Poseidon's Spear lw-3

by Christian Cameron

  Then we had ten of the strongest slaves, led by Neoptolymos, carry loads of flammables up to the tower, under the cover of twenty of us with aspides held over their heads.

  The men in the tower understood immediately, of course.

  We didn’t lose a man.

  Heh.

  Six trips to the tower, and back, across open ground.

  Then Doola lit a torch — one of ours from the ship. He was going to throw it at the pile, but I ran it to the pile and placed it well under. Nothing hit me, because it is really very difficult to shoot straight down in the dark with a bow.

  The pile caught. The tower caught.

  The men inside died screaming. It should have been horrible, but instead, it was deeply satisfying. Make of that what you will.

  Before dawn, the tower was like a lighthouse, a beacon, with flames ten times the height of a ship’s mainmast roaring into the sky. One of the slaves, a man named Herodikles, sacrificed a ram from the pens and threw the carcass into the fire. He was an Aeolian, from Lesbos, and he’d been a slave for fifteen years, taken while on a pilgrimage to Cyrene.

  There were a hundred such stories.

  Men told them, while their oppressors tried to scream the smoke out of their lungs and failed. They smelled like roast pork as they burned.

  In the morning, when the fire burned less than a mast-height high, and the sun was over the rim of the world, we climbed down into the pit.

  They were all there, waiting. They were even thinner, and they didn’t have darkness to hide the open sores, the flies, the ooze of pus. Despite which, they grinned from ear to ear. Gaius. Daud. Demetrios, who looked so bad I was afraid he would die before we could get food into him. I couldn’t even figure out how he could stand on those legs.

  They had been slaves for just two months.

  The Phoenicians were… I was going to say animals, but no animal except man treats another like that.

  We rigged a sling, and lifted them out of the pit. Most of them were too weak to climb the ladder.

  While that happened, I went and posted sentries. There was a new spirit among my men: the shepherds, the herdsmen, the fishermen’s sons, the slaves freed at Centrona. We’d been victorious again; we were doing something noble. They were inspired, just as men can be inspired by a great play, or by the noble words of a godlike man like Heraclitus, or by the gods themselves.

  I knew as soon as I looked at them. They were ready to do something great.

  For the moment, all we had to do was to be alert.

  We watched the plains all day while the tower burned. Men looked at me, and I smiled. I kept my own council. There was food in the sheds, animals in the pens, and I prepared a feast on the coals of the tower and served it to the slaves, telling my own men that they should go from slave to slave as if they were slaves themselves.

  They did so with good will. The slaves tore into the meat, complained about the lack of wine and bread — mock complaints, although there’s always some awkward sod who feels sorry for himself. But they ate and ate.

  I saw no reason to leave so much as a goat alive, so as fast as they ate, we killed more.

  And watched the plains.

  About noon, we saw the dust cloud.

  Seckla was my best rider. I gave him the mounted men, and clear orders. Up at the mine we had a view for fifty stades over the plain, so that I could point out his route — this stream, that copse of trees, that farmhouse.

  They cantered away, and men cheered them.

  The tower had just about burned out. So I asked the slaves to fetch water from the well, a bucket at a time, and pour it into the coals.

  Steam rose to the heavens, carrying the scent of roast meat. Some of it was roast men, and the gods have never rejected such a sacrifice. I remember wondering at myself; I thought Tertikles a barbarian for sacrificing a man before we launched our ships, but I was secretly pleased to have sent twenty Phoenicians screaming to my gods.

  Well.

  It’s true; I can be a vicious bastard.

  When the dust cloud on the plain reached a certain point, I took most of my armed men and marched. We had full bellies and full water bottles, and we moved fast, going downhill, despite the full heat of the summer sun. My friends wanted to come — Gaius demanded it, and muttered words about honour.

  I pushed a chunk of goat into his greasy hands. ‘Honour this,’ I said. ‘I’ll do the killing. You do the eating.’

