Poseidon's Spear (Long War 3) (15 page)

Seckla punched me in the arm.

‘When I touch our
patron
for money, he’s not going to want to let us sail away,’ I said. ‘Not without security.’ I shrugged again. ‘If we do it, we
can’t ever come back here.’ In fact, I knew I wasn’t coming back anyway.

Oh, the gods must have laughed.

Well, I had their attention.

‘Listen,’ I said. ‘We can build our second ship right now. We must have five hundred drachmas. I have more due to me at the shop. You have more in the tin. Let’s get the
hull under way. When it’s finished, we hire rowers to get us to wherever slaves are cheap. And we buy them and train them ourselves.’

‘Now?’ Doola said.

I gave another shrug. ‘Or we give up the whole enterprise. Look, it
is
insane. We’re six former slaves, and we’re going to take on the Carthaginian trade empire and
sail across the Outer Sea to Alba? I agree. We can stay home, make money, take wives and be fat.’

Doola smiled bitterly. ‘I knew my plan would founder on the rock of your desire for heroism.’

I shook my head. ‘No. It doesn’t have to be like that. If we all say so, we’re absolved of our oaths and we can walk away.’

But they all shook their heads. That’s how fate works. We knew we wanted something impossible, but we weren’t willing to give it up.

The next day, Doola, Demetrios and I hired horses and rode along the coast to Marissilia, a little port full of fishing boats around the corner from Syracusa. It was sixty stades from the
taverna where Anarchos sat and ruled the waterfront. I knew it wasn’t far enough, but I had a master to serve and work to do, and my time and funds were limited.

We walked from boatbuilder to boatbuilder. The two largest were scarcely interested in our triakonter, and the smaller didn’t have the labour to build her. The triakonter, or thirty-oared
ship, was the backbone of most small military expeditions, and was also the most useful size for a rowed merchant ship.

The day was lost.

Lydia vanished into the women’s quarters with her courses, and I was able to work without interruption, to meet my master’s eye and to ask for another day off and receive it, as well
as a purse with sixty drachma – my share of five helmets, all completed. The greaves and breastplates were now on my part of the shop floor.

I went and trained, boxed, sparred with the wooden swords and Polimarchos put bruises into my side. ‘That’s for standing me up, you ingrate whoreson,’ he growled. ‘I hope
she was worth it.’

Your trainer always knows.

I was having trouble with my life. I kept different parts in different jars – I was a smith, I was an athlete, I was a sailor. I was looking for a shipbuilder, but I couldn’t ask
Nikephorus to help me, because that would lead very quickly to some shocking admissions. That meant I couldn’t ask Polymarchos anything, either, or it would be known throughout the guild in a
matter of days.

On one of those evenings, as the cold winter rain fell and the masseur worked my muscles, I remember two middle-aged men, both smiths, coming and sitting on my bench. They were good-natured, but
firm.

‘You’re cutting into our business, you scamp,’ one said. He was Diodorus, a master armourer who worked in a different street. I knew him well. The other I didn’t know as
well.

‘Charge more for your damned helmets!’ the younger man said. ‘Or make them worse.’

They both laughed. But I took their point immediately, and when I went back to Nikephorus, he nodded.

‘I’ve heard the same. We’ll raise our price. And refuse a few commissions. I’m sorry, lad, but I don’t want Diodorus to decide to go back to casting brooches. He
used to, and he gave it up so that I could have that part of the business.’ He tugged his beard and looked at me under his bushy eyebrows. ‘Don’t take it personally. But you have
to work with people.’

That meant I was going to make a great deal less money.

On the other hand, I was lucky my master had shared the money with me from the start.

‘I’m making some pieces for trade . . . and the panoplies for Lydia’s suitors,’ I said with a smile that was false. ‘After that, I’ll stick to stock for a
while.’

He ruffled my hair. I felt the traitor I was.

‘Lydia misses you,’ he said. And grinned. ‘When’s the wedding?’

I shook my head, put my eyes down and tried to hide. ‘Not discussed. Yet.’

He nodded.

‘Best discuss it,’ he said, and rose to his feet. ‘Soon.’

I left work and walked down to the port, where Neoptolymos and I watched a dancer while drinking decent wine. She was good. But I remember thinking at her every gyration that Lydia’s hips
were more expressive when she rose from her seat than this golden girl was as she moved.

Ah, lust. Eros.

We gave her the tips she expected from a couple of men and finished our amphora of wine, and then we wandered the waterfront, peering into boats.

‘I’ll need a trireme to get my place back,’ Neoptolymos said, out of the darkness.

