Then looked back at me. He embraced an Etruscan, and they spoke, quickly, and then he came back and took my hand.
Message received.
‘That’s his cousin,’ said the Greek-speaker. He gave me a grin. ‘We’ll see you right. I swear by the daimon of hospitality and the God of the Sea.’
We shook, and men cheered.
And the river flowed on.
It took me months to learn enough Etruscan to get a cup of wine. It sounds like the language petty kingdoms of northern Syria speak, and while I recognized the sounds, I didn’t understand a word. Gaius left us immediately, and many of the rowers — like men of their kind — were rowing Etruscan hulls for pay before the week was out, collecting small wages, tupping different porne and drinking better wine, but living the same life.
I collected what I thought of as ‘my people’, and Gaius got us a fair price for our share of the trireme Sea Sister.
A year had passed since I found Euphoria dead — or more. I was drinking wine with strangers, in a place so foreign they’d never heard of the fight at Marathon, where Keltoi were thicker on the ground than Hellenes. I had no urge to go home, but I was sick of being a chattel, and whatever had been broken was healing. I wanted to live, and I wanted to be a lord and not a slave. I thought often of the Keltoi woman, stepping over the side. I thought often of the moment when the sword fell at my feet. From the gods.
I thought of Dagon.
Neoptolymos wanted to go to Illyria and kill his uncle, but his plans were adolescent.
We didn’t have enough money to buy a ship. But the Etruscan cities in the north were fighting a war with the Keltoi, and I thought that my little oikia might earn money there.
One evening, as the money was running short, it came to a head in a taverna.
I threw a few obols on the table for wine. ‘I say we go north and see what we can pick up,’ I said. I looked at Doola, who shrugged.
‘Wrong way for me,’ he said. He grinned his huge grin. ‘Home is that way.’ He pointed a thumb over his shoulder.
‘So’s Carthage,’ Demetrios said. He was Hektor’s brother. By then, I knew his name. But he shrugged. ‘And Sicily.’
Seckla looked interested in going north to fight. Not Daud. He shrugged. ‘My home,’ he said, pointing north. Even though he and Gaius looked like brothers, he was a Kelt.
‘Come to Sicily,’ Demetrios said suddenly. ‘We can work the passage and save our money. Keep our arms.’ We had all kept the weapons of the Carthaginians — what we were allowed to keep. I had the dead Etruscan’s sword. ‘Listen, my people are always fighting the Greeks — no offence, brother — or the Carthaginians.’ He spat. ‘We’ll earn some money, buy a ship, be partners.’
Daud hugged us all. ‘I’ll go home,’ he said.
‘Where is home?’ Demetrios asked him. ‘My brother always wanted to ask you.’
Daud nodded. ‘North and north and north. Over the mountains and up the great river; over a range of hills by the big forts, and then down the River of Fish to the Northern Sea.’ He smiled. ‘I was a great fool to leave home, but I’m grown-up now.’
‘Where the tin comes from?’ Demetrios asked suddenly — eagerly. Greedily, perhaps.
Daud shook his head. ‘Yes and no. It comes through our town, but it’s from across the Sea-River, on Alba. Or so the traders say.’ He shrugged. ‘I’m not of the Veneti. They know all about the tin. And they don’t tell.’
‘Hektor dreamed of taking a ship to Alba,’ Demetrios said. ‘We were going to take on a cargo of tin, and die rich men.’
Why does insane adventure appeal to me? That’s the way I‘m made. I remember leaning forward, like that young man who has just become interested in my tale — eh? Slavery is dull, but Alba is exotic, eh?
Just so.
‘How far is Alba?’ I asked.
Demetrios shrugged. ‘No one knows. The Phoenicians have an absolute monopoly outside the Pillars of Heracles. Greek merchants used to go overland from Massalia — but those were gentler times.’
Doola shook his head. ‘A dream,’ he said, ‘is an important thing, but a cup of wine is better. The tin of Alba is legendary. But with a little luck we could buy a small ship, and have a good life.’
‘Don’t you want to go home?’ I asked.
Doola and Seckla exchanged a look.
‘No,’ Doola said. Sometimes he sounded like a Spartan.
I waved at the wine slave for more wine. ‘I, for one, would like to go to Alba.’
Daud leaned over. ‘If you are going to Alba, I’ll stay,’ he said.
Doola grinned. ‘Insane,’ he said.
‘We don’t even have a ship,’ Seckla complained.
Doola looked at me. ‘You can navigate?’
I nodded.
Demetrios looked offended. ‘I can navigate.’
Doola grinned his big grin. ‘This one has been a trierarch. I can see it. On a big ship — yes?’
I nodded.
Doola and Seckla exchanged a long look.
‘Let’s swear,’ Doola said suddenly.
So we swore out a pact. It took some time to argue the details, but we swore to be brothers, to split shares evenly: to save and buy a ship, sail her to Alba, take on a cargo of tin and bring it home. We were as drunk as lords by the time we put our right fists together and swore by Zeus and four other gods.
With other men, it would have been a drunkard’s oath. Something we talked about while we traded for bits of amber and salt fish.
But I was not the only man there under the hand of the fates. And when the seven of us were together, it seemed that there was nothing we could not do.
So we swore, and in the morning, we took ship for Sicily.
Now, I had been to Sicily several times by then, but never as a free man with a few obols and a sword, and it tasted better. This time, we landed on the beach by Syracusa, the greatest Greek city on the richest island in the ocean, and we gaped like country hicks. Syracusa is a magnificent city, the rival of Athens.
By all rights, we ought to have squandered our hard-earned drachma in brothels and gone back to sea as oarsmen, or at best, marines. But that’s not how it fell out because, as I say, the gods were close. On landing, we went together up to the big Temple of Poseidon on the headland and spent good money on a ram. I sacrificed him myself, and his blood poured across the altar, and even as a junior priest collected his blood, a senior priest was dividing the meat. It was everyday work for both of them, but a few routine questions — they were courteous men, those priests — established that we were sailors looking for a boat, and that the junior priest’s brother had a small boat to sell.
Twenty days of day-labour, and that boat was ours. It was scarcely forty feet long and just about wide enough to walk the length when the mast was down, but it could carry cargo. I guarded temples and carried sacks on the waterfront for a week, and then I found skilled work at a forge — and suddenly we had the silver to buy the boat. It was odd, and perhaps sad, that I made more in a day as an underpaid journeyman bronze-smith than all five of us earned doing the sort of day-jobs slaves usually did. But access to the shop allowed me to repair our war gear and to make us all some small things: cloak pins, clothes’ pins, buckles. My new master liked my work a great deal — he was mostly a caster, not a forger — and he paid me well enough.
So the other four went to sea with a cargo of salt fish for the cities of Magna Greca, and I stayed in Syracusa making cheap cloak clasps in bulk because, truth to tell, I was making more cash than the boat.
It may seem funny, after a life as a pirate and a lord, that I took pride in keeping a tiny tenement apartment in Syracusa clean and neat, in earning a good wage smithing bronze. Nor did I ever think they’d sail away and leave me. In some way that I still cannot define, we were bonded, as deeply as I was bonded with Aristides and-Well, now that I think of it, most of the friends of my boyhood died at Lades, and I had never really replaced them. Hermogenes, Idomeneus — both were fine men, but more followers than friends. Too many men saw me as a hero,
