The Eagle and the Dragon, a Novel of Rome and China

by Lewis F. McIntyre

  “Gotta break outa here, thank the gods we held this topside space. I don’t wanna think about breakin’ out from below decks. Let’s break out the door there, archers first, an’ lay down some covering volleys. Gotta watch our backs out the hatch, though. There’s a bunch of ‘em up on the quarterdeck above.” Antonius spoke softly, quickly.

  “Can you get some men up there through the rear windows?” asked Gaius.

  “When we make our breakout. Topside bandits be lookin’ forward, tryin’ ter get the men comin’ out the door. Shmuel! Yer got fifteen men in here, and Galosga’s men belowdecks. Ten men follow out behind the Nubians, an’ stay behind ‘em, ‘cuz them Nubian arrows ain’t too perticular. The last five take down that shutter there, real quiet like, an’ when we go out, go topside an’ get ready ter go ter work. Galosga’s men come up by the bow when we break out an’ sweep the decks between us. Have some men relay the command so’s we do it all tergether.”

  “Right!”

  “We ain’t got too long. They just tryin’ ter figure out the best way ter regroup. Any idea how many?”

  Ibrahim interjected. “About a hundred, maybe. Knives and swords, maybe slingers. I don’t know about bows.”

  “We need to get the aft ballistae under control quickly,” said Gaius. “Once we have them, we can keep any other boats from joining in the fun.”

  “Will do!” Antonius shouted down the hatch into the officers’ quarters for the ballista crews to get ready. Then Shmuel levered himself up out of the ladder into the crowded main cabin. “Galosga’s ready.”

  “What’s the signal?” asked Antonius.

  “Just yell Masada.”

  “Judean bastard!” said Antonius, grinning toothily and slapping him on the back. “Well, let’s see if we can do as well as you Jews did.” Masada was the name of a mountain fortress where the last of the Jewish rebels had held out for months against three Roman legions. “Ready to go to war?”

  “Ready!”

  “All right, Abdi, open the doors and let your archer have at ‘em. Fire low, get their legs.”

  The Nubians notched arrows and drew their bows, taking aim at targets yet unseen. Two sailors slipped the timber from the door, swung them open and hit the deck as the first four Nubians let their arrows fly. They knelt down while the four behind them fired and then all eight fanned out through the doors, taking position either side of the door to fire again. Another eight archers filed through the door, and they began to set up a rain of arrows lengthwise down the deck, disciplined and remorseless. Their teeth shown in wicked grins, brilliantly white against their black faces glistening in the rain, as their arrows forced the Malays into a disorganized rout.

  Back in the master’s cabin, Shmuel assembled his men. “Watch your backs!” He slapped each one on the chest, “One, two, three...” he counted. “Remember your number! Odd men turn and cover aft. Even men form up and get ready to advance.” He turned to the men by the window. “When they go out front, you go up. Watch going over the top! Ready?”

  The men nodded.

  Then Shmuel yelled “Masada!” down the hatchway to the lower deck to Galosga’s crew far forward. Gaius and Antonius had buckled on their battle gear, and took position aft of the men erupting out through the door. Antonius and Gaius drew swords, slapped each other’s steel helmet with the pommel, and Gaius said, almost as a prayer, “Fortuna favet portuna!”

  The Malay pirates were not used to ships giving organized resistance. Most ships they raided were small merchants with a few armed men of mediocre skills. When the doors had first opened, they had expected the crew to emerge begging for mercy, perhaps offering money for their lives. They had not expected the volley of arrows from sixteen tall black Nubians. Their disciplined firepower had felled a dozen Malays before the pirates could retreat. The pirates on the quarterdeck, above and behind them, could have dropped down and engaged them, but they were too slow and indecisive. By the time the first one thought to do so, he was too late... he dropped into Shmuel’s swordsmen emerging from the door, half of whom had turned to receive him. And the remainder never saw the second group of sailors clambering over the aft railing, not until the first Malay fell forward clutching a sword point erupting from the center of his chest. The quarterdeck was cleared, and forward, Galosga’s men poured up out of the forward hatch. He had timed his outbreak a few seconds after the command, so the Malays were caught with their attention focused aft. And the archers kept up their fire, carefully aiming at the midships area to avoid casualties to their own. They picked off those who tried to escape the slaughter on deck by climbing into the rigging... those hapless Malays tumbled back down, their bodies studded with arrows.

