pack of scoundrels in the first light of dawn. My new boy wanted me to come with him to Anarchos’s house to fetch his belongings. He also insisted that he was free, not a slave, and that I should ask Anarchos.
The crime lord lived close enough to the water that it was the matter of a few minutes to go there. And I wanted to tell him that she was away.
I suppose I hadn’t read his letter closely enough.
The pais found him. He wasn’t in his andron — that’s where Lydia had waited for Anaxsikles. The andron smelled of her. I slammed my fist into a wall. If you don’t understand why, well, good for you.
But in the back, near the courtyard, he lay on top of his sword, which he’d wedged between two paving stones. He was quite dead.
Men are complex. To my lights, he died well, and was a man I could, if not admire, at least — call a friend. Here’s to his shade.
We got to sea before the sun was high. My new pais cried and cried. I am fairly certain he believed that Anarchos was his father.
And perhaps he was.
His name was Hector.
Ah, you smile! Yes, Hector. Finally, he comes into our story.
Doola was gone over the horizon, and I confess I had a million fears that day, that the Carthaginians would snatch up his ship. Only in the cold, clear light of day did I realize that his ship held Lydia, Anaxsikles and all our treasure, and I had sent it off unguarded.
Men are fools.
But the gods watch over drunkards and fools.
We lay that night on a beach north of Katania, and the next night we evaded the whirlpool and crossed over to Rhegium. Doola was a day ahead of us, which suited me. We made the beautiful beaches of Rhegium in mid- afternoon, and when the setting sun gilded Mount Aetna over on the Sicilian side that night, we were already in the waterfront tavernas. I sat with Gaius. I was poor company.
A single trireme came in, with a small merchant ship trailing astern, making tacks to get in under wind power. The ship was well handled, and the longer I watched it, the more convinced I was that it was Giannis.
The trireme was Athenian. I could see that by its light construction, the way it moved — how low it was to the water. A warship. A shark.
The warship landed first. A crew really shows itself in landing: a well-conducted ship spins end for end a stade offshore and backs into the beach. It’s not a tricky manoeuvre, for a veteran crew, but it always shows a crew’s skills.
This ship was beautifully handled. Not just the helmsman, but the oarsmen. Mine were good. These were better.
A pleasure to watch them.
‘I’m going to go and praise that man,’ I said, pointing at the new arrival.
Gaius nodded. ‘Beautiful,’ he admitted. ‘Does this mean we have to do more drill?’
‘You’ll miss Dionysus, when you are watching your slaves plough your fields,’ I laughed. It was my first laugh in eight hours.
We wandered down to watch the new arrival. His oarsmen were already buying food from the farmers who hastened down to the beach — sacks of charcoal were being bargained for, and the braziers were already coming out of the bilges.
The man with his back to me, dickering with the local farmers, looked familiar.
He turned just as I came up, and we saw each other.
Cimon.
We threw our arms around each other and hugged, slapped each other’s backs and hugged again. This went on for a long, long time.
In fact, I cried.
Look, thugater. I’m crying now.
‘You bastard! You said to meet you in Massalia!’ Paramanos hugged me, too, there on the beach at Croton. I tried not to look at the town. We were on the beach for the night, and Dano sent her greetings and a gift of wine. There were two more black ships on that beach — Paramanos’s, Black Raven, and Harpagos’s Storm Cutter.
Friends… friends are men who, when they think that you are dead, will come halfway around the world because you ask them, and because they want so much to believe that you are alive. I hadn’t seen these men since — well, since the beach of Marathon, almost eight years before. There were a dozen Athenians I knew — there, for example, was Aeschylus, who fought in the front rank at Marathon and at Lades; there was Phrynicus’ young nephew, Aristides. Harpagos, my former right hand, was still a lisping islander, as strong as an ox, with the beginnings of grey in his beard. Mauros, my helmsman. Come to think of it, Paramanos got his start as a helmsman, too. Start with us, that is. He was Cyrenian, and had fought for the Phoenicians before I took him in the sea fight off Cyprus back in the Ionian War.
‘That’s a new ship,’ I said, pointing at Storm Cutter. My old Storm Cutter was a heavy Phoenician capture. Heh! I took her and Paramanos in the same sweep of my spear.
‘The original is firewood,’ he said. ‘Athens has a fleet, now — not a dozen vessels from rich men, either. We have more than a hundred hulls. Aegina-’ He laughed aloud. ‘Aegina isn’t a naval power any more.’
Young Aristides nodded vehemently. ‘Athens is a better place for the common man,’ he said, with all the arrogant pomposity of the young.
Had I ever been that young?
‘Anyone been to Plataea?’ I asked.
There was some shuffling of feet.
I introduced my friends of the last six years to my friends from Athens. Seckla was abashed, for a while — Gaius, on the other hand, kept looking at Cimon, chuckling, and saying, ‘So you really are Miltiades’ son?’
I suppose they might not have got on — Cimon was the son of a hundred generations of Eupatridae, and Seckla was a Numidian former slave; Daud was worse, an out-and-out barbarian, and Sittonax didn’t even like to speak Greek.
However, piracy is its own brotherhood. I listened with half an ear as Harpagos poured out the tale of Athens’ war with Aegina, and Themistocles’ daring political manoeuvre, by which he took the profits of the new silver mine and bought Athens a public fleet. Next to the reforms of Cleisthenes, it was the greatest political revolution in Athenian history. If Cleisthenes gave all the middle-men — the hundred-mythemnoi men — a noble ancestor and the right to think themselves aristocrats and fight in the phalanx, so Themistocles bought Athens a fleet, and gave all the little men — free citizens, but without franchise — a weapon as mighty as the spear. He gave them the oar.
Nowadays, we take it for granted that every Athenian thetis is a rower. Athens rules the waves, from here to the delta of Alexandria and across the seas to Syracusa, too. But in those years between Marathon and the next stage in the Long War, Athens was just feeling her way as a power.
I watched as Gaius began to talk to Cimon about raising horses, and Doola found common cause with Harpagos on the subject of trade. Seckla stood nervously with his attractive courtesan — a woman who couldn’t resist male attention and suddenly had a beach full of it. But in time, Mauros — my former oar-master, and fellow hero of Lade — started to talk, first to Doola, and then to Seckla, and then they were all talking to Paramanos — four Africans on a beach full of Greeks.
Aristides the Younger was amazed to meet an actual Keltoi barbarian, and managed not to sound as condescending as he might have. The fires roared, the wine was excellent and as darkness fell, and I was apologizing to Cimon for the fiftieth time that I wasn’t with his father at the end, Dano herself came down the beach with a dozen of her friends.
‘It is like having the battle of Marathon brought to my town,’ she said. ‘So many famous men. Ari — in truth, my friend, when first you told me you were Arimnestos of Plataea, I thought you one of those men who lie habitually.’
Cimon was deeply pleased to meet the daughter of the great Pythagoras. He bowed — Greeks seldom bow — and was allowed to kiss her cheek, very Italian and not very Greek, and he actually blushed. So did Giannis, who had come with Cimon from Massalia.
