Poseidon's Spear

8

Oiasso welcomed us as victors, which we were. Tertikles was enraged, at first, that we’d stormed Centrona without him.

Doola hugged me on the beach, and introduced me to his wife.

One trick of leadership that I learned young was never to question a man’s taste in bed-partners. No faster way to lose his faith, his loyalty, his courage. That said, though, I’d always known that Doola and Seckla were… together. It wasn’t a spoken thing. It just — was.

And then, one fine day, we landed at Oiasso, Doola fell for a Kelt girl and the next I knew, he was wed. Doola was my friend, practically my brother. It was not my place to even ask. I hugged him, kissed her and bade them every fortune.

But Seckla stood on the beach with death in his eyes. He was younger: tough, strong, tall and thin, and his love went to hate, all at once. I think he’d assumed that Doola would wake up one morning and be done with the woman. Instead, he married her.

And Seckla was also my friend. Seckla was touchier, more full of fire, perhaps less useful sometimes — but not on this last raid. Seckla looked at Doola, and I looked at Seckla.

Command. Leadership. A never-ending labyrinth of difficult decisions.

Tara got it all in one glance. Or maybe knew it from gossip. Either way, she was quick.

‘They were lovers?’ she asked. Actually, she asked something cruder. Her Greek was barbaric.

‘Yes.’ I was moving cautiously towards Seckla. I was afraid he’d kill his former friend right there.

She laughed. ‘I’ll find him someone,’ she said. She laughed again.

‘Men!’

Vasileos had finished both vessels. They were a little longer than Lydia, with beautiful lines, a slightly narrower entry, rather bluffer bows. The ram bow rose just a little at the tip, so that in heavy water, the cutwater would — perhaps — push the bow up, not down. Or so Vasileos theorized.

We sat down to our welcome feast, with Tertikles looking just about as happy as Seckla.

He was easy.

Tara told him that I planned to raid to the south, all along the coast, and he brightened.

A black-haired girl with a narrow face and huge eyes went to

Seckla and hesitantly sat down with him.

Tara winked at me.

Seckla ignored her.

More fool he. But I had Vasileos watch him, and then I ordered Alexandros to watch him. Alexandros, like many other young men I have met and known, had discovered that he liked to be trusted — liked to be responsible. He was rising to command.

I felt old. I’d done all this before; none of it was new.

‘What do we do with the prisoners?’ Doola asked me.

‘I’d like to ransom them,’ I said.

We left it there.

Summer was slipping away by the time we got the cathead repaired on the trireme. And my nearly two hundred former oar-slaves created a certain chaos in the town — just feeding them strained Tertikles to the maximum. So all the silver and the tin from the raid went to paying for grain from other lords.

I gave up on trade and armed them with the helmets I’d made, and we used the rest of the hides to make plain spolas with yokes over the shoulders.

You might think that I’d be away south after Demetrios, Gaius and the rest, but I knew I was up against at least a pair of triremes with expert crews. And my prisoner told me that most of the slaves who went to the south were used in the silver mines above Olisipo on the Tagus, a river to the south of Centrona with a broad estuary, a dangerous bar and silver and gold in the mountains behind it.

He was very talkative.

I promised to release him with his wife and daughters on the coast south of Olisipo — after my raid. He didn’t seem to mind.

Men can be stupid.

The grain was ripe in the fields and the apples were nearly ripe on the trees, and all four of my ships were ready for sea. I’d rowed my new warship up and down, and I’d roared myself hoarse in three languages trying to make the Keltoi obey, something at which, to be honest, they weren’t very good. Keltoi don’t obey, they discuss. Keltoi debate. Every man is the equal of every other man.

On the other hand, I ate well, exercised, trained men to use the sword and shield and made love every night to a woman who — well, who knew what she was about. It is very different for a man to make love to a woman who is the same size as he is. Very different. Very Athletic.

Ah, the blushes.

We celebrated the summer feast of Demeter — at least, that’s what it was to me — and Tertikles sacrificed a slave, which was barbaric as far as I was concerned. He came aboard my trireme, because it was more comfortable. We had three triakonters, packed to the gunwales with Keltoi warriors in good armour, and a trireme with former Phoenician slaves, armed and ready to fight.

We were ready.

The gods had other ideas. We put to sea and sailed for little more than two hours before the wind turned round and headed us, and we were lucky to slip easily back into the estuary and land on our beach at Oiasso. Two days later, we rowed out past the headland and were back before dark — the wind was too fierce for the trireme.

Tempers flared.

Keltoi picked up their gear and went home. Oddly, this was balanced by late arrivals, who wandered down from the mountains as if arriving a week late was perfectly normal. Of course, they’d never rowed, and they resented being taught.

Tertikles became surly, and only his sister being there prevented violence.

We were windbound for ten days. I rowed in the estuary, and Vasileos kept them hard at it in the Lydia, but the other two ships did nothing but eat, drink and sleep. The season was getting on; we had our first cool night.

