by R. W. Peake
“Not that much,” Balbus argued, but Pullus saw his heart wasn’t in it; he had obviously seen the way this was heading.
“No, not as much as we consume,” Scribonius acknowledged, “but enough that they can put a good day in at the oars during their shift.” Pressing his point, Scribonius continued, “This way, we won’t have to worry about them, and with Legionaries manning the oars, they’ll also remain more fit than if they were lolling about.” Glancing over at Pullus, Scribonius asked, “Did you have any luck finding out how long this voyage is supposed to take?”
Pullus shook his head, saying glumly, “No, but I think it’s because nobody really knows. The best guess I heard was that it will be a month, and that’s if we never put in to shore.”
“I doubt Caesar’s willing to risk that,” Scribonius mused. “My guess would be that at least once a week we’ll try to find some place where we can land so the men can spend a night ashore.” When Pullus didn’t answer, which Scribonius took to mean his Primus Pilus agreed, he moved on to the other subject that was foremost on their minds; what was different was this one wasn’t common knowledge, which is why Scribonius reflexively lowered his voice as he asked, “Have you heard any more about the other thing?” Pullus gave him a blank look, reminding Scribonius of how many details Pullus must have to keep track of, so he only added, “What Diocles learned.”
“Ah, that.” Pullus’ face cleared. “Not any more than what I told you.”
Somewhat oddly, this was the first time that Pullus remembered his nephew was sitting across from him, although it was a fairly common occurrence, since Gaius made every attempt to keep his mouth shut when he dined with his uncle and two friends, particularly afterward, when he would be immediately beset by his comrades, pumping him for information.
Sighing, Pullus decided to trust the boy, but he sounded stern as he informed Porcinus, “What we’re talking about can’t leave the tent. Is that understood, Gaius?”
When Pullus referred to him by his praenomen, Porcinus understood that his uncle was emphasizing their familial connection, and he answered in kind, “I understand, Uncle.”
“Diocles learned through Apollodorus that, before we left Susa, Caesar sent orders back to Rome.” Pullus paused, mainly to build up the drama, before he finished, “He ordered that three more Legions be sent, one of them to stay in Susa and two to join the army.”
Porcinus let out a low whistle, and his first response was, “So we’ll have twelve Legions?” He shook his head as he offered up the perspective of the common Gregarius, which was one of several reasons Pullus had him dine with him as often as he did. “I don’t see how Caesar can feed so many of us.”
Pullus and Scribonius exchanged a smile, but it was Balbus who spoke up, telling Porcinus confidently, “Oh, he can, believe me. He’s already done it, after Pharsalus. He had to feed not just his Legions, but Pompeius’ men as well.”
If Balbus thought he had addressed Porcinus’ concerns, he quickly found out he was mistaken.
Porcinus had been in the process of shoving a spoonful of lentils into his mouth, but now he set it down, and while he didn’t sound combative, neither did he shrink from the prospect of arousing the ire of Balbus, who he feared just slightly less than his uncle.
“Forgive me, since I know you were there, but as I recall, Caesar wasn’t with the army during that period. He’d already left in pursuit of Pompeius.” He turned, ostensibly to confirm this with his uncle, although there was no need, since everyone present knew the answer. “Isn’t that correct, Uncle Titus? That’s when you went with him?”
Pullus made no pretense that he wasn’t enjoying watching his nephew challenging Balbus, so he was grinning broadly as he answered, “You’re exactly right, nephew.”
“So,” Porcinus turned back to Balbus, but his demeanor was still one with which the other man could find no fault, and his tone was respectful as he continued, “first, Caesar wasn’t the man who actually fed all of these men, and second, this wasn’t for a long period, was it?”
“It wasn’t short,” Balbus countered, his eyes shifting over to Pullus in a silent plea, but Pullus was still grinning. Porcinus said nothing, then Balbus broke down, admitting, “But no, it wasn’t for more than a couple of weeks.”
