The Great King (47 page)

‘I thought you would bring me five triremes, and you have come with one triakonter?’ he asked.

‘Two of my ships are serving Athens against the Medes,’ I said. ‘Doola should be here with his ship, and Caius with his.’

The tyrant relented and offered me an embrace. ‘Dionysus and his contingent have come and gone and come again,’ he said. ‘Massalia is a loyal ally this summer, and I count your dues as paid. You are here to beg for the Greeks?’

In some ways, it was harder to speak to Gelon than to Xerxes. Gelon looked a bit like my idea of a god, and he was absolutely his own master. He would not ever have ordered the waves lashed. And yet, of all the men who led armies that fateful year, it was Gelon who most likely thought he was a god, himself.

I nodded. ‘Lord, I am here to beg for all Greece.’

He nodded. ‘The answer is no. Save your breath, my friend. My fleet has sailed – did you see a single galley in the harbour? The dice are thrown. My fleet will try a pre-emptive raid on Carthage which may save us all. I have heard that the Libyphoenicians have sent a hundred ships to Xerxes in exchange for Persian help against me.’

‘We hear the same,’ I confessed.

He sat back against a marble bench – shoulders still upright, not ever truly relaxed.

‘This is the war of the world,’ he said. ‘Our names will live for ever.’

I didn’t roll my eyes, but only from Jocasta’s training. ‘We will face the Medes without your might, then, lord.’

He shrugged. ‘Sparta and Athens wanted my help and didn’t want to pay my price,’ he said.

‘So in the end, you, too, are a huckster,’ I said.

He flushed. ‘Where is my Lydia?’ he asked.

‘I do not have her,’ I said. ‘She is now a wife – probably a mother. I beg you let her go.’

He tapped his marble bench with one hand – the greatest sign of agitation I ever saw from him.

‘Confess that you stole her,’ he said.

Some sinners never relent.

I stood as straight as I could. ‘I confess that I stole her to return her to the life that should have been hers,’ I said. ‘You had no more right to her than Anarchos, or me. I merely restored her to what she ought to have had.’

He turned to me a bland actor’s mask. ‘Ah, very well. What’s a strumpet more or less? You are forgiven.’

In that moment, I knew that I’d rather die beside Leonidas than defeat Persia with this man. I bowed. ‘I must take your answer to the League,’ I said.

Gelon shrugged. ‘They know my answer, and it is a sign of their desperation that they sent you. Who was it – Gorgo?’ He made a moue. ‘Gorgo thinks I can be persuaded. But it is now too late, and you might as well remain here. Be one of my captains. Athens and Sparta are done – indeed, Athens may already be afire.’

That blow struck home. ‘What?’

He nodded, pleased as a cat. ‘An Aegyptian ship came in here yesterday. The captain says that Xerxes marched a month ago, and that the ports of Asia are empty. The Persian fleet is at sea.’

I didn’t bow. He wasn’t Xerxes. ‘I must go,’ I said.

He smiled at his guard captain. ‘And if I order you held – for your own good?’

My breath came tight, and I felt that power from the gods on my shoulders. I looked back at the mercenary.

Gelon was serious. Or rather, he was prepared to hold me, merely to spite me. Because I’d stolen Lydia. He was not a god, but a petty man with the powers and will of a god.

But I knew there were real gods, and I knew that I was needed. Elsewhere.

Very quietly, and I hope without bluster, I said, ‘If you order me held, everyone in this garden will die, starting, my lord, with you.’

I give the tyrant his due – he didn’t stiffen, or flush. He met my eye – man to man.

‘Perhaps and perhaps not,’ he said easily. ‘Very well. You may go.’

The Greeks appointed to serve in the fleet were these: the Athenians furnished a hundred and twenty-seven ships; the Plataeans manned these ships with the Athenians, not that they had any knowledge of seamanship, but because of mere valor and zeal. The Corinthians furnished forty ships and the Megarians twenty; the Chalcidians manned twenty, the Athenians furnishing the ships; the Aeginetans eighteen, the Sicyonians twelve, the Lacedaemonians ten, the Epidaurians eight, the Eretrians seven, the Troezenians five, the Styrians two, and the Ceans two, and two fifty-oared barks; the Opuntian Locrians brought seven fifty-oared barks to their aid. These are the forces which came to Artemisium for battle, and I have now shown how they individually furnished the whole sum. The number of ships mustered at Artemisium was two hundred and seventy-one, besides the fifty-oared barks. The Spartans, however, provided the admiral who had the chief command, Eurybiades, son of Euryclides, for the allies said that if the Laconian were not their leader, they would rather make an end of the fleet that was assembling than be led by the Athenians.

