Poseidon's Spear (Long War 3)

by Christian Cameron

  Certainly Doola had his out, although he’d strung it and then wrapped the bow in a cloak to keep the spray off the string.

  I pulled on my beard a dozen times, trying to find anything to do.

  I had my spola on my shoulders, and someone had put my aspis against the bulkhead with two spears.

  So I walked down the waist of Lydia, and clasped hands with all of them – shepherds and herdsmen, fishermen and coasters, and my friends last of all.

  I gathered them in the waist. ‘On my word, we lower the mainmast. We’ll turn to port – on oars. Like lightning. Pass between the two southernmost ships and try for their oars.’ I shrugged. ‘After that, it’s any man’s game.’

  I sounded sane enough, I suppose.

  Men smiled.

  The sails crackled again.

  I walked aft, trying to appear calm.

  ‘Want me to take the steering oars?’ I asked.

  Vasileos shook his head. ‘I think the wind will veer north,’ he said suddenly.

  I looked at the sea and it told me . . . nothing.

  But a north wind—

  Two of the warships were now to the south of us by several stades, closing off our escape, while the northernmost one caught us up.

  They had made a mistake.

  And further, it seemed to me that Vasileos had to be right, because otherwise we wouldn’t be moving north at all.

  So close.

  I ran back along the waist, leaping benches.

  ‘Listen!’ I shouted. ‘We will not take down the mast. Drop the sail – and be ready to put it up again. Ready!’

  ‘It will tangle the oars,’ shouted Vasileos.

  An arrow leaped from a distant bow and fell into the water about a horse-length astern – too damned close.

  Doola loosed. He arrow rose, and fell.

  Three came at us in return, and he loosed again, his whole chest thrown into the curve of the bow.

  One of the arrows struck the curved wood over the helmsman’s bench.

  ‘Ready at the oars!’ I called. ‘Mainsail down!’

  The mainsail came down at a rush. The deck crew – all four of them – caught the great sheets as they came down, hauling them inboard in heaps of hemp. Again, Sittonax lent a hand.

  Priceless time went by, heartbeat after heartbeat. There was no point in giving an order before the sail was clear of the oarsmen.

  And then it was. Arrows were falling around us by then, a dozen every minute or more, and a single hit might have been the end of us – but suddenly the wind was failing, changing.

  ‘Give way!’ I roared. ‘Hard to starboard!’

  We had lots of speed, and the oars bit; the steering oars added their fulcrum and we heeled into the turn – heeled dangerously, but every spare man went to the outside rail.

  Demetrios was ready. He turned with us, his sails already down.

  ‘You fool!’ I said. I wanted him to live, not to follow us.

  We shot under his stern and continued our curve north, and then east.

  An arrow struck my aspis and went a hand’s breadth through it. I hadn’t remembered putting it on my arm.

  I put it up over Vasileos’s head, and three more arrows struck it, the second passing right through the face and stopping only on the bronze arm guard inside the shield, punching deep into it so that my arm took a wound.

  I dropped my arm. But the arrow was wedged in, pinning my arm to the porpax.

  Doola loosed.

  I followed his arrow and was stunned to find that we were going bow to bow with the northernmost warship, which would crush us like a water flea.

  Astern, Demetrios had the Amphitrite around and under oars. Six oars didn’t move her very fast, but he had his boatsail up, and it was full.

  It was full.

  That meant the wind had veered—

  An arrow whanged off my helmet, putting a crease all along the brow ridge.

  ‘Oars in!’ I called.

  Seckla took another in the hip and fell onto the sails.

  The wind change staggered the bigger ship, who had his boatsail set, like the hand of Poseidon moving his bow off course by several points.

  It caught our bare pole, too, and moved us.

  We struck them just aft of their cathead, and glanced down the side. Their archers were unfazed by the collision, leaning out over the side to loose. I saw it happen – the oar loom taken by surprise, the glancing blow from our little ship, and an archer was caught in the broken oars and beaten down. Another leaped for his life and Doola shot him, like a hunter taking a bird on the rise.

