Ship of Rome

by John Stack

  ‘Stand the line!’ Marcus shouted as the maniple formed around him. Every soldier heard the command and braced himself forward against the coming onslaught. The command meant no fall-back, no reserve rally point. There would be no further order to manoeuvre and they would fight where they stood, each man knowing the reason. They could not leave the supplies undefended.

  The attacks had begun five days ago, before the legions had even crossed the territorial dividing line. The first surprise strike had been the most devastating. Although the maniples guarding the supplies, including the IV of the Ninth commanded by Marcus, reacted instantly to the cavalry charge, they were no match for the swift and manoeuvrable mounted enemy. Without the support of their own cavalry units, who were dispersed along the entire length of the three-mile-long marching column, the infantry soldiers could do little but hold their ground and defend themselves. It was at the point of impact in that first attack that Marcus realized the true target of the enemy. While small detachments peeled off the main cavalry charge to keep the infantry tied down, they made no attempt to push home their attack or penetrate the defensive shield walls of the legionaries. Instead their focus had been the supply wagons. Dozens of fire arrows had been loosed into the heaped wagons while spearmen targeted the tethered oxen. The result had been catastrophic. The Carthaginians had disengaged after only five frenzied minutes, leaving the supply train in chaos. Marcus, like the other centurions, had ordered the men to douse the flames while frantic appeals for support were sent up the line to the legion commanders. That first attack had cost them a tenth of their entire supplies.

  The legions had camped that first night on the very spot of the attack, the engineers hastily erecting the protective palisade of a marching legion in enemy territory. The attack had been dissected in detail, the legions’ commanders quizzing the centurions who had witnessed the coordinated ambush. Changes were made. Defences were strengthened. Counter measures were deployed, including cavalry and a fire guard with responsibility for protecting the combustible supplies.

  The ambushes had reached their peak on the third day when a combined force of enemy infantry and cavalry attacked at a river ford. The Romans had been quick to respond and the enemy had been severely bruised and routed, their foolhardy infantry suffering the most against the determined legionaries. The Carthaginians had switched back to exclusively mounted attacks after the minor setback and so now, on the fifth day, an hour after midday, Marcus and his men were forced to respond to yet another strike, the fourth that day.

  From one hundred and fifty yards away, Marcus heard the crunch of steel, bone, man and horse as the two cavalry forces collided. The collision was vicious, the naked belligerence of both sides turning the fight into brutal combat where no quarter was asked or given. The men of the IV maniple could only watch in silence, their teeth bared in hatred at the enemy out of their reach. All eyes were on the chaotic mêlée.

  ‘On the flank!’

  Marcus saw the danger immediately as he reacted to the cry. Another enemy cavalry unit of fifty mounted men had broken from the cover of the woods and were bearing directly down on his maniple’s position, bypassing the engaged Roman cavalry, heading straight for the supply train. The order went out for the Roman reserve cavalry to counter this second thrust, but Marcus knew they would not arrive in time, positioned as they were at the very rear of the supply train.

  ‘Charge weapons,’ the centurion shouted, and the men of his maniple roared a defiant primal scream as they thrust out their pila between their shields, presenting a wall of deadly steel to the approaching horsemen. The oxen behind the men bellowed in terror at the confused scene around them, the sound mixing with the war cries of the fast-approaching Punici. Marcus leaned forward into his shield and braced his left foot behind, steadying himself against the wave of man and beast approaching at the terrifying speed of thirty miles per hour. The ground beneath him trembled with the force of the charge.

  ‘Hastati!’ he shouted, the enemy now one hundred yards away.

  ‘Loose!’

  The whooshing sound of forty pila released together filled the air above the shield wall as the hastati of the IV put their might behind the throw of their javelins, their craving to bring death to the enemy fuelling their effort. The javelins seemed to hang in the air for a heartbeat before falling into the oncoming charge. Man and horse buckled and fell under the deadly shower but the charge was barely checked and the Carthaginians came on over their fallen comrades with renewed hatred and drive.

  ‘Steady, boys!’ Marcus shouted, his men taking strength from the calmness of the command.

  The cavalry charge turned at the last possible second, sweeping down the line of the shield wall, the deadly points of the bared pila forcing the turn. The Carthaginians hurled both fire arrows and spears into the supplies behind the wall of legionaries, striking blow after deadly blow against the precious supplies. One rider was slow to turn and his mount crashed straight into the braced, interlocked shields at the head of the maniple. The one-thousand-pound horse tore through the wall, catapulting two soldiers into the oxen and wagons behind, killing them instantly. The horse slammed directly against the six-foot-high wagon wheel with a sickening crunch. The Carthaginian rider was thrown and landed deep within the ranks of the legionaries where he was instantly dispatched under the blows of half a dozen blades.

  As the last of the riders swept past Marcus, the centurion ordered a second volley of pila, this time into the undefended rear of the charge. Again the missiles had a deadly effect on their targets but again the charge did not waver. As the Carthaginians exhausted all their arrows and spears they peeled off and began their retreat to the woods, the lead rider sounding a horn that signalled to the Carthaginian cavalry engaged with the Romans that it should break off and retreat. Within an instant the field before the defending Romans was clear once again. The attack had lasted no more than four minutes.

  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

  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.