Salamis (21 page)

It was
terrifying.

The Persians on the enemy deck were higher. They were noblemen in scale armour – men like my friend Cyrus, bred from birth to shoot straight and tell the truth.

But they were all together in a huddle in the stern because of the Ionian’s design with high sides and only a catwalk amidships.

I’m guessing they’d never faced a trihemiolia before. My half-deck was perfect for archery, and the low bulwarks nonetheless provided some cover.

It was the grimmest archery duel I have ever witnessed, made more chilling because I could cover my archer but I could do nothing to strike at the enemy. When you are shot at without the means to reply, you are in a different position from a man facing mere combat.

We passed the length of that ship in perhaps five breaths. In that time, I don’t think I breathed at all.

This is what I saw.

A Persian leaned out over his stern to shoot down into our amidships. He killed an oarsman but, luckily, the man’s oar was in.

Ka killed the Persian, putting an arrow into the man’s back.

Pye, the tallest of the Nubians, shot almost straight up into a second Persian and hit him and the man collapsed back, but a third Persian drove an arrow down into Pye’s neck, killing him instantly. Ka’s second arrow caught the third Persian, again in the back, and then we were helm to helm for a moment – side by side, the two ships not quite colliding, all the oars in on both sides.

Ka and the Persian loosed together, ten feet apart. The arrow went through my aspis, splinters exploded off the inside, and Ka went down, his face all blood. The arrow went into the top of my thigh, but I wear leg armour and it did not penetrate the bronze.

I threw my spear.

A woman knocked it down.

There was no hiding that she was a woman. She was tall and strong and she wore a fine thorax of bronze that had been fitted perfectly to her very obvious woman’s breasts. I had never seen such a thing.

I had the sense to get my aspis up as we blew past her, which was as well, because she threw my spear back at me. I batted the spear down onto the deck with my aspis. My left hand hurt, but the rest of me was intact.

It was one of my best spears. No need to drop it into the ocean.

Then we were past them. I looked back around the swan of the stern, heedless of the arrows that might have flown, but there were none. She
was
a woman, a tall woman in a plumed helmet, and she was pushing her way into the steering oars where the oarsman had apparently been killed, and then I lost her behind the curve of the swan as she began to scream orders in Greek.

Artemisia, Queen of Halicarnassus. I’m sure you know all about her. Well, there she was, the most bloodthirsty of the Great King’s captains. But we’d cleared her deck of archers and we’d killed her helmsman, which had a curious result I’ll share with you later.

For the immediate future, she yawed suddenly to the north to avoid our grapnels – we weren’t, in fact, throwing any. Hipponax had a Persian arrow through his aspis and his left bicep and Brasidas was cutting the head off and pushing it through. Achilles, son of Simonides, was down, with blood all over the deck, and three of my oarsmen were dead or maimed; as vicious an exchange as I’ve ever seen.

I looked down at Ka. To my joy, he was plucking splinters out of his face. One was through both cheeks. But he had not lost an eye and he was far from dead.

Close abeam, Aristides was turning back into the open sea, due south. He had the wind in his great mainsail and he had some sort of temporary steering oar out, a normal pulling oar tied to the rail. Together, the two sufficed to bring his head round, and the wind on the sail and the long side of his ship gave him considerable speed.

I saw his stern, crowded with men packed close like a tub of new-caught sardines. I knew then what must have happened: he was raising his bow by pushing the stern down, and that meant he’d opened a seam.

Poseidon!

That was the longest hour I’d known in some years. We ran south on the wind and Leukas got our sail, laid ready to the spar, up the mainmast in record time, and followed Aristides across the Saronic Gulf. Behind us, the Great King’s ships fell behind, but as we sailed south the northern horizon became
filled
with the Great King’s ships. They were still pouring off the beaches, and we watched Artemisia abandon the chase and turn west, and even saw the rest of her Ionian squadron close around her before we sunk them over the rim of the world. The whole Persian fleet was off the beaches and moving.

Leukas watched with me, under his hand. He shook his head. ‘They can’t all be coming for us,’ he said.

