promontory to the north of Eresus.
I lay by the rope I had been hauling and cursed, because the
loss of Stephanos hurt me more than I’d expected. I hadn’t seen
him in a year. I wanted him back.
Idomeneus had his marines in hand and was driving oarsmen
to work, gathering wood to put supports under the hul timbers.
We propped Storm Cutter on sand that was only wet with rain,
and then we drove the oarsmen into the sea to fetch the ram
before it got buried in storm-wrack and sand. The ram was
heavy bronze plate, but with thirty men helping we hauled it
above the tide line. Then we colapsed.
I sent Idomeneus to the citadel to get us help and hospitality,
I sent Idomeneus to the citadel to get us help and hospitality,
then I sat in my sodden chlamys and watched the storm, and
sang a hymn to Poseidon and prayed that Stephanos might live.
The news came back that Sappho’s daughter had died – an
old, old woman, but a great teacher, as awe-inspiring and god-
touched in her way as Heraclitus in his – and had been
succeeded by another woman, Aspasia, who now led the school
of Sappho. So much had changed in just a few years. But
Aspasia was supported by Briseis’s largesse, and she accepted
me without question when I told her who I was, and she lodged
my men and fed them.
I let myself into Briseis’s house and sat by her shuttered
window, drinking her wine and eating her food. Surely it was
she, and not Artaphernes, who had sent me that message.
Hence, she must have need of me, I reasoned. And not a need
she dared commit to paper. I reasoned – with a brain clouded
by Eros, let me add – that she must need me.
I would find Miltiades soon enough. But if I could get Storm
Cutter rebuilt, I would cross the straits and run down the coast
to Ephesus and visit my love, and see why she had summoned
me.
The storm took three days to blow out, and my men praised
me openly for bringing them to such a safe haven, with lamb stew
every night and good red wine for every man, as if they were a
crew of lords. The folk of Eresus treated us like gods – as wel
they might, since it was Briseis’s gold that kept the school going,
and her political power that kept it free of outside control. And
they feared us.
they feared us.
When the storm was gone, we had beautiful weather for
autumn. I put men on the headlands to keep watch, and I prayed
to Poseidon every day and gave offerings of cakes and honey on
the Cyprian goddess’s altar, too – anything to bring back
Stephanos. We cut good wood on the hilsides east of the town
and rebuilt the bow, with two carpenters from the town helping
us with the main beams that had cracked. We stripped the hul
clean and rebuilt the bow, and found a fair amount of rot in the
upper timbers. I built a marine platform – like a box, with
armoured sides – into the new bow, and a little shelf where an
archer or a lookout could stand high above the ram.
I borrowed from the Temple of Aphrodite, and spent the
money on tar and pine pitch, and blacked the hul, a fresh, thick
coat so that he was armoured in the stuff, watertight and shining.
I gave him a stripe of Poseidon’s own blue above the waterline,
and we painted the oar shafts to match, al in a day, and the
women of the town washed our great sail so that the raven was
fresh and stark again.
In such a way we propitiated Poseidon, but there was no sign
of Stephanos. So after a week of good food and freely given aid,
we prepared to sail away in a fresh ship. I was sombre at the
loss of a friend, but the crew was wild with delight.
‘Boys are saying their luck has changed,’ Idomeneus said.
I had appointed two Iberians who could speak some Greek
to be officers. My new oar master was Galas, and he had more
tattoos than a Libyan, for al that his skin was fairer than mine.
He had blue eyes and ruddy hair and his scalp was shaved in
He had blue eyes and ruddy hair and his scalp was shaved in
whorls, but he knew the sea and his Greek was good enough.
And he had taken command of the port-side oars during the
disaster of the landing.
My new sailing master had the same tattoos and his name
was too barbaric for words, something like ‘Malaleauch’. I
caled him Mal, and he answered to it. He spoke a pidgin of
Greek and Italiote and Phoenician.
I had thirty of the former slaves on my benches now. I’d lost
more than a dozen men in that horrible landing – dead, or so
badly injured that they stil lay in Lady Sappho’s Temple of
Aphrodite, waiting to be healed or to die.
The Iberians al viewed me as the author of their freedom. I
explained to Galas how smal a role I’d played, and how much
they owed to the gods, but I was not sorry to benefit from their
gratitude.
At any rate, we heaved Storm Cutter into the surf and got
the rowers in position as if we knew what we were doing, and
then we were away. Galas brought more out of the rowers than I
had, and we spent two more days rowing up and down the sea
off Lesbos to dril them until their oars rose and fel like the single
arm of a single man.
Then we rowed around to Methymna, and I put her stern on
the beach and asked after Miltiades and my friend Epaphroditos,
the archon basileus of the town. But the captain of the guard told
me that Lord Epaphroditos was away at the siege of Miletus.
