He patted his waist. ‘Not likely. But I might build a privateer to go with you. Would you stomach that?’
‘If his captain obeyed,’ I said.
We shook on it.
I collected my armour from Anaxsikles in the same hour that Neoptolymos tried his. Men said we were like Achilles and Hector standing side by side. We glittered with all the new bronze.
Now, if you consider, in all my life I have been armed in the arms of dead men, or in my own work. This was the first panoply I’d ever had that was all the work of one man, purpose-made for me.
Glorious, like the sword and the spears that went with it.
I had thigh guards, and arm guards, upper and lower, and ankle guards, rendering me proof against any chance blow in a ship fight. A solid-bronze thorax and a helmet with folding cheekpieces, and greaves that fitted up over the knee like a bronze skin.
A shop boy held a mirror, and I looked at myself — a man of bronze.
I ran up and down the street in it, to the delight of a hundred small boys. Despite the old wound, I ran well, although Neoptolymos ran better. And we threw our spears and even fenced a bit with our swords, and the crowd roared with pleasure. Remember — this was a society at the edge of war with mighty Carthage. They were afraid. Afraid they would lose. And seeing us — friendly foreigners who would help — gave them heart.
Ah, it was glorious.
Last of all, I went to see Gelon. He seemed scarcely to remember me, which was odd. I explained that I was returning to Massalia, and he was uninterested until I said I would be back in the spring with five ships.
‘It is my intention to strike the Carthaginian trade in the Adriatic,’ I said. ‘If you prefer, I can touch at Rhegium rather than here. I know your relations with Carthage are delicate.’
He nodded. ‘Oh, come here,’ he said. ‘Will your five ships support me when we are at war?’
‘Yes,’ I said.
He nodded. ‘Then let us not mince words. We are at war with Carthage now — and with Persia. There is a rumour that Xerxes is now Great King — and has sent an ambassador to Carthage to demand they make war against us. To destroy the Greek world.’
I nodded. ‘I have heard this rumour before,’ I said. ‘It is something men say. I doubt the Great King even knows where Syracusa is.’
He frowned. ‘Yet Athens intends to send an embassy here to ask for our support against Persia,’ he said.
My eyebrows shot up.
‘Oh, yes, Plataean. It has come to that.’ He drank wine. ‘Athens has more than a hundred ships to put in the water, all triremes. Yet I have half as many again, when all the cities of Magna Greca support me.’ He nodded. ‘I will be Hegemon of the League against Persia. Wait and see.’
I couldn’t see this idealist being invited by Athens to command a rowing boat in a race, but he believed himself a great man. And indeed, despite my dislike of him — yes, I had decided I disliked him — he had greatness in him.
As for promising my ships to support him, I assumed that we would. How could I have seen how it would all fall out? The truth is that, like many Greeks, I never imagined what was coming. To men of my generation, Lade and Marathon settled everything — Lade gave Persia the upper hand in Asia, and Marathon denied them Greece. That business was finished.
In retrospect, I should have known, of all men, where we were headed, and at what speed.
We sailed for Massalia near the end of the season, rich, fat and sleek. Gaius went back to Rome, and we feasted with him and his delighted wife for three days before dropping down the Tiber and racing north. We worried every day and every night about a Carthaginian squadron, and we met none.
Massalia seemed very small after the summer in Syracusa. Dionysus was delighted to see us; he had taken three merchantmen over the summer, and was eager to take part in our Adriatic adventure in the spring. He was, as ever, a hard drillmaster, and our rowers cursed him all winter as they sat on benches on a freezing beach, lifting weighted oars and doing other exercises meant to keep their bodies hard. We trained, too. I tried to remember all that Polimarchos had taught me, and I had men lifting heavy stones, fencing with sticks, practising taking and defending ships large and small. We had two months of heavy, icy rain and Dionysus kept us at it. I think some of the oarsmen would have killed him, if they thought they could have got away with it.
