The Great King (57 page)

‘Rowers to your cushions!’ I called. ‘Marines forward! Ka!’

He held up a thumb and pointed with an arrow.

Hermogenes took a deep breath.

I could see his fear, and he, no doubt, could see mine.

‘Everyone ready!’ I called.

I knew the plan. After all, Themistocles, for all his failings, was a genius. And Eurybiades, for all his caution, was a Spartan.

The bronze aspis in the centre of the fleet flashed three times.

I thumped my spear’s saruater into the deck hard enough to put a small hole in the planking and shouted, ‘Row!’

And while I pulled down the cheek plates on my helmet, the allied fleet went over to the attack.

The Persians weren’t a Persian fleet. I doubt that there were fifty Persians aboard six hundred ships. There were Carians, and Phrygians, and Ionians and Aeolians and Samians and Paphalogians and Syrians and Phoenicians and Carthaginians and Aegyptians, but they were so very large that they weren’t really a fleet. They were really six fleets under six very powerful Persians, and not a one of those powerful men spoke the language of the trierarchs and navarchs under him.

Not a one of them expected us to attack.

And suddenly, on a majestic scale, it was the battle of the day before. No lines, and every trierarch forced to make his own decisions.

Lycomedes made the first kill. He was the first ship out of the circle, his rowers straining like hounds, and he struck a Cypriote, the King of Salamis’s ship – shattered the enemy oar bank, and his marines stormed the ship in a hundred beats of a hoplite’s heart.

The enemy collapsed in chaos. We took forty ships in as long as it would take for the assembly to vote on something routine – Hermogenes misjudged our little trick, and we sank a Syrian trireme, our bow climbing so high out of the water that I was terrified that we’d capsize, and we lost a marine over the side and he sank away into the depths, armour sparkling. That was grim, but the enemy fled like whitefish from tuna.

And it was more than flight. A Lemnian and a pair of Lesbian ships deserted as soon as we struck – raised their oars. The Lesbians were from Eressos and Mythymna – ancient enmies of Mytilini, and thus willing enough to side with us. The Lemnian attacked a Phoenician to show his true intent.

I knocked my son down and refused to let him board our second engagement. I had ordered him to stay behind, and he had boarded with the oarsmen, and his wound was open, his thigh bleeding on my deck.

‘You fool,’ I said, but the blood from my hand wound was falling in quick drops on his blood on the deck, and he gave me the mocking glance of the young man who detects the hypocrisy of the old.

Fair enough, my son.

That was a glorious day for Greece.
Lydia
fought four ships and took one, killed one, and the other two fled and my oarsmen were, in truth, too tired to run them down and take them. As the sun began to set, they
broke.

As they fled from us, they still outnumbered us about four to one.

But they were not cowards. Many of them were skilled sailors, fine marines, and we’d humiliated them without sinking their ships. We were not done.

But we won. And winning is a tonic, in war. We had their measure. Our tactics were good, and though the navarchs all knew that the surprise explosion out of the wheel wouldn’t work again, we nonetheless knew we could handle them. In fact, we were not the worse sailors, the worse oarsmen. Victory proved we were better – or made us better.

I never doubted. Oh, I was terrified, fearful, apprehensive – but I’d sunk and taken enough Phoenicians and Aegyptians and Carians over the years to know that Greeks can handle an oar as well as any man.

We went back to the beaches, and Eurybiades proved he was a better man than Miltiades. He gathered all the trierarchs – two hundred and seventy-one, as we had not lost a ship – and got silence despite our restive joy. He crowned Lycomedes for being the first to score a kill, and then he hopped up on the rostrum I’d had built.

‘Listen, you fools!’ he said. That got our attention.

‘They will be back tomorrow, determined to avenge the humiliation of today. They still have a squadron behind us – as big as our own. The last thing I need – that Greece needs – is for you to celebrate victory. By this time tomorrow, a third of you may be dead.’ He looked around. We stood in the torchlight, and we knew he spoke the truth.

‘A cup of wine per man – a libation for Poseidon and all the gods – and then to your cloaks. That is my command.’

We obeyed the way boys obey a schoolmaster. Even Themistocles.

