Funeral Games

by Christian Cameron

  ‘Good riddance,’ Peleus said, staring under his hand. ‘Heavy metal in their bows and no mistake. I won’t be sorry to see the last of them.’

  The last they saw of them were their masts slipping away under the horizon as the coast of Asia came up on the port bow.

  Satyrus could see the first of the tell-tale headlands that would lead him into Xanthos. ‘I guess we’re not going into Xanthos,’ he said.

  Peleus shook his head. ‘Beautiful day, crew hard as old wood. Let’s use this fine west wind while it blows and see if we can make the beaches of Pamphylia. If the weather holds,’ he said, and made a horn sign with his hand, ‘we might coast into Paphos on Cyprus, and we’ll never see those cocksuckers again.’

  Kyros took a dipper of water from the butt amidships and raised an eyebrow at the helmsman. ‘I won’t mention that to the boys, I guess.’

  Peleus barked a harsh laugh. ‘Maybe when the moon rises.’ He glanced at Satyrus. ‘It’d be something to tell your grandchildren, that you went from Rhodos to Paphos in a day’s rowing.’ He came and stood by Satyrus for ten strokes of the oars, and then they felt the true west wind at their backs.

  Peleus gave one of his rare smiles. He turned to the deck master. ‘Hoist the mainmast, Kalos. Get the cloth on her.’

  ‘Mainmast and mainsail, aye,’ Kalos answered. Short, hairy and scarred, his name spoke for what he was not - beautiful. He was perhaps the ugliest man Satyrus had ever seen, Stratokles included, but he had a sense of humour, and often claimed that he had been an avatar of Aphrodite in a former life and was paying the price now.

  Of course, he was also a highly skilled seaman. In less time than it took to pull an oar a hundred times, the mainmast was up and roped home, and the mainsail was drawing, taut as a board and round as a cheese.

  ‘Navarch,’ Peleus said gruffly, ‘if you’ll have my advice, I’d say that we could make the run to Paphos.’

  Satyrus nodded a few times, considering. ‘Then carry on,’ Satyrus said.

  ‘It’s only that it is open water all the way. No landfalls and no refuge.’ Peleus raised a shaggy eyebrow.

  ‘For one day? Are we sailors or not?’ Satyrus asked rhetorically. ‘What’s the heading?’

  ‘Years since I did it.’ Peleus squinted at the sun and the sky. ‘South and east. No - more south. I like that. Hold that course.’ He looked at the wake for long enough that Satyrus thought he might have changed his mind. ‘Deep-water sailing is where we find out if you can mind your helm or not,’ he said. ‘No landmarks. No seamarks. Your wake is straight, or he ain’t. Hear me, lad?’

  Satyrus was growing weary of a life that seemed to consist of nothing but an endless series of tests - but he bit back on his first answer and managed a grin. ‘Do my best,’ he said.

  ‘Notch in your wake when you talk,’ Peleus said.

  When the sun was high in the sky, Melitta walked down the raised deck between the rowers. Most of them were sitting comfortably, and a dozen of them were busy rigging a long awning on the port side against the sun, while the sailors did the climbing.

  Wherever she walked, silence followed, and stares, and some quiet comments. Life on shipboard had brought home to Melitta how very stupid men were. Her body was capable of ending argument, discussion, religious affirmation - really, it was a wonder that men managed to do any work at all.

  Whereas, by contrast, there were naked men all around her, and none of them moved her by so much as an iota. Some had fine bodies - her brother, for instance, or old Peleus, in his way. Xenophon, if you ignored the pimples on his face, had the physique of Herakles. The marine captain was exercising naked, gleaming with oil and obviously trying to attract her attention. It was a fine body, but, as Melitta had already commented to Dorcus, there wasn’t much inside it.

  She swept her Ionic chiton under her with one arm and gathered her chlamys with the other before sinking on to a bale of sheepskins that acted as the stern-seat for the helmsman’s visitors.

  ‘I’m tired of being stared at,’ Melitta said to her brother.

  ‘I’m tired of being tested. Trade you!’ Satyrus said with a wry smile.

  ‘Deal!’ she said, and spat in her hand. They shook without his unwrapping his arms from the steering oar.

  ‘Now you’ve put a notch in my wake,’ he said.

  She laughed. ‘You’re pretending to be a sailor while I pretend to be a Greek woman,’ she said. ‘When do we get to stop pretending?’

