Salamis (25 page)

Hippias spoke up. He saw a change in his fortunes – Athen’s treason meant his own restoration, perhaps. ‘Trust this man, Great King. You have little to lose; as Great Mardonius says, your fleet will win anyway.’

The lickspittle knew he’d get some of the credit, too.

‘Send the slave back, then, and leave the Spartan and the Plataean as hostages.’ Mardonius’s suggestion made far too much sense. I began to suspect I was going to die for Greece.

The worst of it was that I no longer trusted Siccinius or Themistocles, for all that the slave had done his level best to have us returned.

Xerxes nodded. ‘That is reasonable,’ he said.

I raised my head and was not killed. ‘Great King,’ I said. ‘I beg leave to speak.’

‘Now you
are
more polite,’ he said. ‘Speak.’

‘Great King, many Spartans, and many other ships, will follow Themistocles, if we are there. If we are not – if you keep Brasidas, who leads the party of men who support the exiles – the Spartans will fight. I too command ships, and they will fight.’ I was making things up as fast as I could.

Mardonius laughed. ‘Let them fight – the whole Plataean fleet!’ he mocked. ‘How many ships? None? One?’

‘Or perhaps they will all sail away,’ I said. ‘Tomorrow morning when I do not return.’

‘That is a small risk I will accept,’ the Great King said. ‘Take the Spartan and the Boeotian and throw them in the storehouse. If Themistocles does as he promises, they will be released with honours. If not, I will have them dragged to death by chariots.’ He smiled.

Siccinius was taken away. He did not protest again. I don’t think he was sorry to leave us behind. After all, he was being led to freedom.

I had never been in Jocasta’s storage shed. It was getting light outside and they threw us in, none too gently.

When they were gone, we found some sacking and used it to get warm. And bless Jocasta, there were old blankets, no doubt moth-eaten, and we made ourselves as comfortable as we might on a chilly autumn morning.

It would be hot when day came, but at the very break of day it was cold, and the floor had been cold – and of course, nothing is colder than fear.

Then we sat back to back, for warmth, bundled in old sacking and blankets.

‘I am not afraid to die for Greece,’ I said.

Brasidas grunted.

‘But I am worried that Themistocles is fucking us all,’ I said.

Brasidas, who never swore or talked bawdy, stiffened. ‘What?’ he asked.

I spoke very quietly. ‘I worry that I have been used, that Siccinius just did exactly what he appeared to do, that Themistocles used the veil of honesty to pull the wool over our eyes, and that Themistocles will, in fact, attempt to betray the League tomorrow the same way Samos betrayed us at Lade.’

Brasidas grunted.

‘And you and I will be seen as traitors to the end of time,’ I noted.

Brasidas grunted again. ‘That is bad,’ he admitted.

I sighed. ‘Brasidas, I apologise for bringing you into this.’

He made no comment. After a long while, he said, ‘We must escape.’

I suspect I rolled my eyes, even in the darkness.

‘Listen, brother,’ I said. ‘If we escape too early, we ruin the plan – if Themistocles was telling me the truth. And it is, in fact, the only plan that might have a chance of giving us a battle that we still, of course, have to win.’

Yet even as I spoke, I could see a plan shaping in my head.

‘But if we escape at nightfall,’ I said. I paused and tried to find a stitch in my logic, but the net held. ‘If we escape at nightfall, his fleet orders will already be issued and we’ll have time to warn the Greeks.’

There was a long pause.

‘That’s quite good,’ Brasidas said. In fact, he chuckled. ‘I see it. By arriving, we force Themistocles to behave as if he meant to fight for the League all along.’ For Brasidas this was a long speech. He was deeply amused.

‘Perhaps he did,’ I said.

We were both silent for a while.

Brasidas laughed aloud. ‘Gods, you Athenians,’ he said.

‘I’m a Plataean,’ I said.

‘Oh, so am I,’ Brasidas said, and laughed again, as long and hard as I’d ever heard him laugh.