  As if someone had turned off a faucet, the rain stopped suddenly and the sun came out, beating down hotly on a deck running red with blood.

  The ballista crews manned their weapons, training them outboard to take any boat in range under fire, manned or unmanned, while the disciplined sailors hewed through the confused mass clustered amidships. Some escaped, leaping overside into the water, but the Nubian archers, clustered on the rail, picked off many of them as they tried to swim to safety. There would be few survivors.

  The Big Man watched from his boat. He could hear the cries of his men dying on the deck, could see their lifeless bodies tossed overside to the sharks. Although he was a quarter mile from the ship, bolts from the ballistae hissed wickedly into the water just yards from his boat. He grimly ordered his boat out of action, and was standing out of danger when he felt something strike him hard in the back, knocking him forward.. He tried to turn in his seat but could not; he looked down and saw two feet of bloody bolt protruding from his chest, the tip buried in the splintered wood of his boat.

  It was the last thing he saw.

  CHAPTER 36: RENDEZVOUS AND ARRIVAL

  The remainder of the trip to Palembang was uneventful. Word of the Europa’s routing of the pirates and the death of the Big Man spread quickly along both coasts of the strait, and other would-be pirates were content to watch the big Yavanan western ship drift slowly by.

  The crew took care of their dead, burying them at sea according to each one’s custom. Antonius and other medics on board cared for the wounded. Most of the wounds were sword cuts to an arm or leg; one man had a Nubian arrow lodged in his shoulder, and one had a leg broken in a leap from the quarterdeck. Overall five died and twelve were wounded seriously enough to be out of action for a while. Not bad, considering the intensity of the fight. Marcia sought Antonius out after he finished tending the wounded. “Your dagger. Thank you,” she said, handing him the weapon hilt-first.

  “Welcome and glad it wasn’t needed,” he answered, slipping it back into the empty sheath on his waist. “Does Marcus have a dagger?”

  “Yes, he does, and he will keep it more handy in the future. Trouble comes quickly.”

  “He know how ter use it well? I kin teach him some.”

  “It would be good idea. Anyway, thank you. I must go now.”

  Antonius watched her walk off. She knew exactly what he had meant, that Marcus should kill her rather than let her fall into the hands of the Malay bandits. And she accepted that quite calmly and without argument. Courageous lass, that one.

  The pilot saw no need to tell them that he had been in the pay of the Big Man. He went about his duties quietly, and the ship reached Palembang mid-morning of the following day.

  Lateen rigged fishing boats and lighters darted nimbly in and out of the harbor, the wide delta of a river the pilot said was called Musi. Europa slipped upriver under light sail as far as it was prudent, then dropped anchor.

  Now just a few days behind the Europa, the Asia encountered the debris of the battle, bodies bobbing on the water, boats with bolts impaled in their hull.

  “Seems like the ‘devil ship’ has been at it again. I wonder what annoyed them here?” noted Dionysius.

  “Nothing that will annoy them, or us, again, I suspect. My cousin seems to be good
at his work,” said Aulus.

  Wang Ming came up join them. “Big fight! You friend ship?”

  He had spent the past several months improving his Latin to the point that he preferred discussions without translators to help him out. He still had no concept of grammar, but he could now be understood, even if it sounded like baby-talk.

  “Roman bolt in that little boat there. Looks like they tried to swarm their way onboard.”

  “Hmm,” said Ming.

  Dionysius had experimented with Asia’s sails, using the brails to raise the sail to the yardarm on the lee side, lowering that side of the yardarm at an angle, improvising a lateen sail modeled after those used by the ubiquitous native dhows. That rig allowed him to sail much closer into the wind than he could square-rigged. It was a little frightening to the crew at first, not to mention to Dionysius and Aulus themselves, with the hull heeled hard over to leeward, the rail just five or so feet above the rushing water. Unnerving as it was, the ship didn’t capsize, and it sailed considerably faster, maybe fast enough to catch up with the Europa.

