Killer of Men (42 page)

‘What’d you do?’ the man below me asked out of nowhere. ‘Weren’t you deck crew?’

‘Everyone rows,’ I said, gritting my teeth.

‘Trierarch’s a madman, ain’t he?’ the man asked. ‘A killer, that’s what I hear.’

I laughed. ‘I am the trierarch,’ I said.

He twitched and almost lost the stroke, and I felt better. ‘Listen, boy,’ I said, using the Ionian phrase for a slave, or a man of no value. ‘If we live, you owe me an apology. And if we all die, you’ll have the satisfaction that I’ll be as dead as you.’

That was the end of conversation with my rowers. I don’t think they loved me. They thought I was insane.

Another nightfall found us still at sea. We were resting fifteen men at a time, and I was relieved eventually by another shift of reserve rowers, and I could see that if there was no less water in the bilges, at least there was no more. But I also knew that our rowers were almost finished. I knew because I was as strong as an ox, injury or no injury, and my arms were like wet rawhide.

I went aft, cold now that I wasn’t rowing, and pulled my dry cloak from under the bench and put it around me.

Paramanos was still in the steering rig.

‘Can you take the helm?’ he asked.

‘Give me cup of wine and a hundred heartbeats and I’ll do my best.’ I shrugged. Lekthes and Idomeneus were both rowing, and there wasn’t another man on deck. ‘It’s a miracle we’ve made it this far, isn’t it?’ I said.

He nodded. ‘I’m good,’ he said. He pointed aft. ‘When the rowers fade, I put the sea behind us for a few minutes.’ His grey-black face had a ghost of a grin. ‘Not my first storm.’

I knocked back a cup of neat wine. It flowed like warm honey through my veins, and I was alive. ‘Give me the oars,’ I said.

He handed them over, and the moment I took them I felt the strain. I looked to starboard, and I could see the coast passing in the fading light. The combination of wind and oar was moving us at a speed that seemed superhuman.

I thought that the Nubian would collapse – he’d been between the steering oars for twelve straight hours, dawn to dusk – but instead, he ran forward.

The oars rose and fell to the beat, but the men were barely moving them. The wind was doing the work, and it would soon bring about our ruin. I reckoned that at roughly the time the sun finally set, we’d touch the rocks. No beach at all, there at the foot of the Olympus of Asia.

I poured another cup of wine and drank it. I would die with my oath redeemed, doing my best. What more can the gods ask?

Paramanos came back aft and the grey fatigue was gone from his face. I handed him the wine cup and he drank off the rest.

‘If you served out wine,’ he said, ‘we might get another water-clock of strong rowing. And I think we might –
might
– save the ship.’

We traded places again while he explained. I didn’t think his wine would work. I thought that words would, and I ran forward to the command platform and raised my voice over the rain.

‘Listen, you bastards!’ I shouted into the wind. ‘We’ll be on a beach cooking hot food and drinking wine before the sun sets if you’ll put your backs into it. What a bunch of shits we’ll look in Hades if we drown a horse-length from a safe beach!’

It was my first battle speech. It worked.

They all thought that they were dead men, and the merest glimpse of hope was enough to fire them. I walked up and down the central plank, and I told them exactly what Paramanos planned. Over and over again.

‘We’re going to thread the needle between the Chelidon and Korydela,’ I said. ‘And then we’ll be in the lee of the greatest mountain in Asia – calm water and rest. Our Nubian says we can beach at Melanippian, even in the dark, with this wind, and I believe him.’

It’s easy to believe, when the only other choices are extinction and black death, and they rowed with their guts and their hope of life. Sunset – not that we’d ever seen the sun – gave way to a horrible grey light and then to full night, and still we lived, and I knew that our bow was due west now. The storm was full at the stern and the motion of the ship was easier; the only rowing we needed was to keep her stern on to the wind.

But I knew that we were still in a race with time, and I got my three Aeolians and Lekthe and Idomeneus and two men they seemed to know, and we raised the boatsail. I’d seen it done by Hipponax’s trained mariners – you lash the furled boatsail to the mast, then raise the mast, secure it ten times, and then you cut the lashings on the sail and it spreads itself. The Ephesians did it to show off, but Hipponax had said once that it was a life-saver in a storm.

