by Z. M. Wilmot
The Vessel
I
Lucius Varius Magnus first saw the great black sailing vessel when he was a child, standing upon the inner docks of the great port of Ostia. His parents – or rather, his father, for his mother was confined to her room in Roma due to a terrible fit of consumption – stood beside him, explaining to the young heir of the river-shipping business how to run the thing. He pointed out all of the family-owned ships carrying their goods – mostly salt and stone from the nearby mines and quarries – up the river Tiber to great Roma herself, giving each one a name and a history.
Young Lucius was the eldest son of Gaius Varius Verus, a second-generation member of the Roman equestrian class: families of wealthy plebeians who had made their fortune in some lucrative business. In the case of Verus’ father, this business was shipping.
Their shipping business stretched from Ostia to Roma – not a particularly long stretch of river, but an important one. The family’s vessels carried salt and stone up from Ostia and its nearby mines and quarries to Roma herself, where the materials were used for victuals and construction. Verus did not yet own the quarries and salt mines himself, but it was well-known among those in the trade that he had an eye on acquiring them once he had had attained more disposable wealth.
The Varian fleet, at this time, numbered seven working vessels, two ships in drydock, and two more under construction. Verus hoped that he could soon attain a near-monopoly in the shipping business, and then use that wealth and status to vault himself up into the upper echelons of society – becoming perhaps a tribune, or even a senator! But Verus hid his ambitions from his son as he showed him the proud Mars, flagship of his small armada, its brilliant red sails filling with a gentle wind as its flat bottom floated atop Father Tiber, bearing a heavy load of stone up towards Roma.
As Lucius’ father talked on, young Lucius himself found his attention wandering – he was, after all, still a young boy – and instead watched the numerous ships passing by, his father’s words sounding almost like incomprehensible Gallic to him. Roma was by no means a seaport, and its associated empire – in the loose sense of the word – had never shewed much interest in the sea, despite its prime position at the center of the Mediterranean. Only the river mattered to the Latin peoples, and the flat-bottomed barges that glided by so smoothly reflected that ignorance – no Roman ship that young Lucius saw could have lasted a single day out at sea.
To the young heir, though, all of the boats were marvelous – especially that one of midnight black that floated towards the open sea beyond Ostia. Had the boy more expertise in the art of shipbuilding, he would have noticed several things about this vessel that separated it from the lesser ships around it. This vessel was a seafaring boat, the like of which few Romans had ever seen in their lives. It caught the boy’s eye due mostly to its imposing colour and size; its obsidian black hull easily could have held three levels belowdecks, and it spanned forty or fifty meters from bow to stern. Its black mast sported a massive sail of the same dark colour as the hull, and it billowed out in a direction opposing that of the wind – but the boy did not notice this. What drew his eyes first was the massive spike jutting out of the bow, clearly an effective tool in ramming other ships.
Just behind the bow-spike were two strange devices, towers four or five meters high, with hooked tops that reminded him of a raven’s claw. Had not they been held up by ropes, the towers would have fallen until they were horizontal, creating a flat plank wide enough for two men to stand abreast with ease. These towers fascinated the imaginative mind of young Lucius and held his full attention for quite a while. Had he paid more attention to the water near the bottom of the great vessel, he would have seen both keel and rudder hovering slightly above the river's surface, causing no ripples or waves.
Verus did eventually notice his son’s lapse in attention, and questioned him as to what was so important that he would not respect his own father. Lucius immediately pointed at the silent black vessel, but his father saw nothing but the sky and distant mountains. He immediately berated his son for acting in such a foolish fashion; the boy was growing up rapidly, and he would soon need to start taking a more active role in managing his father’s work. Trained well by his father, Lucius apologized for his transgression and ashamedly confessed that the vessel was a product of his overactive imagination – something that Verus had tried so hard to drive out of his son. Verus sighed and wondered what his heir would come to, but forgave him. The pair walked to his personal vessel to begin the trip back to Roma.
