Poseidon's Spear (Long War 3)

by Christian Cameron

  It grew dark. And there was Doola standing in front of me, and he walked with me a way, and then it was morning, and I awoke with a hard head and a general sense of hopelessness.

  I went downstairs and sat with my friends. Because they were true friends, I told them the whole story. Doola knew some, and Neoptolymos most of it, but when they heard the whole story, they gathered around me and Seckla hugged me, and Doola just stood with a hand on my shoulder.

  ‘You owe the girl,’ he said.

  ‘She must hate me,’ I said.

  Doola nodded. ‘I don’t think that will change. You must help her, anyway. Take her away from here, to where she can start again.’

  ‘Perhaps she likes it here,’ I said; a fairly weak thing to say, really.

  Doola just looked at me.

  Neoptolymos said, ‘Let’s just take her.’

  I didn’t see any solution. But Doola insisted I had to see her, and I determined to try.

  I began by asking any staff I met when I went up to the palace. Rumours of the Tyrant’s hetaera were everywhere in the town, but there was no one at the palace who would even mention her. At my third invitation to dine, I went and sat on young Dionysus’ couch – it was crowded, I can tell you – to see what he would tell me, but the party was growing wilder by the moment and I couldn’t even get his attention.

  I have seldom felt such an utter depression of spirit as I felt that evening. I sat in the Tyrant’s beautiful garden – he’d had the couches arranged outside – and the sun stained the sky and distant clouds a magnificent orange pink even as his roses scented the air. It was an intimate dinner – perhaps thirty guests, with superb music and very good food. I remember none of the dishes, because I didn’t want food.

  I sat alone on a couch, ignored by the other guests, a mere oddity, a foreigner who had sailed a long way and nothing more. I was thirty years old and more. I was a famous man – in a way. But that way was not the kind of fame any man seeks. I had the reputation of a killer. A pirate. A thug. I had abused a girl half my age, and because of it, her family was disgraced or dead and she herself dishonoured. And nothing could make that right. There was no one to kill.

  I am not a fool. I was trained by one of the greatest minds in the history of Greece, and I have a brain of my own. I could, and did, see the difference between what my emotions said I had done and the actual responsibility I bore. But that didn’t matter, any more than the various excuses I make myself for the oceans of blood I have shed with the edge of my sword.

  I was more than thirty years old, and I had neither wife nor children; no permanence, no hope of continuity. If an enemy spear took me, I would be gone like a bad smell in a powerful wind.

  I still think these thoughts, thugater. Nothing makes it better. It is dark, and it can go on for days. There is nothing joyous about murder. The thrill – the contest – of war is only half the story, and the other half is remembering all the men whose lives you reaped so that you could have their gold.

  I decided to go. If I had been feeling better, I might have been bold enough to walk off and search the palace, but dark spirits do not raise your courage.

  Gelon came and sat on my kline just as I was about to leave. ‘You are like the spectre at the feast,’ he said. ‘Is my food bad? Do the musicians displease you?’

  ‘No,’ I said. ‘I am not in the mood for food. I should have declined to come, my lord. I am poor company.’

  He furrowed his brow. ‘I expect better of my guests. Come: tell us of sailing the Outer Sea.’

  Another man – one of the horse-breeders who seemed to be Gelon’s favourites – clapped his hands together. ‘Tell us!’

  Another one of them, a taller man with ringlets, looked at me curiously. I suddenly knew him – he was one of the wealthy men who had evicted me from the city gymnasium some years before.

  Had I been in a different mood, that might have roused me, but in my present mood, it only served to make me tired.

  ‘Another time,’ I said wearily.

  ‘I insist,’ said the Tyrant.

  Well, he was the absolute lord of Syracusa, and my ships were in his harbour. ‘Very well,’ I said.

  He held up a hand. ‘Let me send for Dano,’ he said. ‘She loves any physical science. She will want to hear this herself. In fact, she insisted.’

  I lay back, while slaves rearranged the couches so that I could tell my story to the party.

  Theodorus – his name came to me – came and stood by my kline. ‘I think I know you,’ he said hesitantly.

  ‘I was a slave,’ I said. ‘And you didn’t want to know me.’

  He frowned. ‘You probably shouldn’t be in the palace.’