It is one thing to lash a boatsail to its mast on an autumn day in a brisk breeze, with the warm sun burning your shoulders, surrounded by men who love you, and another to do it in driving rain with your hands so cold that you can’t tell whether you have rope between your fingers or not.

We managed to tie the boatsail eight times with hemp rope, and then we found that we didn’t have the strength to raise the mast. The wind caught it and hurled it over the side, and only the luck of the gods kept the pole from holing us as it went over.

But damn it, we were close to making it through the strait. I could see the cliffs rising on either side.

The rowers were finished. Even hope can’t make spent muscles move an oar.

I wasn’t finished. I got the spar from the mainsail and let the wind take the mainsail over the side like a hundred-handed monster – twenty silver owls of linen lost in two heartbeats, and I didn’t give a damn. The spar was only three men tall, much smaller than the boatsail mast. But we carried a spare boatsail and we bent it to the spar and tied it down, and then I stripped the upper deck of rowers – the oars were in all along the deck, with only the middle men pretending to row, and we were beginning to fall off and broach. Time was running out, we had cliffs on both sides and even Paramanos was out of – of whatever drove him.

They thought I was mad. We were turning so that our long side was vulnerable to the wind – the men still rowing didn’t have the coordination or the strength to keep our head to the waves, and like a ship in battle, once the long sides were to the waves, we were done.

I went from man to man in between lightning flashes, pushing rope ends into unwilling hands. I knocked a man sprawling when he was too slow to obey. He went over the side and the sea took him.

‘Pull, you bastards!’ I called.

Love is a fine thing. Love will take a man above himself, whether it is love for a man or a woman or a ship or a country. But fear can imitate love in most situations, and I knew they didn’t love me.

‘Pull or die!’ I screamed, and my sword was in my hand. ‘Still time to bleed!’ I shouted, and I laughed. Let them think me insane.

The spar shot up like a stallion’s penis. ‘Lash her down! Belay her!’

Then
they were willing. Then they believed. It was easy when we came to it – but someone had to get them over the belief that they would fail. Now every man worked with a will, and Paramanos was next to me, lashing the new stays as fast as his hands could work. Already the wind, that brutal east wind, was on the mast and the tight-wrapped boatsail, and our bow was cutting the sea. Little Idomeneus was at the helm, doing his best to get the bow headed west. Paramanos worked by my side as we tied the ropes and belayed. Ten ropes. Ten heavy cables to hold a mast smaller than the one a day-fisher carried.

Then Paramanos was gone, back to his steering oars.

We were three horse-lengths from the rocks of Chelidon, and there was no more time to worry. My sword was in my hand.

I cut the lashings in two sweeps as accurate as any sword cuts I’d ever made in combat, and the whole sail blew free of the lashings as if Poseidon’s fist had struck it. I thought that the mast would snap, it bent so far, and the bronze-clad bow
plunged
into the sea, so that I thought we might dive to the bottom like a cormorant. Fear took me, but I got my arms around that mast and held on as the water drove aft. And then the bow began to rise. I felt the change under my feet even as I choked on the water in my mouth.

The bow came up, sluggish at first, and then the first stay rope gave with a crack like a thunderbolt, killing the man it hit, one of the Aeolians. He didn’t even get to scream.

The new mast gave a grunt and moved the width of a man’s arm – and held.

The whole ship seemed to groan and the bow rose again, clear of the sea. The waves were at our stern, and we’d put more blood into the water – the Aeolian was our last sacrifice.

I had a chance to see the cliffs of Chelidon, and I don’t think that I have ever moved faster across the surface of the earth than I did in those heartbeats, as the full weight of the storm blew into our tiny sail and we raced across the sea like a mare run wild.

And then, as fast as it takes to tell it, we were through the strait. First the force of the gale diminished by half, because the cliffs were no longer funnelling the whole storm into our little sail. And then Paramanos, grinning like a titan, was turning us – oh, so gradually – to starboard.

It took us longer than we could have imagined – I think that if I’d told the men, back in the teeth of the storm, that we were still half a watch from safety, we’d all have died.