“And we’re likely to be on campaign much longer than that,” Porcinus argued, but he still wasn’t through, and now he turned to Pullus. “But what worries me is that we’re going to a place we know next to nothing about, and not only do they have to catch up with us, at some point, we’re probably going to be forced to forage, wouldn’t you say, Uncle?”
“That’s likely,” Pullus nodded, but the grin was fading, because Porcinus had just brought up a topic that he hadn’t devoted as much thought to when he considered the addition of two more Legions.
“We don’t know if this India place can support the ten Legions we have. If we add two more,” Porcinus continued, then thought of something else, “or if Caesar ever recalls one or both of the Legions that will be at Susa, then we might find ourselves with too many mouths to feed. Wouldn’t we?”
Pullus was acutely uncomfortable, mainly at the thought that a lowly Gregarius could spot this glaring question, although he was proud that it was his nephew.
Scribonius, who had been listening silently to this exchange, spoke up, “There’s something else this may mean.”
Pullus couldn’t stifle a groan, understanding beforehand he wouldn’t like what Scribonius was going to say, and he was quickly proven right.
“Maybe Caesar wants to do more than just campaign in India for the sake of doing it,” Scribonius offered. “Or,” his face turned grim, “he’s learned what’s waiting for us in India, and these two new Legions are going to replace what we lose there.”
This was a forbidding thought, but Pullus, seeing the expression of worry on his nephew’s face, cut the conversation short, saying curtly, “Then we need to make sure it’s not the 10th they’re going to replace. And,” he addressed this to the other three, using a tone they knew very well, “that’s the last we’re talking about this tonight.”
As it turned out, Scribonius had been wrong about the period of time needed to load the army, by a matter of a day. And, thanks to the bribe Pullus paid to Volusenus, who as the quartermaster of the army determined the loading order, the Equestrians weren’t loaded until the final day, sparing them the misery of the cramped quarters as they bobbed up and down. It was an article of faith among Romans that they weren’t seagoing people, only viewing the open water as a means to an end, and the idea of long sea voyages was never met with any enthusiasm by any man, while some of them had to fight down the black panic caused by their fevered imaginations and helped by their comrades, conjured up the many sea monsters that everyone knew existed. If this was the only hazard, it would have been bad enough, but then there were the naturally occurring events— sudden storms, heavy fog, the peril of sailing in uncharted waters—that filled a sizable number of men with a terror that meant that, just as they had been forced to for the first voyage, the Centurions used their viti to varying degrees to “encourage” the men to board.
What Pullus and the other Centurions learned when the army spent four days in Harmozeia would prove to be the first of many hard lessons in transporting a massive army and its baggage in a place where the facilities were minimal. As protected as the harbor was, as sturdily as the stone piers were constructed, the ships moved in rhythm with the incoming tide and waves, which in turn meant that the gangplanks moved with them. For those men fortunate enough to load aboard their assigned ship closer to shore, if they fell in, usually the worst that happened was the ignominy of being jeered by comrades and having to spend time fishing the man’s gear out of the water. This was not always the case; one of the men of the 11th who fell in was only in waist deep water, but while his comrades spent a moment laughing at his expense, an unusually large wave rolled past on its way to the shore, and the transport he was supposed to boa
rd inadvertently caused his death when the heavy craft’s gunwale crashed into the stone pier, crushing the Legionary. Otherwise, the most perilous loadings took place at the ends of the stone piers, and once it was completed, every Legion, including the 10th, lost men to a varying degree. In the case of the Equestrians, the loss was three men, but one of them, a Gregarius of the Fifth of the Tenth, was not an accident; at least, this is what his Pilus Prior, Gnaeus Nasica insisted. What he told Pullus was that there had been bad blood between the dead man and his former close comrade, although the cause wasn’t known with any certainty; Nasica claimed that he had heard from one source it was over a gambling debt that the dead Gregarius had refused to pay, but another had sworn that it was over a woman in Susa. While it didn’t really matter now, Pullus was still irritated that this was the first Nasica had mentioned this to him, but this had more to do with Pullus’ growing dissatisfaction with the Pilus Prior of his Tenth Cohort. Otherwise, the loading process overall went better than Pullus hoped, and he tried to convince himself this was a good omen for the coming ordeal.