Seckla tried to kill Doola. It was quick, and carefully premeditated. But while Vasileos was busy, commanding his ship, Alexandros was right there, and he tackled the Numidian boy, tore the knife from his grasp and then knocked him unconscious.

The next day, I sat with Seckla in my tent, watching the whitecaps in the estuary and cursing the gods.

When his eyes opened, he looked at me for a moment and then rolled over so that he faced the wall of the tent.

‘You are an idiot,’ I said.

His silence was his only reply.

‘If you had killed him, I would have killed you,’ I said.

‘Fine,’ he said. ‘Kill me now.’

‘In a year, this will be a bitter memory. In five years, it will scarcely trouble you. In ten years, you’ll make jokes about it.’ I put a hand on his shoulder.

‘No,’ he said.

‘Yes,’ I said. ‘I know. I know, lad. I have been abandoned, and I have abandoned others. It comes and goes.’

‘When we were slaves,’ he spat, ‘you would moan in your sleep, and say a name. Always the same name. Briseis, Briseis. Always the same.’ He rolled over suddenly, and glared at me. ‘Tell me you have forgotten her, yes, old man?’

I shrugged. ‘I have not forgotten her. But I don’t burn. And neither will you.’

‘My life is over.’ He tried to turn back over.

I pinned him with an elbow. ‘No, it isn’t. And now you can be your own man, and stop being in his shadow.’

Silence.

The young burn so hot, and they have so much energy for hate, and anger. So I put a watch on him.

The next day, the wind pinned us to the beach, and Doola came to my tent. I hugged him, and he went into Seckla, as if Seckla was sick and needed visitation, which was true in a way.

Seckla had a knife. He slashed Doola’s face, and then turned it on himself.

There are advantages to being a hardened killer. When a good friend tries to kill himself, you can disarm him without taking a scratch. I had the knife before he’d done much more than scratch his dark skin. He glared at me like an angry tomcat. I went to Doola and found that, while he was cut to the bone, it was really just a flesh wound. Face wounds bleed like — well, like face wounds. There seems to be enough blood to be fatal.

Hard to staunch, too. The blood went on and on.

Seckla watched — Alexandros was pinning him to his bed. ‘Did I kill him?’ he asked.

Doola got up with a linen towel against his face, soaked with blood.

Let me just say, the following conversation happened in a language I don’t understand — well, mostly. Most of it was in their tongue. Despite that, I understood it fine, and besides, I’ve heard the story told a dozen times.

‘Stop being a fuckhead,’ he said.

‘You betrayed me!’ Seckla screamed.

Doola shrugged. ‘Grow up. Be a man. It’s time to leave childish things. I want a wife and children. We are free now. We can have anything.’

‘I want you!’ Seckla said.

‘No, you don’t. You want someone to take care of you. I want to be a free man. I’m still your friend.’

You get the picture. It went on for as long as it took a man to run five stades. Blood flowed down Doola’s face, and he shouted at Seckla, and Seckla shouted back. Keltoi came and stood around, watching the entertainment.

Finally, they both stopped.

An odd silence fell, a sort of crowded hush as many, many people who had been listening all listened harder.

In the hush, I heard something. I had Seckla by the shoulders at the time. Vasileos, who had run to the sound of the shouting, stood in the doorway. He heard what I heard.

He ran out of the door.

I’m ashamed to say I dropped Seckla like a hot piece of meat and ran after him.

The sun was bright and the wind had dropped and now, a whisper of east wind blew across the hills like a lover’s caress.

‘Man the ships,’ I barked. I knew that once we got to sea, all this foolishness would be gone. Nothing, nothing had gone well since we reached past the Pillars. I wanted to collect my friends, steal some silver and go home.

I was no less an idiot than Seckla.

Four days sailing and rowing brought us to the Iberian settlement across the bay from Centrona. They didn’t give us a hero’s welcome — we had too many ships — but they sold us pigs and barley and we ate well enough.

‘Ships come,’ said the headman. With Sittonax to support me, we finally established that a few weeks before, a pair of triremes had come to Centrona, landed for a day and rowed away south.

That wasn’t all good.

I bought all the grain I could, which wasn’t as much as I wanted, and we rowed south.

We had to beach every evening. In a smaller boat, a triakonter, you can stay the night at sea. Right up to a fifty-oared ship, you can stay two or three days at sea and still have enough food to feed your crew, stowed in the bilges and under the benches. But triremes only carried food and water for one day. A trireme needs to make port — or beach — every night.

But I knew I needed a heavy ship. So we beached, and bought fish — fish for three hundred men. Grain. Rotgut wine, terrible small beer. At extravagant prices, and the haggling meant that the crew ate after dark, each night.

What was worse, I had to turn back every day to find the laggards. The two Keltoi ships always left the beach late and rowed slowly, if at all. The Keltoi were far too proud to row. If they didn’t have a wind, they’d idle along.

I was starting to hate them. And Tara inevitably took their side.

Useless lubbers. No wonder they hadn’t built their own ships.

Sittonax laughed. ‘Wait until you meet the Venetiae,’ he said. Then he made a face. ‘Of course they never row, either.’

