Poseidon's Spear lw-3

by Christian Cameron

  The Keltoi don’t take the love of men for men with the ease that Greeks do. And Etruscans and Aegyptians and everyone else, for that matter. Barbarians.

  ‘Not if he sees real profit,’ Doola said. ‘We represent a long shot at a lot of money, friends. Let’s not undersell our own possibilities. I am not saying we should share the whole truth with the whoreson. Just that if he really can get our boat built, he might be an ally. An untrustworthy ally, but an ally.’

  Doola. He put everything so well.

  So I was allowed to bargain with Anarchos.

  I leaned on the arm of my own kline and smiled.

  ‘We want to enter the tin trade,’ I admitted. ‘We have the skills. We have the ability to do things few other men understand. I know what tin looks like at every stage. I can buy at the side of the stream, or at the mine head.

  ‘We can navigate and sail. There’s tin at Massalia in Gaul, and it comes from upcountry. There’s tin in the mountains behind the Tuscan plain, and there’s tin in Illyria. We have an Illyrian, a Gaul and an Etruscan.’ I shrugged. ‘I can’t be plainer than that.’

  Anarchos drank his wine, and his slaves bustled to refill the cup. Another oddity — he didn’t have the terrified slaves of a bad master. He had the sort of slaves we all want to have. They were mostly silent, but when Anarchos made a witticism, they smiled or even laughed.

  Interesting.

  ‘And you can do all this with a triakonter?’ he asked.

  ‘Well… yes. And the ship we have now.’ I shrugged. ‘And ten more, when we get into the trade.’

  ‘And who protects you from the Phoenicians?’ he asked. ‘Their triremes are cruising for you, even now.’ He shook his head. ‘I made enquiries about this Dagon. He is — quite famous. Infamous. A slaver.’ He fingered his beard. ‘A typical fucking Carthaginian.’ He looked at me. ‘Seriously, Ari. May I call you that? Listen. In Syracusa, we all hate them. It’s the unifying force that binds the commons and the lords together. And sooner or later, they will get their forces together and come for us. Iberians, Keltoi, their own Poieni infantry, their crack cavalry force. They’ll load them on ships and try and finish us off. They mean to control all the trade in the Eastern Sea, and we are in the way.’ He drank. ‘Is this about revenge on this Dagon? I don’t finance revenge. And when dealing with Carthage, anyone who sails from Syracusa does so under a death sentence. Why should I wager on you?’

  ‘No reason at all,’ I said. ‘You invited me, and told me to speak my mind.’

  ‘I’ve always wanted to fit out a couple of big privateers for cruising against Carthage,’ he said.

  I laughed. ‘Listen, Anarchos. Last night you did me the honour of telling me a thing or two. And now I’ll tell you straight back. I’ve been a pirate — with Miltiades. Know the name?’

  ‘Of course.’

  ‘So yes — I’ve killed men and taken their gold. Taken their ships and pushed them men into the sea. Taken the women and given them to my men.’ I leaned over to him. ‘I never meant to be that man, but that’s the man I was, for a while. It’s not a bad life, if you stay drunk and don’t think too much.’ I nodded. ‘There’s men who can live like that, all the time. I’m not one of them. Something tells me you aren’t really, either. The captains you’d need to run a couple of corsairs — they wouldn’t be men you could hope to control. And in a year — less, if they were successful — the assembly would have to have you executed. With five triremes, Miltiades virtually strangled the whole trade of Aegypt. D’you get me?’

  He nodded.

  I wasn’t even lying.

  ‘If we go for some tin, and succeed — well, it’s no one’s business but ours, eh? If we go to sea to take the ships of Carthage, it’s only a matter of time.’ I shrugged and lay back, and a slave refilled my cup.

  ‘The odds against you… ’ he said.

  ‘The odds are balanced by the pay-off if we succeed. What are a thousand talents of tin worth?’ I remember waving my hands in the air.

  He laughed.

  ‘What is my silence with your jilted lover worth?’ he asked. I sat up.

  ‘Relax, Ari. I really mean no harm, but it is clear to me that you are never going to be a settled bronze-smith, try as you will. You aren’t going to marry that girl. You’re going to go sailing off to Massalia… or Alba.’ He laughed. Damn him.

