The rest were riff-raff. I watched them land the ship at the edge of night and almost get her broached in the surf. I was angry, but instead of showing my anger, I walked around and talked. I offered them an increased wage on the spot. That helped a little.
Next day we rose with the last light of the moon and we were away before rosy-fingered dawn touched the beach. We rowed on an empty sea, bearing north and east. The wind was fitful, and the clouds to the north were thickening and looked like a shoreline in the sky, an angry dark purple. The oarsmen muttered as they rowed.
About noon, the sun vanished behind a wall of cloud, and Stephanos spoke up from the steering oars.
‘Time to beach, navarch,’ he said formally.
I shook my head. ‘Lots of time, Stephanos. A little chop won’t slow us. This is when we gain on Miltiades.’ I had abandoned any thought of my chase now — I was just aiming to get back with the squadron, or at least get into Chios on the same day.
By mid-afternoon we were out in the deep blue between Samos and Chios. The sky to the north and east was that terrifying dark blue-grey — so dark as to approach black, and the sky over the bow was distant and bright, like a line of fire.
I’d misjudged my landfall — or misjudged the rate of our drift on the wind. Chios was over there, past the bow — somewhere. It should have been a low line punctuated by mountains, with the island’s coast inviting me in for the night. I couldn’t understand — we were hurtling along as if pushed by the very fist of Poseidon, and yet I wasn’t up with Chios yet.
The muttering of the oarsmen grew. We didn’t have a proper oar master, and we needed one. If only to protect them from me.
‘I missed this!’ I shouted over the wind. ‘Take in the mainsail and strike the mainmast down on deck.’
Under the boatsail alone, we ran into the line of fire.
The sun began to set red, and the dark clouds behind us swallowed the red light and looked more ominous yet.
Just against the white line of the last of the good weather, my lookout spotted the hull of our slave ship.
He had his masts down, and his oarsmen rowing for all they were worth. He was more afraid of the storm than of pirates.
We came up on him fast, as our boatsail was enough in that wind to throw foam and spray right over the ram in our bow and on to the rowers, who sat silently, cursing their fates and looking at the madman who stood in front of the helm.
I summoned Idomeneus aft. ‘We’ll have to take him fast,’ I said. ‘We’ll strip him of rowers and add them to our own, and then we’ll live the night.’
Idomeneus shook his head in admiration. ‘I thought you’d gone soft,’ he said.
‘Don’t kill the Iberians,’ I said. I poured a libation to Poseidon for his gift, because I knew that it was no seamanship of mine that had caught the fast slaver.
When we were five or six stades astern of our prey and the storm line was visible behind us, a long line of rain flowing in the last light of the sun, the Phoenician changed tactics and raised his boatsail.
But Poseidon accepted my libation and spat the slaver’s back. Before it could be sheeted home, his boatsail whipped away on the wind, the ship yawed badly and we gained a stade.
Who knows what happened in the last moments as we closed? He was a slaver, and most of his rowers were slaves. And one of the slaves had a knife — a wickedly sharp raven’s talon.
By the time Idomeneus went aboard, the deck crew was dead and the Iberians were loose, severed ropes hanging from their ankles, and their leader had an axe and was cutting their fetters. The Phoenician was pinned to the mast with a knife through his chest. We left him there, because sometimes Poseidon likes a sacrifice.
I took every extra slave out of that ship that I could, left them undermanned but not desperate and set them a landfall.
Stephanos stepped up. He was Chian, and he wanted his reputation back.
‘They’ll die in the dark,’ he said. ‘Send me aboard and give me a handful of marines and I’ll get them through the night.
Idomeneus nodded.
‘Do it,’ I said. I stepped across to my new ship even as the rain began. I walked down the main deck and touched hands with a few of the Iberians, meeting their eyes and nodding at the men I remembered from my trip to Delos, and many nodded back. A couple smiled. The dangerous one clasped my hand — hard, testing me — and then threw an arm around me.
Aft of the mast, a voice spoke up in Doric. ‘By the gods! Arimnestos! Get me out of here!’
It was the blasphemer, Philocrates.
I leaned down. ‘You want to be thrown over the side?’
‘No! I want — fuck. Get me out of here!’ He was pleading.
‘You want to live?’ I said. ‘Row harder.’ I laughed at him. ‘Pray!’ I suggested.
The Iberian on the opposite bench showed me his teeth. ‘Fucking coward,’ he said.
I pointed at the Iberian. ‘If you don’t row, these men will certainly kill you,’ I said. ‘Now, rationally you must know that if you do row, you may live through the night.’ I stepped up on the bench, stepped up again to the rail and balanced there as the swell raised the stern. ‘But I don’t have to be an aspiring priest — isn’t that what you called me? — to suggest that this might be a good time to examine your relationship with the gods.’
I leaped down from the rail into the midship of Storm Cutter, feeling immensely better. The storm was coming in behind us, but I had done my service for the god, and I knew I could weather the storm.
We turned north and rowed all night, and we constantly lost sight of the other ship, and as often found him again, so that the first fretful grey light, shot with lightning, found the eyes over his ram just a short stade to windward. And about the time that dawn was shining somewhere — it was a grey morning for us, and lashed with rain — I swung the great steering oars to starboard to put the wind astern. I could see a great rock, the size of a castle or the Acropolis, rising from the water to starboard, and I thought that I knew where we were. Somehow we had come two hundred stades north of our target, and we were off the west coast of Lesbos. That rock marked the beach of Eresus, where Sappho had her school.
Best of all, the beach there was wide and deep, and the rock would break the wind and rain long enough for me to get my ship ashore.
My oarsmen were spent — used up, long since. The Iberians had put some strength into them, and they weren’t bad men, but I wasn’t going to get a heroic burst of power from them. Not in a month of feast days.
No way to signal Stephanos, either. But he knew this anchorage as well as I — better, no doubt. So I waved at him and turned my ship, hoping that he would read my mind.
I got Idomeneus to come aft. Only a few hundred heartbeats left before the crisis.
‘Go down the benches and get every man ready. I intend to put him right up the beach, bow first.’ I pointed at the lights shining in the acropolis, high above the beach. ‘Hard to miss.’ I waited until I saw him understand.
Idomeneus shook his head. ‘You’ll break his back,’ he said.
I confess that I shrugged. ‘We’ll live.’ I nodded towards Asia, which loomed ahead, ready to catch us on a much less kind coast if we failed to land on the sand of Eresus. ‘We’re out of sea room.’ I pointed again. ‘Every oarsman has to be ready to back water. Tell them to dip lightly, so that they don’t get killed by the oars.’
Idomeneus nodded and headed forward, shouting as he went.
I hesitate to say how fast Storm Cutter was moving when we came in under the lee of the rock, but I’d say we were faster than a galloping horse. It’s less than a stade from the rock to the beach. We were going too fast.
‘Oars out!’ I shouted across the gale. ‘Back water!’
It was ragged. I was as scared as the next man — now that we were in flat water, our speed was shocking. The oars bit, and I couldn’t see that we were slowing at all — but the ship yawed and an oarsman screamed as his backed oar bit too deep and slammed into him, breaking his arms.