Six days we spent on the coast of Iberia. For an expedition that depended on surprise, we were the most incompetent squadron since Poseidon ruled the seas. We were loud, we spread over stades, we were visible from every headland. We never sailed before the sun — we were always caught on the sea by high noon. We ate late, and the Keltoi drank too much, any night that there was anything to drink.

Little by little, I lost control of the expedition. From here, I can see just how it happened. I wasn’t interested in taking Tertikles on, day after day, night after night. He, on the other hand, was relentless in his lazy, shiftless, arrogant way. Every day, he would push his own authority.

After six days, he left my ship and moved into one of the two triakonters that were all Keltoi.

His sister went after me the next morning. ‘You treat my brother like a slave,’ she said.

‘No, Tara. I treat him like a fool who knows nothing of war or the sea.’ I wasn’t taking this, even from her.

‘My brother is a master of war. He has killed twenty men in single combat.’ She was spitting mad. ‘You cannot take the tone with him that you take. You speak as if to a child.’

‘He wanted me to put the sail up,’ I said.

‘It was a simple request.’ She stood with her hands on her hips.

‘The wind was against us.’ I shook my head. I hope you are seeing what I had to deal with.

She shrugged. ‘So you say,’ she said.

What do you do?

I just let it go.

Seven days, and we sighted the mouth of the Tagus.

I knew from my prisoner that the mines were in the mountains east of the river mouth — about a hundred stades inland, on the south side of the river. So I led my squadron out to sea, and we passed the mouth of the Tagus well to seaward, and then angled back east and landed on the soft sand south of the river mouth. Well south.

That night, I gathered my captains. Or rather, that’s what I thought I was doing. Instead, when Tertikles and his war-captains joined me and Vasileos, Doola and Alexandros at the fire, the Keltoi refused to discuss plans.

Tertikles was in full armour. He jerked a thumb at himself with vast self-importance. ‘I’ll do as I think best,’ he said. ‘And I intend to attack the settlement.’

I thought about it for several heartbeats. It seemed to me that I had two choices: I could kill him, or I could submit to him. Both of those alternatives bored me. Or I could let him go his own way.

‘So be it,’ I said. ‘Enjoy yourself.’

‘You will follow my lead,’ he said.

‘No,’ I said. ‘No, we’re quits here, Tertikles. You make your attack, I’ll make mine.’

He was puzzled, a gleam of gold and bronze in the firelight. ‘What do you plan?’ he asked.

I grinned, my hand on my sword hilt. I may have been wrong — I never found out — but I suspected that I could have put him down before he could take a breath. ‘None of your business,’ I said.

Tara frowned. ‘You must help my brother.’

I shook my head. ‘No. Sorry, Tara. I never intended to attack the settlement. I’m not even going to scout it. It’s defended — we’ll never get as lucky as we did at the last one.’

‘You are a coward,’ she said.

It is funny how much some things hurt, and other things don’t. Cowardice wasn’t something I’d ever really worried about. So I shrugged.

Which infuriated her. ‘Our marriage ends here, on this beach,’ she shouted.

‘Goodbye,’ I said.

She followed her brother across the sand.

Dawn found us at sea. I didn’t trust Tertikles not to burn the trireme out of spite.

But I turned south, not north. We ran two small coves down the coast and put in again before the Keltoi were even awake. We beached stern-first, and brought the ship well up the beach. Turned her turtle, in case it rained.

Then I gathered my whole crew, armed them and we marched inland.

Inland.

Why attack the settlement? The silver came from a hundred stades away. And that was where, in all likelihood, my friends were, if they were alive.

We marched across the plains south of the Tagus. It was hot here, and we raised dust as we marched, and there was no hiding the gleam of metal. By mid-morning, I was sure we could be seen for sixty stades.

There were farms, and plantations. We took water from wells, and I stole horses from the first really prosperous farm we passed, and more horses from the next. Only about twenty of us could ride and we spread out, to prevent surprise. I’ve never really loved horses, but they can be damned useful.

And Iberians have fine horses.

By late afternoon, my prisoner said we were halfway to the mines. We found a stand of trees, and my entire small army went into the trees and laid down, and in minutes most of my people were asleep. Even the stolen horses slept. Alexandros took four men and found a stream, and we filled canteens. I was too nervous — too aware — to sleep. So I helped carry water, and I climbed a tree and watched in all directions.

When the sun began to dip, I slid down my tree and ordered Doola to wake the men.

In the distance, there was smoke, towards the estuary of the Tagus.

I got my men together. We drank water, ate some dried pork and moved east, into the hills. There was a good road, and we found it quickly, and after that, I didn’t need my prisoner.

We found the mines at dark. My herdsmen and shepherds crept around in the dark for a few hours, and came back and reported.

I had hoped that when Tertikles attacked the settlements, the slave guards at the mine would react. What I should have known is that a silver mine is much more important than a bunch of slaves and their families. I can be foolish like that.

