Marathon: Freedom or Death

8

The day after a battle is always horrible. A sea battle hides the worst — the stink and the visible horrors of the dead, and the screams of the wounded. Not many wounded in a sea-fight.

By wounded, I mean those with a spear in the guts or a cut so deep that only a physician can save them, or not save them, as the gods would have it. Because after a fight like Lade, every man has cuts, skinned knuckles, pulled muscles. Every man who has fought hand to hand on ships has small wounds — a deep cut on the arm, a burn, an arrow through the bicep. Some men have two. The fighters — the hoplites, the marines, the heroes — have all the little injuries that come with fighting in armour — the abrasions, the bruises where your armour turned a blow, the punctures where a scale was driven in through the leather. Add to that the sheer fatigue, no matter how high your conditioning, and you can see why a camp is silent after a battle. Tempers flare. Men curse each other.

I had never experienced so total a defeat as Lade. After the battle at Ephesus, I was busy rescuing a corpse and such heroic stuff. I missed the despair. Or perhaps I was too young.

Despair is a killer, children. I’ve seen it in women whose childbirth goes on too long, and I’ve seen it in sick men, but it is worst in a beaten army. Men kill themselves. The poets don’t sing of it, but it happens too often. Men cut themselves or walk into the sea. Men die from wounds that ought to have healed.

Priests are busy, saving what they can. Good doctors make a difference. But on the day after a defeat, the men who matter are the leaders. Anyone can lead men after a victory. Only the best can lead after a defeat.

I awoke the day after Lade to the realization that Stephanos was dead. And Philocrates. And Nearchos. One by one, the weight of them came to my mind, so that it was as if their shades were gathering around me.

Philocrates was on my ship, wrapped in his chlamys, and Stephanos was wrapped in his himation on Trident. To a Greek, that’s some consolation. We would honour them in death.

But not today.

I got up, poured myself a cup of wine and felt the pain of all my muscles and all my wounds, new and old. My head hurt. I said a prayer to my ancestor Heracles for strength — and I began to clean my armour, promising that if ever I came through this to my farm in Boeotia, I would build a shrine to Heracles and put his lion on the inside of my shield. Do you sheltered children know what armour looks like after a fight? Sprayed with blood, with all the fluids inside a man, with ordure — shit — and the leather full of sweat and fear. But I had no hypaspist to do it, and I needed to look like a hero.

When my armour was clean and bright, I began on my shield. The rim was broken where the brave Aegyptian had almost killed me, and the raven of Apollo seemed to me a mockery. Apollo had promised me victory. Apollo had allowed the Samians to betray us. Apollo had allowed treachery to triumph over virtue. Fuck him.

Let me say now, before I go on with the story, that we would have won Lade if the Samians hadn’t cut and run. I know that’s not the popular view. I know that today, Athenians suggest that the Ionians were an effeminate bunch incapable of defeating Persia without the spine of Sparta and Athens to hold them to the task — but that’s all crap. The Phoenicians came to that battle wary of us, and the Aegyptians wanted no part of it and, in effect, only fought to defend themselves. If the Samians had held their place in the line, Epaphroditos would have routed the Aegyptians, and we would have won.

Why do I tell you this? Because my rage and bitterness were boundless. The cupidity, the foolishness, the greed of a few men had killed my friends and robbed me of my love.

The day after Lade, I wanted revenge.

Let me be clear, honey bee. I still do.

I washed in the sea — that hurt, believe me. Nothing like salt water on new wounds. Then I put on a clean wool chiton and boots, and my newly cleaned shirt of Persian scales. I put my sword belt on my shoulder.

Black came into my tent as I finished arming myself. ‘So?’ he asked.

‘Gather the men.’ I said no more, and he went.

Idomeneus took his cue from me, and he had a Tyrian cloak on his shoulder and my good bronze breastplate on his back when he came to me. Harpagos looked like a fisherman in a wool cap. I beckoned him to me, walked him into my tent and bade him dress like a trierarch.

‘Part of leading is play-acting,’ I said. ‘You must dress the part. Today, we have to pull them up a hill the way an ox pulls a cart. Everything matters.’

He shrugged. ‘Yes, lord,’ he said.

I dressed him in a red wool himation and a plain linen chitoniskos with a leather stola. Idomeneus brought him a fine Cretan helmet from a dead Phoenician officer.

The helmet was covered in repousse, a work of art.

‘I’ve never owned anything so fine,’ Harpagos said.

I shrugged. ‘Enjoy it,’ I said.

