Poseidon's Spear (Long War 3)

by Christian Cameron

  I walked in the sun, a little way along the gravel, turned and drew the sword. I put the scabbard in my left hand, and threw my chlamys over my left arm.

  She had a shield. A big shield.

  I saluted and she did not. I stepped in, flicked my blade up and she raised her shield, and I kicked it and her to the ground with a pankration kick which she didn’t see coming because I was too close, and she’d raised her shield and thus couldn’t see.

  I stepped back and let her get to her feet. When she set her stance again, I shook my head. ‘No, you lost. There is no second chance. If you want to send another man, so be it – but you lost.’

  She glared. But she walked over and tapped one of the big men.

  His sword was as long as my arm, and longer. He took the shield.

  It didn’t look thick enough to be stable. It was oddly shaped and too damned long, and his arms were like an octopus’s arms – too long and too fast.

  He came at me, whirling his sword in front of his shield.

  Polymarchos had made me practise against this sort of thing, which he called the whirlwind. I made myself relax, moved with him, backing away, letting him slowly close the distance. He had a tempo to his spin, and I moved with it, almost as if we were dancing.

  I had my strike prepared, but he surprised me, leaping forward with a shriek, the sword cutting up from below my cloak. I got my scabbard – my heavy, wooden scabbard – on his blade, and he cut right through it and into my chlamys. The blow didn’t cut into my arm, but he almost broke my arm with the blow.

  Of course, he had a foot of my steel through his head. A little punch, a hand-reverse to clear his raised shield – one of Polymarchos’s best tricks.

  He was dead before he hit the ground.

  I hadn’t intended to kill him. In fact, it’s worth noting that he was too good. If he’d been worse, or slower, or less long-limbed, I’d have let him live.

  And he was certainly trying to kill or maim me.

  I stepped back and the pain of his blow hit me. I stepped back again, and one of the little bastards came for me.

  He leaped the corpse of the big man, and swung his heavy sword with two hands.

  I cut his sword to the ground and pinked him in the hand.

  He roared and cut at me again.

  Again I cut his sword to the ground with my lighter weapon, and this time I skewered his right hand. But he raised the sword with his left, so I ripped my point out of his hand and brought the blade down on his left forearm. And then stepped in and kicked him in the crotch.

  And he slammed his maimed right hand into my face.

  Kelts: they’re insane.

  He didn’t break my nose. That was lucky.

  I was blind with pain for a moment, so I slashed the air in front of me to keep him back. I connected with something, but most of my long xiphos was scarcely sharp and all it did was raise a welt, I suspect.

  He leaped at me again just as I got control of my head. He didn’t have a weapon. And he was as fast as a fish in the stream. His wounded hands were up, and he was reaching for my blade.

  I had to kill him, too.

  Now I was breathing like a bellows, and I fell back.

  I wanted to say something witty and insulting, because I was angry – full of rage, like Ares. But all I could do was breathe.

  It didn’t feel good.

  In fact, I felt . . . wretched. These two men had never done anything to hurt me – well, except to attack me at the behest of their mistress – and now they were dead.

  She looked at me, and at the four men beside her.

  I breathed hard. And waited.

  Gaius nodded. ‘That’s it, then,’ he said, in his aristocratic Greek. ‘Tell that woman that it is over, or it is war, and if it’s war, we have two hundred men and she has four.’

  I looked at him. I hadn’t expected him to step in. But that’s what friends are for.

  I turned to Detorix. ‘We will leave in the morning,’ I said. ‘Let this be an end to it, and don’t let me regret not walking over and killing her.’

  Detorix nodded.

  That was good. I was done with the Venetiae.

  So we left without Doola, and that didn’t make me happy. Nor did I trust our hosts any more, or our boatmen, or anyone.

  We had to pole our boats north. Some of the oarsmen were quite good at this, and some were not. We had a pair of guides and interpreters, but otherwise we were on our own.

  After the first night, we built a regular camp by the river and we put brush all the way around it and stood to, fully armed, an hour before darkness and an hour after dawn.

