Salamis (32 page)

It took two Aeolian oarsmen and Pericles to pull me up the side – I was already spent. I know a man who swam to Salamis from one of the stricken Athenian ships, in his armour, and he deserves much praise for his swimming. I was only in the water for two hundred heartbeats and I was
tired
.

Hah! But I was alive.

I was on one knee on the catwalk for a long time – long enough for twenty more men to die aboard
Horse Tamer.
That fight had become the centre of the maelstrom.

I looked about. Pericles left me to go onto
Horse Tamer.
Even as I discovered my sword was still strapped to my side, and none the worse for a little salt water, I saw that my riposte into the Phoenician counter-attack had sufficed. Hipponax had killed again; his ship was backing water. Cimon’s brother was finishing off an Ionian ship that looked familiar, but I could not place her. Megakles and Eumenes were both taking ships.

It was here, and now. The Phoenicians were pouring men into this boarding fight and now there were more than a dozen ships all grappled together, and there were Phoenician marines aboard
Lydia
– I could see Leukas fighting in the stern with his bronze axe. I could see Brasidas’s plume two ships away, on board an Ionian which itself had a Phoenician boarding it over the stern, and behind him my son Hipponax’s spear went back and forth like a woman working wool on a loom.

Seldom have I had so much of a feeling that the gods were all about me. I drew my good sword – my long xiphos – and leapt down onto the ram of
Naiad
and then cambered up the stern of
Horse Tamer.
Once again, the enemy had pressed the ship’s defenders into the stern – there was Seckla, and there Pericles, and there Anaxagoras and beside him Cleitus, of all people, with Xanthippus roaring orders and throwing well-aimed javelins from the helmsman’s bench.

I took an aspis off a corpse. it was too heavy for my liking, but there it is, on the wall – Heracles and the Nemean Lion. As if it had been left for me.

I went forward even as Anaxagoras fell.

I got a leg forward, got my right arm well back, and stabbed from very close. I had three opponents, and only then did I realise how badly injured my left shoulder was from the impact with the water when I fell over the side because when my opponent bashed his aspis into mine, the blow ran up my arm to my shoulder like a wound.

But it is when everything is on the line that you show yourself.

Listen, then.

Seckla’s long-bladed spear baffled one of my opponents – he turned his head and I stabbed him in the throat-bole with a flip of my wrist, and then I pivoted and swung my sword backhanded. My second opponent was fouled by the falling body of his mate and he allowed himself to be deceived by the reverse my blade made in the air. I struck him full across the face with my blade, which cut the depth of two fingers into his skull, and then, good sword as he was, didn’t snap when I tore the blade free.

The third adversary got his spear into my helmet; a good blow, but the helmet held, and although I smelled blood, I got my blade over the top of his shield. I did him no damage, but my point lodged at the base of his bronze crest-box on top of his helmet, and the force of my blow moved his head. Where the head goes, the body follows, and he went backward – and straight over the side.

I found that I was roaring Briseis’s name as a war cry. Well, Aphrodite has turned a battle ere now, and on Crete they have a temple to her as Goddess of War. But by
all
the gods I was full of new fire, and perhaps it was Briseis and her own unquenchable spirit, or Aphrodite herself.

Cleitus fell by my side. Anaxagoras was up, pulled to his feet on the bloody deck by Pericles. And down the deck, two oar lengths away, I saw a familiar bulk: Polymarchos, at the head of my marines, pushing towards me, but the Red King’s marines and those of my foe Diomedes were fleeing back into the two triremes that lay, beaks in, amidships.

I got a foot over Cleitus and parried away his death blow from a Phoenician. Later, I prayed to my Mater that she not be offended. In the press, he was Athenian – indeed, he was my brother and not my foe, as I had promised all my men.

There must have been fifty men on that deck and another thirty corpses – and Poseidon only knows how many more gone to feed the squid over the sides. That ship was the epicentre of the western end of the battle.

But like a man waking from long illness, or recovering from injury, I felt the lightening of the pressure, roared my war cry, and baffled Cleitus’s would-be killer with a heavy blow to his head. He raised his shield and I cut his left thigh to the bone. I remember the delicious satisfaction of that cut.