Herodotus, the opening of Book 8, with an English translation by A. D. Godley. Cambridge. Harvard University Press. 1920.

The Syracusan authorities held us for two horrible days with their pettifogging bureaucracy and foolish made-up taxes, and I thought we’d never leave. But on the morning of the third day we were allowed to go, and we were out of the harbour mouth with dawn – a lucky choice on my part, as it proved. We went south around the heel of Italy and touched at Bari and left the cliffs of the heel behind us. Four days out of Syracusa, as we rowed across the Adriatic from Bari – me all but raging at the helm at every delay, imagining Plataea and Athens afire and Leonidas dead – Hipponax slid down the stubby boat sail mast and picked his way through the benches aft.

‘There’re a pair of ships on the horizon to the south,’ he said. It was a calm day, the sea was like a flat field and the water was warm to the touch. The sky was blue-white with haze and sun, and the rowers were all stripped naked.

I pulled myself up the boat sail mast and had a look.

I had to rest my arms on the narrow trees that we used only when we crossed the yard, and there was no foothold and only the mainstays that braced her. A small ship doesn’t need a heavy mast and thus can’t support a crow’s nest like a hemiola or even a trireme. But a life as a pirate teaches a few tricks.

I watched the spot he indicated. I never saw a ship.

But I did see a rhythmic pulse of light, and I knew it was the sun reflecting on oar backs as they rowed.

‘They’re in the eye of the sun,’ I said. ‘On purpose, I think. Two pirates, hunting us.’

I went back and relieved Hector, who was learning to be the helmsman, and after all the admonishments that sailors make to lubbers, I took the oars and cheated us a little farther north.

And so we ran all day, or rather walked, because without a breath of wind, it was a long, long pull, the kind of back-breaking day that makes your oarsmen curse.

All day I wondered who they were and why they were so slow. My gut feeling was that they were both heavy triremes, and thus should have run me down in four hours. I wavered, changing opinion at every rapid beat of my heart – they were after other prey, they were a Syracusan escort, they didn’t even know we were here, they were rowing just one bank of oars.

Nothing made sense. A small triakonter with thirty oars is utterly at the mercy of a bigger ship unless there’s shallow water in which to hide.

Towards evening, they sprinted at us. At least, that’s my guess – they came on, and they had to have known that the movement of the sun across the sky had cost them their hiding. They were ten stades or more south of us and clear as day.

I didn’t hasten the stroke. I had to save my rowers, for the moment when . . .

when . . .

. . . when Poseidon saved us. It’s hard to explain, except that as the lead trireme gained on us, I could see as plain as the nose on my face that it was Dagon’s
Spirit of Baal.
The bad rowing was explained.

Gelon had sold me to Dagon. Hence the delay.

I fear death as much as the next man, or perhaps more – I’ve met the gentleman more often than most. But that day, under the cruel sun, I was sure –
sure
that Poseidon would not let me die at Dagon’s hand.

I watched the sea.

Poseidon provided me with a dead tree.

It may seem odd, given the mighty wars I’m describing, but this encounter was all the work of one huge tree trunk, a product of spring storms in the high Alps north of the lagoons at the top of the Adriatic. It was a huge tree, all its branches intact, and mostly submerged. It was almost the size of my ship.

Hector spotted it first, and Hipponax was the first to guess what it was.

We kept our hull between the Carthaginians and the floating tree for as long as we could. Then we went to full speed, so that the waves seemed to part from our bow . . .

. . . and the Carthaginians, of course, had no more to give. Their ships were badly crewed – Dagon always killed his crews.

At full racing speed – still, in fact, slightly slower than my pursuers – I turned north as sharply as I dared, losing a ship’s length of my lead and wetting my port-side rowers, but they’d been warned and no one lost the stroke.

How I longed for Ka. How I longed for even one of my archers.

The lead Carthaginian made the turn behind me, closing by another half-ship-length.

‘Ready to turn to starboard!’ I bellowed. By Poseidon, they were close.

