“An earlier Ptolemy … ah … borrowed it in order to have a copy made. Through an oversight, an excellent copy was returned, rather than the original.”
“Has this been a common oversight?” I asked.
“Well, we do have several thousand original manuscripts from that library.”
It figured. King or foot soldier, all Macedonians are thieves.
“There are a number of vacant tables, Senator, if you wish to read the book now.”
“Actually. I would rather take it to the embassy and read it at my leisure, if that is permitted.”
“We really prefer not to lend volumes outside the Library, Senator. Now that the original has disappeared, this is the only copy we have.”
“If my investigation is successful,” I said, “I think it very likely that I will be able to return the original to you.” I kept the scroll in a tight grip.
“Well, that being the case, and in view of our sovereign’s eagerness to please Rome in any way he may, I think we can make an exception in this case.”
“You have my heartiest thanks, and those of the Senate and People of Rome,” I assured him.
Back at the embassy. I called on Creticus. I found him going over correspondence from Rome and elsewhere in the Empire.
“If you don’t mind, sir, I think I’d like to take a few days to do some hunting.”
He looked up suspiciously. “Since when did you like to do anything more strenuous than watch other people race chariots? What are you up to?”
“I just need a bit of exercise. Too much of the good life, as it were.
“It’s not as if you do much necessary work around here. Will you take Julia with you?”
“I don’t think that would be proper, sir. We’re not married yet.”
“You’re concerned about
respectability?
Now I know you’re hiding something. What happened to this murder investigation of yours?”
“It will hold for a few days.”
“Go, then. Stay out of trouble.”
Hermes was no less amazed when I told him.
“Hunting?” he said. “You mean, hunting
animals?
”
“What else is there to hunt? Except for runaway slaves?”
“You’ve never done this before.”
“All the more reason to start now. Go find us some hunting gear. This place has clothing and equipment for every sort of activity. We leave tomorrow as soon as it’s light enough to see.” Muttering and shaking his head, he went to do my bidding.
I found a comfortable corner and a pitcher of wine and settled down to delve into Biton’s book. I slipped off its stiff leather cover and carefully began to unroll the crackling scroll. Unlike the original, this copy was made on Egyptian papyrus, another reason for its reduced bulk.
Biton began with a disquisition upon the history of war machines. These had been relatively rare and simple among the Babylonians and Egyptians and even rarer among the early Greeks. The Greek army that besieged Troy had not used them except for the wooden horse, which was not the same thing. But as men increasingly fought over fortified cities, these engines became necessary. At first they were mere towers for storming walls, covered galleries on wheels to protect rammers, and the various forms of missile-hurling device. Alexander’s battles had mostly been of the open-field sort, and he had rarely resorted to engines.
Then came the Successors. These men had no new land to conquer, but they fought interminably among themselves over the carcass of Alexander’s empire. This consisted primarily of seizing each other’s ports, fortresses and capital cities. Such warfare called for engines, and to this endeavor the Successors brought the same mania for size and complexity that they brought to building.
Most notable of these was Demetrius Poliorcetes, “the Besieger,” son of Antigonus One-Eye and the greatest military hobbyist of all time. He designed some of the strangest and certainly the largest engines of war ever conceived. He mounted storming towers on yoked ships for assaulting harbor walls. He built towers a hundred feet high equipped with dozens of catapults and completely plated with iron.
Others were not far behind. Dionysus, tyrant of Syracuse, had formed a sort of academy of military arts where the best engineers worked on engines and new designs of warship and new types of weapons and armor.
All this military experimentation had come to an end with the ascendancy of Rome. We beat them all because we knew that the ultimate weapon is the Roman legionary and the organization of the Roman legion. With them, even mediocre generals turn in victory after victory with monotonous regularity. An inspired general like (even now I hate to admit it) Caesar could accomplish marvels. And the Successors cared only about fighting. It was all they were good for. Romans value law and sound rule. But somebody believed that this inevitable tide of Roman rule could be reversed, and they thought that possession of some magic weapon would give them victory over the invincible legions.
