"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 out 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-homed 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 watch-tower. 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, befanged 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.
"What's that?" he whispered.
"I think I know, but I want a closer look," I whispered back. "From here on, be very quiet and move very slowly. Watch me and do what I do." With that, I lay down on my belly and began to crawl slowly forward on knees and elbows, dragging my spear along the ground by my side. It was a painful means of progression, but there was no remedy for that. I elbowed my way through the grass, keeping a wary eye out for the snakes that are so abundant in Egypt. I was not as nervous as Hermes, but only a fool discounts the creatures. After all, when you slither on your belly like a reptile, you intrude on the domain of snakes, so to speak, and had best be ready to answer their challenges.
A few minutes of this crawling brought me to the edge of the high grass and I paused while Hermes crawled up beside me. Slowly, like actors in a mime, we parted the grass before our faces and looked into the field beyond.
Surrounded by large farm buildings of the usual Egyptian mud-brick architecture was a broad field of hard-packed dirt, rather like a parade ground. In fact, it was a parade ground, for its inhabitants were soldiers. I could tell they were soldiers because, even though none of them bothered with armor or helmet in this place, still they wore their military boots and their sword-belts, without which they would have felt naked. They were a mixed group of Macedonians and Egyptians, and they were drilling on the most fanciful battery of war engines seen since the siege of Syracuse.
One team operated a contraption that looked like six giant crossbows yoked together. It looked ridiculous, but with a startling crash it shot six heavy javelins across the field to smash through a f
ormation of wicker dummies. The machine rocked with the violence of its discharge, and some of the spears went through four or more of the dummies before slowing down.
On another part of the field men worked at a huge, counterweighted catapult with a long, cranelike arm terminating in a sling instead of the usual basket. Soldiers placed a ponderous stone in the sling and stood back. At a shouted signal the counterweight dropped and the long arm swept through a graceful arc. It stopped against a rope-padded horizontal bar and the sling whipped around in an ever-accelerating half-circle and its free end released, hurling the stone an unbelievable height and distance, so far that we did not hear its crashing fall.
There were more conventional-looking weapons as well, moving tortoises slung with battering rams, their heads actually cast in the shape of bronze ram heads with curling horns: giant augurs to bore through walls; small, fast-firing catapults for rocks and javelins; and many others. But the centerpiece, dwarfing all the others, was the tower.
It was at least two hundred feet high, and completely plated with iron. That was the reason for its strange ruddy gleam. At various levels balconies protruded from the main structure, equipped with catapults protected by movable shields. Once in a while a plate would swing forward and up from the forward face and a missile would arch out, after which the plate immediately dropped.
"That," I said, "to answer your earlier question, is something very like the 'city-taker' of Demetrius the Besieger. It was the biggest siege tower ever built, and I think this one may be even bigger."
Then, amid a hideous groaning and squealing, the colossal thing began to move. Slowly, painfully, it lurched forward a foot at a time as the men inside it and atop it cheered. Of course, one expects siege towers to move, else they would be of little use, but they are always pushed by oxen or elephants or at least a crowd of slaves or prisoners. But this outrageous device moved with no visible means of propulsion. Besides, there was something unnatural about anything so large moving at all. If I had not already been as low as I could get, my jaw would have dropped.
"Magic!" Hermes squealed. He tried to get up, but I grabbed his shoulder and held him fast.
"It's not magic, you young idiot! It's driven by some sort of inner mechanism, a windlass or capstan of some sort, a thing of gears and wheels and teeth. I was studying drawings of such things just last night."
Actually, I had only the vaguest idea of what it might be. Even the simplest waterwheel seemed intolerably complex to me. Still, I preferred to think that there was some mechanical explanation. I had only the most minimal belief in magic and the supernatural. Besides, if the Egyptians possessed magic so powerful, how would we manipulate them so easily?
A trumpet sounded and all the soldier-engineers dropped their tools and left their engines. The duty day was over. Perhaps twenty men filed out of the tower. Last of all came about thirty oxen from the interior. Then a gang of slaves went in with baskets and shovels to clean up after the oxen. So much for magic.
"Seen enough?" Hermes asked.
"Our boatman won't be back for us until tomorrow. I want a closer look. Let's go back to the orchard. It will be dark enough soon." We reversed our earlier progress, slithering rearwards until we were safely among the trees.
Two hours later, we passed through the grass again, walking this time, but crouched low. Slowly and with great caution, we made our way to the edge of the parade ground. Had this been a Roman encampment, we would have been challenged by sentries, but these were barbarians, lazy and incompetent, for whom soldiering was scarcely more professional than the tribal warrioring of their native lands. That they were within their own territory with no enemy for a thousand miles was no excuse. The legions fortify every camp even if they are within sight of the walls of Rome. Still, it was convenient for us.
The machines stood like dead monsters in the moonlight as we walked up to them. They were made of wood that had been painstakingly cut and shaped, then sanded smooth and in some cases painted. War engines are usually built at the site of a siege and are made of rough-hewn wood and are often abandoned when the fighting is over, after the ironmongery and the ropes have been salvaged.
