Poseidon's Spear

22

I’d like to say that Neoptolymos forgave his uncle’s relatives and retainers, but he didn’t, and there was a lot of blood in the next few hours. His cousins gathered around him, shouting out each indignity that they had endured at Epidavros’s hands, and they mutilated the man’s corpse. Then they started to execute the prisoners — slave and free, noble and peasant.

I could have stopped it.

But I didn’t.

I suppose that I had secretly wanted Dagon to be in the harbour. He wasn’t. But there were three Carthaginian ships, all small coasters, and we took them from the land while Dionysus closed the harbour mouth, and as the storm came up at sunset, our triremes came onto the harbour beach, safe from the storm, which raged for three days with Adriatic ferocity while the streets of the stronghold ran with blood.

I know philosophers who praise the Illyrians and the other barbarians for the purity of their way of life — the honesty of a world where a man’s strength is in his hands and his weapons. As a warrior, I realize that this may sound hopelessly pious, but as the rain-thinned blood ran down the cobbled streets of Dyrachos, and Epidavros’s relatives, retainers and womenfolk were hunted, raped and executed, I could only think of them all as barbarians. It can happen in Greece. It has happened in Greece. But by the gods, we do what we can to avoid it.

Dionysus took Epidavros’s daughters as slaves to sell in Syracusa. In brothels.

Neoptolymos sat on an ivory chair in the citadel. He had blood under his nails.

I have blood on my hands, too. I embraced him and wished him well, but I wanted no more of Illyria. He loaded me with gifts: gold cups, an Aegyptian ostrich egg, a silk cloak from Cyprus — he was open-handed with his uncle’s riches. Which was as well, as all of us had oarsmen to pay.

On the first fine day, I piled all of our loot, our plunder and our gifts on blankets on the beach, with silver ingots and bronze kettles, helmets, swords, spearheads We began the division of the spoils. I sat on my stool to adjudicate arguments. Will that girl clean up well when she stops crying? Can she weave? Compare her value to the value of that silver inlaid helmet — what’s between her legs is softer, but a moment of fever and she’s a stinking corpse, and the helmet will protect your head.

Ah, thugater, you hide your head. What do you think those scenes in the Iliad are about, when men divide the spoils?

It took two days.

There were the Carthaginian prisoners. By then, we had learned from them that Dagon had escaped us by less than two weeks. But at sea, two weeks is an eternity, and his ship had been clear of the Adriatic before our sails nicked the horizon. At any rate, I took the prisoners, as I was determined to send the bastard a message.

Men made their marks on everything. And there was some rearranging of crews. Most of my oarsmen wanted to go home to Massalia. Not Leukas the Alban, or some of the others. And Daud and Sittonax were done: we’d sworn oaths, and now they were satisfied. They would be going home. Doola and Seckla would return to our little town under the mountains.

I was going back to Plataea.

We loaded the spoils on different ships, and we exchanged oarsmen.

We drank together, one last time. It is odd, I think, and speaks directly to the power of the gods and of our oath, that of the seven who swore one day on a beach in Etrusca, we all lived to go to Alba, and six of us gathered on a beach in Illyria to say goodbye, despite slavery, war, betrayal and murder. We sacrificed an ox, sent his thigh bones to Zeus and asked the King of the Gods to witness that we had fulfilled our oaths to each other. Gaius and I made all of them swear to be guest friends, and each of us swore to visit the others again.

Giannis took the pentekonter for the oarsmen who were bound for Massalia. Megakles just shrugged. ‘I’ll go where you go,’ he said simply. ‘As long as I never have to serve under that fuckhead again.’ By whom he meant Dionysus.

Doola and I had a long conversation the last night at Dyrachos. Perhaps someday I’ll tell you what we said. He felt I was making a terrible mistake in going home.

‘Violence burns you like fire,’ he said.

‘You sound like Dano,’ I said.

He shrugged. ‘I no longer eat meat. And now that I have fulfilled my oath, I will go back to Croton and become an initiate,’ he said. ‘You should, too.’

