On the other hand, without two hundred hungry men with an absolute loyalty to me, I doubt that we’d ever have got so much tin over the hills.
At any rate, we enjoyed Agedinca. Gwan was feasted, and through him, Seckla and Gaius and I met the lords of the Senones, the people who controlled the upper valley of the Sequana. They were rich in good farmland, and in the possession of the trade route, and their halls were full of armour and magnificent plates and cups. Their women wore more jewellery than Persian princesses.
We camped well outside of town, and we rotated a guard of forty men on our camp. By now, every former slave had a sword, a helmet, a spear or two and a shield, and I drilled them myself, teaching them the dances of Ares each day. I had two reasons for my care: first, that they might fight well, if we had to fight; and second, to keep them busy. They were oarsmen, and they had every reason to be bored.
When our donkey train was ready to cross the hills, the King of the Senones came to see us off. He admired my warriors, and offered me a hundred more men.
I bowed respectfully and refused them. I didn’t want to have to trust him.
He shrugged. ‘The Aedui are our enemies,’ he said. ‘They often attack the tin trains. Be wary.’
Gwan nodded. After we had started up the valley, he rode up to me — we had two-dozen horses — and pointed up the pass. ‘If the Venetiae are going to ambush you,’ he said, ‘They won’t do it themselves. They’ll pay someone to attack you. The Aedui are the obvious choice — they attack trains all the time.’
‘And yet the king said nothing of the fifty horsemen,’ I noted.
Gwan looked away. ‘He is my cousin,’ Gwan said. ‘But not a friend to me or to my father. I think perhaps he takes your tin to build your train — and takes silver from the Venetiae to allow your train to be ambushed.’
Gaius said, ‘If that’s so, then the baggage-handlers and the teamsters will all desert. Or attack us.’
Gwan shook his head. ‘That would be hard to work out,’ he said.
I wanted to trust Gwan, but there was a barrier between us, deeper than the cultural divide. I truly wished that I had Daud or Sittonax with me. Leukas was Alban, and too far removed from the politics — if I may call them that — of the Gauls. Leukas distrusted Gwan all the time. Leukas was also jealous of Gwan’s continuing success with every maiden — I use the term loosely — on the river.
People are very complicated.
Men told me that it was six days over the hills to Lugdunum, the town at the head of the Rhodanus River that flows into the Inner Sea. The first night in the hills it was cold, and men pulled their cloaks tight around them and lay closer to other men, or built their fires higher. We had camped at a traders’ campsite — so it was stripped of all useful wood, you can bet. I sent fifty men off into the hills for wood, and another ten armed men to watch them. We built big fires, and shivered, and Gaius and I went from fire to fire, reminding men that we were ten days from Marsala and the Inner Sea, to encourage them that if we had to fight, it would be worth doing.
At a fire, one of the original crew of the Lydia asked me what the shares of the tin would be. It was a fair question, and one that had occupied me.
We’d started as a half-dozen men with a dream. We were coming home with more than a hundred freed slaves. Only sixteen men had died on the whole trip through accident, quarrels and Apollo’s arrows, and the men who were almost home had begun to wonder what they might receive.
And, of course, the men who had started from Marsala thought they were more worthy than the men who had been rescued from slavery. Gian told me point-blank that the former slaves now had their freedom — that was their share.
‘And weapons!’ shouted another Marsalian shepherd.
Greed. They’d been like brothers when we were rowing for our lives in the fog, but ten days from home I assured everyone that the shares would be fair. There was probably some half-truth to my statement, because I had yet to think of a simple, logical mathematical solution. But the mere promise that there would be a payout was enough.
The hills were magnificent; greener and more heavily wooded than hills in Greece. I thought they were quite high, until we climbed over the summit of the second pass and arrived at a mighty hill fort set at the top of a rocky crag and surrounded by stone walls built like any fortress wall in the Ionian Sea. It was a puzzle of giant rocks, as if the whole wall had been built by Titans. From those heights, I could see a range of mountains to the east that rose like jagged teeth. I had never seen mountains so high, even on the coast of Asia. They were breathtaking, at least in part because they were so far away. The Senones all told me they were the Alps. The hill fortress was a capital of the Aedui, but they offered us no violence. In fact, the lord of the place — I forget his name — told me that a Greek had designed his walls and taught his people to build them. I thought about what it would be like to be working so far from home. It cost me a whole pig of tin to feed my people across the hills. They had their own gold and silver here. They wanted tin.
And then we were down the other side of the pass, down the path into the high valleys of the Cares River. Fewer farms, and more trees.
My pig of tin had purchased more than just food. It purchased six more horses and some information, and I was aware that there were fifty horsemen ahead of me on the road. North of Lugdunum, where the Cares flows into the Rhodanus, we marched down the valley and I saw the sparkle and sun-dazzle of Helios on naked steel, and I knew.
I trusted my Senones by then. They didn’t seem shifty enough to be traitors, and they laughed a lot and drank hard. It is difficult for a Greek to distrust such men. Despite which, I had a former oarsman stand with every Senone in the train. And then we all armoured ourselves.
You may say that I was broadcasting to the ambush that we knew they were there.
I was. Why fight? If they wanted to slip away into the hills, I wanted to let them. My guides and my drovers swore we were a day from the navigable waters of the Rhodanus. I didn’t want to fight. In fact, all I wanted to do was to get home. The charms of travel and exploration had faded; I was beginning to feel old. In fact, I was thirty years old that autumn, and the age of it was in my bones.
I watched the hills, and the steel moved, but it did not disperse. Whoever was up there had enough men to fight my two hundred.
When we were armed, I sent my dozen horsemen to scout. As an aside, Greeks are not much good as scouts. Greek cavalry tend to fight other Greek cavalry — it’s like any other Greek contest — and the losers don’t go back to tell their friends what happened, I can tell you. But Seckla’s people have different notions of scouting, and Seckla led his boys down the valley and across the fields on a long sweep while I got my train organized and pushed my main body of spearmen out in front of it. I left eighty men with the Senones — a fine reserve, and at the same time a good baggage guard. My other hundred pushed forward in a line four men deep, a small, shallow phalanx that nonetheless covered the train behind them. They weren’t closed tight — the ground was far too broken — but they were close enough to support each other, ebbing and flowing around the patches of woods and rocks like a stream of hoplites.
Seckla sprang the trap, if it could be called a trap. He encountered a blocking force at a small bridge and rode away before they could throw javelins at him — then found one of the flank forces moving along some hedges to the right. He rode back to me as we closed on the low stone bridge.
He pointed. ‘Sixty men at the bridge, lightly armed. At least a hundred to the right in the woods. Those horsemen must be somewhere, but there’s no dung on the road and no horse signs to the right.’