My bench mate Didymus says we should make the beach this time tomorrow. Wouldn’t that be something! Ithaca at last, and only ten years late!
But I say “Ithaca, mythaca!” I’ll believe it when I’m standing on dry land, lugging a full rucksack, with the Captain’s silver jingling in my purse, and the innkeeper grinning as he sees me coming. Bet he’d grin the other side around though if he knew it was his pretty wife I’m back for, not his sour wine!
Didymus is such a trusting soul. I’m not blaming him. It’s just his nature. I point to that greasy calm spot on the sea, maybe half a league ahead, where a funny string of bubbles slowly swirls—like something big, a sea monster or maybe Poseidon himself, is waiting for us, circling below, just out of sight, about to rise. To me it looks like trouble. Someone ought to warn the Captain. We’ve been close to home before and lost it all—more times than I like to remember.
But Didymus just shrugs. He’s never been the same since that witch bitch Circe made a swine of him. She did the same to all of us, of course, but in his case it STUCK. Take how he smells for instance. He was never what you’d call cleanly, Didymus wasn’t; but now he’s really appalling! I tell you, it’s no treat pulling next to him on a warm day! And from a man like me who’s known nothing but ships and soldiering for 20 years, that’s saying something!

Then there’s the way he grunts in his sleep. And the fact that he’ll eat anything in sight without complaining—swill the rest of us would gag on and spit out, he gulps down without a murmur.

When I point to the bubbles ahead of us in that glassy patch of sea, he just says “Who made you lookout today? Bubbles only mean we’re close to land. Shut up and row!”

“Shut up and row!” That’s the story of my life—the last ten years of it anyway. Before that it was “Stand and fight!” That was another ten years. Or, well, only eight, actually. Didymus and I weren’t with the first wave. We were what the officers like to call “reinforcements”—sounds so much better than “substitutes.” Too depressing back home to mention the mounds of dead bodies piled up for burning on the beach beside that Goddess-damned Trojan wall—twice as tall as a pine tree. Not that you SAW any pine trees on that fornicating plain! By the time we got there— “induced to volunteer”, not “conscripted” mind you—anyhow, by then all the big trees had been chopped for cooking fires, the little ones whittled into spear shafts, and the bushes stripped of leaves to feed the chariot horses—those who could still stand.

You don’t see many horses sailing back from Troy, do you? Butchered for meat in the hard times, or nobbled in the fighting, and the best ones sacrificed to Athena or some other greasy-chinned deity for luck in the fighting, or a fair wind home. War is no way to treat an animal. I was a farmer once, and I know. No way to treat a MAN either, come to that.

Some DO seem to like it though—officers mostly, like the Captain. He’s had his fun; I can tell you! Feasts, loot, women—always his pick of the captives for his couch-mates, and now and then even a princess or a queen, when the local ruler was sidelined, or not too particular.

I don’t begrudge him his pleasure, mind. Given the chance, every man of us would do the same. And he’s a worker too, the Captain is. He’ll bend his back to an oar if we’re short-handed or heave the heaviest bundle overboard in a storm—even if it’s his own booty dropping into Poseidon’s wet lap.
And he’s crafty, too. He comes up with ideas that save lots of time and work. Better still, his stratagems give a man hope and keep us all active, when we’d otherwise likely just sit there moaning with our faces in our hands, or shitting ourselves with fear, and generally making life harder for ourselves—not to mention the other poor devils we’re trapped with.
Not my bench mate Didymus though. He’s eternally hopeful and trusts the Captain completely. “Let the Captain deal with it. He’ll know what to do.” That’s his motto, old Didymus. And, sure enough, sooner or later, the Captain DOES deal with things. So maybe a few of us die or get left behind on the beach as we rush to the ships in the general panic, but somehow the Captain always keeps us together and pulling. It’s thanks to him that we’re a crew and not just a mob—or more likely a pile of bleached bones by the cave of that man-eating freak of a giant with one big eye. “The big guy with the big eye! Ha! How about that, Didymus? Witty, huh?
“Shut up and row!”

What’d I tell you? No sense of poetry, our Didymus. Once a swine, always a swine.

But sometimes I wish that the Captain weren’t so devious. Keep it simple, I say. Work hard and sleep sound—that’s how I was raised. I don’t hold with this constant wheeling and dealing, courting favor, outrageous flattering, scheming and downright deception.

