Christian Cameron: Poseidon's Spear

‘We let them approach as guests,’ the trierarch said.

‘Don’t be weak,’ the oar-master said. ‘We need Epidavros.’

There was a long pause. I had to assume that Epidavros was the oar-master’s contact.

‘Why were the women killed?’ Hasdrubal asked.

The oar-master shrugged. ‘My people got carried away,’ he said. ‘It won’t happen again.’

‘See that it doesn’t. Now I want out of here.’ Hasdrubal gestured at the ship. ‘They’re too weak to dig gravel with their hands. Leave the bodies. Let’s be gone.’ He paused, his fear showing even in the way his right foot moved on the sand. ‘One escaped. They will attack us.’

The oar-master shrugged his infuriating shrug. I could tell that he, not the trierarch, was actually in command. And the name Epidavros stuck in my head. There’s a town of that name on Lesbos. I met Briseis there, once. At any rate, he smiled insolently. ‘Epidavros won’t attack us,’ he said. ‘Even if he wanted to — it’ll be days before he’s finished off their relatives.’

The Carthaginian trierarch turned and looked at those of us digging. ‘I want the men who killed those women to pay,’ he said. ‘Those women were worth the value of the rest of our cargo.’

The guard next to me kicked me. ‘Work faster, motherfucker,’ he spat. He knew his turn was coming, so like a good flunky, he passed his anxiety straight on to a slave.

Hasdrubal pushed us back onto the ship. He switched any slave who was slow getting aboard, and he ordered the oar-master, in a voice suddenly as strong as bronze, to flog the last man on his bench, and when that order was given, we went like a tide up the side and almost swamped the ship.

The Illyrian man could barely walk.

The oar-master ordered me to carry him, thus guaranteeing I would be the last man up the side. And I was. I was naked, my loincloth lost in the night, and he shoved me over a bench and caned me, his stick making that dry, meaty sound as he struck me.

Then he put his head close to mine. ‘I can read your thoughts, pais. You take good care of the Illyrian slave. Show me what you are made of. The more you care for him, the longer he’ll live for me.’ He smiled and let me up. ‘He called me a coward, do you know that, pais? So I’ll keep him alive a long time, and show him what a man is.’

Somehow, I got the Illyrian onto a bench — the starboard-stern thranite’s bench, that had been mine. Lekythos, the biggest guard, pointed at it, and then put me in the bench above.

Now I noticed that a third of the benches were empty. The mad fucks were killing oarsmen and not replacing them.

All we needed was an Illyrian pirate. At worst, he’d kill the lot of us. I really didn’t care.

Time passed.

I cared for the Illyrian a little — not really that much. I had to survive myself. I’d like to say the Thracians and the Greek helped, but I never heard a word from them. They were somewhere else — funny that, in a hull only as long as a dozen horses end to end, I had no idea where they were. They weren’t among the twenty men I could see when I rowed, and the others around me were silent and utterly broken. In fact, one died. He just expired, and his oar came up and slammed his head and he didn’t cry out because he was dead.

I managed to get to the Illyrian in the evening, when the oarsmen were rested, and in the morning, before we began to row. We were off the coast of Illyria now, and we stayed at sea, and every islet on that coast — seen out of the oar-port of the man in front of me — seemed like a potential ship. But our pace never varied, and we rowed on and on. We never raised our boatsail, the small sail in the bow, and we seemed perpetually in motion.

And we never landed.

After a week, the food failed. Suddenly, there was no more barley, much less pig or thin wine. The guards complained and hit us more often.

My Illyrian awoke from whatever torpor had seized him and was given an oar.

We continued north. I assumed it was north — I could seldom see the waves.

The Illyrian didn’t know a word of Greek. I tried to teach him, in grunts and whispered bits, but he wasn’t listening: he didn’t care, and, after a while, I gave up.

The oar-master came to him every day. Stood over him and laughed, and called him a boy and a coward, and told him that he would be sold in Athens to a brothel. But the Illyrian was too far gone, and spoke no Greek, so he endured the abuse.

Another day, he was told he was rowing out of time and beaten, and then beaten for crying out.

You know that feeling you get in the gut, when another man gets what should be yours? That feeling you have when you hear a good man abused? The feeling between your shoulders when a woman screams for help?

When you are a slave, all that happens. For a while. But by taking away from you your ability to respond to these, they take your honour. After a while, a man can be beaten to death an arm’s-length away and you don’t even clench your stomach muscles.

On and on.

We rowed.

We rowed all the way up the coast of Illyria and Dalmatia, and men continued to die, and we rowed without food for a while, as I say. It’s hard to tell this, not just because it’s all so low and disgusting, but because there’s nothing on which to seize. Abuse was routine. Pain was routine. Men hit us, and we rowed. Our muscles ached, and we rowed. Sometimes we slept, and that was as good as our lives ever were.

We came to an archipelago of islets, and they had small villages on them. Finally, we landed. None of us was allowed ashore, and all I can say is that after a time, a dozen slaves and some food came onto the ship and some copper was unloaded.

And then it all happened again.

My Illyrian was moved out of the stern-post rowing station, and I was moved back to the upper deck, and we rowed. There was food. That seemed good.

We rowed.

We made another landfall, and were beached again. This place had a ready-built palisade for slaves, and we could see it was full from our benches, with forty or fifty male slaves waiting to be sold.

Our Illyrian looked at the beach and wept.

We were pushed ashore, roped together and put in the palisade. By luck, I was roped to the Greek, Nestor.

After darkness fell, and the guards went off to fuck the female slaves in another pen — I call these things by their proper names, children, and may you never know what slavery is! — we lay side by side, and whispered very quietly.

‘Still alive, brother?’ he said.

‘Yes,’ I said.

He nodded in the dark, so close I could feel it more than see it. ‘Good,’ he said. ‘I was thinking,’ he went on. ‘Arimnestos is an odd name. Where you from?’

Where was I from? May I tell you the truth, friends? I hadn’t thought of home, of anything, for weeks.

‘Plataea,’ I said, and it was as if a dam opened in my head and thoughts poured in. My forge, my wife, the night she died, the fire.

The Pyrrhiche and how we danced it. The feel of a spear in my hand.

‘You are Arimnestos of Plataea?’ he asked. ‘By the gods!’ he muttered. ‘I’m a man who’s been a slave his whole life, but you! A gent!’

‘I’ve been a slave before,’ I said.

‘Ahh,’ he said, and nodded again. ‘Ahh… that’s why you are alive.’

We ate better after that port. We were also a lighter ship by the weight of our Cyprian copper, and we had forty more rowers, fresher men who hadn’t been abused. Indeed, there were too many for the oar-master to ruin them all at once, and we had easier lives for a week.

We rowed.

Not one man died that week. That’s all I can say.

We made one more port call. None of us was allowed on the beach, and we picked up women — twenty women, all Keltoi with tattoos. They were filthy, hollow-eyed, and the first night at sea the oar-master discovered one was pregnant, and he killed her on the deck and threw her corpse over the side. I don’t know why, even now.