He nodded, eager to have his thoughts taken off the dark and moving waters.
I pointed at the Pole Star. ‘You know that the heavens have a linchpin, like the wheel of a chariot?’ I asked.
After watching for a while, he agreed this might be true, and I thought how odd it was that city men had so little idea of how the world worked. Perhaps a man has to live outdoors in all weathers to properly accept the role of the gods. And the way the world is made.
At any rate, after an hour or so, he accepted that I had a star that didn’t move.
So I showed him a little of the knowledge I’d learned in the hardest school, as a slave on Dagon’s ship, listening to Phoenician navigators talk about how to watch the stars. I showed him how to use a spear shaft, and how to use a cross-staff.
Finally, he laughed nervously — he, who could put me down in three sword-cuts.
‘I don’t know any more than I did when I started,’ he admitted. ‘But now I believe that you know.’
‘Isn’t that what you start with, when you teach an athlete?’ I asked.
He frowned. ‘Usually, that takes a year,’ he said. ‘It is a year before most young men really admit, inside their fool heads, that I can beat them — that they need to know what I have to teach.’
We both laughed. Then he put a hand on my knee. ‘Listen — you are a good man. Why did you do such a foolish thing? To Lydia? And then you name your ship after her? What does that mean?’
I busied myself with the helm for a moment. ‘It means that I refuse to let myself forget it,’ I said. ‘And I told myself a lot of lies about Lydia. I wanted two things. I wanted to sail to Alba, and I wanted the girl. But I can see now that she was the embodiment of something else that I wanted — a life as a craftsman.’
Polymarchos grinned, teeth white and shining in the darkness. ‘I never thought you was really a bronzesmith. Nah — that’s wrong. I knew you was. I just thought it was a hobby. You have aristocrat written all over you — even the way your muscles are formed. You’ve had gymnasiums all your life.’
Now it was my turn to laugh. ‘Polymarchos, I was a slave from age fifteen to age twenty, and again just before you met me.’
He nodded. ‘Sure. Many men spend time as slaves. Some it stamps indelibly, like a leatherworker’s tool, and some it merely teaches a little humility. Gelon could use a few months as someone’s slave.’
I raised an eyebrow. ‘You left Syracusa.’
He nodded. ‘Gelon is a brilliant tyrant, and he will make Syracusa great. But he took my citizenship. Fuck him. I spent half my life earning my way out of the slavery a bunch of pirates put me in, so that one rich bastard could take it again.’ He glared at the dark water and the stars. ‘Now I’ll take this young Italiote to Olympia, and we’ll win. And then Gelon will know what he has earned for himself by losing me. I could have won this for Syracusa.’
The next day, we had another day of pure, sweet sailing — the wind almost dead astern, the mainsail set and drawing well, the bow skimming along the waves. I found it hard to measure our speed — always a problem in blue-water sailing. It is difficult to work the geometrical figures for speed and distance when you don’t know how far you are travelling or how fast you are going.
Leukas came aft for his spot at the helm. As soon as he had the oars, I took charcoal and began to draw on the deck, measuring the cord from Augusta Bay to Olympia by guessing the distance from Melita to Sybaris, based on a dozen journeys, and then making the same guess for the distance from Sybaris to Olympia. If, as I suspected, the two legs formed a right angle, then according to Pythagoras. .
Well, the figure I solved for was two and a half thousand stades. I figured it for an hour, and while I figured, I taught Leukas, who was coming along in his Greek letters, and Megakles, who could not read at all and wasn’t interested. Leukas had never multiplied anything, but Sekla had, and he joined in, and then we were using the cross-staff to measure the sun’s angle. It passed the time, and led the oarsmen to believe that we knew what we were doing.
We tossed wood chips over the side and tried to imagine how fast we were going based on how fast they fell astern. Our young athlete tried racing the wood chips down the length of the hull.
Astylos ran all day — even in the full heat of the sun. A trihemiola — a trireme with a flat deck and standing mast — has far more deck space than a trireme, but it is still only about one hundred and ten feet long. A stadion is six hundred feet long, so he had to run the length of the deck, turning constantly — and avoiding sailors and off-duty oarsmen.
At any rate — Astylos’s performance against the wood chips gave me the notion that we were making about thirty stades an hour, which put us at over seven hundred stades a day, sunrise to sunrise.
Well — Poseidon’s realm is immense. I knew that before I started figuring.
But from that day on, I began to see sailing and rowing as part of something greater, and this had many effects. First, because I taught Sekla and Leukas whatever I knew. Leukas was a far better natural sailor than I was — his guesses of our speed over water were far better than mine, and his notions of currents and his feel for the weather were better, but he was not very good at explaining things. However, he tried. Sekla knew the southern coast of the Inner Sea, and we began to discuss the possibility of exploring it. Greeks tend to know Greek waters. We’re limited to what the Phoenicians allow us. Or we were then.
Not any more. Heh.
The ability to cross the blue deep without touching — I began to think about that tactically. We had often used a small round ship — the sort of ship that could be handled by four to six men — as a supply ship, and I determined to get my hands on one.
And I began to think about what war with Persia would mean. The last time that Greeks had tried to face Persia at sea, the Persians had outspent the Greeks, created a fleet with almost six hundred hulls — and purchased the treason of the Samnians. They won the battle of Lade hands down.
And now all those Ionian Greek cities were in their hands. In effect, that gave them a thousand good ships. My friends — my Athenian friends, who were, I hoped, just over the horizon, or headed for Athens, because I hadn’t seen them in two weeks — my Athenian friends had told me that in my absence, Themistocles had seized the products of the Athenian silver mines and built a one-hundred-ship fleet for Athens with public money. A hundred ships was an incredible number for a Greek city. Rumour was that Aegina had another eighty.
Corinth might have another eighty.
Sparta would have. . none.
Even if the three mightiest sea powers among the remaining Greek cities united — they would have two hundred and fifty ships.
I looked out at the endless waves, and shuddered. In the whole of my life, Athens, Corinth and Aegina had never allied for any reason whatsoever.
The second sunset, and I saw seabirds. I was pleased, and said so to Leukas, who nodded.
Nonetheless, I was on deck all night. The night is a time when a man can think too much, and I had eight hours of darkness to smell the wind and think about Briseis. I could smell her hair on the wind, and I could feel her kiss on my lips, and I could wonder why I hadn’t gone to her at night on the beach. I could think a hundred conflicting thoughts.
I could remember that she had said that some day we would live as man and wife.
I could take my Phoenician cross-staff and measure the heights of stars and their movement, and I could watch my wake and the sea.
I remember — that night, or the one following — I recalled a moment of wry annoyance when I realised that I had sworn to Apollo to learn the kithara or the lyre, and I hadn’t done much with it. I didn’t even have a lyre on which to practise. The gut strings are no friends to the sea — or rather, the sea air is no friends to wood and gut.