To be published September 2024
This novel is a prequel to By the Horn of the South. It explains how my characters got together in the first place.
Synopsis
Qart is a bright, filthy mouthed, street boy who has run away from Carthage to make a new life on the Great Sea. He lives in a dockside shanty in Ibosim in the West and gambles with spinning tops to make ends meet. His existence is so precarious that when he meets Dubb of Miletus, a kind if awe inspiring navigator, he decides to join forces with him, whatever the cost.
Dubb has his own worries and neither time enough, nor inclination, to become the friend of a troublesome runaway. His daunting task is to navigate a vessel, The Delphis, through the infamous Pillars Of Herakles, and report back to his aristocratic boss Hekataios of Miletus about what he finds beyond them. The ancient sages say they form the end of the world, that there is only a river outside them, called Ocean, and that it is filled with dangerous mists and misasmas. Are they right?
The task is easier to plan than accomplish. The obstacles Dubb faces go beyond the normal navigational ones and are enough to make any man question the gods. Troublesome passengers clog the gangways of The Delphis. His skipper’s rising terror as they move closer to their goal makes the man increasingly irrational; he even drowns a horse to placate Poseidon. As if this is not enough to deal with, Dubb discoveres that a vicious campaign of violence and sabotage is directed against The Delphis by spiteful Carthaginians who fear for the security of their lucrative shipping lanes.
All these problems, combined with Dubb’s own fears and self doubt, threaten to sink the expedition.
When, eventually, The Delphis enters the treacherous waters of the Pillars, with the tantalising prospect of River Ocean lying just beyond, Dubb frets about who will stand by his side to help him, who remain true to him whatever the cost. Sailing stalwarts from the past remain loyal. So does Qart who has earned his place on board as the navigator’s boy. What though of Nyptan, the healer, a woman so beautiful that Dubb feels unable even to breath in her presence?
Under the navigator’s hesitant leadership all these characters on The Delphis join forces and become a crew so powerful that they give the Carthaginians the slip, outmaneuver wind and tide and overcome their fears to discover new things about the world beyond the Pillars of Herakles.
Sample Chapter One
Fighting Tops
The boy rolls the spinning top round in his hands and looks up. Expectant faces jostle in, eyes bright, mouths wide with excitement. Rich black curls tumble down his forehead and he pushes at them with the crook of an elbow. He hunches over his spinner, putting skinny shoulders to the task. The warmer the wood, the faster she’ll twirl. He rubs her until she burns and leans down to kiss her fat round belly.
‘Lady, bring me luck today,’ he croons. Eyes shut, he raises her to his nose and rocks to and fro on the balls of his feet. He breathes in long and hard. The tang of sandalwood, sharpness of sweat and musk of string. Memories of his mother’s face at her worktable in Carthage flicker behind his lids, deep gouges above high cheekbones, shining hair, warmth from her body. ‘Pick up those threads, Qart dear,’ she says, her mouth full of pins. ‘There’s a good boy.’ She smiles, frayed fabric, tangles of coloured cotton and wood chips at her feet.
A sharp line appears between Qart’s brows. He opens his eyes wide and takes an awkward step backwards into the throng. No, no, not here, Mother. No. Don’t come here. He looks around, confused.
‘Oi, watch it, boy! Them’s my ankles you’re kickin’,’ says an old codger from behind, and shoves him forwards to the ring.
With a slight shake of the head, Qart wipes the top up and down his grubby loincloth once again. Only think about now, this minute, he says to himself, not her, not it, and he clamps his teeth together. Then, with a mighty wave of his arms, he thrusts his legs apart, tosses his head, arches his back and presents his Lady high to the punters with both hands, string protruding across his thumb. ‘Here is my spinner. Ready!’
‘That’s the way to do it, lad,’ says someone nearby. ‘Have a go.’
It is Qart’s voice which lets him down. The words he throws into the air are not the blazing call to battle he’d hoped for. Rather they emerge from his lips as a rasping croak. Only a few punters nearby have heard him, not the whole teeming grog-shop.
‘Don’t tell me he’s the one who’s going to fight,’ sniggers a Hellene nearby.
‘Not much of a match if you ask me,’ says his mate, as he turns away.
‘Call yourself a man, eh?’ says a loud voice from across the room. It comes from a sabre-toothed pretty who’s been staring at Qart for some time.
Qart feels the blush move from his neck to his cheeks and up towards his hairline. Bastard voice. Where are you? His mouth goes down at the corners and he puts a hand to his throat to rub it. He closes his ears, sticks out his chin.
‘Call for Baal, sprat,’ whispers a Hellene straight into his ear. He feels the waft of liquor on his cheek. ‘If he’s awake he might even help you.’ There’s a chortle before the voice fades away.
Benches scrape as other punters drift from the fight towards the grog. He is getting hotter still. And annoyed. Baal’s balls, unless the referee calls this contest soon there’ll be nothing for me to take away tonight, not even a bowl of stew.
