The Great King (5 page)

I bowed. She had a scarf over her head like a good matron and the only flesh on display was one ankle and one hand, but I knew her body.

I suppose that Sekla was right. I was a pimply boy, when it came to Briseis.

‘Come,’ she said, and led me aft, to where Cyrus – the best of my friends among the Persians – sat with Artapherenes’ head in his lap.

The satrap’s eyes were open. I knelt by him, and just for a moment, some dreadful fate tempted me to put a dagger in his eye and take the woman for my own. I am a man like other men – I think of awful things, even if I try to do the right ones.

He beckoned me closer.

I leaned over to hear him.

‘Arimnestos,’ he said softly.

‘My lord,’ I said.

‘A mighty name,’ he murmured. ‘Carthage,’ he said, and his eyes closed.

Briseis put a hand on my shoulder, and that contact was like the flash of lightning across the sky that heralds the storm. ‘He is asking you to carry us into Carthage,’ she said.

For once, I looked past her, and my eyes locked with the heavy black eyes of Cyrus, captain of Artapherenes’ guard and his right hand.

I sat back on my heels. ‘Cyrus,’ I said. ‘If – I say if – I take you into Carthage – can you guarantee my safety? I have no love for Carthage. Nor she for me.’

Cyrus scratched his beard – so much the old Cyrus, full of humour and Persian dignity, that he made me feel fifteen years old again. ‘Who can guarantee anything that Phoenicians do?’ he said. ‘They lie like Greeks.’ He grinned. ‘I can’t promise that the Carthaginians will treat you as part of our embassy.’ He shrugged. ‘I can only promise that if you take us there and they turn on you, I’ll die beside you.’

That’s a Persian. And he meant it.

If you have any honour in you, you know when another man is honourable. And when he makes a request – a certain kind of request . . .

Artapherenes had spared my life, and other lives, the night I found Hipponax dying on the lost battlefield north of Ephesus. I had saved his life, too. Cyrus and I had traded sword-cuts and guest pledges a few times, as well.

And it is not on a sunny day that your faith is pledged. The value of your oaths to the gods is tested when the storm comes. I sat on my heels, and within three heartbeats of Cyrus’s affirmation that he’d die by my side if the Carthaginians betrayed the truce, I knew I had to do it.

I rose and sighed. ‘Very well. I will tow you to the beach, and see if this ship can be saved. If it cannot, I’ll row you around to Carthage. May Poseidon stand by me. May Athena give me good council.’

Cyrus smiled. ‘You are a man,’ he said.

What’s that worth?

All of my friends glowered at me. I stood their displeasure easily enough, and crossed to the stricken Phoenician ship with half of my deck crew and two dozen of my best rowers and Leukas, who was – and is – a better sailor than I’ll ever be. I left Megakles with the command. I also took young Hector, my new
pais.
He had been seasick since Croton, and not much use, but he was finally getting his sea legs.

Evening found us wallowing in the light surf, twenty horse-lengths off the coast of Africa. The beach was a ribbon of silver in the light of the new moon, and to say that my rowers were exhausted wouldn’t do justice to their state. Remember that most of them were slaves who’d risen against their masters and been beaten.

But no one wants to drown.

Cyrus stood by me. I was between the steering oars, while Leukas led the bailing party and tried to keep the water out of the hull by willpower. Our rowers – tired and desperate – were also pulling a waterlogged hull that weighed three times what it should have.

Lydia
went in first. I saw Brasidas lead his marines over her stern and jump into the shallow water – in case there was a welcoming party.

Cyrus grunted. ‘Your men are very well trained,’ he said.

I nodded. ‘Piracy is a hard school,’ I said.

He frowned.

The oarsmen poured over
Lydia
’s sides and up the beach, and the slick black hull was hauled ashore almost as if by the hands of the gods. It was splendid to watch, despite my worries about the ship I was in. Despite the presence of Briseis just a few feet away – so close that I swear that I could feel the warmth of her body.

Aye.

I tapped the steering oar and took us a few more yards down the beach. I wanted the damaged hulk to land well clear of my beautiful
Lydia
, just in case.

Leukas laid out pulling lines along the decks of the capture, and as soon as
Lydia
was lying on her side, well propped, the oarsmen ran down the beach to us, and it was time. I looked at Briseis, and as my eye met hers, she smiled.

