The centurion was challenged at the gate of the camp by two of the vigilae, the night guard, who, although three hours into their watch, stood alert and ready. A tightly run legion, Septimus thought, as he identified himself. He passed through and headed for the quarters of his own men, spotting Quintus, his optio, standing beside a fire with two of the twenty principes of the Aquila’s half-century. They were having a murmured conversation, keeping their voices low in the quiet time before dawn.
The optio spotted his commander approaching and broke away from the two men.
‘Good morning, Centurion.’
‘Morning, Quintus … all quiet?’
‘As a grave. With the work we have those legionaries doing, they’re sleeping like babies.’
Septimus smiled at the description. The men of the Fourth were anything but babies. As one of the legions of the northern army, the Fourth had historically been at the centre of all of the major conflicts as Rome expanded her borders northwards. Their symbol was the boar, and it was a suitable emblem, for the soldiers were both vicious and stubborn. Septimus realized that the latter quality would make the task ahead more difficult.
Septimus turned to his optio as a trumpet sounded for roll call.
‘Quintus, I want to shift the focus of training and teach the legionaries some of the basics of boarding.’
‘Yes, Centurion,’ Quintus replied, Septimus noticing the underlying scepticism in his optio’s voice. Having gone through the training only ten months before, the techniques and steps were fresh in Septimus’s mind; however, he would let Quintus, a marine with two full years’ experience, take the lead on the agenda.
‘So, what do you think is the best way to proceed?’
‘We introduce them to the hoplon.’
Septimus nodded, knowing that that portion of the training was especially difficult for men used to handling the four-foot scutum shields of the legions.
‘We have to start somewhere, and the sooner the legionaries realize that they don’t have a shield that will defend their torso and legs at the same time, the better,’ Quintus added.
‘Agreed,’ Septimus said, as the men of the V maniple of the Fourth formed up in the training square. Their centurion, Marcus Junius Silanus, approached and Septimus groaned inwardly. Silanus had absolutely no respect for marines, an opinion he constantly expressed both to Septimus and to the men of his own maniple.
‘What’s on today’s agenda, marine?’ he asked, his tone laced with condescension.
Septimus drew himself up to his full height, a good two inches taller than Silanus, the centurion’s tone goading him.
‘More of the same, Silanus,’ Septimus replied, ‘just 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,