Roma Eterna (32 page)

Trajan did not, however, spend any great portion of his time at the new capital, nor, for that matter, at Roma either. He was constantly on the move, now presenting himself at Constantinopolis to remind the Greeks of Asia that they had an Emperor, or touring Syria or Aegyptus or Persia, or darting up into the far north to hunt the wild shaggy beasts
that live in those Hyperborean lands, or revisiting his native Hispania, where he had transformed the ancient city of Sevilla into the main port of embarkation for voyages to the New World. He was a tireless man.

And in the twenty-fifth year of his reign—
A.U.C
. 2278—he set out on his greatest journey of all, the stupendous deed for which his name will be forever remembered: his voyage around the entirety of the world, beginning and ending at Sevilla, and taking into its compass almost every nation both civilized and barbaric that this globe contains.

 

Had anyone before him conceived of such an audacious thing? I find nothing in all the records of history to indicate it.

No one has ever seriously doubted, of course, that the world is a sphere, and therefore is open to circumnavigation. Common sense alone shows us the curvature of the Earth as we look off into the distance; and the notion that there is an edge somewhere, off which rash mariners must inevitably plunge, is a fable suited for children's tales, nothing more. Nor is there any reason to dread the existence of an impassable zone of flame somewhere in the southern seas, as simple folk used to think: it is twenty-five hundred years since ships first sailed around the southern tip of Africa and no one has seen any walls of fire yet.

But even the boldest of our seamen had never even thought of sailing all the way around the world's middle, let alone attempting it, before Trajan Draco set out from Sevilla to do it. Voyages to Arabia and India and even Khitai by way of Africa, yes, and voyages to the New World also, first to Mexico and then down the western coast of Mexico along the narrow strip of land that links the two New World continents until the great empire of Peru was reached. From that we learned of the existence of a second Ocean Sea, one that was perhaps even greater than the one that separates Europa from the New World. On the eastern
side of that vast ocean were Mexico and Peru; on its western side, Khitai and Cipangu, with India farther on. But what lay in between? Were there other empires, perhaps, in the middle of that Western Sea—empires mightier than Khitai and Cipangu and India put together? What if there were an empire somewhere out there that put even Imperial Roma into the shade?

It was to the everlasting glory of Trajan VII Draco that he was determined to find out, even if it cost him his life. He must have felt utterly secure in his throne, if he was willing to abandon the capital to subordinates for so long a span of time; either that, or he did not care a fig about the risk of usurpation, so avid was he to make the journey.

His five-year expedition around the world was, I think, one of the most significant achievements in all history, rivaling, perhaps, the creation of the Empire by Augustus Caesar and its expansion across almost the whole of the known world by Trajan I and Hadrianus. It is the one thing, above all else that he achieved, that drew me to undertake my research into his life. He found no empires to rival Roma on that journey, no, but he did discover the myriad island kingdoms of the Western Sea, whose products have so greatly enriched our lives; and, moreover, the route he pioneered through the narrow lower portion of the southern continent of the New World has given us permanent access by sea to the lands of Asia from either direction, regardless of any opposition that we might encounter from the ever-troublesome Mexicans and Peruvians on the one hand or the war-like Cipanguans and the unthinkably multitudinous Khitaians on the other.

But—although we are familiar with the general outlines of Trajan's voyage—the journal that he kept, full of highly specific detail, has been lost for centuries. Which is why I felt such delight when one of my researchers, snuffling about in a forgotten corner of the Office of Maritime Affairs in Sevilla, reported to me early this year that he had stumbled quite accidentally upon that very journal. It had
been filed all that time amongst the documents of a later reign, buried unobtrusively in a pack of bills of lading and payroll records. I had it shipped to me here in Tauromenium by Imperial courier, a journey that took six weeks, for the packet went overland all the way from Hispania to Italia—I would not risk so precious a thing on the high sea—and then down the entire length of Italia to the tip of Bruttium, across the strait by ferry to Messana, and thence to me.

Was it, though, the richly detailed narrative I yearned for, or would it simply be a dry list of navigators' marks, longitudes and latitudes and ascensions and compass readings?