  We went down the mountain, crossed the stream at its foot and went along the ridge through the high beech trees until we came to the site I’d chosen on the way. When you are a warrior, you think about these things all the time. That field would make a good place.

  That piece of trail.

  Ambushes come in as many different shapes as women. And men, too, if you wish. What would make one ambush perfect would be certain death in another.

  I had very few missile weapons. So my ambush would be close in, a deadly, hand-to-hand thing. And since my men were on foot, we had to win. Because we were unlikely to outrun pursuit.

  If we had had missile weapons — more bows, good javelins and throwing strings, heavy rocks — we might have chosen other sites.

  Instead, we lay down among the trees, an arm’s-length from the road. I took my place with Doola, behind a big rock that slaves and oxen had shifted. You could tell, because it stood clear of the ground, where all the other big rocks were half buried. It allowed me to see the road in both directions.

  If you ever have cause to lay an ambush, whether you do it with a handful of mud for your brothers, or with a sharp spear for your enemies, remember these simple rules.

  Always have a clear line of retreat. Any other ambush is just an elaborate form of suicide.

  Tailor your surprise to your arms and your enemy. If you have bows, you should wait at a good killing range, with an open field that won’t block your archery. If you have time, plan your ambush so that your first flight of arrows panics your foe into a worse position. Don’t drive him off a road and into an impregnable stronghold.

  The moment anything goes wrong, including an hour before you sight the enemy — run. Men in ambush are absurdly vulnerable.

  There, ladies. All my wisdom — wisdom I learned for myself, and not from Heraclitus. He was like a god, but I don’t think he knew much about ambushes.

  At any rate…

  We lay there. And lay there. An hour passed, and another, and the sun went down noticeably.

  I had so much to worry about; a man commanding an ambush always does. Had they stopped and made camp? Taken another route, and even now they were storming the slave camp? They’d given up and gone home.. They’d slipped past us.

  Another hour passed. Insects ate us, and men snuck away to piss and snuck back.

  Men got the jitters.

  And another hour.

  And then we heard the sound. Hard to describe, but instantly identifiable. Men — a powerful number of them. Walking with a rattle and tinkle and clank. Talking.

  They had two scouts. They were moving two hundred paces ahead of the column — walking on the road. When they came to the edge of our copse of woods, they stopped.

  They talked with each other until the column had almost caught up.

  Then they came into the woods.

  My heart was pounding. The enemy had a hundred men — perhaps double that. It was difficult to count them from my hiding place, but there were many of them. They entered the woods.

  Their scouts moved quickly. They were conscious that they’d allowed the column to close up to them too much, and they ran.

  But just about even with me, one of them stopped. He was a handsome young man, wearing only a chlamys and a petasos hat and carrying a pair of heavy spears on his shoulder. He stopped from a sprint and looked into the woods. He wasn’t looking at me, he was looking away from me, staring off into the woods.

  His mate stopped running and looked back.

  ‘See something?’ he called i
n Phoenician.

  The first man looked and looked, and then squatted and looked at the road.

  ‘Men were here,’ he said.

  You have to imagine, they were an arm’s-length from me. They didn’t have to shout.

  Behind them, the column came rolling along the road.

  I saw Alexandros move, and I glared at him. Ambush requires patience.

  ‘Escaped slaves,’ the second man ventured.

  The first man looked all around. He was young. That’s probably what saved him. The young make piss-poor observers. He looked, but didn’t see.

  A commanding voice called from behind them on the road. I couldn’t make it out, but it was doubtless their commander, telling his scouts to get a move on. Twilight was only two hours away.

  The young man looked around again and shrugged.

  He and his companion loped off.

  I looked around. I could see Alexandros and Giannis and about fifteen other men.

  I waited.

  The column trudged forward.

  Waited.

  ‘She had tits like udders — Ba’al, it was disgusting!’

  ‘He was an ignorant-’

  ‘So I said-’

  ‘I drank the wine.’

