And he was certainly trying to kill or maim me.
I stepped back and the pain of his blow hit me. I stepped back again, and one of the little bastards came for me.
He leaped the corpse of the big man, and swung his heavy sword with two hands.
I cut his sword to the ground and pinked him in the hand.
He roared and cut at me again.
Again I cut his sword to the ground with my lighter weapon, and this time I skewered his right hand. But he raised the sword with his left, so I ripped my point out of his hand and brought the blade down on his left forearm. And then stepped in and kicked him in the crotch.
And he slammed his maimed right hand into my face.
Kelts: they’re insane.
He didn’t break my nose. That was lucky.
I was blind with pain for a moment, so I slashed the air in front of me to keep him back. I connected with something, but most of my long xiphos was scarcely sharp and all it did was raise a welt, I suspect.
He leaped at me again just as I got control of my head. He didn’t have a weapon. And he was as fast as a fish in the stream. His wounded hands were up, and he was reaching for my blade.
I had to kill him, too.
Now I was breathing like a bellows, and I fell back.
I wanted to say something witty and insulting, because I was angry — full of rage, like Ares. But all I could do was breathe.
It didn’t feel good.
In fact, I felt… wretched. These two men had never done anything to hurt me — well, except to attack me at the behest of their mistress — and now they were dead.
She looked at me, and at the four men beside her.
I breathed hard. And waited.
Gaius nodded. ‘That’s it, then,’ he said, in his aristocratic Greek. ‘Tell that woman that it is over, or it is war, and if it’s war, we have two hundred men and she has four.’
I looked at him. I hadn’t expected him to step in. But that’s what friends are for.
I turned to Detorix. ‘We will leave in the morning,’ I said. ‘Let this be an end to it, and don’t let me regret not walking over and killing her.’
Detorix nodded.
That was good. I was done with the Venetiae.
So we left without Doola, and that didn’t make me happy. Nor did I trust our hosts any more, or our boatmen, or anyone.
We had to pole our boats north. Some of the oarsmen were quite good at this, and some were not. We had a pair of guides and interpreters, but otherwise we were on our own.
After the first night, we built a regular camp by the river and we put brush all the way around it and stood to, fully armed, an hour before darkness and an hour after dawn.
The third day, we saw horsemen on the horizon as we poled upstream.
By the fourth day, we were quite aware of the horsemen, who scarcely troubled to hide themselves. And the river was a snake, swimming on the sea — an endless curve and back-curve. Sometimes we could see a town or settlement a dozen stades before we reached it. Some settlements were on both sides of a peninsula, so we’d pass the town twice. And it did seem like we paddled or poled twice the distance that we’d have walked — or that our shadows rode.
I’d had about enough of the Keltoi by then. And I was unhappy with myself — the more I thought on it, the more I decided I’d allowed myself to be ruled by Ares in the taverna. I didn’t need to show her my arete. I didn’t need to fight. I could be Odysseus instead of Achilles. And the two dead men were powerfully on my conscience.
But even as I thought these thoughts — thoughts largely fuelled by Heraclitus, of course — I also thought like the pirate I often was. I considered setting an ambush for the riders. It was foolish to let them pick the time for an attack.
But it would be worse to fight them. Once we fought, we’d be the enemy to every barbarian on the river, and that would be the end of us and our tin, too.
I thought about it for another day, as we poled on and on and seemed to make very few stades.
That night, Gaius and Seckla and I took Herodikles and one of the younger shepherds, Leo, who was growing as a man and as a leader. The five of us slipped downstream in a small boat, and we floated silently in the darkness until we came to a campfire. We landed well upstream, and crept carefully down on them.
Eight men, a dozen horses.
It was the work of two minutes to cut all the hobbles of the horses and chase them off into the darkness. They roused themselves, and we were gone.
The next day, we had no contact with them.
We poled on. We were low on food, and I had to bargain with a fairly hostile village of Kelts who lived in reed huts that stood on stilts in the water. We bought grain for silver, and got the worst of the bargain.
Two nights later, one of our interpreters tried to run. He was surprised to find that I was right there, waiting for him.
Three more days poling, and I was sure we had slipped our pursuers. The poling had become quite difficult, as we were travelling into the upper reaches of the river.
Let me add that although I was sick to death of barbarians and their neck collars and their feuds and their superstition, it is beautiful country, and those Gauls could farm. The banks of the river were cultivated — not everywhere, but long swathes cutting through the forests. The towns were prosperous, if hag-ridden with aristocrats.
Another thing I feel I must mention, although this is not meant to be a tale of marvels encountered in travel — traveller’s tales are all lies anyway — is their priests. They were all men, all representatives of the aristocratic classes, and they could perform prodigious feats of memory. I met a priest on the Sequana who could recite the Iliad. I didn’t stay to hear the entire piece — I’d have been there all winter — but his memory seemed perfect to me, and he could start wherever I asked him: I could name a verse or an event, and he would begin to recite. I found this very impressive, and told him so.
Yet these learned men seemed to me more like magpies than like true priests. They absorbed a great many facts — it was from a Keltoi priest that I first heard of Pythagoras, for example — and they knew everything about plants, herbs and medicine, but so does any decent doctor in Athens or Thebes.
For moral philosophy, they were merely barbarians. They had no great code of ethics, and their laws were mostly learned by rote and not reasoned, or so it seemed to me. In behaviour, too, the aristocrats seemed to do every man as he wished, and when the wills of two such clashed, there was war — petty or great depending on the status of the contenders. Twice as we poled our way up the Sequana, we passed villages burned — the second was still smouldering.
Greeks could be just as bad. So could Persians. But there was something… ignorant about the Keltoi. Of course, I’m a Greek, and that may just be my own ignorance speaking. And you must remember that I was seeing all this through the eyes of a man who had suddenly begun to see the uselessness, at some level, of violence. The Keltoi queen — Nordicca, I knew her name to be, of the Dumnoni — was typical of her breed. The truth is that I had found her quite attractive, sought to impress her and ended up behaving like a posturing adolescent, and men were dead. I won’t say they haunted me — they had died with weapons in hand, striving against me — but I will confess that I knew their deaths to be unnecessary.
But I digress. Fill my cup, pais.
I had my two interpreters watched very carefully, night and day. Demetrios managed our boats, and Gaius managed the interpreters. We made sure they knew they’d be well paid, for example. I was quite sure they were supposed to desert us, but we promised them enough silver to make them modestly wealthy men.
In truth, Detorix had taken some precautions to make sure we never came back. I might have hated him, but life had taught me that merchants will act to protect their trade the way farmers act to protect their crops. They will make war, or commit simple murder, to keep others off their trade routes. The Venetiae were no different in kind from the Phoenicians, except that they weren’t quite such rapacious slavers. When I look at how Athens behaves these days, I have to admit that apparently Greeks are just as bad. Or perhaps worse — more efficient.