Poseidon's Spear (Long War 3)

by Christian Cameron

  Of course, tin-mining yields silver. Any smith knows as much.

  But I suppose we’d never really thought about it.

  It was past the summer feast when we landed in Syracusa. We entered the port in a squadron: three warships in the lead, three merchantmen in the centre and three more warships astern. Syracusa had seen much larger fleets, of course, but not many with Carthaginian captures so blatantly displayed.

  Within an hour of landing, both Anarchos and Gelon had sent me messages requesting that I attend them.

  While Doola sat in his warehouse and sold our new fortune in tin, I walked up the steep streets in my best cloak and entered Anarchos’s house. His slaves were as well mannered as ever.

  I sat opposite him on a couch, and drank excellent wine. He had just been for exercise and was covered in oil, which made him look younger.

  ‘Still the hero, I see,’ he said, after a pause.

  I remember grinning. The fight at Hippo had restored something to me. Something I’m not sure I ever knew was missing. But the word ‘hero’ was not, I think, misplaced. I had tried to be a man. I hankered for the warmth of human contact – for a wife and a shop to work bronze.

  But what paltry things they were – love, friendship – next to the feeling in the moment when the lead enemy warship turned away from me. Any of you understand?

  ‘Lydia is ready to leave,’ he said. ‘Gelon is about to discard her.’ He shrugged. ‘She is not a natural courtesan. Do you ever know regret, hero?’

  I writhed at his tone. ‘Yes,’ I said.

  He nodded heavily. ‘Me too.’ He sat up on his couch. ‘Let us try and give her another life, eh?’

  ‘The crime lord and the pirate?’ I asked.

  He laughed bitterly.

  ‘You love her,’ I said.

  ‘Oh, yes,’ he said.

  Men are complex, are they not? But this is my tale, not his.

  I walked up the town, a little drunk and very maudlin. I walked into the street of armourers, and stopped at Anaxsikles’ shop.

  He was standing in the back, staring at a helmet, shaking his head.

  He showed it to me.

  ‘Beautiful, as usual,’ I said.

  He shook his head. ‘Look more closely,’ he said.

  It was true. Under careful inspection, the left eyehole was slightly lower than the right.

  ‘Apprentice?’ I asked.

  He shook his head. And sat. ‘I think my eyes are going,’ he confessed. And burst into tears.

  It was that kind of day.

  ‘Would you marry Lydia, if she was available?’ I said.

  He looked up. ‘What?’ he asked.

  ‘Lydia. If she was available – if I could carry the two of you to another city, where you could be a citizen – a full citizen, with voting rights. Would you go, and marry her?’

  He looked at me. ‘Why?’ he asked.

  I shrugged. ‘I helped ruin her. So did . . . another man. We are willing to make good our error.’

  He looked around. ‘Leaving home . . . my mother, my father.’ He looked at me. ‘But, yes. I’d walk across my lit forge to have her.’

  Just for a moment, I had a flare of pure, brutal jealousy.

  ‘Let me try to make this happen,’ I said. ‘If it will work, I will send you word. We will leave very suddenly – I don’t think that Gelon will be happy to lose you. Or me, for that matter.’ I smiled. ‘Or even Lydia. It might be tomorrow. It might be the end of summer.’

  He nodded. ‘You’ve made my day.’

  That made me happier.

  ‘How was the armour?’ he asked.

  ‘Like Hephaestos himself made it,’ I said.

  He made a gesture of aversion. ‘Don’t say that!’ he groaned. ‘That’s the kind of talk that makes the gods angry.’

  Gelon wanted to hear about our fight. And demanded a tenth of the profits. In many ways, Gelon and Anarchos resembled one another. In the end, I got him to settle for a lump sum in silver – forty silver talents. A fortune.

  I went back to Anarchos and informed him. Of everything – the payment to Gelon, the bronze-smith’s wedding plans.

  Anarchos sat sullenly and drank. ‘I am old,’ he said bitterly. ‘I would marry her and take her to another city. But she would never have me – who would?’

  What could I say?

  I left him to his bitterness.

