The Great King (55 page)

Nothing for it now.

We were the seventh ship from the right – the centre of the line coming off the beach, with Paramanos three horse-lengths away, but we began to angle east and west immediately.

The enemy squadron was in two columns of eight ships, and just as we came off the beach they began to spread out from their rowing columns into a single line. There was no way of knowing whether they had detected our enmity or whether they were merely preparing to land on the beach.

Sekla was heading north and east aggressively, and the rest of my half of the squadron held station on him, using the light westerly to push our hulls east, which caused us to move faster and farther to the flank than Paramanos, who also had to fight the current.

Three stades. In a sea fight, everything seems to take for ever, and then, suddenly, everything happens at once.

Ka and his archers pushed past me into the bow. Every one of them had two quivers, now, and they hung on pegs that hadn’t been there before.

Hipponax and the marines waited on the catwalk. Hector’s face was as white as chalk. But he and Hipponax were grinning, all their teeth showing, refusing to let each other see their fears, like young men since the siege of Troy. Behind them stood Siberios, who watched them with an intent, half-amused look.

I ignored the boys. ‘When we strike, we’re going to
take
. Get aboard and keep her. Take command and make the rowers go for the beach.’

He was watching the enemy over my shoulder. ‘You won’t have any marines,’ he said.

‘Let me worry about that. You’ll be on your own.’ I slapped him on the shoulder, and he laughed.

‘Oh, as to that, I’ll have Hector
and
Achilles,’ he mocked.

I got to the midships platform, where the main deck begins and all the sailors stand. They were armed. We were a rich ship – every deck man had a cuirass and greaves and a sword and spear and helmet.

One stade out, the enemy had formed something like a line, and they had recognised that we were not friends. I could see three ships that looked Phoenician, and the rest looked Ionian or Aeolian – Greeks. The blue ship had Asian decoration under her beak and looked Carian.

The last ship in the leftmost squadron had red sides over dirty white.

Dagon
.

I almost changed course, but it is a pitiful navarch who can’t follow his own plan, even for revenge, even for Apollo. But I watched that ship for many beats of my heart, and I didn’t think about my son, my daughter, Archilogos, mortality, or even Briseis. I watched the evil Carthaginian.

The squadron facing me began to break up.

You must understand, to understand all that follows – you have only the tactics and signals you have practised in advance. You cannot change a plan at sea. You can’t tell all your trierarchs if you suddenly have a better idea. If something unexpected happens, every trierarch has to think for himself. In a line fight, no one has to think.

As they woke up to the fact that we were enemies, we were also forcing them to make decisions. We weren’t going to go ram to ram in line.

In another place and time, they might simply have run through our centre – but five stades behind us was a beach full of Greeks, with ships arming and coming off. None of them was actually ready yet except Cimon’s pirates, and they, of course, were twenty stades to the south along the beach.

Most of the ships facing me turned outward to fight. Two of the eight turned end for end and ran for it.

Instead of going seven of ours against eight of theirs, now we were seven to six, and not a blow had been struck.

I was going ram to ram against the blue ship with the gold decoration. It was a very heavy ship – pretty, with heavy cat-heads intended to break my oars and kill my rowers.

I ran back to Hermogenes like a mother hen.

‘You see those beams?’ I asked.

He withered me like Medusa – which I deserved.

Because we had a superb crew, we’d left our ramming speed to very late. And our opponent wasn’t superb – he’d practised about as much as the Ionians practised before Lades. You make an opponet ten feet tall in your mind – and then, in reality . . .

Ka and his men began to pour arrows over the bow at such a quick pace that it looked as if our ships had a thick black rope connecting the bows.

The enemy helmsman flicked his bow to his right. Helmsmen generally do, just before going bow to bow.

I said, ‘Now!’ and Nicolas, now the oar-master, slammed his staff on the deck and our ship leaped.

It was a high-risk manoeuvre. Ships generally try to go slightly off line just before contact, but Hermogenes used speed, instead.

