Poseidon's Spear (Long War 3)

by Christian Cameron

  Oh, I was strong. I laughed. I laughed at Dagon.

  Break my body, will you?

  My victim screamed, and I got the spear shaft under his jaw at last and broke his neck. Eager hands reached from behind me and grabbed him by the helmet and towed him into the slave quarters.

  The fourth man was still in shock. He’d just seen three comrades die – one, judging from the man’s skill, his captain. And then he’d stabbed his mate.

  I got a deep breath into my body, seized my spear from behind the door and threw it into him so that he fell, the spear deep in his body. He thrashed, and the other men flinched away from him instinctively.

  Men behind me passed me my aspis.

  I had all the time in the world to get it on my arm.

  I started down the steps.

  The Poieni shuffled.

  And broke.

  I must have laughed. I’m laughing now.

  Oh, the power.

  I’d missed this.

  They might as well have stood their ground. None of them made the door of the tower, because Doola was there, and his archers shot them down in the moonlit open ground. A few ran off into the slag heaps.

  Some ruthless bastard in the tower slammed the door shut.

  The slaves started to come out of their quarters. The door was open.

  In the darkness, they looked like creatures from the underworld. They were too thin to be men.

  I didn’t know Neoptolymos when he stepped up to me. In Sicily, he had filled out into a solid rock, with muscles that stood out like a statue of Heracles. Now, the skin was stretched tightly across a skull-like head and his tow-blond hair was Medusa’s in the moonlight.

  ‘Brother?’ he asked, his voice a sibilant whisper.

  I thought he was some Iberian who spoke Greek. He didn’t look like an Illyrian.

  But I got it. Some interplay of light and shadow, something in the set of the mouth.

  I crushed him to me.

  ‘We knew you’d come.’ He managed a laugh.

  ‘Where are the others?’ I asked.

  He pointed towards the gaping pit, a black hole in the dark. ‘They tried to escape and were caught, so they aren’t allowed out of the pit. Gaius especially.’ He grinned. ‘He’s a bad slave.’

  ‘But alive,’ I said. I feared the worst. This was insane. I’d heard rumours that the Athenians used slaves like this in their silver mines, but it made no sense, and now I knew that I should have come as soon as I knew where they were.

  But that kind of thinking leads to mistakes. I shrugged it off. ‘Let’s go and get them,’ I said.

  ‘You have to wait for daylight,’ Neoptolymos said. ‘You can’t even get down the ladders in the dark.’ He shrugged. ‘I tried, once.’

  I reckoned it was two hours until dawn.

  Doola came out of the moonlit darkness and hugged Neoptolymos. So did Seckla.

  Neoptolymos laughed aloud. ‘By the gods,’ he said. ‘You came. You came!’

  There were a hundred or more slaves milling about in the darkness. Many of them ran off – I have no idea what happened to them. Many, of course, must have been Iberians, and found their way home. Or died.

  But there were a hundred men who stayed: Greeks, Etruscans, Iberians, Africans from Libya and farther off, and Keltoi, too. Neoptolymos knew them – most of them by name – and he moved among them, giving orders – well, he had been a prince, once.

  Meanwhile, Doola and I looked at the tower. Men at the top of it shot arrows at us, but I, who had endured Persian archery, didn’t think much of their weak bows and their piss-poor shooting – in the dark, no less.

  We walked all around the tower.

  ‘If we burn it, every Phoenician in Iberia will know we are here,’ Doola said.

  I thought about it. There wasn’t a hurry – yet – and I took some time to think.

  ‘If they find our ships, we’re fucked,’ I said. ‘But, other than that, do you really think they have two hundred soldiers? In this whole colony?’

  Doola’s eyes flashed in the dark. He laughed a cruel laugh. Doola was a gentle man; not a man who fancied killing, not a man who loved the feel of a spear in his hand. But slavery enraged him.

  ‘You want them to come here?’ he asked.