But the moment came when every man aboard knew we were
not
going to die. Hard to define, but between one breath and the next, the wind had dropped so far – broken by the weight of Asian Olympus to our north and east, now – that if we’d all slumped on our oars, we’d have floated the rest of the night and come to no harm. And in the contrary way of the human heart, that gave us strength – we were all one animal by then, and we were going to rise and fall together, no mistake.

My Cretan oar master was gone – swept over the side by the wave when the bow went down – and I beat the deck with my good spear and chanted the
Iliad
at the sea, and men laughed. It was as dark as Tartarus under the lee of the mountain, but the beach rolled on for ever, and we turned the ship in water as calm as any harbour and the stern grated on the gravel, the kiss of life, and the ship stopped, all our oars out over the side as if we were a dead water bug.

We lay in a huddle on the beach, a hundred exhausted men who didn’t even try to start a fire. It was hot in the midst of the pile of men and cold and wet on the fringes, and no man slept, but no man died.

In the morning, the sun rose late over the mountain and we rose slowly, like men who have survived a hard fight – which we were. We caught some goats, sacrificed them to Poseidon and ate them half-cooked. We drank wine from the hold, poured more libations than an assembly of priests and swore that we were brothers until the sun died in the sky.

The next morning, I got them back aboard and, with the bow pointed at Lesbos, we sailed away with our toy boatsail. And as luck would have it, twenty stades up the bay, we found our own boatsail mast with the sail still lashed to it, floating with the wrack of the storm, and further downwind we found the mainsail floating below the surface like a dead creature.

‘Truly, the gods love you,’ Paramanos said.

I shrugged. ‘I have some luck,’ I said.

He nodded. I was at the steering oars, and he was drinking fresh water from a little horn cup, a Phoenician habit. ‘I’ve never seen that trick with the boatsail before,’ he said. It was a peace offering, if I wanted it. He was a better sailor than I and he’d taken command when he had to, and he expected me to resent it.

He had me wrong. I waited until he’d finished his water, then I put my arms around his neck. ‘You fucking saved
us
,’ I said. ‘I’m not so mad as you think.’

He nodded, and finally he couldn’t restrain his grin. ‘I did, didn’t I?’ he said.

‘You did,’ I answered.

The next afternoon, I summoned the Phoenicians aft. I nodded at the helmsman. ‘Paramanos has requested your lives,’ I said. ‘For myself, I bear no grudge against you – we are at war. But I will only free you for a ransom. Choose among yourselves who will go, and who will stay as surety.’

The eldest nodded. First he embraced Paramanos and then he came back to me. ‘I am the richest of these men, and I will stay,’ he said.

I could see the hatred in his eyes, but who loves a man who has killed thirty countrymen in cold blood? I didn’t need his love.

‘Set a price,’ I said.

He named a figure in talents of silver. Paramanos approved and Herakleides, the eldest of the Aeolians, gave a curt nod. Herakleides was already serving as an officer, and training with Paramanos to be a helmsman.

‘On the beach at Methymna,’ I said to the youngest, who was chosen to go. ‘Thirty days.’ I turned to Idomeneus. ‘See to it that he has arms and ten silver owls.’

The eldest Syrian shrugged. ‘Land him at Xanthus,’ he said. ‘We have a factor there.’

And so we did.

When I promised all the rest of the crew shares in the ransom, my status rose again. The four Phoenicians were worth ten times my whole fortune, and I had accounted myself well-off before we fought the battle. Boeotians aren’t good at wealth.

The gods were kind. Dolphins sported at our bow and we had the mainsail up by noon of the second day. A kinder east wind stayed at our stern-quarter all the way up the coast of Asia, until we had to turn and row into the magnificent bay at Mytilene. The beach was not as full of ships as it should have been. Indeed, it was as if only a portion of the fleet that had broken the Phoenicians at Amathus had come to the rendezvous. More than a third of the ships had gone home, and at first glance it looked worse. The Cretans were not the only ones to take their loot and go.

I recognized the Athenian cut of the ships on the south end of the beach but not any of the ships themselves – none of them were Aristides’, but I saw a black hull that might be Herk’s unlovely
Nemesis
, and I turned my ship at the south end of the beach and put the stern in the sand two oar’s lengths from the man himself, who stood in the gentle surf laughing and shouting rude suggestions at my oarsmen.