Poseidon's Spear (Long War 3)

by Christian Cameron

  Hah! Sorry, ladies. A man can dream.

  We coasted northern Sicily. Secretly, every night when I landed, I asked the men of the towns whether they’d ever seen Geaeta before, or a ship bearing her. None had. She said she’d never landed in any of them. Of course, a round ship is more at the mercy of the winds and Poseidon’s whims, and never has to land. It can carry food and water for weeks.

  All of her story was plausible.

  We landed next on the south coast of Sardinia – close enough to home to think about chucking the whole thing. But we didn’t. The prospect of riches can be as intoxicating as wine.

  South of Sardinia, we picked up a pair of Carthaginian traders, half a day apart. I caught one, and Dionysus caught the other. Neither skipper knew anything about a tin convoy, but both admitted there had been a ferocious storm in the Straits of Heracles a month before.

  Their cargoes were valuable – grain in one, and olive oil and hides in the other. We concentrated the cargoes into one of them and put a dozen men aboard under Giannis and sent her north to Massalia. And went west with the second capture filled to the gunwales with water and dried fish, a crew of fishermen under Vasileos sailing her. With our consort to provide food for a thousand rowers, we managed to make the five-day crossing to the Balearics in three days – with seven hundred and fifty mythemnoi of food and as much water. No fleet could have done it, but a handful of pirates—

  Listen, I’ve made Dionysus sound like a monster in the matter of the girl. He wasn’t a nice man. He had fine ethics but didn’t apply them to women – at all. But he was an excellent sailor, a fine navigator and he planned. I learned on that trip how to calculate food expenditure. Off Alba, we had a round ship in consort, but we hadn’t used her for food. Dionysus’ method allowed a squadron of triremes to keep on the sea virtually for ever – as long as the owners were rich enough to buy stores. A thousand men eat a lot.

  Nine days out of Ostia, and we were on a beach on the south coast of the Balearics. I’d landed there before, and I liked the beach. And then we were away south. We cruised warily off Ebusus and landed on a tiny islet, and then we slipped off the beach in the first light of a new-minted summer day and crossed to the Iberian coast, and worked our way along with a favourable wind for two more days.

  The second evening, a pair of local boats saw us from seaward as we were landing. Dionysus was off the beach in a flash, and he took them both – no fishing boat can outrun a warship, as I had reason to remember. We ate their fish as the crews sat, disconsolate.

  Dionysus and I questioned the two fishing captains. They knew New Carthage, and feared it, it was clear. Nether knew anything about the tin fleet. Both expected to die.

  Neither knew anything about a big squadron of Carthaginian triremes setting a trap for pirates, either, to be frank.

  Dionysus was planning to kill them all, but I insisted we leave them there on the beach, alive. Well, not all of them. Four men ‘volunteered’ to row with my ship. I took them.

  We were off into an overcast morning of light rain. We crept down the coast: the wind was wrong, so we rowed into a light headwind, our five-ship squadron spread across thirty stades of sea so that we would sweep up any ship we might want to catch.

  It was mid-afternoon when Neoptolymos – he had a Carthaginian ship so he was the most landward of the sweep – signalled that he could see New Carthage. An hour later, the town was visible in the haze, her red tile roofs glinting against the rising red-brown of the hills behind the town.

  The harbour was empty. So were the seas.

  After fifteen days of frenetic rowing and planning and training and sailing, our disappointment was palpable.

  I had to admit that we hadn’t planned for the situation that confronted us. We planned either to fight our way out of an ambush, or swoop down on our prey. In fact, we found a fortified town with a heavily walled inner harbour – empty. Nor was there a powerful naval squadron waiting for us.

  In the fading, ruddy light, I rowed up alongside Dionysus and hailed him.

  ‘Have you cut her throat yet?’ he asked.

  I laughed. ‘No. She says we’re late.’

  ‘Or early,’ he said. ‘I don’t like it; the whole town’s empty.’

  ‘Now what?’ I asked.

  ‘Now we take the next ship in,’ he said.

  That didn’t take as long as I feared. We stayed at sea all night, ate cold rations from our merchantman and the dawn showed us a Phoenician ship under oars coming up from the darkness to the south and east, from the coast of Africa. Neoptolymos dropped down and took her with only a cursory fight.

