Free The Great King by Christian Cameron

stades from Melita to Olympia. And never a rock or an islet to get fresh water or rest your crew after you depart Sicily. We built a small floor of bricks in the bow and laid sand over it for a brazier, but you cannot cook food for two hundred men on a trireme and you can’t even carry enough food for a week.
    Still, our trip into the Western Ocean had taught us a dozen tricks for surviving in open ocean. One was that we knew we could go two days without food.
    At any rate, Sekla and Megakles and I chose a course after some argument, and we put some scratches in the helmsman’s rail to indicate where the sun should be at dawn, at noon and at sunset. After that, all we had was the straightness of the wake and the position of the stars, because there was no beach to rest at night after the first. The first night we touched at Sicily – we landed on the so-called Carthaginian shore south of Syracusa. Polymarchos took his young man out for a run, and a dozen of us joined him – Brasidas, of course, and me, and Alexandros and young Giannis. We ran under Aetna’s crown, and smoke trailed away from the deeps within her. I have no idea how far we ran, but the young athlete effortlessly outpaced us all, even Brasidas. He was beautiful as he ran, and yet somewhat hangdog about it.
    ‘Why’s he so surly?’ I asked Polymarchos.
    The old fighter shrugged. ‘We’re farther from the Temple of Olympian Zeus than we were fifty days ago when we started,’ he said. ‘He’s late. He may well be banned.’
    It was the longest voyage I’d attempted on the Inner Sea – the longest made intentionally, with no storm to carry me where Poseidon willed. I sacrificed six sheep on the beach at Sicily – not far from where I’d once sat in the marketplace with Demetrios and Herakles, selling hides – and stuffed my oarsmen with mutton, good bread, olives and good red wine.
    And with the dawn, we were off. Our course was almost due east, into the rising sun, and we had the perfect wind. By noon, Aetna was almost gone behind us, and by dark, we were out on the great deep sea without land anywhere. The newer oarsmen were plainly terrified, and we served out wine and stale bread and dates.
    The old hands – the oarsmen who’d been out beyond the pillars – laughed at their timorousness.
    ‘You ain’t seen nothing, young squid,’ one old salt pronounced. ‘A calm night like this on the great green? It’s like being home in your bed.’
    Polymarchos, that master of every weapon, looked green himself. He sat on the helmsman’s bench – where Briseis had sat just a few days before – and groaned. ‘I heard you say you were going into the open ocean,’ he admitted. ‘But I didn’t think it through. Do you . . . know . . . where we are?’
    I laughed. ‘Yes,’ I said. I pointed overhead. ‘See the stars? Do you know they move?’
    He nodded, eager to have his thoughts taken off the dark and moving waters.
    I pointed at the Pole Star. ‘You know that the heavens have a linchpin, like the wheel of a chariot?’ I asked.
    After watching for a while, he agreed this might be true, and I thought how odd it was that city men had so little idea of how the world worked. Perhaps a man has to live outdoors in all weathers to properly accept the role of the gods. And the way the world is made.
    At any rate, after an hour or so, he accepted that I had a star that didn’t move.
    So I showed him a little of the knowledge I’d learned in the hardest school, as a slave on Dagon’s ship, listening to Phoenician navigators talk about how to watch the stars. I showed him how to use a spear shaft, and how to use a cross-staff.
    Finally, he laughed nervously – he, who could put me down in three sword-cuts.
    ‘I don’t know any more than I did when I started,’ he admitted. ‘But now I believe that you know.’
    ‘Isn’t that what you start with, when you teach an athlete?’ I asked.
    He frowned. ‘Usually, that takes a year,’ he