As most sailors know, the measure of time for those who live on the sea isn’t the sun, it’s the tides, so it was still well before dawn when the quinquereme that served as Caesar’s flagship slipped its moorings and began rowing, moving quietly and skillfully away from its spot along the stone pier. Most of the fleet was now out in the harbor, the ships riding the gentle swells, but even in the darkness, there was movement on every one of these ships, as the Legionaries, almost to a man still grumbling at the idea of being expected to propel themselves to India, took their places. The only exception to the order Caesar had imposed about the Legionaries manning the oars were with the warships, the fifteen quinqueremes, ten quadriremes, and twenty swift, maneuverable Liburnians. Nor did they use slaves; the men manning the oars of these vessels were, for the most part, from the Greek islands, Rhodes, and Crete, experienced seamen and capable fighters in the style unique to shipboard combat. While every ship, including the transports, had at least one weapon bolted in place on the upper deck, these massive ships, boasting five banks of oars, literally bristled with a combination of scorpions and ballistae, and six of them were equipped with the corvus, essentially a pivoting gangplank with a huge iron beak attached to the end of it that had proven so effective against Carthage centuries earlier.
Among the men accompanying Caesar, Pullus was one of the relatively few, along with some men of the 6th and 28th Legions, who had actually seen these behemoths in battle, although in Pullus’ case, it had been from the vantage point of a rooftop overlooking the harbor in Alexandria. And, not lost on Pullus was the fact that the larger ships hadn’t fared well when they were outnumbered by the smaller, nimbler-handling craft, although he also knew that much of it relied on the skill of the navarch in command. Also, Pullus reminded himself, as huge as the Alexandria harbor was, it wasn’t the open sea, which he had been informed by men knowledgeable in such matters was one of the main reasons a large ship like the quinquereme could be defeated in the manner he had witnessed, simply because they needed more room to maneuver. Of course, none of this mattered, and despite himself, Pullus felt a rising tide of anticipation as he stood on the deck of the ship that his Century and the Second had been assigned. Not lost on Pullus, or any of the Primi Pili, was the fact that each of them had been assigned a quinquereme, and he took solace in that fact, if only because it also meant there wouldn’t be as much tossing about when the seas got rough, as he was certain they would. Nor was he unaware that, by putting Pullus and the First and Second Centuries of his First on one of the ships with the corvus that it meant, in the event that there was to be combat at sea, Caesar would be expecting him and his men to do it. This didn’t seem to faze his and Balbus’ men in the slightest; from their perspective, the prospect of possible combat paled in comparison to the definite fact that they would never have to sit on a bench, pulling an oar. Despite the early start, by the time the sun rose, there were still ships waiting for their moment to depart, but by this point, when Pullus looked astern, while he could see the hills surrounding the spot, he couldn’t determine where the harbor was located. The oarsmen had been given a break, but the breeze was stiff enough to enable the lumbering ships to make a bit of headway as they waited for the rest of the fleet to gather. As slowly as they were moving, they were moving, which Pullus could tell just by the landmarks he selected onshore and comparing them to his relative position. All in all, Pullus thought, this wasn’t nearly as bad as he’d feared. Fortunately for Pullus, he never uttered this sentiment aloud to anyone, not even Diocles.
