Salamis (42 page)

He should have been in Ephesus the day before, ordering my beloved’s humiliation and death.

I am not one to leave things in the hands of the gods, but in this I knew I could do no more than I had done.

Kineas left it late – on purpose – and Seckla forced our last opponent but one into a wide manoeuvre to cut us off as we threatened to merely sail by. He must have thought his sudden turn was a guarantee of victory.

And he must have died in his heart when he saw how fast our mainsail came down. We left the boat-sail set. We were going very fast.

Our rowers grabbed the mid-ship’s ropes and lay out to starboard, and Seckla’s steering oars bit. One-third of the aft port-side oars went into the water, too – slowing us, and turning us very quickly. Oh, the years of practice in that moment.

And we almost missed.

And as we turned, the deck tilted at an angle I had never experienced and I thought we were going over. I felt the weight change and I feared our mast was taking us down, knocked flat, sideways into the sea. The starboard side rose and rose and every oarsman who could climbed out of his box and threw himself over the deck to the starboard and climbed over the catwalk, and lay out over the starboard rail. A hundred men weigh a great deal.

But what saved us was the impact. Our bow struck their stern. It would have been a glancing blow at a lesser speed, but at our racehorse gallop we sheered off his stern and the resistance – the moment of impact – slowed us.

Grudgingly,
Lydia
righted herself. She did not come up willingly, and for ten heartbeats, it was like watching the last heat at the Olympics, cheering on some beautiful runner who is stride for stride with another – will he win?

And then, with a sudden shake, we were on the level, bobbing like mad, and one of the port-side stern oarsmen lost his oar to the sudden change.

But by then, even though he was pale under his dark skin and looked grey at his own temerity, Seckla was bringing us back on course for Ephesus. Diomedes had sacrificed his consort and now he was only ten stades ahead of us. He was pulling away – of course.

But now our mariners proved their worth again. The readied sail was set back to the mainmast and twenty men raised it with a song. In the distance I could see the opening of the river mouth – the river whose first bend would lead us to magnificent Ephesus and the temple of Artemis shining on the hill of the citadel. It had been years.

I felt the Furies, their wings beating about me to the rush of the wind.

Do you know the feeling you have in the theatre, when you writhe your hips in your desperate wish that Oedipus may make another choice – even though you know that all is written and ordained? When the rhapsode sings the Iliad and you wish that, just this once, Patrocles might live, or Hector triumph?

Well then.

Here we are.

We entered the delta of the Kaystros, passing over the bar under oars, and we were perhaps five stades astern of my enemy. Nor were there warships waiting in the estuary. Indeed, the harbour was empty.

Empty.

One of my many fears in those hours was to find a port packed with enemies, instant allies for Diomedes. But remember, between two hundred hulls to support the bridge over Hellespont and the thousand ships he sent in his navy to Hellas, the Great King stripped the Ionians of their ships and their hoplites.

Diomedes ran.

My crew, Poseidon’s blessing on them, shifted us effortlessly from sail to oars. The promontory on the north of the estuary all but killed the wind, and Seckla and I had it to the last breath, with every rested oarsman on his cushion before the sailors raised their hands to lower the sail.

Four stades.

I could see beaches by the town where Aristides had beached the Athenians eighteen years before, when I was still a boy and the world had seemed a sweeter place. I could see the temple of Artemis on the hill and I thought I could see a certain red-tile roof.

Diomedes took no chances, the coward. He ran his warship onto the beach below the town, bow first. He and all his marines were over the side, abandoning hull and rowers to their fates. And I could see his purple-red cloak fluttering as he ran, wallowing in the deep sand at the top of the beach.

Ka loosed an arrow – and then another and another. His archers joined him as soon as they had the range and the running hoplites began to grow arrows in their shields. It was marvellous shooting for the distance.

I could not watch.

I ran to Seckla. ‘The piers,’ I said. Remember, Seckla had been in and out of Ephesus two years before. He knew the harbour well, although not as well as I. I could not leave my ship and my crew to fall into Persian hands. This had to be touch-and-go: leave me and get into open water to wait conclusions.

