Reeking of rum and tottering like the earth beneath his feet is inflatable, a salty cove approaches you on the quayside. But the quayside is in Cambridge and his eyepatch is made of tweed. The bandoliers slung athwart his chest are stuffed with Loebs, green and red cloth tattered and stained by wind and salt. You look down and see that the man has only one true leg. From the knee down his right has been replaced with one taken from a plaster-cast of the Aphrodite Kallipygos, shapely white curves gleaming in the sunlight.[1]
‘Avast, Jim-lad!’ the strange man says, swigging something dark and strong-smelling from a canteen with ‘This is a Wug’ written on it. He frowns. ‘Or is it Gem-lass? I finds it hard to tell with undergrads such as ye.’
He grins, displaying teeth as grimy, crooked and uneven as the Roman judicial system. He seems to expect a response.
‘Avast,’ you reply, a little self-consciously.
‘Ye looks worried, lad,’ he says in an accent which surely cannot be real. ‘Has ye never seen a pirate classicist afore?’ Continue reading
Ancient Worlds 