But it was not all work. We celebrated feasts like rich men; we built the first stone temple in our small settlement, and many of our men rebuilt their homes in stone. Vasileos rebuilt our Carthaginian capture, making her a lighter ship and slightly longer. We hired more marines from all over the Tyrrhenian Sea — most of them Etruscans. We had some Latins, too — big, tough men.
I threw myself into exercise. It appeared to me that this was my last adventure. I felt old that winter, with aches in my hands and knees that wouldn’t go away. I had no interest in women, and little in wine or song. It seemed to me that the compass of the world was drawing in, smaller and smaller, and that after one more raid, I would go back to Plataea and be an average smith, and die there.
And that seemed to me just.
How the gods must have laughed.
18
Just before the spring feast of Demeter, Dionysus rode over from Massalia to tell us that a Sikel fishing boat had come in with rumour of a heavy Carthaginian squadron cruising our coast. So we got our hulls out of their ship sheds and into the water — my Lydia and Neoptolymos’ Eleuthera. I had Megakles as my helmsman, and Neoptolymos had Vasileos. Our crews were veterans and our marines were, if I may say so, superb — all fully armoured, and all in the peak of training.
We couldn’t wait to get our beaks into some Carthaginians.
We rowed out for a stormy day, our bows into the wind, and came home lashed by rain, and never had a sniff of the Carthaginians. Of course, we never had more than a six-stade sight line, either, so it would have been Poseidon’s will if we had seen them.
But we slept dry at home, with sentries on the headlands and food and wine, which was more than any raiding squadron was getting. And we were off the beach again the next morning, when the air was still brisk and the sun not even a streak of salmon pink on the eastern horizon. We ran along the coast to Massalia, and landed at noon. Dionysus was ready with two ships.
We spent three days training — rowing out towards the northern point of Sardinia until we could see the headland, and then performing manoeuvres — line to column, column to line; changing stroke, changing direction, reversing benches. My oarsmen were openly discussing killing Dionysus. It was Lade in miniature, except that I was a much better trierarch myself, and knew that the standard Dionysus set was perfectly reasonable.
Listen, thugater. It’s like this. If you take a warship to sea, spend the summer rowing up and down the coast looking for the enemy and raiding his pastures, and then finally meet up in the fall — well, your rowers and your marines have, in fact, spent three or four months training. Getting hard. Every direction change, every squadron manoeuvre gets them better.
All Dionysus did was to insist that we be as good as autumn sailors in the spring, by packing a lot of drills into the first week at sea. But such things were innovations, then. Young Phormio does it all the time, these days, or so I’m given to understand.
As usual, I digress. But it is important to understand how untrained crews were, usually, in the spring. We’d worked all winter — I suspect I was the only pirate in the whole circuit of the Inner Sea who paid his crew through the winter. I had never really done it before. When I worked for Miltiades, we fed our oarsmen all winter but we didn’t train them. They just drank and, er, did what oarsmen do, when there’s a town available.
Anyway: three days at sea, and never a sign or report of the Carthaginian squadron. We went back to our home ports for two days’ rest, and then we were at it again. This time, we cruised west along the coast, the mountains rising away to the north and the sea spring blue and clean beneath us.
Oh, how I remember that chase! Two days at sea, and we rowed and rowed, and we were the better men.
Finally, they turned west just at sunset the second day and ran ashore, and we were so close behind them that we landed in the froth of their oars and had our marines ashore before they could draw up their ships.
But they were Etruscans.
How we laughed, there on the beach! They laughed too, with the sudden relief of men at the edge of death. We were poorer by the value of their ships, but that two-day chase put us in fine condition. Most men will only train so hard when there’s no real threat, but offer them a prize on the horizon We were already a third of the way down the coast to the Tiber, so we camped with our Etruscans for a night and set off south in the morning, now a powerful fleet of six ships. The Etruscans were Veii, and ostensibly at sea to protect their city’s shipping. I suspect they had in mind a little piracy.
We left them at the mouth of the Tiber and rowed upstream to Rome, where Gaius was like a man awakened by his friends for exercise — surely you’ve had this experience, eh? A friend sleeps late, you arrive for your morning run, and he pretends he’s ready? You know what I’m talking about. Gaius’s ship was still on stocks and his oarsmen had spent the winter making babies and propping his new vineyards. So we set a rendezvous and went back to sea.
