For Dagon, the oar-master, was mad. Mad with power, mad with rage, mad with the cunning, plotting madness of a long-time drunkard, or a man who enjoys the pain of others.
It was days before I truly felt his displeasure. I know now that we were somewhere on the coast of Dalmatia, rowing north. I had gathered from talk on deck — slaves were forbidden to speak unless spoken to — that we had a cargo of Athenian hides and pottery and some Cyprian copper, and that we were going to bump our way up the coast until we found someone to sell us iron and tin.
I was rowing. When you are in peak physical condition, it is possible to row for a long time while your mind is elsewhere. Despite despair and wounds and struggle, I was sound enough to row — all day — without pain. But my head was in a dark place, considering my life. My life with Briseis. My life with Euphoria. My life as a hero, and my life as a smith. I wasn’t despairing — it takes longer than three days to drive me to despair. But I had started pretty far down, and being enslaved certainly hadn’t helped.
The stick hit me a glancing blow on the left shoulder. ‘Off the beat,’ the oar-master roared, his spittle raining on my left ear.
‘Like fuck!’ I said, before I’d thought about it. In fact, I was dead on the beat — my stroke was perfect.
The next blow hit my head, and I gave a half-scream and sort of fell across my oar, and then he hit me again, five or six blows to the head and neck. My nose broke, and blood showered across me.
‘Silence, scum,’ he roared at me. ‘Do not even scream!’
I grunted.
He hit me again. It was an oak stick.
I must have made some noise. Or maybe not.
‘Silence!’ he said in the kind of voice a man uses to a lover, and hit me again.
My oar caught in the backwash of another man’s oar, jumped and slammed into my chest, cracking ribs. I grunted.
He hit me again. ‘Silence, slave!’
I tried to gain control of the oar. Tears were pouring down my face, and blood.
He laughed. ‘You need to learn what you are. You are a sack full of pain, and I will let it out when I want to. For anything. Until you die, cursing me.’ He moved around until he was in my sight line. ‘I am Dagon, Lord of Pain.’ He laughed.
Just then, the trierarch came up. I knew his voice already. That needs to be said, because I could barely see. And you have to imagine, I was trying to manage an eighteen-foot oar while he hit me in the back.
‘You are off the stroke,’ he said teasingly, and hit me on my left shoulder. He was expert. He hit me so hard I could barely manage the pain — but he didn’t break a bone.
I guess I whimpered.
Dagon laughed again. ‘Silence!’ he said, and hit me again.
The trierarch laughed. ‘New slaves are useless, aren’t they?’ he said.
The oar-master tapped his stick on the deck. ‘He can’t get the rhythm,’ the oar-master said. A lie.
‘You lie,’ I spat.
The blow that struck me put me out.
When I awoke, I was the stern oar of the thranites — the lowest of the low, and since most triremes row a little down by the stern, all of the piss and shit of the whole slave ship was around my ankles and calves. The moment I groaned and shook, one of the oar-master’s minions threw seawater over me and put an oar in my hands, feeding it through the oar-port — it was, of course, a short and difficult oar because of the curve of the ship. Rowing here was always a punishment, even on my ships.
I threw up.
On myself, of course.
And started rowing.
Time lost meaning. I rowed, and hurt, and rowed, and hurt. Men came and hit me with sticks and I rowed, and hurt. We landed for a night, somewhere north of Corcyra, and I was left chained to my bench while other men went ashore. Kritias, a Greek, one of the oar-master’s bully-boys, came to me with stale bread, dipped it in the stinking brown water by my ankles and put it in my lap. ‘I have five obols on this,’ he said. ‘That you’ll eat it.’
He got his five obols.
Then I was sick — sick with one of Apollo’s arrows in me, and shit poured from me into the water at my feet and I vomited, over and over.
And I rowed.
The sun beat down, and men above me died. I was hardly the only victim — indeed, so ill was that ship that men died every second or third day. So that after some more time — I have no idea how much time, but we were somewhere on the coast of Illyria — we landed, and even I was allowed ashore. We ate pig — the slaves got crap, but it was delicious, and we ate everything.