  The Asia docked in Palembang still a few days behind their quarry. The big ships were attracting considerable attention. Ming’s language was common here, and he located an Hanaean pilot to take the ship to the southernmost Hanaean prefecture of Jiaozhi, in a land the locals called Nam Viet. The translators Pontus, Marcellus and Titus were happy to have some work to do, besides translating for Ming.

  The Europa, ahead of them, had embarked its own Hanaean pilot in Palembang, with the help of Marcus and Marcia. The pilot consulted a scroll of strips of bamboo marked with the chicken-scratch Hanaean script, with Marcus and Marcia translating. The scroll contained sailing directions, sending them northeast until the constellation Zhuwang was directly overhead, then north-northwest to landfall, also at Jiaozhi. The Alexandrian navigators determined that Zhuwang was Taurus, and watched with interest as the pilot laid out a course on a detailed map of southeast Asia. They estimated the trip to take about ten to twelve days, maybe less depending on winds. Marcus and Marcia now stood four hour watches on the bridge, translating whenever the pilot was on duty. For the first time in months, they encountered many ships at sea, some half or more the size of Europa, heading north or south. Every few hours another sail emerged on the horizon, and if southbound usually turned out to be the big Hanaean ships which Marcus told them were called chuan. The Europa took the southbound freighters portside, sometimes close enough to wave and call out to their crews lining their rails to see the big foreign ship.

  Antonius had seen little of Marcia since leaving Palembang due to her new responsibilities as translator for the pilot. Friendship with a woman was a wholly new concept to him. Friends were his messmates, officers like Gaius who could treat him as an equal, even Ibrahim, toward whom he was developing some affection. His mother had died when he was young and there were no sisters in his family. He liked Marcia’s company, and admired her intellect, the only woman who had ever captured his interest in that area. And now her courage. But he was totally in the dark how to deal with her. Pondering these thoughts, he was jarred out of his reverie as she came up to join him at rail to watch the brilliant blue sea slip by.

  “Antonius Aristides, my duties have intruded on our talks! I have hardly seen you since Palembang,” she said with a smile.

  “Umh, me, too, been busy training the deck crews again, domina. Didn’t mean ter avoid yer.”

  “Good, because I really enjoy our talks. I am hardly patrician, you know. I would prefer you call me Marcia.”

  “Well, uh, Marcia, jus’ bein’ polite an’ all. Din’t want to be uppity an’ insult yer.”

  “I don’t think you could insult me. But you are nervous. Yer back ter talkin’ soldier’s Latin.” She gave a good rendition of his tortured grammar and pronunciation which made him laugh, breaking the tension.

  “Damn all, not bad … Marcia. Not bad at all! Yer’ve been practicing.”

  “Jes’ thinkin’ how yer would’ve said this, is all… sir! Yer need ter teach me more profanity. Gaius thinks I swear like from a Plautus play.” She laughed and smiled brightly.

  Having lost all his unease, Antonius replied with a big grin, “That’s probably about right. Yer people bin outer touch almost that long. But profanity lesson later, you teach me Hanaean.”

  “Are you sure, Antonius?”

  “Sure, go ahead, try me.”

  “Well, let me start…” she rested her chin on her hands, thinking where to begin. “You know Latin and Greek.”

  “And some German, and my Aramaic is gettin’ better.”

  “All right, forget all of them. Hanaean –Han-yu as we call it – is completely different. You know about grammar, gender, cases, tenses… so forget about them.”

  “How do you tell what you are talking about?” asked Antonius, puzzled.

  “Word order. You know you can say ‘canis homem mandet,’ ‘mandet homem canis,’ or any other arrangement you like, and you always know that the dog is biting the man. Because of the grammar endings. In han-yu, it must always be ‘dog bite man,’ in that order, because if you change the order, you change who is biting whom. If you say ‘bite dog man,’ it means that the bite follows the man!” she laughed.

  “Good with that, not too hard. Go ahead.”

  “Now han-yu has very short words, and only a few of them, so words have several meanings, and we use tones to tell them apart. Here is a phrase my mother taught me as a little girl, to learn to use them correctly. ‘Mama qí mă. Mă màn. Mama mà mă.’ It means. ‘Mother rode a horse. The horse was slow. Mama scolded the horse.’ Ma uses three different tones for Mother, horse and slow. Try it! ‘Mama qí mă. Mă màn. Mama mà mă,’” she said very slowly.

