Poseidon's Spear (Long War 3) by Christian Cameron

ex-slave making a claim that wasn’t true.’
    I reached into the boat and took out my leather satchel – made by Seckla. From it, holding it up so that the hired muscle could see me, I took a bronze eating-knife with a pretty bone
handle, the bone dyed green with verdigris; there were fine silver tacks in the handle for decoration. It was in a sheath of Seckla’s make with a long bronze pick.
    ‘My work,’ I said, handing it to the moneylender.
    He nodded.
    ‘Keep it,’ I said. ‘A token of my esteem.’
    His head shot up. ‘Fuck you, slave,’ he said. ‘No one talks to me like that.’
    I crossed my arms. ‘You’re off your mark here. I’m a craftsman. These men are my friends. I have other friends. We don’t want trouble.’
    He got up. Rubbed his chin, and then his face changed. ‘I’ll keep this,’ he said, holding my eating-knife. ‘And I’ll make some enquiries. And I’ll be
back.’ He looked around. ‘I expect you’ll need my money. And I’ll expect you to be civil. Understand?’
    By civil, he meant subservient.
    Again, you might expect that I’d just kill him and be a local hero.
    But it doesn’t really work like that.
    Some time much later, Daud told me that we could have saved a year of our lives by killing him then and there. And maybe we could have.
    But Heraclitus was reaching me across the years. I had to learn other ways of solving my problems.
    So I bowed my head. ‘Of course,
Patron.
’
    He nodded seriously. And strode off, full of self-importance, his sell-sword by his side.
    Daud turned on me. ‘Are you a
coward
?’ he asked, and stomped off. I didn’t see him for a day.
    I must have turned red, because Doola came and put his arm around my shoulders. ‘Well done,’ he said.
    ‘I don’t feel that it was well done,’ I admitted. Now that the man had walked away, I felt craven.
    ‘We didn’t fight, and we didn’t take his money,’ Demetrios said. ‘Nice job. My brother was good with these vultures, but I – I fear them.’
    So we went back to scraping the boat clean, and afterwards we returned to our two rooms under the thatch, where we counted our money. The taverna on our corner had taken all the wine that
wasn’t tinged with seawater at a good price, and all the tinged wine at one half that price. After Demetrios paid off our debts – mostly food, rope and wood – we had about sixty
drachma. I had made another twenty-four drachma profit, after my own food, wine and clothes.
    Eighty-four drachma, for six men.
    Daud shook his head. ‘We’ll
never
get a twenty-oared ship at this rate.’
    We had decided that if we were going to try the tin run to Alba, we needed
at least
a twenty-oared galley with a good mast. It was a common enough type of boat in the trade. And we
needed a dozen slaves. We couldn’t afford to pay rowers and sailors and build the boat.
    We estimated that building the boat would cost us three hundred drachmas.
    But Demetrios was altogether more sanguine. He put the money in a sack, and put the sack into the thatch. ‘Not bad,’ he said. He shrugged. ‘Not bad. Ari is pulling more than
his fair share. And without him, we’ll never get it done.’
    I didn’t really want to hear that, because while I liked working in the shop, I wanted to be at sea. And my status – if you could call it that – as leader was suffering. All of
them looked to Demetrios, not to me. He had become the skipper. I wasn’t there, at sea. They told me stories of the storm that hit them in the straits off Sybarus, and how Demetrios stayed at
the helm all day and all night—
    You get the idea.
    I might have been bitter. But I wasn’t. Sometimes a dream was bigger than any reality. Sailing to Alba was a big dream – an heroic deed, a worthy thing. I was willing to sacrifice.
We all were.
    We were brothers.
    ‘What about Illyria?’ I asked. Neoptolymos raised his head and smiled. And then frowned and drank more wine.
    ‘I will never go back until my