Poseidon's Spear (Long War 3) (19 page)

After this he proceeds to determine the breadth of the habitable earth: he tells us, that measuring from the meridian of Meroe to Alexandria, there are 10,000 stadia. From
thence to the Hellespont about 8100. Again; from thence to the Dnieper, 5000; and thence to the parallel of Thule, which Pytheas says is six days’ sail north from Britain, and near the Frozen
Sea, other 11,500. To which if we add 3400 stadia above Meroe in order to include the Island of the Egyptians, the Cinnamon country, and Taprobane, there will be in all 38,000 stadia.

Strabo, Geography 1.4

I’m a poor sailor and a mediocre bronze-smith, but I’m an expert pirate.

We coasted east and south, camping in sandy bays on the south coast of Gallia and eating deer and sheep. Stolen sheep.

Somewhere in the Etruscan Sea, we found a Phoenician coaster struggling against a west wind, headed for Sardinia. It was sheer luck – I had not intended to prey on anyone. But we pulled at
her from the eye of the wind, and she ran – and there is something to the old saying that the bleating of the lamb excites the lion. I really didn’t intend to take her until I saw her
run.

And then—

She had a crew of five, four slaves and a Phoenician skipper from Carthage. I kept his slaves and enslaved him, took his ship and sold it still fully laden at Marsala. One of his countrymen
ransomed him – he hadn’t done much work, and the two mina in silver I charged for him seemed fair to everyone.

And the Phoenicians in Marsala marked me.

Demetrios came to visit me on the beach at Tarsilla.

‘You can’t do that again,’ he said without preamble.

I laughed. ‘I didn’t intend to do it that time,’ I said. ‘They were just there.’

That quickly, I had made the change from merchant to pirate.

I put him on the kline of honour, fed him wine and sent him home in the morning with a hard head.

Two days later, before midsummer,
Amphitrite
swept in past the headland and unloaded her cargo.

This time, Doola had done his very best.

We had Roman helmets, Etruscan amphorae of wine, finished and dyed Aegyptian cloth, bags of local salt and even a small leather envelope of raw lapis from Persia. We had Cyprian copper and some
dyes – Tyrian and Aegyptian.

Mostly, we had wine.

I had about thirty minas in worked bronze – brooches and scabbard fittings, because Sittonax said they would sell. And mirrors.

We had two bales of ostrich feathers I had taken off the coaster. No idea how he came to have them, but Carthage gets the best goods out of Africa.

Doola looked at them, heard the tale of the piracy and shook his head. ‘I wish you hadn’t done that, Ari,’ he said. But then he shrugged, and went back to his lists.

And we had two great tusks of ivory, provided by Gaius.

We spent four days loading, working our boys to a frazzle. The triakonter was too stiff and had an odd lie under sail, and Demetrios, after watching us row, ordered the stern to be pushed down
in the water. Ballast amphorae – we were literally ballasted in wine – were shifted, the stern went down a strake or two and the steering oars bit deeper.

I’m guessing, now that I’m a better shipwright and a better captain, that my ram – which bit the sea beautifully, although we hadn’t tested it for its real purpose
– had pulled the bow too deep and made her hard to steer. That ram bow could cut the waves, but if used badly or in heavy seas, could try to lead the ship to plunge too deep. I was lucky. And
I had Vasileos, who supervised the reloading.

When it was all done, we ate a feast of fish and lobster on the beach. Men with partners bid them farewell. Men without made do, or didn’t. I didn’t. I had chosen celibacy.

Hah! I make myself laugh. I hadn’t chosen it at all. I’d failed to find a partner, and done nothing much to find one. I was twenty-seven, by my own reckoning. Too old for the young
girls, unless I wanted marriage.

Just right for paying prostitutes.

More wine, here.

It was two weeks to midsummer night, and the moon was waxing.

We slipped away in the dawn, two small ships against all the might of the ocean. It was a beautiful day, and we had a fair wind for the west, and all day we watched the water run down the sides
of our heavily laden ship. Not a man touched an oar save the steersmen.