Well, I would not know that until I had it in my hands. And as luck would have it, the very day the packet arrived was the day the Caesar Demetrius returned from his month's sojourn in Africa. I barely had time to unseal the bulky packet and run my thumb along the edge of the thick sheaf of time-darkened vellum pages that it contained before a messenger came to me with word that I was summoned to the Caesar's presence at once.

The Caesar, as I have already said, is an impatient man. I paused only long enough to look beyond the title page to the beginning of the text, and felt a profound chill of recognition as the distinctive backhanded cursive script of Trajan Draco rose to my astonished eyes. I allowed myself one further glimpse within, perhaps the hundredth page, and found a passage that dealt with a meeting with some island king. Yes! Yes! The journal of the voyage, indeed!

I turned the packet over to the major-domo of my villa, a trustworthy enough Sicilian freedman named Pantaleon, and told him exactly what would happen to him if any harm came to a single page while I was away.

Then I betook myself to the Caesar's hilltop palace, where I found him in the garden, inspecting a pair of camels that he had brought back with him from Africa. He was wearing some sort of hooded desert robe and had a
splendid curving scimitar thrust through his belt. In the five weeks of his absence the sun had so blackened the skin of his face and hands that he could have passed easily for an Arab. “Pisander!” he cried at once. I had forgotten that foolish name in his absence. He grinned at me and his teeth gleamed like beacons against that newly darkened visage.

I offered the appropriate pleasantries, had he had an enjoyable trip and all of that, but he swept my words away with a flick of his hand. “Do you know what I thought of, Pisander, all the time of my journey? Our great project! Our glorious enterprise! And do you know, I realize now that it does not go nearly far enough. I have decided, I think, to make Sicilia my capital when I am Emperor. There is no need for me to live in the cool stormy north when I can so easily be this close to Africa, a place that I now see I love enormously. And so we must build a Senate House here, too, in Panormus, I think, and great villas for all the officials of my court, and a library—do you know, Pisander, there's no library worthy of the name on this whole island? But we can divide the holdings of Alexandria and bring half here, once there's a building worthy of housing them. And then—”

I will spare you the whole of it. Suffice it to say that his madness had entered an entirely new phase of uninhibited grandiosity. And I was the first victim of it, for he informed me that he and I were going to depart that very night on a trip from one end of Sicilia to the other, searching out sites for all the miraculous new structures he had in mind. He was going to do for Sicilia what Augustus Caesar had done for the city of Roma itself: make it the wonder of the age. Forgotten now was the plan to begin the building program with the new palace in Tauromenium. First we must trek from Tauromenium to Lilybaeum on the other coast, and back again from Eryx to Syracusae to here, pausing at every point in between.

And so we did. Sicilia is a large island; the journey oc
cupied two and a half months. The Caesar was a cheerful enough traveling companion—he is witty, after all, and intelligent, and lively, and the fact that he is a madman was only occasionally a hindrance. We traveled in great luxury and the half-healed state of my ankle meant that I was carried in a litter much of the time, which made me feel like some great pampered potentate of antiquity, a Pharaoh, perhaps, or Darius of Persia. But one effect of this suddenly imposed interruption in my studies was that it became impossible for me to examine the journal of Trajan VII for many weeks, which was maddening. To take it with me while we traveled and study it surreptitiously in my bedchamber was too risky; the Caesar can be a jealous man, and if he were to come in unannounced and find me diverting my energies to something unconnected to his project, he would be perfectly capable of seizing the journal from me on the spot and tossing it into the flames. So I left the book behind, turning it over to Spiculo and telling him to guard it with his life; and for many a night thereafter, as we darted hither and yon across the island in increasingly more torrid weather, summer having now arrived and Sicilia lying as it does beneath the merciless southern sun, I lay tossing restlessly, imagining the contents of the journal in my fevered mind, devising for myself a fantastic set of adventures for Trajan to take the place of the real ones that the Caesar Demetrius had in his blithe selfishness prevented me from reading in the newly discovered journal. Though I knew, even then, that the reality, once I had the chance to discover it, would far surpass anything I could imagine for myself.

