the hull timbers. We propped
I sent Idomeneus to the citadel to get us help and hospitality, then I sat in my sodden chlamys and watched the storm, and sang a hymn to Poseidon and prayed that Stephanos might live.
The news came back that Sappho’s daughter had died — an old, old woman, but a great teacher, as awe- inspiring and god-touched in her way as Heraclitus in his — and had been succeeded by another woman, Aspasia, who now led the school of Sappho. So much had changed in just a few years. But Aspasia was supported by Briseis’s largesse, and she accepted me without question when I told her who I was, and she lodged my men and fed them.
I let myself into Briseis’s house and sat by her shuttered window, drinking her wine and eating her food. Surely it was she, and not Artaphernes, who had sent me that message. Hence, she must have need of me, I reasoned. And not a need she dared commit to paper. I reasoned — with a brain clouded by Eros, let me add — that she must need me.
I would find Miltiades soon enough. But if I could get
The storm took three days to blow out, and my men praised me openly for bringing them to such a safe haven, with lamb stew every night and good red wine for every man, as if they were a crew of lords. The folk of Eresus treated us like gods — as well they might, since it was Briseis’s gold that kept the school going, and her political power that kept it free of outside control. And they feared us.
When the storm was gone, we had beautiful weather for autumn. I put men on the headlands to keep watch, and I prayed to Poseidon every day and gave offerings of cakes and honey on the Cyprian goddess’s altar, too — anything to bring back Stephanos. We cut good wood on the hillsides east of the town and rebuilt the bow, with two carpenters from the town helping us with the main beams that had cracked. We stripped the hull clean and rebuilt the bow, and found a fair amount of rot in the upper timbers. I built a marine platform — like a box, with armoured sides — into the new bow, and a little shelf where an archer or a lookout could stand high above the ram.
I borrowed from the Temple of Aphrodite, and spent the money on tar and pine pitch, and blacked the hull, a fresh, thick coat so that he was armoured in the stuff, watertight and shining. I gave him a stripe of Poseidon’s own blue above the waterline, and we painted the oar shafts to match, all in a day, and the women of the town washed our great sail so that the raven was fresh and stark again.
In such a way we propitiated Poseidon, but there was no sign of Stephanos. So after a week of good food and freely given aid, we prepared to sail away in a fresh ship. I was sombre at the loss of a friend, but the crew was wild with delight.
‘Boys are saying their luck has changed,’ Idomeneus said.
I had appointed two Iberians who could speak some Greek to be officers. My new oar master was Galas, and he had more tattoos than a Libyan, for all that his skin was fairer than mine. He had blue eyes and ruddy hair and his scalp was shaved in whorls, but he knew the sea and his Greek was good enough. And he had taken command of the port-side oars during the disaster of the landing.
My new sailing master had the same tattoos and his name was too barbaric for words, something like ‘Malaleauch’. I called him Mal, and he answered to it. He spoke a pidgin of Greek and Italiote and Phoenician.
I had thirty of the former slaves on my benches now. I’d lost more than a dozen men in that horrible landing — dead, or so badly injured that they still lay in Lady Sappho’s Temple of Aphrodite, waiting to be healed or to die.
The Iberians all viewed me as the author of their freedom. I explained to Galas how small a role I’d played, and how much they owed to the gods, but I was not sorry to benefit from their gratitude.
At any rate, we heaved
Then we rowed around to Methymna, and I put her stern on the beach and asked after Miltiades and my friend Epaphroditos, the archon basileus of the town. But the captain of the guard told me that Lord Epaphroditos was away at the siege of Miletus.
I needed money, and Epaphroditos’s absence left me no choice. I had to take a prize, and a rich one. My men needed paying, and I was down to no wine and no stores. I got one meal out of Methymna based on their memories of me and my famous name, but we sailed from that town like a hungry wolf.
We ran south along the east coast of Lesbos, and the beaches were empty at Mytilene, where the rebel fleet ought to have been forming up. And just south of Mytilene, we saw a pair of heavy Phoenicians guarding a line of merchantmen — Aegyptians, I thought as I stood on the new bow.
‘Get the mainmast up,’ I called to Mal, and motioned for Galas, who was steering, to take us about. We could no more face a pair of heavy Phoenicians than we could weather another storm. ‘Fuck,’ I muttered.
They were none too happy to see us when we put on to the beach at Mytilene, but men remembered me there, and I arranged for a meal and some oil and wine on credit — Miltiades’ credit.
I was sitting alone at a small fire on the beach, cursing my fate, or rather, my ignorance of events and my inability to accomplish anything, when a pair of local men — traders — came up out of the dark.
‘Lord Arimnestos?’ the shorter one asked.
‘Aye,’ I answered, and offered them wine.
In short, they had a cargo of grain — several cargoes, in fact — and they wondered if I’d like to have a go at smuggling it into Miletus. The rate of exchange they offered was good — good enough to give me some slack. So I loaded grain at their wharf and filled the ship, so that she sat deep in the water and my rowers cursed.
‘We’re fucked if we have to run,’ Idomeneus said.
‘Really?’ I asked, as if the thought had never occurred to me.
We sailed at sunset, ran along the coast of Lesbos before full dark fell and were off Chios in the light of a full moon. My oarsmen were none too happy with me, because this was flirting with Poseidon’s rage and no mistake, or so they said.
I made my sea-marks off Chios, and we passed silently along the beaches I had known like family homes in my youth. Just past false dawn, we passed the beach where Stephanos had lived before he went away to sea to be a killer of men.
There was a long, low trireme beached there.
My heart rose in my chest, and I abandoned my plan and put our stern to the beach, and we went ashore.
‘I thought you were done for,’ Stephanos said. ‘And I thought I could weather the cape by Methymna and run free in the channel, with the two islands to break the fury of the storm.’ He shrugged. ‘Those Iberians don’t know how to row, but they have a lot of guts. I got us around the corner, and they kept the bow into the seas, and we determined to land at Mytilene, but there was a current — I’ve never seen anything like it. We went past Mytilene in the blink of an eye, and north of Chios we hit a log that was drifting, broke a board amidships and started to take on water.’ Stephanos was a big, plain-spoken sailor who had grown to manhood as a fisherman, and his hands moved like an actor’s as he told the story.
His sister Melaina was beaming up at him. She, too, was a friend of my youth, from the heady days when I was newly freed, just finding my power as a man-at-arms. We kept grinning at each other.
‘Then what happened?’ Idomeneus asked.
‘The back of the ship snapped like a twig, we sank and the fishes ate us!’ Stephanos laughed. His sister swatted him, and he ducked. ‘One of the rowers shouted that we weren’t done yet — a Greek fellow, Philocrates. He put some heart in the boys and we got the head around, then the wind let up for a few moments, and in that time we got into a cove on the north shore — it was as if Poseidon agreed to let us live. I put the bow on the shingle, and to Hades with the ram — which took a right battering, and we’ve been a week repairing her. But we lived!’
‘As did we,’ I said, and we embraced again. I looked at his ship. ‘What do you call him?’ I asked.
Stephanos grinned his easy grin. ‘Well, we thought of calling him
