We hit, not ram to ram but cathead to cathead, and our forward-row gallery took the blow of theirs and both splintered, and men screamed as their bodies were ground to bloody pulp between the uncaring masses of the two ships. All the momentum came off both ships, and we coasted to a near stop, broadside to broadside, the height of a tall man apart.
Our archers began to shoot into their command deck, and their archers did the same, and then the grapnels flew. Indeed, both sides had decided to fight it out.
Men are foolish animals. No one needed to die. I don’t think there was a man on either ship who stood to gain much from victory. This wasn’t a struggle for freedom or domination, except at the lowest level. This wasn’t Lade or Marathon. This was more like two travellers wrestling at a crossroads, with no spectators.
But there was no less ferocity for all that.
Their marines came at us first. They wore full panoply and they were men who knew their business, and I thought, as a spectator, that they were better men than ours. And we were short by two men of our complement, and when each side has only a dozen armoured warriors, the loss of two is sufficient to swing a contest.
It was odd to sit and watch a deadly fight. One Etruscan went down immediately. A lucky shot from a boarding pike sent him over the side, where he sank without a trace. But our captain took his death wound in the very next fight — a moment’s inattention, a mistake by the man at his side and he was spouting blood. They dragged his bleeding body clear of the fight and dropped him near the stern, and then the melee grew desperate — the Carthaginians knew that they were losing, and the Etruscans knew they were close to winning.
The Etruscans pushed our marines relentlessly down the central gangway — a catwalk that was at the height of our heads and open to the weather. Our ship wasn’t covered with a solid deck, as some of the newest ships are today, so we could watch the whole fight.
The helmsman led a counter-attack from the stern, and his spear put down an Etruscan marine who fell across the catwalk about even with Doola’s bench, one forward from mine. His spear snapped, and he plucked an axe from behind his shield and spiked a second Etruscan in the temple. One of the Carthaginians at his side took a spear in the thigh at the same moment, and the two men fell in a tangle, right onto my bench. And the fight locked up — the catwalk could just fit two men wide, and there they were, like two teams pushing against each other at an athletic contest.
The dying Etruscan was in my lap, bleeding on me. And shitting on me, as well. His sword clattered at my feet out of his dead hand, and lay in a pool of his own blood on the boards where I rested my feet to row.
I had the strangest thoughts. And a great deal of time seemed to pass while I had them, all between one drip of blood from the corpse and another. Just for a few beats of my heart, I think that I saw the world as Heraclitus saw it. It seemed to me, and it still does, as one of the pivotal moments of my life.
The sword lay at my feet, beckoning me. Indeed, it all but called out to me.
I looked at it. But I didn’t take it, because I had a thousand conflicting thoughts in an instant.
It seemed to me that I was four feet lower than any opponent, and that after I cut the ankles of one or two men, I’d be skewered, shieldless, like a dog in a pit.
It seemed to me that I owed Carthage nothing.
I looked at the Carthaginian marines fighting — literally at my head — and I felt no kinship. No brotherhood. They paid, and I rowed, and I was not free to leave. Had Hektor been captain, had the crew been Sikels, I might have felt a bond.
And the man lying across my lap looked Greek. He smelled of coriander, his skin was brown and tanned and his eyes were like my eyes, and his armour — a handsome bronze thorax, a beautiful Corinthian helmet with plumes and a crest of red horsehair — was Greek armour. I didn’t feel the least inclination to risk my skin to help the barbarian Carthaginians fight — and win — against the barbarian Etruscans who at least looked Greek.
And yet another voice urged me to take up the sword.
Because with it in my hand, I was a different man. A free man. The master of my own destiny.
And then came a moment of superb, crystalline clarity. It was absurd.
I — a slave, or near enough — held the key to the fight. If I rose from my bench, sword in hand, the side I backed would triumph. I saw this as if it were written in carved letters on stone.
I, an unarmed slave, held the fate of twenty armoured men and four hundred rowers in my sword hand. Not because I was a great fighter. Not because I was Arimnestos of Plataea. But because I was in the right place, at the right moment of time, and a sword had fallen at my feet.
And I thought, this is how all the world is, in every minute, in every heartbeat in which every human makes any decision. This is the river into which Heraclitus said we could not twice dip our toes. This was the moment, and from this moment every other moment would flow.
I picked up the sword.
The river flowed on. Or rather, a dozen rivers flowed away from that moment. Alive, dead, slave, free — all flowed away from that moment.
The helmsman swung over an Etruscan marine’s shield and cut the fingers off the man’s sword hand.
I caught Doola’s eye. He, too, had a knife in his hand.
So did Hektor’s brother.
I had never spoken a word to him since he poured me wine in the market of some tiny town in Sicily. But now he watched me.
I decided. I swear that in that moment, I saw the future — that the stream came together in a mighty river, and time flowed. I once joked to Doola that we won the Battle of Mycale in that moment, he and I. Fifteen years before the Persians beached there, and we landed our marines, and fought it out for the supremacy of the world.
Every stream flowed from there.
I rose on my bench, dumping the dead Etruscan into the benches below me but wrestling the corpse for his aspis, the round shield on his left arm. It was a perfect fit, and that meant it would not come off cleanly. My moment was passing.
I gave up on the shield. The kopis whirled up over my head, and I cut — and severed the helmsman’s foot at the ankle. He screamed and fell to the deck, and I cut his throat.
Doola was off his bench and onto mine, crawling aft, with Hektor’s brother and Seckla right behind him. Seckla stripped the helmsman of his dagger and sword as he passed, and Hektor’s brother had his spear — all as smoothly as if we’d planned this a hundred times. Perhaps we had. In truth, I think that the fates were there — immanent. At our shoulders.
And then the four of us burst off the benches into the rear files of the Carthaginians. I got my hands on one man’s shoulders and pulled him down, and Seckla cut a man’s hamstrings and Hektor’s brother rammed his spear deep into the side of a third marine under his fine bronze corselet.
In three heartbeats, every top-deck rower was up. The last marines and officers died in a paroxysm of blood.
And then I had time to get the aspis on my arm.
And face the Etruscans.
The lead Etruscan stepped back and raised his helmet. Grinned.
The two ships rose and fell on the swell.
‘Speak Greek?’ I asked.
He looked at the man behind him.
He had a magnificent octopus on his shield and his helmet. He had ruddy blond hair, and didn’t look a bit like a Greek. He was as handsome as Paris. He raised his helmet and nodded.
‘A little,’ he said.
‘I don’t know about the rest of these men,’ I said slowly and carefully, ‘but I’ve had enough of being a rower and a slave. If you’ll give your word to the gods that you’ll free us ashore and give us a share of the value of this ship, why, we’ll row her to port for you. Otherwise-’ I tapped my sword against my shield rim.
The other oarsmen made a lot of noise.
Ten marines can cow two hundred oarsmen — but not under these conditions. Not when we were already up off our benches, with many of us armed.
The Greek-speaker nodded to me and called to the other ship. I didn’t understand a word.
But Gaius appeared at my hip — he was a lower-deck rower. He shouted with joy and clambered past me.
