Over by the palm trees, at the edge of the lagoon near the harbour, and not far from the spot where Thersander had been sitting when Mabon had approached him earlier, an elderly man was throwing pieces of bread to the seagulls. He tossed each piece high into the air and the gulls either swooped and caught a piece, or not, as the mood took them. The wind had freshened and three boats made their way under full sail, their cooking fires smoking, towards the crowded huddle of vessels lying off the beach.
The elderly man threw each morsel of bread in a random manner, and did not appear to watch to see its fate, apparently unconcerned whether a gull caught it in mid-descent or whether it fell into the water for the other birds to fight over. Perhaps he knew. His arthritic fingers struggled already with the next piece of bread and Thersander saw from the tilt of his head that he was blind.
All of a sudden, something startled the flamingos. Away in the distance, towards the north, a pair flapped ferociously and took off, causing a chain reaction that spread quickly until a critical mass was reached and the whole flock arose as one body, with cries and wing-beatings, and a cloud of pink and black headed straight towards Thersander and the blind man. There seemed to be no reason for it.
'Perhaps it is normal,' Thersander thought. The noise of beating wings and cries intensified as the flock began to pass overhead. The blind man mirrored their distress and cowered down onto the ground in confusion, as though able to see something that Thersander could not. He appeared, to Thersander to imagine that he was the centre of their attention. The blind man dropped his bread in fright, and Thersander's heart tightened in pity at the ridiculous spectacle.
Then Thersander saw a possible reason for the flamingos'' alarm. The cooking fire on one of the boats sailing towards the harbour was surely out of control, and the crew were beginning to abandoned ship. At the base of a plume of grey smoke emanating from the boat flickered an orange flame. Yet another figure dived from the low stern into the water as the flames began to spread alarmingly. The other boats were under full sail, and Thersander saw suddenly that they also were on fire. Each prow approached the harbour with a divided stem thrust forward like a gesture of defiance. The smell of burning fat, which Thersander had noticed whilst speaking to the shepherd, blew in more pungently than ever. A smell of burning fat and wood. The nearest boat was now only about a hundred swimming strokes away and bearing down quickly upon the vessels in the makeshift harbour.
Thersander raced to the beach and watched helplessly as the vessels approached. It was clear to him, from an increasingly better view of their hulls, that two fires raged on each, one in the stern and another near the bows, and that the fires were spreading very rapidly.
A shout rose up - 'Cut loose the boats!' - as two armed Cilician warriors came racing down the beach - 'Cut loose...' - Thersander lost no time but ran up a walkway and onto the massive huddle of floating timber. He had no weapon, and therefore no immediate way of cutting rope, so he jumped between a dozen boats or so until he came to one of the far mooring posts and began unfastening the lines, quickly took stock of himself, slowed down, sorted the three ends he was trying to disengage simultaneously and released the bows of two of the boats without difficulty. As he struggled with the other ropes and made sure that he was not about to drift away on a boat he had released, he could see a figure swimming out towards the prow of the nearest approaching ship. Flames licked at the base of its mast. Thersander moved to the opposite mooring post and tried to release the vessels completely, one of which was his own.
The swimmer scrambled from the water up onto a low, smoking stern and tried to pull down the sail, which was beginning to catch alight from the flames now raging in the foredeck. The figure appeared to be unable for some reason to do this. The sail flapped but did not empty of the wind, and was now only a short distance away, with the burning hull that it propelled, heading for the ships moored nearer to the beach. The figure moved back to the stern and heaved upon the steering oar, but could not move it so he picked up a large timber, charred black and smouldering, and raised it purposefully into the fabric of the sail, which caught alight immediately. His agonised cries carried across the water as Thersander freed another rope.
With the last of the lashings released, a parcel of boats drifted away, carrying Thersander with them. Other men had tried to do a similar thing with their own vessels, with varying degrees of success, and as the nearest fire-boat struck, the ships and vessels were in a much looser gaggle than before, which allowed the burning intruder to enter more deeply into the crowd of floating timber than it might otherwise have done. The fire began to spread to the vessels around as leaking casks of oil toppled over and dripped flames over the sides.
