Poseidon's Spear (Long War 3)

by Christian Cameron

  After some negotiation, we bought a small house in Tarsilla and moved our sparse goods there. Doola, Seckla and Demetrios brought our little Amphitrite around the coast to the town, laden with bronze fittings for the ship.

  Gaius, Neoptolymos and I went upcountry with Doola, looking for a crew.

  That may sound foolish, but I had a notion – shared by Demetrios – that we’d have to fight, and that we wanted a free crew if we could get one – fighters rather than slaves, like the ancient men in Homer. And Daud thought that young men searching for adventure sounded like the cheapest labour.

  There are mountains behind the coast; in places cliffs come right to the sea edge, and nowhere are the mountains far from the beach. We went up into the mountains, where the local folk live – more like Sikels than like Keltoi, for all that they speak Gallic and wear armbands and tattoos. They were hospitable, and we got a dozen potential oarsmen out of the little hill villages.

  We got another dozen from among the fishermen themselves, though their parents resented us. But Doola, with his exotic looks, and Neoptolymos, with his lyre, made us sound like the Argonauts, and there was a tacit understanding – never quite spoken – that if we fought, we’d be going to fight Phoenicians. I’m not saying that they are bad men. I’m just saying that they seem to have a lot of enemies.

  Demetrios of Phocaea provided the rest of my spear-carrying oarsmen from his own tail.

  I visited every time the business of building the boat took me to Marsala. We had to count every obol that winter and spring. The easiest way for the metalwork to get done was for me to rent shop space in Marsala, where charcoal and copper were available, and to smelt and forge the metal gear myself. So I did: I traded bronze-work for a pair of iron anchors – better than anything I’d used at home – but men said that beyond the Pillars of Heracles, the anchor stones didn’t work so well. I forged bronze thole pins and I cast lead counterweights for the oars; I forged sixty bronze rings for the sail, while the women of Marsala wove and sewed the hemp for a full set of sails for each boat. I made some chain – chain’s heavy and expensive, but it is better than rope – and I made war gear, caps for every oarsman and simple circular plates for their chest and back. I’d seen these in Etrusca and again in Rome, and they made sense to me: a disc of heavy bronze that covers a man’s heart gives him confidence, and will protect him from many blows.

  I bought or traded for knives – all Spanish blades that I hilted in bronze – and the last of our damaged hides went into making scabbards and belts.

  It was a little like arming Plataea. It made me happy enough.

  Vasileos finished our ship before the spring feast of Demeter. We made a rich sacrifice to her and to Poseidon; I put a decent helmet on the altar of Heracles and a good bronze lamp on the altar of Hephaestos and another on the altar of Apollo. I confess that I felt my skills had diminished. I had betrayed Nikephorus and his daughter, and the smith-god withheld his hand from my shoulder. I marred my work often with stray blows; my helmets were not as neat as I expected them to be, and every one of them seemed to have its flaw. When I made Gaius a pair of greaves, I marred the work with a foolish error in the planishing that I could see every time he wore them.

  I thought of Lydia a great deal. I wished, very hard, that she had suitors and another husband. And I wished other, conflicting things.

  My friends stood by me. Doola would sit in the rented shop and pump the bellows silently for me. Seckla ran errands and bent metal. Demetrios sat with me when I was in the depths. Neoptolymos made me play the lyre, and I grew almost proficient. Gaius and I boxed.

  Despite which, I lay every night and counted the people I’d betrayed, the way I’d done it, the reasons.

  Listen; it may seem a small thing to you, trifling with a girl. I have mounted quite a few of them, and without regret.

  When I was a pirate, I killed men, took their chattels and was accounted a hero. That is the life I led, then.

  But when you are a pirate, you think like a pirate and you are judged – by other pirates. When you are a bronze-smith in a polis, you are judged by a different standard, and I’m enough of a pupil of Heraclitus to know that all of us are, to some extent, a reflection of the lives we lead and the men we trust and listen to. Lydia wouldn’t even have been a bump on my road, the summer of Lades.

  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.

&nbs
p; 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.