  The third day, we saw horsemen on the horizon as we poled upstream.

  By the fourth day, we were quite aware of the horsemen, who scarcely troubled to hide themselves. And the river was a snake, swimming on the sea – an endless curve and back-curve. Sometimes we could see a town or settlement a dozen stades before we reached it. Some settlements were on both sides of a peninsula, so we’d pass the town twice. And it did seem like we paddled or poled twice the distance that we’d have walked – or that our shadows rode.

  I’d had about enough of the Keltoi by then. And I was unhappy with myself – the more I thought on it, the more I decided I’d allowed myself to be ruled by Ares in the taverna. I didn’t need to show her my arête. I didn’t need to fight. I could be Odysseus instead of Achilles. And the two dead men were powerfully on my conscience.

  But even as I thought these thoughts – thoughts largely fuelled by Heraclitus, of course – I also thought like the pirate I often was. I considered setting an ambush for the riders. It was foolish to let them pick the time for an attack.

  But it would be worse to fight them. Once we fought, we’d be the enemy to every barbarian on the river, and that would be the end of us and our tin, too.

  I thought about it for another day, as we poled on and on and seemed to make very few stades.

  That night, Gaius and Seckla and I took Herodikles and one of the younger shepherds, Leo, who was growing as a man and as a leader. The five of us slipped downstream in a small boat, and we floated silently in the darkness until we came to a campfire. We landed well upstream, and crept carefully down on them.

  Eight men, a dozen horses.

  It was the work of two minutes to cut all the hobbles of the horses and chase them off into the darkness. They roused themselves, and we were gone.

  The next day, we had no contact with them.

  We poled on. We were low on food, and I had to bargain with a fairly hostile village of Kelts who lived in reed huts that stood on stilts in the water. We bought grain for silver, and got the worst of the bargain.

  Two nights later, one of our interpreters tried to run. He was surprised to find that I was right there, waiting for him.

  Three more days poling, and I was sure we had slipped our pursuers. The poling had become quite difficult, as we were travelling into the upper reaches of the river.

  Let me add that although I was sick to death of barbarians and their neck collars and their feuds and their superstition, it is beautiful country, and those Gauls could farm. The banks of the river were cultivated – not everywhere, but long swathes cutting through the forests. The towns were prosperous, if hag-ridden with aristocrats.

  Another thing I feel I must mention, although this is not meant to be a tale of marvels encountered in travel – traveller’s tales are all lies anyway – is their priests. They were all men, all representatives of the aristocratic classes, and they could perform prodigious feats of memory. I met a priest on the Sequana who could recite the Iliad. I didn’t stay to hear the entire piece – I’d have been there all winter – but his memory seemed perfect to me, and he could start wherever I asked him: I could name a verse or an event, and he would begin to recite. I found this very impressive, and told him so.

  Yet these learned men seemed to me more like magpies than like true priests. They absorbed a great many facts – it was fro
m a Keltoi priest that I first heard of Pythagoras, for example – and they knew everything about plants, herbs and medicine, but so does any decent doctor in Athens or Thebes.

  For moral philosophy, they were merely barbarians. They had no great code of ethics, and their laws were mostly learned by rote and not reasoned, or so it seemed to me. In behaviour, too, the aristocrats seemed to do every man as he wished, and when the wills of two such clashed, there was war – petty or great depending on the status of the contenders. Twice as we poled our way up the Sequana, we passed villages burned – the second was still smouldering.

  Greeks could be just as bad. So could Persians. But there was something . . . ignorant about the Keltoi. Of course, I’m a Greek, and that may just be my own ignorance speaking. And you must remember that I was seeing all this through the eyes of a man who had suddenly begun to see the uselessness, at some level, of violence. The Keltoi queen – Nordicca, I knew her name to be, of the Dumnoni – was typical of her breed. The truth is that I had found her quite attractive, sought to impress her and ended up behaving like a posturing adolescent, and men were dead. I won’t say they haunted me – they had died with weapons in hand, striving against me – but I will confess that I knew their deaths to be unnecessary.

