Poseidon's Spear (Long War 3) (58 page)

‘It is like having the battle of Marathon brought to my town,’ she said. ‘So many famous men. Ari – in truth, my friend, when first you told me you were Arimnestos of
Plataea, I thought you one of those men who lie habitually.’

Cimon was deeply pleased to meet the daughter of the great Pythagoras. He bowed – Greeks seldom bow – and was allowed to kiss her cheek, very Italian and not very Greek, and he
actually blushed. So did Giannis, who had come with Cimon from Massalia.

Aeschylus just stood there, drinking it all in.

‘How is Aristides?’ I asked, when chance threw us together.

‘You mean, the real one?’ he asked, raising an annoyed eyebrow at Phrynicus’ graceless nephew.

I smiled.

‘He’s a great man, now. He and Themistocles are rivals – enemies, really. I’m not sure if they don’t hate each other worse than either one hates the Persians.
Aristides has inherited the Eupatridae – he leads the oligarchs.’ Aeschylus shrugged.

‘What? Aristides the Just?’ I shook my head.

‘Politics in Athens is different, my friend. Themistocles has raised up the thetis, and he’ll end up giving them the right to serve on juries – mark my words – and that
will be the end of us.’ Aeschylus was an old-fashioned man, despite his relative youth.

Of course, looking at them, I realized that my friends were ageing as fast as I was myself.

That was a shock.

Aeschylus had grey in his beard. Harpagos had a white mark – the scar of a Persian arrow from Lade – in his beard, but his hair was getting grey, too. And to see Dionysus talk to
Cimon – Dionysus had been our trierarch at Lade; Cimon and I had been mere ship’s commanders. Now we commanded squadrons, and Dionysus, I could see, was quite old. Perhaps fifty. A
decade younger than I am right now.

I’d watched him put a Carthaginian marine down, just recently. He wasn’t that old.

But we weren’t any younger, and I couldn’t help but notice that the annoying Aristides the Younger was the age I’d been at Sardis.

Seventeen.

Zeus. I’m lucky I was allowed to live. So cocky. So
sure
.

For the first time that night, I watched older men – proven men, men of unquestioned worth. I wondered, when the young men competed on the beach – on Chios, or again at Lade –
I wondered how many older men watched me, and thought I was an arrogant pup and too young to know any better?

Age. Your turn will come, my young friends.

But enough. It was a great night – so many friends. Such laughter, such wine; and we were not so very old, either.

Finally, the sun peeped over the horizon. We were lying on straw, above the high-water mark, and we’d seen the night through, and slaves were picking up the amphorae and the broken cups.
Dano lay by Cimon on a kline of straw – lucky Cimon – flirting with Paramanos, who appeared to know more of Pythagorean philosophy than any of the rest of us – but he’d been
raised at Cyrene.

They were talking about mathematics, and Cimon laughed, and then raised himself on his elbows to speak over his companions. ‘So, Ari, why have you called us all here?’

Some men laughed, and others hooted.

But they all fell silent.

‘I was hoping we could all spend the summer raiding Carthage,’ I said, to the rising sun. ‘But the summer has slipped away like youth. I have a friend here who is a prince of
Illyria. We were slaves together. I thought that if I could raise my friends, we’d have enough of a fleet to sail north of Corcyra and restore him to his hill fort, kill all his enemies and
perhaps pick up a few bars of silver into the bargain.’

Paramanos grinned. ‘There’s not a one of us who couldn’t use a few bars of silver.’

‘I heard there was a tin fleet,’ Cimon said.

Dionysus was drunk. ‘Too damned late, Athenian!’ he shouted. ‘We took it all!’

I shook my head. ‘We took a third of it. That’s a story for another night, friends. We have ten ships. With ten ships, we could probably conquer any island in the Aegean. With these
men? But if you will follow my lead, we will restore Neoptolymos, and perhaps take a few Carthaginians on the way.’