The guards were alert and awake. They didn’t actually catch any of my people, but we had the immense disappointment of hearing the alarm sounded — a man beating a copper plate and shouting, in Phoenician.

So much for surprise.

I slept for a little, and when I awoke I decided to have a look for myself. I climbed above the mine — actually a huge open pit — with Giannis and Alexios, another shepherd. Lights twinkled below us like orange stars.

Giannis had grown up during the summer. He lay on his stomach and pointed. ‘I think these are the slave quarters,’ he said. ‘See? The largest building. Next to it — the tower. Yes? You see? And then — I don’t know what this other building does.’

I did. I could smell it. They smelted in that shed. In the moonlight, I could make out pits and slag heaps among the shadows. I’d had a glimpse in the last light. It was the only time I can remember where my skills as a smith had tactical value.

I had a dozen archers, a dozen trained marines and a lot of oarsmen. I couldn’t afford a complicated plan; we lacked the skill or the trust. Neither did I have the time. On the other hand, the garrison couldn’t be more than fifteen or twenty men.

And when push came to shove, I didn’t really need to storm the tower. I wanted to — that’s where the silver would be. But what I really needed were the slaves. If Demetrios and Gaius and Daud were here, they’d be in that slave pen.

Sometimes, you make complex decisions on the slenderest of evidence. It can lead to foolishness. Or brilliance.

I put a hand on Giannis’s shoulder. ‘I’m going for the slave pens,’ I said. ‘If I’m not back in an hour, tell Doola to come and get me.’

Giannis argued, but not for long, and then I was ghosting along through the darkness.

I am an old campaigner. I knew how to move well in the dark, even in a foreign place on foreign soil. I fell once, with a clatter. In fact, I fell, rolled and came up one twitch short of falling over a forty-foot cliff that would either have killed me or left me a broken man. But I got up and moved on, no worse for near death — there’s a moral there — I stubbed my sandalled toes several times on the rock. But I moved slowly, took my time and in an hour I had gone down the slope and moved from slag heap to slag heap across the flat ground at the edge of the great black pit.

The slag was fascinating. I lay against one heap and smelled it, ran my hand over it. I even tasted a sample.

That slag heap told me more than my prisoner had told me. More than the slaves had told. It explained everything.

They didn’t mine silver here.

They mined gold.

I crept carefully across the last of the open ground towards the slave house. It was quite big — a sort of hall of hides, with palisade walls — bigger than the largest barn in Boeotia, and it smelled. It smelled of men.

The timbers in the palisade were huge — big, resinated pines from the hillsides.

The hide roof was well up over my head.

I went to the door, first. It was at the top of a low ramp, up a set of steps, and it took me precious time to find.

It was latched outside, with a heavy iron spike driven through a shackle attached to a huge sliding bar.

I crouched, listening to the men in the tower. There were at least two on duty. They knew that someone was moving.

‘It’s a fox,’ said one, with a deep voice.

‘It’s not a fox, you fool,’ said a high-pitched voice. ‘That was a man on the slag heap.’

‘Wake the captain, then,’ said the deep voice.

‘You wake him, idiot,’ said the higher voice.

And so on.

I sat on my heels in the shadow of the slave quarters and waited.

This had happened to me many times. I feel… it is impossible to explain… that I am waiting for a sign, a signal. There is no point in hurrying. I had no idea what I was waiting for, but I waited, and I prayed to Heracles, my ancestor, and to Poseidon, Lord of Horses, and the stars wheeled above me, mocking my pretensions to greatness. I thought of Briseis, and Euphoria, and Lydia. Of Phrynichus, and Aristides. For the first time in months, I thought of Miltiades.

It is an odd thing. I suspect that, when I am on the edge of life and death, perhaps I am closer to the gods. My mind is clear; I think well.

There, in the shadow of the doorway, I took stock, and found that I was wasting time. That my mourning for Euphoria was over. I missed Penelope; I missed Plataea. I didn’t want to start again.

I didn’t want to make a life of killing men, either.

It was a moment of great clarity for me. I remember it much better than I remember the landing on the beach, or the march overland. I believe that the gods reached out and touched me. I think that Athena stood by my shoulder, and helped open my mind.

I reached up and opened the iron shackle. It wasn’t loud, but it made a distinctive noise.

‘What’s that?’ asked the deep voice.

I began tapping on the door. We had tapped on Dagon’s ship. If Neoptolymos was in there, he’d hear the tapping.

‘I say we wake the captain,’ said Deep Voice.

‘And then he orders us to go out in the dark,’ said High Voice. Tap-tap-tap. Tap. Tap.

Thunk.

Well, that could be any slave. On the other hand, it scarcely mattered. I realized I was trying too hard.

I reached up and pulled the bar. It moved silently, the wood smooth.

The door opened inwards, of course.

There were fifty men by the door. Stinking, filthy and thin, eyes shining in the dark.

‘Neoptolymos?’ I whispered. ‘Daud? Demetrios?’

Men were grabbing my arms.

Damn, I thought.

‘He’s in the slave quarters!’ High Voice shouted.