There followed a lengthy text, with drawings, of the various engines, including the fanciful monsters of Demetrius. A final section concerned the defenses designed for Syracuse by the great Archimedes. The incendiary reflectors were mentioned, although there was no description of them. The ship-lifting crane Iphicrates had ridiculed was not mentioned. That, apparently, was an invention of later tale-tellers. There was a cranelike device made to swing
out over the harbor and drop heavy weights upon the attacking ships, smashing through deck and hull to sink them. Perhaps that was the origin of the story.
When I was finished, the light was dim and my pitcher was almost empty. It had been fascinating reading, but it had not explained some things. I still did not know why the murderer had taken the scroll. Surely he knew there was at least one copy, and doubtless there were others in other lands. Might Iphicrates have written in the original? That seemed unlikely. The Librarians would have regarded it as a desecration. The text and drawings would have been extremely useful to a captain of engineers with a city or a fort to besiege, but I saw nothing in the book that would convince even the most gullible would-be conqueror that here was something that would tip the balance against the might of Rome. There had to be more, and it had to be in the original manuscript of Siton, dedicated to Attalus more than a century before.
B
Y LAMPLIGHT, I DRESSED IN THE hunting garments Hermes had found in the well-stocked embassy wardrobe. The tunic was a dark rust-red, with twin stripes of olive green running from the shoulders to the hem. The high boots of red leather were elegantly topped with spotted serval skin, with the dainty paws dangling over the shins. It made a dashing outfit, and I was sorry that Julia wouldn’t have the opportunity to see me wearing it.
Hermes awaited me outside my door and followed me as I left the embassy. He was loaded with our other gear: short hunting spears, a roll of two cloaks, a satchel of travel food and an enormous wineskin.
“I won’t have to carry this far, will I?” he groused.
“Hermes, how would you ever manage in the legions? Do you know what a soldier has to carry?”
“What of it?” he said. “The legions are for citizens. And I’ll bet you never had to carry much. You were an officer.”
“To answer your question, we are going to do most of our journeying by boat.”
Even so, it was a long walk. The city was all but deserted so early. As we passed the Macedonian barracks, there was enough light to discern that, as I had predicted, the war machine was nowhere to be seen. We went to the Canopic Way and took it almost the whole length of the city until we reached the canal that cuts through the Rakhotis from north to south, connecting the Kibotos Harbor to the Nile canal and Lake Mareotis.
We stopped at the bridge over the canal and Hermes set down his burden, puffing away. I descended the stair by the bridge to the broad pavement that ran the length of the canal. It was crowded with boats and rafts, mostly those of farmers bringing produce to the city markets. Along one section I found a line of travel barges. The bargemen sat in their craft. At my approach a dockside foreman came to my, eying my attire.
“You wish to go hunting, sir? Not far from here can be found lion, gazelle, oryx …”
“What I shall hunt I have not yet decided,” I told the man. “Is there a boatman here who took the philosopher Iphicrates of Chios on his monthly expeditions?”
The man looked puzzled, but he turned and addressed the bargemen in Egyptian. One man stood and stepped off his craft. He exchanged a few words with the foreman, who turned back to me.
“This man took Iphicrates out three times.”
“Tell him I want to go where Iphicrates went.” There was a bit more talk and we agreed upon a price. Hermes and the bargeman transferred our gear into the little vessel while I made myself comfortable in the prow. The man went to the stern and picked up his pole. Soon we were off, drifting silently by the awakening city.
The bargeman was a typical Egyptian of the riverine sort. He had short, bowed legs and had probably seldom ventured onto land in his life. His command of Greek was uncertain and he had not a
word of Latin. He poled his craft along with quiet serenity, looking like a picture on a wall.
Soon we were in the tunnel that passed through the lake wall, its great double portcullis raised for the day. The bulk of the canal traffic was coming into the city at that hour. There was very little leaving it. We passed the entrance to the Nile canal and headed toward the lake. I turned and called out to the bargeman.
“Didn’t Iphicrates go to the Nile to measure its rise and fall, and to examine the shores?” I wasn’t sure he understood the whole question, but he understood enough.
“He went to the lake,” he said.
