Poseidon's Spear lw-3

by Christian Cameron

  But I had become a different man. Or rather, I was striving to become a different man.

  And failing.

  I thought of standing at the door of the taverna in Marsala, longing for the clash. Knowing that I could probably take the whole pack of petty thieves. Eager for the spark.

  And I’d sigh, and the whole thing would play again in the theatre of my mind. My last dinner with Lydia. Her foot on mine… my hand on her hip. Her breasts.

  Her father, and the look of bewildered anger.

  And all the other men and women. Dead, abandoned. My son, somewhere on Crete.

  Euphoria, dead in my arms.

  Briseis.

  It was a long winter, and a longer spring.

  And then the ship was finished.

  At thirty oars, she was probably the smallest ship I ever commanded. But no one ever questioned that I would command her. Demetrios was going to take Amphitrite, and he would have Doola, Seckla and Gaius, plus two of our fishermen, Giorgos (the oddest name for a fisherman) and Kosta. I had Neoptolymos and Daud; an older fisherman eager to make a fortune named Megakles, and the shipwright himself. Vasileos couldn’t resist. He was a fine helmsman and a superb resource, the kind of man who could repair anything that nature or error destroyed.

  He added a great deal to our crew. He was older, steady and had a knack — I have a bit of it, and Doola, too — of saying something and being obeyed without ever sounding as if an order had been given. With me, it is reputation — I’m the hero. With him, it was age and also reputation: he was perhaps the most renowned sailor on that coast, and the young men obeyed even the shift of his eyebrows.

  I decided to emulate his extremely laconic manner.

  As for my crew, I had, as I say, a dozen local lads, a dozen shepherds from the hills and six trained Greek oarsmen. They had been at Lades — they worshipped me, and every one of them felt he owed me his life, which is a secure foundation for leadership.

  We spent a week building a set of oar benches on the beach, and then we practised every day while the farm boys and the shepherds ate us out of our wallets. The hill boys acted as if they’d never seen food before.

  Or wine.

  I expected fights, and there were fights, but the boys — all the locals — didn’t quarrel with the men, Demetrios’s oarsmen. I didn’t break up the first fights, but after two evenings of it, I handed them all shields in the dawn of our third day together and made them run five stades. Most of them were puking by the third stade.

  And so it went. I’ve trained crews before, and I’ve told you all about it. These were, in the main, better men than I usually had — eager, young and intelligent. The local fathers locked away their daughters, and we worked them hard, and in a week, we had something like a crew.

  Our Amphitrite didn’t waste the time. She ran up to Marsala and back twice, gathering cargo, and then down the Etruscan coast for hides, wine and all the Etruscan tin that Gaius could arrange, albeit in small quantities. I continued to train my oarsmen, now at sea. We pulled up and down the beach for two weeks, and my store of silver dwindled and the locals began to jack up their prices as my demands increased.

  That’s the way of the world.

  Amphitrite came back from Veii and the Etruscan coast. She sold her cargo, loaded some Alban tin that had come over the passes from High Gaul, and sailed for Sardinia. The margin on tin was very small — the Phoenicians got most of the profit by sailing to Iberia, and their price made the price of the tin brought over the mountains on donkeys precious little. But Doola was finding buyers in Sardinia, Sicily and Etrusca from both ends of the trade, and he knew his business.

  And besides, our dealings in Marsala netted us Sittonax. He was Daud’s age, and spoke another dialect of Keltoi — they couldn’t really understand each other, and mostly they spoke Greek, even though both of them could understand each other’s poetry. He came over the mountains with the tin, as a guard. Someone gave him the ‘mistaken’ impression that we could sail him back to Alba.

  He was the first Kelt I’d met who refused to adopt Greek dress, and wore trousers and all his barbaric finery all the time. Daud had been broken to our ways by years of slavery, but Sittonax made him wear trousers — and how we mocked him.

  They got along like lovers, which is to say, they fought often, and made up swiftly — and they were brothers in all but name. And Sittonax knew a great deal about tin and where it came from.