Cimon nodded. ‘I’m not likely to turn back now: there’s nothing else going on this summer, although you had best pay well, you old rascal – I’ve rowed from Athens
to Massalia and back to Croton to find you.’

I laughed. ‘I have a few coins,’ I admitted.

‘I don’t want to linger,’ he said. ‘The Phoenicians are everywhere in the east – there’s no getting a cargo into Aegypt. Men say that the King of Kings and
his Phoenicians have made a pact with Carthage. And there is war in Aegypt.’

I shook my head. ‘I keep hearing that,’ I said. ‘But I see no proof. The Phoenicians are no real friends of the Great King’s.’

‘Supposedly there are embassies going both ways, even now,’ said Paramanos. ‘In Cyrene, I heard that your – how should I say it, your friend? Hipponax’s son
Archilogos? – is taking a squadron to Carthage. Or perhaps took one, last season.’

Cimon shook his head. ‘That, at least, is not true. He was in Mytilene a month ago.’ Cimon smiled in the rising sun. ‘I spoke to him. We’re not at war. I’d just
heard the message that Ari was alive. I told Archilogos. That was a pleasure.’

I coughed. ‘But you’ll all come north against Illyria?’

Paramanos looked around at the Greeks. ‘Why do you think we came here? For a rest?’ He laughed.

Cimon scrambled to his feet, apologizing to Pythagoras’s daughter. My pais refilled his cup. He poured a long libation of priceless Sybarite wine to the immortal gods, and then raised his
cup to the rising sun.

‘Phobos, Lord of the Chariot of Fire, and Poseidon, Lord of Horses and swift ships and the Sea, with a thousand beautiful daughters; Athena, matchless in guile, who loves men best when
they are most daring; Aphrodite of the high-arched feet, and all the other immortals! Hear us! We thank you for this night of mirth and friendship. And we ask your blessing!’

We all cheered.

Great days. And after that night, I had a hangover of Homeric proportions.

Worth it.

We spent another day provisioning our round ships and making our plans. By then, local rulers were sending embassies to the ‘men of Marathon’. A rumour went out that Dano had hired
us to avenge her father on the Sybarites.

We sharpened our weapons, and drilled.

We had a farewell feast with the Pythagoreans. Vegetables, it turns out, are perfectly palatable.

I saw Lydia, at a distance. It is odd how you know a person by their shape and movement, when you couldn’t possibly see their face. I knew her, and I knew the man with his arm around
her.

There is no happiness of mortal men that cannot be marred in an instant.

Having passed by the Island of Thrinacia, where are the kine of the Sun, they came to Corcyra, the island of the Phaeacians, of which Alcinous was king. But when the Colchians
could not find the ship, some of them settled at the Ceraunian mountains, and some journeyed to Illyria and colonized the Apsyrtides Islands. But some came to the Phaeacians, and finding the Argo
there, they demanded of Alcinous that he should give up Medea. He answered, that if she already knew Jason, he would give her to him, but that if she were still a maid he would send her away to her
father. However, Arete, wife of Alcinous, anticipated matters by marrying Medea to Jason; hence the Colchians settled down among the Phaeacians and the Argonauts put to sea with Medea.

Apollodorus,
Library
I.9

And then we sailed for Illyria.

I won’t say that nothing happened as we cruised up the west coast of Magna Greca. I’ll just say that, bar one incident, I don’t remember anything. There was a lot of fog
– I remember that! And I remember that on our second morning, as we rowed north through the fog, Dionysus’ ship fell afoul of Cimon’s, with much cursing and shouting. Since they
were reckoned two of the finest trierarchs on the seas, the rest of us revelled in their distress. Like men do.

The only incident I remember well arose out of the fog. I’m going to guess it was the third or fourth day, and again, we launched off a small and rocky cove, just big enough for our ships,
with bellies full of lobster and our ships laden only with fresh water. But the fog was everywhere – some trick of the gods – and every morning, to a depth I hadn’t ever seen
before. It took all morning to burn off, and for long hours the sun was a golden orb in the haze.