  But I digress. Fill my cup, pais.

  I had my two interpreters watched very carefully, night and day. Demetrios managed our boats, and Gaius managed the interpreters. We made sure they knew they’d be well paid, for example. I was quite sure they were supposed to desert us, but we promised them enough silver to make them modestly wealthy men.

  In truth, Detorix had taken some precautions to make sure we never came back. I might have hated him, but life had taught me that merchants will act to protect their trade the way farmers act to protect their crops. They will make war, or commit simple murder, to keep others off their trade routes. The Venetiae were no different in kind from the Phoenicians, except that they weren’t quite such rapacious slavers. When I look at how Athens behaves these days, I have to admit that apparently Greeks are just as bad. Or perhaps worse – more efficient.

  The younger of the two interpreter guides was Gwan, and he was a warrior, an aristocrat, and not a merchant. Over the course of a dozen stops on the Sequana, I gathered that this was a great adventure for him; that his father was deeply in debt to the Venetiae, and that his service was part repayment. He was of the Senones, the people who ruled the great river valley.

  He loved horses, and he was the most profligate lover I think I have ever met. It was difficult to find time to talk to him, he was so busy lying with women. The men that Gaius sent to follow him always blushed to tell of his exploits. He was neither particularly clever nor particularly handsome, and yet, in every village, one or two young women seemed to leap on him with an enthusiasm that might have made me jealous, if I hadn’t been so busy.

  What was his secret?

  I have no idea.

  At any rate, after twenty days we were in the upper reaches of the Sequana, and poling was hard, the current was fast even in autumn and we were all tired at the end of the day. Gwan rode ahead on horseback, and was waiting for us on the riverbank. We put up our tents in the fields, already harvested. Men and women with baskets were making a small market, an agora, for us to buy food.

  Gwan was good at his job.

  His partner was an older man, a fisherman. He was not an aristocrat, and he didn’t speak much. Or have the pure enjoyment of life that Gwan had. His name was Brach, and he was dark, tall and silent, and he walked with a stoop that looked sinister to a Greek.

  Gaius and I were poling together with Seckla and a pair of Marsalian fishermen. I don’t even remember their names, but I remember they were both cheerful companions. We were singing hymns – Homer’s hymns, all we could remember. Seckla was laughing at the words – his gods were otherwise, and he found ours odd.

  Brach was sitting in the stern. He’d poled for an hour, and it was his turn to rest. He was watching the bank, and I was watching him. He seemed alert, and afraid. When I stooped to get my wooden canteen and have a drink, I happened to stumble by him (try retrieving anything on a barge that is ten times as long as it is wide, and you’ll see why I stumbled). I got a whiff of him, and he was afraid. He smelled of fear.

  ‘What’s the matter?’ I asked.

  I could see Gwan standing on the bank, and I could see fifty or so farmers and local peasants with their baskets of produce. None of them was a warrior. You can disguise a warrior, but not if you pay attention. Men in top physical training stand and move differently from men who work the land for others. Men at the edge of violence have a different look on their faces. Not that I thought all these things at the time – merely to note that I was conscious that we had more than seventy giant ingots of tin and a lot of gold, too, and that in my heart I knew the Keltoi would try for it, sometime. I couldn’t see anything.

  ‘What’s wrong?’ I asked.

  Brach glanced at me, his face a dead giveaway, and shrugged. He stared at the water.

  ‘Armour,’ I ordered. I shouted the order sternwards to the next boat, and reached for the heavy leather bag with my thorax.

  We were armoured and ready for anything in a quarter of an hour, and the farmers stood on the bank, puzzled, anxious and then downright fearful. They abandoned the bank, and many packed their goods and fled the market. When we landed, we looked like a war band.

  Before the sun had set another finger, a dozen chariots appeared, and fifty Keltoi on horseback. I had forty men with spears and shields out as guards while we dragged downed trees to form an abatis – a wall of branches. Not a great defence, but enough to discourage casual looting and easy predation.