That was the night I realized we were in Illyria. A party of nobles came down to the ship, and I had the energy to pay attention. There were two men and two women on horseback, and they rode straight down the beach.
They gave Hasdrubal the signs of peace, and dismounted warily. He offered them bread and salt and wine.
The two women were young and pretty, tough the way all Illyrians are, as blond as the sun, tanned like old leather, in fine wool with gold bracelets. The men were taller and older, with beards and more gold jewellery. Their servants had tin. We could see it in ingots, brought by donkey from somewhere even farther north.
Illyrians are a strange lot — they have nothing but lords and slaves, and the lords are at war with each other all the time. They look Greek, they sometimes speak Greek — worship our gods, too. Many of them know the Iliad and the Odyssey. But they are not Greek. Or rather, sometimes I think that they are Hellenes who never found the rule of law.
But I was not thinking such rational and philosophical thoughts that night.
I was too far away to hear any of the conversation, but the style of their pins and their clothes, their horse-furniture and a thousand other little details, all made it plain where we were.
Well, while there’s life, there’s hope, or so it is said. Illyrians are the worst pirates in the Middle Sea, and suddenly, it occurred to me that if Hasdrubal would just keep sailing up the coast, an Illyrian coaster was bound to attack us. And the gods knew that we wouldn’t have lasted a moment in a sea fight — a two-thirds crew of sick slaves and bully-boys as marines.
It has to say something for my state that being taken by Illyrians, who enslaved all captives regardless of social status, was my hope.
We were tied together with rope while ashore and put in a stockade, more like a pen, with two armed men as guards. When we were ashore — this was my first time ashore since my first day on board — it was impossible to keep us from talking. Yet, to my utter puzzlement, none of the other oar-slaves would speak.
Not even a word.
It was the lowest part of the whole experience. I had never seen slaves who would not mutter — who would not rebel in a thousand little ways, even if they were too cowed to rebel in the ways that mattered.
The slaves sat silent, every one of them with their eyes closed.
I moved from man to man, whispering, until a guard came into the pen. I froze, but he’d seen me, and he struck me with his spear shaft — heavy ash. He almost broke my arm. He hit me so hard — I’ll just say this as an aside — that he raised a black bruise on the side of the arm opposite to the blow, and it covered the arm. It made a nice counterpoint to the ache in my ribs.
I didn’t even whimper. I’d learned better.
He laughed. ‘Beg me not to hit you again, pais. Beg me. Offer to suck my dick.’
Sometimes, having been a slave before saved my life. This was one of those times. A man who’d always been free might have had to knuckle under and been broken — or might have had to resist, and been killed.
I held my head and looked dumb.
He hit me lightly. ‘You know what I said!’ he grunted.
I held my head, met his eye and then cocked my head to one side.
He sneered. ‘Not even your wits left, eh?’
Outside, there were shouts — rage — a scream.
He ran out of the pen and slammed the rickety gate closed.
The palisade was hastily built — badly cut palings rammed into the sand and held together with a heavy rope woven in and out of the palings. I could see. My arm hurt, but I got myself to an edge.
Two other slaves came to look.
The rest just lay still with their eyes closed.
Our guards were running full tilt for the central fire of the camp. One of the Illyrian servants was making for the wood line; another was face down, and experience told me he wasn’t ever getting up.
‘You’re an idiot,’ said the Thracian at my elbow. ‘Make trouble.’
‘Uh,’ said the other, a Greek. ‘Never fucking talk when they can hear.’
‘Sorry,’ I muttered.
‘Skethes,’ said the Thracian.
‘Arimnestos,’ I said.
‘Nestor,’ said the Greek. He looked to be fifty years old, and as hard as an old oak tree.
Something was happening at the fire. A woman was screaming.
We couldn’t see anything because it was too dark. But we didn’t have to.
