Poseidon's Spear lw-3

by Christian Cameron

  It was close on midsummer, and the sun was out there, somewhere above the cloud. It was dark by mid-afternoon, and darker still at what should have been evening, and the dust coming off Africa was in our eyes. But after the wine had been served out to the oarsmen, Seckla caught sight of a glimmer to the south-west, and shortly afterwards, it was visible on every rise.

  I relieved Megakles, and he went forward, looked for himself and reported that it was the outer lighthouse at Syracusa. Bless him.

  The rowers were filled with confidence, and in an hour, we gained fifteen stades on the wind and the harbour entrance was clear enough. I cheated the helm to the west, so that we approached the entrance at a shallow angle from the north. The great breakwater wasn’t built in those days, and the lesser breakwater only protruded a stade from shore.

  About a stade off the entrance, I noted that there was a current running inshore — from the sea west, into the harbour. Twice, I had the rowers row to hold us in place — bow into the storm — while I ran amidships to peer through the murk at the harbour lights. We had a lantern — three lanterns — over our stern, and another at the masthead, and despite all of that, Neoptolymos almost ran us aboard, his ram shaving past our port-side oars, and he was gone, heading fast into the harbour. His ship turned far too fast, the starboard rowers backing water, took a wave right over the counter and shot into the harbour.

  It was ragged, but he was in. I had intended a somewhat overcareful approach, using the current to push our bow into the harbour which my rowers held steady, but Neoptolymos’s success emboldened me, and I waved to Megakles. I was less bold: I let the wind push our bow around, our rowers gave five rapid strokes, as if we were ramming an enemy, and we were in. The change in the sea was instantaneous — we went from a howling wind and steep waves to glassy calm water and no wind in five strokes.

  A ship’s-length aft, Gaius made the turn. Later I understood that he left it late and his port-side oarsmen actually struck the rocks with their oars, but close enough is close enough — he weathered the headland and we were in the harbour.

  It was moving, to sail along the beaches of the harbour front where I had spent so much time. I wondered if Anarchos still lorded it over the waterfront. I wondered what Gelon was like. I wondered where Lydia was.

  Doola came and stood at my shoulder, as we slid down the calm water towards the waterfront. ‘We are coming back,’ he said.

  I smiled. ‘We said the same at Massalia,’ I noted.

  There was quite a crowd on the waterfront. It was nigh on full dark, but three warships passing the harbour mouth in a storm was something worthy of comment. Perhaps a thousand people watched us land our ships. Doola leaped over the side and went up the beach to find lodging and food for six hundred sailors and oarsmen. I was busy getting the crew off, guiding the stern of a heavy ship well up the beach and setting a night watch on our fortune. My oarsmen were all aware of what they’d been rowing in the bilges beneath their feet, and in an hour they’d have told every petty criminal in every brothel on the waterfront.

  Gaius’s passenger disembarked. He provided her with four marines under Giannis, and she vanished into the darkness. I missed her going, but I wasn’t sorry. To be honest, now that we were ashore, I was foolishly eager to find out what had happened to all my friends — and foes — in the town. And at the same time, suddenly apprehensive all over again. I feared Lydia’s scorn.

  I feared her father’s scorn.

  I also feared thieves, and I slept aboard, my head pillowed on my cloak and my feet on the helmsman’s bench.

  I rose in the morning, swam in the sea and then walked up into the city to find an open bathhouse. The Temple of Poseidon maintains one for travellers, and I emerged clean, massaged and feeling alive and virtuous.

  On return to my ship, I found Doola surrounded by merchants, none of whom was familiar to me. I looked in vain for Anarchos. Instead, I saw a cloaked herald approaching, and I ran aft and changed hurriedly into my best clothes and jewels. As I expected, I was summoned by the Tyrant of Syracusa. He sent me a dozen gentleman hoplites and a polite messenger named Dionysus, son of Anchises. The messenger was a beautiful young man with hair so blond he might have been a Gaul.

  The message was a polite command to attend the tyrant at my earliest convenience. ‘I am ready,’ I said. I sent a messenger for Gaius and asked him to accompany me. He was obviously a gentleman. Remember that I had heard that the tyrant was against commoners.