I am a man of war. Sometimes, when one man wrongs another, only violence will settle the matter. We argued.

But we embraced.

And the next day, I sailed for Athens, with Cimon, Harpagos and Paramanos under my stern. And Sekla on my deck. He embraced Doola, but he came with me.

‘You get wounded in every fight,’ Doola said. ‘In the end, you’ll be killed.’

Sekla grinned. ‘Everyone dies,’ he said. ‘I want to see Athens. And then perhaps I’ll go home.’

The full irony of the next part can’t come home to you, children, unless you understand that I thought that was the end of adventure. I was at Sardis, Lade and Marathon. I went to Alba.

I was thirty-one years old, and it was time to grow up and go home. Face the burned-out forge. Kiss my sister. Grow a crop. Perhaps arrange for another wife; children.

Certainly that’s what Cimon and Harpagos and Paramanos and Sekla and I discussed the next two nights, as we worked our way down the coast of Illyria, past Leucas and landed at last at Ithaca. I felt like Odysseus returning, and we made some jokes. The truth is, too much blood had been spilled at Dyrachos for too little, and we were not ourselves. I have found that men of blood can go into black moods for little reason. That was one of those times, for me. Indeed, as we rowed south towards the Peloponnese, the same darkness began to come over me that had driven me off the cliff at Alkyonis when I tried to kill myself. I was savage to Megakles, who bore it with amused resignation, and to Ka, who glowed with his own rage, and to Sekla, who grinned and paid me no further attention.

That night, though, I saw a satyr near Pheia. Men say they are myth; other men say they live only in the Chersonese, or only in Scythia, or only around Olympia. I know what I saw, and the wonder of seeing it transfigured me. I had walked off the beach to have a piss, and I came back all but glowing. Cimon believed me — told me he had seen one himself in the south of the Peloponnese — while Brasidas ridiculed me and told me to grow up.

Brasidas had come with us as a passenger — he had the money to pay his mess bill — or the term of his exile was over. Either way, it might have been the longest speech I’d heard from him up until that date.

‘You sound more like Thales than like a Spartan,’ I said.

‘All Spartans are philosophers,’ he said.

‘They have to talk about something in between fighting,’ Cimon said.

I had decided to sail all the way to Athens to sell my loot, before going across the mountains to Boeotia. In truth, I think I was delaying my return home. Now that I’d decided on it, it scared me. Or rather, confronting my sister scared me, and the thought that she might have died in the meantime.

I thought a great deal about Odysseus, to tell you the truth.

The next day, the sky was red at dawn and we debated spending the day on the beach, but the rain, when it came, was gentle, and we put to sea.

But the visibility got worse and worse, and by midday, I couldn’t see any of the other ships. The wind was rising, and I turned the bow for shore.

And the wind changed.

We had had the wind alongside all day, and now it swung from west to east and came up with a howl, almost as fast as I can tell the story. An hour later it was as dark as night, the wind howled in the rigging and the rowers were exhausted, and I knew I couldn’t land the ship in this.

I had sailed the Western Ocean and I had been captain of my own ship for fifteen years, at that point. But I would have liked to have Paramanos, Harpagos or Demetrios or Doola at my side — or Miltiades or Cimon, for that matter. All of them, better yet.

I was with Megakles at the steering oars.

‘We have to turn and run before the wind,’ I shouted.

Wearily, he nodded.

Well, I hoped he agreed.

I ran down the sail deck to Leukas and Sekla. Held their arms while I shouted in their ears — that’s how bad the wind was. Leukas looked at the sea for a moment, as if he hoped that something would save us — a friendly sea monster, perhaps.

Then we began to run along among the oar benches, crawling when we had to. We told every oarsman what we were going to do. Every one.

Because turning a galley across big waves in a high wind is suicide. We had no choice. Only excellent luck and fine rowing and the favour of Poseidon would win us through.

I ordered Sekla to get the boat-sail up. I needed Leukas to get the oarsmen around, and I was going to be at the steering oars with Megakles. But the boatsail required timing and boatsail courage — and Sekla had plenty of both. He took Ka and the archers.

