The Great King (53 page)

Xerxes made camp across the plains, at Trachis, where there was room to camp his army.

Antigonus and I had shouted ourselves hoarse like spectators at the Olympics, cheering on our hoplites, too far from the action to even trouble for our armour. But when the Persians ran, we cheered with everyone else.

When the Mantineans returned, we discovered that they had a prisoner. He was the man whose horse had taken so many arrows – he’d been knocked unconscious by a direct hit on his helmet.

I went down to translate. King Leonidas was far too much the gentleman to interrogate a prisoner, but all the Greeks crowded around – the Spartans as much or more than anyone – seeking to touch the Persian. He was quite muddle-headed from the blow, and when we showed him his peaked bronze helmet with a dent three fingers deep, he shuddered.

‘Are you Persian?’ I asked.

His head turned in shock. ‘I am Hyperanthes, son of Hydarnes, friend of the king!’ he said bravely. ‘You speak Persian brilliantly.’

I nodded. ‘I am Arimnestos of Plataea.’

‘The ambassador! Mardonius said you were dead!’ The young man shook his head and then sank it in his hands.

I gave him water. ‘You needn’t fear. When you feel better, the king has decreed you will be returned to your host. King Leonidas wishes the Great King to see that Greeks behave according to the laws of the gods.’

The young man brightened up considerably. Perhaps he thought we’d torture him, or kill him and eat him – who knows what lies the Persians told about us? Certainly we told a few about them.

We were standing on the low hill behind the wall, which gave the best view of the enemy. He got to his feet to see.

‘Sit!’ I said. ‘When you feel better – when your army has stopped marching . . .’ I pointed at the dust cloud.

He laughed. ‘You think that is the army?’ he exclaimed. ‘That is my father’s regiment – the Immortals. They have marched forward to cover the camp while the slaves build it. The army is behind them.’

Leonidas exclaimed in delight, like a man seeing a beautiful treasure. ‘Those are the Immortals?’ he asked.

The Spartans all crowded to the wall to look. You’d have thought a beautiful woman was walking down the beach to bathe.

The Tegeans and Mantineans and Thespians and Plataeans all looked at each other. And then they looked at the dust cloud that seemed to float all the way back to Asia.

There is a particular arrogance to the humility of some men, and most especially those who claim for themselves the will of the gods. But I will claim that Poseidon favoured me that day – wth the rock under his water, and the damage to my ship.

Because, thanks to the rock, my ship was pulled all the way up the beach of Thermopylae, fifty feet above the waterline, when the storm struck.

Had we been at sea – perhaps we might have weathered the storm. But it blew straight from the east down the first leg of the channel and struck the beach at Thermopylae with gale-force winds and waves as tall as a man. The pass – never very wide – was closed to the width of a wagon in some places by the fierce run of water.

The first night that the storm blew, I walked down to the bow of my ship and watched the waves roll in. The storm hit us with no harbinger but those odd, cool gusts of wind, and I stood in the darkness and blessed the fishermen of Artemesium, and Cimon, who knew these waters better than any of the rest of us.

Hermogenes came and stood with me in the dark.

The wind began first to tug at my chlamys, and then – with the force of a blow – tore my cloak right out of its pin. Hermogenes caught it before it vanished.

A wave broke at our feet, and the water came to within six feet of the ram.

Hermogenes turned and ran. I wondered what madness had seized him, but he came back with a skin of Plataean wine and my fine Persian cup of beaten gold, which I’d had from the Queen Mother. And behind him were my oarsmen, leaning into the wind, with resined torches and the ship’s four great oil lanterns, all lit.

We stood on the beach and sang the hymn to Poseidon. We were farmers, not sailors – or most of us were – so we praised him as the creator and breaker of horses, and the shaker of the earth. The rushing monster of the storm drowned most of our song, but I stood there – my chiton soaked by waves and the first lashing of rain, as the lightning forked on the horizon, over and over – and I filled my brave gold cup with the agates and lapis and the largest emerald in Greece to the brim with the wine grown in my own fields in Green Plataea, and then I hurled it as far as I could into the sea.

Let me tell you a thing.

The waters off Thermopylae are as shallow and clear as the waters off any great beach in all of Hellas.

