Salamis (44 page)

But I was drinking in the darkness with Brasidas, because he was my friend, and he was in pain.

‘I thought I’d be dead,’ he said suddenly. It was such an uncharacteristic thing for him to say.

I shook my head.

‘Xerxes is beaten and I am alive,’ Brasidas said. He drank again, and I realised that, for the first time since I had known him, he was drunk.

I sat back – we were sitting, not reclining. The house had but one kline, and that had a special purpose.

‘Xerxes is not beaten,’ I said. ‘If I understand Aristides, Mardonius has withdrawn to Thessaly, but he’ll be back.’

‘Xerxes has run away,’ Brasidas said thickly. ‘Leonidas is dead. Demaratus will never return.’ His dark eyes were like spears in the starlight. ‘I will never be avenged.’

I didn’t know what he was avenging, and it didn’t seem the time to ask.

‘Revenge is for fools,’ I said. ‘Take a wife and be happy.’

Brasidas laughed. It was not hollow, or bitter, but real mirth. ‘Arimnestos,’ he said. ‘Of all men, can you see
me
with a farm and wife?’

‘Yes,’ I said with perfect honesty. ‘We are Greeks, not Medes. We have more music than the song of the spear and the hymn of woeful Ares. There is another loom beside the beat of spear on spear, or oar on oar.’

Brasidas’s head snapped round. ‘You know,’ he said after a sip of wine, ‘only you could say that. Killer of Men. Spear of the West. You have the world fame, and yet you are a bronze-smith and a farmer.’

I raised my cup and poured a libation to my own dead – those I’d slain, and those who’d followed me and died.

‘Listen, Brasidas,’ I said. ‘Every oarsman at Salamis carried a spear. No man is the “Spear of the West”, and every man, every thetes with his cushion, is a Killer of Men. This is not Sparta. And in time – I’m sorry – but Sparta’s dream of war will have to change.’

Brasidas stared long into the darkness. So much darkness. I knew it was there.

Then he raised his head. ‘Perhaps I must truly become a Plataean,’ he said.

And several amphorae later, he said, ‘Do you think the Queen of Halicarnassus is single?’

We laughed, and I knew he would live. He had been to the edge and walked away.

That’s how it is. I hope none of the rest of you ever see that darkness. But if you do – find a friend. It is a like a fight: and fights are better fought in the phalanx than alone.

I spent the next day trying to find a chariot.

Hah! It’s the turn of all the kore – the maidens – to know what I’m talking about. After nights of sailing tackle, ship design, aspides and swords, finally, I’ve reached something that interests my own thugater.

Ouch!

You will give your husband-to-be quite an image of yourself, my dear, if you show so much temper in public.

In good families, at least in Attica and in Plataea, you need a chariot for a wedding.

Hermione is a small town – a very pretty one, but small – and not much given to display. But eventually a chariot was found and Hermogenes and Styges and Tiraesias and I scandalised the whole town by stripping naked, taking over a forge and a wood shop, and rebuilding the ruin of a chariot from the wheels to the pole. I don’t think the little vehicle had been used in fifty years. The tyres were leather and the wheels had broken spokes, and the body had long since fallen to tatters.

We worked while a rhapsode from Thespiae told us the Iliad, and it wasn’t work, it was holiday. Our Plataean silversmith melted down some old jewellery of mine to make decorations and a pair of leather workers made headstalls and reins while Cimon, perhaps the best cavalryman in Athens, went across the ridge to buy me a pair of colts that men said were the prettiest in Attica. Jocasta came in with Penelope and Euphonia several times an hour to ask my opinion on some things about which I knew nothing, like flowers. I don’t think, in a thousand questions, that I gave a satisfactory answer to more than ten.

But they were planning my wedding, and they needed my permission.

Archilogos had a house, arranged by Eugenios, who, like the genius he was, had assumed my raid would be successful, and had further assumed that my bride would wish a traditional wedding. May all the gods bless you, Eugenios!

Now the manner of a wedding among the aristocratic classes is this: first, there is a proclamation of engagement. For many people, and this is true throughout Attica and even Boeotia, the engagement
is
the wedding, and many a baby born in the best families can count back its nine months to the night of the parents’ engagement. But it is a familial ceremony, and often done in the bride’s home, although sometimes the groom’s. The wedding itself, on the other hand, marks the day that the woman goes to live in the man’s house, and is a much more public, riotous, and wine-soaked affair.