  Satyrus watched the horizon over the stern for a long minute. ‘I remember when I thought that you were so much older than me,’ he said. ‘Now I think maybe I’ve passed you - for a while. Because I learned something last year, and I learned it again after I kissed Amastris.’

  ‘You kissed Amastris? Not some slave girl in her clothes?’ Melitta leaned forward.

  ‘Was she chewing cinnamon just before she summoned me?’ Satyrus asked.

  Melitta gave an enigmatic smile. ‘So - you kissed her. Was it beautiful? ’

  Satyrus sighed. ‘It was beautiful, Lita. That’s what I mean. It wasn’t like kissing Phiale at all. Kissing Phiale made my member stiff. Kissing Amastris made me soften.’

  ‘You’re killing me. My brother has a poetic soul? While I’m left with all this chaff?’ She waved around her at the men on deck. Then, seeing that Peleus was coming up the central deck, she leaned close. ‘Tell me what you learned.’

  ‘We’re always pretending.’ He looked at her, eye to eye, so close that he could see the flecks of colour in her iris, and she could see her own reflection in his. She could feel his breath on her face. ‘I pretend to be brave when I’m afraid. I pretend to be interested in sex when I’m interested in impressing my peers, I pretend to be religious when I go to temple. I pretend to be obedient when I steer the ship.’

  She cast a glance at Peleus and he grabbed her arm. ‘Listen, Melitta. Because that’s what every ephebe knows. But what I know is that the pretending becomes the reality.’

  Melitta looked at him as if she’d never seen him before. ‘But—’ She made a face. ‘Satyrus, why can’t you be like this all the time?’

  Satyrus furrowed his eyebrows. ‘What?’

  Melitta raised her arms as if supplicating the gods. ‘At sea, you are - as wise as Philokles. As subtle as Diodorus. On land, you’re often - well, my not-quite-a-man brother.’

  ‘Thanks. I think,’ Satyrus said. After a second, he shrugged. ‘I don’t know. At sea I’m in command - at least this trip. Command - well, it’s like a dose of cold water when you’re asleep. And I keep seeing people do things I know that I do. Xeno does stuff that makes me tremble, and so help me—’ He laughed, and Melitta joined him.

  ‘If you two was sailors, I’d expect a mutiny,’ Peleus said. He spared Melitta a smile. ‘May I offer the despoina an apology for my rude ways when we was running from pirates?’

  Melitta gave him the full weight of her smile - eyes flashing, teeth, a hand sweeping back her hair. If these were all the weapons she had to use as a ‘Greek’ woman, she’d wield them ruthlessly. ‘Were you rude, helmsman? I thought that you were doing your duty.’ She swept by him down the deck, heading for her own awning with Dorcus under the boatsail mast.

  She heard his grunt as she moved away, and smiled again in satisfaction. They weren’t her weapons of choice, but they did cut.

  Well past midday, and the sea rose, blue and blue, out to the rim of the horizon’s bowl. The sun rode the sky above them, heading west, and the handful of fleecy clouds were more ornament than threat.

  ‘Nothing more frightening except a storm,’ Kalos muttered. He squatted in the stern, out of the wind. He kept his eyes forward, as if he didn’t want to see the empty rim of the bowl, unmarked by even the hint of land in any direction.

  ‘Don’t be a woman,’ Peleus said. ‘The boys do as you do.’

  ‘I hate not seeing a coast,’ Kalos said. He got to his feet, stretched like a big, ugly cat and glided forward, light on his feet and u
naffected by the roll.

  ‘I hate it too,’ Peleus said. He gave Satyrus his secret smile. ‘But cutting across the empty sea is what makes us better sailors, lad. And you have to look like you know your way - like there’s a path of gold hammered into the surface of the water for you and only you.’

  Satyrus thought of his advice to his sister. ‘I pretend I’m not afraid all the time,’ he said.

  ‘We have a name for that, lad,’ Peleus said, slapping his shoulder. ‘We call that courage.’

  ‘Do you know where we are?’ Satyrus asked.

  Peleus looked around. ‘No,’ he said. ‘But give or take a thousand stades, we’re west of Cyprus. I draw some hope from that bank of low cloud that just came up under the bow. See it?’

  Satyrus stretched his neck to see under the mainsail. ‘I think I do.’

