Christian Cameron: The Great King

I rose and sighed. ‘Very well. I will tow you to the beach, and see if this ship can be saved. If it cannot, I’ll row you around to Carthage. May Poseidon stand by me. May Athena give me good council.’

Cyrus smiled. ‘You are a man,’ he said.

What’s that worth?

All of my friends glowered at me. I stood their displeasure easily enough, and crossed to the stricken Phoenician ship with half of my deck crew and two dozen of my best rowers and Leukas, who was — and is — a better sailor than I’ll ever be. I left Megakles with the command. I also took young Hector, my new pais. He had been seasick since Croton, and not much use, but he was finally getting his sea legs.

Evening found us wallowing in the light surf, twenty horse-lengths off the coast of Africa. The beach was a ribbon of silver in the light of the new moon, and to say that my rowers were exhausted wouldn’t do justice to their state. Remember that most of them were slaves who’d risen against their masters and been beaten.

But no one wants to drown.

Cyrus stood by me. I was between the steering oars, while Leukas led the bailing party and tried to keep the water out of the hull by willpower. Our rowers — tired and desperate — were also pulling a waterlogged hull that weighed three times what it should have.

Lydia went in first. I saw Brasidas lead his marines over her stern and jump into the shallow water — in case there was a welcoming party.

Cyrus grunted. ‘Your men are very well trained,’ he said.

I nodded. ‘Piracy is a hard school,’ I said.

He frowned.

The oarsmen poured over Lydia ’s sides and up the beach, and the slick black hull was hauled ashore almost as if by the hands of the gods. It was splendid to watch, despite my worries about the ship I was in. Despite the presence of Briseis just a few feet away — so close that I swear that I could feel the warmth of her body.

Aye.

I tapped the steering oar and took us a few more yards down the beach. I wanted the damaged hulk to land well clear of my beautiful Lydia , just in case.

Leukas laid out pulling lines along the decks of the capture, and as soon as Lydia was lying on her side, well propped, the oarsmen ran down the beach to us, and it was time. I looked at Briseis, and as my eye met hers, she smiled.

It took long enough to turn the ship end for end that the moon began to peep over the rim of the world. We didn’t ‘spin’, we wallowed, but eventually we were stern first to the beach and the surviving rowers had their cushions reversed.

Cyrus looked at me, eyes very white in the new darkness. ‘I think the rowers are considering another rising,’ he said.

Cyrus was no fool. Neither was Arayanam, who took his bow from its case and strung it.

There was a curious quality to the rowers’ silence.

‘Leukas!’ I called, and he came back to me.

‘Take the helm,’ I ordered, and he did.

I ran forward to the space amidships where a good trierarch stands in battle — where his voice carries over the whole sweep of the benches.

‘Listen up, oarsmen!’ I called. ‘When we have this ship on the beach, I will see to it you are fed. This ship won’t last three more hours — stay with me and I’ll see you ashore and alive. If you try me now — all I can promise is that every one of you will die.’

I looked down into the gloom.

‘A lot of these men don’t give a shit whether they live or die,’ called a man bolder than the rest. His Greek was Ionian.

‘I can only speak to the Greeks aboard,’ I said. ‘But I’ll do better for them than the Phoenicians ever did. Or I’ll kill them and land the ship anyway.’ I stood above them, and I knew from my time toiling under the lash of Dagon how powerful the voice on the command deck could seem.

I walked back along the catwalk. I didn’t hurry — I wanted to seem as confident as possible. The truth was that we were a hundred yards from shore and I was in no danger, but I had no idea whether Briseis could swim and I couldn’t imagine that Artapherenes would survive the journey.

I heard some muttering.

Muttering is a good sign, usually.

I took the steering oars from Leukas and he began to give orders in his Keltoi-Greek. ‘Pull!’ he commanded.

He began to beat time.

Some oars stayed in. But my rowers dug in with a will, and enough of the others pulled that we made way sternwards, and the sternpost kissed the sand with a gentle thump. Immediately, the current and the waves began to push the head in towards the beach — the worst thing that could happen, and something that a helmsman feared on a stormy day on a windswept beach, but not on a nearly dead calm night on a broad belt of sand.

Luckily for me, Sekla and his oarsmen already had the lines that my borrowed deck crew flung them, and they dragged us with more will than the oarsmen pulled.

Leukas yelled, ‘Over the side, you whoresons!’

Some went, and some didn’t. I couldn’t tell whether I was facing mutiny, desertion or utter, desperate exhaustion. So I walked down the catwalk, abandoning the steering oars — I think I pulled them inboard. I started to prick men lightly with a borrowed Persian spear. One man, with a long scar over his forehead, cursed me and crouched like an angry dog on his little bench, but he couldn’t even reach me with spit, and when his spirit broke, all the men around him went, too. Men are odd animals — too intelligent, sometimes, for their own good.

Leukas and I started them, and the Persians helped — came and threatened — and we got them over the side and on to the beach. A dozen tried to run and were swatted down like errant children by Brasidas and his marines. The last thing we needed was a pack of runaway slaves giving away our positions.

My three Persians got their lord over the side and carried him between two spears to the fire that Sekla had already lit on the beach, and in an hour we had mutton cooking. Any plan to keep our presence secret was wrecked when a pair of cautious shepherds approached and offered to sell us sheep.

By the time the moon was high in the sky, we had the local headman at our fire, and he knew we were Greeks.

I would love to say that I lay with Briseis that night. I desired her — I watched her at the fire the women had, and I sent her a joint of meat after I made the sacrifices to Poseidon and poured libations to all the gods for our safe arrival at land, and she sent me back a cup of sweet wine. But my feelings of the sacred — of what was owed to Artapherenes — kept me from her side. Instead, I introduced my Persian friends — the friends of my earliest youth — to the friends of my recent slavery.

Brasidas, as a Spartiate, took to the Persians immediately. They value most of the same things — indeed, Spartans and Persians have a great deal in common.

But Sekla had no love of the Persians, and they in turn treated him much like a slave — at least in part because the only black men they knew were slaves, I suspect. And the Persians, for their part, were amazed to hear that Megakles was from Gaul — still more amazed that Leukas was from Hyperborea.

‘He looks just like any other man!’ Darius laughed. ‘Well — except for the odd eyes and the dead white skin.’

‘And the size of his nose,’ Aryanam said, but Leukas couldn’t be offended, as it was all said in Persian. Still, they handed wine around to the others, and after an hour, even Sekla was less prickly.

I remember that I looked at the moon — Artemis’s sign — and wondered again at the risk I was running. ‘Cyrus — you are bound to Carthage to get allies there against the Greeks. Am I right?’

Cyrus narrowed his eyes. ‘In effect — yes.’ He shrugged. ‘Really, it is far more complicated than that,’ he continued.