Damn.

The men in the tower reacted far faster than I expected. They must have had a sortie ready and armed. The men on top of the tower shouted, and banged on a piece of copper. There was some more shouting.

The slaves around me seemed to hang back.

‘Anyone speak Greek?’ I asked. No need for silence now.

‘I do, friend,’ said a familiar voice.

And then the Phoenicians attacked.

There were a dozen. They sprinted across the yard — obvious in the moonlight. They had armour and spears.

Of course they did. In one glance, I knew they were Poieni, citizen infantry. Phoenician hoplites. It was, after all, a gold mine.

‘Daud?’ I asked.

‘Arimnestos?’ he asked. ‘By the gods!’

And then the Poieni were coming at me.

They had to come up the short ramp and then the steps. And perhaps they didn’t really believe that the intruder would be armed.

I got one for nothing. You usually do. My spear had not lost its purpose, and my hand had not lost its skill. My spearhead went in one eye, and he fell on top of his mates.

I wasn’t going into the slave quarters. If I did, they could simply lock the door on me and hunt me down in daylight.

But I had the glimmer of a plan. So I took a step backwards onto the low platform just inside the log lintel.

They took a long minute to decide to come after me, though. And when they did, they came silently, their bare feet padding on the steps, fast and purposeful.

The first man came though the door with his aspis thrust well up ahead of him. I launched myself at him, and we went shield to shield in the near darkness. My spear was leaning against the wall, ready to hand. I had a short sword in my fist, and I cut over his shield. Then under it.

This man was good. He rolled with my shield slam and got free — got his shield down, and then up, while he shortened his grip on his spear.

I got my sword against his helmet — but not hard enough. Still, where a man’s head goes, his weight goes, so I kept pushing, and he had to bend back.

But his spear started searching for me, wild pecks like a snake striking at a bird.

All in near-perfect darkness.

Something changed.

A man behind him thrust with his spear at my head, and some noise betrayed him. I wrenched my head to my right. My adversary’s head cracked against the doorpost. Helmet and all, he fell away from me. The spear hit my helmet, but not a killing blow.

I got my weight under me, powered forward, got my right knee into my adversary’s groin and then swung my aspis into his head — and by sheer luck blocked the next thrust from his partner.

There is no going back, in such combat.

I was too close to do anything but grapple.

I let the aspis drop off my right arm as my left arm swept past my new opponent’s head, and I seized his aspis with my left hand, spun it and broke his arm, turned him as he screamed and pulled. I threw him in, through the door and in among the slaves.

‘ DOOLA! ’ I roared.

The third man came up the steps. I had his spearhead. Heracles gave it to me: suddenly it was in my right hand, which ran down the shaft even as he ran up the steps, and I turned it, slammed the spear across his aspis and then slipped it over his head and locked him by the neck. The fourth man thrust at me. The third man’s face went rigid, and I backed up the steps, using him as a shield. I was strong.

Oh, I was strong. I laughed. I laughed at Dagon.

Break my body, will you?

My victim screamed, and I got the spear shaft under his jaw at last and broke his neck. Eager hands reached from behind me and grabbed him by the helmet and towed him into the slave quarters.

The fourth man was still in shock. He’d just seen three comrades die — one, judging from the man’s skill, his captain. And then he’d stabbed his mate.

I got a deep breath into my body, seized my spear from behind the door and threw it into him so that he fell, the spear deep in his body. He thrashed, and the other men flinched away from him instinctively.

Men behind me passed me my aspis.

I had all the time in the world to get it on my arm.

I started down the steps.

The Poieni shuffled.

And broke.

I must have laughed. I’m laughing now.

Oh, the power.

I’d missed this.

They might as well have stood their ground. None of them made the door of the tower, because Doola was there, and his archers shot them down in the moonlit open ground. A few ran off into the slag heaps.

Some ruthless bastard in the tower slammed the door shut.

The slaves started to come out of their quarters. The door was open.

In the darkness, they looked like creatures from the underworld. They were too thin to be men.

I didn’t know Neoptolymos when he stepped up to me. In Sicily, he had filled out into a solid rock, with muscles that stood out like a statue of Heracles. Now, the skin was stretched tightly across a skull-like head and his tow-blond hair was Medusa’s in the moonlight.

‘Brother?’ he asked, his voice a sibilant whisper.

I thought he was some Iberian who spoke Greek. He didn’t look like an Illyrian.

But I got it. Some interplay of light and shadow, something in the set of the mouth.

I crushed him to me.

‘We knew you’d come.’ He managed a laugh.

‘Where are the others?’ I asked.

He pointed towards the gaping pit, a black hole in the dark. ‘They tried to escape and were caught, so they aren’t allowed out of the pit. Gaius especially.’ He grinned. ‘He’s a bad slave.’

‘But alive,’ I said. I feared the worst. This was insane. I’d heard rumours that the Athenians used slaves like this in their silver mines, but it made no sense, and now I knew that I should have come as soon as I knew where they were.

