Luckily, he was mad. So mad, he’d forgotten me and the Illyrian both. He hated women — all women — far more than he hated us. So while I had to witness his brutal degradation of the slave women, I was merely beaten occasionally, as an afterthought. Tapped with his heavy stick when he was bored.
After some time — by Zeus the Saviour, I have no idea how far south we’d come — the oar-master cut the throats of a pair of the women in a sacrifice. He did it in the bow, and I never knew exactly what happened. But after that, the other women stopped being alive. That is to say, they were still warm and breathing, but they were dead inside. A few days later they started to die.
The trierarch simply let it happen.
Sometimes he reacted in anger and hit a slave, but mostly he just fingered his beard and watched the heavens. His two helmsmen said little.
From their stilted conversations, I gathered that we were on our way home, and that home was Carthage.
And I began to learn other things.
I was a good navigator — my best helmsman and friends had taught me well enough — but the Phoenicians have secrets about navigation, and they hold them close. They use stars and the sun. All of us do, but they do it with far more accuracy than we Greeks. Now, since Marathon, we’ve taken enough of their ships to enslave a generation of their navigators, and we have all their secrets, but back then there were still tricks we didn’t know: the aiming stick for taking the height of a star, or the secrets of the Pleiades and the Little Bear. Ah — I see that the lad from Halicarnassus knows whereof I speak!
But the helmsmen and the trierarch were careless. They took their sun sights and their star sights a few feet from my silent back, and they discussed their sightings. Hamilcar, the younger helmsman, was obviously under instruction and very slow. I think — I will never know — that he was so deeply unhappy with the life he was living that his brain had shut down.
And Hasdrubal, the trierarch, used him as his scapegoat. Every wrong answer was punished with a blow. His every thought and opinion was ridiculed.
Another week at sea, and the new slaves began to be broken. Our rations were cut — I can’t even remember why, just the satisfied voice of the oar-master telling us that we deserved it.
We rowed.
Another week.
But the navigational lessons at my back had begun to keep me alive. They gave my brain something on which to seize. And Hamilcar’s obstinate ignorance became my closest friend, because my understanding of the Phoenician tongue — bad to start with — became more proficient, and because Hamilcar needed everything repeated two or three times, three days in a row. Bless him.
One night, the sea grew rougher and the wind came from all directions, and after a while, rowing grew dangerous. A new slave below me lost the stroke, got his oar-handle in the teeth and died. His oar went mad, and other men were injured. None of us was very strong, and the sea was against us — and suddenly the bully-boys were afraid, and they showed their fear by beating us with sticks and spear butts.
The wind steadied down from the north, but it grew stronger and stronger.
We got our stern into the wind by more luck than skill, and suddenly, we had to row or die.
‘Do you want to die, you scum!’ roared the oar-master. He laughed and laughed. ‘If you die, I die too!’ he shouted. ‘Here’s your chance! Rebel, and we all go down to Hades together — you as slaves, and me as your master!’
The trierarch and the two helmsmen had three shouted conferences on the spray-blown deck that convinced me we were close to the coast of Africa — too damned close to be running before a north wind. But the oarsmen were badly trained and brutalized, and the officers were shit — pardon me, ladies — and the trierarch didn’t have the balls to try anything. So on we rushed, the oars just touching the water to keep our stern into the wind.
After some time — it was dark, cold and wet and all I knew was the fire in my arms — one of the Keltoi women stepped over me and jumped over the side. I saw her face in a flash of lightning — she was Medea come to life. To me, that face is printed for ever on my thoughts the way a man writes on papyrus, or carves in stone. It was set with purpose — hate, determination, agony and even a tiny element of joy. She was gone before my heart beat again, sucked under by Poseidon. To a kinder place, I hope.
But something passed from her to me. Her courage, I think.
Right there, in the storm, I swore an oath to the gods.
And we rowed.
We took a lot of water, but we weren’t lucky enough to sink. About a third of our oarsmen drowned or died under their oars, and yet somehow we made it. The bully-boys threw the corpses over the side, and cut the oars free, too. And on we went.
The morning dawned blue and gold, and we were alive.
After that, there was no food and only about eighty whole men to row, and we were on the deep blue. We rowed, and we rowed, and we rowed.
I should have been dead, or nearly dead. But the Keltoi slave woman had told me something with her eyes — I can hardly put this into words. That resistance was worthy. Perhaps, that I could always restore my dignity with death. Either way, I was coming to my senses.
And of course, my brain was engaged, too. I had taken to listening to the men at the steering oars, and now I was interested. Hasdrubal talked about the trade — about how the tin was no longer coming in from northern Illyria in the old amounts, and how the Greeks were trying to cut into the trade from Alba, and that interested me. He talked about new sources of copper down the coast of Africa and up the coast of Iberia, outside the Gates of Herakles, and I discovered, from listening to him, that Africa was much bigger than I had imagined.
I had no cross-staff with which to try calculations, but I used my fingers. Star lessons happened at night, just a horse-length at my back. I was careful, but I tried their sightings as I got the hang of their method.
It worked.
Mind you, it wasn’t that I’d ever needed to do such esoteric navigation, and if Hasdrubal hadn’t been such a poor sailor, neither would he! He was a fine navigator, but a dreadful sailor. We always knew where we were, but we never seemed to be able to move from where we were to where we needed to be. And a big trireme — even a twenty-oared boat — can’t hold enough food to feed its oarsmen for even a few days and nights. This is why all ships coast — they go from beach to beach, buying food from locals, whether they are a tubby merchantman with four oarsmen and a dozen sailors to a fleet of warships with two hundred oarsmen apiece — the ironclad rules of logistika are the same either way.
But I digress.
After some more time — I have no idea how long — we came to Carthage. I’ll tell you about Carthage in good time, but when I first rowed that ship in between the fortress and the mole, I saw nothing. I was not really alive. I was a human machine that pulled an oar, silent, unthinking, at least by day.
The hull bumped the wharf.
The trierarch had the gangplank rigged, and then he, his two helmsmen and the oar-master walked off the ship. An hour later, after we’d grilled in the African sun, twenty soldiers — Poieni, which is their word for citizen infantry, like our hoplites — came to the ship and ordered us off. Many of us could not walk.
The phylarch shook his head. ‘Useless fuck. These men are ruined.’ He spat. Came and looked at me. He pointed at my legs.
My once-mighty legs were like sticks.
‘Look at this one,’ he said. ‘Good-size man. Filthy, lice, and hasn’t been allowed exercise.’ He shook his head. ‘Hasdrubal is a useless fool. Sell this lot to anyone who will take them.’
And with that, he took the surviving women and marched them away. That left another man in charge, and he averted his eyes and his nose and ordered those of us who could walk to carry the rest. I ended up carrying the Illyrian. I have been back to that spot — we only walked about fifty horse-lengths. Less than a stade.