The enemy helmsman had to assume he’d turn slightly off line and then turn back at the last moment, but he misjudged our speed, and our ram struck the shoulder of his ship just aft of the cedar beams of his cat-head – a steep angle, and not a quick kill, but our sharp bow swept down his oar-bank even as we got our oars inboard and men were screaming and Ka was standing in the bow shooting down into the enemy oar-deck and then Hipponax and Hector leaped together . . .

Ka ran along the catwalk, shooting . . .

My armoured deck crew poured grapples into their midships bulwarks and Siberios led the marines over the bow . . .

My son and his friend stood back to back on the enemy catwalk and killed men. A tall man in armour covered in gold – who was he, the Great King himself? – flung a javelin and it went through my son’s thigh and he fell, and Hector stood over him . . .

Hermogenes’ hand closed on my arm. ‘You aren’t in your armour. You are the
navarch.
’

Both were true.

But my son was lying in a pool of his own blood on an enemy deck.

All of my marines were away. To the north and east, Sekla was running free, past the easternmost Phoenician, and all my other ships were engaged. A glance to the west – Paramanos had broken an Aeolian ship in half. He was, after all, the best helmsman in the world. None of the other ships was engaged yet.

‘Cut the grapples!’ I roared, leaving my son to whatever fate awaited him.

Deck crewmen cut the ropes of the very grapples they’d thrown. Others used pikes to push us off.

Siberios killed the man in gold armour, hammering his teeth into his throat with the pommel of his sword.

Hipponax hamstrung a Carian marine in full panoply from his postion lying on the deck, and Hector stabbed the man in his open-faced helmet with his spear – Hector fought fastidiously, like a cat, his spear flicking out.

I wanted to bandage my son’s wound. I wanted to fight.

‘Oars out!’ roared Hermogenes. Hermogenes, who could not command his way out of a linen sack. He glared at me.

Well he might.

‘Arm me,’ I snapped at young Pericles.

He didn’t bother to protest. He opened my bronze thorakes and got it on me.

Sekla was turning in, and
Machaira
was indeed going to cut like a knife.

The two fleeing ships had their sails up.

Paramanos was turning
Black Raven
to the west, where Harpagos lay oar bank to oar bank with a bigger Phoenician, their marines clearly engaged.

The red and white ship – it had to be Dagon, it had a Phoenician build – turned suddenly away from
Athena Nike.
I had to assume that Dagon had found a good helmsman. Or perhaps it wasn’t Dagon at all.

But the red and white ship turned so fast her starboard oars were buried in the water and
Athena Nike
swept by to ram Harpagos’s opponent amidships, killing that ship instantly.

I had a moment to regret that we were Greeks killing Greeks.

I turned west, against an unengaged Carian. He was rowing desperately, at full ramming speed, while turning as fast as he could, and all he managed to do was to lose the turning contest to me. We turned in place, our starboard cushions reversed – and again, the quality of
Lydia
’s oarsmen allowed us to leap to ramming speed and catch him just forward of the helmsman’s station. We didn’t have enough way to break the hull, but our ram caught his gunwale and began to roll his ship over, and Ka’s archers cleared the Carian’s command deck. We came to a stop – I’d ordered the oars in rather than risk them – and there we lay, our bow against his helm.

I ran down the catwalk and leaped over the marine box – the gate was still open from the first attack – and I stepped down on to our ram rather than leaping.

Ka’s arrows flicked over my head.

No marines waited for me, and I put my back to the enemy gunwale and rolled on to their deck at the stern, and everyone there was dead.

The rowers were in shock.

Nicolas – the oar-master – came behind me, with a dozen sailors, but there was no resistance from the oarsmen.

‘Greeks!’ I roared. ‘We are your liberators, not your enemies!’

No one looked relieved, but no one came at me with a sword, either.

‘Get her ashore,’ I said. I stepped up on to the gunwale amidships and leaped for my own ship – and barely made it, scrambling up the side like a terrified cat.

I used to leap from ship to ship without a qualm for the fate that awaited me if I missed.

I looked west. The red and white ship was running. The blue and gold Carian was now rowing sedately for the allied beach.

Cimon’s ships were angling into the flank of Paramanos’ melee.

It was over.

