Poseidon's Spear lw-3

by Christian Cameron

  I stopped on the steps and almost fell.

  She looked at me, put a hand to her chest and then turned and went back into the temple of Nike. Without intending it — indeed, without any conscious thought — I ran back up the steps to the temple, but Dionysus caught my hand.

  ‘You cannot go in there,’ he said. ‘Gelon would have you killed.’

  I saw that the temple doors — well-worked bronze, the height of a man, with deeply inset panels that showed scenes from the triumph of the goddess — were slightly ajar. She was watching me. Or watching for me to go.

  ‘I know her,’ I said. It was, all things considered, a foolish thing to say.

  Dionysus looked at me. ‘I must suggest that you are mistaken,’ he said primly.

  The next few days passed in a pleasant, but confusing, whirl. Doola was busy selling our tin, and through him, our inn became a hive of mercantile activity. Gelon might disdain merchants, but his factor made it clear that Syracusa needed tin.

  I received invitations to the palace, which I accepted. I dined with Gelon and the nobility of Syracusa. Lydia — if it was Lydia I had seen — was nowhere in evidence. I shared a couch with Gaius, and we were bored. I didn’t see Dano. Of course, I was back in civilization and women didn’t, in general, dine with men, especially in conservative, aristocratic Syracusa.

  Dull.

  After two days of it, I couldn’t stand the inaction. At first I wandered the waterfront. I met men from Athens and Croton, from Rome, from all the cities of the Etrusca, from as far away as Tyre. The Tyrian, a senior officer of a merchant on the beach, looked me over carefully from the deck of his ship and then beckoned to me.

  ‘You are the great Greek pirate,’ he said. He grinned. It wasn’t a real expression — more like a dog showing its teeth. He sent a boy for spiced wine, and we sat on bales of his linens from Aegypt and he told me without preamble that Darius, the Great King for all of my life, was rumoured to have died at Persepolis, which was about as far from Syracusa as I could imagine in distance. His successor was Xerxes, or so my Phoenician helmsman informed me.

  He talked about Persia’s determination to conquer Athens, and after a while we moved up the beach to a taverna. Men came and went, asking his leave to buy one thing or sell another. After some small talk about his family, he got to the point. He leaned back, stuck two fingers in the top of his linen kilt and smiled.

  ‘Now I have told you something, yes? So you tell me. You make war — sea war — on Carthago, yes?’ He smiled, but the smile didn’t reach his eyes.

  ‘Carthago enslaved me,’ I said mildly.

  He nodded. ‘You have killed many of my people. Many. Yet I sit here and make the talk with you, and you do not seem like a monster. Why so much war, eh?’

  I spread my hands. ‘It seems to follow me,’ I said.

  He nodded. ‘So tell me this. Is it true you went to the Tin Islands? All the way into the Outer Sea?’

  I was watching him carefully. I didn’t think it impossible that the Phoenicians would murder me in cold blood, for all sorts of reasons — but first and foremost because I knew the route to the tin. ‘Yes. All the way to Alba. And back.’

  He smiled, leaned forward and extended his hand. ‘I’m Thato Abn Ba’al. I, too, have crossed the northern seas.’ He grinned. ‘I tell them, at home, that we could publish the route in every city in the world and do ourselves no harm, because only a great sailor can make the trip. That the squadron at Gades is wasted.’ He nodded. ‘You have prisoners, I believe.’

  I am a man of the world, and I like most people. I have come to an age where I can say that in truth, there is no one truth — that no man is much better than any other, and that Greeks are not handsomer or smarter than Persians. No race has an edge in courage, or discipline, or ship-handling.

  But I cannot abide Phoenicians. Maybe it is bred to the bone after years of war, or perhaps they really are rotten to the core of their child-killing society. Eh?

  So all this, this whole pleasant morning of conversation, was a preamble to asking me if he could ransom my prisoners.

  ‘I have a few,’ I said. My annoyance was already rising.

  ‘Give them to me, and I’ll see what I can do to get you trading privileges in Sidon and Carthago,’ he said with a smile.

  ‘Why would I want to trade there?’ I asked. I was already getting to my feet.

