Even that fight became routine. It went on and on, and my left shoulder began to fail, and I assumed I would die.
But Neoptolymos had more left in him than I, and he pinned my shoulder to the spar in a clamp of iron. He saved me.
And then the storm abated, sailing by as quickly as it had overtaken us. The tone of the roar went down, the rhythm of the waves changed and the sky lightened. The thunder strokes came slower and slower.
I had time to think that it was like the end of a fight, or a battle, when men come apart, out of the rage of Ares, and the sound of spear on shield comes less and less frequently. I know it well.
Before I could think another thought, or pray to Poseidon, we were alone on the Great Blue, our hands linked to a wooden spar. The sun pounded us, and the sea calmed, and we were alone.
3
We were only a few stades from the coast — indeed, as soon as the clouds blew past, I could see Aetna, the beach and trees to the south. I think I might have swum to shore.
But it was not to be. A coaster — a small ship with one mast and a few oarsmen — came out of the storm, throwing a fine bow wave. She was well handled, cutting slantwise across the wind, tacking back and forth in the straits.
A lookout must have spotted us. I was facing the other way and missed all this. Neoptolymos grunted once or twice, but I don’t think he was fully alive at that point, and both of us were parched.
Perhaps I baked for fifteen minutes in the sun, and then I was shocked to hear a hail, and the coaster was a stade away. It was as if a sea monster had surfaced by my side.
The boat dropped its scrap of sail — the breeze was still stiff — and four oarsmen pulled towards me, almost into the eye of the wind, moving the little ship. I paddled weakly towards them.
They pulled me aboard. They spoke Greek, in a way, more like trade lingo. I assumed they were Sikels, and I was right. The leader — trierarch seems too grand a term for a forty-five-foot trading boat — ran his hands over my injuries, gave me a hard smile and nodded to another, younger man who had to be his younger brother. Then he turned to Neoptolymos.
After the sort of examination a man gives to a ram he’s buying in the agora, the two Sikels spoke to each other. The older man’s name was Hektor. Even here, among barbarians, the poet’s work lived. That gave me a ray of hope.
The ray of hope lasted until we found ourselves assigned to oars. The shackles were more figurative than real, but it was clear that I was rowing for my food, at least. Since I could barely speak with any of the men on board, I assumed I was a slave. Again. I was with two men with heavy, hooked noses and deep-set eyes, and two men who were as black as any men I’d ever seen, and Neoptolymos.
On a positive note, we were not forbidden to talk, and as soon as we’d rowed the ship around the headland, the work of an hour, the nearer African smiled at me. ‘Doola,’ he said. I took it for his name.
‘Arimnestos,’ I said. I tapped my chest.
‘Ari?’ Doola asked.
Close enough.
I nodded.
The younger African tapped his chest. ‘Seckla!’ he said sharply.
‘Ari,’ I said again.
You get the picture.
The other two men were not Phoenicians, although they looked the part, nor were they Sikels or Hebrews or anything I knew. They didn’t speak much. But within a few hours, I knew that the ruddy-haired man was Gaius and the dark-haired one was Daud, and that they didn’t really share a language, either. They just looked as if they did. In fact, I’ll save time and say that Gaius was Etruscan and Daud was all Keltoi, from northern Gallia, and spoke a few words of Greek and a few more of Sikel and no other tongue but his own.
It is amazing how much information you can convey without many words. And it is perhaps a comment on my former servitude how happy I was on that boat. The food was good, mostly grilled fish. We had wine every night. The Sikels treated us as — well, more as employees than slaves, and I never was entirely sure as to my status. We moved from small port to small port — really, just a stone house and some wattle huts on a headland with a beach. We rowed past the Greek towns and their temples and familiar smells. We sailed past the Carthaginian towns and well out to sea, and it occurred to me that my new hosts feared the Carthaginians far more than they feared the Greeks, the Italiotes or the Etruscans.
Mostly, we loaded dry fish and sold metal. Every town had a small forge and a bronze-smith, and our ingots of copper and tin were their life’s blood. I was shocked when I finally understood the price of tin. It was absurdly high, and I thought of my time as a smith on Crete — about as far from the tin mines of northern Illyria as a man can be, and still be in the world — and wondered. What had happened? Tin hadn’t ever been that high.
You cannot make bronze without tin. And the tin has to be high quality. You don’t need to add much tin to the copper to make bronze — a little more than one to twenty. But without tin, all you have is soft copper, whether you are making cook pots or helmets.
So an increase in the price of tin — affected everyone.
Neoptolymos was the only man to whom I could really talk. As I recovered a little, so did he, and I went back to work on his Greek. He was sullen, and it was only then that I began to understand the depth of his betrayal. The man I had heard mentioned on the beach — Epidavros — was his uncle. Neoptolymos didn’t need me to tell him who had sold him to the Carthaginians. He already knew. He chewed on his desire for revenge every minute. Illyrians are good haters, and in this case, I think his need for revenge kept him alive.
Mind you, I thought of Dagon constantly. I hated him: I wanted to torture him to death, and I knew, in my heart, that I was afraid of him. This had not happened to me before, and the sensation was like the ache of a tooth. I had to probe it with my tongue.
A week passed, and another. We were not shackled or roped at night. I began to prowl the encampment when the boat was beached, testing the boundaries. We were well along the west coast of Sicily — I have no notion greater than that — in a town that had several stone houses with tile roofs, and I had been a rower for perhaps three weeks when I walked boldly down the beach away from the encampment and into the streets of the town. I made it to their very small agora just before dark, and there was the younger brother, sitting on a blanket, with various ingots of Cyprian copper and a few knucklebones of tin — clearly not Illyrian tin, let me add, because that comes in plainer ingots.
Hektor’s brother rose from his blanket, walked over to me and put a hand on my arm. But there wasn’t any threat.
I shrugged. ‘I want to see the town,’ I said in Greek.
He shrugged and let go my arm.
I walked about. In truth, they were subsistence farmers with no temple and very little to see — a pair of stone statues that were really just phallic pillars. A bronze brooch was the town’s chief adornment for a woman, and only one man wore a sword, and it was more like a dagger.
In the days of my lordship, I’d have walked past them all like a king. As a semi-slave rower, I found the town fascinating. Or rather, a welcome break.
In a very few minutes, I was back in the small agora, and Hektor’s brother met me, led me to the blanket and offered me a cup of wine. So I sat with him. Drank his wine. And, with a smile, got up and walked back down to the boat. I still didn’t know his name, because his brother never used it.
It may seem odd to you, thugater, but I was not unhappy. My body was healing, and no one was unfriendly. Doola and I were becoming comrades. I learned some of his words — I still remember that nitaka means ‘I want’. He learned more of mine. Enough words that when I came back from my wander — he had been sleeping — he rose, threw a chiton over his nudity and sat with me.
‘Was it good?’ he asked. Let me just say that there were grunts, gestures and incomprehensible words interspersed with our very small shared vocabulary. I’ll leave that out.