  He was my thirty-first oarsman. I don’t think he ever pulled an oar in the whole voyage. He was the laziest man I’ve ever seen, and yet he seemed to get things done. He could tell lies without turning a hair, yet we all accepted him as an honourable man. My forge time went to trade goods, about which Sittonax and Daud advised me with conflicting and sometimes boastful advice, and my ram. I had decided to put a bronze sheath on the projection that, on small ships like a triakonter, was usually left bare. I wanted it light, but with enough punch to crack a hull. I had seen a number of rams, and I’d seen the flaws. Sharp rams cut the water nicely but got stuck in the prey; round rams made for uncertain steering.

  I designed a different shape — a series of heavy plates held apart by spacers, like an empty packing crate with partitions for amphorae, but no amphorae. I asked around for weights and got a great many answers. Even alloying the metal myself, the tin and copper came to a great amount — almost fifty mina — and I wondered if I was up to the work, and if I was wasting money and bronze.

  I had help from six other smiths when I cast the ram in sand in my rented shop yard. The neighbours complained I was going to burn the neighbourhood down.

  My mould cracked and the molten metal ran all over the yard, and it was only by the will of Hephaestos that no one was injured.

  I tried again. Fewer men came to help me, the second time. I had real trouble moving the gate, the piece of iron that kept the molten bronze out of the mould, and when it moved, it cracked, and the white bronze flowed awry.

  I went to the shrine of Hephaestos and prayed. I spent a night on the mud floor in front of the terra cotta statue. I dedicated two rams and a good helmet.

  Doola and Seckla and Neoptolymos came to help, the third time. They were already making coasting trips in Amphitrite by this time. But they were in, and they were friends. The local bronze-smiths were distant men.

  I heated the bronze for longer. I’d made a huge wax model of the thing and built the mould carefully, with wood and iron strapping and sand.

  Either the third time was the charm, or the god had forgiven me. I like to think it was the latter. But either way, the ram came shining from the mould. Vasileos shook his head and said the shape was all wrong. He wanted it to be sharp — and he said it would bite the water badly.

  But a week later, we mounted it on the hull and it went on like a porpax on a man’s arm. Perfectly.

  Of course, in and out of all this, we were training our oarsmen. After four weeks of training, most of my shepherds were passable, and my fishermen were bored and threatening to go back to their fathers’ boats, and it was time to take my ship to sea. So I paid for a priest to come from Marsala with my last funds, and we sacrificed a sheep and feasted. And in the morning, before their hangovers were clear, I had them all aboard, and we were running down the coast, headed east, to Italy.

  Part II

  Alba

  After this he proceeds to determine the breadth of the habitable earth: he tells us, that measuring from the meridian of Meroe to Alexandria, there are 10,000 stadia. From thence to the Hellespont about 8100. Again; from thence to the Dnieper, 5000; and thence to the parallel of Thule, which Pytheas says is six days’ sail north from Britain, and near the Frozen Sea, other 11,500. To which if we add 3400 stadia above Meroe in order to include the Island of the Egyptians, the Cinnamon country, and Taprobane, there will be in all 38,000 stadia.

  Strabo, Geography 1.4

  4

  I’m a poor sailor and a mediocre bronze-smith, but I’m an expert pirate.
>
  We coasted east and south, camping in sandy bays on the south coast of Gallia and eating deer and sheep. Stolen sheep.

  Somewhere in the Etruscan Sea, we found a Phoenician coaster struggling against a west wind, headed for Sardinia. It was sheer luck — I had not intended to prey on anyone. But we pulled at her from the eye of the wind, and she ran — and there is something to the old saying that the bleating of the lamb excites the lion. I really didn’t intend to take her until I saw her run.

  And then She had a crew of five, four slaves and a Phoenician skipper from Carthage. I kept his slaves and enslaved him, took his ship and sold it still fully laden at Marsala. One of his countrymen ransomed him — he hadn’t done much work, and the two mina in silver I charged for him seemed fair to everyone.

  And the Phoenicians in Marsala marked me.

  Demetrios came to visit me on the beach at Tarsilla.