Thersander knew that his duty lay with the four boats he was with. He pulled an oar from its recline and used it as a pole to launch the raft of vessels away from the growing conflagration. With all his weight straining against the oar, the raft eased only slowly and began to rotate. Leaping across to a middle boat of the four, Thersander untied the lines and jumped back again. It was much easier to heave two vessels away. Unfortunately in doing so he necessarily pushed other vessels back towards the fire. This worried him for an instant, but only for an instant. The second fire-boat was bearing down in full sail, straight towards him.
Thersander dropped the oar and with a great effort pulled at the bow of one of the ships alongside, then pulled his own bow to the stern of this vessel and let the acquired momentum carry his raft away, while he thrashed at the water with a steering oar. The second fire-boat hit a vessel about ten paces astern of him, creaked and complained, pushed the ship around, slid quietly past, hit another, and with a scrunching and groaning noise slowed enough to transfer its lethal cargo of burning oil. A ship began to rotate menacingly towards Thersander's raft.
On the grassy shore, the blind man raised himself to his full height, grasped a necklace that hung around his neck, snapped its thread and began to throw the teeth from it, one by one, at the dreadful noise in front of him. Almost immediately, on top of the low cliff beyond the beach, armed men began to appear. Thersander could see only their heads and the points of their spears at first. Some were helmeted and carried large shields. Others came into view carrying only a short bow. Then they disappeared from sight again.
A cacophony of shouting rose up from the harbour as the third fire-boat struck, and a terrible panic of bleating began to pour down from the sheep pens. Thersander redoubled his effort to propel his makeshift catamaran out into the lagoon.
On the beach, a dozen or so sheep raced towards the cliff and tried to scale it. Arrows shot across from the direction of the pens and picked off some, but the others found a small gully and disappeared from sight.
The fires raged in the harbour and the sound of distressed sheep filled the air as Thersander thrashed hard with the steering oar and made for the opposite bank of the lagoon. Suddenly, a battle began to spill over the brow of the grassy slope towards the harbour. Cilicians had gathered arms and were driving a group of intruders backwards with javelins. The intruders held great shields in the shape of a figure of eight which extended from their ankles up to their chins. Against this hail of javelins, the enemy formed into a huddle with shields uppermost, and arrows began to spit out from beneath this protection.
'What in the world is going on?' came a voice from behind Thersander. It was Dipsacus, one of Inachus's crew.
But Thersander was fascinated by the spectacle on the grassy slope. The scrummage of shields had moved forwards, something was thrown from a Mycenaean contingent that had now appeared and one of their number began to approach the advancing shield formation with what looked like suicidal bravery; curses and counter curses blew faintly on the wind in a language that Thersander could recognise now and again as his own, and the arrow firing and javelin ballistics ceased. A stray arrow shot out from the Cilician front line and embedded itself harmlessly in the ground near the shore. Then a new shouting erupted and the intruders' shield formation began to disintegrate. Half the warriors within it became engaged in combat with the other half. Some of the Mycenaeans poured down the slope to join the fray, while others peeled off with the Cilicians who had turned back up the slope, shouting, and those who had javelins began clashing them against their shields. Others tried to recapture some rams which had escaped from their attackers. The blind man on the shore cowered in terror.
Between the two of them, Thersander and Dipsacus manoeuvred the lashed pair of boats to the far side of the lagoon, threw out the anchor stone of the larger boat, untied the two vessels and stopped to have a quick think.
'There is no point in joining the battle,' said Thersander. 'We need weapons and we must gather some help.'
Dipsacus agreed. 'You were lucky,' said Thersander. 'I had to push some of our boats back towards the fire in order to get these two out of the way. I chose the right one to keep, didn't I!'
The noise of sheep continued to fill the air with distant bleating and sounds of a different and more disturbing kind as Thersander and Dipsacus rowed the remaining vessel far more easily now that there were two of them at the oars. Soon all was quiet as they rowed towards the far shore, away from a heavy pall of smoke which rose over the harbour and drifted away in a cloud, towards the south.
