Salamis (5 page)

I landed my ships on one of the north-facing beaches on the island of Salamis, and after borrowing a horse and making some hasty arrangements, we gathered the men together – all the Plataeans in one great council. It was, to all intents and purposes, a meeting of the City of Plataea.

Why Salamis? Because that’s where most of the Athenians were. Like I said, I didn’t want to leave their precious ships to rot on the beach or be captured. I handed the five public ships over to a member of the Athenian boule and he was already finding rowers for them while Myron negotiated our passage across to Attica – easy enough, as the Athenians’ shipping was mostly empty going that way. We arranged for all our men to go to Eleusis.

Then I spent time putting my professional crews back together. I had men who were Plataean citizens, but my oarsmen, in several ships; we’d sent them out through the fleet to train other rowers. My
Lydia
had kept her crack crew, and now I left her under Seckla with a skeleton crew and no marines, but with Ka and all his archers and Leukas as his helmsman. Paramanos was dead but we’d retaken
Black Raven
and I gave her to Giannis with Megakles as
his
helmsman. In fact,
Black Raven
was not my property and eventually a probate court in Athens or Salamis would see to it that someone bought her and Paramanos’s daughters were paid, but that was all in some hazy future where the rule of law applied. In the immediate future, Athens needed every ship. Paramanos had a mostly Athenian crew, including Thracians, Cilicians, and men of Cyrenaica, his port of origin so to speak, but they had taken terrible casualties fighting three Egyptians at Artemisium and we had to refill the benches. Aristides was going to Corinth with his wife, but his helmsman Demetrios had his own long
Athena Nike
well in hand, and he’d made captures at Artemisium and seemed content.
Amastis,
our rebuilt Corinthian trireme that has been the source of so much trouble, had come through both battles untouched and her crew was professional and under Moire, who needed no help from me. But Moire, like many of his men, had taken up their Plataean citizenship and had homes or families in Plataea. For some oarsmen it was an empty honour and their families were already on Salamis, but others, and especially my old crews in
Lydia
and
Storm Cutter
, crewed by Chian exiles and other men who’d settled at Plataea, had deeper roots – and they were needed. Many of them wanted to go back to Plataea, even for a few hours, to see to their families.

Moire had adjusted to ‘being Greek’ better than many of my other foreign (or barbarian) friends. His name was an allegory for his acceptance. In his own tongue, Moire (or something that sounded that way) meant ‘a jet black horse’ or so he told us, but in Greek, Moira is the Goddess of Fate and Fortune and many newly enfranchised ex-slaves chose to call themselves ‘Moiregeneus’ or ‘Born of Good Fortune’. Moire never changed his name. And that, I think, represents the man. He sacrificed to our gods, especially to Poseidon, Lord of Horses. But he always had his own gods, small images he carried with him at sea. It was his particular skill, or tact, that he seemed to like being Greek, but never ‘needed’ us particularly. In Athens or in Syracusa you could find him squatted down on his heels with a dozen other men of his kind, jabbering in their barbarous tongue and then he’d stand up, pull his himation around himself, and walk off for wine with another kubernetes or helmsman.

As usual, I digress. Harpagos offered to stay with the ships and he was the best kubernetes or trierarch
of the lot. I left him in command with good officers and loafing warriors like Sittonax the Gaul and orders to keep the men who stayed busy every day, either training to fight or training to row. He had about three full crews when the rest of us headed for Plataea and I had almost four hundred men.

Brasidas shook his head. ‘I’ll stay and train the marines,’ he said. He meant the ten best oarsmen he’d chosen to replace all the men who’d died on
Black Raven.
I pitied them. But I also knew I’d sleep better knowing that he and Seckla would run a tight camp with sentries and watchtowers – and that Brasidas, although it hurts me to say it, could command a respect from the Athenian oligarchs that Seckla would not. I was to regret not taking him, but that’s the way decisions go.

That night on the beach we burned Paramanos. We’d saved his body, or rather, Harpagos and Cimon had, in hard fighting, and we put him on a funeral pyre as his people’s traditions’ demanded, sang the paean of Apollo and other hymns, and drank too much. He had been first my captive, then my not-very-willing helmsman; then a rival pirate under Miltiades and, only later, my peer and friend. He was the best navigator I ever knew, except perhaps Vasileus. He was a good father to his daughters and a right bastard to his enemies. Here’s to his shade.

