Salamis (16 page)

We found it by the busy cries of sea birds and ravens, feasting. We came into the town at sunset, the sky red as blood at our backs, and to my best guess the poor peasants had tried to send a delegation to offer earth and water to the invaders. At least, that’s what it looked like – a tumble of amphorae meant for water, all broken, and two big red clods of Attic earth, dyed redder and browner by the blood of the two young girls who had carried them.

They had died hard. I will not say more … Bah! I remember one young girl had her eyes open, and the whites were still clear, as only young eyes can be, and I hesitated to touch her, to close them, as if I might hurt her. And the sound of the flies everywhere – they assault your senses with a buzz that warns you not to look … too late.

There were bodies throughout the village, a village which was more like the sheds of a big farm or a small estate, really just a crossroads. There was a small shrine, with a middle-aged woman dead across it as deliberate desecration, and six houses, all smouldering, with men lying in the road in fly-swarmed sticky puddles and the smell of cooking flesh to tell us where the rest of the people must have been.

They were, at least most of them, slaves. And the Persians – or Medes or Saka or Egyptians or perhaps even other Greeks – had used them and killed them.

All of us were moved. It was impossible to look on it and not hate. I have seldom hated the Persians. The Persians of my youth were great men. But this was like the rape of a whole land. Done apurpose.

Brasidas stood looking at the two young girls who had carried the earth and water. His face … moved. The muscles of his jaw leaped up and down like a ship on the sea and tears came to his eyes. This, from a Spartan.

‘This is despicable,’ he said.

Ka glanced at the high ridge to the north. I’m going to guess that he had seen more atrocities than I. It is trite to say, but Heraclitus has the right of it: killing in the heat of battle is a very different animal from killing a couple of maidens in a village, much less raping and killing the entire village. A village of slaves. By the rules of war, the Medes might have rounded them all up and carried them away, the same way they took the bronze statues or the silver coins they found.

But they massacred them.

At any rate, Ka said, ‘They are close. The blood is still wet and red.’

Brasidas dropped his shield and spear. He lifted one of the dead girls and carried her, tenderly, to the place where the village shrine was. Hard by it was a small graveyard.

He never gave an order, and neither did Cimon or I, but men found picks and a damaged shovel.

Ka shook his head. ‘They are close,’ he said.

I mastered myself, although the smell of the dead, the burned people in the houses, was in my nose and lingers there to this day. Darkness was coming down fast.

We put out a dozen watchers in the hills around the crossroads and gave them horns. Ka took the archers and hid them along the northern branch of the road.

Two oarsmen broke into the smouldering barn and found that there was food: sausages, and wine jars. The Medes hadn’t even looted. They had merely killed.

When the work of burying the dead, all forty or more of them, was well advanced, I sent half the hoplites back to the ships with Cimon. I was worried that the Medes would attack the ships. I was in a black place and nothing made much sense to me. I slept a little and dreamed of the boy whose soul I sent down to Hades with a sharp knife one dark night on a battlefield in Asia …

When I awoke, Ka had a hand over my mouth.

‘They come,’ he said.

Who knows why they came back. Really, I want them to have been the same men, but perhaps they were another patrol, another group. I can only assume that they smelled our smoke, or saw movement in a valley that should have been dead.

They were careless, riding abroad in the first hour of the day, spread across the northern fields in a long line of perhaps sixty horsemen with more coming on the road.

I had perhaps forty hoplites and a dozen archers. And Brasidas, of course.

They came across the fields at first light and up the road.

We killed all of them we could reach. It was an ambush and there was nothing worthy about the fighting. Nothing I will tell you. We threw our spears into their horses and Ka and his archers dropped them until they broke.

It is what came after of which I will speak.

There were three men taken. All had their horses killed under them.

I wanted to kill them. In fact, the idea that occurred to me was to bury them alive with the corpses of the town they’d massacred.

Or perhaps another group massacred them.

I did not speak to them. One – the youngest – pleaded for his life, to the embarrassment of the other two. They simply waited to be killed.

The marines watched them with a hollow-eyed rage that told them everything.

