And the next day, I sailed for Athens, with Cimon, Harpagos and Paramanos under my stern. And Sekla on my deck. He embraced Doola, but he came with me.
‘You get wounded in every fight,’ Doola said. ‘In the end, you’ll be killed.’
Sekla grinned. ‘Everyone dies,’ he said. ‘I want to see Athens. And then perhaps I’ll go home.’
The full irony of the next part can’t come home to you, children, unless you understand that I thought that was the end of adventure. I was at Sardis, Lade and Marathon. I went to Alba.
I was thirty-one years old, and it was time to grow up and go home. Face the burned-out forge. Kiss my sister. Grow a crop. Perhaps arrange for another wife; children.
Certainly that’s what Cimon and Harpagos and Paramanos and Sekla and I discussed the next two nights, as we worked our way down the coast of Illyria, past Leucas and landed at last at Ithaca. I felt like Odysseus returning, and we made some jokes. The truth is, too much blood had been spilled at Dyrachos for too little, and we were not ourselves. I have found that men of blood can go into black moods for little reason. That was one of those times, for me. Indeed, as we rowed south towards the Peloponnese, the same darkness began to come over me that had driven me off the cliff at Alkyonis when I tried to kill myself. I was savage to Megakles, who bore it with amused resignation, and to Ka, who glowed with his own rage, and to Sekla, who grinned and paid me no further attention.
That night, though, I saw a satyr near Pheia. Men say they are myth; other men say they live only in the Chersonese, or only in Scythia, or only around Olympia. I know what I saw, and the wonder of seeing it transfigured me. I had walked off the beach to have a piss, and I came back all but glowing. Cimon believed me — told me he had seen one himself in the south of the Peloponnese — while Brasidas ridiculed me and told me to grow up.
Brasidas had come with us as a passenger — he had the money to pay his mess bill — or the term of his exile was over. Either way, it might have been the longest speech I’d heard from him up until that date.
‘You sound more like Thales than like a Spartan,’ I said.
‘All Spartans are philosophers,’ he said.
‘They have to talk about something in between fighting,’ Cimon said.
I had decided to sail all the way to Athens to sell my loot, before going across the mountains to Boeotia. In truth, I think I was delaying my return home. Now that I’d decided on it, it scared me. Or rather, confronting my sister scared me, and the thought that she might have died in the meantime.
I thought a great deal about Odysseus, to tell you the truth.
The next day, the sky was red at dawn and we debated spending the day on the beach, but the rain, when it came, was gentle, and we put to sea.
But the visibility got worse and worse, and by midday, I couldn’t see any of the other ships. The wind was rising, and I turned the bow for shore.
And the wind changed.
We had had the wind alongside all day, and now it swung from west to east and came up with a howl, almost as fast as I can tell the story. An hour later it was as dark as night, the wind howled in the rigging and the rowers were exhausted, and I knew I couldn’t land the ship in this.
I had sailed the Western Ocean and I had been captain of my own ship for fifteen years, at that point. But I would have liked to have Paramanos, Harpagos or Demetrios or Doola at my side — or Miltiades or Cimon, for that matter. All of them, better yet.
I was with Megakles at the steering oars.
‘We have to turn and run before the wind,’ I shouted.
Wearily, he nodded.
Well, I hoped he agreed.
I ran down the sail deck to Leukas and Sekla. Held their arms while I shouted in their ears — that’s how bad the wind was. Leukas looked at the sea for a moment, as if he hoped that something would save us — a friendly sea monster, perhaps.
Then we began to run along among the oar benches, crawling when we had to. We told every oarsman what we were going to do. Every one.
Because turning a galley across big waves in a high wind is suicide. We had no choice. Only excellent luck and fine rowing and the favour of Poseidon would win us through.
I ordered Sekla to get the boat-sail up. I needed Leukas to get the oarsmen around, and I was going to be at the steering oars with Megakles. But the boatsail required timing and boatsail courage — and Sekla had plenty of both. He took Ka and the archers.
Even from the bow I could see nothing to the east, but I thought I could hear breakers under the wind.
There was no time to think.
I got on the starboard steering oar. I caught Megakles’ eye, and he nodded.
The wind roared. We rose on a wave.
‘About ship!’ I called, with every force I had.
The port-side rowers reversed their benches as the bow fell off from the wind. The wind wanted us broadside. We were still climbing a great breaker.
And then the port-side oars bit.
The starboard oars pivoted through another stroke.
There was a crack forward, where Ka had cut the boltrope of the boatsail, and it filled. Filled, cracked, slapped… and tore in half.
But in those heartbeats while it was intact, it swung the ship a third of the way around, and the oars now had purchase, and the bow was a little west of south.
We hit the top of the wave, and we weren’t broadside on, and started down.
The two oar-banks gave a great heave, like hoplites pushing at the climax of battle.
Our bow came around another point while the wind screamed, and then We were around. Even the ruins of the boatsail were enough to keep the bow pointed west, and now we were running free, and the rising sea was under the stern. Megakles used to swear we were close enough to Prote that he could have thrown a rock and hit the shore. I don’t know.
I never looked back.
We spent the night at sea, running before the wind and rain. The turn was terrifying, but it was, in many ways, less fearsome than that soaking, endless maw of darkness and freak waves that rolled across our seas against the wind, making my life and Megakles’ an endless torment of crisis.
But we did it. On and on, and finally the sky was a paler grey.
The mainmast went about morning. The pole was bare, of course, but the force of the wind had borne upon it all night, sometimes lashing it back and forth, and never had I thought so ill of the ship’s rig. And finally, there was a thump from below, a scream as an oarsman was pulped by the swinging stump of the mast, and then it was gone over the side.
Will of the gods. It might just as easily have gone through the shell of the ship and broken us in half, but it didn’t. It killed one man. It only had two heavy ropes supporting it, and we cut them away with swords as fast as we could — took a wave that soaked every man aboard and nigh filled us with water, and then the rags of the boatsail took the windboatsail and we were back on course, bailing like mad.
That was the last gust of the storm; we were all but sunk. The wave that struck us filled the bilges, and a trireme is a difficult ship to empty of water. Our rowers were already exhausted, and now they were trying to pull the weight of five thousand mythemnoi of water through the waves. The boatsail kept us alive, but we were wallowing, and had the storm risen again to its former ferocity, we would have foundered right there.
We bailed and bailed, and rigged our wooden pumps, and used helmets and buckets and clay pots and anything we had to get water over the side. We tossed the dead man’s corpse to Poseidon.
Little by little, we won our ship back from the sea.
I can’t tell you how long we bailed. I only know that every man not rowing was standing in the icy water between the thranites’ legs, passing buckets up or taking empty ones down and dumping them as fast as we could. And then, when Megakles reported that we were steering and the wind had died away, I went up to the sail deck — curiously naked without a mainmast — to a calm grey day with a hint of a breeze and every chance of sun later.
The sea.
