Poseidon's Spear (Long War 3) (41 page)

The next morning, we rose and packed our animals carefully, and marched with a strong advance guard – twenty men. After all, we’d captured a dozen horses. And we now had a dozen men
in fine scale shirts.

By evening, we were camping within bowshot of the walls of Ludunca. The town had hundreds of timber houses and some dozens of stone houses, as well as four temples and a stone outer wall. We
paid a fine for camping in someone’s field.

Gwan and his Senones unpacked the donkeys and the horses and the carts, and turned them around for home. Their part was done. At Ludunca, all of our tin was loaded onto barges. These
weren’t made of a single tree trunk like those on the Sequaana. These were made of planks – as few as three very wide planks, or as many as nine. The sides were formed of single, heavy
planks that fitted perfectly to the strakes of the bottom. Again, the boats were designed to take the standard barrels, but could also hold our pigs of tin.

Vasilios was fascinated. He told us all, several times, that the way they built boats depended on the available timber. He was especially impressed with the way the Galles used iron nails to
clench the timbers to cross supports – very alien to the Greek construction method, but very strong.

He showed me one in particular that impressed me. The floor of a particularly large and heavy barge had cross beams to support the side of the boards and to keep them together. These boards had
holes drilled in them and then in the supports, and pegs of oak were driven into those holes, and then iron nails were driven into the pegs, forcefully expanding them against the wood around them.
The result was watertight and as strong as – well, as iron. And oak.

We loaded for Marsala even while we negotiated with the local Aedui for the release of our hostages. They were all important young men – not the infantry, no one even wanted them back, but
the horsemen. In the end, I released them all for a pound of gold and some casks of ale.

I don’t think I’ve mentioned that we figured out that Callum had traded us twelve casks of bee’s wax for a pig of tin. I had no idea if that was a fair trade, but people had
begun to make offers on the bee’s wax already. Without Doola, I was helpless to guess the value. Demetrios said it would trade well in many places, because it was so clear and white.

I have to smile. I had a picture in my head of Arimnestos, the Killer of Men, standing in front of a group of unwed maidens – perhaps at the temple of Artmeis at Brauron. I was holding up
a ball of pure white beeswax, and telling them that it was the very thing to use on their best white linen thread.

Well, I think it’s funny.

The trip down river from Ludunca was uneventful. We reached the Inner Sea at the old Phoneician port at Arla. I’m not ashamed to say that I threw myself down on the beach and kissed the
sand and the water. I was not alone. We ran up and down the beach, and then we ran again, until the running became a kind of celebration.

The boatmen were cautious about the edge of the sea, but they got their barges all the way along the coast to Massalia, almost one hundred stades, poling along the beaches. It is a protected
part of the sea, but it seemed dangerous to me, perhaps because I had been through so much that I feared the loss of everything at the very end.

But one fine day in late autumn – just the edge of winter, with a bitter wind blowing out of the west, and a chill in the air that could make a man ill – we sighted Tarsilla. People
came down to the water’s edge, and we landed on the beach, landed our pigs of tin, our little remaining silver, our bee’s wax, Gallish wine, hides and all. We moved them all into
Vasilios’s shed that he had used to protect our ship when he was building it.

We had a feast on the beach, and the next day we celebrated the Feast of Dionysus in style, with wine and song and even a play done by one of the teams of actors from Massalia.

Two more days, and Demetrios of Phokia arrives with sixty men and a pair of oxen to kill, and gave another feast for our return. We spent two days telling him of our travels.

He spent both days telling us of war with Carthage.

Carthage had struck at Sicily in our absence. And not just Sicily – the Carthaginians were using force to get absolute mastery of all the trade routes in the western Inner Sea. Carthage
had been involved in wars on Sardinia for fifty years – and had squandered armies and fleets attempting to dominate the stiff necked peoples of the island. By the time Telesinus was Archon in
Athens, Carthage had at last dominated the Sardana, and was now attempting to use her new ports to attack Greek colonies like Massalia – and Syracusa.

But the Greek world had not stood still during the year I had been away. Gelon, the Tyrant of Gela and Naxos, had seized power in Syracusa.

That was news. I knew a Sicilian Greek aristocrat named Gelon – in fact, I had enslaved him. It couldn’t be the same man – the Sicilian Tyrant had never been any man’s
slave – but I wondered if my Gelon had made it home.

At any rate, Gelon – the tyrant – was unifying the Greek cities of Sicily and Magna Greca against Carthage. Not everyone joined him. Rich cities like Himera on Sicily and Reggium in
southern Italy chose to remain independent.

Really, it was the Ionian Revolt played out in miniature. It had been going on for years – as one or another Greek state rose to prominence and led the resistance against Carthage, and was
conquered or bought off, another would come. But Gelon of Gela – a right bastard, if Dionysius the Phocaean was to be believed – had at least achieved the building of an alliance.

I wondered what his conquest of Syracusa meant.

We were lying on the beach – it was still warm enough to be outside with a bonfire – eating beef and lobster. Dionysius the Phocaean was licking his teeth. ‘There is no side I
want,’ he said. ‘I don’t want the Carthaginians to enslave me, and Gelon is a horror. He enslaved half of the free population of Syracusa – you know that?’

My blood ran cold.

‘Women, children – sold off or put in brothels. Men made into oarsmen, or forced labour on farms. Gelon won’t allow a lower class – a Thetis class. Claims they
destabilize the state. He insists he’ll have only aristocrats and slaves, like Sparta.’ Dionysius picked his teeth and looked at me. ‘I don’t like either side.’