Even from the bow I could see nothing to the east, but I thought I could hear breakers under the wind.

There was no time to think.

I got on the starboard steering oar. I caught Megakles’ eye, and he nodded.

The wind roared. We rose on a wave.

‘About ship!’ I called, with every force I had.

The port-side rowers reversed their benches as the bow fell off from the wind. The wind wanted us broadside. We were still climbing a great breaker.

And then the port-side oars bit.

The starboard oars pivoted through another stroke.

There was a crack forward, where Ka had cut the boltrope of the boatsail, and it filled. Filled, cracked, slapped… and tore in half.

But in those heartbeats while it was intact, it swung the ship a third of the way around, and the oars now had purchase, and the bow was a little west of south.

We hit the top of the wave, and we weren’t broadside on, and started down.

The two oar-banks gave a great heave, like hoplites pushing at the climax of battle.

Our bow came around another point while the wind screamed, and then We were around. Even the ruins of the boatsail were enough to keep the bow pointed west, and now we were running free, and the rising sea was under the stern. Megakles used to swear we were close enough to Prote that he could have thrown a rock and hit the shore. I don’t know.

I never looked back.

We spent the night at sea, running before the wind and rain. The turn was terrifying, but it was, in many ways, less fearsome than that soaking, endless maw of darkness and freak waves that rolled across our seas against the wind, making my life and Megakles’ an endless torment of crisis.

But we did it. On and on, and finally the sky was a paler grey.

The mainmast went about morning. The pole was bare, of course, but the force of the wind had borne upon it all night, sometimes lashing it back and forth, and never had I thought so ill of the ship’s rig. And finally, there was a thump from below, a scream as an oarsman was pulped by the swinging stump of the mast, and then it was gone over the side.

Will of the gods. It might just as easily have gone through the shell of the ship and broken us in half, but it didn’t. It killed one man. It only had two heavy ropes supporting it, and we cut them away with swords as fast as we could — took a wave that soaked every man aboard and nigh filled us with water, and then the rags of the boatsail took the windboatsail and we were back on course, bailing like mad.

That was the last gust of the storm; we were all but sunk. The wave that struck us filled the bilges, and a trireme is a difficult ship to empty of water. Our rowers were already exhausted, and now they were trying to pull the weight of five thousand mythemnoi of water through the waves. The boatsail kept us alive, but we were wallowing, and had the storm risen again to its former ferocity, we would have foundered right there.

We bailed and bailed, and rigged our wooden pumps, and used helmets and buckets and clay pots and anything we had to get water over the side. We tossed the dead man’s corpse to Poseidon.

Little by little, we won our ship back from the sea.

I can’t tell you how long we bailed. I only know that every man not rowing was standing in the icy water between the thranites’ legs, passing buckets up or taking empty ones down and dumping them as fast as we could. And then, when Megakles reported that we were steering and the wind had died away, I went up to the sail deck — curiously naked without a mainmast — to a calm grey day with a hint of a breeze and every chance of sun later.

The sea.

I ordered Leukas to belay bailing long enough to rig the second boatsail.

In no time, we were moving smartly, and all the oarsmen were bailing, and men began to complain about the lack of water to drink. That’s when I knew we were going to live.

I knew we were well south of the Peloponnese, in the great blue deep between Carthage, Sicily, Athens and Cyrene. I watched the water for a while, and let the wind take us south and west. The rowers were exhausted. I needed land, water and food.

Men slept fitfully, and I told them all we would be another night at sea. I served out half the water we had, and all the grain and stale bread. And a dozen flasks of wine.

It was, thanks to Poseidon, an easy night.

As the sun touched the eastern rim of the aspis of the world with her rosy fingers, we saw a trireme lying under our lee — low in the water, and unmoving, without even a boatsail rigged.

We didn’t even have to run down on her — our ship was pointed at her. I thought for a little bit she might be Cimon’s, or Paramanos’s, but as we got closer I thought she was Harpagos’s Storm Cutter until I remembered that the old Phoenician ship was gone, replaced by a sleek Athenian hull. This was no Athenian. This was a heavy Phoenician warship, the kind that fills the centre of their line in battle.

