The breeze was freshening, cresting the thick, green waves. The little Bosporan liburnian forged ahead, its double banks of oars flashing, spray flying. It turned to the south-east. The trireme followed, angling across the sea towards the low, dark land. Ballista looked out at the unprepossessing sight, dark thoughts in his head.
The trierarch, a short, stubby centurion with a beard, walked to the stern. ‘Almost there, Domini.’ He spoke in Latin to Ballista and Castricius, as the envoy and his deputy. ‘We will make Azara in a couple of hours.’ He smiled. ‘I give you joy of it. Apparently the locals call the place Conopion — Mosquito-town.’
When the ship slipped into one of the many channels of the Lesser Rhombites river, Hippothous was struck by the stillness. The wind was gone. Reeds and sedge pressed in on both sides. The water was black and heavy, glossy in the lowering sun. The creak and splash of the oars, the clicking and chattering of insects and birds, both seemed thin and insubstantial against the oppressive quiet of the delta.
The trireme rowed in the glassy trail of the liburnian, until both were manoeuvred to rest stern on against a dilapidated jetty at the foot of a low, overgrown rise. The Maeotae were waiting for them in arms. The isolated wooden look-outs they had passed jutting up out of the water obviously gave notice of the arrival of men as well as shoals of fish. These tribesmen belonged to a tribe of the Maeotae called the Tarpeites: fishermen on the coast, farmers inland, said to be brigands in both elements. There were a hundred or so of them, dirty, poorly armed, but obviously dangerous in their barbarian irrationality.
The marines on the trireme and the auxiliary soldiers escorting the embassy held themselves very still, weapons to hand. All told, there were about forty Roman fighting men.
The sun was going down, but it was warmer away from the open sea. Hippothous slapped at the insects settling on him and watched the Bosporan ship run out its boarding ladder and the navarchos disembark. The grandly titled commander of the fleets of the Great King of the Bosporus talked for some time with the tribesmen. There was an amount of gesticulating. The armed men on the Roman vessel grew bored, put up their weapons, leant on their shields and the gunwales, talked under their breath. Hippothous did not relax. He had not survived a lifetime of violence as bandit, Cilician chief and, for the last few years, accensus to Ballista, only by luck. The post of secretary usually did not involve much violence, but in the familia of Ballista it was almost the norm.
Finally, the talking ended. Some tribesmen trotted off into the trees which grew up the hill. The navarchos waved for those on the trireme to come ashore. The herald the imperial authorities had attached to the envoys at Panticapaeum went first down the gangplank. At the bottom, the praeco called out in a stentorian voice in Latin: ‘The Legatus extra ordinem Scythica Marcus Clodius Ballista, Vir Perfectissimus, and his deputy, Gaius Aurelius Castricius, Vir Perfectissimus.’
Both men had held high prefectures, which had ranked them each as Vir Ementissimus. Hippothous noted they had been demoted. The praeco had not done that on his own initiative. But Castricius had been Prefect of Cavalry under two pretenders, one of them, briefly, Ballista himself. And it was not Roman practice to send men of the highest ranks as diplomatic envoys to the barbarians, especially not on missions from which they may well not return.
When the envoys had clattered down to the shore with their entourage and eleven-man escort, an individual slightly less grubby than the majority stepped out of the horde of Tarpeites.
‘Pericles, son of Alcibiades,’ he announced himself in heavily accented Greek. ‘Come, I take you to the palace of the king.’
Hippothous did not let himself smile.
Led by Ballista, they followed the barbarian with the ludicrously Hellenic name and patronymic up the path. It was dark under the beech trees, the path narrow. An ideal place for an ambush, Hippothous thought. Surreptitiously, he loosened his sword in its scabbard.
When they emerged from the tree line it was not yet full dark. A sward ran uphill. It was crowned with a rough palisade pierced by a gate with a rustic-looking tower.
‘The palace of the king,’ Hippothous said.
‘Golden Mycenae itself, the strong-founded citadel,’ Castricius replied.
The two men smiled, momentarily united in contempt for this place, if in nothing else except their propensity to violence.
‘You can quote Homer.’ Hippothous managed to sound surprised.
‘When I was in Albania last year, it was a bad time. There were… few people to talk to, nothing else to read. I have developed a liking for epic poetry,’ Castricius ended defiantly.
The hall of the King of the Tarpeites was wooden and thatched. Inside, it was dark, lit by smoking torches. There was a distinct smell of close humanity and smoked fish.
The monarch of all he surveyed sat on a crude wooden imitation of a Roman magistrate’s ivory throne. The imperial bureaucracy had provided the envoys with an interpreter from the Bosporus. It was claimed he could speak eight barbarian languages. His expertise proved unnecessary here. The king spoke Greek, the language of diplomacy throughout the east, if in an uncouth way. He and Ballista exchanged what passed for pleasantries. After a less than dignified interval, the king asked for a present. Expecting it, Ballista handed him a spatha with an inlaid hilt and fine sword belt. The king examined the gift with ill-concealed avarice. Seeming satisfied, he called for a feast.
Hippothous was placed some way down the hall, with Tarpeites on either side. The one on his left launched into an extended discourse on fishing in execrable Greek. There was no better place in the world for fish than Lake Maeotis. Bream; anchovy by the tens of thousand; given the name of the Rhombites, there were turbot of course; and the finest of all, sturgeon. And it was here that the tunny spawned in the spring. Their migration was interesting.
Despite it all, Hippothous was not unhappy. The last eight months had been hard. Last September, the familia had left the Caucasus in a hurry. They had travelled hard down from the mountains to Phasis on the Euxine. There they had chartered a ship to take them to the Kingdom of the Bosporus. As it was late in the season, the owner had charged an outrageous sum of money.
Wintering at Panticapaeum had not been a pleasure. The sights of the town were soon exhausted: the sword with which long ago the Celtic bodyguard had despatched Mithridates the Great, the famous bronze jar split by the cold, the decrepit palace of the kings, echoing of its past glories, the fire-scorched temple of Apollo on the Acropolis, the equally run-down temples of Demeter, Dionysus and Cybele. There had been nothing that passed for an intellectual life in that degenerate outpost of Hellenism, a polis where the citizens dressed like Sarmatian tribesmen and as often as not answered to barbaric names.
Come midwinter, Hippothous had never seen snow like it. A wall of cloud had come down from the north-west. The air had been clogged with big flakes like feathers. It had lasted for days, settled everywhere, drifting deep enough to smother a dog or a child. When the snow stopped, it got colder; the sky a clear, unearthly yellow; all frighteningly still. Then the sea froze. At first just by the shore, but soon it stretched as far as the eye could see; a vast white plain, with here and there jumbles of blocks forced up by the pressure. In February, Hippothous had joined Ballista, driving in a carriage across the straits to Phanagoria, the town on the Asian side. Well wrapped, they had watched men dig out fish trapped in the ice. They used a special pronged instrument like a trident. All their winters had to be as bad. Some of the sturgeon they hauled out had been nearly the size of dolphins.
Being quartered in one of the few houses that still had a working hypocaust had been a saviour. Without the hot air circulating under the floor, Hippothous was convinced he would have died of cold.