“More than you do, I’ll warrant. Do you realise, Ephorus, that on a tin-trading ship you have not only the elements, the wind and the waves, lightning and thunder against you, but your own ship’s master? The secret is so valuable, so precious, that men swear to keep it, even if it costs them their lives.”
“How do you know so much about it?”
“Never mind that. I know. I could, but I won’t, give you the name of a shipmaster who, finding that he was followed by a spy ship, marking his course, deliberately ran his ship aground. Half his crew died, drowned; he and those who remained with him walked for a month through Iberia and many more died of starvation and exhaustion. He survived—and he was rewarded; a ship had been lost and many men had died; but the secret had been kept and that was all that mattered. I know,” she said, reaching out and taking his hand and beginning to weave her smooth white fingers with his, ‘that set in the scales against possible profit a man’s life weighs lightly anywhere, but in the tin trade it does not weigh at all. The tin ships are in the charge of men who set no value on themselves, much less on their crew.
He thought that she exaggerated. In his time he had known several reckless men, but they were, really, men who trusted their luck and were inwardly sure that the risks they seemed to take were not risks at all. A deliberately self-destructive man he had never yet encountered; frankly he doubted whether such a one existed. Men owned ships for profit, and other men sailed them for pay. True, the whole of the tin trade was a mystery, but he could not believe that any ship’s master would sacrifice his life to preserve his secret.
However, Dorcas appeared to believe it and to lift the look of trouble from her face he said:
“Why are we talking about the tin ships? That may be one way to make money, but I know another, and much safer, way.”
“What is it?”
“That is a secret, too.” And though she teased him and tried to trick him into telling her he remained obdurate. Had he been quick-witted
enough to invent a believable story—believable to awoman of her intelligence—he would have told it; so he teased her back, saying that she knew too much already and that no woman could keep a secret. Then he came back to his original question; if he were lucky and returned with enough money to hire a house and buy a slave, would she marry him ?
She looked at him, her eyes very clear between their artificially darkened lashes, their artificially lustrous lids.
“You are absurd,” she said, “And very young, and very sweet.”
“Good enough to wait for?”
“Oh, I shall be here,” she said.
“I shall be here when you return, and we’ll talk of it then. How long will this mysterious, profitable voyage take?”
“It could be a year,” he said, knowing nothing about it but feeling that in the circumstances it was better to guess at too long a time, rather than too short a one.
“A year. To me that will seem a short time. Did you know that, Ephorus? As one gathers years, each one seems shorter than the last.” She put her hands on either side of his head, digging the tips of her fingers into the crisp close curls.
“Swear to me,” she said, ‘that you are not embarking upon any dangerous or difficult enterprise.”
“I swear that. It’s a simple easy way of making money which would cease to be profitable if more people knew about it. And you will wait for me?”
“If, during this voyage which will last a year, you promise to think over what I have said. And promise to consider yourself free; not bound in any way to a woman who would make a bad, barren wife.”
He said, “You are the one woman in the world for me. As for children; you can buy them, you know, in any market, choosing the sex, the size and shape, the age, even the disposition that you prefer. In Delos I saw children with labels about their necks; one label read “This boy bites if provoked”. He fetched a good price.”
“Oh, why must we bother about the future?” she asked.
“To go, to stay, to wait upon the morrow, which the gods hold in their careless hands. This is now, and you are here and I am here. Let us make the most of the moment that is ours.”
So they made love once again, in the small, pretty, scented room. And then he had gone straight out and sold himself into the tin trade.
The place that one sailed for was called the unknown destination; the world’s end; the hidden place. And before he was accepted he had to subject himself to a strict inquisition, ominous in its implications and very enlightening. When he emerged from it he knew why the shipmaster whom Dorcas had mentioned had wrecked his ship rather than allow himself to be spied upon and followed—his family was his hostage. The tin-traders had a monopoly and they guarded it unscrupulously; no man ever took ship on this enterprise without knowing that not only his life was at stake, but the life of someone beloved.
