the top of a massive wave and we rode down that cliff of water like a boy surfing with his body in the fresh waves of a summer storm on the beach. I kept us slant on to the wave as much as I dared.
It worked. After three or four waves, I was on a north-west tack and the odd on-and-off action of the heavy wind on my sail seemed to drive us well enough.
At some point, the lead trireme slackened sail by lifting the hem of his boatsail. His lowest row of oar-ports was now exposed to the storm, and I’m guessing he was shipping water.
Ten more minutes, and he had turned west, putting his high prow to the rollers.
I’d like to say that I planned it all, or guessed it, but my turn was merely to put more water between us.
In another hour, we could scarcely see them, even at the top of the rise, and I had half my oarsmen pulling on the down slope of the wave. It took careful calculation, but it kept our course straight and — give me some credit here — it gave the oarsmen something to do.
By dark we had a sky full of lightning. The land was gone, the wind had risen again and now I brailed up the boatsail to a scrap. Half an hour later, with no order from me, Doola and Vasileos brailed it again, climbing out on the bow and wrapping the whipping, vicious cloth with sodden, slippery rope. But they triumphed, and we lived. Rowing became more important, too, as we needed a continuing impetus to stay stern on to the waves.
Perhaps they didn’t grow larger with the dark, but they were far more terrifying, at least to me. I could just see the rising swell of the things at my shoulder: when a lightning flash came, I was always shocked at how high they were, how white with spume.
But I couldn’t stop looking. The waves were terrible, like the pain of a wound that a warrior must keep testing, perhaps in the hope that it will diminish. That’s my memory of that night — the constant, exhausting shock of the size of the waves.
Eventually, as it always does, night ended. It didn’t end cleanly or evenly, with anything like a dawn. In fact, I remember doubting the evidence of my own eyes as I began to be able to see the white spray hell of the water to the west — that is, if we were running west. I had no stars and no sun; I was in an alien ocean.
I was cold, wet through, of course, and Vasileos stood at one shoulder and Doola at my other. In the night, they’d placed themselves with me in the steering rig. It took all three of us to hold the ship steady.
If one of the steering oars broke If the boatsail mast gave way If the rowers missed their stroke in the trough By midday — a meaningless name for a meaningless time, as we had no idea how much daylight had passed — I began to succumb to hopeless doubt.
What if the whole Outer Ocean were like this? Men said it was a circle of storms, girding the earth. Men at Marsala had said no ship could survive. I thought that they were fools — after all, Carthage came here.
But this was now the worst storm I’d ever seen.
Darkness fell again. It is possible that Doola and I shouted to each other, or perhaps Vasileos roared in my ear, but there was nothing to say.
The rowers — the fishermen, mostly — kept time by nothing but habit. Bless them.
And they rowed on.
The second night, we lost a fisherman’s son overboard. He went to the cathead to defecate, and he was out there when a rogue wave buried the cutwater bow. The ram bit too deep, and, just for a moment, at the steering oar, I thought we would simply plunge to the bottom.
It wasn’t until we’d bailed until daylight that we knew Aristos was gone.
And Bethes, one of the herdsmen, had gone mad. He shrieked and swore and leaped about until Vasileos led a party to trap him in the bow and tie him down.
‘We’re all going to die!’ he screamed. ‘Die! Make it stop!’
His screams were largely covered by the wind.
The second day of the storm dawned — if you could call it that.
Some time after the pale light showed us the roaring chaos of waves, Vasileos put a big arm around my shoulders. ‘ Sky — is — lighter,’ he bellowed.
A tiny, watery ray of hope penetrated my head.
More time passed. Someone cut the madman’s throat; I saw it happen. His screams were… the stuff of nightmare, and someone else couldn’t stand it, shipmate or no. Remember that the herdsmen and the shepherds were different men from the fishermen.
Later, someone threw the corpse over the side.
The wind began to abate. The full-throated shriek of the wind in the boatsail mast’s stays remitted until it was just a scream.
Poseidon’s grip on my steering oars became a mere punch in the guts at the top of every wave.
Our boatsail mast had not given way. Our boatsail had not blown clear of its ropes.
But we’d been rowing for two nights and two days on a meal of dates, and the rowers were so far beyond done that our rowing was more symbolic than real.
I handed the steering oars to Vasileos — a process fraught with peril that revealed that my arms would not function properly and my legs were exhausted — but I struggled forward on a rope tied the length of the ship. At each bench, I stopped.
‘Two more hours. We’re going to make it.’ That’s the whole of the speech I shouted at them.
‘Two more hours. Look at the light. Listen to the wind.’ I shouted these words over and over. Men at one oar bench couldn’t hear me on the next.
Hope is the most intoxicating drug, better than wine or opium.
Hope can make an exhausted man row two more hours; can cause a swordsman’s arm to function for a few more cuts.
Those are the moments when the daimons that make a man’s spirit prove themselves or fail. When everything is gone from you but that ray of hope.
A few failed. Most didn’t. We rowed, and the wind abated.
The waves began to come in a regular cycle, and they grew less steep.
Then suddenly it was noon, on a blue sea with a stiff breeze.
And no land in sight, in any direction.
6
Other, better officers — Doola and Vasileos — had collected rainwater. We drank it. I served out wine from the cargo, and we consumed the last of the dates with handfuls of grain, and then the food was gone.
Despite our hunger and thirst, we threw a heavy handful of dates and a full cup of neat wine over the side to Poseidon.
I let us wallow on the waves until I was sure — sure — which direction was east. Despite the breeze and the sun, I knew that we were right on the edge of death, still. I didn’t think we could survive two more nights at sea. I needed to find the land, find a beach and get my hull on it.
When the movement of the sun gave me east, my heart soared, and I prayed to Apollo Helios, Lord of the Sun, with a fervour I hadn’t shown in many years. Apollo is not really a friend of our house. But that day, the track of the Golden Chariot across the sky revealed that the wind on my cheek was a gentle westerly, and our course was north and west. Vasileos and Doola and I had held our course all night. I’m sure that we went due west at times — the wind was west.
Since then, sailors on the Outer Sea have told me that westerlies are the gentlest storms beyond the Pillars of Heracles.
Let me never face an easterly, then.
Be that as it may, in the afternoon we took down the boatsail and we rowed north and east. It was back- breaking — not because of hard winds, but because we had a fully laden ship and we were exhausted.
After the briefest consultation with Doola and Vasileos, we began to jettison cargo. Four men were bailing all the time, and two more sought out the heaviest cargo with minimum value and threw it over the side. Sodden hides — from sheep and oxen — went. All the dyes, ruined in the storm, so that men’s legs were dyed a vivid purple-black for days.
