Poseidon's Spear
( Long War - 3 )
Christian Cameron
Christian Cameron
Poseidon's Spear
Prologue
So — here we are again.
Last night, I told you of Marathon — truly the greatest of days for a warrior, the day that every man who was present, great or small, remembers as his finest. But even Marathon — the great victory of Athens and Plataea against the might of Persia — did not end the Long War.
In fact, thugater, an honest man might say that the Battle of Marathon started the Long War. Until Marathon, there was the failed revolt of the Ionians, and any sane man would have said they had lost. That the Greeks had lost. In far-off Sardis — in Persepolis, capital of the Persian Empire — they barely knew that Athens existed, or Sparta, and I will wager not a one of the gold-wearing bastards had heard of Plataea.
I was born in Plataea, of course, and my father raised me to be a smith — but my tutor Calchus saw the man of blood inside me, and made me a warrior, as well. And even that isn’t really fair — my pater was a fine warrior, the polemarch of our city, and he led us out to war with Sparta and Corinth in the week of three battles, and fought like a lion, and died — murdered, stabbed in the back while he fought, by his own cousin Simon, and may the vultures tear his liver in eternal torment!
Simon sold me as a slave. I had fallen wounded across my pater’s corpse, and Simon took me from the battlefield and sold me. Why didn’t he kill me? It might have helped him, but often, evil men beget their own destruction with their own acts — that is how the gods behave in the world of men.
I grew to full manhood as a slave in Ionia, the slave of Hipponax and his son Archilogos, and to be honest, I loved them, and seldom resented being a slave. But Archilogos had a sister, Briseis, and she is Helen reborn, so that even at thirteen and fourteen, men competed for her favours — grown men.
I loved her, and still do.
Not that that love brought me much joy.
And I received the education of an aristocrat, by attending lessons with my young master — so that I was taught the wisdom of Heraclitus, whom many worship as a god to this very day.
When I was seventeen or so, events shattered our household — betrayal, adultery and civil war. I’ve already told that story. But in the end, the Ionians — all the Greeks of Asia and the Islands — left the allegiance of Persia and went to war. In my own house, I was freed, and became Archilogos’s friend and war-companion. But in my hubris I lay with Briseis, and was banned from the house and sent to wander the world.
A world suddenly at war.
I marched and fought through the first campaign, from the victory at Sardis to black defeat on the plains by Ephesus, the city of my slavery, and then I fled with the Athenians. I served as a mercenary on Crete, and found myself with my own black ship at Amathus, the first naval battle in the Ionian Revolt. We won at sea. But we lost on land, and again, I was on the run in a captured ship with a bad crew.
Eventually, I found a new home with the Athenian lord, Miltiades. As a pirate. Let’s not mince words, friends! We killed men and took their ships, and that made us pirates, whatever we may now claim.
But Miltiades was instrumental in keeping the Ionian Revolt alive, as I’ve told on other nights. We fought and fought, and eventually we drove the Medes from the parts of the Xhersonese they’d seized, and used it as a base to wreck them — until they sent armies to clear us from the peninsula.
I did as Miltiades bade me: killed, stole, and my name gained renown.
After a year of fighting, we were losing. But we caught a Persian squadron far from its base, in Thrace, and we destroyed them — and in the fighting, I murdered Briseis’ useless husband. Again, I’ve told this story already — ask someone who was here.
I thought that, now Briseis was free to marry me, she would.
I was wrong. She went back east to marry someone older, wiser and more powerful.
So I went back to Plataea.
I worked my father’s farm, and tried to be a bronze-smith.
But a man died at the shrine on the hill — and his death sent me to Athens, and before long I was back at sea, killing men and taking their goods. Hard to explain in a sentence or two, my daughter. But that’s what I did. And so, I was back to fighting the Persians. I served Miltiades — I ran cargoes into Miletus, the greatest city of Ionia, besieged by the Persians, and we saved them. And then the East Greeks formed a mighty fleet, and we went to save Miletus.
