too weary to go on. He was mocking me. ‘She’s always by his
side, or so I hear.’
Cimon nodded. ‘She wanted to be the queen of Ionia,’ he
said. ‘It seems she’s chosen her side. And her brother is no
longer with the rebelion, either. He’s been restored to al his
estates in Ephesus. She may have been the price of his return to
the fold.’
I didn’t weep. I took a deep breath and drank more wine.
‘Good for her,’ I said, though my voice betrayed me, and Cimon
was a good man and let it rest.
‘What’s the plan?’ I asked Miltiades after some time had
passed.
‘We do what we can to rebuild,’ the tyrant of the Chersonese
said. ‘We prey on their shipping and use the proceeds to rebuild
my squadron, and then we retake some of the towns on the
Chersonese.’
‘You’ve lost al the towns?’ I asked.
Cimon stepped between his father and me. ‘Arimnestos,’ he
said, ‘this is it. This is al we have.’ He put his arm around my
shoulder. ‘And unless we convince Athens to get off its arse and
help, Miletus wil fal, and the Persians wil win everything.’
When I had left Miltiades, he had four towns and ten
triremes. I nodded. ‘Wel,’ I said, ‘I guess there’s a lot of work
to do.’
Morning found us at sea south of Myconos, our sails ful of wind
Morning found us at sea south of Myconos, our sails ful of wind
as we bore north by east for Chios, now the heart of the
rebelion and the only island on the coast whose harbours were
open to us.
About the time the sun rose clear of the sea, Stephanos
spotted a sail on our bow. We watched it incuriously until it
stood clear of the water with a hul beneath it, and then I
recognized my Phoenician slaver.
I closed with Miltiades, stern to stern. ‘See that ship?’ I said.
‘Phoenician slaver ful of Iberians, to be delivered to
Artaphernes.’ I remember grinning. It was as if the god had sent
this gift to me. ‘Legitimate prize of war!’ I shouted – not that we
were ever too precise about such stuff. Any Phoenician was fair
game.
Miltiades whooped. ‘Yours if you can catch him!’ he
shouted, and I was away.
October is not the best month for a long chase in the Ionian
Sea. October is the month when the winds change, and the rains
become cold, and Poseidon starts to reckon on his tithe of ships.
But it was a beautiful day, with a golden sun in a dark blue sky,
and I’d spent fifteen days on that dark hul. His oarsmen hated
the slaver, and he was undermanned like al men who made a
profit seling their oarsmen.
On the other hand, the ship carried more sails than I could,
and his hul had a finer entry. Storm Cutter had started his life as
a Phoenician heavy trireme, and nothing in his build was for
racing. Even fuly crewed, he was not the fastest. He had one
great point – he was strong.
great point – he was strong.
I took Storm Cutter to windward under oars, as if I was
departing the rest of the squadron, heading north across the wind
for Thrace. When I was over the horizon, the sun was already
high in the sky, and now I put my oarsmen to work, puling hard
while the sails were up so that we piled speed on speed.
Sometimes this works, but this particular set of oarsmen – not
the same men I’d left in this hul, I’l add – weren’t up to it, and
in the main their oars served only to slow the rush of water down
our side.
I cursed and put the wind directly aft. The wind was stronger
than it had been in the morning, and the sky at my back was
growing dark, and many of my oarsmen were muttering.
Al afternoon we raced along, until I had to brail up the
mainsail to keep something from carrying away, and stil we had
no sight of our prey, or even of Miltiades. ‘Now I feel like a
fool,’ I said quietly to Stephanos.
He made a face. ‘We should be up with them now,’ he said.
I couldn’t figure it out. ‘We lost time on our first leg,’ I said.
‘But unless he turned south—’
‘Miltiades made chase as soon as we went over the horizon,’
Idomeneus said. ‘He needs rowers too.’
I grunted. I’d forgotten what a rapacious bastard my lord
was. ‘Pushed him south and didn’t catch him,’ I added.
‘Can we stay at sea with this crew?’ I asked Stephanos.
‘What, in the dark?’ He shook his head. ‘No. Al the good
men ran or took their treasure and walked. Or they’re dead.
men ran or took their treasure and walked. Or they’re dead.
Nobody wants to tel you this, but your friend – Archilogos of
Ephesus – he came against us with eight ships, caught us
beached and made hay.’
I had a hard time seeing Archilogos, one of the founding
voices of the Ionian Revolt, as a servant of Artaphernes, who
had cuckolded his father and shamed his mother. On the other
hand, his father had been a loyal servant of the King of Kings
before the little incident of his mother’s adultery.
‘You escaped?’ I asked.
‘I had Storm Cutter off the beach. We were washing the hul
when your friend came. I lost most of my rowers.’ He was
ashamed.
‘So what?’ I said. ‘You saved the ship.’
Stephanos turned his head away. ‘Not the view of everyone
concerned,’ he said bitterly.