Idomeneus grinned. I frowned at him. ‘You are the only man in this camp smiling,’ I said.

‘Good fighting yesterday,’ he said. ‘We lived. No reason to cry.’

That was Idomeneus — a man who lived at the edge of madness, I suspect.

Black wore a magnificent chiton when we emerged — purple with red and blue edge-stripes like waves, as nice a piece of cloth as I’d ever seen. And he had the sword I’d taken from the old Persian — not that I begrudged him it.

So we made a good show. The men were surly and quiet, but when they saw us, they understood immediately, and I saw men wipe their faces and look at the dirt on their hands. Good.

‘We lost,’ I said. There were about three hundred men on the beach, where the day before fifteen times that many had eaten breakfast and offered sacrifice. ‘We lost, but life goes on. Lord Miltiades will not stop fighting. Neither will we, as long as there are fat Aegyptian merchants to take and gold to spend.’

All that got was a grumble.

‘The Persians won’t stir today,’ I said, pointing across the bay. ‘We hurt them badly, and they’ll lick their wounds. But tomorrow, they’ll come for us. So we’ll have to be gone — away downwind to Chios, where we’ll put Philocrates and Stephanos in the ground. And say the rites for all those who went down.’

That got a better reaction.

‘But first. .’ I said, and every head came up — every set of eyes locked on mine. ‘But first, I mean to complete our crews in Miletus, and take off every man, woman and child we can save. Before the Persians storm it. Which will happen any hour.’ I looked around, and the only sound was the wind making the empty tents flap like untended sails.

‘We came here to save those people,’ I said. ‘We can still save some. Anyone with me?’

Not bad, thugater. Not bad at all. They were all with me, as it turned out.

We kept a good watch all day, so we knew when the Persians launched their assault on Miletus, just a few stades distant. They didn’t take it by surprise, or anything like — but they knew that the town was nearly empty, and probably further lost to despair than we were on the beaches.

Most of the fleet of Miletus was lost in the fighting. The handful of ships who survived ran for Samos and Chios. Not a single ship ran for their own port — not even Histiaeus himself, who left Istes in ‘command’ of a city denuded of fighting men.

As I say — we kept watch. Twice we saw patrols set off from the beaches opposite, but neither came any closer than ten stades. My two ships were hidden by the bulk of the island. Who would have expected us to hide in plain sight?

At sunset, we launched. Most men had slept all day. Our muscles were stiff, but we ate every animal we found on the beach — cows, goats, all abandoned by the Greeks — and we’d stowed carefully the best of the loot from the rest of the campaign, our weapons and little else.

Once afloat, we lay on our oars in the channel between Lade and Miletus, our oars muffled and every man silent. The rocks hid us from the town and from the besiegers. But we could hear the fighting. The town was falling. There was no question of it.

I was in a curious race with time. I couldn’t let my ships be seen against our shore when we moved — or the Phoenicians and the Aegyptians and the Cilicians would be on us like vultures. But if I waited too long, the town would fall.

Black waited with apparent impassivity, but Harpagos walked up and down the command deck of his trireme, and his bare feet were the loudest noise in the channel. Gulls moved and cried. The wind blew through a camp devoid of Greeks. In the distance, there was a murmur like summer thunder.

I remember the darkness of that hour, and the despair I hid. If I must remind you, the disaster of Lade lost me Briseis. For ever, as it seemed. The Persians have a phrase — they tell a condemned nobleman to ‘go and hunt his death’. Well — I was on the edge of hunting my death, or perhaps past it — but I had my men in order, and I had fired them for this task, and I meant to do an honourable job before I hunted my death.

The sun was a line of crimson in the west, and our shore was dark as new pitch. ‘Let’s go,’ I whispered.

‘Give way, all,’ Black said.

Every oar dipped, and we ghosted down the channel, followed by Harpagos. We made the turn, and there was the town.

Miletus was afire. The palace on the acropolis was burning, great gouts of fire leaping into the air like live daimons, and the summer thunder sound we’d heard was now the great-throated roar of a city being destroyed by fire and sword.

Miletus, the richest city in the Greek world.

We crept up the passage to the harbour, our oars carefully handled, our hulls tight against the mainland shore to avoid being seen. I began to curse. I could see soldiers in the streets of the lower town and people running and being killed, but there was no resistance.

‘Apollo, render justice,’ I said aloud. ‘You owe me better than this.’

And just then, I heard the horn from the Windy Tower.

Of course, that citadel on the harbour was the last to fall — I should have guessed it from the first. I could see men on the walls — archers — and my heart leaped.