'We must find Neileus,' said Thersander. 'Those ships were standing off Kition for quite a while before paying their visit to us.
·
They found Neileus quite by accident. As Thersander raised a call to arms, confirming a concern already growing in the town, Neileus was one of those who emerged to challenge the shouting. They gathered arms with others and ran the mile or so to the temple of Aphrodite and beyond to the far side of the lagoon, where they found chaos but no conflict. Some of the boats in the harbour were burning and drifting, some were burning themselves out under supervision, others were being doused and secured in new and safer positions, and the dead and dying lay on makeshift blankets. Some of the wounded enemy had been taken and were being questioned by characters that Thersander would not like to be questioned by in any state of health. All but a few of the sheep pens had been destroyed and a great many animals were lying in their own blood. In the far distance, the mountains loomed over the white hills in an uncanny silence.
During a search for casualties, Thersander came across the blind man who had been frightened by the flamingos. He had been wounded by a stray arrow and motioned to Thersander to come nearer - 'Cut into thirteen pieces,' he whispered in a croak. 'Cut into thirteen pieces; a fleece, guarded by a serpent. Beware! YOU will be bitten and die!' At this his head rolled back and his eyes looked at something above Thersander's shoulder.
He had not died, and Thersander helped with some others to carry him back to the temple. Groups of Colchian invaders and their mercenaries, particularly the lightly-armed bowmen, were still at large, but the Cilician warriors and the Mycenaeans, Athenians and Ionians had fought a heroic battle and driven most of them into the hills, where the sons of Poseidon were at their most deadly.
Although many of the boats were destroyed, the most widespread losses had been amongst the sheep. Those that had survived had felt no reluctance to hurry back before their attackers towards their spring pastures. There would have been far fewer sheep surviving but for the quick action of one of the Mycenaeans, who had recognised some of his fellow countrymen defending the murderous archers and had had the courage to persuade them of their grave error, and to turn their loyalties around.
·
The temple of Aphrodite lay only a short walk from the lagoon. In a fading light, Ariadne tended to the wounded and the burnt. She lit a lamp and whispered spells and incantations over the upper body of a man who watched the ceiling with an intense stare and moaned a little. The burns on his hands and arms and across his shoulders were very severe; he had held burning wood into the fabric of a sail.
The lagoon water contained anger which might soon erupt into fever, but the immediate threat to his life was shock and she administered for that, pulling the blanket up to his chin to keep him warm, raising his head a little and putting the rim of a cup of hot fluid to his lips, steeped in analgesic. Then she resumed her incantations, clapping gently over his face in homeopathic imitation of shock. A gentle clap caused only a gentle shock. In this way she would take control of his malady.
After a while, her patient finished his drink and slipped into an uneasy sleep, and she turned to others.
When Ariadne found a moment to rest, she came over to Thersander, who was looking rather worried. He turned to her and smiled. Her skirt was long, heavy and beautifully embroidered, and hung from her ultra-slim waist beneath a golden apron. Her black hair was not elaborately arranged and hung without the attraction of ringlets. She was certainly no beauty by any commonplace standards but if she could be called plain, it was a plainness that Thersander found captivating. Just then, Neileus returned from a meeting with those who were not out hunting miscreants and gathering sheep.
'Right,' he said, to Thersander and the other members of Inachus's crew. 'Get some sleep. Before dawn we will set out into the hills and try to retrieve as many rams as we can. The auspices are far from favourable and there is nothing we can do in the dark. Many of the rams have been lost and all will be lost to others if we do not recover as many as we can, as soon as we can.' He paused to glance at the woman he assumed to be a priestess of this Temple of Aphrodite. She seemed to be forming an attachment to Thersander and he found himself wondering what her motives could be.
'Thersander,' he continued, 'you did well by making our boats safe, but you have made a few enemies, so watch out. I have sent our vessels out to sea and instructed them to sail down to Amathus. Others will take care of their own vessels, I am sure. We must act on our own, and pursue our own interests from now on.'