Soon we were on the quiet waters of Lake Mareotis. Its shores were low and marshy, lined with papyrus. The reeds were alive with waterfowl, wild ducks and geese and gulls, herons and the occasional wading ibis. We passed wallows where hippos disported themselves, their smiling mouths and comically wiggling ears belying their essentially hostile and ill-tempered nature. Hermes’s eyes grew round when he saw these huge, wild beasts so close.
“Will they attack us?” he asked.
“They never scared you before,” I said.
“We were on a bigger boat then. Those things could swallow us with one gulp.”
“If they were so inclined. But they eat grass. As long as we stay clear of them, they won’t bother us. Now that”—I pointed at something that looked like a floating log—“will definitely eat you, should you fall in.” As if hearing me, the thing turned and regarded us with a glistening eye. Hermes grew paler.
“Why don’t they exterminate those monsters?” he said.
“Crocodiles are sacred to the god Sobek. They mummify them and put them in temple crypts.”
“Egyptians! Is there anything they don’t worship and make into mummies?”
“Slaves,” I told him. “There is no god of slaves.”
“Or Romans either I’ll bet,” was his rejoinder.
We drifted eastward in the direction of the delta until the sun was nearly noon-high. Then we came around a low headland to a place where a stone dock protruded into the water. The bargeman turned the nose of his craft toward the wharf.
“What is this?” I asked him.
“This is where the man from the Museum went.”
In the distance I could see a large house amid tilled fields.
“Whose estate is this?”
He shrugged. “The king’s, or some great noble’s.” A safe guess, since everything belonged to the king or some great noble.
“Keep going,” I instructed him. “I’ll tell you where to put in to shore.”
He turned away from the wharf. I saw nobody manning the pier. As far as I could tell, we were unobserved. That was of little importance in any case, since we were far from the only watercraft on the lake that morning. Fowlers and fishers were at their work, and boats carried produce from the plantations fringing the lake. Barges like ours carried huge bundles of papyrus reeds for the paper factories of Alexandria. It was not exactly crowded, but one more boat should attract no attention.
About a mile east of the pier I saw a small inlet that cut through the reeds to the shore. “Put us in there.”
The barge nosed aground on a sandy bank surrounded by palm trees. We unloaded our gear and set it among the trees. The bargeman looked around with a dubious expression.
“Not much hunting here, I think.”
“We’ll chance it,” I told him. “Come back for us here at this time tomorrow and I’ll pay you double what you got today.”
It was all one to him, so he agreed. People everywhere assume that all foreigners are insane. Thus, when you are in a strange land, it is easy to get away with eccentric behavior. He poled his barge away from the shore and was soon out of sight. We carried our gear to a spot sheltered from view by high bushes and rested beneath the shade of the palms.
“All right,” Hermes demanded. “Why are we here? It certainly
isn’t for hunting.” He started at a sound in the nearby bushes. When he saw that it was just an indignant ibis, he relaxed.
“Iphicrates was in the habit of taking monthly journeys, supposedly to measure the Nile waters and observe the banks. As I’ve just learned, he went nowhere near the river. He came instead to this estate, and I propose to find out what he was doing here.”
“If he was lying about where he went, he had a reason for it,” Hermes said, with a slave’s grasp of subterfuge. “Couldn’t this be dangerous?”
“It most certainly is. That is why I am taking as few chances as possible. Many travelers go hunting in the Egyptian wilds, so our leaving the city should have aroused no suspicion. I intend to explore this estate, but I shall do it cautiously. It’s too early now. We’ll set out when the sun gets lower.”
“We?” Hermes said.
“Yes, we. You’ll enjoy this, Hermes, it’s just your sort of activity.”
“You mean I should enjoy getting caught and tortured for spying?”
“No, Hermes.
Not
getting caught is what you like.”
So we made ourselves as comfortable as possible and dozed away the forenoon and a good part of the afternoon. In the cool of early evening we kindled a small fire in which I charred some pulpy, rotted palm-wood. Then we immediately extinguished the fire lest the smoke betray our presence.
Some years before, I had served under my kinsman Quintus Caecilius Metellus Pius in Spain, during the rebellion of Sertorius. I had seen no open, set-piece battles, but instead had fought guerrillas in the mountains. This was considered poor campaigning by most, since conventional leadership of soldiers in glorious battles was considered a necessity for political advancement at home. But it had taught me some valuable skills. Our Iberian mountaineer scouts had taught me the rudiments of their craft, and these skills I was about to put to good use in Egypt.
