‘Arimnestos,’ I said. I tapped my chest.
‘Ari?’ Doola asked.
Close enough.
I nodded.
The younger African tapped his chest. ‘Seckla!’ he said sharply.
‘Ari,’ I said again.
You get the picture.
The other two men were not Phoenicians, although they looked the part, nor were they Sikels or Hebrews or anything I knew. They didn’t speak much. But within a few hours, I knew that the ruddy-haired man was Gaius and the dark-haired one was Daud, and that they didn’t really share a language, either. They just looked as if they did. In fact, I’ll save time and say that Gaius was Etruscan and Daud was all Keltoi, from northern Gallia, and spoke a few words of Greek and a few more of Sikel and no other tongue but his own.
It is amazing how much information you can convey without many words. And it is perhaps a comment on my former servitude how happy I was on that boat. The food was good, mostly grilled fish. We had wine every night. The Sikels treated us as — well, more as employees than slaves, and I never was entirely sure as to my status. We moved from small port to small port — really, just a stone house and some wattle huts on a headland with a beach. We rowed past the Greek towns and their temples and familiar smells. We sailed past the Carthaginian towns and well out to sea, and it occurred to me that my new hosts feared the Carthaginians far more than they feared the Greeks, the Italiotes or the Etruscans.
Mostly, we loaded dry fish and sold metal. Every town had a small forge and a bronze-smith, and our ingots of copper and tin were their life’s blood. I was shocked when I finally understood the price of tin. It was absurdly high, and I thought of my time as a smith on Crete — about as far from the tin mines of northern Illyria as a man can be, and still be in the world — and wondered. What had happened? Tin hadn’t ever been that high.
You cannot make bronze without tin. And the tin has to be high quality. You don’t need to add much tin to the copper to make bronze — a little more than one to twenty. But without tin, all you have is soft copper, whether you are making cook pots or helmets.
So an increase in the price of tin — affected everyone.
Neoptolymos was the only man to whom I could really talk. As I recovered a little, so did he, and I went back to work on his Greek. He was sullen, and it was only then that I began to understand the depth of his betrayal. The man I had heard mentioned on the beach — Epidavros — was his uncle. Neoptolymos didn’t need me to tell him who had sold him to the Carthaginians. He already knew. He chewed on his desire for revenge every minute. Illyrians are good haters, and in this case, I think his need for revenge kept him alive.
Mind you, I thought of Dagon constantly. I hated him: I wanted to torture him to death, and I knew, in my heart, that I was afraid of him. This had not happened to me before, and the sensation was like the ache of a tooth. I had to probe it with my tongue.
A week passed, and another. We were not shackled or roped at night. I began to prowl the encampment when the boat was beached, testing the boundaries. We were well along the west coast of Sicily — I have no notion greater than that — in a town that had several stone houses with tile roofs, and I had been a rower for perhaps three weeks when I walked boldly down the beach away from the encampment and into the streets of the town. I made it to their very small agora just before dark, and there was the younger brother, sitting on a blanket, with various ingots of Cyprian copper and a few knucklebones of tin — clearly not Illyrian tin, let me add, because that comes in plainer ingots.
Hektor’s brother rose from his blanket, walked over to me and put a hand on my arm. But there wasn’t any threat.
I shrugged. ‘I want to see the town,’ I said in Greek.
He shrugged and let go my arm.
I walked about. In truth, they were subsistence farmers with no temple and very little to see — a pair of stone statues that were really just phallic pillars. A bronze brooch was the town’s chief adornment for a woman, and only one man wore a sword, and it was more like a dagger.
In the days of my lordship, I’d have walked past them all like a king. As a semi-slave rower, I found the town fascinating. Or rather, a welcome break.
In a very few minutes, I was back in the small agora, and Hektor’s brother met me, led me to the blanket and offered me a cup of wine. So I sat with him. Drank his wine. And, with a smile, got up and walked back down to the boat. I still didn’t know his name, because his brother never used it.
