Poseidon's Spear (Long War 3) (27 page)

The slaves around me seemed to hang back.

‘Anyone speak Greek?’ I asked. No need for silence now.

‘I do, friend,’ said a familiar voice.

And then the Phoenicians attacked.

There were a dozen. They sprinted across the yard – obvious in the moonlight. They had armour and spears.

Of course they did. In one glance, I knew they were Poieni, citizen infantry. Phoenician hoplites. It was, after all, a
gold mine
.

‘Daud?’ I asked.

‘Arimnestos?’ he asked. ‘By the gods!’

And then the Poieni were coming at me.

They had to come up the short ramp and then the steps. And perhaps they didn’t really believe that the intruder would be armed.

I got one for nothing. You usually do. My spear had not lost its purpose, and my hand had not lost its skill. My spearhead went in one eye, and he fell on top of his mates.

I wasn’t going into the slave quarters. If I did, they could simply lock the door on me and hunt me down in daylight.

But I had the glimmer of a plan. So I took a step backwards onto the low platform just inside the log lintel.

They took a long minute to decide to come after me, though. And when they did, they came silently, their bare feet padding on the steps, fast and purposeful.

The first man came though the door with his aspis thrust well up ahead of him. I launched myself at him, and we went shield to shield in the near darkness. My spear was leaning against the wall,
ready to hand. I had a short sword in my fist, and I cut over his shield. Then under it.

This man was good. He rolled with my shield slam and got free – got his shield down, and then up, while he shortened his grip on his spear.

I got my sword against his helmet – but not hard enough. Still, where a man’s head goes, his weight goes, so I kept pushing, and he had to bend back.

But his spear started searching for me, wild pecks like a snake striking at a bird.

All in near-perfect darkness.

Something changed.

A man behind him thrust with his spear at my head, and some noise betrayed him. I wrenched my head to my right. My adversary’s head cracked against the doorpost. Helmet and all, he fell
away from me. The spear hit my helmet, but not a killing blow.

I got my weight under me, powered forward, got my right knee into my adversary’s groin and then swung my aspis into his head – and by sheer luck blocked the next thrust from his
partner.

There is no going back, in such combat.

I was too close to do anything but grapple.

I let the aspis drop off my right arm as my left arm swept past my new opponent’s head, and I seized his aspis with my left hand, spun it and broke his arm, turned him as he screamed and
pulled
. I threw him in, through the door and in among the slaves.

‘
DOOLA!
’ I roared.

The third man came up the steps. I had his spearhead. Heracles gave it to me: suddenly it was in my right hand, which ran down the shaft even as he ran up the steps, and I turned it, slammed the
spear across his aspis and then slipped it over his head and locked him by the neck. The fourth man thrust at me. The third man’s face went rigid, and I backed up the steps, using him as a
shield. I was strong.

Oh, I was strong. I laughed. I laughed at Dagon.

Break my body, will you?

My victim screamed, and I got the spear shaft under his jaw at last and broke his neck. Eager hands reached from behind me and grabbed him by the helmet and towed him into the slave
quarters.

The fourth man was still in shock. He’d just seen three comrades die – one, judging from the man’s skill, his captain. And then he’d stabbed his mate.

I got a deep breath into my body, seized my spear from behind the door and threw it into him so that he fell, the spear deep in his body. He thrashed, and the other men flinched away from him
instinctively.

Men behind me passed me my aspis.

I had all the time in the world to get it on my arm.

I started down the steps.

The Poieni shuffled.

And broke.

I must have laughed. I’m laughing now.

Oh, the power.

I’d missed this.

They might as well have stood their ground. None of them made the door of the tower, because Doola was there, and his archers shot them down in the moonlit open ground. A few
ran off into the slag heaps.

Some ruthless bastard in the tower slammed the door shut.

The slaves started to come out of their quarters. The door was open.

In the darkness, they looked like creatures from the underworld. They were too thin to be men.

I didn’t know Neoptolymos when he stepped up to me. In Sicily, he had filled out into a solid rock, with muscles that stood out like a statue of Heracles. Now, the skin was stretched
tightly across a skull-like head and his tow-blond hair was Medusa’s in the moonlight.

