Killer of Men

by Christian Cameron

  Well – I’d made a small fortune from him, and I didn’t mean to die at sea. And yet I remember thinking that I had, at least in part, redeemed my oath, and that meant that I was free to die, in a way. The thought relaxed me, to be honest. I was an honourable man again.

  So I stayed in the steering oars, and we sailed north, or more likely north by west, and the sun sank in the sky, and the murmurs from forward grew louder.

  A water-clock before sunset, Lekthes came forward with a black man. I’d seen the Nubian when the prisoners had been herded aboard by marines – you couldn’t miss him, with his skin as black as new pitch in the smithy, ready for the forging of fine bronze.

  ‘Lord?’ Lekthes asked, coming aft. ‘This one claims he was helmsman on a Phoenician trireme.’ He prodded the black man, and the man looked at him with ill-concealed resentment.

  ‘Claims, my arse, lord,’ the Nubian said in Ionian Greek – better Greek than mine. ‘Lord, you are too far west of north – I’ve been watching since the evening star rose. I know these waters.’

  ‘That will be all, Lekthes,’ I said, borrowing Aristides’ manner when dismissing a man. Lekthes snapped a salute and went back to the decks.

  ‘What’s your name?’ I asked.

  The Nubian crossed his arms and looked forward. ‘Paramanos, lord.’

  ‘Your Greek is excellent,’ I said.

  He nodded. ‘It ought to be – I grew up with it. My family owns ships at Naucratis, and there’s more of us in Cyrene.’ He looked forward again. ‘And my daughters will be orphans if you don’t point this ship north, lord.’

  Naucratis? A Greek city in the Nile delta. They say it was founded by mercenaries serving the pharaohs at the time of the siege of Troy. And Cyrene is a colony – richer than the mother city – in Africa. What is it that your tutors teach you?

  ‘You are a helmsman?’ I asked.

  ‘I’ve been navarch of a blue-water merchant,’ he said.

  ‘If you are lying, I’ll kill you,’ I said. ‘Take the steering oars.’

  I could see his fear, and smell it, but I didn’t know whether he was afraid of me or simply afraid of death – the coming storm – hard to tell. I stepped off the helmsman’s bench and he took the oars. ‘I have the ship,’ he said.

  ‘Yes, you do,’ I said.

  He shook his head. ‘I’m changing course. See the evening star there by the moon? That’s well west of north from here.’ He swung the oars, his arms taut with muscle, and the ship changed course smoothly, the wind passing from under our quarter to dead astern.

  ‘Before the north star rises we’ll be in with the coast, or you can feed me to the fishes,’ he said. But his voice shook.

  I didn’t trust him.

  At sunset, Idomeneus came aft with a trio of lanky Asian Greeks. ‘All three brothers?’ I guessed.

  ‘They were taken in arms as rebels on the mainland and pressed as rowers,’ Idomeneus said. ‘All citizens of Phocaea in Aeolis.’ He looked aft. ‘We’ve a dozen more Aeolians. They shouldn’t be prisoners to start with.’

  The eldest brother fell to his knees. ‘Lord, we are Ionians! We fought at Sardis! I was in the agora when you fought, lord!’

  It was an easy claim to make – I had no idea who had been in the agora at Sardis, but I had been a slave. I knew that tone. Besides, let’s be honest – I liked being called lord.

  I held up my hand. ‘Will you swear – to me? Now?’

  All three knelt on the deck and swore. Ionians swear the way Cretans do, hands between the hands of their lords. They aren’t much for democracy, like mainland Greeks. I took their oaths by Poseidon and Zeus Soter, and then I armed them and set them to choosing any other Aeolians that they knew. Herakleides was their leader, and his brothers were Nestor and Orestes, and they were good men.

  I have a soft spot for men who carry the name of my ancestor.

  I was just congratulating myself on having some good men when the Phoenicians decided to take the ship. They must have been desperate – as they saw the Aeolians separated out, they must have known that their chances of taking the ship were dropping by the moment.