It may seem odd to you, thugater, but I was not unhappy. My body was healing, and no one was unfriendly. Doola and I were becoming comrades. I learned some of his words — I still remember that nitaka means ‘I want’. He learned more of mine. Enough words that when I came back from my wander — he had been sleeping — he rose, threw a chiton over his nudity and sat with me.
‘Was it good?’ he asked. Let me just say that there were grunts, gestures and incomprehensible words interspersed with our very small shared vocabulary. I’ll leave that out.
‘Not bad,’ I said, and shrugged. ‘Hektor’s brother gave me wine.’
‘He’s not bad,’ Doola agreed.
We sat in companionable silence until Hektor himself joined us. He lay down. He was a very big man — a head taller than me — and handsome. He had a small amphora and a mastos cup, and he poured a libation. Doola and I both raised our hands in the universal sign of prayer to the gods, and he grinned. He said some words. Then he drank from the cup and passed it. After a while a small boy, I think Hektor’s son, came and brought small fish fried in olive oil. Neoptolymos joined us and ate the fish with the closest thing to a smile I’d seen from him. We ate them, got greasy, drank the wine. One by one the other rowers came, and then the rest of Hektor’s deck crew — all relatives, I guess.
I still think they had made a profit. It was a good little party.
So the next morning, when the boat rowed away, I was at my bench. I was happy enough.
That’s the best evening I remember. I can’t say exactly how long I rowed for the Sikels. At least a month, and perhaps longer. But sometime after that, on a clear day, we saw a trireme hull up to the north, and the Sikels spoke in agitated tones, and we turned south and ran downwind. The two brothers argued, and I will assume that the younger was in favour of maintaining our course to the west and appearing unfazed, while the older was in favor of running immediately and gaining sea room.
We ran south across a darkening sea, and as the wind grew less and less, we went to the oars and pulled. Hektor began to cheat the helm more and more west of south.
But the black trireme was on us.
I rowed looking over my shoulder. I’d been the hunter a hundred times. I’d snapped up coasters just like this one — sometimes three and four at a time. I knew in an hour that the trireme had us.
So did Hektor.
He gathered his family in the stern. I couldn’t hear them, or understand them. But they didn’t shout, and they took weapons. They had a look about them that I know too well. They weren’t planning to resist because they believed they could win. They were resisting so they would die with honour.
The youngest boy smiled and kissed his father and uncles and brothers and then jumped into the sea just before the trireme came alongside, and drowned. Just like that.
Hektor was a giant, a fine figure of a man, but he was no fighter, and the marines from the black hull knew their business. He inflicted no wounds. They spitted him on a spear. He screamed a few times, until one of the marines hit him with the hilt of his kopis the way a fisherman whacks a fish to kill it. Hektor died.
The other Sikels fought, but they didn’t fight well. Two were wounded. But Hektor’s brother and the rest were taken.
They looted the boat, and then they took us aboard. In less time than it takes to tell it, I was a slave rower. Again. On a Carthaginian military trireme.
I know you think I should have risen from my bench with Doola and perhaps Seckla and killed all
the marines. But my body was far from healed — healed for fighting, I mean — and I had neither weapon nor armour, and they had everything. I considered fighting. I wondered, almost idly, if I had learned cowardice at last. Doola and I certainly exchanged a look, in the last few moments before the marines came aboard. Neoptolymos grunted once, in real agitation. He wanted to fight, but he looked for my lead.
Well, I’d led once before, and failed.
If Hektor had armed us I’d be dead. So there. Poseidon frowned, and smiled too. I went to a bench, and I had Doola and Seckla at arm’s length, and Hektor’s brother below me, Neoptolymos a dozen benches ahead of us.
The trireme was called the Sea Sister in Phoenician. I didn’t know a man aboard, but in an hour I knew that the trierarch was a capable man with an expert set of officers. Nor were the rowers slaves. This was a military ship, run for a profit by means of piracy. We preyed on the Sikels and the Etruscans, too, as well as the Greeks of Magna Greca. In my first week aboard we took six ships — none much larger than the coaster on which I’d served. Ours was the only one that resisted, and for several weeks they treated us with care, keeping us at arm’s length when we were fed. Wine was rare, and meant we were in for a fight. But at the end of the fifth week, we pulled into Laroussa, a Carthaginian port on Sicily, and the rowers were marched down the wharf from the ship to a barracks — and paid.
