Salamis (34 page)

The Persians were cut down to a man. And then the Athenian archers began to flay any ship that came within range.

And, finally, the Aeginians on the eastern-facing beaches of Cape Cynosura gave up on waiting for their signal to act as the eastward arm of the trap and attacked out into the channel. Or, according to others, they supported Aristides’ attack. I wasn’t there. But either way, the retreat of the Cilicians became a rout.

There is tragedy even in victory and the heroes of the Persian retreat were Greeks. The Ionian Greeks, who had been led so ill at Lade, held together, and fought like lions for their ill master. They killed almost as many Athenian ships as they lost themselves; the only Aeginian casualties that day were from Ionians. The Red King’s ship sank at least two of ours and perhaps five, although many blamed him for things he could not have done. And Diomedes, his henchman, sank an Aeginian ship at the very moment of victory.

But it was to Artemisia of Halicarnassus that the honour of the day must go. Not only was she the leading Killer of Men for the Great King, but when the Phoenicians broke, she was caught in their rout. It is interesting to me that I must have been within a few ship lengths of her, watching Heliodora leap with dignity into the depths, when she got her ship free of the wreck of their van, and fled east. But when Ameinias of Pallene pursued her, eager to take the Great King’s female captain, she escaped by ramming one of her own ships! Now, I have since heard from men of that region that the ship she rammed was a political enemy of hers; some say it was the Red King, but as you’ll hear, I promise you it was not. Others say she was just a wily woman. I raise my cup in respect. It was a trick worthy of Odysseus himself, and when she rammed the Ionian ship – some say a Phoenician – Ameinias naturally assumed she was Athenian and let her go.

Such was that combat; it was in many ways easier to fight the Phoenicians when we could always tell their ships from ours, than Ionians – every ship full of Greeks.

The Ionians fought us as the rest of the Great King’s fleet fled. But exhaustion kept us from destroying their fleet utterly. Too many of them made the beaches of Phaleron.

But that was for another day.

I remember standing by Seckla. Brasidas and Hipponax had Leukas out of his armour and to everyone’s great relief there was a lot of blood but danger only of infection; he had a bad cut all across one buttock, which makes you all giggle but is, I promise you, not a light matter, and a deep but clean penetration of the back of his left thigh and another in his guts, almost certainly a death blow. Brasidas had a deep cut across the top of his shoulder that bled like mad, and required him to be stitched up like a sail. Sittonax looked as if he’d been decapitated and his head sewn back on – a horrible-looking wound. We were all gathered around Leukas, as his wounds were the worst that were still saveable. Perhaps.

I mention this because Leukas had, for one reason and another, been sure he was to die in the battle, and despite that he’d fought very well – but he was sure that the wounds were mortal, until Brasidas began to wash them.

‘Men got behind me,’ Leukas said. He was, apparently, afraid we would think he’d turned his back and fled.

‘So I see,’ Hipponax said politely. He was holding the honey pot in his unbroken right hand and helping Brasidas, who was keeping him busy despite, or perhaps because of, his own pain. I knew that when the despair of battle’s end hit him, added to the death of the girl, he would be in a bad place.

Hipponax’s hand had swelled up like a melon. But I’m digressing.

Onisandros was not doing as well. The farther he got from the fire of battle, the worse his wound seemed, and I suspected he was slipping away on us. And he was in pain, and pain robs a man of courage. He had two deep stab wounds and a dozen cuts.

His screams were not helping young Kineas, whom Seckla had appointed acting oar-master. Kineas admired Onisandros and wanted to help him and we were trying to get a ship full of wounded men underway.

I think Brasidas wanted me to put him out of his misery, but I was in a black mood – I hadn’t liked killing the man who had raised his hands for mercy and as I grew older, the blackness after battle grew worse, not better. And I had been with Onisandros and Leukas too long.

War is a terrible mistress. I have given so many friends into the maw of Ares. And I could not forget that Seckla took a belly wound and lived.

But Onisandros’s screams and whimpering were not the trumpets of victory that we deserved and there were twenty other men as badly off or worse, and neither were they silent.

I went to Onisandros’s side, and held his hand a while, and my son brought the honey and we anointed him as best as we could.

