The Great King (52 page)

I snapped my fingers and Hector appeared at my elbow. At my whisper he pulled out a pair of wax tablets.

Eurybiades nodded in Laconian satisfaction and dictated a rapid message.

Midway through, he turned. ‘Is that all?’ he asked Lycomedes.

The younger captain raised both eyebrows.

‘Cimon is lying at Aphetae tonight,’ he said. ‘He thinks the weather is about to turn bad.’

‘Why Aphetae?’ I asked. ‘Why not here?’

Lycomedes laughed. ‘I promised not to tell,’ he said, and grinned wickedly. ‘When you are out to the east, the headlands look like one single stretch of land – eh?’ He drew them on the sand, and I could see how, if you had too much southing, Artemesium and Aphetae would look like one peninsula.

He put his stick into the sand. ‘We missed Artemesium and landed at Aphetae. Cimon was one of the last to come up – he knew the error, and sent me here. We’re all still mocking Callisthenes, who led the way to the wrong beach.’

It was, as you’ll see, an easy error to make.

We didn’t have any Euboean triremes, but for the last five days we’d been fed a great deal of fish by Euboean fishermen, and Eurybiades summoned all those in camp to our impromptu council.

I walked down the beach at sunset. The sky was the warm pink of a beautiful evening. There was nothing that might have piqued my weather sense except the merest flash of white, far off on the eastern horizon, and a cool breeze out of the east. We had olive groves all the way down to the beach on the headland of Artemesium, and suddenly, like the voice of the god, all the leaves moved together.

I walked back to the council.

One of the older fishermen was humming and hawing, clearly anxious at speaking in front of so many great men. Another tall brute in a Phrygian cap pushed him gently aside.

‘Weather might be ugly the next four days, gents.’ He shrugged. ‘And it might not. Storms come off Africa – sometimes right down the channel.’ He looked at me for some reason. ‘If you are worried about the anchorage – an’ you should be – just slip back to Troezen.’

Themistocles slammed his fist in his palm. ‘We can’t anchor both flanks at Troezen. We cannot cover Leonidas from Troezen. We must be here!’

Adamenteis shoved his way forward. ‘Leonidas can’t hold the Gates against a million men! We should go back to the isthmus – now, while we have a fleet.’

Isocles of Aegina, their navarch, shook his head. ‘We should do what we should always have done – press forward and strike them when they don’t expect us, on the Thracian coast.’

‘Are you mad?’ said another – one of the Peloponnesian captains. ‘They’ll slip past us and burn our farms.’

‘Four hundred triremes don’t slip anywhere, you fool!’

‘Back to the isthmus where we can command our own fates!’

Eurybiades didn’t seem to straighten up, or fill his lungs. But his voice was like the voice of brazen-lunged Ares. ‘Ears!’ he shouted.

Men stood silent, stunned.

‘Gentlemen,’ he said into the silence, in a voice that expected their continued cooperation. ‘The allied fleet needs Poseidon’s help. If that help is going to take the form of a storm from the north and east, we do
not
want to be caught on a beach facing north and east.’ He nodded courteously to Adamenteis. ‘Our strategy is set, and will no longer be discussed. In the morning, we will retire to Troezen. We can be back here in six hours. No one is permitted to send dispatches home, or to leave the fleet under any circumstances. Arimnestos of Plataea will take my messages to King Leonidas and meet us at Troezen.’ He nodded.

No one offered any protest. Greece was not lost or won in that moment, but it is the moment I think of, when men say that Themistocles defeated the Medes.

His message, which Hector wrote out and I read ten times, said just this.

Xerxes left Therma fourteen day ago and makes good time.

I will retire to Troezen to allow the gods to save us, if they will.

Running down a channel at night is never easy. The wind was rising slightly and I didn’t care to use the sails, and so my oarsmen got still more practice. I left Paramanos in charge of my squadron, because he had more experience of command than any, even Demetrios, Aristides’ helmsman.

At any rate, we rowed down the dog-leg passage. From the open sea and the coast of Thessaly, it runs due west, and then turns south around the island of Euboea and then runs at an angle towards Attica.

There is a deep bay on the western shore of the dog-leg, and the narrow gates of Thermopylae – the so called ‘hot gates’ where the hot water flows from deep in the earth into shallow bowls – the gates, as I say, were formed by the mountains coming almost to the edge of the sea. Men had walled the pass many times, to stop various invasions from Thessaly and Thrace, with varying degrees of success.