I needed money, and Epaphroditos’s absence left me no
I needed money, and Epaphroditos’s absence left me no
choice. I had to take a prize, and a rich one. My men needed
paying, and I was down to no wine and no stores. I got one meal
out of Methymna based on their memories of me and my famous
name, but we sailed from that town like a hungry wolf.
We ran south along the east coast of Lesbos, and the
beaches were empty at Mytilene, where the rebel fleet ought to
have been forming up. And just south of Mytilene, we saw a pair
of heavy Phoenicians guarding a line of merchantmen –
Aegyptians, I thought as I stood on the new bow.
‘Get the mainmast up,’ I caled to Mal, and motioned for
Galas, who was steering, to take us about. We could no more
face a pair of heavy Phoenicians than we could weather another
storm. ‘Fuck,’ I muttered.
They were none too happy to see us when we put on to the
beach at Mytilene, but men remembered me there, and I
arranged for a meal and some oil and wine on credit – Miltiades’
credit.
I was sitting alone at a smal fire on the beach, cursing my
fate, or rather, my ignorance of events and my inability to
accomplish anything, when a pair of local men – traders – came
up out of the dark.
‘Lord Arimnestos?’ the shorter one asked.
‘Aye,’ I answered, and offered them wine.
In short, they had a cargo of grain – several cargoes, in fact –
and
they wondered if I’d like to have a go at smuggling it into
Miletus. The rate of exchange they offered was good – good
enough to give me some slack. So I loaded grain at their wharf
enough to give me some slack. So I loaded grain at their wharf
and filed the ship, so that she sat deep in the water and my
rowers cursed.
‘We’re fucked if we have to run,’ Idomeneus said.
‘Realy?’ I asked, as if the thought had never occurred to me.
We sailed at sunset, ran along the coast of Lesbos before ful
dark fel and were off Chios in the light of a ful moon. My
oarsmen were none too happy with me, because this was flirting
with Poseidon’s rage and no mistake, or so they said.
I made my sea-marks off Chios, and we passed silently along
the beaches I had known like family homes in my youth. Just
past false dawn, we passed the beach where Stephanos had
lived before he went away to sea to be a kiler of men.
There was a long, low trireme beached there.
My heart rose in my chest, and I abandoned my plan and put
our stern to the beach, and we went ashore.
‘I thought you were done for,’ Stephanos said. ‘And I thought I
could weather the cape by Methymna and run free in the
channel, with the two islands to break the fury of the storm.’ He
shrugged. ‘Those Iberians don’t know how to row, but they
have a lot of guts. I got us around the corner, and they kept the
bow into the seas, and we determined to land at Mytilene, but
there was a current – I’ve never seen anything like it. We went
past Mytilene in the blink of an eye, and north of Chios we hit a
log that was drifting, broke a board amidships and started to
take on water.’ Stephanos was a big, plain-spoken sailor who
had grown to manhood as a fisherman, and his hands moved like
had grown to manhood as a fisherman, and his hands moved like
an actor’s as he told the story.
His sister Melaina was beaming up at him. She, too, was a
friend of my youth, from the heady days when I was newly freed,
just finding my power as a man-at-arms. We kept grinning at
each other.
‘Then what happened?’ Idomeneus asked.
‘The back of the ship snapped like a twig, we sank and the
fishes ate us!’ Stephanos laughed. His sister swatted him, and he
ducked. ‘One of the rowers shouted that we weren’t done yet –
a Greek felow, Philocrates. He put some heart in the boys and
we got the head around, then the wind let up for a few moments,
and in that time we got into a cove on the north shore – it was as
if Poseidon agreed to let us live. I put the bow on the shingle,
and to Hades with the ram – which took a right battering, and
we’ve been a week repairing her. But we lived!’
‘As did we,’ I said, and we embraced again. I looked at his
ship. ‘What do you cal him?’ I asked.
Stephanos grinned his easy grin. ‘Wel, we thought of caling
him Storm Cutter, but that’s taken, so we opted for Trident.’
The sign of Poseidon. ‘A fine name.’
He grinned again. ‘So – how do we make some money?’ He
kissed his sister and pointed up the beach. ‘Go and find
Harpagos, dear.’
Harpagos proved to be Stephanos’s cousin. Melaina brought
him down to the beach, and he was no smaler than Stephanos
and his hands were hard as rock. Stephanos introduced him with
flowery compliments.
flowery compliments.
‘This is my useless layabout cousin Harpagos, who wants to
ship with me. He’s never been to sea.’ Stephanos spat on the
sand and laughed.
Harpagos had the look of a man who’d kept the sea his
entire life. His hair was ful of salt. But he stood, abashed.
I winked at Stephanos. It was like old times. ‘You’re a
trierarch now, my friend. No need to consult me on every raw
man.’
‘I’ve been helmsman on a grain ship,’ Harpagos said.
‘I want him as my helmsman,’ Stephanos admitted. Then he
said, ‘I need him where I can see him.’
