But as the last of the horsemen cantered uphill away from the stream, he decided it must be true. And he led his cavalry across the stream, and that, my friends, was the end of the battle. Collam captured half a hundred noble cavalrymen and twenty chariots.
Of course, the Biturges cavalry had had ten minutes to chew on us, and I missed the end because I was lying face down in the grass.
I missed everything. Doola came upriver with ten more pigs of tin, his wife and twenty barrels of wine, as well as three hundred Gaulish refugees looking for a new life on the Inner Sea.
Collam made a treaty with the Venetiae on his own terms, and traded them six of their merchant aristocrats for Gwan’s father and his debt.
I was two weeks returning to consciousness, and I had headaches and black depression — the result, a Greek doctor told me later, of a bad blow to the head. I never saw the man who put me down — I was alone, and a great many of them came for me because, of course, I’d downed their champions.
My recovery was slow. I caught something — one of Apollo’s arrows — that made me drip at both ends, and my foot swelled and got purple so that I thought it would have to come off. And then I lost more time — off my head, I think, with a fever.
Doola nursed me. Bless him, and his wife. I was a hero to the Gauls, but with so many prisoners, so much loot and the trade negotiations, I was largely forgotten.
It was a month before we left. Even then, I’d lost weight, and I could just barely ride, and it was Doola, not me, who led us back across the passes to Lugdunum. We had many parting embraces and declarations of friendship, and I had enough golden torques given me to start a collection.
And in fact, gold is always good.
When Doola rode south to find his wife, he found Oiasso destroyed — the villages burned, the hall flattened. But the people were scarcely touched; they simply retreated into the hills.
The Carthaginians encouraged the local Iberians to attack again. And winter set in with no crops harvested. The whole community of Oiasso had to depend on relatives in neighbouring communities for food.
As soon as the hill thawed, Neoptolymos and Alexandros led a hundred men on a counter-raid into the mountains, and they took flocks and grain. And tin.
Doola convinced them that they should pack their belongings and leave. It was a fine tale, and one that I heard told several times and never fully understood. I did learn that Tara and her brother died defending their hall; that the Phoenicians had come back twice, and had four ships the second time and five ships the first time.
‘They were hunting us,’ Doola said.
We said goodbye to Gwan at Lugdunum and rode south, moving in easy stages. I was still recovering, and our Gaulish horde needed food and rest. But it was a fine summer, and we had Doola’s tin to trade — ill-gotten gains from the Iberians.
Midsummer saw us at Arelata, and men said that Phoenician ships had been on the coast all summer. And there had been raids.
Massalia had been attacked, and had repelled the attack.
My stomach clenched, and then rolled. No one at Arelata knew where Tarsilla was, but they all agreed that the Phoenicians had attacked every town on the coast that was Greek.
At Arelata, we prepared for the last dash to home. We elected to do it by land, because everyone at Arelata said the coast was too dangerous. There were no tin shipments moving into — or out of — Massalia.
And Sittonax and Daud were leaving us. They had helped get the convoys out to Arelata, where all of Tara’s people were planning to settle. There was good farmland all the way up the hillsides, and these were people used to terracing.
But the last night, Sittonax and Daud both changed their minds. Daud and I embraced, and we both wept a little.
And then he said, ‘Fuck it. I’m coming.’
Sittonax looked at him as if he’d grown an extra head. And then shrugged.
‘Fine,’ he said. ‘I’ll come too.’
So we all drank more wine. The next day, we offered sacrifices for our own safety and for that of our friends at Tarsilla, and we headed for home.
15
Tarsilla was not a smoking ruin. We came down the steep ridge behind, already aware that the town was safe from our friends among the herdsmen and shepherds, but still peering over every hill for a sign.
The timber temple of Apollo was still there. The theatre — a small one — was still there.
There were ships on the beach.
I knew Lydia as soon as I saw her. She was perfect — the finest trireme I had ever seen. Vasileos had outdone himself. And her twin sister was next to her. Gaius’s vessel, and although I did not know it at the time, she was at that moment just a day old, all complete, the traditional ceremony just complete, the oarsmen sleeping off the festivities under awnings.
Gaius called her Iusticia. Justice.
Demetrios’s house was closed and boarded. The wine shops certainly looked as if the Phoenicians had landed and smashed the town, but the rest looked good, and our house was secure, the main gate closed. Giannis opened the gate and embraced me, and we were home.
The thing I remember best about that homecoming was Doola and Seckla. Doola had brought his wife, of course. Seckla helped her down from her mule, and we all knew — right there — that all was well. She smiled at him, perfectly aware that this was an important moment. Then Doola went and embraced him. Seckla cried.
Well, lots of us cried. But we were home, and we’d done it.
We had done it.
I haven’t mentioned Neoptolymos. Of course he was with Doola. He had done great deeds of arms in the south, with the Vascones, and against the Iberians. And when I recovered from my wounds, I found him as big as ever, his frame filled out, but calmer and happier, too. He had married a Vascone woman, Brillix, who was as much the opposite of the blond Illyrian as a human being could be. Where he was tall and pale, she was small and dark. He was taciturn and morose, and she was cheerful, funny, endlessly talkative. I’ve heard that opposites attract, but Brillix was the most opposite I could imagine to my vengeful Illyrian friend. And she made him — better. She made him happy. Happiness is better than revenge.
Nonetheless, she also gave him a reason to want both wealth and security. He was no longer a sword for hire. He was a husband and, it was obvious, about to be a father. Brillix was as close to perfectly spherical as a woman could be when pregnant.
We drank a lot of wine that day, and handed out more to the oarsmen.
It’s not all war, my friends. Sometimes, life is just sweet. The next few weeks — oh, there’s no story to tell, except that watching Brillix wander the house, cooking, cleaning, feathering her nest — watching Doola and Seckla rebuild their friendship, with Doola’s wife as an ally — caulking and preparing our triremes for sea, training our oarsmen, drinking at the edge of the Middle Sea It rivals any time in my life. I missed having a love of my own, but to be honest, watching Neoptolymos and Brillix, or Doola and his wife, I was not interested in buying a slave and pumping away at her. I wanted a wife.
I wondered if Lydia were still available. But it had been more than two years. And to a marriageable young woman Still, one of the things my teacher, Calchus, had taught me over and over again, when I was a boy at the tholos tomb above Plataea, was that you never know until you ask. I had thought about Lydia many, many times in two years. I had behaved badly — shockingly badly, really, by my own standards. But her father was not without error, either. It began to occur to me that in my new status, as a rich shipowner, I might have a certain appeal.
Other things were occurring to me, as well. Riches — real wealth — the wealth to buy and maintain a ship, retainers, warehouses — have a cascade of effects.
Have I mentioned that I knew by then that Miltiades had died? Pointlessly, of a minor wound, in prison? The