  ‘Alba’s too hard,’ I said, knowing that he’d guessed it all.

  ‘Hmm,’ he said. ‘Glad you know that. I know a dozen men who claim they’ve been there. You’ll find more in Massalia, but no two of them tell the same tale, and I’m not sure that Alba isn’t a myth that Carthage uses to hide the source of all that white tin.’

  I shrugged. He might have been right, except that Daud knew where Alba was. It was an edge other rivals wouldn’t have had.

  ‘We’re close to war with Carthage even now. That war is going to collapse our economy. How much money do I have to put in my bet with you, and what’s my profit?’ He sat up, too.

  I drank almost a cup of wine, trying to find a path through all the lies, the subterfuge, the desires of my friends, the needs of the group.

  Sticking men with a spear is much, much simpler.

  ‘Your friend Miltiades is leading an expedition against Paros,’ Anarchos added.

  Well, that didn’t tempt me. He was now the great man he’d always wanted to be.

  I lay back. ‘I’m done with all that,’ I said.

  He leaned in, and I realized this was what he wanted to talk about, more than the trade. ‘Why? Tell me why, Plataean. You have a name, you survived slavery and now you are here — if you really are who you say you are. For a few months I told myself that the bronze-smith’s daughter held you. Why not? She’s a beauty. But now I see that you are using her. You really are a man like me, aren’t you?’ he leered. ‘And yet, if you are, why not go back to Miltiades? He’s living high, now. He’ll be Tyrant of Athens if he takes Paros, or greater. He’s building an empire in the east.’

  I remember sighing. ‘I said, I’m done with all that,’ I remember responding. I sat up on my couch. ‘Listen, I came as close to death as a man can come. I want a life. A real life.’

  ‘But not a wife and a home,’ he shot back.

  ‘I am what I am,’ I said.

  He shook his head. We lay in silence — I remember listening to slaves in the kitchen, bickering about whether to serve the next course or not.

  ‘What do you need?’ he asked.

  ‘We need to build our ship, and we need thirty good oarsmen. In a perfect world, they’d be slaves willing to work through to freedom for shares.’ I shrugged. ‘Slave oarsmen aren’t what you want in a tight spot. I have reason to know.’

  He chuckled. ‘You have no doubt encountered the local attitude about slavery,’ he said.

  ‘Oh, yes,’ I said.

  He shook his head. ‘In a year, war with Carthage may change everyone’s tune,’ he said. ‘I’d want five to one for every silver mina I put in.’

  ‘Three to one.’

  ‘Five to one. Five to one, and I do you the justice that it’s a straight business deal in which I’m a member — that is, I make sure the yard deals straight, I help find the oarsmen and I don’t play the patron about control. In exchange, you give me your word, your absolute word, that you will bring your tin here and sell it through me, and give me my share first if you make it.’

  I blinked. Five to one.

  Of course, we could sail away and never come back.

  ‘And another thing,’ he said. ‘You’re going to spurn Despoina Lydia. So: how can I believe you’ll come back?’

  ‘My word? My oath to the gods?’

  ‘Didn’t you give her the same?’ he said.

  That stung, and like most comments that enrage you, it was true.

  ‘So you marry her,’ he said. ‘And tell old Nikephorus the truth. Then I’ll know you plan to come back.’

  ‘Marry her and sail away?’ I said.
<
br />   ‘Isn’t that better than not marrying her and sailing away?’ he asked. ‘Let me ask you, oh bold veteran of Marathon — when she kills herself, how will you feel?’

  Something cold gripped the bottom of my stomach and my heart.

  He laughed. ‘You know, the hard men to touch are the dead ones who feel nothing. Men like you — you are easy. You care. I could make you do a great many things, simply by seizing on your own notions of right and wrong and twisting.’ He put his wine cup down. ‘But I won’t. Here’s my price: marry the girl, and give me five to one. I’ll put up a couple of mina in silver, I’ll coax the shipwrights and you’ll start with a well-found ship. No one loses. In fact, I think I’m actually doing a good deed, and if you make it back, everyone will benefit.’

  He raised his cup.

  I raised mine.

  We drank.

