fucking Athenians — pardon me, thugater — had imprisoned him for failing to take the island of Paros. Heh. That’s what they said, anyway. I loved the pirate, but he was scheming to make himself tyrant, I guarantee it, and I wasn’t there to save his aristocratic arse.
Themistocles was building Athens a mighty fleet. All the Inner Sea was talking about it, because the Phoenicians were rumoured to be allied to the Persians. In Massalia, over wine, Dionysius told me that two sets of Persian envoys had come and gone from Carthage.
And everyone in the Inner Sea knew that Persia was going for Athens. Again. But this time, not with a provincial satrap and a hastily raised army. The word was that the Persians were going to throw a thousand ships and a million men at Greece.
Well, that’s what Dionysius said, anyway. And Demetrios was gone.
He’d taken Sikel Herakles to sea as soon as I was gone. He’d also taken a quarter of the tin.
And he hadn’t come back.
There’s time for rage, friends. Time to swear revenge and get it.
There are other times to shrug and call it a day.
It was only tin. There were fifty-six pigs still under the floorboards of our house, and another eight we’d brought all the way from the Vascones’ land. Interesting that Doola insisted we all share, even though he and Neoptolymos and Daud had done all the work.
So we had sixty-four pigs left, less four pigs that Gaius used and four I used, sheathing our ships and our rams, and two more that we sold in Massalia to cover expenses and to do favours for bronze-smiths who helped us. That left us fifty-six pigs. We sold ten pigs — a lot of tin — to Dionysius, both to keep him sweet on us and to raise the cash to pay my oarsmen and hire oarsmen for Gaius. In the view of all of us — except, unfortunately, Demetrios — these were group expenses.
We ballasted our triremes in tin — twenty-four pigs each ship. It was a lot of tin.
Those forty-eight pigs were pure profit, and every man of us was due one-sixth in cash.
At the same time, I threw all my remaining silver and all the gold torcs I’d earned into the common pot. Doola and Neoptolymos had loot, too — and in it went. That came to a tidy sum. Vasileos was voted a full share of the tin, and so was Sittonax, which reduced our shares to one-eighth.
Getting all this? Merchants are always surprised at how well soldiers can divide profits, but listen, honey — the rules for dividing spoils are in the Iliad. We’re good at maths. I had run the tin as a profitable military venture, not as a trading concession — or at least, that’s how it had ended. Vasileos was deeply moved to be offered a fortune, and Sittonax laughed. He just laughed.
Of course, we had one last task — to sell the tin.
Forty-eight pigs of tin was enough to wreck the trade in a small market, or make other men rich in a large market.
Doola had other plans. He wanted to sell the tin at the top of the market, a month or so before the yearly convoys from Iberia reached Carthage. He studied such things, and he sat on the beach at Massalia and listened to the merchants — no Phoenicians this year — and made his plans.
Sometimes, you wander lost in life and you feel abandoned by the gods, and you move fecklessly from one day to another without purpose. Other times, it seems as if the hand of the gods is on your steering oars, and no matter what you might plan, the gods point you to a certain act, or in a certain direction. That is how I felt that summer. We had four glorious weeks of preparation, and then, after a night without wine and a good sleep, I rose in the dark with all my friends and all my people, and we got the two new ships manned, and friends — shepherds and fishermen — pushed our heavily laden ships down the beach and into the sea. And as the sky lightened to the east, we pulled our swift ships over a calm sea, bound for Sicily and Syracusa and the largest market for tin in the Inner Sea.
We rowed east and south, and stayed on open beaches with a heavy guard. Fishermen fled us, but when we managed to convince one we were safe, off Etrusca, he reported that a heavy Carthaginian squadron was operating in Sardinian waters.
We rowed south the next day, giving Sardinia a wide berth by continuing down the Tyrrhenian coast. We seemed to push the trade right off the seas — we did, after all, have a pair of sleek warships, and everyone ran. Which was just fine with all of us.
