Salamis (28 page)

Cleitus folded his arms, but his right hand was close to the hilt of the small, Spartan-style xiphos he wore under his left arm.

‘My plan?’ Themistocles asked.

‘Your plan to force the Greek fleet to fight by luring the Persians into the bay,’ I said. ‘In an hour, they will be at sea.’

The skin around Cleitus’s eyes tightened. Crow’s feet appeared at the corners of his eyes. He was a brilliant man – I think he understood
everything.

Themistocles sat very still. ‘What – how – how do you know?’ he asked.

‘Brasidas and I have just escaped from the Great King,’ I said. ‘We escorted a certain slave to the Great King himself, and he took us prisoners. Hostages.’

‘I knew nothing of this!’ he said suddenly. He was lying, and it was a foolish lie, but Themistocles was such an able politician and so contemptuous of other men’s minds that he thought – and perhaps he was right – that anything my friends said after the fact would be forgotten.

I shrugged. ‘It is true. Not a few hours ago, I lay on my face before the Great King while his commanders discussed their attack and a spear was pressed into my neck.’

‘This is – incredible!’ Themistocles said.

I almost hit him.

His hands were shaking.

Let me pause here, on the edge of saving Greece, and say again: I think he was as guilty as an adulterer caught in the act. So why not expose him?

Think about it. If I exposed him, who would fight? The Athenians would shatter instantly into pro- and anti-Themistoklean factions. What? You think the democrats and the oarsmen would convict him out of hand? You must be joking. Facts? There were no facts. It was all intuition and supposition. Heraclitus did not train me to think for nothing. The only hope for Greece was to pretend that Themistocles had all along planned to force the Greek fleet to fight. Perhaps it was even true.

Perhaps he intended the Greek fleet to cut and run – into the closing jaws of the Persians. Perhaps he imagined that the Corinthians and Peloponnesians would be caught and destroyed piecemeal, leaving Athens and Aegina in a powerful bargaining position and making his position tenable.

It makes my head hurt.

‘The Persians will be at sea any moment,’ I said. ‘It’s time to reveal this to the fleet, so that we can prepare. To fight.’

Themistocles allowed his eyes to meet mine. He was searching me. I knew, just the way a girl knows when a man is looking at her breasts and not into her eyes. He wanted to know what I knew.

Cleitus tugged at his beard. ‘Reveal what?’ he asked.

Themistocles stiffened, and then rose to his feet. ‘I have a plan to save Greece,’ he said portentously.

Well, whatever else might have been true, from that moment he bent his will to save Greece.

The gods play a role in most affairs of men, so it will not surprise you that they had some part in that night. The first was probably my rescue by Ka, but the most vital was to come. We were walking back to the council, which was still loud. My friend Lykon was speaking, promising the men of Athens that Adeimantus did not speak for all Corinthians. We were twenty paces from the firelight, near the outer ring of listeners where men stood to piss against the trees and slaves waited with wine skins. Out of the darkness came Aristides.

‘Themistocles,’ he said.

‘Aristides,’ the democrat answered.

If I wanted to know what Cleitus and I looked like when speaking to one another, here it was – a tableau of mutual antipathy. Yet they had worked together from the first for the liberation of Greece. If I was correct, Themistocles had changed his mind or given up. But Aristides had not.

‘We are surrounded,’ Aristides said. ‘Do you know?’

‘Surrounded?’ Themistocles asked.

Aristides nodded. Behind him, two of his slaves held torches. ‘I left my
Nike
back on Aegina,’ he said. ‘I came with a pair of Aeginian triremes carrying sacred statues of their gods. Aeginian fishing boats reported to us after sunset.’ He looked around. Cleitus stepped closer, and other men began to gather; Cimon was there, and Xanthippus too. It was Aristides’ voice gathering them, his friends and his enemies too.

‘The entire Persian fleet is at sea,’ he said. ‘The beaches at Phaleron must be empty. We came through the Egyptians. We were challenged repeatedly, but one of my oarsmen speaks Egyptian and Persian as well.’ He shrugged.

Themistocles gave a false laugh. ‘Ah, Aristides, we may be adversaries, but you are the man to appreciate my cleverness. I have brought the Persians.’

‘You?’ Aristides asked.

‘I sent for them,’ Themistocles joked. He looked at me. ‘Ask Arimnestos.’

Oh, he was clever. Aristides would never believe I was involved in a treason plot. Themistocles had just played me – again.

