The Seven Hills

by John Maddox Roberts

  From Pamphylia they passed into Lycia. This proved to be an extremely rugged land, composed of the many spurs of Mount Taurus that fanned out to the sea, where many of them formed high, wave-splashed promontories. It was impossible to hug the coast, so they had to make their way through one mountain pass after another, and progress was slow. They were further slowed by the immense baggage train, but the soldiers never complained when a wagon broke down and they had to put their shoulders to the wheels. They knew it was their own wealth they were transporting.

  At the mouth of the Xanthus near the Lycian town of Myra, they found the Roman fleet in the harbor.

  "That's quite a sight," Lentulus Niger said with some understatement as they crested a pass in the hills to the east of the little bay. The harbor was full of galleys and transports, all of them bright with new paint, their prows, masts and sails sporting Roman eagles. On the narrow, rocky beach spare sails had been employed to make marquees. Most of the ships' crews appeared to be ashore, relaxing, tending fires or dickering with locals for livestock and produce.

  "Let's go down and have a few words with them," Norbanus said. They nudged their horses into a walk and descended the hillside. Behind them came the standard bearers, and then the rest of the army. Down below someone shouted and pointed upward. A huge cheer rang out from the men below when they saw the standards and the dusty men coming down toward them.

  Norbanus and his party rode into the shore camp amid the cheers and congratulations. They saw a sprinkling of Greeks, but most of the men in blue tunics were clearly native Italians. There were marines among them, wearing bronze helmets and armed with sword and spear, but without body armor. Norbanus rode up to the largest marquee and a man emerged dressed in splendid armor and grinning broadly.

  "Greetings, Titus Norbanus!" he called. "Your feat is the talk of all Italy."

  Norbanus took the man's hand. "Decimus Arrunteius; isn't it? Haven't seen you since Noricum. In the Senate now, eh?" He dismounted, as did his officers. He remembered the family as soldierly but poor. They could rarely afford to have more than one man in the Senate in any generation. That could work well for him.

  "Enrolled last year. Now I'm duumvir of the Brundisium fleet. Come inside out of this sun." Duumvir was the old Roman title for "admiral," revived for the new era.

  They followed him into the shade of the spread sail. Long tables had been erected and they sat on benches. Arrunteius told them of the latest doings in Italy, and the much-traveled officers told him and the other Roman naval commanders of their adventures in the East.

  When the wine had flowed sufficiently, Norbanus said: "Duumvir, eh? Of course, I'm sure it's an honor to have so much responsibility so young, but with your family's long military reputation, I'd have thought you'd be given an army command." In the old days, the navy had always been considered an inferior service, no matter how crucial it might be.

  "Oh, you know how it is," Arrunteius said. "The good commands always go to the old families, no matter how distinguished anyone else might be. With everybody clamoring for officer's commissions these days, you're lucky to get any kind of appointment. I have friends qualified to lead cohorts who've taken appointments as centurions just to get in on the fighting. And I can't complain that it isn't interesting, whipping a fleet into shape. You've never had fun until you've tried to bludgeon a pack of Italians into being sailors. Especially if you've never been to sea yourself."

  Under the bluff words Norbanus heard the edge of resentment. This was something with which he was familiar. It was something he could use.

  "So you've been given the task of ferrying me and my men back to Italy, eh?" he said, reminding Arrunteius that he had not been given the task of battle with the Carthaginian fleet.

  "Well, yes. I believe we've carrying capacity enough for your whole force. There'll be crowding, of course, but that can't be helped."

  "I have more than men to transport. Come outside with me for a moment."

  Puzzled, Arrunteius took his cup and walked outside. The other officers went with them, Norbanus's looking amused, Arrunteius's puzzled. Outside, they studied the legionaries, now encamping on a field off the beach. They were lean, burned dark, and wild-looking. Their arms were perfectly kept, but their tunics were of every color and design, scavenged along their route. Clothing wore out quickly on a long campaign, and the fine tunics Jonathan had given them had long since been reduced to rags. Most oddly, many now wore their swords on belts studded with plaques of gold and silver. Their hands and arms wore rings, bracelets and armlets that winked gold and jewels.

  "Well, they seem to have done well in your service," Arrunteius said. "I think we'll have no trouble getting them all aboard."

  "Look up there," Norbanus said, nodding toward the pass. Arrunteius followed his gaze and gasped. An endless line of pack animals and wagons still poured over the pass to join a huge compound next to the legionary camp.

  "Is that your baggage train? I'm sorry, Titus, but you'll have to leave most of it here. We can't get a tenth of it into our transports along with your men. How much more is there?"

  "I'd say about half has come through the pass now." He enjoyed his friend's gape-mouthed expression, then said, "It's not exactly baggage, Decimus. Come have a look."

  They walked to the compound where the animals were being unloaded and the wagons parked in long rows. "Pick something at random."

  Mystified, Arrunteius walked to a wagon and pointed to a chest. "Open it." Norbanus ordered the wagoneer. With a small prybar the man pried the lid from the chest. Arrunteius and his officers gasped. The box was packed with a miscellaneous heap of gold coins, bars of the same metal, gemstones in the raw or carved and set in jewelry, pearls in endless ropes, chains of every sort of precious metal. Their eyes dazzled.

  "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 adulterated, 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 accompany us offshore, carrying our, ah, baggage. We can move much faster with it loaded on ships. It really has been slowing 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.

  CHAPTER THIRTEEN

  "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 underwater 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 crazier 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 applications, 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 believe 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 territory, and they're a different proposition entirely, as you well know."

  "I don't mean that I want to see another Roman army defeated!" 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 presence 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."