Masters of the Sea Trilogy: Ship of Rome, Captain of Rome, Master of Rome. John Stack

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СКАЧАТЬ 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 СКАЧАТЬ