  And we were past.

  Our mad rush had turned the big warship, but it was Demetrios with his cool hand at the helm and deep experience of the sea that really hurt them. He had his oars in – easy in a slab-sided tub with only six oar-ports. He was under sail alone, and his bluff bow struck the starboard rowers’ stations on the opposite side from our very small strike, crushing a dozen oars and oarsmen and then poling off. His lightning strike took away momentum in him, and in a bigger fight he’d have been dead – but the enemy had no second line and the trireme carried forward, all his top-deck rowers in disarray.

  We caught the new north wind, and sailed north.

  We had barely stung our three mighty opponents. I doubt if we killed a dozen men, and crushed twenty oars.

  But that northernmost trireme lost way, and wallowed in the swell in our wakes. Her consorts turned north and passed her, offering no assistance, bent on renewing the pursuit.

  The sun in the west became a red ball on the horizon, and the sea-hawks weren’t going to have us before darkness fell.

  As soon as it was full dark, I passed Amphitrite and hailed her.

  Demetrios came to the starboard side.

  ‘We should turn west,’ I said. ‘As soon as we can, before moonrise.’

  Demetrios spat over the side. ‘West,’ he repeated. In his shouted tone, I heard it all. Doubt, and more doubt.

  But he followed my lead. We turned west, slanting across the wind as it began to veer again, and by midnight we were again in a full westerly, and I was cursing because the wind change meant that the enemy would have every reason to follow in our wake.

  I snatched sleep when I could, as did all of us. The oarsmen were fresh – so far – but Doola sent them to their benches to sleep. Still, any man who went to the ram to relieve himself was questioned when he went back to his bench.

  The first grey light came, and we could see Amphitrite on the same tack, but well off to the north of us.

  Men cheered.

  The sky was increasingly red at our backs over Iberia, and I didn’t like that. But the wind was steady, and in the wrong direction to turn, and we sailed along as the sun rose red as blood off the land and into the sky.

  I saw three nicks, like the fins of sharks, on the eastern horizon, and my heart sank.

  Vasileos went off to take breakfast, such as it was – unmilled barley and wine from our cargo. I took the oars and began to cheat the helm north. A triakonter doesn’t sail many points off the wind – but it will sail a few, and I was going for all I could get.

  An hour later, it was obvious that the triremes were gaining.

  Doola and Vasileos came aft after Doola had looked at Seckla’s wound. The young man was lucky – the arrow had struck the hip without severing the artery and glanced along the bone. Deeply painful, but one of the lightest wounds a man can take, if one must be wounded.

  ‘Only a matter of time,’ I said.

  Doola looked at the sails on the horizon.

  Vasileos smiled. ‘Made it through yesterday,’ he said. He looked at the sky.

  I pointed at the red dawn over Iberia. ‘If I were at sea in the Ionian,’ I said, ‘that would mean trouble.’

  Vasileos took a deep breath and shook his head. ‘Smells like lightning,’ he said.

  ‘Make all fast,’ I ordered. I made my way aft, catching each man’s eye. It wasn’t an order for
the sake of shouting. I wanted to make sure everyone understood. Heavy weather was not necessarily our friend but was, in many ways, a deadlier enemy.

  As they put heavy linen tarpaulins across the standing cargo and rigged the big tarps that could cover the bilges, the wind began to veer, first north, then south, then all around.

  We had the mainsail down in no time, and the boatsail up.

  The wind veered again, and suddenly the sky began to cloud over.

  ‘Feed them the dates,’ I said. Dates were the only food we had aboard, by then. It was money lost. Or not – if we lived. And if we didn’t live—

  I laughed.

  We ate twenty drachmas’ worth of dates. We hadn’t had a good meal in two days, and we inhaled the dates.

  An hour later, I had to order the mainmast down, or cut it away. It was close.