I put my other leg forward, leaving Cleitus behind me, and Seckla cut a man’s hand right off his arm with the sharp edge of his spearhead – his favourite trick, cutting with a spear, which his people apparently did routinely.

And then I was chest to chest with Polymarchos and he grinned evilly.

‘You stopped for a bath?’ he laughed. ‘You look like a puppy someone tried to drown.’

‘Better than being dead,’ I said. I turned to Cleitus, still trapped on his back in the press, gave him my sticky right hand and got him to his feet.

He didn’t say anything. He just stood there for two breaths. When you go down on the deck in a boarding fight, you are very close to becoming a corpse or fish food. I knew – I’d just been there.

But there was no time for talk. He took a spear from someone and we pressed up the deck, finished the last Phoenician marines, who died well, and went over the sides. I led my people back aboard
Lydia
, where Ionian and Phoenician marines were fighting my deck crew and my top-deck rowers. My men were making a fight of it, but rowers are no match for hoplites.

I say my men, but there was one obvious exception – a tiny girl, dwarfed by the bronze men against her, was fighting with a spear. She mystified them, her steps sure, her movements deceptive, and two trained men could not kill her. She gave ground steadily, stabbing when she could, and even as we boarded she turned and leapt into the sea.

I knew her immediately – Cleitus’s daughter, Heliodora.

But the tide had turned. An Athenian ship came in behind
Lydia
and put marines over her stern even as we went back aboard over the starboard side, and the Phoenicians collapsed, dead, dying, or in the water before I could get my sword on one.

Then I saw my son.

Hipponax came down the gangway from the bow, at the head of my people who’d followed Brasidas – indeed, the Spartan’s plumes were just behind him. He fought like one possessed, or maddened, and his spear point was everywhere, his aspis was a battering ram and a trickster’s cloak, and yet he seemed to walk forward unopposed.

Then I knew where the girl had come from, and whose girlish voice had sung the hymn to Apollo.

As soon as my deck was clear, I ran to the side, but Hipponax beat me there – and she was not among those swimming.

Brave soul – to wish to face the Medes. I sent a prayer for her winning, and turned to Leukas, but he had two wounds, and I ordered Seckla gruffly into the oars. Xanthippus was cutting the grapples.

We were winning. But when you are outnumbered two to one, you cannot stop fighting for a local victory. As oarsmen went back to their cushions, I tried to climb my mast – and could not. Something was awry with my left shoulder, and my missing fingers were not helping. I could not climb at all.

I could not see Cimon’s
Ajax
, nor any of the ships of his squadron – nor any of the Corinthians.

We had stopped the Phoenician counter-attack, but that was all. The Ionians were backing water toward the straits, unbeaten. The survivors of the Phoenicians were gathered around that red and god-giant ship, and it towered above the others like one ship piled atop a second.

Off to the east there was a great roar, like the sound the crowd makes going to the mysteries at Eleusis – and then again, and then, a third time repeated, and again we heard the paean sung, and then a Laconian cheer, so different from our own.

Xanthippus, who was covered in blood and certainly one of the day’s heroes, leaned over from his ship’s rowing station. He shouted some words that were lost, and then ‘ … big bastard.’

I assumed he meant he was going for the big Phoenician.

I thought that was the best new attack. So I nodded emphatically.

Seckla was in the steering oars. My son Hipponax was on his knees, weeping.

Oh, rage. Ares and Aphrodite, together.

I pulled him to his feet and I struck him. ‘Cease your weeping!’ I shouted. I am ashamed now. I struck my own son, and I said, ‘Avenge her first. And then explain to her father why she died, you useless shit.’

He stood and looked at me like a whipped dog.

I struck him again and Seckla and Brasidas dragged me off him. I cannot ever remember being so gripped with rage, and the image of that poor girl, and the bravery of her leap in to the waves – a beautiful defiance.

But there were arrows in the air again, and Ka and Nemet were in the stern, lofting shafts at the Ionians. I was hit in the aspis and the shards of the cane cut my face and woke me from my rage.

But I didn’t apologise.

I turned to Seckla. Most of our rowers were in their positions. Onisandros was wounded but on his feet – by Heracles my ancestor, it seemed to me that every man on my deck was wounded, except my son and Brasidas, who seemed to have had godlike powers that day.

