Like a wool blanket that unravels in the wind, his failure spread, so that the whole port-side loom of oars began to fall apart. Men struggled to keep their oars clear, but the ship rolled from the mis-strokes, and the port-side oars bit too deep, and men died, or were broken. We turned suddenly, and the port side dipped so low on the roll that we took water. We still had so much way on us that we were racing sideways into the beach.
The port-side rowers — those still in command of themselves — finally got all their oars clear of the water. The starboard-side rowers were at full stretch and the hull pivoted again, rotating on the starboard oar bank, and the bow hit the sand a glancing blow as the bronze-plated ram caught the trough of gravel just shy of the beach and skipped along it.
Then we could hear the ram ploughing a furrow in the gravel and suddenly the boatmast snapped with a crack as loud as the lightning, and every man not sitting a bench was thrown flat on the deck as a wave picked up the stern and tossed us — the kindly hand of Poseidon, I like to think — up the beach, stern first.
‘Over the side!’ I roared, although I was lying half-stunned. ‘Get her up the beach!’
It was the ugliest landing I ever saw — we’d been rotated halfway round by the sea, men were badly hurt all along both sides, and I could see broken boards where my ram ought to be.
But when I jumped over the side, my feet barely splashed.
We were ashore.
Stephanos didn’t even try to land. He watched us, and he assumed we were lost in the waves, and he put up his helm and coasted by, a few oar-lengths offshore. In seconds he was past the beach, and before we had our broken hull clear of Poseidon’s reaching tendrils, his ship had gone around the promontory to the north of Eresus.
I lay by the rope I had been hauling and cursed, because the loss of Stephanos hurt me more than I’d expected. I hadn’t seen him in a year. I wanted him back.
Idomeneus had his marines in hand and was driving oarsmen to work, gathering wood to put supports under the hull timbers. We propped Storm Cutter on sand that was only wet with rain, and then we drove the oarsmen into the sea to fetch the ram before it got buried in storm-wrack and sand. The ram was heavy bronze plate, but with thirty men helping we hauled it above the tide line. Then we collapsed.
I sent Idomeneus to the citadel to get us help and hospitality, then I sat in my sodden chlamys and watched the storm, and sang a hymn to Poseidon and prayed that Stephanos might live.
The news came back that Sappho’s daughter had died — an old, old woman, but a great teacher, as awe-inspiring and god-touched in her way as Heraclitus in his — and had been succeeded by another woman, Aspasia, who now led the school of Sappho. So much had changed in just a few years. But Aspasia was supported by Briseis’s largesse, and she accepted me without question when I told her who I was, and she lodged my men and fed them.
I let myself into Briseis’s house and sat by her shuttered window, drinking her wine and eating her food. Surely it was she, and not Artaphernes, who had sent me that message. Hence, she must have need of me, I reasoned. And not a need she dared commit to paper. I reasoned — with a brain clouded by Eros, let me add — that she must need me.
I would find Miltiades soon enough. But if I could get Storm Cutter rebuilt, I would cross the straits and run down the coast to Ephesus and visit my love, and see why she had summoned me.
The storm took three days to blow out, and my men praised me openly for bringing them to such a safe haven, with lamb stew every night and good red wine for every man, as if they were a crew of lords. The folk of Eresus treated us like gods — as well they might, since it was Briseis’s gold that kept the school going, and her political power that kept it free of outside control. And they feared us.
When the storm was gone, we had beautiful weather for autumn. I put men on the headlands to keep watch, and I prayed to Poseidon every day and gave offerings of cakes and honey on the Cyprian goddess’s altar, too — anything to bring back Stephanos. We cut good wood on the hillsides east of the town and rebuilt the bow, with two carpenters from the town helping us with the main beams that had cracked. We stripped the hull clean and rebuilt the bow, and found a fair amount of rot in the upper timbers. I built a marine platform — like a box, with armoured sides — into the new bow, and a little shelf where an archer or a lookout could stand high above the ram.
I borrowed from the Temple of Aphrodite, and spent the money on tar and pine pitch, and blacked the hull, a fresh, thick coat so that he was armoured in the stuff, watertight and shining. I gave him a stripe of Poseidon’s own blue above the waterline, and we painted the oar shafts to match, all in a day, and the women of the town washed our great sail so that the raven was fresh and stark again.
In such a way we propitiated Poseidon, but there was no sign of Stephanos. So after a week of good food and freely given aid, we prepared to sail away in a fresh ship. I was sombre at the loss of a friend, but the crew was wild with delight.
‘Boys are saying their luck has changed,’ Idomeneus said.
I had appointed two Iberians who could speak some Greek to be officers. My new oar master was Galas, and he had more tattoos than a Libyan, for all that his skin was fairer than mine. He had blue eyes and ruddy hair and his scalp was shaved in whorls, but he knew the sea and his Greek was good enough. And he had taken command of the port-side oars during the disaster of the landing.
My new sailing master had the same tattoos and his name was too barbaric for words, something like ‘Malaleauch’. I called him Mal, and he answered to it. He spoke a pidgin of Greek and Italiote and Phoenician.
I had thirty of the former slaves on my benches now. I’d lost more than a dozen men in that horrible landing — dead, or so badly injured that they still lay in Lady Sappho’s Temple of Aphrodite, waiting to be healed or to die.
The Iberians all viewed me as the author of their freedom. I explained to Galas how small a role I’d played, and how much they owed to the gods, but I was not sorry to benefit from their gratitude.
At any rate, we heaved Storm Cutter into the surf and got the rowers in position as if we knew what we were doing, and then we were away. Galas brought more out of the rowers than I had, and we spent two more days rowing up and down the sea off Lesbos to drill them until their oars rose and fell like the single arm of a single man.
Then we rowed around to Methymna, and I put her stern on the beach and asked after Miltiades and my friend Epaphroditos, the archon basileus of the town. But the captain of the guard told me that Lord Epaphroditos was away at the siege of Miletus.
I needed money, and Epaphroditos’s absence left me no choice. I had to take a prize, and a rich one. My men needed paying, and I was down to no wine and no stores. I got one meal out of Methymna based on their memories of me and my famous name, but we sailed from that town like a hungry wolf.
We ran south along the east coast of Lesbos, and the beaches were empty at Mytilene, where the rebel fleet ought to have been forming up. And just south of Mytilene, we saw a pair of heavy Phoenicians guarding a line of merchantmen — Aegyptians, I thought as I stood on the new bow.
‘Get the mainmast up,’ I called to Mal, and motioned for Galas, who was steering, to take us about. We could no more face a pair of heavy Phoenicians than we could weather another storm. ‘Fuck,’ I muttered.
They were none too happy to see us when we put on to the beach at Mytilene, but men remembered me there, and I arranged for a meal and some oil and wine on credit — Miltiades’ credit.