Long War 04 - The Great King Read online

  Two strokes. We were moving a little faster than walking pace, and the lead western ship cheated his helm a little to keep his ram in line with us.

  Without a word from me, Megakles read my mind and steered a little bit to the west. I was looking at the sloppily rowed ship. There he was.

  You know how you can pick out a woman you have loved or a good friend three streets away in a crowded city street – yes? The sway of hips, the particular way a man holds his hand or cocks his head, the slant of the forehead, the droop of a shoulder . . .

  There was Dagon.

  I knew him.

  I laughed.

  There are fools who do not believe in the gods, but I have seen them. And that day, in the harbour of Carthage, I felt Athena at my shoulder as if I was Odysseus reborn.

  Third stroke. We were now moving as fast as a man can run.

  I raised my fist and waved it at Dagon.

  Fourth stroke. We shot out from between the beaks of the Carthaginians, like a hare that gybes so fast that the claws of the eagle close on empty air.

  Except that there were six eagles, and they were on converging courses.

  I watched Dagon as he saw the two ships to the east which had been hidden by my hull. And his own greed.

  All six ships tried to change course.

  One ship evaded the collision, but the other five slammed into each other – our two pursuers from the east into Dagon and the ships immediately north and south of his. They all collided – oars snapped, and men died.

  We rowed out of their harbour, smelling their barbaric sacrifices and listening to the screams of their broken oarsmen, as their ships fouled the oars of the others, splintering the shafts, and breaking men’s chests and arms and necks.

  Brasidas came aft, and gave me his little smile.

  Sekla was still shaking his head. ‘Did you plan all that?’ he asked.

  I shrugged. ‘I made it possible for the gods to show their hands,’ I said.

  The Spartan nodded.

  I wasn’t going back to Sybaris or Croton or Syracusa. So I watered at Lampedusa and again at Melita, and rested my rowers there. I intended to run for Athens, but at Melita, Brasidas asked me – with grave courtesy – if I could take him home.

  And there was a man on the beach, nearly beside himself with fury. He was an Italian Greek, and an athlete. I knew him – everyone did, in those days. Astylos of Croton. He had won the stade and the diaulos at Olympia. He had a statue in Croton, his home city, and I had seen him pointed out to me there by Dano, Pythagoras’s daughter.

  He came to me as soon as we landed, put his hand out in supplication, and begged me to take him aboard as a passenger. The same storm that had dismasted Lydia had wrecked his ship on Melita’s rocky shores. And he was desperate because it was an Olympic year, and he was due to compete. Athletes are required by the games to come a full lunar month before the first sacrifice – to prove they are worthy to compete. He was already a week late.

  And his trainer was Polymarchos. Do you remember him from last night? A freedman who had trained me in Syracusa. I won’t say he was the best swordsman I ever saw – that honour belongs to Istes, brother of Hippeis of Militus. But he taught swordsmanship better than any man I ever met, and he taught pankration as well, and running, and here he was on the beach at Melita.

  He looked at me from under his heavy brows, like Herakles come to life – I’ve seldom met a man with the same weight of bone over his brow and yet such startling intelligence.

  ‘You ruined Lydia,’ he said. ‘Daughter of Nikedemos, who took you into his home and welcomed you – and you ruined her.’ He shook his head. ‘Come,’ he said to his athlete. ‘I would rather miss the games than travel in this ship.’

  I could see that his athlete felt differently. I walked to him, planted myself in his path, thumbs hooked in my zone. ‘I have done evil deeds,’ I said. ‘But I have attempted to come right with the gods. Will you hear me?’

  He turned his head away. His hands flexed at his sides, and his stance changed slightly – preparing to fight.

  I knew his strength and speed. So I took a half-step back and touched my sword-hilt.

  ‘Speak,’ he commanded.

  ‘Lydia is married to Anaxsikles the smith, and they have gone to Croton to live.’ I frowned. ‘I helped Anarchos to arrange it. You must just have missed them. I provided the ship and the money. Polymarchos, I never intended that such evil befall her. But I accept that it was through my actions that she came to grief.’ I shrugged. ‘I have nothing more to say,’ I managed, sounding very young in my own ears. It is hard to talk to a man with his head turned away.