At any rate, we rowed in at first light, and I won’t pretend I wasn’t very relieved to have made the voyage without touching a rock. There was a light surf running as we turned
Lydia
to land her stern first – the first taste of the easterly blowing down the coast of Thrace from the Hellespont. I am ashamed to admit that I was not at the helm, where I ought to have been, but amidships, shitting away my relief at a successful night navigation with Hermogenes, when we struck a rock.

We weren’t moving fast, but we started taking water immediately. The wound was bad enough that I could see where two planks had broken.

We were in no danger of sinking – we were in four feet of water, half a stade off a beautiful beach. It was a simple accident, but it angered me.

We got the ship ashore, rowing like heroes to overcome the weight of water and keep her bottom strakes off the sand, and then my rowers piled over the sides with a will and rolled her dry and carried her up the beach. It wasn’t as bad as it might have been, but we had two strakes broken and a third cracked. By the will of the gods – or blessed by Moira – I had not sold my cargo of Illyrian timber and pitch. It had seemed wiser to keep it for emergency repairs, and I had divided the cargo among the ships of my squadron, so that before I went up the beach to find the camp of the Greeks, Hermogenes and Stygies had axes in their hands and splitting wedges and two dozen willing Plataean farmers were giving them advice.

I took both of my boys and walked up the beach, and found the ancient wall, and a very alert sentry from Corinth, in full panoply. This pleased me almost as much as the rock had annoyed me, and I shouted my name and my errand with a will.

The Corinthian sent for a superior. He leaned over the low wall. ‘I’m sorry, Plataean. But the king gave orders that we admit no man until daylight.’

I waved at the sky.

The Corinthian shrugged. ‘Are you not the notorious pirate?’ he asked.

Of course, in Corinth I
was
a notorious pirate.

‘I have certainly been a pirate,’ I said. ‘But that Corinthian ship? I found her high and dry, sold for scrap timber in Aegypt.’

‘Really?’ he asked, and leaned out over the wall again. ‘I hear you killed all the oarsmen and officers and took her south of Cyprus.’

I shrugged. ‘Believe as you will. But all my men will back my version, and I could get priests from Aegypt to swear to it as well.’

The Corinthian nodded. ‘Of course, all that could be lies and fakery,’ he said.

I nodded.

‘So it could. What would convince you?’ I asked.

Someone came up behind him, and he had a whispered conference. A ladder was lowered.

I climbed it. At the top, the Corinthian peered at me. ‘You don’t look like a man who would massacre a citizen crew for the sake of a hull,’ he said.

The man behind him on the wall was the King of Sparta. He didn’t look the worse for sleep, and his hair was long and curly and his beard oiled. He nodded to the Corinthian. ‘What is it that engages the two of you so hotly?’ he asked.

‘A lawsuit in Corinth,’ I muttered.

The King of Sparta laughed. ‘Truly, you are Greeks,’ he said. ‘Xerxes marches, and we argue lawsuits.’

‘Xerxes is very close,’ I said. I handed the king my tablets.

He took them and nodded. ‘So I assumed from the moment my sentries reported your ship,’ he said. ‘No one sends a trireme with good news.’

That day, while the allied fleet retreated from the possibility of a storm, we worked on
Lydia.
We dried her hull upside down in the sun, which was good for her, and Hermogenes led the self-appointed carpenters. We had good tools, but no adze, and the Locrians brought us one, bless them.

While my friends worked, I walked through the camps, and visited. I knew men in many contingents, and I got news of the Olympics, and sat with Antigonus for a cup of wine.

We drank, and talked of farming and lawsuits.

When we’d bored his neighbours into leaving us alone, he leaned close to me – we were lying in the dry grass behind his tent. ‘Can the fleet hold?’ he asked.

I nodded. ‘Every day, we are better. We have good officers and good oarsmen. When the Olympics end, we’ll have another fifty ships.’ I leaned on my elbow. ‘We can hold the Medes for a few days. That’s all we need.’

‘And the storm?’ Antigonus asked. ‘Everyone is praying to Poseidon for a storm.’

I remember that I shrugged. Rather impiously, my outswept arm indicated the blue sea and cloudless eastern horizon. ‘The fleet is seeking anchorage from Poseidon’s wrath,’ I said in mockery. ‘Tomorrow, no doubt, we’ll go back to our station at Artemesium.’

