After inspecting the new arrangements, Bruteddius climbed some way up the sternpost and gazed aft. Eventually, he climbed stiffly down, and addressed the senior passengers on the quarterdeck.
‘Domini, you see the cloud behind us over our starboard quarter. Most likely, it has formed over the high land behind Sinope. If that is right, we drifted further east in the night than we thought. With the Goths where they are, now there is no chance of us making Sinope.’
Those assembled received this in silence.
‘The wind has moved to the north-west. The Argestes, the ‘Cleanser’, as it is known, is strengthening. Maybe it will ‘cleanse’ us of these Goths.’ Bruteddius smiled with no great humour. ‘The Argestes will blow a storm. The second, outer steering oars are there to help in a high sea. When it hits, we will run before it under sail. But we will try to keep it a touch on our larboard quarter. We do not want to be driven on to the coast to the east of Sinope. It is inhospitable, a fifty-mile bight of shifting shoals and banks. The local pilot and the periplous I studied both say the first safe harbour is Naustathmos. But it is in the marshes of the estuary of the Halys. Better we try for Amisus. It is only some fifteen miles further, and has an easy approach. Failing that, a little beyond, there is Ankon on the headland of the Daiantos Plain.’
‘And failing that?’ Ballista asked.
‘Trapezus.’
‘How far?’
‘Better none of us think of that.’ Bruteddius went back to studying his ship and the sea.
The storm did not come in one rush. It built gradually, wave on wave, the wind keening higher in the rigging. The fore and aft lift were increasing. The waves were showing white. The rowers were having trouble catching their strokes. Bruteddius, ignoring the pleading looks of his officers and men, bided his time.
Ballista, one arm holding the sternpost, the other firm around Wulfstan and Bauto, watched the Goths astern. The longboats were only about two hundred yards behind. They were rising and falling on the waves like seagulls. At times, they were completely lost from view in the troughs between the rollers. These were big – all the way from the mouth of the Borysthenes; three, four hundred miles of sea room to gather themselves, to build up into something terrifying.
‘Are we going to die?’ Wulfstan had to shout to be heard.
‘We are not sailing on a mat. Old Bruteddius knows what he is doing.’ Ballista squeezed the boys harder. ‘The goddess Ran will not get us with her drowning net today.’ He did what he could to convey reassurance.
Maximus, timing the roll, slid to his side. ‘The Goths are gaining.’
Ballista flicked his head to get his long hair out of his eyes. ‘There will be no fighting in this. Help me out of this mail shirt.’ He released Wulfstan and Bauto. ‘You boys hold on tight to the rail.’
Soon the waves were breaking and tumbling. The oarsmen were fighting for purchase on the broken sea. The deck was streaming. One of the thalamians was carried up from the depths of the ship. He was twitching, his face a bloody mess. He had missed his stroke; somehow the metal counterweight on his oar had smashed into his face.
‘Deck crew,’ Bruteddius bellowed above the elements, ‘on my command, unfurl the mainsail – only a little canvas, steady on the brails. Rowing master, when she draws, on my second command, oars inboard; zygians and thalamians, all the way, seal the oarports; thranites, leave just the blades outside the weather screen.’
Bruteddius, moving easily across the wildly pitching deck, went to the rear helm. He placed his hands on the tillers, next to those of the helmsman. Braced, feeling the run of his ship, he gazed back over his shoulder towards the prow.
‘Deck crew, now!’
The sail dropped, snapped and bellied out, tight as a drum in an instant. The mast groaned.
‘Enough!’
The deck crew, leaning back, feet slipping, struggling for balance, wrestled the brails secure. There was just a few feet of sail showing. The ship shied like a racehorse.
‘Rowing master, oars inboard!’
The poles rattled home, and the Armata twisted, straightened and forged ahead with a new urgency.
‘Helmsmen, bring the wind a touch to larboard.’
The waves rushed under the high, curving stern of the trireme, tipped her nose down, lifted her. The long, delicate ship rode at a slant up the great face of water. At the top, she hung for a moment among the flying spume, ram high, then wriggled and slid down the far side. Again and again the threat was surmounted, the inhuman power negated.
