Marathon: Freedom or Death

3

I managed to find a ship at Sounion, practically on the steps of the Temple of Poseidon. He was a Phoenician bound for Delos with a cargo of slaves from Italy and Iberia. I didn’t think very highly of slavers and I dislike Phoenicians on principle, even though they are great sailors, but I took it as a test from the gods and I kept my eyes open and my mouth shut.

All the slaves were Iberians, big men with heavy moustaches, tattoos and the deep anger of the recently enslaved. They eyed my weapons and I kept my distance. They all looked like fighting men.

The navarch, a man with a beard trimmed the Aegyptian way, curling like a talon from his chin, made them row in shifts between his professional rowers. He was training them so that he’d get a better price. He planned to sell the best of them at Delos and the rest at Tyre or Ephesus.

‘Ephesus?’ I asked. Ephesus always interested me.

‘The satrap of Phrygia has an army laying siege to Miletus,’ he said. ‘His fleet is based at Ephesus.’

That was news to me. ‘Already?’ I asked. The fall of Miletus — the most powerful city in the Greek world, or so we thought — would be the end of the Ionian Revolt.

Once again, I have to leave my tale to explain. In those days, most of the cities of Ionia — and there were dozens, from beautiful Heraklea on the Euxine, down along the coast of Asia to mighty Miletus, then to Ephesus, the city of my youth, richer than Athens by a factor of five times — across the Cyprian Sea to Cyprus and Crete — more Greeks lived in Ionia than lived in Greece. Except that most of those Greeks lived under the rule of the King of Kings — the Great King of the Persians.

While I was growing to manhood in the house of Hipponax, I lived under Persian rule. The Persians ruled well, thugater. Never believe the crap men say today about how they were a nation of slaves. They were warriors, and men of honour — in most cases, more honour than we Greeks. Artaphernes — the satrap of Phrygia — was the friend and foe of my youth. He was a great man.

In those days — in my youth — the Greeks of Ionia rose up to throw off the shackles of Persian slavery. Hah! Now, there’s a load of cow shit. Selfish men seeking power for themselves cozened the citizens of many Ionian cities to trade the safety and stability of the world’s greatest empire for ‘freedom’. To most Ionians, that freedom was the freedom to be killed by a Persian. None of the Ionians trusted each other, and every one of them wanted power over the others. The Persians had a unified command, brilliant generals and excellent supplies. And money.

The Ionian Revolt had lasted for ten years, but it was never much of a success. And when this story starts, as I was sailing as a passenger on a slave ship, it was entering its final phase, although we didn’t know it. The Persians had seemed at the edge of triumph before, and each time, the revolt had been rescued — usually by Athens, or by Athenians acting as surrogates for their mother city, like Miltiades.

But Athens had its own problems — the near civil war I described. Persian gold was pouring into the city, inflating the power of the aristocratic party and the Alcmaeonids, and the Pisistratids were backed by Persia to restore the tyranny — not that I knew that then. Persian gold was paralysing Athens, and the Persian axe was poised over Miletus.

To the navarch of this slave ship, all this meant that he could make a handsome profit selling half-trained rowers to the Persian fleet anchored on the beaches around Ephesus, supporting the siege of Miletus.

I listened and managed not to speak.

We were fifteen days making a three-day voyage, and I hated that ship by the time we landed. His long, black hull was swift and clean, and for a light trireme he was the very acme of perfection — yet this Phoenician cur sailed him like a pig. The Phoenician was afraid of every cup of wind, and he stayed on a coast to the very end of a headland and crossed open water with visible reluctance. I’ve never loved the Phoenicians, but most of them were brilliant sailors. Every pack has a cur.

I sat alone in the bow, sang the hymn to Apollo as we sing it in Plataea — I have Apollo’s raven on my shield — and prepared myself to meet the god of the lyre and the plague. I tried not to think of how easily I could take this ship. Those days were gone. Or so I thought.

The last night at sea, I had a dream — such a dream that I can remember wisps of it even today. Ravens came to me and carried my good knife away, and one of them set a lyre in my hand as a replacement. I didn’t need a priest to tell me what that meant.

The most dangerous of the Iberians — you could see it in his eyes — had a raven tattooed on his hand and another on his sword arm. When the slaver’s stern was set in the deep sand of a Delian beach and his people were moving cargo, I dropped my heavy knife into the blackness under the Iberian’s bench, while he lay watching me, exhausted from rowing.

Our eyes met. I nodded. His face was completely blank. I wasn’t even sure he’d seen the knife, and I went ashore, poorer by a good blade.

Priests are priests the world around — I’ve noted a certain similarity from Olympia to Memphis in Aegypt. Many of them are good men and women; a few are remarkable, genuinely blessed. The rest are a sorry lot — people who probably, in my opinion, couldn’t make a living any other way, except as beggars or farm labour.

The man who met me as I kissed the rock by the stern of the slave ship was one of the latter. His hands were soft and his hand-clasp was limp and unpleasant, and his soft voice wished me a speedy encounter with the god in a voice that seemed all too ready to wheedle and plead.

‘You are Arimnestos of Plataea,’ he said.

Well, that took me aback. I was naive then, and didn’t know the effort to which the great priesthoods went to be informed. Nor did I suspect how carefully engineered this might be.

