Marathon: Freedom or Death

yet.

Just against the white line of the last of the good weather, my lookout spotted the hull of our slave ship.

He had his masts down, and his oarsmen rowing for all they were worth. He was more afraid of the storm than of pirates.

We came up on him fast, as our boatsail was enough in that wind to throw foam and spray right over the ram in our bow and on to the rowers, who sat silently, cursing their fates and looking at the madman who stood in front of the helm.

I summoned Idomeneus aft. ‘We’ll have to take him fast,’ I said. ‘We’ll strip him of rowers and add them to our own, and then we’ll live the night.’

Idomeneus shook his head in admiration. ‘I thought you’d gone soft,’ he said.

‘Don’t kill the Iberians,’ I said. I poured a libation to Poseidon for his gift, because I knew that it was no seamanship of mine that had caught the fast slaver.

When we were five or six stades astern of our prey and the storm line was visible behind us, a long line of rain flowing in the last light of the sun, the Phoenician changed tactics and raised his boatsail.

But Poseidon accepted my libation and spat the slaver’s back. Before it could be sheeted home, his boatsail whipped away on the wind, the ship yawed badly and we gained a stade.

Who knows what happened in the last moments as we closed? He was a slaver, and most of his rowers were slaves. And one of the slaves had a knife — a wickedly sharp raven’s talon.

By the time Idomeneus went aboard, the deck crew was dead and the Iberians were loose, severed ropes hanging from their ankles, and their leader had an axe and was cutting their fetters. The Phoenician was pinned to the mast with a knife through his chest. We left him there, because sometimes Poseidon likes a sacrifice.

I took every extra slave out of that ship that I could, left them undermanned but not desperate and set them a landfall.

Stephanos stepped up. He was Chian, and he wanted his reputation back.

‘They’ll die in the dark,’ he said. ‘Send me aboard and give me a handful of marines and I’ll get them through the night.

Idomeneus nodded.

‘Do it,’ I said. I stepped across to my new ship even as the rain began. I walked down the main deck and touched hands with a few of the Iberians, meeting their eyes and nodding at the men I remembered from my trip to Delos, and many nodded back. A couple smiled. The dangerous one clasped my hand — hard, testing me — and then threw an arm around me.

Aft of the mast, a voice spoke up in Doric. ‘By the gods! Arimnestos! Get me out of here!’

It was the blasphemer, Philocrates.

I leaned down. ‘You want to be thrown over the side?’

‘No! I want — fuck. Get me out of here!’ He was pleading.

‘You want to live?’ I said. ‘Row harder.’ I laughed at him. ‘Pray!’ I suggested.

The Iberian on the opposite bench showed me his teeth. ‘Fucking coward,’ he said.

I pointed at the Iberian. ‘If you don’t row, these men will certainly kill you,’ I said. ‘Now, rationally you must know that if you do row, you may live through the night.’ I stepped up on the bench, stepped up again to the rail and balanced there as the swell raised the stern. ‘But I don’t have to be an aspiring priest — isn’t that what you called me? — to suggest that this might be a good time to examine your relationship with the gods.’

I leaped down from the rail into the midship of Storm Cutter, feeling immensely better. The storm was coming in behind us, but I had done my service for the god, and I knew I could weather the storm.

We turned north and rowed all night, and we constantly lost sight of the other ship, and as often found him again, so that the first fretful grey light, shot with lightning, found the eyes over his ram just a short stade to windward. And about the time that dawn was shining somewhere — it was a grey morning for us, and lashed with rain — I swung the great steering oars to starboard to put the wind astern. I could see a great rock, the size of a castle or the Acropolis, rising from the water to starboard, and I thought that I knew where we were. Somehow we had come two hundred stades north of our target, and we were off the west coast of Lesbos. That rock marked the beach of Eresus, where Sappho had her school.

Best of all, the beach there was wide and deep, and the rock would break the wind and rain long enough for me to get my ship ashore.

My oarsmen were spent — used up, long since. The Iberians had put some strength into them, and they weren’t bad men, but I wasn’t going to get a heroic burst of power from them. Not in a month of feast days.

No way to signal Stephanos, either. But he knew this anchorage as well as I — better, no doubt. So I waved at him and turned my ship, hoping that he would read my mind.

I got Idomeneus to come aft. Only a few hundred heartbeats left before the crisis.

‘Go down the benches and get every man ready. I intend to put him right up the beach, bow first.’ I pointed at the lights shining in the acropolis, high above the beach. ‘Hard to miss.’ I waited until I saw him understand.

Idomeneus shook his head. ‘You’ll break his back,’ he said.

I confess that I shrugged. ‘We’ll live.’ I nodded towards Asia, which loomed ahead, ready to catch us on a much less kind coast if we failed to land on the sand of Eresus. ‘We’re out of sea room.’ I pointed again. ‘Every oarsman has to be ready to back water. Tell them to dip lightly, so that they don’t get killed by the oars.’

Idomeneus nodded and headed forward, shouting as he went.

I hesitate to say how fast Storm Cutter was moving when we came in under the lee of the rock, but I’d say we were faster than a galloping horse. It’s less than a stade from the rock to the beach. We were going too fast.

‘Oars out!’ I shouted across the gale. ‘Back water!’

It was ragged. I was as scared as the next man — now that we were in flat water, our speed was shocking. The oars bit, and I couldn’t see that we were slowing at all — but the ship yawed and an oarsman screamed as his backed oar bit too deep and slammed into him, breaking his arms.

Like a wool blanket that unravels in the wind, his failure spread, so that the whole port-side loom of oars began to fall apart. Men struggled to keep their oars clear, but the ship rolled from the mis-strokes, and the port- side oars bit too deep, and men died, or were broken. We turned suddenly, and the port side dipped so low on the roll that we took water. We still had so much way on us that we were racing sideways into the beach.

The port-side rowers — those still in command of themselves — finally got all their oars clear of the water. The starboard-side rowers were at full stretch and the hull pivoted again, rotating on the starboard oar bank, and the bow hit the sand a glancing blow as the bronze-plated ram caught the trough of gravel just shy of the beach and skipped along it.

Then we could hear the ram ploughing a furrow in the gravel and suddenly the boatmast snapped with a crack as loud as the lightning, and every man not sitting a bench was thrown flat on the deck as a wave picked up the stern and tossed us — the kindly hand of Poseidon, I like to think — up the beach, stern first.

‘Over the side!’ I roared, although I was lying half-stunned. ‘Get her up the beach!’

It was the ugliest landing I ever saw — we’d been rotated halfway round by the sea, men were badly hurt all along both sides, and I could see broken boards where my ram ought to be.

But when I jumped over the side, my feet barely splashed.

We were ashore.

Stephanos didn’t even try to land. He watched us, and he assumed we were lost in the waves, and he put up his helm and coasted by, a few oar-lengths offshore. In seconds he was past the beach, and before we had our broken hull clear of Poseidon’s reaching tendrils, his ship had gone around the promontory to the north of Eresus.

I lay by the rope I had been hauling and cursed, because the loss of Stephanos hurt me more than I’d expected. I hadn’t seen him in a year. I wanted him back.

Idomeneus had his marines in hand and was driving oarsmen to work, gathering wood to put supports under