Poseidon's Spear (Long War 3)

by Christian Cameron

  We got water. We traded copper for silver – they mined silver in the hills. And we got expert sailing advice from the local fishermen, who offered to show us the Phoenician port. I took two locals aboard who spoke Keltoi, and we rowed at their direction, coming up on the Phoenician post with the sun behind us, so we were invisible, or so we hoped.

  If it was a trade post, it was a very small one. There was what had to be a warehouse – the largest building, all heavy wooden piles and bark walls, and a slave pen – I knew what that was. Twenty huts, a single stone tower and a lighthouse.

  And a warship drawn up on the beach.

  Sittonax was tired of interpreting, and I was beginning to get the hang of the local Keltoi tongue and Tara was even better, so I talked to the fishermen through her.

  ‘How many soldiers?’ I asked.

  Let’s just say it took us some time to define what I meant by soldier.

  In the end we agreed that I meant armed men.

  ‘Twenty,’ he answered. ‘And more come in the ships.’

  We crept north and west to stay out of sight, and then went ashore on the opposite side of the headland from the lighthouse, in case it was manned, and made our way up a long ridge that dominated the settlement.

  It was a long time since I’d done all these things. But let me tell you, friends, it came back like the feel of a good sword in your hand.

  We spent the day high on the ridge, with a woven screen of brush in front of us – me, Tara, Sittonax and two fishermen, as well as Aeneas and Alexandros, my two most reliable marines.

  The warship on the beach was being repaired. I was pretty sure she was the trireme we’d damaged off the Pillars of Heracles, because her starboard cathead was a mess and there were injured men in the slave pen.

  And the rowers were either slaves, or men treated as slaves.

  ‘We can take them now,’ I insisted to Sittonax.

  He shrugged. ‘Fine,’ he said. But despite his bored face, he quivered with excitement.

  Tara’s eyes sparkled.

  ‘Send to the ship and get everyone and have them arm,’ I said.

  Tara made a moue. ‘What do you need them for?’ she asked. ‘Go and challenge their leader to single combat!’

  Keltoi.

  I grinned. ‘I have my own ways,’ I said.

  We struck when the sun set, but the sky was still light. Working people would have been in bed.

  I went straight for the tower. I had the marines and Sittonax and Tara, who had weapons and seemed to know how to use them. The eight of us would, I hoped, be enough.

  Seckla led the oarsmen to open the slave pens and cow its occupants. Seckla had been a slave – I reckoned he’d be able to tell who might make a good ally among them.

  Dogs barked and men shouted, and then I was up the ladder and in through the second-storey door to the stone tower. There was a man inside.

  I killed him.

  It had been some time. But the motions weren’t unfamiliar, and neither were the smells.

  I held the door for about twenty heartbeats, and then Alexandros was next to me, and then we were among them. I expect about half of them got to weapons before the real killing started, but they had neither armour nor shields, and their bedmates helped us a great deal. Girls – and boys – pinned the ankles of men, or trapped their hands, or simply kicked them from behind.

  All told, it didn’t take long. We slaughtered the guards and stormed the tower. There was a family living on the top floor – the only actual Phoenicians in the whole complex. I’m proud to say that we took them prisoner. The Keltoi don’t rape, by and large, and Tara – whose right arm was covered in blood to the elbow – took the women and turned towards Seckla, who grinned and saluted her.

  And that was that. The curly-bearded overseer’s life wouldn’t have been worth a brass obol had I let go of him, but he knew the mathematika of his situation the moment I took him, and he babbled out where the ship’s crew was and his store of silver.

  ‘Six marines! And the trireme’s deck crew!’ I shouted to my men.

  ‘Follow me!’

  But sometimes, the gods smile. I’d missed them sneaking in – they’d been quartered in a barn beyond the slave pens, and the trireme’s helmsman had a house by the huts, but when Seckla freed the slaves – well, they tore the helmsman limb from limb. Which wasn’t what I’d have wanted. A man who really knew these waters would have been a priceless asset.

  Otherwise, it was all easy.

