The Great King (16 page)

Brasidas looked off into the darkness for so long I thought that he wouldn’t answer. And why should he? It was an angry, rhetorical question.

But he coughed, and sat up. ‘When I was young, and had just finished the Agoge,’ he said, ‘we went to war with Argos. It wasn’t much of a war, really. We knew we would win, and so did the Argives – good fighters, but not like us. And we had more hoplites.’ He turned, to make sure he had my attention. He looked into the fire. ‘Cleomenes was the king. He was attempting to breathe new life into the Peloponnesian League and to let the allies have more say. One of the allied leaders made a suggestion about tactics.’ He shrugged. ‘And Cleomenes allowed the allies to follow this man – even though his brother, Leonidas, derided the notion as un-Greek and unworthy. So the allies marched off slightly to our left, and at a set command, they moved at an incline – very rapidly – like this.’ His right hand was the Spartan phalanx, moving forward, neither slow nor fast, but inexorable.

I had seen it. Faced it. Nothing, in the aspis of the world, is more to be feared than the Spartan advance.

His left hand swung out wide to the left and then accelerated in from the flank.

Total silence had fallen. Brasidas never told a story – even those who did not know him paused to hear him. And Calliteles nodded, almost imperceptibly supporting Brasidas –
yes, it was as he says.

‘As soon as they saw themselves outflanked, the Argives broke and ran,’ Brasidas said.

Many men nodded. Cimon looked like a boy who knows the punchline to the joke.

I shrugged. ‘Outnumbered, facing Spartans, and outflanked?’ I said. I nodded. ‘I’d run, too.’

Brasidas nodded. ‘They ran a stade – out of the jaws. Then they stopped. They reformed their phalanx.’

His eyes flicked to Calliteles, who was older. He was an Olympian, and that meant, I knew, that he’d probably been in the Hippeis – the Spartan Royal Guard – with Cleomenes.

He raised one eyebrow. ‘Then they mocked us.’

Calliteles nodded.

‘They sent a herald. They said, “O Spartans, mighty in war – have your arms lost their strength, that you stoop to trickery? Meet us chest to chest and shield to shield
in a real contest
, or march home and be damned.”’

Brasidas allowed himself a small smile. ‘We told the allies to stand aside. We marched down the field, and the Argives came to us, and we fought.’ He nodded. ‘We defeated them, of course. They sent heralds to offer submission and to request permission to bury their dead. We granted it.’ He nodded.

Calliteles nodded also.

Cimon nodded in his turn. ‘I know that I have heard this story told a dozen times,’ he said. ‘I was at dinner with Leonidas and Gorgo one night and an ephor told the story. I thought the point was that the Peloponnesian allies had wrecked the pincer movement by being too slow. I said so, and Gorgo looked at me – well, the way a wife looks at you when you say something foolish at temple.’ He raised his eyebrows and spread his hands like a mime.

Brasidas looked at the ground.

Calliteles looked at the stars.

Styges had grown to manhood with Idomeneaus. He understood immediately – as did I, thanks. I had been with the Cretans. He leaned forward – a young man, and thus not quick to offer his views – but after several breaths, he said, ‘I understand.’

Brasidas looked at him. ‘Yes?’ he asked. He sounded tired, as if using so many words had exhausted him.

‘There’s more to victory than occupying ground,’ Styges said. ‘My . . . mentor, Idomeneaus, says that victory and defeat are . . . in men’s minds. Some men die, and yet are not defeated. Other men kill, but at the end of the day, they allow themselves to feel defeated.’ His dark eyes searched around the fire – looked at me, looked at Cimon and then Brasidas. ‘I have seen it, too.’

We all nodded. ‘The Argives were completely undefeated by the clever trick. Angered, but not even shamed. They had come to test themselves – man to man – against the Spartans, not to dick about with manoeuvre.’ I had it, by then. ‘Leonidas wants the Greeks to measure their spears against those of the Medes. Man to man. Like the Argives.’

Brasidas nodded. ‘Not the Greeks,’ he said. He shrugged. ‘Or perhaps. But mostly, the men of Lacedaemon.’

Calliteles had worked hard to avoid appearing to speak to Brasidas, but now he couldn’t help himself. He nodded emphatically, and his right fist smashed into his left hand. ‘To see who is best,’ he said simply.

I went to sleep and dreamed of Herakles. I remember it well. Herakles was striding the earth, with the club on his shoulder, and he was coming to Olympia to compete. It was a beautiful dream and it was followed by another that had Gorgo, naked, riding a horse.