‘I’ll find us one, when it’s time,’ I said. ‘This will sound foolish, but I
own
a trireme. If she still swims above the waves, I’ll put her at your
service.’

He was sitting on the dog’s head that held the mooring lines for a pair of smugglers owned by Anarchos. Pretty little twenty-oared boats with lines like racehorses.

He laughed. ‘You’re an odd one. You
own
a trireme. You fought at Marathon. Yet you are living in a tenement in Syracusa with a pack of former slaves, trying to sail around
the world.’ He punched me. ‘Why in Hades don’t we take your Poseidon-forsaken trireme to Gades and Alba? Eh?’

I shook my head. It was hard to explain, and I didn’t really want to, but—

‘If I go back, I have to go back,’ I said lamely. ‘Political power, my farm, my family, war, Athens—’ I realized that I sounded angry. I
was
angry.

What was I angry at?

‘What happened?’ Neoptolymos asked. He leaned forward and put a hand on my arm. ‘It’s none of my business. We all trust you. But you have things none of us has –
none of us but bloody Gaius. It’s funny that you’re the one pressing us to move faster, as you are the one who has somewhere else to go. I’ll never take back my little kingdom.
Even if I do, I’ll never . . . make it right. My sister told me to be careful of pirates, and I left her to her death. A horrible death.’ He stared at the stars, and wept.

I hugged him. ‘Don’t be an arse, brother. You did not rape your sister. You did not kill her. You are not responsible. Or rather—’ I thought of Heraclitus. ‘Rather,
yes, you made an error, and you can atone for it by finding Dagon and putting a spear up his arse.’

At my crudity, he raised his face.

‘You are a good hater,’ he said.

‘I have imagined killing him twenty thousand times,’ I said.

‘Killing who?’ asked a gruff voice. Anarchos came out of the darkness with a half-dozen of his minions. He owned the boats. He wasn’t the one out of place.

‘A Phoenician named Dagon,’ I said, with perfect honesty.

Anarchos frowned, whether in real interest or simulated, I could not tell. But then he shrugged. ‘I hear you are looking to build a boat?’ he asked. His flunkeys stood around him,
trying to look tough, which is difficult in the dark. One of them had a torch, and it didn’t throw enough light for anyone.

‘Yes,’ I said. ‘A triakonter, big enough for the tin trade.’ A little truth goes a long way.

‘You have a regular source with the Etruscans?’ Anarchos asked. He was really interested. We all knew this could lead to big money.

I shrugged.

Anarchos stepped up close to me, so I could smell the onion on his breath. ‘You have a problem, my young friend. Everyone I know is waiting for you to marry the bronze-smith’s
daughter. Some say she‘s already baking your bread in her oven, eh? And yet, other people tell me you are looking to get a ship built.’ He eyed me, his head a little to one side like a
curious dog. ‘And I say – to myself I say it – what if he’s playing her for a fool?’

Shit. Anarchos was that smart. And that was going to make it nearly impossible to take him for money.

‘And I wondered, does the old smith know his new young master is building a ship?’ Anarchos was very close, and very quiet. ‘Not that I’d tell him, unless I had reason. I
am, after all, a reasonable man. And your patron.’ He took a step back. ‘I have six shipyards under my thumb, Arimnestos of Plataea. I think you know this, so I have to wonder why you
don’t come to me. And then I have to find you in the dark and ask you all this. And it seems to me that your slave friends have just made a fine profit on a voyage, but not an obol has found
its way to me. I wonder if we don’t need a little reminder of how this ought to work. Eh?’

It’s hard to glare at a man by torchlight.

‘I will apologize for our oversight,’ I said slowly, ‘and bring you our contribution in the morning. And you must understand,
patron
, that I might be a little shy
about using your boatyards. I don’t wish to say any more about it.’

‘But I have two yards that need work – and can build your ship. By giving this work to either one, I am more important, and my patronage is secure. And you would deny me this?’
He laughed, as a man will when explaining a sticky problem to an infant.

I shrugged in the darkness. ‘We are not rich men,’ I said. ‘But I will try your yards.’

‘Ah! You sound as if you are doing me a favour. And perhaps you are. You are an odd duck, Plataean. You demand to be treated differently from all the rest of my clients – and I
do
treat you differently. You think I’m a fool? I’ve held this waterfront for thirty years. I know what kind of man you are. Don’t treat me as a fool, and we will
continue as friends. Come and drink wine with me.’