That meant the stone pier beyond the breakwater where we could leap ashore and run through the town without crossing a beach. In fact, it was the choice that Diomedes should have made, but he didn’t trust his tired rowers and another two stades of channel.

Well. I did.

Seckla governed our turns. I was my own oar-master, and we made the two turns into the inner harbour at the speed of a cantering horse. Risk upon risk upon risk.

But at my feet, Leukas
sat up
against the mainmast.

‘Get forward,’ he said in his odd accent. ‘Get your … enemy. I will lead the rowers.’

‘Poseidon bless you, brother,’ I said. The word brother came to my lips often that day, because indeed, they were
all
my brothers in this moment of reckless, tragic insanity.

Leukas used the mast to rise to his feet. But his spear was thumping the deck and all around me oarsmen began to smile.

And I thought –
we’re going to do this.

Leukas’s voice should never have carried. But it did – a little higher and weaker than usual, but the port-side oars came in and the starboard checked, and we slipped down the long stone quays, and long before Kineas threw a loop of rope over a stone bollard, I leapt over the side to the rushing stone quay, stumbled and blessed the bronze greave on my knee as it struck the sand on the surface of the stone, and began to run. Brasidas came across behind me and Polymarchos and Achilles and Sitalkes and all the rest. And although I had never run well since my first bad wound, yet it was hard for them to pass me, because Aphrodite and Ares held my arms and I skimmed the earth. And behind me, ten heroes bent on glory.

But after
Lydia
came Archilogos in his magnificent, gilded
Heracles.
He was going to get ashore just behind me.

I have reason to know that it is three hundred and some steps from the top of the beach to the base of the steps to the Great Temple of Artemis. Ephesus is a steep town and I had run up and down the steps of that city all the days of my youth. Three hundred and twenty-six steps, I believe. And the dooryard of Hipponax is at the top, where the city’s great aristocrats live just below the temple precinct.

When everything you have ever wanted in the world awaits extinction at the end of your run, you do not stop. You do not rest, or gasp for air. You do not make a humorous aside, or banter, and practise the kind of bravado boys use when they want to fight.

You merely run, the greaves on your legs weighing like oxen tied to your feet. And despite the best armourer in the world, as you climb, the base of the bronze begins to drive into the top of your instep and the sides of your brave bronze thorax begin to restrict the full expansion of your lungs, and your helmet weighs like a young heifer on your neck; your plume seems to have a life of its own, and the sweat pours down your face from the wool and straw that lines your helmet, stinging your eyes and making you blind.

I had not slept one moment the night before. I had new wounds and old, and I was no longer even a little young.

That
I
ran to the top of the town is
not
the miracle. I was in the hands of a god and a goddess.

That
every one
of my marines ran to the top of the town is a miracle. Not for them, the wonder of Briseis. They only knew that this was my desire – and that Brasidas and I led them. It was for this that they had trained. Beside it, the day at Salamis was a pleasure outing.

Wear full armour. Wear it all day, and then, as the sun sets, leap from a moving ship to a stone pier, land, rise, and run four stades up three hundred steps.

And then fight for your life.

I can tell you about that run in detail. But it would be lies. I remember nothing.

No thought entered my sweat-soaked head, and no sight entered my eyes until I was at the top, on the well-remembered path – too narrow for a street – that led to Hipponax’s arched front gate, and the mural of Heracles my ancestor that decorated his entryway.

By Heracles – it had all started here, in this house. The Furies were close – all their wings beating like oarsmen pulling together.

I saw the entryway. Standing in the narrow alley was a pair of hoplites and they filled it, just the two of them.

Thoughts came into my head. And for the first time I wondered if she was here at all, or in her house in Sardis.

But Diomedes thought so.

The two men facing us were big and brave.