‘Yes,’ I allowed.

‘Brought here by the god to hear your penance for murder,’ he said in the same voice that a man might tease a girl into his blanket roll. I didn’t like him. But he had me, I can tell you.

‘Yes,’ I said.

‘The god has spoken to us of you,’ he said. He leaned his chin on the head of his staff. ‘What have you brought as offering?’

Just like that. My feet were still in the sand of the beach and the priests of Apollo wanted their fees.

I sighed. ‘I have served Apollo and Hephaestus all my life,’ I said. ‘I revere all the gods, and I serve at the shrine of the hero Leitos of Plataea.’ This by way of my religious credentials, so to speak.

He said nothing. His eyes flickered to the purse in my hand.

‘I have twenty drachmas, less the one I owe as passage to that slave trader.’ Need I mention that the priests of Apollo played an active role in the trade?

‘Nineteen silver owls? That is all the duty you pay to the god, you who are called the Spear of the Greeks?’ He shook his head. ‘I think not. Go back and return when you intend to give the god his due.’

Now, lest you young people miss the accounting, nineteen silver owls was the value of a farm’s produce for a year. But of course, it was as nothing next to the profits a man might make trading — or as a pirate.

I didn’t know what to say. I had more respect for priests in those days — even venal creatures like this one. ‘These nineteen drachmas are all I have,’ I protested.

He laughed. ‘Then Lord Apollo will give you nineteen drachmas’ worth of prophecy — I can feel his words in my heart. Go — and come back when you have learned enough wisdom to pay your tithe.’

Perhaps at eighteen, I’d have obeyed.

But I was older. ‘Out of my way,’ I said. ‘I need to find a priest.’

He oozed insult. ‘I am the priest the god has assigned.’

I shrugged and pushed past him. ‘I suspect the god can do better.’

He followed me up the rock and his voice became increasingly shrill as he demanded that I speak to him, but I continued up the steps to the temple complex. At the gate, he was still shouting at me as I asked the porter to find me a priest.

The porter grunted and I gave him a drachma, and he sent a boy.

‘Arimnestos of Plataea!’ the priest from the beach persisted. ‘This is not the way a gentleman behaves!’

‘Only eighteen drachmas left,’ I said. ‘And by the time I get a new guide to the altar, there will be none.’

‘Your arrogance will be your death,’ he said. ‘You seek to cheat the god!’

‘I do not,’ I said. ‘I am a farmer in Boeotia, not a pirate in the Chersonese. These coins are a fair share of my fortune in the last year.’

I said so — but I began to be afraid. Those coins were, as you know, taken from the corpses of men who tried to kill me. Perhaps the coins were polluted. But essentially my words were true ones. The eighteen coins in my purse were more than a tenth of all the coins I had in the world.

‘Why have you requested a second guide?’ a hard voice asked. This priest was older, dressed in a simple wool garment that had seen better days. ‘Thrasybulus? Why have I been summoned?’

‘You may go back to your cell,’ the oily man behind me answered. ‘This arrogant Boeotian is attempting to bargain with god.’

‘I wish to be washed by the god for a murder committed in Athens,’ I said. ‘If the god has words for me to hear, I would laugh with delight to hear them. But this man asks me for money I do not have.’ I pointed at the younger priest.

The older man rubbed his beard. ‘What price have you offered?’ he asked.

‘He is-’

‘Silence, Thrasybulus.’ The older priest seemed a different kind of man.

‘I have offered eighteen drachmas,’ I said. ‘It is all I have.’

‘The cost of three new bulls?’ He looked at me.

‘He can do better. Much better.’ Thrasybulus pointed at the metalwork on my empty scabbard.

The older man sighed. ‘This is unseemly. The priesthood of Apollo does not bargain like fishwives on the beach.’

The porter’s laugh suggested that this statement was not entirely true.

‘I am Dion of Delos,’ the older man said. ‘I am principally a scholar, and I seldom lead men to the gates — but Thrasybulus has, I fear, earned your displeasure.’ The older man glared at the younger. ‘You will need silver for food — and passage home, as well. Will you not?’

I nodded.

‘Give me twelve drachmas for your sacrifices, and I will lead you to the god,’ he said.

Thrasybulus spat. ‘You are a liar before the god,’ he said, pointing at me.

Not an auspicious start to my time on the island of Apollo.

That evening, I made the first of my three sacrifices — this one on the so-called altar of ash. I sacrificed a black lamb, a symbol of my crime, and I told the god and all the other men waiting to sacrifice how I had come to kill the thug in Athens and what my sin was — the sin of hubris, in feeling that I was as fit to decide his fate as the gods.

Other men sacrificed for other crimes. One, from Crete, had killed his son with a javelin — an error, a grievous miscast while hunting. Another had slept with a foreign woman during her courses and felt unclean. I almost laughed, but everyone else seemed to feel this was a serious thing. Several men were soldiers — mercenaries — who had come to atone for killing other Greeks — over dice, or in battle. Two men were guilty of gross impiety.

My sacrifice was refused. I took the animal to the altar and killed it, but the fire would not accept the beast. I saw it myself.

The same happened to one of the men guilty of impiety, and the man who had killed his son.

