Poseidon's Spear (Long War 3) Read online

  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 where 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.

  On and on.

  We rowed.

  We rowed all the way up the coast of Illyria and Dalmatia, and men continued to die, and we rowed without food for a while, as I say. It’s hard to tell this, not just because it’s all so low and disgusting, but because there’s nothing on which to seize. Abuse was routine. Pain was routine. Men hit us, and we rowed. Our muscles ached, and we rowed. Sometimes we slept, and that was as good as our lives ever were.

  We came to an archipelago of islets, and they had small villages on them. Finally, we landed. None of us was allowed ashore, and all I can say is that after a time, a dozen slaves and some food came onto the ship and some copper was unloaded.

  And then it all happened again.

  My Illyrian was moved out of the stern-post rowing station, and I was moved back to the upper deck, and we rowed. There was food. That seemed good.

  We rowed.

  We made another landfall, and were beached again. This place had a ready-built palisade for slaves, and we could see it was full from our benches, with forty or fifty male slaves waiting to be sold.

  Our Illyrian looked at the beach and wept.

  We were pushed ashore, roped together and put in the palisade. By luck, I was roped to the Greek, Nestor.

  After darkness fell, and the guards went off to fuck the female slaves in another pen – I call these things by their proper names, children, and may you never know what slavery is! – we lay side by side, and whispered very quietly.

  ‘Still alive, brother?’ he said.

  ‘Yes,’ I said.

  He nodded in the dark, so close I could feel it more than see it. ‘Good,’ he said. ‘I was thinking,’ he went on. ‘Arimnestos is an odd name. Where you from?’

  Where was I from? May I tell you the truth, friends? I hadn’t thought of home, of anything, for weeks.

  ‘Plataea,’ I said, and it was as if a dam opened in my head and thoughts poured in. My forge, my wife, the night she died, the fire.

  The Pyrrhiche and how we danced it. The feel of a spear in my hand.

  ‘You are Arimnestos of Plataea?’ he asked. ‘By the gods!’ he muttered. ‘I’m a man who’s been a slave his whole life, but you! A gent!’

  ‘I’ve been a slave before,’ I said.

  ‘Ahh,’ he said, and nodded again. ‘Ahh . . . that’s why you are alive.’

  We ate better after that port. We were also a lighter ship by the weight of our Cyprian copper, and we had forty more rowers, fresher men who hadn’t been abused. Indeed, there were too many for the oar-master to ruin them all at once, and we had easier lives for a week.

  We rowed.

  Not one man died that week. That’s all I can say.

  We made one more port call. None of us was allowed on the beach, and we picked up women – twenty women, all Keltoi with tattoos. They were filthy, hollow-eyed, and the first night at sea the oar-master discovered one was pregnant, and he killed her on the deck and threw her corpse over the side. I don’t know why, even now.

  The bully-boys forced the slave women every night. Sometimes these acts happened a few feet over my head. The despair, the sheer horror that those women experienced was somehow worse than any of the blows I had received because it was all so casual. They were used like . . . like old cloaks to keep off rain.

  And none of us could do a thing.

  Or perhaps what is worse is that we could have done something, if we had been willing to die. Die without revenge – die nameless, achieving nothing, our bodies dumped in the sea. That would have taken a special courage I didn’t have. But it took yet more of my honour. I was a slave.

  Then we turned south. I was moved to a stern oar on the top deck, and I, who feared no man in war, was terrified to be
so close to the oar-master. Indeed, I was just a few steps from him at all times.

  Luckily, he was mad. So mad, he’d forgotten me and the Illyrian both. He hated women – all women – far more than he hated us. So while I had to witness his brutal degradation of the slave women, I was merely beaten occasionally, as an afterthought. Tapped with his heavy stick when he was bored.

  After some time – by Zeus the Saviour, I have no idea how far south we’d come – the oar-master cut the throats of a pair of the women in a sacrifice. He did it in the bow, and I never knew exactly what happened. But after that, the other women stopped being alive. That is to say, they were still warm and breathing, but they were dead inside. A few days later they started to die.

  The trierarch simply let it happen.