At any rate, that morning, as we rowed north – again, rowing because there was no wind at all – we were trying to practise signalling. Dionysus was making himself increasingly
unpopular with the other captains by insisting on drill and signalling when we knew we were after no prey loftier then some Illyrian pirates in pentekonters. No one likes to work that hard. Had we
been rowing north to fight the Persians at Lade, we might have felt differently – although, come to think of it, when we rowed to Lade, we all hated Dionysus then, too.

The sun climbed above us in the haze, just visible – one of the few times in your life you can look directly at him in all his glory. And as with the other days, just past midday the fog
suddenly burned off, as fast as a bird crossing the sky, so that in one moment it was all we could do to see the ships ahead and behind us in line, and then we could see three ships ahead, and then
I could see Dionysus up at the head of the line, and then—

And then we could see the merchant trireme, six stades away, and just as surprised to see us as we were to see him.

Every ship, even Dionysus, turned out of the line as fast as their oarsmen could respond to volleys of orders, and went from a slow cruise to ramming speed. The triemiolas raised sail, as the
fresh wind was suddenly coming off the land.

We could all see it was a Phoenician. Or perhaps a Carthaginian.

And he could see us, too.

His oarsmen beat the water into a froth, like a good Athenian matron making soup the evening before a feast day, and he struggled to get his mainsail up.

It was a race, of sorts. But a horribly unequal one, between ten ships in high training with full crews and marines and sailors and clean hulls, against a lone merchant with fifty oarsmen and
old sails.

He could sail much closer to the wind then we could, of course. So as soon as he had his mainmast rigged, he lay over and ran north, and we all lost the wind and had to row.

Lydia
was fast, but Paramanos’s new
Black Raven
was like a racing shell with a ram, and Cimon’s
Ajax
was as fast as Paramanos. Dionysus’
Agamemnon
was as fast as either.

Oh, how we exhausted ourselves! We raced along, our oars all but touching the nearest ship. A missed stroke might have been disaster.

But we were heroes, of course. We didn’t miss any strokes.

We caught the merchant at mid-afternoon, about the hour a gentleman rises from his nap and goes to the agora – not in Plataea, ladies. Men work all day in Plataea. But in Athens.

We caught him, and he surrendered without a fight. Who would even try to fight, with ten sharks all around him?

Cimon’s hull was the first to come aboard his, and Dionysus was second. We carried the captured ship to the next beach and pulled her up the sand and gravel. The oarsmen were cleared off
and the deck crew, the miserable owner and the trierarch all cowered together.

She had a cargo of cheap Carthaginian pottery, some Greek wine with Ionian labels that must, itself, have come off a capture and copper with the Cypriote mark. The copper was valuable. The wine
we broached on the spot for our oarsmen.

Cimon and Dionysus began to argue over the spoils. Paramanos wandered over to where I stood, seeing to it that
Lydia
was carried well up the beach and rolled over to dry her hull. He
nodded to me.

‘I thought this was your little expedition,’ he said.

I shrugged.

‘Cimon and Dionysus are going to gut each other over a handful of copper,’ he said. ‘Not because it’s valuable, but because they are important men and each has to be
first.’

I sighed. The party was over.

Sharing spoils: always the moment when arête goes by the board and life among pirates becomes difficult.

I walked across the sand, cursing how it burned the sides of my feet. It was deep and soft. Try walking with determined gravity and manly elegance across deep sand.

They weren’t quite spitting like Lesbian fishwives. Not quite. But close.

‘Friends,’ I said. ‘This is unseemly.’

That may not seem like a very telling remark to a pair of bloody-handed pirates, but the two of them immediately pivoted on their heels to face me. ‘
Unseemly
?’ Dionysus
said. ‘I don’t remember asking your opinion.’

‘As long as you are in my squadron, you can listen to any opinion I choose to deliver,’ I said.