Poseidon's Spear

13

Ever waited for someone in the Agora?

Ever sat by a stream, waiting for a girl who promised to walk with you? Or by a door, because she said she’d be there in a minute?

Ever waited and waited, and been disappointed?

At what point do you walk away?

For me, the issue was winter. The Venetiae were unfailingly polite — even a little oily, which is not how one thinks of barbarians, is it? But they wanted us gone. They feared that the Phoenicians would come, as did I — and they feared that we would make trouble, which wasn’t so far from possible, either. And they feared that we might try to seize our ships back. They feared too that my freed slaves might eat them out of house and home.

I feared the cost. I wasn’t living on charity, but I had made a deal — for the whole journey — and I knew that sooner or later, Detorix would sidle up to me very apologetically and demand that we get under way. I didn’t really have to care, but there might come a further point where the Venetiae would simply refuse to perform their part. Or that the passes would close, and we’d be stuck for another winter in the north country.

Something had happened to me. And the longer I spent in the pretty town of Loluma, the more thoroughly it happened. I was turning back into Arimnestos. I still mourned Euphoria, but I was merely sad. I missed Athens. I missed Plataea.

I was sorry that I had made such a mess of Lydia, and Sicily, but I was determined to go back and set it right.

I was going back to being the man I had been. With, perhaps, some changes. I did not seriously consider, just for example, threatening the Venetiae with the burning of their town, just to keep them in awe.

Of course I’m smiling, thugater. Things change. People change. But some things remain the same always, as you’ll see if you stay with me another hour.

About two weeks after we landed — to be honest, the whole period is a blur of activity to me — a round ship crept up the estuary under oars — eight long sweeps handled in a fairly seamanlike manner — and I sat in my favourite of the three waterfront tavernas, drinking a wooden bowl of the excellent Gaulish wine and watching the ship come in.

She was a trader, of course — a Venetiae ship that had just made the passage to Alba. Not a tin ship, or not this trip — this ship had been far to the north along the east coast of Alba, collecting hides and selling wine.

The captain, whom I‘ll call Accles because that’s the closest I ever got to his name, sat with me for a day, recounting his adventures. He was eager to meet me, because he’d met with the Phoenicians off Vecti and spoken to them.

‘You have made them very angry,’ he said.

Detorix was sitting across from me. Spying, I think — or at least, watching. Leukas translated for me — translated some. By then, my Gaulish-Keltoi wasn’t bad.

‘The Phoenician trierarch said that you… were a pirate who came from Greece just to prey on Phoenician shipping,’ he said.

I smiled. ‘I have no love for Carthage or Tyre,’ I said. ‘I have sunk many of their ships, and killed or taken many of their men.’

Detorix and Accles exchanged a look.

‘Have they asked for you to hand me over?’ I asked.

‘They will,’ Accles answered. ‘I mean, I had no idea who you were until I came ashore here.’

I nodded. ‘Will they come here?’ I asked.

Detorix gave me an odd look. ‘We don’t allow them to come here,’ he said.

I looked at both of them. They both watched me.

I resisted the impulse to place a hand on my xiphos hilt.

While we were all staring — or perhaps glaring — at each other, a woman came in. She was a matron — a year or two older than me, I expect. Keltoi women are very fit, like Spartan women, and you can’t always read their age in their bellies. But she had the wrinkles of laughter in her eyes, and the way she carried her head spoke of dignity combined with, shall we say, experience?

She wore a sword, but that wasn’t so rare among aristocratic Kelts. She looked at me with appraisal — perhaps even challenge — and sat by Accles.

‘Is this the pirate?’ she asked.

Accles pretended to laugh.

‘Yes,’ I said. ‘I am. But not of Keltoi. Merely of Carthaginians.’

She raised an eyebrow. She had red-brown hair and a long, straight nose and wore a gold pin on her wool cloak that was worth… hmm.. a small ship.

‘I’m Arimnestos of Plataea,’ I said.

She looked at Accles. ‘Well?’ she asked.

Detorix leaned forward. ‘He’s on his way south with a cargo of tin.’

‘Stolen tin?’ she asked Detorix.

Ten years before, I’d have slammed my fist on the table and said something like, ‘I’m right here.’

Instead, I sat back and had a sip of wine.

‘He purchased the tin at Vecti,’ Detorix said.

‘With spoils taken from the Phoenicians?’ she insisted.

I snorted.

She ignored me.

Detorix looked at me, though. ‘He says not. He says that he brought trade goods from the Inner Sea.’

‘And the Phoenicians, our most reliable trade partners, are lying — is that it?’ she asked.

Detorix shrugged and didn’t meet her eye.

She turned to me. ‘The Phoenicians landed north of Vecti, burned a village and killed a handful of people,’ she said slowly. ‘My people.’

‘And took fifty of them as slaves?’ I guessed.

She shrugged. ‘Yes, I have reason to believe it.’

I nodded. ‘When I stormed their town, I opened the slave pens. There were hundreds of Keltoi.’ I shrugged. ‘And I rescued them and brought them home. Ask around.’

‘Your attack may have provoked a war,’ she said.

‘They attacked me first,’ I said.

She shrugged, as if the rights and wrongs of the issue didn’t interest her much. And there was no reason it should. As I found out later from Detorix, she was the queen of three tribes, and she needed to keep her peoples happy and well fed — which meant a constant tin trade, reliable alliances and open communications — with the Phoenicians.

‘Wouldn’t it make more sense to burn a couple of their ships to teach them not to enslave your people?’ I asked.

She went back to talking to Detorix. ‘If we just send them his head, will that be enough?’

Detorix shook his head. ‘They don’t even know what he looked like,’ he said.

Well, there’s barbarian honesty for you. They discussed taking me, executing me and sending my head to my enemies — in front of me. It’s honour of a sort.

‘I’m not sure there are enough men in this town to take me,’ I said, conversationally.

She looked at me the way a man would look at a pig, if the pig talked. She smiled. ‘Southerners don’t even know how to use a sword,’ she said.

‘Really?’ I asked. ‘I don’t expect many of our swordsmen come this way. The way I hear it, you get architects, tin vendors and wine merchants.’

She smiled; it was amazingly condescending. Briseis could have taken lessons.

‘And are you a swordsman?’ she asked.

Damn it, I was being played. She knew what I would say, and I was being manoeuvred into giving a display of skill so that I could be killed. And Neoptolymos wasn’t close.

I had a boy — a pais — named Ajax. He was tiny, underfed and fast. He was around me all the time, fetching me wine, carrying my purse — you know, a pais. He wasn’t a slave — or rather, he had been a slave and now he was free, and I’m not sure he had noticed a difference.

‘Ajax, run and fetch Gaius, will you, lad?’ I said. The boy ran out into the afternoon.

The great lady leaned forward. ‘Are you going to show us your swordsmanship?’ she asked.

I frowned. ‘Against whom? You?’

She smiled. ‘You are as far beneath me as the pigs who eat rubbish on my farms, foreigner. Why not fight one of them first?’

I leaned back — I’m a Greek, not a Kelt. I was being bated, and I knew it. And I wasn’t fifteen years old, either.

We were sitting on three-legged wooden stools at a wooden table in the open, under a linen canvas awning that stuck out from a timber building. When I leaned back on two legs, I could put my back against one of the supports that held up the awning.

