difficult to moor our boat. After I had stood for what seemed like a long time, searching the bank for an old stump, a small boy appeared.
He spoke in a foreign tongue and held out his hand. I had no idea what he was saying — he wasn’t speaking Etruscan. After several sallies, I understood that he wanted six coppers — the words were enough like Greek to make them out, especially when he ticked them off on his fingers.
Doola jumped ashore.
‘It was the same last time. He’ll find a place to moor us.’ Doola laughed, and paid the boy in Sicilian obols. The boy looked at them, squinted at Doola and then nodded sharply. Two other boys came out with a heavy stake and a maul, drove the stake into the bank and moored us, bow and stern.
‘Romans can make money out of anything,’ Doola remarked.
Seckla ran off on his long legs to find Gaius, and we set to unloading the boat. There was a pier, but the charges were exorbitant, and the bank was firm enough to get our bales of dry fish over the side and onto our tarpaulins with relative ease. Before the tenth bale was ashore, a dozen men had appeared to sneer at our fish, and before the twentieth bale was ashore, Doola was bargaining furiously.
Gaius appeared in the midst of this, embraced every one of us, handed round a flask of wine and then issued a set of rapid-fire orders in the local tongue. He ordered four bales of fish set aside for his own use, he changed the bid price in the ongoing dickering, and he asked me to fetch him one of the jars of fish oil.
I had, in effect, been demoted to the level of holding mooring lines and fetching fish oil.
And I was fine with that. I wanted to work, to be useful.
He broke the seal on the first amphora and a smell hit us that was like raw human sewage. It was incredible.
He grinned, and dipped the tip of a finger into the stuff. Well, no one likes the smell — they say you can smell the factories in the Euxine from a hundred stades away.
He tasted it, and grinned. In Greek, he said: ‘Four for me. The rest, I’ll find a proper buyer for those.’
He had a donkey, which he left with us, and he walked away — he was wearing a good himation and carried a stick, like a gentleman, and he appeared unhurried, but when I got the next armload of the heavy little amphorae ashore, Gaius was gone.
He came back with a trio of slaves and a wagon. Doola and Demetrios had sold ten of the amphorae at a healthy two silver coins apiece — a wild profit — and we had covered the costs of the voyage on the salt fish. Sailing in winter is dangerous, but the profits are excellent, if you live. In the dead of winter, a spot of fish stew, a cup of good wine, a taste of fine fish sauce — these mean more.
In fact, by the time Gaius returned, Daud and Neoptolymos weren’t unloading any more. They were standing guard with spears over the bales of fish. No one threatened violence and there was no out-and-out theft, but no one thought the two warriors were slacking, either.
We made a good profit. The fish oil was not all good — in fact, about one amphora in three was ruined or too old — but what was good was very good. Doola had performed his usual miracle, and we cleared almost fifty drachmas or their local, Latin equivalent. We climbed up the Capitoline Hill and made sacrifice at the Temple of Jupiter Optimus Maximus. They, like the Etruscans, had the same gods as Hellenes, but with different names, some interesting and some barbaric — Minerva for Athena, Jupiter for Zeus, and so on. Jupiter Optimus Maximus is ‘Zeus Greatest and Best’, and was worshipped in much the same way as our ‘Zeus Sator’. Poseidon — Neptune in Rome — was not much worshipped, but we gave him our sheep, to the puzzlement of the two priests, both of whom were prominent local aristocrats, just as they are at home. Gaius introduced us to everyone as his companions in slavery, which didn’t seem to have anything of the same stigma in Roma that it had in Syracusa.
The town was too small to hold our interest long, and had no shipbuilding. I saw some fine metalwork, most of it done by slaves, and I was very impressed by the Etruscan-style painting on plaster, which seemed to me much better than that which I had seen in Boeotia, and as good as the painting in Attica.
We picked up a cargo of tanned hides — rich, creamy leather from mature cattle. We got over two hundred hides at a good price — not a great price, but a good one — and a hundred big amphorae of local wine. And Gaius handed his share of the cash to his wife and came aboard.