  ‘I just want to ask this again-’

  They were just men. Tall, short, weak, strong, smart, foolish — they were men, walking down the road on a summer evening, headed for battle. Nervous. Over-talkative, as all men are before a fight. As the tail of the column started to pass me, I saw the last two men of the first taxis nervously checking the draw of their swords while their phylarch told them that they needed to stay together, stay together in the fighting.

  ‘Pirates! Just pirates. They won’t have any discipline. Like the lot we took yesterday. Don’t worry about-’

  I rose from my place and roared my war cry.

  We fell on the head of the column. They died, and the survivors broke and ran across the road for the shelter of the trees. Most ran a few steps into the woods before they died, because Doola and his men were on that side of the road, a little farther back.

  The second taxis froze outside the woods, listening to the screams of their comrades and the sounds of one-sided hand-to-hand.

  My dozen archers began to drop shafts into them.

  Perhaps their officer was hit early. Perhaps he was a fool. Either way, they did the worst thing possible — they huddled like sheep and bleated, and the arrows fell.

  A dozen good archers can do a lot of damage, even to armoured men, even trained men with good morale.

  No one had trained men with good morale in a colony, ten thousand stades from home.

  By this time, I was watching them. The fight in the woods was over before it really began — a hundred dead Phoenicians — mercenaries, in fact, mostly north Africans with some Greeks among them.

  Men like me.

  Heh. But not enough like me.

  I started to get my oarsmen in order, and Alexandros was there, and Doola and Sittonax, his long Kelt sword red to the hilt.

  I knew the second taxis would break the moment I charged it. You can read these things as easily as you read words on a page. It’s like a woman’s facial expressions. The nervous tick; the cold glance. So, by the same token, you can read the moving of spears, the shuffling of feet and the shaking of horsehair plumes. Nervous fidgets.

  ‘Charge!’ I roared.

  We hadn’t run six paces before they broke. They ran away from our charge, and many of them threw down their shields in the flight. The archers loosed and loosed, until our charge obscured their targets.

  I didn’t catch one of them. They ran so early that they easily outdistanced my people, all of whom had already fought in one combat — even an ambush is a combat — and by the time we’d crossed the clearing, it was plain to see we didn’t have the daimon to run them down.

  So we went around the darkening battlefield, collecting loot. There wasn’t much. The weapons were average, the armour was leather and often already ruined, and most of the helmets were cheap, open-faced helmets or Etruscan-style salad bowls.

  A few men had purses, most of them containing only copper.

  Not much to die for.

  At twilight, we gave up plundering the dead. There were no survivors, not even the two scouts, who’d been killed by the northern fringe of our ambush. That’s the way of it, when an ambush works.

  We left the bodies for the birds, and marched back towards the mine. When we got there, we ate some meat, drank water and watched the steam rising off the ruin of the tower. Then we went to sleep.

  I remember that I forgot to post sentries. Luckily, Doola wasn’t as tired, or as foolish.

  Not that it mattered.

  About midnight, Seckla came back. He had heads dangling from his saddlecloth, bouncing and frightening his horse. It was ghoulish.

  I woke up long enough to embrace him and hear that he’d hit the survivors and harried them back to their settlement. And then I went back to sleep.

  In the morning, it was grey, and the sun wasn’t going to show. My men were surly with fatigue and reaction. I knew how to cure that.

  I got a dozen former slaves and some of the stronger herdsmen, and together we moved the two largest of the charred beams from the stump of the tower. With shovels, we cleared the ash and the collapsed roof materials, but the fire had burned a long time, and almost everything had been consumed.

  Except the gold and silver, of course.

  It took two hours, and I was beginning to doubt, but there they were — a molten puddle of gold, and another of silver, about a yard apart. A fair amount of gold, and quite a lot of silver.

  We took axes and hacked it up into manageable chunks, and loaded it on to our stolen horses. Morale soared.

  We gorged once more on the dwindling stock of animals, and then we marched for our ships.