‘Brother?’ he asked, his voice a sibilant whisper.

I thought he was some Iberian who spoke Greek. He didn’t look like an Illyrian.

But I got it. Some interplay of light and shadow, something in the set of the mouth.

I crushed him to me.

‘We knew you’d come.’ He managed a laugh.

‘Where are the others?’ I asked.

He pointed towards the gaping pit, a black hole in the dark. ‘They tried to escape and were caught, so they aren’t allowed out of the pit. Gaius especially.’ He grinned.
‘He’s a bad slave.’

‘But alive,’ I said. I feared the worst. This was insane. I’d heard rumours that the Athenians used slaves like this in their silver mines, but it made no sense, and now I knew
that I should have come as soon as I knew where they were.

But that kind of thinking leads to mistakes. I shrugged it off. ‘Let’s go and get them,’ I said.

‘You have to wait for daylight,’ Neoptolymos said. ‘You can’t even get down the ladders in the dark.’ He shrugged. ‘I tried, once.’

I reckoned it was two hours until dawn.

Doola came out of the moonlit darkness and hugged Neoptolymos. So did Seckla.

Neoptolymos laughed aloud. ‘By the gods,’ he said. ‘You came. You came!’

There were a hundred or more slaves milling about in the darkness. Many of them ran off – I have no idea what happened to them. Many, of course, must have been Iberians, and found their
way home. Or died.

But there were a hundred men who stayed: Greeks, Etruscans, Iberians, Africans from Libya and farther off, and Keltoi, too. Neoptolymos knew them – most of them by name – and he
moved among them, giving orders – well, he had been a prince, once.

Meanwhile, Doola and I looked at the tower. Men at the top of it shot arrows at us, but I, who had endured Persian archery, didn’t think much of their weak bows and their piss-poor
shooting – in the dark, no less.

We walked all around the tower.

‘If we burn it, every Phoenician in Iberia will know we are here,’ Doola said.

I thought about it. There wasn’t a hurry – yet – and I took some time to think.

‘If they find our ships, we’re fucked,’ I said. ‘But, other than that, do you really think they have two hundred soldiers? In this whole colony?’

Doola’s eyes flashed in the dark. He laughed a cruel laugh. Doola was a gentle man; not a man who fancied killing, not a man who loved the feel of a spear in his hand. But slavery enraged
him.

‘You
want
them to come here?’ he asked.

‘We have the high ground, and their gold. They’d be fools to come for us. But if they do, we can teach them a lesson.’ I grinned. He grinned.

We set fire to the tower.

It took time. It is one thing to say, ‘The tower is made of wood’, and another thing entirely to get it to burn.

Here’s what we did. We stripped all the shingles off the livestock sheds, and then we broke down the sheds themselves and the big wooden structure where the smelting went on. We had a
hundred pairs of willing hands, and it is literally
unbelievable
how much damage a hundred angry former slaves can do to their master’s property.

Then we had ten of the strongest slaves, led by Neoptolymos, carry loads of flammables up to the tower, under the cover of twenty of us with aspides held over their heads.

The men in the tower understood immediately, of course.

We didn’t lose a man.

Heh.

Six trips to the tower, and back, across open ground.

Then Doola lit a torch – one of ours from the ship. He was going to throw it at the pile, but I ran it to the pile and placed it well under. Nothing hit me, because it is really very
difficult to shoot straight down in the dark with a bow.

The pile caught. The tower caught.

The men inside died screaming. It should have been horrible, but instead, it was deeply satisfying. Make of that what you will.

Before dawn, the tower was like a lighthouse, a beacon, with flames ten times the height of a ship’s mainmast roaring into the sky. One of the slaves, a man named Herodikles, sacrificed a
ram from the pens and threw the carcass into the fire. He was an Aeolian, from Lesbos, and he’d been a slave for fifteen years, taken while on a pilgrimage to Cyrene.

There were a hundred such stories.

Men told them, while their oppressors tried to scream the smoke out of their lungs and failed. They smelled like roast pork as they burned.