I confess I had several cups of wine. Every time I saw Brasidas out of the corner of my eye, I had to pound him on the back – I hugged Sekla after the action, and he blushed.

Giannis’s fine light trireme had burst its seams, so we replaced it with one of the heavy captures – the blue Carian. So men had to stay up caulking and making her all shipshape.

But when Orestes rose, I went to sleep. I noted as I wedged myself between Hipponax and Hector that Hipponax did not have a fever, his leg wasn’t hot, and the east wind was steady.

Morning was leaden grey, and the east wind was steady with fitful gusts that cracked the awning like whips and shot whitecaps over the sea to the north.

Every Plataean groaned. Wounds hurt, and abrasions were raw, and some men had two days of terror to overcome.

I stood in the wind on the headland during the morning sacrifices of the priests and priestesses, and made my decision with the help of the Huntress, and then I groaned my way down the rocks to the beach, gathered my crew, and took
Lydia
to sea.

My oarsmen didn’t even groan. That took too much energy.

Forty stades across the strait to Aphetae. I put a small boat up my mainmast with two men in it, but they took too much of the gusting wind, swayed like a tower about to fall and threw the ship off course, so I brought them down. I had all the sails laid to the guards on the hemiola deck, ready to run up the masts.

I tried the boat sail, and it eased the rowing. The gusts could head her, but the main force of the wind came broadside. Triremes do not sail well at the best of times, and we were making so much leeway that we might have ended in Thermopylae, but every so often I’d take in the sails and row.

The Great King’s fleet was on the beach. I saw them from six stades out, and not a ship was stirring.

I ran all the way down the beach, east to west, across almost thirty stades of beached ships, and no one offered me a fight.

I remember that, as we passed the headland at Aphetae itself, Brasidas whistled. The Spartan was smiling.

I was smiling too.

We ran a little too far west, because the wind pushed us that way – so my oarsmen, now awake enough to grumble, had to start rowing us back up the channel to Artemesium. I was tempted – sorely tempted – to run down to Thermopylae and see the king, but the Persian camp was under my lee and the wind was strong, and if it kept up for a day, I could be cut off from the fleet. I was like Cimon a week before – I didn’t think the fleet could spare me, and besides

. . . I didn’t want to miss the greatest victory since Troy.

From the stern, as we turned, took down our sails and started to row, I could see the fires of the Great King’s army – the little student of Heraklitus in my head started trying to calculate the firewood I was seeing burned, because the campfires were like cabbages in a farmer’s field, a big field that runs off as far as the eye can see.

As I looked under my hand, I caught a glimpse of sails to the south in the main channel, just exactly between Euboea and the mainland. I was rowing east into the wind, and they were sailing north on a broad reach, so that for the next whole leg, they were gaining on me as fast as a big boy catches a little one.

The Persian squadron.

But a number of factors were against it being the enemy. First, there were not two hundred ships, and Brasidas, of all men, is not prone to exaggerate. Second, I didn’t think they could have run all the way down Euboea, weathered the great point there, and come up the main channel without any of our scouts seeing them – without the Ionian packet boat at Thermopylae giving us warning.

It was young Pericles – who had now become a member of our crew – who made the call.

‘Those are Athenian ships,’ he said.

Now, I’ve mentioned before that Aegina and Athens both left ships in home waters. Ostensibly, this was to cover Attica if the Persians sent a Phoenician squadron out into the Great Blue and straight in on the coast – I, for one, feared landing at Marathon or Brauron more than anyone. But the sad truth is that neither state trusted the other, and both left heavy squadrons to watch the other’s heavy squadron.

Something had changed, then. When we were within a dozen stades, Pericles was sure that the nearest ship belonged to his family. I thought I saw public ships like the ones Themistocles had built – smaller and lighter that anything in the Persian fleet.

I was the first man off my
Lydia
. Not a ship had moved off the opposite shore.

Cimon’s spot on the beach was empty, as were those of half a dozen other enterprising captains, and when I went up the beach, Eurybiades met me hand on hip.

‘Next time you wish to scout, ask permission.’

From many other men, that would have earned sharp words or even a blow. But Eurybiades was not one of them, and I was rueful.

‘Of course, I want your news,’ he said.

There were cries from the main beach.

