On and on.
We rowed.
We rowed all the way up the coast of Illyria and Dalmatia, and men continued to die, and we rowed without food for a while, as I say. It’s hard to tell this, not just because it’s all so low and disgusting, but because there’s nothing on which to seize. Abuse was routine. Pain was routine. Men hit us, and we rowed. Our muscles ached, and we rowed. Sometimes we slept, and that was as good as our lives ever were.
We came to an archipelago of islets, and they had small villages on them. Finally, we landed. None of us was allowed ashore, and all I can say is that after a time, a dozen slaves and some food came onto the ship and some copper was unloaded.
And then it all happened again.
My Illyrian was moved out of the stern-post rowing station, and I was moved back to the upper deck, and we rowed. There was food. That seemed good.
We rowed.
We made another landfall, and were beached again. This place had a ready-built palisade for slaves, and we could see it was full from our benches, with forty or fifty male slaves waiting to be sold.
Our Illyrian looked at the beach and wept.
We were pushed ashore, roped together and put in the palisade. By luck, I was roped to the Greek, Nestor.
After darkness fell, and the guards went off to fuck the female slaves in another pen — I call these things by their proper names, children, and may you never know what slavery is! — we lay side by side, and whispered very quietly.
‘Still alive, brother?’ he said.
‘Yes,’ I said.
He nodded in the dark, so close I could feel it more than see it. ‘Good,’ he said. ‘I was thinking,’ he went on. ‘Arimnestos is an odd name. Where you from?’
Where was I from? May I tell you the truth, friends? I hadn’t thought of home, of anything, for weeks.
‘Plataea,’ I said, and it was as if a dam opened in my head and thoughts poured in. My forge, my wife, the night she died, the fire.
The Pyrrhiche and how we danced it. The feel of a spear in my hand.
‘You are Arimnestos of Plataea?’ he asked. ‘By the gods!’ he muttered. ‘I’m a man who’s been a slave his whole life, but you! A gent!’
‘I’ve been a slave before,’ I said.
‘Ahh,’ he said, and nodded again. ‘Ahh… that’s why you are alive.’
We ate better after that port. We were also a lighter ship by the weight of our Cyprian copper, and we had forty more rowers, fresher men who hadn’t been abused. Indeed, there were too many for the oar-master to ruin them all at once, and we had easier lives for a week.
We rowed.
Not one man died that week. That’s all I can say.
We made one more port call. None of us was allowed on the beach, and we picked up women — twenty women, all Keltoi with tattoos. They were filthy, hollow-eyed, and the first night at sea the oar-master discovered one was pregnant, and he killed her on the deck and threw her corpse over the side. I don’t know why, even now.
The bully-boys forced the slave women every night. Sometimes these acts happened a few feet over my head. The despair, the sheer horror that those women experienced was somehow worse than any of the blows I had received because it was all so casual. They were used like… like old cloaks to keep off rain.
And none of us could do a thing.
Or perhaps what is worse is that we could have done something, if we had been willing to die. Die without revenge — die nameless, achieving nothing, our bodies dumped in the sea. That would have taken a special courage I didn’t have. But it took yet more of my honour. I was a slave.
Then we turned south. I was moved to a stern oar on the top deck, and I, who feared no man in war, was terrified to be so close to the oar-master. Indeed, I was just a few steps from him at all times.
Luckily, he was mad. So mad, he’d forgotten me and the Illyrian both. He hated women — all women — far more than he hated us. So while I had to witness his brutal degradation of the slave women, I was merely beaten occasionally, as an afterthought. Tapped with his heavy stick when he was bored.
After some time — by Zeus the Saviour, I have no idea how far south we’d come — the oar-master cut the throats of a pair of the women in a sacrifice. He did it in the bow, and I never knew exactly what happened. But after that, the other women stopped being alive. That is to say, they were still warm and breathing, but they were dead inside. A few days later they started to die.
The trierarch simply let it happen.