We passed the Tiber without entering the estuary. Gaius didn’t want to go home until the tin was sold, and I appreciated his willingness; we didn’t want to stay at sea with our cargoes. We wanted to get to the Sicilian market as soon as possible.
Let me wander off my topic to say that by this time I had begun to consider returning to Plataea. Euphoria’s death was far enough behind me now, and I had begun to think of taking my tin and going back to start again. So I did mention to Doola that the very best market at which to sell our fortune in tin was Athens.
Doola just shrugged. ‘I don’t know Athens,’ he said. And that was that. Listen — when the storm was roaring, we listened to Vasileos and Demetrios. When there were spears drinking blood, they all listened to me. When there were things to be traded, we listened to Doola. That’s what made us strong.
We had three days’ bad weather south of Tiber. We were headed by winds and the seas were short and choppy and a misery for the oarsmen, and I did something I hate — I turned tail and ran for a beach, landed and spent two days watching the weather. I remember so well, because without it Well, talk about the hand of the gods. The gods had me in both hands, that summer.
Two days later, we weathered Pelorus in a fine west wind, passing Charybdis under sail with the rowers making jokes about their godsend of a vacation. With the wind under our sterns, we ran west as far as we could, tacked, rowed and did it again. I mention this because it was a tactic I used to work up a rapid response in my crews, and always have — it’s neither faster nor slower than rowing, but it does give the men a rest, and it also trains them in the rapid switch from sailing rig to rowing and back, which is essential to survival. Well, I laugh — survival as a pirate, anyway.
Both of our ships had the new Tyrrhenian rig which men now call the triemiola, so we no longer took our mainmast down — ever — and we had a half-deck aft instead of a catwalk making for a heavier, but more stable, ship; a wide platform for our marines and archers, and a permanent station for the deck crew who worked the sails. Again, none of this was revolutionary. There were a hundred triemiolas in the Inner Sea. But we had a pair, and we had trained our crews the way the best military crews were trained. We’d been together a long time, too — the core of our crews were the men who’d gone to the Outer Sea and back.
You can tell we’re coming to a fight, can’t you?
Heh.
We were tacking and rowing our way down the Strait of Messina, with me in the bow watching our tacks and trying to decide whether I was going all the way to Syracusa, or whether to make do with Regium on the port side — the mainland side. I passed the city, noting three triremes in the harbour, yards crossed and ready for sea, and we crossed the strait one more time and ran south along the Sicilian coast, watching for the beaches north of Katania as Aetna grew to starboard to dominate the horizon. The wind abated — blocked by Aetna — and we found the beach I remembered. I missed Demetrios, and that’s the truth; he knew these waters like a pilot, and I was a mere duffer by comparison. But we got our heavy hulls ashore, and we hired rollers from the fishermen and ran our hulls right up the beach to give them a good drying. Wet hulls are heavier and slower, and when you have a ballast of tin We set a heavy guard. I was a day short of my goal, with a fortune in tin, and there was a heavy Carthaginian squadron at sea. I was no fool. I had marines on either headland, and by all the gods, that night I considered hiring a hundred donkeys and walking the ingots to Syracusa, I was that afraid.
I was afraid of more than that. The Tyrant of Syracusa was becoming renowned by then for his treatment of merchants. He was a bloody-handed aristocrat, a man who had risen to his place by a long string of military victories. Gelon hated merchants and ‘little people’, as he called them; he exacted heavy taxes to pay for his wars, and despite all that, Syracusa was more prosperous than ever. Maybe because of him. He had restored Syracusa’s military power. Carthage was not going to find Syracusa an easy nut to crack.
But I might. Former slave — tin merchant. I was more than a little afraid of his customs officers.
And as we sat on the beach at Katania, returning to talk to Lydia seemed stupider. It seemed like foolish romantic claptrap.
Cowardice is the sum of the whispers of the weaker daimons in your soul, my friends.
The sun rose, and I didn’t buy the donkeys. I got my oarsmen onto the ships, put on my finest chiton, my