  ‘Nikedemos was a fool to turn her out of his house,’ Polymarchos said. ‘She was a fool to be so hurt by you, and you were a fool to play with a girl so young.’ His eyes met mine. ‘There are many fools in the world and I have been one of them. Are you sorry?’

  Anger – anger born of resentment, anger at my own foolishness – bubbled up. I suppose my eyes clouded, and I’m sure my hands clenched, because I can still remember unclenching them. ‘I’m more than sorry. I . . . lost something of what I thought I was.’

  He rubbed his beard. ‘Well – I never had you figured for a scheming betrayer, for all you’re a subtle swordsman.’ He glanced at his athlete. The young man was all but begging him. ‘This pup will be much in your debt if you’ll run us across to the coast of Elis.’ He glanced at me from under his heavy brows.

  ‘I’ve promised to take one of my men to the port for Sparta.’ I pointed to Brasidas. He came over from his fire. He was candidly admiring the young athlete.

  ‘Brasidas, this is Polymarchos, a hoplomachos teacher, a pankrationist, a wrestler – a fine coach. Polymarchos, this is Brasidas – sometime captain of my marines. A Lacedaemonian.’

  Brasidas nodded graciously. Polymarchos matched his nod almost exactly. Then he turned to me. ‘No matter how fast your ship – I’d have to ask you to run to Elis first, or even into the delta of Alpheos. The games are only a week away.’

  I looked at Brasidas, and he smiled. He met my eyes and nodded.

  ‘We’ll take you,’ I said.

  Brasidas caught my arm – an unaccustomed gesture from the Spartan. ‘I would see the Olympics,’ he said. Quite a speech, from him.

  Ten minutes’ discussion on the beaches of Melita and it turned out that there wasn’t a man in my crew who didn’t want to see the Olympics.

  Oh, what a pleasure it is to be rich enough and powerful enough to take a warship to sea with no better purpose than to go to the greatest games given in all the lands of the Hellenes! Mind you, I wasn’t completely a fool. I loaded seventy great Melitan amphora of the best Chian wine I could buy. I’d never been to the Olympics, but there were men in Plataea who had – old Epiktetus, for one – and they all complained about the shameful bad wine and the crowds.

  I remember that trip – less than three thousand stades, with a fair wind – as one of the more pleasant of my life. We filled our bilges with wine amphorae and then tucked up the nooks and crannies with water and salt pork and some bread, and we did what only Phoenicians usually did – we sailed the blue ocean, a straight line from Sicily to Elis. It is hard to reckon distances on the pathless surface of the sea, but my estimate was (and is) that it is almost three thousand stades from Melita to Olympia. And never a rock or an islet to get fresh water or rest your crew after you depart Sicily. We built a small floor of bricks in the bow and laid sand over it for a brazier, but you cannot cook food for two hundred men on a trireme and you can’t even carry enough food for a week.

  Still, our trip into the Western Ocean had taught us a dozen tricks for surviving in open ocean. One was that we knew we could go two days without food.

  At any rate, Sekla and Megakles and I chose a course after some argument, and we put some scratches in the helmsman’s rail to indicate where the sun should be at dawn, at noon and at sunset. After that, all we had was the straightness of the wake
and the position of the stars, because there was no beach to rest at night after the first. The first night we touched at Sicily – we landed on the so-called Carthaginian shore south of Syracusa. Polymarchos took his young man out for a run, and a dozen of us joined him – Brasidas, of course, and me, and Alexandros and young Giannis. We ran under Aetna’s crown, and smoke trailed away from the deeps within her. I have no idea how far we ran, but the young athlete effortlessly outpaced us all, even Brasidas. He was beautiful as he ran, and yet somewhat hangdog about it.

  ‘Why’s he so surly?’ I asked Polymarchos.

  The old fighter shrugged. ‘We’re farther from the Temple of Olympian Zeus than we were fifty days ago when we started,’ he said. ‘He’s late. He may well be banned.’