We beached for the night and I went from fire to fire, getting to
know my rowers. There were half a dozen men I knew – a
couple of survivors of the storm-tossed days of my first
command, and they were happy to see me. A few former slaves
I’d freed for a year’s rowing, now rowing as free men for wages.
The rest were riff-raff. I watched them land the ship at the
edge of night and almost get her broached in the surf. I was
angry, but instead of showing my anger, I walked around and
talked. I offered them an increased wage on the spot. That
helped a little.
Next day we rose with the last light of the moon and we were
Next day we rose with the last light of the moon and we were
away before rosy-fingered dawn touched the beach. We rowed
on an empty sea, bearing north and east. The wind was fitful, and
the clouds to the north were thickening and looked like a
shoreline in the sky, an angry dark purple. The oarsmen muttered
as they rowed.
About noon, the sun vanished behind a wal of cloud, and
Stephanos spoke up from the steering oars.
‘Time to beach, navarch,’ he said formaly.
I shook my head. ‘Lots of time, Stephanos. A little chop
won’t slow us. This is when we gain on Miltiades.’ I had
abandoned any thought of my chase now – I was just aiming to
get back with the squadron, or at least get into Chios on the
same day.
By mid-afternoon we were out in the deep blue between
Samos and Chios. The sky to the north and east was that
terrifying dark blue-grey – so dark as to approach bl
ack, and the
sky over the bow was distant and bright, like a line of fire.
I’d misjudged my landfal – or misjudged the rate of our drift
on the wind. Chios was over there, past the bow – somewhere.
It should have been a low line punctuated by mountains, with the
island’s coast inviting me in for the night. I couldn’t understand –
we were hurtling along as if pushed by the very fist of Poseidon,
and yet I wasn’t up with Chios yet.
The muttering of the oarsmen grew. We didn’t have a proper
oar master, and we needed one. If only to protect them from me.
‘I missed this!’ I shouted over the wind. ‘Take in the mainsail
and strike the mainmast down on deck.’
and strike the mainmast down on deck.’
Under the boatsail alone, we ran into the line of fire.
The sun began to set red, and the dark clouds behind us
swalowed the red light and looked more ominous yet.
Just against the white line of the last of the good weather, my
lookout spotted the hul of our slave ship.
He had his masts down, and his oarsmen rowing for al they
were worth. He was more afraid of the storm than of pirates.
We came up on him fast, as our boatsail was enough in that
wind to throw foam and spray right over the ram in our bow and
on to the rowers, who sat silently, cursing their fates and looking
at the madman who stood in front of the helm.
I summoned Idomeneus aft. ‘We’l have to take him fast,’ I
said. ‘We’l strip him of rowers and add them to our own, and
then we’l live the night.’
Idomeneus shook his head in admiration. ‘I thought you’d
gone soft,’ he said.
‘Don’t kil the Iberians,’ I said. I poured a libation to
Poseidon for his gift, because I knew that it was no seamanship
of mine that had caught the fast slaver.
When we were five or six stades astern of our prey and the
storm line was visible behind us, a long line of rain flowing in the
last light of the sun, the Phoenician changed tactics and raised his
boatsail.
But Poseidon accepted my libation and spat the slaver’s
back. Before it could be sheeted home, his boatsail whipped
away on the wind, the ship yawed badly and we gained a stade.
Who knows what happened in the last moments as we
Who knows what happened in the last moments as we
closed? He was a slaver, and most of his rowers were slaves.
And one of the slaves had a knife – a wickedly sharp raven’s
talon.
By the time Idomeneus went aboard, the deck crew was
dead and the Iberians were loose, severed ropes hanging from
their ankles, and their leader had an axe and was cutting their
fetters. The Phoenician was pinned to the mast with a knife
through his chest. We left him there, because sometimes
Poseidon likes a sacrifice.
I took every extra slave out of that ship that I could, left them
undermanned but not desperate and set them a landfal.
Stephanos stepped up. He was Chian, and he wanted his
reputation back.
‘They’l die in the dark,’ he said. ‘Send me aboard and give
me a handful of marines and I’l get them through the night.
Idomeneus nodded.
‘Do it,’ I said. I stepped across to my new ship even as the
rain began. I walked down the main deck and touched hands
with a few of the Iberians, meeting their eyes and nodding at the
men I remembered from my trip to Delos, and many nodded
back. A couple smiled. The dangerous one clasped my hand –
hard, testing me – and then threw an arm around me.
Aft of the mast, a voice spoke up in Doric. ‘By the gods!
Arimnestos! Get me out of here!’
It was the blasphemer, Philocrates.
I leaned down. ‘You want to be thrown over the side?’
I leaned down. ‘You want to be thrown over the side?’
‘No! I want – fuck. Get me out of here!’ He was pleading.
