‘We need to talk,’ I said.
He looked at me. ‘We certainly do,’ he said. ‘My daughter is very unhappy.’
I nodded. ‘I want to marry her,’ I said. ‘But I have a problem, and I want to admit it to you.’
He nodded. ‘You are already married.’
I shook my head. ‘She died; I loved her very much. That is not what this is about.’
He nodded. I could tell he was gritting his teeth. I wasn’t doing well.
‘I want to take an expedition to Massalia to buy tin,’ I said. ‘It may be more than that.’ I held up my hand, silencing his protest for a moment. ‘I am not what you think, master. I am a smith — but I am also a warrior, and sometimes a sea captain.’ I tried to read his expression. ‘I wish to ask her to marry me, but I wish you to know that if I die at sea, I have nothing to leave her. I think you want a son to manage the shop, and I am not that man.’
He sat back and polished a bronze cup on his writing table absently — but thoroughly. He was angry — I could see the anger in the red blotches on his face, and in his posture. Finally, he got up.
‘Leave this house,’ he said. ‘My curse on you. You have lied, and your lies have hurt us all. My daughter loves you. My wife loves you. I love you. And this is what you give us? That you wish to run away to sea?’ He shook his head slowly. ‘Have I treated you badly, that this is what you repay me with?’
I opened my mouth. I was shocked. I had expected — well, I had expected it would all be fine. I wanted Lydia — at this point, I was aware that Julia was keeping the girl from me for our mutual protection, so to speak. And in my worst nightmares, I hadn’t imagined that Nikephorus would send me from the door.
I walked to the door in a haze.
‘Don’t go to the gymnasium. You will never work in this town again,’ he said.
I stopped in the doorway, all youth and bluster. ‘Why?’ I asked. ‘I love her — I mean-’ I paused. ‘I never meant to hurt any of you.’
‘Really?’ he asked, and closed the door.
I walked slowly towards our tenement. Before I’d gone a hundred steps, I heard a woman shriek. It was the sound men made when they knew a wound was mortal, the sound women made when childbirth became too much to be borne.
I prayed to Poseidon, to Heracles, to Apollo and to Aphrodite.
They ignored me, because I had done this myself. And, of course, to her.
Anarchos sent me word, by a thug, that our deal was off.
The thug said it in just that way.
‘The patron says the deal is off. But he says, “No hard feelings”. Eh?’ The bruiser shrugged.
I shrugged too. We understood each other perfectly, the bruiser, the crime lord and I.
I drank too much, for the first time in my life. That is, I drank too much quite regularly for several days.
Doola found me drinking in the morning of the third day, and collected me and my bad temper and led me home.
‘We’re putting to sea,’ he said.
‘It’s winter,’ I answered.
None of them ever questioned me about the failure of my plan, or the loss of my work, or anything.
They stood by the hull of our boat, just about the same length as four horses, and together we pushed her down into the water on rollers. We warped her around to the pier that small merchants and smugglers used, and we loaded salt fish in bales. The bilge was already full of small amphorae.
Even in my mood of abject self-hatred, I was curious.
‘What’s in those, wine?’ I asked Seckla. They didn’t look like wine amphorae, unless it was a very fine vintage.
Seckla shrugged. ‘Doola got a deal,’ he said.
Doola grinned. ‘Fish oil. From the Euxine.’ He helped me hoist a bale of dried fish. ‘The importer died, and I bid at his estate auction. It may be worthless, but I paid about the value of the jars.’
Well. Everyone else was pulling his weight, even if I had failed.
We got to sea with a favourable breeze. I hadn’t sailed in months, I didn’t know the boat and I was miserable and temperamental. I objected to everything, disliked the way the sails were stowed, disliked the placement of the helmsman’s bench — on and on.
Everyone stayed out of my way.
And of course, I saw that I was not in command. Demetrios was in command.
Since my first slavery, I have always been a leader — often the leader. To see how well Demetrios commanded them… in fact, he didn’t command at all. He merely indicated what needed to be done, and it was done. He did it with smiles and shrugs.
It made perfect sense; he’d been running the boat for months without me. But it was another blow.
Luckily for me, we had a storm.
I don’t remember the storm very well. It came up slowly, and I remember that we had time to tie everything down, to run cables to the masthead, to brail up the sail until it was just a scrap of heavy weather canvas; time for each man to prepare himself a nest against the gunwales where he could be warm and dry — well, that’s a lie, but miserable in as much comfort as he could manage.
We were well north of Sicily, in the Etruscan Sea, and we had plenty of sea room, so we set the helm and sailed with the wind and waves under the windward quarter. Our boat climbed each wave, bobbing like a cork, and seemed to skid along the crest with an odd bumping motion until we slid down towards the next trough. It wasn’t the biggest sea I’d ever seen, and the sky never took on the purple-black colour I associate with the worst weather. But it took me outside myself; focused me on survival and teamwork.
The storm took three days to blow itself out, and on the morning of the fourth, we were scudding along in a stiff winter breeze in bright sunshine. The sea was a deep blue, the whitecaps were a startling white and the mainland of Italy was visible on the horizon.
And I felt better.
We made landfall. None of us knew where we were, but after a day tacking north, we saw a cluster of rocks that Doola and Demetrios recognized, and then we were in the estuary of the Po, one of the larger rivers on the Etruscan plain. We entered the mouth of the river, got our mast down and landed in the mud and grassy fields of Italy. It had been a remarkable passage with a fine landing, and in midwinter, such a passage was worth a trip to the temple and the sacrifice of a young ram. We were the only foreign boat in the river mouth.
After a meal on the fruits of our sacrifice, we slept and headed upriver. The wind and current were against us, and we had to row all the way. Even a small boat is a heavy burden with four rowers, and we had to row near our peak effort to make any headway at all.
We rowed for about half a day, and gave it up, and spent another night in the estuary. Ostia, that’s what the village is called. I remember that the wine was good.
We were windbound for four days, and despite the rain on the fifth, we were stir-crazy, and we set out again with rested muscles and a gentle breeze at our backs. We got the sail up, and between the fitful breeze and our new strength, we got upriver at a walking pace all day.
That night we slept on the boat, a tangle of arms and legs in a gentle but spray-filled wind. My cloak soaked through, and my spare.
On the third day out, we made Rome. Despite Daud’s carping, Rome was, and is, a fine town with handsome buildings. The core town is not much bigger than Plataea, and I could see real similarities. They call Plataea ‘Green Plataea’ for the contrast between our tilled fields and the desert that is most of Greece. Italy is fertile, but Rome’s surrounding plains are astonishingly fertile. The farms are larger than anything at home, with two-story houses, roofed in thatch, built around central courtyards.
There was a fine temple, visible from the water; it was painted in bright colours, with an impressive colonnade. We arrived on a sunny afternoon, and the red tile roof seemed like the welcoming hand of Zeus extended to us.
The town itself was unwalled, and seemed to have both planned and unplanned elements — hundreds of small houses built like peasant huts in Greece, shacks, really — and then a cluster of public buildings and larger houses. The waterfront and the ford over the river seemed the focal points, but perhaps that is merely a sailor’s perspective.
We beached on mud below the ford. The bank had been so completely cleared of trees as to make it very