Sometimes he reacted in anger and hit a slave, but mostly he just fingered his beard and watched the heavens. His two helmsmen said little.
From their stilted conversations, I gathered that we were on our way home, and that home was Carthage.
And I began to learn other things.
I was a good navigator — my best helmsman and friends had taught me well enough — but the Phoenicians have secrets about navigation, and they hold them close. They use stars and the sun. All of us do, but they do it with far more accuracy than we Greeks. Now, since Marathon, we’ve taken enough of their ships to enslave a generation of their navigators, and we have all their secrets, but back then there were still tricks we didn’t know: the aiming stick for taking the height of a star, or the secrets of the Pleiades and the Little Bear. Ah — I see that the lad from Halicarnassus knows whereof I speak!
But the helmsmen and the trierarch were careless. They took their sun sights and their star sights a few feet from my silent back, and they discussed their sightings. Hamilcar, the younger helmsman, was obviously under instruction and very slow. I think — I will never know — that he was so deeply unhappy with the life he was living that his brain had shut down.
And Hasdrubal, the trierarch, used him as his scapegoat. Every wrong answer was punished with a blow. His every thought and opinion was ridiculed.
Another week at sea, and the new slaves began to be broken. Our rations were cut — I can’t even remember why, just the satisfied voice of the oar-master telling us that we deserved it.
We rowed.
Another week.
But the navigational lessons at my back had begun to keep me alive. They gave my brain something on which to seize. And Hamilcar’s obstinate ignorance became my closest friend, because my understanding of the Phoenician tongue — bad to start with — became more proficient, and because Hamilcar needed everything repeated two or three times, three days in a row. Bless him.
One night, the sea grew rougher and the wind came from all directions, and after a while, rowing grew dangerous. A new slave below me lost the stroke, got his oar-handle in the teeth and died. His oar went mad, and other men were injured. None of us was very strong, and the sea was against us — and suddenly the bully-boys were afraid, and they showed their fear by beating us with sticks and spear butts.
The wind steadied down from the north, but it grew stronger and stronger.
We got our stern into the wind by more luck than skill, and suddenly, we had to row or die.
‘Do you want to die, you scum!’ roared the oar-master. He laughed and laughed. ‘If you die, I die too!’ he shouted. ‘Here’s your chance! Rebel, and we all go down to Hades together — you as slaves, and me as your master!’
The trierarch and the two helmsmen had three shouted conferences on the spray-blown deck that convinced me we were close to the coast of Africa — too damned close to be running before a north wind. But the oarsmen were badly trained and brutalized, and the officers were shit — pardon me, ladies — and the trierarch didn’t have the balls to try anything. So on we rushed, the oars just touching the water to keep our stern into the wind.
After some time — it was dark, cold and wet and all I knew was the fire in my arms — one of the Keltoi women stepped over me and jumped over the side. I saw her face in a flash of lightning — she was Medea come to life. To me, that face is printed for ever on my thoughts the way a man writes on papyrus, or carves in stone. It was set with purpose —
hate, determination, agony and even a tiny element of joy. She was gone before my heart beat again, sucked under by Poseidon. To a kinder place, I hope.
But something passed from her to me. Her courage, I think.
Right there, in the storm, I swore an oath to the gods.
And we rowed.
We took a lot of water, but we weren’t lucky enough to sink. About a third of our oarsmen drowned or died under their oars, and yet somehow we made it. The bully-boys threw the corpses over the side, and cut the oars free, too. And on we went.
The morning dawned blue and gold, and we were alive.
After that, there was no food and only about eighty whole men to row, and we were on the deep blue. We rowed, and we rowed, and we rowed.
I should have been dead, or nearly dead. But the Keltoi slave woman had told me something with her eyes — I can hardly put this into words. That resistance was worthy. Perhaps, that I could always restore my dignity with death. Either way, I was coming to my senses.
