And then the Poieni were coming at me.
They had to come up the short ramp and then the steps. And perhaps they didn’t really believe that the intruder would be armed.
I got one for nothing. You usually do. My spear had not lost its purpose, and my hand had not lost its skill. My spearhead went in one eye, and he fell on top of his mates.
I wasn’t going into the slave quarters. If I did, they could simply lock the door on me and hunt me down in daylight.
But I had the glimmer of a plan. So I took a step backwards onto the low platform just inside the log lintel.
They took a long minute to decide to come after me, though. And when they did, they came silently, their bare feet padding on the steps, fast and purposeful.
The first man came though the door with his aspis thrust well up ahead of him. I launched myself at him, and we went shield to shield in the near darkness. My spear was leaning against the wall, ready to hand. I had a short sword in my fist, and I cut over his shield. Then under it.
This man was good. He rolled with my shield slam and got free — got his shield down, and then up, while he shortened his grip on his spear.
I got my sword against his helmet — but not hard enough. Still, where a man’s head goes, his weight goes, so I kept pushing, and he had to bend back.
But his spear started searching for me, wild pecks like a snake striking at a bird.
All in near-perfect darkness.
Something changed.
A man behind him thrust with his spear at my head, and some noise betrayed him. I wrenched my head to my right. My adversary’s head cracked against the doorpost. Helmet and all, he fell away from me. The spear hit my helmet, but not a killing blow.
I got my weight under me, powered forward, got my right knee into my adversary’s groin and then swung my aspis into his head — and by sheer luck blocked the next thrust from his partner.
There is no going back, in such combat.
I was too close to do anything but grapple.
I let the aspis drop off my right arm as my left arm swept past my new opponent’s head, and I seized his aspis with my left hand, spun it and broke his arm, turned him as he screamed and pulled. I threw him in, through the door and in among the slaves.
‘ DOOLA! ’ I roared.
The third man came up the steps. I had his spearhead. Heracles gave it to me: suddenly it was in my right hand, which ran down the shaft even as he ran up the steps, and I turned it, slammed the spear across his aspis and then slipped it over his head and locked him by the neck. The fourth man thrust at me. The third man’s face went rigid, and I backed up the steps, using him as a shield. I was strong.
Oh, I was strong. I laughed. I laughed at Dagon.
Break my body, will you?
My victim screamed, and I got the spear shaft under his jaw at last and broke his neck. Eager hands reached from behind me and grabbed him by the helmet and towed him into the slave quarters.
The fourth man was still in shock. He’d just seen three comrades die — one, judging from the man’s skill, his captain. And then he’d stabbed his mate.
I got a deep breath into my body, seized my spear from behind the door and threw it into him so that he fell, the spear deep in his body. He thrashed, and the other men flinched away from him instinctively.
Men behind me passed me my aspis.
I had all the time in the world to get it on my arm.
I started down the steps.
The Poieni shuffled.
And broke.
I must have laughed. I’m laughing now.
Oh, the power.
I’d missed this.
They might as well have stood their ground. None of them made the door of the tower, because Doola was there, and his archers shot them down in the moonlit open ground. A few ran off into the slag heaps.
Some ruthless bastard in the tower slammed the door shut.
The slaves started to come out of their quarters. The door was open.
In the darkness, they looked like creatures from the underworld. They were too thin to be men.
I didn’t know Neoptolymos when he stepped up to me. In Sicily, he had filled out into a solid rock, with muscles that stood out like a statue of Heracles. Now, the skin was stretched tightly across a skull-like head and his tow-blond hair was Medusa’s in the moonlight.
‘Brother?’ he asked, his voice a sibilant whisper.
I thought he was some Iberian who spoke Greek. He didn’t look like an Illyrian.
But I got it. Some interplay of light and shadow, something in the set of the mouth.
I crushed him to me.
‘We knew you’d come.’ He managed a laugh.
‘Where are the others?’ I asked.
He pointed towards the gaping pit, a black hole in the dark. ‘They tried to escape and were caught, so they aren’t allowed out of the pit. Gaius especially.’ He grinned. ‘He’s a bad slave.’
‘But alive,’ I said. I feared the worst. This was insane. I’d heard rumours that the Athenians used slaves like this in their silver mines, but it made no sense, and now I knew that I should have come as soon as I knew where they were.
But that kind of thinking leads to mistakes. I shrugged it off. ‘Let’s go and get them,’ I said.
‘You have to wait for daylight,’ Neoptolymos said. ‘You can’t even get down the ladders in the dark.’ He shrugged. ‘I tried, once.’
I reckoned it was two hours until dawn.
Doola came out of the moonlit darkness and hugged Neoptolymos. So did Seckla.
Neoptolymos laughed aloud. ‘By the gods,’ he said. ‘You came. You came!’
There were a hundred or more slaves milling about in the darkness. Many of them ran off — I have no idea what happened to them. Many, of course, must have been Iberians, and found their way home. Or died.
But there were a hundred men who stayed: Greeks, Etruscans, Iberians, Africans from Libya and farther off, and Keltoi, too. Neoptolymos knew them — most of them by name — and he moved among them, giving orders — well, he had been a prince, once.
Meanwhile, Doola and I looked at the tower. Men at the top of it shot arrows at us, but I, who had endured Persian archery, didn’t think much of their weak bows and their piss-poor shooting — in the dark, no less.
We walked all around the tower.
‘If we burn it, every Phoenician in Iberia will know we are here,’ Doola said.
I thought about it. There wasn’t a hurry — yet — and I took some time to think.
‘If they find our ships, we’re fucked,’ I said. ‘But, other than that, do you really think they have two hundred soldiers? In this whole colony?’
Doola’s eyes flashed in the dark. He laughed a cruel laugh. Doola was a gentle man; not a man who fancied killing, not a man who loved the feel of a spear in his hand. But slavery enraged him.
‘You want them to come here?’ he asked.
‘We have the high ground, and their gold. They’d be fools to come for us. But if they do, we can teach them a lesson.’ I grinned. He grinned.
We set fire to the tower.
It took time. It is one thing to say, ‘The tower is made of wood’, and another thing entirely to get it to burn.
Here’s what we did. We stripped all the shingles off the livestock sheds, and then we broke down the sheds themselves and the big wooden structure where the smelting went on. We had a hundred pairs of willing hands,