I pointed a finger — my left hand — at Detorix as if I was going to make an accusation. And then my left hand darted to her right arm and pinned it down, and I drew my kopis and laid it on her throat.

Her eyes were fairly large.

‘Leukas, tell this woman exactly what I say. Are you ready?’

Leukas swallowed. ‘She’s my queen, boss.’

I nodded. ‘Good. Tell her, she can fight me herself. I don’t see any reason to fight the pig, the pig-keeper — you getting this? The pig-keeper’s boss, her warlord, her top swordsman — no, I’ll wait until you’re done.’ I kept her pinned in place. She tried to get to her feet and I slammed her back down on the stool.

‘Or, I’ll just cut her throat and burn the town and steal what I need to get home,’ I said to Detorix. ‘Understand me, Detorix? You tried to take my things and my ships once before. Call me pirate? What you lack here is the force to carry out your will. Understand?’

The silence went on a long time.

Gaius came in. ‘There’s some very unhappy barbarians over there. I think they are sending for archers,’ he said.

‘You will be my second in a duel,’ I said.

He shrugged. ‘Detorix?’

I let go of the queen and backed away.

She looked at me with pure, unadulterated hate.

I smiled. ‘You haven’t met a swordsman, lady. I know, because a swordsman wouldn’t have let that happen. I don’t think you want the humiliation of facing me with a sword in your hand, but unless you apologize to me, now, and swear an oath to the gods that you will not harm me, you can fight.’

She stood straighter. ‘Fight,’ she spat.

I turned my back on her and walked out into the sun.

Leukas followed me. ‘Aristocrats — all they do is fight. And practise to fight.’

I was looking at her sword, which was long and straight. ‘Ajax, go and fetch me my long xiphos,’ I said.

Six burly Kelts in heavy leather came and stood around the queen. I smiled at them. None of them smiled back. Two were huge, and two were quite small — thin and wiry. Such men can be the most dangerous.

Detorix came towards me, hesitating with every step. ‘I really need to stop this,’ he said. ‘This is not our way. This woman is a guest. You are a guest.’

‘And we have agreed to play a little game,’ I said. ‘Gaius, ask her if she wants a shield.’

Leukas asked the question. No one answered him.

Ajax ran back with my longest, slenderest xiphos. I had taken it off a Carthaginian, and I rather liked it.

I walked in the sun, a little way along the gravel, turned and drew the sword. I put the scabbard in my left hand, and threw my chlamys over my left arm.

She had a shield. A big shield.

I saluted and she did not. I stepped in, flicked my blade up and she raised her shield, and I kicked it and her to the ground with a pankration kick which she didn’t see coming because I was too close, and she’d raised her shield and thus couldn’t see.

I stepped back and let her get to her feet. When she set her stance again, I shook my head. ‘No, you lost. There is no second chance. If you want to send another man, so be it — but you lost.’

She glared. But she walked over and tapped one of the big men.

His sword was as long as my arm, and longer. He took the shield.

It didn’t look thick enough to be stable. It was oddly shaped and too damned long, and his arms were like an octopus’s arms — too long and too fast.

He came at me, whirling his sword in front of his shield.

Polymarchos had made me practise against this sort of thing, which he called the whirlwind. I made myself relax, moved with him, backing away, letting him slowly close the distance. He had a tempo to his spin, and I moved with it, almost as if we were dancing.

I had my strike prepared, but he surprised me, leaping forward with a shriek, the sword cutting up from below my cloak. I got my scabbard — my heavy, wooden scabbard — on his blade, and he cut right through it and into my chlamys. The blow didn’t cut into my arm, but he almost broke my arm with the blow.

Of course, he had a foot of my steel through his head. A little punch, a hand-reverse to clear his raised shield — one of Polymarchos’s best tricks.

He was dead before he hit the ground.

I hadn’t intended to kill him. In fact, it’s worth noting that he was too good. If he’d been worse, or slower, or less long-limbed, I’d have let him live.

And he was certainly trying to kill or maim me.

I stepped back and the pain of his blow hit me. I stepped back again, and one of the little bastards came for me.

He leaped the corpse of the big man, and swung his heavy sword with two hands.

I cut his sword to the ground and pinked him in the hand.

He roared and cut at me again.

Again I cut his sword to the ground with my lighter weapon, and this time I skewered his right hand. But he raised the sword with his left, so I ripped my point out of his hand and brought the blade down on his left forearm. And then stepped in and kicked him in the crotch.

And he slammed his maimed right hand into my face.

Kelts: they’re insane.

He didn’t break my nose. That was lucky.

I was blind with pain for a moment, so I slashed the air in front of me to keep him back. I connected with something, but most of my long xiphos was scarcely sharp and all it did was raise a welt, I suspect.

He leaped at me again just as I got control of my head. He didn’t have a weapon. And he was as fast as a fish in the stream. His wounded hands were up, and he was reaching for my blade.

I had to kill him, too.

Now I was breathing like a bellows, and I fell back.

I wanted to say something witty and insulting, because I was angry — full of rage, like Ares. But all I could do was breathe.

It didn’t feel good.

In fact, I felt… wretched. These two men had never done anything to hurt me — well, except to attack me at the behest of their mistress — and now they were dead.

She looked at me, and at the four men beside her.

I breathed hard. And waited.

Gaius nodded. ‘That’s it, then,’ he said, in his aristocratic Greek. ‘Tell that woman that it is over, or it is war, and if it’s war, we have two hundred men and she has four.’

I looked at him. I hadn’t expected him to step in. But that’s what friends are for.

I turned to Detorix. ‘We will leave in the morning,’ I said. ‘Let this be an end to it, and don’t let me regret not walking over and killing her.’

Detorix nodded.

That was good. I was done with the Venetiae.

So we left without Doola, and that didn’t make me happy. Nor did I trust our hosts any more, or our boatmen, or anyone.

We had to pole our boats north. Some of the oarsmen were quite good at this, and some were not. We had a pair of guides and interpreters, but otherwise we were on our own.

After the first night, we built a regular camp by the river and we put brush all the way around it and stood to, fully armed, an hour before darkness and an hour after dawn.

The third day, we saw horsemen on the horizon as we poled upstream.

By the fourth day, we were quite aware of the horsemen, who scarcely troubled to hide themselves. And the river was a snake, swimming on the sea — an endless curve and back-curve. Sometimes we could see a town or settlement a dozen stades before we reached it. Some settlements were on both sides of a peninsula, so we’d pass the town twice. And it did seem like we paddled or poled twice the distance that we’d have walked — or that our shadows rode.

I’d had about enough of the Keltoi by then. And I was unhappy with myself — the more I thought on it, the more I decided I’d allowed myself to be ruled by Ares in the taverna. I didn’t need to show her my arete. I didn’t need to fight. I could be Odysseus instead of Achilles. And the two dead men were powerfully on my conscience.

But even as I thought these thoughts — thoughts largely fuelled by Heraclitus, of course — I also thought like the pirate I often was. I considered setting an ambush for the riders. It was foolish to let them pick the time for an attack.

But it would be worse to fight them. Once we fought, we’d be the enemy to every barbarian on the river, and that would be the end of us and our tin, too.

I thought about it for another day, as we poled on and on and seemed to make very few stades.