North of the straits, we picked up a Carthaginian merchantman. He surrendered at once, but swore he was part of a convoy for Sardinia. We had six days until our rendezvous, so we rowed east along the north shore of Sicily looking for the convoy.
We swept for eight days and found nothing.
We left our Carthaginian prisoners on their own coast of Sicily. I watched Demetrios’s homeport go by under my lee, and considered dropping down for a chat. He had to be there.
But sometimes, it is best to leave a man alone.
So we rowed north, to Ostia.
Two days there — see, I have the logs. Two days there, and our crews were sick. The place is deeply unhealthy, and the spring mosquitoes were brutal, and men were fevered. And no sign of Gaius. Dionysus grew angry, and threatened to leave us. We were drinking in a waterfront taverna so filthy that I had my pais wipe our table down with his chlamys, which he then threw onto a heap of filth rather than wear. One of the porne who served the wine picked it up and put it on.
When Achilles said it was better to be the slave of a bad master than King of the Dead, he hadn’t seen porne in Ostia.
It was an oppressive place.
I sent Doola upstream in a small boat while I kept the squadron together by force of will. A dozen of my own carefully trained oarsmen deserted — or wandered off — or simply got sick.
Two days later, Doola returned — alone.
‘He’ll join us later in the summer,’ Doola said. He scowled, which was unlike him. ‘He’s a great man now,’ Doola said.
Dionysus snorted, and later that night gave full vent to his feelings — wasted time, lost oarsmen, disease, suffering, the missed chance of a great capture.
But the gods meant us to be there.
That night, a dancer came to our taverna. We were surly drunks, but she was a fine-looking woman — not young, but in high training, with muscled legs and arms. She danced beautifully, some foreign dance that was just enough like our women’s dances at home to make me weep wine-soaked tears. We showered her with money, and she smirked, and the taverna’s porne cursed her and glared.
The taverna’s owner, a surprisingly young and innocent-looking villain, caught the woman unawares and tried to take her earnings. He didn’t even bother to threaten her; he just grabbed the front of her chiton.
She threw him over her hip and slammed his head on the dirt floor.
My lads cheered and threw more money.
She bowed and smiled. She was missing some teeth, and was none too clean, but in Ostia she looked like a fine courtesan. She bowed and did a little skip on her feet. Seckla hooted — Seckla, let me say again.
Doola grinned at me. Megakles stood up and yelled, ‘Show us your tits!’ Sorry, ladies. But that was his speed, and he was a sailor.
Our dancer smiled and pulled her chiton over her head, as easily as a snake wriggling out of its skin, and stood naked, one hand on her hip. She had a matching pair of bruises inside her thighs and a nasty cut at the top of her right thigh, but otherwise, she was the best-looking woman any sailor needed to see, in Ostia or anywhere else.
We roared, and more coins were tossed.
She reached out and grabbed Seckla and kissed him — and hooked his chlamys off his shoulder and wrapped herself in it. She was grinning.
The innkeeper started to get off the floor. She flicked one nicely arched foot at him and it caught him on the temple, and he was out.
Quite a performance.
She collected her coins, showing a great deal of herself, doing little acrobatics like walking on her hands — naked — to pick up coins, and doing the splits and backwards handsprings and such stuff. She put the coins into a bag around her waist that seemed to be her only permanent possession. This process went on a long time, because men threw more money and she had to come up with ever more inventive methods of picking it up.
Finally, she pulled Seckla’s cloak around her and suddenly, with a spring, she was sitting on the bench across from me, where I sat beside Dionysus.
‘You two are the captains, yes?’ she asked.
Dionysus shrugged. ‘Yes,’ he said.
I pointed at Neoptolymos, who was very carefully not looking.
‘He’s a captain. So’s young Achilles, there.’ Achilles was Dionysus’ hard-bitten second.
