Black Ships (11 page)

Jamarados had rented a large house in the harbor quarter, one of many such owned by merchants and rented out to foreigners. He quickly cleared out his own quarters for Neas, and everyone set about fitting in there. Neas ordered that half the crew must stay on each ship at night rather than ashore. I wasn’t certain whether this was for space or safety, but it was prudent either way.

I was jammed in with ten women in a large room off the main courtyard, an airy frescoed room that was obviously intended for the wives and children of the household. It was a big room, but not so much so for eleven of us.

Still, it was cool and pleasant, with a small fountain in the courtyard and a tiled floor done in blue and white in the Hittite fashion. The frescoes were in the style of the isles, however, with deep blue fish swimming inside geometric borders. It was very pretty.

It was strange to be with the women in a civilized place this way, to not be summoned to council. After a while I pinned up my hair with the copper pins as She Who Had Been Pythia had taught me, put my veil in place so that it covered my hair but not my face, and went in search of the men.

I found Neas in a room on the other side of the courtyard. They do not have one central room with a hearth, as I was accustomed to, but rather a series of rooms off square courtyards in the style of the islands. Neas was mixing wine and water in a plain copper krater and serving it out to his guests. Xandros was there, and Jamarados, and
Hunter
’s captain and Anchises. Two of the other men I did not know.

One was a man of Anchises’ age, with a neatly trimmed pointed beard in the Hittite style that was laced with gray. The other was twenty years younger, but so closely resembled him that it was obvious he was his son. They were both richly dressed in embroidered robes, though those of the son were shorter and slashed at the sides for greater movement.

I checked in the doorway. I did not know what the customs were, and I felt Anchises’ eyes upon me, warning me away. Neas looked to see what his father was glaring at and saw me.

“Gentlemen,” he said, “this is Sybil. She serves the Lady of the Dead, She Who Is Called Ereshkigal in your tongue.”

I inclined my head.

The older of the gentlemen looked up and almost smiled at me. “I am Hattuselak, and this is my son, Elaksas. In kinder days, long ago, I was the guest-friend of Lord Anchises in fair Wilusa. Indeed, Elaksas’ mother was his distant kin.”

“The granddaughter of my father’s great-uncle,” Anchises said.

“It is my pleasure to welcome you to Millawanda,” Hattuselak said to Neas. “I hope that you will honor me with the tale of your voyage.”

They talked far into the night. I excused myself after some little time and went to make sure that the women knew about the guests and were preparing some food. Then I laid down in a room that wasn’t rocking and slept. I knew that I should hear what had happened in the morning.

N
EAS AND XANDROS
sought me out together while I was spreading my hair to dry in the sun. I had washed it in clear fresh water from the fountain and at last gotten all the salt out, then combed it and tugged free every last tangle. Clean and combed, it fell nearly to my knees. I sat in the sun beside the fountain, my head inclined and my hair spread to dry, my eyes closed. It was peaceful in the sun, with the sound of the fountain nearly drowning the noise and the chatter of the People.

Still, I heard their footsteps approaching and knew who it was without looking. “Yes, Prince Aeneas?” I said.

He sat down beside me on the fountain rim. Xandros hovered.

“There are slaves,” he said. “Neoptolemos brought some fifty or sixty women and older children here. They were sold, and some of them have been taken from the city, though most are still here. Unless we wish to break the laws of Millawanda and take them by force, it will require hundreds of deben of gold to trade for them all from the owners who have them now.”

“I don’t think taking them by force is a good idea,” Xandros said. “We’d have to get out of the harbor afterward. Did you see the forts?”

“And we would have to take dozens of people at once in dozens of places, from what you say,” I said. I lifted my head and let my hair fall back. “Then fight and flee with them through the streets to the ships before getting out of the harbor. Gold may be a better solution this time.”

“The problem is...” Neas said.

“We don’t have hundreds of deben of gold,” Xandros finished.

“Why did I see that problem coming?” I said.

“Because you stopped us from stripping Pylos bare,” Neas said.

“Oh, it’s my fault now?” I asked. “If you had waited to strip Pylos you would have run straight into Neoptolemos.”

“A lot of it wasn’t portable,” Xandros said.

“I know,” I said. “You grabbed everything that wasn’t solid bronze or sunk in the earth.”

“I’d have gotten those if you’d given me more time.” Xandros grinned. “Those big pots full of lentils, as tall as a man...”

“Where would you have put them on
Dolphin
?” Neas asked, also smiling. “Did you have room after the hundred amphorae of wine?”

“Perhaps he should have just tied them on behind and towed them,” I said.

“That would be very seaworthy,” Xandros said.