But that kind of thinking leads to mistakes. I shrugged it off. ‘Let’s go and get them,’ I said.

‘You have to wait for daylight,’ Neoptolymos said. ‘You can’t even get down the ladders in the dark.’ He shrugged. ‘I tried, once.’

I reckoned it was two hours until dawn.

Doola came out of the moonlit darkness and hugged Neoptolymos. So did Seckla.

Neoptolymos laughed aloud. ‘By the gods,’ he said. ‘You came. You came!’

There were a hundred or more slaves milling about in the darkness. Many of them ran off — I have no idea what happened to them. Many, of course, must have been Iberians, and found their way home. Or died.

But there were a hundred men who stayed: Greeks, Etruscans, Iberians, Africans from Libya and farther off, and Keltoi, too. Neoptolymos knew them — most of them by name — and he moved among them, giving orders — well, he had been a prince, once.

Meanwhile, Doola and I looked at the tower. Men at the top of it shot arrows at us, but I, who had endured Persian archery, didn’t think much of their weak bows and their piss-poor shooting — in the dark, no less.

We walked all around the tower.

‘If we burn it, every Phoenician in Iberia will know we are here,’ Doola said.

I thought about it. There wasn’t a hurry — yet — and I took some time to think.

‘If they find our ships, we’re fucked,’ I said. ‘But, other than that, do you really think they have two hundred soldiers? In this whole colony?’

Doola’s eyes flashed in the dark. He laughed a cruel laugh. Doola was a gentle man; not a man who fancied killing, not a man who loved the feel of a spear in his hand. But slavery enraged him.

‘You want them to come here?’ he asked.

‘We have the high ground, and their gold. They’d be fools to come for us. But if they do, we can teach them a lesson.’ I grinned. He grinned.

We set fire to the tower.

It took time. It is one thing to say, ‘The tower is made of wood’, and another thing entirely to get it to burn.

Here’s what we did. We stripped all the shingles off the livestock sheds, and then we broke down the sheds themselves and the big wooden structure where the smelting went on. We had a hundred pairs of willing hands, and it is literally unbelievable how much damage a hundred angry former slaves can do to their master’s property.

Then we had ten of the strongest slaves, led by Neoptolymos, carry loads of flammables up to the tower, under the cover of twenty of us with aspides held over their heads.

The men in the tower understood immediately, of course.

We didn’t lose a man.

Heh.

Six trips to the tower, and back, across open ground.

Then Doola lit a torch — one of ours from the ship. He was going to throw it at the pile, but I ran it to the pile and placed it well under. Nothing hit me, because it is really very difficult to shoot straight down in the dark with a bow.

The pile caught. The tower caught.

The men inside died screaming. It should have been horrible, but instead, it was deeply satisfying. Make of that what you will.

Before dawn, the tower was like a lighthouse, a beacon, with flames ten times the height of a ship’s mainmast roaring into the sky. One of the slaves, a man named Herodikles, sacrificed a ram from the pens and threw the carcass into the fire. He was an Aeolian, from Lesbos, and he’d been a slave for fifteen years, taken while on a pilgrimage to Cyrene.

There were a hundred such stories.

Men told them, while their oppressors tried to scream the smoke out of their lungs and failed. They smelled like roast pork as they burned.

In the morning, when the fire burned less than a mast-height high, and the sun was over the rim of the world, we climbed down into the pit.

They were all there, waiting. They were even thinner, and they didn’t have darkness to hide the open sores, the flies, the ooze of pus. Despite which, they grinned from ear to ear. Gaius. Daud. Demetrios, who looked so bad I was afraid he would die before we could get food into him. I couldn’t even figure out how he could stand on those legs.

They had been slaves for just two months.

The Phoenicians were… I was going to say animals, but no animal except man treats another like that.

We rigged a sling, and lifted them out of the pit. Most of them were too weak to climb the ladder.

While that happened, I went and posted sentries. There was a new spirit among my men: the shepherds, the herdsmen, the fishermen’s sons, the slaves freed at Centrona. We’d been victorious again; we were doing something noble. They were inspired, just as men can be inspired by a great play, or by the noble words of a godlike man like Heraclitus, or by the gods themselves.

I knew as soon as I looked at them. They were ready to do something great.

For the moment, all we had to do was to be alert.

We watched the plains all day while the tower burned. Men looked at me, and I smiled. I kept my own council. There was food in the sheds, animals in the pens, and I prepared a feast on the coals of the tower and served it to the slaves, telling my own men that they should go from slave to slave as if they were slaves themselves.

They did so with good will. The slaves tore into the meat, complained about the lack of wine and bread — mock complaints, although there’s always some awkward sod who feels sorry for himself. But they ate and ate.

I saw no reason to leave so much as a goat alive, so as fast as they ate, we killed more.

And watched the plains.

About noon, we saw the dust cloud.

Seckla was my best rider. I gave him the mounted men, and clear orders. Up at the mine we had a view for fifty stades over the plain, so that I could point out his route — this stream, that copse of trees, that farmhouse.