Brasidas threw his heavy ten-foot spear from three paces out, at a dead run. He was just behind me, and yet he threw over my shoulder. His spear struck the aspis of the left-hand hoplite. The man had his shield on his shoulder as men sometimes do when tired, and thus it had no ‘angle’ to the spear tip – which struck full force, as if Achilles himself had thrown it. It went in the width of a hand, weight and strength blowing through layers of hide and wood and linen and pitch, and the man screamed as it went into his bicep, perfectly aimed and thrown, and his instinctive movement ripped it back out of the entry wound, the spear bobbed up and down, lashing through muscles in his left arm, and his own spear fouled his mate as I slammed my aspis into his. Achilles my cousin put a spear in the downed man’s throat somewhere behind me, or so I’ve heard since, and I was entering the gate, where two more stood.

Now they both threw their spears together. I had my own spear up high, my thumb back around the shaft and a little cord between my fingers, as is my habit in a ship fight. From this position it is child’s play to cover yourself against a thrown spear and both casts went wide – one skimmed off my angled shield and would not bite, and the other clattered against my own spear haft as I rolled it, a turn of the wrist, right to left, a little snap that meant life and not death.

Then I slipped between the right-hand man and the gatepost, placed my aspis against his as I slipped, moving his weight the way the end of his spear-cast led him, overextended, right foot forward and thus without the structure to support his aspis. And high above my head, Heracles in his lion skin looked down on me as my spear point rose a fraction of a finger’s width over his aspis and struck almost straight down. He wore a corselet of bronze scale, but my spear went into the muscles of his neck where it met the shoulder, unprotected, under the cheeks of his helmet, and my spear point went far into his body and he was dead before his knees buckled – and my spear leapt back out again, untrammelled by his death.

And I passed my left foot past my right and carried on, leaving the second man, alone, to face Brasidas and Sitalkes.

In the great doorway were two more hoplites, and behind them, two more – a tiny phalanx.

But their spears shook.

No one, my daughter, can watch four of their friends die in twenty heartbeats without a moment of deep doubt and real fear.

I threw my dory when I was half a pace from the faces of their aspides. My spear flew perhaps a single pace and slid between the edges of the man’s helmet, deep between his teeth into his throat. I tugged the cord, but it was gone, lodged too far.

The other front ranker lost an entire action being afraid.

I got my hand on my xiphos
.

Finally, he struck – a simple, straight blow to the face of my aspis. A wasted blow. If he had been trained by Calchus he would have known what to do when a Killer of Men came and faced him. He and his friends would have set their shields together and put their spear points to my face, and driven me away or let me expend the rage of Ares on their impenetrable shields.

But I was Hector
and
Heracles, and they had no hero to steady them.

My long xiphos came out of my scabbard as if called by Ares. My draw lengthened into a high cover that took my terrified adversary’s spear high and then I sprayed his fingers over his companions with a flick of my wrist, and my aspis and my shoulder cast him into his own second rank, a step higher on the marble, and his blood sprayed over his friends.

They reached for me with their spear, but they also stumbled back.

And Brasidas was there.

What evil fate set those men to face me, and to face Brasidas, on the same day and in the same hour?

His sword flew like one of the ravens of Apollo, stooping and rising.

And then – I tell it because it will be difficult to believe – we drove them back from the threshold into the portico, and I have never seen it, before or since, but Brasidas’s opponent thrust, pushing forward on his right foot with his spear reversed, and while he went shield to shield with the Spartan, he was wide open to me. I had just covered a heavy, sweeping blow on my shield and I turned and killed Brasidas’s opponent with a thrust to the throat – and in that beat of the heart, Brasidas drove over my arm into my man, killing him.

My sword caught in Brasidas’s adversary, though. The swell in the ‘leaf’ of the blade had gone too deep and he took my sword in death. But Ares guided my hand and I took his spear from him as if he had handed it to me.

I ran down the hallway to the women’s quarters.

I knew it well.

And as I had imagined it a thousand times that day, there he stood.

Diomedes.

Two women dead at his feet, their young corpses piled one atop another like lovers in a tragedy.