That night, Gaius and Seckla and I took Herodikles and one of the younger shepherds, Leo, who was growing as a man and as a leader. The five of us slipped downstream in a small boat, and we floated silently in the darkness until we came to a campfire. We landed well upstream, and crept carefully down on them.

Eight men, a dozen horses.

It was the work of two minutes to cut all the hobbles of the horses and chase them off into the darkness. They roused themselves, and we were gone.

The next day, we had no contact with them.

We poled on. We were low on food, and I had to bargain with a fairly hostile village of Kelts who lived in reed huts that stood on stilts in the water. We bought grain for silver, and got the worst of the bargain.

Two nights later, one of our interpreters tried to run. He was surprised to find that I was right there, waiting for him.

Three more days poling, and I was sure we had slipped our pursuers. The poling had become quite difficult, as we were travelling into the upper reaches of the river.

Let me add that although I was sick to death of barbarians and their neck collars and their feuds and their superstition, it is beautiful country, and those Gauls could farm. The banks of the river were cultivated — not everywhere, but long swathes cutting through the forests. The towns were prosperous, if hag-ridden with aristocrats.

Another thing I feel I must mention, although this is not meant to be a tale of marvels encountered in travel — traveller’s tales are all lies anyway — is their priests. They were all men, all representatives of the aristocratic classes, and they could perform prodigious feats of memory. I met a priest on the Sequana who could recite the Iliad. I didn’t stay to hear the entire piece — I’d have been there all winter — but his memory seemed perfect to me, and he could start wherever I asked him: I could name a verse or an event, and he would begin to recite. I found this very impressive, and told him so.

Yet these learned men seemed to me more like magpies than like true priests. They absorbed a great many facts — it was from a Keltoi priest that I first heard of Pythagoras, for example — and they knew everything about plants, herbs and medicine, but so does any decent doctor in Athens or Thebes.

For moral philosophy, they were merely barbarians. They had no great code of ethics, and their laws were mostly learned by rote and not reasoned, or so it seemed to me. In behaviour, too, the aristocrats seemed to do every man as he wished, and when the wills of two such clashed, there was war — petty or great depending on the status of the contenders. Twice as we poled our way up the Sequana, we passed villages burned — the second was still smouldering.

Greeks could be just as bad. So could Persians. But there was something… ignorant about the Keltoi. Of course, I’m a Greek, and that may just be my own ignorance speaking. And you must remember that I was seeing all this through the eyes of a man who had suddenly begun to see the uselessness, at some level, of violence. The Keltoi queen — Nordicca, I knew her name to be, of the Dumnoni — was typical of her breed. The truth is that I had found her quite attractive, sought to impress her and ended up behaving like a posturing adolescent, and men were dead. I won’t say they haunted me — they had died with weapons in hand, striving against me — but I will confess that I knew their deaths to be unnecessary.

But I digress. Fill my cup, pais.

I had my two interpreters watched very carefully, night and day. Demetrios managed our boats, and Gaius managed the interpreters. We made sure they knew they’d be well paid, for example. I was quite sure they were supposed to desert us, but we promised them enough silver to make them modestly wealthy men.

In truth, Detorix had taken some precautions to make sure we never came back. I might have hated him, but life had taught me that merchants will act to protect their trade the way farmers act to protect their crops. They will make war, or commit simple murder, to keep others off their trade routes. The Venetiae were no different in kind from the Phoenicians, except that they weren’t quite such rapacious slavers. When I look at how Athens behaves these days, I have to admit that apparently Greeks are just as bad. Or perhaps worse — more efficient.

The younger of the two interpreter guides was Gwan, and he was a warrior, an aristocrat, and not a merchant. Over the course of a dozen stops on the Sequana, I gathered that this was a great adventure for him; that his father was deeply in debt to the Venetiae, and that his service was part repayment. He was of the Senones, the people who ruled the great river valley.

He loved horses, and he was the most profligate lover I think I have ever met. It was difficult to find time to talk to him, he was so busy lying with women. The men that Gaius sent to follow him always blushed to tell of his exploits. He was neither particularly clever nor particularly handsome, and yet, in every village, one or two young women seemed to leap on him with an enthusiasm that might have made me jealous, if I hadn’t been so busy.

What was his secret?

I have no idea.

At any rate, after twenty days we were in the upper reaches of the Sequana, and poling was hard, the current was fast even in autumn and we were all tired at the end of the day. Gwan rode ahead on horseback, and was waiting for us on the riverbank. We put up our tents in the fields, already harvested. Men and women with baskets were making a small market, an agora, for us to buy food.

Gwan was good at his job.

His partner was an older man, a fisherman. He was not an aristocrat, and he didn’t speak much. Or have the pure enjoyment of life that Gwan had. His name was Brach, and he was dark, tall and silent, and he walked with a stoop that looked sinister to a Greek.

Gaius and I were poling together with Seckla and a pair of Marsalian fishermen. I don’t even remember their names, but I remember they were both cheerful companions. We were singing hymns — Homer’s hymns, all we could remember. Seckla was laughing at the words — his gods were otherwise, and he found ours odd.

Brach was sitting in the stern. He’d poled for an hour, and it was his turn to rest. He was watching the bank, and I was watching him. He seemed alert, and afraid. When I stooped to get my wooden canteen and have a drink, I happened to stumble by him (try retrieving anything on a barge that is ten times as long as it is wide, and you’ll see why I stumbled). I got a whiff of him, and he was afraid. He smelled of fear.

‘What’s the matter?’ I asked.

I could see Gwan standing on the bank, and I could see fifty or so farmers and local peasants with their baskets of produce. None of them was a warrior. You can disguise a warrior, but not if you pay attention. Men in top physical training stand and move differently from men who work the land for others. Men at the edge of violence have a different look on their faces. Not that I thought all these things at the time — merely to note that I was conscious that we had more than seventy giant ingots of tin and a lot of gold, too, and that in my heart I knew the Keltoi would try for it, sometime. I couldn’t see anything.

‘What’s wrong?’ I asked.

Brach glanced at me, his face a dead giveaway, and shrugged. He stared at the water.

‘Armour,’ I ordered. I shouted the order sternwards to the next boat, and reached for the heavy leather bag with my thorax.

We were armoured and ready for anything in a quarter of an hour, and the farmers stood on the bank, puzzled, anxious and then downright fearful. They abandoned the bank, and many packed their goods and fled the market. When we landed, we looked like a war band.

Before the sun had set another finger, a dozen chariots appeared, and fifty Keltoi on horseback. I had forty men with spears and shields out as guards while we dragged downed trees to form an abatis — a wall of branches. Not a great defence, but enough to discourage casual looting and easy predation.

The local aristo had an eagle in bronze set on top of his helmet, and wore a knee-length tunic of scale — not a style of armour I’d ever seen before — and it looked as if it would weigh far too much for use in combat. Of course, the great gentry of Gaul travel to war in chariots. I wondered if this was what Lord Achilles looked like.

He spoke to Gwan, saluted and his driver rolled to a stop an arm’s-length from me. I had my pais offer him a cup of wine, and he took it, poured a libation like a Greek and drank it off.

‘Tell him that I apologize for frightening his people. Tell him, as one warrior to another, that I received a sign — perhaps from my ancestor, Heracles — and had my men get into their armour.’ As I spoke, I indicated the plaque that showed Heracles and the Nemean Lion that was affixed to the inside of my aspis.

