We ran on, the silence punctuated by the sound of water on the steering oars, and the ship-noise; creaking, groans from the wood, snapping noises that always sounded a little threatening.
‘How else do you navigate at night?’ he asked.
‘Sound,’ I said. ‘The look of the waves. The wind. Some stars move less in the wheel of the sky than others and you can use them. Look — right now I’m aimed at the Plough.’
‘Sound?’ Hipponax asked.
It happened that I knew where I was to within a few stades, so I took the steering oars in my hands and turned the ship — very gradually — to the east, and ran in closer to the long beach. It showed like the edge of a road in the moonlight.
‘Listen,’ I said, but my son already had the lesson by heart.
He smiled at me.
‘Do you want a ship of your own?’ I asked.
‘Yes!’ he said.
I smiled at the darkness. ‘Learn to navigate. And to command. That means patience.’ Oh — I could see by his moonlit face I was veering off into the kind of lecture boys hate. ‘You think you could command a ship for me?’ I asked.
He shocked me by looking out over the sea. ‘Someday,’ he said with a snort. ‘Not tomorrow morning.’
Well. We all know where wisdom begins, eh?
The mouth of the Alpheos was once again crowded. Because, of course, it was an Olympic year. I had known this somewhere in my heart — four years had passed since I had sailed here on a bowline from Bari. And it is true that the older you get, the faster time moves. Yet, my visit to Neoptolymos and my sighting of Dagon had made the world of four years before seem very immediate, so that it seemed possible, as I have heard philosophers theorise, that two points in time may not be as far apart as they seem — like wave caps with a trough between.
But there was not a single Athenian ship on the beach, and I could see only Corcyrans and Northerners, and a handful of Peloponnesians. Not a ship from Ionia.
Two from Syracusa.
We ate a very expensive meal on the beach — safe, for one night, from any attempt Dagon might make — and then, loaded to the point that the ship was hard to row, we headed south and stayed at sea for three days and two nights, drinking every amphora in the sand of the hold dry and eating every shred of dried meat, figs, dates and old bread aboard.
We weathered the Hand in fine style, with a beautiful westerly coming under our quarter as we passed the rocks. The seas were as empty as a new-washed bowl, and I worried less about Dagon and more about the Persians.
The seas south of Olympia were empty.
I put in at the port of Sparta for water and grain, and traded some of my Sicilian wines. The seas might be empty, but Sparta was not — I gathered from the traders on the beach that the citizenry of Lacedaemon were preparing for their great festivals. Half the citizen population was away at the Olympics, and the rest were preparing for the great Spartan festival — the one where everyone dances naked.
Well, that’s what Athenians say. I’ve never been.
At any rate, there was no sense of crisis. I did learn that Leonidas was already at Corinth, or somewhere east of Corinth.
A fisherman said that a Megaran fisherman had told him that Xerxes had crossed the Hellespont.
The beachside traders were derisive.
‘There won’t be any fighting this summer,’ one said. ‘If there were, do you think all the Spartiates would be swanning about butt naked at home?’ He made a rude gesture and laughed.
Have I mentioned that the helots and periokoi had no great love for their masters?
We sailed — still cautious, may I add — with the fine west wind at our backs. The fisherman had put a chill into me — I decided to try and navigate directly, Sparta to Athens, without passing up the Gulf of Corinth or touching at Hermione or any of my other favourite ports.
So again we filled the ship with water and food, and I used the profit on my Sicilian wine to buy a small fishing smack. I put Hector and Hipponax and Nicolas — an old oarsman I’ve mentioned before — and two of the slaves into her with a hold filled with food and wine, and we were away.
I was not the least afraid of finding Dagon out in the Great Blue. I spent too much time at the helm, and I didn’t even have Hipponax to teach. Despite which, we made a fine passage for two days, and I liked everything I saw. .
Except a pair of big trireme sails on the horizon.
There are so many factors to a chase at sea. In an extreme, a captain can always abandon his course and run with the wind, or land at the first beach, burn his ship and run inland. I’ve done both.
But my ship was well worked up, my rowers were fresh and healthy and had, from a few good port visits, learned that they were treated like men, given wine and a few coins, and trusted. In return, I felt the first stirrings of a crew becoming. . well, a phalanx. I’d done it so many times by that summer that I could build a crew almost without conscious thought. A storm, or a sea battle — either one would make them mine. They were ready.
And the ship — Neoptolymos called her Andromeda — was no Lydia, but she was a fine ship and better for our rebuilding. She had a tendency to turn to starboard, like a horse with a bad bridle, and she had no brilliant turn of speed, and we’d had her in the water too long, so that her timbers were heavy with water. She needed a drying.
But I felt in my bones that she was faster and better manned than anything Dagon would have.
And I knew where I was — about five hundred stades west and south of Athens. Unless Dagon had found himself a new trierarch, he’d be worried about fighting here — in the Athenian shipping lanes.
I watched the two sails for enough time for the sun to move across the sky, and then I ordered my sails taken in, the mainmast stowed — what a pleasure a good crew is! Many ships had to land on a beach to stow the mainmast. Hah!
And then I turned the bow south, and went at my enemy.
Well! It wasn’t Dagon.
Surprised? So was I. Even two stades away I thought I was watching a pair of Carthaginian triremes, and I had to get quite close — already manoeuvring for a strike — before I caught the flash of a shield from the stern of the nearest galley. It was a Greek aspis, and that gave me a little doubt, so I passed on my oar rake and got upwind of them, passing close.
One of the triremes was badly damaged. The other had a long scar down her paint on the starboard side, and looked familiar, and very Phoenician.
My smaller galley got upwind, and we turned, and the two enemy galleys got their bows around to us — the wounded one took so long I knew she was not any threat at all. But the Greek aspis worried me a little.
I let my lads rest on their oars while I drank a little water. We were low on everything, and I wasn’t going to fight unless it was Dagon. I had the weather gauged — I could engage or run at my leisure.
Something told me they were Greeks. After laying on our oars for as long as it takes an orator to speak in the assembly, my conviction that they were Greeks was growing, and then Giorgios, one of my old sailors, ran back along the catwalk to tell me that he could hear men shouting in Greek.
We were, as I say, upwind. I summoned Hipponax under my stern.
‘Run down and see if they are Greek,’ I yelled. ‘If they are, raise your aspis over your head. If not, turn to port and run free, and I’ll join you, and we’ll leave them here.’
Hector raised his hand in casual salute — the two of them were as brown as old walnut by then, and with their burned-blond hair they really did look like gods. The little fishing smack turned on her heel and ran down the wind — wallowed down it, more like. I saw Hipponax stand up in the bow and I saw someone on the stern of the other ship lean far out to shout.