My first wedding, to Euphonia, my beloved honey-haired girl, had included both the engagement and the wedding, but the final acts of the wedding had been somewhat lacklustre, as she had come over the mountains to Plataea and her family had not followed.

As an aside, her father, Aleitus, was in Hermione and asked, with his beautiful manners, to be included in the wedding, as family. And of course, weddings were supposed to be for young people, not old men like me. I was about to turn thirty-six. Briseis was one year younger, an old matron of thirty-five with two grown sons.

So I asked Aleitus to take the place of my father, and I asked Simonides and his boys to stand with me, alongside my friends.

I need to mention that in one ceremony, I was to wed Briseis, Hector was to wed Iris, and Hipponax to wed Heliodora. I told my boys that they had to find their own chariots.

Well.

I remember little of that week in Hermione, except that it was beautiful. There were tears – we had a ceremony of remembrance for many who fell at Salamis, including Idomeneus. But for the most part, we had happy work and the memory of a great victory; we, as a people, had survived hardship, and we were unbowed. My ships rode at anchor or were overturned on the beach, and in fact, after we’d forged bronze tyres and sweated them over new-cut wheels (made by a professional, let me add) and cut and painted a magnificent Tyrian-dyed cover for the cab of the chariot, and gilded it, and reassembled the whole – after we’d done all that, and then repeated our triumph for Hector and for Hipponax – of course I helped them with their chariots! – then we bought a cargo of pinewood from Arcadia and we built ship sheds on the promontory below the temple and set our fighting ships to dry.

On Hermoú, the day of the week named for Hermes, patron of the city, we went to the temple of Poseidon on the headland. The engyesis was a major event. Cleitus spoke at length, praising me – how he enjoyed that – and my son Hipponax. And Xanthippus – I must give the man his due – stood up for his daughter like a gentleman, and his wife Agariste, who quite clearly disapproved of whatever union had begot Iris, nonetheless did her proud, with linens and wools, a loom, and a fine wagonload of household goods. Xanthippus spoke eloquently about the need to rebuild in the aftermath of the war and that the rebuilding was beginning even then, in exile, in the Peloponnese.

Aleitus, representing my father, and Simonides, gave speeches welcoming their family into ours, so to speak. Simonides even went so far as to make a joke about the destruction of our cities, and the houses to which these brides would be carried.

Men laughed. That’s how confident we had become that we would triumph. It was funny: we were exiles, and our cities destroyed, our temples all thrown down. Our ships outside on the beaches of Pron and on the waves – our wooden walls – were all the fortune any of us had.

The girls, Iris and Heliodora, both fifteen, and Briseis, at thirty-five still the most beautiful – wore veils of fine Egyptian linen in pure white and never pulled them back, although they were flimsy enough to see through. Briseis wore a fine chiton of dark blue, with a woven edge in a startling Persian pattern in red, white, and black, and she wore a chlamys across her shoulders leaving only the fine linen of her chiton exposed on one breast – an unheard of innovation in Hermione, I can tell you, and while the younger girls wore their peploi more modestly, every woman present was watching Briseis. Her Ionian fashion was both exotic and enticing and dignified. Nor did she wear the crown of a kore, but instead wore the headpiece of a priestess of Aphrodite.

Heliodora, probably the richest girl, wore the plainest chiton in wool, with a magnificent embroidered border that I had no doubt she had done herself. She was that sort of person.

Iris wore a vivid red peplos that had cost Xanthippus a fortune, because he was
that
sort of person. And libations were poured, hymns to Poseidon sung, and the girls went back to ‘their’ homes in a torchlit procession. All the women followed them – by prior arrangement they all shared a beautiful house overlooking the agora for that one night – and all the women went to a single party, while all the men went to the home of Aristides, which was ‘my’ house for the evening, and that of Hipponax and Hector.

Very little was done the next day. I’ll leave you to imagine what kind of party we had – we, the victors of Salamis, with a whole town to supply our wine. It was there, on a kline with my ‘father’ Aleitus, that I heard the story, from him and from Aristides, of the storming of Psyttaleia, and a dozen other tales of the fighting that day.