And we failed.
We fought the battle of Lade, and the Samians betrayed us, and most of my friends died. Miletus fell, and in the wake of that defeat, Ionia was conquered and the East Greeks ceased to be free men. The men of some islands were all killed, and the women sold into slavery.
It’s odd, thugater, because I loved the Persians, their truth-telling and their brilliant society. They were good men, and honourable, and yet war brought the worst of them to the fore and they behaved like animals — like men inevitably do, in war.
They raped Ionia and Aetolia, and we — the survivors — scuttled into exile. I ran home, after Briseis spurned me again.
So I went back to the smithy in Plataea. I began, in fact, to learn to be a fine smith.
But I had famous friends and a famous name. I had occasion to save Miltiades of Athens from a treason charge — heh, I’ll tell that story again for an obol — and as a consequence, my sister got me a beautiful wife. Listen, do you doubt me? She was beautiful, and had I not saved Miltiades…
At any rate, I married Euphoria.
And a summer later, when she was full of my seed, I led the Plataean phalanx over the mountains to Attica, to help save Athens. This time, when the Persians forced us to battle, we had no traitors in our ranks and we were not found wanting. This time, the gods stood by us. This time Apollo and Zeus and Ares and Athena lent us aid, and we beat the Persians at Marathon.
But I told that story last night.
And when I came home, my beautiful Euphoria was dead in childbirth. Her newborn child — I never saw it — lay in swaddling with a slave. I assumed it dead. My sister still blames herself for that error, but I have never blamed her. Yet, to understand my tale, you must understand — I thought my child had died…
So I picked my beloved wife up, took her to my farm and burned it, and her, with every piece of jewellery and every scrap of cloth she’d ever worn or woven.
And then I took a horse and rode away.
That ought to have been the end. But it was, of course, another beginning, because that’s how the gods make men.
You need to understand this. After Marathon, nothing was the same. No one was the same. Life did not taste sweet. Indeed, most of us felt that our greatest deed, and days, were behind us, and there was not much left for us to do. And I had lost wife and child. I had nothing to live for, and no life to which to return.
Part I
Sicily
I see a Greek ship on the beach, and sailors who ply the oar coming to this cave with one who must be their commander. About their necks they carry empty vessels, since it is food they need, and pails for water. O unlucky strangers! [90] Who can they be? They know not what our master Polyphemus is like, nor that this ground they stand on is no friend to guests, and that they have arrived with wretched bad luck at the man-eating jaws of the Cyclops. But hold your peace so that we may learn [95] where they have come from to Sicilian Aetna’s crag.
Euripides Cyclops 85
1
I was off my head.
I rode south past the shrine in a thunder of hooves, so that Idomeneus came out with a spear in his hand. But I did not want his blood-mad comfort. I rode past him, up t
he mountain.
Up the Cithaeron, to the altar of my family. The old altar of ash and ancient stone where the Corvaxae have worshipped the mountain since Leitos left for Troy, and before.
I had nothing to sacrifice, and it had begun to rain. The rain fell and fell, and I stood at the ash altar watching the rains wash it, watching the water rush down the hillside. And my life was like those ashes — so useless it was fit only to be washed away. Lightning flashed in the sky, the thunderbolts of Zeus struck the earth and I stood by the altar and prayed that Zeus would take me — what a grand way to go! I stood straight, and with every crash I expected But the lightning passed me by. It is odd — I decided to slay myself, and only then realized that I had neither sword nor spear. Looking back, it is almost comic. I was exhausted — I had fought at Marathon only a week before, and I hadn’t recovered, and the cold rain soaked me. My sword and spear were back on the plains below me — at my sister’s house, where even now they would be looking for me, and looking for Euphoria to bury her.
I wasn’t going back.
Cithaeron is not a mountain with a crag from which a man can easily hurl himself. The whole thing has an aura of dark comedy — Arimnestos, the great hero, seeks to slay himself like Ajax, but he’s too damned tired.