By the time we made our preparations, Hermes was eager to
go. He had spent hours in a near-panic. A true child of the metropolis, he was certain that open country was alive with wild, ravenous beasts hungering for his flesh. Every disturbance in the water was a crocodile coming ashore. Every quiet rustle in the bushes was a cobra. The louder rustles had to be lions. The scorpions that infested Alexandria probably represented a far greater danger to him, but they were commonplace. For some reason, most people fear being slain in an exotic manner. This is not peculiar to slaves.
With soot from the charred wood I streaked my face, arms and legs and directed Hermes to do the same. Then we daubed ourselves liberally with reddish clay from the bank. Egyptians divide their nation into the Red Land and the Black Land. The Red Land is Upper Egypt, to the south, but anywhere in Egypt away from the river and the delta is tolerably red. With our streaked limbs and faces and our dark red tunics, we would blend well with our surroundings in the fading light.
I picked up one of the short hunting spears and told Hermes to do likewise. He held it as if it were an asp that might bite him, but I thought it might give him a bit of confidence. We smeared the points with soot and clay to dampen any gleam, and we set off.
The first half-mile was easy, the reeds and brush so high that we could walk upright. There was a good deal of wildlife, and these were hard on my slave’s nerves. We disturbed a family of ugly little pigs, and a pair of hyenas lurked back in the bush, watching us. A jackal cocked its huge ears in our direction. These last are rather attractive little beasts, somewhat like foxes.
“Hermes,” I whispered at about the twentieth time he jumped, “the only really dangerous beasts are still well ahead of us. You’ll know them because they will be carrying weapons.” That quieted him.
With startling abruptness, we were out of the dense lakeside growth and at the edge of the cultivated land. At the limit of the tall grass there was a sloping earthwork dike, perhaps ten feet high. This presumably was a barrier against the occasional overflow of
the lake. We went up this on hands and knees. At the crest I slowly raised my head until I could see over the top.
On the other side stretched cultivated fields, but these had been left fallow, sown with grass and made into pasture for at least the past year or two, from the look of them. A few head of the piebald, lyre-horned Egyptian cattle munched placidly on the rich forage. On the far side I could vaguely descry some buildings and odd shapes, including what appeared to be a high watchtower. I wanted a closer look, but it was still too light to risk crossing the pasture, where we could easily be seen. A few hundred paces to the left I saw an orchard of date palms. I ducked back down below the crest of the dike, and Hermes did the same.
“We’re not going to cross that field, are we?” he said. “It’s all full of cowshit and those animals have sharp horns.”
“I didn’t see any bulls,” I told him. “But don’t worry. We’re going over to that date orchard and work our way closer through the trees.” He nodded excitedly. He was naturally sneaky and underhanded, and all this appealed to him, except for the animals.
We walked the short distance and crossed the dike, descending its opposite slope into the cool dimness of the orchard. Like the fields, this, too, was neglected. Last season’s fruit lay on the ground, food for pigs and baboons, while monkeys swarmed overhead, eagerly devouring this season’s growth.
“Some of the finest farmland in the world here,” I said, “and someone is letting it go to ruin. That’s not like Egyptians.” Indeed, the sight offended the remnants of my rustic Roman soul. Hermes was unmoved, but then, slaves do the actual work of farming, while we landowners practice a sort of agrarian nostalgia, fed by stories of our virtuous ancestors and pastoral poetry.
We progressed cautiously through the orchard, scanning the surroundings for observers. At one point a tribe of baboons screamed and hooted at us, pelting us with dung and dates. These were quite unlike the tame baboon-servants of the court, but rather were nasty, bad-tempered beasts like hairy dwarfs with long, be-fanged snouts.
“Do you think all that noise gave us away?” Hermes asked when we were past them.
“Baboons sound like that all the time. They scream at intruders and at each other. Everyone here will be used to it.”
At the extremity of the orchard we could see the roofs of the buildings, but the grass had grown too high to see anything else, except for the exceedingly high tower, which gleamed a lurid red in the rays of the setting sun. Hermes pointed up at it.