Long War 04 - The Great King Read online

  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 s
miled. ‘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.’

  Darius sighed. ‘And yet we are an embassy, and embassies are sacred to all the gods,’ he said.

  Brasidas nodded. ‘So they are. I come from a family of heralds – I recognise the sign of the god upon you. And surely – leaving aside the differences in our opinions – surely this war is not so imminent?’

  Darius looked at Cyrus. Arayanam simply drank another cup of wine, as was his wont. He seldom spoke, unless he had something vital to say, and might have been welcomed in any Lacedaemonian mess group.

  Cyrus shrugged. ‘The Great King has ordered a canal dug across the isthmus of Mount Athos,’ he said. ‘He gathers a fleet. Now that the revolt in Aegypt is broken, Athens will not take so long.’

  ‘How long?’ I asked.

  ‘Two years?’ he said. ‘A year to defeat Babylon, anyway. See, I am honest.’

  I laughed, my mood restored. ‘Two years?’ I said. ‘By Poseidon, Cyrus, I imagined you were speaking of weeks or months. Two years? Pardon me, but in two years storms may wreck a fleet, the Great King may die – a year of famine might cripple your army, or the will of the gods might make itself manifest in a hundred ways.’

  Cyrus spread his hands. ‘Perhaps. But Athens can count its days.’ He looked at me. ‘What do you care? You are not an Athenian or a Spartan. You could be one of us. Your former master, Archilogos, is one of the Great King’s most trusted officers. You could be the same, or even greater.’

  I frowned. ‘Cyrus, my elder brother,’ I said. ‘I no longer know what I want from life.’ I looked across the fire to the women’s fire, but Briseis’ slim, deep-breasted figure was gone. ‘But I know that service to the Great King is not what I want. And my city is Athens’ closest friend.’

  Cyrus shrugged. ‘Athens is doomed,’ he said.

  In the morning, we bought every scrap of wood that the Berbers could bring us – herdsmen and villagers from a fishing port a few stades farther west. In the end, after two days attempting to effect repairs with too little wood, I gave up on the Phoenician ship and broke it up. It seemed like a defeat, and a waste, but there simply wasn’t enough good wood to repair the two great gashes in its side. And then there were the rowers. They were mutinous, and the more I fed them, and the more they recovered their strength, the more mutinous I found them. So after two days, I ordered the Phoenician broken up, and her good timbers were immediately pressed into the repairs of my lovely Lydia. With the worked pine and cedar of the other ship, we had our own repaired in a day, and we had enough pitch in our own ballast to caulk her tight.

  My rowers were all free men, and professionals – a mixture of the very best of all the fishermen, herdsmen and freed slave rowers I’d had for the last few years. Every man of them had arms, and I lined them up on the soft sand and formed them four deep, like a small phalanx, with my marines on the right and my archers on the left, and I took them to the other rowers before they could consider flight or resistance. We had weapons and training and numbers. They had nothing but sullen ferocity.

  Men who are ill used become evil men themselves. Ill use is like a disease that robs men of their worth and leaves them broken, empty vessels capable of filling with ire and hate and inflicting only harm. They stood like a sullen pack, and I eyed them with something like loathing.

  The fact is, I couldn’t take them, and I couldn’t leave them behind. If I left them on the beach, they’d rape and murder among the local Berbers until one of the lords raised an army and massacred them. And even though these were not Sekla’s people, they were close enough that I couldn’t inflict so much suffering on them.

  I’m a soft-hearted pirate.

  If I took them, I’d be selling them as slaves in Carthage, and I had been a slave rower in Carthage. Carthage, unlike Persia, is truly evil. She lives on the backs of her slaves. And orders parents to kill their children.

  Bah. You can smell their children roasting on their foul altars when you land a ship in the harbour. Think of that, and tell me that Carthage is a state like the others.

  The answer was obvious – to massacre them myself. At thirty, I might not have hesitated, but I was older, and I had finally begun to appreciate the wisdom of Apollo and practise mercy.

  So I looked at the sullen men as they cringed at the edge of the hard sand.

  I made a sign to Brasidas. ‘I am going to let the gods decide which of them lives and which dies,’ I said. ‘Watch me – but not too closely.’

  The Spartan nodded. He wore a small smile.

  Ka put an arrow to his Persian bow.

  ‘All the Greeks, form on the right,’ I called out to them.

  ‘Phoenicians!’ I called, but there were none.

  ‘Aegyptians!’ I called, and there were a few, and a pair of Jews, and a single Babylonian and a dozen Keltoi and two Illyrians. I divided them by nation, and I moved among them, talking to those who could, or would, talk.

  And as I expected, as I walked among the Greeks, further dividing them into Ionians and Dorians, the angry dog – that’s
how I thought of him, the man with the scar on his forehead – came at me. I saw him early, moving among his friends, if such a man has friends, and I didn’t let him know I had seen him. But I never quite gave him my back.

  He had a knife. And some idea how to use it. And his friends – or his followers or his flunkies or what have you – seized stones and clubs they’d made themselves and came at me. Most of them were Greeks, I’m saddened to say.

  There were four of them close enough to me to do me immediate harm. But the youngest Greek, who was closest to me, gave them away with an odd noise – the angry dog gave a great shout, and the boy struck me with an ineffectual blow and cringed, rather than, say, grappling my arms, or legs.

  I drew my long xiphos from its scabbard and killed the boy on the draw, the rising blade opening his naked belly and the edge of the upper leaf cutting through the bone of his chin and spraying teeth as it exited his face. Then I pivoted slightly on my right foot and cut down with the other edge, and the next man died, too.

  Ka shot one who was at my back.

  The fourth man stumbled back, but the gods had played their role, and I killed him with a cut across his eyes and a merciful thrust.

  Brasidas didn’t fence with the angry dog, either, but put a spear in his throat with brutal economy.

  ‘Kill only those who are armed, or resist!’ I shouted.

  The two Jews and the Babylonian, who all seemed to know each other, lay flat. The Keltoi gathered in a huddle.

  I confess that some innocent men probably died on our spears, and perhaps some who were merely foolish, but in a minute I was rid of the most vicious.

  While their blood was still soaking into the sand, I rounded up the rest, had them searched, and called them forth by nation.

  ‘Are any of you worth a ransom?’ I asked. Several of the Greeks claimed that they were. I sent them to Brasidas. Trust a Spartan to be able to spot an aristocrat.

  The two Jews and the Babylonian all claimed to be worth ransom. And many other men had stories – some scarcely believable, some patent lies, and a few truly horrible.