‘Lay me under the sea wall by the tower,’ I said to Black, pointing.

‘Aye, lord,’ he said.

We turned in the mouth of the harbour and I loved my men — every oarsman of them — as we raced for the tower.

I leaped to the jetty and Idomeneus followed me.

‘Pole off,’ I called, ‘or we’ll be swamped. Wait for my word.’

Black waved.

They were fighting hand to hand on the steps of the tower when I slipped in the postern with Idomeneus. The startled sentry took one look at us — and at the two great dark hulls behind us on the tower’s jetty — and he fell to his knees. ‘You-’

‘We came for you,’ I said. ‘Take me to Istes, if he lives.’

We ran along the walls, all my wounds and all my fatigue forgotten, where men were leaning and pointing at the ships. It was worth it — all the waiting and the strain on muscles — to see those men, who had thought that they were dead, realize that they were going to live.

Istes was in the arch of the courtyard steps with a dozen other hoplites, holding the entrance. I watched him fight for a minute. In that time, three souls went to Hades on his blade, and as many fell back, wounded or simply too frightened to face him.

To fight that well — when you have no hope — is a great gift. Or a great curse.

In the Pyrrhiche, we practise replacing one another in combat. It is practised in every town, in every polis, in every gymnasium. No man can fight for ever.

‘You switch with him,’ I said to Idomeneus. ‘I’ll get this organized.’

Idomeneus flexed his shoulders and set his aspis and grinned. ‘Aye, lord,’

‘Don’t go and get killed,’ I said. ‘I’m low on friends,’ I added.

His mad grin flashed and he kissed me. ‘I’ll do my best, lord,’ he said.

He stepped up behind Istes — none of the other men in the courtyard seemed to feel any need to give their lord a rest. Then, in between kills, he tapped twice — hard — on Istes’ backplate.

Istes flashed a backwards look.

Idomeneus tapped a rhythm on his shield — and one, and two — Istes pivoted on his hips and slid diagonally to the right rear, and Idomeneus lunged forward, right foot first with a sweeping overhead cut that forced the Persian facing Istes to back a step, and then Idomeneus filled the spot and killed the Persian with a feint and a back cut, and the line was as solid as it had been a moment before.

Istes sank to a knee and breathed. Then his helmet came off, and he raised his head and saw me.

For a long moment, all he did was breathe and look at me.

‘You came to die with us?’ he asked.

‘You’re as mad as he is,’ I said, pointing at Idomeneus. ‘I came to rescue you, you soft-handed Asiatic.’

Then he embraced me. ‘Oh gods, I thought we were all dead and no man would even sing of our end. There’s no counting the fucking Persians. And there’s Greeks with them — armoured men, fighting for their slave-masters.’

‘I need you to get your men off the walls and into the ships,’ I said.

‘There are fifty women and children, as well,’ he said. ‘When the lower town fell, the smart ones ran here.’

‘I have two ships,’ I said. ‘I will leave no one behind, even if it means I have to swim.’

Then he embraced me again and ran off through the courtyard, calling for his officers.

The hard part would be holding the stairs and the gate until the boats were loaded. The men on the stairs would be unlikely to live — and it is harder to get men to die when they know there is hope.

But Istes’ men loved him. He told off ten to take the places of those fighting at that moment, who were the first to go to the boats — still dazed from combat and from their turn of fortune.

The next trick was to get the archers off the citadel walls without letting the Persians and Lydians know they were leaving.

I saw Teucer and waved. He came down off the walls. ‘I heard you were here,’ he said, a grin covering his face. ‘It’s true — you’ll take us all off?’

I laughed. Despair had left me. Save a hundred lives and you’ll find it hard to despair. Every Milesian going on board my ships gave heart to my rowers. Every woman with a babe in her arms was like new life for a wounded marine.

I tapped Idomeneus when I saw him flag. The Persians were relentless. They came in waves, determined to finish us. And they still didn’t know we were leaving.

He hamstrung an archer with a thrust under his shield, pivoted as the man screamed and I was in his place before the man had fallen to the ground.

The Persian behind the falling man had a long spear with a heavy ball of silver on the end. I stabbed at him — three fast strokes, the same attack every time. The third time went past his defences and my spearhead went through his wrist, into his neck.

The man to my left fell — I have no idea what happened — and suddenly our line was gone.

I powered forward into the press, and my spear played on them like a stork taking frogs. I felt faster and stronger than other men, and I felt no fear. I was the saviour of Miletus that night, and the flames of the dying city framed my victims.

