I bought or traded for knives — all Spanish blades that I hilted in bronze — and the last of our damaged hides went into making scabbards and belts.
It was a little like arming Plataea. It made me happy enough.
Vasileos finished our ship before the spring feast of Demeter. We made a rich sacrifice to her and to Poseidon; I put a decent helmet on the altar of Heracles and a good bronze lamp on the altar of Hephaestos and another on the altar of Apollo. I confess that I felt my skills had diminished. I had betrayed Nikephorus and his daughter, and the smith-god withheld his hand from my shoulder. I marred my work often with stray blows; my helmets were not as neat as I expected them to be, and every one of them seemed to have its flaw. When I made Gaius a pair of greaves, I marred the work with a foolish error in the planishing that I could see every time he wore them.
I thought of Lydia a great deal. I wished, very hard, that she had suitors and another husband. And I wished other, conflicting things.
My friends stood by me. Doola would sit in the rented shop and pump the bellows silently for me. Seckla ran errands and bent metal. Demetrios sat with me when I was in the depths. Neoptolymos made me play the lyre, and I grew almost proficient. Gaius and I boxed.
Despite which, I lay every night and counted the people I’d betrayed, the way I’d done it, the reasons.
Listen; it may seem a small thing to you, trifling with a girl. I have mounted quite a few of them, and without regret.
When I was a pirate, I killed men, took their chattels and was accounted a hero. That is the life I led, then.
But when you are a pirate, you think like a pirate and you are judged — by other pirates. When you are a bronze-smith in a polis, you are judged by a different standard, and I’m enough of a pupil of Heraclitus to know that all of us are, to some extent, a reflection of the lives we lead and the men we trust and listen to. Lydia wouldn’t even have been a bump on my road, the summer of Lades.
But I had become a different man. Or rather, I was striving to become a different man.
And failing.
I thought of standing at the door of the taverna in Marsala, longing for the clash. Knowing that I could probably take the whole pack of petty thieves. Eager for the spark.
And I’d sigh, and the whole thing would play again in the theatre of my mind. My last dinner with Lydia. Her foot on mine… my hand on her hip. Her breasts.
Her father, and the look of bewildered anger.
And all the other men and women. Dead, abandoned. My son, somewhere on Crete.
Euphoria, dead in my arms.
Briseis.
It was a long winter, and a longer spring.
And then the ship was finished.
At thirty oars, she was probably the smallest ship I ever commanded. But no one ever questioned that I would command her. Demetrios was going to take Amphitrite, and he would have Doola, Seckla and Gaius, plus two of our fishermen, Giorgos (the oddest name for a fisherman) and Kosta. I had Neoptolymos and Daud; an older fisherman eager to make a fortune named Megakles, and the shipwright himself. Vasileos couldn’t resist. He was a fine helmsman and a superb resource, the kind of man who could repair anything that nature or error destroyed.
He added a great deal to our crew. He was older, steady and had a knack — I have a bit of it, and Doola, too — of saying something and being obeyed without ever sounding as if an order had been given. With me, it is reputation — I’m the hero. With him, it was age and also reputation: he was perhaps the most renowned sailor on that coast, and the young men obeyed even the shift of his eyebrows.
I decided to emulate his extremely laconic manner.
As for my crew, I had, as I say, a dozen local lads, a dozen shepherds from the hills and six trained Greek oarsmen. They had been at Lades — they worshipped me, and every one of them felt he owed me his life, which is a secure foundation for leadership.
We spent a week building a set of oar benches on the beach, and then we practised every day while the farm boys and the shepherds ate us out of our wallets. The hill boys acted as if they’d never seen food before.
Or wine.
I expected fights, and there were fights, but the boys — all the locals — didn’t quarrel with the men, Demetrios’s oarsmen. I didn’t break up the first fights, but after two evenings of it, I handed them all shields in the dawn of our third day together and made them run five stades. Most of them were puking by the third stade.
And so it went. I’ve trained crews before, and I’ve told you all about it. These were, in the main, better men than I usually had — eager, young and intelligent. The local fathers locked away their daughters, and we worked them hard, and in a week, we had something like a crew.
Our Amphitrite didn’t waste the time. She ran up to Marsala and back twice, gathering cargo, and then down the Etruscan coast for hides, wine and all the Etruscan tin that Gaius could arrange, albeit in small quantities. I continued to train my oarsmen, now at sea. We pulled up and down the beach for two weeks, and my store of silver dwindled and the locals began to jack up their prices as my demands increased.
That’s the way of the world.
Amphitrite came back from Veii and the Etruscan coast. She sold her cargo, loaded some Alban tin that had come over the passes from High Gaul, and sailed for Sardinia. The margin on tin was very small — the Phoenicians got most of the profit by sailing to Iberia, and their price made the price of the tin brought over the mountains on donkeys precious little. But Doola was finding buyers in Sardinia, Sicily and Etrusca from both ends of the trade, and he knew his business.
And besides, our dealings in Marsala netted us Sittonax. He was Daud’s age, and spoke another dialect of Keltoi — they couldn’t really understand each other, and mostly they spoke Greek, even though both of them could understand each other’s poetry. He came over the mountains with the tin, as a guard. Someone gave him the ‘mistaken’ impression that we could sail him back to Alba.
He was the first Kelt I’d met who refused to adopt Greek dress, and wore trousers and all his barbaric finery all the time. Daud had been broken to our ways by years of slavery, but Sittonax made him wear trousers — and how we mocked him.
They got along like lovers, which is to say, they fought often, and made up swiftly — and they were brothers in all but name. And Sittonax knew a great deal about tin and where it came from.
He was my thirty-first oarsman. I don’t think he ever pulled an oar in the whole voyage. He was the laziest man I’ve ever seen, and yet he seemed to get things done. He could tell lies without turning a hair, yet we all accepted him as an honourable man. My forge time went to trade goods, about which Sittonax and Daud advised me with conflicting and sometimes boastful advice, and my ram. I had decided to put a bronze sheath on the projection that, on small ships like a triakonter, was usually left bare. I wanted it light, but with enough punch to crack a hull. I had seen a number of rams, and I’d seen the flaws. Sharp rams cut the water nicely but got stuck in the prey; round rams made for uncertain steering.
I designed a different shape — a series of heavy plates held apart by spacers, like an empty packing crate with partitions for amphorae, but no amphorae. I asked around for weights and got a great many answers. Even alloying the metal myself, the tin and copper came to a great amount — almost fifty mina — and I wondered if I was up to the work, and if I was wasting money and bronze.
I had help from six other smiths when I cast the ram in sand in my rented shop yard. The neighbours complained I was going to burn the neighbourhood down.
My mould cracked and the molten metal ran all over the yard, and it was only by the will of Hephaestos that no one was injured.
I tried again. Fewer men came to help me, the second time. I had real trouble moving the gate, the piece of iron that kept the molten bronze out of the mould, and when it moved, it cracked, and the white bronze flowed awry.
I went to the shrine of Hephaestos and prayed. I spent a night on the mud floor in front of the terra cotta statue. I dedicated two rams and a good helmet.
Doola and Seckla and Neoptolymos came to help, the third time. They were already making coasting trips in