It took long enough to turn the ship end for end that the moon began to peep over the rim of the world. We didn’t ‘spin’, we wallowed, but eventually we were stern first to the beach and the surviving rowers had their cushions reversed.

Cyrus looked at me, eyes very white in the new darkness. ‘I think the rowers are considering another rising,’ he said.

Cyrus was no fool. Neither was Arayanam, who took his bow from its case and strung it.

There was a curious quality to the rowers’ silence.

‘Leukas!’ I called, and he came back to me.

‘Take the helm,’ I ordered, and he did.

I ran forward to the space amidships where a good trierarch stands in battle – where his voice carries over the whole sweep of the benches.

‘Listen up, oarsmen!’ I called. ‘When we have this ship on the beach, I will see to it you are fed. This ship won’t last three more hours – stay with me and I’ll see you ashore and alive. If you try me now – all I can promise is that every one of you will die.’

I looked down into the gloom.

‘A lot of these men don’t give a shit whether they live or die,’ called a man bolder than the rest. His Greek was Ionian.

‘I can only speak to the Greeks aboard,’ I said. ‘But I’ll do better for them than the Phoenicians ever did. Or I’ll kill them and land the ship anyway.’ I stood above them, and I knew from my time toiling under the lash of Dagon how powerful the voice on the command deck could seem.

I walked back along the catwalk. I didn’t hurry – I wanted to seem as confident as possible. The truth was that we were a hundred yards from shore and I was in no danger, but I had no idea whether Briseis could swim and I couldn’t imagine that Artapherenes would survive the journey.

I heard some muttering.

Muttering is a good sign, usually.

I took the steering oars from Leukas and he began to give orders in his Keltoi-Greek. ‘Pull!’ he commanded.

He began to beat time.

Some oars stayed in. But my rowers dug in with a will, and enough of the others pulled that we made way sternwards, and the sternpost kissed the sand with a gentle thump. Immediately, the current and the waves began to push the head in towards the beach – the worst thing that could happen, and something that a helmsman feared on a stormy day on a windswept beach, but not on a nearly dead calm night on a broad belt of sand.

Luckily for me, Sekla and his oarsmen already had the lines that my borrowed deck crew flung them, and they dragged us with more will than the oarsmen pulled.

Leukas yelled, ‘Over the side, you whoresons!’

Some went, and some didn’t. I couldn’t tell whether I was facing mutiny, desertion or utter, desperate exhaustion. So I walked down the catwalk, abandoning the steering oars – I think I pulled them inboard. I started to prick men lightly with a borrowed Persian spear. One man, with a long scar over his forehead, cursed me and crouched like an angry dog on his little bench, but he couldn’t even reach me with spit, and when his spirit broke, all the men around him went, too. Men are odd animals – too intelligent, sometimes, for their own good.

Leukas and I started them, and the Persians helped – came and threatened – and we got them over the side and on to the beach. A dozen tried to run and were swatted down like errant children by Brasidas and his marines. The last thing we needed was a pack of runaway slaves giving away our positions.

My three Persians got their lord over the side and carried him between two spears to the fire that Sekla had already lit on the beach, and in an hour we had mutton cooking. Any plan to keep our presence secret was wrecked when a pair of cautious shepherds approached and offered to sell us sheep.

By the time the moon was high in the sky, we had the local headman at our fire, and he knew we were Greeks.

I would love to say that I lay with Briseis that night. I desired her – I watched her at the fire the women had, and I sent her a joint of meat after I made the sacrifices to Poseidon and poured libations to all the gods for our safe arrival at land, and she sent me back a cup of sweet wine. But my feelings of the sacred – of what was owed to Artapherenes – kept me from her side. Instead, I introduced my Persian friends – the friends of my earliest youth – to the friends of my recent slavery.

Brasidas, as a Spartiate, took to the Persians immediately. They value most of the same things – indeed, Spartans and Persians have a great deal in common.

But Sekla had no love of the Persians, and they in turn treated him much like a slave – at least in part because the only black men they knew were slaves, I suspect. And the Persians, for their part, were amazed to hear that Megakles was from Gaul – still more amazed that Leukas was from Hyperborea.

‘He looks just like any other man!’ Darius laughed. ‘Well – except for the odd eyes and the dead white skin.’

‘And the size of his nose,’ Aryanam said, but Leukas couldn’t be offended, as it was all said in Persian. Still, they handed wine around to the others, and after an hour, even Sekla was less prickly.