I cleared the stairs. What more can I say? I put down eight or ten men, and the rest fled. I took blows on my armour, and my opponents were not fully armed men, but it was still one of my best moments, and yet I remember little, save that I stood alone at the head of the stairs and breathed like a horse after a race, and behind me the line restored itself and the men began to call my name.

‘Ar-im-nes-tos! Ar-im-nes-tos!’ they called.

Down at the base of the steps, I heard officers calling, and men were forming. I picked up a heavy spear that lay discarded, hefted it and then I stepped out into the arrows of the Persians.

Two thudded into my shield, but I knew that the gods had made me immune. I stepped up and threw that spear into one of the Persian officers. He took it under his arm, and I stepped back and laughed. I took advantage of the lull to look at the citadel doors, but they were smashed, and nothing could close the gate but a line of men.

‘Come to me,’ I yelled at the Milesians, and they shuffled forward warily — I might be their saviour, but I was a stranger. ‘Stand here.’ I beckoned to the men in the courtyard. ‘Close up — like a phalanx. No spaces. Listen to me. Their arrows can’t reach you here. When we retreat, the left files retreat up the left wall stairs, and the right files up the right wall stairs. Understand?’

We still had a minute. I grabbed the rightmost and leftmost men. ‘Follow me!’ I called, and I took them in the gate. ‘You go that way — single file, like forming or unforming the Pyrrhiche.’

He didn’t understand, but another man did, and I pushed the first man into the third rank. ‘Sorry, lad. I need a thinker. You — can you live long enough to get them up these stairs?’

The new phylarch shrugged.

‘Here they come!’ the men at the gate called.

I got back there with my two appointed phylarchs. We had time to take our places — me in the centre of the line, they at either end. We were seven men to a rank, three ranks deep.

‘Listen up,’ I said. ‘We take their charge, and hold. On my word, we give ground to the edge of the courtyard — and then charge. Can you do it? No shirking — all together.’

And then they came at us. It was the bodyguard. Cyrus led from in front, and I knew him as soon as he came up the steps, and he knew me, as I heard it later, from my shouted commands.

These were the best of Artaphernes’ men, picked swordsmen, nobles all, and men of discipline. They came into us together, and our line gave a step, and then we were fighting.

Cyrus didn’t come against me — by luck or the will of the gods. He had a big wicker shield, and he pushed it into the man next to me.

I didn’t await the onset of my man. I threw a spear — low — and took my man in the ankle, and down he went, and I went forward into the space, right past Cyrus. I had my second spear, and my shield was better than theirs. My second spear — like my old deer-killer — had a wicked tapered point like a needle, and I used it ruthlessly in the firelit dark, ramming it through wicker shields into their shield arms. I don’t know how many men I wounded that way, but it was more than three, and then I stepped back into my place in the ranks, leaving a hollow behind me.

‘Break!’ I called, and we turned like a school of fish threatened by a dolphin and fled, just ten steps in the tunnel, and I turned. ‘Stand!’ I said, and the Milesians turned and stood like heroes. ‘Charge!’ I called, and we went at the startled Persians.

We had men down, and so did they, and the footing was treacherous, and on balance, it was foolish of me to charge like that, but foolish things are unexpected things, and we crashed into them and pushed them right off the platform of the steps, so that one of my file-leaders took an arrow in the side — we’d over-charged, and we were in the open.

‘Back!’ I called. We shuffled back as a storm of arrows fell on the portico. I tripped — a man grabbed at my leg, and I was looking into Cyrus’s helmet. My sword point stopped a finger’s width from his eye.

‘Doru,’ he said. He managed a smile, although I was about to slay him.

I stepped over him. ‘Can you walk?’ I asked, and he managed to get to one knee. Another wounded guardsman rose, holding his left arm — where I’d put a spear into it, no doubt.

‘Let them go,’ I told my men. Apollo, witless lying god, witness my mercy.

Six Persians shuffled away. They didn’t meet our eyes. But they lived, and they had fought well. As my hero Eualcidas of Eretria told me once, everyone runs sometime.

I could hear argument in the darkness.

Istes came up beside me.

‘We’re out,’ he said. ‘All but ten archers up on the walls with all our remaining arrows.’

‘No time like the present,’ I said. ‘By files, to the right and left, retire!’

Istes laughed. ‘You Dorians have orders for everything,’ he said.

We backed up the tunnel, and then they came at us.

Greeks. In armour.

