The Great King (6 page)

Darius sighed. ‘And yet we are an embassy, and embassies are sacred to all the gods,’ he said.

Brasidas nodded. ‘So they are. I come from a family of heralds – I recognise the sign of the god upon you. And surely – leaving aside the differences in our opinions – surely this war is not so imminent?’

Darius looked at Cyrus. Arayanam simply drank another cup of wine, as was his wont. He seldom spoke, unless he had something vital to say, and might have been welcomed in any Lacedaemonian mess group.

Cyrus shrugged. ‘The Great King has ordered a canal dug across the isthmus of Mount Athos,’ he said. ‘He gathers a fleet. Now that the revolt in Aegypt is broken, Athens will not take so long.’

‘How long?’ I asked.

‘Two years?’ he said. ‘A year to defeat Babylon, anyway. See, I am honest.’

I laughed, my mood restored. ‘Two years?’ I said. ‘By Poseidon, Cyrus, I imagined you were speaking of weeks or months. Two years? Pardon me, but in two years storms may wreck a fleet, the Great King may die – a year of famine might cripple your army, or the will of the gods might make itself manifest in a hundred ways.’

Cyrus spread his hands. ‘Perhaps. But Athens can count its days.’ He looked at me. ‘What do you care? You are not an Athenian or a Spartan. You could be one of us. Your former master, Archilogos, is one of the Great King’s most trusted officers. You could be the same, or even greater.’

I frowned. ‘Cyrus, my elder brother,’ I said. ‘I no longer know what I want from life.’ I looked across the fire to the women’s fire, but Briseis’ slim, deep-breasted figure was gone. ‘But I know that service to the Great King is
not
what I want. And my city is Athens’ closest friend.’

Cyrus shrugged. ‘Athens is doomed,’ he said.

In the morning, we bought every scrap of wood that the Berbers could bring us – herdsmen and villagers from a fishing port a few stades farther west. In the end, after two days attempting to effect repairs with too little wood, I gave up on the Phoenician ship and broke it up. It seemed like a defeat, and a waste, but there simply wasn’t enough good wood to repair the two great gashes in its side. And then there were the rowers. They were mutinous, and the more I fed them, and the more they recovered their strength, the more mutinous I found them. So after two days, I ordered the Phoenician broken up, and her good timbers were immediately pressed into the repairs of my lovely
Lydia
. With the worked pine and cedar of the other ship, we had our own repaired in a day, and we had enough pitch in our own ballast to caulk her tight.

My rowers were all free men, and professionals – a mixture of the very best of all the fishermen, herdsmen and freed slave rowers I’d had for the last few years. Every man of them had arms, and I lined them up on the soft sand and formed them four deep, like a small phalanx, with my marines on the right and my archers on the left, and I took them to the other rowers before they could consider flight or resistance. We had weapons and training and numbers. They had nothing but sullen ferocity.

Men who are ill used become evil men themselves. Ill use is like a disease that robs men of their worth and leaves them broken, empty vessels capable of filling with ire and hate and inflicting only harm. They stood like a sullen pack, and I eyed them with something like loathing.

The fact is, I couldn’t take them, and I couldn’t leave them behind. If I left them on the beach, they’d rape and murder among the local Berbers until one of the lords raised an army and massacred them. And even though these were not Sekla’s people, they were close enough that I couldn’t inflict so much suffering on them.

I’m a soft-hearted pirate.

If I took them, I’d be selling them as slaves in Carthage, and I had
been
a slave rower in Carthage. Carthage, unlike Persia, is truly evil. She lives on the backs of her slaves. And orders parents to kill their children.

Bah. You can smell their children roasting on their foul altars when you land a ship in the harbour. Think of that, and tell me that Carthage is a state like the others.

The answer was obvious – to massacre them myself. At thirty, I might not have hesitated, but I was older, and I had finally begun to appreciate the wisdom of Apollo and practise mercy.

So I looked at the sullen men as they cringed at the edge of the hard sand.

I made a sign to Brasidas. ‘I am going to let the gods decide which of them lives and which dies,’ I said. ‘Watch me – but not too closely.’

The Spartan nodded. He wore a small smile.

Ka put an arrow to his Persian bow.

‘All the Greeks, form on the right,’ I called out to them.