 

And then I returned at last to Tauromenium; and reclaimed the book from Spiculo and read its every word in three astonishing days and nights, scarcely sleeping a moment. And found in it, along with many a tale of wonder and beauty and strangeness, many things that indeed I would not have imagined, which were not so pleasing to find.

Though it was written in the rougher Latin of medieval days, the text gave me no difficulties. The Emperor Trajan VII was an admirable writer, whose style, blunt and plain and highly fluent, reminded me of nothing so much as that of Julius Caesar, another great leader who could handle a stylus as well as he did a sword. He had, apparently, kept the journal as a private record of his circumnavigation, very likely not meaning to have it become a public document at all, and its survival in the archives seems to have been merely fortuitous.

His tale began in the shipyards of Sevilla: five vessels being readied for the voyage, none of them large, the greatest being only of 120 tons. He gave detailed listings of their stores. Weapons, of course, sixty crossbows, fifty matchlock arquebuses (this weapon having newly been invented then), heavy artillery pieces, javelins, lances, pikes, shields. Anvils, grindstones, forges, bellows, lanterns, implements with which fortresses could be constructed on newly discovered islands by the masons and stonecutters of his crew; drugs, medicines, salves; six wooden quadrants, six metal astrolabes, thirty-seven compass needles, six pairs of measuring compasses, and so forth. For use in trading with the princes of newly discovered kingdoms, a cargo of flasks of quicksilver and copper bars, bales of cotton, velvet, satin, and brocades, thousands of small bells, fishhooks, mirrors, knives, beads, combs, brass and copper bracelets, and such. All this was enumerated with a clerk's finicky care: reading it taught me much about a side of Trajan Draco's character that I had not suspected.

At last the day of sailing. Down the River Baetis from Sevilla to the Ocean Sea, and quickly out to the Isles of the Canaria, where, however, they saw none of the huge dogs for which the place is named. But they did find the noteworthy Raining Tree, from whose gigantic swollen trunk the entire water supply of one island was derived. I think this tree has perished, for no one has seen it since.

Then came the leap across the sea to the New World, a
journey hampered by sluggish winds. They crossed the Equator; the pole-star no longer could be seen; the heat melted the tar in the ships' seams and turned the decks into ovens. But then came better sailing, and swiftly they reached the western shore of the southern continent where it bulges far out toward Africa. The Empire of Peru had no sway in this place; it was inhabited by cheerful naked people who made a practice of eating human flesh, “but only,” the Emperor tells us, “their enemies.”

It was Trajan's intention to sail completely around the bottom of the continent, an astounding goal considering that no one knew how far south it extended, or what conditions would be encountered at its extremity. For that matter, it might not come to an end in the south at all, and so there would be no sea route westward whatever, but only a continuous land mass running clear down to the southern pole and blocking all progress by sea. And there was always the possibility of meeting with interference by Peruvian forces somewhere along the way. But southward they went, probing at every inlet in the hope that it might mark the termination of the continent and a connection with the sea that lay on the other side.

Several of these inlets proved to be the mouths of mighty rivers, but wild hostile tribes lived along their banks, which made exploration perilous; and Trajan feared also that these rivers would only take them deep inland, into Peruvian-controlled territory, without bringing them to the sea on the continent's western side. And so they continued south and south and south along the coast. The weather, which had been very hot, swiftly worsened to the south, giving them dark skies and icy winds. But this they already knew, that the seasons are reversed below the Equator, and winter comes there in our summer, so they were not surprised by the change.

Along the shore they found peculiar black and white birds that could swim but not fly; these were plump and proved good to eat. There still appeared to be no westerly
route. The coast, barren now, seemed endless. Hail and sleet assailed them, mountains of ice floated in the choppy sea, cold rain froze in their beards. Food and water ran low. The men began to grumble. Although they had an Emperor in their midst, they began to speak openly of turning back. Trajan wondered if his life might be in danger.