Poseidon's Spear

15

Tarsilla was not a smoking ruin. We came down the steep ridge behind, already aware that the town was safe from our friends among the herdsmen and shepherds, but still peering over every hill for a sign.

The timber temple of Apollo was still there. The theatre — a small one — was still there.

There were ships on the beach.

I knew Lydia as soon as I saw her. She was perfect — the finest trireme I had ever seen. Vasileos had outdone himself. And her twin sister was next to her. Gaius’s vessel, and although I did not know it at the time, she was at that moment just a day old, all complete, the traditional ceremony just complete, the oarsmen sleeping off the festivities under awnings.

Gaius called her Iusticia. Justice.

Demetrios’s house was closed and boarded. The wine shops certainly looked as if the Phoenicians had landed and smashed the town, but the rest looked good, and our house was secure, the main gate closed. Giannis opened the gate and embraced me, and we were home.

The thing I remember best about that homecoming was Doola and Seckla. Doola had brought his wife, of course. Seckla helped her down from her mule, and we all knew — right there — that all was well. She smiled at him, perfectly aware that this was an important moment. Then Doola went and embraced him. Seckla cried.

Well, lots of us cried. But we were home, and we’d done it.

We had done it.

I haven’t mentioned Neoptolymos. Of course he was with Doola. He had done great deeds of arms in the south, with the Vascones, and against the Iberians. And when I recovered from my wounds, I found him as big as ever, his frame filled out, but calmer and happier, too. He had married a Vascone woman, Brillix, who was as much the opposite of the blond Illyrian as a human being could be. Where he was tall and pale, she was small and dark. He was taciturn and morose, and she was cheerful, funny, endlessly talkative. I’ve heard that opposites attract, but Brillix was the most opposite I could imagine to my vengeful Illyrian friend. And she made him — better. She made him happy. Happiness is better than revenge.

Nonetheless, she also gave him a reason to want both wealth and security. He was no longer a sword for hire. He was a husband and, it was obvious, about to be a father. Brillix was as close to perfectly spherical as a woman could be when pregnant.

We drank a lot of wine that day, and handed out more to the oarsmen.

It’s not all war, my friends. Sometimes, life is just sweet. The next few weeks — oh, there’s no story to tell, except that watching Brillix wander the house, cooking, cleaning, feathering her nest — watching Doola and Seckla rebuild their friendship, with Doola’s wife as an ally — caulking and preparing our triremes for sea, training our oarsmen, drinking at the edge of the Middle Sea It rivals any time in my life. I missed having a love of my own, but to be honest, watching Neoptolymos and Brillix, or Doola and his wife, I was not interested in buying a slave and pumping away at her. I wanted a wife.

I wondered if Lydia were still available. But it had been more than two years. And to a marriageable young woman Still, one of the things my teacher, Calchus, had taught me over and over again, when I was a boy at the tholos tomb above Plataea, was that you never know until you ask. I had thought about Lydia many, many times in two years. I had behaved badly — shockingly badly, really, by my own standards. But her father was not without error, either. It began to occur to me that in my new status, as a rich shipowner, I might have a certain appeal.

Other things were occurring to me, as well. Riches — real wealth — the wealth to buy and maintain a ship, retainers, warehouses — have a cascade of effects.

Have I mentioned that I knew by then that Miltiades had died? Pointlessly, of a minor wound, in prison? The fucking Athenians — pardon me, thugater — had imprisoned him for failing to take the island of Paros. Heh. That’s what they said, anyway. I loved the pirate, but he was scheming to make himself tyrant, I guarantee it, and I wasn’t there to save his aristocratic arse.

Themistocles was building Athens a mighty fleet. All the Inner Sea was talking about it, because the Phoenicians were rumoured to be allied to the Persians. In Massalia, over wine, Dionysius told me that two sets of Persian envoys had come and gone from Carthage.

And everyone in the Inner Sea knew that Persia was going for Athens. Again. But this time, not with a provincial satrap and a hastily raised army. The word was that the Persians were going to throw a thousand ships and a million men at Greece.

Well, that’s what Dionysius said, anyway. And Demetrios was gone.

He’d taken Sikel Herakles to sea as soon as I was gone. He’d also taken a quarter of the tin.

And he hadn’t come back.

There’s time for rage, friends. Time to swear revenge and get it.

There are other times to shrug and call it a day.