  And now the bigger ships were gaining. There’s a belief among non-sailors that small ships are faster than big ships. This is far from true. Small ships are nimbler than large ships, and often shallower in draught and have other useful qualities, but the longer and heavier a ship is, the less it fights the motion of the sea. An old shipwright on Crete – my first son’s grandfather, if you like – explained it to me when I was a complete lubber by saying that if a small boat rode the waves, she travelled farther with all the ups and downs than the bigger boat that cut the waves. I’m not altogether sure that’s the answer, either. But bigger boats are faster, and in heavy weather, they are faster still.

  Demetrios pulled alongside. ‘I’m going to part company!’ he shouted.

  Let me add that I could barely hear him.

  He waved west.

  Of course, in this heavy wind, his tubby merchant hull could carry more sail, heel farther and manage a point or two closer to the wind than my triakonter – or our pursuers. It meant going due west, away from land.

  In a storm.

  ‘Go!’ I shouted back. We both waved.

  Our deviation was slow at first, and then very rapid as his mainsail filled and he found his point of sailing.

  My oarsmen were still eating dates. It was like something out of Aristophanes – thirty men pushing dates down their gullets as fast as they could. Sittonax looked like a drowned blond cat, sitting on someone else’s bench with both hands full. Brasidas, the eldest of the herdsmen, was stripped naked despite the cold and rain – he’d just helped with the mainmast – and he, too, looked like a dog worrying fresh meat; his cheeks were smeared with dates.

  Aye, we were hungry.

  The boatsail kept our head up and our stern to the rollers, but we didn’t have much headway, and as the storm mounted behind us, the waves grew steeper. This didn’t happen immediately: in fact, I could tell this whole story as a transition from worry about our pursuers with little concern for the weather to worry about the weather with little concern for our pursuers.

  About midday, the storm had risen to a point where the wind, which was now steadily westerly, was shrieking in the rigging, and the waves were so big that the little boatsail mast was only in the wind when our bow was going up the increasingly steep sides of the waves. We were all but becalmed in the trough.

  At first, that was hard on us, but merely annoying.

  Then the effect grew, and the moment where the wind caught the boatsail became increasingly perilous. The boatsail snapped and strained at its ropes, and the motion of the ship between my hands became . . . alien.

  Our two pursuers were close – too damned close. And with the wind behind them, their archers could loose at us and we couldn’t hope to reply.

  Luckily the wind was so strong that archery was not very effective.

  The next change was to the steering – the ship began to accelerate down the steep wave sides. The waves were now as tall as the mast of a small ship, and as we went over the crest, the ship would slide on the far side. All this, while rain crashed down like a torrent of Persian arrows and the wind howled like the spirits of all the Titans sent to Tartarus.

  It wasn’t that any particular moment was perilous. The storm was not the worst I’d ever seen. It was the combination of all the factors: a single wrong decision, a moment’s inattention at the helm, and we’d be dead.

  I’m a fine man in a fight – none better. But fights only last so long. The sea is always there, and I am not the best sailor. Sailing, like smithing, requires patience.

  Both of our enemies were away to the south, coming up on a very slight tack. Amphitrite was gone in the spume – perhaps already over the distant horizon. I couldn’t even glimpse her.

  When I could count the guy ropes on the bow of the nearest trireme, I cheated my own helm to the north at the top of a massive wave and we rode down that cliff of water like a boy surfing with his body in the fresh waves of a summer storm on the beach. I kept us slant on to the wave as much as I dared.

  It worked. After three or four waves, I was on a north-west tack and the odd on-and-off action of the heavy wind on my sail seemed to drive us well enough.

  At some point, the lead trireme slackened sail by lifting the hem of his boatsail. His lowest row of oar-ports was now exposed to the storm, and I’m guessing he was shipping water.

  Ten more minutes, and he had turned west, putting his high prow to the rollers.

  I’d like to say that I planned it all, or guessed it, but my turn was merely to put more water between us.

  In another hour, we could scarcely see them, even at the top of the rise, and I had half my oarsmen pulling on the down slope of the wave. It took careful calculation, but it kept our course straight and – give me some credit here – it gave the oarsmen something to do.