  I winced to watch Neoptolymos, a decent man, slam his fist repeatedly into the captured Phoenician trierarch. Torturing prisoners is cowardly, to me. I didn’t like what I was seeing.

  Heh.

  Then he was brought aboard my ship.

  It was Hasdrubal.

  He had a bad cut under one eye and another on a corner of his mouth, which was ripped open by repeated blows. Even as he landed on my deck, Neoptolymos, who followed him over the side, hit him again.

  The Illyrian laughed mirthlessly. ‘I can’t stop hitting him,’ he said.

  ‘Make him stop!’ pleaded the Carthaginian.

  He didn’t recognize me.

  I’d like to say that I stopped Neoptolymos from tormenting the man, who was already broken.

  Listen, there’s limits. I try to be the man that Heraclitus taught, and not the thug I might have been. But sometimes—

  An hour passed. Dionysus dropped onto my deck. He looked down at the wreckage of a human body on my ship.

  He laughed.

  ‘I thought you were too soft for this life,’ he said. ‘Ares! Kill him.’ He looked at me, a little sickened, I could tell.

  ‘He enslaved us,’ I said. ‘He killed Neoptolymos’s sister.’

  Dionysus nodded. Looked away. ‘Have you vengeful Furies even asked him about the tin fleet?’ he asked.

  Neoptolymos nodded. ‘He passed it two days ago, headed east. Under full sail.’

  The same wind that we’d rowed into.

  Dionysus nodded. ‘Let’s chase them,’ he said gently. ‘This is a waste of time.’ He picked up Hasdrubal and threw him over the rail into the sea without asking us.

  Neoptolymos growled.

  I seemed to awaken.

  Sometimes, when I fancy myself a better man then other men, I think of two things from the ten years between Plataea and Artemisium. I think of how I treated Lydia. I think of what I did to Hasdrubal.

  He didn’t even scream when he hit the water. He sank, unable even to swim.

  Choked and drowned.

  Slowly, I hope.

  All of his marines had been killed, and, of course, Dagon wasn’t aboard. His ship was a small merchant galley of fifty oars, with the usual collection of broken men as oarsmen – men he’d played his own role in breaking, no doubt. As soon as Neoptolymos’s marines came down the gangway, the oarsmen had ripped the rest of the crew asunder.

  It is odd that there are so many bad captains, as the payback is so ruthless.

  We took the ship and the oarsmen. It was ballasted in wine for the western stations. So we gave our oarsmen good African wine every night as we ate salt fish and rowed and sailed east.

  We tried every trick. We wet our sails to take the breeze when it was coming over our sterns, and we sailed on a quarter-reach with both boatsail and mainsail drawing together – a rare point of sailing even in our rig, and very fast, so that for a whole day we made perhaps thirty stades an hour.

  We had advantages and disadvantages. We knew where our quarry was going, and elected to cut the corner – they would have crossed directly to Africa, while we went on a long hypotenuse, slanting away east, south-east. We were neither lucky nor unlucky in our winds, and of course, our quarry had the same winds. Best of all, we knew about them and they, we hoped, knew nothing of us.

  Dionysus knew the waters better than I, and he was ma
king for Hippo, on the north shore of Africa, about six hundred stades from Carthage.

  This was more blue-water sailing than most of our oarsmen had ever seen. We were lucky to have so many veterans from our adventures in the Outer Sea. Sailors like nothing better than to tell a shipmate This ain’t nothing, brother, and I stood between the oars on the third night, the taste of salt anchovies barely drowned in wine on my tongue, listening to my oarsmen.

  ‘You ain’t seen nothing, mate,’ said Xenos, a fisherman’s son from Massalia. ‘We were nine days at sea off Iberia – the Outer Sea coast of Iberia, mate – in a storm so bad men cut their wrists rather than face another day. As Poseidon is my witness.’

  ‘And when we tried to run from Gaul to Alba,’ says another voice in the darkness, ‘Poseidon blew us over the edge of the world.’

  ‘And then what happened?’ asked a sceptic.