  ‘You can’t do that again,’ he said without preamble.

  I laughed. ‘I didn’t intend to do it that time,’ I said. ‘They were just there.’

  That quickly, I had made the change from merchant to pirate.

  I put him on the kline of honour, fed him wine and sent him home in the morning with a hard head.

  Two days later, before midsummer, Amphitrite swept in past the headland and unloaded her cargo.

  This time, Doola had done his very best.

  We had Roman helmets, Etruscan amphorae of wine, finished and dyed Aegyptian cloth, bags of local salt and even a small leather envelope of raw lapis from Persia. We had Cyprian copper and some dyes — Tyrian and Aegyptian.

  Mostly, we had wine.

  I had about thirty minas in worked bronze — brooches and scabbard fittings, because Sittonax said they would sell. And mirrors.

  We had two bales of ostrich feathers I had taken off the coaster. No idea how he came to have them, but Carthage gets the best goods out of Africa.

  Doola looked at them, heard the tale of the piracy and shook his head. ‘I wish you hadn’t done that, Ari,’ he said. But then he shrugged, and went back to his lists.

  And we had two great tusks of ivory, provided by Gaius.

  We spent four days loading, working our boys to a frazzle. The triakonter was too stiff and had an odd lie under sail, and Demetrios, after watching us row, ordered the stern to be pushed down in the water. Ballast amphorae — we were literally ballasted in wine — were shifted, the stern went down a strake or two and the steering oars bit deeper.

  I’m guessing, now that I’m a better shipwright and a better captain, that my ram — which bit the sea beautifully, although we hadn’t tested it for its real purpose — had pulled the bow too deep and made her hard to steer. That ram bow could cut the waves, but if used badly or in heavy seas, could try to lead the ship to plunge too deep. I was lucky. And I had Vasileos, who supervised the reloading.

  When it was all done, we ate a feast of fish and lobster on the beach. Men with partners bid them farewell. Men without made do, or didn’t. I didn’t. I had chosen celibacy.

  Hah! I make myself laugh. I hadn’t chosen it at all. I’d failed to find a partner, and done nothing much to find one. I was twenty-seven, by my own reckoning. Too old for the young girls, unless I wanted marriage.

  Just right for paying prostitutes.

  More wine, here.

  It was two weeks to midsummer night, and the moon was waxing.

  We slipped away in the dawn, two small ships against all the might of the ocean. It was a beautiful day, and we had a fair wind for the west, and all day we watched the water run down the sides of our heavily laden ship. Not a man touched an oar save the steersmen.

  Three more days, and Poseidon gave us a west wind. At night, we sheltered on sandy beaches or heavy pebbles under cliffs, and we bartered for supplies or ate wild sheep and goats.

  Those are the days when life at sea is a fine thing. We had new rigging, new sails and fresh hulls on both boats and we raced along, west and south.

  On the fourth day, we saw the coast of Iberia rising before us and we put the helms over and started more south than west, and still we had the god’s own wind in our sails.

  By the end of the week, we had had some rowing. By the end of the second week, it was as if this was the only life we’d ever known. We sailed all day, rowing when the wind was calm or against us. Amphitrite could stay much closer to the wind, but couldn’t row in anything like a breeze. Lydia — for so I called my new ship — could row in anything but a gale, so fine was her entry and her designs, and Vasileos beamed with pride as our oarsmen powered us into a heavy wind as if they were racing small boats on a beach.

  But Lydia was never a good ship for sailing with the wind anywhere but her stern quarter, nor did I expect much more.

  This resulted in a great many tortoise-and-hare days, where we’d crawl under oars, following a straight course across a bay, and Amphitrite would sail away — sometimes seemingly in the very opposite course to the one we were rowing — only to appear near close of day on the same beach.

  We began to rotate our crews. Men on Amphitrite learned a great deal more about sailing than men on Lydia, and our shepherds were taken off their benches, three days at a time, and sent to make sail. So all my friends came to Lydia, from time to time, and I, too, took a trick on the sailing vessel and left command to Vasileos, who, I suspect, did it better than I.

