lower decks of a slave-driven trireme.
I lay quietly for as long as I possibly could, because I knew that as soon as they noticed me, I would be made to row. But a man can only stand so much piss in his hair and beard. I moved my arm, and the oar-master was on me. He struck me several times with a stick, grinning with delight, and put an oar in my hands. It took time for him to bring it from amidships.
He seemed to speak a little Greek, and I barely understood him, but the man above me in the second deck leaned down.
‘He’s a killer, mate,’ he said. ‘Obey, or he’ll gut you.’
For a moment I thought he was talking about me, rather than to me. I thought perhaps he was telling the oar-master that I was a killer.
Hah!
Pride goes first, when you are a slave.
The oar-master grinned at me, took a knife from under his arm and poked it into my groin. Smiled more broadly.
‘Tell him I know how to pull an oar!’ I shouted. Instant surrender.
The oar-master laughed. And hit me.
I’m sure you are waiting to hear, my friends, how I recovered my wits, rose from my bench and slaughtered my enemies.
Well, you haven’t been a slave, have you? Any of you.
In a week, I was used to it. I was strong enough, and there was food — badly cooked fish, barley bread, sour beer.
I ate. I no longer wanted to die. Or rather, I only wanted to live to kill the oar-master, whom I hated. And I hated him with a pure, searing hate. But I was a slave, and he laughed at my hate. He was big, and very strong — fully muscled like a Pankrationist. He enjoyed inflicting pain — on us, the slaves, but he even enjoyed inflicting petty, verbal hurst on his subordinates and the helmsmen and the deck crew.
I was ridden like a horse. For the first week I rowed in the depths of the ship, with water and shit over my ankles, the smell enough to stop a man from work. But even exhausted and injured, I was strong compared to other men, and that crew had seen better days. After a long pull — I have no idea when, or where we landed — I was ‘promoted’ to the top deck of rowers, the ‘elite’. I, who had commanded my own ship, who could steer and make sail. And fight.
The top deck was not an improvement, except for the clean ocean air. Here I was constantly under the eye of the oar-master and his minions, the six men he used to impose his authority. The ship carried no marines — or, just possibly, these men were the marines — a surly, churlish lot. They proved their manhood by tormenting the rowers.
It is a thing I have often noted, how the stamp of a leader imprints itself on his followers. Hasdrubal — the captain — was a beak-nosed Phoenician from far-off Carthage. He was tall, he was strong and he was a vicious bully. He never gave a direct order — rather, he wheedled and manipulated when strength would have done better, and then turned into a right tyrant when some persuasion might have served the trick.
He was handsome, in a burly way, and had the pointiest, heaviest, most perfumed beard I’d ever seen on a man. Well, a man at sea, anyway. I’d seen such things on Thebans.
But his bad command skills transmitted themselves to this captain’s officers as effectively as Miltiades’ were transmitted to his. The oar-master was a torturing tyrant, the sailing-master was a weak man with a drink problem who knuckled under to the oar-master in every situation and hated him for it and the helmsmen — a pair of them, both Carthaginians learning the trade — were young, silent, morose and bitter. My guess, from the yawning chasm that separated us — you can’t imagine I ever talked to these bastards — was that the two helmsmen were better men, just trying to survive under the regime of a bully and a madman.
For Dagon, the oar-master, was mad. Mad with power, mad with rage, mad with the cunning, plotting madness of a long-time drunkard, or a man who enjoys the pain of others.
It was days before I truly felt his displeasure. I know now that we were somewhere on the coast of Dalmatia, rowing north. I had gathered from talk on deck — slaves were forbidden to speak unless spoken to — that we had a cargo of Athenian hides and pottery and some Cyprian copper, and that we were going to bump our way up the coast until we found someone to sell us iron and tin.
I was rowing. When you are in peak physical condition, it is possible to row for a long time while your mind is elsewhere. Despite despair and wounds and struggle, I was sound enough to row — all day — without pain. But my head was in a dark place, considering my life. My life with Briseis. My life with Euphoria. My life as a hero, and my life as a smith. I wasn’t despairing — it takes longer than three days to drive me to despair. But I had started pretty far down, and being enslaved certainly hadn’t helped.
The stick hit me a glancing blow on the left shoulder. ‘Off the beat,’ the oar-master roared, his spittle raining on my left ear.
‘Like fuck!’ I said, before I’d thought about it. In fact, I was dead on the beat — my stroke was perfect.
The next blow hit my head, and I gave a half-scream and sort of fell across my oar, and then he hit me again, five or six blows to the head and neck. My nose broke, and blood showered across me.
‘Silence, scum,’ he roared at me. ‘Do not even scream!’
I grunted.
He hit me again. It was an oak stick.
I must have made some noise. Or maybe not.
‘Silence!’ he said in the kind of voice a man uses to a lover, and hit me again.
My oar caught in the backwash of another man’s oar, jumped and slammed into my chest, cracking ribs. I grunted.
He hit me again. ‘Silence, slave!’
I tried to gain control of the oar. Tears were pouring down my face, and blood.
He laughed. ‘You need to learn what you are. You are a sack full of pain, and I will let it out when I want to. For anything. Until you die, cursing me.’ He moved around until he was in my sight line. ‘I am Dagon, Lord of Pain.’ He laughed.
Just then, the trierarch came up. I knew his voice already. That needs to be said, because I could barely see. And you have to imagine, I was trying to manage an eighteen-foot oar while he hit me in the back.
‘You are off the stroke,’ he said teasingly, and hit me on my left shoulder. He was expert. He hit me so hard I could barely manage the pain — but he didn’t break a bone.
I guess I whimpered.
Dagon laughed again. ‘Silence!’ he said, and hit me again.
The trierarch laughed. ‘New slaves are useless, aren’t they?’ he said.
The oar-master tapped his stick on the deck. ‘He can’t get the rhythm,’ the oar-master said. A lie.
‘You lie,’ I spat.
The blow that struck me put me out.
When I awoke, I was the stern oar of the thranites — the lowest of the low, and since most triremes row a little down by the stern, all of the piss and shit of the whole slave ship was around my ankles and calves. The moment I groaned and shook, one of the oar-master’s minions threw seawater over me and put an oar in my hands, feeding it through the oar-port — it was, of course, a short and difficult oar because of the curve of the ship. Rowing here was always a punishment, even on my ships.
I threw up.
On myself, of course.
And started rowing.
Time lost meaning. I rowed, and hurt, and rowed, and hurt. Men came and hit me with sticks and I rowed, and hurt. We landed for a night, somewhere north of Corcyra, and I was left chained to my bench while other men went ashore. Kritias, a Greek, one of the oar-master’s bully-boys, came to me with stale bread, dipped it in the stinking brown water by my ankles and put it in my lap. ‘I have five obols on this,’ he said. ‘That you’ll eat it.’
He got his five obols.
Then I was sick — sick with one of Apollo’s arrows in me, and shit poured from me into the water at my feet and I vomited, over and over.
