Doola was the only one to meet my eyes. ‘Two years,’ he said. ‘Maybe three, until we’ve got secure trade connections in Massalia and Etrusca and Latinium. Etrusca is rich, brother. There’s no reason for us to be here. Sicily is not the hub. Etrusca is.’
I laughed. Shook my head. ‘How’s Gaius?’ I asked.
‘He’s going to come back to us — with a small ship of his own,’ Neoptolymos said. ‘We visited his city.’
‘It’s a dung heap compared to Syracusa,’ Daud said. He shrugged. ‘And everything they have is taken from my people. But they are rich, and they buy tin — all ten cities. Eleven cities. However many; they pack more cities into the plains of Tusca than we have cities in all of Gaul.’
I shook my head. ‘I’ve got myself into trouble,’ I admitted. ‘If I stay here two years, I’ll be a married shop- owner with a pot belly and four kids. And no mistake.’
Their faces fell.
For the very first time, it occurred to me that we might part ways. Somewhere in another world, off to the east, I had a ship, a family, some wealth and the burned-out remains of a prosperous farm. I could always make a go of it there.
I could marry Lydia and take her to Plataea.
I could go and find Briseis. By Aphrodite, friends, I never, ever, forgot Briseis for more than ten heartbeats. Even then.
Heh.
‘If we do as you suggest,’ I said to Doola, ‘we work our way up to the Alba run gradually. I see the value in it. But it is my observation — I hear the gossip here — that the Carthaginians have all but closed the Gates of Heracles. I don’t know of any ship, Greek or Etruscan, that trades with Iberia or Alba. They carry it all, and they sink anyone who tries to run the gauntlet. Am I right?’
Neoptolymos took a swig of wine while keeping me in the corner of his eye, and he gave a hard grin. ‘That sounds like a fight.’
Doola nodded, biting his lip. ‘It’s true.’
‘Gaius is a trader, and he’s filled your heads with trade. I’m a bronze-smith, but I’m also a warrior. If we go to Alba — even if we only go to the north coast of Iberia! — we will have to fight and sail and sneak, and fight again, if we must. And if we spend two or three years learning the trade, the bastards will see us coming. We need to take them by surprise — a crew of nobodies, a ship they don’t know.’
‘Two ships,’ Demetrios said with a shrug. ‘ Amphitrite goes too. We can fill her full of stores, and take a rowed ship for speed when we need it. Two ships double the profit, and make it more likely one gets home.’
I shrugged right back at him. ‘Ten ships? A couple of triremes?’
Seckla punched me in the arm.
‘When I touch our patron for money, he’s not going to want to let us sail away,’ I said. ‘Not without security.’ I shrugged again. ‘If we do it, we can’t ever come back here.’ In fact, I knew I wasn’t coming back anyway.
Oh, the gods must have laughed.
Well, I had their attention.
‘Listen,’ I said. ‘We can build our second ship right now. We must have five hundred drachmas. I have more due to me at the shop. You have more in the tin. Let’s get the hull under way. When it’s finished, we hire rowers to get us to wherever slaves are cheap. And we buy them and train them ourselves.’
‘Now?’ Doola said.
I gave another shrug. ‘Or we give up the whole enterprise. Look, it is insane. We’re six former slaves, and we’re going to take on the Carthaginian trade empire and sail across the Outer Sea to Alba? I agree. We can stay home, make money, take wives and be fat.’
Doola smiled bitterly. ‘I knew my plan would founder on the rock of your desire for heroism.’
I shook my head. ‘No. It doesn’t have to be like that. If we all say so, we’re absolved of our oaths and we can walk away.’
But they all shook their heads. That’s how fate works. We knew we wanted something impossible, but we weren’t willing to give it up.
The next day, Doola, Demetrios and I hired horses and rode along the coast to Marissilia, a little port full of fishing boats around the corner from Syracusa. It was sixty stades from the taverna where Anarchos sat and ruled the waterfront. I knew it wasn’t far enough, but I had a master to serve and work to do, and my time and funds were limited.
We walked from boatbuilder to boatbuilder. The two largest were scarcely interested in our triakonter, and the smaller didn’t have the labour to build her. The triakonter, or thirty-oared ship, was the backbone of most small military expeditions, and was also the most useful size for a rowed merchant ship.
The day was lost.
Lydia vanished into the women’s quarters with her courses, and I was able to work without interruption, to meet my master’s eye and to ask for another day off and receive it, as well as a purse with sixty drachma — my share of five helmets, all completed. The greaves and breastplates were now on my part of the shop floor.
I went and trained, boxed, sparred with the wooden swords and Polimarchos put bruises into my side. ‘That’s for standing me up, you ingrate whoreson,’ he growled. ‘I hope she was worth it.’
Your trainer always knows.
I was having trouble with my life. I kept different parts in different jars — I was a smith, I was an athlete, I was a sailor. I was looking for a shipbuilder, but I couldn’t ask Nikephorus to help me, because that would lead very quickly to some shocking admissions. That meant I couldn’t ask Polymarchos anything, either, or it would be known throughout the guild in a matter of days.
On one of those evenings, as the cold winter rain fell and the masseur worked my muscles, I remember two middle-aged men, both smiths, coming and sitting on my bench. They were good-natured, but firm.
‘You’re cutting into our business, you scamp,’ one said. He was Diodorus, a master armourer who worked in a different street. I knew him well. The other I didn’t know as well.
‘Charge more for your damned helmets!’ the younger man said. ‘Or make them worse.’
They both laughed. But I took their point immediately, and when I went back to Nikephorus, he nodded.
‘I’ve heard the same. We’ll raise our price. And refuse a few commissions. I’m sorry, lad, but I don’t want Diodorus to decide to go back to casting brooches. He used to, and he gave it up so that I could have that part of the business.’ He tugged his beard and looked at me under his bushy eyebrows. ‘Don’t take it personally. But you have to work with people.’
That meant I was going to make a great deal less money.
On the other hand, I was lucky my master had shared the money with me from the start.
‘I’m making some pieces for trade… and the panoplies for Lydia’s suitors,’ I said with a smile that was false. ‘After that, I’ll stick to stock for a while.’
He ruffled my hair. I felt the traitor I was.
‘Lydia misses you,’ he said. And grinned. ‘When’s the wedding?’
I shook my head, put my eyes down and tried to hide. ‘Not discussed. Yet.’
He nodded.
‘Best discuss it,’ he said, and rose to his feet. ‘Soon.’
I left work and walked down to the port, where Neoptolymos and I watched a dancer while drinking decent wine. She was good. But I remember thinking at her every gyration that Lydia’s hips were more expressive when she rose from her seat than this golden girl was as she moved.
Ah, lust. Eros.
We gave her the tips she expected from a couple of men and finished our amphora of wine, and then we wandered the waterfront, peering into boats.
‘I’ll need a trireme to get my place back,’ Neoptolymos said, out of the darkness.
‘I’ll find us one, when it’s time,’ I said. ‘This will sound foolish, but I own a trireme. If she still swims above the waves, I’ll put her at your service.’
He was sitting on the dog’s head that held the mooring lines for a pair of smugglers owned by Anarchos. Pretty little twenty-oared boats with lines like racehorses.
He laughed. ‘You’re an odd one. You own a trireme. You fought at Marathon. Yet you are living in a tenement in Syracusa with a pack of former slaves, trying to sail around the world.’ He punched me. ‘Why in Hades don’t we