I liked Harpagos. His embarrassment at al this attention
shouted of the sort of solid, quiet confidence that makes a man
able to go to sea and fish every day for forty years. ‘On your
head be it,’ I said. ‘Harpagos, can you fight?’
He shrugged. ‘I wrestle,’ he said. ‘I teach the boys in the
vilage. I can take this big fool.’ He indicated Stephanos.
‘Hmm,’ I alowed. ‘Wel, he can take me, and that would be
bad for discipline. Ever used a spear and shield?’ I asked.
Harpagos shook his head. ‘Can’t say I have.’
‘Ever kiled?’ I asked.
Harpagos looked out to sea. ‘Yes,’ he said, voice flat.
We al stood together in silence, and the fine wind blew
across us. ‘Wel,’ I said, ‘welcome aboard. We’re pirates,
Harpagos. Sometimes we fight for the Ionian rebels, but mostly
we take other people’s ships for profit. Can you do that?’
we take other people’s ships for profit. Can you do that?’
He grinned – the first grin I’d seen. ‘Yes, lord.’
Melaina listened to this exchange and brought more wine, and
we ate fresh sardines and a big red fish I hadn’t eaten often –
with flesh like lobster. We drank too much wine. Melaina
pressed herself on me, and I flirted with her, smiled, even held
her for a time while standing by the fire on the beach. But I didn’t
take her into the dark. My head was ful of Briseis, and Melaina
wasn’t a beach girl. She was Stephanos’s sister, and she dressed
like a woman of property. Somewhere, she had a man she was
going to marry. And to bed her would have been to betray my
guest-friendship with Stephanos.
In the morning, I gave him half the grain, and the next evening,
ful of food and a little too much wine, we were off the beach,
rowing soft in the moonlight for Miletus.
Our plan was simple, like most good plans. We both had
Phoenician ships – both newly repaired and looking fairly
prosperous. We sailed due south, got behind the coastal islands,
west around Samos, rowing al the way, and came into the Bay
of Miletus from the south-west – that is, from the direction of
Tyre and Phoenicia – as the sun set in the west, mostly behind
us. We stood straight down the bay, bold as brass, apparently a
pair of their own ships bound for the blockade fleet at Tyrtarus
on the island of Lade.
The fishermen of Chios had been able to lay the whole siege out
like a scrol for us, because they smuggled fish to the rebels and
sold them openly to the Medes, Persians, Greeks and
sold them openly to the Medes, Persians, Greeks and
Phoenicians who served the Great King, too. Miletus is an
ancient city, founded before Troy, and she stands at the base of
a deep inlet of the sea, just south of Samos, although the bay
over towards Mycale is starting to silt up. Miletus has a steep
acropolis, impregnable, or so men used to say, and her outer
town is protected by a circuit of stone wa
ls with towers. The
Persians began by moving their fleet to Ephesus, just a hundred
stades up the coast. Once they had a base there, they moved in
and stormed Tyrtarus, a fishing vilage with a smal fort, and used
it as their forward base, so that ships from there could easily
launch into the narrow channel and catch any vessel heading into
Miletus.
Mind you, it is possible to row north around Lade. The
problem is that anyone holding the fort on Lade can see you
coming fifty stades away, and when you turn north, they’re
waiting – and the currents around the island favour the side that
holds it.
Once the Persians had the fort at Tyrtarus, they brought up
their land forces on the landward side of the peninsula.
Artaphernes came in person, and they built a great camp in the
hils overlooking Miletus. After a few weeks of skirmishing, he
started on the siege mound.
Men tel me the Assyrians invented the siege mound, and
perhaps they did, although as usual the Aegyptians claim they
invented it. Either way, it was not the Greeks, who prefer a nice
flat field and a single day of battle to a year’s siege. But the
Ionians and Aeolian Greeks have fortified cities, and when the
Ionians and Aeolian Greeks have fortified cities, and when the
Lydians or the Medes come against them, they fight a war of
shovels. The Persians dig a giant hil that runs from the flat of the
plain to the top of the wals, and the Greeks in the city counter-
dig, trying either to raise the wal by the mound or to destroy the
Persian mound. And while both sides dig, the men outside make
sure that the men inside receive no help, no weapons and, most
of al, no food.
Sometimes the men inside the wals triumph, boring their
opponents into backing off. And sometimes a single load of grain
can be a mighty weapon. First, because the men inside the wals
can eat, and their hearts rise; second, because the men outside
the wals know they must struggle for so much longer each time a
cargo reaches their enemies.
But in my experience, sieges are rarely settled by the hand of
man. Usualy, the Lord Apolo hurls his fearsome arrows of
disease into one side or the other – or sometimes into both – and
the dead pile up as if Ares had reaped them with a sword, but
faster. Sieges eat men.
I didn’t know that then, as the sun set over my stern. I was
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