  Sometimes he reacted in anger and hit a slave, but mostly he just fingered his beard and watched the heavens. His two helmsmen said little.

  From their stilted conversations, I gathered that we were on our way home, and that home was Carthage.

  And I began to learn other things.

  I was a good navigator – my best helmsman and friends had taught me well enough – but the Phoenicians have secrets about navigation, and they hold them close. They use stars and the sun. All of us do, but they do it with far more accuracy than we Greeks. Now, since Marathon, we’ve taken enough of their ships to enslave a generation of their navigators, and we have all their secrets, but back then there were still tricks we didn’t know: the aiming stick for taking the height of a star, or the secrets of the Pleiades and the Little Bear. Ah – I see that the lad from Halicarnassus knows whereof I speak!

  But the helmsmen and the trierarch were careless. They took their sun sights and their star sights a few feet from my silent back, and they discussed their sightings. Hamilcar, the younger helmsman, was obviously under instruction and very slow. I think – I will never know – that he was so deeply unhappy with the life he was living that his brain had shut down.

  And Hasdrubal, the trierarch, used him as his scapegoat. Every wrong answer was punished with a blow. His every thought and opinion was ridiculed.

  Another week at sea, and the new slaves began to be broken. Our rations were cut – I can’t even remember why, just the satisfied voice of the oar-master telling us that we deserved it.

  We rowed.

  Another week.

  But the navigational lessons at my back had begun to keep me alive. They gave my brain something on which to seize. And Hamilcar’s obstinate ignorance became my closest friend, because my understanding of the Phoenician tongue – bad to start with – became more proficient, and because Hamilcar needed everything repeated two or three times, three days in a row. Bless him.

  One night, the sea grew rougher and the wind came from all directions, and after a while, rowing grew dangerous. A new slave below me lost the stroke, got his oar-handle in the teeth and died. His oar went mad, and other men were injured. None of us was very strong, and the sea was against us – and suddenly the bully-boys were afraid, and they showed their fear by beating us with sticks and spear butts.

  The wind steadied down from the north, but it grew stronger and stronger.

  We got our stern into the wind by more luck than skill, and suddenly, we had to row or die.

  ‘Do you want to die, you scum!’ roared the oar-master. He laughed and laughed. ‘If you die, I die too!’ he shouted. ‘Here’s your chance! Rebel, and we all go down to Hades together – you as slaves, and me as your master!’

  The trierarch and the two helmsmen had three shouted conferences on the spray-blown deck that convinced me we were close to the coast of Africa – too damned close to be running before a north wind. But the oarsmen were badly trained and brutalized, and the officers were shit – pardon me, ladies – and the trierarch didn’t have the balls to try anything. So on we rushed, the oars just touching the water to keep our stern into the wind.

  After some time – it was dark, cold and wet and all I knew was the fire in my arms – one of the Keltoi women stepped over me and jumped over the side. I saw her face in a flash of lightning – she was Medea come to life. To me, that face is printed for ever on my thoughts the way a man writes on papyrus, or carves in stone. It was set with purpose – hate, determination, agony and even a tiny element of joy. She was gone before my heart beat again, sucked under by Poseidon. To a kinder place, I hope.

  But something passed from her to me. Her courage, I think.

  Right there, in the storm, I swore an oath to the gods.

  And we rowed.

  We took a lot of water, but we weren’t lucky enough to sink. About a third of our oarsmen drowned or died under their oars, and yet somehow we made it. The bully-boys threw the corpses over the side, and cut the oars free, too. And on we went.

  The morning dawned blue and gold, and we were alive.

  After that, there was no food and only about eighty whole men to row, and we were on the deep blue. We rowed, and we rowed, and we rowed.

  I should have been dead, or nearly dead. But the Keltoi slave woman had told me something with her eyes – I can hardly put this into words. That resistance was worthy. Perhaps, that I could always restore my dignity with death. Either way, I was coming to my senses.