My priest — Dion — led the three of us from the altar. He took us to a hut made of brush on the cliff high above the beach. ‘You will remain here for a week, eating clean food and drinking only water. Consider how you became unclean. Consider your life. I will return for you.’

That was a long week.

The Cretan was called Heracles. He was tall and strong, noble in his carriage, and so broken by grief that it was hard to speak to him. He felt the guilt that I did not feel. He felt that he had killed his son and deserved the wrath of the god, while I felt that I had acted hastily — selfishly — but that I had now learned my lesson and did not deserve the wrath of Apollo. Yet I had enough sense to see that I had far more culpability than this Cretan lord.

In fact, he was mistaking sorrow for guilt. I sat with him, night after night, held his hand and spoke to him of hunting, and of Crete, a place I knew well. I could get him to listen, and I could make him smile, and then some chance of speech would cast him back into the pit.

‘I am cursed,’ he said. ‘I have killed my son, and now my wife is barren.’

‘Take a concubine,’ I said, with all the arrogance of youth.

‘I cannot replace eighteen years of my life and his, just by making another squawking babe,’ he shot back — with more spirit than I’d seen so far.

‘Lord, you can. And then you must toil for as many years again, until he comes to manhood, so that your patronage is secure.’ I spoke carefully, for I felt I might be speaking wisdom.

He sighed. ‘Perhaps,’ he said. ‘You are young. When you have seen fifty winters, tell me how you feel about lasting through another fifteen seasons of war and the hunt. My joints hurt just lying here.’

The other man was a blasphemer. I could tell this because he swore by various gods every hour on the hour, and cursed the gods for setting him on Delos. He was a little man — in mind, not stature — and a lesson to anyone who would listen about the vices men can get into through idleness and superstition. I might have been a foolish young man, but I was the very king of piety next to Philocrates.

‘If you care so little for the gods, why did you come here and confess?’ I asked him.

He shrugged. ‘I swore an oath — nothing big — just part of a business deal. I never meant to pay the bastard — he was cheating me. But the priest of Zeus in Halicarnassus will not let me do any business in the agora until I atone.’ He shrugged. ‘All mummery. No greater liars or thieves than those priests.’ And grunted. ‘And now I have to put up with this. My money is as silver as everyone else’s. Fuck the gods. Why am I singled out? Because they think I should pay more.’ He spat.

I didn’t like his attitude, but I had to agree with the sense of his complaint. ‘You are hardly repentant,’ I said.

‘What are you, some kind of aspiring priest?’ he asked. ‘Fuck off. I’ll eat my bread and water for a week, and if they don’t take my sacrifice, I’ll sail away and let them dance for the money.’

‘But the god?’ I asked.

‘How much of a bumpkin are you?’ he asked me. ‘Listen, there’s a pair of bellows behind the altar — they manipulate them to decide which sacrifices are accepted and which rejected. Right? You understand, boy, or are you too thick? There are no gods. All you get is what you take.’

I felt the sort of shock that a man feels when lightning strikes too close at sea. I had thought of myself as a man of the world — I was a hardened killer, a soldier of fortune, a former pirate. But that men would manipulate the sacrifices of the gods? Or that this man would claim there were no gods?

Heraclitus told us that such men were contemptible, but very brave. ‘Only small men are incapable of seeing something greater than themselves,’ my master once said.

So I shook my head at Philocrates. ‘You are a sad case,’ I said.

He just smirked. ‘Bumpkin,’ he shot back.

The week was hard. I drank water and watched the sun, and I sang a hymn to Apollo every day. I set myself a task — to remember all the men I had killed. Of course, there were men I couldn’t remember — the Carians at Sardis and Ephesus had died in the anonymity of their armour, and the Phoenicians I’d killed on my ship during the mutiny didn’t even have faces in my memory — but I was able to conjure up fifty men in the theatre of my head, and that seemed a great many. And I had probably killed twice that, or even three times.

A week of consideration, and it seemed to me that the god was right to refuse my sacrifice. I killed too easily, I decided. It wasn’t a hard decision to reach. After all, Heraclitus had said as much most of the days of my youth.

When old Dion came for me, he was leading another black ram. ‘Did you dream?’ he asked.

I shrugged. ‘I had dreams,’ I said. ‘I dreamed once of a man I killed — a boy I put out of his misery on a battlefield. And I dreamed of a woman I love.’

Dion led me to the highest headland on the island — ten stades or more from our hut. The ram followed along obediently. Then he sat me down on a seat carved from the living rock.

‘And why do you think the god refused your sacrifice?’ he asked.

I looked out over the sea. There were a dozen ships on the beach below me. Two of them I knew, and I sat up with a start.

‘That’s my ship!’ I said. It was Storm Cutter, and he still had the raven of Apollo on his sail, the first ship I had ever owned, spear-won from the Phoenicians. Even now, his navarch was likely to be one of my chosen men.

Dion raised an eyebrow. ‘Men have been asking for you for three days,’ he said. ‘But you are in the god’s hands. Answer my question.’

‘The god refused my sacrifice because I kill to easily, and for little things,’ I said. ‘And yet, even as I say this, I wonder what the god asks of me. I am a warrior.’

Dion nodded. ‘I thought you were a farmer and a bronze-smith?’