I raised my hand. ‘Ignore them,’ I said. ‘It’s the Athenian reserve squadron. I’m . . . almost sure.’

Eurybiades listened to my explanation and shook his head. ‘I will not wager Greece on the word of a fifteen-year-old Athenian boy,’ he said, and the whole weary fleet was ordered to sea – into the teeth of the rising wind.

We were better men in every way than we had been four weeks before off the beach of Marathon. And Eurybiades was absolutely correct. If we were seeing the two hundred Persian ships of their flanking force, it was our best hope to crush them before they made camp behind us – or even reunited with the main fleet at Aphetae.

But of course, they were Athenians
and
Aeginians. That night, they explained how the storm – a storm we’d scarcely felt – had savaged the Persian flanking manoeuvre and blown the Athenian and Aeginian squadrons ashore by Marathon and the north, all intermingled – and how, when the Persian wreckage began to come ashore, the Aeginian commander had suggested that they run up the channel together.

‘They cheered us off Thermopylae!’ they said.

Before we got to hear all their news, we had another stroke of luck – or the gods’ will – in that a dozen Cilician triremes and another dozen smaller ships – all that was left of the rearguard of the flanking fleet – rounded the coast of Euboea and ran towards Artemesium – the same error again, mistaking the landings. Their rowers were exhausted.

They didn’t put up much of a fight.

The Plataeans let the Corinthians do it all. We watched, nearly asleep on our oars. I was rowing, because I was not overtly popular just then, having had my
Lydia
at sea all day –
For nothing and nothing
, as a disgruntled oarsman said from two benches behind me.

But when we landed that night and had the trierarchs’ assembly, we had more than three hundred trierarchs.

Themistocles was elated. ‘We have more ships by a fifth of our total,’ he said, ‘and they have fewer by a fifth of theirs.’

It was a pretty piece of sophistry, and we all laughed.

When it was my turn to speak, I said, ‘I am happiest that the enemy felt they couldn’t come off their beaches today.’

Many of the old salts nodded.

In a fight, when you have the upper hand, you are ruthless, lest the other man discover you are not so very tough.

‘I think we must attack again tomorrow,’ I said, and Themistocles nodded.

Eurybiades stroked his beard.

‘How goes it with the army?’ Cimon asked.

‘There have been more than twenty attacks on the pass. Each contingent goes forward and fights the Medes by turns. No attack has come to the wall yet,’ Eurybiades said, and men cheered. But he held his hand up. ‘Leonidas is beginning to lose men. He warns me,’ he looked up from a tablet, ‘that if the main army does not come in ten days, he will have to retire.’

Themistocles stepped forward to speak, and Eurybiades held up his hand again. ‘The king also reports that Xerxes was openly enraged by the defeat of his fleet, and warns us to expect the most desperate measures. The barbarians execute leaders who fail.’

He turned and nodded to the Athenian, who stepped eagerly on to the rostrum. ‘Brothers!’ he said, a little too brightly and a little too eagerly. We were not a crowd of out-of-work labourers. We were tired men.

‘Brothers!’ he said again, looking for more effect. ‘If we can win again – tomorrow – as we won yesterday . . .’ He grinned. ‘. . . the Ionians will change sides. I promise it. And then,’ he was grinning like a boy, ‘perhaps we can convince the Great King to retreat without the main army ever reaching King Leonidas!’

A few men cheered, but we were, as I say, weary trierarchs, and I think we all knew what it would take to fight again – a fourth straight day for my oarsmen, at any rate.

I walked down the beach to pray to Herakles and Poseidon, and I threw wine and a fine cup into the sea, and I thought of my son with Archilogos – dead in the storm? Dead in the fighting? Alive, and waiting for the morning?

Where had I acquired all these entanglements?

Aristides came up with me, and we walked the shingle in silence.

I thought of Briseis. I prayed again, this time to Aphrodite.

‘Tomorrow,’ Aristides said.

I agreed.

The swell was down when I awoke, far too early. My whole body hurt – my shoulder burned, and my hand was infected. It throbbed, and my arm was hot, and I could not get back to sleep.

I opened the bandage, found the red spot, and picked at it with my eating knife until I drained it, and then poured wine on it until the pain was unbearable. And then, again. And then put it in the salt water until the pain was, again, unbearable.