  Antonius took a breath and tried to repeat it. “Mamashima..mamamamama.. ma, I think. I hope.”

  Marcia giggled. “We’ll have to work on this some more.” She repeated the phrase, with Antonius struggling to hear the subtle differences in pitch, then ending with about the same result. But after about fifteen minutes, Antonius got close to the right tones.

  “That’s great, you catch on fast!” She touched his shoulder, and for moment her hand rested there, and he, for a change, did not pull away, savoring the intimate coolness of her touch.

  Just then Gaius strode up to them. “Hate to interrupt your conversation, but Antonius, we need you aft. There’s a sail behind us, and it might be one of our ships.”

  “Right. Thank you, Marcia, I really enjoyed it. Tomorrow, if yer can put up with me.”

  “Shi shi,” she replied. “That is ‘Thank you’ in han-yu. And I can always put up with you, Antonius.”

  But Antonius caught a glimmer of concern on her face. If that is the Asia with Wang Ming on board…

  Antonius and Gaius strode aft to the quarterdeck, where Demetrios and Ibrahim were shielding their eyes against the sun. On the horizon, a tiny white dot bobbed, several miles aft.

  “What makes yer think that white dot’s not one of the chuan junks?” asked Antonius.

  “Because it is white. Most of the junks’ sails have been yellowish or even dark. We have the only white sails in this whole ocean, though ours are getting a bit grey after all the wear and tear,” replied Demetrios.

  “Hmm,” thought Gaius, one foot on a bollard. “How long before they close with us?”

  “Hard to tell. If he can get a knot or two of speed on us, five or ten hours.”

  “Any chance that ship could be hostile, still under Hadrubal?”

  Ibrahim answered, “Hasdrubal wouldn’t have made such a difficult journey into the unknown. His plan was to go to Parthia, sell the ships, and hand over the gold while keeping a good share of it for himself. It would make no sense for him to go east.” He continued with a chuckle, “He’s too damned lazy and greedy to do that!”

  “What do you think, Demetrios?” asked Gaius.

  “I agree, sir. These past few months have the hardest sailing of my life, and a
few times I wasn’t sure we’d make it,” answered the captain.

  “Antonius?”

  “Agreed, sir. If it’s one of the Senator’s ships, I would bet it’s in his hands.”

  “All right, we have a consensus. Antonius, break out the ballista crews, but don’t load any bolts until I order it. Even if it is Aulus Aemilius, he may be spoiling for a fight with Ibrahim. Demetrios, hoist the Galba house flag, so that he can see we are flying his colors. And ready a small boat to take us over as he draws near. I would like to parley face-to-face with him, or with whoever is onboard, before he gets in firing range.”

  On the Asia, Dionysius and Aulus also had spotted the white sail on the horizon ahead of them, and came to the same conclusion. They could just make out the triangular topsail now.

  “That confirms it is Europa. Or a very lost Roman freighter!” said Dionysius.

  “Agreed, skipper. What do you make of the situation?” asked Aulus.

  “I suspect your cousin has regained control of the ship. The dockyard workers in Palembang confirmed there were two Romans and several Hanaeans on board. But also an Arab. They seem to be enroute to Ch’in.”

  Wang Ming joined them. “You ship? Bright white sail,” he said.

  “My ship, almost certainly. Top sail triangle,” said Aulus, making a triangle with his hands. He had learned to speak slowly and in simple words to Ming. “We wonder if we fight when close.”

  “Prepare fight now, not need later, good,” said Ming.

  “That’s good advice. Ready the ballista crews, and fire a few practice rounds, captain. We haven’t used them at all, and Europa’s crew appears to be pretty proficient.

  On the Europa, they were surprised at the speed which the white dot closed the gap. In the space of two hours, the ship was just two miles astern, close enough for them to make out the rig of the sails. The square artemon foresail billowed out ahead, but the other two sails were rigged lateen style, and the ship sailed heeled over at sharp angle, white water curling under her bow. The Asia had three or more knots on them.