In the office where Ephorus offered himself, the man asked why he wished to make this venture; and he gave an honest answer; he wished to make money, so that he could marry. Marry whom? He gave her name, just as every other man who sailed for the unknown destination, had given the name of someone who mattered to him.
“Come back tomorrow,” the man in the office had said; and when, on the next day Ephorus presented himself, he knew that there had been a check, to make sure that Dorcas existed and was there, in Byblos, easily available, to be tortured, killed, if he should fail in any way, or should utter an indiscreet word. Tin was the most important commodity, scarcer than gold, and the few Phoenicians who held the trade in their hands knew the value of the secret.
The man in the office was quite blunt, as he could afford to be.
“A complaint,” he said, ‘or a misplaced question, a comment, a hint, an unconsidered word, and …” He made the gesture of a man slashing a knife across a throat.
Ephorus thought—With other men, no doubt he makes different gestures; Dorcas is particularly vulnerable in this respect. Any man with a knife could enter that house…. He said, “I understand; no complaints, I promise; no question, no loose talk.”
“Very well. You are hired. Take this.” He handed Ephorus asmall clay tablet, with, inset on its upper side, a tiny thread of tin, not much thicker than a hair and in length the eighth of a man’s thumb, ‘to Appolodorus, on the Dido.”
When he handed the clay tablet to Appolodorus that stout cheerful man had said, “Oh. One in two hundred! Well, boy, if we’re lucky you won’t be able to buy up Byblos when we get back, but you should have what it would take you ten years to earn in any other trade.”
And that was exactly what the dockside whisper had said-one voyage on a tin ship paid as well as ten in any other kind. Ephorus, settling down amongst his fellows, all for some reason desperate and committed men, thought of the little houses, the busy slave, and Dorcas, enshrined.
He had known, for this was common talk in all the ports, that voyages made to the secret place were not very pleasant. Ships that went in search of tin faced unimaginable dangers, places where the sea was a sheet of flame and sails scorched; places where two-headed monsters rose from the sea and crunched a ship in their jaws; places where there were women with snakes for hair, and kisses that were irresistible and fatal.
He’d heard all the stories; discounting some and believing others, he had been prepared to risk all for Dorcas’ sake. When he had been aboard Dido for a short time he began to suspect that old seamen were paid to sit about in taverns and tell such discouraging tales. Dido sailed due west, holding roughly to a course that he knew; but she did not go south to Carthage, or north to Marsala. Soon they were in waters farther west than any he had known, but the sea was not on fire and there were no snake-haired women. Finally they came to a place of which Ephorus had heard but which he had never seen, the Pillars of Hercules as it was called, where the known sea ended in a narrow passage between high escarpments, Calpe and Abyla. This was, to sailors, the end of the world. But not to Appolodorus. He pressed on, through the straits and into the sea beyond, which was ordinary sea, though rougher than any Ephorus had yet sailed. And—this was what Ephorus, years later in Bethlehem, remembered—there was no sun. They moved now between a grey sea and a grey sky, a curious twilit world. Soon they took a northerly course and then, turning East, headed for the land which lay, tiger-coloured, on their starboard side, but they did not make port. They anchored and a swarm of little boats came out from the tawny land, boats manned by men with Phoenician faces, clothes and tongues. This, then, Ephorus said to himself, is the unknown destination, the source of tin. But he was wrong. What the swarming boats carried were fresh supplies of perishable foodstuffs, meat, vegetables, fruit and cheese. With stores replenished, they headed out into such a sea as Ephorus had never imagined, a sea which—by a fine irony-took away the appetite of even the most hardened. The grey sea reared and tumbled, and every wave bore a crest of white foam which often blew free and with the wind behind it stung faces and hands. Dido plunged and rolled and every man in her, even Appolodorus, was grimly sick; the wind flung foam, and rain, and worse than rain, small pieces of ice at the sick, dizzy, reeling men who manned the tortured ship. But she survived, and so did they, and presently the seas smoothed out, the wind eased, the belly muscles ceased their spasmodic contractions, and Appolodorus, his face coloured as no human face should be, green around the mouth and purple around the eyes, said, “We’ve made the Bay. And that is what we’re paid for.”