  Another week, and we came to the headland where Iberia juts the farthest into the Middle Sea. To port, we saw the Balearics. We could have traded there, for their famous wine and their fine wool, but we had wine, and we had wool, and we were under way on our great adventure.

  That night, we had a talk at a great roaring fire on a pebble beach, with the sound of regular waves playing like a monotonous and low-tuned lyre in the background. The sky was full of stars, and our lads were singing the songs they’d sung to sheep and goats at home.

  We lay on our cloaks, sipping wine. Every sip was that much less we had to deliver to our destination. We were getting thrifty, or perhaps greedy.

  We fell silent, listening to the sea. And Demetrios picked up a stick from the fire and pointed south.

  ‘Not a one of us has ever been through the Pillars of Heracles,’ he said. He looked around. ‘The rumours are that there is a heavy current, flowing out, and a brutal wind.’

  Well, that shut us up.

  Doola was picking his teeth, I remember that, because he spat, and then laughed his great laugh. ‘We should quit and go home, then,’ he said.

  And we all laughed with him.

  ‘Sounds as if it will be worse coming home than going out,’ Neoptolymos said.

  Demetrios shook his head. ‘I really don’t know,’ he said. ‘And that scares me. I want to run south with this fine wind and coast along Africa going west, rather than stay on the Iberian shore.’

  ‘More chance of a Carthaginian,’ I said.

  Demetrios nodded. ‘I know. But this coast gets rockier and rockier. Eventually we’ll have no landing places. And… there’s Gades. I don’t know its exact location, but it’s a major port, according to men in Marsala, and it has a fleet. A Carthaginian fleet.’ He looked around at all of us in the firelight. ‘South is the coast of Libya, mostly desert down to the sea. I’ve never heard that it was thickly populated.’

  None of the rest of us knew, either.

  Really, we were shockingly unprepared. We had asked every sailor we could find about the route, but the Carthaginians wouldn’t talk, or didn’t know, and the Greeks were cagey. We knew that Africa had odd winds that could carry a lot of sand, and we knew that the coast of Iberia could be kind and could be harsh — we’d just experienced three weeks of pure sweet sailing, and we’d found her soft. But from here, the rest of the way was rumour and legend. I’d met five men who’d claimed to have sailed past the Pillars of Heracles.

  None of them gave me the same description.

  I assume that if I’d used my brief stay in Carthage better, I’d h
ave learned more. Even as it was, I worked the calculations I’d learned while a slave, and I was none the wiser, because navigation by the heavens is relative, and I didn’t have any fixed points from which to calculate. But I had a notion that Heracles wouldn’t spurn me, and that the Pillars would be in his realm, not Poseidon’s; and that if I took a precise bearing there on the heavens, I’d have something to go by. It’s a little like a drunkard going out of his farmhouse for a piss in the middle of the night — he doesn’t take his bearings in his bedroom or in the kitchen, but at the garden gate.

  So none of us gainsaid Demetrios, and the next morning we left the land and ran due south, for Africa.

  5

  Africa was low, compared to Iberia. The coast rises slowly, and if it wasn’t for the cloud banks and the wind, we might have run on her in the dark. The gods know that thousands of other sailors have drowned on that coast, but we were fortunate.

  Having found the coast of Africa, we turned west, into the setting sun, and sailed. We had a good wind for it, and our only trouble was water. The coast of Africa didn’t seem to have much of it, and what there was, someone owned. After passing three harbours, all obviously owned by the Carthaginians, we lay alongside one another and agreed that we had to go into the next small port.

  They were Numidians, there. They weren’t Doola’s people, but they were black like him, and thin like Seckla, and while there were Phoenician merchants, we avoided them, filled with water from the stream and paid a small toll. We also bought bread and meat and grain: all outlay. We sold some wine. Before we left the beach, Doola had purchased two hundredweight of dates, dried dates. Who knew what ignorant barbarians might pay for delicious dates?

  They couldn’t get them into the hull of the Amphitrite, so we had to put them under tarpaulins between the benches of the Lydia.