conning the ship – of course he would know just how sluggish we were. Truly, I was a piss-poor commander. I had too much to learn.
It was a Phoenician ship, and it had tackle I didn't understand. It had pumps – sliding wooden pumps that rigged to the top strakes and allowed a strong man to shoot water up and over the side, straight up from the bilges. The Nubian got them rigged and shooting water while I rowed on in a haze of pain, because now that I was active, my left arm hurt like fire with every stroke, and the whole thing seemed pointless.
Every rower harbours a secret fear in a storm – that by rowing for the safety of all, he is losing his own strength to swim, if the ship founders. I was a strong swimmer – I'd learned in Ephesus and swum every day on Crete, and now I knew that if we wrecked, I would drown, dragged under by a weak left arm and a hundred cuts and bruises.
'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