Dion was a decent priest. So I said what came to mind. ‘The sight of that ship raises my heart in a way that my anvil never does,’ I confessed.

‘So,’ Dion said. Now he smiled. ‘So now you are confused?’

I laughed. ‘Yes,’ I said. ‘Answer me a question, priest.’

He shrugged. ‘It is my place to ask. But I’ll answer one question, if I can.’

I pointed at the temple. ‘Is there a pair of bellows mounted in the altar of ash to control the flame of the sacrifices?’

Dion nodded. ‘When you work bronze, do you use bellows?’ he asked.

I nodded.

‘And do you pray to Hephaestus to guide your hand when you work?’

‘Of course!’ I said. ‘Before I started my helmet, I omitted the prayer, and my work failed.’

Dion nodded again. ‘And yet you had bellows and a hammer and an anvil, I expect.’

‘I did,’ I said, seeing his point.

‘And if you sought to work bronze, and you prayed, and yet had neither bellows nor an anvil?’ he asked.

‘I’d be a fool,’ I agreed.

‘Some of us here are fools,’ Dion said. His eyes narrowed. ‘I am not one of them. Are you?’

‘I’m still not sure I understand what the god asks of me,’ I said.

‘The confession of confusion is often the beginning of wisdom,’ he said, and slapped my knee. ‘Let’s make sacrifice.’

My ram died well, and the god accepted him in a blast of fire, and I walked down the steps of the altar, my bare feet treading on the burnt remnants of thousands of animals sent to the heavens here, so that I wondered for a moment what a herd they’d make, and what the first animal to die here had been.

Let me also note that the god accepted the sacrifice of the impious trader and rejected the sacrifice of the Cretan lord who had killed his son. My confusion deepened.

‘There is more to god than a pair of bellows and an altar,’ Dion said. ‘He’s a good man, and the god will send him home when he is. . ready.’

The next morning, in the first blush of dawn, I waited in the cleft at the base of the altar, clad in simple white linen without so much as a stripe woven in. The cleft smelled of almonds and honey, and I was afraid. Hard to say why, exactly.

Dion held my shoulder while the first supplicant crawled up and into the cleft. He was gone for a long time, and when he returned he was as white as a corpse and couldn’t stand up, so that three acolytes had to carry him. When he was able to speak, priests gathered around him like sharks around a kill, demanding to know what words the god had spoken.

Then it was my turn.

Men were known to die confronting the god in the cleft. No amount of spear-craft on my part could avoid death if the god intended it for me, and I was afraid.

The cleft itself was odd. A big shelf of rock overhung another, and the cleft was between them, so that a man had to climb up first, as if into a hearth. I could just get my head and shoulders through the gap, and I banged my knees badly, and the smell of almonds grew stronger all around me. The priests had told me not to flinch and not to stop climbing, so I felt in front of me with my hand — all black, and me lying on my back — and I found the next handhold and pushed myself up with my legs, crouching and pressing myself flat against an invisible rock surface. My head bumped rock, and I felt a breeze on my face. I got a knee up, and scraped it again, but the pain was far, far away, and then I was up on the second shelf, breathing like bellows. .

‘Eh-eh-eh. .’ said the dying man at my elbow.

I looked at him, and he was younger than me — and kalos, even at the point of death, with big, beautiful eyes that wanted to know how his world had turned to shit. His skin, where it was not smeared with sweat and puke, was smooth and lovely. He was somebody’s son.

I drew my short dagger, really my eating knife, from under my scale shirt where I keep it, and I put my lips by his ear.

‘Say goodnight,’ I said. I tried to sound like Pater when he put me to bed. ‘Say goodnight, laddy.’

‘G’night,’ he managed. Like a child, the poor bastard. Go to Elysium with the thought of home, I prayed, and put the point of my eating knife into his brain. .

I tried to stand, and my head hit the rock.

I whirled, and I couldn’t find the cleft any more.

I knelt and my knees were bleeding.

How strong are you, Killer of Men? a voice said.

To be honest, I suspect I may have whimpered.

I have no memory past that, until I was kneeling on the sand of the beach, puking my guts out like a babe.

Dion held my hand. ‘You are clean, and the god has spoken through you,’ he said gently. ‘I will send word to Aristides.’

‘You know Aristides?’ I asked.

Dion smiled. ‘The world is not so big,’ he said.

‘Did the god have words for me?’ I asked.

Dion nodded. ‘Simple words, simply obeyed. You are lucky.’ He patted me on the head. I was that weak. ‘When you leave the temple, obey the first man you meet. Through obeying him, you will do a service for the god — it will come straight to you, like an arrow.’ He held out his hand and I got to my feet. A slave brought me water and I drank it. ‘Are you ready?’

My head was spinning, but the world was growing calmer by the moment. ‘Yes,’ I said.

‘I add on my own account,’ the priest said, as he led me up to the altar, ‘that if you were to hold your hand when you could kill, each time you acted so would count as a sacrifice to Lord Apollo.’

‘Hmm,’ I said. But I knew that this was the most important message, and the lesson I had come to Delos to learn. The stuff about the first man outside the temple — I had seen Miltiades’ ship on the beach. I knew who would be waiting for me outside the temple, and I was cynical enough to wonder how much my former lord had paid for me.

