In the Inner Sea, we like to chat a little before we do business — but there, with the lights of the town behind us and the gale beginning to blow down the estuary, I was happy to negotiate in a hurry.
‘Seventy,’ I said.
He twirled his moustaches, which were heavy.
‘Land your ships as our guests,’ he said. ‘You have my word you will not be seized here.’ He gave Detorix a significant look.
The younger man was unabashed. ‘What was I to do?’ he asked. ‘He had three hundred fighting men.’
‘And he still does. And yet he has come back to us in peace,’ Tellonix said in Keltoi, which Leukas translated.
Well, I knew I had nowhere else to go, but there was no reason I had to say so aloud.
We got our keels up the beach — as I say, it was more mud than sand. Men’s feet stank when they got ashore, and we were so far up the estuary that the water was scarcely salt. We pulled the ships even higher up the beach — at high tide, my trireme was ten horse-lengths onto the grass. We had help from a hundred willing Keltoi — men and women.
We got the ships ashore, and we got our cargoes off and under our tarpaulins, and then the rain started and we ran for shelter. I think that in all Gaul, only the Venetiae had the facilities to sleep three hundred sailors, and even so, we had to raise our tents — in a blustering, squall-laden wind. It was hard work, but our feet were on dry land and we were filled with spirit, like Heracles.
In the morning, the weather was, if anything, worse, but I woke in a fine wooden house — a little smoky, I confess, and cold, but outside a gale blew over the town, and even the water of the estuary looked deadly.
Breakfast was an oddly shaped squash full of good butter and honey, and we ate with gusto and drank the thin local beer. Demetrios raised his small beer and said, ‘May the gods protect all sailors on a day like this. Even the poor Phoenicians.’
I don’t think Neoptolymos would have drunk to that, but he was away south.
We slept and ate for three days while the storm blew itself out, and then the serious trading began.
We had been unlucky in some things, and lucky in others. In our favour, the winds that had seemed adverse to us had allowed us to bring a cargo of tin before the last convoy left the mouth of the Sequana for the interior. Winter closed down the tin trade, as it closed everything else, and we had arrived in good time to make the trip.
Our ships were not as valuable as I had hoped. Freighting three hundred men and seventy mule-loads of tin overland to Marsala cost me all four ships and all my silver. ‘My’ silver. That’s a laugh.
And my gold was spent keeping us all in Marsala while the convoy prepared.
It was only in the mouth of the Sequana, at Loluma, which is what the Venetiae called their trade town there, that we really saw the power of the Venetiae. It wasn’t just that they had ships — and they did, ships as large as our Inner Sea grain ships, capable of carrying thousands of mythemnoi of grain in a single cargo. The Keltoi built barrels — as I’ve described — to standard sizes. And they built the open boats — the ones I’d seen at the piers — also to standard sizes, so that the barrels rolled easily aboard, right down the gunwales to the stern. It was a superb design: a Gaulish riverboat could load on any bank, and unload right back up the bank with a few strong men. They could row or pole, and they drew so little water that they could run up quite a small stream, or pass a dam or a fish weir.
They had a particular flat barge for carrying tin. Each boat took three ingots, and had a crew of two. Tin was so valuable, even here, that each boat had a curiously carved log on a rope, and the log was threaded into the ingots. I asked Tellonix what it was for.
He smiled. ‘If the boat capsizes and sinks, the little piece of wood floats to the surface and shows where we can retrieve the tin,’ he said.
They usually hired out guards — men like Sittonax. Detorix wanted my oarsmen, but I wasn’t willing to sell them. I did convince him to treat them as free men, and offer them wages. Few of them were willing, at first, but after an idle week and some descriptions of the trip we were going to make, more and more of them signed to row for him — almost a third of the former slaves. None of the men from Marsala, of course. We were almost home, or so it seemed to us, and most of the fishermen assumed we had about ten days’ travel before we got there.
I spent many fine evenings in the tavernas of Loluma, talking to Venetiae captains about their routes. They were careful, circumspect, but sailors have a natural tendency to brag to each other, and Demetrios was the very prince of navigators — he had brought us through the Pillars of Heracles and all the way to Alba, and his exploits loosened their tongues. They told us fabulous tales — tales of islands west of Alba, and north, too — of islands of ice that glittered in the sun, and shoals of cod so thick a man could walk on them.
One captain had made a dozen trips to the north of Alba, for slaves and gold. He laughed at our notion that we could sail around Alba in ten days.
‘Thirty days,’ he said, shaking his head. ‘And even then you would need the gods at your helm.’
Demetrios gave me a long look.
What could I say?
We Greeks gathered in a circle of standing stones, and Herodikles said the prayers for the autumn feast of Demeter. We gave a horse race, with prizes, for Poseidon, who had favoured us and let us live. It pleased the Keltoi, too, because they loved horses, even though theirs were, to me, the ugliest horses I’d ever seen: heavy, ungainly and short-legged. But they raced them, praised them, called them names like Wind and Spirit, just like our horses at home.
We introduced them to the idea of a night-time torch race on horseback, which they liked a good deal. We paid for a feast.
Our convoy was completed. I was taking a little over two hundred men home. All I needed was Doola.
13
Ever waited for someone in the Agora?
Ever sat by a stream, waiting for a girl who promised to walk with you? Or by a door, because she said she’d be there in a minute?
Ever waited and waited, and been disappointed?
At what point do you walk away?
For me, the issue was winter. The Venetiae were unfailingly polite — even a little oily, which is not how one thinks of barbarians, is it? But they wanted us gone. They feared that the Phoenicians would come, as did I — and they feared that we would make trouble, which wasn’t so far from possible, either. And they feared that we might try to seize our ships back. They feared too that my freed slaves might eat them out of house and home.
I feared the cost. I wasn’t living on charity, but I had made a deal — for the whole journey — and I knew that sooner or later, Detorix would sidle up to me very apologetically and demand that we get under way. I didn’t really have to care, but there might come a further point where the Venetiae would simply refuse to perform their part. Or that the passes would close, and we’d be stuck for another winter in the north country.
Something had happened to me. And the longer I spent in the pretty town of Loluma, the more thoroughly it happened. I was turning back into Arimnestos. I still mourned Euphoria, but I was merely sad. I missed Athens. I missed Plataea.
I was sorry that I had made such a mess of Lydia, and Sicily, but I was determined to go back and set it right.
I was going back to being the man I had been. With, perhaps, some changes. I did not seriously consider, just for example, threatening the Venetiae with the burning of their town, just to keep them in awe.
Of course I’m smiling, thugater. Things change. People change. But some things remain the same always, as you’ll see if you stay with me another hour.
About two weeks after we landed — to be honest, the whole period is a blur of activity to me — a round ship crept up the estuary under oars — eight long sweeps handled in a fairly seamanlike manner — and I sat in my favourite of the three waterfront tavernas, drinking a wooden bowl of the excellent Gaulish wine and watching the ship come in.