And yet, by Poseidon, I felt the power. I felt that I was the master, and not the slave.

Hector motioned from the bow.

I put the steering oars over, the starboard-side rowers bit deep, the port side raised their oars, and we were around – about an eighth of a circle.

Dagon’s ship never saw the log. They started the turn, almost on our stern rail, and they struck at full ramming speed.

The tree had most of its branches intact, and instead of a spectacular collision that broke his bow, instead the first collision checked his way, and then the tree fell off on my enemy’s port side, and rowers caught it – oars snapped, and men screamed, and the whole ship turned to starboard. If I had had anything like a real ram, I might have turned and had him. If he’d had anything like a real crew, he could have carried on. If his companion had a captain worth his salt, he’d have manoeuvred, but instead, the following ship fell afoul of Dagon – wood splintered, and oars broke, and we were running free.

I looked at my rowers – near exhausted, and not a man in armour – and put the helm down for Ithaca and kept running.

Behind us – they followed.

I lost Dagon in the islands off Illyria. If it was Dagon, and I’m pretty sure it was. Despite my fears for Athens and Sparta, I had an easy way out of my predicament, and I ran north, not south – to Neoptolymos. A day in his blood-soaked town convinced me that I would never make an Illyrian, but he rented me his trireme – one I’d built for him, really – and put rowers on the benches.

‘If I come, I’ll have no kingdom when I return,’ he said.

I looked at the heads rotting on his gate and the long lines of slaves loading into ‘my’ trireme.

‘You can be king here until someone puts a knife in your belly,’ I said. ‘Or come with me and be Achilles.’

He chose to treat my words as mere raillery. No light flashed in his eyes, and he looked away when I pressed him.

I rowed away, leaving my triakonter on the beach, with a crew of unwilling slave ‘oarsmen’ and my own thirty professionals as officers and deck crew and marines, and we wallowed about for three days, scraping wood off her keel at every landing, breaking oars on rocks, catching every crab in the water – this in a dead flat, calm sea – Poseidon, we were pitiful. Worse yet, there was worm in the ship’s hull, so that despite all my need for speed and caution, we had to beach for almost a week, barter for timber from barbarous Illyrians and then defend our ship and our slaves.

Really, there are few situations worse than being caught on a hostile coast with the planks off your ship and only thirty trustworthy men to hold your palisade. I cursed my decisions, each of them – to go north to Neoptolymos, to go straight to sea in an untested ship . . .

Well, I’m here, so we weren’t all taken or killed. Had we been, we’d have missed the greatest days in the history of Greeks, and the worst.

Never mind. After a long and pointless skirmish with the Illyrians – we stared at each other, they screamed challenges, and we sat tight – suddenly a man appeared who offered us good pine pitch and fine, carefully dried pine for repairs in fair Greek. We bought everything he offered, and rowed away the next day short by twenty oarsmen who deserted in the night. A man has to be particularly desperate or a complete fool to desert in Illyria, but there we were.

That night we beached in waters I knew, and I gathered all the slaves and offered them my usual deal – freedom and wages for six months’ service.

Of course, they all accepted.

I was a more experienced man than I had been. I had Hector record all their names, and I walked among them. ‘You will row for your freedom, every day,’ I said. ‘No grumbling, no lying on your oars. Six months of work, and you are free men. Six months of bad behaviour, and you will remain slaves.’

A handsome man with a square jaw and a crop of brown-blond hair spat. ‘How do we know you’ll keep your word?’ he asked.

There was muttering from my men, but I raised my hand. ‘It’s a fair question. I could answer that you’d better hope that I do, because you have no other choice – eh? You are slaves.’ I let them think about that. ‘But when we reach Piraeus under Athens, I’ll be happy to write it in the form of a contract.’ I shrugged. ‘Until then, trust me or don’t.’

I’m not Themistocles or Miltiades or even Aristides. I’m not an orator.

But the rowing improved.

For three weeks we moved like a mouse under the eye of a cat. We rested at day at Corcyra and found that, for all her fair promises, the city was prevaricating – they were sending sixty ships to sea, but only as far as Sphacteria. I heard a great many excuses, but the Corcyrans didn’t see any possibility that Persia could ever reach them – whereas they saw it as a certainty that Persia would defeat Athens.