But no man has ever found my cup of gold, or the rock that tore a hole in
Lydia
.

Only fools doubt that the gods walk with men.

For three days, the Hellesponter storm blew like Poseidon’s will – and for three days, the Persian army sat opposite us and did nothing. The Spartans champed at the bit like racehorses waiting for the Olympic races, eager and ready, fully exercised. They sat on the wall and combed out their hair, danced their dances, ran races, and waited for their battle.

The Tegeans and Mantineans and the rest were perhaps a little less eager, but Xerxes’ hesitation heartened everyone.

Because I had drunk wine with the taxiarchs, I knew that the Great King’s apparent hesitation was created by the weather. Unless the enemy were planning to cross the pass and attack us one at a time – one file – they had to wait for the abnormally high waves to subside.

And unless the Phoenicians had better access to Poseidon than we had, the Great King had to be waiting to see where his fleet was. We all prayed that it had been caught on the sea by the storm, but I suspected otherwise. It had struck us at the edge of darkness. Farther east, it would still have struck after any sane navarch had all his ships on the beach.

All we could do was wait. The same sea that closed the pass made it impossible for us to sail. To make matters worse, we had to guard the ship day and night, because we’d beached her too far along the beach – when we’d landed, it had been Greece, but now it was the no man’s land between the hosts.

I wore myself out, walking on the soft sand back and forth between the wall, the army and my ship.

Three times parties of Persian horsemen came along the beach, or along the coast road above it, testing the footing for their horses. They would ride up close to the wall, and the Spartans would wave at them.

The third day, Ka strung his bow. The rain was dying away, but I put a hand on his arm. ‘They don’t even have their bows,’ I said.

‘They are still spies,’ Ka spat.

I shrugged. ‘Plenty of time for killing later,’ I said.

Later on that third day, as the sea began to recede, I led a party of Greeks with a herald and the prisoner. We rode all the way to the edge of the Persian camp, and no one challenged us until we left the road for the open ground north of it. Then a party of horsemen appeared, as if by magic. They’d been hidden by a fold of earth and a rock outcropping. I knew they were great horsemen, but it was an excellent reminder.

I knew the troop’s commander immediately, and I rode up to the giant, Amu, and saluted him, and he embraced me. This came as a shock to all the Greeks.

‘How is your son?’ I asked. ‘Araxa?’

‘Hah! He outranks me!’ he shouted with the delight of a father. ‘In the Guards, leaving me to outpost duty like this. And who is this lordling?’

I waved him over. ‘We took him the first day. He seems to be recovered, and so we send him back. King Leonidas of Sparta wishes the Great King to know that we will abide by the laws of war.’

Amu frowned. He looked around, saw horsemen coming from the camp, and shook his head. ‘The word is all of you are to be treated as rebels. No prisoners.’ He spat. ‘Because Mardonius is a fool. Those are his men coming. Best ride away.’ He smiled. ‘I’ll delay them. Listen, my friend. This will be ugly. Take your women and go somewhere else – eh?’

This disquieted me. I had expected better of the Great King than to have Greeks – win or lose, we were not rebels – treated as criminals.

We rode away.

I left Leonidas that evening, because I thought I could get my ship to sea, and because the Persian outposts were pushing forward as the sea retreated. I didn’t want to lose my ship to cavalrymen.

Leonidas did me the honour of clasping my hand.

‘Any message for Eurybiades?’ I asked.

The king shrugged. ‘No – not until we taste their bronze will we know what we have to do.’

I nodded at the sea. ‘I have a fast, dry ship and a good crew. I intend to run east and see if I can find the enemy fleet before I go south to Eurybiades.’ I smiled. ‘Just in case I don’t come back.’

He slapped me on the back with Spartan goodwill, and I ran for my ship. Even as I clambered over the stern, there were Persian cavalry and some odd-looking psiloi prowling down the beach.

The Persian camp stretched over forty stades.

The Greek camp covered a little less than two.

The patch held beautifully, and we had minimal stores, a dry hull and a favourable wind.
Lydia
was a trihemiolia, so I raised the yard, hung the mainsail, and we were away. The Greek army cheered.