  I nodded. I found that I was growing angry easily, that I wanted to quarrel with this relative nonentity. Which was foolish. Anger is always foolish.

  ‘Why don’t you tell him, and we’ll see how he reacts?’ I said.

  Theodorus looked at me. ‘How does a former slave own three warships?’ he asked me.

  ‘Good question,’ I said. I smiled.

  He went and said something to one of his cronies, and then the Tyrant was back with Dano. She wore a veil and sat in a chair.

  Theodorus cleared his throat even as Dano raised the edge of her veil and gave me the sweetest smile. It wasn’t the smile of a flirtatious woman, but merely a smile. In that moment, it was as if she read my mind – my anger, my hurt.

  She was a good woman. A good woman.

  I tore my eyes away from her to find Theodorus standing by Gelon. The Tyrant was listening to him speaking, low and urgently.

  Despite Dano’s presence, I was content to be thrown out. I didn’t like Gelon, and his cronies seemed to me to be the opposite of proper aristocrats. Instead of tough, educated men who could lead war parties or talk about the affairs of their city, these seemed to me to be soft-handed sycophants.

  But Gelon laughed. ‘Theodorus, do you actually think that men like us are bound by petty notions like slavery?’ His laugh was real, and it rang, loud and full, and again, the Tyrant gave me the impression that he was like the Lord Zeus. It was the laugh of the king of the gods. ‘If the Lord Apollo fell to earth and was enslaved, would he be any less a god?’

  Some of the others looked at Theodorus, and some looked at me. I’m not sure that the Tyrant convinced them, but after a moment, it was obvious that I wasn’t going to be conveniently thrown out of the palace, and would have to sing for my supper, so I began to tell the story.

  I thought I’d tell it fairly, so I started from Syracusa, with our first boat. They were true nobles – they were fascinated by the way that small men make money. The tale of the purchase of our second boat fascinated most of them in a way that the tale of my trip beyond Gades did not.

  When I mentioned Anarchos, the tyrant slapped his thigh and laughed. ‘I know him,’ he said. ‘He is precious to me.’

  Well, well.

  By the time I had the ships off the beach at Massalia and off the Inner Sea coast of Iberia, two-thirds of my listeners had lost interest. The Tyrant and the Lady Dano, on the other hand, were rapt with attention, and young Dionysus gazed at me with genuine hero-worship. When I told the story of running the mill race at the Pillars of Heracles, he clapped his hands together and said, ‘Odysseus, come to life,’ and Dano’s eyes shone.

  Let me tell you a secret. No matter how far down you are, the admiration of a handsome woman will almost always bring you up in your own estimation, and some male hero-worship doesn’t hurt, either.

  Not at all.

  I took them up the coast, out to sea in storms, in raids on the Carthaginians, up to Alba and all the way home. The sun was gone, the lamps were lit and half the guests had left when I was done.

  I took a long drink of wine.

  Dano threw back her veil and drank some wine. She looked, not at me, but at Gelon, who nodded.

  ‘Indeed, for an hour, I was the King of the Phaekeans, listening to the Man of Sorrows tell hi
s tale. If you ask me for a ship to take you home, I will have to give you my treasure. That was a great tale.’

  Dano raised the communal cup. ‘How my father would have loved you,’ she said.

  I smiled. ‘I eat meat,’ I admitted. ‘I don’t think I could give it up.’ Sorry – that quip was aimed at her, because the secretive Pythagoreans didn’t let outsiders know anything of their practice, but everyone knew they didn’t eat meat.

  She shrugged. ‘He loved men who do things, and men who learn things. It seems to me you are both. And that was a marvellous story. What will you do with the rest of your life?’

  I shrugged. ‘You overwhelm me with so much unmerited praise.’ I slid off my couch and stretched.

  Gelon rose and crushed my hand in the two of his. ‘Stay here with us, then. Be one of my captains. Persia and Carthage are combining to extinguish the Greek world: a single great war to dominate the earth, or so my spies tell me. Come and help me stop them. This is the richest city in the Greek world; we can have a grand fleet.’

  Dano made a motion with her hand. ‘Athens has built more than a hundred triremes in the last three years,’ she said.

  I whistled.

