by Hal Clement
Nimshi didn’t seem to mind this trouble, though it annoyed Sargon. The Judean seemed to feel that since the fleet was going to the land he wanted anyway there would be no trouble in finding the place, and as long as they had Gizona there would be no trouble in finding their way back. Besides, they might not want to come back-certainly not to any place where Pharoah Niku might find them.
The efforts of Nimshi and Sargon to make friends in the various drinking places had been quite successful, they claimed. Gizona had seen them in action once or twice when his own activities took him near a tavern, and he was sure that they were at least having a good time. He supposed that if enough of their acquaintances also enjoyed themselves there might be some chance of the Judean’s plan succeeding. So far, though, there had been no mention of enlisting with any particular group. Gizona rather wondered how the money was holding out, since the soldiers had not been getting pay from anyone. Prices were quite high at the shipyard, yet the three ate well at the inn and the two men drank well elsewhere for week after week. The boy was sure they were not stealing money, or he would have heard about it-not that he didn’t hear of robberies enough, but he was always able to get enough detail to convince him that his masters were not involved. He decided that Nimshi must have taken a tremendous amount of silver from his former captain.
Then something happened which took Gizona’s thoughts away from such matters as money.
It was within a month of sailing time. The ships were finished; some had even been floated, and lay at anchor in the gulf. Several large bodies of troops had arrived, mostly Greeks; some of these were to man the galleys and the rest were guarding the royal property which lay waiting to be loaded in the merchant ships. The crews were all present, some sleeping on their ships but most still ashore. The captains no longer stood around in idle talk; they were either on their ships or in offices ashore, and in either case were busily issuing orders. Occasionally they came together for meetings, and Gizona decided that he really should listen to some of these.
At first he tried to sneak up to one of the rough huts where the captains were gathered, but he never got close. There were guards, and they were wide awake. They chased Gizona, and several other boys who tried the same thing, away from the neighborhood with kicks and blows-one of the boys was caught and beaten so badly that he could hardly walk for several days. That started a feud between the boys and the soldiers, and for some time thereafter the men suffered as a result-it is quite uncomfortable to find sand in one’s food as a regular thing, and very annoying to have extremely dead fish in every hard-to-find corner of a camp site.
None of this helped Gizona with his eavesdropping, however; he had no luck there until the captains, who were growing more and more secretive, began to hold their meetings on shipboard. They may have meant this to keep intruders away, and they certainly had guards on the ship; but a slim twelve-year-old can hide in an unbelievably small place, and the deck of a ship carries lots of articles such as coils of trope and casks. Gizona swam out to the ship after dark, knowing perfectly well from the other boys that all the captains were aboard and perfectly sure they were having a secret meeting. In addition to her usual bow anchor the merchantman had two others, so he had a choice of routes to the deck. He waited in the quiet water, listening for footsteps to tell him where the sentries might be, but after several minutes of silence he had detected nothing and decided to take a chance. He went up the rope like a monkey, stopped with his head just below the gunwale, and cautiously lifted himself until he could see over. The deck was badly cluttered, which was good; he could see no sentries, which might or might not be good. Remembering an incident many months before, he looked up the mast to the lookout’s nest, and was relieved to see it empty. Making up his mind and his courage simultaneously, he wormed his way over the side and dropped behind a cask, where he lay silently for some minutes. There was no cry of alarm, and no one appeared suddenly to surprise him as Nimshi and Sargon had done so long ago on the Carthaginian galley. He was tensed to hurl himself back overside if anything of the sort occurred, but after a few minutes he relaxed and began to consider his next move.
He knew the construction of the ship, of course; he had seen it in various stages of building. She was big-a good hundred and twenty feet long, and nearly forty broad. There was only the single deck; nothing corresponded to the poop and forecastle of her descendants a few centuries later. Gizona had expected to find the meeting in progress somewhere on the deck, but there was nothing of the sort. The captains appeared to have gone below. They must really want this meeting to be secret.
That created another problem. To go below, he would have to use a hatch, and there would almost certainly be sentries at those. There was no other way below; the Phoenicians considered portholes below deck as a danger to a heavily laden ship. After some minutes’ thought, it occurred to the boy that he might be able to hear through the deck; it was well planked, but not caulked as carefully as were the sides. It was worth trying, anyway, and he began to crawl carefully from one bit of cover to the next, applying his ear to any cracks he found. For some time he heard nothing; the space below decks was divided, as he well knew, into several compartments, and he would have to be over the right one to do himself much good. He heard no voices-and, to his great surprise, met no guards-until he had covered almost the full length of the great vessel and was in the narrow region of deck just back of the blunt bow.
Here he suddenly heard-suddenly, and clearly. For a moment he huddled motionless, making sure that the speakers were the ones he wanted; then he heard a name mentioned which he recognized as that of one of the captains, and was satisfied. He made himself as comfortable as he could under the circumstances and settled down to file the conversation in his memory.