  We walked up the twisting streets to the citadel through a city that was far quieter than the Syracusa I had known three years earlier. There were few men and no women in the streets, and those men I saw did not meet my eyes, but merely hurried by.

  I had mistaken the hoplites for local aristocrats, but after climbing a few streets, I realized that they were beautifully kitted-out mercenaries.

  ‘Anyone here from Plataea?’ I asked cheerfully.

  None of them was, but there were men of Thebes and Megara and even little Thebai.

  ‘Are you from Plataea, then?’ asked the escort officer, a phylarch from Hermione in the Peloponnese.

  ‘I’m Arimnestos of Plataea,’ I said. He stopped dead. ‘You’re not.’

  ‘I am,’ I said.

  He shook his head, and then gave his spear to another man, took my hand and shook it. ‘A pleasure to meet you. Why didn’t you say? The Tyrant would have sent a better escort.’

  I laughed. It is good to be famous.

  The other mercenaries pressed around me and shook my hand over and over.

  One of them, a short man with short hair and an Attic drawl, laughed. ‘I was there too,’ he said. ‘At Marathon. With Miltiades.’ He shook his head. ‘Great days.’

  ‘I understand Miltiades is dead,’ I said.

  He nodded. ‘Where have you been?’ he asked. ‘He’s been dead nearly five years.’

  I shrugged. ‘It’s a long story.’

  Gaius stood by and rolled his eyes. Well — no one is very famous to his friends, which is probably just as well.

  The Palace of Syracusa is, to me, an exercise in hubris. It is built like a temple to the gods, and yet its only purpose is to house men. It towers over the town, on top of the acropolis, where there ought to be a temple and instead there is a citadel. As far as I’m concerned, that citadel is the reason that Syracusa succumbs so easily to tyrants — always has and always will. The man who holds the acropolis holds the city. By placing the gods on the acropolis, Athens makes it much harder for a mere man to take their houses — and any man who does such a thing is an obvious blasphemer. The Peisistratids had houses on the Acropolis, but no one but priests dwell there now.

  I digress, again.

  High above the town, we emerged on a path with a marble railing, lined by statues of women who were holding the railing. The view was breathtaking, and the storm off towards Africa was a pronounced darkness, like a bruise in the sky. My escort halted at the end of the path, where the statues gave way to a garden, open on one side to the city, and closed on the other three by deep colonnades.

  All this for the pleasure of one man.

  Gelon was standing among his roses; he had a small, sharp sickle in one hand and he was pruning, cutting dead flowers, slicing away buds past their promise.

  Hah! It all appeared a trifle contrived, to me. Gelon, the great aristocrat, tamer of the commons, pruner of the high and the low. Something like that.

  Nonetheless, I bowed.

  My escort commander said, ‘Lord Arimnestos of Plataea,’ and saluted with his spear. To me, he said, ‘Lord Gelon of Syracusa.’ He caught my eye as he turned, and his escort marched away smartly.

  Gelon, the Tyrant of Syracusa, was a tall, deep-chested man with deep, dark blue eyes, the kind of eyes usually painted on by amateur statue-painters who have access to too much lapis. His eyes were arresting.

  His gold hair, almost metallic in its vitality, was arresting, too. He had a touch of silver-grey at the temples, well mus
cled arms and legs — he looked, in fact, like a big, handsome man in the very prime of life and condition. And I have always thought that his looks were part of his success. He looked like a statue of a god, like the best statues of Heracles or Zeus. He dressed simply, as had become the fashion since the teachings of Pythagoras began to sweep over the Greek world, and he wore no jewellery unless he wore a cloak.

  At any rate, at the mention of my name, his eyes widened ever so slightly.

  ‘Are you really Arimnestos of Plataea?’ he asked.

  I bowed. What do you say to such a foolish question?

  ‘Well,’ he said. ‘Welcome to Syracusa. I gather that your ships bring a cargo. And I gather that you have quite a story to tell.’

  ‘You have the better of me, then, my lord,’ I said. ‘I have a cargo of tin, which my factor is even now selling.’

  ‘Of course I have the better of you,’ Gelon said, a trifle petulantly. ‘It is my business to know such things. I gather that you had an encounter with ships of Carthage.’

  ‘We encountered them,’ I admitted.