He listened. And I’d say he understood, as he gave me a sharp glance, dismounted and offered me his hand to clasp. I took it.

He spoke slowly, paused, took off his helmet and spoke again.

‘He says, warriors must learn to understand and obey such signs. He says a party of armed men passed his outposts this morning, travelling quickly on horseback, and he has been in armour all day. He says, perhaps your ancestor is not so wrong, after all. He gives you his word that no harm will come to your people tonight.’

I let go his hand. Let me say that sometimes, between people, there is a spark of understanding. It can lead instantly to love, or friendship; to treaties, to alliances, to marriages. This man was clear-eyed and honourable. I would have staked my life on it. Gwan said his name was Collam.

We passed a few minutes looking at each other’s war gear. His scale mail was beautifully wrought: the scales were fine, the size of a man’s thumb or slightly smaller, and I’d say, as a bronze-smith, that there were four thousand of them in the whole tunic. His helmet was superb: very different from the helmets I made, and he took mine, put it on and moved like a fighter, trying it, while encouraging me with motions to try his.

I found his interesting — airy, open. The cheeks were hinged, the bowl was shallow, the neck curved down like my father’s to meet the armour at the back, like the tail of a shrimp or lobster, except without the articulation. There was a narrow brim over the eye, which, even late on an autumn day, kept the sun from my eyes.

Collam made a motion and grinned. He had bright blond hair and enormous moustaches — I don’t think I’d ever seen a man with so much moustache.

‘He wants to trade,’ Gwan said. ‘My father is his sister’s husband’s brother — does that make sense? We’re not close, but he’s a famous warrior and his words are true.’

I hadn’t needed Gwan to tell me that. I loved my helmet — I had made it with my own hands. It fitted me perfectly, and I trusted it.

But when you can’t give something away, you are a slave to it. And generosity is one of the virtues. Besides, his helmet was a magnificent piece of work — the eagle on top was an artwork.

I grinned. ‘Tell him it is his.’

We fed him. The farmers came back at dusk, when they saw their lord sitting on one of our stools, drinking our wine, and we bought pigs and grain. We also bought some dried fruit and meat.

I was so interested in Collam that I lost track of Brach, and so did Gaius. Collam was the sort of man that Gaius loved, and he sat with us. The Latins are not entirely Keltoi, but they have many words in common, and Gaius’s Keltoi was far better than mine, good enough that he could almost converse without Gwan. I missed Sittonax, and I missed Daud.

Play it as you will; it was morning — the night passed uneventfully — when we discovered that Brach was missing. Collam came down to the riverside with his corps of charioteers and cavalry to see us off. I was in my armour, watching the men load the barges and keeping an eye on Gwan, while Seckla and Gaius searched the fields and woods around our camp. Seckla could track. So could a number of the herdsmen.

When Collam came up, we embraced.

‘He asks if you’d like to sell any of your tin,’ Gwan said.

He was on the main tin route, but then, of course, he was wearing ten pounds of the stuff in his harness. His war band probably ate bronze.

‘How much do you want?’ I asked.

He shrugged. ‘One pig,’ he said. Eighty pounds. The value in Marsala would be almost eighty ounces of gold. Twice that in Sicily.

Gwan turned to me. ‘He won’t — well, trade, precisely. If you give it to him, he will make you gifts of equal value. This sort of thing frustrates the Venetiae-’ He smiled.

But I had approached Collam as a warrior. So we were bound to behave like heroes.

Fair enough: I’d been a hero before. Herodikles had a team of men who had just wrestled a pig of tin to the riverside. I waved to stop them from loading it into Herodikles’ barge.

‘Yours,’ I said in passable Keltoi.

That was one-eightieth of all our profits. I was going to look like an idiot if he didn’t give me something in return.

He went and lifted it — by himself. He grunted, grinned and put it in his chariot, and the leather and rawhide stretched, and the whole light vehicle sank a little into the riverbank. The charioteer looked as if he might cry.

I said, ‘I’m missing a man — a Gaul, lent to me by the Venetiae as a guide. He has wandered off. And I would like to know anything you know about this party of armed men.’

Collam nodded when this was translated. And Gwan grew pale and looked at me.

In Greek, I said, ‘Gwan, I suspect you were told to betray me. Yes?’

Gwan couldn’t meet my eye.

‘Do you want me to tell this famous warrior that you are a hireling of the Venetiae? That you have been paid to lead me to an ambush?’ It wasn’t quite a shot in the dark.

‘They have my father,’ he said.

‘Gwan, the world is not always as dark as it seems. When Detorix knows that I am gone away south to Marsala and won’t return, he’ll release your father. Or you can come and find me, and I swear by the immortal gods I’ll come back with thirty warriors and take your father back.’

Gwan looked at the ground. Collam asked him something — asked him what was wrong, I think.

He looked at Collam and spoke for a long time.

Collam grew angrier and angrier.

It can be very difficult as an alien in another culture. Coming upon the Keltoi from the sea, it was easy to assume that the Venetiae were typical of the breed — indeed, that they were the lords of the whole people. I had fallen into this trap, and that morning, on the Sequana, I realized that I knew almost nothing of the Keltoi. Collam was no more like Detorix than Detorix was like Tara. Briseis and Euphoria and Aristides and I are all Greek, and yet four more different people could not be imagined. One wants to typify a people, but they are always too diverse to be typified.

At any rate, Collam began to ask questions, and Gwan hesitated to answer, and I began to suspect that Collam was going to injure or kill Gwan on the spot.

‘What’s the problem?’ I asked.

Gwan went on talking to Collam.

I stepped in between them. ‘Speak to me,’ I said.

‘He is angry because… my father had no right. He says my father had no right.’ Gwan was on the edge of tears.

Collam was shouting. His charioteer had his hand on the knife at his belt.

I put a hand on Collam’s arm. ‘Tell him I’ll fix it,’ I said.

Collam looked at me.

‘He says, what business is it of yours?’

Warriors are all alike, in too many ways. Most of those ways are dark, but not all.

‘Gwan, are you my man, or do you serve the Venetiae?’ I asked.

Gwan met my eye. ‘Yours, my lord.’

‘Then tell Collam that I say, “Gwan is my man. I will see to his father’s debt”.’ I offered Collam my hand.

Collam listened. He took two or three deep breaths, and took my hand.

I thanked the gods that I had just given him a small fortune in tin. It had to sway him; he had to accept that I was an aristocrat like him, not a venal river trader.

He drove away in his chariot, and I doubled the guard and told Seckla and Herodikles to hurry the loading. And I took Gwan aside.

‘You’d better give this to me straight,’ I said.

Gwan shrugged. ‘I’m supposed to leave you at the first portage,’ he said. ‘That would be tonight or tomorrow night.’

‘And then what?’ I pressed.

‘My father’s people will put together a caravan of donkeys and horses to go across the hills to the next river,’ he said. He shrugged. ‘I don’t know what happens next. But I can guess.’ He looked miserable. ‘I think they will ambush you in the hills. Or perhaps-’ He shook his head. ‘Perhaps my people will ambush you.’