I remember that I looked at the moon – Artemis’s sign – and wondered again at the risk I was running. ‘Cyrus – you are bound to Carthage to get allies there against the Greeks. Am I right?’

Cyrus narrowed his eyes. ‘In effect – yes.’ He shrugged. ‘Really, it is far more complicated than that,’ he continued.

‘Why?’ Brasidas asked. He rarely asked questions. It was fascinating to see how animated the Persians made him.

Cyrus made the Persian hand sign for ‘a little of this, a little of that’, rocking his hand back and forth. ‘It is not that the Great King needs their ships, or their men,’ he said. ‘But there is a rumour at Sardis that Gelon of Syracusa might lead his fleet against the Great King.’ He frowned. ‘You might know more of that than I, eh? Arimnestos?’

I smiled grimly. ‘I might,’ I allowed.

Brasidas laughed when the silence lengthened. ‘Perhaps you could become a Spartan,’ he said.

Cyrus nodded. ‘You don’t wish to tell us what you know?’

I looked around the circle of firelight. The Persians had all taken one side of the fire, at least in part so that they could tend to their lord, who lay close to the fire, wrapped in three cloaks. On my side of the fire were Sekla and Brasidas – Ka stood alone by the wine, almost asleep, and Leukas was already gone, wrapped in his chiton. Megakles sat quietly, wrapping rope-ends in linen, and showing Hector – patiently – how to do it.

‘Are we to have a war, then?’ I asked. ‘I have been gone from the world of Medes and Greeks for five years.’

Cyrus looked away, and Arayanam frowned, and Darius met my eye and smiled. ‘Aye, little brother, it’s war,’ he said. ‘And I’ll guess you’ve been at this Syracusa about which we hear so much these days.’

I nodded. Persians are great ones for telling the truth, and truth-telling can be habit-forming. Yet even then, I was calculating some lies. I’m a Greek.

‘I was a slave, not a trierarch,’ I said. ‘And pardon me, brothers, but I think that I have captured you, and not the other way around. It is my hospitality you enjoy here, and in this situation I may choose not to answer every question.’

Cyrus nodded. ‘I, too, may decline to answer.’

I bowed slightly, in the Persian way. ‘Elder brother, I respect your right to be silent. But I beg you to see this from my point of view – I am a Greek. I fought Datis at Marathon.’

All three of the Persians laughed. ‘Ah, Datis,’ they said.

We all knew Datis as an ambitious and somewhat power-mad man.

‘I thought Marathon was the end of the Great King’s ambitions in Greece,’ I said.

‘Ambitions!’ Cyrus said, truly stung, I think. ‘My lord is the rightful ruler of all that is under heaven, and the resistance of a few petty states of pirates and terrorists on the fringes of the world will scarcely constitute the
end of ambition.
Athens encourages the Ionian rebels. Athenian ships prey on our shipping and disrupt our trade. Athenian soldiers burned the temple of Cybele in Sardis. Even last year, Athenians aided rebels against the Great King’s authority in Aegypt. Greek mercenaries are serving against the Great King at Babylon! It is not my lord’s ambition, but the foolish and militant posturing of the Greeks! A culture of hate and war, where no man respects his neighbour! Much less a lawful ruler!’

Brasidas chuckled. ‘In Sparta, we say many of the same things about Athens,’ he said.

Cyrus wasn’t done. ‘Sparta! A nest of godless vipers who executed one of the king’s sacred messengers!’ He leaned in to the fire. ‘When I was a boy, no one in Persia had ever heard of these two cities – Athens and Sparta. But now the Great King knows both of these names, and he will erase them as if they had never been.’

I shook my head. ‘Cyrus – Cyrus. You are letting unaccustomed anger cloud your thoughts. The Great King lacks the reach to take Athens – or Sparta. You have no idea how big the world is.’

I had been outside the pillars of Herakles. I had been to Alba in the Western Ocean, and my idea of the size of the world was profoundly affected. The world was
immense.

Cyrus shrugged. ‘In truth, the intransigence of Athens makes me angry, which is foolish.’ He frowned, looked away, and smiled. ‘And a poor return on your hospitality. But yes – the world is wide, and we should be conquering it together – Greeks and Persians side by side – not squandering our strength on each other.’

I poured a libation to the King of the Gods, Zeus. ‘Cyrus – it pains me to say this, but if we stand at the edge of a great war of Greeks and Medes, perhaps it is not the wisest course for me to take you to Carthage.’