Killer of Men - Christian Cameron [158]
‘Stand by me,’ I said. I nodded at Lekthes. ‘Take his bench.’
Lekthes was used to this, but the look he shot me was full of reproach. He’d had a year of feasting as a warrior in the great hall – he had no desire to go back to rowing. But he went.
Ahead of me, the Samian ships to the seaward of Archi suddenly dashed from the line. They were twenty strong, and they acted in concert. They went from the slow cruise all the way to the fastest attack stroke so quickly that we were watching them pull away before we were sure what they were doing.
But the other ships in our part of the first line followed them.
Nearchos looked at me blankly.
‘The Samians are going for the enemy Greeks!!’ I stood on the rail and bellowed to Lord Achilles. He could see it as well as I could, but in my youthful arrogance, I assumed he wouldn’t know any more than his son.
He nodded.
Ahead of us, the exiled Ephesians and Lemnians followed the Samians.
Lord Achilles had his squire raise a banner of red cloth and wave it.
‘Up tempo to fast cruise,’ I said. I ran to the midships fighting platform, leaving my ‘navarch’ with the steering oars. We didn’t need to stay up with the first line, or so I’d been told, but I was anxious to get forward and I wanted to go faster than Lord Achilles had ordered.
Speed changes require orders, and now I was amidships I couldn’t see as well. I got Thetis to fast cruise and then ran to the bow.
The Samians were just putting their beaks into the enemy. You could hear the collisions clearly across the water.
I watched Archi’s ship, but he was cut off from the first impacts by the rush of Samians, and he and the other exiles were rowing diagonally across the beach, going to seaward, north and east across the current, to try and find an opening.
Somewhere in the enemy line, some oily Phoenician made a decision and the battle changed in the twinkling of their oars. Their centre broke up like an egg under a hammer, and the bulk of the centre turned landward – into the flank of the Samians. Our very aggression would now count against us, and our vulnerable flanks would be open to the rams of the heavy Phoenician ships.
That’s why you keep a second line, of course.
I ran back down the centre plank between the upper-deck benches. To the north and west, our front left, the Phoenician centre was turning south and Archi’s exiles were all that stood in their way. The Milesians and Chians seemed paralysed – just as they had been at every other battle.
‘We need to turn north!’ I shouted across the strip of sea between our ships at Lord Achilles, ignoring his son by my side.
Either the lord didn’t hear me or he chose to ignore me. If we held our course, we’d enter the winning part of the combat close to the beach, a position where even in the event of a disaster, the Cretans could beach their ships and escape. Lord Achilles was thinking like a king.
I was thinking like a nineteen-year-old with an oath to fulfil.
I turned to Nearchos. ‘If those ships are crushed, we lose the battle,’ I said, pointing to the north. And the gods sent me an inspiration, because ships were sprinting out of the centre to help the exiles – Lesbian ships. ‘Epaphroditos is going too! We have to support him!’
Nearchos rose to the moment. ‘Go!’ he said. ‘Let my father follow me!’
I was sure that I had been hired to prevent just this sort of incident.
‘Troas! Take the oars!’ I pushed him into the steering rig. ‘Nearchos – get forward with the marines and be ready to lead the boarders.’ Lord Achilles would have a fit, I knew – but I wasn’t sending the boy anywhere I wasn’t going myself.
Troas got between the steering oars, and we were turning even as I ordered the last increase in speed. All our decks were rowing now, and the oar masters were thumping the deck with their canes, so that the whole ship rang with the tempo.
We were turning out of the second line, heading across the bows of other Cretan lords. It was exhilarating. There is something to war at sea – the speed of a ramming