‘Phoenicians!’ I called, but there were none.

‘Aegyptians!’ I called, and there were a few, and a pair of Jews, and a single Babylonian and a dozen Keltoi and two Illyrians. I divided them by nation, and I moved among them, talking to those who could, or would, talk.

And as I expected, as I walked among the Greeks, further dividing them into Ionians and Dorians, the angry dog – that’s how I thought of him, the man with the scar on his forehead – came at me. I saw him early, moving among his friends, if such a man has friends, and I didn’t let him know I had seen him. But I never quite gave him my back.

He had a knife. And some idea how to use it. And his friends – or his followers or his flunkies or what have you – seized stones and clubs they’d made themselves and came at me. Most of them were Greeks, I’m saddened to say.

There were four of them close enough to me to do me immediate harm. But the youngest Greek, who was closest to me, gave them away with an odd noise – the angry dog gave a great shout, and the boy struck me with an ineffectual blow and cringed, rather than, say, grappling my arms, or legs.

I drew my long xiphos from its scabbard and killed the boy on the draw, the rising blade opening his naked belly and the edge of the upper leaf cutting through the bone of his chin and spraying teeth as it exited his face. Then I pivoted slightly on my right foot and cut down with the other edge, and the next man died, too.

Ka shot one who was at my back.

The fourth man stumbled back, but the gods had played their role, and I killed him with a cut across his eyes and a merciful thrust.

Brasidas didn’t fence with the angry dog, either, but put a spear in his throat with brutal economy.

‘Kill only those who are armed, or resist!’ I shouted.

The two Jews and the Babylonian, who all seemed to know each other, lay flat. The Keltoi gathered in a huddle.

I confess that some innocent men probably died on our spears, and perhaps some who were merely foolish, but in a minute I was rid of the most vicious.

While their blood was still soaking into the sand, I rounded up the rest, had them searched, and called them forth by nation.

‘Are any of you worth a ransom?’ I asked. Several of the Greeks claimed that they were. I sent them to Brasidas. Trust a Spartan to be able to spot an aristocrat.

The two Jews and the Babylonian all claimed to be worth ransom. And many other men had stories – some scarcely believable, some patent lies, and a few truly horrible.

I spent an hour listening, and then I had them distributed among my own rowers. They’d been bled of their most dangerous men, twice – there were fewer than forty of them left, and I was almost twenty rowers short. They brought me to full complement. In fact, with Briseis and her women, with Artapherenes and his soldiers and his four servants, we were as crowded as a trireme can possibly be, but on the positive side, with twenty extra rowers, I had reliefs, and because my
Lydia
was a hemiola and not a true trireme, I had the deck space to ship them all – aye, and sleep at sea if required. So we coasted to a small inlet and took on water, and then we started west, into the afternoon sun, for Carthage.

Carthage, on whom I had made war for years.

Dagon’s home.

The masters of the tin trade.

Laugh if you like. Sometimes, when you make a decision, you know it is right before you feel the consequence.

Carthage enjoys one of the finest natural harbours in all the great aspis of the world, improved by the genius of man. The breakwater is longer and stronger than that of Syracusa, and the two beaches that flank the promontory like the guard on a xiphos’s hilt each have berthing for a hundred ships, and there are ship-sheds – the largest and best in all the Middle Sea – all along the promontory coast, an incredible fortune in quarried stone, and every shed holds a hull, dry, well stored, ready for sea.

The last time I entered that harbour, I’d been a half-dead victim of a month of the most extreme humiliations and tortures at the hands of Dagon, the mad or cursed helmsman. This was the first time I’d entered the magnificent harbour in command of my own vessel, and the view was better.

On the other hand, I could smell the roast-pork smell of human sacrifice rising to the gods. Down in the urine-soaked hull of a slave-rowed trireme, I’d never smelled it.

Listen, friends. The Greeks have been known to sacrifice men. I watched Themistocles do it once, and frankly, it sickened me, like a lot of the other crap that half-mad demagogue did. But it is scarcely the norm, for all that power-mad Agamemnon sacrificed his own daughter for a fair wind to Troy. I say again – Greeks can do such things, but most Greeks think them barbarous.

The whole trip to Carthage, I had Briseis on my deck. She would walk the catwalk like a queen, or settle on the short bench by the helm. We talked as we had not talked in many years.