Ka and his archers went out into the fields to collect their arrows. Only Ka looked at me and shook his head, and made a little noise in his throat.

I would like to say that my urge to destroy these three, to humiliate them and then kill them in their despair, that my urge was defeated by the sayings of my master, Heraclitus, or what I had learned in Sicily about myself and about violence. But in that hour I was merely rage.

The sparkling, gleaming whites of a young corpse’s eyes. The corpse should have been alive.

Bah! I tell this badly. I was in a sort of shock and I wanted blood.

Brasidas walked up to me. His face was … horrible.

‘We,’ he said thickly. The word took him effort. ‘We should let these animals go, before we lower ourselves to what they are.’

It was not at all what I expected him to say.

Will you believe me if I say that the two of us stood still and yet seemed to have trouble breathing?

We made it back to the boats. We had lost one man in the fighting, if cutting down surprised men in an ambush can be called fighting. We boarded our ships, a sullen mass of angry, disheartened men. Many of the oarsmen and even a few marines glowered at me.

I was beginning to breathe. I prayed to Lord Apollo that I had done right, because everything in me screamed that those three Medes should have been killed. But we had, in fact, let them go, and the discipline of the marines had held, although I could tell that Brasidas and I were virtually alone.

But there, on the white sand of the beach, young Pericles came and put his hand on my shoulder. ‘That was brave,’ he said.

Behind him was the Ionian I had seen him talking to on the day the Naxian ship came over to us.

Pericles smiled his too-hard smile. ‘Anaxagoras of Clazomenae,’ he said in introduction. ‘Son of Laertes.’

The young man bowed. ‘Lord Istes spoke highly of you, sir,’ he said. ‘But releasing the barbarians was an act of pure arete.’

I tried to smile, but very little came to my face. In fact, rather than feeling flattered, I felt nothing. Have you ever lost someone you loved? Mother, father, sister? You know that between weeping and recovery there is a time when you feel … nothing. No desire for sex, no desire for war. Nothing.

I was in that place. I felt nothing. My disdain for their youthful arrogance was but a distant echo of my true feeling.

The Ionian man would have said more, but Cimon, close behind him, had better skills in reading me and pushed him along brusquely. ‘Best get aboard your ship, boys,’ he said. He used an offensive word – pais, the same word we use for a juvenile or a slave.

Pericles flashed him a look of undisguised, adolescent anger.

Cimon met his look steadily. ‘Feel free to go back to your precious father,’ he said.

I didn’t understand the reference. I had, by then, been living and fighting alongside the scions of the Athenian noble families for more than fifteen years, but I still barely understood them.

At any rate, we got our ships to sea. It was a pretty day, utterly at odds with the revulsion I felt – that we all felt.

Seckla told me later that Brasidas threw his sword into the sea.

Salamis was crowded and had begun to develop the same smell as the vale of Olympus during the games – part cooking, part sacrifices, part men’s piss. But the place was
alive
, perhaps more thoroughly alive than Attica usually was, because of the crowds. I got my ships ashore and there was almost a quarrel over beaching our Ionian capture, because space on the beaches was at a premium. But Seckla worked a miracle of humble negotiation and convinced one of Xanthippus’s trierarchs to float and re-ground his vessel and so we all had room.

When I saw my people ashore and into their tents – it was excellent to have a pre-built camp and food ready to be served, and I pitied Cimon’s oarsmen, competing with every man in Athens for bread – I walked across the beach to find Xanthippus. I knew of him – oh, I had no doubt shared wine with him somewhere, but I didn’t know him well.

By the time I reached him, his young son was there, speaking in his usual slightly high-pitched, calm, clear voice, an almost unnatural voice for a man so young. He had the young Ionian by him.

He summoned me under an awning with a wave of his hand and a pair of Thracian slaves hurried to place a stool for me and put a cup of wine in my hand. Xanthippus was a big man, with a broad face and heavy muscles. He had the sandy fair hair common in his family and he had humour, which many rich men lack. I knew him as a friend and sometimes ally of Themistocles.

‘Arimnestos of Plataea. My son sings your praises. My wife – a member of the Alcmaeonidae! – sings me your praises.’ He nodded.

