Poseidon's Spear lw-3

by Christian Cameron

‘Should have saved the dead man,’ joked Kalimachos, one of the herdsmen.

  Men paused, as if a collective shudder went through them all.

  I thumped the side of the boat with my sighting staff. ‘Not on my ship,’ I said.

  Everyone breathed.

  And we ran on.

  And on.

  After noon, when I took a sight on the height of the sun as the Phoenicians do, and learned little from it except that I could calculate when noon passed — exactly — I worked my way to the stern and stood with Doola.

  ‘Shall we turn the ship due east?’ I asked, looking past my friend at the shipwright.

  Vasileos was between the oars. He shrugged. ‘Who knows?’

  Doola looked forward. I followed his look. The whole crew was watching us.

  ‘Stay on course,’ I said, a little louder.

  Vasileos met my eye, and his eye said, It doesn’t matter either way.

  We ran on.

  Along towards evening, a pair of gulls attached themselves to our sternpost. They took fish out of our wake for a while, and then just sat there, defecating.

  I took in the mainsail at full dark and we ran on, far more sedately. And when I took my trick at the helm, I turned the ship until the wind was stern on. Due east.

  In the morning, everyone was sober and sullen, thirsty, and very hungry indeed.

  There was no more wine to serve. That is to say, I knew there were twenty-four more big amphorae stowed forward, and I’d broach them rather than die, but we had a steady stream of seabirds now, and I was sure we were up with the land. In fact, it looked oddly as if the land was to our south, as well as our east.

  An hour after dawn, when two men in the bow were demanding that we have a ‘ship’s meeting’, porpoises appeared off the bow. They leaped and leaped, and the ship fell silent. Men fell to their knees, praying for Poseidon’s favour.

  We ran on, another hour. I got the mainsail up, aided only by three hands while Doola and Vasileos steered. The rest either wouldn’t help or couldn’t.

  While I was taking the sight for noon, a group of the herdsmen gathered in the bow. I heard them, saw them, knew their intent. Their frightened ignorance was driving them. They thought To be honest, they weren’t thinking.

  They came forwards over the benches with swords and spears and clubs.

  ‘Turn the ship around!’ called the leader. He was the oldest of the herdsmen, and should have known better — Theophrastos. A good enough man.

  ‘Turn the fucking ship around,’ he said again, and some of his fear leaked through his voice.

  I came to the edge of the small aft deck and stood over them.

  ‘Back to your benches,’ I said. ‘You’re all idiots. Do you think you know anything about sailing? There aren’t any sheep here to herd. We survived the triremes and we survived the storm, and in a few hours we’ll be on a beach.’

  ‘We are going the wrong way!’ shouted one of the boys. ‘I can feel it!’

  I looked at him, and almost died. Theophrastos stabbed at me with his spear. I had not reckoned on their deadly intent, and I almost missed the blow.

  Almost.

  Even as it was, his spear point caught me behind the ear and cut my scalp.

  Without thinking, I got my right hand on his spear haft and jumped onto him from my higher vantage point. I stripped the spear from his hands and knocked him to the bilges.

  The others stepped back.

  One of the fishermen tripped the youngest herdsman and put his arms around him in a bear hug.

  I looked around. The others were indecisive — not cowed, but unsure if they were willing to step up to violence.

  I thought, too. We were hours from land — or so I thought. But I didn’t have the strength to fight a mutiny, and And, as horrible as it sounds, these were herdsmen. Not my finest rowers.

  Theophrastos, bellowing with rage, rose from the bilge.

  I drew my xiphos and killed him. I deceived his reaching hands with a flick of my point and then cut back, hard, the full force of my right arm into his neck just above the collarbone. I didn’t quite behead him. But close. And his blood fountained over his comrades.

  They flinched.

  I pointed my sword at them. ‘He was a fool, and he died for it. Get back to your stations, or die with him. We’ll be eating mutton tonight — or you can eat black air in Hades.’

  That was the end of the mutiny, if it was a mutiny. It was really the rush of some panicked men, and I think now that killing Theophrastos was too much. I could just as easily have kicked him in the head. But I was tired, and afraid myself.

