Christian Cameron: The Great King

It was Brasidas — my former Spartan marine — who was left with the complex job of watching the vessel we’d taken. Complicated because, in truth, we hadn’t taken her — we’d rescued her. The presence of Briseis, the love of my life, made everything complicated. But the Persians aboard — my three friends, Darius, Cyrus and Arayanam, and Artapherenes himself — complicated things still more. We were not at war with Persia, that summer. And the Persians were clearly an embassy, and embassies were sacred to all the gods. I’m a pious man, even when I’m a fool — I could see the boughs of ivy and laurel in the bow, and I wasn’t going to betray my guest oaths and friendship oaths with these Persians, but I was hard put to decide just what to do with them. Or my love.

Had Artapharenes just died. .

He wasn’t going to die. And that being plain, I dived into the cold seawater to help repair my ship and to clear my head, despite a wounded hand and the stares of Briseis’ women at my naked body, or perhaps because of them.

Leukas, bless him, had no worries beyond the ship, and he went down under the hull and back up, again and again, shaking his head until, with ten men hauling the sodden remains of the other ship’s boat sail, we managed to get at our sprung timbers and bind the sail over it. It didn’t stop the leak, but it reduced it.

We still had six oarsmen at the wooden pumps all day and all night.

The Carthaginian ship we’d taken was in even worse shape. The mast had been down when the storm hit, but my guess — all the officers were dead — was that the tackle hadn’t been stowed properly and had blown loose in the night, rolling and pitching, driving the oarsmen mad and finally blowing over the side in the darkness, after swamping the ship and tearing a grisly hole in the side. The boat sail spar had smashed half the oars and stove a hole right through the side, and when dawn showed them calmer water and the coast of Africa under their lee, the oarsmen revolted.

That ship was finished. I thought perhaps I could get it on to the beach of Libya, but that was the last place I wanted to go myself. Good sense told me to take my own and row away. But Artapherenes held my guest oath and had given me my life, and I had worn his ring for years.

When we had the hole in our side patched, I rolled aboard and dried myself, and stood in the sun. Thirty feet away, Briseis smiled at me across the water.

Damn her.

I puffed out my chest, no doubt.

Why are men such simple creatures? Eh?

Sekla had the deck. The steering oars were inboard, waiting until there was way on the ship, but Sekla stood between them, the traditional command space, at least on my ships. He leaned forward.

‘That’s the famous Briseis,’ he said. He had the temerity to laugh.

‘Yes,’ I said.

He shook his head. ‘Beautiful,’ he said. ‘She never took her eyes off you, while you were in the water.’ He shrugged.

I was watching Briseis.

He elbowed me. ‘Are you the mighty pirate Arimnestos, or some spotty boy?’ he asked.

I glared at him. I’d saved him from lovesickness — I thought, How dare you .

He laughed in my face.

I had to laugh with him. ‘A spotty boy,’ I agreed. ‘That’s what she always does to me.’

Leukas was drying himself on his chiton. The Alban shook his head but remained silent.

Megakles didn’t. His broad Italiote accent added emphasis to his comic delivery. ‘While we all drool at her, my lord, any Liby-Phoenician in these waters will snap us all up. And we’ll all be slaves.’

Sittonax — my lazy Gallish friend — stretched like a cat. ‘That is one well-formed woman,’ he agreed. ‘Not worth dying for, though.’ He nodded at Megakles. ‘You know he’s right.’

‘They’re an embassy,’ I said. ‘Even the Carthaginians respect an embassy.’

I gathered that my friends didn’t agree. Their intransigence made me angry, and I remember biting my lip and trying to keep my temper. I was thrice tired — awake all night at the helm, fighting a boarding action, and now I’d helped fother the hull — and it was all I could do to stay on my feet, and their teasing got under my skin far too easily.

I stood there, watching my oarsmen pump water out of my damaged hull. I couldn’t see us making any of the southern Peloponnesian ports — too far, and too much chance of another spring storm.

Brasidas motioned with his usual economy of effort — a single flick of the hand.

I leaned over the port-side rail. ‘What do you need?’ I called.

‘Nothing,’ he said. ‘But the woman wants you.’

In any other man’s mouth, that might have sounded like ribaldry, but the Spartan was carefully spoken. We don’t call them Laconic for nothing.

On any other day, I’d have ordered the oarsmen to use boarding pikes to pull the ships closer. But Briseis was watching, and so, despite fatigue, I seized a chiton and pulled it on, belted it with a corded zone, pulled my sword belt over my head, and leapt — leapt, I say — from one oar bank to the next. I noted as I landed that the other ship was lower in the water.

I managed to jump inboard over the terrified survivors among the slave oarsmen — what was left after the fight, watched like hawks by my own marines — and I tried not to swagger too much as I went aft to Briseis.

I bowed. She had a scarf over her head like a good matron and the only flesh on display was one ankle and one hand, but I knew her body.

I suppose that Sekla was right. I was a pimply boy, when it came to Briseis.

‘Come,’ she said, and led me aft, to where Cyrus — the best of my friends among the Persians — sat with Artapherenes’ head in his lap.

The satrap’s eyes were open. I knelt by him, and just for a moment, some dreadful fate tempted me to put a dagger in his eye and take the woman for my own. I am a man like other men — I think of awful things, even if I try to do the right ones.

He beckoned me closer.

I leaned over to hear him.

‘Arimnestos,’ he said softly.

‘My lord,’ I said.

‘A mighty name,’ he murmured. ‘Carthage,’ he said, and his eyes closed.

Briseis put a hand on my shoulder, and that contact was like the flash of lightning across the sky that heralds the storm. ‘He is asking you to carry us into Carthage,’ she said.

For once, I looked past her, and my eyes locked with the heavy black eyes of Cyrus, captain of Artapherenes’ guard and his right hand.

I sat back on my heels. ‘Cyrus,’ I said. ‘If — I say if — I take you into Carthage — can you guarantee my safety? I have no love for Carthage. Nor she for me.’

Cyrus scratched his beard — so much the old Cyrus, full of humour and Persian dignity, that he made me feel fifteen years old again. ‘Who can guarantee anything that Phoenicians do?’ he said. ‘They lie like Greeks.’ He grinned. ‘I can’t promise that the Carthaginians will treat you as part of our embassy.’ He shrugged. ‘I can only promise that if you take us there and they turn on you, I’ll die beside you.’

That’s a Persian. And he meant it.

If you have any honour in you, you know when another man is honourable. And when he makes a request — a certain kind of request. .

Artapherenes had spared my life, and other lives, the night I found Hipponax dying on the lost battlefield north of Ephesus. I had saved his life, too. Cyrus and I had traded sword-cuts and guest pledges a few times, as well.

And it is not on a sunny day that your faith is pledged. The value of your oaths to the gods is tested when the storm comes. I sat on my heels, and within three heartbeats of Cyrus’s affirmation that he’d die by my side if the Carthaginians betrayed the truce, I knew I had to do it.