‘I got the captain of one of the round ships,’ she said. ‘He had had quite a scare. That’s when men talk the most. He almost lost his ship — and his life. He went to the temple four times while he was staying in my room.’ She shrugged, smiled. ‘He wanted me.’ She made a face — pride and revulsion together. ‘He wanted me every hour of the day and night — besotted, he was. So he paid a bribe to the brothel owner so that I could come with him to Carthage and back — he was being sent for replacement oarsmen and all sorts of chandlery that New Carthage didn’t have.’ She met my eyes. ‘The day we left, news came that the other survivors of the tin fleet had returned to Gades. And that we could expect them in fifteen days, at the new moon.’ She looked around. It was the evening of our second day at sea. She’d told the story enough times that it had a polished ring to it that made her sound like a liar. The problem was that she was a damned good storyteller, and that didn’t actually help her veracity.
Gaius — now a surly, somewhat domineering Roman magnate who clearly didn’t want to go to sea that summer — shook his head. ‘Dionysus is right,’ he said. ‘You can’t believe a word she says.’
Seckla spat. ‘I believe her,’ he said.
Gaius made an obscene suggestion as to exactly why he believed her, and Daud laughed and laughed. It was good to hear the Keltoi man laugh; he had been silent for so long. His second brush with slavery had all but ruined his cheerful disposition, leaving him dour.
‘How’d you come to be in Ostia?’ Daud asked, when he was done laughing.
‘I jumped ship at Rhegium,’ she said.
‘Why, exactly?’ I asked. ‘I mean, why would a Carthaginian ship bound for Carthage ever come anywhere near Rhegium?’
She shrugged. ‘How would I know?’ she said. ‘I’m not a great sailor. When we were at sea, he’d, um, make use of me when he pleased, and otherwise the boat went up and down, men ran about and the oarsmen all watched me like cats watch rats. I swore I’d never go to sea again.’
Gaius pursed his lips and scrated his red hair. ‘I’m leaving my farms at a touchy time — to be killed by the Carthaginians,’ he said. ‘Perhaps if I’m lucky, I’ll only be a slave.’
Geaeta looked pointedly at his waistline. ‘At least you know you won’t be sold to a brothel,’ she said.
Gaius wasn’t used to being talked to that way, much less by a mere woman. He stomped off.
That night, Dionysus said to me, ‘She’s either real, or she’s the most gifted actress I’ve ever seen.’
I agreed. I believed her. Most of the time.
Of course, it was possible. It was all plausible. Ships go off course. But an unarmed merchant ship headed for Carthage should have avoided the north coast of Sicily — the Greek coast — like a plague. He should have run south and coasted Africa.
On the other hand, she was just the kind of girl who got the trierarchs in a brothel — not a broken spirit in a vaguely fleshy body, but a passionate woman with good looks and a mouth. If I owned a brothel, I’d buy a dozen of her.
Hah! Sorry, ladies. A man can dream.
We coasted northern Sicily. Secretly, every night when I landed, I asked the men of the towns whether they’d ever seen Geaeta before, or a ship bearing her. None had. She said she’d never landed in any of them. Of course, a round ship is more at the mercy of the winds and Poseidon’s whims, and never has to land. It can carry food and water for weeks.
All of her story was plausible.
We landed next on the south coast of Sardinia — close enough to home to think about chucking the whole thing. But we didn’t. The prospect of riches can be as intoxicating as wine.
South of Sardinia, we picked up a pair of Carthaginian traders, half a day apart. I caught one, and Dionysus caught the other. Neither skipper knew anything about a tin convoy, but both admitted there had been a ferocious storm in the Straits of Heracles a month before.
Their cargoes were valuable — grain in one, and olive oil and hides in the other. We concentrated the cargoes into one of them and put a dozen men aboard under Giannis and sent her north to Massalia. And went west with the second capture filled to the gunwales with water and dried fish, a crew of fishermen under Vasileos sailing her. With our consort to provide food for a thousand rowers, we managed to make the five-day crossing to the Balearics in three days — with seven hundred and fifty mythemnoi of food and as much water. No fleet could have done it, but a handful of pirates Listen, I’ve made Dionysus sound like a monster in the matter of the girl. He wasn’t a nice man. He had fine ethics but didn’t apply them to women — at all. But he was an excellent sailor, a fine navigator and he planned. I learned on that trip how to calculate food expenditure. Off Alba, we had a round ship in consort, but we hadn’t used her for food. Dionysus’ method allowed a squadron of triremes to keep on the sea virtually for ever — as long as the owners were rich enough to buy stores. A thousand men eat a lot.
Nine days out of Ostia, and we were on a beach on the south coast of the Balearics. I’d landed there before, and I liked the beach. And then we were away south. We cruised warily off Ebusus and landed on a tiny islet, and then we slipped off the beach in the first light of a new-minted summer day and crossed to the Iberian coast, and worked our way along with a favourable wind for two more days.
The second evening, a pair of local boats saw us from seaward as we were landing. Dionysus was off the beach in a flash, and he took them both — no fishing boat can outrun a warship, as I had reason to remember. We ate their fish as the crews sat, disconsolate.
Dionysus and I questioned the two fishing captains. They knew New Carthage, and feared it, it was clear. Nether knew anything about the tin fleet. Both expected to die.
Neither knew anything about a big squadron of Carthaginian triremes setting a trap for pirates, either, to be frank.
Dionysus was planning to kill them all, but I insisted we leave them there on the beach, alive. Well, not all of them. Four men ‘volunteered’ to row with my ship. I took them.
We were off into an overcast morning of light rain. We crept down the coast: the wind was wrong, so we rowed into a light headwind, our five-ship squadron spread across thirty stades of sea so that we would sweep up any ship we might want to catch.
It was mid-afternoon when Neoptolymos — he had a Carthaginian ship so he was the most landward of the sweep — signalled that he could see New Carthage. An hour later, the town was visible in the haze, her red tile roofs glinting against the rising red-brown of the hills behind the town.
The harbour was empty. So were the seas.
After fifteen days of frenetic rowing and planning and training and sailing, our disappointment was palpable.
I had to admit that we hadn’t planned for the situation that confronted us. We planned either to fight our way out of an ambush, or swoop down on our prey. In fact, we found a fortified town with a heavily walled inner harbour — empty. Nor was there a powerful naval squadron waiting for us.
In the fading, ruddy light, I rowed up alongside Dionysus and hailed him.
‘Have you cut her throat yet?’ he asked.
I laughed. ‘No. She says we’re late.’
‘Or early,’ he said. ‘I don’t like it; the whole town’s empty.’
‘Now what?’ I asked.
‘Now we take the next ship in,’ he said.
That didn’t take as long as I feared. We stayed at sea all night, ate cold rations from our merchantman and the dawn showed us a Phoenician ship under oars coming up from the darkness to the south and east, from the coast of Africa. Neoptolymos dropped down and took her with only a cursory fight.
I winced to watch Neoptolymos, a decent man, slam his fist repeatedly into the captured Phoenician trierarch. Torturing prisoners is cowardly, to me. I didn’t like what I was seeing.
Heh.
Then he was brought aboard my ship.
It was Hasdrubal.
He had a bad cut under one eye and another on a corner of his mouth, which was ripped open by repeated blows. Even as he landed on my deck, Neoptolymos, who followed him over the side, hit him again.
The Illyrian laughed mirthlessly. ‘I can’t stop hitting him,’ he said.
‘Make him stop!’ pleaded the Carthaginian.
He didn’t recognize me.