I nodded. ‘I think you should come with me, all the way to Marsala. Take a share of the profits and come back and buy your father’s freedom.’ I looked into his blue eyes. ‘You really think your people want to fight me and two hundred of my men?’ I asked.

He shook his head.

When we had most of our boats loaded, a pair of heavy wagons came down to the waterside, and two chariots. Collam leaped off the lead chariot as it drove by and landed cleanly on his feet. He was a pleasure to watch, and I would have liked to wrestle with him.

The wagons were full of barrels, and the barrels were his gift to me. We had twelve big casks, and each weighed as much as a pig of tin. I laughed, embraced him and told him through Gwan that Gwan would go with me to Marsala and return rich enough to retrieve his father’s debts to the Venetiae. In effect, I involved Collam in an alliance to preserve Gwan’s honour — and my convoy.

Collam shook my hand again, and through Gwan, told me that fifty horsemen had crossed his lands the night before and that as far as he knew, Brach was gone.

Fifty horsemen. I laughed. ‘They’ll need a lot of help,’ I said.

Collam offered me twenty warriors, but I patted his shoulder and told him not to worry.

We swapped belts, there on the shore. It was a little like living in the Iliad. And then we were away, into the late morning, poling hard upstream.

Gwan usually rode ahead, but I kept him by me — the best way to avoid temptation is to avoid temptation, in fact — and I sent Seckla, who was a brilliant rider, to lead a dozen other men who could run. I’ve already said that the Sequana runs like a snake: a few men, running and resting, can easily pace a convoy of boats.

It was mid-afternoon when we ran out of water. There were good landing stages; this was the point from which the Venetiae transshipped their own cargoes. A big town stood there, well fortified with heavy palisades and a stone socle under the timber ramparts.

Gwan’s father was a minor lord in these parts. But the men who were to form our donkey train didn’t seem to be part of a conspiracy: the animals were already assembled, and they had panniers sewn to hold the big pigs of tin. There were eighty animals in the train, with forty men to handle them. The whole assemblage cost us four pigs of tin.

In the town, which was both smelly and quite marvellous, I found a gem — a goldsmith whose skill, while barbaric, was still very fine. I traded him a small amount of our gold for a pair of arm rings such as the local gentry wore. I liked them, and I needed to wear my status. It is often that way, when you are among foreigners. In Boeotia, they would know who I was even if I was naked and covered in soot from the smithy. In Gaul, I needed a pair of heavy gold arm rings. Herodikles mocked me for turning barbarian, but I think the arm rings stood us all in good stead.

We drank wine, ate well, and a day later, we were away. In any place we lingered, we spent too much. I had almost one hundred and eighty men, and they cost me an amount of gold equal to the size of your little finger every day just to keep in food and wine. Let me put it this way: we took a rich treasure from the Phoenicians, and two hundred slaves. The treasure, every ounce of it, about paid for the food. It had been the same when I served with Miltiades — there isn’t much economy to piracy.

On the other hand, without two hundred hungry men with an absolute loyalty to me, I doubt that we’d ever have got so much tin over the hills.

At any rate, we enjoyed Agedinca. Gwan was feasted, and through him, Seckla and Gaius and I met the lords of the Senones, the people who controlled the upper valley of the Sequana. They were rich in good farmland, and in the possession of the trade route, and their halls were full of armour and magnificent plates and cups. Their women wore more jewellery than Persian princesses.

We camped well outside of town, and we rotated a guard of forty men on our camp. By now, every former slave had a sword, a helmet, a spear or two and a shield, and I drilled them myself, teaching them the dances of Ares each day. I had two reasons for my care: first, that they might fight well, if we had to fight; and second, to keep them busy. They were oarsmen, and they had every reason to be bored.

When our donkey train was ready to cross the hills, the King of the Senones came to see us off. He admired my warriors, and offered me a hundred more men.

I bowed respectfully and refused them. I didn’t want to have to trust him.

He shrugged. ‘The Aedui are our enemies,’ he said. ‘They often attack the tin trains. Be wary.’

Gwan nodded. After we had started up the valley, he rode up to me — we had two-dozen horses — and pointed up the pass. ‘If the Venetiae are going to ambush you,’ he said, ‘They won’t do it themselves. They’ll pay someone to attack you. The Aedui are the obvious choice — they attack trains all the time.’

‘And yet the king said nothing of the fifty horsemen,’ I noted.

Gwan looked away. ‘He is my cousin,’ Gwan said. ‘But not a friend to me or to my father. I think perhaps he takes your tin to build your train — and takes silver from the Venetiae to allow your train to be ambushed.’

Gaius said, ‘If that’s so, then the baggage-handlers and the teamsters will all desert. Or attack us.’

Gwan shook his head. ‘That would be hard to work out,’ he said.

I wanted to trust Gwan, but there was a barrier between us, deeper than the cultural divide. I truly wished that I had Daud or Sittonax with me. Leukas was Alban, and too far removed from the politics — if I may call them that — of the Gauls. Leukas distrusted Gwan all the time. Leukas was also jealous of Gwan’s continuing success with every maiden — I use the term loosely — on the river.

People are very complicated.

Men told me that it was six days over the hills to Lugdunum, the town at the head of the Rhodanus River that flows into the Inner Sea. The first night in the hills it was cold, and men pulled their cloaks tight around them and lay closer to other men, or built their fires higher. We had camped at a traders’ campsite — so it was stripped of all useful wood, you can bet. I sent fifty men off into the hills for wood, and another ten armed men to watch them. We built big fires, and shivered, and Gaius and I went from fire to fire, reminding men that we were ten days from Marsala and the Inner Sea, to encourage them that if we had to fight, it would be worth doing.

At a fire, one of the original crew of the Lydia asked me what the shares of the tin would be. It was a fair question, and one that had occupied me.

We’d started as a half-dozen men with a dream. We were coming home with more than a hundred freed slaves. Only sixteen men had died on the whole trip through accident, quarrels and Apollo’s arrows, and the men who were almost home had begun to wonder what they might receive.

And, of course, the men who had started from Marsala thought they were more worthy than the men who had been rescued from slavery. Gian told me point-blank that the former slaves now had their freedom — that was their share.

‘And weapons!’ shouted another Marsalian shepherd.

Greed. They’d been like brothers when we were rowing for our lives in the fog, but ten days from home I assured everyone that the shares would be fair. There was probably some half-truth to my statement, because I had yet to think of a simple, logical mathematical solution. But the mere promise that there would be a payout was enough.

The hills were magnificent; greener and more heavily wooded than hills in Greece. I thought they were quite high, until we climbed over the summit of the second pass and arrived at a mighty hill fort set at the top of a rocky crag and surrounded by stone walls built like any fortress wall in the Ionian Sea. It was a puzzle of giant rocks, as if the whole wall had been built by Titans. From those heights, I could see a range of mountains to the east that rose like jagged teeth. I had never seen mountains so high, even on the coast of Asia. They were breathtaking, at least in part because they were so far away. The Senones all told me they were the Alps. The hill fortress was a capital of the Aedui, but they offered us no violence. In fact, the lord of the place — I forget his name — told me that a Greek had designed his walls and taught his people to build them. I thought about what it would be like to be working so far from home. It cost me a whole pig of tin to feed my people across the hills. They had their own gold and silver here. They wanted tin.

