Only a day ago, our departure had been swift and efficient. Lopex had intended to wait until the wounded men were fit for travel, but the plan changed at noon of our third day, when the beach lookout spotted a small boat with a triangular sail, cruising slowly past the inlet. As we watched, it turned around and headed back the way it came.
Lopex stared intently at the boat until it disappeared, then turned to face the camp. “Men!” he shouted. “Break camp! We sail in two hands.” It took a moment before I understood. The Greeks divided the day and night into twenty hands, the time it took the sun to cross from wrist to fingertip behind a hand held at arm’s length.
I caught up with Kassander, who was carrying some empty water skins to the spring. His stoop was almost gone today. “Why is he so afraid of that little boat?” I asked him. “It didn’t even come near us!”
His eyebrows went up. “Your master’s no fool,” he replied. “The Cicones have no navy to speak of, just some coastal fishing boats like that one. But those fishermen will report our location as soon as they return.” He frowned. “Impressive, that. I’ve never heard of a ship that could sail into the wind before. Thank the gods they have no navy or they could manoeuvre around us as if we were stones.”
He scratched his chin, thinking. “I’d guess that the Cicones will be on the march within a few hands. If they push it, they could arrive in time to mount a dawn attack tomorrow. And as you saw yesterday, beaches make a poor defensive position.”
The men had learned from Ismaros, and the ships were floated swiftly enough for us to row out on the trailing end of the high tide that afternoon. But at the steering oar, the steersman Zanthos had shaken his head. “Don’t like the looks of that sky, ” he muttered.
It wasn’t long before I found out why.
It had been bad during the day, but night was worse. Daytime, we’d had a lookout watching for land ahead, a harbour for refuge or cliffs to avoid. But we found no sanctuary, and landing on a rocky shore in this storm would have been suicidal. The night, black as squid ink, could have blown us past a dozen harbours or a hundred cliffs.
The ship plunged blindly on, its timbers creaking madly on each crest as we fought to keep it above the waves, praying to any gods who might be listening that we wouldn’t run aground on a reef or be battered to splinters by a rocky coast.
By the grey dawn of the second morning, my stomach had settled down enough to let me think, but the storm was as fierce as ever. “Why doesn’t he take the sail down?” I bawled into the steersman’s ear over the howling wind, the spray-laden gale lashing my hair against his face.
“Because we’re not ready to die yet, boy!” he bellowed back through salt-cracked lips. “That sail keeps us ahead of them waves. Without it, they’d spin us broadside and swamp us out!” Glancing up at the straining mast and drum-tight sail, I caught again the eerie threnody of the wind blowing through the taut ox-hide stays and muttered a quick prayer to Poseidon. I should have known better. Of all the gods, only Hades had a stronger thirst for souls than Poseidon, lord of the seas.
It happened just after a grey dawn on the morning of the third day. The driving rain had fallen off, but the waves were still dangerously high. Two days of constant pounding had loosened the ship’s seams to the point that we were stuffing our own tunics into the cracks to try to seal them, leaving the slaves and most of the Greeks in loincloths or naked. I had been bailing the bow hold with the other slaves all night, passing my bucket up the ladder to a soldier to empty over the side, and each dip of my bucket made the bilges squeak and rustle as the waterlogged hold rats scrambled out of the way. Suddenly there was a loud crack from up top.
Scrambling up the ladder, I was just in time to see the mast topple, its jagged stump stabbing upward as the billowing sail wrapped the men beneath in a clammy linen shroud. Lopex sprang up immediately to untangle the men from the sail, cutting the stay lines and heaving the shattered mast overboard in what seemed a single motion.
The steersmen were bending their oars to keep the ship from turning broadside to the waves, but without the sail it had already begun. Laden with plunder and knee-high with water in the hold, the ship was sluggish, but I could see it beginning a slew to the right. As the turn continued, the waves began to tip the ship dangerously. I grabbed something for balance as the men began to clamour in terror.
