Killer of Men - Christian Cameron [169]
We lay in a huddle on the beach, a hundred exhausted men who didn’t even try to start a fire. It was hot in the midst of the pile of men and cold and wet on the fringes, and no man slept, but no man died.
In the morning, the sun rose late over the mountain and we rose slowly, like men who have survived a hard fight – which we were. We caught some goats, sacrificed them to Poseidon and ate them half-cooked. We drank wine from the hold, poured more libations than an assembly of priests and swore that we were brothers until the sun died in the sky.
The next morning, I got them back aboard and, with the bow pointed at Lesbos, we sailed away with our toy boatsail. And as luck would have it, twenty stades up the bay, we found our own boatsail mast with the sail still lashed to it, floating with the wrack of the storm, and further downwind we found the mainsail floating below the surface like a dead creature.
‘Truly, the gods love you,’ Paramanos said.
I shrugged. ‘I have some luck,’ I said.
He nodded. I was at the steering oars, and he was drinking fresh water from a little horn cup, a Phoenician habit. ‘I’ve never seen that trick with the boatsail before,’ he said. It was a peace offering, if I wanted it. He was a better sailor than I and he’d taken command when he had to, and he expected me to resent it.
He had me wrong. I waited until he’d finished his water, then I put my arms around his neck. ‘You fucking saved us,’ I said. ‘I’m not so mad as you think.’
He nodded, and finally he couldn’t restrain his grin. ‘I did, didn’t I?’ he said.
‘You did,’ I answered.
The next afternoon, I summoned the Phoenicians aft. I nodded at the helmsman. ‘Paramanos has requested your lives,’ I said. ‘For myself, I bear no grudge against you – we are at war. But I will only free you for a ransom. Choose among yourselves who will go, and who will stay as surety.’
The eldest nodded. First he embraced Paramanos and then he came back to me. ‘I am the richest of these men, and I will stay,’ he said.
I could see the hatred in his eyes, but who loves a man who has killed thirty countrymen in cold blood? I didn’t need his love.
‘Set a price,’ I said.
He named a figure in talents of silver. Paramanos approved and Herakleides, the eldest of the Aeolians, gave a curt nod. Herakleides was already serving as an officer, and training with Paramanos to be a helmsman.
‘On the beach at Methymna,’ I said to the youngest, who was chosen to go. ‘Thirty days.’ I turned to Idomeneus. ‘See to it that he has arms and ten silver owls.’
The eldest Syrian shrugged. ‘Land him at Xanthus,’ he said. ‘We have a factor there.’
And so we did.
When I promised all the rest of the crew shares in the ransom, my status rose again. The four Phoenicians were worth ten times my whole fortune, and I had accounted myself well-off before we fought the battle. Boeotians aren’t good at wealth.
The gods were kind. Dolphins sported at our bow and we had the mainsail up by noon of the second day. A kinder east wind stayed at our stern-quarter all the way up the coast of Asia, until we had to turn and row into the magnificent bay at Mytilene. The beach was not as full of ships as it should have been. Indeed, it was as if only a portion of the fleet that had broken the Phoenicians at Amathus had come to the rendezvous. More than a third of the ships had gone home, and at first glance it looked worse. The Cretans were not the only ones to take their loot and go.
I recognized the Athenian cut of the ships on the south end of the beach but not any of the ships themselves – none of them were Aristides’, but I saw a black hull that might be Herk’s unlovely Nemesis, and I turned my ship at the south end of the beach and put the stern in the sand two oar’s lengths from the man himself, who stood in the gentle surf laughing and shouting rude suggestions at my oarsmen.
He was the first