To say that the day that followed was long does not do it justice. I am not a man given over to worry, but that day my whole existence seemed to have been focused down to a nested set of tensions, rather the way that Empedocles’ glass focused the rays of the sun into a beam of light and heat. I feared Themistocles was a traitor and yet I simultaneously feared that Siccinius had not reached the Greek fleet. I feared that the Greek League might already have fallen apart, the Corinthians rowing away to the isthmus, and yet I feared that Adeimantus was pouring more poison into the ears of the council. I had time, between naps, to consider the possibility that Themistocles and Adeimantus were allies in treason – an idea that I could not make hold water.

In fact, if they were both traitors, they did it in a typically Greek and fractious way, each man striving to be the one who delivered the League to the Great King.

But surely Themistocles was
not
a traitor? He was the architect of the naval strategy and the originator of the League, with Gorgo and Leonidas and to a lesser extent Aristides. It made no sense that, having built an alliance and a fleet that seemed capable of resisting the Great King to the bitter end, he should betray his own creation.

And yet … and yet. I have said before, other nights, that I sometimes think that courage is a limited thing; that a man can squander it while young, and then one day find the reservoir empty. Indeed, I observe as I get older that my muscles will no longer respond the way they once would; that even if I train every day, I am more likely to injure something than to become massively strong. I suspect that it might be the same with courage. I think perhaps men can reach a state where they have wrung their courage dry, and then, when they need it, it is no longer there – or no longer there in the abundance that it had formerly been.

And make no mistake, my friends, the creation of an alliance requires immense personal courage – the courage and the confidence to recognise the needs of others, articulate them, and subsume your own needs to cement the good of the whole. When, for example, Athens allowed Sparta to win the chariot race at the Olympics – if that is in fact what happened – Themistocles and Aristides were putting the needs of their allies above their own needs.

But when I thought about it on that long and hot day in early autumn – I had nothing to do but think, and that can be a curse to a man – Themistocles had given unstintingly, and failed. He had surrendered command of the allied fleet, when by any calculation it should have been his. He had recalled the conservative exiles, when by rights it was obvious that his policy had been the correct one. Despite these and other sacrifices, the Greeks had not triumphed at Artemisium – or if we had, it was to no avail. And now, on the beaches of Salamis, it was increasingly obvious that the Greek fleet would splinter as it had at Lade and in other summers.

Was it not possible that at some point, perhaps after Artemisium, when I had observed him to be shattered, almost unable to think, that he gave up? Or perhaps when we all saw the fires raging over his beloved Athens – did he then admit defeat? Was it the serpent Adeimantus, with his assertion that the destruction of Athens robbed Athenians of their right to vote or speak because they had no city?

Was all this the imagining of a fevered, anxious mind, and even now Themistocles was preparing a master stroke?

Perhaps most annoying to me on that endless day was that Brasidas simply slept, the bastard.

I should have trusted my friends more.

Brasidas awoke in mid-afternoon when the guards were changed and brought us water. Our new guards were not Persians or Medes but Sakje, the steppe nomads of the far east, beyond the Euxine sea. There were four of them, and they walked badly – their very legs seemed formed to grasp the back of a horse and they walked with a rollicking gait, like sailors too long at sea.

They did not speak Greek and they didn’t seem to speak Persian; one of them struck me with his whip when I tried to ask for food.

They were extremely careful of us. They had clearly been told that we were dangerous men. But as the afternoon wore away, a Mede came and spoke to them in their own tongue. He wore a great deal of gold and was quite tall. The four of them grunted and put arrows on their bows, and the new man came and summoned us out into the yard. We were allowed water to wash and slaves brought us towels to dry ourselves, and fresh wool chitons from Aristides’ clothes press. I rather fancied the one I received, with a magnificent flame pattern on the hems, a tribute, I suspected, to Jocasta’s skill.

Then we were taken back to the courtyard of the house, where Xerxes sat enthroned. Around the margins of the garden, in among the pillared portico, stood a dozen men and one woman. I knew the woman – or rather, given her presence and her aura of authority, I knew she must be the same Artemisia who had returned my thrown spear. There stood the Phoenician commander, Tetramnestos, who some Greeks called the ‘King of Sidon’. There stood Ariabignes, son of Darius and brother of Xerxes, commander of their whole fleet. He stood close by Tetramnestos, as if they were brothers. Theomestor, son of Androdamas, a Samian, one of the traitors who helped the Great King beat us at Lade, stood by Artemisia, with another man who I knew better than all the others – Diomedes of Ephesus.