I could not allow myself to care. This was for everything. ‘Now we have to fight,’ I said.

Themistocles took Aristides by the hand. ‘You saw the Medes?’

‘Medes, Persians, Phoenicians and Egyptians, and far too many Greeks,’ Aristides said.

Themistocles pumped his hand. ‘You must tell the council. No one will believe me. But all know how you hate me – you will be believed.’

‘Say rather that I will be believed because I do not make a habit of telling lies,’ Aristides said. It was true and false, too – Greeks have a foolish habit of believing men that they would like to be telling the truth, rather than those they know to be honest.

Themistocles winced but did not let go of my friend’s hand.

Cleitus came up behind me, and very softly said, ‘What in the name of black Tartarus is going on?’ he growled.

‘We’re saving Greece from the barbarians,’ I said.

Cleitus laughed. ‘Not the first time,’ he said.

I roared with laughter. Men turned, and saw me laughing, and before the gods, I embraced the bastard. ‘Too right, mate,’ I said.

He returned the embrace and Aristides smiled in the torchlight.

‘If those two can be at peace,’ he said, ‘I will make peace with you. And it is only the truth, after all. Take me to the council.’

So it was that Themistocles, the arch-democrat, led Aristides the Just, the priggish, snobbish arch-conservative and my best friend, to the rostra in front of three hundred captains. It was deep in the night.

Themistocles pointed to the man standing ready to speak.

‘There is my nemesis, Aristides, returned from exile to speak to the captains,’ he said. ‘Pay heed, and know that I support his every word.’

Aristides looked around. His eye met mine, and then passed over – he was never a man to wink. He was silent for long enough that men coughed and the silence became edgy.

‘The Persian fleet is already at sea,’ he said softly. ‘They are all around us. They have ships on the beaches opposite us to the north, and they have sent a squadron to close the western passages to the isthmus.’

Now the silence was absolute.

‘There is no longer a choice to be made,’ he said. ‘I will argue nothing. Unless you choose to submit and be slaves, we must fight.’

The silence stayed, and then a babble began, the usual Greek game of finding whose fault it must have been, might have been. It rose all about us, and then Eurybiades struck the speaker’s rostra with his staff – I remember the sound like a thunderbolt.

‘Are you children?’ he asked.

He was going to say more, and Themistocles stepped past him into the firelight. ‘I have a plan,’ he began.

‘Silence, or I strike,’ Eurybiades said, raising his stick. He was angry, as any commander would have been.

‘Strike, but only listen,’ Themistocles begged. He actually
bent his knee
like a beggar requesting alms.

Zeus, it was a masterful performance.

There stood the Spartan, stick raised, and there the Athenian knelt before him in supplication.

‘Speak,’ growled the Spartan.

Themistocles leapt to his feet. ‘The Persians think this is a land battle,’ he said. ‘They think that having their right overmatch our left will lead them to collapse us. They imagine that we will fight with our lines spread east to west. They don’t know the waters, and their ships will have been at sea all night, their hulls damp, men tired.
We can win.
’

Say what you will – and I have – once he was committed, he was brilliant. I saw it immediately. Other men had to be convinced; some had to hear the whole thing two or three times, and all the while Eurybiades was sending the lesser men to bed, and ordering heralds to wake the rowers an hour before sunrise.

It was not in any way my plan, although in its relation I knew that my words had played a part. Certainly Themistocles planned to use the dawn chop and the breeze, but his notion that we could form the trap by backing water, despite having inflicted two defeats this way at Artemisium, was entirely his own. He told them that the Great King expected the treason of whole bodies of Greeks and thus would expect us to flee.

Well. I still had an eye on the Corinthians.

But it was a good plan, simple enough, with the flexibility so that if the weather went our way, he’d make use of it, and if the day was calm, we had alternatives.

Aristides, without a ship, as his beautiful
Athena Nike
was still being repaired, added a wrinkle. We had far more hoplites than we could fit on ships. Aristides was given command of all the hoplites left on Salamis. He said he would attempt to take the two islets in the middle of the straits. Neither is very considerable, but the larger is big enough for a thousand men to stand in formation and archers on that island would be able to wreck our centre. We gave him all the pentekonter and all the fishing boats.

In fact, once the decision was made to fight, we moved along at a great rate. I want to say that it was Eurybiades who decided to fight. He never called for another vote. Perhaps he thought it was obvious or perhaps he was tired of oratory. I know I was.