  It was the longest voyage I’d attempted on the Inner Sea – the longest made intentionally, with no storm to carry me where Poseidon willed. I sacrificed six sheep on the beach at Sicily – not far from where I’d once sat in the marketplace with Demetrios and Herakles, selling hides – and stuffed my oarsmen with mutton, good bread, olives and good red wine.

  And with the dawn, we were off. Our course was almost due east, into the rising sun, and we had the perfect wind. By noon, Aetna was almost gone behind us, and by dark, we were out on the great deep sea without land anywhere. The newer oarsmen were plainly terrified, and we served out wine and stale bread and dates.

  The old hands – the oarsmen who’d been out beyond the pillars – laughed at their timorousness.

  ‘You ain’t seen nothing, young squid,’ one old salt pronounced. ‘A calm night like this on the great green? It’s like being home in your bed.’

  Polymarchos, that master of every weapon, looked green himself. He sat on the helmsman’s bench – where Briseis had sat just a few days before – and groaned. ‘I heard you say you were going into the open ocean,’ he admitted. ‘But I didn’t think it through. Do you . . . know . . . where we are?’

  I laughed. ‘Yes,’ I said. I pointed overhead. ‘See the stars? Do you know they move?’

  He nodded, eager to have his thoughts taken off the dark and moving waters.

  I pointed at the Pole Star. ‘You know that the heavens have a linchpin, like the wheel of a chariot?’ I asked.

  After watching for a while, he agreed this might be true, and I thought how odd it was that city men had so little idea of how the world worked. Perhaps a man has to live outdoors in all weathers to properly accept the role of the gods. And the way the world is made.

  At any rate, after an hour or so, he accepted that I had a star that didn’t move.

  So I showed him a little of the knowledge I’d learned in the hardest school, as a slave on Dagon’s ship, listening to Phoenician navigators talk about how to watch the stars. I showed him how to use a spear shaft, and how to use a cross-staff.

  Finally, he laughed nervously – he, who could put me down in three sword-cuts.

  ‘I don’t know any more than I did when I started,’ he admitted. ‘But now I believe that you know.’

  ‘Isn’t that what you start with, when you teach an athlete?’ I asked.

  He frowned. ‘Usually, that takes a year,’ he said. ‘It is a year before most young men really admit, inside their fool heads, that I can beat them – that they need to know what I have to teach.’

  We both laughed. Then he put a hand on my knee. ‘Listen – you are a good man. Why did you do such a foolish thing? To Lydia? And then you name your ship after her? What does that mean?’

  I busied myself with the helm for a moment. ‘It means that I refuse to let myself forget it,’ I said. ‘And I told myself a lot of lies about Lydia. I wanted two things. I wanted to sail to Alba, and I wanted the girl. But I can see now that she was the embodiment of something else that I wanted – a life as a craftsman.’

  Polymarchos grinned, teeth white and shining in the darkness. ‘I never thought you was really a bronzesmith. Nah – that’s wrong. I knew you was. I just thought it was a hobby. You have aristocrat written all over you – even the way your muscles are formed. You’ve had gymnasiums all your life.’

  Now it was my turn to laugh. ‘Polymarchos, I was a slave from age fifteen to age twenty, and again just before you met me.’

  He nodded. ‘Sure. Many men spend time as slaves. Some it stamps indelibly, like a leatherworker’s tool, and some it merely teaches a little humility. Gelon could use a few months as someone’s slave.’

  I raised an eyebrow. ‘You left Syracusa.’

  He nodded. ‘Gelon is a brilliant tyrant, and he will make Syracusa great. But he took my citizenship. Fuck him. I spent half my life earning my way out of the slavery a bunch of pirates put me in, so that one rich bastard could take it again.’ He glared at the dark water and the stars. ‘Now I’ll take this young Italiote to Olympia, and we’ll win. And then Gelon will know what he has earned for himself by losing me. I could have won this for Syracusa.’

  The next day, we had another day of pure, sweet sailing – the wind almost dead astern, the mainsail set and drawing well, the bow skimming along the waves. I found it hard to measure our speed – always a problem in blue-water sailing. It is difficult to work the geometrical figures for speed and distance when you don’t know how far you are travelling or how fast you are going.