‘You want to live?’ I said. ‘Row harder.’ I laughed at him.
‘Pray!’ I suggested.
The Iberian on the opposite bench showed me his teeth.
‘Fucking coward,’ he said.
I pointed at the Iberian. ‘If you don’t row, these men wil
certainly kil you,’ I said. ‘Now, rationaly you must know that if
you do row, you may live through the night.’ I stepped up on the
bench, stepped up again to the rail and balanced there as the
swel raised the stern. ‘But I don’t have to be an aspiring priest –
isn’t that what you caled me? – to suggest that this might be a
good time to examine your relationship with the gods.’
I leaped down from the rail into the midship of Storm Cutter,
feeling immensely better. The storm was coming in behind us, but
I had done my service for the god, and I knew I could weather
the storm.
We turned north and rowed al night, and we constantly lost
sight of the other ship, and as often found him again, so that the
first fretful grey light, shot with lightning, found the eyes over his
ram just a short stade to windward. And about the time that
dawn was shining somewhere – it was a grey morning for us, and
lashed with rain – I swung the great steering oars to starboard to
put the wind astern. I could see a great rock, the size of a castle
or the Acropolis, rising from the water to starboard, and I
thought that I knew where we were. Somehow we had come
two hundred stades north of our target, and we were off the
west coast of Lesbos. That rock marked the beach of Eresus,
west coast of Lesbos. That rock marked the beach of Eresus,
where Sappho had her school.
Best of al, the beach there was wide and deep, and the rock
would break the wind and rain long enough for me to get my ship
ashore.
My oarsmen were spent – used up, long since. The Iberians
had put some strength into them, and they weren’t bad men, but
I wasn’t going to get a heroic burst of power from them. Not in a
month of feast days.
No way to signal Stephanos, either. But he knew this
anchorage as wel as I – better, no doubt. So I waved at him and
turned my ship, hoping that he would read my mind.
I got Idomeneus to come aft. Only a few hundred heartbeats
left before the crisis.
‘Go down the benches and get every man ready. I intend to
put him right up the beach, bow first.’ I pointed at the lights
shining in the acropolis, high above the beach. ‘Hard to miss.’ I
waited until I saw him understand.
Idomeneus shook his head. ‘You’l break his back,’ he said.
I confess that I shrugged. ‘We’l live.’ I nodded towards
Asia, which loomed ahead, ready to catch us on a much less
kind coast if we failed to land on the sand of Eresus. ‘We’re out
of sea room.’ I pointed again. ‘Every oarsman has to be ready to
back water. Tel them to dip lightly, so that they don’t get kiled
by the oars.’
Idomeneus nodded and headed forward, shouting as he
went.
I hesitate to say how fast Storm Cutter was mo
ving when
I hesitate to say how fast Storm Cutter was moving when
we came in under the lee of the rock, but I’d say we were faster
than a galoping horse. It’s less than a stade from the rock to the
beach. We were going too fast.
‘Oars out!’ I shouted across the gale. ‘Back water!’
It was ragged. I was as scared as the next man – now that
we were in flat water, our speed was shocking. The oars bit, and
I couldn’t see that we were slowing at al – but the ship yawed
and an oarsman screamed as his backed oar bit too deep and
slammed into him, breaking his arms.
Like a wool blanket that unravels in the wind, his failure
spread, so that the whole port-side loom of oars began to fal
apart. Men struggled to keep their oars clear, but the ship roled
from the mis-strokes, and the port-side oars bit too deep, and
men died, or were broken. We turned suddenly, and the port
side dipped so low on the rol that we took water. We stil had
so much way on us that we were racing sideways into the beach.
The port-side rowers – those stil in command of themselves
– finaly got al their oars clear of the water. The starboard-side
rowers were at ful stretch and the hul pivoted again, rotating on
the starboard oar bank, and the bow hit the sand a glancing blow
as the bronze-plated ram caught the trough of gravel just shy of
the beach and skipped along it.
Then we could hear the ram ploughing a furrow in the gravel
and suddenly the boatmast snapped with a crack as loud as the
lightning, and every man not sitting a bench was thrown flat on
the deck as a wave picked up the stern and tossed us – the
the deck as a wave picked up the stern and tossed us – the
kindly hand of Poseidon, I like to think – up the beach, stern
first.
‘Over the side!’ I roared, although I was lying half-stunned.
‘Get her up the beach!’
It was the ugliest landing I ever saw – we’d been rotated
halfway round by the sea, men were badly hurt al along both
sides, and I could see broken boards where my ram ought to be.
But when I jumped over the side, my feet barely splashed.
We were ashore.
Stephanos didn’t even try to land. He watched us, and he
assumed we were lost in the waves, and he put up his helm and
coasted by, a few oar-lengths offshore. In seconds he was past
the beach, and before we had our broken hul clear of
Poseidon’s reaching tendrils, his ship had gone around the
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