It was only tin. There were fifty-six pigs still under the floorboards of our house, and another eight we’d brought all the way from the Vascones’ land. Interesting that Doola insisted we all share, even though he and Neoptolymos and Daud had done all the work.

So we had sixty-four pigs left, less four pigs that Gaius used and four I used, sheathing our ships and our rams, and two more that we sold in Massalia to cover expenses and to do favours for bronze-smiths who helped us. That left us fifty-six pigs. We sold ten pigs — a lot of tin — to Dionysius, both to keep him sweet on us and to raise the cash to pay my oarsmen and hire oarsmen for Gaius. In the view of all of us — except, unfortunately, Demetrios — these were group expenses.

We ballasted our triremes in tin — twenty-four pigs each ship. It was a lot of tin.

Those forty-eight pigs were pure profit, and every man of us was due one-sixth in cash.

At the same time, I threw all my remaining silver and all the gold torcs I’d earned into the common pot. Doola and Neoptolymos had loot, too — and in it went. That came to a tidy sum. Vasileos was voted a full share of the tin, and so was Sittonax, which reduced our shares to one-eighth.

Getting all this? Merchants are always surprised at how well soldiers can divide profits, but listen, honey — the rules for dividing spoils are in the Iliad. We’re good at maths. I had run the tin as a profitable military venture, not as a trading concession — or at least, that’s how it had ended. Vasileos was deeply moved to be offered a fortune, and Sittonax laughed. He just laughed.

Of course, we had one last task — to sell the tin.

Forty-eight pigs of tin was enough to wreck the trade in a small market, or make other men rich in a large market.

Doola had other plans. He wanted to sell the tin at the top of the market, a month or so before the yearly convoys from Iberia reached Carthage. He studied such things, and he sat on the beach at Massalia and listened to the merchants — no Phoenicians this year — and made his plans.

Sometimes, you wander lost in life and you feel abandoned by the gods, and you move fecklessly from one day to another without purpose. Other times, it seems as if the hand of the gods is on your steering oars, and no matter what you might plan, the gods point you to a certain act, or in a certain direction. That is how I felt that summer. We had four glorious weeks of preparation, and then, after a night without wine and a good sleep, I rose in the dark with all my friends and all my people, and we got the two new ships manned, and friends — shepherds and fishermen — pushed our heavily laden ships down the beach and into the sea. And as the sky lightened to the east, we pulled our swift ships over a calm sea, bound for Sicily and Syracusa and the largest market for tin in the Inner Sea.

We rowed east and south, and stayed on open beaches with a heavy guard. Fishermen fled us, but when we managed to convince one we were safe, off Etrusca, he reported that a heavy Carthaginian squadron was operating in Sardinian waters.

We rowed south the next day, giving Sardinia a wide berth by continuing down the Tyrrhenian coast. We seemed to push the trade right off the seas — we did, after all, have a pair of sleek warships, and everyone ran. Which was just fine with all of us.

We passed the Tiber without entering the estuary. Gaius didn’t want to go home until the tin was sold, and I appreciated his willingness; we didn’t want to stay at sea with our cargoes. We wanted to get to the Sicilian market as soon as possible.

Let me wander off my topic to say that by this time I had begun to consider returning to Plataea. Euphoria’s death was far enough behind me now, and I had begun to think of taking my tin and going back to start again. So I did mention to Doola that the very best market at which to sell our fortune in tin was Athens.

Doola just shrugged. ‘I don’t know Athens,’ he said. And that was that. Listen — when the storm was roaring, we listened to Vasileos and Demetrios. When there were spears drinking blood, they all listened to me. When there were things to be traded, we listened to Doola. That’s what made us strong.

We had three days’ bad weather south of Tiber. We were headed by winds and the seas were short and choppy and a misery for the oarsmen, and I did something I hate — I turned tail and ran for a beach, landed and spent two days watching the weather. I remember so well, because without it Well, talk about the hand of the gods. The gods had me in both hands, that summer.

Two days later, we weathered Pelorus in a fine west wind, passing Charybdis under sail with the rowers making jokes about their godsend of a vacation. With the wind under our sterns, we ran west as far as we could, tacked, rowed and did it again. I mention this because it was a tactic I used to work up a rapid response in my crews, and always have — it’s neither faster nor slower than rowing, but it does give the men a rest, and it also trains them in the rapid switch from sailing rig to rowing and back, which is essential to survival. Well, I laugh — survival as a pirate, anyway.