Lopex leapt to the stern deck. “We’re not dead yet, men!” he shouted, his voice booming out over the wind. “And by Athene, we won’t be if you do what I say! Port side, out oars! Now!” His forceful tone was compelling, and the men scrambled to unship their oars as Lopex came forward across the benches. I watched fearfully, clinging to the bow rail.
“Port side, stroke backwards! Row! Row! Row!” he called out from the bow, timing his calls to set their pace. The men on the left dipped their oars and started to row. For a moment I couldn’t understand: they were rowing in the wrong direction! Then I got it. Pushing the left side backwards was counteracting the waves slewing us to the right.
Our turn slowed but didn’t stop. We were now almost broadside to the oncoming sea and the ship was tipping so far as it slipped down each wave I had to cling to the railing to keep from tumbling overboard. One more large wave would spill us into the seething ocean below. Lopex responded immediately. “Port side rowers, turn around. Face the bows. Now!”
The rowers scrambled to turn around so that they faced the front of the boat. “Port side rowers, ready, row!”
Facing the other way, the rowers could pull their oars naturally instead of pushing on them. With the full strength of their backs behind their strokes, the ship slowly began to straighten. But Lopex wasn’t done yet.
“Starboard side, out oars! Standard row!” On the right side of the ship, the oars were extended and began to row in the other direction. I watched, rapt, at the spectacle of the two banks of oarsmen rowing in opposite directions. It was working, the ship turning smoothly to reverse the slew. As the Pelagios slowly righted itself and the side-to-side pitching stopped, Lopex barked more orders to halt the turn. Despite the ongoing storm, the men began laughing in relief. We weren’t going to sink after all! At least not yet. Phidios the rowing master, grasping the scheme, took over.
Lopex stood on the forward deck watching the rowers, his arms folded, his sea balance superb. From the side, with the wind whipping his beard off his lantern-square jaw, he looked a bit like my father.
I took a deep breath. “Sir?”
He turned, a scowl just starting across his face, and I plunged ahead. “Um—nice trick with the oars.”
His expression didn’t change, but after a moment he nodded, very slightly.
We had escaped being swamped, but the struggle to bail out the inrushing waves continued, and for three days I went without real sleep. On the third afternoon, when I finally noticed that the water between the ribs in the hold was only up to my ankle, I was so fatigued that I didn’t understand. Then I felt it: the storm-tossed action of the boat had died down.
Zosimea shook my shoulder. “Well, go on, boy, get up on deck!” her voice crackled in my ear. “Tell us what’s happening!”
I clambered up the bow hold ladder and looked around. The wind had died, and as I watched, the clouds began to part. In a few minutes we saw our first sunlight in three days. The men began to cheer, but it died out quickly. I could see why. The storm was over, but there was no land to be seen. We were surrounded in all directions by the wine-dark sea.
Lopex crossed the benches to the stern and spoke up. “Men,” he announced, “we’ve survived the storm, as I said we would. Procoros has tracked exactly where we are. Right now we’ll find the quickest route to land, and meet up with the other ships later.”
I could see the navigator’s angry expression as Lopex approached. I couldn’t hear what they were arguing about, but he was gesturing furiously at the sheepskin chart.
I crept closer. “How should I know where we are? And none of this would have happened if we�
�d made sacrifice!” Procoros was saying.
Lopex had his arms folded across his chest. “The gods help us as they choose, but men are more reliable.” He glanced over at me and I busied myself with the bow fire pot. “We had no fresh meat, and no time to organize a hunting party, ” he continued. “Or do you think that the gods would have been pleased by an offering of dried fish and millet stew?”
Procoros muttered something in which I caught the name Agamemnon. Back in Troy, even young children knew that name. The king who had started the war, he was the worst of all the Greek warlords, his name even more hated than Achilles the savage.
“Agamemnon?” Lopex’s tone was sour. “I don’t believe in that type of sacrifice. Not even with slaves.” It would be a long time before I found out what he meant.
All the next day, the men kept one eye over their shoulder as they rowed, waiting eagerly for a glimpse of land. But as the day wore on with the ocean sun beating down on us, the muttering began.
“He doesn’t know where we are. We’re totally lost,” I heard one soldier saying, his voice cracking in the heat. There was a pause for the power stroke.
