Poseidon's Spear lw-3

by Christian Cameron

  Gaius and Neoptolymos, Daud and Sittonax, Vasileos and Megakles and Doola and Seckla and I all lay on couches that night, with twenty more men — Anchises, red-faced and too loud, and Ka, shining black and deeply versed, it appeared, in Aegyptian lore, debating with Doola.

  Gaius rolled over to me, probably to avoid having to watch Geaeta and Seckla on the next couch. But he met my eye and we laughed like boys. He held out a silver wine cup and tapped it against mine.

  ‘I guess this is the last time,’ he said. ‘It is time I grew up and became a rich fuck on a farm.’

  I shrugged. ‘You were doing well enough this spring when we found you,’ I said.

  Gaius rolled his eyes. ‘That is what worries me. Rome is such a backwater. When we put Neoptolymos on his throne, you’ll go back to Athens.’

  ‘Plataea,’ I corrected, automatically.

  ‘And we’ll never see you again,’ he said.

  ‘Oh, the sea’s not that wide,’ I joked.

  He nodded. ‘Well,’ he said, ‘here’s to the last of youth.’

  I drank to that, because I shared the sentiment. I was thirty-one years old. Not bad, you think. But that’s quite old for a warrior.

  Hah! Little did I know what the gods had in store.

  We were pretty drunk when the pais came. He was ten or eleven — pretty enough, if that sort of thing is to your taste. He bowed deeply and held out a scroll tube to me.

  Lydia is at my house. She awaits her transport. It should not be you. She expressed the deepest gratitude to me that I had found her a husband.

  I regret that I will not be here to attend you. I will not see you again, I fear, so I offer you this boy as a token of my regard — you mentioned yours had died.

  Through the fumes of wine, I had to read the note three times.

  Then I sent the boy to fetch Anaxsikles. I was half sober by the time he came, and sent him to fetch his bride from Anarchos.

  I begged Doola to carry them to Croton for me. He accepted gravely, and embraced me.

  I confess that I stood in a doorway near the ship, and watched Anaxsikles bring her down to the shore. The only skiff was loading the archers. He picked her up, and she snuggled her head into his shoulder. He carried her out into the water and handed her up to the sailors on the deck, and then leaped up into the round ship’s waist, and she put her arms around his neck.

  Bah. Why do I tell this?

  More wine.

  Doola sailed long before dawn. I suspected that Gelon would be none too happy when he found out that his smith and his mistress were gone, so I ordered my drunken, orgiastic crews rounded up. We were a surly, vicious pack of scoundrels in the first light of dawn. My new boy wanted me to come with him to Anarchos’s house to fetch his belongings. He also insisted that he was free, not a slave, and that I should ask Anarchos.

  The crime lord lived close enough to the water that it was the matter of a few minutes to go there. And I wanted to tell him that she was away.

  I suppose I hadn’t read his letter closely enough.

  The pais found him. He wasn’t in his andron — that’s where Lydia had waited for Anaxsikles. The andron smelled of her. I slammed my fist into a wall. If you don’t understand why, well, good for you.

  But in the back, near the courtyard, he lay on top of his sword, which he’d wedged between two paving stones. He was quite dead.

  Men are complex. To my lights, he died well, and was a man I could, if not admire, at least — call a friend. Here’s to his shade.

  We got to sea before the sun was high. My new pais cried and cried. I am fairly certain he believed that Anarchos was his father.

  And perhaps he was.

  His name was Hector.

  Ah, you smile! Yes, Hector. Finally, he comes into our story.

  Doola was gone over the horizon, and I confess I had a million fears that day, that the Carthaginians would snatch up his ship. Only in the cold, clear light of day did I realize that his ship held Lydia, Anaxsikles and all our treasure, and I had sent it off unguarded.

  Men are fools.

  But the gods watch over drunkards and fools.

  We lay that night on a beach north of Katania, and the next night we evaded the whirlpool and crossed over to Rhegium. Doola was a day ahead of us, which suited me. We made the beautiful beaches of Rhegium in mid-afternoon, and when the setting sun gilded Mount Aetna over on the Sicilian side that night, we were already in the waterfront tavernas. I sat with Gaius. I was poor company.