‘Oarsmen, lie on your benches. Thranites, listen for orders. More hands to the pump. Bow officer, get some men bailing.’ A bigger wave brought Bruteddius to his knees. He was up in a moment. He bawled the traditional cry of seafarers: ‘Alexander lives and reigns!’
Ballista had been in a galley caught in heavy weather before – the Clementia, out in the Adriatic, north of Corycra. He understood the risks. So many things could turn the boat side on to the waves – too much water in the bilges, rushing uncontrolled, making the boat unstable, unresponsive to the helm; an exposed rank of oars, caught by a wave, acting like a lever; the ram driven too deep, becoming a forward rudder; a broken steering oar – and caught side on, she would roll, and that would be an end to it. Bruteddius was doing everything he could. The pump and bailing. The double steering oars. Just enough sail to give the vessel steerage. The oars inboard, but the upper rank poised for a desperate attempt to claw her head around.
You could not fault Bruteddius’s efforts. But they might well not be enough. A terrible wave could break over the ship, swamp her. If that happened, no despairing efforts would prevent her, sooner or later, turning broadside to the sea. The Armata might fail to ride a huge wave. Not reaching the crest, she would pitch poll; upended, stern over bow. If such a terrible wave came, it could simply drive the ship, ram first, down into the depths. That would be best – it would be the quickest.
The storm buffeted at their ears, yet not so loud they could not hear the groans and unnatural thumps as thousands of wooden joints flexed and ground together, not so deafening they were not aware of the high thrum of the rigging, and the roar and crash of the waves.
‘Dominus, the water down below is rising. I think the hypozomata is working loose.’
‘No,’ Bruteddius reassured the shipwright, ‘it is just the seams moving. Nail a patch over anywhere it is coming in too fast – and get more men bailing; keep changing the shifts on the pump.’
The naupegos reeled away below deck, clutching at the woodwork as he negotiated the steps.
‘What is a hypo– hypozoma–?’ Maximus asked.
‘Nothing of importance,’ replied Bruteddius.
The air was full of water, the sea raging, but still the ship swam; sliding, twisting, bucking beneath their feet, but she still swam.
‘Hercules’ hairy arse!’
The Armata ran into something. She was smashed sideways. Across the deck men were knocked off their feet, sent sliding down towards the starboard rail.
‘All hands, larboard,’ bellowed Bruteddius. ‘Now!’
Ballista did not think. He skidded around the corner of the cabin, and set off between it and the back of the rear helmsman. The deck lurched up in front of him. He was thrown flat. He was slipping backwards in a deluge of water. His foot hit something, broke the momentum. His fingers found purchase in a join in the deck. Wulfstan was slithering past. Ballista put out a hand, grabbed the boy by the scruff of his tunic.
‘Larboard now!’ Bruteddius’s voice was cracked. ‘The next one will turn us over.’
A few steps and Ballista’s chest collided with the rail. Locking his forearms under it, he gripped for dear life. A body banged in on either side, another from behind.
Looking up, Ballista saw that a mountain of water was heading straight for him. The third of the rogue triple waves towered over the boat.
Ballista forgot to breathe before the impact. Saltwater forced its way into his mouth, up his n
ose. It tried to rip him from the rail. The Armata was tipping. Ballista tried to breathe out. He failed. The boat reared still higher.
Ballista’s body forced him to try and breathe. Nothing but water, choking, down into his lungs, drowning him. The boat literally hung in the balance.
Allfather, this is it, thought Ballista. I am going to die.
Then wonderful, sweet air. Gulping, coughing, Ballista felt the rail start to fall. Slowly at first, then faster, the Armata began to right herself.
‘Rowers, back to your benches.’ Bruteddius was indestructible, a thing of nature. ‘Balance the boat.’
From below, the sounds of the starboard oarsmen stumbling, bumping to their places – a herd of weird migrating animals.
All around Ballista, cheering, faces with insane grins. Someone was thumping him on the back. Saved! Saved! Gods be praised!
The stern of the boat lifted on a normal wave.