As we manned the oars and Brasidas armed the marines, we saw them doing the same. The damaged ship began to crawl away from us and her archers lofted a dozen shafts, and one of Ka’s men was killed outright.

They were rowing directly away from us, which was insane. We had the wind. They couldn’t outrun the wind. It was shockingly poor seamanship — not that they were going to escape. Fewer than half their oars were being worked.

I motioned to Leukas, and he took in our boatsail when we were two stadia apart and we rowed — not that my lads were rowing better than theirs, but I had a great many more exhausted, desperate men. I’d like to think my first intention had been rescue, before the arrow killed Ka’s man.

Now, as we closed, the arrows came thick and fast. Ka’s Nubians returned them, shaft for shaft. I went forward with Brasidas. We were going to ram the Phoenician’s stern, and board.

I made it to the foredeck with only two arrows in my aspis. On Lydia we had a screen built in front of the marine’s boarding station — long experience had shown me how dangerous this post was, in a ship fight. My screen was riddled with arrows.

We were ten horse-lengths apart. I could now see why my opponent was running straight downwind.

He had no steering oars.

Damned fool! He started the fight by lofting arrows at us. A fight he couldn’t win.

From the Phoenician ship, there was a roar of rage and a sound of many women screaming.

Another arrow struck my aspis. It struck hard enough to rock my body back, and the head of the arrow drove through three layers of good willow and one of bronze, and the light bronze head protruded a good three fingers above my naked arm in the porpax.

Ka’s lieutenant, Artax, took an arrow that went through the wooden screen and hit his bow, shattering the wood and horn. Artax stood there, with the lower arm of the bow in his hand, staring at it.

I reached out, threw a hand around his neck and pulled him to the deck. Before he got killed.

The truth was, my Nubians were losing the fight. They’d put a great many arrows in the air, and they had the wind behind them.

But they were exchanging arrows with Persians — Persian noblemen, I was guessing by the length of the shafts and their thickness. Warriors trained from youth to draw the bow and shoot well. Bows that I had to struggle to draw — arrows as thick as a lady’s finger and as long as my arm.

My aspis fielded another one. Look, thugater — it is the third aspis there, with the raven in bronze. See the holes? All from that day. Count them! Eleven holes. Each time an arrow shot by a Persian nobleman hits you, your body staggers as if you’ve taken a blow, and when two hit together, you rock back a step.

Ka had an arrow through his bicep. The blood was red, and his skin didn’t appear so dark. He slumped to the deck, his back against the lower part of the screen.

‘Sorry, lord,’ he said.

I shook my head. He and his Nubians had done pretty well, considering.

Brasidas was crouched behind me. The Spartan was brilliantly trained, but he wasn’t stupid. And my marines were crouched in rows, ready to go over the bow.

I wished for Doola and his heavy bow.

‘Keep your aspis up. When you jump from our ship to theirs, go fast, and keep your aspis towards the archers. Understand me?’ I shouted the words.

Men nodded. The man behind Brasidas — Darius — licked his lips.

‘I never thought I’d be fighting Persians again,’ he said.

‘Ah,’ said Brasidas. He brightened. ‘These are Persians?’

I nodded. ‘At least half a dozen of their noble archers,’ I said. ‘Someone on that ship is important.’

We were very close. I wasn’t going to raise my head to find out just how close, but the archery had stopped and I could hear the sound of swords, screams from men who were wounded and the shrill keening of women. Quite a few women.

I raised my head above the screen.

We were passing down the enemy side. You can’t board over a well-built trireme’s stern, of course — the stern timbers rise like a swan’s neck over the helmsman’s station, and there is no purchase for any but the most desperate boarder.