They came fast, hard and silent, and the man who led them had a great scorpion on his shield. He put my right file-leader down and sent his shade away screaming at the first contact, and the line couldn’t rally because the end men were retreating up the stairs.

Suddenly, our orderly flight was chaos.

Istes went forward into the fight, and all I could do was go with him. For ten heartbeats — maybe twice that — the two of us held ten armoured men.

Istes killed a man in that time. He was that good.

I didn’t. I was facing three men, and one of them was the man with the scorpion on his shield. It was Archilogos.

It was bound to happen sometime.

I had sworn to save him and his family, before all the gods, at the shrine of Artemis. And he was one of the best fighters in the Greek world. We had the same training. We’d been in the same battles.

The gods send us these challenges to see what we’re made of, I think.

The last thing I wanted Archilogos to know was that he was immune to my blade. I rammed my shield into his and made him stumble, and then I thrust at each of his two companions, fast as a cat, and then I jumped back.

Istes, as I said, killed his man.

He felt me back away, and he backed, and then we backed together.

Archilogos shouted for his men to get around me. ‘They’re abandoning the gate!’ he roared.

As the leftmost man sprang forward, I threw my second spear and caught him in the outstretched leg, and down he went.

I was out of spears, but I felt the right-hand stairs to the wall under my right heel.

Archilogos came for me again, and I backed up a step and then another, and then he cut at my feet — remember, I had boots on, not greaves, because of my wounds. I got my shield in late — too late — and he got a piece of my leg, his blade slicing through my boot, through my bandages, to lay a line of icy fire across my calf.

But my shield rim caught his helmet as he leaned into the blow, and staggered him, and he fell.

Another man leaped into his place, and I backed another step and my heart fell to see the amount of blood I’d already lost. The step I abandoned glittered in the light of the doomed city.

I backed again, and the new man cut at my legs. I had no qualms about killing this Ephesian, and I parried his blow with my sword and turned my xiphos over his blade and cut his throat — a nasty move learned in close-quarter fighting. Not very sporting. But I thought I was dying.

Put yourself in my place. I had lost everything — friends, lover, ship. The rescue of the Milesians would make my name for ever, I thought. And if I died here — what more could I want? A sad end, but a great song. I could trust Phrynichus, if he survived his wound, to write of it.

When I took that wound, I thought I was done. It was too damned far to the ships, and I was losing blood like a dying man.

But nor am I a quitter. I killed the man with my xiphos and I got up another step.

Idomeneus leaned past me with a spear and put it through the next comer’s faceplate, and I was up another step.

Teucer shot the next man, and he fell back, an arrow in his upper thigh, and he swept the steps clean for a hundred heartbeats. Then Idomeneus got a hand under my arm and I was up on the wall.

It is good to have companions.

‘I’m finished, friends,’ I said.

Idomeneus picked me up bodily.

‘Like fuck you are,’ he said.

Our wall was empty. Teucer was the last man behind us. He shot, ran to us, turned and shot again. No man of the Ephesians — even wearing full armour — wanted to be the first to put his head above the parapet.

‘Can you stand?’ Idomeneus asked. He could see something I couldn’t.

‘No,’ I responded. The world was going dark on me.

He stood me up anyway. I sank to one knee.

Teucer cried, ‘No!’ and shot, right over my head.

The wall had a crenellated parapet on the city side, but on the courtyard side, just a low wall to keep foolish or drunken sentries from falling to their deaths on the flagstones benath. The stairs were recessed into the wall. We couldn’t see the enemy on our steps, but I could see — even as the curtain came down over my eyes — the line of armoured men racing up the far steps, and Istes, alone on the wall, taking them. I have never seen anyone fight as well, unless perhaps it was Sophanes, but that was later, and Sophanes wasn’t fighting in the last moments of a losing battle, doomed, against overwhelming odds. Istes threw them from the wall, he stabbed them, he baffled with his shield, his cloak, his sword, and they died.

But he was flagging. I could see it. And he’d sent his men away — they all said as much later.

In fact, Istes never intended to reach the ships. I saw him there, burning with godlike power on the wall, fighting so well that he seemed to glow with his own light. He had full bronze — cuirass, helmet, greaves, thigh guards, arm guards, shoulder cups, shield face — and his armour caught the fire of his city as it died, and rendered it a golden sun atop its last defended wall.

Teucer had three arrows left and he used them all for his lord — three more Ephesians sent to Hades.

Then Idomeneus was there, having put me down to run all the way around the wall to Istes. Idomeneus threw his spear over Istes’ shoulder, and then tapped his shoulder — but Istes shook his head and went shield to shield with a big man. Behind that man was the Scorpion. Archilogos had shaken off my blow.

