The Wildside Book of Fantasy: 20 Great Tales of Fantasy (3 page)

However, I did look back, sneakily, like a fox that has stolen a pullet. The island had dwindled until the red columns of the palace seemed slender wounds in the white immaculate walls, and yes, Astyanax followed a few hundred feet in our wake. He raised his hand and called, “Bear, goodbye!”

“Lower the sweeps!” I shouted. The sailors looked at the captain, and the captain looked at me.

“Has the moon possessed you?” he growled. “There is nothing to stop for here.”

“You can double my fare,” I said. “I am taking on a friend.” I seized a sweep, a long wooden oar with a blade of double width, and thrust it into the sea. The ship veered sharply to the right.

“Oh, very well,” grumbled Vel. He lowered a sweep on the starboard and returned the ship to its course, with speed considerably reduced.

Astyanax soon overtook us. I threw him a rope and he climbed, laughing, into my arms. I heard him mumble a name.

“What did you say?” I asked.

“Hungry,” he said. “I lost my grapes.” I think he really said “Hector.”

I did not suspect the difficulties—dangers, I should say—which hunched like sphinxes along the road to Circe. The trouble started almost at once—not Circe’s part in it; not yet, anyway. I had paid the captain for Astyanax’ passage, and the Triton had kept his promise to fish for the crew. But Vel was not appreciative. First he complained that the fish were small and bony. “Fit for him, perhaps. Not for me.” Then he said, “Tritons are Greek, not Etruscan. How do we know he isn’t spying for pirates?” The mood of the captain soon infected his crew. The Black Rats, petulant as well as soiled, began to grow insufferable. When Astyanax stretched on the deck to take a sunbath, one of them stepped on his tail and then made the limp apology, “Mistook him for a hawser.”

“It looks,” I said to Astyanax, when the Rat had crossed the deck, “as if we may have trouble before Agylla.” Located close to Caere, my home, Agylla was the port where we hoped to find ship and crew to begin our search.

“Don’t worry,” said Astyanax, pointing to a rare white dolphin in the wake of the
Turan
. “Her name is Atthis. She has been following us ever since Aeaea. A ship with a white dolphin enjoys good luck.”

The luck, it seemed, belonged to the ship and crew but not her passengers. A week after our departure from Aeaea, Astyanax woke me in the middle of the night. I heard him thump noisily onto the floor of our cabin—cabin? It was little more than canvas stretched over timbers, but at least it gave shelter and privacy.

“Are you going for a swim?” I asked.

“I didn’t mean to wake you,” he said.

I was well aware that the thump had been deliberate. When he woke in the night, he liked conversation. “Can’t you wait till morning?”

“By then my tail will be stiff.”

I climbed out of bed and threw a cloak across my shoulders. “I’d better go with you and ask Vel to lower our speed. You might lose us in the night.” The vessel was dark except for the fitful burning of a torch enclosed in a dried bladder. It was not usual for ships to sail at night; much more often they dropped anchor in convenient coves and waited for the coming of Thesan, the Lady of the Dawn, whom the Greeks call Eos. But the weather was clear and Vel preferred the sea to the doubtful refuge of a coast which belonged to the Greeks.

With Astyanax in my arms, I stepped from the cabin. Most of the crew was asleep beneath a thick tarpaulin, but Vel and the one-eared sailor, huddled at the prow, were talking and motioning. I waited in the doorway. Something in their tone, a hushed excitement, a hint of conspiracy, warned me to pause and listen. The wind brought words in ominous snatches.

“In Graviscae,” said the one-eared sailor, “…slave market…sell him on the block…Tritons are rare…good price.”

“What about his friend?…can’t sell freeborn Etruscan…”

“Brand him…pass him off as criminal condemned to slavery…”

At first I wanted to laugh. Sell us into slavery? Incredible! My second thought was less reassuring. My travels had never led me to Graviscae, but the captain, no doubt, was known in the port. If he wished to sell us into slavery, who would believe that the Triton did not belong to Vel, and that I myself had begun the voyage as a passenger? In truth Astyanax would bring a handsome price. I had seen a centaur, trapped in the hills, sold to a troop of traveling acrobats who wanted him in their show. As for myself, sleek rather than brawny, I was hardly fit to become an acrobat, field hand, or gladiator, but I knew that Etruscan ladies, bored with their husbands, sometimes bought slaves for purposes other than work. After I was sold, I might convince my master (or mistress) of my true identity, but Astyanax by then would have gone to a different master and I might have lost him for good. The thought of that sea-loving boy as a slave appalled me.

The wind rose to a whistling howl. I did not hear when they meant to take us captive. I stepped back into the cabin and sat on the couch to think.

