After the sort of examination a man gives to a ram he’s buying in the agora, the two Sikels spoke to each other. The older man’s name was Hektor. Even here, among barbarians, the poet’s work lived. That gave me a ray of hope.
The ray of hope lasted until we found ourselves assigned to oars. The shackles were more figurative than real, but it was clear that I was rowing for my food, at least. Since I could barely speak with any of the men on board, I assumed I was a slave. Again. I was with two men with heavy, hooked noses and deep-set eyes, and two men who were as black as any men I’d ever seen, and Neoptolymos.
On a positive note, we were not forbidden to talk, and as soon as we’d rowed the ship around the headland, the work of an hour, the nearer African smiled at me. ‘Doola,’ he said. I took it for his name.
‘Arimnestos,’ I said. I tapped my chest.
‘Ari?’ Doola asked.
Close enough.
I nodded.
The younger African tapped his chest. ‘Seckla!’ he said sharply.
‘Ari,’ I said again.
You get the picture.
The other two men were not Phoenicians, although they looked the part, nor were they Sikels or Hebrews or anything I knew. They didn’t speak much. But within a few hours, I knew that the ruddy-haired man was Gaius and the dark-haired one was Daud, and that they didn’t really share a language, either. They just looked as if they did. In fact, I’ll save time and say that Gaius was Etruscan and Daud was all Keltoi, from northern Gallia, and spoke a few words of Greek and a few more of Sikel and no other tongue but his own.
It is amazing how much information you can convey without many words. And it is perhaps a comment on my former servitude how happy I was on that boat. The food was good, mostly grilled fish. We had wine every night. The Sikels treated us as — well, more as employees than slaves, and I never was entirely sure as to my status. We moved from small port to small port — really, just a stone house and some wattle huts on a headland with a beach. We rowed past the Greek towns and their temples and familiar smells. We sailed past the Carthaginian towns and well out to sea, and it occurred to me that my new hosts feared the Carthaginians far more than they feared the Greeks, the Italiotes or the Etruscans.
Mostly, we loaded dry fish and sold metal. Every town had a small forge and a bronze-smith, and our ingots of copper and tin were their life’s blood. I was shocked when I finally understood the price of tin. It was absurdly high, and I thought of my time as a smith on Crete — about as far from the tin mines of northern Illyria as a man can be, and still be in the world — and wondered. What had happened? Tin hadn’t ever been that high.
You cannot make bronze without tin. And the tin has to be high quality. You don’t need to add much tin to the copper to make bronze — a little more than one to twenty. But without tin, all you have is soft copper, whether you are making cook pots or helmets.
So an increase in the price of tin — affected everyone.
Neoptolymos was the only man to whom I could really talk. As I recovered a little, so did he, and I went back to work on his Greek. He was sullen, and it was only then that I began to understand the depth of his betrayal. The man I had heard mentioned on the beach — Epidavros — was his uncle. Neoptolymos didn’t need me to tell him who had sold him to the Carthaginians. He already knew. He chewed on his desire for revenge every minute. Illyrians are good haters, and in this case, I think his need for revenge kept him alive.
Mind you, I thought of Dagon constantly. I hated him: I wanted to torture him to death, and I knew, in my heart, that I was afraid of him. This had not happened to me before, and the sensation was like the ache of a tooth. I had to probe it with my tongue.
A week passed, and another. We were not shackled or roped at night. I began to prowl the encampment when the boat was beached, testing the boundaries. We were well along the west coast of Sicily — I have no notion greater than that — in a town that had several stone houses with tile roofs, and I had been a rower for perhaps three weeks when I walked boldly down the beach away from the encampment and into the streets of the town. I made it to their very small agora just before dark, and there was the younger brother, sitting on a blanket, with various ingots of Cyprian copper and a few knucklebones of tin — clearly not Illyrian tin, let me add, because that comes in plainer ingots.
Hektor’s brother rose from his blanket, walked over to me and put a hand on my arm. But there wasn’t any threat.
I shrugged. ‘I want to see the town,’ I said in Greek.
He shrugged and let go my arm.
I walked about. In truth, they were subsistence farmers with no temple and very little to see — a pair of stone statues that were really just phallic pillars. A bronze brooch was the town’s chief adornment for a woman, and only one man wore a sword, and it was more like a dagger.
In the days of my lordship, I’d have walked past them all like a king. As a semi-slave rower, I found the town fascinating. Or rather, a welcome break.
In a very few minutes, I was back in the small agora, and Hektor’s brother met me, led me to the blanket and offered me a cup of wine. So I sat with him. Drank his wine. And, with a smile, got up and walked back down to the boat. I still didn’t know his name, because his brother never used it.
It may seem odd to you, thugater, but I was not unhappy. My body was healing, and no one was unfriendly. Doola and I were becoming comrades. I learned some of his words — I still remember that nitaka means ‘I want’. He learned more of mine. Enough words that when I came back from my wander — he had been sleeping — he rose, threw a chiton over his nudity and sat with me.
‘Was it good?’ he asked. Let me just say that there were grunts, gestures and incomprehensible words interspersed with our very small shared vocabulary. I’ll leave that out.
‘Not bad,’ I said, and shrugged. ‘Hektor’s brother gave me wine.’
‘He’s not bad,’ Doola agreed.
We sat in companionable silence until Hektor himself joined us. He lay down. He was a very big man — a head taller than me — and handsome. He had a small amphora and a mastos cup, and he poured a libation. Doola and I both raised our hands in the universal sign of prayer to the gods, and he grinned. He said some words. Then he drank from the cup and passed it. After a while a small boy, I think Hektor’s son, came and brought small fish fried in olive oil. Neoptolymos joined us and ate the fish with the closest thing to a smile I’d seen from him. We ate them, got greasy, drank the wine. One by one the other rowers came, and then the rest of Hektor’s deck crew — all relatives, I guess.
I still think they had made a profit. It was a good little party.
So the next morning, when the boat rowed away, I was at my bench. I was happy enough.
That’s the best evening I remember. I can’t say exactly how long I rowed for the Sikels. At least a month, and perhaps longer. But sometime after that, on a clear day, we saw a trireme hull up to the north, and the Sikels spoke in agitated tones, and we turned south and ran downwind. The two brothers argued, and I will assume that the younger was in favour of maintaining our course to the west and appearing unfazed, while the older was in favor of running immediately and gaining sea room.
We ran south across a darkening sea, and as the wind grew less and less, we went to the oars and pulled. Hektor began to cheat the helm more and more west of south.
But the black trireme was on us.
I rowed looking over my shoulder. I’d been the hunter a hundred times. I’d snapped up coasters just like this one — sometimes three and four at a time. I knew in an hour that the trireme had us.