Neas shook his head. “You’re both as silly as children.”

“And you’re not?” I asked.

“I am a very serious man.”

“Indeed,” said Xandros, pulling a long face that almost but didn’t quite look like Anchises.

Neas rolled his eyes, but he was still smiling. They both looked better for a night of real rest in real beds on land. “The problem still is that we don’t have hundreds of deben of gold. And we haven’t got anything we can sell or trade that’s worth that amount.”

“Except the ships,” I said.

“Except the ships,” Xandros agreed with a pained expression.

“But if we sell one of the ships, where are we going to put fifty more people?” Neas asked. “We’re already jammed in on the warships, and it looks like that’s going to get worse. One of the fishing boats is barely seaworthy, and we may have to scrap her and move everyone onto one of the warships.”

“None of the three of them are in good shape,” Xandros said. “I wouldn’t really like to take any of them out, not out of sight of the harbor.”

“Well, they’ve got to go out of sight of the harbor. Wherever we go,” Neas said.

“Are we going?” Xandros asked. “Why not stay here? It’s not home, but it’s not so far away. Plenty of people speak our language. It’s not Ahhiyawa.”

“And do what?” Neas asked. “We’ve got four hundred people. Fishermen, farmers, horse breeders. Only no farms, no horses, and three leaky fishing boats. We have no way to earn our living. And the merchants of Millawanda will not extend credit lightly. We’d be selling ourselves into slavery.”

“What will we do somewhere else?” Xandros asked.

Neas looked at me. “Found a new city.”

“A new city? You can’t be serious! We’ve got only four hundred people.”

“Xandros, we’re all that’s left of the People. We have to stick together,” Neas said. “We can’t just scatter to the eight winds in Millawanda.”

“Neas...”

“Xandros, I need you at my side. I need you on my side when I talk with the other captains.” Neas leaned forward.

Xandros let out a long breath. “I’m with you. You know that. I don’t have the slightest idea what you’re doing, though.”

“Neas is right,” I said. “If we stay here, we have four hundred separate fates, and the People will no longer exist. We will vanish into the Free City, three hundred men with debts they cannot pay. And that will be the end. We must stay together and go on. And somehow we must find the gold to trade for the slaves.”

Neas leaned back against the fountain. “And that’s the trick.”

I leaned back next to him. “It certainly is.”

Xandros sat on the ground and leaned back against the rim between our knees, his hands clasped around his own. “This is going to be dangerous, isn’t it?”

TRADES

N
eas was in a fine temper. I could hear him shouting all the way across the courtyard. I hurried over to see what was happening.

Xandros was escorting two young boys out the door. They were clean, but wore nothing but breechclouts, and looked to be ten and twelve years old. “Come on, boys,” Xandros was saying. “We’ll find a place for you to sleep, and then we can go down to the harbor.” He raised one eyebrow at me as I passed. I didn’t know him well enough yet to know if it was a warning or not.

I went into the chamber that Aeneas was using as a workroom. “What is the matter, Prince Aeneas?” I asked.

“He’s an idiot,” Neas said.

“Xandros?”

“Not Xandros.” Neas paced across the floor. “Amynter,
Hunter
’s captain. He’s gone and sold himself into slavery to get his boys back. He traded himself to a merchant for them.”

“The boys who just left?” I asked.

“Yes, the boys who just left.” Neas picked up a cup on the table and put it back down. “So now I have no captain for
Hunter.
And two more children.”

“Prince Aeneas,” I said in my most reasonable tone, “what father would not do the same upon learning that his children live? What father would not trade his servitude for their freedom? Amynter traded nothing that was not his own to give.”

“Yes. Well. I still have no captain for
Hunter.
” He was calming down, but kept pacing. “I would have found a way to trade for the boys if he had but waited on me. Now I have lost one of my best men, an experienced captain who cannot be replaced. And who knows if the merchant who bought him will be willing to trade him again? An experienced man-at-arms is worth a great deal.”

“So would those boys be, to a brothel,” I said.

Neas stopped in his pacing and looked at me. “You think?”

“Of course that is what Amynter thought,” I said. “When he reckoned his sons’ worth in gold.”

“Well,” Neas said.

“It is a hard thing,” I said, coming and sitting on the edge of the table, “to reckon our lives and those of our loved ones in gold. To say to oneself, baldly, what am I worth? What can I do that is worth anything?”

“That is what I have been asking myself,” Neas said. “What can we do to get hundreds of deben of gold?” He turned and picked up the cup again. “What am I worth, the prince of a people that are no more? I have nothing that is mine except this sword.”

“You have eight warships and the men to sail them,” I said. “That is the asset we have. No horses, no farms, no lands or crafter’s workshops. The question that we must ask is, what can we do with that?”

