Salamis (14 page)

‘Greece!’ called a rower.

I leaned down into the oar decks. ‘Will you row for Greece?’ I roared.They were pressed men – always an error in a sea fight – and among the top-deck rowers were men who knew me and one or two I remembered from happier days.

I kept my marines aboard. I was too old to take chances on trust.

I waved to Leukas and summoned Seckla to take the helm. The Lesbian helmsman protested, but I ordered him to sit down on the deck and put Seckla into the steering rig, and then Cimon – a Cimon with a bad sunburn and dark circles under his eyes – was calling from under my lee.

We bellowed back and forth like fishwives. But when he understood, we all turned broadside on to the rising waves, something we didn’t think the Ionians would attempt, and we ran east.

Ran is probably the wrong word. We crept east for a few stades and then we raised sail and ran north and east, and then, when we felt safe, at the edge of darkness, we lowered our sails and rowed along the coast of Euboea. We landed on the first good beach we could find and lit no fires. It was a long, bad night.

But as Cimon said, while drinking my wine, it was not a night he’d expected to live to see.

As soon as there was enough light to navigate, we got off the beach, unfed, and rowed south. That was a hard morning, and fifteen stades rowing into that damned south wind without food used up my poor Ionians.

But by noon, in lowering skies and rising seas, I got them all onto the beaches below Megalos and we landed with two thousand hungry men.

There are many ways people supported the cause of Greek freedom. That village on Megalos didn’t supply a single row boat for the fleet, but by Heracles and Demeter, they fed every man that day, and again the next morning – a whole winter’s worth of salt fish and sheep and goats, consumed in a day. Bless them. When we piled back into our ships, every man had enough food in him to row home to Salamis and enough wine to have made the night before passable.

The Persian fleet stayed the night on the beaches at Makri and Marathon – there must have been officers who remembered their last adventure there. Certainly Archilogos had been at Marathon. And they waited there – it’s a fine anchorage – until their supply ships caught them up.

I wish I could say that Cimon and I caught all their supplies emerging from the narrows and carried them off, but our crews were tired and Cimon was disheartened by ten days of raids and ambushes that had lost him a ship and gained him very little. He had made captures and lost them again; he had sunk a pair of merchantmen, but suspected they’d been empty, already unloaded.

Sometimes it does seem that Tyche and Ares are the same god.

The seventh day out from Salamis came up in a red dawn of wrath and we stayed on our beaches, ate our barley soup and mutton, and drank the last of the wine. My Lesbian crew were unsure of their status, somewhere between volunteers and prisoners, and they murmured. I spent the day sitting with them and I wished I had Harpagos or Herk or any of my other Aeolian friends – living or dead. It was, besides them, a very
Athenian
beach.

What I mean by that, my honeys, is that the Athenians, despite everything, or perhaps because of it, were growing rather more than less cocky and self-assured. I had just had a cup of wine with Theognis, the helmsman of the
Naiad
, our capture. He seemed a little too eager – there was something about him I didn’t quite like, but then, I’ve never been a captive on a potentially hostile beach, trying to plead my loyalty to my new masters.

As usual, I digress. Cimon came, wrapped in a himation that was never going to grace a party in Athens or any other city that prized cleanliness. His timing was perfect – I was just rising from my folding seat and Eugenios had just picked up the stool and slapped it closed.

‘Walk with me,’ I said.

Cimon grinned. It was the phrase his father had used when he had matters of import – and usually, crime – to impart.

I laughed. ‘No, I didn’t mean it like that,’ I said.

Cimon looked back at the Lesbians. ‘I sometimes find it difficult to believe that we tried to fight a war on their behalf.’

I nodded. ‘I love Eressos,’ I said. ‘But there is a soft-handed entitlement to them.’ I shrugged. ‘On the other hand, I don’t have a Persian garrison in the citadel of my city.’ I paused, as if struck. ‘Oh, by Zeus! I do!’ I slapped my forehead in disgust.

Cimon smiled, and looked like his father. ‘By now, no doubt I do, too.’ He looked back at the Aeolians. ‘Let’s be fair, the Lesbians fought like lions at Lade.’

I looked back at them too. ‘I wonder …’

Cimon raised an eyebrow.

‘Just the thoughts of an old man,’ I said. ‘Have you ever thought that courage erodes, little by little, fight by fight? Yesterday, when I had to leap from my ship to theirs …’ I looked away in embarrassment. ‘I hesitated. In fact, I find it gets harder and harder to find that spirit – the daimon
.’

