I looked at my rowers — near exhausted, and not a man in armour — and put the helm down for Ithaca and kept running.
Behind us — they followed.
I lost Dagon in the islands off Illyria. If it was Dagon, and I’m pretty sure it was. Despite my fears for Athens and Sparta, I had an easy way out of my predicament, and I ran north, not south — to Neoptolymos. A day in his blood-soaked town convinced me that I would never make an Illyrian, but he rented me his trireme — one I’d built for him, really — and put rowers on the benches.
‘If I come, I’ll have no kingdom when I return,’ he said.
I looked at the heads rotting on his gate and the long lines of slaves loading into ‘my’ trireme.
‘You can be king here until someone puts a knife in your belly,’ I said. ‘Or come with me and be Achilles.’
He chose to treat my words as mere raillery. No light flashed in his eyes, and he looked away when I pressed him.
I rowed away, leaving my triakonter on the beach, with a crew of unwilling slave ‘oarsmen’ and my own thirty professionals as officers and deck crew and marines, and we wallowed about for three days, scraping wood off her keel at every landing, breaking oars on rocks, catching every crab in the water — this in a dead flat, calm sea — Poseidon, we were pitiful. Worse yet, there was worm in the ship’s hull, so that despite all my need for speed and caution, we had to beach for almost a week, barter for timber from barbarous Illyrians and then defend our ship and our slaves.
Really, there are few situations worse than being caught on a hostile coast with the planks off your ship and only thirty trustworthy men to hold your palisade. I cursed my decisions, each of them — to go north to Neoptolymos, to go straight to sea in an untested ship. .
Well, I’m here, so we weren’t all taken or killed. Had we been, we’d have missed the greatest days in the history of Greeks, and the worst.
Never mind. After a long and pointless skirmish with the Illyrians — we stared at each other, they screamed challenges, and we sat tight — suddenly a man appeared who offered us good pine pitch and fine, carefully dried pine for repairs in fair Greek. We bought everything he offered, and rowed away the next day short by twenty oarsmen who deserted in the night. A man has to be particularly desperate or a complete fool to desert in Illyria, but there we were.
That night we beached in waters I knew, and I gathered all the slaves and offered them my usual deal — freedom and wages for six months’ service.
Of course, they all accepted.
I was a more experienced man than I had been. I had Hector record all their names, and I walked among them. ‘You will row for your freedom, every day,’ I said. ‘No grumbling, no lying on your oars. Six months of work, and you are free men. Six months of bad behaviour, and you will remain slaves.’
A handsome man with a square jaw and a crop of brown-blond hair spat. ‘How do we know you’ll keep your word?’ he asked.
There was muttering from my men, but I raised my hand. ‘It’s a fair question. I could answer that you’d better hope that I do, because you have no other choice — eh? You are slaves.’ I let them think about that. ‘But when we reach Piraeus under Athens, I’ll be happy to write it in the form of a contract.’ I shrugged. ‘Until then, trust me or don’t.’
I’m not Themistocles or Miltiades or even Aristides. I’m not an orator.
But the rowing improved.
For three weeks we moved like a mouse under the eye of a cat. We rested at day at Corcyra and found that, for all her fair promises, the city was prevaricating — they were sending sixty ships to sea, but only as far as Sphacteria. I heard a great many excuses, but the Corcyrans didn’t see any possibility that Persia could ever reach them — whereas they saw it as a certainty that Persia would defeat Athens.
We rowed away south, and my heart was as heavy as iron ore. Corcyra, like Syracusa, had a mighty fleet. But she was a former colony of Corinth, and I could see the long arm of Adamenteis at work. Right or wrong, I held him responsible. Certainly I’d heard his name often enough over wine in Corcyra.
Aside from Corcyra, we hid our camp every night and moved close to the coast by day. I assumed that Dagon was still hunting me — I knew his obsessions, and I knew from bitter experience how well he knew these waters. We never let a campfire show from the shore, and even when we passed the entrance to the Gulf of Patras and left it on our port side, sailing with a fair wind down the west coast of the Peloponnesus, I continued to take all the care I could. We saw a pair of ships well out to sea the day we sighted Mount Olympus, and we took down our sail and crept in with the coast.
Every day, my oarsmen got a little better.
I was lucky in my crew. I was also tested. I had never sailed far without a superb sailor at my side — Leukas, Vasilios, Sekla, Megakles, Demetrios, and their ilk. Professionals, born to the role. I always felt like a fake with them — after all, Plataea doesn’t have any ships. I was seventeen before I handled a ship.
But that summer, the best sailor on my ship was me. My son — what a pleasure it is to say that — my son Hipponax was an excellent hand at the steering oar, and he had weather sense, but he couldn’t navigate from one side of a public bath to the other. I assume his grandfather had always handled the navigation.
In a way, that was good. I was still a little unsure of my navigation — I had the pride of a new skill, and I liked to talk about what I was seeing out loud as I took a sighting, or tried to calculate my speed through the water for dead reckoning. Hipponax and I had been entirely distant since the incident when Demetrios knocked him flat. He was correct and polite in my presence, and affected to despise me to Hector while trying very hard to impress me.
You know. Young men.
The day we saw Olympus — and what we thought might be Dagon’s ships — I decided to stay out to sea and steal a march on my enemy. I wanted to fight Dagon, but not against desperate odds. The farther I could lead him from his base, and the better worked up my ship was. .
And my gods were not telling me that I had to fight just then. This is hard to explain, so you must believe me. I trusted I would have him. The floating tree had been where I needed it. So would revenge.
At any rate, my rowers grumbled when I said we’d spend the night at sea, but that was all, and we got the sail up again as soon as it was dark, with my veterans rigging the mast by moonlight while the rowers watched us as if we were the Argonauts. And then it was all a navigation problem. I sat in the stern, and it was Hipponax’s trick at the helm, and we sailed through the moonlit darkness.
I talk to myself. No, it’s true, and sometimes men think I’ve lost my wits, but navigation, for me, is always a conversation with myself, and with Pythagoras and Heraklitus and sometimes with Harpagos, whether he is there or not. So I stood with a spear shaft braced on the helmsman’s rail, taking sightings on stars I knew.
‘You can. . find your way with the stars?’ Hipponax asked, suddenly. His voice carried the message that it had taken him time and effort to frame this question.
You can almost never go wrong with the young by giving them the full truth.
‘Not really,’ I admitted. ‘With the stars, I could tell you where I was in the most general terms. Which we already know. But that star there will always show me north — see it?’
Hipponax snorted that adolescent boy snort. He knew the North Star. Of course he did.
‘Well, it may seem simple to you, but I find it constantly reassuring that I am running south and east, because I’ve been this way before and that’s the way this coast runs. If I make too much way to the east, smack — we’ll hit the Peloponnesus.’