Chapter 6: Preparations
Royal Lounge, Queen of the Sea, Alexandria Harbor
January 15, 319 BCE
Ptolemy took his usual seat in the Royal Lounge. “Are you sure that this is worthwhile?” he asked the room at large.
Marie followed his gaze as he looked around the room. There was Roxane and Dag, who’d recovered from the poisoning. Digitalis washed out of the system in only a few days if it didn’t kill you, which, with proper medical intervention, it usually didn’t. But Travis Siegel had a heart condition and he had apparently ingested at least three times as much of the digitalis-laced cocoamat as Dag had.
Next to Dag were Eleanor Kinney and Amanda Miller, who by now was Al Wiley’s ambassador at large. She and her daughter traveled with the Queen of the Sea and by agreement enjoyed diplomatic immunity from Carthage to Alexandria and north to the remnants of the Etruscan League.
Marie looked over at Lars, who looked at Eleanor Kinney. Eleanor was the ship’s purser who was now the main architect of the monetary and banking system on the Queen of the Sea and in New America. She hadn’t done it alone. She’d had the help of Amanda Miller, and a few other passengers with banking and money-management experience.
“I’m surprised,” Eleanor said. “Eumenes seemed quite anxious to have us circle the Horn of Africa.”
“Eumenes is acting as strategos for the empire,” said Ptolemy. “His goal is to use the Queen as a threat against Antigonus’ rear so that Antigonus can’t bring the armies of his allies to the war that is going to be fought along the Euphrates. My concerns are more pragmatic. There is more trade between Egypt and New America than the Queen of the Sea can truly support. If you go exploring around the Horn of Africa, that will take the Queen out of service for months. And to stockpile the fuel you will need will require taking the Reliance out of the trade lanes as well. The market for super turkeys and llama, not to mention jade and gold decorative art, are helping our economy.”
Marie looked at Ptolemy in surprise, but she got over the surprise quickly. Thaïs, his mistress—for lack of a better word—traveled on the Queen of the Sea for months and she was a very smart woman who studied intently. And apparently shared her thoughts with Ptolemy. She looked around the table and saw Dag’s expression. Roxane, seated beside Dag, was showing nothing but polite interest, but Dag’s face was easier to read. There was a cynical twist to his lips; not a very severe one, but it was enough. Marie looked back at Ptolemy and realized that the satrap of Egypt wasn’t in any great hurry to see Eumenes defeat Cassander and Antigonus. As long as Eumenes was busy in Macedonia or Babylon, Ptolemy would be able to strengthen Egypt and the other territories he had gobbled up since Alexander’s death.
With good planning—and just a little luck on Ptolemy’s part—Egypt would be too powerful for the United Satrapies and States of the Empire to fight by the time they got around to trying to reimpose imperial control and make him give back Syria, the Palatine, the kingdoms of Nabataean and Judea.
“Surely,” Marie said, “the goods that might be found in southern Africa or shipped by the Queen from India to the Port of Suez will add more to the empire’s economy.”
“Perhaps, but the—” Ptolemy held up a hand. “What is that expression that my daughter picked up from you ship people . . . ? Something about birds and hands?”
“A bird in the hand is worth two in the bush.” Marie lifted an eyebrow.
“Yes, that’s it. The transatlantic trade and the Mediterranean trade are birds in the hand. This trip to south of the great desert is very much birds in the bush.”
“That’s not the only factor,” said Eleanor Kinney. “There are going to be new trade ships. In fact, we hear that there are sailing, or at least primarily sailing, ships that are attempting the transatlantic crossing already. From Rome and Carthage, even from here. Exploration and establishing trade routes and weather stations will help the whole world.”
“And,” added Amanda Miller, “the sooner those trade routes are established, the sooner ships from New America and the Mediterranean powers, can follow in relative safety. Don’t forget, Satrap, that the weather predictions that our computer models can provide are very dependent on the number and spread of our weather stations. The weather stations dotted around the Mediterranean help, but a storm front from the Atlantic might send a hurricane to Trinidad with almost no warning. Storms and rain, high winds, all these things could destroy your crops in the field if you are not warned.”
Marie watched Ptolemy’s expression as Mrs. Miller went through this list of advantages. He didn’t seem convinced, but Dag was smiling and so was Lars.
Royal Palace, Alexandria
January 15, 319 BCE
“Did you get them to delay?” Thaïs asked.
“Not for a day, and I couldn’t use the oil depot at Suez, because they know we’re building it anyway. I’d like to know how they learned that.”
Thaïs laughed. “Come, now! You know that the radio team is here as much to spy as to provide communications. Bruce Lofdahl is a nice man and TinTin Wai is charming, if her accent is sometimes hard to follow. But they are collecting information on Alexandria and the rest of Egypt and reporting it back to the Queen of the Sea.”
Ptolemy did indeed know that. He was just blowing off steam, another one of the ship people sayings. This one hadn’t made much sense to Ptolemy until he had seen one of the new steam engines in operation. “I know, but Menelaus says that the ship people are cooperating with Roxane. Even if they don’t do anything so overt as dropping troops or shelling coastal cities, just sailing along the coast in sight of land will scare the crap out of Tlepolemus.” That, at least, wasn’t one of the ship people’s catchy phrases.
“What’s the word from Eumenes?”
“He’s still at the Bosphorus and, according to Claudius, building pontoons.”
“They should be getting close, shouldn’t they?”
“Yes, but the Bosphorus is wide even at its narrowest point. It’s going to take them a while.”
“How long?”