They cantered away, and men cheered them.

The tower had just about burned out. So I asked the slaves to fetch water from the well, a bucket at a time, and pour it into the coals.

Steam rose to the heavens, carrying the scent of roast meat. Some of it was roast men, and the gods have never rejected such a sacrifice. I remember wondering at myself; I thought Tertikles a barbarian for sacrificing a man before we launched our ships, but I was secretly pleased to have sent twenty Phoenicians screaming to my gods.

Well.

It’s true; I can be a vicious bastard.

When the dust cloud on the plain reached a certain point, I took most of my armed men and marched. We had full bellies and full water bottles, and we moved fast, going downhill, despite the full heat of the summer sun. My friends wanted to come — Gaius demanded it, and muttered words about honour.

I pushed a chunk of goat into his greasy hands. ‘Honour this,’ I said. ‘I’ll do the killing. You do the eating.’

We went down the mountain, crossed the stream at its foot and went along the ridge through the high beech trees until we came to the site I’d chosen on the way. When you are a warrior, you think about these things all the time. That field would make a good place.

That piece of trail.

Ambushes come in as many different shapes as women. And men, too, if you wish. What would make one ambush perfect would be certain death in another.

I had very few missile weapons. So my ambush would be close in, a deadly, hand-to-hand thing. And since my men were on foot, we had to win. Because we were unlikely to outrun pursuit.

If we had had missile weapons — more bows, good javelins and throwing strings, heavy rocks — we might have chosen other sites.

Instead, we lay down among the trees, an arm’s-length from the road. I took my place with Doola, behind a big rock that slaves and oxen had shifted. You could tell, because it stood clear of the ground, where all the other big rocks were half buried. It allowed me to see the road in both directions.

If you ever have cause to lay an ambush, whether you do it with a handful of mud for your brothers, or with a sharp spear for your enemies, remember these simple rules.

Always have a clear line of retreat. Any other ambush is just an elaborate form of suicide.

Tailor your surprise to your arms and your enemy. If you have bows, you should wait at a good killing range, with an open field that won’t block your archery. If you have time, plan your ambush so that your first flight of arrows panics your foe into a worse position. Don’t drive him off a road and into an impregnable stronghold.

The moment anything goes wrong, including an hour before you sight the enemy — run. Men in ambush are absurdly vulnerable.

There, ladies. All my wisdom — wisdom I learned for myself, and not from Heraclitus. He was like a god, but I don’t think he knew much about ambushes.

At any rate…

We lay there. And lay there. An hour passed, and another, and the sun went down noticeably.

I had so much to worry about; a man commanding an ambush always does. Had they stopped and made camp? Taken another route, and even now they were storming the slave camp? They’d given up and gone home.. They’d slipped past us.

Another hour passed. Insects ate us, and men snuck away to piss and snuck back.

Men got the jitters.

And another hour.

And then we heard the sound. Hard to describe, but instantly identifiable. Men — a powerful number of them. Walking with a rattle and tinkle and clank. Talking.

They had two scouts. They were moving two hundred paces ahead of the column — walking on the road. When they came to the edge of our copse of woods, they stopped.

They talked with each other until the column had almost caught up.

Then they came into the woods.

My heart was pounding. The enemy had a hundred men — perhaps double that. It was difficult to count them from my hiding place, but there were many of them. They entered the woods.

Their scouts moved quickly. They were conscious that they’d allowed the column to close up to them too much, and they ran.

But just about even with me, one of them stopped. He was a handsome young man, wearing only a chlamys and a petasos hat and carrying a pair of heavy spears on his shoulder. He stopped from a sprint and looked into the woods. He wasn’t looking at me, he was looking away from me, staring off into the woods.

His mate stopped running and looked back.

‘See something?’ he called in Phoenician.

The first man looked and looked, and then squatted and looked at the road.

‘Men were here,’ he said.

You have to imagine, they were an arm’s-length from me. They didn’t have to shout.

Behind them, the column came rolling along the road.

I saw Alexandros move, and I glared at him. Ambush requires patience.

‘Escaped slaves,’ the second man ventured.

The first man looked all around. He was young. That’s probably what saved him. The young make piss-poor observers. He looked, but didn’t see.

A commanding voice called from behind them on the road. I couldn’t make it out, but it was doubtless their commander, telling his scouts to get a move on. Twilight was only two hours away.

The young man looked around again and shrugged.

He and his companion loped off.

I looked around. I could see Alexandros and Giannis and about fifteen other men.

I waited.

The column trudged forward.

Waited.

‘She had tits like udders — Ba’al, it was disgusting!’

‘He was an ignorant-’

‘So I said-’

‘I drank the wine.’

‘I just want to ask this again-’

They were just men. Tall, short, weak, strong, smart, foolish — they were men, walking down the road on a summer evening, headed for battle. Nervous. Over-talkative, as all men are before a fight. As the tail of the column started to pass me, I saw the last two men of the first taxis nervously checking the draw of their swords while their phylarch told them that they needed to stay together, stay together in the fighting.