  ‘The richest trade in the world? The finest entrepot, the best warehouses, the most imposing array of products, the best craftsmanship?’

  ‘Athens, you mean?’ I said.

  He laughed, but his laugh was more false than an old whore’s smile.

  ‘Athens is a nice little town,’ he said. ‘Sidon, Tyre, Carthago — these are the finest cities in the world, and you should beg to trade in them.’

  ‘Why?’ I asked. I leaned forward. ‘I can take whatever they have to offer whenever it suits me.’ I nodded. ‘Like that ship right there.’

  ‘It would mean war between Carthago and Syracusa. A war that Syracusa would lose. Carthago can put a hundred thousand men in the field.’ He stood up. ‘Slavery has eroded your manners as well as your sense of right and wrong. I sought to do you no harm, Greek. I want to buy your prisoners.’

  I nodded. ‘I’ll send you my factor,’ I said haughtily. In fact, I wanted rid of them, and money is always nice. The problem with anger is that it can get in the way of common sense. I didn’t need him or his ship, or the international complications that would arise. Even as it was, my possession of the hull of a captured Carthaginian warship and the freed Greek slaves roaming the streets spending their pay was making trouble for my host, who in turn was increasingly distant to me.

  Piracy. Always a complicated matter.

  I turned to leave Thato Abn Ba’al, and had another thought.

  ‘Do you know a Greek in Carthago’s service called Dagon?’ I asked.

  The Phoenician rolled his eyes. ‘Yes.’

  ‘Insane?’ I asked.

  The Phoenician shipmaster shrugged. ‘A bad man. And not one of us, whatever you say.’ He spat.

  ‘Will you see him? In Carthago?’ I asked.

  Thato narrowed his eyes.

  I shrugged. ‘I am not after your ship. I spoke in heat.’

  He splashed some wine on the floor. ‘Make me your guest friend, and I’ll talk to you about it.’

  A guest friend is a sort of sacred trust, like brotherhood. If you make a man your guest friend, you accept responsibility for him in your house and your city — but you also, in effect, swear to support him and not to harm him, ever. Sometimes guest friendships are passed down from generation to generation.

  ‘If you wanted my prisoners, why not just say so?’ I asked.

  ‘It is rude to start a conversation with a demand,’ he said. ‘I am a gentleman. I heard that you are, too, despite your violence.’

  I sat again. Poured a little more wine. ‘Guest friendship is a door that swings both ways,’ I said.

  He spat thoughtfully. ‘I am not a barbarian,’ he said. ‘Make me your guest friend, and we will share the rewards in the eyes of our gods. And men.’

  Despite all, I liked him. So I got up and swore the oath to Zeus, and he swore by Ba’al and Apollo, and we clasped hands. Some bystanders in the taverna witnessed — a big Athenian helmsman I didn’t know came and slapped me on the back.

  ‘Then take the prisoners,’ I said to my new brother. ‘No ransom.’

  He was genuinely surprised. Unaffectedly surprised. ‘You mean that?’ he asked.

  I led him to where Neoptolymos sat under an awning, drinking wine. He had six Carthaginian officers, and a pair of our marines watching them — and making sure our former slaves didn’t gut them for old times’ sake.

  ‘Neoptolymos?’ I said. ‘Let them go. This man will take them home.’

  Neoptolymos nodded. He was an aristocrat, too; he rose to his feet and bowed to our Phoenician guest.

  Thato started to lead them towards
his ship, they clutching his knees and patting his hands and weeping. As well they might. But he pushed the youngest one away and turned to me.

  ‘I may see Dagon in Carthago,’ he said. ‘I can’t stand him, but I see him all too often.’

  ‘Tell him you met Arimnestos of Plataea.’ I smiled. ‘Tell him that when I find him, I will break him on an oar and crucify him on my mainmast.’

  Thato nodded and pursed his lips. ‘I will,’ he said seriously.

