by Tom Holt
I found that I was turning the old smith’s story into a protagonist’s speech, for a play called The Long Sufferer or something like that. The plot would come later, or maybe there wouldn’t be the usual sort of plot, all politics and the usual jokes. That didn’t matter so much; it could just be a play about this extraordinary lucky-and-unlucky man, and how he saw the world, how it was unbelievably cruel to everyone else and unbelievably kind to him. I sat there and built that speech like you would build a wall, first one layer, then another one on top of it; or a pile of apples which has been heaped up too much, and the slave keeps on putting on more and more, so that you stand there waiting for it to collapse, but it doesn’t. It was a good speech, as funny as anything I had ever done, and as I heaped misfortune on to misfortune for this extraordinary character of mine, I forgot completely where I was or what was happening.
Then a taxiarch was standing over me and shouting something, and he wouldn’t go away, so I picked up my helmet and my shield and went where he told me to go, still hammering out the words of my speech, like the slaves at the mint hammering coins and tossing them into jars. I joined a long queue of men leading to a ship, and I got the impression that the army was being embarked for a big sea-battle, to fight as marines. But just as I was coming to the head of the queue they shouted out that there was no more room; so I sat down on my helmet again and got back to work. I was left in peace for a while, then someone else pushed me into another line of men. I lifted my head after a while and looked out over the harbour, as I groped in my mind for an article of clothing that scanned long-long-short, and saw our fleet moving out from the shore. All the ships were riding very low in the water, and every inch of them was crammed with soldiers. I commanded my mind to hold the speech and started to count the ships, for I had never seen so big a fleet in all my life. There were a hundred and ten.
Nicias appeared from somewhere and started to make a speech to us. He explained briefly what was happening; he had embarked as many men as possible on the ships, and they would try and break down the barrier the Syracusans had put across the mouth of the harbour. If they succeeded they would disembark and the ships would come back for us, and we would all go to Catana. If they failed, we would have to go to Catana on foot.
Then he started talking about honour and our city and freedom and so on, and my mind was just about to wander back to my speech when someone yelled out that the Syracusans were setting sail, and we all craned our necks to see what was going on. Out by the mouth of the harbour we could see the enemy fleet, and there seemed to be a depressingly large number of them, fanning out like the fingers of a hand.
‘Oh, for God’s sake,’ someone shouted, ‘they’re sailing straight into them.’
He was right. Our ships just went ploughing on, while the Syracusans opened up to receive them. I think Demosthenes (who was commanding) reckoned he could split the enemy in two, break the barrier, and get out into the open sea, where he would be able to turn. The enemy would follow, and he would turn quicker than they expected and be on to them before they could form. It was a typically daring Demosthenean plan, but it was obvious that it wasn’t going to work. The Syracusans were too strong to brush aside like that, and our fleet had started to move too late. The enemy ships closed round us like fingers round a stone, crushing our ships closer together. It was brilliant work on their part. At least forty of our ships were trapped in the middle of a huge block, utterly useless, while all the enemy ships were spread out like a net; their ninety ships were engaging only seventy of ours, and ours were jammed and unable to move. They were the rocks and the Syracusans were the waves. In that enclosed space, of course, all our superior skills and seamanship were useless; the Athenians are open-sea fighters and need masses of space to execute their dazzling turns and sail-throughs. But in the harbour it was solid demolition work, like a land-battle on sea. Now I assume Demosthenes had foreseen this, which is why he crammed the larger part of his land forces on to the ships; but of course that was useless too, since the bulk of his forces were trapped on the ships in the middle and could do nothing. But what was worst of all was the way the Syracusans were fighting this land-on-sea battle. The normal way these affairs go is for the opposing ships to grapple on to each other and board each other for an infantry fight. But the Syracusans had rigged up rawhide shields over their ships so that our grappling-hooks would simply slide off; they drew their ships up alongside ours, just far enough apart so that our soldiers couldn’t jump aboard their ships, and let loose volley after volley after volley of arrows, javelins and stones. There was absolutely nothing our men could do; there was nowhere for them to take cover since they were all packed tightly on to the ships like horses in a horse-transport. They stood there and the Syracusans shot them, clearing our ships one by one.
‘Somebody stop them, for God’s sake,’ shouted a man near me. ‘That’s not fighting, it’s just killing.’
For a while I couldn’t understand; then it started to make sense. It was basically the tactic Cleon had used at Pylos, when his light infantry with their slings and bows had conquered the invincible Spartan heavy infantry, who had no bows and so could not shoot back. I started to laugh, for it struck me as unbearably comic that our own cleverness should be used against us in this way, until somebody got very angry with me and threatened to kill me if I didn’t stop laughing. I tried to explain the joke to him, but he couldn’t grasp the point. Meanwhile, Demosthenes and his squadron had managed to break a hole in the ring of enemy ships and was running for the shore as fast as possible. The Athenian ships in the centre followed him as best they could, pouring out of the gap he had made like water out of a punctured skin; but the Syracusan reserves were waiting for them and hit them as they came out, and there was a quite awful mess until the Syracusan ring was broken somewhere else and ships started pouring out of there too. Because there was so little room for manoeuvre, particularly with empty or sinking ships all over the place, neither side was able to do anything much; there was just a horribly confused jam. It reminded me irresistibly of a net that has just been drawn up and landed in the bottom of a boat; and the ships were all the fish, heaped on top of each other and thrashing and wriggling furiously.
