Poseidon's Spear lw-3

by Christian Cameron

  I’d had about enough of the Keltoi by then. And I was unhappy with myself — the more I thought on it, the more I decided I’d allowed myself to be ruled by Ares in the taverna. I didn’t need to show her my arete. I didn’t need to fight. I could be Odysseus instead of Achilles. And the two dead men were powerfully on my conscience.

  But even as I thought these thoughts — thoughts largely fuelled by Heraclitus, of course — I also thought like the pirate I often was. I considered setting an ambush for the riders. It was foolish to let them pick the time for an attack.

  But it would be worse to fight them. Once we fought, we’d be the enemy to every barbarian on the river, and that would be the end of us and our tin, too.

  I thought about it for another day, as we poled on and on and seemed to make very few stades.

  That night, Gaius and Seckla and I took Herodikles and one of the younger shepherds, Leo, who was growing as a man and as a leader. The five of us slipped downstream in a small boat, and we floated silently in the darkness until we came to a campfire. We landed well upstream, and crept carefully down on them.

  Eight men, a dozen horses.

  It was the work of two minutes to cut all the hobbles of the horses and chase them off into the darkness. They roused themselves, and we were gone.

  The next day, we had no contact with them.

  We poled on. We were low on food, and I had to bargain with a fairly hostile village of Kelts who lived in reed huts that stood on stilts in the water. We bought grain for silver, and got the worst of the bargain.

  Two nights later, one of our interpreters tried to run. He was surprised to find that I was right there, waiting for him.

  Three more days poling, and I was sure we had slipped our pursuers. The poling had become quite difficult, as we were travelling into the upper reaches of the river.

  Let me add that although I was sick to death of barbarians and their neck collars and their feuds and their superstition, it is beautiful country, and those Gauls could farm. The banks of the river were cultivated — not everywhere, but long swathes cutting through the forests. The towns were prosperous, if hag-ridden with aristocrats.

  Another thing I feel I must mention, although this is not meant to be a tale of marvels encountered in travel — traveller’s tales are all lies anyway — is their priests. They were all men, all representatives of the aristocratic classes, and they could perform prodigious feats of memory. I met a priest on the Sequana who could recite the Iliad. I didn’t stay to hear the entire piece — I’d have been there all winter — but his memory seemed perfect to me, and he could start wherever I asked him: I could name a verse or an event, and he would begin to recite. I found this very impressive, and told him so.

  Yet these learned men seemed to me more like magpies than like true priests. They absorbed a great many facts — it was from a Keltoi priest that I first heard of Pythagoras, for example — and they knew everything about plants, herbs and medicine, but so does any decent doctor in Athens or Thebes.

  For moral philosophy, they were merely barbarians. They had no great code of ethics, and their laws were mostly learned by rote and not reasoned, or so it seemed to me. In behaviour, too, the aristocrats seemed to do every man as he wished, and when the wills of two such clashed, there was war — petty or great depending on the status of the contenders. Twice as we poled our way up the Sequana, we passed villages burned — the second was still smouldering.

  Greeks could be just as bad. So could Persians. But there was something… ignorant about the Keltoi. Of course, I’m a Greek, and that may just be my own ignorance speaking. And you must remember that I was seeing all this through the eyes of a man who had suddenly begun to see the uselessness, at some level, of violence. The Keltoi queen — Nordicca, I knew her name to be, of the Dumnoni — was typical of her breed. The truth is that I had found her quite attractive, sought to impress her and ended up behaving like a posturing adolescent, and men were dead. I won’t say they haunted me — they had died with weapons in hand, striving against me — but I will confess that I knew their deaths to be unnecessary.

  But I digress. Fill my cup, pais.

  I had my two interpreters watched very carefully, night and day. Demetrios managed our boats, and Gaius managed the interpreters. We made sure they knew they’d be well paid, for example. I was quite sure they were supposed to desert us, but we promised them enough silver to make them modestly wealthy men.