Megakles was running up the enemy’s side. He — or Leukas — had coaxed a burst from our oarsmen, and now we shot along, our oars came in and we crushed the few oars the Phoenician had over the side. Our bow struck their side just forward of the rower’s station and we spun the enemy ship a little in the water, and had we been at full speed, we’d have rolled her over and sunk her right there — it was a brilliant piece of helmsmanship. As it was, we tipped the heavier ship, our ram biting on his keel or some projection below the waterline and our bow catching his gunwale, so that he took on water.

‘ At them! ’ I shouted.

I don’t remember much of the boarding action because of what came next, but this is what I do remember.

I pulled the rope that held the screen and it fell forward, and I jumped up onto it, ran a few steps and leaped for the enemy ship. I got one foot on the gunwale, and had one heartbeat to see the whole ghastly drama.

Right in the stern, around the helmsman’s station, stood four Persians — helmets, scale shirts, long linen robes and fine boots. One was still shooting, and the other three were armed with short spears and swords. Behind them, packed into the swan’s neck, were a dozen women — some screaming, and some clutching daggers. In and among the women were two corpses — one of a Persian with gold bracelets and gold on his sword, his head in the lap of a woman in a long Persian coat with sleeves and a shawl. Even as I watched, she laid his head to the side and took his sword from his hand.

Forward of them was a horde of desperate men with various weapons: boarding pikes, spears, broken oars, swords and fists. The pile of dead in front of the Persians told its own story.

I leaped down onto the afterdeck. Phoenicians are often decked directly above the rowing compartment. This one was decked over the after-rowing area, like Lydia.

Brasidas landed on the deck behind me.

‘Clear the riff-raff away from the Persians,’ I ordered.

The desperate, dehydrated, unfed oarsmen should have been easy meat. But they were not. There were an awful lot of them, and their desperation was total.

Let me tell you how fighting is. While I was killing them, I never thought of how I had been in the very same position, once. Of how understandable was their desperation. I called them riff-raff — hah! I have been riff-raff.

But they were beyond fear. It was like fighting Thracians — they came at me, first in ones and twos as their rear ranks discovered us, and then the mass of them, trying to crush us or throw us over the sides before we got all of our marines on their deck and formed up.

I was hit repeatedly in the first moments. And never have I had such cause to bless an armourer as I did Anaxsikles. I took a heavy blow on top of my outstretched right foot — and the bronze turned it. A boarding pike went past my aspis on my naked right side and scored my bronze-armoured thigh, and the blow slipped away, turning like rain from a good roof. A thrown javelin left a deep dent in my right greave, and then the shaft rotated and slapped hard into my left ankle, and there was bronze there, too.

Their screams and roars were those of a hundred-headed monster, and that monster had two hundred arms and unlimited stores of strength. The press of men struck my aspis and I staggered back a step, and behind me was empty air and water.

Listen, then. This is who I was.

As they came to contact, my spear flew like the raven on my shield. I had a trick I’d practised for a year — rifling the spear from my shoulder on a leather lanyard, so that, in fact, I threw it about the width of a man’s palm. But the leather never left my hand and armoured wrist, so that I could tear it out of a corpse. When done just right, the spear would either take a life, or bounce off a shield or armour and return to my hand like a magical thing.

Ah, the man from Halicarnassus doubts me. Hand me that spear — the heavy one. I’m not so old that my hand cannot hold a spear. Watch, my children.

Three times into the old beam — in as many heartbeats. No man can block all three, unless the gods give him strength.

Ah, you interrupted me with your doubts, young man.

Listen, then.

My first blow went into the bridge of a man’s nose, and before he fell to the deck, my second blow went deep into his mate to the right, and the man fell to the deck clutching my spear. I stepped forward into the moment of time created by the kills and twisted my spear in his guts, ripped it clear and killed a third man with my sauroter as the spike rotated up.

Just like that.

By the will of Heracles, my spear didn’t break, and I threw it forward again on my wrist thong and missed, and my bronze spike slammed into an unarmoured man.

My right side was naked, and every heartbeat I waited for the spear in the ribs that would end my fight. I had boarded confident that we would break the Persians in a moment, and now I was fighting for my life.

