Poseidon's Spear (Long War 3) (63 page)

But his no-holds-barred approach was ideal for facing down a crowd of badly armed men, and when the deck crew crossed behind him, the fight began to be a massacre.

I stood and breathed. And bled, of course.

And then I turned and walked over the pile of corpses towards the Persians.

I had no aspis, and one of them – the youngest by ten years, I’d guess – had an arrow on his string.

I
knew
one of these Persians.

‘Greetings, brother,’ I said to Cyrus. I reached up my bleeding hand and tipped my helmet back.

Cyrus was the centre Persian. He was a superb swordsman, and a fine archer. I’ve mentioned him before, and his brother Darius, and their friend Arynam. The world is truly very small, at
least among fighting men.

Cyrus laughed, and his teeth showed white in his old-wood face. ‘Ari!’ he shouted. In Persian, he said, ‘Brothers, we are saved. This one is my friend – my sword
brother.’

We embraced, and I bled on his armour and apologized.

‘Tell your women they don’t have to stab themselves,’ I said. I slapped Cyrus on the shoulder. I felt alive.

Behind me, the desperate oarsmen threw down their weapons and begged for mercy. The Persian woman by Cyrus dropped her weapon and threw back her shawl. And stepped forward into my arms.

Sometimes, I think that we are mere playthings of the gods. And sometimes, that they mean us to be happy.

Men were dying at my back.

There was blood running over my sandals.

A friend of my youth stood at my shoulder.

I saw none of them, because the woman in my arms was Briseis.

My voice is gone, and I’ve talked enough – the Halicarnassan’s stylus hand must hurt like fire, or be cramped like an oarsman’s after a long row. And my
thugater must be tired of hearing her old man brag – eh?

I’ll wager you’ll come back tomorrow. Because tomorrow, I’ll tell of how we went to Aegypt; how we explored the Erytherean Sea. How we found Dagon.

But what you’ll come back for is the fight with the Persians. At Artemesium, where the Greeks showed Persia we could fight at sea. And at Thermopylae. Where the Spartans showed us all how
much like gods we could be.

I was thirty-one, and I thought the adventure was over. It was just beginning.

As closely as possible, this novel follows the road of history. But history – especially Archaic Greek history – can be more like a track in the forest than a road
with a kerb. I have attempted to make sense of Herodotus and his curiously modern tale of nation states, betrayal, terrorism and heroism. I have read most of the secondary sources, and I have found
most of them wanting.

Early in the planning of this series, it became obvious that something would have to happen between Marathon – in 490 BCE, and Thermopylae/Artemesium, in 480 BCE. There was a commercial
temptation to move from military campaign to military campaign. I resisted it. While war was a major force in Greek culture, there were other forces—

About the time that I started this series, I got a copy of Robin Lane Fox’s
Travelling Heroes
. Then I saw a copy of the
Periplus of Hano
and the Hakluyt Society’s
Periplus of the Erytherean Sea
, two ancient sources on routes to Sub-Saharan Africa. Then I read a dozen articles on the ancient tin trade. Somewhere around page 50 of Tim Severin’s
Jason Voyage
I knew what my hero would do during the ten years that separated the two military events that most of my readers expected.

Could a Greek have travelled from Athens to Britain in 485 BCE? Euthymenes of Massalia may well have reached Britain in 525 BCE or so, and Pytheas (also of Massalia) certainly reached Britain by
330 BCE or roughly the time of Alexander. Recent archaeology has found several apparently ‘Greek’ graves in the valleys of the Seine and Rhone, and current scholarship on ships and
boats supports the notion of a regular trade from the tin mines of the north down to Massalia. In fact, it seems increasingly likely that the Mediterranean world never lost touch with the north and
Britain after early Mycenaean contacts, and the increasing crisis over tin (a crisis which some have likened to the oil crisis in our modern world) may in fact have brought Britain a certain
notoriety early on.

I pride myself on research and, for want of a better phrase, ‘keeping it real.’ I spend an inordinate amount of time wearing various historical kits in all weathers – not just
armoured like a taxiarch, but sometimes working like a slave. So I wish to hasten to say that I have rowed a heavy boat (sixteen oars) in all weathers; I have sailed, but not as much or as widely
as I would like; I have been in all the waters I discuss, but often on the deck of a US Navy warship and not, I fear, in a pentekonter or a trireme. Because of this, I have relied – sometimes
heavily – on the words of ancient sailors and their excellent modern reenactors, like Captain Severin. I am deeply indebted to him, to a dozen sailors I’m lucky enough to count as
friends, and to the Hakluyt Society, of which I’m now a member. All errors are mine, and any feeling of realism of accuracy in my nautical ‘bits’ belongs to their efforts.

I also have to note that just before I began work on this book, I helped to create the reenactment of the 2500th anniversary of the Battle of Marathon. We had about one hundred and twenty
reenactors from all over the world. You can find the pictures on our website at http://www.amphictyonia.org/ and you really should. It was a deeply moving experience for me, and what I learned
there – because every reenactor brings a new dose of expertise and amazing kit – has affected this book and will affect the rest of the series. I have now worn Greek armour for three
solid days. Fought in a phalanx that looked like a phalanx. You’ll spot the changes in the text. I wish to offer my deep thanks to every reenactor who attended, and all the groups in the
Amphictyonia. I literally couldn’t write these books without you.

And, of course, if, as you read this, you burn to pick up a xiphos and an aspis – or a bow and a sparabara! Go to the website, find your local group, and join. Or find me on my website or
on facebook. We’re always recruiting.

Finally – neither the Phoenicians nor the Persians were ‘bad’. The Greeks were not ‘good’. But Arimnestos is a product of his own world, and he would sound –
curious – if he didn’t suffer from some of the prejudices and envies we see in his contemporaries.

At the risk of repeating what I said in the afterword to
Marathon
– the complex webs of human politics that ruled the tin trade and Carthage’s attempts to monopolize it
– the fledgling efforts of Persia (perhaps?) to win allies in the far west to allow them to defeat the Greeks on multiple fronts – these are modern notions, and yet, to the helmsmen and
ship owners of Athens and Tyre and Carthage and Syracuse, these ideas of strategy must have been as obvious as they are to armchair strategists today. The competition for tin was every day. Trade
and piracy were very, very closely allied. If my novels have a particular
point
it is that the past wasn’t simple. In Tyre and Athens, at least, the leading pirates were also the
leading political decision makers.

In the last two books, I’ve said that ‘
it is all in the Iliad
.’ Well – in this book, it is all in the
Odyssey
, and I’ve gone back to that source
again and again. I have enormous respect for the modern works of many historians, classical and modern. But they weren’t there. Homer and his associates – they were there.

I have seen war at sea – never the way of the oar and ram, but war. And when I read the
Iliad
and the
Odyssey
, they cross the millennia and feel
true
. Not,
perhaps, true about Troy. Or Harpies. But true about
war
. Homer did not love war. Achilles is not the best man in the
Iliad
. War is ugly.

Arimnestos of Plataea was a real man. I hope that I’ve done him justice.

An Orion eBook

First published in Great Britain in 2012 by Orion Books
This eBook first published in 2012 by Orion Books

Copyright © Christian Cameron 2012

The moral right of Christian Cameron to be identified as
the author of this work has been asserted in accordance
with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.

All characters and events in this publication, except those already in
the public domain, are fictitious, and any resemblance to real persons,
living or dead, is purely coincidental.

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced,
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being imposed on the subsequent purchaser.

A CIP catalogue record for this book
is available from the British Library.

ISBN 978 1 4091 1413 0

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