I almost expired from shock. I had assumed I was a slave. The Sea Sister was run in Phoenician, of course, and I spoke a little and understood more; and most of the officers spoke enough Greek to be understood. None had bothered to suggest to me that I was not a slave. But in the barracks, I was shown a bed and handed a little less than sixty drachmas.
Doola and I had managed to expand our shared vocabulary, although, to be honest, we spoke neither Greek nor Numidian, but our own language. Now that we were in barracks, though, I found that there were a dozen more Greeks in our crew and they knew the town and the drill.
‘We’re not slaves,’ said an Athenian guttersnipe named Aristocles. ‘But we have very limited rights. You can go to the whorehouses or the agora or the wine shops. You cannot leave town. You cannot refuse to row.’ He shrugged. ‘It is like being a slave with some privileges.’ He grinned, showing me all ten of his teeth. ‘You look like a gent,’ he said. ‘Want to share a ride?’
He meant share a porne at the brothel, and I didn’t really fancy that, but I bought a pitcher of wine and fruit juice on ice — extravagant aristocrat that I was — and a dozen of us drank it in a taverna that smelled like old octopus. Then we ate a huge meal.
The whores came around when the serious drinking started. They didn’t want sex — the ideal customer paid and passed out. But I hadn’t even talked to a woman in months, and my body felt better — the soreness in my side and my shoulders was a little less every morning, and the wounds from Dagon’s spear were healed. I wanted one of them. So I talked, chatted, flirted.
For my pains, I ended up riding one of the older women — she seemed quite old to me — a near-hag of thirty. She had beautiful hair and some teeth and a deep tan and a ready laugh, and she was the only one of the porne who had much of a smile. We drank wine afterwards, and she sat with me, a hand on my arm, for the rest of the evening, and we had another ride after dark. Of course I paid. Porne don’t ride for free, and men who say so lie. But she liked me well enough, and I her. Her name was Lin, or enough. She was a Sikel.
I went from mourning Euphoria to riding an old prostitute. Yes. I was alive.
We were on shore a little less than a week. The Sea Sister was provisioned for sea again, and an officer came and fetched us. We each got a few coins for signing on — not that we had any choice — and in an hour the shore was a dream and Lin’s body was a mirage, and I was rowing.
This time, we went north along the coast of Sardinia, and the sea was empty. The officers were cautious about our landing beaches. Then we turned east into the setting sun and sailed on the ocean’s wind. On the second day, we picked up a small coaster. The crew fought. Two of our marines were killed and the crew of the coaster all suicided, the survivors diving in armour into the sea.
Carthage had a terrible reputation, in those days. A lot of what happened came from the way they treated slaves. The Sea Sister was an exception, but our victims had no way of knowing that. Most Carthaginians, sea officers or lubbers, treated slaves as an expendable resource. Always more where this one came from, whether this one was a skilled rower or a fine mosaicist or an ignorant yokel.
But I digress.
Later that afternoon, we found out why the coaster had fought so hard. Out of the afternoon haze came her consort, a heavy Etruscan trireme. She was ready to fight, and so were we, and our trierarch turned into the wind, dropped his boatsail and we took the oars in our hands.
The trierarchs gave us a short speech. My Phoenician was up to it, so I could tell that he promised all the rowers a share if we won. I passed that on to Seckla and Doola and Neoptolymos and Hektor’s brother.
I was on the top deck, and I knew the business. We went for a straight head-to-head ram, the helmsman watching the enemy ship like a cat watches a mouse’s hole.
‘Oars in!’ he shouted, when we were half a stadion from our enemy, the two ships hurtling together with the speed of two galloping horses.