‘Oh, for Melqart’s sake!’ bawls a voice in the midst of the throng. ‘Don’t go leaving for liquor, you sons of whores.’ The man has finally arrived on the scene, a sweating wreck. ‘Come back. Come back here.’ He sweeps his arms in a curve to point to the floor in front of Qart. ‘Can’t you see he’s only young. So go easy on him, you barbarians. If you want a match, settle down and place your bets.’ He rattles a box in his hands and coins of various types plonk in.
A circle opens up before Qart. He bends his knees a little and jumps from side to side. His eyes flick around the grimy room. Who’s going to take me on? he thinks. Who will fight my Lady? Across the floor he spies the bulky form of the toothy one, making his way towards him. A moment later he is there, opposite, torso solid as a tree, onions for eyes. So this is him, is it, the one I’ve got to thrash? Qart looks down at the scraggy spinners the man pulls from a bag. He smiles to himself. It won’t be too difficult to win against them!
‘Hypatos of Corinth versus the Carthaginian boy,’ shouts the referee. A cloth drops and the game begins.
Qart throws back his head and raises his voice once again. This time when it leaves his throat his words are a dockside mangle of Punic, Persian and Hellene.
‘By all the gods,’ he declares, a base note beginning to quiver amongst the squawk, ‘by the great Poseidon, noble Baal Hammon, and most holy whore glorious Astarte.’ He embellishes, working the company to support him and pushing his throat to its limit. ‘I call you, Hypatos of Corinth, to a duel.’ He points a finger dramatically at his opponent’s head. His voice gets stronger, to his surprise and the Corinthian’s. ‘Show me your weapons!’ He holds up his own beautiful Lady. ‘It is to the glory of the gods that I engage in this battle and it is in their names that I will defeat you.’ His voice is clear, deep and commanding.
‘That’s more like it. That’s my boy!’ roar the Carthaginians. And the game of chance, and skill and subterfuge is on.
Amid the shouting more coins drop into the referee’s pot. Good, thinks the boy. At least there’ll be something to eat tonight.
The game is best of three. Hypatos of Corinth is a brute of a player with a warped interpretation of the rules. He argues at Qart’s every move, calls time without reason and, late in the day, tries to introduce a top with a metal spike at the tip. The referee halts the game and threatens to declare the whole proceedings null and void. After much argument it proceeds.
Through all the histrionics and the shouting Qart keeps his nerve. His Lady holds her own. She twirls gracefully down and up the wooden ring like a dancer thrusting her hips at a lover. Twice the dumpy top of his opponent slews sideways, an overweight potentate upended by a fart, to leave his own lovely spindle pirouetting at the rim of the dish. How the men have cheered him on. How the cash has congregated!
‘Right, final round,’ shouts the referee.
Qart stands prepared at the edge of the circle, Lady at his chest, head down, and waits his turn.
He hears the scuffle a second before he feels the overheated hand of the Corinthian around his neck. The man grabs him and lifts him, bodily, over his head to twist and throw him, full force, into the mob.
‘You’re a skanky little cheat,’ he roars, ‘a filthy street boy who should have been drowned at birth.’
Me, a cheat? flashes through Qart’s mind, as the wind whistles in his ears and he lands, heavy, amongst the benches. Smashed beakers, grog slops and the remains of stew land on top of him. He wipes himself down, gets to his feet and his head flies around to find the Corinthian. I’ll have him, he thinks, teeth clenched. I’ll pummel him to pieces. He launches himself at the man from across the room.
A big bony body suddenly blocks his way. It appears between himself and his opponent, obscuring everything bar a dirty mantle and a thick ponytail. What? Who’s this? What’s happened?
‘Get out of my way, you idiot,’ he squawks, and pushes and punches it. A giant fight breaks out across the whole room. Men heave and thump, shove and shunt, the noise escalating. Qart is left at the back with nowhere to go.
‘Spikes on your spinners might be common in your part of the world,’ he hears the man with the ponytail scoff to the Corinthian, voice loud amidst the din. ‘It doesn’t happen in this part of the Great Sea.’ He speaks in a lilt.
Qart climbs onto a bench to try and see what’s happening. Who is the man? Too many heads. He jumps down, bends low and squirms his way between the backsides to emerge under the arm of the kind stranger. He looks up to see a pair of grey eyes looking down at him. They seem to be amused.
‘Thank you,’ is all that Qart can get out before the brawl takes over, Hellene against Pune, Thrace against Rusadir, the whole tavern a rumpus of thumping fisticuffs. Qart drops to the floor. I’ve got to get out of here, he thinks. This minute. He peers for his Lady, hurled when he was, into the benches. She lies sideways on the dirt. Crablike he scuttles to her and, hands juddering, loops her on a string around his neck. Too bad about the stew, he thinks, as he crawls on his elbows through the benches. He escapes through the tavern’s back door.
That is not the end of it. As Qart heads for the vermin-infested shanty he calls home, he is followed and attacked. Hypatos of Corinth comes after him, and gives him a thrashing. Dazed and bloody, the boy totters along the track until he is overtaken by the ponytailed stranger and his mate.