‘A sign from the gods would hearten us all,’ he said. He drank some neat wine from a canteen and held it out to me. ‘But barring the direct involvement of the Olympians, I suppose we’ll just have to dig in our heels and fight. Are you any good at mathematics?’

I laughed. ‘Fair enough. I can work geometry.’

Antigonus nodded. ‘Well – figure this. We have six thousand hoplites and Xerxes has a million. How many do I have to kill?’

‘Two hundred, give or take a few,’ I said.

He whistled. ‘Well,’ he said. He looked at me. ‘If I fall, tell Penelope that she was . . . everything I ever desired in a wife.’

There is something embarrassing about seeing another man’s love for your sister, even when you think very highly of him. So I slapped his shoulder and shrugged. ‘Tell her yourself,’ I said. ‘I’d never get it out without mocking her.’

‘Fine, then. I’ll stay alive to spite you.’ He laughed, and I laughed.

We were sharing a third cup of unwatered wine – war is hell – when there was a stir by the forward posts across the wall. There was a party of Tegeans cutting palisades, and they all stopped. There were Spartan helots cutting grass for their master’s bedding, out in the wide part of the pass, where there was a low hill and two good broad fields. The helots’ heads came up like those of horses scenting danger.

Antigonus and I started walking towards the wall.

There was dust, over to the east.

I remember putting a hand to my eyes to shade them from the sun – Hekatombaion is a cruel month for the eyes. On the beach at my feet, Hermogenes was doing the same.

All the Greeks stopped what they were doing and looked east.

The dust cloud was like a thunderhead. It swam in my vision – shimmered in the heat. My first thought was that Poseidon had sent us a storm after all.

There was a sudden gust of wind from the east with a breath of coolness and all the tents and awnings snapped, like the shields of two armies in the first moments of a battle.

My eyes began to appreciate the
scale
of the dust cloud I was seeing to the east.

The Tegeans were standing to arms, out on the plain, and suddenly the helots broke and ran – carrying, I might add, the forage fodder they’d been sent to fetch.

The wind stirred again, and for a moment the front of the dust cloud vanished, and I saw the flash of bright sun on steel and bronze.

I was not looking at a storm of Poseidon. I was looking at the armed might of the Great King, and it filled the horizon like a thundercloud.

Below me, on the plain, a hundred Persian cavalrymen swept past the Tegeans contemptuously, and began to shoot the fleeing helots with bows. I couldn’t tell whether they were Persians, Medes or Saka, but they rode like centaurs and shot like Apollo, and a pair of helots went down – fell face forward, and heartbeats later were speared through the back like new-caught fish.

The Tegeans formed an orb – a tiny island of defence.

The Persian cavalry came all the way down the plain at a gallop, but the helots had vanished into the dust and the brush.

Below me, I saw Ka and six Numidians draw their bows.

They loosed.

It is very difficult to shoot a man over a long range. Arrows – especially the lightest flight arrows that master-archers carry – can fly over two hundred paces, and some over three hundred paces, but such light darts are moved by every breath of wind. Further, it takes long enough for an arrow to fly two hundred paces that a galloping horse has moved ten paces in the interval.

So the lead riders came at us unscathed.

But about midway down the squadron of Persians, two riders fell backwards into the dust, and another horse screamed its trumpet cry of rage and pain and threw its rider on the ground, and the compact Persian troop burst apart like a nest of hornets stoned by boys.

The helots leapt to their feet and dashed for the wall, and the guard – all Mantineans – turned out like heroes, formed under the wall, and covered the helots as they ran.

My sailors and marines were formed and ready to move, with Hermogenes, adze in hand, in his moment of glory.

Ka’s archers loosed.

All the armed Greeks on the plain before the walls charged the Persian cavalry at a run, the way we’d done at Marathon. Another Persian fell, and someone waved a sword – and they ran.

Horse archers run all the time. It means nothing. They run so that they can find a better position from which to fill you full of arrows. But that day, when they ran, it was Greece that had carried the day. Two helots lay dead, and three Persians had gone to Hades with them.

If there was irony in that little victory, it might be that all the killing had been done by a handful of Numidian archers, but let us not parse this too carefully. The Tegeans and the Mantineans and the Plataean oarsmen met far out on the plain, slapped each other’s backs, and marched into the gates like the heroes of the Iliad. The Persian cavalry ran all the way back to Xerxes.