I sacrificed at the low altar and the high altar, and then I changed my temple garments for my own Boeotian wool, with my own sturdy boots and my own felt hat. And the hilt of my own sword under my arm. I looked for my knife, and then I remembered that I’d given it to the slave — or it was lost in the bilges of a Phoenician slaver, rusting away.

I kissed Dion on both cheeks. I couldn’t help but notice that Thrasybulus was standing by the portico, eyeing me the way a butcher eyes a bull.

‘Thank you,’ I said.

‘You doubt,’ Dion said. ‘I, too, doubt. Doubt is to piety what exercise is to athletics. But the god spoke to you, and in a day or less, you will see.’

Then I walked down the steps of the portico. I contemplated briefly a dramatic assault on my fate. I wondered what would happen if I ran to the left, accosted the slave sweeping the steps and demanded that he order me to do something, so that I might obey.

But some things are ordained. Whether the hand of man or the hand of the gods is in it matters little, as the petty hands of men may well be the tools of the gods as well. Dion’s lesson. So I walked down the steps to where Miltiades stood, his arms crossed over his magnificent breastplate of silvered bronze. His helmet was between his feet, and his shield was being held by his hypaspist. His son Cimon stood behind him, also arrayed for war.

In truth, my heart soared to meet them.

‘Command me, lord,’ I said.

‘Follow me,’ he said, as his arms embraced me, and he crushed me against his chest. Just those two words, and my fate was sealed.

Again.

Miltiades had had a bad season, and he’d lost two ships in the fighting. He had three ships on that beach: his own, with Paramanos of Cyrene as his helmsman, whom I embraced like a brother; Cimon, with a long, low trireme he’d taken himself; and Stephanos of Chios, a man my own age, who had served under me every step of the ladder and now had my own Storm Cutter.

‘Take command,’ Miltiades said, as I embraced Stephanos.

I looked at Stephanos.

He shook his head. ‘I can’t afford to run a warship yet,’ he said. It was true — it took treasure to keep a ship at sea, scraped clean and full of willing rowers.

I turned to Miltiades. ‘All my money gone?’ I asked. I’d left him my treasure when I went back to the farm.

The Athenian shrugged. ‘I’ll repay you,’ he said. ‘It’s been a bad season. We’ve been fighting Medes and not taking ships. More losses than gold darics.’ He shrugged. ‘I lost two ships in the Euxine. I need captains.’

‘Who told you I was on Delos?’ I asked, curious. Not even angry. Fate is fate.

‘I did,’ Idomeneus said. He stepped out from the crowd of rowers as if produced by the machine in a play. ‘I came to Athens with a wagon of goods and a corpse. Aristides took it all off my hands and told me to follow you.’ He grinned. ‘I thought you were going back to the real world.’

‘Who’s tending to the shrine?’ I asked.

‘Ajax, who served against us in Asia, and Styges,’ he said. My hypaspist had an answer for everything.

I nodded. ‘Will you be helmsman?’ I asked Stephanos.

He grinned.

‘Captain my marines?’ I asked Idomeneus.

He grinned too.

I didn’t grin. I sighed, wondering why it was so easy to fall back into a life I thought I’d put behind me. Wondering why the god who asked that I avoid killing men would send me back to the life of a pirate.

But before the sun slipped any farther down the horizon, our stern was off the beach and we were at sea. We weren’t particularly elegant — my lovely Storm Cutter was unpainted, unkempt and down thirty rowers from her top form. Neither of Miltiades’ other ships was doing any better.

Stephanos followed my eyes and nodded. ‘It’s been bad,’ he said. ‘Artaphernes is no fool.’

That I knew. And hearing his name brought to mind the messenger I’d left waiting in the courtyard of my house in Plataea. I turned to Idomeneus.

‘Did you stop by my home before rushing after me?’ I asked.

‘Of course, lord,’ he said. ‘Where do you think I got the wagon or all the bronze?’

‘Any messages?’ I asked.

He laughed. ‘Despoina Penelope says that if you make money, you had better send some home. Hermogenes says that he’ll sit this one out. And here’s a message from the satrap of Phrygia.’ He held out an ivory tube slyly, knowing that he was causing me a certain consternation.

I took it.

Inside was a letter from Artaphernes inviting me to come and serve him as a captain, at a rate of pay that made me gasp. I knew he would remember me — I had saved his life. And he had saved mine. This was the message I had spurned in Plataea.

As I contemplated the ways of the gods, a single curl of milk-white parchment fluttered in the breeze, peeking out of the scroll tube. I almost missed it. And when I saw it, I plucked at it and it escaped me and flew away, but Idomeneus trapped it against the mast.

On it, in a strong hand, was written:

Some men say a squadron of ships is the most beautiful but I say it is thou who art beautiful. Come and serve my husband, and be famous. Briseis.

That night, we landed on an empty beach on the south coast of Myconos. After we had eaten cold barley and drunk bad wine, I approached Miltiades.

‘Hear anything of Briseis?’ I ventured. I’m sure I asked with the attempt at casual disinterest for which the young strive when they really want something.

‘Your sweetheart is married to Artaphernes,’ he said. He shook his head and made as if to rest it in the palms of his hands, too weary to go on. He was mocking me. ‘She’s always by his side, or so I hear.’