Before darkness fell, I started down the mountain, headed west over the seaward shoulder, intending — nothing. Intending, I think, to jump from the very first promontory that I came to.
Or perhaps intending nothing at all. May you never be so tired and so utterly god-cursed that you seek only oblivion, my daughter. May your days be filled with light, and never see that darkness, where all you want is an end to pain. But that was me.
I walked and walked, and it grew dark.
And I fell, and then I slept, or rather, I passed out of this world.
I woke in the morning to the cold, the rain, deep mist — and to the knowledge that there was nothing awaiting me. It came to me immediately — my first thought on waking was of her death. And I rose and wandered the woods, and I remember calling her name aloud, more a groan than a greeting.
On and on I walked, always down and east and south.
I slept again, and rose the third day, with no food, no water, endless rain and cold. I wept, and the rain carried my tears to the earth. I prayed, and the skies answered me. I thought of how, on the eve of Marathon, I had dreamed of Briseis and not of Euphoria, and I knew in my heart that I had killed her with my betrayal.
I was an animal, fit only to kill other animals, and I was not a worthy man: death was what I deserved.
It may seem impossible, my friends, that one of the victors of Marathon should feel this way a week after the greatest victory in all the annals of men, but if you know any warriors, you know the revulsion and the fatigue that comes with killing. Truly we were greater than human at Marathon. But the cost was high.
I could see the faces of the men I’d killed, back and back and back to the first helot I’d put down with a spear cast at Oinoe.
I thought of the slave girl I’d sworn to protect, and then abandoned.
I thought of the beautiful boy I’d killed on the battlefield by Ephesus, while he lay screaming in pain.
And of the woman I had left, pregnant, on Crete.
And of Euphoria, with whom I had often fought, and seldom enough praised.
I went down the mountain, looking for a cliff face.
Eventually I found one.
The rain stopped when I reached the top of the cliff. I couldn’t see the base — it was hidden in fog. But the sun was about to burst through the clouds. And even as I stood there, it did — a single arm of Helios’s might reached through a tiny gap to shine on the ground before my feet and dispel the cloud of fog below the cliff.
Well.
Apollo pointed the way. He has never been my friend, that god, and I might have ignored his summons, but I wanted only extinction.
I said a prayer. I said her name out loud.
I jumped.
I hit water.
How the gods must laugh at men!
I had jumped into the ocean. It was a long fall, and I struck badly. It knocked the wind out of me, and then I became the butt of the laughter of the gods because instead of letting the cold water close over my head and drowning — I had, after all, intended to die — I began to fight to live. My arms moved, my legs kicked and my lungs starved for precious air until my head burst from under the waves and my mouth drank air like precious wine.
Against my own desire, I began to swim.
I was just a few horse-lengths off a rocky coast — it was deep water, or I’d have been dead — but with nowhere to land.
Oh, how the gods laughed.
Because now, suddenly, I was filled with a desire to live, and my arms swam powerfully, and yet there was nowhere to go but onto rocks. The sea struck the rocks sharply — three days of rain had raised a swell.
I turned my head out to sea in the fog and began to swim.
The change from suicide to struggle for life was so swift that I never questioned it. I merely moved my arms — as strong as any man’s arms, and yet weak from four days of no food, and from the incredible effort that was Marathon. I was not going to last long. But I swam, drank mouthfuls of air and swam more, and eventually — long after I think I should have been dead — I turned the headland and saw a beach at the base of the next cove, a beach with a small fire on it. The smell of the burning spruce came to me like a message from the gods, and I swam like a porpoise — twenty strokes, fifty strokes.
My toes brushed sand.
I was swimming in an arm’s-span of water.
I dragged myself up the beach.
I lay with my legs in the water and my elbows in the sea wrack and kelp, and strong arms came and lifted me clear. They dragged me up the beach. I didn’t know their language, but they rolled me over and they had serious, hairy faces — skin the colour of old wood, and black beards.