  The next day, we paid off our debts in the city and filled our merchant ships with food and mercenaries – almost a hundred men hired off the docks. I picked up a dozen Nubian archers being sold as labourers – fool of a slave-master. I got them at labour prices. I bought back their weapons from another dealer and put them in armour. Their leader was Ka, and he was taller than some houses, as thin as a sword blade and he could draw a Scythian bow to his mouth as if it were a child’s bow. Ka’s lads were very pleased to be bought, in that I promised them their freedom and wages in the immediate future.

  Doola had turned our tin into gold. But if we paid off our oarsmen, they’d never be seen again. So we made a single payment that night, about one-twentieth what every man had coming. Doola gave them a fine speech – more than a thousand men standing by torchlight on the beach between the quays on the Syracusan waterfront – and he told them how much money they had coming at the end of the Illyrian expedition, and exactly why we weren’t paying in full until that trip was over.

  I suppose they might have rioted. But money – lots of money – has a magical quality. It is often better in the offing than in reality, and no one knows that as well as a sailor.

  Gaius and Neoptolymos, Daud and Sittonax, Vasileos and Megakles and Doola and Seckla and I all lay on couches that night, with twenty more men – Anchises, red-faced and too loud, and Ka, shining black and deeply versed, it appeared, in Aegyptian lore, debating with Doola.

  Gaius rolled over to me, probably to avoid having to watch Geaeta and Seckla on the next couch. But he met my eye and we laughed like boys. He held out a silver wine cup and tapped it against mine.

  ‘I guess this is the last time,’ he said. ‘It is time I grew up and became a rich fuck on a farm.’

  I shrugged. ‘You were doing well enough this spring when we found you,’ I said.

  Gaius rolled his eyes. ‘That is what worries me. Rome is such a backwater. When we put Neoptolymos on his throne, you’ll go back to Athens.’

  ‘Plataea,’ I corrected, automatically.

  ‘And we’ll never see you again,’ he said.

  ‘Oh, the sea’s not that wide,’ I joked.

  He nodded. ‘Well,’ he said, ‘here’s to the last of youth.’

  I drank to that, because I shared the sentiment. I was thirty-one years old. Not bad, you think. But that’s quite old for a warrior.

  Hah! Little did I know what the gods had in store.

  We were pretty drunk when the pais came. He was ten or eleven – pretty enough, if that sort of thing is to your taste. He bowed deeply and held out a scroll tube to me.

  Lydia is at my house. She awaits her transport. It should not be you. She expressed the deepest gratitude to me that I had found her a husband.

  I regret that I will not be here to attend you. I will not see you again, I fear, so I offer you this boy as a token of my regard – you mentioned yours had died.

  Through the fumes of wine, I had to read the note three times.

  Then I sent the boy to fetch Anaxsikles. I was half sober by the time he came, and sent him to fetch his bride from Anarchos.

  I begged Doola to carry them to Croton for me. He accepted gravely, and embraced me.

  I confess that I stood in a doorway near the ship, and watched Anaxsikles bring her down to the shore. The only skiff was loading the archers. He picked her up, and she snuggled her head into his shoulder. He carried her out into the water and handed her up to the sailors on the deck, and then leaped up into the round ship’s waist, and she put her arms around his neck.

  Bah. Why do I tell this?
>
  More wine.

  Doola sailed long before dawn. I suspected that Gelon would be none too happy when he found out that his smith and his mistress were gone, so I ordered my drunken, orgiastic crews rounded up. We were a surly, vicious pack of scoundrels in the first light of dawn. My new boy wanted me to come with him to Anarchos’s house to fetch his belongings. He also insisted that he was free, not a slave, and that I should ask Anarchos.

  The crime lord lived close enough to the water that it was the matter of a few minutes to go there. And I wanted to tell him that she was away.

  I suppose I hadn’t read his letter closely enough.

  The pais found him. He wasn’t in his andron – that’s where Lydia had waited for Anaxsikles. The andron smelled of her. I slammed my fist into a wall. If you don’t understand why, well, good for you.

  But in the back, near the courtyard, he lay on top of his sword, which he’d wedged between two paving stones. He was quite dead.

  Men are complex. To my lights, he died well, and was a man I could, if not admire, at least – call a friend. Here’s to his shade.

  We got to sea before the sun was high. My new pais cried and cried. I am fairly certain he believed that Anarchos was his father.