In a matter of four days, Pullus had completely forgotten his mistaken idea that the sea voyage that lay ahead of them wouldn’t pose much of a hardship. His only consolation lay in the fact that he was far from alone in his misery, although admittedly, it didn’t help all that much. Only part of it was the pitching and rolling of the deck; for the first two days, there was at least the variation of the terrain that, by order, the fleet never lost sight of, even if it was completely devoid of vegetation and was almost uniform in a beige-gray color, but then even that had vanished. From that point forward, all that was visible was a thin line, mostly of the same color, that was only occasionally broken up by small, isolated clumps of green vegetation. These were usually places where fresh water could be found, but this turned out to be something of a problem in itself, because almost as often as it being where a river emptied into the sea, it turned out to be a waterhole, or in some cases, a well. This was discovered when the ships who had assumed the lead once the fleet was formed up outside Harmozeia, sent parties ashore, and before the empty barrels for five ships were filled, the well had run dry. Only later did Pullus learn the rest of the story; the men of the small village for whom this well was responsible for sustaining their collective lives tried to repel the Romans, with predictable results. From Pullus’ vantage point aboard his own ship as it went sliding past, the only sign of a disturbance was a column of black smoke that rose about a hundred feet in the air before it dissipated. Not until they finally landed to make camp, five days into the journey, did Pullus and the other Primi Pili learn what had taken place. The spot they had landed at had been selected by Volusenus, who, since the invasion of Britannia, had been Caesar’s most trusted scout in nautical matters, sent ahead by the general in the fastest Liburnian in the fleet to search for places such as this, and once they reached India, to determine the best place to land an army. And, as had been the case in the first spot, because it was where a river emptied into the sea, there was a village present, except in this case, rather than fight, the inhabitants chose to flee, some of them in small but very fast boats, all of whom chose to head east farther along the coast, while the rest melted into the hinterland, probably to a line of low hills several miles north. There was no pursuit by the Romans; frankly, these people, who according to what Pullus had read in Nearchos’ account, were known as the Maka, and apparently had once been part of the Persian empire that had been conquered by Alexander, weren’t enough of a threat to worry about. Whereas Harmozeia and the surrounding environs had been considered worthy of investment by the Macedonians, this didn’t appear to be the case with the Maka, something that Pullus readily understood just by glancing around.
The water was brackish, although this was to be expected, and Caesar sent a detail consisting of three Cohorts to escort the carts that had been taken from the ships and loaded with the barrels for potable water a distance of three miles upriver to refill them. Because of the ordeal they had endured not long before crossing the wasteland to get to Harmozeia, there wasn’t much grumbling by the men, although Pullus ascribed this to their being happier to be on land than from any real understanding of the importance of fresh water. Thus, the pattern was set for the next three weeks plus a couple of days; sailing for five, stopping for one, until, very gradually, the terrain started to change, not in its undulation but in its color. Finally, on a day that in terms of the blazing sun
, searing heat and roiling stomach was exactly as the days before, Pullus suddenly realized that for the entire day the thin ribbon of land had been green. One of the few things that he and the other Centurions had been told about what to expect in India was that it was lush and green, with thick forests and all manner of strange animals, but there was only one variety that the men talked about.
“They have elephants?” Porcinus had asked on what turned out to be their last night in camp on land before landing in India, but while he tried to sound casual, he didn’t fool his older dinner companions.
Stifling a groan, Pullus asked, “Who told you this?”
For a moment, Porcinus resisted, but under his uncle’s glare, he finally relented. “Vulso heard it from Centumalus in the First Section.”
Rather than continue subjecting Porcinus to his silent censure, Pullus transferred his gaze to Scribonius, who flushed and raised his hands in a placating gesture. Certainly at the time, it had made sense when Scribonius suggested pairing Porcinus with one of the few men remaining from the original dilectus in Gnaeus Vulso, who had been in the Fourth Cohort during the first sixteen years of the Legion’s existence and had been moved to the First of the Second during the reorganization after Munda. What Scribonius and, by extension, Pullus were learning was that Vulso was one of the worst gossips, not just in the Second Cohort, but in the entire Legion. And, as most such men tended to do, Vulso seemed to relish the most lurid, gory, or alarming pieces of gossip, which meant that Pullus was beginning to regret taking Scribonius’ advice. What made this a bit more problematic was that it was true, in a manner of speaking.
Turning back to Porcinus, Pullus admitted, “Yes, Gaius. There are elephants here.”