  ‘We have the high ground, and their gold. They’d be fools to come for us. But if they do, we can teach them a lesson.’ I grinned. He grinned.

  We set fire to the tower.

  It took time. It is one thing to say, ‘The tower is made of wood’, and another thing entirely to get it to burn.

  Here’s what we did. We stripped all the shingles off the livestock sheds, and then we broke down the sheds themselves and the big wooden structure where the smelting went on. We had a hundred pairs of willing hands, and it is literally unbelievable how much damage a hundred angry former slaves can do to their master’s property.

  Then we had ten of the strongest slaves, led by Neoptolymos, carry loads of flammables up to the tower, under the cover of twenty of us with aspides held over their heads.

  The men in the tower understood immediately, of course.

  We didn’t lose a man.

  Heh.

  Six trips to the tower, and back, across open ground.

  Then Doola lit a torch – one of ours from the ship. He was going to throw it at the pile, but I ran it to the pile and placed it well under. Nothing hit me, because it is really very difficult to shoot straight down in the dark with a bow.

  The pile caught. The tower caught.

  The men inside died screaming. It should have been horrible, but instead, it was deeply satisfying. Make of that what you will.

  Before dawn, the tower was like a lighthouse, a beacon, with flames ten times the height of a ship’s mainmast roaring into the sky. One of the slaves, a man named Herodikles, sacrificed a ram from the pens and threw the carcass into the fire. He was an Aeolian, from Lesbos, and he’d been a slave for fifteen years, taken while on a pilgrimage to Cyrene.

  There were a hundred such stories.

  Men told them, while their oppressors tried to scream the smoke out of their lungs and failed. They smelled like roast pork as they burned.

  In the morning, when the fire burned less than a mast-height high, and the sun was over the rim of the world, we climbed down into the pit.

  They were all there, waiting. They were even thinner, and they didn’t have darkness to hide the open sores, the flies, the ooze of pus. Despite which, they grinned from ear to ear. Gaius. Daud. Demetrios, who looked so bad I was afraid he would die before we could get food into him. I couldn’t even figure out how he could stand on those legs.

  They had been slaves for just two months.

  The Phoenicians were . . . I was going to say animals, but no animal except man treats another like that.

  We rigged a sling, and lifted them out of the pit. Most of them were too weak to climb the ladder.

  While that happened, I went and posted sentries. There was a new spirit among my men: the shepherds, the herdsmen, the fishermen’s sons, the slaves freed at Centrona. We’d been victorious again; we were doing something noble. They were inspired, just as men can be inspired by a great play, or by the noble words of a godlike man like Heraclitus, or by the gods themselves.

  I knew as soon as I looked at them. They were ready to do something great.

  For the moment, all we had to do was to be alert.

  We watched the plains all day while the tower burned. Men looked at me, and I smiled. I kept my own council. There was food in the sheds, animals in the pens, and I prepared a feast on the coals of the tower and served it to the slaves, telling my own men that they should go from slave to slave as if they were slaves themselves.

  They did so with good will. The slaves tore into the meat, complained about the lack of wine and bread – mock complaints, although there’s always some awkward sod who feels sorry for himself. But they ate and ate.

  I saw no reason to leave so much as a
goat alive, so as fast as they ate, we killed more.

  And watched the plains.

  About noon, we saw the dust cloud.

  Seckla was my best rider. I gave him the mounted men, and clear orders. Up at the mine we had a view for fifty stades over the plain, so that I could point out his route – this stream, that copse of trees, that farmhouse.

  They cantered away, and men cheered them.

  The tower had just about burned out. So I asked the slaves to fetch water from the well, a bucket at a time, and pour it into the coals.

  Steam rose to the heavens, carrying the scent of roast meat. Some of it was roast men, and the gods have never rejected such a sacrifice. I remember wondering at myself; I thought Tertikles a barbarian for sacrificing a man before we launched our ships, but I was secretly pleased to have sent twenty Phoenicians screaming to my gods.