  In truth, Detorix had taken some precautions to make sure we never came back. I might have hated him, but life had taught me that merchants will act to protect their trade the way farmers act to protect their crops. They will make war, or commit simple murder, to keep others off their trade routes. The Venetiae were no different in kind from the Phoenicians, except that they weren’t quite such rapacious slavers. When I look at how Athens behaves these days, I have to admit that apparently Greeks are just as bad. Or perhaps worse — more efficient.

  The younger of the two interpreter guides was Gwan, and he was a warrior, an aristocrat, and not a merchant. Over the course of a dozen stops on the Sequana, I gathered that this was a great adventure for him; that his father was deeply in debt to the Venetiae, and that his service was part repayment. He was of the Senones, the people who ruled the great river valley.

  He loved horses, and he was the most profligate lover I think I have ever met. It was difficult to find time to talk to him, he was so busy lying with women. The men that Gaius sent to follow him always blushed to tell of his exploits. He was neither particularly clever nor particularly handsome, and yet, in every village, one or two young women seemed to leap on him with an enthusiasm that might have made me jealous, if I hadn’t been so busy.

  What was his secret?

  I have no idea.

  At any rate, after twenty days we were in the upper reaches of the Sequana, and poling was hard, the current was fast even in autumn and we were all tired at the end of the day. Gwan rode ahead on horseback, and was waiting for us on the riverbank. We put up our tents in the fields, already harvested. Men and women with baskets were making a small market, an agora, for us to buy food.

  Gwan was good at his job.

  His partner was an older man, a fisherman. He was not an aristocrat, and he didn’t speak much. Or have the pure enjoyment of life that Gwan had. His name was Brach, and he was dark, tall and silent, and he walked with a stoop that looked sinister to a Greek.

  Gaius and I were poling together with Seckla and a pair of Marsalian fishermen. I don’t even remember their names, but I remember they were both cheerful companions. We were singing hymns — Homer’s hymns, all we could remember. Seckla was laughing at the words — his gods were otherwise, and he found ours odd.

  Brach was sitting in the stern. He’d poled for an hour, and it was his turn to rest. He was watching the bank, and I was watching him. He seemed alert, and afraid. When I stooped to get my wooden canteen and have a drink, I happened to stumble by him (try retrieving anything on a barge that is ten times as long as it is wide, and you’ll see why I stumbled). I got a whiff of him, and he was afraid. He smelled of fear.

  ‘What’s the matter?’ I asked.

  I could see Gwan standing on the bank, and I could see fifty or so farmers and local peasants with their baskets of produce. None of them was a warrior. You can disguise a warrior, but not if you pay attention. Men in top physical training stand and move differently from men who work the land for others. Men at the edge of violence have a different look on their faces. Not that I thought all these things at the time — merely to note that I was conscious that we had more than seventy giant ingots of tin and a lot of gold, too, and that in my heart I knew the Keltoi would try for it, sometime. I couldn’t see anything.

  ‘What’s wrong?’ I asked.

  Brach glanced at me, his face a dead giveaway, and shrugged. He stared at the water.

  ‘Armour,’ I ordered. I shouted the order sternwards to the next boat, and reached for the he
avy leather bag with my thorax.

  We were armoured and ready for anything in a quarter of an hour, and the farmers stood on the bank, puzzled, anxious and then downright fearful. They abandoned the bank, and many packed their goods and fled the market. When we landed, we looked like a war band.

  Before the sun had set another finger, a dozen chariots appeared, and fifty Keltoi on horseback. I had forty men with spears and shields out as guards while we dragged downed trees to form an abatis — a wall of branches. Not a great defence, but enough to discourage casual looting and easy predation.

  The local aristo had an eagle in bronze set on top of his helmet, and wore a knee-length tunic of scale — not a style of armour I’d ever seen before — and it looked as if it would weigh far too much for use in combat. Of course, the great gentry of Gaul travel to war in chariots. I wondered if this was what Lord Achilles looked like.

  He spoke to Gwan, saluted and his driver rolled to a stop an arm’s-length from me. I had my pais offer him a cup of wine, and he took it, poured a libation like a Greek and drank it off.

  ‘Tell him that I apologize for frightening his people. Tell him, as one warrior to another, that I received a sign — perhaps from my ancestor, Heracles — and had my men get into their armour.’ As I spoke, I indicated the plaque that showed Heracles and the Nemean Lion that was affixed to the inside of my aspis.