Three more days, and Poseidon gave us a west wind. At night, we sheltered on sandy beaches or heavy pebbles under cliffs, and we bartered for supplies or ate wild sheep and goats.

Those are the days when life at sea is a fine thing. We had new rigging, new sails and fresh hulls on both boats and we raced along, west and south.

On the fourth day, we saw the coast of Iberia rising before us and we put the helms over and started more south than west, and still we had the god’s own wind in our sails.

By the end of the week, we had had some rowing. By the end of the second week, it was as if this was the only life we’d ever known. We sailed all day, rowing when the wind was calm or
against us.
Amphitrite
could stay much closer to the wind, but couldn’t row in anything like a breeze.
Lydia
– for so I called my new ship – could row in
anything but a gale, so fine was her entry and her designs, and Vasileos beamed with pride as our oarsmen powered us into a heavy wind as if they were racing small boats on a beach.

But
Lydia
was never a good ship for sailing with the wind anywhere but her stern quarter, nor did I expect much more.

This resulted in a great many tortoise-and-hare days, where we’d crawl under oars, following a straight course across a bay, and
Amphitrite
would sail away – sometimes
seemingly in the very opposite course to the one we were rowing – only to appear near close of day on the same beach.

We began to rotate our crews. Men on
Amphitrite
learned a great deal more about sailing than men on
Lydia
, and our shepherds were taken off their benches, three days at a time,
and sent to make sail. So all my friends came to
Lydia
, from time to time, and I, too, took a trick on the sailing vessel and left command to Vasileos, who, I suspect, did it better than
I.

Another week, and we came to the headland where Iberia juts the farthest into the Middle Sea. To port, we saw the Balearics. We could have traded there, for their famous wine and their fine
wool, but we had wine, and we had wool, and we were under way on our great adventure.

That night, we had a talk at a great roaring fire on a pebble beach, with the sound of regular waves playing like a monotonous and low-tuned lyre in the background. The sky was full of stars,
and our lads were singing the songs they’d sung to sheep and goats at home.

We lay on our cloaks, sipping wine. Every sip was that much less we had to deliver to our destination. We were getting thrifty, or perhaps greedy.

We fell silent, listening to the sea. And Demetrios picked up a stick from the fire and pointed south.

‘Not a one of us has ever been through the Pillars of Heracles,’ he said. He looked around. ‘The rumours are that there is a heavy current, flowing out, and a brutal
wind.’

Well, that shut us up.

Doola was picking his teeth, I remember that, because he spat, and then laughed his great laugh. ‘We should quit and go home, then,’ he said.

And we all laughed with him.

‘Sounds as if it will be worse coming home than going out,’ Neoptolymos said.

Demetrios shook his head. ‘I really don’t know,’ he said. ‘And that scares me. I want to run south with this fine wind and coast along Africa going west, rather than stay
on the Iberian shore.’

‘More chance of a Carthaginian,’ I said.

Demetrios nodded. ‘I know. But this coast gets rockier and rockier. Eventually we’ll have no landing places. And . . . there’s Gades. I don’t know its exact location, but
it’s a major port, according to men in Marsala, and it has a fleet. A Carthaginian fleet.’ He looked around at all of us in the firelight. ‘South is the coast of Libya, mostly
desert down to the sea. I’ve never heard that it was thickly populated.’

None of the rest of us knew, either.

Really, we were shockingly unprepared. We had asked every sailor we could find about the route, but the Carthaginians wouldn’t talk, or didn’t know, and the Greeks were cagey. We
knew that Africa had odd winds that could carry a lot of sand, and we knew that the coast of Iberia could be kind and could be harsh – we’d just experienced three weeks of pure sweet
sailing, and we’d found her soft. But from here, the rest of the way was rumour and legend. I’d met five men who’d claimed to have sailed past the Pillars of Heracles.

None of them gave me the same description.

I assume that if I’d used my brief stay in Carthage better, I’d have learned more. Even as it was, I worked the calculations I’d learned while a slave, and I was none the
wiser, because navigation by the heavens is relative, and I didn’t have any fixed points from which to calculate. But I had a notion that Heracles wouldn’t spurn me, and that the
Pillars would be in his realm, not Poseidon’s; and that if I took a precise bearing there on the heavens, I’d have something to go by. It’s a little like a drunkard going out of
his farmhouse for a piss in the middle of the night – he doesn’t take his bearings in his bedroom or in the kitchen, but at the garden gate.