But who knows? Maybe you have to be that way when you’re born into a noble family. Look how casually they kill each other off. And the love affairs! This whole fornicating war only happened because randy prince Paris’s planned one-night-stand went a little overboard. It’s not healthy living cooped up in a palace—fathers messing with daughters, brothers with sisters, and those moony minstrels always strolling about warbling their make-believe tales about perfect love.

Mind you, the women know better. I guess girls learn pretty early what love really means. But oh, how we men lap it up! We’re the real romantic fools. No matter where we are, any hour of the day or night, we’re always ready to give into lust. If you ask me, half the time we’re in love with love itself—a flash of joy that’s over almost before it begins and hardly ever lives up to your expectations. Our real trouble is that we don’t want reality, we want perfection; and whenever we don’t get it (which is always) we’re damned liable to turn mean and start a fight.

What I started to say though was I just wish sometimes the Captain’d think less and deal straighter. When he starts scratching that curly black beard of his and staring out to sea, he’s not just hunting fleas! He’s planning something, and that means someone will probably die, and most often it’s one of us who does the dying.

I wonder, was the Captain always this way? Or did he start out normal—like me and Didymus here? We deal straight whenever circumstances allow, and when they don’t, we reach quickly for something heavy or sharp to fight our way out of whatever mess we’re in. What do you want to bet that early on he got into some jam that he couldn’t buy or fight his way out of and that’s when he got the notion that fast thinking and clever talk could save his hide better than fighting or bribes?

Look at him there, with his finely trimmed beard and his flashy armor. He goes striding through life like he owned it. And maybe he does! He owns US sure enough, –owns our lives—and spends ’em like copper coins—the small change of adventure.

That time he had us tie him to the mast and stuffed our ears with wax—he was playing with our lives then right enough. Normally if you don’t jump when he gives the word, he’ll string you up so fast you’ll think you’ve sprouted wings. But this time he tells us to disregard anything he says. But starting when; and for how long? He doesn’t say that does he?

So there he is, trussed up good and tight, but comfortable, you know. Some actually like it. I knew this girl once who always wanted me to. . .well, anyway. . .there he IS, and all of us rowing for dear life and trying not to notice how he’s jabbering and yelling hour after hour. By this time the rocks are far behind and we think maybe the game is over, and the Captain’s got a cramp, or needs to piss or something, and we’re nudging one another and wondering what to do, but we’re all afraid it’s as much as our lives are worth to pull the wax out and hear what he’s actually saying.

We rowed on like that for hours, ’til one of us fell asleep at his oar, rolled off the bench, and accidentally knocked his wax earplug loose enough to hear the Captain (by this time hoarse and practically dead from exhaustion) pleading for a drop of water. That’s what his smart thinking got him.

And do you know, he actually had the watchman flogged for not spotting the secret sign he gave to be let free—wiggling both of his big toes at once. Some secret sign! It was night by then. How could anyone see the Captain wiggle his big toes in the dark? I ask you, Didymus—was that reasonable? Was that fair?

“Will you shut up and row?”

“All right, Didymus. All right. Look I’m rowing!”

No democrat, our Didymus. What does he care if the ruling families abuse and exploit us? They treat their hunting dogs better than us. But a fat lot old Didymus cares. It’s his arse they plant their boot in, and his tongue that makes sure the boot’s polished clean for the next kick.

I doubt things’ll ever get better. Not unless someone DOES something for once—like push the Captain overboard. I wonder how many of us would dare to do it? Not Didymus of course. But among the rest of us, how many? Would I? What if I did? Right now, before we hit that patch of bubbles up ahead?

I could. I really could. It would be easy. I’m the inboard man on this bench. Just need to stand up, take three running steps, get a grip on the Captain’s sword arm with one hand, grab his leg just below the peplum with the other, and alley-oop he’s over the gunwale! If his heavy armor didn’t drag him straight to the bottom, all those oars pounding down on his head for sure would put him under and keep him there.

Then what? The other officers are dead. There’s only ordinary crewmen left like myself. And Didymus. That’s right, though. Men like Didymus. Men who LIKE to row, DON’T like to think, and DEFINITELY don’t like sudden changes. They’d do me in for certain and only miss the Captain when they got ashore and found no one there to pay them.

And anyway, we’ve reached the bubbles now. They’re all around us. Oh well. . . .