  I was busy in other ways, as well. The Athenian helmsman — a former slave named Simon, like my hateful cousin — was almost fully loaded with Sicilian wine and copper ore and three ingots of my tin, and he was headed east to Athens. Since I had already begun to form my plans to return to my own life, so to speak, I asked him to see if he could find Mauros, or any of my other friends in Athens or Piraeus. I wrote a letter to Aristides, sometimes known as The Just who had led one of the Athenian taxeis at Marathon, and another to Themistocles, the leader of the Athenian demos, asking them to see to it that if my ship still sailed the seas, it came to me at Massalia.

  I wrote another letter to my sister Penelope.

  I had decided that it was time to return to my home.

  But first, I had a military operation to plan.

  And I had to know about Lydia.

  I completed my letter-writing, visited Doola’s mercantile exchange and sat down to listen to him dicker with a pair of Sybarite merchants.

  It took me a moment to realize that he was buying their tin.

  This made no sense to me, but I smiled at Doola, who was clearly having a fine time, and walked outside, where, to my confusion, Seckla was leading a pair of donkeys loaded with tin out of the inn’s yard.

  He smiled at me and walked on, attended by a pair of slaves.

  Perhaps we delivered.

  I fortified myself with one more cup of wine and walked up the town, to the shop where I had worked for a year. I sent a slave in for Nikephorus. But I already knew that the forge was silent, and when the mistress of the house emerged, she looked at me, face carefully blank.

  ‘Where is Master Nikephorus?’ I asked.

  She looked away. ‘He died.’

  ‘And his wife?’ I asked.

  The woman looked at the ground. ‘She died first.’ She finally met my eye, and hers held rage. ‘You have nerve, coming here. After what you did. You don’t think I know you? I know you.’

  This was what I had imagined, when I imagined the worst possible outcome of my visit. And I didn’t know her.

  ‘You ruined her. Turned her head — made her a whore.’ The woman spat at my feet. ‘My curse on you. I pray for your destruction, every day. May the sea god suck you down. May the Carthaginians take you.’

  I confess that I stepped back before her rage.

  ‘I wanted to marry her,’ I said weakly, knowing that this was not precisely true.

  ‘Did you?’ she asked. ‘I’m sure you still can. She might make a good wife, between pleasuring gentlemen at parties.’ She stepped forward. ‘My sister died, of a broken heart. Her husband died when the fucking Tyrant took his citizen rights. They took you in, you fuck. Gave you work. You ruined them.’ She was screaming now. I was backing away as if she were three swordsmen. Or perhaps five.

  Five swordsmen would not have made me feel like this one middle-aged woman.

  What do you say? To the screaming harridan in the street? I meant no harm? We were just playing? I play with girls all the time? I’m a warrior, and it is my right to take women as chattel?

  One of the effects of age is to realize that most of society’s rules — even the most foolish — exist for reasons, and are broken only at someone’s peril. From the comfort of this kline and across the distance of years, I doubt that I wrecked Lydia alone, or that her mother died entirely of my actions. Nikephorus could have been less intransigent. As I discovered, he threw her from the house. She was a prostitute by the next morning. That’s the way of it. And she came to the attention of the man who became Tyrant, and he took her for his own. As you will hear.

  Well.

  How much of that is my responsibility? Eh?

  When the night is dark, and the wine is sour, it looks to me as if it is all my responsibility. All of it. I played with her life, and I broke it. That’s hubris, my daughter. Treating a free person as if they are a slave.

  I never promised you a happy story.

  I left the street and walked down the hill, and sat on the beach over the headland from the citadel, and I wept. And then I went back to town along the waterfront, looking for a fight, and didn’t find one. You never do, when you really want one. So I drank, and I walked, and I wandered.

  It grew dark. And there was Doola standing in front of me, and he walked with me a way, and then it was morning, and I awoke with a hard head and a general sense of hopelessness.

  I went downstairs and sat with my friends. Because they were true friends, I told them the whole story. Doola knew some, and Neoptolymos most of it, but when they heard the whole story, they gathered around me and Seckla hugged me, and Doola just stood with a hand on my shoulder.

  ‘You owe the girl,’ he said.

  ‘She must hate me,’ I said.

  Doola nodded. ‘I don’t think that will change. You must help her, anyway. Take her away from here, to where she can start again.’

  ‘Perhaps she likes it here,’ I said; a fairly weak thing to say, really.

  Doola just looked at me.