So none of us gainsaid Demetrios, and the next morning we left the land and ran due south, for Africa.

Africa was low, compared to Iberia. The coast rises slowly, and if it wasn’t for the cloud banks and the wind, we might have run on her in the dark. The gods know that
thousands of other sailors have drowned on that coast, but we were fortunate.

Having found the coast of Africa, we turned west, into the setting sun, and sailed. We had a good wind for it, and our only trouble was water. The coast of Africa didn’t seem to have much
of it, and what there was, someone owned. After passing three harbours, all obviously owned by the Carthaginians, we lay alongside one another and agreed that we had to go into the next small
port.

They were Numidians, there. They weren’t Doola’s people, but they were black like him, and thin like Seckla, and while there were Phoenician merchants, we avoided them, filled with
water from the stream and paid a small toll. We also bought bread and meat and grain: all outlay. We sold some wine. Before we left the beach, Doola had purchased two hundredweight of dates, dried
dates. Who knew what ignorant barbarians might pay for delicious dates?

They couldn’t get them into the hull of the
Amphitrite
, so we had to put them under tarpaulins between the benches of the
Lydia
.

We put to sea as soon as we could, and counted on our fingers. The prices were ruinous. And despite that, we knew we’d been absurdly lucky to find a port that wasn’t dominated
directly by Carthage.

But we were young and foolish, and we sailed on.

Two days farther west, and we had serious doubts. The land was rising on either hand – we could see the coast of Iberia. And the current was palpable – the sea was beginning to flow
like a river. Out, into the Outer Sea.

If you have never been a sailor, this may not sound terrifying.

Worst of all was the wind. The wind was at our backs, and it grew stronger by the hour, a firm westerly that pushed our ships along at a breakneck pace. Turning back was no longer an option.

The current wasn’t so very strong, but it denied us the opportunity to consider.

The wind rose, stronger and stronger.

The great rock of the Northern Pillar is much greater than the smaller rock at the southern side. And it is obvious, once you start to pass the straits, that this is not the hand of the gods
– any more that everything else in the universe is. The wind is funnelled by the rising land – the sea wind – and what is merely a breeze elsewhere is virtually a gale between the
Pillars. Add to that the current—

We were moving very fast indeed. And beyond, we could see the Great Sea – the Outer Sea. What some men call the Atlantic: the ocean on which Atlantis once lay.

Faster and faster.

Gades is a mighty port city in Iberia, sheltered behind the rock of the Northern Pillar. I prayed to Heracles, my ancestor – the port was visible now, and full of ships. The heavy
construction of the big Phoenicians made more sense to me as I eyed the heavy rollers of the Outer Sea. The waves were twice as high.

We hit them in the rip – the confusing water between the oceans, just at the base of the Pillars – and before my crew had our sail down, we’d been turned all the way around and
flung ten ship-lengths by a series of waves. Luck, the will of Poseidon and some expert ship-handling by Vasileos saved us, but it was terrifying in a rowed ship. Our fishermen’s sons were
the other vehicle of our salvation, for they saw the threat and, without orders, got to benches – any benches – and put oars in the water, and we managed not to swamp completely. But we
took a great deal of water in those first few moments – and that was on a sunny day with a fine breeze.

The Phoenicians are fine sailors. And I had made a number of mistakes.

Demetrios did no better. The rip took him by surprise as well, and a flaw in the current took him away from us on the outflow, as a pair of boys may be swept apart when they attempt to swim in a
strong river.

I couldn’t watch. I was busy saving my own ship.

When all our rowers were rowing, we ought to have been safe, but we’d shipped too much water and the ship was a slug, and the big swells of the Atlantic threatened her low sides with every
wave. I had to make ten decisions a minute, about who should row and who should bail. Sittonax bailed – one of the few times I watched him work like a working man. He bailed with his helmet
until someone put a bucket in his hands.