And then we were down the other side of the pass, down the path into the high valleys of the Cares River. Fewer farms, and more trees.

My pig of tin had purchased more than just food. It purchased six more horses and some information, and I was aware that there were fifty horsemen ahead of me on the road. North of Lugdunum, where the Cares flows into the Rhodanus, we marched down the valley and I saw the sparkle and sun-dazzle of Helios on naked steel, and I knew.

I trusted my Senones by then. They didn’t seem shifty enough to be traitors, and they laughed a lot and drank hard. It is difficult for a Greek to distrust such men. Despite which, I had a former oarsman stand with every Senone in the train. And then we all armoured ourselves.

You may say that I was broadcasting to the ambush that we knew they were there.

I was. Why fight? If they wanted to slip away into the hills, I wanted to let them. My guides and my drovers swore we were a day from the navigable waters of the Rhodanus. I didn’t want to fight. In fact, all I wanted to do was to get home. The charms of travel and exploration had faded; I was beginning to feel old. In fact, I was thirty years old that autumn, and the age of it was in my bones.

I watched the hills, and the steel moved, but it did not disperse. Whoever was up there had enough men to fight my two hundred.

When we were armed, I sent my dozen horsemen to scout. As an aside, Greeks are not much good as scouts. Greek cavalry tend to fight other Greek cavalry — it’s like any other Greek contest — and the losers don’t go back to tell their friends what happened, I can tell you. But Seckla’s people have different notions of scouting, and Seckla led his boys down the valley and across the fields on a long sweep while I got my train organized and pushed my main body of spearmen out in front of it. I left eighty men with the Senones — a fine reserve, and at the same time a good baggage guard. My other hundred pushed forward in a line four men deep, a small, shallow phalanx that nonetheless covered the train behind them. They weren’t closed tight — the ground was far too broken — but they were close enough to support each other, ebbing and flowing around the patches of woods and rocks like a stream of hoplites.

Seckla sprang the trap, if it could be called a trap. He encountered a blocking force at a small bridge and rode away before they could throw javelins at him — then found one of the flank forces moving along some hedges to the right. He rode back to me as we closed on the low stone bridge.

He pointed. ‘Sixty men at the bridge, lightly armed. At least a hundred to the right in the woods. Those horsemen must be somewhere, but there’s no dung on the road and no horse signs to the right.’

Friends, that’s a scouting report. Honest, factual and terse.

I had put Demetrios in charge of the baggage train, and I took command of the phalanx myself, with Gaius and Gian as my deputies. I got them all together, quickly. ‘We’re going right over the bridge,’ I said. ‘We’ll smash them and move across, and then the spearmen will switch from advance guard to rearguard while the train moves as fast as they can. We’ll be out of their reach before their flanks can close on us.’ I pointed at the bad going — the fallow fields, the marsh on our right. ‘Don’t lose your nerve. Just keep going. My only worry is that they have more men in ambush on the other side of the stream. Seckla, that’s your part — as soon as we clear the bridge, ride through and look down the road. Everyone got it?’

Everyone did.

I rode to the head of the phalanx, dismounted and gave my horse to my boy. ‘ Philoi!’ I shouted. ‘You are better men, and you are better armed. See the men by the bridge? We will sweep them aside like a woman sweeps dust off the floor. And then we will go home.’

They roared.

I was glad that they were roaring, because my stomach was somersaulting like a landed fish. My quick count was that the enemy — I had to assume they were the enemy — had three hundred warriors and another fifty cavalry. Odds of three to two sound heroic, but in a small fight, a few men are an enormous advantage. The ground was passable for cavalry; hardly ideal, but fifty Saka archers could have destroyed my whole force. Luckily, Gaulish noblemen don’t use bows. Ares be praised.

I took my place in the ranks and raised my spear. ‘Let’s go!’ I said. And like Miltiades at Marathon, I called: ‘Let’s run!’

We ran at them.

The entire time I held my command meeting and gave my little speech, the men on the right flank had been moving forward cautiously. It is a thing men do — they sort of pretend to cling to cover, even after they have been discovered.

My archers — the same men who performed the role on board ship, but without Doola’s magnificent archery — began to drop shafts among the more confident men on the right. I don’t think they hit a man, but they slowed the right flank of the ambush to a literal belly crawl.

We ran forward to the bridge. The Aedui were in a shield wall, about forty men with javelins, big shields, a few well-armoured men in front. Gaius and I took the centre of our spearmen into them, and our flank men went right down into the stream and up the other side. In spring, I’m sure the stream was full and the bridge was required, but in mid-autumn, all they lost was their close order as they poured over the streambed.

I didn’t have time to watch. I ran forward, and despite the old wound in my leg, I flew. When I reached the Aedui shield wall, it was just me and Gaius.

We had never really fought together.

Perhaps we sought to impress one another. But neither of us would give a step, and neither of us slowed, and so we hurtled straight into their ranks. I got my aspis up and forward onto the spears and I let them slow me, and then I leaped as high as I could and threw my spear — hard — into the front rank, and came down without getting a spear in my foot or knee or head — alive, in other words.

Gaius must have thrown a pace farther out, because a man fell, and for a moment, their ranks rippled I put my shoulder into the back of my aspis as I landed, head down, and my impetus slammed a man back even as I got my kopis out of the scabbard. The long swords the Gauls used only hampered them, this close. I know, because one rang off my helmet immediately. I was in their ranks, moving among them, slashing right and left. I doubt I killed a man, but I’ll wager I hit six in as many heartbeats.

And about then, the rest of my spearmen hit their shield wall, and they folded. They began to break from the front, not the back, and suddenly they were dead men — just like that. Let me say, we outnumbered them four to one, and we had every advantage: terrain, flanks, depth and armour. But their shield wall couldn’t hold two of us.

It is a difference in attitude, eh? As many Persians would have killed us. Hmm… Or perhaps not, eh?

I burst out through the back of their shallow line, and my flankers were climbing the bank and I was almost across the low bridge. To the right, a hundred men or more were coming at the flank of the tin train. It would be close whether they got to it, or it got across the bridge.

To the left, the river guarded my flank. Or so I thought. But when I looked, there were fifty armoured horsemen swimming the river. The same low water that had allowed me to cross the streambed Well, I can be a fool, sometimes.

And my spearmen were running the Gauls down and killing them instead of stopping to rally.

Oh, for a hundred real soldiers! Even real pirates.

Men in victory are as irrational as men in defeat. Only a veteran knows the truth — that it’s not over until it is over.

Seckla hadn’t crossed yet. I held up a hand and stopped him.

‘If there’s an ambush, the spearmen will find it,’ I said. ‘Stop the horsemen. And take the archers.’

Seckla nodded and rode off, and I ran — in armour, damn it — back to the donkey train. They were trotting along the road. Demetrios was at their head.

‘Move!’ I roared. ‘ Move! ’

I looked to the right. The archers lofted another volley, and hit not one but two Aedui warriors, and the rest fell on their faces. My archers turned and followed Seckla, and the Aedui rose to their feet and came forward — slowly at first, and then with more spirit.

I had been far too confident.

Panicked men do not make good animal-handlers. Panicked men lead to panicked animals, and panicked animals run. In all directions.