‘You’re in the wars tonight,’ says the man, who catches him as he falls.
By The Horn Of The South
Book One: First published 28th September 2023
By The Pillars Of Herakles
Book Two: Published – September 2024
Historical Note
By the Pillars of Herakles is set at around 510 BCE when the city state of Carthage was in its heyday. For hundreds of years it had held sway over large sections of the Mediterranean. In particular it protected its access to the mineral wealth of the Iberian peninsular.
When this historic supremacy was challenged, especially by Greek city states, commercial and political rivalries broke into the open. The Sicilian Wars were the result.
Historians are divided on whether the Strait of Gibraltar, as the Pillars of Herakles is now known, was ever blockaded by the Carthaginians to keep Hellenic rivals out of the region. Or, if not blockaded, protected by dirty tricks. I have chosen to believe that it was.
I have also set the story at a time when a wider spirit of empirical enquiry was emerging in Archaic Greece. The great sages of that period had begun to doubt the funamental belief system which had been handed down to them by Homer, Hesiod and others. Thales, Anaximander and Hekataois were bold enough to question the world view of The Illiad or Theogony. They began to interrogate how the world actually works rather than accept the Hellenic founding myths. Skeptical of the gods, they drew up maps based on evidence, did astronomical observations of the skies and wrote treaties about the natural world.
No River Ocean was ever found to correspond with Homer’s description of it on his shield of Achilles in The Illiad. As we now know, the Atlantic Ocean lies beyond the Strait of Gibraltar.
A kind of map, engraved on a bronze plaque, did actually exist and was offered by the philosopher Anaximander to the Spartans to help them to fight off invasion. They refused it.
Hekataois of Miletus did eventually write a History (lost) and create a further ‘map’ (written fragments only remain).
A widely available reconstruction of Hekataois’s map is here.
This image was conjectured by a scholar in the 19th century and can be found in A History of Ancient Geography among the Greeks and Romans from, the Earliest Ages till the Fall of the Roman Empire, 2d ed., 2 vols (1883; republished with a new introduction by w.h. Stahl new York; Dover 1959), Vol1. map facing p. 148 by Edward Herbert Bunbury.
Chapter Headings
Fighting Tops
The Mission
Dispatches from Carthage
The Delphis
Old Coot Arish
Bad Omens
Nyptan the Healter
Sounding the Way
Clear as Mud
Ghosts and Gods
Just you and Me
Up in the Hills
Staunch Weed
A Hollow Black Ship
Crisis Over the Horse
The Cylinder
News from the Coast
Malaka’s Woes
Sacrifice to Poseidon
New Regime in Carthage
Herakles at the Pillars – The Approach
Herakles at the Pillars – The Departure
East and West
In River Ocean
Historical Note
Major Characters
The only person History would recognise is Hekataios, the Archaic Greek philosopher. All others are fictional.
The Delphis story line
Qart – street boy who ran away from Carthage and left his mother behind.
Dubb – ship’s navigator of renown on the Great Sea. The latest in a long line of famous Phoenician navigators, he is named after a star in Ursa Major. Hekataios, the eminent Miletian philosopher, is his friend from youth, now his master.
Chares – old friend and sailing companion of Dubb’s. A Hellene.
Rabs – sailor from Carthage.
Koragas – skipper of his own vessel, from Thessaly in Hellas. Member of an elite Miletian Academy headed up by Hekataois. Married Nyptan because he needs to be healed and accepted Tanu as his own child.
Nyptan – wife of Koragas, originally from Tyre. All the women in her family have been healers. Their practice reflects the ancient tradition of Sumerian medicine. Her godess, Gula, is associated with dogs. She has been married three times.
Tanu – Nyptan’s daughter by her first husband.
Hekataios – early Greek historian and geographer. Only fragments of his works remain
The Gadir story line
Lord Apsan Asrupal Nimiran – Carthaginian bureaucrat. Educated at military school in Motya, Sicily, he has been in post as Commissioner for Trade in Gadir for too many decades and despises the place.
Tasiioonos of Knutes – slave and lover of Lord Apsan. Born in a poor family in Tartessos, he was educated as temple boy at the great Shrine to Melqart on the Western Sea. Tartessos was the predominant social and political power of the region and traded with Carthage.
Gatit – Lord Apsan’s meek body guard
Adyat – Lord Apsan’s anxious house girl
Lord Arish – High Priest of the famous Temple of Melqart in the Western Sea and rivalrous with Lord Apsan.
Lord Ateban – former High Priest of the Temple of Melqart. Not well.
Ypmatat Palu – an ambitious local spy of Carthaginian heritage.
Arganthonis III – generous monarch of Tartessos. His grandfather was well known in Hellas and donated gold to help protect the Phocaeans, one of the Hellenic tribes.
Esau – accountant sent from Carthage at the end of the tax year. Old student friend of Apsan’s from his Motya days.