  ‘I can buy and sell Athens,’ Gelon said. ‘A commercial city ruled by a squabbling assembly of proles. They will never rise to greatness. Men require to be led, and well led, by those who are better. Syracusa will be a greater city, because those who rule her are themselves greater.’

  I shrugged again. ‘Men on ships require to be led,’ I said. ‘Men on farms require only to be left alone.’

  Dano laughed. ‘May I quote that? It’s brilliant. And you say you studied with that fool Heraclitus?’

  ‘He was not a fool, but a great thinker and a brilliant man, humble before the gods, capable of solving almost any problem. And yet he studied other men’s thoughts and learned from them, too – in Aegypt, in Persia. Even your father, who he viewed as the greatest mathematician of the age.’ I had a thought, then, of sitting in the garden of Hipponax’s house, teaching Briseis from a book of Pythagoras, watching her beautiful fingers work the geometric figures with the compass I had made her.

  Gelon smiled. ‘Can you work any of Pythagoras’s solutions?’ he asked me.

  ‘Several,’ I said. ‘I can find the value of the hypotenuse given the lengths of the two other sides.’ Seeing his surprise, I said, ‘I use it every day to figure my dead reckoning at sea. If I am rowing twenty stades an hour to the south, and wind and current are moving me six stades an hour to the west, what is my true course and speed?’ I asked.

  ‘A little less then twenty-one stades an hour, south by east,’ Dano said, clapping her hands together.

  ‘What do you do when your course and the current aren’t at perfect right angles?’ Gelon asked.

  ‘Guess,’ I said, and he laughed.

  ‘And how do you measure the speed of your cross-current? Or the wind? Or even your own speed through the water?’ Dano asked.

  ‘We cast the log for speed – it is guesswork, but accurate guesswork. My young friend Seckla can cast the log for a ship’s speed and he’ll be accurate within . . . well, within my tolerance, anyway. Currents: more guesswork.’ I waved my hands.

  Gelon nodded. ‘It is experience, is it not? That gives a mariner the ability to make these guesses?’

  I sensed I was entering into another argument.

  ‘But you could teach another person to do it, could you not, Lord Arimnestos?’ she demanded. ‘I am reckoned intelligent – could you teach me to command your ship?’

  ‘Or could she teach herself?’ asked the Tyrant. ‘Could she work it all out from first principles and then put to sea?’

  ‘My lord, my lady, I have the feeling that I am caught between Scylla and Charybdis here. But I would say that yes, I could teach Lady Dano to command or to pilot; and yes, she might even teach herself, although she might also die in the attempt. But I would insist that while she might learn to be a brilliant navigator by practising mathematics, seamanship is a great deal more, and requires years at sea. I started late, and my helmsman Megakles, for example, a fisherman born, has a deep understanding of waves and weather – and I do not. So I ask him, often. Nor have I learned his knack. Yet I can pilot a ship from here to Gades with a few landfalls, and the sun, moon and stars, and he would have to coast the whole way. There are many skills at sea, just as on land, and not every skill is acquired the same way.’

  The Tyrant’s laugh boomed out again.

  ‘You don’t lose an argument often, do you?’ he asked. He rose from his couch and went to be gracious to other guests, and I gathered I had annoyed him.

  Dano sat on the edge of my couch. ‘I wonder if you could come and speak about navigation for our school in Croton?’

  I was flattered. ‘I would be delighted,’ I said. ‘But I understood that your father was exiled from Croton, and no longer had a school there?’

  ‘Oh,’ she said. ‘That was many years ago. Members of our . . . group—’ She looked up and met my eye. ‘Men can be fools, no matter how well born and well educated. Indeed, it sometimes seems to me that well-born, well-educated Greek men are the greatest fools in the world.’

  I laughed. ‘Such speech must endear you to all such men.’

  She shrugged impatiently. ‘It is foolish to speak in generalities,’ she said. ‘Indeed, you make me garrulous, when I would prefer to be silent.’

  ‘Because women should be seen and not heard?’ I asked.

  She glared, and then saw that I was smiling. ‘Because a philosopher learns more from listening than from talking,’ she said.

  ‘You are a philosopher?’ I asked.

