Our mad rush had turned the big warship, but it was Demetrios with his cool hand at the helm and deep experience of the sea that really hurt them. He had his oars in — easy in a slab-sided tub with only six oar-ports. He was under sail alone, and his bluff bow struck the starboard rowers’ stations on the opposite side from our very small strike, crushing a dozen oars and oarsmen and then poling off. His lightning strike took away momentum in him, and in a bigger fight he’d have been dead — but the enemy had no second line and the trireme carried forward, all his top-deck rowers in disarray.
We caught the new north wind, and sailed north.
We had barely stung our three mighty opponents. I doubt if we killed a dozen men, and crushed twenty oars.
But that northernmost trireme lost way, and wallowed in the swell in our wakes. Her consorts turned north and passed her, offering no assistance, bent on renewing the pursuit.
The sun in the west became a red ball on the horizon, and the sea-hawks weren’t going to have us before darkness fell.
As soon as it was full dark, I passed Amphitrite and hailed her.
Demetrios came to the starboard side.
‘We should turn west,’ I said. ‘As soon as we can, before moonrise.’
Demetrios spat over the side. ‘West,’ he repeated. In his shouted tone, I heard it all. Doubt, and more doubt.
But he followed my lead. We turned west, slanting across the wind as it began to veer again, and by midnight we were again in a full westerly, and I was cursing because the wind change meant that the enemy would have every reason to follow in our wake.
I snatched sleep when I could, as did all of us. The oarsmen were fresh — so far — but Doola sent them to their benches to sleep. Still, any man who went to the ram to relieve himself was questioned when he went back to his bench.
The first grey light came, and we could see Amphitrite on the same tack, but well off to the north of us.
Men cheered.
The sky was increasingly red at our backs over Iberia, and I didn’t like that. But the wind was steady, and in the wrong direction to turn, and we sailed along as the sun rose red as blood off the land and into the sky.
I saw three nicks, like the fins of sharks, on the eastern horizon, and my heart sank.
Vasileos went off to take breakfast, such as it was — unmilled barley and wine from our cargo. I took the oars and began to cheat the helm north. A triakonter doesn’t sail many points off the wind — but it will sail a few, and I was going for all I could get.
An hour later, it was obvious that the triremes were gaining.
Doola and Vasileos came aft after Doola had looked at Seckla’s wound. The young man was lucky — the arrow had struck the hip without severing the artery and glanced along the bone. Deeply painful, but one of the lightest wounds a man can take, if one must be wounded.
‘Only a matter of time,’ I said.
Doola looked at the sails on the horizon.
Vasileos smiled. ‘Made it through yesterday,’ he said. He looked at the sky.
I pointed at the red dawn over Iberia. ‘If I were at sea in the Ionian,’ I said, ‘that would mean trouble.’
Vasileos took a deep breath and shook his head. ‘Smells like lightning,’ he said.
‘Make all fast,’ I ordered. I made my way aft, catching each man’s eye. It wasn’t an order for the sake of shouting. I wanted to make sure everyone understood. Heavy weather was not necessarily our friend but was, in many ways, a deadlier enemy.
As they put heavy linen tarpaulins across the standing cargo and rigged the big tarps that could cover the bilges, the wind began to veer, first north, then south, then all around.
We had the mainsail down in no time, and the boatsail up.
The wind veered again, and suddenly the sky began to cloud over.
‘Feed them the dates,’ I said. Dates were the only food we had aboard, by then. It was money lost. Or not — if we lived. And if we didn’t live I laughed.
We ate twenty drachmas’ worth of dates. We hadn’t had a good meal in two days, and we inhaled the dates.
An hour later, I had to order the mainmast down, or cut it away. It was close.
And now the bigger ships were gaining. There’s a belief among non-sailors that small ships are faster than big ships. This is far from true. Small ships are nimbler than large ships, and often shallower in draught and have other useful qualities, but the longer and heavier a ship is, the less it fights the motion of the sea. An old shipwright on Crete — my first son’s grandfather, if you like — explained it to me when I was a complete lubber by saying that if a small boat rode the waves, she travelled farther with all the ups and downs than the bigger boat that cut the waves. I’m not altogether sure that’s the answer, either. But bigger boats are faster, and in heavy weather, they are faster still.
Demetrios pulled alongside. ‘I’m going to part company!’ he shouted.
Let me add that I could barely hear him.
He waved west.
Of course, in this heavy wind, his tubby merchant hull could carry more sail, heel farther and manage a point or two closer to the wind than my triakonter — or our pursuers. It meant going due west, away from land.
In a storm.
‘Go!’ I shouted back. We both waved.
Our deviation was slow at first, and then very rapid as his mainsail filled and he found his point of sailing.
My oarsmen were still eating dates. It was like something out of Aristophanes — thirty men pushing dates down their gullets as fast as they could. Sittonax looked like a drowned blond cat, sitting on someone else’s bench with both hands full. Brasidas, the eldest of the herdsmen, was stripped naked despite the cold and rain — he’d just helped with the mainmast — and he, too, looked like a dog worrying fresh meat; his cheeks were smeared with dates.
Aye, we were hungry.
The boatsail kept our head up and our stern to the rollers, but we didn’t have much headway, and as the storm mounted behind us, the waves grew steeper. This didn’t happen immediately: in fact, I could tell this whole story as a transition from worry about our pursuers with little concern for the weather to worry about the weather with little concern for our pursuers.
About midday, the storm had risen to a point where the wind, which was now steadily westerly, was shrieking in the rigging, and the waves were so big that the little boatsail mast was only in the wind when our bow was going up the increasingly steep sides of the waves. We were all but becalmed in the trough.
At first, that was hard on us, but merely annoying.
Then the effect grew, and the moment where the wind caught the boatsail became increasingly perilous. The boatsail snapped and strained at its ropes, and the motion of the ship between my hands became… alien.
Our two pursuers were close — too damned close. And with the wind behind them, their archers could loose at us and we couldn’t hope to reply.
Luckily the wind was so strong that archery was not very effective.
The next change was to the steering — the ship began to accelerate down the steep wave sides. The waves were now as tall as the mast of a small ship, and as we went over the crest, the ship would slide on the far side. All this, while rain crashed down like a torrent of Persian arrows and the wind howled like the spirits of all the Titans sent to Tartarus.
It wasn’t that any particular moment was perilous. The storm was not the worst I’d ever seen. It was the combination of all the factors: a single wrong decision, a moment’s inattention at the helm, and we’d be dead.
I’m a fine man in a fight — none better. But fights only last so long. The sea is always there, and I am not the best sailor. Sailing, like smithing, requires patience.
Both of our enemies were away to the south, coming up on a very slight tack. Amphitrite was gone in the spume — perhaps already over the distant horizon. I couldn’t even glimpse her.
When I could count the guy ropes on the bow of the nearest trireme, I cheated my own helm to the north at
