact reverberated through the room, ringing in my ears. A guard appeared at the door, then backed away. She bent over and picked the little hero up, smiling. She set it down where she’d found it. She turned to me, leaned back on the table behind her. “Isn't it sad, dear Pliny, that the gods cannot make a man as well as our sculptors do?”
To that I had no answer.
"You men are not well made, you know. Claudius!” she laughed, the scorn dripping from her words, “And his silly freedmen. I have yet to meet a senator can stand up against me. In fact I’ve yet to meet a man deserving respect. I respect only my grandfather and my father, neither of whom I knew. I envy you, that they visited you in your dream. Tell me something about my grandfather I don't already know."
"I... I don’t know,” I admitted. “I’ve read everything I could...”
“Not what you read. I want to know from your dream. What he was like. Did he talk about me?”
“He asked me to write his history. He was a very strong man, very impressive, deep as the ocean. We talked about the past, and the future of the empire...”
"But not about me?” This seemed to trouble her. “You haven’t forgotten?”
I shrugged. A moment’s silence ensued, as though having come to the point of the interview, she was done with [email protected]
“I'm sorry, Pliny, it's b
een a long day, an unfortunately long day for my husband, and I must go to him. The poor man needs me,” she announced. She swept out the door and was gone as suddenly as a grouse flushed in the woods. I sat for a moment staring out the window to the low, wooded mountains, then at the statue which had survived Agrippina's test. At last I walked out of the villa to where Lucius and Lightning were waiting to start back home.
I shivered as I walked, as though some poison had seeped into my soul. I thought for a moment of finding one of the Marsi, the tribe who lived nearby, and who it was said could by the touch of their hand extract the poison of a serpent’s bite.
Though this would be the last time I would meet her, and none of us could see into the future, Agrippina’s struggle for her place in the sun would in the coming years consume first her husband, then herself, and then too the young son whose career she was so carefully cultivating.
Three nights later, the first night back in my apartment, I dreamt.
A huge dark tunnel spewing water.
I swim against the current, burst out into the sunlight, onto the shores of a lake. It is calm. There are many people, eating, drinking, talking. I cannot understand them.
Suddenly from somewhere a Triton blows a deafening note. The sound reverberates inside my head, like the sound of a big coin dropped into a gigantic brass bowl. As it dies I hear a steady beat, like a heartbeat. It is the sound of many oars rising and falling. The once-calm waters are roiled by the oars, and by a sudden squall.
I see all this from within the water, in the midst of a great naval battle, the Rhodians against the Sicilians.
The battle rages. Ships go down, one after the other. Men scream in agony. I swim this way and that, to stay clear of the ships and falling men. Struggling to survive, one of the men climbs atop me and uses me to stay above water, pushing me down. I feel as though I will drown. I escape the man’s grasp, rise to the surface, gasping for air. My wheezing wakes me for a moment. I peer around my room into the dark, then fall back asleep. I find myself once again in the lake. The battle is over. Ships float upside down. Floating corpses bump into me. The air around me is bitter with sulfur while above I can see vultures circling in dark clouds.
