And that seemed to me just.
How the gods must have laughed.
18
Just before the spring feast of Demeter, Dionysus rode over from Massalia to tell us that a Sikel fishing boat had come in with rumour of a heavy Carthaginian squadron cruising our coast. So we got our hulls out of their ship sheds and into the water — my Lydia and Neoptolymos’ Eleuthera. I had Megakles as my helmsman, and Neoptolymos had Vasileos. Our crews were veterans and our marines were, if I may say so, superb — all fully armoured, and all in the peak of training.
We couldn’t wait to get our beaks into some Carthaginians.
We rowed out for a stormy day, our bows into the wind, and came home lashed by rain, and never had a sniff of the Carthaginians. Of course, we never had more than a six-stade sight line, either, so it would have been Poseidon’s will if we had seen them.
But we slept dry at home, with sentries on the headlands and food and wine, which was more than any raiding squadron was getting. And we were off the beach again the next morning, when the air was still brisk and the sun not even a streak of salmon pink on the eastern horizon. We ran along the coast to Massalia, and landed at noon. Dionysus was ready with two ships.
We spent three days training — rowing out towards the northern point of Sardinia until we could see the headland, and then performing manoeuvres — line to column, column to line; changing stroke, changing direction, reversing benches. My oarsmen were openly discussing killing Dionysus. It was Lade in miniature, except that I was a much better trierarch myself, and knew that the standard Dionysus set was perfectly reasonable.
Listen, thugater. It’s like this. If you take a warship to sea, spend the summer rowing up and down the coast looking for the enemy and raiding his pastures, and then finally meet up in the fall — well, your rowers and your marines have, in fact, spent three or four months training. Getting hard. Every direction change, every squadron manoeuvre gets them better.
All Dionysus did was to insist that we be as good as autumn sailors in the spring, by packing a lot of drills into the first week at sea. But such things were innovations, then. Young Phormio does it all the time, these days, or so I’m given to understand.
As usual, I digress. But it is important to understand how untrained crews were, usually, in the spring. We’d worked all winter — I suspect I was the only pirate in the whole circuit of the Inner Sea who paid his crew through the winter. I had never really done it before. When I worked for Miltiades, we fed our oarsmen all winter but we didn’t train them. They just drank and, er, did what oarsmen do, when there’s a town available.
Anyway: three days at sea, and never a sign or report of the Carthaginian squadron. We went back to our home ports for two days’ rest, and then we were at it again. This time, we cruised west along the coast, the mountains rising away to the north and the sea spring blue and clean beneath us.
Two days west, and we sighted a pair of warships to the south and gave chase. They fled, and we rowed like madmen — all of us, even me.
Oh, how I remember that chase! Two days at sea, and we rowed and rowed, and we were the better men.
Finally, they turned west just at sunset the second day and ran ashore, and we were so close behind them that we landed in the froth of their oars and had our marines ashore before they could draw up their ships.
But they were Etruscans.
How we laughed, there on the beach! They laughed too, with the sudden relief of men at the edge of death. We were poorer by the value of their ships, but that two-day chase put us in fine condition. Most men will only train so hard when there’s no real threat, but offer them a prize on the horizon We were already a third of the way down the coast to the Tiber, so we camped with our Etruscans for a night and set off south in the morning, now a powerful fleet of six ships. The Etruscans were Veii, and ostensibly at sea to protect their city’s shipping. I suspect they had in mind a little piracy.
We left them at the mouth of the Tiber and rowed upstream to Rome, where Gaius was like a man awakened by his friends for exercise — surely you’ve had this experience, eh? A friend sleeps late, you arrive for your morning run, and he pretends he’s ready? You know what I’m talking about. Gaius’s ship was still on stocks and his oarsmen had spent the winter making babies and propping his new vineyards. So we set a rendezvous and went back to sea.
North of the straits, we picked up a Carthaginian merchantman. He surrendered at once, but swore he was part of a convoy for Sardinia. We had six days until our rendezvous, so we rowed east along the north shore of Sicily looking for the convoy.
We swept for eight days and found nothing.
We left our Carthaginian prisoners on their own coast of Sicily. I watched Demetrios’s homeport go by under my lee, and considered dropping down for a chat. He had to be there.
But sometimes, it is best to leave a man alone.
So we rowed north, to Ostia.
Two days there — see, I have the logs. Two days there, and our crews were sick. The place is deeply unhealthy, and the spring mosquitoes were brutal, and men were fevered. And no sign of Gaius. Dionysus grew angry, and threatened to leave us. We were drinking in a waterfront taverna so filthy that I had my pais wipe our table down with his chlamys, which he then threw onto a heap of filth rather than wear. One of the porne who served the wine picked it up and put it on.
When Achilles said it was better to be the slave of a bad master than King of the Dead, he hadn’t seen porne in Ostia.
It was an oppressive place.
I sent Doola upstream in a small boat while I kept the squadron together by force of will. A dozen of my own carefully trained oarsmen deserted — or wandered off — or simply got sick.
Two days later, Doola returned — alone.
‘He’ll join us later in the summer,’ Doola said. He scowled, which was unlike him. ‘He’s a great man now,’ Doola said.
Dionysus snorted, and later that night gave full vent to his feelings — wasted time, lost oarsmen, disease, suffering, the missed chance of a great capture.
But the gods meant us to be there.
That night, a dancer came to our taverna. We were surly drunks, but she was a fine-looking woman — not young, but in high training, with muscled legs and arms. She danced beautifully, some foreign dance that was just enough like our women’s dances at home to make me weep wine-soaked tears. We showered her with money, and she smirked, and the taverna’s porne cursed her and glared.
The taverna’s owner, a surprisingly young and innocent-looking villain, caught the woman unawares and tried to take her earnings. He didn’t even bother to threaten her; he just grabbed the front of her chiton.
She threw him over her hip and slammed his head on the dirt floor.
My lads cheered and threw more money.
She bowed and smiled. She was missing some teeth, and was none too clean, but in Ostia she looked like a fine courtesan. She bowed and did a little skip on her feet. Seckla hooted — Seckla, let me say again.
Doola grinned at me. Megakles stood up and yelled, ‘Show us your tits!’ Sorry, ladies. But that was his speed, and he was a sailor.
Our dancer smiled and pulled her chiton over her head, as easily as a snake wriggling out of its skin, and stood naked, one hand on her hip. She had a matching pair of bruises inside her thighs and a nasty cut at the top of her right thigh, but otherwise, she was the best-looking woman any sailor needed to see, in Ostia or anywhere else.
We roared, and more coins were tossed.
She reached out and grabbed Seckla and kissed him — and hooked his chlamys off his shoulder and wrapped herself in it. She was grinning.