And of course, my brain was engaged, too. I had taken to listening to the men at the steering oars, and now I was interested. Hasdrubal talked about the trade — about how the tin was no longer coming in from northern Illyria in the old amounts, and how the Greeks were trying to cut into the trade from Alba, and that interested me. He talked about new sources of copper down the coast of Africa and up the coast of Iberia, outside the Gates of Herakles, and I discovered, from listening to him, that Africa was much bigger than I had imagined.
I had no cross-staff with which to try calculations, but I used my fingers. Star lessons happened at night, just a horse-length at my back. I was careful, but I tried their sightings as I got the hang of their method.
It worked.
Mind you, it wasn’t that I’d ever needed to do such esoteric navigation, and if Hasdrubal hadn’t been such a poor sailor, neither would he! He was a fine navigator, but a dreadful sailor. We always knew where we were, but we never seemed to be able to move from where we were to where we needed to be. And a big trireme — even a twenty-oared boat — can’t hold enough food to feed its oarsmen for even a few days and nights. This is why all ships coast — they go from beach to beach, buying food from locals, whether they are a tubby merchantman with four oarsmen and a dozen sailors to a fleet of warships with two hundred oarsmen apiece — the ironclad rules of logistika are the same either way.
But I digress.
After some more time — I have no idea how long — we came to Carthage. I’ll tell you about Carthage in good time, but when I first rowed that ship in between the fortress and the mole, I saw nothing. I was not really alive. I was a human machine that pulled an oar, silent, unthinking, at least by day.
The hull bumped the wharf.
The trierarch had the gangplank rigged, and then he, his two helmsmen and the oar-master walked off the ship. An hour later, after we’d grilled in the African sun, twenty soldiers — Poieni, which is their word for citizen infantry, like our hoplites — came to the ship and ordered us off. Many of us could not walk.
The phylarch shook his head. ‘Useless fuck. These men are ruined.’ He spat. Came and looked at me. He pointed at my legs.
My once-mighty legs were like sticks.
‘Look at this one,’ he said. ‘Good-size man. Filthy, lice, and hasn’t been allowed exercise.’ He shook his head. ‘Hasdrubal is a useless fool. Sell this lot to anyone who will take them.’
And with that, he took the surviving women and marched them away. That left another man in charge, and he averted his eyes and his nose and ordered those of us who could walk to carry the rest. I ended up carrying the Illyrian. I have been back to that spot — we only walked about fifty horse-lengths. Less than a stade.
I remember it as being more like fifty stades. It went on for ever. Oddly, they never struck us, and one of the Poieni asked us why we were so silent.
No one spoke.
We were put in stone slave pens with a roof and shade. There was water in which to bathe, drinking water and a shit-hole. I saw men break there — men who had been free and were now slaves.
But for us, fresh from Hasdrubal’s grim trireme, it was like the Elysian Fields. We had barley porridge for dinner and again at breakfast, and red wine so thin it was like water. It made me drunk, so I laughed and sang the Paean of Apollo. I was the first to give way to sound. After a second helping of that awful wine, a dozen men were grunting at my song. Or my attempt at song.
We passed out. But in the morning, I found that the Illyrian was curled tight against me, and the Greek, Nestor, was lying against the wall with the Thracian.
Nestor looked me in the eye. ‘We lived,’ he said quietly.
The Thracian grunted.
‘Now,’ I said, ‘we need to get free.’
Both men nodded.
And the Illyrian stiffened. ‘ Eleuthera,’ he said. Freedom.
Free. That’s what we thought.
2
My Illyrian’s name was Neoptolymos. He considered himself a direct descendant of Achilles, and he was willing to kill every man who had even seen him enslaved. His humiliation had almost broken him. But after two days in Carthage, he joined me for my morning prayer to Apollo — in awful Greek — and we began to talk.
We were allowed to talk, in Carthage. Talk, and eat. They fattened us up for about a week. We got cheap pork sausage with bread in it and green stuff — I still hate cheap pork sausage. They gave it to us three times a day, and took us out in a tiny yard for exercise, where we had to leap and jump and do foolish antics — stupid stuff that any gymnasium would have frowned on.