Aristides the Just was in exile. He wasn’t even supposed to be on Salamis, but we all stretched a point. He was eager to get over the mountains to Plataea where his wife awaited, but he wept – openly – to see the whole of the population of Attica gathered on the beaches of Salamis, like a nation of beggars. His words, not mine.

The camps of the Athenians stretched inland, on every path of flat ground the island had to offer. Ajax the Hero may have come from Salamis but it is not the most prosperous place, nor well inhabited, and it lacked the resources to feed the whole population of Attica for any significant time.

But I digress like an old man, which I certainly am! We held our meeting, and our leaders – Myron and Draco, as Timaeus was already gone with the messengers – chose to take the Plataean people over the isthmus to the Peloponnese. Well, Myron had already made that decision and had sent messages to that effect, but sometimes democracy is retroactive tyranny.

In fact, the Spartan navarch had invited all of our people to go to Sparta – probably meant as an honour, it led to a lot of loud talk and some rough jests in our meeting. In the end, they decided to go to Hermione, a small town on the west coast, one of Sparta’s allies, a member of her league. Hermione was five days’ hard walking from Plataea and a man could pack a cart with enough food for that journey. Because many men had gone to Epidauros to be healed at the sanctuary of the God-Hero Asclepius, many knew the roads to Hermione. Myron hoped to find shipping at the isthmus, and although it plays almost no role in this story, I’ll say that my three merchant ships never joined the fleet because they ferried Boeotians – first, people from Thespiae and then Plataeans – to Hermione from the Gulf of Corinth.

At any rate, that was the plan that seemed best. And the phalanx would march home under Hermogenes. I was determined to go to Plataea and come swiftly back over the mountains to the ships. The sight of thousands of Attic refugees crowding the beaches of Salamis taught me a lesson; I knew from the moment I saw them that Athens would fight. The Athenian fleet was not going to sail to the isthmus to defend Corinth and Sparta. It was going to fight right here.

Of course, there was another alternative that didn’t bear thinking about – the possibility that Themistocles would sell the alliance out to the Medes. Thebes had, as I have said, already gone over to the Great King. Athens might make the same choice.

But I doubted it.

Aristides found all the Brauron girls after Paramanos’s feast, when he met a friend of his wife’s on the beach. The next morning, as the phalanx of Plataea loaded themselves into a dozen Athenian grain ships on our beach, I rode over the headland with my sons to find Euphonia as a
skope
in a small lookout tower, watching the waters of the Gulf of Salamis for Persians. All her Brauron sisters were living in a camp of Laconian severity, at the foot of the cliff. The girls were very proud of the orderly, military camp. They had stacks of firewood, simple tents, and when I came, they were practising dancing on the wet sand.

Euphonia laughed and embraced me, which brought a lump to my throat, and still does. She was becoming a young woman and not a slip of a girl – becoming, but not yet there, although her body was lean and hard from a summer of dancing and archery, riding and fighting and hunting. Brauron was like a Spartan academy, but for the girls of the wealthy. The women who ran it, the priestesses of Artemis, had been required to abandon their temple with its magnificent Pi-shaped stoa and its great dining hall where women learned to recline on couches like their brothers – and not spill their wine, I hope.

She began talking without sparing her brothers so much as a look. ‘I love to be sentry,’ she said. ‘I pretend I’m Atlanta, running with Heracles. Or perhaps Achilles. And I want to be the first to spot the Persians. I saw your ships, Pater! I was on duty yesterday, too, and I sent my pais running to say that the fleet of Plataea was on the beaches! And I won the younger girls’ dancing, but we had to dance on the sand and not in the great hall, because the Persians are going to burn it, and Mother Bear Europhile says that the dance counts anyway, but Eustratia said it wasn’t fair. And next year I’ll be allowed to wear the red cord! Unless the Persians burn the temple,’ she said in sudden deflation.

I kissed her. ‘Euphonia, this is your brother, Hipponax, and no doubt you remember Hector.’

