Prince Theodoric interrupted. ‘We Visigoths are no enemies of the Vandals. Our father is to marry our sister Amalasuntha to Genseric’s son himself.’
Nicias looked sardonic. ‘Pirates are no great respecters of treaties, son.’
‘We’re finished talking,’ Aetius snapped. ‘Now, bugger off.’
Nicias stumped away.
Aetius looked at Theodoric sharply. ‘Your sister? That pretty slip of a girl? To marry Genseric’s son?’
Theodoric nodded.
‘Then your father is a fool.’
The young man’s eyes blazed. ‘How dare you speak of my father like that!’
Prince Torismond took a step nearer Aetius. The general held his hands up. He had indeed overstepped the bounds of politeness. He apologised profusely. They relaxed.
‘But I will have to beg of your father-’
‘That is his policy. An alliance between the Visigoths and the Vandals, a Germanic empire in the West, neither friend nor enemy to Rome.’
Aetius shook his head. ‘The Vandals are already in alliance with the Huns. I know it in my bones. I will bring your father proof. That embittered, half-lame Genseric is playing him false.’
‘So you want to believe.’
‘So I do believe.’
‘The Vandals are your fellow Christians.’
‘Even the Devil himself believes in God,’ muttered Aetius.
They sailed on the small evening tide again. The storm had blown out, the sea was subsiding. It was peaceful. And too damn slow.
Aetius sent for Nicias. ‘Bring up your chest,’ he said. ‘Entertain us.’
The Cretan needed no second bidding. In a trice he scuttled down to the hold and got one of the sailors to help him up with his chest. He raised the lid and knelt down reverently, like a holy man before an altar.
The princes and the Gothic wolf-lords crowded along the rail to watch the show. The master and bosun craned from the wheelhouse to watch this great wonder-worker about his miracles, and the sun-bronzed sailors sat along the yard above, swinging bare feet, grinning, gold earrings winking in the sunset. Only the slaves below worked on unregarded.
Nicias rummaged, giving a running commentary. ‘My recipe combines essence of nitre, phosphorus, and refined black oil from Mesopotamia.’
‘Must make a right stench,’ grunted the master.
‘The odour is distinctive.’
‘And you better not set fire to my fuckin’ ship.’
The alchemist ignored this uncouth remark.
He drew out of his chest some wooden spars and an iron frame, and quickly assembled them into something like a miniature ballista. He set the machine on the deck beside the chest, and rapidly wound back a little brass winch. His audience was interested now, despite themselves. Even Aetius kept his grey eyes fixed steadily on the proceedings.
Nicias produced a small ball from his chest, holding it between forefinger and thumb, and showed it around like a huckster in the market-place trying to sell off a rare egg. It was a perfect iron sphere, studded all round with sharp spikes, rather like a caltrop thrown out to stop cavalry. Nicias set the sphere down at the end of his little ballista, turned a brass knob at the side one half-turn, and was ready to fire.
‘Hold,’ said Aetius. ‘There are dolphins out there. Look.’
Breaking the surface of the burnished sea, between them and the falling sun, there were dark, glossy shapes arcing and curvetting through the water in the wake of the ship, some fifty yards off.
‘All the better!’ said the little alchemist excitedly, turning his machine aft. The onlookers stepped back warily. ‘I will use them as my targets. I will show you what becomes of mortal flesh when one of my devices…’
Aetius turned his head very slowly and regarded him. Nicias quailed and his voice trailed away.
‘Dolphins were sacred to Apollo once,’ said Aetius, ‘in the old days, under the old religion.’
‘But good to eat?’
‘Indeed they are. But not for us to slaughter for mere amusement, like foxes in a hencoop.’
There was a moment of awkward silence, and then Nicias said, speaking very quickly, ‘Very well, then, let us assume… let us imagine that out there is a ship, straight to port, an imaginary ship, a boat, upon the sea, an enemy vessel, which we needs must destroy, we must-’
‘Enough talking,’ said Aetius. ‘Just show us.’
Nicias aimed his machine out across the water and loosed a lever. The tiny machine gave a crack of astonishing power, and the spiked ball whirred out on a flat trajectory straight over the waves, bouncing and cutting into the water as it went. It travelled for over two hundred yards.
Nicias looked around excitedly. ‘Do you see? This whirling caltrop of my own device, even in miniature, skims across the surface of the sea like a stone thown by a boy. But imagine what it would do in a bigger machine, built to scale, cutting across the canvas of an enemy sail. Tear it to shreds! Or to the deckboards over the heads of enemy rowers. It could tear up the planks, if it were big enough. Imagine the rowers below, thinking themselves safe from missiles beneath their awnings of hardened leather, suddenly blinking and terrified, exposed like helpless animals in their burrows. What power! We could destroy them utterly, from afar, without ever having even to engage. We could slaughter them at will.’
Prince Torismond glanced round at Aetius. He said nothing.
‘Now,’ continued Nicias, ‘this is not all.’ Taking another iron sphere he grasped it carefully and unscrewed it into two perfect halves. He took a thick glass flask from the chest and poured some greyish powder into one half. He laid a thin circular wafer of leather over the powder, and then poured over it a dark treacle. ‘The ingenuity of the chemists of Alexandria and Antioch truly knows no bounds,’ he commented excitedly. ‘Prepare to be amazed. For I give you a fire that continues to burn in water, a sticky fire which can gum itself to a boat’s wooden hull and burn perpetually, and which no number of water-buckets can extinguish.’ Near the wheelhouse, the master stirred uneasily. ‘Imagine if such a fire stuck to your arm. You cannot imagine the screams if you have not heard them. Men leap into the water, burning alive.’
Some wondered how Nicias knew this, and feared for the fate of any condemned prisoners in Alexandria who might have been passed his way for experimentation. He quickly screwed the iron ball back together again and set it into the shoot on his ballista. They noticed that his expression had grown markedly more nervous, and stepped back.
‘Now,’ he said, eyes gleaming, mouth working, ‘consider this!’
It was unclear quite what happened next, but there was a tremendous explosion of flame and noise, a sparking cloud of smoke, and bellowing from Nicias in the heart of it. When the smoke cleared, the alchemist was still kneeling beside his charred chest, the skin on his face and one arm burned hairless and red, and the little ballista had vanished.
The deck was on fire, but, miraculously, no one else was hurt.
‘Hm,’ said Aetius, coming forward. ‘Needs working on, I think.’
The master was roaring for buckets to be lowered and the fire to be put out, but the sailors were already letting out ropes.
Aetius helped the dazed alchemist to his feet.
‘Now,’ he said, ‘take your box of tricks back below, and don’t let me ever see it on deck again. If I do, it goes into the water – and you follow it.’ He kicked the chest lid shut. ‘And get some vinegar on those burns.’
The fire on deck sizzled out. Mercifully, Nicias’ incendiary invention had not yet been perfected. Many there prayed that it never would.
4
Three days on, they had passed several cargo ships plying the busy sea routes between Syracuse, Nicopolis, Alexandria, Antioch, Rhodes, Thessalonika. They hailed them and asked for news of pirates, and the cargomen shook their heads and said they had encountered nothing…