Cimon nodded. ‘She wanted to be the queen of Ionia,’ he said. ‘It seems she’s chosen her side. And her brother is no longer with the rebellion, either. He’s been restored to all his estates in Ephesus. She may have been the price of his return to the fold.’

I didn’t weep. I took a deep breath and drank more wine. ‘Good for her,’ I said, though my voice betrayed me, and Cimon was a good man and let it rest.

‘What’s the plan?’ I asked Miltiades after some time had passed.

‘We do what we can to rebuild,’ the tyrant of the Chersonese said. ‘We prey on their shipping and use the proceeds to rebuild my squadron, and then we retake some of the towns on the Chersonese.’

‘You’ve lost all the towns?’ I asked.

Cimon stepped between his father and me. ‘Arimnestos,’ he said, ‘this is it. This is all we have.’ He put his arm around my shoulder. ‘And unless we convince Athens to get off its arse and help, Miletus will fall, and the Persians will win everything.’

When I had left Miltiades, he had four towns and ten triremes. I nodded. ‘Well,’ I said, ‘I guess there’s a lot of work to do.’

Morning found us at sea south of Myconos, our sails full of wind as we bore north by east for Chios, now the heart of the rebellion and the only island on the coast whose harbours were open to us.

About the time the sun rose clear of the sea, Stephanos spotted a sail on our bow. We watched it incuriously until it stood clear of the water with a hull beneath it, and then I recognized my Phoenician slaver.

I closed with Miltiades, stern to stern. ‘See that ship?’ I said. ‘Phoenician slaver full of Iberians, to be delivered to Artaphernes.’ I remember grinning. It was as if the god had sent this gift to me. ‘Legitimate prize of war!’ I shouted — not that we were ever too precise about such stuff. Any Phoenician was fair game.

Miltiades whooped. ‘Yours if you can catch him!’ he shouted, and I was away.

October is not the best month for a long chase in the Ionian Sea. October is the month when the winds change, and the rains become cold, and Poseidon starts to reckon on his tithe of ships. But it was a beautiful day, with a golden sun in a dark blue sky, and I’d spent fifteen days on that dark hull. His oarsmen hated the slaver, and he was undermanned like all men who made a profit selling their oarsmen.

On the other hand, the ship carried more sails than I could, and his hull had a finer entry. Storm Cutter had started his life as a Phoenician heavy trireme, and nothing in his build was for racing. Even fully crewed, he was not the fastest. He had one great point — he was strong.

I took Storm Cutter to windward under oars, as if I was departing the rest of the squadron, heading north across the wind for Thrace. When I was over the horizon, the sun was already high in the sky, and now I put my oarsmen to work, pulling hard while the sails were up so that we piled speed on speed. Sometimes this works, but this particular set of oarsmen — not the same men I’d left in this hull, I’ll add — weren’t up to it, and in the main their oars served only to slow the rush of water down our side.

I cursed and put the wind directly aft. The wind was stronger than it had been in the morning, and the sky at my back was growing dark, and many of my oarsmen were muttering.

All afternoon we raced along, until I had to brail up the mainsail to keep something from carrying away, and still we had no sight of our prey, or even of Miltiades. ‘Now I feel like a fool,’ I said quietly to Stephanos.

He made a face. ‘We should be up with them now,’ he said.

I couldn’t figure it out. ‘We lost time on our first leg,’ I said. ‘But unless he turned south-’

‘Miltiades made chase as soon as we went over the horizon,’ Idomeneus said. ‘He needs rowers too.’

I grunted. I’d forgotten what a rapacious bastard my lord was. ‘Pushed him south and didn’t catch him,’ I added.

‘Can we stay at sea with this crew?’ I asked Stephanos.

‘What, in the dark?’ He shook his head. ‘No. All the good men ran or took their treasure and walked. Or they’re dead. Nobody wants to tell you this, but your friend — Archilogos of Ephesus — he came against us with eight ships, caught us beached and made hay.’

I had a hard time seeing Archilogos, one of the founding voices of the Ionian Revolt, as a servant of Artaphernes, who had cuckolded his father and shamed his mother. On the other hand, his father had been a loyal servant of the King of Kings before the little incident of his mother’s adultery.

‘You escaped?’ I asked.

‘I had Storm Cutter off the beach. We were washing the hull when your friend came. I lost most of my rowers.’ He was ashamed.

‘So what?’ I said. ‘You saved the ship.’

Stephanos turned his head away. ‘Not the view of everyone concerned,’ he said bitterly.

We beached for the night and I went from fire to fire, getting to know my rowers. There were half a dozen men I knew — a couple of survivors of the storm-tossed days of my first command, and they were happy to see me. A few former slaves I’d freed for a year’s rowing, now rowing as free men for wages.

The rest were riff-raff. I watched them land the ship at the edge of night and almost get her broached in the surf. I was angry, but instead of showing my anger, I walked around and talked. I offered them an increased wage on the spot. That helped a little.

Next day we rose with the last light of the moon and we were away before rosy-fingered dawn touched the beach. We rowed on an empty sea, bearing north and east. The wind was fitful, and the clouds to the north were thickening and looked like a shoreline in the sky, an angry dark purple. The oarsmen muttered as they rowed.