  Well.

  It’s true; I can be a vicious bastard.

  When the dust cloud on the plain reached a certain point, I took most of my armed men and marched. We had full bellies and full water bottles, and we moved fast, going downhill, despite the full heat of the summer sun. My friends wanted to come – Gaius demanded it, and muttered words about honour.

  I pushed a chunk of goat into his greasy hands. ‘Honour this,’ I said. ‘I’ll do the killing. You do the eating.’

  We went down the mountain, crossed the stream at its foot and went along the ridge through the high beech trees until we came to the site I’d chosen on the way. When you are a warrior, you think about these things all the time. That field would make a good place.

  That piece of trail.

  Ambushes come in as many different shapes as women. And men, too, if you wish. What would make one ambush perfect would be certain death in another.

  I had very few missile weapons. So my ambush would be close in, a deadly, hand-to-hand thing. And since my men were on foot, we had to win. Because we were unlikely to outrun pursuit.

  If we had had missile weapons – more bows, good javelins and throwing strings, heavy rocks – we might have chosen other sites.

  Instead, we lay down among the trees, an arm’s-length from the road. I took my place with Doola, behind a big rock that slaves and oxen had shifted. You could tell, because it stood clear of the ground, where all the other big rocks were half buried. It allowed me to see the road in both directions.

  If you ever have cause to lay an ambush, whether you do it with a handful of mud for your brothers, or with a sharp spear for your enemies, remember these simple rules.

  Always have a clear line of retreat. Any other ambush is just an elaborate form of suicide.

  Tailor your surprise to your arms and your enemy. If you have bows, you should wait at a good killing range, with an open field that won’t block your archery. If you have time, plan your ambush so that your first flight of arrows panics your foe into a worse position. Don’t drive him off a road and into an impregnable stronghold.

  The moment anything goes wrong, including an hour before you sight the enemy – run. Men in ambush are absurdly vulnerable.

  There, ladies. All my wisdom – wisdom I learned for myself, and not from Heraclitus. He was like a god, but I don’t think he knew much about ambushes.

  At any rate . . .

  We lay there. And lay there. An hour passed, and another, and the sun went down noticeably.

  I had so much to worry about; a man commanding an ambush always does. Had they stopped and made camp? Taken another route, and even now they were storming the slave camp? They’d given up and gone home . . . They’d slipped past us.

  Another hour passed. Insects ate us, and men snuck away to piss and snuck back.

  Men got the jitters.

  And another hour.

  And then we heard the sound. Hard to describe, but instantly identifiable. Men – a powerful number of them. Walking with a rattle and tinkle and clank. Talking.

  They had two scouts. They were moving two hundred paces ahead of the column – walking on the road. When they came to the edge of our copse of woods, they stopped.

  They talked with each other until the column had almost caught up.

  Then they came into the woods.

  My heart was pounding. The enemy had a hundred men – perhaps double that. It was difficult to count them from my hiding place, but there were many of them. They entered the woods.

  Their scouts moved quickly. They were conscious that they’d allowed the column to close up to them too much, and they ran.

  But just about even with me, one of them stopped. He was a handsome young man, wearing only a chlamys and a petasos hat and carrying a pair of heavy spears on his shoulder. He stopped from a sprint and looked into the woods. He wasn’t looking at me, he was looking away from me, staring off into the woods.

  His mate stopped running and looked back.

  ‘See something?’ he called in Phoenician.

  The first man looked and looked, and then squatted and looked at the road.

  ‘Men were here,’ he said.

  You have to imagine, they were an arm’s-length from me. They didn’t have to shout.

  Behind them, the column came rolling along the road.

  I saw Alexandros move, and I glared at him. Ambush requires patience.

  ‘Escaped slaves,’ the second man ventured.

  The first man looked all around. He was young. That’s probably what saved him. The young make piss-poor observers. He looked, but didn’t see.