  That’s how it is, at sea.

  My guilt for killing him increased all day, as little signs — a floating log, a wren — told us that we were coming up with the land. After midday, we saw land — a mountain range to the south. And then we saw the land to the east.

  People cheered.

  I felt empty, and foolish. I had earned their thanks, and then I had killed one of them. They all moved shy of me.

  Even Doola.

  The sun was just starting to sink when we came up with the land, and we coasted north, looking for a beach. We had to row, and that was difficult, as the men were weak and scared — scared of me, now.

  But the closer we got to the land, and the more we could smell it, the more our hearts rose.

  By sunset, we were within bowshot of land — a low and difficult coast. But just before full dark robbed our eyes, Doola saw a break in the coast, and we turned west under sail and passed over the bar of a river, and we saw huts — beautiful huts, with stone foundations and big roofs of thatch on the south bank, and two heavily built open boats riding a few ship’s lengths out from a muddy beach.

  I took down the sail in the last of the light, and we got the oars out with a slovenly motion that would have disgraced an all-slave crew on a Carthaginian. And we pulled badly — I say we, because I was on a bench. We caught crabs, and some men seemed incapable of effort.

  We crawled the last hundred paces across the calm water of the estuary. Backing water to land stern-first seemed impossible.

  But we managed, in a laborious and inefficient manner. We floundered the ship around, and backed water like boys rowing for the first time, and the stern grounded with a soft thump.

  We’d lived.

  I know I wept. Many others did, too. I lay over my oar, and I cried.

  Landing stern-first means that the rowers are facing away from the land. So I was one of the last to notice that armed men were forming on the greensward by the river. It was Doola who alerted me.

  Fifty men with spears.

  Ares. I remember thinking that if they came to enslave me, I’d just lie down and take it.

  But I rose, and moved perhaps by my killing of the morning, I seized not my spear but my staff, and I leaped off the stern to the riverbank and walked slowly, the land moving under me, towards the spearmen. It was just the last edge of a summer evening: the sky was still pink, but night was close.

  I fell to my knees and clutched the earth, and kissed the grass.

  Then I hobbled like a drunkard towards the spearmen. They watched me.

  They looked utterly foreign. Many — most — were heavily tattooed. They had big, ugly bodies with fat bellies and hollow backs — men who didn’t exercise properly. But they had big muscles, heavy thighs — trousers in checks and violent stripes.

  Their hair was all the colours of the rainbow, even in the fading light.

  Sittonax came up next to me, and he had a spear. He grinned at me.

  He shouted at them, and two men shouted back. Both wore fine gear.

  It was as if he cast a spell, or broke one. As soon as Sittonax called to them, their disciplined silence broke and most of them simply walked away. A few stayed to look at the ship, and one man, in a magnificent helmet with bronze wings and a gold torque around his neck, stood warily to the side. After a pause, he came and spoke to Sittonax, and when the two were done
, they embraced like old friends and the man grinned at me and stood by.

  ‘Your people?’ I asked Sittonax. He gave me a look of pure annoyance in return.

  ‘If we landed in a part of Sicily where they spoke Greek, would you be home?’ he asked, which for him was a long speech.

  ‘You speak to them well enough,’ I commented.

  He shrugged. ‘These are Tarbelli. Their aristocrats speak a good form of my language — I can understand them.’ He nodded at two spearmen who were looking at our ship. ‘I can’t understand a word from those two.’

  ‘Oh,’ I said, or something equally intelligent. ‘You seemed to be talking ten to the dozen.’

  ‘They thought we were coming to attack,’ Sittonax said. He shrugged. ‘Now they think we’re here to trade. I had to explain that we aren’t Phoenicians.’

  I nodded. ‘Tell him we’re here to trade,’ I agreed. ‘And that we need food and water, or men will die. Tell them we’ve been at sea eight days in a galley.’

  He nodded. He spoke to the man in the excellent war gear, who made noises in return.