In a matter of heartbeats, an easy victory had become a disaster. My train didn’t cross the bridge. It ran off, away from the charging Aedui and towards the river. A donkey with an eighty-pound ingot of tin doesn’t run all that well, but it will run as fast as it can.

The horsemen were almost across. The archers were starting to engage them. The range was close, and the archers had time and felt safe, at least for the moment.

Horses and men began to die.

Behind me, the Aedui from the bridge were dying. But my precious spearmen had run too far, all but Alexandros’s marines and maybe a dozen others.

I could have screamed in my frustration. Even Gaius had run off after the Aedui. Gwan — I could see his Gaulish gear — was beside him, halfway down the valley.

On the other hand, when the animals broke for the river, the eighty men in reserve ceased to matter as baggage guards. That’s how it goes.

‘Demetrios!’ I called. He did not look like a great warrior; he wasn’t very tall and his helmet looked several sizes too big. ‘Face to the right!’ I called. I ran to his men.

I’d like to say that the enemy didn’t expect us to abandon our tin, but they were not under anyone’s control either, at this point. I put myself at the head of Demetrios’s baggage guards and we charged the Aedui on foot, who had been pricked by the archers and crawled across the marsh.

A few of them died, but the rest chose to run, evading our short charge and running back into the marsh. There were some desultory spear casts from both sides.

I needed a decisive result.

I wasn’t going to get one.

‘Hold them here,’ I said to Demetrios, and ran — panting, now, with effort — back to my marines and Giannis and a few comrades.

‘Follow me,’ I spat. I ran down the slope towards the river.

The cavalrymen were trying to kill Seckla, and Seckla was refusing to be drawn into a fight, and the archers were running around, trying to stay alive and occasionally launching a shaft. I only had six archers, and they were the balance of the fight. The cavalrymen didn’t seem to know that, though. Phokis, one of the former slaves and a fine archer, died from a chance javelin throw, but he was one of the few.

At any rate… I charged fifty cavalrymen with twenty infantry.

I didn’t have a spear to throw.

It was foolishness. They were brilliant horsemen — as good as Persians — and one of them saw me, and all by himself he turned out of the chase for Seckla and rode at me. I should have stopped running, but I didn’t. I ran right at him.

He was grinning. He had a scale shirt down to his thighs, a fine helmet and two javelins. He threw one just before he reached me. It bounced off the face of my aspis and then I sidestepped and his horse sidestepped — he struck with his javelin, hitting me in the head. My sword licked out and caught his leg, and then he was past me, and I was alive.

I shook my head, and the eagle fell off.

A dozen more of their cavalrymen turned, now, eager to emulate their fellow. And he was circling wide behind me, coming back for another try.

‘Form on me,’ I croaked, and set my feet. I remember praying to Heracles, and feeling like a fool. I had come all this way, and I was losing my train of tin. And perhaps my life or my freedom.

I gritted my teeth.

A dozen cavalrymen may not sound like much. After all, I was a hero of Marathon! I had faced down a hundred Persian noblemen — the finest horsemen in the circle of the world.

But the Gauls were, man for man, marvellous horsemen, perhaps the equals of the Persians, and they were fresh, delighted to be fighting, dangerous men on well-trained horses. I was tired, and defeat has its own fatigue. And we were losing.

Behind me, the Aedui infantry were gaining courage, and working their way forward.

Far to the south, I could see Gaius’s Etruscan feathers waving on the brows of his helmet. He was rallying my phalanx. He would only be ten minutes late. In time, perhaps, to rescue my corpse.

My marines and some shepherds pressed in around me.

‘Spears up!’ I remember roaring.

There’s a belief that horses won’t face a spear point, or a well-ordered host of men. I don’t know — perhaps it becomes true at some point, if the host is wide enough. Certainly, I’ve seen five hundred Athenians turn the charge of the very best of the Persian noble cavalry, the horses turning away before a single man had died.

But the Gauls trained their horses differently. The Gauls came at us in no particular order, but one man, on a beautiful white horse, was in front, and he came at me at a dead gallop, and when he was a few horse-lengths away, I realized that he was not slowing down and that I was literally trapped between my comrades.

So naturally, I leaped out and charged him.

What would you do?

I got my aspis up — no low blows from a horseman. I was on the cavalryman’s bridle-hand side, so he had to cut cross-body at me, and I took his blow on my sword — held high over my head, across my aspis face — and I let the blow roll off my blade like rain falling off a temple roof, turned my hand and struck. It was a short blow, but I had plenty of fear to power it, and he had no armour on his thighs, and then the next horseman hit me in the back and I went down.

My cuirass took the blow, but I went face down over my aspis and I stunned myself on the rim of my own shield. A horse kicked me as I fell, right on the point of the hip.

I thought I’d got a spear through my armour. I assumed I was dead. I was down, and the pain was intense, and when I tried my legs, they didn’t work.

My legs didn’t work.

I don’t know how long I lay there. I was conscious, but I had taken two bad blows and a light ring to my head, and I had every reason to think I was raven’s food.

Then a riderless horse came pounding across the ground at me, and without conscious thought, I rolled myself over to avoid it.

With my legs.

Thought is action. I got my feet under me and powered to an upright position. My sword was lying there. My helmet had twisted on my head. I remember standing there on a stricken field, unable to decide which I should do first — retrieve the sword? Fix the helmet?

Aye, laugh if you like. Pain and fatigue and desperation make you stupid.

My marines had scattered. Giannis helped me get myself together.

Six of the Gauls’ cavalrymen were down. And Seckla was leading the others in a merry dance.

Suddenly, we were in a stalemate. A stasis. I muttered to Giannis, and he began shouting for the men to come to me.

Other men pointed at me.

Demetrios had all of the reserve together, and they came to me in a block. The Aedui infantry were still hesitant.

My archers were in a patch of brush, down by the water, and they were carefully loosing at the bolder Gaulish horsemen. They didn’t hit many men. But they hit a great many horses. And the Gauls are tender on their horses.

When I went down, we were losing. When I got up, we weren’t.

War’s like that. I made a good plan, and it failed. The enemy plan was foolish, and it nearly succeeded.

But now we had some advantages. So I ignored that dull, metallic ache in my hip, and I picked up a fine Gaulish spear and pointed it down the field at the riverbank, where our donkeys and horses were pinned by a handful of mounted Gauls.

‘There’s our tin, friends,’ I said.

‘Arimnestos!’ shouted Giannis. I thought he was trying to get my attention, but Demetrios shouted it too. In a moment, a hundred men were bellowing my name as if it were a war cry.

I’m not ashamed to say I almost burst into tears. And when we charged, I had the feeling — that old feeling — that I was invincible.

That’s the daimon of combat, thugater. One moment you think you are dead, and the next, you are full of of piss and vinegar, ready for anything.

I’ve seen a few defeats, but far more victories, and men die in defeat faster than they do in victory.

We slammed into them. No, that’s a lie, friends. We ran at them, and most of them ran from us — into the river. The men chasing Sekla were cut off, well up the ridge to our right. And in a few moments, we were all around our pack animals. The stubborn panic of the average donkey is a two-edged sword. They ran from us, but they weren’t going to tamely submit to our enemies, either.