  A single trireme came in, with a small merchant ship trailing astern, making tacks to get in under wind power. The ship was well handled, and the longer I watched it, the more convinced I was that it was Giannis.

  The trireme was Athenian. I could see that by its light construction, the way it moved — how low it was to the water. A warship. A shark.

  The warship landed first. A crew really shows itself in landing: a well-conducted ship spins end for end a stade offshore and backs into the beach. It’s not a tricky manoeuvre, for a veteran crew, but it always shows a crew’s skills.

  This ship was beautifully handled. Not just the helmsman, but the oarsmen. Mine were good. These were better.

  A pleasure to watch them.

  ‘I’m going to go and praise that man,’ I said, pointing at the new arrival.

  Gaius nodded. ‘Beautiful,’ he admitted. ‘Does this mean we have to do more drill?’

  ‘You’ll miss Dionysus, when you are watching your slaves plough your fields,’ I laughed. It was my first laugh in eight hours.

  We wandered down to watch the new arrival. His oarsmen were already buying food from the farmers who hastened down to the beach — sacks of charcoal were being bargained for, and the braziers were already coming out of the bilges.

  The man with his back to me, dickering with the local farmers, looked familiar.

  He turned just as I came up, and we saw each other.

  Cimon.

  We threw our arms around each other and hugged, slapped each other’s backs and hugged again. This went on for a long, long time.

  In fact, I cried.

  Look, thugater. I’m crying now.

  ‘You bastard! You said to meet you in Massalia!’ Paramanos hugged me, too, there on the beach at Croton. I tried not to look at the town. We were on the beach for the night, and Dano sent her greetings and a gift of wine. There were two more black ships on that beach — Paramanos’s, Black Raven, and Harpagos’s Storm Cutter.

  Friends… friends are men who, when they think that you are dead, will come halfway around the world because you ask them, and because they want so much to believe that you are alive. I hadn’t seen these men since — well, since the beach of Marathon, almost eight years before. There were a dozen Athenians I knew — there, for example, was Aeschylus, who fought in the front rank at Marathon and at Lades; there was Phrynicus’ young nephew, Aristides. Harpagos, my former right hand, was still a lisping islander, as strong as an ox, with the beginnings of grey in his beard. Mauros, my helmsman. Come to think of it, Paramanos got his start as a helmsman, too. Start with us, that is. He was Cyrenian, and had fought for the Phoenicians before I took him in the sea fight off Cyprus back in the Ionian War.

  ‘That’s a new ship,’ I said, pointing at Storm Cutter. My old Storm Cutter was a heavy Phoenician capture. Heh! I took her and Paramanos in the same sweep of my spear.

  ‘The original is firewood,’ he said. ‘Athens has a fleet, now — not a dozen vessels from rich men, either. We have more than a hundred hulls. Aegina-’ He laughed aloud. ‘Aegina isn’t a naval power any more.’

  Young Aristides nodded vehemently. ‘Athens is a better place for the common man,’ he said, with all the arrogant pomposity of the young.

  Had I ever been that young?

  ‘Anyone been to Plataea?’ I asked.

  There was some shuffling of feet.

  I introduced my friends of the last six years to my friends from Athens. Seckla was abashed, for a whi
le — Gaius, on the other hand, kept looking at Cimon, chuckling, and saying, ‘So you really are Miltiades’ son?’

  I suppose they might not have got on — Cimon was the son of a hundred generations of Eupatridae, and Seckla was a Numidian former slave; Daud was worse, an out-and-out barbarian, and Sittonax didn’t even like to speak Greek.

  However, piracy is its own brotherhood. I listened with half an ear as Harpagos poured out the tale of Athens’ war with Aegina, and Themistocles’ daring political manoeuvre, by which he took the profits of the new silver mine and bought Athens a public fleet. Next to the reforms of Cleisthenes, it was the greatest political revolution in Athenian history. If Cleisthenes gave all the middle-men — the hundred-mythemnoi men — a noble ancestor and the right to think themselves aristocrats and fight in the phalanx, so Themistocles bought Athens a fleet, and gave all the little men — free citizens, but without franchise — a weapon as mighty as the spear. He gave them the oar.

