Killer of Men - Christian Cameron [168]
I went from man to man in between lightning flashes, pushing rope ends into unwilling hands. I knocked a man sprawling when he was too slow to obey. He went over the side and the sea took him.
‘Pull, you bastards!’ I called.
Love is a fine thing. Love will take a man above himself, whether it is love for a man or a woman or a ship or a country. But fear can imitate love in most situations, and I knew they didn’t love me.
‘Pull or die!’ I screamed, and my sword was in my hand. ‘Still time to bleed!’ I shouted, and I laughed. Let them think me insane.
The spar shot up like a stallion’s penis. ‘Lash her down! Belay her!’
Then they were willing. Then they believed. It was easy when we came to it – but someone had to get them over the belief that they would fail. Now every man worked with a will, and Paramanos was next to me, lashing the new stays as fast as his hands could work. Already the wind, that brutal east wind, was on the mast and the tight-wrapped boatsail, and our bow was cutting the sea. Little Idomeneus was at the helm, doing his best to get the bow headed west. Paramanos worked by my side as we tied the ropes and belayed. Ten ropes. Ten heavy cables to hold a mast smaller than the one a day-fisher carried.
Then Paramanos was gone, back to his steering oars.
We were three horse-lengths from the rocks of Chelidon, and there was no more time to worry. My sword was in my hand.
I cut the lashings in two sweeps as accurate as any sword cuts I’d ever made in combat, and the whole sail blew free of the lashings as if Poseidon’s fist had struck it. I thought that the mast would snap, it bent so far, and the bronze-clad bow plunged into the sea, so that I thought we might dive to the bottom like a cormorant. Fear took me, but I got my arms around that mast and held on as the water drove aft. And then the bow began to rise. I felt the change under my feet even as I choked on the water in my mouth.
The bow came up, sluggish at first, and then the first stay rope gave with a crack like a thunderbolt, killing the man it hit, one of the Aeolians. He didn’t even get to scream.
The new mast gave a grunt and moved the width of a man’s arm – and held.
The whole ship seemed to groan and the bow rose again, clear of the sea. The waves were at our stern, and we’d put more blood into the water – the Aeolian was our last sacrifice.
I had a chance to see the cliffs of Chelidon, and I don’t think that I have ever moved faster across the surface of the earth than I did in those heartbeats, as the full weight of the storm blew into our tiny sail and we raced across the sea like a mare run wild.
And then, as fast as it takes to tell it, we were through the strait. First the force of the gale diminished by half, because the cliffs were no longer funnelling the whole storm into our little sail. And then Paramanos, grinning like a titan, was turning us – oh, so gradually – to starboard.
It took us longer than we could have imagined – I think that if I’d told the men, back in the teeth of the storm, that we were still half a watch from safety, we’d all have died.
But the moment came when every man aboard knew we were not going to die. Hard to define, but between one breath and the next, the wind had dropped so far – broken by the weight of Asian Olympus to our north and east, now – that if we’d all slumped on our oars, we’d have floated the rest of the night and come to no harm. And in the contrary way of the human heart, that gave us strength – we were all one animal by then, and we were going to rise and fall together, no mistake.
My Cretan oar master was gone – swept over the side by the wave when the bow went down – and I beat the deck with my good spear and chanted the Iliad at the sea, and men laughed. It was as dark as Tartarus under the lee of the mountain, but the beach rolled on for