I dragged myself, one step at a time, paralleling Istes’ retreat. Helmeted heads began to peek above our stairs. On the far wall, the man behind Archilogos fell with an arrow in his side.

Teucer cursed. ‘That was my last arrow, lord.’

I managed a laugh. ‘Might have been better if you hadn’t told them,’ I said.

There was a great black puddle under me. I got to my feet anyway.

On the opposite wall, Archilogos, my boyhood friend, faced Istes, the best sword in the world. Istes glowed gold.

‘Miletus!’ he roared.

Archilogos took his sword cut on his aspis and pushed forward with it, and Istes stumbled back and Archi cut up under the shield with his sword — once, twice, as fast as a hawk stooping — and Istes stumbled back, and I could see his shield arm was wounded.

Now Istes had fought all day. And he knew he would die.

But Archilogos showed himself to be a master. He gave the golden man no respite, and cut again — a heavy blow to the helmet.

He got Istes’ shield in the face, though, and he went back, and Istes backed a step. Idomeneus tapped him again, and he said something. Later he told me that he begged Istes to live. Istes didn’t reply, except to charge Archilogos. He had his arms out, and he ran like a man finishing a race, and he swept my childhood friend and slave-master off the wall in his arms, and they fell together to the courtyard, and as he fell he roared ‘Miletus’ one more time, and then he was gone, and his armour rang as he hit the flagstones.

Teucer had got me to the ropes over the wall by then. I must have been lighter by the weight of all my blood, but I remember stepping on a spear that one of the men had dropped to slide more easily to the ships.

‘Go,’ I said to Teucer.

He shook his head.

‘Go, you fool,’ I said.

He let go of my shoulder, grabbed the rope and slid off towards the deck of Black Raven.

I was the last man on the walls of Miletus — the last free Greek. I had no intention of leaving. The spear came to me as a sign, or so I thought. And Istes was dead. And Archilogos was dead.

So I had no reason not to be dead, too.

I had the strength to raise the spear over my head, and I set my shield, and waited for the rush. I could hear their feet on the walls, and I couldn’t see very well, but I knew they were coming.

One Ephesian came out of the dark and his aspis hit my Boeotian, shield to shield, and mine broke like a child’s toy. The blows from the Aegyptian must have weakened it.

But even blind with blood loss, I got my spear into his face, and he went down, cursing.

I stepped back and caught a breath. I was still alive.

I can only tell this as I saw it, honey. What I will say is what I saw.

Helen came to me on the wall — or Aphrodite, or perhaps Briseis. I like to think it was Briseis. Her hair was unbound, and her skin glowed like a goddess.

‘This is not your fate, love,’ she said. And she was gone.

That’s what I saw.

So I threw the spear as hard as I could, right along the parapet. I stumbled backwards, my fingers reaching for the rope, almost blind. I found it even as a blow rang off the scale shirt on my back — a spear-thrust on the heavy yoke over the shoulders. I fell, my hands holding the rope, and my feet dropped free of the wall, and I slid down the rope. My palms burned, but I wouldn’t let go.

I’m told I hit the mast quite hard. I was already pretty far gone, and I fell to the deck as if dead, all my sinews cut. But my armour did its job, and the wool stuffed in my helmet.

I remember the men crowding around me. I remember hands on my leg, and fire.

I have never run the stade since.

The women wept and keened, and men as well, as the oarsmen pulled us away into the dark. I lay cushioned in blood loss, far away and yet able to think clearly enough, and Black Raven unfolded his wings and swept us out to sea. The Phoenicians and the Cilicians and the Aegyptians never saw us, or thought we weren’t worth their trouble, or simply let us go. We saved Teucer and a hundred other soldiers, five gentlemen of property, and another hundred women and children. Four thousand died and forty thousand were sold into slavery.

And that was just the start.

We made Chios in three days — three desperate days, when Harpagos, Idomeneus and Black did the work of keeping us alive while my body made the hard choices between life and death. I missed the moment when Idomeneus made a speech — he ordered the treasure thrown over the side, and he told them that the babes of the Milesians would be their treasure, and asked them to count the weight of the silver and tell him which was the most valuable, and they cheered as they threw it over. I missed that, although it is all part of the story.

The Milesians pitched in and rowed, and we shared what food we had, and everyone who had lived to flee the walls of Miletus lived to see the beaches of Chios.