  By dark we had a sky full of lightning. The land was gone, the wind had risen again and now I brailed up the boatsail to a scrap. Half an hour later, with no order from me, Doola and Vasileos brailed it again, climbing out on the bow and wrapping the whipping, vicious cloth with sodden, slippery rope. But they triumphed, and we lived. Rowing became more important, too, as we needed a continuing impetus to stay stern on to the waves.

  Perhaps they didn’t grow larger with the dark, but they were far more terrifying, at least to me. I could just see the rising swell of the things at my shoulder: when a lightning flash came, I was always shocked at how high they were, how white with spume.

  But I couldn’t stop looking. The waves were terrible, like the pain of a wound that a warrior must keep testing, perhaps in the hope that it will diminish. That’s my memory of that night – the constant, exhausting shock of the size of the waves.

  Eventually, as it always does, night ended. It didn’t end cleanly or evenly, with anything like a dawn. In fact, I remember doubting the evidence of my own eyes as I began to be able to see the white spray hell of the water to the west – that is, if we were running west. I had no stars and no sun; I was in an alien ocean.

  I was cold, wet through, of course, and Vasileos stood at one shoulder and Doola at my other. In the night, they’d placed themselves with me in the steering rig. It took all three of us to hold the ship steady.

  If one of the steering oars broke—

  If the boatsail mast gave way—

  If the rowers missed their stroke in the trough—

  By midday – a meaningless name for a meaningless time, as we had no idea how much daylight had passed – I began to succumb to hopeless doubt.

  What if the whole Outer Ocean were like this? Men said it was a circle of storms, girding the earth. Men at Marsala had said no ship could survive. I thought that they were fools – after all, Carthage came here.

  But this was now the worst storm I’d ever seen.

  Darkness fell again. It is possible that Doola and I shouted to each other, or perhaps Vasileos roared in my ear, but there was nothing to say.

  The rowers – the fishermen, mostly – kept time by nothing but habit. Bless them.

  And they rowed on.

  The second night, we lost a fisherman’s son overboard. He went to the cathead
to defecate, and he was out there when a rogue wave buried the cutwater bow. The ram bit too deep, and, just for a moment, at the steering oar, I thought we would simply plunge to the bottom.

  It wasn’t until we’d bailed until daylight that we knew Aristos was gone.

  And Bethes, one of the herdsmen, had gone mad. He shrieked and swore and leaped about until Vasileos led a party to trap him in the bow and tie him down.

  ‘We’re all going to die!’ he screamed. ‘Die! Make it stop!’

  His screams were largely covered by the wind.

  The second day of the storm dawned – if you could call it that.

  Some time after the pale light showed us the roaring chaos of waves, Vasileos put a big arm around my shoulders. ‘Sky – is – lighter,’ he bellowed.

  A tiny, watery ray of hope penetrated my head.

  More time passed. Someone cut the madman’s throat; I saw it happen. His screams were . . . the stuff of nightmare, and someone else couldn’t stand it, shipmate or no. Remember that the herdsmen and the shepherds were different men from the fishermen.

  Later, someone threw the corpse over the side.

  The wind began to abate. The full-throated shriek of the wind in the boatsail mast’s stays remitted until it was just a scream.

  Poseidon’s grip on my steering oars became a mere punch in the guts at the top of every wave.

  Our boatsail mast had not given way. Our boatsail had not blown clear of its ropes.

  But we’d been rowing for two nights and two days on a meal of dates, and the rowers were so far beyond done that our rowing was more symbolic than real.

  I handed the steering oars to Vasileos – a process fraught with peril that revealed that my arms would not function properly and my legs were exhausted – but I struggled forward on a rope tied the length of the ship. At each bench, I stopped.

  ‘Two more hours. We’re going to make it.’ That’s the whole of the speech I shouted at them.

  ‘Two more hours. Look at the light. Listen to the wind.’ I shouted these words over and over. Men at one oar bench couldn’t hear me on the next.

  Hope is the most intoxicating drug, better than wine or opium.

  Hope can make an exhausted man row two more hours; can cause a swordsman’s arm to function for a few more cuts.