  The local aristo had an eagle in bronze set on top of his helmet, and wore a knee-length tunic of scale – not a style of armour I’d ever seen before – and it looked as if it would weigh far too much for use in combat. Of course, the great gentry of Gaul travel to war in chariots. I wondered if this was what Lord Achilles looked like.

  He spoke to Gwan, saluted and his driver rolled to a stop an arm’s-length from me. I had my pais offer him a cup of wine, and he took it, poured a libation like a Greek and drank it off.

  ‘Tell him that I apologize for frightening his people. Tell him, as one warrior to another, that I received a sign – perhaps from my ancestor, Heracles – and had my men get into their armour.’ As I spoke, I indicated the plaque that showed Heracles and the Nemean Lion that was affixed to the inside of my aspis.

  He listened. And I’d say he understood, as he gave me a sharp glance, dismounted and offered me his hand to clasp. I took it.

  He spoke slowly, paused, took off his helmet and spoke again.

  ‘He says, warriors must learn to understand and obey such signs. He says a party of armed men passed his outposts this morning, travelling quickly on horseback, and he has been in armour all day. He says, perhaps your ancestor is not so wrong, after all. He gives you his word that no harm will come to your people tonight.’

  I let go his hand. Let me say that sometimes, between people, there is a spark of understanding. It can lead instantly to love, or friendship; to treaties, to alliances, to marriages. This man was clear-eyed and honourable. I would have staked my life on it. Gwan said his name was Collam.

  We passed a few minutes looking at each other’s war gear. His scale mail was beautifully wrought: the scales were fine, the size of a man’s thumb or slightly smaller, and I’d say, as a bronze-smith, that there were four thousand of them in the whole tunic. His helmet was superb: very different from the helmets I made, and he took mine, put it on and moved like a fighter, trying it, while encouraging me with motions to try his.

  I found his interesting – airy, open. The cheeks were hinged, the bowl was shallow, the neck curved down like my father’s to meet the armour at the back, like the tail of a shrimp or lobster, except without the articulation. There was a narrow brim over the eye, which, even late on an autumn day, kept the
sun from my eyes.

  Collam made a motion and grinned. He had bright blond hair and enormous moustaches – I don’t think I’d ever seen a man with so much moustache.

  ‘He wants to trade,’ Gwan said. ‘My father is his sister’s husband’s brother – does that make sense? We’re not close, but he’s a famous warrior and his words are true.’

  I hadn’t needed Gwan to tell me that. I loved my helmet – I had made it with my own hands. It fitted me perfectly, and I trusted it.

  But when you can’t give something away, you are a slave to it. And generosity is one of the virtues. Besides, his helmet was a magnificent piece of work – the eagle on top was an artwork.

  I grinned. ‘Tell him it is his.’

  We fed him. The farmers came back at dusk, when they saw their lord sitting on one of our stools, drinking our wine, and we bought pigs and grain. We also bought some dried fruit and meat.

  I was so interested in Collam that I lost track of Brach, and so did Gaius. Collam was the sort of man that Gaius loved, and he sat with us. The Latins are not entirely Keltoi, but they have many words in common, and Gaius’s Keltoi was far better than mine, good enough that he could almost converse without Gwan. I missed Sittonax, and I missed Daud.

  Play it as you will; it was morning – the night passed uneventfully – when we discovered that Brach was missing. Collam came down to the riverside with his corps of charioteers and cavalry to see us off. I was in my armour, watching the men load the barges and keeping an eye on Gwan, while Seckla and Gaius searched the fields and woods around our camp. Seckla could track. So could a number of the herdsmen.

  When Collam came up, we embraced.

  ‘He asks if you’d like to sell any of your tin,’ Gwan said.

  He was on the main tin route, but then, of course, he was wearing ten pounds of the stuff in his harness. His war band probably ate bronze.

  ‘How much do you want?’ I asked.

  He shrugged. ‘One pig,’ he said. Eighty pounds. The value in Marsala would be almost eighty ounces of gold. Twice that in Sicily.