  Nowadays, we take it for granted that every Athenian thetis is a rower. Athens rules the waves, from here to the delta of Alexandria and across the seas to Syracusa, too. But in those years between Marathon and the next stage in the Long War, Athens was just feeling her way as a power.

  I watched as Gaius began to talk to Cimon about raising horses, and Doola found common cause with Harpagos on the subject of trade. Seckla stood nervously with his attractive courtesan — a woman who couldn’t resist male attention and suddenly had a beach full of it. But in time, Mauros — my former oar-master, and fellow hero of Lade — started to talk, first to Doola, and then to Seckla, and then they were all talking to Paramanos — four Africans on a beach full of Greeks.

  Aristides the Younger was amazed to meet an actual Keltoi barbarian, and managed not to sound as condescending as he might have. The fires roared, the wine was excellent and as darkness fell, and I was apologizing to Cimon for the fiftieth time that I wasn’t with his father at the end, Dano herself came down the beach with a dozen of her friends.

  ‘It is like having the battle of Marathon brought to my town,’ she said. ‘So many famous men. Ari — in truth, my friend, when first you told me you were Arimnestos of Plataea, I thought you one of those men who lie habitually.’

  Cimon was deeply pleased to meet the daughter of the great Pythagoras. He bowed — Greeks seldom bow — and was allowed to kiss her cheek, very Italian and not very Greek, and he actually blushed. So did Giannis, who had come with Cimon from Massalia.

  Aeschylus just stood there, drinking it all in.

  ‘How is Aristides?’ I asked, when chance threw us together.

  ‘You mean, the real one?’ he asked, raising an annoyed eyebrow at Phrynicus’ graceless nephew.

  I smiled.

  ‘He’s a great man, now. He and Themistocles are rivals — enemies, really. I’m not sure if they don’t hate each other worse than either one hates the Persians. Aristides has inherited the Eupatridae — he leads the oligarchs.’ Aeschylus shrugged.

  ‘What? Aristides the Just?’ I shook my head.

  ‘Politics in Athens is different, my friend. Themistocles has raised up the thetis, and he’ll end up giving them the right to serve on juries — mark my words — and that will be the end of us.’ Aeschylus was an old-fashioned man, despite his relative youth.

  Of course, looking at them, I realized that my friends were ageing as fast as I was myself.

  That was a shock.

  Aeschylus had grey in his beard. Harpagos had a white mark — the scar of a Persian arrow from Lade — in his beard, but his hair was getting grey, too. And to see Dionysus talk to Cimon — Dionysus had been our trierarch at Lade; Cimon and I had been mere ship’s commanders. Now we commanded squadrons, and Dionysus, I could see, was quite old. Perhaps fifty. A decade younger than I am right now.

  I’d watched him put a Carthaginian marine down, just recently. He wasn’t that old.

  But we weren’t any younger, and I couldn’t help but notice that the annoying Aristides the Younger was the age I’d been at Sardis.

  Seventeen.

  Zeus. I’m lucky I was allowed to live. So cocky. So sure.

  For the first time that night, I watched older men — proven men, men of unquestioned worth. I wondered, when the young men competed on the beach — on Chios, or again at Lade — I wondered how many older men watched me, and thought I was an arrogant pup and too young to know any better?

  Age. Your turn will come, my young friends.

  But enough. It was a great night — so many friends. Such laughter, such wine; and we were not so very old, either.

  Finally, the sun peeped over the horizon. We were lying on straw, above the high-water mark, and we’d seen the night through, and slaves were picking up the amphorae and the broken cups. Dano lay by Cimon on a kline of straw — lucky Cimon — flirting with Paramanos, who appeared to know more of Pythagorean philosophy than any of the rest of us — but he’d been raised at Cyrene.

  They were talking about mathematics, and Cimon laughed, and then raised himself on his elbows to speak over his companions. ‘So, Ari, why have you called us all here?’

  Some men laughed, and others hooted.

  But they all fell silent.

  ‘I was hoping we could all spend the summer raiding Carthage,’ I said, to the rising sun. ‘But the summer has slipped away like youth. I have a friend here who is a prince of Illyria. We were slaves together. I thought that if I could raise my friends, we’d have enough of a fleet to sail north of Corcyra and restore him to his hill fort, kill all his enemies and perhaps pick up a few bars of silver into the bargain.’