At any rate, she sniffed the air and looked at me. ‘What is that, love?’ she said. ‘Pigs instead of sheep?’

I shook my head. ‘The Great King’s allies sacrifice children to Ba’al for fair weather and good sailing,’ I said.

In the face she made, I read the utter disgust of the mother. I seldom thought of Briseis in those days as anything but a lover, but in that moment I had to see that she had children whom she loved – perhaps loved far more than she loved Artapherenes. Or me.

‘How are your own children?’ I asked. ‘And dare I ask how you come to be here?’

She leaned back and let the fold of her shawl fall away from her face. ‘My children are wonderful,’ she said. ‘My two sons are tall and strong, and will be fine men.’

I laughed to see her pleasure in thinking of her sons. ‘Better men than their father, I hope?’ I asked. Her first husband had been, in my eyes, a coward and a fool – for all that he was, for a while, one of the most powerful men in the Greek world. I’d killed him, of course.

‘I hope that Heraklitus, at least, will not be the fool his father is,’ she said. ‘And Dionysus will be a scholar.’

‘You called your first after the teacher?’ I asked. ‘My teacher?’

She looked at the growing crescent of the Carthaginian harbour. ‘You have never asked his name before,’ she said. ‘You know that he is fourteen years old? He goes to the gymnasium of Sardis with the Greek boys, and throws his spears. He wishes to compete in the boys’ pankration.’ She raised her eyes and met mine. ‘He looks like you.’

That struck me like a sword-blow – like being hit with another man’s shield, right in the face, or like the blow of another ship hitting your own ship, so that you are knocked flat.

‘He’s . . . what?’ I asked.

Briseis shook her head. ‘Why do I love you so?’ she asked. ‘You are sometimes the merest brute.’

Megakles was beginning the landing routine. A pair of pilot boats were pulling out from the main wharf, and two warships were being put into the water.

Someone had recognised my ship.

Sekla came to stand by me. Brasidas was fully armed, and so were all of his marines, and Ka had all his non-wounded archers in the bow, bows strung. Cyrus and his two friends were amidships, fully dressed in rather formal Persian robes over trousers and tucked into their beautiful red-leather boots, and Artapherenes reclined on a pallet of their cloaks, his beard neatly trimmed.

Sekla bowed to Briseis and turned to me. ‘Time to pay the ferryman,’ he said. ‘Or whatever you Greeks say when you are about to die. May I just say . . .’ he pointed at the onrushing shapes of the two Carthaginian warships ‘. . . that I told you so? I’d like you to accept that I told you this would happen before we died.’

I was still looking open mouthed at Briseis. She pulled a fold of her shawl over her face.

In the time it took the rowers to pull five strokes, everything about my life had changed.

Because I had a son. By Briseis. Named Heraklitus.

The pilot boats put an elder on my deck, and the two Carthaginians lay off, with burning fire pots prepared on their marine decks and bows strung. As soon as the old man came aboard, he faced me without a bow.

‘I am old and have grown sons,’ he announced. ‘No one will ransom me, and if I raise my right hand, this ship will be rammed and sunk with all hands, and no one will account me a loss. Understand, pirate?’

I nodded. ‘Sir, I am merely the tool of the gods, in this instance. My ship bears the tokens of an embassy, and I carry the Lord Artapherenes, who comes from the Great King of Persia to speak to the council of Carthage.’

I think his face must have worn the look I had when Briseis told me that her son was also mine.

I motioned to him, and led him forward to where Artapherenes lay among his attendants.

‘This is the Lord Artapherenes, Satrap of Phrygia, relative of the Great King,’ I said. ‘And his wife Briseis and men of his bodyguard.’

I suppose it might have been possible to impersonate such rank, but not in such numbers. The Carthaginian bowed deeply. ‘I’m sure that the tale of your presence here will bear some telling,’ he snapped at me. ‘But I will see to it your tokens of embassy are respected, at least until you clear the harbour.’

I nodded. I had my own plan, now that my duty was done. I went and knelt by Artapherenes, and I motioned Cyrus to attend. He knelt by my side.

‘My lord,’ I said.

His eyes were open and his face was stronger. I have known many men recover at sea and in deserts who might have perished on land. The sea is clean.