All our oars came in. On the top deck it was easy, but the lower decks needed time to get the oars across — at the bow and stern, the rowers had to cooperate, putting the blades out through the opposite oar-port. But we were a good crew.
So were the Etruscans.
We hit, not ram to ram but cathead to cathead, and our forward-row gallery took the blow of theirs and both splintered, and men screamed as their bodies were ground to bloody pulp between the uncaring masses of the two ships. All the momentum came off both ships, and we coasted to a near stop, broadside to broadside, the height of a tall man apart.
Our archers began to shoot into their command deck, and their archers did the same, and then the grapnels flew. Indeed, both sides had decided to fight it out.
Men are foolish animals. No one needed to die. I don’t think there was a man on either ship who stood to gain much from victory. This wasn’t a struggle for freedom or domination, except at the lowest level. This wasn’t Lade or Marathon. This was more like two travellers wrestling at a crossroads, with no spectators.
But there was no less ferocity for all that.
Their marines came at us first. They wore full panoply and they were men who knew their business, and I thought, as a spectator, that they were better men than ours. And we were short by two men of our complement, and when each side has only a dozen armoured warriors, the loss of two is sufficient to swing a contest.
It was odd to sit and watch a deadly fight. One Etruscan went down immediately. A lucky shot from a boarding pike sent him over the side, where he sank without a trace. But our captain took his death wound in the very next fight — a moment’s inattention, a mistake by the man at his side and he was spouting blood. They dragged his bleeding body clear of the fight and dropped him near the stern, and then the melee grew desperate — the Carthaginians knew that they were losing, and the Etruscans knew they were close to winning.
The Etruscans pushed our marines relentlessly down the central gangway — a catwalk that was at the height of our heads and open to the weather. Our ship wasn’t covered with a solid deck, as some of the newest ships are today, so we could watch the whole fight.
The helmsman led a counter-attack from the stern, and his spear put down an Etruscan marine who fell across the catwalk about even with Doola’s bench, one forward from mine. His spear snapped, and he plucked an axe from behind his shield and spiked a second Etruscan in the temple. One of the Carthaginians at his side took a spear in the thigh at the same moment, and the two men fell in a tangle, right onto my bench. And the fight locked up — the catwalk could just fit two men wide, and there they were, like two teams pushing against each other at
an athletic contest.
The dying Etruscan was in my lap, bleeding on me. And shitting on me, as well. His sword clattered at my feet out of his dead hand, and lay in a pool of his own blood on the boards where I rested my feet to row.
I had the strangest thoughts. And a great deal of time seemed to pass while I had them, all between one drip of blood from the corpse and another. Just for a few beats of my heart, I think that I saw the world as Heraclitus saw it. It seemed to me, and it still does, as one of the pivotal moments of my life.
The sword lay at my feet, beckoning me. Indeed, it all but called out to me.
I looked at it. But I didn’t take it, because I had a thousand conflicting thoughts in an instant.
It seemed to me that I was four feet lower than any opponent, and that after I cut the ankles of one or two men, I’d be skewered, shieldless, like a dog in a pit.
It seemed to me that I owed Carthage nothing.
I looked at the Carthaginian marines fighting — literally at my head — and I felt no kinship. No brotherhood. They paid, and I rowed, and I was not free to leave. Had Hektor been captain, had the crew been Sikels, I might have felt a bond.
And the man lying across my lap looked Greek. He smelled of coriander, his skin was brown and tanned and his eyes were like my eyes, and his armour — a handsome bronze thorax, a beautiful Corinthian helmet with plumes and a crest of red horsehair — was Greek armour. I didn’t feel the least inclination to risk my skin to help the barbarian Carthaginians fight — and win — against the barbarian Etruscans who at least looked Greek.
And yet another voice urged me to take up the sword.
Because with it in my hand, I was a different man. A free man. The master of my own destiny.
And then came a moment of superb, crystalline clarity. It was absurd.
I — a slave, or near enough — held the key to the fight. If I rose from my bench, sword in hand, the side I backed would triumph. I saw this as if it were written in carved letters on stone.
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