Read Poseidon's Spear (Long War 3) for Free Online Page B

weeks.
    ‘Plataea,’ I said, and it was as if a dam opened in my head and thoughts poured in. My forge, my wife, the night she died, the fire.
    The
Pyrrhiche
and how we danced it. The feel of a spear in my hand.
    ‘You are Arimnestos of Plataea?’ he asked. ‘By the gods!’ he muttered. ‘I’m a man who’s been a slave his whole life, but you! A gent!’
    ‘I’ve been a slave before,’ I said.
    ‘Ahh,’ he said, and nodded again. ‘Ahh . . . that’s why you are alive.’
    We ate better after that port. We were also a lighter ship by the weight of our Cyprian copper, and we had forty more rowers, fresher men who hadn’t been abused. Indeed,
there were too many for the oar-master to ruin them all at once, and we had easier lives for a week.
    We rowed.
    Not one man died that week. That’s all I can say.
    We made one more port call. None of us was allowed on the beach, and we picked up women – twenty women, all Keltoi with tattoos. They were filthy, hollow-eyed, and the first night at sea
the oar-master discovered one was pregnant, and he killed her on the deck and threw her corpse over the side. I don’t know why, even now.
    The bully-boys forced the slave women every night. Sometimes these acts happened a few feet over my head. The despair, the sheer horror that those women experienced was somehow worse than any of
the blows I had received because it was all so casual. They were used like . . . like old cloaks to keep off rain.
    And none of us could do a thing.
    Or perhaps what is worse is that we
could have
done something, if we had been willing to die. Die without revenge – die nameless, achieving nothing, our bodies dumped in the sea.
That would have taken a special courage I didn’t have. But it took yet more of my honour. I was a
slave.
    Then we turned south. I was moved to a stern oar on the top deck, and I, who feared no man in war, was terrified to be so close to the oar-master. Indeed, I was just a few steps from him at all
times.
    Luckily, he was mad. So mad, he’d forgotten me and the Illyrian both. He hated women – all women – far more than he hated us. So while I had to witness his brutal degradation
of the slave women, I was merely beaten occasionally, as an afterthought. Tapped with his heavy stick when he was bored.
    After some time – by Zeus the Saviour, I have no idea how far south we’d come – the oar-master cut the throats of a pair of the women in a sacrifice. He did it in the bow, and
I never knew exactly what happened. But after that, the other women stopped being alive. That is to say, they were still warm and breathing, but they were dead inside. A few days later they started
to die.
    The trierarch simply let it happen.
    Sometimes he reacted in anger and hit a slave, but mostly he just fingered his beard and watched the heavens. His two helmsmen said little.
    From their stilted conversations, I gathered that we were on our way home, and that home was Carthage.
    And I began to learn other things.
    I was a good navigator – my best helmsman and friends had taught me well enough – but the Phoenicians have secrets about navigation, and they hold them close. They use stars and the
sun. All of us do, but they do it with far more accuracy than we Greeks. Now, since Marathon, we’ve taken enough of their ships to enslave a generation of their navigators, and we have all
their secrets, but back then there were still tricks we didn’t know: the aiming stick for taking the height of a star, or the secrets of the Pleiades and the Little Bear. Ah – I see
that the lad from Halicarnassus knows whereof I speak!
    But the helmsmen and the trierarch were careless. They took their sun sights and their star sights a few feet from my silent back, and they discussed their sightings. Hamilcar, the younger
helmsman, was obviously under instruction and very slow. I think – I will never know – that he was so deeply unhappy with the life he was living that his brain had shut