Cimon nodded and spread his hands. ‘What can I say? My father loved you, but he thought you Ares-mad, a war child. If he were here, he might say you were … more a man and less a madman.’ He met my eye and gave me a surprisingly gentle smile. ‘I now fear
every
time I leap.’ After this admission, he looked away.

We were silent a long time.

‘But yes – age – life is sweet,’ he spoke softly.

‘Eualcides – do you remember him? The Euboean?’

‘My father spoke of him. I never met him. A famous hero.’ Cimon nodded.

‘He said the same about running.’

We didn’t need to say more.

The waves pounded the beach and the rain began; I wished I had my himation.

I remembered why I had started this hare.

‘I only meant to say that perhaps the Aeolians are, as a race, like men – brave men – whose courage has been tried too often, and now they are shattered. They fought brilliantly at Lade – and got beaten. They fought like lions in defence of their island – and they were massacred, and their women sold as slaves. Perhaps they have been beaten too often.’

‘Perhaps their bravest few are dead. The Killers of Men.’ Cimon shrugged. ‘I owe you for yesterday. I don’t know if we’d have made it or not.’

I shrugged. ‘I will remember it fondly for many years to come,’ I said. ‘After we beat the Persians.’

‘By Poseidon and Ajax my ancestor,’ Cimon said. ‘You are a slap of cold seawater on my depression. You think we can win?’

I bobbed my head back and forth – really, not my most attractive habit, but I do. Hah! You laugh. I laugh too.

‘Of course we can win!’ I said, with more eagerness than the prior conversation might have led him to expect.

‘I want to believe,’ Cimon said. ‘Please convince me.’ He sat against a rock, a reasonably dry rock, under the cliff. I looked up at a pair of boulders that seemed to be held in place by nothing but the hands of the gods and thought that if the gods intended two of the best trierarchs of the Greek fleet to die here, then that was that. I snuggled in beside him.

‘You bring any wine?’ he asked. He winked at Eugenios, who stood in the light rain. ‘Oh, by all the gods, Eugenios, fetch us some wine and I’ll give you a share of the shelter.’

Eugenios smiled. Slaves are seldom spoken to directly by men like Cimon, members of the old nobility. But in that month, in that year, we were all in the fight together and such things mattered less. I had virtually forgotten that Eugenios was a slave and that thought struck me with some guilt. I, who have been a slave twice, knew that while I might forget, he would
never
forget.

He ran off. ‘I should free him,’ I said.

‘He’s rowing for you and he’s your steward?’ Cimon laughed. ‘Too valuable to be freed. Want to sell him? I could use a steward who could also row.’

Sometimes Cimon could be a rich fool, like anyone.

‘The Persians,’ I said.

‘Yes. I love your confidence. But I don’t share it. I spent eight days running and fighting, running and fighting. I left little messages in all the harbours along Boeotia, all the cliff faces, inviting the Ionians to come over to us. So did Themistocles, along the Euboean shore. Not one of them changed sides. You know what I saw every day, every god-cursed day? More ships join the Great King’s fleet. Thirty, the first day. Thirty!’ He shook his head.

Eugenios came trotting back. It came into my head then: something for the gods, something about Greek freedom, something about who we were and what we were fighting for.

He had my old canteen – a piece of ceramic with the feet broken off, missing a side-lug, that had been dropped on a dozen decks and never split. It didn’t look like much, but I loved it.

I poured a libation onto the rain-drenched sand and it looked like blood. ‘To Zeus, the god of kings and princes and free men, and to you, Eugenios, who I make a free man with this libation to the gods. I sacrifice this man’s slavery that Greece may be free.’

I drank and handed the canteen to Cimon. He straightened up. ‘Arimnestos, you are—’ he laughed. ‘To Eugenios, the very prince of stewards. To your freedom. And to Poseidon, Earth Shaker, Lord of Stallions and the Sea, witness his freedom, and give Athens fair winds.’

He handed the canteen to Eugenios, who drank it and burst into tears. ‘I was born free,’ he admitted. ‘Indeed – oh, bless you, my lord.’

‘I’ll see to it you are made a citizen of Plataea if we survive all this.’ I was gruff. I had not expected hard-eyed Eugenios, terror of my slaves and lord of my household, to weep.