  I sent Seckla to fetch Lydia around the point. We’d exterminated the opposition, and we didn’t have to hurry.

  We examined the stores of the little post. They were ample. The Phoenicians collected taxes from the whole district, even while taking their people as slaves. I suspect we’d have been quite popular if we’d stayed, but on the other hand, it was always possible the locals would see us as more of the same.

  Which, of course, we were.

  Slaves – African slaves – told Seckla that another ship had come in with the trireme on the beach and then sailed away. That’s the only reason we missed a huge consignment of silver.

  You can’t waste curses on these things. We’d stormed the place with a boat’s crew, and the worst injury was Giannis, the youngest of my herdsmen, who managed to lose the chape from his scabbard. In the attack, the point of his long knife rammed through the top of his thighs as he ran, opening truly horrible-looking wounds. No, I’m not making this up. We all teased him about it, and he took our teasing the way young men who want to be heroes react.

  Good fun, really.

  My crew were . . . blooded. There’s no other way to put it. They killed together, and they were victorious together, and we had a small stack of silver bars and some tin that they all knew they’d share – together.

  It all came back to me so easily. Kill the men. Take the women. Sell the cargo. Build morale in the crew. Train them to fight. Kill, and don’t be killed.

  Hardly worth the telling, really.

  At any rate, we burned the slave pens and cooked pigs in the embers. The slaves liked that. Tara’s admiration was candid. I liked that.

  In the morning, I looked over the trireme. Her starboard cathead was smashed to splinters, and needed professional help. I remember standing there with two of my fishermen and Alexandros and Seckla. Seckla was a craftsman – the kind of man who’s never happy unless he’s working. He pushed and pulled and shook his head.

  I agreed. I wanted that ship, but she was too damaged to use.

  So I turned to my friends, the fishermen. ‘Tell me about the weather the next four days.’

  They prevaricated. But eventually, the older one admitted that it was unusually fine, even for summer.

  Seckla glared at me. ‘You can’t be thinking we can tow this thing?’

  Many things in my life have represented gifts from the gods. Briseis, despite the many ugly turns she did me – she drove me to heroism like a farmer drives an ox to work. My father’s decision to send me to the old priest, Calchus, for training.

  Four days’ west wind.

  I asked the former slaves for volunteers, and let’s be frank – what choice did they have? Stay, and be enslaved by the Iberians? By the time the smoke of the slave pens was in the sky, there were already Iberian warriors prowling the ridges above the little warehouse town.

  Before we’d been at sea an hour, they set fire to the lighthouse.

  My Phoenician factor was a cringing coward. I might be, too, if a savage pirate and his tattooed mistress had my wife and children. But he was a fount of information as we sailed east on a perfect wind.

  ‘We have no defences,’ he admitted. He almost bragged it. ‘It is fifty years since any of the interior tribes attacked us.’ He looked at the sea. ‘How did you make it past the squadron at Gades?’ Then he looked at me. ‘You – you were the small ship that Dadalos was pursuing!’

  I smiled nastily.

  ‘But – we took that ship!’ He quailed at hi
s own words.

  I was older, calmer, more mature. So I didn’t grab him by the throat.

  ‘What ship?’ I asked. I thought my tone was mild.

  He grew very red in the face, like a maiden blushing. I took his hand and pressed my thumb and forefinger to a certain spot.

  It was scarcely necessary. He shrieked. ‘Days ago. Helitkon of Tartessos took a small sailing ship – no more than a fishing boat. Laden with goods from the Inner Sea.’ He writhed in my hands.

  ‘Where?’

  ‘Helitkon brought him in to me. I supplied him – he sailed south!’

  ‘Where’s the ship? The crew?’ I asked.

  ‘He took them! To sell!’ he was screaming.

  It is sickening, I’ll admit. His daughters looked at me with naked hate that transcended fear – they hated me more than they feared rape and death, which, all things considered, suggests they were brave. And they obviously loved him, which meant that, however much I wanted to see him as the enemy, as a piece of shit who dealt in human lives and stole and killed – he was a good father.