"Hasdrubal, you need not worry," was the sentence which had satisfied him that he was listening to the right men. It went on, "Your ship is not just a tender; we are all carrying the same sort of cargo. Until now only the Admiral, Captains Bomilcar and David, and I have known the entire story of this trip. You thought you were losing your share of the trading venture when your ship was loaded almost entirely with provisions, and supposed that the rest of us were getting more than our fair amount of trade goods. It is not so. Now that sailing is so near, Pharoah’s representative has given permission to tell the whole truth to the captains-but it must go no farther until we are at sea. I am allowed to tell you now only because the voyage is more dangerous than the one you bargained for, and Pharoah wishes you to have the chance to withdraw if you wish."
"If we withdraw now, when the voyage is still supposed to be secret, what will happen to us?" asked one of the captains.
"I’ll understand you will be kept under guard until after the fleet sails, then released. Pharoah will bear no ill will, according to the officer he sent with this information."
The other gave a dry chuckle. "I think I’ll agree to go along right now, just the same," he said. "I have nothing against Pharoah Niku, who is as good a master as I have ever served, but kings sometimes get rid of dangers in the quickest way.”
The first speaker made no direct answer to this, but Gizona could imagine him shrugging his shoulders. "The journey is not just to Punt, but farther. It is not a trading journey. To state it quickly, Pharoah desires to know how big the land of Africa may be; and we are to sail as far along it as may be possible, and not return until we have gone around Africa, if it should be surrounded by sea, or around the sea into which this one leads, if it should prove to be surrounded by land. If the latter is true, we will return to this gulf without having turned back on our course; if the former, these ships will do what no ship before ever did— start from the Red Sea and come at last to anchor at the city of Sai on the Nile!"
CHAPTER 12
If there was any surprise among the captains at this announcement, Gizona did not notice it; he was too surprised himself. This would call for a lot of thinking, he realized— then decided that the thinking had bette
r be done later; there was more being said below deck, and much of it might be useful. He placed his ear against the planks once more.
"— is why most of the cargo in all our ships is food. That’s what we’ll need most, since no one knows how far we will have to go."
"But men have sailed far to the south on the African coast."
"Of course. Who knows that better than we? Our ships have gone many months journey that way, and returned with riches. Niku does not know that, though he may have heard of Solomon’s fleet. Our real problem is not the journey, but how much of it we are to report to Pharoah. We know the coast farther than any Egyptian; we have maintained profitable trade with it for many years; what will happen to our profit if Niku hears of these lands?"
"What is our profit for this voyage anyway, if we are not trading?" cut in another voice.
"Niku is paying. That part is settled; have no fear for your profit, if you live.”
A slower voice, which Gizona recognized as belonging to the oldest of the captains, made itself heard.
"The problem is really threefold, as I understand it. Since there will be the two galleys, full of soldiers who are not our own people, we cannot stop at any of our posts in the far south without Niku’s finding out about them. We cannot stop short of those posts without forfeiting his reward. We cannot go past them without— "
"Without doing exactly what he wants!" interrupted the first speaker. "I say that is just what we should do. It is a shame to Tyre that for more than fifty years no captain has gone farther down the African coast than his grandfather did. Why not go on? There must be lands beyond, with people living in them; and where people live, people trade."
"Some people trade in foreigner’s skulls," remarked a captain drily.
"That’s a chance we all take." Again Gizona could imagine the shrug of the speaker’s shoulders. "I say again, the only question is not how far we go, but how much of our discoveries we report to Pharoah."
"What do the masters in Tyre say?"
"There has been no chance to inform them and ask their opinions, and there will be none before we sail. We are on our own in this matter. The Admiral knows this, and has agreed that we should make the decision."
"That is correct." Gizona recognized the voice of Admiral Tennes, commander of the fleet.
"I move that we make no decision until we know what there may be to report," said the slow-voiced elder. "Since all who are concerned will be with us, I see no need to bind ourselves with a decision before we sail."
There was a murmur of agreement, then the Admiral spoke again.
"That is true. However, we should either agree on what to report or on the method of decision to be used later; you well know what happens to acts wherein the contract is not clear. Nothing worse can happen to a fleet, or a ship, than to have its officers disagree on a fundamental point after it is too late for anyone to withdraw. If we are all going, we must all either reach the decision Captain Hanno has mentioned or else appoint one man irrevocably to hold the casting vote in case we cannot agree later."
"One man-and his successor."
"Of course, Captain David."
"Then I nominate the Admiral, with Captain Bomilcar as his successor should he no longer be with us to decide." This was in a flat voice that Gizona had not heard before that evening, though he knew the speaker, of course.
"Motion seconded."
"Do any wish to speak?" No one did.