“I can think of only one thing to do,” Neas said. “Turn pirate in truth. There are merchant vessels still, richly laden this late in the season. There are villages along the shore and in the islands with few defenses.”

And that is the way of it,
I thought.
Seize other vessels about their business and enslave their crews. Raid fishing villages with no wealth except their women. Trade those people for our kin. Sell them into slavery to buy our people free.

It seemed to me for a moment that I heard the voice of She Who Was Pythia behind me.
Can I rid the seas of pirates or raise men from the dead to plow fallow fields? You must think about the causes of things, about the shape of the world. You must understand such things if you are to give counsel to kings.

We should trade our lamentations for theirs, and other women would weep, other cities burn, other parents seek their children in vain. And so it goes on, spiraling downward into the dark, deeper with every year.

Neas was looking at me. “Can you think of anything better?”

“No,” I said slowly. “I do not see what else to do either. But perhaps before making such a weighty decision we should seek guidance of my Lady. Isn’t that what oracles are for?”

“You can do this here?”

“I can,” I said. “It is better in a holy place, but I can seek Her in any darkened room.”

W
E CHOSE
an inner room with only one window. I covered it in three falls of cloth and set up the brazier. I felt oddly keyed up. It had been weeks since I had tried to see anything, since before I left Pylos. Carefully, I painted my face white and black. Neas sat quiet in the corner as a suppliant should, considering the question he would ask Sybil. We were almost ready when Xandros knocked on the door.

Neas answered it.

“Sorry,” Xandros said, “but Hattuselak is here, and he says he needs to talk to you immediately, Neas. He says it’s important.”

“A moment,” Neas said, and looked at me.

“Go,” I said. “I am not quite ready yet.”

He left, closing the door. I stirred the coals on the brazier and knelt beside it, looking into the fire.

Wait,
She whispered.
It is changing as you wait.

I could feel eddies of it around me, the shape of the future changing. Like the octopus shimmering underwater I had seen on the Island of the Dead, or the painted one seeming to shift on the floor of the temple in Pylos. I focused on one glowing coal. Shifting in the flames.

This city will burn too,
I thought.
Not this year, but next, or the one after. The walls and towers will not save it. There is too much gold in Millawanda. It will go down in fire as well.

The door opened. Neas was back, a delighted expression on his face. Relieved, I thought, as though something lay before him unexpectedly.

He came and knelt across from me. “I’m sorry for the interruption, Lady.”

“I have seen what there is to see,” I said. “We cannot stay here. This city will fall as well, and we will have fled one sacking for another.”

“We are leaving,” Neas said. “Hattuselak has shown me how.” He could not contain his good news any longer. “The merchants of Millawanda have talked together. For many months none of them have dared send trade ships forth to sell goods across the sea. There are too many pirates this year. In the spring, when the sailing season began, the first three ships to sail were all taken within hours of leaving port. Since then, none have sailed. But Millawanda depends on trade. If the merchants dare not send their ships forth, the city will starve, even though Egyptian and Kretan ships come in.”

“What has this to do with us?” I asked, though I was beginning to see.

“They will pay us richly to use our eight warships to escort a merchant convoy south along the Lydian coast and down to Byblos. Hattuselak has vouched for our honor with the merchants, and swore upon his own life that we would not plunder their trade ships ourselves, but rather see them safely into Byblos with all their cargo. In return for this, we will have those slaves Neoptolemos brought from Wilusa.”

“The slaves are very valuable,” I said. “But if their ships cannot go out without being lost, it does not matter how many slaves there are in Millawanda.”

“Yes,” he said. “That is the argument Hattuselak used. He said that it was an opportunity that would not come again—eight strong ships manned by honorable men, commanded by the son of his guest-friend. We can see them safe to Byblos.”

“That is far,” I said. “Have you been there?”

Neas shook his head. “Not that far around the coast. I’ve been as far as Rhodes and the Lydian coast. Jamarados has been to Byblos, and south of there as far as Ashkelon. We used to trade in Ugarit before it was sacked and burned.”

“When was that?” I said.

“Five years ago,” Neas said. “The spring I married Creusa. It was a great city, an ancient city. And now it is no more. I was not on that last trading mission, but Jamarados and Xandros were, when Xandros was a rower on
Lady’s Eyes.
They arrived, and the city was nothing but ashes and the unburned dead.”

I shivered despite the stuffy heat of the room. The brazier was warm.
What is happening?
I asked.
Why, Great Lady, are all the cities and works of men falling one by one? Even so far away, where the curse that Agamemnon invoked has no sway? What is happening to Your people?