About noon, the sun vanished behind a wall of cloud, and Stephanos spoke up from the steering oars.

‘Time to beach, navarch,’ he said formally.

I shook my head. ‘Lots of time, Stephanos. A little chop won’t slow us. This is when we gain on Miltiades.’ I had abandoned any thought of my chase now — I was just aiming to get back with the squadron, or at least get into Chios on the same day.

By mid-afternoon we were out in the deep blue between Samos and Chios. The sky to the north and east was that terrifying dark blue-grey — so dark as to approach black, and the sky over the bow was distant and bright, like a line of fire.

I’d misjudged my landfall — or misjudged the rate of our drift on the wind. Chios was over there, past the bow — somewhere. It should have been a low line punctuated by mountains, with the island’s coast inviting me in for the night. I couldn’t understand — we were hurtling along as if pushed by the very fist of Poseidon, and yet I wasn’t up with Chios yet.

The muttering of the oarsmen grew. We didn’t have a proper oar master, and we needed one. If only to protect them from me.

‘I missed this!’ I shouted over the wind. ‘Take in the mainsail and strike the mainmast down on deck.’

Under the boatsail alone, we ran into the line of fire.

The sun began to set red, and the dark clouds behind us swallowed the red light and looked more ominous yet.

Just against the white line of the last of the good weather, my lookout spotted the hull of our slave ship.

He had his masts down, and his oarsmen rowing for all they were worth. He was more afraid of the storm than of pirates.

We came up on him fast, as our boatsail was enough in that wind to throw foam and spray right over the ram in our bow and on to the rowers, who sat silently, cursing their fates and looking at the madman who stood in front of the helm.

I summoned Idomeneus aft. ‘We’ll have to take him fast,’ I said. ‘We’ll strip him of rowers and add them to our own, and then we’ll live the night.’

Idomeneus shook his head in admiration. ‘I thought you’d gone soft,’ he said.

‘Don’t kill the Iberians,’ I said. I poured a libation to Poseidon for his gift, because I knew that it was no seamanship of mine that had caught the fast slaver.

When we were five or six stades astern of our prey and the storm line was visible behind us, a long line of rain flowing in the last light of the sun, the Phoenician changed tactics and raised his boatsail.

But Poseidon accepted my libation and spat the slaver’s back. Before it could be sheeted home, his boatsail whipped away on the wind, the ship yawed badly and we gained a stade.

Who knows what happened in the last moments as we closed? He was a slaver, and most of his rowers were slaves. And one of the slaves had a knife — a wickedly sharp raven’s talon.

By the time Idomeneus went aboard, the deck crew was dead and the Iberians were loose, severed ropes hanging from their ankles, and their leader had an axe and was cutting their fetters. The Phoenician was pinned to the mast with a knife through his chest. We left him there, because sometimes Poseidon likes a sacrifice.

I took every extra slave out of that ship that I could, left them undermanned but not desperate and set them a landfall.

Stephanos stepped up. He was Chian, and he wanted his reputation back.

‘They’ll die in the dark,’ he said. ‘Send me aboard and give me a handful of marines and I’ll get them through the night.

Idomeneus nodded.

‘Do it,’ I said. I stepped across to my new ship even as the rain began. I walked down the main deck and touched hands with a few of the Iberians, meeting their eyes and nodding at the men I remembered from my trip to Delos, and many nodded back. A couple smiled. The dangerous one clasped my hand — hard, testing me — and then threw an arm around me.

Aft of the mast, a voice spoke up in Doric. ‘By the gods! Arimnestos! Get me out of here!’

It was the blasphemer, Philocrates.

I leaned down. ‘You want to be thrown over the side?’

‘No! I want — fuck. Get me out of here!’ He was pleading.

‘You want to live?’ I said. ‘Row harder.’ I laughed at him. ‘Pray!’ I suggested.

The Iberian on the opposite bench showed me his teeth. ‘Fucking coward,’ he said.

I pointed at the Iberian. ‘If you don’t row, these men will certainly kill you,’ I said. ‘Now, rationally you must know that if you do row, you may live through the night.’ I stepped up on the bench, stepped up again to the rail and balanced there as the swell raised the stern. ‘But I don’t have to be an aspiring priest — isn’t that what you called me? — to suggest that this might be a good time to examine your relationship with the gods.’

I leaped down from the rail into the midship of Storm Cutter, feeling immensely better. The storm was coming in behind us, but I had done my service for the god, and I knew I could weather the storm.

We turned north and rowed all night, and we constantly lost sight of the other ship, and as often found him again, so that the first fretful grey light, shot with lightning, found the eyes over his ram just a short stade to windward. And about the time that dawn was shining somewhere — it was a grey morning for us, and lashed with rain — I swung the great steering oars to starboard to put the wind astern. I could see a great rock, the size of a castle or the Acropolis, rising from the water to starboard, and I thought that I knew where we were. Somehow we had come two hundred stades north of our target, and we were off the west coast of Lesbos. That rock marked the beach of Eresus, where Sappho had her school.

Best of all, the beach there was wide and deep, and the rock would break the wind and rain long enough for me to get my ship ashore.

