The Nubian crossed his arms and looked forward. 'Paramanos, lord.'
'Your Greek is excellent,' I said.
He nodded. 'It ought to be – I grew up with it. My family owns ships at Naucratis, and there's more of us in Cyrene.' He looked forward again. 'And my daughters will be orphans if you don't point this ship north, lord.'
Naucratis? A Greek city in the Nile delta. They say it was founded by mercenaries serving the pharaohs at the time of the siege of Troy. And Cyrene is a colony – richer than the mother city – in Africa. What is it that your tutors teach you?
'You are a helmsman?' I asked.
'I've been navarch of a blue-water merchant,' he said.
'If you are lying, I'll kill you,' I said. 'Take the steering oars.'
I could see his fear, and smell it, but I didn't know whether he was afraid of me or simply afraid of death – the coming storm – hard to tell. I stepped off the helmsman's bench and he took the oars. 'I have the ship,' he said.
'Yes, you do,' I said.
He shook his head. 'I'm changing course. See the evening star there by the moon? That's well west of north from here.' He swung the oars, his arms taut with muscle, and the ship changed course smoothly, the wind passing from under our quarter to dead astern.
'Before the north star rises we'll be in with the coast, or you can feed me to the fishes,' he said. But his voice shook.
I didn't trust him.
At sunset, Idomeneus came aft with a trio of lanky Asian Greeks. 'All three brothers?' I guessed.
'They were taken in arms as rebels on the mainland and pressed as rowers,' Idomeneus said. 'All citizens of Phocaea in Aeolis.' He looked aft. 'We've a dozen more Aeolians. They shouldn't be prisoners to start with.'
The eldest brother fell to his knees. 'Lord, we are Ionians! We fought at Sardis! I was in the agora when you fought, lord!'
It was an easy claim to make – I had no idea who had been in the agora at Sardis, but I had been a slave. I knew that tone. Besides, let's be honest – I liked being called lord.
I held up my hand. 'Will you swear – to me? Now?'
All three knelt on the deck and swore. Ionians swear the way Cretans do, hands between the hands of their lords. They aren't much for democracy, like mainland Greeks. I took their oaths by Poseidon and Zeus Soter, and then I armed them and set them to choosing any other Aeolians that they knew. Herakleides was their leader, and his brothers were Nestor and Orestes, and they were good men.
I have a soft spot for men who carry the name of my ancestor.
I was just congratulating myself on having some good men when the Phoenicians decided to take the ship. They must have been desperate – as they saw the Aeolians separated out, they must have known that their chances of taking the ship were dropping by the moment.
They almost killed Lekthes in the first rush. They clubbed him with oars broken short – what a labour that must have been! They'd worked in secret below decks, of course, muffling the sound in their cloaks and rowing cushions, I suppose. I had no idea. They were brave men, desperate men, and they came in one gallant charge, up the benches, oar shafts falling like axe blows. Lekthes took one on his helmet and fell to his knees, but Idomeneus stood by him, put a spear point in one big Syrian and slammed his shield into another, shoving him over the side. They went to get around him, but I got my sword out of my scabbard, cursing myself for a fool – I had ordered my men to arm, but I was standing nearly naked, my helmet and scale shirt stowed uselessly under the helmsman's bench.
Short sword against oar shaft is not a good match. I took a blow on my shield arm and killed the man – my arm was numb.
The three Aeolians weren't armed, but they threw themselves into the fight, fists and gymnasium-trained muscles. The oldest took the oar shaft from the nerveless fingers of the man I'd hacked down. I climbed on the next bench, the rage of combat on me and all thought of leadership lost, while Idomeneus, the only fully armed man, was laying waste to the Syrians. There were two dead at his feet and a third was trying to hold in his guts while grappling Idomeneus's feet. I stepped on his throat and blocked a blow meant for Lekthes, then one of the Aeolians doubled up my opponent with a vicious blow to the man's stomach and they broke.
We hunted them through the boat, and killed them all. It isn't pretty to say it but, with a wind rising and the peril of mutiny and the blood hot, we didn't take any prisoners. Syrian Phoenicians can't hide among Greeks, and we weren't too fussy about who had carried a broken oar shaft and who hadn't.
When I came back aft, my arm still numb and my feet as red with the blood as if I'd been treading grapes in Boeotia, I found four more Phoenicians clustered around the helmsman's bench.
Their pointed beards gave them away. I raised my arm to kill them and the nearest put up his arm to protect himself.
'Stop!' the Nubian demanded. 'Stop it!' He tried to catch my arm, and I socked him in the face with my sword fist. He fell back into the steering rig and the ship yawed. His nose pumped blood but he was back on his feet.
'Stop it! Or Poseidon will take us!' he said. That got through my blood-drunk head. 'They're trying to surrender!' he said again. 'Zeus Soter, lord! These are noblemen, worth ransom. This one was my navarch. Stop it!' He was screaming at me while leaning all his weight on the oars, and I saw that while I'd been slaughtering Syrians, the wind had come up.
'Get forward,' I said to the four Phoenicians. 'Throw the bodies over the side.' I knew it was heartless, but the bastards had tried to take my ship and I suspected that these four fine noblemen were just as guilty – or more guilty.
After the slaughter of forty Syrians, we were down to half a compliment of rowers. The coast was nowhere in sight and the wind was shifting around. My new helmsman looked at me as if he thought I was mad.
I looked at him as if he was a traitor. 'You seem awfully friendly with the Phoenicians,' I said.
I'd broken his nose. He shook his head to clear it. 'I don't know who the fuck you are,' he said, 'with your barbaric Greek and your murderous temper, but we all used to be friends with the merchants of Tyre. I've traded with them all my life.'
There was something funny about a black man in an Asian chiton telling me that I was a barbarian. I laughed. 'You are a brave man,' I said.
'Fuck your mother,' he growled. 'We're all going to die anyway.' He spat over the side. 'You just killed the whole lower oar deck. We don't have the manpower to beach the ship.'
I laughed again. 'We'll stay at sea, then. Nothing to fear from a night at sea.' I laughed, and pointed at the blood running out of the oar ports. 'Poseidon has had his share of sacrifices,' I said.
His eyes said that he didn't agree.
'And the ship is rid of vermin,' I added. If I was going to play the mad captain, I'd play it to the hilt. Even the Cretans were different in the morning. They might still be useless, but now they were terrified of me, and that made them better sailors. Paramanos got us in with the coast of Asia – the long east – west reach south of Aeolis and west of Lydia, full of pirates and dangerous rocks. But he knew that coast, and we ran west with the new storm at our backs all night, and morning showed the teeth of the mountains dead ahead.
'Unless we row south,' Paramanos said, 'we're dead men.'
I agreed, so I had all three decks rowing – well, at least the two I could man – in the grey rain, and we had the sea broadside on, pouring through the oar ports and pushing us steadily west for all the southing that we made, which was precious little.
Some time in that endless grey day, I sent the deck crew to row, and even gave orders for the handful of armed Aeolians who still stood by to serve wine to every man, strip their armour and take up an oar.
My left arm was still numb, and even in the rain I could see a bruise as black as the darkest night where the oar had hit me, but I knew that I had to row. Leadership is an odd thing – sometimes you want your men to fear you as they fear the gods, at others you need them to love you like a long-lost brother. So I settled to an upper- deck bench, and for the first time I could see how much water was swirling down in the hold below me.
My stomach clenched. We were a third full of water, and if the Phoenicians had still been manning the lower benches, they'd have been drowning.
I called to the Nubian and told him that we were full of water. I could see him smile at my ignorance. He was