There was the unmistakable sound of a man being beaten with spear shafts — blows falling like hail on a tent, the hollow sound of a man’s head and chest taking them.
And the women, screaming. They were being raped.
One by one, many of the slaves went to sleep.
I couldn’t. I lay there and hated.
Towards morning, two more guards opened the pen and threw in the body. It was a man, and he was alive. I didn’t have to be a philosopher to figure out that he was one of the Illyrian men, although his face was a swollen pulp and he was covered in weals and blood and shit — his own.
All the slaves woke when he was tossed into the pen. He lay there, bleeding, for a long time. Too damned long.
Finally, I couldn’t stand it. I guess I wasn’t broken. Again, my experience as a slave helped me because I wasn’t shocked and I was learning the ‘rules’, sick as they were. So I stripped my loincloth off my groin, dipped it in our drinking water — well might you flinch, young woman — and started to wash the man.
I gave him some water when his eyes opened — they were just slits.
He punched me as hard as he could in the nose — my recently broken nose.
He roared some sort of war cry, and Skethes pinned his shoulders and Nestor rammed my loincloth into his mouth.
The guards, watching through the palisade, laughed.
Fuck them, I thought. I had found a way to rebel. I went back to washing the brutalized man.
The three of us got him cleaner, and we dripped some water into him, and when the sun rose above the rim of the world, we fed bread to him, too. By then, he knew where he was. He didn’t speak. He was, in fact, in shock.
As soon as the light was strong, we could see the bodies. Six of them. The two girls, the other Illyrian nobleman, two Illyrian servants or slaves and one of the oar-master’s bully-boys, all dead in the sand, with a lot of blood around them.
The oar-master woke the slaves with cold water, and ordered us to bury the bodies.
‘You useless fucks,’ he went on to his guards, ‘can watch them, and you can think about how I’m going to take the price of two blond slave girls out of your pay.’ He hit a guard.
The guard flinched.
‘Useless coward,’ the oar-master said. ‘And one of them escaped. So we won’t get all their tin, and their war party will come. Your fault!’ he screamed. He looked at Kritias. ‘If my contact here is killed, I’ll sell the lot of you as slaves.’
Really, you have to wonder that someone didn’t kill him. But I caught that. I’m still proud I did — neither hate nor shock nor the will of the Gods plugged my ears. Dagon had a contact among the Illyrians.
I must have seemed to be listening too closely.
He struck out with his stick and hit me.
I didn’t make a sound.
The guards stood over us and prodded us with their spear points while we dug in the sand. Planting corpses in sand is useless — an offence to gods and men, an invitation to scavengers. But he didn’t care, and the trierarch was silent and withdrawn.
We were down into the gravel layer under the sand, and making heavy work of it — we were digging with bare hands and no shovels — when the trierarch came up, stroking his beard.
‘A little hasty, attacking guests,’ he said. His voice trembled. He was speaking to the oar-master, but since no one on the beach was making a noise, his voice carried. He spoke in Greek, accented, but clear enough.
‘You think so?’ said the oar-master. He sneered. ‘Don’t be weak. We need slaves. That’s what we are here for. And now we don’t have to pay for the tin.’ He looked at the wood line. ‘Besides, you know as well as I, my lord, that his uncle offered us-’
The trierarch spat. ‘We are here for iron,’ he said primly. ‘Not tribal feuds.’
‘Bullshit, I’m here for slaves and tin.’ The oar-master smiled. ‘And we’ll get more. The same way. Epidavros has promised.’
‘We let them approach as guests,’ the trierarch said.
‘Don’t be weak,’ the oar-master said. ‘We need Epidavros.’
There was a long pause. I had to assume that Epidavros was the oar-master’s contact.
‘Why were the women killed?’ Hasdrubal asked.
The oar-master shrugged. ‘My people got carried away,’ he said. ‘It won’t happen again.’
