I let go of the queen and backed away.
She looked at me with pure, unadulterated hate.
I smiled. ‘You haven’t met a swordsman, lady. I know, because a swordsman wouldn’t have let that happen. I don’t think you want the humiliation of facing me with a sword in your hand, but unless you apologize to me, now, and swear an oath to the gods that you will not harm me, you can fight.’
She stood straighter. ‘Fight,’ she spat.
I turned my back on her and walked out into the sun.
Leukas followed me. ‘Aristocrats — all they do is fight. And practise to fight.’
I was looking at her sword, which was long and straight. ‘Ajax, go and fetch me my long xiphos,’ I said.
Six burly Kelts in heavy leather came and stood around the queen. I smiled at them. None of them smiled back. Two were huge, and two were quite small — thin and wiry. Such men can be the most dangerous.
Detorix came towards me, hesitating with every step. ‘I really need to stop this,’ he said. ‘This is not our way. This woman is a guest. You are a guest.’
‘And we have agreed to play a little game,’ I said. ‘Gaius, ask her if she wants a shield.’
Leukas asked the question. No one answered him.
Ajax ran back with my longest, slenderest xiphos. I had taken it off a Carthaginian, and I rather liked it.
I walked in the sun, a little way along the gravel, turned and drew the sword. I put the scabbard in my left hand, and threw my chlamys over my left arm.
She had a shield. A big shield.
I saluted and she did not. I stepped in, flicked my blade up and she raised her shield, and I kicked it and her to the ground with a pankration kick which she didn’t see coming because I was too close, and she’d raised her shield and thus couldn’t see.
I stepped back and let her get to her feet. When she set her stance again, I shook my head. ‘No, you lost. There is no second chance. If you want to send another man, so be it — but you lost.’
She glared. But she walked over and tapped one of the big men.
His sword was as long as my arm, and longer. He took the shield.
It didn’t look thick enough to be stable. It was oddly shaped and too damned long, and his arms were like an octopus’s arms — too long and too fast.
He came at me, whirling his sword in front of his shield.
Polymarchos had made me practise against this sort of thing, which he called the whirlwind. I made myself relax, moved with him, backing away, letting him slowly close the distance. He had a tempo to his spin, and I moved with it, almost as if we were dancing.
I had my strike prepared, but he surprised me, leaping forward with a shriek, the sword cutting up from below my cloak. I got my scabbard — my heavy, wooden scabbard — on his blade, and he cut right through it and into my chlamys. The blow didn’t cut into my arm, but he almost broke my arm with the blow.
Of course, he had a foot of my steel through his head. A little punch, a hand-reverse to clear his raised shield — one of Polymarchos’s best tricks.
He was dead before he hit the ground.
I hadn’t intended to kill him. In fact, it’s worth noting that he was too good. If he’d been worse, or slower, or less long-limbed, I’d have let him live.
And he was certainly trying to kill or maim me.
I stepped back and the pain of his blow hit me. I stepped back again, and one of the little bastards came for me.
He leaped the corpse of the big man, and swung his heavy sword with two hands.
I cut his sword to the ground and pinked him in the hand.
He roared and cut at me again.
Again I cut his sword to the ground with my lighter weapon, and this time I skewered his right hand. But he raised the sword with his left, so I ripped my point out of his hand and brought the blade down on his left forearm. And then stepped in and kicked him in the crotch.
And he slammed his maimed right hand into my face.
Kelts: they’re insane.
He didn’t break my nose. That was lucky.
I was blind with pain for a moment, so I slashed the air in front of me to keep him back. I connected with something, but most of my long xiphos was scarcely sharp and all it did was raise a welt, I suspect.
He leaped at me again just as I got control of my head. He didn’t have a weapon. And he was as fast as a fish in the stream. His wounded hands were up, and he was reaching for my blade.
I had to kill him, too.
Now I was breathing like a bellows, and I fell back.
I wanted to say something witty and insulting, because I was angry — full of rage, like Ares. But all I could do was breathe.
It didn’t feel good.
In fact, I felt… wretched. These two men had never done anything to hurt me — well, except to attack me at the behest of their mistress — and now they were dead.
She looked at me, and at the four men beside her.
I breathed hard. And waited.
Gaius nodded. ‘That’s it, then,’ he said, in his aristocratic Greek. ‘Tell that woman that it is over, or it is war, and if it’s war, we have two hundred men and she has four.’
I looked at him. I hadn’t expected him to step in. But that’s what friends are for.
I turned to Detorix. ‘We will leave in the morning,’ I said. ‘Let this be an end to it, and don’t let me regret not walking over and killing her.’
Detorix nodded.
That was good. I was done with the Venetiae.
So we left without Doola, and that didn’t make me happy. Nor did I trust our hosts any more, or our boatmen, or anyone.
We had to pole our boats north. Some of the oarsmen were quite good at this, and some were not. We had a pair of guides and interpreters, but otherwise we were on our own.
After the first night, we built a regular camp by the river and we put brush all the way around it and stood to, fully armed, an hour before darkness and an hour after dawn.
The third day, we saw horsemen on the horizon as we poled upstream.
By the fourth day, we were quite aware of the horsemen, who scarcely troubled to hide themselves. And the river was a snake, swimming on the sea — an endless curve and back-curve. Sometimes we could see a town or settlement a dozen stades before we reached it. Some settlements were on both sides of a peninsula, so we’d pass the town twice. And it did seem like we paddled or poled twice the distance that we’d have walked — or that our shadows rode.
I’d had about enough of the Keltoi by then. And I was unhappy with myself — the more I thought on it, the more I decided I’d allowed myself to be ruled by Ares in the taverna. I didn’t need to show her my arete. I didn’t need to fight. I could be Odysseus instead of Achilles. And the two dead men were powerfully on my conscience.
But even as I thought these thoughts — thoughts largely fuelled by Heraclitus, of course — I also thought like the pirate I often was. I considered setting an ambush for the riders. It was foolish to let them pick the time for an attack.
But it would be worse to fight them. Once we fought, we’d be the enemy to every barbarian on the river, and that would be the end of us and our tin, too.
I thought about it for another day, as we poled on and on and seemed to make very few stades.
That night, Gaius and Seckla and I took Herodikles and one of the younger shepherds, Leo, who was growing as a man and as a leader. The five of us slipped downstream in a small boat, and we floated silently in the darkness until we came to a campfire. We landed well upstream, and crept carefully down on them.
Eight men, a dozen horses.
It was the work of two minutes to cut all the hobbles of the horses and chase them off into the darkness.