We trudged back to our camp and I laid out my
panoply and woke two of my slaves to shine it. I planned to wear the whole thing – shin guards and thigh guards and arm guards and everything. To shine like a god. Because in war, these things matter.

And then I rolled in my cloak and went to sleep without another thought.

Part II

The Razor’s Edge

When all Greece was balanced on the razor’s edge

we protected her with our souls, and here we lie

Cenotaph to the dead of Salamis

I woke from a dream so erotic that I might have been on the point of an indiscretion, and pondered what the gods meant by sending me a dream of making love to Jocasta, for whom I had infinite respect but towards whom I had never felt the least attraction. But my waking mind found the notion humorous, and I rolled out of my cloak looking more like a satyr than a man and threw myself into the sea. I dried myself with my linens in the darkness and woke Seckla, and all around me men blew life into campfires.

I sent Hipponax up the ridge to see what could be seen from our watchtowers, and I walked along the beach until I was sure that the Athenians were in motion. Xanthippus was civil enough and already in his armour, while I was still naked and my hair wet from my swim, but I felt better for it, and better still when Hector put a horn cup of mulled wine in my hand.

The first kiss of dawn touched the sky and I put on my best chiton, milk-white wool with purple stripes and red embroidery, ravens and stars. Then I put on the leather straps that went around my ankles to protect them from the slap of the greaves against my instep, and then I snapped the greaves over my shins, cursing the way they cut into every old wound and new scratch from my last outing. Hector knelt behind me and buckled them on, and then he put armour on my left thigh – the thigh most likely to be hit. Sometimes I wear armour on both, but usually I do not.

Then he hinged open my beautiful bronze thorax that Anaxicles had hammered out of new bronze back in Syracusa, what seemed like many years before. He closed it and slid the pins shut, slipped the arm guard on my right forearm and the shoulder guard on my right shoulder. No man needs a guard on his left shoulder or forearm – that’s what the aspis covers.

Many men were gathered there. It was like a ceremony and a festival, too. I was Achilles being armed, or Ares, or mighty Ajax or Diomedes, or one of the Immortals or the heroes, and the dawn gilded my bronze and made it glow red, as if I’d spilled a fiery immortal blood. Hector brought my helmet and Hipponax, back from his mission and looking furtive for some reason, reported that the Peloponnesians were already arrayed and putting rowers into their ships, and also reported, somewhat unnecessarily, that the Brauron girls were awake and singing hymns. He put my aspis on my arm, and then he and Hector armed together. Brasidas came out of his tent armed, and Idomeneus, who looked more like a god than any, with his perfect body and shining bronze and his old-fashioned high crest nodding like Hector’s in Iliad. And Achilles’ namesake, my cousin, did us no disgrace, despite his recent wound and his surly ways, but he ran down from the upper beach fully armed, and his bronze also lit up in the new sun.

But against our bronze, most of the rowers were naked, or wore loincloths. But the top-deck rowers on
Lydia
had helmets and thorax of captured Persian linen, stitched tight and hard with embroidery, or quilted, or beautiful leather spolas taken off Ionian ships, or tawed leather yokes made in Athens or Massalia, and spears. A few even sported swords, or axes, or little maces with bronze heads. They watched us arm, as if our bronze plate protected them as well as us – and I like to think it did.

When we were all together, as far as I could see – the marines in neat rows, and Leukas and Onisandros and Polymarchos, standing with Sittonax, the laziest deadly fighter I knew, my old Gaulish friend and my old sparring mate and newest marine – then our ship’s dog condescended to join us, running down the beach. He ran to me with a live rabbit still breathing in his mouth. I gentled him, gave him a hug and a long pat and beckoned Hector to give the dog a sausage, which he clearly craved. But the rabbit was from the gods and I slit its throat, as much a mercy as a sacrifice, and opened it over the fire.

‘Victory!’ I roared, before I had even glanced at its entrails. But the liver was whole and spotless – not all that usual with rabbits, let me tell you. I am no great diviner, but that rabbit was sent by Zeus and told me we would win.

My people cheered and cheered and the men on other ships began to cheer, and the cliff above us echoed hollowly, as if the gods were shouting approval.

One of our Gaulish wine barrels was open and Onisandros was serving a cup of wine to every man. I leapt on it.

‘
Lydia!’
I said.

They all froze.