‘See that it doesn’t. Now I want out of here.’ Hasdrubal gestured at the ship. ‘They’re too weak to dig gravel with their hands. Leave the bodies. Let’s be gone.’ He paused, his fear showing even in the way his right foot moved on the sand. ‘One escaped. They will attack us.’
The oar-master shrugged his infuriating shrug. I could tell that he, not the trierarch, was actually in command. And the name Epidavros stuck in my head. There’s a town of that name on Lesbos. I met Briseis there, once. At any rate, he smiled insolently. ‘Epidavros won’t attack us,’ he said. ‘Even if he wanted to — it’ll be days before he’s finished off their relatives.’
The Carthaginian trierarch turned and looked at those of us digging. ‘I want the men who killed those women to pay,’ he said. ‘Those women were worth the value of the rest of our cargo.’
The guard next to me kicked me. ‘Work faster, motherfucker,’ he spat. He knew his turn was coming, so like a good flunky, he passed his anxiety straight on to a slave.
Hasdrubal pushed us back onto the ship. He switched any slave who was slow getting aboard, and he ordered the oar-master, in a voice suddenly as strong as bronze, to flog the last man on his bench, and when that order was given, we went like a tide up the side and almost swamped the ship.
The Illyrian man could barely walk.
The oar-master ordered me to carry him, thus guaranteeing I would be the last man up the side. And I was. I was naked, my loincloth lost in the night, and he shoved me over a bench and caned me, his stick making that dry, meaty sound as he struck me.
Then he put his head close to mine. ‘I can read your thoughts, pais. You take good care of the Illyrian slave. Show me what you are made of. The more you care for him, the longer he’ll live for me.’ He smiled and let me up. ‘He called me a coward, do you know that, pais? So I’ll keep him alive a long time, and show him what a man is.’
Somehow, I got the Illyrian onto a bench — the starboard-stern thranite’s bench, that had been mine. Lekythos, the biggest guard, pointed at it, and then put me in the bench above.
Now I noticed that a third of the benches were empty. The mad fucks were killing oarsmen and not replacing them.
All we needed was an Illyrian pirate. At worst, he’d kill the lot of us. I really didn’t care.
Time passed.
I cared for the Illyrian a little — not really that much. I had to survive myself. I’d like to say the Thracians and the Greek helped, but I never heard a word from them. They were somewhere else — funny that, in a hull only as long as a dozen horses end to end, I had no idea wh
ere they were. They weren’t among the twenty men I could see when I rowed, and the others around me were silent and utterly broken. In fact, one died. He just expired, and his oar came up and slammed his head and he didn’t cry out because he was dead.
I managed to get to the Illyrian in the evening, when the oarsmen were rested, and in the morning, before we began to row. We were off the coast of Illyria now, and we stayed at sea, and every islet on that coast — seen out of the oar-port of the man in front of me — seemed like a potential ship. But our pace never varied, and we rowed on and on. We never raised our boatsail, the small sail in the bow, and we seemed perpetually in motion.
And we never landed.
After a week, the food failed. Suddenly, there was no more barley, much less pig or thin wine. The guards complained and hit us more often.
My Illyrian awoke from whatever torpor had seized him and was given an oar.
We continued north. I assumed it was north — I could seldom see the waves.
The Illyrian didn’t know a word of Greek. I tried to teach him, in grunts and whispered bits, but he wasn’t listening: he didn’t care, and, after a while, I gave up.
The oar-master came to him every day. Stood over him and laughed, and called him a boy and a coward, and told him that he would be sold in Athens to a brothel. But the Illyrian was too far gone, and spoke no Greek, so he endured the abuse.
Another day, he was told he was rowing out of time and beaten, and then beaten for crying out.
You know that feeling you get in the gut, when another man gets what should be yours? That feeling you have when you hear a good man abused? The feeling between your shoulders when a woman screams for help?
When you are a slave, all that happens. For a while. But by taking away from you your ability to respond to these, they take your honour. After a while, a man can be beaten to death an arm’s-length away and you don’t even clench your stomach muscles.
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