Both of our ships had the new Tyrrhenian rig which men now call the triemiola, so we no longer took our mainmast down — ever — and we had a half-deck aft instead of a catwalk making for a heavier, but more stable, ship; a wide platform for our marines and archers, and a permanent station for the deck crew who worked the sails. Again, none of this was revolutionary. There were a hundred triemiolas in the Inner Sea. But we had a pair, and we had trained our crews the way the best military crews were trained. We’d been together a long time, too — the core of our crews were the men who’d gone to the Outer Sea and back.

You can tell we’re coming to a fight, can’t you?

Heh.

We were tacking and rowing our way down the Strait of Messina, with me in the bow watching our tacks and trying to decide whether I was going all the way to Syracusa, or whether to make do with Regium on the port side — the mainland side. I passed the city, noting three triremes in the harbour, yards crossed and ready for sea, and we crossed the strait one more time and ran south along the Sicilian coast, watching for the beaches north of Katania as Aetna grew to starboard to dominate the horizon. The wind abated — blocked by Aetna — and we found the beach I remembered. I missed Demetrios, and that’s the truth; he knew these waters like a pilot, and I was a mere duffer by comparison. But we got our heavy hulls ashore, and we hired rollers from the fishermen and ran our hulls right up the beach to give them a good drying. Wet hulls are heavier and slower, and when you have a ballast of tin We set a heavy guard. I was a day short of my goal, with a fortune in tin, and there was a heavy Carthaginian squadron at sea. I was no fool. I had marines on either headland, and by all the gods, that night I considered hiring a hundred donkeys and walking the ingots to Syracusa, I was that afraid.

I was afraid of more than that. The Tyrant of Syracusa was becoming renowned by then for his treatment of merchants. He was a bloody-handed aristocrat, a man who had risen to his place by a long string of military victories. Gelon hated merchants and ‘little people’, as he called them; he exacted heavy taxes to pay for his wars, and despite all that, Syracusa was more prosperous than ever. Maybe because of him. He had restored Syracusa’s military power. Carthage was not going to find Syracusa an easy nut to crack.

But I might. Former slave — tin merchant. I was more than a little afraid of his customs officers.

And as we sat on the beach at Katania, returning to talk to Lydia seemed stupider. It seemed like foolish romantic claptrap.

Cowardice is the sum of the whispers of the weaker daimons in your soul, my friends.

The sun rose, and I didn’t buy the donkeys. I got my oarsmen onto the ships, put on my finest chiton, my armour, my best cloak. I arrayed myself as Arimnestos of Plataea, lord of men. I took a deep breath and reminded myself that Gelon of Syracusa was a parvenu from Magna Greca, and I was a son of Heracles.

I prayed, too.

We got off the beach in fine style, and I sacrificed a fine silver cup and some superb Sicilian wine to the sea god, and then we were rowing south. When we were clear of Aetna’s shadow the west wind was unleashed, and we began to make leeway to the west — virtually a stade west for a stade south. It was a strong wind, raising a phalanx of whitecaps that made the water look like the Outer Sea.

‘Any stronger, and we’ll have to run west,’ I commented to Giannis and Megakles, who were sharing the steering oars.

Megakles grunted. Giannis smiled — he was about to go to Syracusa, and he was excited.

I remember looking up from Giannis to find that Seckla was pointing at the bow, and I followed his pointing finger to see the low shape of a ship nicking the horizon to the west on the opposite course.

And another astern of it.

And another.

They were all of them triremes, or so they appeared at this distance. A word for you virgins — a warship is low and crewed by rowers, virtually invisible until you are within fifteen stades or so, and even then difficult to see. A heavy merchant is not longer, but it is rounder, higher out of the water, heavier in its masts — much easier to see, in any weather. So we could see that the ship closest to us on the horizon was a trireme or a big bireme, and the ships astern of her were not merchantmen.

Also worth noting is that there are a hundred things a sailor learns in one look at a ship — even a ship on the horizon. Listen, girls: when you are going to the fountain-house with your friends and your slaves, you know it is young Eustacia bending over the well long before you can see her face, right? You know her from her clothes, from the shape of her hips, from the indefinable way she bends her body… isn’t that true?

Just so, at sea. One glance, and you know.

So, the lead ship was Greek.