But the next day more ships entered the little harbour, and still more landed at Thermisia and on the beaches of Troezen north of us. Themistocles had taken Andros, or driven them to capitulate, or made a face-saving gesture towards victory (no one could quite tell me) and the sailing season was well and truly past. Winter was coming on.

But the returning sailors, who included my friend Lykon of Corinth, and Ion and Moire, had news. They had scouted all the way to Skiathos opposite Thessaly, and Mardonius had taken Larissa, ejected its inhabitants despite their status as ‘allies’ and was wintering his horses in the green fields of the north.

It sobered us. At first blush many men had been sure that the whole Persian host was fleeing and our work was done. But in fact, as Lykon attested, already Persian ambassadors were going out to every city, demanding earth and water before the next onslaught.

We were far from despair, but we were thoughtful.

On the day given to Aphrodite, in the last week of Pyanepsion, Gorgo came. Now, in truth, Sparta is not so very far from Hermione, as the city had cause to know all too well a hundred years before, but I had not expected her, a new widow, to come. And yet, when you consider how very hard she had worked for the League … and between Troezen and Hermione, we had most of the League’s captains.

Pyanepsion! I’ve become an Athenian. And well I might – I’d been voted a citizen after Marathon; my sons were both made citizens, Iris was allowed to be a citizen by birth (essential if her children were to be citizens), and yet in poor old Boeotia, in Green Plataea of my youth, that late harvest month was called Pamboiotios, and it had some weeks left to run.

Pardon me for once again wandering like a drunken shepherd, but I digress only to come to my point. It was in Hermione that week and that month, and not in Corinth, that the League began to look at the next step in the war.

It was, I think, two days before my wedding. I was fighting my own black mood; I remember asking my daughter if Briseis was well, I was so sure that Apollo or some sly god would snatch her and my happiness from me.

Euphonia put her arms around me. ‘She said the best thing,’ my daughter said. ‘She said she’d always wanted a daughter, and now she was getting a beautiful, talented girl without the pain of childbirth or the wakeful nights.’ Euphonia sat back. She was sitting by me in the garden of my borrowed house. ‘I thought to be offended, and then I thought that you, too, had me without the pain of bearing me or hearing me cry as a baby.’

Penelope, who was living in my house, put a cup of wine in my hand. ‘You were the best baby,’ she said wistfully. ‘My sons were loud and demanding, and you were always sweet—’

‘I pulled your loom over when I was six,’ Euphonia said.

There was a brief silence.

‘I thought Andronicus did that,’ Penelope said with that dangerous tone in her voice.

I remember looking out from the little portico where we were sitting, and seeing the marvellous stars, thousands and thousands on a perfect autumn evening. I thought we were going to have a row, and I was willing myself away.

But Pen just hugged my daughter. ‘Well, that loom is ashes now, my child,’ she said. To me, she said, ‘Your chosen wife gives more orders than any woman I’ve ever met. And spends more time on her appearance.’ She raised a hand to forestall my response. ‘Despite which, she is easy to like. Her clothes are going to cause a scandal in Athens, I promise you – she all but wears one breast bare! We’ll all have to exercise like Spartans to support them, I do declare.’

Pen, in fact, still had a fine figure, and ran for exercise, but I understood her comment.

‘Ionia is different,’ I said. ‘And she has led a different life from you.’

Penelope sat and hugged her knees like a much younger woman. She looked at my daughter.

‘Oh, I see! Adult things. I
know
how babies happen!’ Euphonia said. She tossed her head and flounced off. ‘Perhaps I should attend the Queen of Sparta? She always speaks to me as if I am an adult!’

I had grown wise enough as a parent to merely blow her a kiss.

‘She asked me,’ Penelope said. It was dark in our little porch with its beautiful columns and the fragrant garden. ‘She asked me how long I would wait to marry again.’

I blinked.

‘She said did I really want to sleep alone? And I knew I did not. Oh, brother, is that treason?’ Penelope was suddenly crying and I wondered, guiltily, if it was my place to comfort those in need just that week. Brasidas – the strongest man I knew – and now my sister, who, with Jocasta, was my model of strong women.

Yet, using silence to cover my confusion, I had to admit that loyalty to a dead partner could be very cold comfort. ‘I think you must do what seems best,’ I said.