Even with my inexperienced eye, I could see that these machines were held together by pins and wedges, so that they could be disassembled for transport. That, I guessed, was an innovation of Iphicrates. Egypt has little native wood save for palm, a soft and fibrous material unsuitable for such work. All of this wood had to be imported, shiploads of it.
We walked to the base of the tower, which gave off a powerful, disagreeable smell.
"What's that stink?" Hermes asked.
"It takes a lot of oil to keep this much iron from rusting," I told him. "There's enough here to make armor for three legions." I fingered a plate that had pulled a little loose from the frame. It was good metal, about the thickness of body armor. I walked up the back ramp and looked inside, but it was far too dark to see, only a little moonlight coming through the ports that had been left open. Despite the efforts of the slaves, the interior smelled strongly of oxen. This, mixed with the stench of rancid olive oil, finally drove me away.
The other machines told me little more. They were all as ingeniously designed and lovingly built. I assumed that the more commonplace machines all incorporated some improvement of Iphicrates's design, if only in their ease of transport and reassembly.
"What do we do now?" Hermes asked as I stepped off the ramp.
"We could have a look at those buildings," I said, "but they're probably just barracks and storerooms. Whatever is going on is happening in Alexandria. This is just a training facility and arsenal." I thought for a while. "It might be fun to set fire to all this."
"Let's do it!" I could hear the grin in his voice. "I could sneak a torch from one of those buildings, and there must be plenty of oil jars in the storehouses to keep all this metal greased. We could have everything alight before they know what's going on!" Arson was an unthinkable crime in Rome, so it was one he might never get a chance to commit at home.
"But then they'd sweep the area to find the culprits. They may not be much as soldiers, but they probably know how to make a search for fugitives."
"Maybe we'd better not, then."
"And I might need all this as evidence."
"Evidence of what?"
It was a good question. Rome would look with great disfavor upon this development, but would the Senate take action? I rather doubted it. And what had it all to do with the murder of Iphicrates? With these questions unanswered, we made our stealthy way back to the lakeside.
Chapter VIII
One of the requirements for a career in Roman politics is an onerous but necessary apprenticeship in the civil service. Nobody likes it, but at least it teaches you how a state works. This is why kings so often rule badly. They know public life only from the top. They like the enjoyable parts: fighting and killing their enemies, lording it over everybody else, being above the law. But the rest of it bores them, and they leave it to men or sometimes eunuchs who may have ambitions of their own. Since the kings don't know how the business of government operates, they don't know that their flunkies are incompetent, or are robbing or even subverting them.
Washed free of mud and soot and dressed decently once more, I presented myself at the Land Office, a sizable government building near the Palace. I knew that here I would find the exact boundaries and ownership of every square inch of land in Egypt. The Egyptians invented the art of surveying out of necessity, since their lands are inundated yearly and boundary markers are often swept away. Like most conquerors, the Ptolemies had adopted the most beneficial practices of the conquered people, and this office was staffed almost entirely by native Egyptians. In the first room I entered, a public slave hurried over, bowing.
"How may I help you, sir?"
"Where might I find maps and documents concerning the lands nearest Alexandria?"
"Please come with me." We walked past rooms where scribes sat cross-legged i
n the Egyptian fashion, papyrus resting on their tight-stretched kilts, brushes in their hands, inkpots resting on the floor next to them. Others labored over maps spread on long tables.
"This is the Office of the Royal Nome, Senator, and this is Sethotep, Royal Overseer of the Northern Survey."
The man rose from his desk and came forward. He was a native and simply dressed, but by now I had learned to judge status by the quality of a man's wig and the weave of his kilt. Sethotep was a high-ranking functionary, about equivalent to a Roman equite. We made the expected introductions and I launched upon the story I had made up.
"I have embarked upon a work of geography concerning Egypt. There has been none in Latin in more than fifty years, and the earlier works are translations from Greek and consequently riddled with errors. I think we need an original book of our own."
"A commendable project," said Sethotep.
"I have already embarked upon my work concerning the city of Alexandria, and I want to begin my study of the nearby lands. I propose to start with Lake Mareotis and the lands surrounding it. Have you any maps of the lake? I would prefer survey maps, listing the estates of the district and their owners."
"Certainly, Senator," said Sethotep. He stepped over to a rack like the ones in the Library and took out a large scroll. "Of course, all land in Egypt is the property of his Majesty King Ptolemy, but, after ancient custom, the king grants dominion over broad estates to his loyal nobles." That was just what I wanted to hear.
He took the map to a long table and slipped it from its leather tube. To clear a space for it, he picked up some scraps of papyrus, glanced at them, then tossed them into a huge box at the end of the table. The box was half full. The Egyptian bureaucracy generated ten times the waste papyrus of its Roman equivalent. The stuff was cheap in Egypt and they didn't even try to reuse it.
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