The two ships behind were Phoenician.

There are these moments in every man’s life — women, too — in fact, whole cities and nations — that define them. And are defined by them. There are moments where you act because you are what you are, and not because you have some finely realized philosophy to justify your actions.

I turned to Megakles. ‘Hard to port,’ I said. Doola was a few steps away on the half-deck. All I had to do was give the signal to raise the mainsail, and it was in motion.

We heeled a little as we turned.

The mainsail raced up the mast, and we had the wind astern, and we were tearing downwind at the two Phoenicians. It feels to me now as if we turned before the words had left my mouth, but in fact it must have taken some minutes, and many breaths must have passed my lips.

None of them questioned me.

Let me say this — with a smile, I hope. I had two ships laden with treasure, and I was a few hours’ sail from the port where we would realize our fortunes, and when I ordered us to turn, the Phoenicians were far too committed to the chase of that Greek ship to pay us any attention. We’d have been in Syracusa by late afternoon.

I turned off our plot to run downwind on a pair of well-armed enemy warships with professional crews, for no better reason than that I hated them, and that they were chasing a Greek ship, and every one of us had been a slave on a Carthaginian.

I threw it all away.

Hah!

Beat that.

We ran down at them; they were well trained and saw us almost immediately, with our heavy sails set. No reason that they shouldn’t.

But they were nearly up with the Greek galley, and they began to range up either side, archers shooting into the crew. The Greeks were resisting. Then, one of the Carthaginians dropped astern, and with a magnificent effort got his crew to row double hard, and he rammed the Greek ship in the stern — a difficult ram in any conditions, and twice as difficult in that sea. The Greek ship’s bow fell off the wind, and she was caught broadside and rolled. The Phoenicians rammed the Greek, but their attacks were oar-rakes, and they may have killed rowers but they couldn’t get their beaks in.

All this time, and we were racing down the wind. And then we saw why they were so bold.

There were two more triremes rowing up in the eye of the wind. Two more Phoenicians.

This was the heavy squadron.

I laughed.

I mean, I had committed my treasure and my ships… right down their throats.

We were under sail, so I manoeuvred my hull right alongside Gaius. I got up on the swan-neck of wood that protected the helmsman, and he climbed out to meet me. We were only a few feet apart.

‘Want to run for it?’ I called.

He laughed. ‘No,’ he said.

That was our command meeting.

Two stades out, we got our sails down. We were racing along faster than a horse gallops, a heady speed that fills the senses, and we had new-built ships with strong bows and new timber. And tons of tin. And new rams, just cast by me. I trusted Vasileos’s work, and I trusted my own.

Ah, the moment.

We were going so fast that when the rowers put their oars in the water, they slowed us, and we threatened to fall off our course as they touched the choppy water.

The two nearest Phoenicians were on either side of the Greek, boarding from both broadsides. Because they’d made shallow oar-rakes from astern, they had both grappled with their bows just about amidships to the Greek ship, so their sterns projected.

We came at them like arrows from a bow, an oar’s-length separating us, my Lydia just astern and to the starboard. We struck their sterns almost together. Lydia ’s beak struck through the enemy ship’s timbers like a man punching through a house wall when his house is afire, and timber flew through the air. It was the most decisive strike I have ever seen. Most ram attacks turn a ship over, and the wreck floats. But the target was stationary, held by the grapples, and couldn’t turn or roll. And we hit hard — hard enough to stove the bows of most ships.

But not my Lydia. We ripped the stern right off, and the Phoenician filled and sank as fast as I can tell it.

Two hundred men died in the next minute — drowned, slave and free, Phoenician nobleman and Greek victim.

I watched them die as my rowers cheered and backed water.

Gaius blew right through his — probably an older ship, or one with the Tenedos rot, because he tore the stern off and his hull slid over the wreck and he raced on, leaving his victim to sink. I admit that I watched his standing mainmast spring forward the length of a horse as he struck, and I feared it would rip through his bottom — but it didn’t.

The Greeks cut their grapples desperately, because the weight of two sinking ships was dragging them down like one of Poseidon’s monsters.

The Greek was in rough shape. He had a dozen Phoenician marines on his decks and a great many dead oarsmen, his stern was badly damaged and his ship was sinking under him.