  A commanding voice called from behind them on the road. I couldn’t make it out, but it was doubtless their commander, telling his scouts to get a move on. Twilight was only two hours away.

  The young man looked around again and shrugged.

  He and his companion loped off.

  I looked around. I could see Alexandros and Giannis and about fifteen other men.

  I waited.

  The column trudged forward.

  Waited.

  ‘She had tits like udders – Ba’al, it was disgusting!’

  ‘He was an ignorant—’

  ‘So I said—’

  ‘I drank the wine.’

  ‘I just want to ask this again—’

  They were just men. Tall, short, weak, strong, smart, foolish – they were men, walking down the road on a summer evening, headed for battle. Nervous. Over-talkative, as all men are before a fight. As the tail of the column started to pass me, I saw the last two men of the first taxis nervously checking the draw of their swords while their phylarch told them that they needed to stay together, stay together in the fighting.

  ‘Pirates! Just pirates. They won’t have any discipline. Like the lot we took yesterday. Don’t worry about—’

  I rose from my place and roared my war cry.

  We fell on the head of the column. They died, and the survivors broke and ran across the road for the shelter of the trees. Most ran a few steps into the woods before they died, because Doola and his men were on that side of the road, a little farther back.

  The second taxis froze outside the woods, listening to the screams of their comrades and the sounds of one-sided hand-to-hand.

  My dozen archers began to drop shafts into them.

  Perhaps their officer was hit early. Perhaps he was a fool. Either way, they did the worst thing possible – they huddled like sheep and bleated, and the arrows fell.

  A dozen good archers can do a lot of damage, even to armoured men, even trained men with good morale.

  No one had trained men with good morale in a colony, ten thousand stades from home.

  By this time, I was watching them. The fight in the woods was over before it really began – a hundred dead Phoenicians – mercenaries, in fact, mostly north Africans with some Greeks among them.

  Men like me.

  Heh. But not enough like me.

  I started to get my oarsmen in order, and Alexandros was there, and Doola and Sittonax, his long Kelt sword red to the hilt.

  I knew the second tax
is would break the moment I charged it. You can read these things as easily as you read words on a page. It’s like a woman’s facial expressions. The nervous tick; the cold glance. So, by the same token, you can read the moving of spears, the shuffling of feet and the shaking of horsehair plumes. Nervous fidgets.

  ‘Charge!’ I roared.

  We hadn’t run six paces before they broke. They ran away from our charge, and many of them threw down their shields in the flight. The archers loosed and loosed, until our charge obscured their targets.

  I didn’t catch one of them. They ran so early that they easily outdistanced my people, all of whom had already fought in one combat – even an ambush is a combat – and by the time we’d crossed the clearing, it was plain to see we didn’t have the daimon to run them down.

  So we went around the darkening battlefield, collecting loot. There wasn’t much. The weapons were average, the armour was leather and often already ruined, and most of the helmets were cheap, open-faced helmets or Etruscan-style salad bowls.

  A few men had purses, most of them containing only copper.

  Not much to die for.

  At twilight, we gave up plundering the dead. There were no survivors, not even the two scouts, who’d been killed by the northern fringe of our ambush. That’s the way of it, when an ambush works.

  We left the bodies for the birds, and marched back towards the mine. When we got there, we ate some meat, drank water and watched the steam rising off the ruin of the tower. Then we went to sleep.

  I remember that I forgot to post sentries. Luckily, Doola wasn’t as tired, or as foolish.

  Not that it mattered.

  About midnight, Seckla came back. He had heads dangling from his saddlecloth, bouncing and frightening his horse. It was ghoulish.

  I woke up long enough to embrace him and hear that he’d hit the survivors and harried them back to their settlement. And then I went back to sleep.

  In the morning, it was grey, and the sun wasn’t going to show. My men were surly with fatigue and reaction. I knew how to cure that.