He screamed.

I could only think of my master, Hipponax, when I found him after the fight at Ephesus, when we stopped the Carians and the Persians broke the other rebels. He’d been in a worse case, and a life of nobility was screamed out in fear and despair.

War is terrible. Let no one doubt it.

I knelt by Onisandros and considered cutting his throat – for his own good. For the good of all. And I decided that the man who was afraid was me and that I needed to be strong and listen to him scream and do what I could for him, and not be afraid of his screams.

But by luck, or the grace of the gods, when we wrapped a clean length of Egyptian linen around his belly, he grew quieter. His eyes fluttered open – and then closed.

He took a few breaths.

‘Just remember,’ I said to my son, ‘that this could as easily be you or I.’

Hipponax was crying.

I stood up, and looked over the sea. Kineas had the oars in the water – about two-thirds of our benches were manned, so that he’d emptied the bottom rowing deck. We were moving steadily, but slowly, because we were towing the great Phoenician trireme we’d taken.

As far as the eye could see to the east there were dead men, floating wrecks – triremes rarely sink when they are hit. Usually they just turn over and float like giant turtles or huge basking sharks.

Wrecks, corpses, and broken oars, a hideous carpet. As with everything else about Salamis, I had never seen anything like it – after Lade, the dead sank and the water hid the horror, but it was as if the Bay of Salamis wanted men to see what they had wrought.

The Great King’s throne was gone.

It was late afternoon. Over towards Phaleron the Ionians fought a desperate rearguard action with the Aeginians, who came in like sharks to kill the weakest ships, and harried the Great King’s fleet almost to their landing beaches. But around the island of Psyttaleia, the rest of the Greek fleet lay on their oars in an agony of exhaustion and victory.

In a wing beside me rowed Moire, in
Amastris
, with
Naiad
next outboard, followed by
Storm Cutter
with fewer benches manned than I had – Harpagos was dead and his nephew Ion was at the helm, and every marine aboard had died, except Sittonax, and many oarsmen and sailors, too. Then came Giannis and Megakles in
Black Raven.
I’d say we lost almost a quarter of our manpower without losing a single ship – the worst casualties I can remember taking in a sea fight, win or lose, except Lade.

The other Athenians whose ships ended the fight over by the coast of Attica gathered round me and Eumenes of Anagyrus, and we began to move slowly southward. The unwounded marines fished for living men as we rowed, and brought aboard a Persian nobleman and a dozen Ionians. We spared them – everyone had had a surfeit of blood, and men swimming in the water offer no threat.

The Persian was white and pasty from being in the water – he said his ship had been among the first struck. I gave him wine and fresh water and set him by Onisandros, because he was pretty far gone. He’d been in the water a long time.

Touchingly, he knew who I was. So I leaned over him, shading him from the sun, while Brasidas got me out of my armour.

I screamed too.

Blood from the earlier wound to my lower back had dried, making a great scab pressed between the back plate of bronze and my flesh. Brasidas tried to use water to break the scab away, but in his haste he got salt water.

I screamed for some time, I promise you. And no one offered to put me down.

But my recovery was swifter because I’d been wounded – often – and knew that the wound had only gone into fat and muscle. In fact, my wrenching of my left shoulder when I hit the water was to prove the worst wound I took that day, but that’s another matter. Age magnifies wounds. Youth, however, fears them.

Eventually – and I swear it took us half the afternoon to cross six stades of water – we were nearing our landing beach, and the beach was full, crowded beyond belief with people. The whole population of Attica was there.

They were cheering and cheering. Xanthippus was just beaching – he came up from the east as we came from the north – and I saw Cleitus with a pang, knowing that the death of his daughter aboard my ship would reignite our feud. That is how men are. Someone must be blamed, and truly, my Hipponax was to blame.

He was by me, and I was glad he was alive. But I was going to make him do this thing.

I pointed at Cleitus’s golden head. The man looked magnificent and still had his armour on. I was stripped to a terrible old chiton and my greaves.

‘You must tell him,’ I said.

Hipponax’s eyes were red and his whole face was so puffy that he might have been badly beaten in a boxing match.

His head sank.