‘Listen, brothers!’ I called. ‘Many times before today, I have heard men argue whether the hoplites or the rowers would save Greece.’ I paused.

By the gods, it was quiet.

‘I tell you, we will only save Greece together. I tell you, today, any man who pulls an oar against the Medes is my brother, a descendent of Heracles, noble in his birth, free to walk the earth and defy his foes. I say that this is our hour, when the world will decide if indeed we are worthy of that freedom our fathers won. I say that those who die today will go with Hector and Achilles and the dead of Marathon, even if they were born of slaves and were themselves unfree, and those who live today having done their duty will be remembered as long as free men in any country walk under the stars. And as I make every one of you noble sons of Heracles, then every one of you must want nothing better than to die in arms, or live victorious. For I promise you, brothers, I will not leave the field today alive and beaten. If Greece, free, is a dream, I will die today, still dreaming. Will you, my friends, be my brothers?’

Zeus, the noise they made. I was carried away – I was already with the gods and Athena said those words in my ear, yet even as their cheers rang like the voice of Poseidon echoing from the cliffs over my head, I heard a curiously high-pitched cheer from close at hand.

I remembered it later.

Themistocles held one last meeting. I confess that I think the man loved a council, where his particular merits shone forth at their best. Or perhaps he just liked to talk.

It was greater than just a council, because he had there most of the trierarchs and navarchs, but also many of the helmsmen and marines, both captains and famous men. No one was forbidden to attend. The sun was not yet fully in the sky when he made his speech, and Eurybiades did nothing but bid us to hold our places, to back water when ordered and not break the line.

I felt that Eurybiades’ speech was more to the point.

But I’ll give Themistocles this, he was calm, dignified, and when he said we were assured of victory, he looked the part of a general.

He gathered two dozen commanders as the marines and helmsmen ran for their ships. The morning breeze was stiffening to a wind, and we could see the Persian army marching along the roads opposite us, under the slopes of Mount Aigeleos.

But between us and the Great King’s army lay one of the most awesome spectacles I have ever seen. The breeze was stiffening to a wind, but over the Bay of Salamis a morning fog lay. It clung to the water like smoke clings to the sacrifice on the altar, and the Persian fleet, their masts down, was only visible in the same way that a sharp-eyed hunter might spot a herd of deer on a foggy morning: by movement, and by fleeting gaps in the haze.

But even with these disadvantages to sight, from our eminence we could see that the Persians had moved silently past the island Psyttaleia and that the island itself was crawling with Persian troops. They were moving to encircle our beaches – indeed, had almost done so already.

Aristides nodded, tall and godlike in his panoply. ‘We’ll take the island,’ he said.

‘Not until I give the signal,’ Eurybiades said. ‘The Persians want a sea battle like a land battle?’ he asked. He didn’t smile or grin – that was not the Laconian way. But he exuded a steady confidence. ‘I will give them a battle that will remind them what is sea, what is land, and what is merely air.’

Then he ordered the Aeginians to stay fully armed and ready to launch, bows out, on their beaches, covered by Aristides and his hoplites and the Athenian corps of four hundred archers – enough skilled bowman to clear the decks of five ships in a single mighty volley.

‘Circumstances have changed, but not so much,’ he said. ‘Note how far their lead group has advanced,’ he said, pointing.

Cimon spoke up. ‘Phoenicians,’ he said, looking under his hand. ‘I’d wager my life on it. Almost to Eleusis.’

‘You may have done,’ Eurybiades said. ‘You, Cimon – and you, Plataean – will take your ships off the beaches and bear away west, as if fleeing. Xanthippus, you will follow them.’ He nodded. ‘When you see the gold shield flash you will engage, and not before. Every stade you can make on them westward that allows you to turn the battle back to the east will be the better for us.’

Men looked confused. ‘You want us to fish-hook to the west and drive back east on your command,’ I said.

‘Exactly,’ he said.

‘Lade in reverse,’ Cimon said cheerfully. ‘We’ll remind the Phoenicians of how well they fought there.’

‘The Corinthians will face east against the Egyptians, in case they weather the island and approach from the west. I have sacrificed and prayed that they may not, as then the Corinthians will be our reserve.’ Eurybiades waited, as there was a babble of complaint. He rode it out with his impassivity. ‘You will not advance until I send a pentekonter for you.’

Adeimantus nodded, pleased, I think, to be held back from the fighting.