  And perhaps he was.

  His name was Hector.

  Ah, you smile! Yes, Hector. Finally, he comes into our story.

  Doola was gone over the horizon, and I confess I had a million fears that day, that the Carthaginians would snatch up his ship. Only in the cold, clear light of day did I realize that his ship held Lydia, Anaxsikles and all our treasure, and I had sent it off unguarded.

  Men are fools.

  But the gods watch over drunkards and fools.

  We lay that night on a beach north of Katania, and the next night we evaded the whirlpool and crossed over to Rhegium. Doola was a day ahead of us, which suited me. We made the beautiful beaches of Rhegium in mid-afternoon, and when the setting sun gilded Mount Aetna over on the Sicilian side that night, we were already in the waterfront tavernas. I sat with Gaius. I was poor company.

  A single trireme came in, with a small merchant ship trailing astern, making tacks to get in under wind power. The ship was well handled, and the longer I watched it, the more convinced I was that it was Giannis.

  The trireme was Athenian. I could see that by its light construction, the way it moved – how low it was to the water. A warship. A shark.

  The warship landed first. A crew really shows itself in landing: a well-conducted ship spins end for end a stade offshore and backs into the beach. It’s not a tricky manoeuvre, for a veteran crew, but it always shows a crew’s skills.

  This ship was beautifully handled. Not just the helmsman, but the oarsmen. Mine were good. These were better.

  A pleasure to watch them.

  ‘I’m going to go and praise that man,’ I said, pointing at the new arrival.

  Gaius nodded. ‘Beautiful,’ he admitted. ‘Does this mean we have to do more drill?’

  ‘You’ll miss Dionysus, when you are watching your slaves plough your fields,’ I laughed. It was my first laugh in eight hours.

  We wandered down to watch the new arrival. His oarsmen were already buying food from the farmers who hastened down to the beach – sacks of charcoal were being bargained for, and the braziers were already coming out of the bilges.

  The man with his back to me, dickering with the local farmers, looked familiar.

  He turned just as I came up, and we saw each other.

  Cimon.

  We threw our arms around each other and hugged, slapped each other’s backs and hugged again. This went on for a long, long time.

  In fact, I cried.

  Look, thugater. I’m crying now.

  ‘You bastard! You said to meet you in Massalia!’ Paramanos hugged me, too, there on the beach at Croton. I tried not to look at the town. We were on the beach for the night, and Dano sent her greetings and a gift of wine. There were two more black ships on that beach – Paramanos’s, Black Raven, and Harpagos’s Storm Cutter.

  Friends . . . friends are men who, when they think that you are dead, will come halfway around the world because you ask them, and because they want so much to believe that you are alive. I hadn’t seen these men since – well, since the beach of Marathon, almost eight years before. There were a dozen Athenians I knew – there, for example, was Aeschylus, who fought in the front rank at Marathon and at Lades; there was Phrynicus’ young nephew, Aristides. Harpagos, my former right hand, was still a lisping islander, as strong as an ox, with the beginnings of grey in his beard. Mauros, my helmsman. Come to think of it, Paramanos got his start as a helmsman, too. Start with us, that is. He was Cyrenian, and had fought for the Phoenicians before I took him in the sea fight off Cyprus back in the Ionian War.

  ‘That’s a new ship,’ I said, pointing at Storm Cutter. My old Storm Cutter was a heavy Phoenician capture. Heh! I took her and Paramanos in the same sweep of my spear.

  ‘The original is firewood,’ he said. ‘Athens has a fleet, now – not a dozen vessels from rich men, either. We have more than a hundred hulls. Aegina—’ He laughed aloud. ‘Aegina isn’t a naval power any more.’

  Young Aristides nodded vehemently. ‘Athens is a better place for the common man,’ he said, with all the arrogant pomposity of the young.

  Had I ever been that young?

  ‘Anyone been to Plataea?’ I asked.

  There was some shuffling of feet.

  I introduced my friends of the last six years to my friends from Athens. Seckla was abashed, for a while – Gaius, on the other hand, kept looking at Cimon, chuckling, and saying, ‘So you really are Miltiades’ son?’