In the morning, when the fire burned less than a mast-height high, and the sun was over the rim of the world, we climbed down into the pit.

They were all there, waiting. They were even thinner, and they didn’t have darkness to hide the open sores, the flies, the ooze of pus. Despite which, they grinned from ear to ear. Gaius.
Daud. Demetrios, who looked so bad I was afraid he would die before we could get food into him. I couldn’t even figure out how he could stand on those legs.

They had been slaves for just two months.

The Phoenicians were . . . I was going to say animals, but no animal except man treats another like that.

We rigged a sling, and lifted them out of the pit. Most of them were too weak to climb the ladder.

While that happened, I went and posted sentries. There was a new spirit among my men: the shepherds, the herdsmen, the fishermen’s sons, the slaves freed at Centrona. We’d been
victorious again; we were doing something noble. They were inspired, just as men can be inspired by a great play, or by the noble words of a godlike man like Heraclitus, or by the gods
themselves.

I knew as soon as I looked at them. They were ready to do something great.

For the moment, all we had to do was to be alert.

We watched the plains all day while the tower burned. Men looked at me, and I smiled. I kept my own council. There was food in the sheds, animals in the pens, and I prepared a feast on the coals
of the tower and served it to the slaves, telling my own men that they should go from slave to slave as if they were slaves themselves.

They did so with good will. The slaves tore into the meat, complained about the lack of wine and bread – mock complaints, although there’s always some awkward sod who feels sorry for
himself. But they ate and ate.

I saw no reason to leave so much as a goat alive, so as fast as they ate, we killed more.

And watched the plains.

About noon, we saw the dust cloud.

Seckla was my best rider. I gave him the mounted men, and clear orders. Up at the mine we had a view for fifty stades over the plain, so that I could point out his route – this stream,
that copse of trees, that farmhouse.

They cantered away, and men cheered them.

The tower had just about burned out. So I asked the slaves to fetch water from the well, a bucket at a time, and pour it into the coals.

Steam rose to the heavens, carrying the scent of roast meat. Some of it was roast men, and the gods have never rejected such a sacrifice. I remember wondering at myself; I thought Tertikles a
barbarian for sacrificing a man before we launched our ships, but I was secretly pleased to have sent twenty Phoenicians screaming to my gods.

Well.

It’s true; I can be a vicious bastard.

When the dust cloud on the plain reached a certain point, I took most of my armed men and marched. We had full bellies and full water bottles, and we moved fast, going downhill, despite the full
heat of the summer sun. My friends wanted to come – Gaius demanded it, and muttered words about honour.

I pushed a chunk of goat into his greasy hands. ‘Honour this,’ I said. ‘I’ll do the killing. You do the eating.’

We went down the mountain, crossed the stream at its foot and went along the ridge through the high beech trees until we came to the site I’d chosen on the way. When you are a warrior, you
think about these things all the time.
That
field would make a good place.

That
piece of trail.

Ambushes come in as many different shapes as women. And men, too, if you wish. What would make one ambush perfect would be certain death in another.

I had very few missile weapons. So my ambush would be close in, a deadly, hand-to-hand thing. And since my men were on foot, we had to
win
. Because we were unlikely to outrun
pursuit.

If we had had missile weapons – more bows, good javelins and throwing strings, heavy rocks – we might have chosen other sites.

Instead, we lay down among the trees, an arm’s-length from the road. I took my place with Doola, behind a big rock that slaves and oxen had shifted. You could tell, because it stood clear
of the ground, where all the other big rocks were half buried. It allowed me to see the road in both directions.

If you ever have cause to lay an ambush, whether you do it with a handful of mud for your brothers, or with a sharp spear for your enemies, remember these simple rules.

Always have a clear line of retreat. Any other ambush is just an elaborate form of suicide.

Tailor your surprise to your arms and your enemy. If you have bows, you should wait at a good killing range, with an open field that won’t block your archery. If you have time, plan your
ambush so that your first flight of arrows panics your foe into a
worse
position. Don’t drive him off a road and into an impregnable stronghold.