Odd, given the way they’d refused engagement, but the Egyptians stayed with us longest, and there were a fair number of them. But as the sun reached its highest point in the sky, the Egyptians also turned west. We gradually left them behind.

But, best we could make out in the sunny autumn haze, the whole Persian fleet was forming an enormous line at the mouth of the Bay of Salamis and we were off their left or port-side flank. Only when we left them all over the horizon did we turn west across the seas, which by then, just after midday, even though every one of us felt as if it had been a month since morning, were calm and gentle.

Aristides and all his crew bailed as if the Furies were aboard them. I could do little more than hang off his starboard rail and hope to save what could be saved.

I won’t repeat a dozen frustrating shouted conversations, but eventually we understood that he could not point any nearer the wind than due west – and that he was running for Aegina before his ship sunk under him.

It looked to me as if the Persians were forming for a fight. It was an afternoon of anguish, for over the horizon to the north the Great King’s fleet was offering battle to the league. Would they fight? By Poseidon, I was missing the great contest!

But Aristides, that prig, some might say, was the best man I knew.

We prepared what we could to lighten ship suddenly.
Lydia
had a dozen contrivances to make her a better ship – one of them was a small bricked-in hearth forward of the boat-sail mast, and we prepared to heave that over the side, as well as armour, weapons, and spares. If Aristides foundered, he’d have two hundred men desperate for life in the water – veteran men, and our friends, too.

Aside from preparing for disaster, there was little we could do but watch and fret and speculate about what was happening to the north. I looked at my son’s wound, but Brasidas had done a thorough job and he’d even come up with honey to put in the bloody slit. My boy behaved well – his head was high and he swore he was ready to fight again. Hector hovered about and looked miserable.

We’d run Attica under the horizon long before, lost the last Egyptian, and there was a high, blue sky almost without clouds, and we were alone on an empty ocean just a parasang from the largest fleet in history.

West we ran, and west, losing our northing as the world’s wind blew us farther south despite our best efforts. But along toward early afternoon, we sighted Aegina, and as the day began to wane we got
Athena Nike
on one of that island’s beaches, bow first, as gently as could be managed. As soon as the sail came down, Aristides’ magnificent ship began to take water, so that for a heart-stopping moment we thought we might lose her before we got her bow on the beach. Both our crews went ashore and dragged the
Nike
up the gravel.

Aristides shook his head in sadness – and perhaps awe.

His ram was gone, the bronze sunk in the depths of the ocean. He’d struck a floating log, perhaps some great tree ripped up by Poseidon’s wrath and sent far out to sea, and the blow had ripped away the ram, and somehow, by luck, one of the bow’s planks had been crushed
inward
with such force as to wedge it into the framing of the bow, so that the ship didn’t fill and sink instantly.

One by one, all his marines and oarsmen came and touched the bow.

Many raised their arms to heaven, faced the sea, and sang the hymn to Poseidon.

Aristides chose to remain on Aegina. We’d been seen coming in and he had access to some of the best shipwrights in the world to repair his beloved warship. After several embraces I took my own ship back toward Salamis. It was late afternoon. I was – desperate.

I admit that I considered, once again, taking
Lydia
down the Saronic Gulf and out into the open ocean and running for Ephesus. At Aegina, the war seemed far removed from our concerns. The Persian fleet was over the horizon, and they would never catch us, never even pursue us. I had waited my whole life, or so it felt, for Briseis, and now she waited perhaps as little as five days’ sailing away, with a fair wind.

But to do so seemed like desertion. Or perhaps I wasn’t sure what I wanted. Perhaps, after all those years of waiting, the achievement of my desire was … frightening. Does this surprise you? And yet, I was no longer the blood-mad boy I had once been. What would Achilles have been, if he had lived? Thetis offered him a long, happy life, or a brief life and immortal fame and I often think of Achilles. What would he have been, in his long, happy life? A bronze-smith in sunny Achaea? A prince of a happy realm, with his Briseis making babies and supporting him, ruling by his side, performing the dances of the goddess?

