Poseidon's Spear (Long War 3) (49 page)

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 displease 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.

She was a good woman. A
good
woman.

I tore my eyes away from her to find Theodorus standing by Gelon. The Tyrant was listening to him speaking, low and urgently.

Despite Dano’s presence, I was content to be thrown out. I didn’t like Gelon, and his cronies seemed to me to be the opposite of proper aristocrats. Instead of tough, educated men
who could lead war parties or talk about the affairs of their city, these seemed to me to be soft-handed sycophants.

But Gelon laughed. ‘Theodorus, do you actually think that men like us are bound by petty notions like slavery?’ His laugh was real, and it rang, loud and full, and again, the Tyrant
gave me the impression that he was like the Lord Zeus. It was the laugh of the king of the gods. ‘If the Lord Apollo fell to earth and was enslaved, would he be any less a god?’

Some of the others looked at Theodorus, and some looked at me. I’m not sure that the Tyrant convinced them, but after a moment, it was obvious that I wasn’t going to be conveniently
thrown out of the palace, and would have to sing for my supper, so I began to tell the story.

I thought I’d tell it fairly, so I started from Syracusa, with our first boat. They were true nobles – they were fascinated by the way that small men make money. The tale of the
purchase of our second boat fascinated most of them in a way that the tale of my trip beyond Gades did not.

When I mentioned Anarchos, the tyrant slapped his thigh and laughed. ‘I know him,’ he said. ‘He is precious to me.’

Well, well.

By the time I had the ships off the beach at Massalia and off the Inner Sea coast of Iberia, two-thirds of my listeners had lost interest. The Tyrant and the Lady Dano, on the other hand, were
rapt with attention, and young Dionysus gazed at me with genuine hero-worship. When I told the story of running the mill race at the Pillars of Heracles, he clapped his hands together and said,
‘Odysseus, come to life,’ and Dano’s eyes shone.

Let me tell you a secret. No matter how far down you are, the admiration of a handsome woman will almost always bring you up in your own estimation, and some male hero-worship doesn’t
hurt, either.

Not at all.

I took them up the coast, out to sea in storms, in raids on the Carthaginians, up to Alba and all the way home. The sun was gone, the lamps were lit and half the guests had left when I was
done.

I took a long drink of wine.

Dano threw back her veil and drank some wine. She looked, not at me, but at Gelon, who nodded.

‘Indeed, for an hour, I was the King of the Phaekeans, listening to the Man of Sorrows tell his tale. If you ask me for a ship to take you home, I will have to give you my treasure. That
was a great tale.’

Dano raised the communal cup. ‘How my father would have loved you,’ she said.

I smiled. ‘I eat meat,’ I admitted. ‘I don’t think I could give it up.’ Sorry – that quip was aimed at her, because the secretive Pythagoreans didn’t
let outsiders know anything of their practice, but everyone knew they didn’t eat meat.

She shrugged. ‘He loved men who do things, and men who learn things. It seems to me you are both. And that was a marvellous story. What will you do with the rest of your life?’

I shrugged. ‘You overwhelm me with so much unmerited praise.’ I slid off my couch and stretched.

Gelon rose and crushed my hand in the two of his. ‘Stay here with us, then. Be one of my captains. Persia and Carthage are combining to extinguish the Greek world: a single great war to
dominate the earth, or so my spies tell me. Come and help me stop them. This is the richest city in the Greek world; we can have a grand fleet.’

Dano made a motion with her hand. ‘Athens has built more than a hundred triremes in the last three years,’ she said.

I whistled.

‘I can buy and sell Athens,’ Gelon said. ‘A commercial city ruled by a squabbling assembly of proles. They will never rise to greatness. Men require to be led, and well led, by
those who are better. Syracusa will be a greater city, because those who rule her are themselves greater.’

I shrugged again. ‘Men on ships require to be led,’ I said. ‘Men on farms require only to be left alone.’

Dano laughed. ‘May I quote that? It’s brilliant. And you say you studied with that fool Heraclitus?’

‘He was not a fool, but a great thinker and a brilliant man, humble before the gods, capable of solving almost any problem. And yet he studied other men’s thoughts and learned from
them, too – in Aegypt, in Persia. Even your father, who he viewed as the greatest mathematician of the age.’ I had a thought, then, of sitting in the garden of Hipponax’s house,
teaching Briseis from a book of Pythagoras, watching her beautiful fingers work the geometric figures with the compass I had made her.

Gelon smiled. ‘Can you work any of Pythagoras’s solutions?’ he asked me.

‘Several,’ I said. ‘I can find the value of the hypotenuse given the lengths of the two other sides.’ Seeing his surprise, I said, ‘I use it every day to figure my
dead reckoning at sea. If I am rowing twenty stades an hour to the south, and wind and current are moving me six stades an hour to the west, what is my true course and speed?’ I asked.

‘A little less then twenty-one stades an hour, south by east,’ Dano said, clapping her hands together.

‘What do you do when your course and the current aren’t at perfect right angles?’ Gelon asked.

‘Guess,’ I said, and he laughed.

‘And how do you measure the speed of your cross-current? Or the wind? Or even your own speed through the water?’ Dano asked.