It is roughly three hundred stades from the coastline at Thermopylae to the headland at Artemesium – perhaps not as the raven flies or the seabird, but as my oarsmen row. We crossed to the Euboean shore before full darkness set in, to be free of the Medes, and made a hasty camp and ate mutton we didn’t pay for, and we rose before dawn, had her sternpost wet before the rosy fingers of the most beautiful young goddess danced across the world, and the west wind held and we ran before the wind once we were out in the channel.

We hadn’t travelled a parasang before we found the first wreck – a Phoenician turned turtle. Her oars were still in the oar leathers. She’d been rolled while at sea, and there were dead men – bloated, horrible dead men – trapped in her lines and under her deck.

An hour later and we’d seen enough floating wreckage for it to be the whole Persian fleet.

My rowers sang a hymn to Poseidon.

We passed six more floating wrecks, and the last two had no oars in them – they’d been anchored.

That told me a story.

We ran along the south coast of Thessaly, and just north of Artemesium we met up with Cimon, on the same errand but on the opposite tack and headed for the fleet.

‘You beach at Artemesium and keep watch!’ he called. ‘I’m for Malia.’

The end of his shout was lost as his ship swept by at the speed of a galloping horse, but his intent was clear enough.

We beached at Artemesium and put up a tower on the headland. We were alone, where a few days before there had been two hundred triremes. The northernmost beach was full of driftwood and dead men.

Hermogenes drafted a watch schedule and Hector wrote it all down on the wax, and we pulled
Lydia
clear of the water to keep her dry.

Hermogenes pointed at the tower – an old trick from my time with Miltiades.

‘Like old times,’ he said.

The next morning, I took
Lydia
to sea as soon as there was enough light to get her off the beach. We ran north and east under the boat sail, keeping well out into the fairway and with two men slung in a small boat from the mainmast, a trick I’d learned on Sicily.

The sea to the north was empty. We found another trireme, turned turtle, all her oars still aboard, some smashed. I hove to, fingered my beard, and then salvaged her.

Imagine our shock to find two Phoenicians alive under the capsized hull. They’d been in the water three days. They were as weak as kittens and out of their wits, but to Greeks, the men Poseidon preserves are sacred. We hauled them aboard and they drank water until I thought they might explode – in fact, Hermogenes took the water from them, afraid they’d die of it. It was hours before they could talk.

In the meantime, with a dozen men to help me, we got ropes on the gunwales of the Phoenician and rolled her upright, and then, with half the oarsmen in her, we baled her dry enough to tow, with two dozen oarsmen aboard just to keep her head up and land her. We only had thirty stades to make, but it took us until nightfall, and we had to row all the way, as our mast was down. The setting sun showed us the allied fleet coming up the channel. Eurybiades had them practising a reverse crescent. They could fill fifteen stades of water and still have a small reserve, and they looked magnificent, and my throat tightened.

I turned to Hermogenes. ‘We may yet do this, brother,’ I said.

He grinned. ‘There are the Plataeans!’ he called, and sure enough, on the left of the line, there were ten ships all as neat as a farmer’s furrow.

We wallowed our way to the beach and landed before the first ships to the right of the line – Athenians under Cimon – got ashore. I had claimed the spots right by the olive groves – better shade, and a deeper beach. Cimon cursed, but he leaped ashore and we embraced.

‘You have a capture!’ he said, envious but happy for me.

I shook my head. ‘She’s Poseidon’s capture,’ I said. ‘The storm got her. I have two men who were alive in the wreck.’

I was gathering a crowd. Cimon took my shoulder and we went along the beach to where I’d had my tent set in the olive grove, and Hector gave Cimon wine. We sent Hipponax for Eurybiades and Sittonax condescended to walk off and find Themistocles – moving slowly, to show that he was above such vulgar considerations as crisis or work.

Themistocles came first. He hugged me close.

‘You two!’ he said, including Cimon. ‘I thought we’d never get the fleet back here. Adamenteis is still threatening to sail for the isthmus. And then Cimon shows up off the beach and says that the Persians are wrecked and Greece is saved, and all our cowardly allies . . . that is to say . . .’ He nodded to Eurybiades.

The Spartan nodded and looked at me. ‘Prisoners?’ he asked.

I saluted. ‘Navarch, while they are prisoners, they were rescued after three days’ shipwreck. To us, that makes them sacred.’