  ‘I’ll go forward and look - slowly, so it doesn’t look bad. Notch in your wake, lad.’ Peleus went forward, adjusting sheets and cursing the oarsmen, most of whom hadn’t touched an oar since mid-morning and were so much human cargo.

  Satyrus watched him go and stood looking at his sister and thinking of Amastris. Thinking that, like the flower of the lotus, Amastris was probably something that would be bad for him in the long run. What if he endangered their chance at revenge? At having their own kingdom? In his mind’s eye he could see Ataelus - just to name one man - the small Sakje had been with his mother when she died. He’d escaped to raise his clan in revolt, and he had worked tirelessly at rallying the former coalition of the Eastern Assagatje to fight against the Sauromatae and against Eumeles, supported by Leon. Or Lykeles, who spoke against Heron every day in the assembly in Olbia.

  What if he incurred her father’s real displeasure? Or Ptolemy’s?

  He watched his wake. Life, he thought, is too complicated. He enjoyed being a helmsman. He enjoyed the simple, yet endless, task - he enjoyed the trust and the responsibility and the palpable success at the end of the day. If you piloted a ship well, it came to port. Task complete. Kingship seemed to be much worse.

  His thoughts wandered off to the moment when she slipped into his arms, the surrender of her mouth, the quickness of her tongue—

  ‘Planning to sail back to Rhodos, lad?’ Peleus said. He pointed at the long curve of the wake.

  ‘Oh - ugh!’ Satyrus brought the ship back on course with a perceptible turn that made heads come up all along the deck. He was irrationally angry - at himself, at Peleus - at always being tested. Again.

  ‘Girl?’ Peleus asked.

  ‘Yes,’ Satyrus answered, almost inaudibly.

  ‘Don’t think about any of that when you’re at the helm. Mind you, you’ve been at it without relief for a watch and a half. I’ll take the helm.’

  ‘I’m fine,’ Satyrus said.

  ‘No, you ain’t. I’ll take the helm, navarch. If you please.’ Peleus was suddenly very formal.

  Satyrus stood straight and managed to get the oar into the helmsman’s hand, despite the shame of his burning face. ‘You have the helm.’

  ‘I have the helm. Go and lie down and dream of your girl, boy. You earned a rest - don’t fret.’

  Despite this last admonition, Satyrus knew that he’d made an error - a bad error, one that in a normal young man would have been punished by a blow or worse. He walked to the awning in silence, and the deck crew made way for him as if he was injured. Sailors were very perceptive to social ills - they had to be, living so close - and he’d seen before how a man who had been punished was treated with consideration that verged on tenderness.

  Now that same blanket surrounded him, and he hated that he had failed them. He collapsed on a cushion of straw next to his sister. ‘Don’t say anything,’ he said.

  She raised an eyebrow but said nothing, and after a long bout of recrimination, he managed to fall asleep.

  Evening came - a beautiful evening. Satyrus woke to find his head pillowed in his sister’s lap, with the first star - Aphrodite - just rising above the ship’s side. ‘You were tired,’ his sister said.

  ‘Hermes! I’ve slept for hours!’ Satyrus bounced up and found that his whole body was sore, and that his mouth was dry and he was cold.

  Kyros came aft and passed him a water skin. ‘Drink,’ he said. ‘You got too much sun today. Old bastard left you too long at the oar. He’s got no skin left to burn - just hide.’

  The water skin no sooner touched his lips than he drained it right down to the evil-tasting swill in the bottom, where the resin and the goat hair and the water made a disgusting brew. He spat over the side and Kyros laughed.

  ‘Get some more, navarch. You’re sun-sick and no mistake. Cold yet?’ he asked.

  Satyrus nodded guiltily.

  ‘Wrap up. You’ll be colder tonight. Glad you slept. Good pillow, I expect,’ he said with a sidelong glance at Melitta.

  Satyrus climbed down past the oarsmen in the bilge, which stank of piss and worse, where amphorae of clean water stood point down in the sand of the ballast. He lifted the open one clear of the bilge and filled the leather bucket and then refilled the oar master’s skin, punishing himself with the task. With the bucket he refilled the butt on deck so other men could drink, and then he passed the skin back to the oar master. Only when the whole smelly job was done did he present himself to the helmsman.

  ‘Sun-sick, I hear,’ Peleus said.

  ‘Yes, sir,’ Satyrus answered.