Euphonia gazed at them her usual adoration. ‘I saw them,’ she said. She smiled. ‘Hector is no longer anyone’s hyperetes,’ she added. ‘I can tell, because Mother Bear Thiale lectured us on armour, and that thorax is a very good one. Anyway, I didn’t need the lecture – you own lots of armour, and you even used to make it, so I raised my hand and said—’

At this point the boys crushed her in two manly, armoured embraces that stopped even her flow of words for a few moments.

She waved a red shield – a small thing of hide – down at the camp, and instantly, as if they were all Spartan peers, a girl sprinted out of the camp and up the ridge to us. She and Euphonia exchanged salutes – exactly like my own epilektoi! – and my daughter grinned.

‘We want to carry swords or at least knives, but Mother Bear Thiale will not let us,’ she said. ‘I want to kill a Persian,’ she added. ‘Anyway, we’re going to do our special “little bear” dances this morning, and I want you to see them. It’s an honour even to be asked to see them,’ she said to the two young men.

They chose – wisely, I feel – to look respectful and impressed.

What followed was better than a mere delight. Despite our hurry – and believe me, I felt the beating of the wings of time’s winged horses with the passing of every moment – we sat on stools provided by the priestesses. Wine was brought us, and we poured libations to Artemis and heard them sing her hymns – three of them, one disturbingly like a marching paean.

Mother Thiale turned to me. ‘You believe that is too warlike for women,’ she said.

I cocked an eyebrow. ‘No,’ I said. ‘I’m delighted to see what a little Titan you’ve made of my daughter.’

Thiale seemed ready for a different answer. She looked at me carefully. ‘Report has it that you are a man of blood,’ she said.

I shrugged. ‘I am, at that. So I imagine my daughter bears the same blood that all the Corvaxae bear, and perhaps even the same daimon
.
’

She frowned. ‘The girls are ready to begin,’ she said.

The girls dancing were between the ages of eight and fifteen. Fifteen was quite old for an aristocratic woman to still be at Brauron – most of them were married by then. But some stayed – some stayed for ever as priestesses, and some remained as guides and junior teachers for the younger girls, summer after summer. In truth, it must have been a fine life for a girl who liked sport, and I know that some weep bitter tears when they leave the sanctuary for the last time. Who encourages women to run the two-stade race after they have borne a child? Who gives new mothers the time to dance the sacred dances or shoot a bow? What of the girls who excel at athletics the way boys do? Well might they be bitter when their fathers announce to them that they must put away childish things and bear children.

Well, I am not one of those fathers. I hope.

At any rate, there they were – big and small, tall and short, long-legged and short-legged, black-haired and brown-haired and red-haired – the height of fashion at the time, let me tell you – and golden-haired like Euphonia. They were beautiful in their coltish innocence, afire with the excitement of their exile and the adventure of the war, and in the rising sun, they looked like so many muses or naiads. Most wore a simple boy’s chitoniskos, worn off one shoulder and thus exposing one breast on a few of the older girls. In the dawn, preparing for their dance, they were all stretching like boys in a gymnasium. In fact, the women’s gymnasium at Brauron was a wonder throughout Attica, and perhaps until that moment I had never seen women as athletes. But closest to me was an older girl whose legs carried the same sort of muscle my legs wore when I could run two stades faster than all the other youths, and her arms showed the same ridges of muscle at biceps and triceps that any well-trained boy had.

My two boys were acting like clods, their mouths open, their teeth showing.

I leaned back on my stool and kicked Hipponax sharply in the shin even as I held my cup out to a young girl of perhaps ten years to have it refilled.

Let me add that if Hector and Hipponax had ever had a thought in their handsome heads about anything but war, I had assumed it was about each other. This is natural enough, especially in war – they were young and tough and together every minute. Perhaps I should have given it more thought. I suppose I assumed they were Achilles and Patrocles, or something like.

As it proved, they were just two boys who’d never seen a girl. Much less twenty girls all on the edge of womanhood, wearing an arm’s length of transparent cloth that revealed one breast, one shoulder, and most everything else, especially when a girl stretched a leg high in the air in a manner than
no
boy could manage, or did a handstand.

I’ll blush myself if I go on. These girls were young enough to be my daughters. If they were shameless, they were also utterly innocent. Their very shamelessness came of summers of high training with no men about to stare or pry.