If men hadn’t died, it would have been like comedy, Thugater. We’d run around in all directions, our bandit enemies had largely run around us, and now they were running away. I’m not sure if that counts as a battle or not. We lost nine men, dead and badly wounded, and the worst part was killing off our own wounded — Garun, a Marsalian fisherman who’s been with me since I poured bronze for the ram-spur, and others just as good, or just as deserving of life. But when a man has a spear right through his guts so that the head comes out the back Best he have brave friends.

The Aedui infantry on our side of the stream faded the moment it became clear that their noble cavalry wasn’t going to fight. We took eight of them, too — tired men who didn’t have the muscles to run away.

The enemy had about thirty dead and wounded and twenty captured. A dozen of the captured were cavalrymen. They couldn’t cross the gully to freedom, and Gaius closed the bridge, and Demetrios and I worked with Sekla to herd them into a circle. They were mostly very young men, and all the fight had gone out of them, and I think they’d have surrendered sooner except that they got the idea we were going to execute them.

Did they think we were fools?

We used them as hostages, of course. We sent the youngest, a boy of seventeen, up the ridge to tell his lord that we had them, and then we made camp. We spend two hours on our ditch and our abatis, and then we collapsed in exhaustion. A fight — even an easy fight — takes it out of you, and the affray at the bridge on the Rhodanus was a sharp fight with a bad bit.

The next morning, we rose and packed our animals carefully, and marched with a strong advance guard — twenty men. After all, we’d captured a dozen horses. And we now had a dozen men in fine scale shirts.

By evening, we were camping within bowshot of the walls of Ludunca. The town had hundreds of timber houses and some dozens of stone houses, as well as four temples and a stone outer wall. We paid a fine for camping in someone’s field.

Gwan and his Senones unpacked the donkeys and the horses and the carts, and turned them around for home. Their part was done. At Ludunca, all of our tin was loaded onto barges. These weren’t made of a single tree trunk like those on the Sequaana. These were made of planks — as few as three very wide planks, or as many as nine. The sides were formed of single, heavy planks that fitted perfectly to the strakes of the bottom. Again, the boats were designed to take the standard barrels, but could also hold our pigs of tin.

Vasilios was fascinated. He told us all, several times, that the way they built boats depended on the available timber. He was especially impressed with the way the Galles used iron nails to clench the timbers to cross supports — very alien to the Greek construction method, but very strong.

He showed me one in particular that impressed me. The floor of a particularly large and heavy barge had cross beams to support the side of the boards and to keep them together. These boards had holes drilled in them and then in the supports, and pegs of oak were driven into those holes, and then iron nails were driven into the pegs, forcefully expanding them against the wood around them. The result was watertight and as strong as — well, as iron. And oak.

We loaded for Marsala even while we negotiated with the local Aedui for the release of our hostages. They were all important young men — not the infantry, no one even wanted them back, but the horsemen. In the end, I released them all for a pound of gold and some casks of ale.

I don’t think I’ve mentioned that we figured out that Callum had traded us twelve casks of bee’s wax for a pig of tin. I had no idea if that was a fair trade, but people had begun to make offers on the bee’s wax already. Without Doola, I was helpless to guess the value. Demetrios said it would trade well in many places, because it was so clear and white.

I have to smile. I had a picture in my head of Arimnestos, the Killer of Men, standing in front of a group of unwed maidens — perhaps at the temple of Artmeis at Brauron. I was holding up a ball of pure white beeswax, and telling them that it was the very thing to use on their best white linen thread.

Well, I think it’s funny.

The trip down river from Ludunca was uneventful. We reached the Inner Sea at the old Phoneician port at Arla. I’m not ashamed to say that I threw myself down on the beach and kissed the sand and the water. I was not alone. We ran up and down the beach, and then we ran again, until the running became a kind of celebration.

The boatmen were cautious about the edge of the sea, but they got their barges all the way along the coast to Massalia, almost one hundred stades, poling along the beaches. It is a protected part of the sea, but it seemed dangerous to me, perhaps because I had been through so much that I feared the loss of everything at the very end.

But one fine day in late autumn — just the edge of winter, with a bitter wind blowing out of the west, and a chill in the air that could make a man ill — we sighted Tarsilla. People came down to the water’s edge, and we landed on the beach, landed our pigs of tin, our little remaining silver, our bee’s wax, Gallish wine, hides and all. We moved them all into Vasilios’s shed that he had used to protect our ship when he was building it.

We had a feast on the beach, and the next day we celebrated the Feast of Dionysus in style, with wine and song and even a play done by one of the teams of actors from Massalia.

Two more days, and Demetrios of Phokia arrives with sixty men and a pair of oxen to kill, and gave another feast for our return. We spent two days telling him of our travels.

He spent both days telling us of war with Carthage.

Carthage had struck at Sicily in our absence. And not just Sicily — the Carthaginians were using force to get absolute mastery of all the trade routes in the western Inner Sea. Carthage had been involved in wars on Sardinia for fifty years — and had squandered armies and fleets attempting to dominate the stiff necked peoples of the island. By the time Telesinus was Archon in Athens, Carthage had at last dominated the Sardana, and was now attempting to use her new ports to attack Greek colonies like Massalia — and Syracusa.

But the Greek world had not stood still during the year I had been away. Gelon, the Tyrant of Gela and Naxos, had seized power in Syracusa.

That was news. I knew a Sicilian Greek aristocrat named Gelon — in fact, I had enslaved him. It couldn’t be the same man — the Sicilian Tyrant had never been any man’s slave — but I wondered if my Gelon had made it home.

At any rate, Gelon — the tyrant — was unifying the Greek cities of Sicily and Magna Greca against Carthage. Not everyone joined him. Rich cities like Himera on Sicily and Reggium in southern Italy chose to remain independent.

Really, it was the Ionian Revolt played out in miniature. It had been going on for years — as one or another Greek state rose to prominence and led the resistance against Carthage, and was conquered or bought off, another would come. But Gelon of Gela — a right bastard, if Dionysius the Phocaean was to be believed — had at least achieved the building of an alliance.

I wondered what his conquest of Syracusa meant.

We were lying on the beach — it was still warm enough to be outside with a bonfire — eating beef and lobster. Dionysius the Phocaean was licking his teeth. ‘There is no side I want,’ he said. ‘I don’t want the Carthaginians to enslave me, and Gelon is a horror. He enslaved half of the free population of Syracusa — you know that?’

My blood ran cold.

‘Women, children — sold off or put in brothels. Men made into oarsmen, or forced labour on farms. Gelon won’t allow a lower class — a Thetis class. Claims they destabilize the state. He insists he’ll have only aristocrats and slaves, like Sparta.’ Dionysius picked his teeth and looked at me. ‘I don’t like either side.’

I lay on my straw paliase, using a metal pick to get the meat out of the body of a lobster and drinking wine. ‘I owe Carthage something. I’m of a mind to trade my share of the tin, take a ship while I have a crew — a fighting crew-’ I paused. I hadn’t been aware that this was my intention. But suddenly it was.

I nodded. ‘But first, I’m going to have Demetrios here go sell the tin, while I go back and find my friends,’ I said. ‘Doola, Daud, Sittonax, Alexandros — they’re probably right behind us on the road. And I owe something to young Gwan there.’

‘Winter will close the passes,’ Demetrios said. ‘And I won’t be selling any tin this winter, either.’

As if to prove him right, a cold gust of wind blew down off the mountains at our backs.