  Leukas came aft for his spot at the helm. As soon as he had the oars, I took charcoal and began to draw on the deck, measuring the cord from Augusta Bay to Olympia by guessing the distance from Melita to Sybaris, based on a dozen journeys, and then making the same guess for the distance from Sybaris to Olympia. If, as I suspected, the two legs formed a right angle, then according to Pythagoras . . .

  Well, the figure I solved for was two and a half thousand stades. I figured it for an hour, and while I figured, I taught Leukas, who was coming along in his Greek letters, and Megakles, who could not read at all and wasn’t interested. Leukas had never multiplied anything, but Sekla had, and he joined in, and then we were using the cross-staff to measure the sun’s angle. It passed the time, and led the oarsmen to believe that we knew what we were doing.

  We tossed wood chips over the side and tried to imagine how fast we were going based on how fast they fell astern. Our young athlete tried racing the wood chips down the length of the hull.

  Astylos ran all day – even in the full heat of the sun. A trihemiola – a trireme with a flat deck and standing mast – has far more deck space than a trireme, but it is still only about one hundred and ten feet long. A stadion is six hundred feet long, so he had to run the length of the deck, turning constantly – and avoiding sailors and off-duty oarsmen.

  At any rate – Astylos’s performance against the wood chips gave me the notion that we were making about thirty stades an hour, which put us at over seven hundred stades a day, sunrise to sunrise.

  Well – Poseidon’s realm is immense. I knew that before I started figuring.

  But from that day on, I began to see sailing and rowing as part of something greater, and this had many effects. First, because I taught Sekla and Leukas whatever I knew. Leukas was a far better natural sailor than I was – his guesses of our speed over water were far better than mine, and his notions of currents and his feel for the weather were better, but he was not very good at explaining things. However, he tried. Sekla knew the southern coast of the Inner Sea, and we began to discuss the possibility of exploring it. Greeks tend to know Greek waters. We’re limited to what the Phoenicians allow us. Or we were then.

  Not any more. Heh.

  The ability to cross the blue deep without touching – I began to think about that tactically. We had often used a small round ship – the sort of ship that could be handled by four to six men – as a supply ship, and I determined to get my hands on one.

  And I began to think about what war with Persia would mean. The last time that Greeks had tried to face Persia at sea, the Persians had outspent the Greeks, created a fleet with almost six hundred hulls – and purchased the treason of the Samnian
s. They won the battle of Lade hands down.

  And now all those Ionian Greek cities were in their hands. In effect, that gave them a thousand good ships. My friends – my Athenian friends, who were, I hoped, just over the horizon, or headed for Athens, because I hadn’t seen them in two weeks – my Athenian friends had told me that in my absence, Themistocles had seized the products of the Athenian silver mines and built a one-hundred-ship fleet for Athens with public money. A hundred ships was an incredible number for a Greek city. Rumour was that Aegina had another eighty.

  Corinth might have another eighty.

  Sparta would have . . . none.

  Even if the three mightiest sea powers among the remaining Greek cities united – they would have two hundred and fifty ships.

  I looked out at the endless waves, and shuddered. In the whole of my life, Athens, Corinth and Aegina had never allied for any reason whatsoever.

  The second sunset, and I saw seabirds. I was pleased, and said so to Leukas, who nodded.

  Nonetheless, I was on deck all night. The night is a time when a man can think too much, and I had eight hours of darkness to smell the wind and think about Briseis. I could smell her hair on the wind, and I could feel her kiss on my lips, and I could wonder why I hadn’t gone to her at night on the beach. I could think a hundred conflicting thoughts.

  I could remember that she had said that some day we would live as man and wife.

  I could take my Phoenician cross-staff and measure the heights of stars and their movement, and I could watch my wake and the sea.

  I remember – that night, or the one following – I recalled a moment of wry annoyance when I realised that I had sworn to Apollo to learn the kithara or the lyre, and I hadn’t done much with it. I didn’t even have a lyre on which to practise. The gut strings are no friends to the sea – or rather, the sea air is no friends to wood and gut.