ruefully.
‘It is hard to take orders from a younger man,’ he said.
I nodded.
‘When you are my age, see how you like it.’ He looked as if he was going to say more, but he swallowed it. ‘Never mind. Cimon, my apologies.’
‘And mine to you, sir. I spoke in heat.’ The two clasped arms like men in the gymnasium.
I looked at the stack of copper ingots. It was worth a small fortune — to one man. It was, to be frank, worthless to two hundred oarsmen and marines.
I looked at the two of them. ‘Gentlemen,’ I said, ‘this is a small amount of booty. I propose that, rather than dividing it, we have a foot race, and the fastest man takes all the copper. And we dedicate the game to Olympian Zeus, pour the wine down our throats and offer some of the sheep I see on that hill as sacrifices.’
Cimon laughed.
Dionysus laughed.
A seventeen-year-old oarsman from Etrusca won the foot race. We crowned him in olive and his mates helped him carry his copper onto Gaius’s ship. Gaius put his olive wreath on his mast for luck.
That’s the incident that I remember.
Oh, I ran. Of course I ran. I lost in the first heat — Aristides the Younger flew past me from the start. I was placed fifth among eight men.
I felt old. But men said I had made a fine decision, as wise as Odysseus.
As the sun set on our sacrifices, and their smoke climbed to heaven — Cimon was a priest of Zeus, of course, like all the men of his clan — Dionysus put his arm around me. ‘Let’s sacrifice the prisoners,’ he said.
Men began to call for it. Men who surprised me. Young Aristides, for example, and many of the other unblooded young. Paramanos smiled and looked away. Doola shook his head vehemently. Sittonax sidled closer to me.
‘I had no idea,’ he said. ‘I’ve never seen a Greek sacrifice a man.’
‘And you won’t here,’ I said. ‘By Zeus, are we as bad as barbarians?’ I seldom swear by Zeus. But some things I walked across the sand, as drunk as a sailor, and stumbled to the prisoners with a hundred oarsmen and officers behind me. Most of them knelt in the sand. The Carthaginian helmsman grabbed Paramanos’s knees and began to beg for his life in Phoenician.
The trierarch eyed me steadily. He didn’t kneel.
‘You are a free man,’ I said. ‘Go — walk away.’
He didn’t say a word. He caught the eyes of his mates and picked up a bundle at his feet. Paramanos, somewhat surreptitiously, handed the helmsman a sword.
The Carthaginians were off up the beach before most of my audience knew I’d let them go.
‘You really are too soft for this,’ Dionysus said, wine-soaked breath in my face.
I shrugged. ‘Perhaps,’ I said.
Like I said, that’s the only incident that sticks in my head.
Word must have been out that there was a squadron at sea: the Adriatic was as empty as a mud puddle after rain. The morning after we released the Carthaginians, the wind came up — a favourable wind — and we sailed across the Adriatic. Our swords were sharp, and we were as ready as men can be.
We landed south of Dyrachos an hour before nightfall on a late summer evening: the sun took his time going down to the west, over the mountains, and we were ashore and camped before the night was dark. Insects chirped and it sounded like Greece. It smelled like Greece.
We built no fires, but rolled in our cloaks and slept on the sand, and in the morning we were up long before the sun.
‘Now I need a horse,’ Neoptolymos said. He and the Spartan, Brasidas, stood together, both in full armour.
‘Because you don’t want to walk?’ I asked.
‘I intend to ride around and raise my friends and relatives,’ he said. ‘Dyrachos is sixty stades — that way.’
I had slightly different notions of how to proceed, based on years of experience with Miltiades. I sent all my archers inland under Ka, and before I was done with my stale bread and sour wine, Ka was back, all but bouncing on the balls of his feet like an eager hound with a fine bay led by the halter.
He had four prisoners and a dozen horses. Ka was from the far south of Aegypt — Nubia, and not Numidia, South even of the Kingdom of Adula, of which, if you stay with me long enough, you’ll hear more. To be honest it was years before I truly understood the difference. But both peoples love horses, ride superbly and view horse- thieving as a natural part of life.
We started our march for Dyrachos before the sun cleared the distant coast of Italy, and Ka and his men were all mounted, with Seckla laughing along with them. Seen together, Numidians and Nubians are as different as Keltoi and Hellenes, and yet they rode like Scythians, knees high, hips moving with the gait of the animal, and with their dark skin they looked like centaurs on their stolen bays.
I kept Neoptolymos from riding inland. I feared that he would be taken or killed, and that he would give himself away. He accepted my ‘guidance’ with an ill grace, and the command party was a surly group as we trudged inland over the first low ridge. The khora was incredibly prosperous — fields of oats and barley stretching away in a beautiful patchwork. Harvest wasn’t far off.
Once we were clear of the coastal scrub, we had excellent sight lines — which, of course, meant we could be easily observed. I sent Ka and his scouts well ahead, blessing the gods I had made such a provident purchase. The Nubians knew their business: they rode south and east to the horizon, collecting every horse on that flat plain and terrifying the inhabitants.
I have to say a word about Illyria. The Illyrians are like Hellenes — indeed, many of their aristocrats claim Hellenic descent, and they share our gods and heroes, although they have some cruel monsters of their own. They are far more warlike than Hellenes — the whole of Illyria is in a perpetual state of war, and every man’s hand is against everyone else, or rather, perhaps I should say that every aristocrat’s hand is against every other aristocrat. They have no ‘hoplite class’ of farmers. There are only the rich, and slaves. The only real way for slaves to win their freedom is by fighting: they arm their slaves for war, and the bravest are promoted to the aristocracy. On the other hand, the least effective warriors are captured and made slaves, or killed.
You might think that this vicious system would create superb warriors. Perhaps it does, but I never met them. Mostly it creates brutal, ignorant aristocrats and a society of semi-slave land-tillers with nothing but contempt for their ‘lords’, who can’t seem to grow food or protect them. Neoptolymos was a fine man and a pretty fair spearman — but I taught him that. And slavery mellowed him.
By the time the sun was high in the sky, we’d marched twenty stades or more and we had a dozen prisoners — local men, all ‘unfree’ but more like overseers than like slaves. Neoptolymos insisted we take them, because he said they would report to his uncle if they could.
In fact, Neoptolymos, after seven years with me, had reverted to being an Illyrian. He wanted to kill them all.
From the eldest of them, we heard the story of the last few years. Epidavros had seized power after arranging for Neoptolymos’s murder, but after that, things had gone wrong. He had seized power with the support of the Carthaginians, but he failed to deliver the tin he had promised, and so the Carthaginians had abandoned him. His own cousins had begun to raid his borders, and take his land and his slaves, and he had spent the last two years in a constant state of war. Last summer — while we were bringing our tin over the mountains — he had gone to sea with a dozen pentekonters and taken a pair of Phoenician merchantmen, and Carthage had sent a reprisal raid which had burned the shipping in his harbour, including a pair of Greek merchantmen who he had seen as his most promising new allies.
I’d like to moralize and say that Epidavros got what he had coming to him, but that’s Illyria.
However, because of the Carthaginian raid, his petty kingdom was as alarmed as the house of a man who has been robbed. The overseers all agreed that by now, Epidavros had been fully informed of our force — he had coastal towers every few stades, or so they claimed.
Neoptolymos wanted to start burning things.
We camped that night at the edge of a stand of ancient oak trees in the foothills, having marched farther east