Leukas was sitting on the port-side helm bench, bleeding, with Polymarchos, stripped of his aspis, trying to staunch the blood and close the wounds. But elsewhere on the aft deck, surviving sailors were slicing cut cables and serving out new oars to men who’d lost theirs in the fighting. The men moved with decision.

We were still a fighting ship.

‘Fetch me alongside the big Phoenician, or ram him if you can,’ I said to Seckla. Leukas gave a great cry and fainted.

‘Hipponax!’ I called. He was standing with Brasidas, head down.

He came slowly, even as the oars came out raggedly and the once nimble
Lydia
gathered way.

He was crying, and he was ashamed.

I dropped my sword on the deck and put my arms around him.

‘That was ill-said,’ I admitted. ‘It was hubris for me to strike you.’

He looked as shocked as if I’d hit him again. ‘But you are right, Pater,’ he moaned. ‘I might as well have killed her myself.’

I held him for a moment. So complex are the weavings of the gods. I knew he would now fight like one with no hope – brilliantly. And perhaps take his death wound, uncaring. Killed, in a strange way, by Cleitus. So we are tied together. Yoked, like oxen in a field.

‘No time for tears,’ I said gruffly. I might have said – stay, live. But I did not.

‘No,’ he said. He straightened. ‘Only revenge.’ He managed a crooked, terrible smile. ‘Let me go up the side first,’ he said.

Brasidas shook his head.

‘Perhaps,’ I said. I turned away. I had once been young – how would I have felt if I had caused the death of Briseis? Who was I to tell my son that there would be other loves?

The Ionians deployed well, but now the battle had turned completely along the narrow north-south axis that Themistocles and Eurybiades had wanted. The Phoenician flagship was still closer to the coast of Attica than I liked, almost under the Great King’s throne, but the chaos of the fight had put us hard by and Themistocles was going into the remnants of the Phoenicians even as the Laconians – and the Corinthians, although I could not see them – were smashing into the Ionian centre.

And still there were mighty cheers coming from beyond our centre.

As
Lydia
went forward,
Naiad, Storm Cutter
and
Black Raven
joined us. There was a brief pause – the Great King’s fleet was collapsing in two directions, back against the coast of Attica for the Phoenicians and westernmost Ionians, and back towards Phaleron for the rest of them. Many ships were simply trapped. Ameinias in his
Parthenos
made another spectacular kill just then, right in the centre, far from us, but under the eyes of the main fleet, and as his doomed adversary broke in half, the Athenian main squadron gave a huge cheer.

There were no cheers from our adversaries. And we knew we were winning. We knew that, after many days of defeat, and some hard-fought draws and one victory squandered by the death of brave Leonidas, that now was our hour. Now was our moment.
Now
we were going to win. And yet, no one shirked. It is easy in the hour of victory to turn aside, to feel the weight of your wounds and wait for another man to do the final work and cut the throat of the downed enemy, but no one shirked.

Nothing needed to be said. From the fight at Sardis to this day in the Bay of Salamis, all had been defeat and retreat and now we had men who were willing to give their lives to be sure it was done.

I was one.

The Phoenician squadron under the Great King’s throne had to be beaten. It stood off our new flank as the battle turned, and if left unfought, it could change the tide again. And yet … they had no room to manoeuvre. Indeed, their sterns were almost on the beaches, and the Persian Immortals guarding the Great King were in position to bury us in arrow shafts.

But they had their own crisis, and the flagship suddenly had its oars out and was coming at us, trailing escorts the way a mother duck trails ducklings. It was badly coordinated and to this day I can only assume that the Phoenicians were humiliated that we were going to attack them without any response.

It was a foolish decision, because they came out from under the screen of their archers.

But it was also the closest thing to an open-water engagement that day: a dozen of theirs against about the same of ours. That was when I discovered that Xanthippus was not there. He’d gone to the big fight in the centre.

War is often like tragedy – the Fates walk, and dooms are laid, and what happens often seems either incredible or easily predictable. We had the same number of ships on either side, in that engagement. Our ships had fought two or three or four engagements that day, and most of theirs – the Phoenician reserve – were as fresh as a child waking from sleep.