Men like to say of such and such that their blood ran cold, but so, as I watched him, did I feel his eyes come to me, and so, as our eyes locked, did the hairs on my neck begin to stand as if I was in bitter cold water.

Behind me stood four Sakje with their bows slightly bent and arrows on them, and in front of me, a garden full of my enemies.

And there, over by Ariaramnes – a man I had met as a boy, a friend of Artaphernes and a member of his faction – stood Hippias, the broad smile of a merchant selling used goods stamped on his greasy face, and close by them, the deposed King of Sparta, Demaratus, who looked as if he’d eaten a bad egg.

When we entered the courtyard, most of the men there fell silent. Mardonius continued speaking to the Great King in a low tone, and Artemisia looked at me and kept talking. She had a low, pleasant voice, deeper than many men’s and not less feminine for it. She was speaking to Diomedes of Ephesus, and her last words before she was shushed to silence were ‘beat us like a drum’.

And then they all looked at us.

Demaratus winced and looked away and I saw my fate sealed. And Diomedes grinned at me.

Without being pushed by the Sakje, I made my obeisance to the Great King, exactly as I had done at Persepolis, with one hand on the ground. No one pushed me down into proskynesis
.

Xerxes made no reaction and I didn’t know whether to rise unbidden or stay in this uncomfortable posture. I was sure he meant me to be uncomfortable, but I held it. I was, after all, supposed to be a willing conspirator, not an arrogant Greek.

Mardonius continued speaking in a low voice. I caught only a little of what he said for he spoke quietly and quickly. He said ‘captains’ and he said ‘council’ and he went on with real animation about altars.

Of course, I could not see him.

Eventually, Xerxes must have bored of his harangue.

‘Rise, Arimnestos. Be at ease.’ I rose. ‘And your Spartan, who is, I believe, dear to my good friend Demaratus.’

Brasidas rose.

Demaratus bowed his head. ‘My thanks, Great King.’

Xerxes nodded civilly enough to me, as one gentleman might to another in the street.

‘Mardonius and Ariabignes thought that we should question you about the Greek fleet before my captains discussed tonight,’ the Great King said.

I bowed. ‘Ask me anything,’ I said with as much panache as I could manage.

Xerxes shook his head. ‘No.
Tell
me everything, Plataean.’

I looked around, surprised by the quality of hate focused at me. Perhaps I am dispassionate when I make war; certainly, I have made a business of it sometimes, and I feel little hate and even some compassion for my victims – once they are beaten. But Diomedes bared his teeth, almost in a snarl – fair enough, since I tried to turn him into a temple prostitute once, his hate did not surprise me, but the look on Ariabignes’ face was remarkable: a rictus of anger. And Mardonius’s brows were furrowed, his mouth set, as if we were about to go sword to sword, edge to edge.

I had no friends there.

And I was supposed to act the part of the traitor?

I thought of Odysseus. It is hard, forcing your mind when men hate you. When your cause appears hopeless. Or, just possibly, my mind focused well
because
my cause was hopeless.

‘It is a better fleet than yours, Great King,’ I said.

With that, the anger on faces was translated to hisses and mutterings, with the sole exception of a woman’s laugh, which cut through the other sounds like a sword through spider web.

Artemisia was laughing.

‘Tell us what is so funny,’ Xerxes said, somewhat pettishly.

Artemisia was apparently without fear – or at least, without fear of the Great King. She gave the slight shrug of a modest woman and cast her eyes down. ‘I thought this Boeotian bumpkin you all described was a great liar,’ she said. Then she chuckled, a lovely sound. ‘I find instead that he tells the truth, and thus I suspect he may be what he claims.’

‘You think the Greek fleet is greater than ours? These rebels?’ Xerxes asked. It’s worth noting here that to the Persians, we were all rebels against the authority of the Great King. Xerxes turned to me. ‘How many ships in your fleet?’ he asked.

I met his eye. ‘Almost four hundred trieres,’ I said. ‘Some pentekonters and triakonters, too.’

Xerxes sat back and clasped the arms of what had once been Jocasta’s favourite chair. I could not tell whether he was genuinely relieved or mocking relief, as if what I had said had no worth.

‘My fleet is more than twice the size,’ Xerxes said. ‘So I have little to fear.’