Read The Great King for Free Online Page A

of the gods. It was splendid to watch, despite my worries about the ship I was in. Despite the presence of Briseis just a few feet away – so close that I swear that I could feel the warmth of her body.
    Aye.
    I tapped the steering oar and took us a few more yards down the beach. I wanted the damaged hulk to land well clear of my beautiful Lydia , just in case.
    Leukas laid out pulling lines along the decks of the capture, and as soon as Lydia was lying on her side, well propped, the oarsmen ran down the beach to us, and it was time. I looked at Briseis, and as my eye met hers, she smiled.
    It took long enough to turn the ship end for end that the moon began to peep over the rim of the world. We didn’t ‘spin’, we wallowed, but eventually we were stern first to the beach and the surviving rowers had their cushions reversed.
    Cyrus looked at me, eyes very white in the new darkness. ‘I think the rowers are considering another rising,’ he said.
    Cyrus was no fool. Neither was Arayanam, who took his bow from its case and strung it.
    There was a curious quality to the rowers’ silence.
    ‘Leukas!’ I called, and he came back to me.
    ‘Take the helm,’ I ordered, and he did.
    I ran forward to the space amidships where a good trierarch stands in battle – where his voice carries over the whole sweep of the benches.
    ‘Listen up, oarsmen!’ I called. ‘When we have this ship on the beach, I will see to it you are fed. This ship won’t last three more hours – stay with me and I’ll see you ashore and alive. If you try me now – all I can promise is that every one of you will die.’
    I looked down into the gloom.
    ‘A lot of these men don’t give a shit whether they live or die,’ called a man bolder than the rest. His Greek was Ionian.
    ‘I can only speak to the Greeks aboard,’ I said. ‘But I’ll do better for them than the Phoenicians ever did. Or I’ll kill them and land the ship anyway.’ I stood above them, and I knew from my time toiling under the lash of Dagon how powerful the voice on the command deck could seem.
    I walked back along the catwalk. I didn’t hurry – I wanted to seem as confident as possible. The truth was that we were a hundred yards from shore and I was in no danger, but I had no idea whether Briseis could swim and I couldn’t imagine that Artapherenes would survive the journey.
    I heard some muttering.
    Muttering is a good sign, usually.
    I took the steering oars from Leukas and he began to give orders in his Keltoi-Greek. ‘Pull!’ he commanded.
    He began to beat time.
    Some oars stayed in. But my rowers dug in with a will, and enough of the others pulled that we made way sternwards, and the sternpost kissed the sand with a gentle thump. Immediately, the current and the waves began to push the head in towards the beach – the worst thing that could happen, and something that a helmsman feared on a stormy day on a windswept beach, but not on a nearly dead calm night on a broad belt of sand.
    Luckily for me, Sekla and his oarsmen already had the lines that my borrowed deck crew flung them, and they dragged us with more will than the oarsmen pulled.
    Leukas yelled, ‘Over the side, you whoresons!’
    Some went, and some didn’t. I couldn’t tell whether I was facing mutiny, desertion or utter, desperate exhaustion. So I walked down the catwalk, abandoning the steering oars – I think I pulled them inboard. I started to prick men lightly with a borrowed Persian spear. One man, with a long scar over his forehead, cursed me and crouched like an angry dog on his little bench, but he couldn’t even reach me with spit, and when his spirit broke, all the men around him went, too. Men are odd animals – too intelligent, sometimes, for their own good.
    Leukas and I started them, and the Persians helped – came and threatened – and we got them over the side and on to the beach. A dozen tried to run and were swatted down like errant children by Brasidas and his marines. The