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

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СКАЧАТЬ teaching your boys how to fight.’

      Silanus bristled at the slight against his maniple.

      ‘Look, marine,’ Silanus growled, ‘orders are orders – which means my maniple has to sit here and watch your men dance around all day, but don’t think for one second you can teach the V anything about real fighting.’ He turned on his heel and marched back to his men. Septimus watched him go, angry at himself for allowing Silanus to incite him into another round of insults. If he was going to prepare the legionaries for naval warfare, he needed to get Silanus on side.

      An hour later, Quintus finished his demonstration to the assembled maniple of the Fourth. Septimus called for questions but none was forthcoming; he knew the silence was not because the men completely understood the techniques of fighting with a rounded hoplon shield, but rather because of the contempt the legionaries felt for the foreign shield. At the eye of that contempt was Silanus, the centurion providing a focal point of disdain for the marines and their method of fighting, and by extension the Carthaginians. Septimus caught the centurion’s eye and held his gaze. If the men of the V maniple were going to be trained, Septimus knew that Silanus would have to be taught first.

      Lucius Fulfidias reached out from his position at the front of the small skiff and grasped the rope ladder. With a single fluid movement he swung his feet onto the rungs and quickly climbed onto the deck of the Aquila. The four other men in his skiff followed suit. He was the captain of the newly formed command crew, chosen because of his experience commanding trading galleys, while the other four men were his second-in-command, helmsman, boatswain and drum master. Four other skiffs were quickly alongside, each one containing the five men of a command crew. Once on board, Fulfidias followed the other trainee captains to the aft-deck where the young commander of the military trireme stood confidently beside his helmsman. Fulfidias sneered inwardly at the sight, disliking the man and what he represented, a servitude enforced by Rome – and the young pup wasn’t even Roman himself, he was a bloody Greek. Who in Hades was he to command a galley of the Republic?

      Fulfidias was a trader from Naples, his ship a nimble bireme named the Sol. She was a small vessel, her cargo hold tiny in comparison to the gigantic trading barges, but she was fast and the shallow draught allowed her to berth at any port. It was this flexibility and speed that had given Fulfidias a niche in the markets of Ostia and Rome. For over ten years he had built a reputation of being the first to market with the pick of every season’s first crop. It was not a commodity for the common man, but one for the affluent of Rome who, as a sign of their status and wealth, liked to be the first to serve each new season’s bounty at their table when entertaining guests. Fulfidias traded primarily in new-season wines from the Gaulish coast, and first spring lambs and suckling pigs from Campania. It was a lucrative business, with the rich paying exorbitant prices to have goods merely weeks before their social peers.

      Two weeks before, when the Roman military had begun trawling the port of Ostia for crews to man their new fleet, the Sol had been in dry dock, her hull undergoing repairs to damage caused by the odious shipworm that had dug deep into the timbers of the bireme. With his ship temporarily out of action, Fulfidias had been left with nowhere to go to, and he had been indentured into military service at the Senate’s pleasure.

      As Fulfidias waited on the aft-deck for the remaining crews to come on board the Aquila, his thoughts strayed to his own ship. She would be afloat by now, the repairs only three days short of completion when he had been drafted into service. She would be sitting at the dockside in Ostia instead of heading south under a favourable wind to Campania, where the approach of spring heralded the birthing season for sheep. In another week Fulfidias knew it would be too late for him to set sail and another trader would beat him to market with the prized lambs. The market of Ostia had no loyalty, no honour if those virtues stood in the way of profit, and so the men who regularly dealt with Fulfidias would immediately deal with the new supplier. The contacts and negotiating terms carefully built up by Fulfidias over ten years would be wiped away in one season.

      As the trireme got under way, the young military commander began explaining the training that the teams would be undergoing that day. Fulfidias was not listening. He had sailed on trading galleys for over thirty years and he firmly believed there was nothing the young pup could teach him that he didn’t already know. The captain of the Sol raged internally at the injustice of life. The injustice of a system that robbed him of his livelihood with impunity. He had been forced into service, knowing that a refusal would result in banishment from the sea-lanes of Rome, and so he had acquiesced, but only to the point of being present. For Fulfidias that presence fulfilled his portion of the unfair contract.

      *

      Atticus finished his description of the day’s training ahead to the assembled captains and helmsmen on the aft-deck as the Aquila headed for the open sea. Of the ten men present, a half-dozen or so seemed to be giving the discussion their full attention, the number an increase on the day before. The others were distant, while two had expressions of open hostility. Atticus could understand their frustration and anger. He had chosen the life he led, a life dedicated to the navy. The men around him had also chosen their own path, until Rome had decided that they would follow her whim.

      Atticus did his best to inject respect into his instructions, knowing that some of the men had greater experience of seamanship than he, albeit on non-military vessels. Many of the helmsmen and captains had sailed on galleys before and had a firm grasp of the basics, but they lacked the tactical thinking and fast decision-making skills required of a military commander. At sea and in battle, the line between victory and defeat was often drawn between men who commanded the events of the battle and men who simply reacted to the attacks of others. To be victorious at sea a captain needed to take the fight to the enemy.

      As the Aquila sailed directly away from the shore she passed through the busy north–south sea-lane. The trireme was under oar power and so Gaius deferred to the sail-propelled vessels as he nimbly negotiated the crossing. Atticus looked over his shoulder at the receding shoreline. Against the black sands of Fiumicino, the polished skeletal frames of the new triremes stood out like ivory on black marble, their purpose evident even to an untrained eye. The spread of news in Ostia, Rome – in fact the whole Republic – was the result of the interconnected threads of the trading routes. That Rome could not keep anything secret was simply an unavoidable side effect of trade. The problem could not have been avoided, even if the camp had been placed away from a trading route. From the ships supplying raw materials to the merchants supplying the camp, there were simply too many people interacting with the site. It was only a matter of time before the Punici knew every detail there was to know about Rome’s new fleet.

      Atticus cursed inwardly as he counted the odds stacked against them. Currently the Romans had no advantages over the Carthaginians. News of the new fleet would spread south eventually and the element of surprise would be lost. The enemy ships were heavier and crewed by more experienced sailors, highly skilled in ramming, while the newly recruited Roman crews were hopelessly unskilled. The Roman legionaries were certainly a match for the Carthaginians but, because of Tuditanus, they lacked the skills necessary for boarding and so could not carry the fight to the deck of an enemy galley.

      As the Aquila cleared the last vessels of the sea-lane, Atticus turned once more to his trainees. It was time to begin. The training schedule was tedious and unrelenting and the recruits far from ready for battle. He could teach them the basics of every manoeuvre but in the end it was experience that counted. He could only hope they would have enough time.

       CHAPTER NINE

      ‘How old is this report?’ Gisco roared. ‘Ten days at least,’ the messenger said, cringing from the admiral’s furious gaze.

      ‘Ten СКАЧАТЬ