  He blew a horn, and the Keltoi moved quickly. My oarsmen stumbled ashore — it’s amazing how unstable a man can be on dry land — and a local man showed Doola where we could set up tents. We had two big tents, built to rig on the hull of the ship. We had one up before the roast pig was brought down to us, and then no man could raise a finger for anything. They might have enslaved the lot of us in a matter of minutes, just for some pig.

  I don’t really remember much more of that evening. I ate and ate. I went to the ship, and Vasileos and I managed to get one of our heavy amphorae out of the bilge, and we broached it and served it to our hosts. And then I went to sleep — real sleep, for the first time in ten days.

  I awoke to a rainy day and heavy swell out in the estuary. And to the thought that I had sailed out of the Pillars of Heracles, onto the Great Sea, and lived. You’d think I’d have been worried for Amphitrite and all my friends aboard. Let me tell you something about the life I led, honey. You had to trust your comrades and the gods. If they were dead, well, they were dead.

  The first thing I did after rising was to pour a long libation and say a prayer aloud, to Poseidon, for their deliverance.

  Then I went to find the tin.

  7

  There wasn’t any tin at Oiasso. We sat with the lord of the town the next day, exchanging pleasantries, while his steward looked over our selection of wine and copper. Neither seemed to hold the least interest for the locals, and after some discussion I found that they had excellent copper down the coast in Iberia and that, while they enjoyed our wine, they had excellent wines of their own.

  The Amphitrite had all of our other trade goods. I didn’t have pepper; I didn’t have silphium or anything else except for my own bronze wares — some helmets, a bronze aspis, some cooking pots and a bundle of swords. I won’t say that they turned up their noses at my work.

  I’ll just say that they smiled and moved on to look at other items.

  I had time to examine the chieftain’s war gear. His bronze helmet with the wings was unlike anything I’d ever seen — almost like a Chaldicean helmet, with hinged cheekpieces and a low bronze bowl, but very different in appearance and marvellously well fashioned. It was decorated over almost the entire surface with beautiful repousse — the work was very fine, even though the figures were, to me, amateurish. It took time for me to develop an eye for Keltoi work. To be honest, I still think they need some help with their figures.

  Every man likes the art of his home, doesn’t he?

  That’s not really the point. The point is that by the time the sun was high in the sky, I knew that I’d made an arrogant assumption about the north. They weren’t ignorant savages ready to be impressed with the marvellous goods of our civilization. They were, in fact, impressed only by our pottery. They didn’t really want our wines, but they wanted all the amphorae, and the empty one from the night before became our first guest gift.

  The second thing we discovered was that the customs of the Inner Sea didn’t hold here. Or rather, it was like stepping back in time, to the century before my father’s time, or even farther — to the world of the Iliad and the Odyssey. The Tarbelli aristocrat didn’t trade. He hosted us and gave us gifts. Then he waited patiently for us to give him gifts, and the steward prompted us through Sittonax, who rolled his eyes.

  ‘This is old-fashioned,’ he admitted. ‘But Southerners are old-fashioned.’

  It made me smile, because for once, I was in my element. It was just like Crete, and I’d lived there. So I put myself in the role of the aristocratic captain and I disdained matters of trade, and Doola became my steward, and by dinner on the second evening, Tertikles — that’s the best I can do with the local lord’s name — and I were guest friends. We’d hit each other with swords, we’d raced horses on the dunes and I’d given him my second best helmet, which was, if no better than his own, no worse. He liked it.

  Tertikles and Sittonax spoke together a great deal, and I left them to it when I wasn’t required, seeing to the emptying of the ship. She’d stood nine days at sea, and she needed… everything. We stripped her to the wood, scrubbed the bilge, recaulked the seams, and Vasileos wandered around her hull on the beach with a heavy mallet, driving pegs back into the hull and examining every inch with a professional eye.

  I brought him a cup of wine. ‘Good ship,’ I said.

  He beamed. ‘She is, isn’t she?’ he said.

  By the morning of the third day, Sittonax had his bearings, and he drew me a chart in the sand while the oarsmen scrubbed the hull clean.

  ‘We came through the Pillars of Heracles,’ he said, an eyebrow raised, ‘as you call them, here.’