  And of course, my brain was engaged, too. I had taken to listening to the men at the steering oars, and now I was interested. Hasdrubal talked about the trade – about how the tin was no longer coming in from northern Illyria in the old amounts, and how the Greeks were trying to cut into the trade from Alba, and that interested me. He talked about new sources of copper down the coast of Africa and up the coast of Iberia, outside the Gates of Herakles, and I discovered, from listening to him, that Africa was much bigger than I had imagined.

  I had no cross-staff with which to try calculations, but I used my fingers. Star lessons happened at night, just a horse-length at my back. I was careful, but I tried their sightings as I got the hang of their method.

  It worked.

  Mind you, it wasn’t that I’d ever needed to do such esoteric navigation, and if Hasdrubal hadn’t been such a poor sailor, neither would he! He was a fine navigator, but a dreadful sailor. We always knew where we were, but we never seemed to be able to move from where we were to where we needed to be. And a big trireme – even a twenty-oared boat – can’t hold enough food to feed its oarsmen for even a few days and nights. This is why all ships coast – they go from beach to beach, buying food from locals, whether they are a tubby merchantman with four oarsmen and a dozen sailors to a fleet of warships with two hundred oarsmen apiece – the ironclad rules of logistika are the same either way.

  But I digress.

  After some more time – I have no idea how long – we came to Carthage. I’ll tell you about Carthage in good time, but when I first rowed that ship in between the fortress and the mole, I saw nothing. I was not really alive. I was a human machine that pulled an oar, silent, unthinking, at least by day.

  The hull bumped the wharf.

  The trierarch had the gangplank rigged, and then he, his two helmsmen and the oar-master walked off the ship. An hour later, after we’d grilled in the African sun, twenty soldiers – Poieni, which is their word for citizen infantry, like our hoplites – came to the ship and ordered us off. Many of us could not walk.

  The phylarch shook his head. ‘Useless fuck. These men are ruined.’ He spat. Came and looked at me. He pointed at my legs.

  My once-mighty legs were like sticks.

  ‘Look at this one,’ he said. ‘Good-size man. Filthy, lice, and hasn’t been allowed exercise.’ He shook his head. ‘Hasdrubal is a useless fool. Sell this lot to anyone who will take them.’

  And with that, he took the surviving women and marched them away. That left another man in charge, and he averted his eyes and his nose and ordered those of us who could walk to carry the rest. I ended up carrying the Illyrian. I have been back to that spot – we only walked about fifty horse-lengths. Less than a stade.

>   I remember it as being more like fifty stades. It went on for ever. Oddly, they never struck us, and one of the Poieni asked us why we were so silent.

  No one spoke.

  We were put in stone slave pens with a roof and shade. There was water in which to bathe, drinking water and a shit-hole. I saw men break there – men who had been free and were now slaves.

  But for us, fresh from Hasdrubal’s grim trireme, it was like the Elysian Fields. We had barley porridge for dinner and again at breakfast, and red wine so thin it was like water. It made me drunk, so I laughed and sang the Paean of Apollo. I was the first to give way to sound. After a second helping of that awful wine, a dozen men were grunting at my song. Or my attempt at song.

  We passed out. But in the morning, I found that the Illyrian was curled tight against me, and the Greek, Nestor, was lying against the wall with the Thracian.

  Nestor looked me in the eye. ‘We lived,’ he said quietly.

  The Thracian grunted.

  ‘Now,’ I said, ‘we need to get free.’

  Both men nodded.

  And the Illyrian stiffened. ‘Eleuthera,’ he said. Freedom.

  Free. That’s what we thought.

  2

  My Illyrian’s name was Neoptolymos. He considered himself a direct descendant of Achilles, and he was willing to kill every man who had even seen him enslaved. His humiliation had almost broken him. But after two days in Carthage, he joined me for my morning prayer to Apollo – in awful Greek – and we began to talk.

  We were allowed to talk, in Carthage. Talk, and eat. They fattened us up for about a week. We got cheap pork sausage with bread in it and green stuff – I still hate cheap pork sausage. They gave it to us three times a day, and took us out in a tiny yard for exercise, where we had to leap and jump and do foolish antics – stupid stuff that any gymnasium would have frowned on.

  I knew how to condition myself, so I did proper exercises whenever I could, and taught them to my companions. The guards didn’t care.