The next thing I remember was Melaina weeping. There was a pyre for Stephanos, and another for Philocrates, and Phrynichus wept as he said their elegies. Alcaeus of Miletus — one of the gentlemen we’d rescued — organized funeral games.

Melaina cared for me, cleaning my wounds, bathing me, cleaning away the wastes of my body. My fever broke in the second week, and by the third week I could walk. Summer was almost over.

‘The Persians will come,’ I said. ‘Come with me. I owe you — and your brother’s shade — that much.’

She shrugged. ‘I’ll stay anyway,’ she said. ‘I’m a fisherman’s daughter. I don’t like the change. And my father is here, and my sisters, and all the children. Can you move the whole of Chios?’

Another week, while my body healed. Black was restless, eager to get to sea. Suddenly, there were Cilician pirates everywhere, and down the coast, a village burned.

Finally, I set a sailing date. The evenings were brisk, and the sun was lower in the sky.

We sat and drank wine until the sun set, wine that went straight to my head, and we ate a big tuna that Melaina’s father caught. He came and clapped me on the shoulder. ‘Stephanos loved you,’ he said. ‘You’re a good man.’

That made me cry. I cried easily in those days.

It was harder to abandon Chios than it had been to leave Miletus, because unlike these cheerful fisherfolk, I knew what was coming to them. The light hand of Persia was about to be replaced by an iron fist. I watched the sun set, and I knew that it would be a long time before I saw it rise here, in the east.

Melaina came into my bed that last night, while I lay looking at the rafters. I didn’t send her away, although our lovemaking had more grief to it than lust. But she left before dawn, and she was a proper daughter again on the beach when she poured a libation and washed Harpagos’s shield in wine.

Then my keel was in the water, and I ceased to think of her, because we went to sail an ocean full of enemies.

We ran north, evading everything we saw, until we entered the Bosporus.

Kallipolis was still free. We beached, and I embraced Miltiades.

I’ll make this brief. We wintered there. In the spring, Histiaeus — Istes’ brother, who left him to die — came to us, asking that we follow him to make a pre-emptive attack on the coast of Phoenicia — to show that the East Greeks weren’t beaten. It was a strategy that was a year too late.

‘I’ll stay and defend the Chersonese,’ Miltiades said. ‘It is mine. But I will lose no more men in Asia.’

Histiaeus was captured in Phrygia a month later, trying to forage for food for his oarsmen. Datis executed him for treason. It was a cheap death for a man who had led the Ionian Revolt. He should have died on the walls with his brother.

Less than a week later, Datis flooded the Chersonese with Scythian and Thracian mercenaries. He outspent Miltiades, ten to one, and in a week we lost four of our towns.

We expected it, though. The east was lost. We loaded our ships, taking every Greek man and woman — the survivors of Miletus, and Methymna and Teos, and all of Miltiades’ men and their women. We filled ten triremes and as many Athenian grain ships, and we sailed away. The Scythians burned Kallipolis behind us, but we left it empty.

Datis landed an army on Lesbos, and he swept the island with a chain of men all the way across, looking for rebels. He crucified those he caught, and he took the best of the boys and all of the unmarried girls, and sold them as slaves or took them for the harem. Then he went to Chios and did the same.

There was no force in the world that could stop him. He harried the Aeolians, selling their children to brothels, and then he harried the Ionians, and humiliated them, island by island, until there was no longer the sigh of a girl or the worship of Aphrodite from Sardis to Delos. He broke the world of my youth. He destroyed it. I grew to manhood in the world of Alcaeus and Sappho. He destroyed Sappho’s school and sold the students to satisfy the lusts of his soldiers.

You children know the world Athens made, and you think it good. I love Athens — but there was a fairer world once, a brighter place, with better poets and freer ways. Where Greeks and Persians could be friends with each other, with Aegyptians and Lydians.

Datis killed it, to break the spirit of the Greeks and reduce them to servitude. Truly, it was the rape of the islands that taught us Greeks what the Persians were capable of, and showed us why we would have to fight, or see our culture die.

Artaphernes resisted Datis, of course. But Datis was the Great King’s nephew and had won the great battle, and Artaphernes was considered soft on Greeks.

Datis raped the islands, and we sailed away and left them. I sailed Black Raven into Corinth and unloaded the refugees, While Black took him back to sea as a paid ship, for Athens, I brought them north, to Plataea.

Idomeneus was a bastard, for all I loved him, and when the treasure had gone over the side, none of it was mine or his — so I still had riches, and I spent them that summer. I settled forty families in the vale of Asopus, and when I was finished, the money of my piracy was gone, washed clean in rescuing them from poverty, or so I hoped.