  He listened. And I’d say he understood, as he gave me a sharp glance, dismounted and offered me his hand to clasp. I took it.

  He spoke slowly, paused, took off his helmet and spoke again.

  ‘He says, warriors must learn to understand and obey such signs. He says a party of armed men passed his outposts this morning, travelling quickly on horseback, and he has been in armour all day. He says, perhaps your ancestor is not so wrong, after all. He gives you his word that no harm will come to your people tonight.’

  I let go his hand. Let me say that sometimes, between people, there is a spark of understanding. It can lead instantly to love, or friendship; to treaties, to alliances, to marriages. This man was clear-eyed and honourable. I would have staked my life on it. Gwan said his name was Collam.

  We passed a few minutes looking at each other’s war gear. His scale mail was beautifully wrought: the scales were fine, the size of a man’s thumb or slightly smaller, and I’d say, as a bronze-smith, that there were four thousand of them in the whole tunic. His helmet was superb: very different from the helmets I made, and he took mine, put it on and moved like a fighter, trying it, while encouraging me with motions to try his.

  I found his interesting — airy, open. The cheeks were hinged, the bowl was shallow, the neck curved down like my father’s to meet the armour at the back, like the tail of a shrimp or lobster, except without the articulation. There was a narrow brim over the eye, which, even late on an autumn day, kept the sun from my eyes.

  Collam made a motion and grinned. He had bright blond hair and enormous moustaches — I don’t think I’d ever seen a man with so much moustache.

  ‘He wants to trade,’ Gwan said. ‘My father is his sister’s husband’s brother — does that make sense? We’re not close, but he’s a famous warrior and his words are true.’

  I hadn’t needed Gwan to tell me that. I loved my helmet — I had made it with my own hands. It fitted me perfectly, and I trusted it.

  But when you can’t give something away, you are a slave to it. And generosity is one of the virtues. Besides, his helmet was a magnificent piece of work — the eagle on top was an artwork.

  I grinned. ‘Tell him it is his.’

  We fed him. The farmers came back at dusk, when they saw their lord sitting on one of our stools, drinking our wine, and we bought pigs and grain. We also bought some dried fruit and meat.

  I was so interested in Collam that I lost track of Brach, and so did Gaius. Collam was the sort of man that Gaius loved, and he sat with us. The Latins are not entirely Keltoi, but they have many words in common, and Gaius’s Keltoi was far better than mine, good enough that he could almost converse without Gwan. I missed Sittonax, and I missed Daud.

  Play it as you will; it was morning — the night passed uneventfully — when we discovered that Brach was missing. Collam came down to the riverside with his corps of charioteers and cavalry to see us off. I was in my armour, watching the men load the barges and keeping an eye on Gwan, while Seckla and Gaius searched the fields and woods around our camp. Seckla could track. So could a number of the herdsmen.

  When Collam came up, we embraced.

  ‘He asks if you’d like to sell any of your tin,’ Gwan said.

  He was on the main tin route, but then, of course, he was wearing ten pounds of the stuff in his harness. His war band probably ate bronze.

  ‘How much do you want?’ I asked.

  He shrugged. ‘One pig,’ he said. Eighty pounds. The value in Marsala would be almost eighty ounces of gold. Twice that in Sicily.

  Gwan turned to me. ‘He won’t — well, trade, precisely. If you give it to him, he will make you gifts of equal value. This sort of thing frustrates the Venetiae-’ He smiled.

  But I had approached Collam as a warrior. So we were bound to behave like heroes.

  Fair enough: I’d been a hero before. Herodikles had a team of men who had just wrestled a pig of tin to the riverside. I waved to stop them from loading it into Herodikles’ barge.

  ‘Yours,’ I said in passable Keltoi.

  That was one-eightieth of all our profits. I was going to look like an idiot if he didn’t give me something in return.

  He went and lifted it — by himself. He grunted, grinned and put it in his chariot, and the leather and rawhide stretched, and the whole light vehicle sank a little into the riverbank. The charioteer looked as if he might cry.