  They almost killed Lekthes in the first rush. They clubbed him with oars broken short – what a labour that must have been! They’d worked in secret below decks, of course, muffling the sound in their cloaks and rowing cushions, I suppose. I had no idea. They were brave men, desperate men, and they came in one gallant charge, up the benches, oar shafts falling like axe blows. Lekthes took one on his helmet and fell to his knees, but Idomeneus stood by him, put a spear point in one big Syrian and slammed his shield into another, shoving him over the side. They went to get around him, but I got my sword out of my scabbard, cursing myself for a fool – I had ordered my men to arm, but I was standing nearly naked, my helmet and scale shirt stowed uselessly under the helmsman’s bench.

  Short sword against oar shaft is not a good match. I took a blow on my shield arm and killed the man – my arm was numb.

  The three Aeolians weren’t armed, but they threw themselves into the fight, fists and gymnasium-trained muscles. The oldest took the oar shaft from the nerveless fingers of the man I’d hacked down. I climbed on the next bench, the rage of combat on me and all thought of leadership lost, while Idomeneus, the only fully armed man, was laying waste to the Syrians. There were two dead at his feet and a third was trying to hold in his guts while grappling Idomeneus’s feet. I stepped on his throat and blocked a blow meant for Lekthes, then one of the Aeolians doubled up my opponent with a vicious blow to the man’s stomach and they broke.

  We hunted them through the boat, and killed them all. It isn’t pretty to say it but, with a wind rising and the peril of mutiny and the blood hot, we didn’t take any prisoners. Syrian Phoenicians can’t hide among Greeks, and we weren’t too fussy about who had carried a broken oar shaft and who hadn’t.

  When I came back aft, my arm still numb and my feet as red with the blood as if I’d been treading grapes in Boeotia, I found four more Phoenicians clustered around the helmsman’s bench.

  Their pointed beards gave them away. I raised my arm to kill them and the nearest put up his arm to protect himself.

  ‘Stop!’ the Nubian demanded. ‘Stop it!’ He tried to catch my arm, and I socked him in the face with my sword fist. He fell back into the steering rig and the ship yawed. His nose pumped blood but he was back on his feet.

  ‘Stop it! Or Poseidon will take us!’ he said. That got through my blood-drunk head. ‘They’re trying to surrender!’ he said again. ‘Zeus Soter, lord! These are noblemen, worth ransom. This one was my navarch. Stop it!’ He was screaming at me while leaning all his weight on the oars, and I saw that while I’d been slaughtering Syrians, the wind had come up.

  ‘Get forward,’ I said to the four Phoenicians. ‘Throw the bodies over the side.’ I knew it was heartless, but the bastards had tried to take my ship and I suspected that these four fine noblemen were just as guilty – or more guilty.

  After the slaughter of forty Syrians, we were down to half a compliment of rowers. The coast was nowhere in sight and the wind was shifting around. My new helmsman looked at me as if he thought I was mad.

  I looked at him as if he was a traitor. ‘You seem awfully friendly with the Phoenicians,’ I said.

  I’d broken his nose. He shook his head to clear it. ‘I don’t know who the fuck you are,’ he said, ‘with your barbaric Greek and your murderous temper, but we all used to be friends with the merchants of Tyre. I’ve traded with them all my life.’

  There was something funny about a black man in an Asian chiton telling me that I was a barbarian. I laughed. ‘You are a brave man,’ I said.

  ‘Fuck your mother,’ he growled. ‘We’re all going to die anyway.’ He spat over the side. ‘You just killed the whole lower oar deck. We don’t have the manpower to beach the ship.’

  I laughed again. ‘We’ll stay at sea, then. Nothing to fear from a night at sea.’ I laughed, and pointed at the blood run
ning out of the oar ports. ‘Poseidon has had his share of sacrifices,’ I said.

  His eyes said that he didn’t agree.

  ‘And the ship is rid of vermin,’ I added. If I was going to play the mad captain, I’d play it to the hilt.

  Even the Cretans were different in the morning. They might still be useless, but now they were terrified of me, and that made them better sailors. Paramanos got us in with the coast of Asia – the long east – west reach south of Aeolis and west of Lydia, full of pirates and dangerous rocks. But he knew that coast, and we ran west with the new storm at our backs all night, and morning showed the teeth of the mountains dead ahead.

  ‘Unless we row south,’ Paramanos said, ‘we’re dead men.’