  Neoptolymos said, ‘Let’s just take her.’

  I didn’t see any solution. But Doola insisted I had to see her, and I determined to try.

  I began by asking any staff I met when I went up to the palace. Rumours of the Tyrant’s hetaera were everywhere in the town, but there was no one at the palace who would even mention her. At my third invitation to dine, I went and sat on young Dionysus’ couch — it was crowded, I can tell you — to see what he would tell me, but the party was growing wilder by the moment and I couldn’t even get his attention.

  I have seldom felt such an utter depression of spirit as I felt that evening. I sat in the Tyrant’s beautiful garden — he’d had the couches arranged outside — and the sun stained the sky and distant clouds a magnificent orange pink even as his roses scented the air. It was an intimate dinner — perhaps thirty guests, with superb music and very good food. I remember none of the dishes, because I didn’t want food.

  I sat alone on a couch, ignored by the other guests, a mere oddity, a foreigner who had sailed a long way and nothing more. I was thirty years old and more. I was a famous man — in a way. But that way was not the kind of fame any man seeks. I had the reputation of a killer. A pirate. A thug. I had abused a girl half my age, and because of it, her family was disgraced or dead and she herself dishonoured. And nothing could make that right. There was no one to kill.

  I am not a fool. I was trained by one of the greatest minds in the history of Greece, and I have a brain of my own. I could, and did, see the difference between what my emotions said I had done and the actual responsibility I bore. But that didn’t matter, any more than the various excuses I make myself for the oceans of blood I have shed with the edge of my sword.

  I was more than thirty years old, and I had neither wife nor children; no permanence, no hope of continuity. If an enemy spear took me, I would be gone like a bad smell in a powerful wind.

  I still think these thoughts, thugater. Nothing makes it better. It is dark, and it can go on for days. There is nothing joyous about murder. The thrill — the contest — of war is only half the story, and the other half is remembering all the men whose lives you reaped so that you could have their gold.

  I decided to go. If I had been feeling better, I might have been bold enough to walk off and search the palace, but dark spirits do not raise your courage.

  Gelon came and sat on my kline just as I was about to leave. ‘You are like the spectre at the feast,’ he said. ‘Is my food bad? Do the musicians displea
se you?’

  ‘No,’ I said. ‘I am not in the mood for food. I should have declined to come, my lord. I am poor company.’

  He furrowed his brow. ‘I expect better of my guests. Come: tell us of sailing the Outer Sea.’

  Another man — one of the horse-breeders who seemed to be Gelon’s favourites — clapped his hands together. ‘Tell us!’

  Another one of them, a taller man with ringlets, looked at me curiously. I suddenly knew him — he was one of the wealthy men who had evicted me from the city gymnasium some years before.

  Had I been in a different mood, that might have roused me, but in my present mood, it only served to make me tired.

  ‘Another time,’ I said wearily.

  ‘I insist,’ said the Tyrant.

  Well, he was the absolute lord of Syracusa, and my ships were in his harbour. ‘Very well,’ I said.

  He held up a hand. ‘Let me send for Dano,’ he said. ‘She loves any physical science. She will want to hear this herself. In fact, she insisted.’

  I lay back, while slaves rearranged the couches so that I could tell my story to the party.

  Theodorus — his name came to me — came and stood by my kline. ‘I think I know you,’ he said hesitantly.

  ‘I was a slave,’ I said. ‘And you didn’t want to know me.’

  He frowned. ‘You probably shouldn’t be in the palace.’

  I nodded. I found that I was growing angry easily, that I wanted to quarrel with this relative nonentity. Which was foolish. Anger is always foolish.

  ‘Why don’t you tell him, and we’ll see how he reacts?’ I said.

  Theodorus looked at me. ‘How does a former slave own three warships?’ he asked me.

  ‘Good question,’ I said. I smiled.

  He went and said something to one of his cronies, and then the Tyrant was back with Dano. She wore a veil and sat in a chair.

  Theodorus cleared his throat even as Dano raised the edge of her veil and gave me the sweetest smile. It wasn’t the smile of a flirtatious woman, but merely a smile. In that moment, it was as if she read my mind — my anger, my hurt.