  ‘A Titan blew us back,’ said the storyteller. ‘I’m here, ain’t I?’

  Five days at sea.

  Even with the prospect of boundless riches, sailors will eventually tire of bad food and back-breaking labour. Even sailors.

  Five days of rowing – for the most part. We were low on water and out of food. Men spoke poems in praise of bread. No lie: bread is the thing you miss most at sea.

  Well, many men were missing something else. Geaeta was not inhibited by the presence of two hundred crewmen, and Seckla’s continuing education at her hands – and more – was noisy, demonstrative and sometimes annoyingly emotive. I have said before that a woman – especially a desirable but unavailable woman – aboard a ship is a fine thing for morale, but to be sure, a desirable and sexually active woman aboard a ship with two hundred men just makes the one hundred and ninety-nine more difficult.

  Myself, I took to pulling my cloak around my head, despite the heat.

  I won’t say the crew was near mutiny – merely that I thought it possible that Seckla would be murdered. I confined him to the sailor’s deck amidships, and read Geaeta my best speech on being a shipmate. She laughed, but obeyed. She knew that she was still on sufferance. Most men believed her story, now – I did. But she understood.

  Another day. We finished the water.

  We sighted land. We’d sighted it for days, but that evening, Dionysus laid alongside and told me that we were hundreds of stades short of our landfall and that we had to land anyway.

  I knew that.

  In the last light of a summer evening, we rowed into a river mouth. We rowed until the water was fresh and drank it straight from the stream, reaching through the oar-ports to drink out of wooden cups. The water was brackish – not even fresh. But men were badly dehydrated, and most of them drank and pissed it away immediately – pardon my frankness – but we were close to the edge.

  We landed in the darkness, put a guard over the wine and slept. In the morning, the marines caught a shepherd boy who said we were west of Kissia.

  Dionysus shook his head. ‘Poseidon hates us. We’re hopelessly behind.’

  Morale plummeted. Things might have gone ill, but we made a landfall, got water and sent the shepherd for his father and paid silver for the whole flock and ate it, too.

  Next morning, full of mutton, we rowed east. We stood well out as we passed Kissia, which had a pair of triremes on her open beach. I proposed we burn them on the beach, but Gaius wanted to go home and Dionysus wanted to try for the tin fleet for two more days – right up to the walls of Carthage.

  We landed that night with the twinkling lights of Hippo in the distance and the smell of their fires in our nostrils.

  In the morning, when the sun rose, we saw that her harbour was full of ships.

  Full of ships.

  Dionysus turned and hugged his helmsman. Most of the men on our ship hugged Geaeta.

  Sixteen ships, though. We’d chased a gazelle, and caught a lion.

  20

  The Bay of Hippo stretches a good sixty stades from promontory to promontory, forming a superb natural harbour with shelving beaches running into the fertile lands above. The ‘city’ is really three or four communities all the way around the half-moon curve: there’s a fishing village, a sailor’s village with wine shops and an entrepreneurial agora, there’s a fine town with walls and homes for the rich, and there’s a slave town that stretches along the downwind side of the beach. If I keep telling this story, I’ll eventually tell you how I came to know Hippo and Carthage so well, but for the moment, just take my word for it.

  Top up my wine, lad. Ah! Lesbian wine. When it crosses my lips, I feel young again.

  Where was I? Ah.

  We sighted the Carthaginian tin fleet.

  Dionysus was a ship’s-length ahead of me. We were under oars, the wind heading us as it had for ten days. There was a commotion aboard my ship, and Doola came aft to tell me that Dionysus was standing on his stern platform and asking for me.

  I ran forward along the gangway. I ordered the marines into their armour as I went. My heart beat fast, and my old – well, let’s call it what it is, eh? – my old greed for glory was suddenly there.

  So much for maturity.

  I ran onto the bow platform. Dionysus hailed me from his stern and bellowed, ‘Let’s take them!’

  Even as he called, he was turning his ship.

  Megakles was following him, and the oars were in perfect order, with Doola sounding the time as Seckla put him in his thorax.

  I stood on tiptoe on the bow rail for a long breath.

