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

with stale bread, dipped it in the stinking brown water by my ankles and
put it in my lap. ‘I have five obols on this,’ he said. ‘That you’ll eat it.’
    He got his five obols.
    Then I was sick – sick with one of Apollo’s arrows in me, and shit poured from me into the water at my feet and I vomited, over and over.
    And I rowed.
    The sun beat down, and men above me died. I was hardly the only victim – indeed, so ill was that ship that men died every second or third day. So that after some more time – I have
no idea how much time, but we were somewhere on the coast of Illyria – we landed, and even I was allowed ashore. We ate pig – the slaves got crap, but it was delicious, and we ate
everything.
    That was the night I realized we were in Illyria. A party of nobles came down to the ship, and I had the energy to pay attention. There were two men and two women on horseback, and they rode
straight down the beach.
    They gave Hasdrubal the signs of peace, and dismounted warily. He offered them bread and salt and wine.
    The two women were young and pretty, tough the way all Illyrians are, as blond as the sun, tanned like old leather, in fine wool with gold bracelets. The men were taller and older, with beards
and more gold jewellery. Their servants had tin. We could see it in ingots, brought by donkey from somewhere even farther north.
    Illyrians are a strange lot – they have nothing but lords and slaves, and the lords are at war with each other all the time. They look Greek, they sometimes speak Greek – worship our
gods, too. Many of them know the
Iliad
and the
Odyssey
. But they are not Greek. Or rather, sometimes I think that they are Hellenes who never found the rule of law.
    But I was not thinking such rational and philosophical thoughts that night.
    I was too far away to hear any of the conversation, but the style of their pins and their clothes, their horse-furniture and a thousand other little details, all made it plain where we were.
    Well, while there’s life, there’s hope, or so it is said. Illyrians are the worst pirates in the Middle Sea, and suddenly, it occurred to me that if Hasdrubal would just keep sailing
up the coast, an Illyrian coaster was bound to attack us. And the gods knew that we wouldn’t have lasted a moment in a sea fight – a two-thirds crew of sick slaves and bully-boys as
marines.
    It has to say something for my state that being taken by Illyrians, who enslaved all captives regardless of social status, was my
hope.
    We were tied together with rope while ashore and put in a stockade, more like a pen, with two armed men as guards. When we were ashore – this was my first time ashore since my first day on
board – it was impossible to keep us from talking. Yet, to my utter puzzlement, none of the other oar-slaves would speak.
    Not even a word.
    It was the lowest part of the whole experience. I had never seen slaves who would not mutter – who would not rebel in a thousand little ways, even if they were too cowed to rebel in the
ways that mattered.
    The slaves sat silent, every one of them with their eyes closed.
    I moved from man to man, whispering, until a guard came into the pen. I froze, but he’d seen me, and he struck me with his spear shaft – heavy ash. He almost broke my arm. He hit me
so hard – I’ll just say this as an aside – that he raised a black bruise on the side of the arm
opposite
to the blow, and it covered the arm. It made a nice counterpoint
to the ache in my ribs.
    I didn’t even whimper. I’d learned better.
    He laughed. ‘Beg me not to hit you again,
pais
. Beg me. Offer to suck my dick.’
    Sometimes, having been a slave before saved my life. This was one of those times. A man who’d always been free might have had to knuckle under and been broken – or might have had to
resist, and been killed.
    I held my head and looked dumb.
    He hit me lightly. ‘You know what I said!’ he grunted.
    I held my head, met his eye and then