I lay on my straw paliase, using a metal pick to get the meat out of the body of a lobster and drinking wine. ‘I owe Carthage something. I’m of a mind to trade my share of the tin,
take a ship while I have a crew – a fighting crew—’ I paused. I hadn’t been aware that this was my intention. But suddenly it was.

I nodded. ‘But first, I’m going to have Demetrios here go sell the tin, while I go back and find my friends,’ I said. ‘Doola, Daud, Sittonax, Alexandros –
they’re probably right behind us on the road. And I owe something to young Gwan there.’

‘Winter will close the passes,’ Demetrios said. ‘And I won’t be selling any tin this winter, either.’

As if to prove him right, a cold gust of wind blew down off the mountains at our backs.

Even more should we deserve the ridicule of men if, having before us the example of the Phocaeans who, to escape the tyranny of the Great King, left Asia and founded a new
settlement at Massilia, we should sink into such abjectness of spirit as to submit to the dictates of those whose masters we have always been throughout our history.

Isocrates,
Archidamus
84

I didn’t go anywhere that winter. I sat in Massalia with my smithy and a supply of tin the other bronze smiths envied, and cast a pair of light rams – carefully
designed and carefully cast, according to my own theories. Around the headland at Tarsilla, Vasilios laid down the keel for a trieres. She would carry one hundred seventy-two oarsmen and each
oarsmen would have a dactyl over two cubits in which to breathe. I had copper, and I had tin, and I traded Dionysius a competed ram for all the timber. I told the oarsmen that I would need them in
the spring, and that the payoff for the tin adventure would happen at the spring feast of Demeter.

Gaius stayed the winter with me. He disdained working in the forge, but he would sit in a chair and chat with me while I worked, which made the time pass pleasantly enough.

Winter passed slowly.

It was interesting, the experience of being rich. Some men were jealous, and some were openly admitting it. Of course, I had two hundred ‘clients’ in the form of the former slave
oarsmen, the marines, the shepherds and the fishermen. None of them seemed to want to go back to work.

Piracy has many ills, and the greatest may be that when you teach a hard-working boy that he can steal and kill for gold, he may feel that hauling nets is dull.

And there was an element of comedy to my riches. After all, the tin ingots were still stacked in the warehouse, and before midwinter, when one of the ingots showed signs of the tin illness, we
brought them into the house we’d built and kept them warm, which seemed to help.

You probably don’t know about tin blight. Tin, when it gets cold and wet, can develop an illness like wheat – it grows a white mould, and once the mould spreads, the metal can be
ruined. Indeed, if you leave the tin long enough, one day you’ll walk in and find your fortune in tin is nothing but a small pile of white dust. This was one of the reasons smiths
couldn’t build up stores of tin. As a smith, I knew a few tricks – I knew to run over the outside of the pigs with flax tow and pork fat; I knew to keep them warm. But I spent my winter
in a constant anxiety about the tin.

And that wasn’t my only anxiety. Again, my riches were more apparent than real. We had some gold – the ransom of the Gaul aristocrats, the gold we took all the way back in Iberia
– but it was only really enough to pay for food and wine for the oarsmen who remained.

It was the
rumour
of our wealth in tin that made us rich. Some men thought we had thousands of mythemnoi of tin – other men thought we’d discovered a new source. All
ascribed to us an almost heroic level of wealth.

As the winter wore on, and I worked in my shop in Massalia, I began to fear what those rumours might sound like out on the Great Blue. Somewhere, I feared that men just like me were hearing of
the fabulous wealth we’d won. And were fingering their swords.

After the midwinter festivals, I laid out the rest of my hoard to have my oarsmen build a pair of towers down by the beach. And I put the word out in Massalia that I was looking for archers.

Massalia isn’t a big town. At most, there are a thousand free men, with their families; another thousand slave men, or perhaps a little more, and then another few hundred Gauls, mostly
jobbing labourers or craftsmen. While there are caravan guards working the tin trade and the wine trade, there aren’t enough professional soldiers in the town to make a company, and when I
enquired around the wine houses for more archers, most men shook their heads. Archery isn’t all that popular among the Gauls.

In fact, as Dionysius said one evening on a kline in my townhouse, I already had the biggest body of soldiers in the town. He didn’t sound jealous.

His new ship,
Massalia
, was being built in a stone ship shed down by the beach. He was planning to go to sea to prey on the Phoenicians, and to protect the Massalian trade.
Increasingly, as winter passed and we talked, I was of a mind to join him. But only after I’d found Doola, who I hoped – and prayed – was wintering with his wife, somewhere on the
other side of the Alps.

Spring came late, after a great deal of rain. My new ship – which I called
Lydia
despite some superstitious qualms – was taking shape. But Demetrios’s new merchantman,
Sikel Herakles
, was almost complete.

We were standing on the beach in the rain, looking at the hulls.

‘I’ll take her to sea as soon as she’s ready,’ Demetrios said. He licked his lips as a boy does when a girl shows a bit of thigh or breast – sorry, girls. These
things happen, and I’m sure they are all errors, eh?

‘With the tin?’ I asked.

He nodded quietly.

‘Where do you plan to sell it?’ I asked.

‘Syracusa. Or just possibly Rome.’ He shrugged. ‘I’d like to have Doola back.’

‘I’d like you to wait for me,’ I said. ‘Seventy pigs of tin – a rich prize for a pirate, and everyone’s had the winter to hear of our success.’ I shook
my head. ‘Please wait for me.’

He narrowed his eyes.

‘I was trading these waters before I ever knew you,’ I said.

We looked at each other. ‘Listen,’ I said. ‘I’m not
telling
you, I’m asking. Doola will want to be here for the sale. He has contacts; he understands
things—’ I paused. I could tell I was going the wrong way.

‘I was trading tin when you were off being a pirate in the east,’ he said.