I knew how to condition myself, so I did proper exercises whenever I could, and taught them to my companions. The guards didn’t care.
A little at a time, I put some of the moves of pankration into my callisthenics. They gave me weights. I boxed with my shadow. The guards took an interest, but not much of one, and it was a small rebellion — the kind that means a great deal to the morale of a slave.
And that was a good thing, because eight days after we landed, Dagon came into our exercise yard and ordered us to be marched to a ship.
It still seems incredible to me that we could have gotten him again. Perhaps his deep — well, I’ll call it a sickness for lack of a better word, though I think he was cursed by the gods for something — at any rate, his sickness drove him to want to torment us. Again. It’s the only rational explanation why he, an officer, wanted the same broken men he’d just brought in.
We were marched through the streets, surrounded by guards. Dagon took all eighty of the survivors, and we were added to a hundred fresh slaves — Sikels, recently taken in war, who spoke little Greek and had never pulled an oar.
As we walked through the darkened streets of Carthage, Dagon walked by me. He didn’t say anything at all. He just smiled at me, and rubbed the butt of his thonged whip against my thighs and arse like a caress. Still makes me shudder.
And then he hit me with the whip — the butt, not the thongs — across the temple.
And when I kept pace and didn’t scream, he laughed.
I think the Sikels saved my life. Because they were so bloody awful that Dagon never had a chance at me those first two weeks at sea. He beat them raw, and they still couldn’t — and wouldn’t — row. He killed a pair who he said were fomenting mutiny, and they killed one of his bully-boys in the dark.
We were ten days out, somewhere on the deep blue north of Africa and south of Sicily, and the sun was a relentless foe, an aspis of fire slamming into our heads and backs. The ship stank of excrement and sweat and fear. The masts were stowed, there wasn’t a breath of wind and sweat ran straight down my chest and into my groin to drip onto the man below — I say below, because after eight days at sea, I was a top-deck oar.
We all knew that Kritias was dead and over the side, slain in the dark, and the Sikels were waiting to see what Dagon would do.
As luck would have it, I was across the bench from Neoptolymos,
who was on the port side while I was on the starboard. Skethes and Nestor — both, by the standards of our new ship, the Baal Shamra, expert oarsmen — sat several benches behind us, but together. I’d managed to exchange a long look with Skethes. Slaves can communicate a great deal in a look. And we’d learned to tap on the wood of our benches. We had a few rhythms — nothing like communication, but it could convey simple messages. My look said: ‘I’m alert and ready’. His said: ‘Me too’. My taps said: ‘Be ready’.
Watch your slaves sometime, honey. They have many ways to communicate.
We pulled. The rowers were tired, but not exhausted, and we hadn’t been fed. I had a feeling that the bullies were arming in the stern behind me, although I couldn’t see them.
And then Dagon was standing beside me. He was in bronze — a good breastplate, a heavy helmet. He put the point of a spear at my back. It was very sharp.
‘I don’t want you to die easily, lover,’ he said with his usual smile. ‘But if you move, I kill you.’
Suddenly, there were screams.
The Sikels rose off their benches.
And died.
Seven men in armour were more than a match for seventy naked, tired men without even the shafts of their oars. I know. I’ve done it myself.
The Sikels fought hard for a few minutes, while we, on the upper tier, sat silently. Dagon was behind me and above me on the catwalk — there was no combination of moves that would allow me to rise off my bench and trip him. I considered it, anyway.
If the Sikels failed, I knew my life would become much, much worse, because Dagon would have no distraction from me. And because eighty of us — his ‘survivors’ — would have to row the pig of the ship, laden with African iron ore.
About the time the Sikels began to give way to despair, I decided that my life wasn’t worth an obol. I thought of the Keltoi woman. There just comes a point where either you submit and become an object, not a person, or you break and go mad. Or you fight.
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