Gelon was in the only boarding fight still burning, and Hermogenes put the helm down even while I acted as my own oar-master and we turned, under way again.
Lydia
’s dry, light hull seemed to be powered by the gods.

Gelon had caught a tiger. He’d got the worst of a ramming exchange with a big-hulled Phoenician and had then been flooded with the other ship’s desperate marines. Giannis, in the lightest and fastest of the Athenian public ships, had also gone head to head with a Phoenician and couldn’t help. Sekla had brought
Machaira
into
Sea Horse
’s adversary.

I went for
Nemesis.
I could see Gelon fighting hand to hand by his helm. He didn’t have time for me to manoeuvre.

I pointed to Hermogenes. ‘Our bow to his stern,’ I said. Then I ran forward and grabbed all the best armed sailors. Armoured like hoplites, they had the most remarkable assortment of weapons – chains, axes, a trident. I had no idea how we’d do against real Phoenician marines.

Hermogenes kissed the stern of
Nemesis
as if he’d been a helmsman all his life and not a farmer. I was ready, standing over the ram. I went sideways, from the top of the marine box into the helmsman’s bench . . .

Nemesis
was almost taken.

The first Tyrian made the simple mistake of thinking he could finish Gelon before I was on him. Gelon got a foot on the man’s spear against the deck, and he turned to see my spear take his life, and then I was beside my former slave, and suddenly, everything felt right – my armour, the sun on my back, the deck under my feet.

As if my body said,
Ah! This!

There was a rush – a press. I punched repeatedly with the rim of my aspis, putting my opponents against the rail, bouncing one man so hard that he stumbled and Giorgos got a chain over his head and put a dagger in his neck, and then we went at them. I rifled my spear at an officer and killed him and then I had my lovely long sword in my hand – thrust, change feet, slip on the blood and cut to cover the loss of balance.

Feint, and see my effort wasted as a long black arrow kills my opponent.

I punch with my aspis, and the spear shaft of his weapon crosses my chest and I get it in my shield hand and my enemy is wide open for my thrust. I have time to watch him watch his death.

I punch with the shield rim and cut with the sword, taking a spearhead cleanly off its shaft, and a spear comes from behind me to finish him. Young Pericles, with no armour on, is fighting as my hypaspist.

What joy.

I go sword to sword with a Phoenician. He is a big man in red, with gold on his armour, and at some point I have moved from
Nemesis
to his ship. He bashes at me with his shield, his shoulder in the top of the rim, and I meet him shield to shield and I flick my long blade up into his eyes. I don’t score, but the blow to his helmet rocks his head back and he stumbles. I thrust, passing my right foot forward over my left even as he backs away a step, and he sweeps his sword across his body because his shield is committed – I roll my wrist over the parry, and I can see his eyes as he tries to reverse his parry . . .

I roll my sword over his again, the double deception I learned in Sicily from Polymarchos, and my thrust goes in just under his ribs, right through his gold-plated bronze scales and into his gut and down into his pelvis – one of the prettiest blows of my life.

Unfortunately, I have to leave my beautiful sword in his body.

Bah – sometimes I relive it. Is it terrible, that ripping a man’s life from his body and throwing it through the iron gates to Hades can be such a joy?

I took his spear from his fingers even as he screamed and his entrails loosed and his feet pounded the deck, and stood, but my pirates had cleared the enemy marines and the Phoenician oarsmen had had a long day, a long pull, and had no fight in them.

I stood and panted, and only then noticed that my left leg was covered in blood.

I turned, and blood sprayed. I look desperately at my mid-section, at my armour. There was blood there, too, but no glistening wound, no death blow.

I dropped my sword – my vision was tunnelling – and reached for my neck, and only then did I see it . . .

My left hand was cut to the bone and two fingers were severed.

I fell to my knees. Men were running to help me . . .

I wasn’t in the darkness when we ran up the beach. Hermogenes bound the hand tight while Pericles got my armour off.

The old chiton was turning red.

But I managed to stay upright, as the allied fleet cheered us. I heard later that the Medes could hear our cheers across the straits at Aphetae.

We beached under the eyes of the commander and I watched as Siberios brought the blue ship in – Hector was at the helm. He waved, and I knew from his face my son was alive.