I think that, in truth, I hate slavery. Oh, I have a phalanx of slaves, do I not? But I free them, too. Some men are better and some are worse, that much I acknowledge. But enough better to own another?

I’ve
been
a slave.

Eugenios wouldn’t snuggle into the cleft with us. His ideas of social station were stronger than Cimon’s. Mock if you will.

I stepped out into the blowing spray and rain, and threw my chiton over my arm like a boy training to be an orator. ‘Hear me, oh Cimon,’ I said.

He laughed and drank my wine.

‘First, before I deliver my argument, let us set the course of our own judging. Are there, on all the seas, any two men who have faced the Persians and the Phoenicians and the Egyptians more often than we?’ I asked.

‘My father,’ he said. ‘Miltiades. And perhaps that prig Aristides. And your friend Diodorus of Massalia, for all that I loathe him.’

‘Better than we? Or merely the same,’ I asked. ‘Your father I allow.’

‘Then I shan’t quibble,’ Cimon, son of Miltiades, said with a smile. ‘We have faced them most often.’

‘And does that not make us, in the matter of fighting the Persians at sea, the wisest?’ I raised a hand to forestall argument. ‘If perhaps we had been beaten often, I’d confess that the frequency of our fighting was worthless, but you and I have more often than not triumphed.’

Cimon nodded. ‘You want me to agree, and of course I do. But I’m sure that Pythagoras would debate with you whether the frequency of our contact or even our triumph had anything to do with wisdom.’

‘He might, but let’s remember that he was against eating bacon and beware,’ I said, and Cimon roared.

‘You have missed your calling, my friend. You should go stand in the agora and preach like a sophist
.
’ He winked at Eugenios.

I was play-acting, mostly to raise his humour. ‘Very well then, I’ll pass on the agora, which today is probably full of Persian Immortals uncaring of my heights of wisdom, and we’ll agree that you and I are as fit to judge the capability of the Great King’s fleet as any two men.’

Cimon laughed again. ‘I have that sinking feeling I get when I listen to Aristides make a speech in which he wins every point but makes all the undecided men hate him, and our party,’ he said.

‘Very well, then. Here is why we will defeat the Great King’s fleet,’ I said. ‘First, and simplest, because we have done so already, not once but twice.’

Cimon bit his lip. ‘But they have replaced their losses and then some.’

‘Have they replaced their hearts?’ I asked. ‘By your own admission you kept the sea eight days with ten ships facing all of them – and they only managed to take one of yours while you sank, crippled or captured five.’

He shrugged. ‘So? What is five ships among a thousand?’

‘Answer me this, doubter! If one single Ionian ship had come into our beaches at Artemisium and offered a fight or tried a raid, how many ships would have launched and fought her?’

He winced. ‘A hundred.’

‘Yet you went right in off their beaches,’ I said. ‘They are afraid.’

Cimon shrugged. ‘I want to believe you.’

‘The Ionians are probably the weakest part of their fleet,’ I asserted.

Cimon shook his head. ‘The best and worst,’ he said. ‘There are fine captains and ships among them. Don’t go beak to beak with the Queen of Halicarnassus – Artemisia.’ He stroked his beard. ‘There’s a woman with a fine helmsman. They say she’s Xerxes’ Greek mistress. I’m not sure.’

‘But the ship we took yesterday?’ I asked.

‘Not very good,’ he admitted.

‘Yet it was
leading
the chase for your ships, while the Phoenicians and the Egyptians – who have every reason to hate the Great King – lagged well back in the narrows.’ I waved at the Lesbians, sitting disconsolately in the rain. ‘What am I to make of that?’

Cimon laughed. ‘You are persuasive,’ he said, laughing. He almost sounded … guilty.

‘My last piece of evidence requires only that you believe me,’ I said. ‘Yesterday, when I came out of the morning sun into their flank, I saw them cringe.’

‘You took everyone by surprise,’ he said.

‘First, most of their ships, more then twenty ships, turned a point or two
away,’
I said. ‘Then, when three of their ships turned out of the general chase, the rest used the time they bought to get closer to the coast. None of them was trained well enough to manoeuvre at close range against me, and in fact all their hulls are wet through and slow.’ I grinned like the wolf I am at times. ‘I had them in speed, in tactics, in rowing quality,
and they knew it.
They were like boys facing men.
And that was their best.
’