  The enemy ships were not in supporting range. Why would they be? They were a day out from home in a Carthaginian port, not in the face of the enemy. And who had ten warships to come after their fleet?

  We had five.

  Their warships were mostly clustered at the western end of the crescent. The seven big tin freighters were three stades farther east, opposite the agora. It was early morning, well before the hour when a gentleman puts on his chlamys and wanders down to the agora. Only slaves are awake at such an hour.

  And pirates.

  I scratched my beard, took another breath and raised my fist.

  ‘Let’s take them!’ I roared back.

  Behind me, on my own deck, the rowers grunted in unison and there was a rumbling – of approval, I hoped.

  I’m not usually one for speaking when going into action, but I ran amidships and stood by the mainmast.

  ‘Listen, philoi! The whole treasure of Carthage lies under our rams, and all we have to do is take it. Some of you have your own quarrel with Carthage. Some of you would like to be rich. There’s five hundred ingots of tin over there, maybe more. Enough for every man here to buy a farm and twenty slaves to work it for him.’

  My maths may have been weak. But they cheered.

  ‘But they aren’t weak, the men of Carthage. So listen carefully for orders, and when we board, I want every man coming with a roar. Right? Here we go.’

  It was something like that. They roared, and on the ships behind, Gaius and Neoptolymos probably said something similar.

  We rowed. I was not willing to use my rower’s energy yet, and Dionysus must have been of a similar mind, so we rowed at a walking pace in line ahead. Dionysus was first, and I was second; Neoptolymos third, Teukes fourth. Vasileos had our round ship, and Daud, who had seen plenty of sea time, had asked to be placed in command of Hasdrubal’s pentekonter. He had a difficult job. We put two-dozen good oarsmen into his ship and took the hardest cases out, but the pentekonter was always sagging behind – a slow, old ship. That’s how Hasdrubal had ended up, and well deserved, too.

  At any rate, we pulled into the east wind, and as we closed with the westernmost part of the convoy – the tin ships – we saw men waking up, running down the beach, pointing at us, and so on.

  I had all the time in the world to put on my gleaming, magnificent new panoply. I walked along my catwalk, feeling rather like Ares come to life. Men reached out to touch me. That’s praise.

  The enemy warships were coming awake.

 
; Men were pouring down the sand, working like Titans to get those ships off. The round merchantmen were anchored out, with their round stone anchors holding them near the beach.

  I watched them all. As usual with a fight, everything seemed to be moving very slowly – right up until the moment when everything would suddenly go very fast. Our surprise was slipping away, and I began to wonder if we’d have been better to come in at ramming speed and try to crush the enemy triremes where they lay. But it was too late for that, now.

  Doola came up next to me, bow in hand. He looked under his hand at the merchantmen.

  ‘I want you and Seckla and ten men of your choosing to go into that one,’ I said, choosing the third ship out from the beach. ‘Put her sails up and get into the offing. And then run for Massalia.’

  He looked at the warships. ‘You might need every man,’ he said.

  ‘I might. But I’m not aiming for a heroic last stand,’ I grinned. ‘Just take it and run. Pick up Vasileos and Daud as you go.’

  He nodded. ‘You think it is a trap?’

  ‘Nope,’ I said. I could feel the strength in my sword arm. ‘I think we’ve bitten off more than we could possibly chew.’

  We didn’t bother to ram the merchants – we wanted them intact. My Lydia shaved alongside my chosen victim, my starboard side oars in and across in perfect order, and my archers watched their rigging while my marines went up a ladder and across from our standing mainmast to theirs. Boarding from the mast was one of Dionysus’ tricks. It had a number of advantages, and in this case, where we really had reason to fear a trap, even a handful of men well above the enemy deck allowed us some security. A merchant’s sides are much higher than a trireme’s, which makes boarding difficult and dangerous. A merchantman packed with soldiers would make a tough target and a perfect trap.

  But not that day.

  Our men stormed aboard as cleanly as they might have in a drill – better, because their blood was up. The ship’s keeper – the only man aboard – jumped over the side and swam for shore.

  Doola crossed over with his chosen volunteers. Too late, I realized that Seckla was taking Geaeta. I saw her run up the boarding plank, long shins flashing in the early summer sun.