But nothing came into my right side. A man threw his arms around my aspis, seeking to break my arm. I thrust forward with both legs into the press and he tripped, and my sauroter went into his mouth and out again. His limbs loosened and he fell. Brasidas tapped his aspis against me on my right to tell me that he was there.

I whirled my spear over my head, changing the sauroter for the spear point. Roared my war cry: ‘HERACLES!’

They all came at us at once, and there was a long time there that I remember nothing, except that I killed men, and no man killed me. They were soft and unarmoured, and I was covered in bronze. They were not warriors, and I was trained from boyhood.

And yet they almost had me, again and again.

Desperation makes all men equal. A small man in a Phrygian cap caught my spear arm and tore my spear away — broke my balance, dragged me forward and a dozen blows fell on my armour and helmet. One — a spear — punched that small hole in the backplate of my thorax. See?

I got the sword out from under my arm. My fancy long-bladed xiphos was too damned long — hard to draw in a press. I couldn’t get it clear of the scabbard and I almost died trying.

Two men were trying to press me to the deck. Brasidas killed one — I saw his spearhead — but he had his own dozen opponents.

I went to one knee. Something cold was in my right side, and something hot was trickling down the middle of my back.

A woman screamed. I thought I knew that woman, and that scream.

I got my foot under me and pushed. My right hand gave up on the xiphos and went instead to the stout dagger I always wore at my right hip. Like a beautiful thought, it rose from its scabbard and my hand buried it in my immediate grappling adversary’s arm. He had to let go. I must have stabbed twenty times, punching with a dagger, over and over, as I cleared the space around me. I was blind — sweaty, and my helmet twisted just a fraction on my head — but it didn’t matter, and any man I could touch, I cut, or stabbed.

I felt an aspis press into my back.

I heard Darius shout, ‘I’m here, lord!’

I rotated my hips, and let him step forward. Only then did I discover that the little rat with the cap had dislocated my left shoulder, and my shield hung at my side like a dead thing. It’s odd what your body can do, when it is life or death.

We had ten marines aboard by then, doing what they did best — they had to fight to get into a formation, and we lost one, but when Brasidas and nine hoplites were formed in a rough line, five wide and two deep, they were unstoppable on a ship.

I got my helmet off. Only then did I see that my right hand was pouring with blood. Apparently at some point I grabbed a blade.

I dropped the aspis off my left arm.

Leukas came onto our deck. He had good armour and a Gaulish helmet, and carried a long sword. He led a dozen of our deck crewmen, who were better armoured than many poorer hoplites.

His sword whirled — I’d never seen him fight. He was full of fury, and I remember thinking that he should be trained. An odd thought to have in a fight.

But his no-holds-barred approach was ideal for facing down a crowd of badly armed men, and when the deck crew crossed behind him, the fight began to be a massacre.

I stood and breathed. And bled, of course.

And then I turned and walked over the pile of corpses towards the Persians.

I had no aspis, and one of them — the youngest by ten years, I’d guess — had an arrow on his string.

I knew one of these Persians.

‘Greetings, brother,’ I said to Cyrus. I reached up my bleeding hand and tipped my helmet back.

Cyrus was the centre Persian. He was a superb swordsman, and a fine archer. I’ve mentioned him before, and his brother Darius, and their friend Arynam. The world is truly very small, at least among fighting men.

Cyrus laughed, and his teeth showed white in his old-wood face. ‘Ari!’ he shouted. In Persian, he said, ‘Brothers, we are saved. This one is my friend — my sword brother.’

We embraced, and I bled on his armour and apologized.

‘Tell your women they don’t have to stab themselves,’ I said. I slapped Cyrus on the shoulder. I felt alive.

Behind me, the desperate oarsmen threw down their weapons and begged for mercy. The Persian woman by Cyrus dropped her weapon and threw back her shawl. And stepped forward into my arms.

Sometimes, I think that we are mere playthings of the gods. And sometimes, that they mean us to be happy.

Men were dying at my back.

There was blood running over my sandals.

A friend of my youth stood at my shoulder.

I saw none of them, because the woman in my arms was Briseis.