‘He swims!’ shouted the sailors and the oarsmen, to whom the ship was a man. Every sign of success rallied more men amidships.
‘Bail!’ shouted the passenger.
Two of the veteran oarsmen already had the olive-tree pump rigged, and water began to spurt over the side like arterial blood. Other men used helmets, pots, anything that came to their hands. By the time the passenger hauled himself inboard, the benches were no longer awash. The sailing master’s attention was on the sea beyond him.
‘Another gust and we’re dead. I have to get the bow up to the wind,’ he said with a murderous glance at the trierarch. He shouted orders at the oarsmen and the sailors, who began to cut the mast itself away. One of the seams in the larboard side had opened when the ship broached; water was coming in with every wave and a cross-wave with the impetus of the wind behind it flooded the waist again over the benches. The lack of an oar master told — the oarsmen hesitated, their hope destroyed by the second wave.
The passenger flung himself into the waist, taking his own helmet from his baggage in the stern as he passed, and scooped water over the side. ‘Bail!’ he ordered. And then as men turned to the task, he started pushing men to their benches. He didn’t know their names, or where they belonged, but the force of his will was sufficient to move them. A long minute was wasted dragging unbroken oars from the larboard side across to the starboard and feeding them into the tholes and still the ship swam. At the first hesitant pull to the passenger’s ringing shout, the ship moved a fraction of its own length.
‘Pull!’ he bellowed again, taking his timing from a bandy-armed professional on the bench under his feet. Only six oars a side in the water, the ship full of water and her bottom filthy with weed, and again the ship barely moved. He sloshed to another bench, pushed two frightened men down on to it and put the oar in their hands. Opposite there was a corpse filling the bench. He lifted the corpse, heavy beyond anything he could remember, and another pair of hands helped him fling his burden clear of the side even as he called ‘Pull!’ again. The oar shaft, free of the corpse, moved like a live thing and struck him a glancing blow in the shoulder that knocked him on to the bench. The man who had helped him caught it, lifted it clear of the water, and sat on the bench in one continuous motion. The passenger caught it on the return stroke, added his strength, and called ‘Pull!’ as the oar reached the top of the stroke. Around the shaft went, and down, the blade biting the water firmly — the oar felt alive under his hands. He raised his head and saw the sailing master aft, standing by the steering oar. He caught his eye and the sailing master took up the call for the stroke, leaving the passenger to pull, his smooth wet hands already feeling the weight of the oar.
‘Pull!’ called the sailing master.
The fourth stroke, or the fifth, and the man at the steering oar called, ‘He steers!’ and the sailing master gave him an order.
Then came an hour of physical hell for the passenger, without the rush of overwhelming danger, just the pain in his shoulders and the sight of his hands turning to bloody pulp as he pulled on and on, water rising around his feet and then his thighs. Another squall hit them and then another. They made no distance; indeed, the sail was visible to starboard with every rise of the waves. All the oars could do was keep the head of the waterlogged vessel up to the wind so that no wave could poop her.
They did all that men could do, and they prayed to the gods and just when the oarsmen were flagging and the heaves to keep her bow up to the wind were increasingly desperate, just when the second larboard oar caught a crab that threatened to endanger the stroke, the wind dropped, and before the passenger could look again at the ruin of his hands the sun appeared between clouds, and then the clouds themselves were rarer, and then they were rising and falling in the swell of a sunny day on the Euxine, and they were alive.
It was only when the wind fell off that the passenger could hear the thin cries from starboard, over the rail, where some poor soul was struggling with the sea.
‘Rowed of all!’ shouted the sailing master, his voice as raw as the passenger’s hands. He was not used to calling the stroke for so long. The oars were tossed and pulled in, a ragged motion but an efficient one, so that they crossed the benches and tucked their handgrips under the opposite thwart, their blades held clear of the water. The passenger’s bench mate fell forward on the headrest thus provided, his arms over the oars, his cheek against their shafts. He breathed in and out.
The passenger heard another cry from starboard. He pulled himself from under the crossed oar shafts, the residual salt water burning his hands like fire.
His bench mate looked up at him and smiled. ‘Well pulled, mate.’
‘There’s a man in the water,’ the passenger replied, pulling himself up on an empty starboard bench. The hold beneath their feet was undecked, and there was water over most of the cargo. They were still barely afloat.
The sailing master was seeing to it. He had the sailors, the deck crew, throwing bodies and anything else he deemed of no use over the side. Every minute lightened the ship, placed the thwarts a fraction higher out of the water.
The passenger looked under his hand at the empty blue sea, the sun reflecting with blinding intensity from the wavelets, and listened for another cry. When he heard it, it was closer than he had expected; a man, swimming weakly but still afloat just a rope’s length from the bow. He dove before he thought the action through, and swam as best he could through the now smaller waves, the salt water chilling him and burning his hands all over again.
He reached the survivor quickly, but the man tried to fight him, surprised at the touch and fearing, perhaps, that Poseidon had come for him at last. The passenger shouted at him, took his long hair in a fist and began to pull him towards the ship. The man’s struggles endangered them both, but he took in a lungful of water and his struggles ended. The passenger got him to the side. He was surprised at the hesitancy of the oarsmen to pull the man inboard, but they did.
The man lay across an empty bench, alternating breathing and vomiting, for a long time. The passenger came aboard helped by more willing hands, to see the leather bag that held his armour and most of his tack being lifted towards the side. Slow from the sea’s grip, he was still fast enough to get himself between the ship’s side and his baggage.
‘Don’t,’ he gasped. ‘Everything — own.’
The sailing master stripped the bag from his crewman’s hands and tossed it on the deck with a bronze clang. ‘We owe ye that much,’ he rasped. He pointed his chin at the long-haired man puking over a bench in the waist. ‘They don’t like him. Sailors don’t take the prey from Poseidon. Shipwrecked men…’ He left his thought unfinished, probably too superstitious to speak the belief aloud.
The passenger was Athenian; he had different views on Poseidon, Lord of Horses, and his ‘prey’. ‘I’ll look after him. We’ll need every man on the benches to get this boat on to a beach.’
The sailing master muttered something under his breath, a prayer or a curse. The passenger went back to his bench. It was only when he had wiped the long-haired man’s face clean of vomit and heard a gasp of Lakedaemian-accented thanks, that he realized that the trierarch was no longer aboard.
They bailed and rowed all day until they were once again in sight of the land to starboard. This shore of the Euxine was notorious for its lack of beaches, just endless rock alternating with ugly low marsh. The sailing master didn’t try to force the men to get the ship ashore, despite the slow bleeding of seawater from the open seam. They ate dried fish, sodden with salt water, and felt better for it. They slept in watches, even the passenger, and pumped and bailed through the night, and the sun rose the next day to more of the same. Breakfast was skimpier than dinner. Small trading ships beached at night and carried little in the way of provisions. The amphorae of fresh water were point down in the sand of the hold and most of their waxed caps were open, showing their empty innards to the blue sky. The passenger had no idea of the distance to their next port, but he had the sense not to discuss it.