I don’t need a priest to interpret either.

I awoke and went to piss, again, and again I passed from anger to joy at the very early morning and the camp. I was used to the smell. There was a gentle sea breeze creeping up the valley, and I dropped my chiton and ran. My old wound hurt – it was my third day of running – but I was determined, and I ground along the river.

After six stades or so, my right ankle began to hurt. By my tenth stade, it hurt a great deal.

It is one thing to endure pain, and another thing to fear real injury. Most men can endure enormous pain if they know the consequence. What makes you a coward is the fear – the fear of permanent injury, laming, rupture, loss.

My ankle didn’t look bad, but I moved farther from the stream, into the meadow where the ground was softer.

It grew worse.

Gorgo rode round the bend in the valley, her horse at a dead gallop. I knew her immediately, because she was a woman on a horse with no clothes on, and there simply couldn’t be so many of them. Even at the Olympics.

I forgot my ankle. This is how simple the male animal is. I forgot my ankle and flew.

Well. I thought that I flew.

She reined in by me. ‘Arimnestos, if I didn’t know that you had taken that wound fighting the Persians at Lades, I’d say that you were the most shameful runner I’d seen in many years.’

I grinned, suddenly delighted to have an excuse to stop.

‘I see that in one way, at least, the Spartans are like other Greeks,’ I said.

Gorgo shrugged. She backed her horse a step. ‘How is that?’ she asked.

‘Women are more talkative than men,’ I said.

She laughed. ‘Shall I leave you to hobble home, then, Plataean?’ she asked. ‘I had not taken you for the sort who prefer to pretend that women have no wits.’

I stopped and laughed. ‘No. But no man likes to be told he hobbles, when once he was young and fleet. Achilles never hobbled.’ I held up a hand like a pankrationist who submits. ‘Spare me, Queen! I’ll walk by your side and endure your jests. Truly, my ankle is killing me.’

If she offered me any sympathy I didn’t see it. ‘You speak Persian,’ she said.

‘It is true.’ Unbidden, the phrase ‘nice tits’, often used by Persian soldiers in Ephesus, came to mind. I turned my head to hide my smile.

She nodded. ‘You have many friends inside the border of the empire?’ she asked.

‘And a few enemies,’ I admitted. It is very, very difficult
not
to posture in front of an attractive woman. Luckily, she was above me on a horse.

We went along in companionable silence for a stade.

‘I gather from my husband that I can welcome you to our League,’ she said.

‘League?’ I asked.

‘The conspiracy to save Greece,’ she said.

I stopped and bowed as I would to a priestess. She was – hard to explain – like a priestess of Greece, if Greece were a goddess.

‘I wonder if you would consider . . .’ she began, and then frowned.

It was deliberate. I saw through it, because I knew women – not all women, but a woman like Gorgo. I knew Briseis. This was a woman used to getting her way from strong men – not by flaunting her sex, but by using her mind. The body was there to be admired, but it was only the bait.

Nor did I imagine that the wife of the King of Sparta was . . . licentious. I can be a boy of nineteen with Briseis, but I am not utterly a fool. Gorgo wanted something.

It pleased me to play the Spartan, and walk along the valley with her, and act as if I hadn’t heard her.

The camp came into sight.

‘How did you come to count Brasidas among your friends?’ she asked.

I thought this was a digression, but I liked the way it led. At least she had named him. ‘I found him at liberty on the dockside of Syracusa,’ I said. ‘I needed a good man to captain my marines.’ In truth, I had a good man in Alexandros. Brasidas was more like a force of nature.

She smiled. ‘My husband hates him,’ she said. ‘Although it might be said that Brasidas hates my husband, as well.’

She smiled at me, daring me – I thought – to ask.

I had a hard time reading her age. But if Leonidas was fifty, she was thirty – with the body of a twenty-year-old. And the mind of an ephor – always scheming. Later I learned that she had one of the better spy networks in the Greek world, and when she and Cimon became allies, they, together, had the best information networks anywhere – equal to that of the Great King or the temple at Delphi.

I wasn’t going to ask. You learn early, as a commander, that you
do not want to know
. If they tell you, well and good. If they choose not to tell you – well and good. And time saved, sometimes.

She shook her head. ‘I gather you are immune to my charms,’ she said.

I smiled up at her. ‘I don’t think your charms are on offer, Queen of Sparta? Or am I to imagine myself the new Paris – and seize you and carry you to my ship?’

She laughed and made an attractive face – pretending fear. ‘It sounds exciting,’ she said.