"Let all who wish it so show their hands. It is so ordered. Any objecting to this order must speak now, or lose the right to speak later." No one objected.
"Then we shall sail as Pharoah orders, go as far to the south as we can; and when it is decided that we can go no farther we decide what shall be reported to Egypt. In making that decision," the chairman added in a less formal tone, "we must bear in mind the galleys which accompany us. They will bear Niku’s foreign soldiers-men we could never trust to keep secrets we wanted kept."
"They will be commanded by captains of Tyre," said the Admiral. "If necessary, that fact may be used to our advantage."
"There are other methods that might also be used." Captain David was the speaker. "It is sometimes worth while at the sale to have one’s own man do a little bidding from among the crowd. Should there be a foreign soldier or two devoted to our interests on one or both of the galleys, convenient accidents might happen. After all, many foreigners are reluctant to take orders from Phoenician captains, and we might find the galleys lost to us at just the wrong moment if we depended on the captains alone."
"There is something to be said for that. However, there is the problem of finding such men. Pharoah takes steps to insure the loyalty of the foreigners he hires, and if one of his soldiers reported that we were trying to bribe him the results would be unfortunate."
"True enough," replied David. "There may be a way out, however. Not all the soldiers in this town belong to Niku, it may be. Months ago some of us met a pair of Asians coming from the Nile country in search of a crew position on this voyage, which they like everyone else thought was to get the gold of the south. I would not trust either of them as far as I could throw a ship’s anchor, and if Niku’s officers are as smart as I think they are they would never have hired either one. If they are still in the town and haven’t been executed yet, we might find a use for them."
"If you can’t trust them, what use would they be?"
Gizona wished he could see David’s expression as he answered. "I don’t trust the wind, but I use it. More to the point, perhaps, one does not trust the oar-slaves on a galley, but one uses them."
"Very well; I see you have a plan. I move that Captain David be entrusted with the task of finding and securing the services of these men, or others whom he deems useful in the same way. I suppose he will have to take them onto his own ship, since we can do little about the galley crews."
The move was seconded and voted as the other had been. Gizona was hoping to hear more about Captain David’s plans, since it was obvious that the men he had in mind were Sargon and Nimsh; but if the captain said anything about the matter the boy had no chance to hear it.
Just as the voting was coming to an end his attention was distracted by a hard, cruelly painful grip on the nape of his neck. He was plucked from the deck the way a boy might have picked up a puppy, and dangled helplessly in the hand of a man who proved to be larger than Sargon. Gizona was swung around to face his captor, so the size of the fellow was no secret. His clothing and language proved him a Phoenician, which was hardly surprising under the circumstances. His first words brought some relief to the frightened boy, though.
"You young imps think you can go where you please and do what you want, don’t you?" the fellow growled. "I’ll teach you that you don’t come out and sleep on ships just to get away from the flies. If I had my way you’d be strung from a masthead as an example to the rest."
"But-but you’re not going to do it?" Gizona had trouble talking, though the hard fingers were under his ears rather than in his windpipe.
"Maybe. It’s up to the captain. Usually I just throw people like you back overboard, but tonight the captain said that anyone found aboard was to be brought to him. Maybe you’re lucky, and on the other hand maybe you'll wish I’d dealt with you. Come on; we'll find out." The fellow strode toward a nearby hatchway, Gizona still dangling helplessly and almost too dazed with pain to think.
For a moment he was relieved, being sure that none of the captains would treat him very roughly; then another thought struck him. One of the captains below was David. While several months had passed since the trip from the Bitter Lakes, David had evidently remembered Sargon and Nimshi from that trip. It was too much to expect that he would not remember Gizona also-at least, so Gizona himself felt; he still found it hard to comprehend the forgetting ability of ordinary people.
Assuming that the captain would recognize him, it would be ridiculous to expect him not to put two and two together. He would regard Gizona as a spy, a
cting for his two masters: the Phoenicians had said much in the last few minutes that they would not want spread around. They would handle the situation in the simplest way; Gizona would be dropped quietly overboard, with a broken neck to keep him from swimming ashore with his information, and in the morning the Phoenicians would hire someone to cut the throats of Sargon and Nimshi, just to make sure. The fact that the men they hired might have trouble earning their money would not do Gizona any good by that time.
It was, he thought ruefully as his captor dragged him down the hatch, the same business that Nimshi had warned him of before. Gizona had been looking cheerfully at the power he had just gained over both his masters and the Phoenicians; this had been the first information he had picked up which he felt worth holding for his own use. Scarcely had he started gloating over the possibilities when this fellow had caught him; he had been neglecting defence, as Nimshi had said.
But recognizing his mistake did not help in correcting it. He had only moments before the whole palace of possibilities would collapse in ruin; whatever he tried could be tried only once, not even that, unless he did it quickly.