The Great King Read Online Free PDF Page B

been down when the storm hit, but my guess – all the officers were dead – was that the tackle hadn’t been stowed properly and had blown loose in the night, rolling and pitching, driving the oarsmen mad and finally blowing over the side in the darkness, after swamping the ship and tearing a grisly hole in the side. The boat sail spar had smashed half the oars and stove a hole right through the side, and when dawn showed them calmer water and the coast of Africa under their lee, the oarsmen revolted.
    That ship was finished. I thought perhaps I could get it on to the beach of Libya, but that was the last place I wanted to go myself. Good sense told me to take my own and row away. But Artapherenes held my guest oath and had given me my life, and I had worn his ring for years.
    When we had the hole in our side patched, I rolled aboard and dried myself, and stood in the sun. Thirty feet away, Briseis smiled at me across the water.
    Damn her.
    I puffed out my chest, no doubt.
    Why are men such simple creatures? Eh?
    Sekla had the deck. The steering oars were inboard, waiting until there was way on the ship, but Sekla stood between them, the traditional command space, at least on my ships. He leaned forward.
    ‘That’s the famous Briseis,’ he said. He had the temerity to laugh.
    ‘Yes,’ I said.
    He shook his head. ‘Beautiful,’ he said. ‘She never took her eyes off you, while you were in the water.’ He shrugged.
    I was watching Briseis.
    He elbowed me. ‘Are you the mighty pirate Arimnestos, or some spotty boy?’ he asked.
    I glared at him. I’d saved him from lovesickness – I thought, How dare you .
    He laughed in my face.
    I had to laugh with him. ‘A spotty boy,’ I agreed. ‘That’s what she always does to me.’
    Leukas was drying himself on his chiton. The Alban shook his head but remained silent.
    Megakles didn’t. His broad Italiote accent added emphasis to his comic delivery. ‘While we all drool at her, my lord, any Liby-Phoenician in these waters will snap us all up. And we’ll all be slaves.’
    Sittonax – my lazy Gallish friend – stretched like a cat. ‘That is one well-formed woman,’ he agreed. ‘Not worth dying for, though.’ He nodded at Megakles. ‘You know he’s right.’
    ‘They’re an embassy,’ I said. ‘Even the Carthaginians respect an embassy.’
    I gathered that my friends didn’t agree. Their intransigence made me angry, and I remember biting my lip and trying to keep my temper. I was thrice tired – awake all night at the helm, fighting a boarding action, and now I’d helped fother the hull – and it was all I could do to stay on my feet, and their teasing got under my skin far too easily.
    I stood there, watching my oarsmen pump water out of my damaged hull. I couldn’t see us making any of the southern Peloponnesian ports – too far, and too much chance of another spring storm.
    Brasidas motioned with his usual economy of effort – a single flick of the hand.
    I leaned over the port-side rail. ‘What do you need?’ I called.
    ‘Nothing,’ he said. ‘But the woman wants you.’
    In any other man’s mouth, that might have sounded like ribaldry, but the Spartan was carefully spoken. We don’t call them Laconic for nothing.
    On any other day, I’d have ordered the oarsmen to use boarding pikes to pull the ships closer. But Briseis was watching, and so, despite fatigue, I seized a chiton and pulled it on, belted it with a corded zone, pulled my sword belt over my head, and leapt – leapt, I say – from one oar bank to the next. I noted as I landed that the other ship was lower in the water.
    I managed to jump inboard over the terrified survivors among the slave oarsmen – what was left after the fight, watched like hawks by my own marines – and I tried not to swagger too much as I went aft to Briseis.
    I bowed. She had a scarf over her head like a good matron and the only flesh on display was one ankle and one hand, but I knew her body.
    I