tore the helmsman limb from limb. Which wasn’t what I’d have wanted. A man who really knew these waters would have been a priceless asset.
Otherwise, it was all easy.
I sent Seckla to fetch Lydia around the point. We’d exterminated the opposition, and we didn’t have to hurry.
We examined the stores of the little post. They were ample. The Phoenicians collected taxes from the whole district, even while taking their people as slaves. I suspect we’d have been quite popular if we’d stayed, but on the other hand, it was always possible the locals would see us as more of the same.
Which, of course, we were.
Slaves — African slaves — told Seckla that another ship had come in with the trireme on the beach and then sailed away. That’s the only reason we missed a huge consignment of silver.
You can’t waste curses on these things. We’d stormed the place with a boat’s crew, and the worst injury was Giannis, the youngest of my herdsmen, who managed to lose the chape from his scabbard. In the attack, the point of his long knife rammed through the top of his thighs as he ran, opening truly horrible-looking wounds. No, I’m not making this up. We all teased him about it, and he took our teasing the way young men who want to be heroes react.
Good fun, really.
My crew were… blooded. There’s no other way to put it. They killed together, and they were victorious together, and we had a small stack of silver bars and some tin that they all knew they’d share — together.
It all came back to me so easily. Kill the men. Take the women. Sell the cargo. Build morale in the crew. Train them to fight. Kill, and don’t be killed.
Hardly worth the telling, really.
At any rate, we burned the slave pens and cooked pigs in the embers. The slaves liked that. Tara’s admiration was candid. I liked that.
In the morning, I looked over the trireme. Her starboard cathead was smashed to splinters, and needed professional help. I remember standing there with two of my fishermen and Alexandros and Seckla. Seckla was a craftsman — the kind of man who’s never happy unless he’s working. He pushed and pulled and shook his head.
I agreed. I wanted that ship, but she was too damaged to use.
So I turned to my friends, the fishermen. ‘Tell me about the weather the next four days.’
They prevaricated. But eventually, the older one admitted that it was unusually fine, even for summer.
Seckla glared at me. ‘You can’t be thinking we can tow this thing?’
Many things in my life have represented gifts from the gods. Briseis, despite the many ugly turns she did me — she drove me to heroism like a farmer drives an ox to work. My father’s decision to send me to the old priest, Calchus, for training.
Four days’ west wind.
I asked the former slaves for volunteers, and let’s be frank — what choice did they have? Stay, and be enslaved by the Iberians? By the time the smoke of the slave pens was in the sky, there were already Iberian warriors prowling the ridges above the little warehouse town.
Before we’d been at sea an hour, they set fire to the lighthouse.
My Phoenician factor was a cringing coward. I might be, too, if a savage pirate and his tattooed mistress had my wife and children. But he was a fount of information as we sailed east on a perfect wind.
‘We have no defences,’ he admitted. He almost bragged it. ‘It is fifty years since any of the interior tribes attacked us.’ He looked at the sea. ‘How did you make it past the squadron at Gades?’ Then he looked at me. ‘You — you were the small ship that Dadalos was pursuing!’
I smiled nastily.
‘But — we took that ship!’ He quailed at his own words.
I was older, calmer, more mature. So I didn’t grab him by the throat.
‘What ship?’ I asked. I thought my tone was mild.
He grew very red in the face, like a maiden blushing. I took his hand and pressed my thumb and forefinger to a certain spot.
It was scarcely necessary. He shrieked. ‘Days ago. Helitkon of Tartessos took a small sailing ship — no more than a fishing boat. Laden with goods from the Inner Sea.’ He writhed in my hands.
‘Where?’
‘Helitkon brought him in to me. I supplied him — he sailed south!’
‘Where’s the ship? The crew?’ I asked.
‘He took them! To sell!’ he was screaming.
It is sickening, I’ll admit. His daughters looked at me with naked hate that transcended fear — they hated me more than they feared rape and death, which, all things considered, suggests they were brave. And they obviously loved him, which meant that, however much I wanted to see him as the enemy, as a piece of shit who dealt in human lives and stole and killed — he was a good father.
Of course, I knew that I dealt in human lives, too.
Time makes things difficult. Maturity — unless you are simply a killer, a thug — robs you of certainty.
I let go his hand. And I felt… ashamed.
Tara watched me. She looked at me the way a cat looks at something it doesn’t know. A cat is asking, Is this prey? Or predator?
Yes. Well.
I looked up at my mainsail, drawing well. I looked back at the long curve of the tow rope. I wished, for the hundredth time, that I had Vasileos.
But I sang a prayer to Poseidon that night, after I made love to my wife on the beach with the ancient pines.
The coast of Iberia had been Phoenicia’s cash cow for seventy years, and it was naked before me.
Old thoughts boiled to the surface. I had enough silver from the one raid to make the trip a success. But But there could be more.
8
Oiasso welcomed us as victors, which we were. Tertikles was enraged, at first, that we’d stormed Centrona without him.
Doola hugged me on the beach, and introduced me to his wife.
One trick of leadership that I learned young was never to question a man’s taste in bed-partners. No faster way to lose his faith, his loyalty, his courage. That said, though, I’d always known that Doola and Seckla were… together. It wasn’t a spoken thing. It just — was.
And then, one fine day, we landed at Oiasso, Doola fell for a Kelt girl and the next I knew, he was wed. Doola was my friend, practically my brother. It was not my place to even ask. I hugged him, kissed her and bade them every fortune.
But Seckla stood on the beach with death in his eyes. He was younger: tough, strong, tall and thin, and his love went to hate, all at once. I think he’d assumed that Doola would wake up one morning and be done with the woman. Instead, he married her.
And Seckla was also my friend. Seckla was touchier, more full of fire, perhaps less useful sometimes — but not on this last raid. Seckla looked at Doola, and I looked at Seckla.
Command. Leadership. A never-ending labyrinth of difficult decisions.
Tara got it all in one glance. Or maybe knew it from gossip. Either way, she was quick.
‘They were lovers?’ she asked. Actually, she asked something cruder. Her Greek was barbaric.
‘Yes.’ I was moving cautiously towards Seckla. I was afraid he’d kill his former friend right there.
She laughed. ‘I’ll find him someone,’ she said. She laughed again.
‘Men!’