It seemed to go on like that for hours and hours. I don’t know what you would call it; it certainly wasn’t a sea-battle. The ships didn’t ram each other, they collided, and you could hear the oars being broken off, like the branches of a falling tree; and you could hear the screams of the oarsmen as the handles of their oars were driven back and through their bodies, or they were crushed against the side of the other ship. And then one of our ships would break free and make a dash for the shore, with half its oars broken, perhaps, or a great hole in its side; and our men on the shore would cheer it on so desperately that you imagined that if that one ship got away we would all be saved. And sometimes it made it to the shore, and sometimes a Syracusan ship would catch up with it and rake it with arrows, shooting the oarsmen dead at their oars, so that our ships would suddenly lose speed and come to a pathetic halt or drift round in a circle, struggling like a bird with a broken wing. And some of our ships managed to outrun their pursuers, broken oars and all, and dash across to where they thought they could see a force of Athenian infantry on the shore who would protect them; and they would flop up on to the beach like so many tunny-fish, only to discover that the men they had seen were Syracusans and not Athenians. When they discovered that, they didn’t even bother to fight, but simply allowed themselves to be cut down where they stood. And whenever one of our ships was lost, all the men round me would shriek and yell and throw themselves on the ground as if they were completely mad.
Eventually the Syracusans withdrew. I heard afterwards that they had run out of arrows and felt they could achieve nothing more. Our ships were able to limp back to the shore, and every single one of them had dead men on its decks. But just as the battle was dying away, we saw a Syracusan ship being driven towards us by two Athenians; it had somehow
got separated from the others and allowed our two to get behind it. The encounter between these ships was a remarkable sight, considering the wretched state they were all three of them in; it was like a fight I once saw between three decrepit old men, who hardly had enough life between them to keep from falling over; yet they were lashing out wildly at each other with their sticks and dealing their puny blows as if they were the Achaeans at Troy. As the ships drew nearer to us, the men around me fell silent, watching the attempts of the Syracusan to break away from its pursuers. For my part, I must confess, I wanted them to succeed, for I could make out the expressions on the Syracusans’ faces as they came close in to the shore trying to turn, and they looked so pitiful that I could see no earthly point in their being killed, now that everything had been so conclusively decided. But for once that day the Athenians prevailed, and the enemy ship, after several desperate attempts to turn, ran aground on the beach and was unable to move. As soon as it came to rest, the men around me let out the most ferocious whoop of pure pleasure that you could possibly imagine and splashed out into the shallow water. In a matter of minutes they had turned every man aboard that ship, living and dead, into so many cuts of butchers’ meat; including a couple of our Corcyrean allies, whom the Syracusans had fished out of the water earlier on. I distinctly heard these men yelling out who they were, but nobody took any notice, and I was reminded of a bad day in the Assembly or the Law Courts, when the voters get an idea into their heads and refuse to listen to the opposing view.
Just one more thing. A few hours after the battle I went down to the shore to pick up some driftwood for a fire, and I saw the body of a man floating peacefully in the water a few yards out. The shape of the body looked familiar, and my curiosity was aroused, so I waded out and had a look. It was the lucky-and-unlucky blacksmith. There was an arrow wound in his forehead and the fish had already started on him, but it was unmistakably him; and it might just have been the relaxation of the muscles in death, but I would swear he was smiling. As I walked back to the camp with my driftwood I tried to remember the speech I had been composing just before the battle started, but it had completely slipped my mind.
CHAPTER FIVE
A week or so ago, just before I started scratching this narrative down on wax — wax isn’t what it was, by the way; in my young days, it never used to crumble or flake the way it seems to now, and you could melt it down and use it over and over again — I found I couldn’t remember some detail or other and decided that I had better check it; so I walked up into the Market Square to Dexitheus’ stall, to see if he had any copies of a book I had heard about which dealt with the matters I was concerned with. I found the book I was after and persuaded Dexitheus to let me have a look at it for nothing — you will remember that Dexitheus is the lucky entrepreneur who has secured the right to copy this great work of mine; and I persuaded him that it was in his own interests that all the facts in it should be accurate — and then partly since I had nothing else to do that morning and partly to irritate Dexitheus, I stood for a while browsing through some of the other books he had there, including one about this Sicilian expedition I am currently describing. As I stood there reading it to myself, a little old man (I would say he was about my age, or maybe a year or so younger, but bent up with arthritis) obviously overheard the words I was saying from the book and came up to me.
‘What was that you said?’ he asked me.
‘It wasn’t me,’ I replied, ‘it was this book. It’s by…’ I turned back to the head of the roll ‘… Pheidon of Lepcis, whoever he is.’
‘What was it you just read, then?’
I looked back over the page. ‘He says that in the great battle in the harbour between the Athenians and the Syracusans, the Athenians lost fifty ships, either sunk in the fighting or rendered useless, and the Syracusans forty. And he says that his authority for this is Sicanus, the Syracusan commander, who counted the wrecks himself and was regarded by both friend and foe as a truthful man.’