‘Man overboard!’ The shout came from the stern. Ballista staggered towards it.
Hippothous was pointing. The Armata was sliding up the wave – nothing to be seen but water.
The boat crested the wave, and there was a small head in the water. Arms wide, thrashing in a wild crawl.
‘Bauto!’ Wulfstan screamed.
The Frisian boy was going up the front of the following wave. He went over the top.
Ballista hugged Wulfstan to him, as tight as his own child.
The Armata slid up the wave, hung on its peak. And Bauto was gone. Nothing but empty, pitiless water.
‘The Goths! They are gone.’
It meant nothing to Ballista. There was no room in his thoughts for anything but a small boy lost in a wild sea.
The storm went as it came – gradually. All the long day, and most of the following night, the Armata ran, as far as could be told, a little east of south-east.
Dawn found the ship crawling past the mole into the miraculous safe harbour of Amisus. She was leaking like a sieve. Several planks sprung, the two great ropes of the hypozomata that girdled the hull and held her together were loose. The water had risen past the bilges. The pump and bailing barely held it at bay from the lower benches. Only the natural buoyancy of a wooden boat was stopping her sinking.
The human cost could have been worse. Five broken limbs, three arms, two legs. Several bad cuts and rope burns. Two men knocked senseless. Just one dead – a young boy drowned in the immensity of the Kindly Sea.
PART THREE
The Mountains of Prometheus
(The Caucasus, Summer–Autumn, AD262)
Slim indeed are our hopes, if we must entrust our safe return to women.
–Apollonius of Rhodes, Argonautica, 3, c. 488–9
XX
When the sea fret lifted, there, fine over the starboard bow, were the Caucasus mountains. Forty, fifty or more miles away, the immense green-grey slopes thrust up and, far behind them, cloud-topped, the jagged white peaks of the mountain wall. They were, thought Ballista, a fitting place for a high god to chain an immortal traitor.
Ballista had crossed the Alps several times, and as a young man he had served in the Atlas, but those mountains were as nothing to this eastern range. He could see why some men held that the Caucasus might stretch as far as India. Somewhere high in that wilderness of rock and snow, he had to seduce a king from his Persian inclination and cajole him back into friendship with Rome. Somewhere up there was a grim pass he had to defend from the savage northern nomads. It was the far edge of the world; a sort of armed exile.
‘Arrian was right,’ Hippothous said. ‘The Phasis river does have a strange colour.’
Ballista looked. Mud carried down by the great river of Colchis stained the sea in a wide yellowish fan. The waters of the Phasis were indeed light with a tawny shade, just as the bookish governor of Cappadocia had written more than a century before. For these Greeks and Romans, everything was seen through a filter of literary texts.
The Armata turned and nudged in towards Phasis. The last leg of the furthermost run had been slow. They had taken eight days at Amisus repairing the trireme after the storm. It had been a miserable time: hard, dirty work tightening the hypozomata around the vessel, making sound the sprung planks, caulking the seams, splicing and replacing damaged rigging, cleaning the fouled bilges. The spirits of the passengers as well as the labouring crew had been oddly oppressed by the fate of one young barbarian slave boy. The death on shore of one of the unconscious crewmen had passed almost unnoticed.
Two days out from Amisus, they had docked in the neat man-made harbour below the towers of Trapezus and a smoke-blackened temple to Hadrian and Rome, where a battered statue of the deified emperor pointed out to sea. They had gone ashore. The fold of his toga over his head, Felix had sacrificed an ox, inspected its entrails – nothing untoward – and poured a libation. Trapezus was the headquarters of the Black Sea fleet, and the most important garrison town for the army at the eastern end of the sea. The next morning, the consular, for all the world as if he were the governor of Cappadocia, had inspected the ships, the troops, their weapons, the walls, the trench, the sick, the muster rolls, and the food supplies. All were sadly depleted. Only a few years earlier, the Classis Pontica had boasted no fewer than forty warships here; there had been some ten thousand local troops as well as many regulars. But then the northmen had come, the garrison had failed in its duty and courage and the Borani had sacked the city. Now there were but ten liburnians – four of them laid up – and just three units of soldiers. The two units of local infantry, Numeri I and II Trapezountioon, numbered no more than a hundred and fifty men each, and the cavalry regulars, Ala II Gallorum, about two hundred, even including those absent without leave and the ill.