He looked at Themistocles. The wily Athenian nodded, as if they’d planned the whole talk like a play, each with his part. Perhaps they had. Themistocles, at least, was committed. No one now talked of surrender or flight. Even Adeimantus – I wish to give the slug his due – was armoured, alert, and committed.

‘What we must do, in the first minutes of the action, is turn the battle,’ he said. He pointed out over the straits.

Below us on the beaches, men were restless. Helmsmen shouted up at us, as if they thought we were not aware of how close the Persians were. It takes strong nerves to talk to your officers in the very face of the enemy, but it also wins battles. Eurybiades was such a man. He seemed as calm as a man about to go hunt hares, or have a walk in his vineyard.

Themistocles went on. ‘The Persians intend to fight with their line from east to west,’ he said. ‘We will turn them and force them to fight with their backs to the straits, and a north-south axis.’

We could see that even as the Persian ships deployed, more ships were passing behind the lead divisions. To my eye it looked as if they’d left themselves too little margin for error, too little rowing room.

And I liked our plan.

I’d heard it in the early hours of the morning. I knew the plan, and I liked it. And I liked that we would start with three of our largest squadrons apparently running west for open water along the coast – deserting. Just as the Persians expected.

‘Not until I raise the gold shield,’ Eurybiades said.

I nodded, and so did Cimon. I assume the rest of the navarchs nodded as well.

‘Let’s do this thing,’ Eurybiades said.

‘Remember,’ Themistocles began, but the older Spartan cut him off.

‘The time for talking is done,’ he said, mildly enough. ‘Now, we fight.’

As we walked away, Adeimantus remarked, as if to the air, ‘The old Spartan knows who he can trust! The Corinthians have the place of honour, in reserve – the balance of the battle.’

Cimon ignored him.

I managed a smile. ‘You know, Adeimantus, I have been in forty or so fights, and no one has ever once suggested that I be in reserve.’

He flushed, Cimon laughed, and several men patted me on the back.

I do get in a good thing from time to time.

The fog still lay over the bay, although it was burning off. The sea smelled beautiful and the breeze was almost a wind – more wind, in fact, than any captain wanted for a sea fight. It made our launching off the beaches tricky, to say the least, catching us broadside the moment the bow anchor-stones came in and threatening every ship with being laid broadside in a light surf. But we didn’t have any trierarchs – or helmsmen – so inexperienced.

We launched well enough, but we were ragged getting into formation and Xanthippus’s helmsman cursed Seckla like a man buying a bad horse in the agora, and his imprecations carried across the water. Strangely, we could hear the Persians, too, even with the thigh-high waves – nothing for a sailor to fear, but unusual in the bay.

My ships came off the beach. I only had four,
Lydia
included: Harpagos in
Storm Cutter
, Moire in
Amastris,
Giannis and Megakles in
Black Raven. Athena Nike
lay useless, her bows stove in, on the beach of Aegina to the south. My other ships were now crewed by Athenian citizens and not Plataeans. Ah, I lie. I had five –
Naiad
of Mithymna, my capture turned ‘free Greek’. I left Theognis as the helmsman, but I sent away half of his marines, and replaced them with young Pericles, with his father’s permission, and Anaxagoras, and a captain, a Spartiate provided by Bulis, named Philokles. It was the only ship with an ‘allied’ crew; I added twenty of my Plataean rowers and took twenty men of Lesvos aboard
Lydia.
But I still didn’t trust
Naiad
in the first line, and I told Harpagos and Moire to keep eyes on her. Had Aristides not taken command of the hoplites, I’d have offered him the command.

But four ships or five, it wasn’t the sort of fight where I was needed to tell my captains what to do. My duty was simple: to follow Cimon, to row as far west as I could manage; and then to obey the signal.

There’s something every sailor and every oarsman loves about duplicity. Perhaps it is the touch of the criminal in every man, but all our lives we’re told to avoid duplicity, to be honest – and then, when you are told that it is your duty to act a part and deceive your enemies, it can be great fun. I promise you, as our ragged line, a column of triremes three wide and thirty or more ships long, raced west under oars, I heard an oarsman grunt ‘We’ll be at the isthmus in no time, mates!’ and another pretend to weep from fear. It was not, perhaps, good enough for Dionysus and Aeschylus, but I promise you that our ill-kept column that scattered over a third of the bay to the west would have convinced anyone we were fleeing in panic.