  I said, ‘I’m missing a man — a Gaul, lent to me by the Venetiae as a guide. He has wandered off. And I would like to know anything you know about this party of armed men.’

  Collam nodded when this was translated. And Gwan grew pale and looked at me.

  In Greek, I said, ‘Gwan, I suspect you were told to betray me. Yes?’

  Gwan couldn’t meet my eye.

  ‘Do you want me to tell this famous warrior that you are a hireling of the Venetiae? That you have been paid to lead me to an ambush?’ It wasn’t quite a shot in the dark.

  ‘They have my father,’ he said.

  ‘Gwan, the world is not always as dark as it seems. When Detorix knows that I am gone away south to Marsala and won’t return, he’ll release your father. Or you can come and find me, and I swear by the immortal gods I’ll come back with thirty warriors and take your father back.’

  Gwan looked at the ground. Collam asked him something — asked him what was wrong, I think.

  He looked at Collam and spoke for a long time.

  Collam grew angrier and angrier.

  It can be very difficult as an alien in another culture. Coming upon the Keltoi from the sea, it was easy to assume that the Venetiae were typical of the breed — indeed, that they were the lords of the whole people. I had fallen into this trap, and that morning, on the Sequana, I realized that I knew almost nothing of the Keltoi. Collam was no more like Detorix than Detorix was like Tara. Briseis and Euphoria and Aristides and I are all Greek, and yet four more different people could not be imagined. One wants to typify a people, but they are always too diverse to be typified.

  At any rate, Collam began to ask questions, and Gwan hesitated to answer, and I began to suspect that Collam was going to injure or kill Gwan on the spot.

  ‘What’s the problem?’ I asked.

  Gwan went on talking to Collam.

  I stepped in between them. ‘Speak to me,’ I said.

  ‘He is angry because… my father had no right. He says my father had no right.’ Gwan was on the edge of tears.

  Collam was shouting. His charioteer had his hand on the knife at his belt.

  I put a hand on Collam’s arm. ‘Tell him I’ll fix it,’ I said
.

  Collam looked at me.

  ‘He says, what business is it of yours?’

  Warriors are all alike, in too many ways. Most of those ways are dark, but not all.

  ‘Gwan, are you my man, or do you serve the Venetiae?’ I asked.

  Gwan met my eye. ‘Yours, my lord.’

  ‘Then tell Collam that I say, “Gwan is my man. I will see to his father’s debt”.’ I offered Collam my hand.

  Collam listened. He took two or three deep breaths, and took my hand.

  I thanked the gods that I had just given him a small fortune in tin. It had to sway him; he had to accept that I was an aristocrat like him, not a venal river trader.

  He drove away in his chariot, and I doubled the guard and told Seckla and Herodikles to hurry the loading. And I took Gwan aside.

  ‘You’d better give this to me straight,’ I said.

  Gwan shrugged. ‘I’m supposed to leave you at the first portage,’ he said. ‘That would be tonight or tomorrow night.’

  ‘And then what?’ I pressed.

  ‘My father’s people will put together a caravan of donkeys and horses to go across the hills to the next river,’ he said. He shrugged. ‘I don’t know what happens next. But I can guess.’ He looked miserable. ‘I think they will ambush you in the hills. Or perhaps-’ He shook his head. ‘Perhaps my people will ambush you.’

  I nodded. ‘I think you should come with me, all the way to Marsala. Take a share of the profits and come back and buy your father’s freedom.’ I looked into his blue eyes. ‘You really think your people want to fight me and two hundred of my men?’ I asked.

  He shook his head.

  When we had most of our boats loaded, a pair of heavy wagons came down to the waterside, and two chariots. Collam leaped off the lead chariot as it drove by and landed cleanly on his feet. He was a pleasure to watch, and I would have liked to wrestle with him.

  The wagons were full of barrels, and the barrels were his gift to me. We had twelve big casks, and each weighed as much as a pig of tin. I laughed, embraced him and told him through Gwan that Gwan would go with me to Marsala and return rich enough to retrieve his father’s debts to the Venetiae. In effect, I involved Collam in an alliance to preserve Gwan’s honour — and my convoy.