  ‘Everyone is,’ she said simply. ‘Only a few mortals have the leisure to devote the time to it that it deserves, but everyone who travels the face of the world is a philosopher – unless they sink to become animals.’ She smiled, at her own vehemence, I think. Pythagoreans eschewed displays of emotion.

  ‘I think I must agree to that, or be characterized as an animal,’ I said.

  She looked at Gelon, with the last of his guests, and said, ‘I love it here, but I am merely a curiosity. I came for the friendship my father bore Gelon. I have been well received, but Gelon imagines that I am a woman, and sends me yarn. Will you take me back to Croton? I can pay.’

  I nodded. ‘With pleasure.’ I wanted out of Sicily.

  And I had remembered Anarchos.

  The next morning, sober and of sounder mind, I wandered the inner harbour – not where the big foreign ships beached, but where the local trade came. It took me about two hours to find one of Anarchos’s enforcers, and an hour later, I was with the man himself.

  He looked at me over the rim of his wine cup, and toasted me.

  ‘Here’s to success,’ he said. ‘The greatest mariner of the age, or so I hear it.’

  ‘Here’s to your friendship with the Tyrant,’ I said. ‘He told me that he loves you. In just so many words.’

  Anarchos looked around. ‘He said that? Out loud?’ He snorted. ‘I’ll be lynched.’

  ‘I gather he’s none too popular with the lower classes,’ I said.

  Anarchos leaned back. ‘He stripped everyone but the richest six hundred families of their voting rights. Set against that, he’s lowered taxes, and he has kept the Carthaginians at bay.’ He motioned over my shoulder. ‘Nice ships. You have become an important man.’

  ‘Again,’ I said.

  I smiled.

  ‘So what do you want?’ he asked. ‘Of me? You don’t need me any more.’ He shrugged. ‘I try to be realistic about these things.’ He nodded. ‘Or do you need me after all?’

  ‘Where’s Lydia?’ I said.

  ‘Ah,’ he said. In fact, he knew what I was there for from the moment I walked in. Anarchos was a man who bought and sold weakness. And he knew mine.

  Our eyes locked. ‘You walked off and left her,’ he said.

  ‘I offered to marry her,’ I said in instant defe
nce. Foolish, wasted words.

  ‘But her father turned you down. I remember. When you left, her father threw her into the street.’ He licked his lips. ‘I took her up.’

  His statement cut me like a sharp sword.

  He spread his hands. ‘Don’t pretend you cared! We are men of the world. You had your turn, and I had mine.’ He laughed at my face. ‘But I lay with her, which you hadn’t the balls to do. And she liked it.’ He smiled. ‘I didn’t rape her. Hah! You are a fool. And my men are all around you. If you draw, you’ll be dead in a moment.’

  I couldn’t help myself. Rage, jealousy, self-hate – what a stew of low emotions I was. I got to my feet and men crowded in close, and I felt the prick of a knife through my cloak.

  ‘When I was tired of her – just as you tired of her, no doubt – I arranged for Gelon to meet her. Beautiful, well spoken, hot on the couch and cool in debate – the perfect mistress for the Tyrant. He couldn’t have some low-born porne, could he?’ Anarchos laughed. ‘You still think that you are better than me, lad.’

  It is chilling that, in the moments that most matter, we don’t think of our great and noble teachers and their fine thoughts, but instead we think like animals. I wanted to kill him.

  Because, of course, he was completely correct. His contempt was merited. And he had probably dealt fairly with her, by his own lights.

  But as a man, I didn’t see any of that. I burned – oh, Zeus! – I burned with rage.

  Anarchos laughed again. ‘Will killing me make you a better man, hero?’ he asked. ‘Get you gone.’

  He stood up.

  I stood too.

  It may not strike you as one of my boldest, bravest, strongest moments – but it was. I stood up, and I mastered myself. I clamped down on the rage. I told myself that I was not responsible for his actions, but only my own.

  ‘Tell me how to reach her,’ I said. I kept my voice low.

  He looked at me as if I had slapped him.

  ‘I want to talk to her,’ I said. ‘That is all.’

  He narrowed his eyes. ‘Why? I mean, why should I help you?’

  I took a deep breath. ‘You and I have a great many things in common.’ I met his eyes. ‘So I’m going to assume that some of the things you do are difficult to live with. And that once in a while, you have to do something to help someone, or become a monster.’