  I agreed, so I had all three decks rowing – well, at least the two I could man – in the grey rain, and we had the sea broadside on, pouring through the oar ports and pushing us steadily west for all the southing that we made, which was precious little.

  Some time in that endless grey day, I sent the deck crew to row, and even gave orders for the handful of armed Aeolians who still stood by to serve wine to every man, strip their armour and take up an oar.

  My left arm was still numb, and even in the rain I could see a bruise as black as the darkest night where the oar had hit me, but I knew that I had to row. Leadership is an odd thing – sometimes you want your men to fear you as they fear the gods, at others you need them to love you like a long-lost brother. So I settled to an upper-deck bench, and for the first time I could see how much water was swirling down in the hold below me.

  My stomach clenched. We were a third full of water, and if the Phoenicians had still been manning the lower benches, they’d have been drowning.

  I called to the Nubian and told him that we were full of water. I could see him smile at my ignorance. He was conning the ship – of course he would know just how sluggish we were. Truly, I was a piss-poor commander. I had too much to learn.

  It was a Phoenician ship, and it had tackle I didn’t understand. It had pumps – sliding wooden pumps that rigged to the top strakes and allowed a strong man to shoot water up and over the side, straight up from the bilges. The Nubian got them rigged and shooting water while I rowed on in a haze of pain, because now that I was active, my left arm hurt like fire with every stroke, and the whole thing seemed pointless.

  Every rower harbours a secret fear in a storm – that by rowing for the safety of all, he is losing his own strength to swim, if the ship founders. I was a strong swimmer – I’d learned in Ephesus and swum every day on Crete, and now I knew that if we wrecked, I would drown, dragged under by a weak left arm and a hundred cuts and bruises.

  ‘What’d you do?’ the man below me asked out of nowhere. ‘Weren’t you deck crew?’

  ‘Everyone rows,’ I said, gritting my teeth.

  ‘Trierarch’s a madman, ain’t he?’ the man asked. ‘A killer, that’s what I hear.’

  I laughed. ‘I am the trierarch,’ I said.

  He twitched and almost lost the stroke, and I felt better. ‘Listen, boy,’ I said, using the Ionian phrase for a slave, or a man of no value. ‘If we live, you owe me an apology. And if we all die, you’ll have the satisfaction that I’ll be as dead as you.’

  That was the end of conversation with my rowers. I don’t think they loved me. They thought I was insane.

  Another nightfall found us still at sea. We were resting fifteen men at a time, and I was relieved eventually by another shift of reserve rowers, and I could see that if there was no less water in the bilges, at least there was no more. But I also knew that our rowers were almost finished. I knew because I was as strong as an ox, injury or no injury, and my arms were like wet rawhide.

  I went aft, cold now that I wasn’t rowing, and pulled my dry cloak from under the bench and put it around me.

  Paramanos was still in the steering rig.

  ‘Can you take the helm?’ he asked.

  ‘Give me cup of wine and a hundred heartbeats and I’ll do my best.’ I shrugged. Lekthes and Idomeneus were both rowing, and there wasn’t another man on deck. ‘It’s a miracle we’ve made it this far, isn’t it?’ I said.

  He nodded. ‘I’m good,’ he said. He pointed aft. ‘When the rowers fade, I put the sea behind us for a few minutes.’ His grey-black face had a ghost of a grin. ‘Not my first storm.’

  I knocked back a cup of neat wine. It flowed like warm honey through my veins, and I was alive. ‘Give me the oars,’ I said.

  He handed them over, and the moment I took them I felt the strain. I looked to starboard, and I could see the coast passing in the fading light. The combination of wind and oar was moving us at a speed that seemed superhuman.

  I thought that the Nubian would collapse – he’d been between the steering oars for twelve straight hours, dawn to dusk – but instead, he ran forward.

  The oars rose and fell to the beat, but the men were barely moving them. The wind was doing the work, and it would soon bring about our ruin. I reckoned that at roughly the time the sun finally set, we’d touch the rocks. No beach at all, there at the foot of the Olympus of Asia.

  I poured another cup of wine and drank it. I would die with my oath redeemed, doing my best. What more can the gods ask?

  Paramanos came back aft and the grey fatigue was gone from his face. I handed him the wine cup and he drank off the rest.