None of us asked him about it, and he didn’t say much, but he was happy to be at sea, and to be working. I’m guessing, but I think that the life of a penniless Etruscan aristocrat in Rome didn’t agree with him. He had obligations he could barely fulfil, and he was a drain on his family. He never said so, but I saw how happy his wife was to receive ten good Athenian drachmas.
It can be hard, being an aristocrat. If you work, people make fun of you. You have to figure out a cunning way to make some money without appearing to get your hands dirty, unless you own a lot of land. Gaius didn’t own a lot of land, but he wasn’t afraid to work — once we were safely at sea.
And so, we did it again. Winter can be a cruel mistress, but we were blessed again, and we made Sardinia in two days and then did what Demetrios was best at — we coasted along until we found a town that wanted our hides. Some of the men of the town were Sikels, and Demetrios did most of the work, and we sold our hides at a profit, sold some of our wine, took on another cargo including copper and sailed for Marsala.
Marsala is a Greek town, for all that the Phoenicians established it. It is mostly Phocaeans, and when we made landfall it made me homesick, at least for Greece. Marsala looks like Greece.
The harbour is magnificent, and the two beaches are fine white sand. We beached, stern first, and ran the boat up above the tide line with the help of a dozen locals for a few coppers. Then we propped the hull to keep it sound and began unloading. Hawk-nosed Phoenicians came down to look at our wares, and tattooed Keltoi, tanned Greeks and even a couple of blond Iberians. Everyone expressed a unified contempt for our sour Roman wine and our ugly hides and our poor-quality Sardinian copper.
And then one of the Phoenicians offered us a handsome profit for a single sale — the whole cargo.
He was a big man, with a nose bigger than some men’s faces, and he thumped his stick at Doola. ‘Everything,’ he said. ‘One hundred and fifty drachma. Take it or leave it. And no shilly-shally.’
Other men began to shout.
Doola nodded. ‘No,’ he said.
The Phoenician shrugged, turned on his heel and walked off, attended by two slaves. A cold wind blew along the bay, and the islands off the coast were showing spray off their sandbars.
But as if his offer had changed the mood, the other potential buyers began to bid. They were like sharks on the corpse of a whale — as soon as one made a buy, two more would go after Doola as if he was the enemy. I’d never seen it like this; Rome, for example, had been much calmer. I went to his shoulder with some notion of supporting him, but Demetrios pulled me back.
‘This is his element,’ he said. ‘Let him swim.’
The frenzy lasted less than an hour, but by the end of it, Doola’s clay pot held more than two hundred drachma, and we had four damaged hides, a dozen amphorae of wine and one single ingot of copper.
Doola looked at the young Gaul standing there. ‘I’ll give you what’s left for two silvers,’ he said. ‘The copper alone’s worth twice that.’
The man beamed with gratitude, Doola took his cash and we had an empty hull. He gave me the clay pot full of silver. ‘It doesn’t pay to be too greedy,’ he said. ‘We were lucky — the only cargo on the beach.’
I shrugged under the weight of the pot. ‘This is going to sound foolish,’ I said, ‘but why did you refuse the first offer? He met your price.’
Doola rocked back and laughed his laugh. ‘Did he? I couldn’t work it all out, so I assumed he was under my price.’ He shook his head.
Demetrios laughed, too. ‘You made almost twice that.’
Neoptolymos was carrying our belongings. There was nothing in the boat to guard but the oars, and we paid a local Gallic boy to handle that. ‘Are we there yet?’ he asked.
We sat in a very Greek taverna with two pretty slave girls, ten big wooden bench-tables and nets hanging from the rafters — we might have been in Piraeus. He poured the takings out on the table, and added the Sicilian money from a leather wallet he wore all the time.
We had a lot of money, so much money that the innkeeper came down from his perch and leaned into our group. ‘Sorry to be the bearer of bad tidings, gents, but there’s no watch here, and some hard men just sent runners for help. That’s too much money to show in here.’ He stepped back and raised his hands. ‘I don’t want trouble, and I don’t want corpses.’