  Let me say this. A local thug is a dangerous nuisance. A crime lord is often a much more complex animal. Anarchos was a man who, under other circumstances, would have ruled a city. I’ve seldom known anyone so intelligent, so attuned.

  So terrifying.

  It took me ten days to face Nikephorus.

  I actually started several times, in a small voice — so small he walked past and called out to an apprentice, and the day moved on.

  Finally, the day before the spring feast of Demeter, I caught him writing at his work table.

  ‘We need to talk,’ I said.

  He looked at me. ‘We certainly do,’ he said. ‘My daughter is very unhappy.’

  I nodded. ‘I want to marry her,’ I said. ‘But I have a problem, and I want to admit it to you.’

  He nodded. ‘You are already married.’

  I shook my head. ‘She died; I loved her very much. That is not what this is about.’

  He nodded. I could tell he was gritting his teeth. I wasn’t doing well.

  ‘I want to take an expedition to Massalia to buy tin,’ I said. ‘It may be more than that.’ I held up my hand, silencing his protest for a moment. ‘I am not what you think, master. I am a smith — but I am also a warrior, and sometimes a sea captain.’ I tried to read his expression. ‘I wish to ask her to marry me, but I wish you to know that if I die at sea, I have nothing to leave her. I think you want a son to manage the shop, and I am not that man.’

  He sat back and polished a bronze cup on his writing table absently — but thoroughly. He was angry — I could see the anger in the red blotches on his face, and in his posture. Finally, he got up.

  ‘Leave this house,’ he said. ‘My curse on you. You have lied, and your lies have hurt us all. My daughter loves you. My wife loves you. I love you. And this is what you give us? That you wish to run away to sea?’ He shook his head slowly. ‘Have I treated you badly, that this is what you repay me with?’

  I opened my mouth. I was shocked. I had expected — well, I had expected it would all be fine. I wanted Lydia — at this point, I was aware that Julia was keeping the girl from me for our mutual protection, so to speak. And in my worst nightmares, I hadn’t imagined that Nikephorus would send me from the door.

  I walked to the door in a haze.

  ‘Don’t go to the gymnasium. You will never work in this town again,’ he said.

  I stopped in the doorway, all youth and bluster. ‘Why?’ I asked. ‘I love her — I mean-’ I paused. ‘I never meant to hurt any of you.’

  ‘Really?’ he asked, and closed the door.

  I walked slowly towards our tenement. Before I’d gone a hundred steps, I heard a woman shriek. It was the sound men made when they knew a wound was mortal, the sound women made when childbirth became too much to be borne.

  I prayed to Poseidon, to Heracles, to Apollo and to Aphrodite.

  They ignored me, because I had done this myself. And, of course, to her.

  Anarchos sent me word, by a thug, that our deal was off.

  The thug said it in just that way.

  ‘The patron says the deal is off. But he says, “No hard feelings”. Eh?’ The bruiser shrugged.

  I shrugged too. We understood each other perfectly, the bruiser, the crime lord and I.

  I drank too much, for the first time in my life. That is, I drank too much quite regularly for several days.

  Doola found me drinking in the morning of the third day, and collected me and my bad temper and led me home.

  ‘We’re putting to sea,’ he said.

  ‘It’s winter,’ I answered.

  None of them ever questioned me about the failure of my plan, or the loss of my work, or anything.

  They stood by the hull of our boat, just about the same length as four horses, and together we pushed her down into the water on rollers. We warped her around to the pier that small merchants and smugglers used, and we loaded salt fish in bales. The bilge was already full of small amphorae.

  Even in my mood of abject self-hatred, I was curious.

  ‘What’s in those, wine?’ I asked Seckla. They didn’t look like wine amphorae, unless it was a very fine vintage.

  Seckla shrugged. ‘Doola got a deal,’ he said.

  Doola grinned. ‘Fish oil. From the Euxine.’ He helped me hoist a bale of dried fish. ‘The importer died, and I bid at his estate auction. It may be worthless, but I paid about the value of the jars.’

  Well. Everyone else was pulling his weight, even if I had failed.

  We got to sea with a favourable breeze. I hadn’t sailed in months, I didn’t know the boat and I was miserable and temperamental. I objected to everything, disliked the way the sails were stowed, disliked the placement of the helmsman’s bench — on and on.

  Everyone stayed out of my way.

