When oil jars ran low, more was purchased. Floors were cleaned. No servant or slave approached me for any reason.
Well — I’d been a slave, and I was not a very good master — too involved, I suspect. But my joke to Pen as I paused at her great house to sip wine en route to the Gulf of Corinth was that the house would run best of all if I wasn’t there.
I saw Aegypt that summer. Sekla had Lydia, so I paid rent to Aristides and took his beautiful Athena Nike from where he’d laid her up in Corinth. I got to spend the summer with Demetrios, one of my earliest mentors — one of Aristides’ helmsmen. He, too, was rich.
We had a fine voyage. I had learned a great deal of pure navigation in the Western Ocean, and I was no longer cautious about using it. Demetrios was still — like Vasileos and Megakles — a much better dead-reckoning sailor than I, and we challenged each other all summer. I suspect our rented oarsmen loathed us — we spent too much time over the horizon from any land, but we had fun, and we had some very fast passages.
In Aegypt, we found a Corinthian trireme — badly damaged by a storm and abandoned. In fact, locals were starting to pick her apart for firewood. How I wished for Vasileos! But I got her off the beach, towed her into the delta and got some linen patches on her sides — the Aegyptian revolt had cut them off from any source of wood unless Greeks brought it, so that their shipbuilding industry was at a standstill.
We left her there to get new rigging, and we ran a small cargo of perfumes and wines and some finished papyrus to Lebanon — and came back with the whole centreline of the ship burdened with timber. I think that Aristides would have cried to see his magnificent warship, her fine entry to the water ruined by overloading, her beautiful midship catwalk unusable because of fifty great pine logs. We all had to run down the ship’s sides with ropes, and it was a dead uncomfortable voyage — rowing all the way, no wind, terrible heat.
But out of it, I got a trireme — a heavy merchant trireme, well built and beautifully rebuilt by men happy to have work. We made a small fortune on the wood — the best cargo in the world is a cargo that your buyer needs desperately and for which you have no competition.
We called her Astarte for her new timbers, and we crewed her from rowers stranded in Aegypt by the revolt and loaded her with papyrus and linen, and we used all our profits on the wood to load Athena Nike’s narrow holds with glass — Aegyptian faience, mostly perfume bottles.
Summer was wearing on to autumn. We had our ‘home cargo’ and we also knew that there was a squadron of Phoenicians preying on Greek merchants — there was the biter bit — off the delta. So we ran out of the eastern mouth of the delta — for the south coast of Crete. I’d done it before when desperate — this was simply good navigation, and I put into Gortyn’s port as if I’d had a Pole Star over it all the way. Permit me a little bragging. It was a pretty piece of navigation, given two hard blows and a couple of grey days with no sun sighting.
We’d slipped the pirates — who were, according to the Cretans, the Persian navy enforcing a blockade on Aegypt, which was being punished for revolt. I’ll waste a little of your time to say that Aegypt — one of the richest lands in the world — was not in ‘revolt’. According to their own way of thinking, they were throwing off the yoke of oppression. To Xerxes, they were rebels.
Old Lord Achilleus was dead — and his son Neoptolymos had died at Lades. But the new King of Gortyn was Scyllus, Achilleus’s brother, and his son Brotachus was already a famous soldier. I was feasted in the palace, sold some fancy perfume bottles — wait, I lie. I gave the Cretans the perfume bottles of Aegyptian glass, and they gave me rich gifts in return. Very aristocratic, the Cretans. Too good for trade.
Bah — none of that matters. What matters is that in the town — the fishing port that supplied the king and his soldiers — I met Troas, the fisherman — still hale, still rude. He crushed me to him, and invited me to dinner.
So I went. Troas no longer lived in a rude shack on the beach. He’d had two boats and a fine son-in-law and some war loot, and from that he’d gone to a dozen fishing boats, nets in a tangle in every direction, a small army of fishermen who worked for him — and a fine stone house.
Gaiana didn’t share our dinner — that was not the Cretan way. But her oldest son did. His name was Hipponax, and he was. . mine. There was no hiding it — he had my nose, my mouth, my eyes — and her long limbs.
He was overeager to please me, and rude to his mother and his grandfather, and it was quite clear to me that he was a handful.
After dinner, he was sent to the agora on an errand, and we three sat together. Gaiana had aged. She was tall and plump and had lines around her eyes, and probably had a thousand other flaws, but I was older myself and I saw her as. . the same girl I’d bedded in the rain under Hephaestion’s porch, fifteen or more years before. She smiled nervously when first I came in, and then she had to find fault with me. .
‘I’m sure our manners are too coarse for a great lord like you,’ she said.
‘Do you ever stop talking to hear yourself think?’ she asked, and:
‘Do you know any stories that are not about you?’
And a dozen other quips. But after a cup of wine, she looked at her father.
He leaned forward on the kitchen table and held his bronze cup between his hands. ‘Would you take your son?’ he asked. ‘He’s going to kill someone. He’s set on being a warrior, and fishermen’s sons are not warriors on Crete. He fights all the time — with the boys from the warrior societies. He wins, too.’ Troas grinned in pleasure. Then shook his head.
‘You do not have the best record around here,’ Gaiana put in. ‘Half the island died at Lades!’
I shrugged. At thirty, I might have launched into some hot-blooded defence of my actions, and Miltiades and the whole Ionian Revolt — a diatribe against the treasons of Samos. But instead I shrugged and smiled at her.
And she smiled back.
‘Stop looking at me like that,’ she said.
At twenty, I’d have assumed she meant just that, but there and then, I knew she meant the opposite.
‘Will you take him?’ Troas asked.
‘Yes,’ I said. I felt good saying it. ‘Bless you for raising my son. I’ll take him to sea and try to keep him alive.’ I looked at Troas. ‘You know there is no guarantee.’
Troas raised his chin. ‘I lost her husband,’ he said gruffly.
‘Pater. .’ she began, and then paused.
I think we talked more, but eventually old Troas glared at his daughter. ‘Shall I leave you two lovebirds alone?’ he asked testily.
‘Yes,’ she said, defiant.
And he did.
Much later, she lay beside me. The gods were smiling — rain was falling on the roof.
‘I’m old and fat,’ she said.
‘No,’ I said. I spent some time proving my point.
She laughed and laughed and tickled me. ‘Damn you for coming back,’ she said. ‘I loved my husband. But I’m sick of being in a bed alone.’
And later still, she said, ‘Keep him alive. I have two other boys. They’ll make good fishermen. But Hipponax is. . something else. When he’s not a violent fool, he’s. . like a poet.’
Like a poet? I liked the sound of that.
The world is a strange and wonderful place, and one of the ways in which it is strange is this — few women in my life have stirred me as quickly or as deeply as Arwia of Babylon, with her scents and her earthy brilliance and her remarkable body. But while she was an adventure — and a sensual pleasure — Gaiana was. . better. Truer. Better for my soul, anyway.