Christian Cameron: Poseidon's Spear

Illyrians are a strange lot — they have nothing but lords and slaves, and the lords are at war with each other all the time. They look Greek, they sometimes speak Greek — worship our gods, too. Many of them know the Iliad and the Odyssey. But they are not Greek. Or rather, sometimes I think that they are Hellenes who never found the rule of law.

But I was not thinking such rational and philosophical thoughts that night.

I was too far away to hear any of the conversation, but the style of their pins and their clothes, their horse-furniture and a thousand other little details, all made it plain where we were.

Well, while there’s life, there’s hope, or so it is said. Illyrians are the worst pirates in the Middle Sea, and suddenly, it occurred to me that if Hasdrubal would just keep sailing up the coast, an Illyrian coaster was bound to attack us. And the gods knew that we wouldn’t have lasted a moment in a sea fight — a two-thirds crew of sick slaves and bully-boys as marines.

It has to say something for my state that being taken by Illyrians, who enslaved all captives regardless of social status, was my hope.

We were tied together with rope while ashore and put in a stockade, more like a pen, with two armed men as guards. When we were ashore — this was my first time ashore since my first day on board — it was impossible to keep us from talking. Yet, to my utter puzzlement, none of the other oar-slaves would speak.

Not even a word.

It was the lowest part of the whole experience. I had never seen slaves who would not mutter — who would not rebel in a thousand little ways, even if they were too cowed to rebel in the ways that mattered.

The slaves sat silent, every one of them with their eyes closed.

I moved from man to man, whispering, until a guard came into the pen. I froze, but he’d seen me, and he struck me with his spear shaft — heavy ash. He almost broke my arm. He hit me so hard — I’ll just say this as an aside — that he raised a black bruise on the side of the arm opposite to the blow, and it covered the arm. It made a nice counterpoint to the ache in my ribs.

I didn’t even whimper. I’d learned better.

He laughed. ‘Beg me not to hit you again, pais. Beg me. Offer to suck my dick.’

Sometimes, having been a slave before saved my life. This was one of those times. A man who’d always been free might have had to knuckle under and been broken — or might have had to resist, and been killed.

I held my head and looked dumb.

He hit me lightly. ‘You know what I said!’ he grunted.

I held my head, met his eye and then cocked my head to one side.

He sneered. ‘Not even your wits left, eh?’

Outside, there were shouts — rage — a scream.

He ran out of the pen and slammed the rickety gate closed.

The palisade was hastily built — badly cut palings rammed into the sand and held together with a heavy rope woven in and out of the palings. I could see. My arm hurt, but I got myself to an edge.

Two other slaves came to look.

The rest just lay still with their eyes closed.

Our guards were running full tilt for the central fire of the camp. One of the Illyrian servants was making for the wood line; another was face down, and experience told me he wasn’t ever getting up.

‘You’re an idiot,’ said the Thracian at my elbow. ‘Make trouble.’

‘Uh,’ said the other, a Greek. ‘Never fucking talk when they can hear.’

‘Sorry,’ I muttered.

‘Skethes,’ said the Thracian.

‘Arimnestos,’ I said.

‘Nestor,’ said the Greek. He looked to be fifty years old, and as hard as an old oak tree.

Something was happening at the fire. A woman was screaming.

We couldn’t see anything because it was too dark. But we didn’t have to.

There was the unmistakable sound of a man being beaten with spear shafts — blows falling like hail on a tent, the hollow sound of a man’s head and chest taking them.

And the women, screaming. They were being raped.

One by one, many of the slaves went to sleep.

I couldn’t. I lay there and hated.

Towards morning, two more guards opened the pen and threw in the body. It was a man, and he was alive. I didn’t have to be a philosopher to figure out that he was one of the Illyrian men, although his face was a swollen pulp and he was covered in weals and blood and shit — his own.

All the slaves woke when he was tossed into the pen. He lay there, bleeding, for a long time. Too damned long.

Finally, I couldn’t stand it. I guess I wasn’t broken. Again, my experience as a slave helped me because I wasn’t shocked and I was learning the ‘rules’, sick as they were. So I stripped my loincloth off my groin, dipped it in our drinking water — well might you flinch, young woman — and started to wash the man.

I gave him some water when his eyes opened — they were just slits.

He punched me as hard as he could in the nose — my recently broken nose.

He roared some sort of war cry, and Skethes pinned his shoulders and Nestor rammed my loincloth into his mouth.

The guards, watching through the palisade, laughed.

Fuck them, I thought. I had found a way to rebel. I went back to washing the brutalized man.

The three of us got him cleaner, and we dripped some water into him, and when the sun rose above the rim of the world, we fed bread to him, too. By then, he knew where he was. He didn’t speak. He was, in fact, in shock.

As soon as the light was strong, we could see the bodies. Six of them. The two girls, the other Illyrian nobleman, two Illyrian servants or slaves and one of the oar-master’s bully-boys, all dead in the sand, with a lot of blood around them.

The oar-master woke the slaves with cold water, and ordered us to bury the bodies.

‘You useless fucks,’ he went on to his guards, ‘can watch them, and you can think about how I’m going to take the price of two blond slave girls out of your pay.’ He hit a guard.

The guard flinched.

‘Useless coward,’ the oar-master said. ‘And one of them escaped. So we won’t get all their tin, and their war party will come. Your fault!’ he screamed. He looked at Kritias. ‘If my contact here is killed, I’ll sell the lot of you as slaves.’

Really, you have to wonder that someone didn’t kill him. But I caught that. I’m still proud I did — neither hate nor shock nor the will of the Gods plugged my ears. Dagon had a contact among the Illyrians.

I must have seemed to be listening too closely.

He struck out with his stick and hit me.

I didn’t make a sound.

The guards stood over us and prodded us with their spear points while we dug in the sand. Planting corpses in sand is useless — an offence to gods and men, an invitation to scavengers. But he didn’t care, and the trierarch was silent and withdrawn.

We were down into the gravel layer under the sand, and making heavy work of it — we were digging with bare hands and no shovels — when the trierarch came up, stroking his beard.

‘A little hasty, attacking guests,’ he said. His voice trembled. He was speaking to the oar-master, but since no one on the beach was making a noise, his voice carried. He spoke in Greek, accented, but clear enough.

‘You think so?’ said the oar-master. He sneered. ‘Don’t be weak. We need slaves. That’s what we are here for. And now we don’t have to pay for the tin.’ He looked at the wood line. ‘Besides, you know as well as I, my lord, that his uncle offered us-’

The trierarch spat. ‘We are here for iron,’ he said primly. ‘Not tribal feuds.’

‘Bullshit, I’m here for slaves and tin.’ The oar-master smiled. ‘And we’ll get more. The same way. Epidavros has promised.’