And then I was just another farmer with a forge, for my gold was gone.

While I was spending money like a drunken sailor, I heard the rumours — that I was a murderer, that I was accursed of Apollo. All my father’s friends spoke up for me, as well as all my own friends — Hermogenes and Epictetus the Younger, and Myron and his sons — but my absences, my riches and the constant murmurs of the sons of Simon, from Thebes, had their effect. Men pushed me away, in the little ways that men use when they are afraid. And to my shame, I responded with arrogance and let the distance grow.

It was a dark winter, with one beam of light. For when I was settling my Milesians, I met Antigonus of Thespiae, the young basileus of that town. He took ten of my families and made them citizens, and we became friends quickly — and as quickly, he courted my sister. He was a wealthy man, and he might have had any maiden in the valley of the Asopus, but he courted Pen, and in the spring he wed her, and men came to that wedding who had whispered about me, and my life was the better for it.

My mother stayed sober until the priest was gone, and I kissed her, and she cried. Then I folded my finery away and went back to the forge, and she went back to drinking, and men went back to whispering that the Corvaxae were all accursed.

There were other fights, that last year. But the Ionian Revolt died with Istes, as he fell, shouting ‘Miletus’.

I suppose we thought that the Long War was over. And I had forgotten my slave girl. I tried to forget Briseis, and Melaina. I tried to forget all of it. I ignored my armour and my helmet and I worked on bronze kettles and drinking cups.

Until the archon came and asked me to return to teaching the Pyrrhiche.

My calf throbbed and burned, and my hips hurt when we danced, but they all admired my splendid Persian scale shirt and my rich red cloak, and Myron came and embraced me.

‘Your new citizens have made us richer by a thousand gold darics,’ he said.

‘And fifty shields in the phalanx,’ Hermogenes said.

The men of Plataea came to me, and clasped my arm. Glad to have you back, they said, but now I sensed the hesitation in their grips and the tendency of their eyes to wander when they spoke. Plataeans didn’t just take off to fight in other people’s wars. Or show up with a passel of foreigners.

But I was the devil they knew. And by then, thanks to the word-fame of my role at Lade, I was famous — so famous that it was hard for my neighbours to accept me as a man who danced and sweated and had trouble with his grape vines. Fame makes you different — ask any man who has won the laurel at Olympia or Nemea.

May none of you ever experience defeat, and the death of all your friends. Idomeneus remained, back at the tomb of the hero, but he was as mad as a wild dog. Black was fighting against Aegina for Athens. Hermogenes was like another man — a good man, but a farmer and a husband. All the rest of them were dead. Even Archilogos was dead. And I didn’t dare allow my mind to think about Briseis. In some way, I let her be dead, as well.

But one of the saddest truths of men is that no grief lasts for ever.

My helmet was waiting, just where I had left it, on a leather bag on the great square bench that Pater had built. I had to hobble around the shop — my calf never healed, and as I said, I never ran well again — and I was angry all the time. Hermogenes forced me to work, and Tiraeus fired the forge, and after mending a few pots, my hands remembered their duty.

I think it was a month after the Pyrrhiche, and perhaps three months after Pen’s wedding, before I looked at the helmet. I was surprised by what a good helmet it was, how far along I had left it. It seemed like ten years — like a lifetime. There was the ding where I’d mis-struck when the boy came to me with news from Idomeneus. I blinked away tears. Then I took out the ding with careful, methodical planishing, which seemed more restful than dull.

When the bowl was as smooth as Briseis’s breasts, I turned the helmet over and looked at the patterns I’d incised.

I had started the ravens on the cheekplates before I left. I did not love Lord Apollo any more. But the ravens seemed apt. If I ever stood in the phalanx again, I wanted to wear ravens.

Instead of going to work on the helmet, I took a piece of scrap, pounded it out flat and tapped the ravens to life on a practice piece. I made a dozen errors, but I worked through patiently, reheating as I went. It was two days before I was satisfied, and then I went back and put the ravens on the cheekplates in an afternoon. I had time left to go and help my slaves prop the grape vines. Then I went back, looked my work over carefully and polished it as the sun set behind the hills of home. I filled the ravens with lead on the inside, planished a little more.

Tiraeus kept an eye on me while he put a new bail on an old bronze bucket for the temple. And then he looked at my work.

‘You’ve grown up,’ he said. And then, his voice rough, he pointed at the back of the skullpiece. ‘Little rough there.’

I picked up the hammer.

Ting-ting.

Ting-ting.