“Figure fifteen feet between two pontoons, including the width of one of the pontoons. That’s a hundred and fifty pontoons or close to it. There are the bridge sections that fit over the pontoons. But there will be different groups working on pontoons and bridge sections.” He snorted. “From what Claudius said, they are even using a group to make railings for the sides of the bridge, but that won’t take any more time. Just more hands working on it. It will take several days for each pontoon, but again they will be making several pontoons at the same time. A month and a half, maybe two months from when they started. Add two weeks for the time it took them to build the factory and arrange to have the wood and fabric brought in. Not today or tomorrow, but I would be surprised if it takes Eumenes more than another month.
“Then they have to tie them together. That’s a week right there, and they will be doing it under the arrows of Lysimachus.”
“Will they?”
“What do you mean?”
“They have the ship people rockets.”
Ptolemy stood suddenly and strode across the room, then back. “I’ve seen the steam cannon, but not their rockets.” Frustration was clear in his voice. “I don’t have any idea how effective they will be. They might do very little, or they might wipe Lysimachus’ army from the western shore of the Bosphorus as though they were a mighty broom.”
“I saw a couple of examples while we were in New America, but it was only a few rockets, fired one at a time.” Thaïs reached up and tugged on a curl of her dark brown hair. “They have the range to reach across the Bosphorus, I’m almost certain. But how accurate they will be at that range, I’m not sure. What I do know is that they often explode either just before or just after they hit the ground. It is like a grenade, but larger.”
Now Ptolemy sat back down. Egypt had grenades. Gunpowder was one of the first bits of ship people knowledge the locals gained. Dinocrates started using black powder in construction months ago, and Ptolemy had a unit of grenadiers training with the small, throwable bombs. They were fused, not contact, explosives, and there had been two very demonstrative accidents, where a grenade was lit, then dropped.
A total of seven dead, five the first time and two the second. Against a phalanx, grenades would be pure murder.
“Accuracy wouldn’t have to be that great if the grenades in the rockets are large enough. Then there is the shock value. I’ve had to pull quite a few of my soldiers out of the grenadiers. Veterans who I would have called fearless are sometimes terrified of the things. It’s the indiscriminate nature of the weapons. Not even that, exactly. With a flight of arrows, you can hold up your shield and if you hold it right, you have a good chance. With grenades, there is nothing you can do. You die, or don’t. In the second accident, a man standing not five feet from the grenade was barely scratched, but a man almost fifteen feet away had a piece of shrapnel go right through his breastplate.”
“The ship people’s way of war,” Thaïs said, “lacks in honor, I think.” Thaïs followed Alexander the Great’s army from Macedonia to India and back. She’d seen many battles and had been forced to wield a sword in defense of the baggage train in two of them. She respected war as a contest of skill, strength and courage. But the way the ship people did it. . . . She shook her head. It wasn’t the better man who won when ship people fought. It was the man with the better tools.
And that meant that Eumenes was almost certain to cross the Bosphorus successfully. What would happen after that was less certain, because Eumenes only had so many of the critical venturi for the rockets.
Community center, Fort Plymouth
January 16, 319 BCE
Carthalo took his seat with a beer in one hand and a super turkey and bacon corn-flour wrap with lettuce, tomato, and green pepper in the other.
It was the 3:00 to 3:30 news report, the one that was in Phoenician. And most of the people sitting on the chairs in front of the television were from Carthage. About three-quarters were former slaves, indentured or not. The rest were freemen who came looking for opportunity. And Captain Boka, who gave all his slaves their freedom, was seated next to his wife, who was a former slave. Carthalo wasn’t sure whether to admire the captain or just acknowledge that he was a crazy man.
The news came on and Carthalo watched as he drank his beer. They talked about the rubber groves up north and the work on the copper-wire-pulling shop on 5th Street, then about where the two big ships were at the moment—which Carthalo didn’t care about at all—then ended up with a report on the war in the Alexandrian Empire, which he cared about even less. He took a bite out of his wrap as the screen showed a map of the Bosphorus with a little red dot where Eumenes’ army was supposed to be.
Then the report was over and so was Carthalo’s lunch. He went back to the shop on 12th Street.
Lydia, east of the Bosphorus Straits
January 16, 319 BCE
The blacksmith took the cone in his hand and placed its tip against the round oblong of wrought iron. Then he struck the conical wedge with his hammer. He looked at the still-yellow oblong and hit it again to try and get his wedge a bit deeper. Then he lifted the whole thing and knocked it against his anvil to loosen the still very much unfinished venturi. Pharnabazus gave him one of the venturi that the ship people made as a model, but he built the tools to make the thing himself, working it out from the shape of the bells, one on each end and the hole between them.
He put the venturi back in the fire and selected a smaller punch. Even with the tools he had and starting from a blank provided by other smiths in Lydia, making a venturi was a lot of work.
On the other hand, Strategos Eumenes had promised to buy all he produced.
Eumenes’ headquarters
Lydia, east of the Bosphorus Straits
“Not enough,” Pharnabazus said. “Not to affect this battle anyway. And probably not to affect any battles that we will fight in the next three or four months.”
“And the cost,” Eurydice complained, “of one of those damned venturi is almost as much as a short sword. Worse, we can only use the venturi once.”
“That is true, Majesty,” Eumenes agreed. “Everything either of you have said is completely true. But even more expensive in the long run would be trying to cross the Bosphorus with only swords and arrows. We could do it, yes. But it would cost us a thousand men and more. If we can get a force on the far side of the strait with minimal casualties, they can hold it while the rest of our army crosses and our army is bigger than Lysimachus’, especially if Seuthes is tying down half of Lysimachus’ army with his attacks.”
“How long, then?” Eurydice asked, even though by now they all knew the schedule by heart. She was just nervous.
“Another week,” Eumenes said.