  ‘If you served out wine,’ he said, ‘we might get another water-clock of strong rowing. And I think we might – might – save the ship.’

  We traded places again while he explained. I didn’t think his wine would work. I thought that words would, and I ran forward to the command platform and raised my voice over the rain.

  ‘Listen, you bastards!’ I shouted into the wind. ‘We’ll be on a beach cooking hot food and drinking wine before the sun sets if you’ll put your backs into it. What a bunch of shits we’ll look in Hades if we drown a horse-length from a safe beach!’

  It was my first battle speech. It worked.

  They all thought that they were dead men, and the merest glimpse of hope was enough to fire them. I walked up and down the central plank, and I told them exactly what Paramanos planned. Over and over again.

  ‘We’re going to thread the needle between the Chelidon and Korydela,’ I said. ‘And then we’ll be in the lee of the greatest mountain in Asia – calm water and rest. Our Nubian says we can beach at Melanippian, even in the dark, with this wind, and I believe him.’

  It’s easy to believe, when the only other choices are extinction and black death, and they rowed with their guts and their hope of life. Sunset – not that we’d ever seen the sun – gave way to a horrible grey light and then to full night, and still we lived, and I knew that our bow was due west now. The storm was full at the stern and the motion of the ship was easier; the only rowing we needed was to keep her stern on to the wind.

  But I knew that we were still in a race with time, and I got my three Aeolians and Lekthe and Idomeneus and two men they seemed to know, and we raised the boatsail. I’d seen it done by Hipponax’s trained mariners – you lash the furled boatsail to the mast, then raise the mast, secure it ten times, and then you cut the lashings on the sail and it spreads itself. The Ephesians did it to show off, but Hipponax had said once that it was a life-saver in a storm.

  It is one thing to lash a boatsail to its mast on an autumn day in a brisk breeze, with the warm sun burning your shoulders, surrounded by men who love you, and another to do it in driving rain with your hands so cold that you can’t tell whether you have rope between your fingers or not.

  We managed to tie the boatsail eight times with hemp rope, and then we found that we didn’t have the strength to raise the mast. The wind caught it and hurled it over the side, and only the luck of the gods kept the pole from holing us as it went over.

  But damn it, we were close to making it through the strait. I could see the cliffs rising on either side.

  The rowers were finished. Even hope can’
t make spent muscles move an oar.

  I wasn’t finished. I got the spar from the mainsail and let the wind take the mainsail over the side like a hundred-handed monster – twenty silver owls of linen lost in two heartbeats, and I didn’t give a damn. The spar was only three men tall, much smaller than the boatsail mast. But we carried a spare boatsail and we bent it to the spar and tied it down, and then I stripped the upper deck of rowers – the oars were in all along the deck, with only the middle men pretending to row, and we were beginning to fall off and broach. Time was running out, we had cliffs on both sides and even Paramanos was out of – of whatever drove him.

  They thought I was mad. We were turning so that our long side was vulnerable to the wind – the men still rowing didn’t have the coordination or the strength to keep our head to the waves, and like a ship in battle, once the long sides were to the waves, we were done.

  I went from man to man in between lightning flashes, pushing rope ends into unwilling hands. I knocked a man sprawling when he was too slow to obey. He went over the side and the sea took him.

  ‘Pull, you bastards!’ I called.

  Love is a fine thing. Love will take a man above himself, whether it is love for a man or a woman or a ship or a country. But fear can imitate love in most situations, and I knew they didn’t love me.

  ‘Pull or die!’ I screamed, and my sword was in my hand. ‘Still time to bleed!’ I shouted, and I laughed. Let them think me insane.

  The spar shot up like a stallion’s penis. ‘Lash her down! Belay her!’

  Then they were willing. Then they believed. It was easy when we came to it – but someone had to get them over the belief that they would fail. Now every man worked with a will, and Paramanos was next to me, lashing the new stays as fast as his hands could work. Already the wind, that brutal east wind, was on the mast and the tight-wrapped boatsail, and our bow was cutting the sea. Little Idomeneus was at the helm, doing his best to get the bow headed west. Paramanos worked by my side as we tied the ropes and belayed. Ten ropes. Ten heavy cables to hold a mast smaller than the one a day-fisher carried.