  ‘Such encounters are my business. Tell me, please.’ He snapped his fingers and a pair of slaves appeared. One reached for my cloak. The other handed me wine.

  I removed my cloak in a fine swirl of Tyrian red, and both slaves fell back a pace. Gelon paled — or rather, as I was to learn with him, his lips grew redder.

  ‘You are armed,’ he said.

  ‘At all times,’ I said cheerfully, and tossed my cloak to the nearer slave. ‘See to it the pin’s still there when I get it back,’ I said.

  ‘My slaves do not steal,’ he said.

  ‘Good,’ I said. ‘I found three ships of Carthage pursuing a Greek ship north of here — practically off your harbour mouth. I sank two and took the third.’

  ‘Under whose protection?’ the Tyrant asked. ‘Do you act for Athens? Is that why you feel you can take ships on the high seas with impunity?’

  I laughed. ‘I doubt that anyone in Athens even knows that I am alive,’ I said. ‘I need no man’s permission to take ships on the seas but my own.’

  ‘Dano says that you told her you are a pirate,’ he said.

  ‘Dano?’ I asked.

  ‘The woman you might recall rescuing,’ he said with a slight smile.

  I shrugged. ‘I served Miltiades too many years to call myself anything else,’ I said. ‘And I was bold enough to assume that I would be welcome here, for making war on Carthage.’

  The Tyrant pulled his beard and nodded. ‘You are correct. And yet, it might have been better had you asked me, first. Carthage has a mighty armament off my coast, and I am not yet ready to contend with them.’ He shrugged. ‘Where did you acquire so much tin? Preying on Carthage?’

  I shook my head. ‘No. And then, perhaps they would tell this story differently. We sailed into the Outer Sea and they hounded us unfairly. After a while, I attacked their shipping and their trade, yes.’

  Gelon nodded. ‘There have been rumours of a Greek pirate in the Outer Sea,’ he said. ‘Well done. Now that I know you are the famous Arimnestos, it makes more sense to me, as the earliest rumours said you were some bronze-smith with a taste for war.’

  I was feeling perverse. ‘I am a bronze-smith with a taste for war,’ I said. ‘I cast the rams on my ship’s prows, I can make a better helmet than any smith in this city and I have fought in a dozen pitched battles on land and sea, and in fifty skirmishes. Heracles is my ancestor. I led the Plataeans at Marathon.’ I smiled. ‘My ships carry more than forty full ingots of Alban tin, which Sicily needs.’

  He nodded. His godlike face split in a smile. ‘You need to put me in my place because you have heard that I hate the tekne,’ he said. He shrugged. ‘Men — lesser men who cannot understand me — say such things. Indeed, I love fine things, and I honour the artisans who make them. Yet I know that they lack the skills and education to serve as citizens and voters. Their dedication is their craft, as women’s dedication is their children. They are too busy to direct the affairs of the city.’

  ‘You should meet my friend Aristides,’ I said. ‘You two would have much to discuss.’

  Gelon shook his head again. ‘Debate with me, if you disagree.’

  ‘If cities were directed by craftsmen, perhaps there would be less war and more art. The exercise of craft — the excellence of making things well — is, I maintain, as sure a guide to arete as excellence in rhetoric or athletics. What excellence does a man have merely by birth?’ I nodded out to the south, towards Carthage. ‘I have seen more courage from Keltoi slaves, sometimes.’

  Gelon was not angered, nor was he stung. He was no straw tyrant. ‘Well said, if full of possible holes. What if a man makes things all day and has no idea of what has gone on in the assembly?’

  ‘When did your assembly last meet?’ I asked.

  The sound of a woman’s laughter pealed through the garden. I knew her laugh immediately — the laugh of a deep-voiced, deep-chested woman.

  She came along a gravel path with the grace of a goddess. She was tall, as I have said. Her face was… magnificent, but not beautiful. The angles were too sharp, her nose almost like a beak, her eyebrows fierce, her mouth a long slash. And yet Dano of Croton was, and remains, as enigmatic as her father.

  ‘He argues like a sophist, changing his ground as fast as you change yours,’ she said.

  ‘I practised debate as a boy, when I was learning to be a swordsman,’ I said.

