Poseidon's Spear (Long War 3) (6 page)

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.

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.

A little at a time, I put some of the moves of
pankration
into my callisthenics. They gave me weights. I boxed with my shadow. The guards took an interest, but not much of one, and it
was a small rebellion – the kind that means a great deal to the morale of a slave.

And that was a good thing, because eight days after we landed, Dagon came into our exercise yard and ordered us to be marched to a ship.

It still seems incredible to me that we could have gotten him again. Perhaps his deep – well, I’ll call it a sickness for lack of a better word, though I think he
was cursed by the gods for something – at any rate, his sickness drove him to want to torment us. Again. It’s the only rational explanation why he, an officer, wanted the same broken
men he’d just brought in.

We were marched through the streets, surrounded by guards. Dagon took all eighty of the survivors, and we were added to a hundred fresh slaves – Sikels, recently taken in war, who spoke
little Greek and had never pulled an oar.

As we walked through the darkened streets of Carthage, Dagon walked by me. He didn’t say anything at all. He just smiled at me, and rubbed the butt of his thonged whip against my thighs
and arse like a caress. Still makes me shudder.

And then he hit me with the whip – the butt, not the thongs – across the temple.

And when I kept pace and didn’t scream, he laughed.

I think the Sikels saved my life. Because they were so bloody awful that Dagon never had a chance at me those first two weeks at sea. He beat them raw, and they still couldn’t – and
wouldn’t – row. He killed a pair who he said were fomenting mutiny, and they killed one of his bully-boys in the dark.

We were ten days out, somewhere on the deep blue north of Africa and south of Sicily, and the sun was a relentless foe, an
aspis
of fire slamming into our heads and backs. The ship
stank of excrement and sweat and fear. The masts were stowed, there wasn’t a breath of wind and sweat ran straight down my chest and into my groin to drip onto the man below – I say
below, because after eight days at sea, I was a top-deck oar.

We all knew that Kritias was dead and over the side, slain in the dark, and the Sikels were waiting to see what Dagon would do.

As luck would have it, I was across the bench from Neoptolymos, who was on the port side while I was on the starboard. Skethes and Nestor – both, by the standards of our new ship, the
Baal Shamra
, expert oarsmen – sat several benches behind us, but together. I’d managed to exchange a long look with Skethes. Slaves can communicate a great deal in a look. And
we’d learned to tap on the wood of our benches. We had a few rhythms – nothing like communication, but it could convey simple messages. My look said: ‘I’m alert and
ready’. His said: ‘Me too’. My taps said: ‘Be ready’.

Watch your slaves sometime, honey. They have many ways to communicate.

We pulled. The rowers were tired, but not exhausted, and we hadn’t been fed. I had a feeling that the bullies were arming in the stern behind me, although I couldn’t see them.

And then Dagon was standing beside me. He was in bronze – a good breastplate, a heavy helmet. He put the point of a spear at my back. It was very sharp.

‘I don’t want you to die easily, lover,’ he said with his usual smile. ‘But if you move, I kill you.’

Suddenly, there were screams.

The Sikels rose off their benches.

And died.

Seven men in armour were more than a match for seventy naked, tired men without even the shafts of their oars. I know. I’ve done it myself.

The Sikels fought hard for a few minutes, while we, on the upper tier, sat silently. Dagon was behind me and above me on the catwalk – there was no combination of moves that would allow me
to rise off my bench and trip him. I considered it, anyway.

If the Sikels failed, I knew my life would become much, much worse, because Dagon would have no distraction from me. And because eighty of us – his ‘survivors’ – would
have to row the pig of the ship, laden with African iron ore.

About the time the Sikels began to give way to despair, I decided that my life wasn’t worth an obol. I thought of the Keltoi woman. There just comes a point where either you submit and
become an object, not a person, or you break and go mad. Or you fight.

Or die. Or both.

I gave a great shout. Sometimes, sound can throw a man off. And I turned, trying to get an arm behind me to block his thrust.

Warned by my shout, Neoptolymos came off his bench and went for Dagon’s ankles.

As slave attacks went, it was a fine attempt. But Dagon foiled it by the simple expedient of stepping back. Then he whirled, ignoring us, and stabbed Skethes, his point in and out of the
Thracian’s eye socket in a heartbeat. The Thracian fell forward, dead, his blood running out of his eye in a steady stream like wine from a wineskin.

Nestor didn’t rise off his bench. Instead, he kicked. It was a remarkable kick – I was around by then, fouled by the two useless slaves behind me who were cowering instead of
helping. But the kick caught Dagon in the arse and he stumbled, and I was on him.

I was in bad shape – tired, arms weak, far from my conditioning as a smith or a warrior. And he was in armour.

And as soon as I had one of his arms, I found out just how skilled he was. He broke my armlock and countered it: in three beats of my heart, he had my left arm in a lock and had begun to
dislocate my left shoulder.

The
daimon
of combat flew to my aid. I put the crown of my head into his jutting jaw – he had a helmet on, but the cheek plates didn’t break the force of my blow. Where a
man’s head moves his body follows, and I moved him off his feet and Nestor sank his teeth into the hated man’s thigh.

But he wriggled like a worm, caught me a blow to my head with his right elbow, slammed the shaft of his spear into Nestor and he was away from us – back three steps. If even one oarsman
had aided us—

But none did.

He grinned. ‘I knew you’d try, lover,’ he said, in Phoenician. ‘I’d have thought less of you, if you hadn’t.’

And then – only then – did we all notice that another ship was coming alongside, up from our stern. She was a beautiful low trireme, her hull black with new pitch, with a long line
of woad-blue painted down her side along the upper-deck oar-ports and eyes over her ram. Her oars were beautifully handled.

The oars came in, all together, even as we watched. I backed up two steps, looking for
anything
to use as a weapon. A boarding pike, a staff for poling off another ship, a
stick—