No man is simple, and desire is as complex as anything else. So is duty.

And at the same time that I could consider deserting the cause of Greece for my woman, I could also be distraught at the notion that I was missing the greatest sea fight in history. Oh, Poseidon, my heart beat faint to think I was missing it! I roamed the deck of my
Lydia
like a lion stalking prey, up and down the deck, and my sailors stayed clear of me.

Did I want Briseis? Did I want the undying glory of the great battle? Did I want a peaceful, happy life?

I wanted them all!

We came in through the mouth of the bay at the islands and there were no wrecks. The Aeginian ships were snug on their beaches, and there wasn’t a Persian to be seen.

We landed at the very edge of darkness. It wasn’t hard; there were so many fires lit along the beaches of Salamis that the navigation was, if anything, easier rather than harder, and many willing hands came down to the water’s edge to help warp
Lydia
ashore.

I landed my ship at Salamis.

Pericles came down to fetch me from the tedious business of getting my ship ashore.
Lydia
was landed, but she needed to be hauled clear of the water and dried so that her fine, light hull caught the full sun in the morning, and she had a small leak forward.

The things you remember! I can tell you almost anything about that ship, and yet, when I close my eyes, I cannot see my Lydia’s face very clearly; really, just a soft pale smudge of memory. But every splintered oar shaft and every bubble in her hull’s pitch is marked on my brain. That ship was more my lover than her namesake, I suspect. But …

Pericles came down wearing a himation that made him look even younger than he was.

‘Eurybiades has summoned all the trierarchs,’ the boy said. ‘Cimon is speaking even now.’

I picked up a spear – a little affectation, I admit, as no one carries a spear to a council any more but me – and walked up the sand. I remember my calf muscles hurting and my ankles complaining – too little exercise, and too much time sitting at campfires or standing on the half-deck.

It was a long walk, up over the first headland and along to the temple; long enough for me to consider that I was wearing an old chiton meant only to keep my armour off my naked skin, and a chlamys that had begun life as a fine shade of dark blue and now resembled the sky on a late autumn day; there was some blue in it, but not much, and the rest was a sort of muddy pale grey with a great deal of sea-salt and some spots of pine pitch. It was, in fact, the fine chlamys I’d purchased with my earnings on Sicily, at Syracusa, when I was first courting Lydia. Lydia was suddenly much in my thoughts.

In fact, that walk was … dark. Too much fighting can have this effect on any man, and I had reached my limit. My fingers burned on my left hand – isn’t it odd how a new injury seems to aggravate the old ones? The stumps of my missing fingers were livid and they throbbed in the darkness because of the new wound from the Persian arrow, a wound so inconsiderable that in youth I might never have mentioned it. Facing the Persian arrows had been exhausting and I have no idea why. The entire experience had lasted less than a minute, but I was stumbling on the sandy road and near weeping with the sullen darkness that often infected me after a fight.

Well.

Ahead of me in the darkness, a hundred men or more were gathered on the steps of the temple. They were surrounded by torchlight, as if a festival was going on, and in the clear air I saw the ruddy light before I saw the temple. I could smell the scent of pines and the reek of ash from Attica, and the sound of men’s voices stirred me somehow.

I stopped and looked up at the stars. I remember this very well – that surge of pure emotion, as I felt … something. It is difficult to describe, but my loss emptied a little, and my sense of the rightness of the world returned, looking at the stars. Some men see the gods in the stars, and others see the rational turning of the creation of the gods. Sometimes I see only the points of light by which a man navigates the deep at night and a sailor knows that everywhere you go, the stars change. Think on that. The stars change.

Bah! Enough of my musings. I only mean that when I strode up to the council, I was in an odd place in my head. I will not say I had seen a god, but I would not be surprised if one had been at my shoulder.

By chance, Themistocles had just spoken, and men were honouring his words with silence. I know now that Cimon had spoken about the might of the enemy fleet, and Themistocles had laid out the reasons why we had to fight. Adeimantus waited. He was a fair orator and he knew that to speak too soon would be to lose his audience.