The subsequent two days, a similar story had played out. Just down the coast at the fort of Hyssou Limen, the old, proud Cohors Apuleia Civium Romanorum Ysiporto had only two hundred and fifty men with the standards all told. Eighty miles to the east, things were yet worse at the city of Asparus. In the glory days of Arrian, Asparus had been home to five cohorts. Now Cohors II Claudiana and Cohors III Ulpia Patraeorum Milliaria Equitata Sagittariorum, despite a notional compliment of around fifteen hundred soldiers, could put just three hundred men on the parade ground. There was no reason to suppose things would be better at Phasis.
They entered the estuary slowly. The Phasis ceaselessly created new, shifting mud flats. A man in the bow swung the lead, calling back the soundings. When they were over the main bar, Felix poured out unmixed wine into the river, a libation to Earth, the divine genius of the emperor Gallienus, the gods who inhabited this land and the spirits of the dead heroes.
The trireme backed water to the military jetty. Longshoremen caught the ropes, made her fast. The boarding ladder was run out. Headed by the venerable senator Felix, the mission to the Caucasus clattered off the ship. Bruteddius called farewell. Five days before the kalends of June, twenty-six since they had weighed anchor at Byzantium, and the outward voyage of the latter-day Argonauts was over.
The prefect in command of the imperial troops greeted them. A Spaniard of a certain age, he had a careworn, placatory demeanour: the Vir Clarissimus and his esteemed comites had been expected much earlier – it had been necessary to return the soldiers of the welcoming party to other duties – they were terribly overstretched – he very much hoped the Vir Clarissimus would understand, that no one would take offence.
Felix, urbanely but firmly, cut through the apologia: all would be splendid, quite splendid, if their baggage could be conveyed to their quarters, and if lunch was in hand; nothing like a return to terra firma to give one an appetite.
‘Just so, Dominus, just so.’
The prefect conducted them through the vicus. Ballista noted with approval the well-built brick wall and deep ditch which protected the landward approach to the settlement of veterans and traders. Better still, the fort itself had a double ditch before its walls and artillery visible on its towers. The state of the garrison remained t
o be discovered, but it was worth remembering that Phasis was one of the few localities that had not fallen in either of the great raids by the Borani.
The headquarters building was modest, and the lunch in keeping with its surroundings. When they were still on the hard-boiled eggs and pickled fish, one of Felix’s bodyguards came and whispered in his ear. The consular’s face flushed and assumed an appearance of dignitas outraged.
‘Prefect,’ Felix snapped, ‘your men may have committed some dereliction, but the soldiers with me have done nothing to deserve punishment.’
Ballista’s sympathy went out to the prefect, who appeared both baffled and anxious.
‘Millet!’ Felix said. ‘My men are being served millet.’
Understanding dawned on the prefect’s face, but not ease. ‘Oh no, not a punishment, nothing of the sort.’
Felix continued to look like thunder.
‘No slight intended,’ the prefect floundered on. ‘A forced measure, supplies of wheat have not been shipped to the garrison since … since the …’ He seemed to be struggling to find the right words to describe the recent years of continuous usurpation, civil war and repeated barbarian triumph. ‘Since the troubles,’ he concluded lamely.
Now it was the elderly senator’s turn for confusion. ‘Why not purchase wheat locally?’
‘We do, we do, but little is grown in Colchis. It is prohibitively expensive. Although, of course, we would never serve anything else to a Vir Clarissimus and his comites.’
‘Then requisition the stuff.’
The prefect looked as if he were going to raise some objection, but did not. ‘Of course, Dominus.’
Over the apples and nuts, Felix announced a desire to view the monuments and places associated with the heroic age, with Jason and the Argonauts, with princess Medea and her bloody-minded father Aeetes. So strong was his desire, he would set out straight after lunch.
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