Free The Great King by Christian Cameron Page A

said. ‘It is a year before most young men really admit, inside their fool heads, that I can beat them – that they need to know what I have to teach.’
    We both laughed. Then he put a hand on my knee. ‘Listen – you are a good man. Why did you do such a foolish thing? To Lydia? And then you name your ship after her? What does that mean?’
    I busied myself with the helm for a moment. ‘It means that I refuse to let myself forget it,’ I said. ‘And I told myself a lot of lies about Lydia. I wanted two things. I wanted to sail to Alba, and I wanted the girl. But I can see now that she was the embodiment of something else that I wanted – a life as a craftsman.’
    Polymarchos grinned, teeth white and shining in the darkness. ‘I never thought you was really a bronzesmith. Nah – that’s wrong. I knew you was. I just thought it was a hobby. You have aristocrat written all over you – even the way your muscles are formed. You’ve had gymnasiums all your life.’
    Now it was my turn to laugh. ‘Polymarchos, I was a slave from age fifteen to age twenty, and again just before you met me.’
    He nodded. ‘Sure. Many men spend time as slaves. Some it stamps indelibly, like a leatherworker’s tool, and some it merely teaches a little humility. Gelon could use a few months as someone’s slave.’
    I raised an eyebrow. ‘You left Syracusa.’
    He nodded. ‘Gelon is a brilliant tyrant, and he will make Syracusa great. But he took my citizenship. Fuck him. I spent half my life earning my way out of the slavery a bunch of pirates put me in, so that one rich bastard could take it again.’ He glared at the dark water and the stars. ‘Now I’ll take this young Italiote to Olympia, and we’ll win. And then Gelon will know what he has earned for himself by losing me. I could have won this for Syracusa.’
    The next day, we had another day of pure, sweet sailing – the wind almost dead astern, the mainsail set and drawing well, the bow skimming along the waves. I found it hard to measure our speed – always a problem in blue-water sailing. It is difficult to work the geometrical figures for speed and distance when you don’t know how far you are travelling or how fast you are going.
    Leukas came aft for his spot at the helm. As soon as he had the oars, I took charcoal and began to draw on the deck, measuring the cord from Augusta Bay to Olympia by guessing the distance from Melita to Sybaris, based on a dozen journeys, and then making the same guess for the distance from Sybaris to Olympia. If, as I suspected, the two legs formed a right angle, then according to Pythagoras . . .
    Well, the figure I solved for was two and a half thousand stades. I figured it for an hour, and while I figured, I taught Leukas, who was coming along in his Greek letters, and Megakles, who could not read at all and wasn’t interested. Leukas had never multiplied anything, but Sekla had, and he joined in, and then we were using the cross-staff to measure the sun’s angle. It passed the time, and led the oarsmen to believe that we knew what we were doing.
    We tossed wood chips over the side and tried to imagine how fast we were going based on how fast they fell astern. Our young athlete tried racing the wood chips down the length of the hull.
    Astylos ran all day – even in the full heat of the sun. A trihemiola – a trireme with a flat deck and standing mast – has far more deck space than a trireme, but it is still only about one hundred and ten feet long. A stadion is six hundred feet long, so he had to run the length of the deck, turning constantly – and avoiding sailors and off-duty oarsmen.
    At any rate – Astylos’s performance against the wood chips gave me the notion that we were making about thirty stades an hour, which put us at over seven hundred stades a day, sunrise to sunrise.
    Well – Poseidon’s realm is immense. I knew that before I started figuring.
    But from that day on, I began to see sailing and rowing as