Achilles, whose real name was Teukes, gave me a mock glare. He was older than any of us, and calling him ‘young Achilles’ was, well, teasing, of a sort. Hah, hah.
At any rate, she leaned across the table, and I couldn’t really keep my eyes on her face, if you take my meaning. I was old, but not so very old.
‘I have something to sell,’ she said, with a wink.
‘I’m sure any man in this room will buy,’ I said.
She shook her head. ‘Not that. I don’t sell that — what do you think I am? A whore? I’m a dancer. Listen, trierarchs. I have something to sell. The value of it won’t last.’ She shrugged, a lovely motion.
Dionysus was quicker witted than I. ‘Information?’ he asked.
She smiled at him. ‘Perhaps,’ she said, reaching up to put her hair back up.
It takes a superior courage to be a woman, alone in a room full of pirates, wearing nothing but a borrowed cloak and dickering over the price of information. I couldn’t do it.
‘Are you a slave?’ I asked.
She raised her eyebrows. ‘On and off,’ she said. She shrugged. ‘Just now, I own myself.’
‘Tell me your information and I’ll tell you what it’s worth,’ I suggested.
She smiled. ‘You have a special herb and I won’t ever get pregnant?’ she shot back. ‘You’ll pay tomorrow? Your rich aunt just died and you haven’t got the bequest yet?’
‘How did you know?’ I asked.
She leered. ‘Don’t be like this. I have something amazing to relate, and you are my only customers. By Aphrodite, gentlemen!’
‘How much do you want, then?’ Dionysus asked.
‘A talent. In gold.’ She looked back and forth, evaluating our reactions.
‘Ten silver drachma would seem to be more your price,’ Dionysus said.
‘Ten silver mina,’ she said.
‘Wait!’ I said. ‘Is this shipping information?’ I asked.
She grew demure. ‘Perhaps.’
‘On this coast?’ I asked.
She looked down. ‘No. But by Aphrodite, gentlemen, it’s an opportunity for wealth, beyond-’ She shook her head.
‘How’d you get it, then?’ I asked.
‘A gentleman friend told me some things,’ she said, smiling.
‘Navarchs don’t actually whisper secrets to porne,’ Dionysus said, his voice hard. ‘Go and ply your trade with the others, woman.’
She looked at me. ‘Why? You two are heroes. I want to tell you. Death to Carthage. Eh? We all hate the bastards. Why can’t I make a killing with you?’
Dionysus caught her, pinned her hand to the table and put a knife against her wrist.
‘Hey!’ she said, and then the confidence went out of her.
‘I wager this is a trap,’ Dionysus said. ‘You are far too expensive and far too out of place to be here. Who told you to come here?’
She wriggled. ‘Damn you! Every porne on the waterfront knows who you are and how much cash you have! I know something worth knowing! I won’t give it for free!’
Dionysus rolled his dagger blade over her wrist, and she whimpered. He was a cruel bastard. In fact, he liked inflicting pain — it wasn’t just that he was a strong leader. He liked watching his men suffer when he trained them.
‘I can maim your hand,’ he said. ‘Or your face. Or have every oarsman on my ships fuck you till you die. Now talk, whore.’
I can be a hard man. I’ve killed a lot of men, and some women. But this sort of thing sickened me.
On the other hand, I was fairly sure Dionysus was right.
Seckla, on the other hand, was watching, and he wasn’t having any of it. ‘Let her go,’ he said, lurching up to our table in drunken arete.
Dionysus pushed the blade down harder.
She moaned. ‘I’m not-’
Seckla pulled at her hand. I’m sure he didn’t mean to cause her more pain, but he rotated her body and she screamed: ‘Fuck you, you bastards! I’m not lying!’
Dionysus leaned back and let her go.
She snatched her hand away and nursed it against her breast. She seemed smaller and dirtier. She began to cry.
‘Why?’ she asked, looking at me. ‘Why did he have to do that?’
‘I’ll slit your nose, next,’ Dionysus said. He leaned back and motioned a porne for wine. He looked at me. ‘You can’t believe any of this.’
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