That was too bad, because I wasn’t leaving Gaius to fight two angry Phoenicians alone, and I wasn’t about to put my marines onto a sinking ship. Doola shot one of the Phoenician marines — a beautiful arrow — and we were away, and that was all the help we offered him. Well, aside from sinking both his enemies, of course.

The two oncoming triremes were under oars, and they had had a long pull — they’d been far to windward. You could see from their rowing.

We had standing rigging, remember. We didn’t have to take our masts down, even after a collision like the one we’d just had. Now we had them aloft again, just as fast, our victorious oarsmen resting.

I laughed. I felt like a god of the sea.

I would have fought fifty Carthaginians, if they had come at me.

The ones to the west of us turned on their oars and raised their mainsails and ran.

It was the right decision. We’d evened the odds in one headlong rush, and now we had the fresh crews and the edge that victory brings, and they knew it.

Now, in sea terms, we were supposed to let them go. It is not for nothing that we say ‘A stern chase is a long chase’. When you are astern of an enemy, you have no advantage of wind direction. You have only the speed of your ships. For the most part, Greek ships are faster than Phoenicians, but we were heavily laden.

And when they turned away, we had won. It became our duty, by the laws of hospitality, to rescue the Greek ship.

But the closer Phoenician had lingered in his turn — bad ship-handling. The westernmost one had issues, too, and got around before his sails were well set, leading to some yawing.

Megakles looked at me. He had his grin on his face. ‘That guy is a fool,’ he said, pointing with his chin at the nearer Phoenician. ‘Bad crew.’

Seckla was all teeth. ‘Let’s take him.’

Doola had just unstrung his bow. Without demur, he restrung it.

It was like that.

The oarsmen grumbled.

But, as I pointed out, we were under sail.

We ran about six stades, and the sail began to shiver. The wind was changing, the sun was clouding over and the air had that taste it gets when there’s a storm over Africa. We got our sails down long before our prey, and they wallowed in the gusts as the wind changed and we were coming up on them hand over fist.

Gaius was well astern of us, and five stades to the north. This was a natural consequence of the weather change, and if the pattern of wind gusts had been different, he’d have come up with the third Phoenician and we’d have been left to the south — but there came a point when he was no longer in the fight.

That decided me on my tactics. We crept up the last three ship-lengths, using the boatsail to give us an edge, and then we went to ramming speed, our ship shot forward and we caught their steering oars. The enemy ship yawed, and all my archers shot into the command platform.

We ran farther west because we could only turn so fast, and it was then, as the second enemy ship ran like a rabbit, leaving the one we’d just struck to its fate, that I saw Dagon. He was a stade away, and I knew him in a moment.

And every shade of fear and hate struck me, all together.

Ever see a woman you have loved? A boy you wanted and lost to another girl?

You know what I mean. All that, in one moment. I swear, I had all but forgotten his existence, until I saw him.

My ship was already turning under me. The orders were given, the sails were down, the rowers fully engaged. I was not going to catch that galley that day. But I watched him from my command deck until we turned back to our prey.

I don’t think he saw me.

Damn him.

The wounded Phoenician surrendered. He hadn’t a chance: I had a consort on the horizon, and he had lost his steering and most of his officers in one pass. And as soon as we came alongside, some Greek dragged a Carthaginian down into the benches and strangled him.

I put Doola and Megakles and all my marines into him, and we rowed his bow around while Megakles rigged a jury steering oar, and then we were rowing across the new, choppy African wind. Darkness was falling when we came alongside Gaius. Gaius had run west ahead of us. He was the one who came alongside the sinking wreck of the Greek ship and rescued her crew and her oarsmen, filling his ship to a dangerous degree, knowing that I was right behind him. And I was. I came up beside him, and at the edge of darkness, lashed together, we transferred a hundred desperate men. A trireme can only hold so much, and then it won’t float. Or it folds in the middle. But bless Vasileos, he built good ships, and we ran for the coast, rowing as well as we could with so many extra bodies on board.

But they helped, sometimes three men sitting on the same bench. I put forty Greek rowers into my capture, and at about midnight we were off the beach at Katania. Seckla swam ashore, roused fishermen and got beacons lit, and one by one we got our ships landed, stern-first. It wasn’t that the seas were high, or the current treacherous. It was merely that we were exhausted. It was dark. Mistakes were made.

Men were injured.

But we didn’t lose a ship, or an ingot of tin, and in the end we got fires lit, and men fell asleep naked on the summer sands.