“Of course he knows,” came another voice as they pushed back their oars on the return. “But we can’t get back to land. That’s why he’s not telling us.”
“For shame!” A soldier’s voice boomed from a few benches away. It was Pharos, said to be the most pious man on the ship. A giant with a billowing black beard, he alone had the wind to speak through the whole rowing cycle. “Live or die in the hands of the gods. Sacrifice and prayer! To mighty Poseidon make your sacrifice, perhaps to spare your lives!”
A few took his advice, clipping locks from their beards and burning them in the stern fire pot during water breaks. What the gods would do with burnt Greek beards, I had no idea. Most, however, preferred just to mutter. The grumbles grew louder on the second day after the storm, when Lopex announced that water rations would be cut to half.
“Half? How can we row on that? Rowing’s thirsty work!”
Lopex held up his hand. “No more rowing. The current will take us to shore. We’ll stretch the sail over the oars to give us some shade.”
By the third day after the storm, the heat was taking its toll on the badly wounded in the rear hold. Despite Kassander’s assurance, I was nervous as I came to report to Lopex. “Sir?” My voice hissed from a dry throat and I tried again. “Sir? One of the wounded men has died. Kyranos.”
He glanced sharply at me, but it seemed Kassander had been right. His only comment was, “Keep it quiet, boy, it’s bad for morale. We’ll deal with it this evening.”
After darkness fell, he ordered me to wrap the dead soldier’s body in a winding sheet. “Leave it in the hold. Get that beak-faced woman to help you.”
The idea of handling a dead barbarian repelled me, but Zosimea plunged in as though he were a pile of laundry, stripping his tunic and sandals to leave the body naked. “Here—sit him up while I wrap this sheet around his shoulders.”
Swallowing my disgust, I braced my foot against a cross-strut and pushed him up while Zosimea expertly wrapped his torso, leaving just enough to knot the ends together across his chest. Clearly something she’d done before. We left the corpse in the hold, indistinguishable from the motionless injured men nearby. The next morning it was gone.
I was shocked. An improperly buried corpse had no chance of reaching Hades. I couldn’t imagine how the Greeks would react, but Zosimea took it all in stride. “What else can he do, boy? Leave it on board, in this heat? By tomorrow nightfall we’d be jumping overboard ourselves to escape the stink.”
She reached into a fold of her threadbare tunic. “Besides, he’d never have gotten into Hades anyway.” She held out the red cabochon that Lopex had given me to put under the corpse’s tongue. “No point wasting a good gemstone on a dead barbarian.”
We wrapped several more corpses over the next few days, as the injured succumbed to their wounds and the lack of water. Each morning the bodies were gone, splashes in the night. One of the last to go was the old healer, Kallikrates. As I wrapped him in the winding sheet in the airless hold I patted him down for his knife. Someone had already taken it. I shrugged. No honour among these Greek thieves.
By the time Procoros sighted land on the ninth afternoon, a day after our water gave out, his mouth was too dry to shout. But even had he been heard, nobody had the strength to react.
Chapter 11
I WAS DOZING BELOW, my head rolling slightly against one of the hull’s wooden ribs as the ship rocked, when I felt the keel grate against pebbles. Down in the hold the sound was louder than on deck, and the other slaves began to wake. Zosimea scratched my shoulder weakly. “Go see,” she rasped. Lack of water and the heavy pitch fumes in the hold had left all our throats as dry as fired clay. I rubbed my gummed-up eyes and staggered to my feet.
On deck, a few of the men were starting to sit up. I stood on the hold ladder and squinted out. We had drifted up against a stony shore that led back to steep, shrub-covered hills. There were no other ships in sight. Lopex walked up stiffly and thrust a clutch of goatskin water sacks at me. “Go find water, boy,” he said, his voice hoarse. “Find another slave to help. The men can fetch their own after they’ve had a few mouthfuls.”