  Gelon raised an eyebrow. ‘ Learning to be a swordsman,’ he said, with gentle contempt. ‘Any well-born boy is born knowing how to wield a sword. It is an innate skill. Like virtue.’

  He truly believed what he said. It is important that you understand this to understand the complexity of our lives. He was a great man: a great mind, a deep thinker, a superb general. And yet he truly, utterly believed that the well born were superior in every way — far more like the gods than, say, one of his Sikel or African slaves.

  But my growing respect for him couldn’t stop the sneer from touching my face. ‘Would you care to put one of your well-born young men against me?’ I asked.

  He shook his head. ‘You claim descent from Heracles,’ he said. ‘Naturally, you are a better warrior than other men.’ He smiled. ‘Even if you waste your talents working bronze.’

  It was like the feeling of a heavy Persian arrow hitting my aspis.

  ‘Would you care to put one of your well-born gentlemen against a slave of my choosing?’ I said.

  He shrugged. ‘There are always exceptions. But in general… Come, you won’t deny that the well born are handsomer, with better bodies and more aptitude for anything. It doesn’t surprise me that you are a fine bronze-smith. Any gentleman will excel at any of the lesser trades. But this is like an adult stooping to enter the boy’s events in the Olympics. Let the lesser men work bronze. A gentleman should work with men.’

  ‘If this is true,’ I said, trying once more, ‘why are so few gentlemen any use at the helm of a ship in a storm?’

  Dano of Croton laughed. ‘He doesn’t know, and you should stop trying to beat him. And Gelon, be a good host. This is the man who saved me from the Phoenicians. Even now my great height would be fetching a stunning price at some brothel in Carthage.’ She smiled at me. ‘I failed to thank you at the time, Arimnestos. I was… disconsolate. It is difficult to explain. I do not live in a world of ship battles and pirates. I read about such things.’ She shrugged.

  Well. It is rather difficult to harbour resentment against someone thanking you in front of the ruler of a tenth of the known world. She offered her cheek to be kissed, and I kissed it.

  The Tyrant laughed. ‘Do you know who she is, son of Heracles? She’s Dano of Croton. Pythagoras’s daughter. One of my best friends. I owe you immeasurably for her rescue — but we had no notion of what kind of man you might be. I had imagined a much blacker pirate.’

  I shrugged. ‘I have been a black pirate. I imagine that the darkness of one’s acts is
often judged differently, depending on which end of the sword faces you.’

  Dano shook her head. ‘I confess that you rescued me, and I am grateful. But despite that, I believe that all violence makes men lesser — more like animals.’

  ‘War is the king and father of all; some men it makes kings, and others, slaves,’ I said. ‘Peace begets nothing but dull care. Strength comes through change. The wise adapt.’

  ‘Heraclitus!’ she said. ‘That charlatan.’

  ‘He was my master and teacher,’ I said. ‘And he honoured your father.’

  ‘My father did not honour him,’ she said. She paused. Her voice had begun to grow coloured, heated, and she took several breaths. More than any Pythagorean I ever knew, Dano controlled herself at all times.

  Now the Tyrant laughed. ‘Brilliant!’ he said. ‘I have a follower of Heraclitus to debate with my daughter of Pythagoras; we can form a three-sided triangle of discussion. Arimnestos, be free in my city. I may have a matter of… hmm… policy to discuss with you, now that I have met you. I’m sure many people here will want to meet you. Do you wish me to give you a guide?’

  ‘I know the city well,’ I said.

  Gelon gave me an odd look, and said, ‘Very well. I will have rooms assigned to you in the palace.’

  ‘I would be too afraid of being murdered by fanatic Pythagoreans,’ I said.

  She started to bite back, and realized she was being mocked. Instead of glaring at each other, we found ourselves smiling. It was an odd interaction. I was quite sure that I didn’t find her attractive, so I wondered at the readiness of my unintended smile.

  The pretty young Dionysus, son of Anchises, reappeared to lead me out of the palace. We didn’t leave the way we’d come, but went up into the main apartments so that he could show me, I suppose, the sheer magnificence of the palace, and then we headed down a grand outside marble stair that wrapped around a small temple platform to Nike. A priestess was just emerging from the temple; her sheer gracefulness caught my eye. She wasn’t tall, but willowy and her neck rose from her sheer white chiton It was Lydia.