‘Pirates! Just pirates. They won’t have any discipline. Like the lot we took yesterday. Don’t worry about-’

I rose from my place and roared my war cry.

We fell on the head of the column. They died, and the survivors broke and ran across the road for the shelter of the trees. Most ran a few steps into the woods before they died, because Doola and his men were on that side of the road, a little farther back.

The second taxis froze outside the woods, listening to the screams of their comrades and the sounds of one-sided hand-to-hand.

My dozen archers began to drop shafts into them.

Perhaps their officer was hit early. Perhaps he was a fool. Either way, they did the worst thing possible — they huddled like sheep and bleated, and the arrows fell.

A dozen good archers can do a lot of damage, even to armoured men, even trained men with good morale.

No one had trained men with good morale in a colony, ten thousand stades from home.

By this time, I was watching them. The fight in the woods was over before it really began — a hundred dead Phoenicians — mercenaries, in fact, mostly north Africans with some Greeks among them.

Men like me.

Heh. But not enough like me.

I started to get my oarsmen in order, and Alexandros was there, and Doola and Sittonax, his long Kelt sword red to the hilt.

I knew the second taxis would break the moment I charged it. You can read these things as easily as you read words on a page. It’s like a woman’s facial expressions. The nervous tick; the cold glance. So, by the same token, you can read the moving of spears, the shuffling of feet and the shaking of horsehair plumes. Nervous fidgets.

‘Charge!’ I roared.

We hadn’t run six paces before they broke. They ran away from our charge, and many of them threw down their shields in the flight. The archers loosed and loosed, until our charge obscured their targets.

I didn’t catch one of them. They ran so early that they easily outdistanced my people, all of whom had already fought in one combat — even an ambush is a combat — and by the time we’d crossed the clearing, it was plain to see we didn’t have the daimon to run them down.

So we went around the darkening battlefield, collecting loot. There wasn’t much. The weapons were average, the armour was leather and often already ruined, and most of the helmets were cheap, open-faced helmets or Etruscan-style salad bowls.

A few men had purses, most of them containing only copper.

Not much to die for.

At twilight, we gave up plundering the dead. There were no survivors, not even the two scouts, who’d been killed by the northern fringe of our ambush. That’s the way of it, when an ambush works.

We left the bodies for the birds, and marched back towards the mine. When we got there, we ate some meat, drank water and watched the steam rising off the ruin of the tower. Then we went to sleep.

I remember that I forgot to post sentries. Luckily, Doola wasn’t as tired, or as foolish.

Not that it mattered.

About midnight, Seckla came back. He had heads dangling from his saddlecloth, bouncing and frightening his horse. It was ghoulish.

I woke up long enough to embrace him and hear that he’d hit the survivors and harried them back to their settlement. And then I went back to sleep.

In the morning, it was grey, and the sun wasn’t going to show. My men were surly with fatigue and reaction. I knew how to cure that.

I got a dozen former slaves and some of the stronger herdsmen, and together we moved the two largest of the charred beams from the stump of the tower. With shovels, we cleared the ash and the collapsed roof materials, but the fire had burned a long time, and almost everything had been consumed.

Except the gold and silver, of course.

It took two hours, and I was beginning to doubt, but there they were — a molten puddle of gold, and another of silver, about a yard apart. A fair amount of gold, and quite a lot of silver.

We took axes and hacked it up into manageable chunks, and loaded it on to our stolen horses. Morale soared.

We gorged once more on the dwindling stock of animals, and then we marched for our ships.

We all squeezed aboard, although the conditions were probably not much better than those in the slave pens. We had two hundred and fifty men in a trireme built for two hundred, and we had sixty men in a triakonter.

Off the Tagus, I signalled to Doola to lay alongside, and he agreed to take his shallower craft over the bar and have a look at the town. It was raining, and rowing the trireme was brutal, and I already doubted whether I could get the ship home to Oiasso like this.

Now that the derring-do was over, I began to consider what had happened to my wife and her brother, my erstwhile allies. I had to assume they’d been defeated. How badly? Badly enough, perhaps, not to make it home. Or worse, badly enough to make it back to Oiasso and close it against me.

Doola caught the morning breeze coming off the land and came back, my beautiful Lydia wallowing with so many people on board. He gave me a thumbs-up as soon as he was close enough to wave.

We went into the estuary at sunset. The moon was lost in the clouds, and the night was black, and we crept up the river, impeded by ignorance and by the current, which was absurdly strong for summer.

The town was twenty stades upstream. We found it, but it had a mole and the approach looked too hard to try in the dark.

On the other hand, there were a dozen small ships on the beach and in the channel on moorings. There was Amphitrite, and there were two more like her — tubby Greek-style merchantmen.

We took them. And for good measure, having silently acquired what we wanted, we set the rest afire. Then, on the dawn breeze and falling tide, we slipped away. My trireme was lighter by fifty men, and Lydia was lighter by thirty. Demetrios insisted on managing Amphitrite himself.

It took us ten days to reach Oiasso.