  I nodded.

  He drew a box. ‘Iberia. As I understand it from Tertikles.’

  I shrugged. No one at Marsala had ever been able to draw us even the vaguest chart of the world outside the Pillars.

  ‘We’re in this deep bay,’ he said, drawing me the point where the north-western edge of the box intersected a long line he’d drawn with his stick that ran north to south. ‘Somehow we ran all the way down this bay.’ He shrugged.

  Not a sailor. I knew exactly how it had happened. I just kept sailing east, expecting to find the coast of Iberia, and it kept escaping us.

  ‘Those mountains,’ he pointed to the long line in the south, ‘are northern Iberia.’

  ‘We sailed all the way round Iberia?’ I asked. I’m a scientific sailor, but sometimes you just have to believe that Poseidon sends you where he wants you to go.

  He shrugged again. ‘Tertikles says that there is a Phoenician trading post — south and west, four days’ rowing.’

  I grunted. ‘You think we could just sail in and trade for tin?’ I asked. Sittonax shrugged. ‘No idea. But Tertikles wants to know if you’d like to join him in attacking it.’

  ‘Attacking it?’ I must have looked foolish.

  Now, let’s remember, my young friends — I had been a pirate. But by this time, I’d lived for years — years — on my own work and my own production and trade. It makes me smile, but at the time, I believe I thought myself too mature to engage in such foolishness.

  ‘Oh, I don’t recommend it, but he insisted I ask you,’ the Kelt said. ‘For my part, the Venetiae are farther up this coast — maybe six days’ rowing. They’ll have tin.’

  ‘Are they your people?’ I asked.

  He rolled his eyes. ‘No,’ he said.

  ‘Do you know them?’ I asked.

  ‘We trade with them, everyone does. They have the ships. They go to Alba. They control all the tin.’ He looked the way a man does trapped in an argument with a small child.

  ‘Will they want our copper or our wine?’ I asked.

  Sittonax shrugged. ‘How would I know?’ he answered.

  That night, we sat down to dinner in the lord’s hall. I met his sister, who was a year or two older than he — perhaps thirty. She was not
beautiful, but rather strong-featured — a long, horsey face, strong teeth, a marvellous laugh. She had heavy bones like an athlete, and she was as tall as I am and perhaps as strong, too. I’d never seen a Greek woman who looked like her.

  And yet I find I do her injustice. She was slim-waisted and wide-hipped and had deep breasts — just in a larger, stronger way than Greek women. She didn’t have an ounce of fat on her. And her face looked… ungentle. When she laughed, which was often, she laughed with the abandon with which men laugh.

  But the longer I watched her, and the other Keltoi, the more I saw how different their women were. By the second night, their boldness had become proverbial with my crew — both for their straightforward propositions, and for forceful management when displeased. Thugater, that’s a nice way of saying that when a Kelt woman didn’t like the way you treated her, she had a way of punching you in the head.

  And the gentlewomen — the aristocrats — all wore knives. They used them to eat, but they were not eating knives. Or so it appeared to me.

  At any rate, her name was Tara, or close enough. She was far from beautiful, I suppose, but I wanted her the moment my eyes fell on her, and I suspected that the feeling was mutual. But she was the lord’s sister, and that meant I needed to be careful.

  Still, I taught her to play knucklebones our way, which was rather different from theirs. And she caught me peering down her marvellous cleavage, and she laughed. A Greek girl might have blushed, might have simpered; might have met my eyes for a moment and glanced away. Might have fled the room or gone stony cold, too. But she met my eye and roared.

  When her brother came and sat with us, and Sittonax joined us, we could converse a little.

  I have no idea what we talked about, but Sittonax became bored very quickly. Who wants to interpret for someone else’s flirting? I mean, really.

  Tertikles leaned in, then, and spoke vehemently — so strongly that I thought I was getting the ‘this is my sister’ lecture.

  But she looked at me, licked her lips and nodded enthusiastically.

  So I met her eye. She had wonderful, lively, expressive eyes. She was a person for whom the world was a fine place.