Amphitrite by this time. But they were in, and they were friends. The local bronze-smiths were distant men.
I heated the bronze for longer. I’d made a huge wax model of the thing and built the mould carefully, with wood and iron strapping and sand.
Either the third time was the charm, or the god had forgiven me. I like to think it was the latter. But either way, the ram came shining from the mould. Vasileos shook his head and said the shape was all wrong. He wanted it to be sharp — and he said it would bite the water badly.
But a week later, we mounted it on the hull and it went on like a porpax on a man’s arm. Perfectly.
Of course, in and out of all this, we were training our oarsmen. After four weeks of training, most of my shepherds were passable, and my fishermen were bored and threatening to go back to their fathers’ boats, and it was time to take my ship to sea. So I paid for a priest to come from Marsala with my last funds, and we sacrificed a sheep and feasted. And in the morning, before their hangovers were clear, I had them all aboard, and we were running down the coast, headed east, to Italy.
Part II
After this he proceeds to determine the breadth of the habitable earth: he tells us, that measuring from the meridian of Meroe to Alexandria, there are 10,000 stadia. From thence to the Hellespont about 8100. Again; from thence to the Dnieper, 5000; and thence to the parallel of Thule, which Pytheas says is six days’ sail north from Britain, and near the Frozen Sea, other 11,500. To which if we add 3400 stadia above Meroe in order to include the Island of the Egyptians, the Cinnamon country, and Taprobane, there will be in all 38,000 stadia.
4
I’m a poor sailor and a mediocre bronze-smith, but I’m an expert pirate.
We coasted east and south, camping in sandy bays on the south coast of Gallia and eating deer and sheep. Stolen sheep.
Somewhere in the Etruscan Sea, we found a Phoenician coaster struggling against a west wind, headed for Sardinia. It was sheer luck — I had not intended to prey on anyone. But we pulled at her from the eye of the wind, and she ran — and there is something to the old saying that the bleating of the lamb excites the lion. I really didn’t intend to take her until I saw her run.
And then She had a crew of five, four slaves and a Phoenician skipper from Carthage. I kept his slaves and enslaved him, took his ship and sold it still fully laden at Marsala. One of his countrymen ransomed him — he hadn’t done much work, and the two mina in silver I charged for him seemed fair to everyone.
And the Phoenicians in Marsala marked me.
Demetrios came to visit me on the beach at Tarsilla.
‘You can’t do that again,’ he said without preamble.
I laughed. ‘I didn’t intend to do it that time,’ I said. ‘They were just there.’
That quickly, I had made the change from merchant to pirate.
I put him on the kline of honour, fed him wine and sent him home in the morning with a hard head.
Two days later, before midsummer, Amphitrite swept in past the headland and unloaded her cargo.
This time, Doola had done his very best.
We had Roman helmets, Etruscan amphorae of wine, finished and dyed Aegyptian cloth, bags of local salt and even a small leather envelope of raw lapis from Persia. We had Cyprian copper and some dyes — Tyrian and Aegyptian.
Mostly, we had wine.
I had about thirty minas in worked bronze — brooches and scabbard fittings, because Sittonax said they would sell. And mirrors.
We had two bales of ostrich feathers I had taken off the coaster. No idea how he came to have them, but Carthage gets the best goods out of Africa.
Doola looked at them, heard the tale of the piracy and shook his head. ‘I wish you hadn’t done that, Ari,’ he said. But then he shrugged, and went back to his lists.
And we had two great tusks of ivory, provided by Gaius.
We spent four days loading, working our boys to a frazzle. The triakonter was too stiff and had an odd lie under sail, and Demetrios, after watching us row, ordered the stern to be pushed down in the water. Ballast amphorae — we were literally ballasted in wine — were shifted, the stern went down a strake or two and the steering oars bit deeper.
I’m guessing, now that I’m a better shipwright and a better captain, that my ram — which bit the sea beautifully, although we hadn’t tested it for its real purpose — had pulled the bow too deep and made her hard to steer. That ram bow could cut the waves, but if used badly or in heavy seas, could try to lead the ship to plunge too deep. I was lucky. And I had Vasileos, who supervised the reloading.
When it was all done, we ate a feast of fish and lobster on the beach. Men with partners bid them farewell. Men without made do, or didn’t. I didn’t. I had chosen celibacy.
Hah! I make myself laugh. I hadn’t chosen it at all. I’d failed to find a partner, and done nothing much to find one. I was twenty-seven, by my own reckoning. Too old for the young girls, unless I wanted marriage.
Just right for paying prostitutes.
More wine, here.
It was two weeks to midsummer night, and the moon was waxing.
We slipped away in the dawn, two small ships against all the might of the ocean. It was a beautiful day, and we had a fair wind for the west, and all day we watched the water run down the sides of our heavily laden ship. Not a man touched an oar save the steersmen.
Three more days, and Poseidon gave us a west wind. At night, we sheltered on sandy beaches or heavy pebbles under cliffs, and we bartered for supplies or ate wild sheep and goats.
Those are the days when life at sea is a fine thing. We had new rigging, new sails and fresh hulls on both boats and we raced along, west and south.
On the fourth day, we saw the coast of Iberia rising before us and we put the helms over and started more south than west, and still we had the god’s own wind in our sails.
By the end of the week, we had had some rowing. By the end of the second week, it was as if this was the only life we’d ever known. We sailed all day, rowing when the wind was calm or against us. Amphitrite could stay much closer to the wind, but couldn’t row in anything like a breeze. Lydia — for so I called my new ship — could row in anything but a gale, so fine was her entry and her designs, and Vasileos beamed with pride as our oarsmen powered us into a heavy wind as if they were racing small boats on a beach.
But Lydia was never a good ship for sailing with the wind anywhere but her stern quarter, nor did I expect much more.
This resulted in a great many tortoise-and-hare days, where we’d crawl under oars, following a straight course across a bay, and Amphitrite would sail away — sometimes seemingly in the very opposite course to the one we were rowing — only to appear near close of day on the same beach.
We began to rotate our crews. Men on Amphitrite learned a great deal more about sailing than men on Lydia, and our shepherds were taken off their benches, three days at a time, and sent to make sail. So all my friends came
