to Lydia, from time to time, and I, too, took a trick on the sailing vessel and left command to Vasileos, who, I suspect, did it better than I.
Another week, and we came to the headland where Iberia juts the farthest into the Middle Sea. To port, we saw the Balearics. We could have traded there, for their famous wine and their fine wool, but we had wine, and we had wool, and we were under way on our great adventure.
That night, we had a talk at a great roaring fire on a pebble beach, with the sound of regular waves playing like a monotonous and low-tuned lyre in the background. The sky was full of stars, and our lads were singing the songs they’d sung to sheep and goats at home.
We lay on our cloaks, sipping wine. Every sip was that much less we had to deliver to our destination. We were getting thrifty, or perhaps greedy.
We fell silent, listening to the sea. And Demetrios picked up a stick from the fire and pointed south.
‘Not a one of us has ever been through the Pillars of Heracles,’ he said. He looked around. ‘The rumours are that there is a heavy current, flowing out, and a brutal wind.’
Well, that shut us up.
Doola was picking his teeth, I remember that, because he spat, and then laughed his great laugh. ‘We should quit and go home, then,’ he said.
And we all laughed with him.
‘Sounds as if it will be worse coming home than going out,’ Neoptolymos said.
Demetrios shook his head. ‘I really don’t know,’ he said. ‘And that scares me. I want to run south with this fine wind and coast along Africa going west, rather than stay on the Iberian shore.’
‘More chance of a Carthaginian,’ I said.
Demetrios nodded. ‘I know. But this coast gets rockier and rockier. Eventually we’ll have no landing places. And… there’s Gades. I don’t know its exact location, but it’s a major port, according to men in Marsala, and it has a fleet. A Carthaginian fleet.’ He looked around at all of us in the firelight. ‘South is the coast of Libya, mostly desert down to the sea. I’ve never heard that it was thickly populated.’
None of the rest of us knew, either.
Really, we were shockingly unprepared. We had asked every sailor we could find about the route, but the Carthaginians wouldn’t talk, or didn’t know, and the Greeks were cagey. We knew that Africa had odd winds that could carry a lot of sand, and we knew that the coast of Iberia could be kind and could be harsh — we’d just experienced three weeks of pure sweet sailing, and we’d found her soft. But from here, the rest of the way was rumour and legend. I’d met five men who’d claimed to have sailed past the Pillars of Heracles.
None of them gave me the same description.
I assume that if I’d used my brief stay in Carthage better, I’d have learned more. Even as it was, I worked the calculations I’d learned while a slave, and I was none the wiser, because navigation by the heavens is relative, and I didn’t have any fixed points from which to calculate. But I had a notion that Heracles wouldn’t spurn me, and that the Pillars would be in his realm, not Poseidon’s; and that if I took a precise bearing there on the heavens, I’d have something to go by. It’s a little like a drunkard going out of his farmhouse for a piss in the middle of the night — he doesn’t take his bearings in his bedroom or in the kitchen, but at the garden gate.
So none of us gainsaid Demetrios, and the next morning we left the land and ran due south, for Africa.
5
Africa was low, compared to Iberia. The coast rises slowly, and if it wasn’t for the cloud banks and the wind, we might have run on her in the dark. The gods know that thousands of other sailors have drowned on that coast, but we were fortunate.
Having found the coast of Africa, we turned west, into the setting sun, and sailed. We had a good wind for it, and our only trouble was water. The coast of Africa didn’t seem to have much of it, and what there was, someone owned. After passing three harbours, all obviously owned by the Carthaginians, we lay alongside one another and agreed that we had to go into the next small port.
They were Numidians, there. They weren’t Doola’s people, but they were black like him, and thin like Seckla, and while there were Phoenician merchants, we avoided them, filled with water from the stream and paid a small toll. We also bought bread and meat and grain: all outlay. We sold some wine. Before we left the beach, Doola had purchased two hundredweight of dates, dried dates. Who knew what ignorant barbarians might pay for delicious dates?
They couldn’t get them into the hull of the Amphitrite, so we had to put them under tarpaulins between the benches of the Lydia.
We put to sea as soon as we could, and counted on our fingers. The prices were ruinous. And despite that, we knew we’d been absurdly lucky to find a port that wasn’t dominated directly by Carthage.
But we were young and foolish, and we sailed on.
Two days farther west, and we had serious doubts. The land was rising on either hand — we could see the coast of Iberia. And the current was palpable — the sea was beginning to flow like a river. Out, into the Outer Sea.
If you have never been a sailor, this may not sound terrifying.
Worst of all was the wind. The wind was at our backs, and it grew stronger by the hour, a firm westerly that pushed our ships along at a breakneck pace. Turning back was no longer an option.
The current wasn’t so very strong, but it denied us the opportunity to consider.
The wind rose, stronger and stronger.
The great rock of the Northern Pillar is much greater than the smaller rock at the southern side. And it is obvious, once you start to pass the straits, that this is not the hand of the gods — any more that everything else in the universe is. The wind is funnelled by the rising land — the sea wind — and what is merely a breeze elsewhere is virtually a gale between the Pillars. Add to that the current We were moving very fast indeed. And beyond, we could see the Great Sea — the Outer Sea. What some men call the Atlantic: the ocean on which Atlantis once lay.
Faster and faster.
Gades is a mighty port city in Iberia, sheltered behind the rock of the Northern Pillar. I prayed to Heracles, my ancestor — the port was visible now, and full of ships. The heavy construction of the big Phoenicians made more sense to me as I eyed the heavy rollers of the Outer Sea. The waves were twice as high.
We hit them in the rip — the confusing water between the oceans, just at the base of the Pillars — and before my crew had our sail down, we’d been turned all the way around and flung ten ship-lengths by a series of waves. Luck, the will of Poseidon and some expert ship-handling by Vasileos saved us, but it was terrifying in a rowed ship. Our fishermen’s sons were the other vehicle of our salvation, for they saw the threat and, without orders, got to benches — any benches — and put oars in the water, and we managed not to swamp completely. But we took a great deal of water in those first few moments — and that was on a sunny day with a fine breeze.
The Phoenicians are fine sailors. And I had made a number of mistakes.
Demetrios did no better. The rip took him by surprise as well, and a flaw in the current took him away from us on the outflow, as a pair of boys may be swept apart when they attempt to swim in a strong river.
I couldn’t watch. I was busy saving my own ship.
When all our rowers were rowing, we ought to have been safe, but we’d shipped too much water and the ship was a slug, and the big swells of the Atlantic threatened her low sides with every wave. I had to make ten decisions a minute, about who should row and who should bail. Sittonax bailed — one of the few times I watched him work like a working man. He bailed with his helmet until someone put a bucket in his hands.
Doola shipped the pump, a simple wooden contraption that fitted over gunwale, and he and I worked it as hard as we could, lifting a steady stream of water over the side. A dozen other men — all the shepherds — bailed as fast as they could.
But it wasn’t a one-sided fight.
A wave a little higher than the others caught us — not quite broadside, thank the gods, but on our forward quarter, and suddenly we were taking water amidships. All our gains were lost, and more besides.
Men began to look around. And at me. The fishermen could swim. The herdsmen couldn’t.