I stared despairingly at the sacks but went off to beckon Kassander from the hold. As we trudged wearily down the beach, he put a hand on my shoulder. “Lopex is doing you a favour,” he said hoarsely. “You get to drink first.” A flicker of a smile crossed his cracked lips. “Me too. Thank you.”
I hardly had energy to move my feet, but beside me, Kassander seemed to be growing stronger since we’d left the ship, walking with his head up, throwing off his usual crouch. To my relief, we found a trickle of water running across the beach nearby and followed it upstream to its source, a strong spring in a grassy stand of willows. We lay on our stomachs in the lush green grass and put our faces straight into the spring, drinking greedily until we could hold no more. Finally Kassander stirred. “Come on, ” he said, struggling to his feet. “The men are counting on us.”
I looked lazily over at him. “What’s your hurry? If the barbarians are thirsty, they can come and get their own.”
Kassander hesitated. “Yes. Of course. Barbarians. But they’re still human. And don’t forget the slaves, they need water too.” He shouldered his load and set off. I stood up to follow, shaking my head. Sometimes Kassander was impossible to understand.
The ship was still untethered in the shallows when we returned. As I reached to climb up the ladder, Kassander stopped me with a touch on the shoulder. “Alexi, find a few more skins and toss them down. I’ll go fetch some more water while you serve out what we’ve got here.” I shrugged. Carrying the full skin bags back from the spring was clearly the harder chore.
Lopex had been right. A little water had revived the men enough to get their own, so that afternoon I was sent around to look at their wounds. He had ordered the men who couldn’t walk to be laid in the shade of some plane trees at the foot of the hills behind the beach. I knelt beside Pen and unwrapped his bandage. Nine days wrapped in the same filthy rag had done him no good. His leg wound, once healing nicely, now showed a fiery red streak creeping up his thigh toward his heart. I felt a chill. Eksepsis.
Pen looked up. Since I’d brought him water that morning he’d been doing better, but his face was haggard. “How am I doing?”
“Uh . . . fine.” If their wounds were getting worse, my father never told them. He always managed to sound cheerful. But he had always had medicines. Nobody knew where Kallikrates’ medicine chest had gone. From what I’d heard of him, he probably didn’t even have one. I thought for a moment. How would my father have treated this?
A breeze from the ocean bobbed the heads of a few straggly red poppies in the grass nearby, stirring a memory. I scrambled up to find Lopex.
He was sitting in his tent, a large pavilion made of sailcloth. The sides were rolled up to let th
e breeze through, and he was planning repairs with the ship’s carpenter.
“Honey?” he said, looking out at me curiously from under his heavy eyebrows. “What do you want it for, boy?”
Ury was perched on a boulder nearby, whetting his sword with a small oilstone. “What stupidity is this, boy? What next—some figs and almonds?”
“Shut up, Ury,” Lopex said calmly. “Speak, boy.”
“My father used to put honey on wounds that were festering,” I replied, feeling awkward. “He said the sweetness drew out the rot.”
Behind me, Ury spat on the ground. Lopex shrugged. “Well, boy, if you can find some honey and a volunteer, I’ll permit it. But don’t expect the soldiers to believe you.”
The man in charge of ship’s stores was a grotesquely fat one-eared sailor named Demetrios. I found him sprawled on a makeshift bed of purple cloth bolts on the rear deck, a small cloth canopy spread across two oars over his head for shade. Nearby, Zanthos and another sailor were perched on the railing, stitching up rips in the sail.
Demetrios turned his head lazily toward me. “Honey, heh. Not much call for that around here, boy. What do you think we are, the king’s palace? What d’you want honey for anyway, hah?”
He’d just argue if I told him. “Lopex wants it.”
“Heh.” At Lopex’s name he heaved his bulky body upright and waddled to the rear hold ladder, leaning on a bronze-tipped cane. I followed him, wondering again how someone so fat was allowed to be part of a group of soldiers.
“Down this way, boy, hah, heh.” I couldn’t tell whether his strange noises were grunts of exertion or demented chuckles. Following him down the ladder, I watched as he headed for a bulky woollen sack hung from a bronzed nail in a crossbeam. He used a hook on the end of his cane to lift the bag down.
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