Even more should we deserve the ridicule of men if, having before us the example of the Phocaeans who, to escape the tyranny of the Great King, left Asia and founded a new settlement at Massilia, we should sink into such abjectness of spirit as to submit to the dictates of those whose masters we have always been throughout our history.
14
I didn’t go anywhere that winter. I sat in Massalia with my smithy and a supply of tin the other bronze smiths envied, and cast a pair of light rams — carefully designed and carefully cast, according to my own theories. Around the headland at Tarsilla, Vasilios laid down the keel for a trieres. She would carry one hundred seventy-two oarsmen and each oarsmen would have a dactyl over two cubits in which to breathe. I had copper, and I had tin, and I traded Dionysius a competed ram for all the timber. I told the oarsmen that I would need them in the spring, and that the payoff for the tin adventure would happen at the spring feast of Demeter.
Gaius stayed the winter with me. He disdained working in the forge, but he would sit in a chair and chat with me while I worked, which made the time pass pleasantly enough.
Winter passed slowly.
It was interesting, the experience of being rich. Some men were jealous, and some were openly admitting it. Of course, I had two hundred ‘clients’ in the form of the former slave oarsmen, the marines, the shepherds and the fishermen. None of them seemed to want to go back to work.
Piracy has many ills, and the greatest may be that when you teach a hard-working boy that he can steal and kill for gold, he may feel that hauling nets is dull.
And there was an element of comedy to my riches. After all, the tin ingots were still stacked in the warehouse, and before midwinter, when one of the ingots showed signs of the tin illness, we brought them into the house we’d built and kept them warm, which seemed to help.
You probably don’t know about tin blight. Tin, when it gets cold and wet, can develop an illness like wheat — it grows a white mould, and once the mould spreads, the metal can be ruined. Indeed, if you leave the tin long enough, one day you’ll walk in and find your fortune in tin is nothing but a small pile of white dust. This was one of the reasons smiths couldn’t build up stores of tin. As a smith, I knew a few tricks — I knew to run over the outside of the pigs with flax tow and pork fat; I knew to keep them warm. But I spent my winter in a constant anxiety about the tin.
And that wasn’t my only anxiety. Again, my riches were more apparent than real. We had some gold — the ransom of the Gaul aristocrats, the gold we took all the way back in Iberia — but it was only really enough to pay for food and wine for the oarsmen who remained.
It was the rumour of our wealth in tin that made us rich. Some men thought we had thousands of mythemnoi of tin — other men thought we’d discovered a new source. All ascribed to us an almost heroic level of wealth.
As the winter wore on, and I worked in my shop in Massalia, I began to fear what those rumours might sound like out on the Great Blue. Somewhere, I feared that men just like me were hearing of the fabulous wealth we’d won. And were fingering their swords.
After the midwinter festivals, I laid out the rest of my hoard to have my oarsmen build a pair of towers down by the beach. And I put the word out in Massalia that I was looking for archers.
Massalia isn’t a big town. At most, there are a thousand free men, with their families; another thousand slave men, or perhaps a little more, and then another few hundred Gauls, mostly jobbing labourers or craftsmen. While there are caravan guards working the tin trade and the wine trade, there aren’t enough professional soldiers in the town to make a company, and when I enquired around the wine houses for more archers, most men shook their heads. Archery isn’t all that popular among the Gauls.
In fact, as Dionysius said one evening on a kline in my townhouse, I already had the biggest body of soldiers in the town. He didn’t sound jealous.
His new ship, Massalia, was being built in a stone ship shed down by the beach. He was planning to go to sea to prey on the Phoenicians, and to protect the Massalian trade. Increasingly, as winter passed and we talked, I was of a mind to join him. But only after I’d found Doola, who I hoped — and prayed — was wintering with his wife, somewhere on the other side of the Alps.
Spring came late, after a great deal of rain. My new ship — which I called Lydia despite some superstitious qualms — was taking shape. But Demetrios’s new merchantman, Sikel Herakles, was almost complete.
We were standing on the beach in the rain, looking at the hulls.
‘I’ll take her to sea as soon as she’s ready,’ Demetrios said. He licked his lips as a boy does when a girl shows a bit of thigh or breast — sorry, girls. These things happen, and I’m sure they are all errors, eh?
‘With the tin?’ I asked.
He nodded quietly.
‘Where do you plan to sell it?’ I asked.
‘Syracusa. Or just possibly Rome.’ He shrugged. ‘I’d like to have Doola back.’
‘I’d like you to wait for me,’ I said. ‘Seventy pigs of tin — a rich prize for a pirate, and everyone’s had the winter to hear of our success.’ I shook my head. ‘Please wait for me.’
He narrowed his eyes.
‘I was trading these waters before I ever knew you,’ I said.
We looked at each other. ‘Listen,’ I said. ‘I’m not telling you, I’m asking. Doola will want to be here for the sale. He has contacts; he understands things-’ I paused. I could tell I was going the wrong way.
‘I was trading tin when you were off being a pirate in the east,’ he said.
‘And because I’m an excellent pirate, I want you to consider that in every little port on the Inner Sea, men like me are gathering over cheap wine and entertaining themselves with stories of how Arimnestos of Plataea and his friends went and got a thousand mythemnoi of tin.’ I shrugged. ‘Do what you like, Demetrios. It’s as much yours as mine.’
‘I know it’s as much mine as yours,’ Demetrios said quietly. ‘Do you?’
I crossed my arms. ‘What’s that supposed to mean?’
‘Equal shares for the seven of us. And all your oarsmen’s pay comes out of your share. They aren’t my men. They don’t work for me.’ He spat. ‘They don’t get a dactyl of my tin.’
To say I was taken aback wouldn’t do justice to my feelings. ‘We wouldn’t have any tin without them,’ I said.
He shrugged. ‘Says you.’
‘Demetrios!’ I shouted. ‘What- We swore by Zeus and Heracles. Don’t be like this. We need everyone together to decide on the shares.’
He turned away. ‘Doola and the others are dead.’
‘Why do you think so?’ I asked him, following him along the beach.
‘If they were alive, they would be here.’ He kept walking. ‘It is you and me and Gaius and Seckla. But Gaius and Seckla are your men, not my friends.’
Riches. The root of all evil, if you ask me.
So I spent the winter worrying about Doola and Daud and Alexandros and the rest, and about pirates taking my treasure, and tin blight and friendship. Not the best winter.
I also looked for love, and found nothing. I bought a slave girl I fancied, and she was temperamental, anxious, ill used and mostly not very interested in what I purchased her for. Her name was Dais and she was Iberian, and she hated my pais and he hated her, and she was jealous of everyone in my life and at the same time demanding and lazy. She had a beautiful body. She had been badly treated. I felt for her; I caught her slashing her
