Poseidon's Spear (Long War 3) Read Online Free PDF Page A

ever talked to these bastards – was that the two
helmsmen were better men, just trying to survive under the regime of a bully and a madman.
    For Dagon, the oar-master, was mad. Mad with power, mad with rage, mad with the cunning, plotting madness of a long-time drunkard, or a man who enjoys the pain of others.
    It was days before I truly felt his displeasure. I know now that we were somewhere on the coast of Dalmatia, rowing north. I had gathered from talk on deck – slaves were forbidden to speak
unless spoken to – that we had a cargo of Athenian hides and pottery and some Cyprian copper, and that we were going to bump our way up the coast until we found someone to sell us iron and
tin.
    I was rowing. When you are in peak physical condition, it is possible to row for a long time while your mind is elsewhere. Despite despair and wounds and struggle, I was sound enough to row
– all day – without pain. But my head was in a dark place, considering my life. My life with Briseis. My life with Euphoria. My life as a hero, and my life as a smith. I wasn’t
despairing – it takes longer than three days to drive me to despair. But I had started pretty far down, and being enslaved certainly hadn’t helped.
    The stick hit me a glancing blow on the left shoulder. ‘Off the beat,’ the oar-master roared, his spittle raining on my left ear.
    ‘Like fuck!’ I said, before I’d thought about it. In fact, I was dead on the beat – my stroke was perfect.
    The next blow hit my head, and I gave a half-scream and sort of fell across my oar, and then he hit me again, five or six blows to the head and neck. My nose broke, and blood showered across
me.
    ‘Silence, scum,’ he roared at me. ‘Do not even scream!’
    I grunted.
    He hit me again. It was an oak stick.
    I must have made some noise. Or maybe not.
    ‘Silence!’ he said in the kind of voice a man uses to a lover, and hit me again.
    My oar caught in the backwash of another man’s oar, jumped and slammed into my chest, cracking ribs. I grunted.
    He hit me again. ‘Silence, slave!’
    I tried to gain control of the oar. Tears were pouring down my face, and blood.
    He laughed. ‘You need to learn what you are. You are a sack full of pain, and I will let it out when I want to. For anything. Until you die, cursing me.’ He moved around until he was
in my sight line. ‘I am Dagon, Lord of Pain.’ He laughed.
    Just then, the trierarch came up. I knew his voice already. That needs to be said, because I could barely see. And you have to imagine, I was trying to manage an eighteen-foot oar while he hit
me in the back.
    ‘You are off the stroke,’ he said teasingly, and hit me on my left shoulder. He was expert. He hit me so hard I could barely manage the pain – but he didn’t break a
bone.
    I guess I whimpered.
    Dagon laughed again. ‘Silence!’ he said, and hit me again.
    The trierarch laughed. ‘New slaves are useless, aren’t they?’ he said.
    The oar-master tapped his stick on the deck. ‘He can’t get the rhythm,’ the oar-master said. A lie.
    ‘You lie,’ I spat.
    The blow that struck me put me out.
    When I awoke, I was the stern oar of the thranites – the lowest of the low, and since most triremes row a little down by the stern, all of the piss and shit of the whole
slave ship was around my ankles and calves. The moment I groaned and shook, one of the oar-master’s minions threw seawater over me and put an oar in my hands, feeding it through the oar-port
– it was, of course, a short and difficult oar because of the curve of the ship. Rowing here was always a punishment, even on my ships.
    I threw up.
    On myself, of course.
    And started rowing.
    Time lost meaning. I rowed, and hurt, and rowed, and hurt. Men came and hit me with sticks and I rowed, and hurt. We landed for a night, somewhere north of Corcyra, and I was
left chained to my bench while other men went ashore. Kritias, a Greek, one of the oar-master’s bully-boys, came to me