  ‘You don’t call me sir, lad. You’re the navarch. I left you too long at the oar, and that’s no mistake. I’m a fool. Mind you, you stood there like a fool without asking to be relieved.’ He shrugged. ‘You’ll live. I can smell the land - can ye smell it?’

  Satyrus took a deep breath. ‘No, but I see the gulls.’

  ‘Right you are, and land birds before the sun sets. Now comes the hard part - where on Poseidon’s liquid plain are we, eh? Because we’ll want a beach as soon as we can get one - fresh water, and a place to cook in the morning. The boys can only slurp kykeon so many times before they rise up and murder me.’ He nodded, as if talking with a third party.

  ‘You want me to take the helm?’ Satyrus asked.

  ‘No. Into the bow and watch the horizon. Landfall any time, now. Bring me word.’

  ‘I could climb the mainmast,’ Satyrus asked. He was gushing in his eagerness to be forgiven.

  ‘Only in an emergency,’ Peleus said. ‘Makes the whole ship lean. A nice trick on a merchantman - not on a trireme, eh? Into the bow.’

  ‘Aye!’ Satyrus headed forward, scooping his heavier Thracian cloak as he went past his sister. Most of the men on deck were naked, but Satyrus was chilled to the bone, and yet the last rays of the sun seemed to flay him when he emerged under the mainsail into the bow.

  Behind him, he heard Peleus order Kyros to begin clearing away the oar decks, as the wind that had carried them all day was now dying away to a breeze. In the bow, the low clouds of mid-afternoon were now well up in the sky and catching the sun in a wall of pink and red.

  Satyrus had to look at them and away twice before he was sure. Then he ran back along the central deck between the top-deck rowers, dropping his cloak in his rush aft. ‘Land! Right on the bow, no points off.’

  Peleus took the news as if he had never known a moment’s doubt. He nodded. ‘Ready to take the helm, Navarch?’ he asked.

  Satyrus put a hand on the oar. ‘I have the helm.’

  ‘You have the helm,’ Peleus said, and slipped from the stern to move forward. He vanished under the sail. Kyros came up with Kalos in tow. Satyrus nodded. ‘Land,’ he said.

  Both men looked relieved. Kalos stopped when Kyros turned away. ‘Sorry to be so scared,’ he said. ‘Your first time at the steering oar across the blue water - we could end in Hades, understand?’ Then he slapped Satyrus’s bare back, making him cringe and notching the wake. ‘But you didn’t!’ he said, and went back to organizing the lowering of the mainmast.

  Melitta brought him his cloak while Peleus watched forward. He pul
led it on gratefully, feeling more like an old man on a winter night than was fair. ‘Everyone says I have sun-sickness,’ he said.

  ‘You’re as red as Tyrean wool,’ she answered. ‘You mind your oar and Dorcus will rub some oil into your skin.’

  Together, she and her maid rubbed a mixture of olive oil and wool oil into his skin and he felt better - warmer, and less as if his skin would be flayed off by morning. ‘Thanks, sister,’ he said.

  ‘Now who’s all grown up?’ she asked. ‘I have the sense to stay out of the sun. He was testing you.’

  ‘I failed,’ Satyrus said bitterly.

  ‘You’re an idiot,’ Melitta answered fondly. She stood with him in companionable silence until Peleus joined them, and then she slipped away.

  ‘The Rock of Akkamas is just under our ram,’ Peleus said, appearing from under the mainsail. ‘Your course may be as erratic as a newborn lamb, but you are Poseidon’s son, lad. We’re bang on course - so fine that we’ll weather the headland to the north and have the north coast and the west wind tomorrow.’ Louder, he turned and addressed the sailors and oarsmen in the waist of the ship. ‘Perfect landfall. Thirty stades of light rowing and the white sands of Likkia will be under our stern.’

  With a quiet cheer, the oarsmen settled into their benches with a will. Before the moon was full on the swell, they were turning the ship just off the beach, the long hull broadside-on to the whispering surf, and then the rowers reversed their directions and the Lotus backed up the beach until the curving stern kissed the shining sand and they were safe.

  Satyrus slept late the next morning, and hid his face from the sun as they set out, and Dorcus rubbed him down twice that day as the west wind carried them down the north coast of Cyprus, with Peleus pointing out the promontories and the best beaches, where a helmsman could slip ashore for an unlicensed cargo of copper, where the food was cheap. They landed for the night at Ourannia with a rested crew and Peleus paid for meat. The oarsmen had a feast.