a full recovery, and had a little bump on his chest he used to scratch.
We had water. We had two days’ food, our holds full of tin and we had exact sailing directions for the northern Venetiae islands and the mouth of the Sequana River, which we were told was two days away.
We were five weeks from home.
It was glorious.
We set sail with the dawn, and we had to row out of the estuary as the wind had shifted all night and then settled back into an easterly, but the oarsmen — every one of whom was going to get a share of all that tin — rowed steadily, slowly, but with a will. And our ships were clean and dry, and we moved well enough.
We found Amphitrite hurrying towards us in the early morning, her mainsail and boatsail set, slanting up from the south and east.
We watched them and chuckled, because they weren’t going to reach us on that tack, and they’d be all day following us if they lost ground. There was a certain rivalry between the men who had to row all day and the ‘mere’ sailors.
At our closest point of approach, perhaps ten stades, they dropped all their sails.
That meant something.
‘I think they’re waving,’ Doola said.
I nodded. Already my eyes weren’t what they had been at seventeen.
‘Let’s go and speak to them,’ I said wearily. They were downwind — easy to get there, harder to row back.
The boatsail mast was rigged, so I gave the rowers a rest and we ran downwind, and Lydia and Nike lay on their oars.
When we were a stade away, they started to yell — Demetrios and a dozen other men all yelling in unison.
I got it immediately.
‘PHOENICIANS!’
As soon as Demetrios knew that I understood, he put his helm over, raised his sails and ran back west.
Even as Seckla’s men raised the mainmast and the two triakonters followed suit — you don’t always need signals — the first shark’s fin nicked the southern horizon in the sunlight.
By the time we had our sails set and we were all running west, there were five of them.
12
I was thousands of stades north of the Pillars, and the Phoenicians had sent a squadron to track me down.
In a way, it was flattering.
But the immediate crisis was one of navigation. The wind was blowing off the coast of Gaul, and it was going to blow us west. West was the tin island, but after that — nothing. I’d seen glimpses of that nothing: a grey, rock- bound coast stretching away into the setting sun.
There is a saying in Plataea that the frog would rather be alive in the desert than dead in the pond. It’s not a pretty saying, but it is a true one. My oarsmen grumbled and looked west with desperate anxiety, but as long as we sailed west with the world’s wind at our backs, the Phoenicians were not likely to catch us.
So I sailed west. I had a plan, one that depended on my being a little more cunning than my adversaries. I sailed west, and planned to double back around the tin island and leave them all a-stand in the channel. I didn’t expect it to work, but I wanted to try.
We sailed west a day, and made camp in an estuary — not a place I’d been, of course. Leukas told us it was safe to land.
He insisted that if we beached and drew our ships up, the Dumnoni would protect us.
‘Of course,’ he said with a shrug, ‘it would have been better if you’d sailed north into the heart of our country.’
It was late, and we had a dozen small fires burning behind the dunes that separate the cold beach from the sea. I had as many men on watch. All the Phoenicians had to do was to catch us against the beach and we would either be dead men, or we’d spend the rest of our lives on Alba. All the natives said it was an island. An island with three hundred stades of sea between it and the mainland.
I don’t think I went to sleep that night. It wasn’t just the ships. The truth was, with Vasileos — possibly my greatest weapon — I could build more ships.
No, it wasn’t ships. It was the cargo. The tin, the silver and the gold. If we abandoned or burned the ships, we lost the cargo: no two ways about it. There was no way to keep thousands of pounds of tin — or even a couple of hundred pounds of gold and silver. And I hadn’t come all this way to lose it.
Long before dawn, I stumbled around in the dark until I had located Doola, Seckla, Gaius, Neoptolymos and the rest. I had heated enough wine to fill my old mastos cup, and above us, the stars wheeled across the sky — bigger and farther away, I think, than they were back in Greece.
I had built up a fire and I handed the cup around, and they pulled their cloaks as tightly as they could. Beyond the circle of the fire, men were rising from sleep — and none of them was happy to rise so early.
Doola looked at me blurrily over the rim of my cup. ‘So?’ he asked.
‘I see two choices,’ I answered. ‘We can burn the ships and lose the cargoes. Go inland, find Leukas’s people and wait the Phoenicians out.’ I looked around. ‘We have three hundred men, and they rely on us. We’ll have to feed them, or risk having them either turn on us or to banditry.’
I looked around. Demetrios shrugged. ‘You took them,’ he said.
‘I did, so they are my responsibility,’ I agreed. ‘But we are in this together, and that cargo is our cargo.’
Doola nodded.
Neoptolymos shrugged. ‘Let’s fight,’ he said.
‘That’s a third option,’ I agreed. ‘We could put to sea and fight: five triremes against one trireme, two triakonters and a tub of a merchantman — all brilliantly handled, of course.’
Demetrios shook his head. ‘Suicide,’ he said. ‘We’d just die.’
Seckla grinned. ‘No, the gods will make a way for us.’ He looked at me. ‘Because Arimnestos has the luck of Hermes.’
Gaius was staring out to sea. ‘You have another option?’
I nodded. ‘We run west. According to the Dumnoni, it is a long promontory. Then we run north, around the north end of the island.’
Demetrios whistled. ‘How far?’ he asked.
I raised my hands to the heavens. ‘How would I know? Leukas says ten days’ sailing, but — let’s face it — he doesn’t really know any waters but these right here. Just like all the other Keltoi.’
‘Except the Venetiae,’ Demetrios said.
Doola handed me the cup. ‘If we run all the way around Alba — and stay ahead of the Phoenicians all the way — where do we get to?’
‘The coast of Gaul,’ I said. I drew them a chart, as best I could, in the sand. ‘Alba is a triangle, about three days’ sailing by ten,’ I said. I remember saying that. Laughable, but the Venetiae had said it, and Leukas said it. I believed it. I drew the long line of the Gaulish coast — another angle.
‘North around Alba, then east to Gaul, looking for the estuary where the Venetiae have their homes,’ I said. ‘We sell them our ships, and move our tin over the mountains and down to Marsala.’
Demetrios was looking out to sea. ‘And all we have to do is stay ahead of the Phoenicians all the way.’
I nodded. ‘It’s true.’
He shook his head. ‘Listen, I’m a good sailor, and not a good warrior. But that plan seems foolish to me. Fifteen days’ sailing — twenty days’, more like. Twenty days for them to catch us on a beach. Twenty days where we have to find a safe route and a site to camp, and all they have to do is follow us. It is a landlubber’s plan, that depends on our navigation being perfect. One error, one blocked channel, one day of adverse winds — and they have us.’