  Of course, I knew that I dealt in human lives, too.

  Time makes things difficult. Maturity – unless you are simply a killer, a thug – robs you of certainty.

  I let go his hand. And I felt . . . ashamed.

  Tara watched me. She looked at me the way a cat looks at something it doesn’t know. A cat is asking, Is this prey? Or predator?

  Yes. Well.

  I looked up at my mainsail, drawing well. I looked back at the long curve of the tow rope. I wished, for the hundredth time, that I had Vasileos.

  But I sang a prayer to Poseidon that night, after I made love to my wife on the beach with the ancient pines.

  The coast of Iberia had been Phoenicia’s cash cow for seventy years, and it was naked before me.

  Old thoughts boiled to the surface. I had enough silver from the one raid to make the trip a success. But—

  But there could be more.

  8

  Oiasso welcomed us as victors, which we were. Tertikles was enraged, at first, that we’d stormed Centrona without him.

  Doola hugged me on the beach, and introduced me to his wife.

  One trick of leadership that I learned young was never to question a man’s taste in bed-partners. No faster way to lose his faith, his loyalty, his courage. That said, though, I’d always known that Doola and Seckla were . . . together. It wasn’t a spoken thing. It just – was.

  And then, one fine day, we landed at Oiasso, Doola fell for a Kelt girl and the next I knew, he was wed. Doola was my friend, practically my brother. It was not my place to even ask. I hugged him, kissed her and bade them every fortune.

  But Seckla stood on the beach with death in his eyes. He was younger: tough, strong, tall and thin, and his love went to hate, all at once. I think he’d assumed that Doola would wake up one morning and be done with the woman. Instead, he married her.

  And Seckla was also my friend. Seckla was touchier, more full of fire, perhaps less useful sometimes – but not on this last raid. Seckla looked at Doola, and I looked at Seckla.

  Command. Leadership. A never-ending labyrinth of difficult decisions.

  Tara got it all in one glance. Or maybe knew it from gossip. Either way, she was quick.

  ‘They were lovers?’ she asked. Actually, she asked something cruder. Her Greek was barbaric.

  ‘Yes.’ I was moving cautiously towards Seckla. I was afraid he’d kill his former friend right there.

  She laughed. ‘I’ll find him someone,’ she said. She laughed again.

  ‘Men!’

  Vasileos had finished both vessels. They were a little longer than Lydia, with beautiful lines, a slightly narrower entry, rather bluffer bows. The ram bow rose just a little at the tip, so that in heavy water, the cutwater would – perhaps – push the bow up, not down. Or so Vasileos theorized.

  We sat down to our welcome feast, with Tertikles looking just about as happy as Seckla.

  He was easy.

  Tara told him that I planned to raid to the south, all along the coast, and he brightened.

  A black-haired girl with a narrow face and huge eyes went to

  Seckla and hesitantly sat down with him.

  Tara winked at me.

  Seckla ignored her.

  More fool he. But I had Vasileos watch him, and then I ordered Alexandros to watch him. Alexandros, like many other young men I have met and known, had discovered that he liked to be trusted – liked to be responsible. He was rising to command.

  I felt old. I’d done all this before; none of it was new.

  ‘What do we do with the prisoners?’ Doola asked me.

  ‘I’d like to ransom them,’ I said.

  We left it there.

  Summer was slipping away by the time we got the cathead repaired on the trireme. And my nearly two hundred former oar-slaves created a certain chaos in the town – just feeding them strained Tertikles to the maximum. So all the silver and the tin from the raid went to paying for grain from other lords.

  I gave up on trade and armed them with the helmets I’d made, and we used the rest of the hides to make plain spolas with yokes over the shoulders.

  You might think that I’d be away south after Demetrios, Gaius and the rest, but I knew I was up against at least a pair of triremes with expert crews. And my prisoner told me that most of the slaves who went to the south were used in the silver mines above Olisipo on the Tagus, a river to the south of Centrona with a broad estuary, a dangerous bar and silver and gold in the mountains behind it.

  He was very talkative.