‘Tomorrow,
patron.
’

He laughed. ‘You know what is funny, Plataean? You think you are a better man than I. You don’t want to drink wine with a crime lord, eh? You have
aristocrat
embroidered on
your forehead. And yet I like you, and I let you do things that I would kill other men for doing – like refusing to drink with me. And I’ll go further. I’ll bet that you’ve
killed men and taken their gold without a qualm. Just like me. And you have friends and allies who depend on you – like I do. You keep your word. So do I.’ He pointed at me, and the
torchlight caught the grey in his hair and made it flare. ‘I give you my word that if you come and drink with me, you will not regret it, and neither will your friends.’

He turned on his heel and walked up the wet stones to his house, leaving me with Neoptolymos and a body full of the daimon of combat. I had been so sure he was going to attack us.

The next evening I appeared at his house wearing a good Ionian chiton of my own, and over it a decent himation I’d bought secondhand. Of my friends, only Doola wanted to come, and I
wasn’t sure that an African, however dignified, was going to win Anarchos over.

Slaves took my stick and my himation, and I went into his andron, which was beautifully appointed – more like that of a very rich merchant than a street fixer. He had a pair of marble
amphorae on columns – they must have been a thousand years old. His kline were all Ionian work, like the ones on which Briseis and I made love, with wicker mats on a fruitwood frame. I sank
onto mine, a slave took my sandals and I was given a cup of red wine.

He was on the other kline, and he raised his head over the arm rest. ‘So – you came,’ he said. ‘I’m surprised, after all my ranting last night. I’ll have to
kill a rival to convince my bullies I’m still tough.’

I laughed. I wanted to hate him, but in truth, I liked him for all the reasons he named. We had a great deal in common.

‘Tell me about your boat,’ he said.

‘I have our contribution,’ I said.

He shook his head. ‘That’s business. Bring it to me in public. This is private. No witnesses, no attribution. I’ll take no revenge for what you say here. So speak the truth, or
keep your breath in the fence of your teeth.’

The six of us had debated all day what we should do. Daud and Neoptolymos were for instant flight over the sea to Etrusca. Doola and Demetrios and I were for looking at what the crime lord had
to offer.

‘He can sell us to the Phoenicians!’ Seckla said. He certainly had Anarchos sized up.

‘Not if he’s in love with Ari,’ Doola said. He gave me a wicked smile.

Daud looked away. ‘You two make me uncomfortable,’ he said.

The Keltoi don’t take the love of men for men with the ease that Greeks do. And Etruscans and Aegyptians and everyone else, for that matter. Barbarians.

‘Not if he sees real profit,’ Doola said. ‘We represent a long shot at a lot of money, friends. Let’s not undersell our own possibilities. I am not saying we should share
the whole truth with the whoreson. Just that if he really can get our boat built, he might be an ally. An untrustworthy ally, but an ally.’

Doola. He put everything so well.

So I was allowed to bargain with Anarchos.

I leaned on the arm of my own kline and smiled.

‘We want to enter the tin trade,’ I admitted. ‘We have the skills. We have the ability to do things few other men understand. I know what tin looks like at every stage. I can
buy at the side of the stream, or at the mine head.

‘We can navigate and sail. There’s tin at Massalia in Gaul, and it comes from upcountry. There’s tin in the mountains behind the Tuscan plain, and there’s tin in Illyria.
We have an Illyrian, a Gaul and an Etruscan.’ I shrugged. ‘I can’t be plainer than that.’

Anarchos drank his wine, and his slaves bustled to refill the cup. Another oddity – he didn’t have the terrified slaves of a bad master. He had the sort of slaves we all want to
have. They were mostly silent, but when Anarchos made a witticism, they smiled or even laughed.

Interesting.

‘And you can do all this with a triakonter?’ he asked.

‘Well . . . yes. And the ship we have now.’ I shrugged. ‘And ten more, when we get into the trade.’

‘And who protects you from the Phoenicians?’ he asked. ‘Their triremes are cruising for you, even now.’ He shook his head. ‘I made enquiries about this Dagon. He is
– quite famous. Infamous. A slaver.’ He fingered his beard. ‘A typical fucking Carthaginian.’ He looked at me. ‘Seriously, Ari. May I call you that? Listen. In
Syracusa, we all hate them. It’s the unifying force that binds the commons and the lords together. And sooner or later, they will get their forces together and come for us. Iberians, Keltoi,
their own Poieni infantry, their crack cavalry force. They’ll load them on ships and try and finish us off. They mean to control all the trade in the Eastern Sea, and we are in the
way.’ He drank. ‘Is this about revenge on this Dagon? I don’t finance revenge. And when dealing with Carthage, anyone who sails from Syracusa does so under a death sentence. Why
should I wager on you?’