  I suppose they might not have got on – Cimon was the son of a hundred generations of Eupatridae, and Seckla was a Numidian former slave; Daud was worse, an out-and-out barbarian, and Sittonax didn’t even like to speak Greek.

  However, piracy is its own brotherhood. I listened with half an ear as Harpagos poured out the tale of Athens’ war with Aegina, and Themistocles’ daring political manoeuvre, by which he took the profits of the new silver mine and bought Athens a public fleet. Next to the reforms of Cleisthenes, it was the greatest political revolution in Athenian history. If Cleisthenes gave all the middle-men – the hundred-mythemnoi men – a noble ancestor and the right to think themselves aristocrats and fight in the phalanx, so Themistocles bought Athens a fleet, and gave all the little men – free citizens, but without franchise – a weapon as mighty as the spear. He gave them the oar.

  Nowadays, we take it for granted that every Athenian thetis is a rower. Athens rules the waves, from here to the delta of Alexandria and across the seas to Syracusa, too. But in those years between Marathon and the next stage in the Long War, Athens was just feeling her way as a power.

  I watched as Gaius began to talk to Cimon about raising horses, and Doola found common cause with Harpagos on the subject of trade. Seckla stood nervously with his attractive courtesan – a woman who couldn’t resist male attention and suddenly had a beach full of it. But in time, Mauros – my former oar-master, and fellow hero of Lade – started to talk, first to Doola, and then to Seckla, and then they were all talking to Paramanos – four Africans on a beach full of Greeks.

  Aristides the Younger was amazed to meet an actual Keltoi barbarian, and managed not to sound as condescending as he might have. The fires roared, the wine was excellent and as darkness fell, and I was apologizing to Cimon for the fiftieth time that I wasn’t with his father at the end, Dano herself came down the beach with a dozen of her friends.

  ‘It is like having the battle of Marathon brought to my town,’ she said. ‘So many famous men. Ari – in truth, my friend, when first you told me you were Arimnestos of Plataea, I thought you one of those men who lie habitually.’

  Cimon was deeply pleased to meet the daughter of the great Pythagoras. He bowed – Greeks seldom bow – and was allowed to kiss her cheek, very Italian and not very Greek, and h
e actually blushed. So did Giannis, who had come with Cimon from Massalia.

  Aeschylus just stood there, drinking it all in.

  ‘How is Aristides?’ I asked, when chance threw us together.

  ‘You mean, the real one?’ he asked, raising an annoyed eyebrow at Phrynicus’ graceless nephew.

  I smiled.

  ‘He’s a great man, now. He and Themistocles are rivals – enemies, really. I’m not sure if they don’t hate each other worse than either one hates the Persians. Aristides has inherited the Eupatridae – he leads the oligarchs.’ Aeschylus shrugged.

  ‘What? Aristides the Just?’ I shook my head.

  ‘Politics in Athens is different, my friend. Themistocles has raised up the thetis, and he’ll end up giving them the right to serve on juries – mark my words – and that will be the end of us.’ Aeschylus was an old-fashioned man, despite his relative youth.

  Of course, looking at them, I realized that my friends were ageing as fast as I was myself.

  That was a shock.

  Aeschylus had grey in his beard. Harpagos had a white mark – the scar of a Persian arrow from Lade – in his beard, but his hair was getting grey, too. And to see Dionysus talk to Cimon – Dionysus had been our trierarch at Lade; Cimon and I had been mere ship’s commanders. Now we commanded squadrons, and Dionysus, I could see, was quite old. Perhaps fifty. A decade younger than I am right now.

  I’d watched him put a Carthaginian marine down, just recently. He wasn’t that old.

  But we weren’t any younger, and I couldn’t help but notice that the annoying Aristides the Younger was the age I’d been at Sardis.

  Seventeen.

  Zeus. I’m lucky I was allowed to live. So cocky. So sure.

  For the first time that night, I watched older men – proven men, men of unquestioned worth. I wondered, when the young men competed on the beach – on Chios, or again at Lade – I wondered how many older men watched me, and thought I was an arrogant pup and too young to know any better?

  Age. Your turn will come, my young friends.

  But enough. It was a great night – so many friends. Such laughter, such wine; and we were not so very old, either.