  I promised to release him with his wife and daughters on the coast south of Olisipo – after my raid. He didn’t seem to mind.

  Men can be stupid.

  The grain was ripe in the fields and the apples were nearly ripe on the trees, and all four of my ships were ready for sea. I’d rowed my new warship up and down, and I’d roared myself hoarse in three languages trying to make the Keltoi obey, something at which, to be honest, they weren’t very good. Keltoi don’t obey, they discuss. Keltoi debate. Every man is the equal of every other man.

  On the other hand, I ate well, exercised, trained men to use the sword and shield and made love every night to a woman who – well, who knew what she was about. It is very different for a man to make love to a woman who is the same size as he is. Very different. Very—

  Athletic.

  Ah, the blushes.

  We celebrated the summer feast of Demeter – at least, that’s what it was to me – and Tertikles sacrificed a slave, which was barbaric as far as I was concerned. He came aboard my trireme, because it was more comfortable. We had three triakonters, packed to the gunwales with Keltoi warriors in good armour, and a trireme with former Phoenician slaves, armed and ready to fight.

  We were ready.

  The gods had other ideas. We put to sea and sailed for little more than two hours before the wind turned round and headed us, and we were lucky to slip easily back into the estuary and land on our beach at Oiasso. Two days later, we rowed out past the headland and were back before dark – the wind was too fierce for the trireme.

  Tempers flared.

  Keltoi picked up their gear and went home. Oddly, this was balanced by late arrivals, who wandered down from the mountains as if arriving a week late was perfectly normal. Of course, they’d never rowed, and they resented being taught.

  Tertikles became surly, and only his sister being there prevented violence.

  We were windbound for ten days. I rowed in the estuary, and Vasileos kept them hard at it in the Lydia, but the other two ships did nothing but eat, drink and sleep. The season was getting on; we had our first cool night.

  Seckla tried to kill Doola. It was quick, and carefully premeditated. But while Vasileos was busy, commanding his ship, Alexandros was right there, and he tackled the Numidian boy, tore the knife from his grasp and then knocked him unconscious.

  The next day, I sat with Se
ckla in my tent, watching the whitecaps in the estuary and cursing the gods.

  When his eyes opened, he looked at me for a moment and then rolled over so that he faced the wall of the tent.

  ‘You are an idiot,’ I said.

  His silence was his only reply.

  ‘If you had killed him, I would have killed you,’ I said.

  ‘Fine,’ he said. ‘Kill me now.’

  ‘In a year, this will be a bitter memory. In five years, it will scarcely trouble you. In ten years, you’ll make jokes about it.’ I put a hand on his shoulder.

  ‘No,’ he said.

  ‘Yes,’ I said. ‘I know. I know, lad. I have been abandoned, and I have abandoned others. It comes and goes.’

  ‘When we were slaves,’ he spat, ‘you would moan in your sleep, and say a name. Always the same name. Briseis, Briseis. Always the same.’ He rolled over suddenly, and glared at me. ‘Tell me you have forgotten her, yes, old man?’

  I shrugged. ‘I have not forgotten her. But I don’t burn. And neither will you.’

  ‘My life is over.’ He tried to turn back over.

  I pinned him with an elbow. ‘No, it isn’t. And now you can be your own man, and stop being in his shadow.’

  Silence.

  The young burn so hot, and they have so much energy for hate, and anger. So I put a watch on him.

  The next day, the wind pinned us to the beach, and Doola came to my tent. I hugged him, and he went into Seckla, as if Seckla was sick and needed visitation, which was true in a way.

  Seckla had a knife. He slashed Doola’s face, and then turned it on himself.

  There are advantages to being a hardened killer. When a good friend tries to kill himself, you can disarm him without taking a scratch. I had the knife before he’d done much more than scratch his dark skin. He glared at me like an angry tomcat. I went to Doola and found that, while he was cut to the bone, it was really just a flesh wound. Face wounds bleed like – well, like face wounds. There seems to be enough blood to be fatal.

  Hard to staunch, too. The blood went on and on.