Astyanax spoke with more excitement than fear. “We shall have to swim for it, Bear!”

“We’re a good ten miles from shore. I can’t swim that far.”

“Not even if I push?”

“Not even then.” I deliberated. “But there’s always the dinghy moored to the stern.”

“Isn’t it a bit—well, undignified? As if one were skulking to safety.”

“Skulking or not, the dinghy is our best chance.” Once ashore, we might fall prey to the Greeks, but even they were preferable to Vel and his Black Rats. I secreted a dagger in my loincloth. Everything else—my chest, my sandals, my sword, even my money pouch—I would have to leave in the cabin.

“What shall we do for provisions?” asked Astyanax, eyeing a bunch of grapes on a table beside the couch.

“Go hungry until we reach the shore.”

He crammed his mouth with grapes.

I lifted the canvas and peered on deck.

“All clear?” he whispered.

“All clear.”

The sides of the cabin hid us from Vel and his friend at the prow and also the navigator manning the sweep at the stern. I gave Astyanax my knife. A strong swimmer, he could match the speed of the
Turan
and cut the cord which held the dinghy. He clung to my back as I crept under the canvas. At the edge of the ship, I held him over the bulwark and let him slide from my hands. The wind and the waves muffled the sound of his dive. I dove after him. The hull diminished like a black, retreating whale and left me in foam and the almost-darkness of a sickle moon.

By now Astyanax had cut the dinghy’s rope. Still in the water, he thrust the little boat in my direction. I clambered over the edge and gave him a hand. The vanishing ship had left a faint white trail, as if the Lady Moon had walked with phosphorescent sandals.

I slid my fingers along the bottom of the boat. The boards were moist with sea-slime. “There’s no paddle,” I sighed. “We’ll have to trust to the current.”

“Why don’t I push?” He readied himself to dive.

I reached to stop him. “No!” I cried, sensing danger. Perhaps I had seen a movement under the waves.

“But I live in the water,” he protested. “I’m not afraid—“

The sea exploded beside us and a white shape arched above our heads. I ducked and shivered as water showered my neck.

“Atthis!” shouted Astyanax. “I’ll ask her to give us a shove.”

I peered at the water. Low, choppy waves tossed in the feeble moonlight. “Are you sure she’s friendly?” I asked.

As if to answer my question with a resounding “No,” the end of our dinghy shot into the air and Astyanax and I rolled like peas from a pod. The boat slid under the surface and reappeared, capsized and low in the water.

We clung to the keel. Atthis circled us with rapid, lessening loops. It was hard to tell her intention: if she meant to attack or wished to atone for throwing us into the sea. I felt her smooth white snout brush against the soles of my feet, inquisitive, exploratory, as if to examine my skin, feel my pulse, fathom my thoughts. My thoughts at the moment were not charitable. I will kick her, I told myself, if she touches me again. Then I remembered the shark-killing teeth behind her impassive face.

The men on the
Turan
had seen our accident. The ship had turned and now she bore down on us like a great black Harpy.

“Swim for it,” I pleaded with Astyanax. “They’ll never catch you.”

“Bear,” he reproved, “you don’t expect me to leave you?”

“They won’t hurt me. It’s you they want.”

“We will think of a way to outwit them.”

I gave him a shove from the boat. “Astyanax, go!” He clung to my hand with thin, tenacious fingers. Defeated, I drew him beside me and cradled him with my arm. “Well, then, we shall face them together.”

Vel shouted from the deck. “We’ll run you down unless you surrender peaceably. Both of you.”

Astyanax swore under his breath: “Nethuns, god of the deep, feed him to sharks and cuttlefish!” But he wisely restrained his utterances when the captain threw us a rope.

Hand over hand, he followed me onto the deck. Silent, inscrutable, the white dolphin watched us from the water.

The captain bound our hands. He removed his signet ring, a gold shark with gaping jaws. “Heat it in the torch,” he said to the one-eared sailor, “It will serve as a brand.”

II: THE HALCYON FINDS A CREW

To the north lay Elba, the island of iron and copper; to the east, the port of Graviscae, with quays and canals and red-tile houses laid in terraced rows. Behind the port the twin ridges of Tarquinia jutted against the sky: one a necropolis; one the capital city of Etruria, with walls of mortarless stone and battlemented towers, arched entrances and basalt thoroughfares. Olive groves flanked the ridges, and cypress trees, like bronze inverted cones, shaded the highways which joined Tarquinia to her port.