  We all squeezed aboard, although the conditions were probably not much better than those in the slave pens. We had two hundred and fifty men in a trireme built for two hundred, and we had sixty men in a triakonter.

  Off the Tagus, I signalled to Doola to lay alongside, and he agreed to take his shallower craft over the bar and have a look at the town. It was raining, and rowing the trireme was brutal, and I already doubted whether I could get the ship home to Oiasso like this.

  Now that the derring-do was over, I began to consider what had happened to my wife and her brother, my erstwhile allies. I had to assume they’d been defeated. How badly? Badly enough, perhaps, not to make it home. Or worse, badly enough to make it back to Oiasso and close it against me.

  Doola caught the morning breeze coming off the land and came back, my beautiful Lydia wallowing with so many people on board. He gave me a thumbs-up as soon as he was close enough to wave.

  We went into the estuary at sunset. The moon was lost in the clouds, and the night was black, and we crept up the river, impeded by ignorance and by the current, which was absurdly strong for summer.

  The town was twenty stades upstream. We found it, but it had a mole and the approach looked too hard to try in the dark.

  On the other hand, there were a dozen small ships on the beach and in the channel on moorings. There was Amphitrite, and there were two more like her — tubby Greek-style merchantmen.

  We took them. And for good measure, having silently acquired what we wanted, we set the rest afire. Then, on the dawn breeze and falling tide, we slipped away. My trireme was lighter by fifty men, and Lydia was lighter by thirty. Demetrios insisted on managing Amphitrite himself.

  It took us ten days to reach Oiasso.

  9

  We were not welcome.

  Tara came down to meet us. Tertikles sulked in his great hall of timber and let his sister tell us we were not welcome. Through Daud, because Sittonax wanted nothing more to do with the whole process.

  ‘We need water and food. I’ll pay.’ I wasn’t contrite — I thought that she and her brother had got what they deserve
d for poor scouting and planning.

  ‘Pay with what?’ she said. ‘You little coward — running off and leaving us when there was a fight. Why would I give you food?’

  ‘I have all the slaves we saved,’ I pointed out. ‘They need food.’

  She spat. ‘Not from us,’ she said.

  I liked her. And she was making me angry. The two, sometimes, go together. ‘You want to blame me? Blame your brother. If he had followed me-’

  ‘My brother? The King? Follow you, a foreigner?’ She shook her head. ‘A man like you does well to follow a man like my brother.’

  I shook my head. ‘Your brother is a fool. No one will willingly follow such a man.’

  ‘And this should convince me to feed your slaves?’ she spat.

  I shrugged. ‘Sell me food. Or I’ll take it.’

  She drew herself up as only a woman of good birth can. ‘You think you can take us? You and your slaves?’

  I nodded. ‘Yes.’ I pointed behind me. There were six ships.

  She turned her face away.

  Daud said something very quickly in Keltoi.

  ‘We lost thirty men,’ Tara said, in Greek. ‘Half. Half our war party.’

  ‘And accomplished nothing,’ I said.

  ‘My brother called out to them, challenging their captain to single combat. Instead, they shut the gates on us and shot arrows at us, and then the garrison marched out.’ She smiled. ‘We faced them. And charged them. We killed many.’

  ‘At least a dozen,’ I said.

  ‘Hah! What did you do?’ she asked.

  I shrugged. ‘We stormed their gold mine, killed the guards, took the gold, freed the slaves and came home. Oh — we massacred the town garrison, too. In an ambush.’ I suspect I sounded smug.

  She glared, and spat some words in Kelt.

  Daud, despite his appearance, was recovering. He laughed. His laugh stung her.

  ‘Give me food and water, and I’ll pay in gold and leave. Or refuse.’ I crossed my arms. ‘And I swear to the gods I’ll storm your town and burn your brother’s hall and leave you for the ravens. You and your brother are amateurs. War is not a pursuit for amateurs.’