me.
Even Doola.
The sun was just starting to sink when we came up with the land, and we coasted north, looking for a beach. We had to row, and that was difficult, as the men were weak and scared — scared of me, now.
But the closer we got to the land, and the more we could smell it, the more our hearts rose.
By sunset, we were within bowshot of land — a low and difficult coast. But just before full dark robbed our eyes, Doola saw a break in the coast, and we turned west under sail and passed over the bar of a river, and we saw huts — beautiful huts, with stone foundations and big roofs of thatch on the south bank, and two heavily built open boats riding a few ship’s lengths out from a muddy beach.
I took down the sail in the last of the light, and we got the oars out with a slovenly motion that would have disgraced an all-slave crew on a Carthaginian. And we pulled badly — I say we, because I was on a bench. We caught crabs, and some men seemed incapable of effort.
We crawled the last hundred paces across the calm water of the estuary. Backing water to land stern-first seemed impossible.
But we managed, in a laborious and inefficient manner. We floundered the ship around, and backed water like boys rowing for the first time, and the stern grounded with a soft thump.
We’d lived.
I know I wept. Many others did, too. I lay over my oar, and I cried.
Landing stern-first means that the rowers are facing away from the land. So I was one of the last to notice that armed men were forming on the greensward by the river. It was Doola who alerted me.
Fifty men with spears.
Ares. I remember thinking that if they came to enslave me, I’d just lie down and take it.
But I rose, and moved perhaps by my killing of the morning, I seized not my spear but my staff, and I leaped off the stern to the riverbank and walked slowly, the land moving under me, towards the spearmen. It was just the last edge of a summer evening: the sky was still pink, but night was close.
I fell to my knees and clutched the earth, and kissed the grass.
Then I hobbled like a drunkard towards the spearmen. They watched me.
They looked utterly foreign. Many — most — were heavily tattooed. They had big, ugly bodies with fat bellies and hollow backs — men who didn’t exercise properly. But they had big muscles, heavy thighs — trousers in checks and violent stripes.
Their hair was all the colours of the rainbow, even in the fading light.
Sittonax came up next to me, and he had a spear. He grinned at me.
He shouted at them, and two men shouted back. Both wore fine gear.
It was as if he cast a spell, or broke one. As soon as Sittonax called to them, their disciplined silence broke and most of them simply walked away. A few stayed to look at the ship, and one man, in a magnificent helmet with bronze wings and a gold torque around his neck, stood warily to the side. After a pause, he came and spoke to Sittonax, and when the two were done, they embraced like old friends and the man grinned at me and stood by.
‘Your people?’ I asked Sittonax. He gave me a look of pure annoyance in return.
‘If we landed in a part of Sicily where they spoke Greek, would you be home?’ he asked, which for him was a long speech.
‘You speak to them well enough,’ I commented.
He shrugged. ‘These are Tarbelli. Their aristocrats speak a good form of my language — I can understand them.’ He nodded at two spearmen who were looking at our ship. ‘I can’t understand a word from those two.’
‘Oh,’ I said, or something equally intelligent. ‘You seemed to be talking ten to the dozen.’
‘They thought we were coming to attack,’ Sittonax said. He shrugged. ‘Now they think we’re here to trade. I had to explain that we aren’t Phoenicians.’
I nodded. ‘Tell him we’re here to trade,’ I agreed. ‘And that we need food and water, or men will die. Tell them we’ve been at sea eight days in a galley.’
He nodded. He spoke to the man in the excellent war gear, who made noises in return.
He blew a horn, and the Keltoi moved quickly. My oarsmen stumbled ashore — it’s amazing how unstable a man can be on dry land — and a local man showed Doola where we could set up tents. We had two big tents, built to rig on the hull of the ship. We had one up before the roast pig was brought down to us, and then no man could raise a finger for anything. They might have enslaved the lot of us in a matter of minutes, just for some pig.
I don’t really remember much more of that evening. I ate and ate. I went to the ship, and Vasileos and I managed to get one of our heavy amphorae out of the bilge, and we broached it and served it to our hosts. And then I went to sleep — real sleep, for the first time in ten days.
I awoke to a rainy day and heavy swell out in the estuary. And to the thought that I had sailed out of the Pillars of Heracles, onto the Great Sea, and lived. You’d think I’d have been worried for Amphitrite and all my friends aboard. Let me tell you something about the life I led, honey. You had to trust your comrades and the gods. If they were dead, well, they were dead.
The first thing I did after rising was to pour a long libation and say a prayer aloud, to Poseidon, for their deliverance.
Then I went to find the tin.
7
There wasn’t any tin at Oiasso. We sat with the lord of the town the next day, exchanging pleasantries, while his steward looked over our selection of wine and copper. Neither seemed to hold the least interest for the locals, and after some discussion I found that they had excellent copper down the coast in Iberia and that, while they enjoyed our wine, they had excellent wines of their own.
The Amphitrite had all of our other trade goods. I didn’t have pepper; I didn’t have silphium or anything else except for my own bronze wares — some helmets, a bronze aspis, some cooking pots and a bundle of swords. I won’t say that they turned up their noses at my work.
I’ll just say that they smiled and moved on to look at other items.
I had time to examine the chieftain’s war gear. His bronze helmet with the wings was unlike anything I’d ever seen — almost like a Chaldicean helmet, with hinged cheekpieces and a low bronze bowl, but very different in appearance and marvellously well fashioned. It was decorated over almost the entire surface with beautiful repousse — the work was very fine, even though the figures were, to me, amateurish. It took time for me to develop an eye for Keltoi work. To be honest, I still think they need some help with their figures.
Every man likes the art of his home, doesn’t he?
That’s not really the point. The point is that by the time the sun was high in the sky, I knew that I’d made an arrogant assumption about the north. They weren’t ignorant savages ready to be impressed with the marvellous goods of our civilization. They were, in fact, impressed only by our pottery. They didn’t really want our wines, but they wanted all the amphorae, and the empty one from the night before became our first guest gift.
The second thing we discovered was that the customs of the Inner Sea didn’t hold here. Or rather, it was like stepping back in time, to the century before my father’s time, or even farther — to the world of the Iliad and the Odyssey. The Tarbelli aristocrat didn’t trade. He hosted us and gave us gifts. Then he waited patiently for us to give him gifts, and the steward prompted us through Sittonax, who rolled his eyes.
‘This is old-fashioned,’ he admitted. ‘But Southerners are old-fashioned.’
It made me smile, because for once, I was in my element. It was just like Crete, and I’d lived there. So I put myself in the role of the aristocratic captain and I disdained matters of trade, and Doola became my steward, and by dinner on the second evening, Tertikles — that’s the best I can do with the local lord’s name — and I were guest friends. We’d hit each other with swords, we’d raced horses on the dunes and I’d given him my second best helmet, which was, if no better than his own, no worse. He liked it.
Tertikles and Sittonax spoke together a great deal, and I left them to it when I wasn’t required, seeing to the emptying of the ship. She’d stood nine days at sea, and she needed… everything. We stripped her to the wood,