I shook my head. ‘Look how it came out for them,’ I said.

She laughed again. Gorgo’s laugh was like Leonidas’s voice – sharp, incisive, no quarter asked or given. ‘And yet I hear you are a great lover of women?’ she said. ‘I told the king I could wrap you around my finger.’

‘Did you?’ I asked – flattered, in a way.

‘I tend to melt Greek men,’ she said, without immodesty.

‘I am melted,’ I said. ‘If my ankle didn’t hurt, I’d . . .’

I met her eyes. There was something deadly serious there. The witty flirtation wasn’t right.

‘I’m sorry,’ I said. ‘I’ve missed the tone. May I help you and the king in some way?’

We went along for half a stade.

‘I wonder if you would consider,’ she asked carefully, ‘taking a pair of Spartan heralds to the Great King?’

‘To Persia?’ I asked. I was . . . shocked.

She sighed. ‘I
have
handled this badly.’

‘Brother, you look as if you’ve seen a ghost,’ Cimon said when I hobbled back to camp. By then, my ankle was swollen. ‘You’ve talked to Gorgo?’

That snapped me out of my state. ‘What do you know?’ I asked.

Cimon shrugged. ‘Quite a bit,’ he admitted.

‘Poseidon, Cimon, if the Spartans are sending heralds to Persia, Athens is doomed.’ I couldn’t stop myself from saying it.

Cimon raised an eyebrow. ‘Arimnestos, sometimes you do sound like a provincial hick and not like a cosmopolitan man of the world. Leonidas is the heir of Cleomenes and his aggressive foreign policy. He’s unlikely to submit to Persia.’ He looked at me and smiled. ‘Is he?’

I had to admit that he had a point – and I knew enough to know that the cunning son of wily Miltiades would know more than I about what was going on. ‘Gorgo just asked me to take the Spartan heralds to Susa,’ I said. ‘And to use my good offices with the Satrap of Phrygia to see them well treated.’

Cimon scratched under his chin. ‘Yes. Well, you do speak Persian.’ He looked away. And then back. ‘Do you trust me?’ he asked.

I smiled. I remember thinking of all the things about Miltiades that I hated, and those I loved. ‘I’d be very careful of you if we were talking about Athenian politics,’ I said. ‘Outside of that – yes.’

Cimon grinned. ‘No offence taken, Plataean. So – will you accept for the moment that I’m a member of the war party?’

I suppose I shrugged. As he was the leader of the conservatives who wanted war with Persia, it was not a sensible question. ‘Of course.’

He sat back on his elbow, his long, aristocratic legs stretched towards my fire. ‘You know what it will mean if the Great King actually marches – yes?’

I probably frowned. I do now. ‘Yes. Hundreds of thousands of men marching over Greece and a ten-year war to push them out.’ I nodded. ‘Yes. It will be horrible.’

Cimon said softly, ‘It will be the end of Greece as we think of Greece.’ He waved a hand in the direction of the stadium and the hippodrome. ‘They will cast down our temples and burn our cities and cut down our olive trees – destroy a generation of farmers, and loot us until we are even poorer than we are now.’ He paused. ‘And that’s what will happen if we win.’

‘If it is a land war,’ I said.

He nodded. ‘Your bridge – over the Hellespont – that idea frightens me, because I think . . . I think it’s true. I didn’t believe you at first. Now – I can see it. A roadbed laid over sixty or seventy triremes.’

‘Two hundred,’ I said. ‘It’d take two hundred triremes to bridge the Hellespont.’ I laughed. ‘Think of it as two hundred ships we won’t be facing.’

‘None of them will take the pirate’s way and fight the Persians down at their end of the sea,’ Cimon said. ‘And when we suggest it, all they see is two men who will make their fortunes—’

‘I already have my fortune,’ I said.

‘As do I,’ Cimon muttered. ‘But . . .’ he paused.

I waited.

I remember that Hector came out of his cloak, and brought us wine, and I remember that Cimon stopped talking altogether while the boy waited on us. And that told me a great deal.

Finally he pursed his lips grimly. ‘The ultimate in forward strategy is to go to the Great King directly – and see if something can be done short of war.’

I sat back, deflated. ‘We surrender?’

Cimon looked at me as if I were a fool. I had had a long day and too much wine and I suppose I was. I know a great deal about war, thugater, and one thing I know is that war is always bad. Good for broken fools and pirates and beautiful for young men who fear to be thought cowards. Horrible for women and children and everyone else.