  And of course, I saw that I was not in command. Demetrios was in command.

  Since my first slavery, I have always been a leader — often the leader. To see how well Demetrios commanded them… in fact, he didn’t command at all. He merely indicated what needed to be done, and it was done. He did it with smiles and shrugs.

  It made perfect sense; he’d been running the boat for months without me. But it was another blow.

  Luckily for me, we had a storm.

  I don’t remember the storm very well. It came up slowly, and I remember that we had time to tie everything down, to run cables to the masthead, to brail up the sail until it was just a scrap of heavy weather canvas; time for each man to prepare himself a nest against the gunwales where he could be warm and dry — well, that’s a lie, but miserable in as much comfort as he could manage.

  We were well north of Sicily, in the Etruscan Sea, and we had plenty of sea room, so we set the helm and sailed with the wind and waves under the windward quarter. Our boat climbed each wave, bobbing like a cork, and seemed to skid along the crest with an odd bumping motion until we slid down towards the next trough. It wasn’t the biggest sea I’d ever seen, and the sky never took on the purple-black colour I associate with the worst weather. But it took me outside myself; focused me on survival and teamwork.

  The storm took three days to blow itself out, and on the morning of the fourth, we were scudding along in a stiff winter breeze in bright sunshine. The sea was a deep blue, the whitecaps were a startling white and the mainland of Italy was visible on the horizon.

  And I felt better.

  We made landfall. None of us knew where we were, but after a day tacking north, we saw a cluster of rocks that Doola and Demetrios recognized, and then we were in the estuary of the Po, one of the larger rivers on the Etruscan plain. We entered the mouth of the river, got our mast down and landed in the mud and grassy fields of Italy. It had been a remarkable passage with a fine landing, and in midwinter, such a passage was worth a trip to the temple and the sacrifice of a young ram. We were the only foreign boat in the river mouth.

  After a meal on the fruits of our sacrifice, we slept and headed upriver. The wind and current were against us, and we had to row all the way. Even a small boat is a heavy burden with four rowers, and we had to row near our peak effort to make any head
way at all.

  We rowed for about half a day, and gave it up, and spent another night in the estuary. Ostia, that’s what the village is called. I remember that the wine was good.

  We were windbound for four days, and despite the rain on the fifth, we were stir-crazy, and we set out again with rested muscles and a gentle breeze at our backs. We got the sail up, and between the fitful breeze and our new strength, we got upriver at a walking pace all day.

  That night we slept on the boat, a tangle of arms and legs in a gentle but spray-filled wind. My cloak soaked through, and my spare.

  On the third day out, we made Rome. Despite Daud’s carping, Rome was, and is, a fine town with handsome buildings. The core town is not much bigger than Plataea, and I could see real similarities. They call Plataea ‘Green Plataea’ for the contrast between our tilled fields and the desert that is most of Greece. Italy is fertile, but Rome’s surrounding plains are astonishingly fertile. The farms are larger than anything at home, with two-story houses, roofed in thatch, built around central courtyards.

  There was a fine temple, visible from the water; it was painted in bright colours, with an impressive colonnade. We arrived on a sunny afternoon, and the red tile roof seemed like the welcoming hand of Zeus extended to us.

  The town itself was unwalled, and seemed to have both planned and unplanned elements — hundreds of small houses built like peasant huts in Greece, shacks, really — and then a cluster of public buildings and larger houses. The waterfront and the ford over the river seemed the focal points, but perhaps that is merely a sailor’s perspective.

  We beached on mud below the ford. The bank had been so completely cleared of trees as to make it very difficult to moor our boat. After I had stood for what seemed like a long time, searching the bank for an old stump, a small boy appeared.

  He spoke in a foreign tongue and held out his hand. I had no idea what he was saying — he wasn’t speaking Etruscan. After several sallies, I understood that he wanted six coppers — the words were enough like Greek to make them out, especially when he ticked them off on his fingers.

  Doola jumped ashore.

  ‘It was the same last time. He’ll find a place to moor us.’ Doola laughed, and paid the boy in Sicilian obols. The boy looked at them, squinted at Doola and then nodded sharply. Two other boys came out with a heavy stake and a maul, drove the stake into the bank and moored us, bow and stern.