I stammered my thanks. And went down into the darkness.
That was probably for the best.
Because when I awoke, we were at sea, and I was chained to an oar bench.
Remember, I had been a slave before.
This was worse. Far, far worse, but having been a slave before saved me. I knew all the petty degradations, I knew the perils and I knew the penalties.
I was chained in the very depths of a trireme — as a thranite, the very lowest tier of oarsmen. Air came to me through my oar-port, which was mostly covered in leather and leaked air and water in equal profusion.
When the men above me relieved themselves, the piss and shit fell on me. Oh, yes. That’s the way in the lower decks of a slave-driven trireme.
I lay quietly for as long as I possibly could, because I knew that as soon as they noticed me, I would be made to row. But a man can only stand so much piss in his hair and beard. I moved my arm, and the oar-master was on me. He struck me several times with a stick, grinning with delight, and put an oar in my hands. It took time for him to bring it from amidships.
He seemed to speak a little Greek, and I barely understood him, but the man above me in the second deck leaned down.
‘He’s a killer, mate,’ he said. ‘Obey, or he’ll gut you.’
For a moment I thought he was talking about me, rather than to me. I thought perhaps he was telling the oar-master that I was a killer.
Hah!
Pride goes first, when you are a slave.
The oar-master grinned at me, took a knife from under his arm and poked it into my groin. Smiled more broadly.
‘Tell him I know how to pull an oar!’ I shouted. Instant surrender.
The oar-master laughed. And hit me.
I’m sure you are waiting to hear, my friends, how I recovered my wits, rose from my bench and slaughtered my enemies.
Well, you haven’t been a slave, have you? Any of you.
In a week, I was used to it. I was strong enough, and there was food — badly cooked fish, barley
bread, sour beer.
I ate. I no longer wanted to die. Or rather, I only wanted to live to kill the oar-master, whom I hated. And I hated him with a pure, searing hate. But I was a slave, and he laughed at my hate. He was big, and very strong — fully muscled like a Pankrationist. He enjoyed inflicting pain — on us, the slaves, but he even enjoyed inflicting petty, verbal hurst on his subordinates and the helmsmen and the deck crew.
I was ridden like a horse. For the first week I rowed in the depths of the ship, with water and shit over my ankles, the smell enough to stop a man from work. But even exhausted and injured, I was strong compared to other men, and that crew had seen better days. After a long pull — I have no idea when, or where we landed — I was ‘promoted’ to the top deck of rowers, the ‘elite’. I, who had commanded my own ship, who could steer and make sail. And fight.
The top deck was not an improvement, except for the clean ocean air. Here I was constantly under the eye of the oar-master and his minions, the six men he used to impose his authority. The ship carried no marines — or, just possibly, these men were the marines — a surly, churlish lot. They proved their manhood by tormenting the rowers.
It is a thing I have often noted, how the stamp of a leader imprints itself on his followers. Hasdrubal — the captain — was a beak-nosed Phoenician from far-off Carthage. He was tall, he was strong and he was a vicious bully. He never gave a direct order — rather, he wheedled and manipulated when strength would have done better, and then turned into a right tyrant when some persuasion might have served the trick.
He was handsome, in a burly way, and had the pointiest, heaviest, most perfumed beard I’d ever seen on a man. Well, a man at sea, anyway. I’d seen such things on Thebans.
But his bad command skills transmitted themselves to this captain’s officers as effectively as Miltiades’ were transmitted to his. The oar-master was a torturing tyrant, the sailing-master was a weak man with a drink problem who knuckled under to the oar-master in every situation and hated him for it and the helmsmen — a pair of them, both Carthaginians learning the trade — were young, silent, morose and bitter. My guess, from the yawning chasm that separated us — you can’t imagine I ever talked to these bastards — was that the two helmsmen were better men, just trying to survive under the regime of a bully and a madman.
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