I returned his nod. ‘I have come only to thank you for giving me room to beach my spare ship.’

‘Spare!’ Xanthippus laughed. ‘Ah, you are a shame on us, Plataean. You mean, the Ionian ship you took in the very teeth of the Great King’s fleet!’

What does one say? I love praise all too well, and praise from a navarch as famous as Xanthippus was praise indeed. But it was laid too thick.

‘How do we do here?’ I asked, waving my wine familiarly. ‘In council?’

Xanthippus barked a mirthless laugh. ‘Oh, the Corinthians loathe Themistocles. It might be better for us if we had young Cimon represent us, or best of all, Aristides.’

‘He is in exile,’ I said, probably a little too quickly.

‘I know he’s your friend, for all he’s the leader of our opposition,’ Xanthippus said.

Through all this, the two young men stood silently. They had not been offered wine.

‘Your son served with distinction,’ I said. It was true, and besides, I’ve never known a man displeased by praise heaped on his child.

‘Cimon was kind enough to say the same. For myself, I’m still trying to understand why my son would go to sea with a pirate in a fleet of oligarchs rather than his own father.’ His bluff face filled with colour.

He was
actually
angry, not merely pretending.

‘Can’t you let men praise me for once, Father, and not you?’ Pericles said.

‘Can’t you tell the difference between a man who fights for his country and a killer who fights to steal other men’s gold?’ Xanthippus shot back.

Well. I rose to my feet and put my cup in the hands of a slave.

Xanthippus turned. ‘Please – I apologise for my rudeness and my son’s. A family quarrel is the most embarrassing thing in which to be caught.’

I managed a smile. ‘I too have children,’ I said. ‘Truly, I have another errand and sought only to thank you.’

Xanthippus turned on his son. ‘You have humiliated me in front of a man of consequence. Go to your tent and leave this effeminate Ionian to his own devices.’

These were not words I’d choose to speak to my own child, in front of witnesses or even alone. In a few sentences, Xanthippus, who had a fine reputation as a sailor, had given me the impression of a hollow man: a man for whom appearances mattered more than anything.

Pericles stood his ground. ‘He is not effeminate; really, Father, that’s a foolish insult, more suited to a man my age than yours. And if anyone here is offensive, it is you. Oligarchs and pirates? You have, in effect, just insulted your own guest. Few men are more frequently called pirates than our well-beloved Arimnestos of Plataea.’

He was deadly, with his calm voice, pitched not for beauty but for ease of hearing. You have to imagine that Pericles told his father and every oarsman within a hundred paces that he was a fool.

I thought perhaps Xanthippus would explode.

And then a woman appeared. She was no kore, but a mature woman of my own age or a year or two older, strong and tall. She wore a fine blue chiton pinned in gold and her feet were bare for walking on sand, which gave her a touch of informality. She’d thrown a woman’s himation over her chiton for decency. Athenian noblewomen did go out in public, then, but Salamis had made life even more informal. You cannot live on a beach and piss in a common latrine without a certain breakdown of the barriers of class.

I had never seen her, but one look at her and I knew she was of the Alcmaeonidae. She had Cleitus’s black brows and high forehead and his arrogance stamped around her mouth. But where Xanthippus’s arrogance rested on the soft sand of fear – fear of his status, I’d guess – Agariste’s arrogance rested on the bedrock of wealth, position and a solid belief in her own worth.

She flashed me a very private smile. It was all the apology I was ever to receive for the embarrassment of being privy to the family quarrel, but it was well done. Then her head turned – gracefully.

‘My dear husband,’ she said. ‘Of course our guest is anxious to depart! His daughter is over the ridge with the girls from Brauron. My niece says she is a very accomplished dancer.’

Her
only
acknowledgement of the difficulties of the scene, besides her presence, of course, was a single look at her son, Pericles. Their eyes met and she just lifted one eyebrow.

What she said in that lifted eyebrow I could read, as clearly as if my own mother had done it. ‘
Really? Must you provoke your father in front of a famous guest who might be accounted an enemy of our clan?’
All this in one eyebrow.