I’d like to say that I stopped Neoptolymos from tormenting the man, who was already broken.
Listen, there’s limits. I try to be the man that Heraclitus taught, and not the thug I might have been. But sometimes An hour passed. Dionysus dropped onto my deck. He looked down at the wreckage of a human body on my ship.
He laughed.
‘I thought you were too soft for this life,’ he said. ‘Ares! Kill him.’ He looked at me, a little sickened, I could tell.
‘He enslaved us,’ I said. ‘He killed Neoptolymos’s sister.’
Dionysus nodded. Looked away. ‘Have you vengeful Furies even asked him about the tin fleet?’ he asked.
Neoptolymos nodded. ‘He passed it two days ago, headed east. Under full sail.’
The same wind that we’d rowed into.
Dionysus nodded. ‘Let’s chase them,’ he said gently. ‘This is a waste of time.’ He picked up Hasdrubal and threw him over the rail into the sea without asking us.
Neoptolymos growled.
I seemed to awaken.
Sometimes, when I fancy myself a better man then other men, I think of two things from the ten years between Plataea and Artemisium. I think of how I treated Lydia. I think of what I did to Hasdrubal.
He didn’t even scream when he hit the water. He sank, unable even to swim.
Choked and drowned.
Slowly, I hope.
All of his marines had been killed, and, of course, Dagon wasn’t aboard. His ship was a small merchant galley of fifty oars, with the usual collection of broken men as oarsmen — men he’d played his own role in breaking, no doubt. As soon as Neoptolymos’s marines came down the gangway, the oarsmen had ripped the rest of the crew asunder.
It is odd that there are so many bad captains, as the payback is so ruthless.
We took the ship and the oarsmen. It was ballasted in wine for the western stations. So we gave our oarsmen good African wine every night as we ate salt fish and rowed and sailed east.
We tried every trick. We wet our sails to take the breeze when it was coming over our sterns, and we sailed on a quarter-reach with both boatsail and mainsail drawing together — a rare point of sailing even in our rig, and very fast, so that for a whole day we made perhaps thirty stades an hour.
We had advantages and disadvantages. We knew where our quarry was going, and elected to cut the corner — they would have crossed directly to Africa, while we went on a long hypotenuse, slanting away east, south-east. We were neither lucky nor unlucky in our winds, and of course, our quarry had the same winds. Best of all, we knew about them and they, we hoped, knew nothing of us.
Dionysus knew the waters better than I, and he was making for Hippo, on the north shore of Africa, about six hundred stades from Carthage.
This was more blue-water sailing than most of our oarsmen had ever seen. We were lucky to have so many veterans from our adventures in the Outer Sea. Sailors like nothing better than to tell a shipmate This ain’t nothing, brother, and I stood between the oars on the third night, the taste of salt anchovies barely drowned in wine on my tongue, listening to my oarsmen.
‘You ain’t seen nothing, mate,’ said Xenos, a fisherman’s son from Massalia. ‘We were nine days at sea off Iberia — the Outer Sea coast of Iberia, mate — in a storm so bad men cut their wrists rather than face another day. As Poseidon is my witness.’
‘And when we tried to run from Gaul to Alba,’ says another voice in the darkness, ‘Poseidon blew us over the edge of the world.’
‘And then what happened?’ asked a sceptic.
‘A Titan blew us back,’ said the storyteller. ‘I’m here, ain’t I?’
Five days at sea.
Even with the prospect of boundless riches, sailors will eventually tire of bad food and back-breaking labour. Even sailors.
Five days of rowing — for the most part. We were low on water and out of food. Men spoke poems in praise of bread. No lie: bread is the thing you miss most at sea.
Well, many men were missing something else. Geaeta was not inhibited by the presence of two hundred crewmen, and Seckla’s continuing education at her hands — and more — was noisy, demonstrative and sometimes annoyingly emotive. I have said before that a woman — especially a desirable but unavailable woman — aboard a ship is a fine thing for morale, but to be sure, a desirable and sexually active woman aboard a ship with two hundred men just makes the one hundred and ninety-nine more difficult.
Myself, I took to pulling my cloak around my head, despite the heat.
I won’t say the crew was near mutiny — merely that I thought it possible that Seckla would be murdered. I confined him to the sailor’s deck amidships, and read Geaeta my best speech on being a shipmate. She laughed, but obeyed. She knew that she was still on sufferance. Most men believed her story, now — I did. But she understood.
Another day. We finished the water.
We sighted land. We’d sighted it for days, but that evening, Dionysus laid alongside and told me that we were hundreds of stades short of our landfall and that we had to land anyway.
I knew that.
In the last light of a summer evening, we rowed into a river mouth. We rowed until the water was fresh and drank it straight from the stream, reaching through the oar-ports to drink out of wooden cups. The water was brackish — not even fresh. But men were badly dehydrated, and most of them drank and pissed it away immediately — pardon my frankness — but we were close to the edge.
We landed in the darkness, put a guard over the wine and slept. In the morning, the marines caught a shepherd boy who said we were west of Kissia.
Dionysus shook his head. ‘Poseidon hates us. We’re hopelessly behind.’
Morale plummeted. Things might have gone ill, but we made a landfall, got water and sent the shepherd for his father and paid silver for the whole flock and ate it, too.
Next morning, full of mutton, we rowed east. We stood well out as we passed Kissia, which had a pair of triremes on her open beach. I proposed we burn them on the beach, but Gaius wanted to go home and Dionysus wanted to try for the tin fleet for two more days — right up to the walls of Carthage.
We landed that night with the twinkling lights of Hippo in the distance and the smell of their fires in our nostrils.
In the morning, when the sun rose, we saw that her harbour was full of ships.
Full of ships.
Dionysus turned and hugged his helmsman. Most of the men on our ship hugged Geaeta.
Sixteen ships, though. We’d chased a gazelle, and caught a lion.
20
The Bay of Hippo stretches a good sixty stades from promontory to promontory, forming a superb natural harbour with shelving beaches running into the fertile lands above. The ‘city’ is really three or four communities all the way around the half-moon curve: there’s a fishing village, a sailor’s village with wine shops and an entrepreneurial agora, there’s a fine town with walls and homes for the rich, and there’s a slave town that stretches along the downwind side of the beach. If I keep telling this story, I’ll eventually tell you how I came to know Hippo and Carthage so well, but for the moment, just take my word for it.
Top up my wine, lad. Ah! Lesbian wine. When it crosses my lips, I feel young again.
Where was I? Ah.
We sighted the Carthaginian tin fleet.