  Paramanos grinned. ‘There’s not a one of us who couldn’t use a few bars of silver.’

  ‘I heard there was a tin fleet,’ Cimon said.

  Dionysus was drunk. ‘Too damned late, Athenian!’ he shouted. ‘We took it all!’

  I shook my head. ‘We took a third of it. That’s a story for another night, friends. We have ten ships. With ten ships, we could probably conquer any island in the Aegean. With these men? But if you will follow my lead, we will restore Neoptolymos, and perhaps take a few Carthaginians on the way.’

  Cimon nodded. ‘I’m not likely to turn back now: there’s nothing else going on this summer, although you had best pay well, you old rascal — I’ve rowed from Athens to Massalia and back to Croton to find you.’

  I laughed. ‘I have a few coins,’ I admitted.

  ‘I don’t want to linger,’ he said. ‘The Phoenicians are everywhere in the east — there’s no getting a cargo into Aegypt. Men say that the King of Kings and his Phoenicians have made a pact with Carthage. And there is war in Aegypt.’

  I shook my head. ‘I keep hearing that,’ I said. ‘But I see no proof. The Phoenicians are no real friends of the Great King’s.’

  ‘Supposedly there are embassies going both ways, even now,’ said Paramanos. ‘In Cyrene, I heard that your — how should I say it, your friend? Hipponax’s son Archilogos? — is taking a squadron to Carthage. Or perhaps took one, last season.’

  Cimon shook his head. ‘That, at least, is not true. He was in Mytilene a month ago.’ Cimon smiled in the rising sun. ‘I spoke to him. We’re not at war. I’d just heard the message that Ari was alive. I told Archilogos. That was a pleasure.’

  I coughed. ‘But you’ll all come north against Illyria?’

  Paramanos looked around at the Greeks. ‘Why do you think we came here? For a rest?’ He laughed.

  Cimon scrambled to his feet, apologizing to Pythagoras’s daughter. My pais refilled his cup. He poured a long libation of priceless Sybarite wine to the immortal gods, and then raised his cup to the rising sun.

  ‘Phobos, Lord of the Chariot of Fire, and Poseidon, Lord of Horses and swift ships and the Sea, with a thousand beautiful daughters; Athena, matchless in guile, who loves men best when they are most daring; Aphrodite of the high-arched feet, and all the other immortals! Hear us! We thank you for this night of mirth and friendship. And we as
k your blessing!’

  We all cheered.

  Great days. And after that night, I had a hangover of Homeric proportions.

  Worth it.

  We spent another day provisioning our round ships and making our plans. By then, local rulers were sending embassies to the ‘men of Marathon’. A rumour went out that Dano had hired us to avenge her father on the Sybarites.

  We sharpened our weapons, and drilled.

  We had a farewell feast with the Pythagoreans. Vegetables, it turns out, are perfectly palatable.

  I saw Lydia, at a distance. It is odd how you know a person by their shape and movement, when you couldn’t possibly see their face. I knew her, and I knew the man with his arm around her.

  There is no happiness of mortal men that cannot be marred in an instant.

  Part IV

  Illyria

  Having passed by the Island of Thrinacia, where are the kine of the Sun, they came to Corcyra, the island of the Phaeacians, of which Alcinous was king. But when the Colchians could not find the ship, some of them settled at the Ceraunian mountains, and some journeyed to Illyria and colonized the Apsyrtides Islands. But some came to the Phaeacians, and finding the Argo there, they demanded of Alcinous that he should give up Medea. He answered, that if she already knew Jason, he would give her to him, but that if she were still a maid he would send her away to her father. However, Arete, wife of Alcinous, anticipated matters by marrying Medea to Jason; hence the Colchians settled down among the Phaeacians and the Argonauts put to sea with Medea.

  Apollodorus, Library I. 9

  21

  And then we sailed for Illyria.

  I won’t say that nothing happened as we cruised up the west coast of Magna Greca. I’ll just say that, bar one incident, I don’t remember anything. There was a lot of fog — I remember that! And I remember that on our second morning, as we rowed north through the fog, Dionysus’ ship fell afoul of Cimon’s, with much cursing and shouting. Since they were reckoned two of the finest trierarchs on the seas, the rest of us revelled in their distress. Like men do.