Neas looked at the brazier. “Does this course bring good to us? That is the question I would ask of Her.”

“Yes, Prince Aeneas,” I said. “It does.” She answered his question, but not mine.

W
E SAILED
from Millawanda a few days later. Neas had gotten rid of the fishing boats because they could not keep up, traded instead for food and other stores, as well as the freedom of Amynter,
Hunter
’s captain. With the fifty slaves we had recovered from the merchants of Millawanda, we were crowded in very tightly on the warships. Fifteen merchant ships joined us, so with twenty-three ships we were a very great fleet. It took half the morning to get out of the harbor.

Dolphin
was on the seaward flank of the convoy, halfway down the line. Xandros was nearly frantic trying to keep the merchant ships together, rather than straggling out under sail all over the place, like a dog with a flock of unruly geese.

It was a beautiful sight. Twenty-three sails spread on the deep blue sea under an azure sky, the sun golden and the air balmy. Standing on the prow alone I caught sight of a shadow in our bow wave. It was the old dolphin again, seamed face smiling, escorting us back out to sea.

I bent down. “I believe,” I said, “that you are some friend of Xandros, some old sailor who accompanies us out of love.” The dolphin rose in a long leap, playing with the foam, and sank beneath us again. “And you are a flirt,” I said with a smile.

I looked back along the length of the ship. Xandros was at the tiller. Kos was helping our newest rower. Bai couldn’t take his bench back until his collarbone healed, so we had a new rower in his place, the eldest son of Amynter brought out from Millawanda. His name was Kassander, and he was trying very hard. At twelve he was old enough to start learning the trade, but he still couldn’t keep the rhythm very well, and was constantly fouling the oarsman behind him. Kos was fairly patient. Xandros kept looking forward and grimacing with every foul, but he said nothing and let Kos do his work.

We were nearly four weeks on the way to Byblos, and the sailing season was ending when we arrived. We had stopped nine times on the way, trading at great cities and small. Our first was Halicarnassos, hardly two days’ trip down the coast, then Cnidos on its cape. Then we turned out to open sea, crossing to the island of Rhodes, the greatest of the islands. Kamiros is a great city indeed, fortified like Millawanda, but to a lesser degree. This was the last place where the tongue they spoke was like enough to that of Wilusa for everyone to make themselves understood. After that, we relied on those like Jamarados who had learned some of the Lydian or other tongues.

After Kamiros, we crossed to Patara on the Lydian coast, and then to Myra. Then we cut across the great bay to Korakes in Karia, and then across to Soli, on Kyrenia, where the copper comes from. The merchants traded wine, salt, olives, and oil for great ingots of raw copper. These are smelted by skilled men and mixed with tin, which is how bronze is made. The ratio differs, and it is a mark of skill to know how much to mix to make swords that are sharp but do not break easily. Neas explained these things to me while the merchants were ashore, trading.

From Soli we went five days at sea along the shore of Kyrenia and across the sea to the east, striking southward when we cleared the treacherous cape and came into the port of Paltos, just south of where Ugarit had been. From there we followed the coast south to Arkah, and then to Byblos.

By now the weather was turning. The sailing season was ending, and we must wait until spring to sail again.

“We will stay in Byblos,” Neas decided. “We can winter over here and perhaps escort other ships back in the spring. I will arrange a place where we can haul the ships out and mend them. They will need to be retarred at least.”

“There are some rotting planks too,” Jamarados said. “Is there anyone who has a boatbuilder’s skill?”

Kos shifted back and forth. He was not accustomed to speaking in Prince Aeneas’ council, and I wondered why Xandros had brought him. “My father was a boatbuilder. I wasn’t brought up to the trade, but I was around it all my life. I can have a look.”

Xandros nodded. “I’ve done emergency repairs. I know how the planks should lie, though I don’t have the skill of seasoning them and preparing them. And seasoning them takes months at least. A couple of years is better.”

“Where will we get the wood?” Amynter asked.

Neas looked out at the coast, at the busy port. “They are known for their woods here. Cedars that are the finest in the world.”

“Indeed they are,” Jamarados said. “That is the chief wealth of these parts, besides trade. In Ugarit we used to buy cedar that was seasoned and ready for building. Surely we can trade for it here, though it was expensive.”

Neas blew out a long breath. “Everything is expensive. And we have months to make our trades last, until spring comes and we can put to sea again.”

“Is that what we’ll do?” Amynter asked. “Hire out again next spring?”

“It is beneath the dignity of a prince of Wilusa to trade like an islander,” Anchises said. “Better that you should make your way with a sword, as befits a nobleman.”

“Better that I should think about the good of the People before my own honor,” Neas snapped.