‘Bail, friends,’ I called. ‘No one can swim in this.’
And we bailed.
Vasileos had the steering oars, and I could tell from his actions that he was not having a good time of it, that we didn’t really have enough way on us. The obvious solution was to get the boatsail up.
That meant taking five good men off bailing.
I thought about it for as long as a man sings a prayer to the gods. It still seemed incredible to me that, on a beautiful day, I was about to die at the mercy of the elements.
Nonetheless I made the decision. Without steerage way, we were doomed, and it was just a matter of time.
‘Boatsail!’ I called.
That took five of my best — very best — men off the benches and the bailing, too.
For a long minute, we were in the balance. The ship was, to all intents, sinking. We’d taken on a great deal of water. The wind wasn’t going to save us.
But the wind gave a bite to the steering oars. And the steering oars allowed Vasileos to put the stern to the wind and the bow to the waves.
And then we were all bailing. And bailing. And bailing.
An hour became another hour, and the crisis seemed just as acute. Every rogue wave, every spill of wind that shipped a little water started the struggle again in earnest, and such is the nature of men that the deadly became routine. And still we bailed. There was no choice.
As the wind aided us, more and more men came off the rowing benches to bail.
That got us a little more.
At some point, the balance changed in the ship. We were lighter. The bilges still swirled with water, but we were afloat. And running before the wind, due west into the Atlantic.
Demetrios had made a different choice. Because of his rig, he’d had his sails up all along, and the vicious current had driven him inshore. The water closer in was calmer, and in fact (as any sailor who knows the Pillars learns), there was a countercurrent close in to the shore, just as there is in the Bosporus, if I’d only had the wit to think. Demetrios and Amphitrite had weathered the current and the rip better than we had, and now lay astern about two stades.
That might have been the end of our despair, except that for three hours we had had no lookout, because all hands were needed on the ship. When I sent Doola, who was grey with fatigue, to ‘rest’ in the bow, he turned.
‘Warships!’ he called.
How the bastard Carthaginians must have laughed. There we were, wallowing like pigs in a trough, because we didn’t know the tide change for the Atlantic and we had chosen a stupid moment to pass the straits. Nor did we know where to lie to, where to wait. We knew nothing.
And they lay safe in Gades and watched, and when it became obvious that we were going to live, they came out like hawks on their prey. Like any predator, they liked us the better that we were tired.
Three heavy triremes came out of Gades, and all with just one thought — to take us.
Listen, thugater, and my lily-handed ladies. You are not sailors, and I imagine that to you, one body of water is much like another. I cannot express to you the fear — gut-churning and senseless — of the Atlantic. It is not right. The water feels different. It tastes different.
I swear to you that Lydia handled differently in the Outer Ocean.
Those three war-hawks leaped out of Gades in our wakes, and they were gaining on us before they had their lower oar-ports open. A hundred and eighty rowers will always beat thirty rowers, even if the thirty are all Argonauts and have Heracles himself at an oar.
I went aft, to where Vasileos was between the oars.
‘Well?’ he asked. He was tired.
I had the sense not to talk. I looked aft.
‘I won’t be a slave,’ he said.
I had all the time in the world to see how this was, in the main, my fault. Of course we knew that the Carthaginians had a squadron in Gades.
I thought about it for fifty beats of my heart. The equation looked like this.
If we ran west on the wind, and raised the mainsail, and we were lucky, we would stay ahead of the big warships. They couldn’t possibly have such heavy crews and still have supplies.
But we would have to go out of sight of land, and spend the night. A storm would kill us. A heavy west wind would kill us. And we had little water and no food beyond raw grain that we couldn’t cook because we didn’t have a beach.
If we cheated north, the triremes would have us.
And if we stood on under boatsail alone, the triremes would have us.
‘Mainmast,’ I said. I pretended to calm, unhurried command. Laconic, like Vasileos.
Men sprang to obey, and our mainmast went up and was belayed.
‘Stays,’ I said. ‘Four.’
Four stays were the equivalent of preparing for a major storm.
The stays went up, too. Seckla raced aloft, his superb gymnastics acted out for our lives, and he slipped the noose of every stay over the masthead while the deck crew belayed.
The miracle is that the men didn’t panic. I seemed calm, so they obeyed.
I was anything but calm. I wasn’t even resigned. Inwardly, all I could do was curse my incredible hubris in thinking that we could pass the Pillars. And my lack of scouting, lack of preparation.
I seldom feel a complete fool, but I did then.
For the whole of these preparations, the warships gained, hand over fist. I know Vasileos thought the preventer-stays were a waste of time. But he said nothing, and I knew that if I didn’t get them up immediately, they’d never go on later — in darkness, on a dirty night. And my sense of the weather was that it was getting worse.
As soon as the mainsail fell free, the ship’s motion changed. The bow took far more punishment than in the Inner Sea, as the pace of the rollers was very different. But we were going faster — much faster.
Demetrios raised Amphitrite ’s mainsail and let the corners of the lateen go, and the little ship sprang forward.
For an hour, as the sun began to set, I thought we’d make it.
But Amphitrite was falling behind. It was slower at first, but we were not on her best point of sailing, so I put my helm up a few points and Demetrios matched our new course and then she seemed to hold her own. I went back to bailing.
She wasn’t holding her own.
And the three Carthaginians weren’t letting go.
At one remove, it didn’t matter a damn whether they had the food and water to give chase, because I had done what could be done. I didn’t have any other brilliant stratagems.
But when Vasileos summoned me to the steering platform and I saw how badly Amphitrite was sagging, I knew the triremes were going to catch us.
I swear, I just stood and watched for as long as it took the sun to go a finger’s width across the sky.
‘Armour,’ I called.
The word tasted good in my mouth. I turned to Vasileos. ‘I won’t be a slave, either. But it’s going to cost us.’ I shrugged. ‘And I won’t let them die.’ I pointed to Amphitrite.
Vasileos nodded.
All I could do was turn and dash back. If I went between two of the warships, anything might happen. I might lure them away. I might kill a helmsman with a lucky arrow shot. I might lure a foolish ship into an oar-rake — even my little triakonter could make trouble with the oars of a big line-of-battle ship.
I might. But these were the best sailors in the world, and I wasn’t likely to surprise them. When I went about, they would have, at this rate, half an hour to see me coming.
That meant I needed to surprise them, which was nigh on impossible but worth an effort.
‘Spill the wind,’ I called to Seckla. He let fly the lower corners of the sail.
Our motion changed, and we slowed.