‘You loved her?’ I asked.

‘I was going to marry her,’ he said. His voice was barely audible for the cheering. ‘I thought you knew.’

I admit that in that moment I understood a great many things I’d been told and to which I’d paid no attention in the past month. ‘You brought her aboard?’ I asked, attempting, and failing, to conceal my anger.

‘She demanded it,’ he said. ‘You didn’t know her, Pater. She was like … a goddess, or a force of nature. She said that if I wanted to wed her, I needed to know that she was of the same – gold as me. That’s what she said. That she could row and oar and fight.’ He was crying again.

It was excruciating to hear him. I knew her only as the best dancer of the girls, nothing more. But Gorgo might have said the same to Leonidas.

‘She claimed it was her bride price …’ He hung his head. ‘I knew she could pull the oar. Onisandros helped me.’

I shook my head. But I could imagine Lydia or Briseis or Euphonia making the same demand and I know I’d have smuggled any of them aboard for the ultimate contest. And I had a sense – maybe because of what happened between me and Lydia – of what a woman’s life was like. How the horizon began wide and narrowed with marriage to become almost a cage with children in it.

But that didn’t assuage my anger, as a father and as a commander.

Anger, fatigue, fear, pain – all close friends. With the black mood that clouds your head after battle, a poisonous gang.

But I was no longer seventeen and I managed to walk away from my son and to help order the landing of the great Phoenician ship. She – he, I suppose, as most Phoenician ships were male – still had most of his rowers aboard with twenty Greek marines watching over them, and I had no intention of letting them be massacred by the crowd, or by Persians or Ionians either.

Brasidas led the unwounded marines ashore, despite his wound. They cheered him and the marines, but he cleared a large space and Xanthippus and his oarsmen pitched in, making space for the Phoenician ship to come ashore. The crowd began to bay for blood like hounds after a hunt, but some of the Priestesses of Athena and of Artemis were there and they silenced the crowd so that we could work the big Phoenician ashore.

We landed well, and the surf was down, and with the help of the priestesses the crowd went from vicious mongrels to willing hands. We got the ship up the beach as if he was made of parchment and a
taxis
of Athenian hoplites, eager to give us help, took the prisoners away, except the Persian, who I kept. Doctors came with a dozen remedies for wounds; one specialised in arrow removal and was very popular, and another had a preparation of vinegar and honey that he used on wounds, which he said averted the arrows of Apollo. The sheer number of helpers lifted my mood – there was even a man setting bones who looked at my son’s hand and splinted it carefully, and another who, as I have mentioned, used needle and thread to close the flap of skin on Brasidas’s shoulder and then pushed the Gaul down on the beach, knelt by him like a tailor of human flesh, and began on the slash to his neck.

Here is how close Sittonax came to death. While he fought, alone, a Phoenician marine or a Persian came behind him, threw his sword over the Gaul’s head, and was just tightening his grip and cutting my friend’s throat when an Athenian spear took the would-be killer from behind.

Onisandros and Leukas were taken with the rest of our badly wounded men to the big tents going up all along the streams – all made of our sails. Triremes, for the most part, don’t put to sea to fight with their mainmasts or their sails on board. The wood and canvas is heavy and the rowers don’t need the extra work. The handful of trihemiolias, like
Lydia
, had standing masts and rigging and made up for the weight in other ways. Suffice it to say we left our sails on the beach – most of us – and they made good tents for the wounded.

And then we had to contend with the adoration of the people of Attica. One of the oddest elements of that wonderful, terrible day is that we fought under the very eyes of our people. I don’t think any battle in which I had ever participated so clearly brought home to me the division between a war of justice – the defence of people who would otherwise be made slaves – and a war of injustice like the piracy which I had made for most of my life. To be wrapped in the thanks of thousands, or tens of thousands of people … the blackness of the day evaporated. It was not just me; every man coming off
Lydia
to pull her ashore lifted his head from the weight of pain and blood, saw the welcome prepared him, and smiled. Matrons kissed me while their husbands pumped my hand; little girls held my knees, and boys gazed on me with the devotion given to gods, and such was the favour shown equally to every marine and every oarsman, too, top deck or bottom deck.