‘Well I’m buggered,’ said the old man. ‘Did we really sink forty of the bastards’ ships? It didn’t seem like it at the time.’
‘Were you there too, then?’ I asked. And then, quite suddenly, I recognised him and was able to call him by his name: Jason son of Alexides of Cholleidae. Then I introduced myself.
‘You owe me seven drachmas,’ he replied.
The first and last time I had seen him was on the evening after that battle. He was sitting in front of an evil-smelling fire fuelled mostly by discarded helmet-plumes (which seemed to be rather significant in the circumstances) playing knuckle-bones against himself. To cheer myself up I asked if he wanted a game. He asked if I had any money and I said yes, some, so he proposed stakes of two obols a point. Those were quite high stakes in those days, but since I could see little point in dying rich I accepted and we started to play. Of course he won every point and took off me every last obol that I had, plus the seven drachmas alluded to above. When he found that I couldn’t pay the whole amount he was most upset and called me all sorts of uncouth names, and started demanding that I put down my sword and armour as security for the debt. At this point I left rather hurriedly. But he followed me all round the camp, whining on about his seven miserable drachmas, until Callicrates and some of his friends came up and chased him away.
I mention this incident for three reasons: first, because it makes a moderately light-hearted opening for a rather miserable part of my story; second, in the hope that one day Jason son of Alexides will hear this being read and feel thoroughly ashamed of himself; thirdly as a comment on the profound bad taste of the Fates, who allowed men like me and this poisonous Jason to get out of Sicily alive but struck down so many good men there.
To return to my story. After the battle in the harbour the only question that remained was how, if at all, we would be able to get away. Although honest general Sicanus may have been aware that the Syracusans had lost forty of their ninety ships, no one on our side knew that, and when Demosthenes suggested to the crews of our ships that they might like to consider having another go at a break-out the following morning he barely escaped with his life. So it was decided that we should burn our remaining ships and march off over land to Catana, which at the moment represented a sort of earthly paradise to every man in our army. In fact our ships never did get burnt; the man whose job it was thought it was someone else’s job, and they were left neatly lined up on the sand for the Syracusans, who thus ended the war, as they had started it, with exactly ninety warships.
The next problem was when we should leave. Demosthenes was for setting off straight away. Defeat had not addled Demosthenes’ brains to the same extent as it had those of his colleagues, and he could see that if we set off immediately, not only would the enemy not have time to send out units to cut the roads, but our soldiers would not have an opportunity to burden themselves with all the useless junk that any army, given the chance, insists on taking with it, to the great detriment of its average marching speed. But Nicias flatly refused to budge without first taking full inventories of our supplies and making detailed calculations as to what we would need to get us to Catana without having to rely on finding food by the way. Demosthenes realised that, in his present near-hysterical state, the only thing that would calm Nicias down was a good five-hour burst of heavy book-keeping, and let him have his way. This was a disastrous mistake, of course; but I believe that Demosthenes had a genuine though misguided affection for Nicias, who was suffering the torments of the damned immediately after the battle, and could not bear to overrule him in anything.
So it wasn’t until three days after the battle that we finally left that horrible, fever-stricken slaughterhouse of a camp, and there wasn’t a single man in the army (except me) who wasn’t heartbroken to leave it. For a start, most men were leaving wounded friends there —there was no possibility of taking our wounded with us —and those few who weren’t were leaving friends and relatives unburied. Then there was the natural and instinctive fear of
leaving a place that was apparently safe and going out into a world that was quite definitely hostile, which was made infinitely worse by the fact that we were. leaving our ships behind. An Athenian soldier regards his ships as a small child regards his mother; so long as they are there he cannot truly lose hope, but once he loses sight of them he starts to panic and lose his wits.
Now I come to think of it, there was one particular ship in that fleet which had assumed an almost divine aura; it was obviously quite old, to judge by its design and the way it had been built, and the legend quickly grew up in the camp that it was one of the ships that the celebrated Themistocles had built all those years ago, just before the Great Persian War, and that it had seen service at the immortal victory of Salamis, when it had sunk the ship of one of the Persian admirals. Although this was obviously ludicrous most of us believed it, and by some strange chance it was virtually the only one of our ships not to suffer damage or casualties in either of the sea-battles; in fact, it had sunk a Syracusan ship by ramming in the second battle, and was one of the last of our vessels to retire from the fighting. As a result, we believed in this ship as if it was our patron God, and the thought of leaving it was the last straw for some of our people. In the end, we put the most seriously wounded men into it before we left; and oddly enough most of them survived and got back to Athens, since both the ship and its contents were bought by a rich Syracusan slave-trader who was secretly pro-Athenian. He sent doctors to look after the men, and when the war was over and the State had no further use for the ship, he had it dragged inland to his estate and set up on a platform outside his house, with a carved pillar next to it setting out its remarkable history. There it stayed for a good ten years, until a slave accidentally set light to it and damaged it beyond repair; whereupon it was broken up and the serviceable timbers used to build a cheese warehouse.