As Lucius walked behind his father, he looked back one last time. He had lied to his father. He knew that the black vessel was no product of his imagination, for it had not faded like his other imaginary visions had when his father brought his attention back to reality. It steadfastly held onto reality, solid as ever, gliding serenely above Father Tiber. In his final glance back, young Lucius saw something that caused him to almost cease breathing: the vessel, before his very eyes, passed through two smaller boats, and all three ships carried on like nothing had happened. The ship with the midnight-black sails moved onwards, finally leaving the Tiber behind it and heading out to sea. Lucius blinked, believing that the ship would vanish then, but it did not, instead sailing off into the distance and eventually out of sight.
The vessel soon slipped to the back of the young boy’s mind, however, as he stepped onto his father’s boat. He delighted in the sensation of being on top of the water and river that he loved so much, and forgot almost all else in the moment. It would be a long while before he saw the vessel again.
II
When Lucius grew older and attained the age of sixteen years, he stepped fully into the realm of men and into the family shipping business, as his father’s lesser partner. He had, in the last eight years, learned to keep his imagination in check and focus his mind, to the point where he became known among the equestrians in Roma for his intelligence and keen mind. The equestrians said that one day he would proudly carry forward the family tradition and become an asset to his father.
And an asset he did indeed quickly become. Lucius had never lost his fascination with boats, and as more and more ships began to flock into Ostia, he began to note the design and function of each vessel. At seventeen years of age, he confronted his father and explained to him an idea that would greatly improve the carrying capacity and speed of each vessel, making use of the various features he had seen on the larger vessels in Ostia. His father heeded his son’s wisdom and ordered the Varian fleet, consisting now of sixteen vessels in commission and one under construction, to rotate into and out of the dry dock for renovations. Lucius himself was given the responsibility of overseeing the operation, and did so with the greatest of enthusiasm.
During the upgrading process, the Varius family took a small hit to their fortunes, but when the seventeen new vessels were finally put to work, their income shot up again rapidly, supplying them with the funding to begin work on four more boats over the course of the next few months. The rapidly accumulating funds were also enough for the family to purchase a smaller building in Ostia itself, near the docks, where Lucius and Verus could stay overnight and manage business from the Ostian end more directly. Lucius was given more responsibilities in this sector, and quickly became the Ostian partner in the company leadership. The number of ships under the Varius family grew larger with each passing month, until on Lucius’ eighteenth birthday their fleet numbered twenty-seven functional ships and four under construction, acquiring the family a near-monopoly.
It was on the day before his father’s death that the black vessel made its second appearance. Lucius, a week after he had turned eighteen, was in the Ostian house, going over financial records with one of his subordinate ship captains, when he happened to glance out the window. He immediately caught sight of its massive bulk, gliding silently above the river, slipping easily through the ships around it as if they were not there. The vessel was exactly as Lucius had remembered it, with its massive bl
ack sail, imposing bow-spike, and pair of clawed towers.
Now, however, the young man had a more trained eye. He could recognize the black ship as a seagoing vessel, and not one of any type he had ever seen in the port. It could have held three ranks of rowers, yet it was not a Greek trireme. It did not belong to the Carthaginians or to any other, smaller Mediterranean civilizations either – it was completely alien to Lucius. He noticed that its bow was raised slightly, providing a platform higher than the mid-deck, and the stern was even higher than the bow, giving anyone standing there a vantage point over the whole ship.
The sail itself was primitive, consisting merely of pitch-black cloth stretched over a black wooden frame, set onto a mast of the same colour. It was full of air, and its fullness never varied despite clear differences in the velocity and direction of the wind. No crew manned the vessel, and there was no visible mechanism of steering other than the rudder, which did not move at all.
Most disturbing to Lucius – other than its passage through other ships – was the fact that the vessel did not touch the water at all, and left no sign of disturbance upon the surface of Father Tiber. It also made no noise, and the sounds of the world seemed muted to Lucius as it passed by. The vessel quickly left Lucius’ sight as it passed the far edge of the narrow window, and the sounds of the world were restored.
Before the captain opposite him could call attention to Lucius’ sudden slip in attention, he forced his mind away from the thought of the vessel and returned to the figures as if nothing had happened. Moments later, he dismissed the phantasm as a strange resurgence of the overactive imagination of his youth. He did not think of it again.
The next morning, Gaius Varius Verus was found dead of unknown causes on the privy, and the whole of the Varius shipping company, as well as the family itself, passed into the hands of his son, Lucius Varius Magnus.