We moored near the mouth of a canal roofed by a massive barrel vault. Preceded and followed by Black Rats, I descended the ship’s ladder and received Astyanax from the arms of the one-eared sailor. Like the other male slaves in Etruscan cities, I was stripped and barefoot. Nakedness in itself did not embarrass me; Etruscans, used to a climate which discourages excessive clothing, are not a modest people. But nakedness, as now, in the heart of a town, signified shame and the loss of liberty. What was more, I carried on my forearm a brand in the shape of a shark. If I called for help, the entire crew of the
Turan
would point to the scar and insist that I belonged to Vel, who had the right to sell me. Astyanax, fortunately, had not been branded. Vel did net want to mar him as a curiosity.

Beyond the vault a midday sun blazed on a forest of sails. There was no real harbor, but a network of moles and jetties buttressed the small indentations of the coast, and a multitude of ships lay moored or anchored: Sardinian cargo boats in the shape of plowshares; Tyrian traders redolent of cedar; Greek penteconters, ironically berthed beside the same Etruscan merchantmen which, on the high seas, sometimes fell prey to their speed and their vicious beaked prows. The Etruscan ships, both merchant and war, were broader and taller than the Greek, slower but far more seaworthy in rough waters. Some looked battered, with rent sails and crusted hulls, and I guessed that they must have returned from the stream of Ocean, where the waves were as tall as palaces. I looked frantically for someone I knew—a captain with whom I had sailed, a visitor from Caere. I looked in vain.

Away from the ships, the highways rumbled with chariots hammered from bronze and wooden carts on ponderous wheels of stone. Pedestrians walked the footpaths beside the highways and, bright as coquina shells, paraded their colored robes—Tyrian purple, red of cinnabar, yellow of saffron crocuses—or their silken loin cloths, trimmed with gilt and artfully tapered to flatter the wearer’s hips. I had walked with such crowds in most Etruscan cities; I had worn robes whose color rivaled the halcyon, and I had carried a sword at my side. Women had stared at me, and I had returned their stares indifferently, sleepily, if at all, confident that she whom I sought did not inhabit the city, but waited, patient and dreaming at the end of my furthest voyage. Today I walked as a slave, and the women looked over or through me or at the Triton I carried in my arms. I heard them whisper:

“A Triton!”

“A boy with a tail!”

“And hair to match!”

But no one said, “Look at the man who carries him!”

The Mart of the Slaves was a square in the middle of that larger square, the town marketplace: a small paved island surrounded by the canvas-roofed stalls of farmers selling their grapes and fishermen their tunnies and herring. A low platform, set against a wooden backdrop, rose like the stage of a theater and allowed the slaves to parade or be prodded like actors. We had to wait our turn. Vel, the three Black Rats, and the one-eared sailor shoved me into a circle beside the platform.

A young woman with cinnamon hair, probably a Greek, stood on the block. Nude, she turned at her owner’s prompting to display her full, perfect breasts and the bold flare of her thighs. She looked supremely bored and her eyes seemed to say, “You needn’t expect me to cringe like a pale little virgin. I have been sold before.” Several young gallants were bidding against each other in excited voices. Finally she went for five hundred asses to a youth who stepped forward to claim her with great eagerness and promptly lost his tongue. Embarrassed and diffident, he covered her shoulders with a fine embroidered cloak and led her down from the block. She shook her head, rippling the cinnamon hair, and allowed the cloak to reveal her handsome breasts.

Astyanax, however, did not have eyes for the Greek. He pointed to a lady of fashion whose small leather moccasins tilted up at the toes like the bow of a boat. “Does she grow that way or is it just her shoes?”

Before I could answer his question, a Black Rat jerked him out of my arms and onto the block. I saw with dismay that Astyanax planned to bite him. But he seemed to change his mind, hesitant, no doubt, to risk a fall on his tail. Flanked by two Black Rats, I had to keep my place. Restless daggers jiggled in their hands.

Etruscan aristocrats, both men and women, dominated the audience; poor men could not afford to bid for slaves. Sandwiched among the Etruscans, a party of visiting Romans, in spite of their solemnity and their dignified white togas, ogled Astyanax like red-faced farmers. Rome, after all, is an overgrown village, and villagers gape when they come to the city. Astyanax did not let their rudeness disconcert him. He rocked his tail rhythmically, as a walker swings his arms, and met their stares. In addition to Etruscans and Romans there were two boys, fifteen and sixteen, I judged, whose wheat-colored hair marked them as Gauls or Scandians and probably also as brothers. Their loincloths were gray and tattered; they wore neither rings nor bracelets and their hair, far from the flowing elegance of the wealthy, was short and wind-blown. It was clear that they could not bid, but they looked at Astyanax eagerly, as if they hoped to make friends. He returned their smiles. In spite of his predicament, he had not lost his sense of adventure.