My oarsmen were spent — used up, long since. The Iberians had put some strength into them, and they weren’t bad men, but I wasn’t going to get a heroic burst of power from them. Not in a month of feast days.

No way to signal Stephanos, either. But he knew this anchorage as well as I — better, no doubt. So I waved at him and turned my ship, hoping that he would read my mind.

I got Idomeneus to come aft. Only a few hundred heartbeats left before the crisis.

‘Go down the benches and get every man ready. I intend to put him right up the beach, bow first.’ I pointed at the lights shining in the acropolis, high above the beach. ‘Hard to miss.’ I waited until I saw him understand.

Idomeneus shook his head. ‘You’ll break his back,’ he said.

I confess that I shrugged. ‘We’ll live.’ I nodded towards Asia, which loomed ahead, ready to catch us on a much less kind coast if we failed to land on the sand of Eresus. ‘We’re out of sea room.’ I pointed again. ‘Every oarsman has to be ready to back water. Tell them to dip lightly, so that they don’t get killed by the oars.’

Idomeneus nodded and headed forward, shouting as he went.

I hesitate to say how fast Storm Cutter was moving when we came in under the lee of the rock, but I’d say we were faster than a galloping horse. It’s less than a stade from the rock to the beach. We were going too fast.

‘Oars out!’ I shouted across the gale. ‘Back water!’

It was ragged. I was as scared as the next man — now that we were in flat water, our speed was shocking. The oars bit, and I couldn’t see that we were slowing at all — but the ship yawed and an oarsman screamed as his backed oar bit too deep and slammed into him, breaking his arms.

Like a wool blanket that unravels in the wind, his failure spread, so that the whole port-side loom of oars began to fall apart. Men struggled to keep their oars clear, but the ship rolled from the mis-strokes, and the port-side oars bit too deep, and men died, or were broken. We turned suddenly, and the port side dipped so low on the roll that we took water. We still had so much way on us that we were racing sideways into the beach.

The port-side rowers — those still in command of themselves — finally got all their oars clear of the water. The starboard-side rowers were at full stretch and the hull pivoted again, rotating on the starboard oar bank, and the bow hit the sand a glancing blow as the bronze-plated ram caught the trough of gravel just shy of the beach and skipped along it.

Then we could hear the ram ploughing a furrow in the gravel and suddenly the boatmast snapped with a crack as loud as the lightning, and every man not sitting a bench was thrown flat on the deck as a wave picked up the stern and tossed us — the kindly hand of Poseidon, I like to think — up the beach, stern first.

‘Over the side!’ I roared, although I was lying half-stunned. ‘Get her up the beach!’

It was the ugliest landing I ever saw — we’d been rotated halfway round by the sea, men were badly hurt all along both sides, and I could see broken boards where my ram ought to be.

But when I jumped over the side, my feet barely splashed.

We were ashore.

Stephanos didn’t even try to land. He watched us, and he assumed we were lost in the waves, and he put up his helm and coasted by, a few oar-lengths offshore. In seconds he was past the beach, and before we had our broken hull clear of Poseidon’s reaching tendrils, his ship had gone around the promontory to the north of Eresus.

I lay by the rope I had been hauling and cursed, because the loss of Stephanos hurt me more than I’d expected. I hadn’t seen him in a year. I wanted him back.

Idomeneus had his marines in hand and was driving oarsmen to work, gathering wood to put supports under the hull timbers. We propped Storm Cutter on sand that was only wet with rain, and then we drove the oarsmen into the sea to fetch the ram before it got buried in storm-wrack and sand. The ram was heavy bronze plate, but with thirty men helping we hauled it above the tide line. Then we collapsed.

I sent Idomeneus to the citadel to get us help and hospitality, then I sat in my sodden chlamys and watched the storm, and sang a hymn to Poseidon and prayed that Stephanos might live.

The news came back that Sappho’s daughter had died — an old, old woman, but a great teacher, as awe-inspiring and god-touched in her way as Heraclitus in his — and had been succeeded by another woman, Aspasia, who now led the school of Sappho. So much had changed in just a few years. But Aspasia was supported by Briseis’s largesse, and she accepted me without question when I told her who I was, and she lodged my men and fed them.

I let myself into Briseis’s house and sat by her shuttered window, drinking her wine and eating her food. Surely it was she, and not Artaphernes, who had sent me that message. Hence, she must have need of me, I reasoned. And not a need she dared commit to paper. I reasoned — with a brain clouded by Eros, let me add — that she must need me.

I would find Miltiades soon enough. But if I could get Storm Cutter rebuilt, I would cross the straits and run down the coast to Ephesus and visit my love, and see why she had summoned me.

The storm took three days to blow out, and my men praised me openly for bringing them to such a safe haven, with lamb stew every night and good red wine for every man, as if they were a crew of lords. The folk of Eresus treated us like gods — as well they might, since it was Briseis’s gold that kept the school going, and her political power that kept it free of outside control. And they feared us.

When the storm was gone, we had beautiful weather for autumn. I put men on the headlands to keep watch, and I prayed to Poseidon every day and gave offerings of cakes and honey on the Cyprian goddess’s altar, too — anything to bring back Stephanos. We cut good wood on the hillsides east of the town and rebuilt the bow, with two carpenters from the town helping us with the main beams that had cracked. We stripped the hull clean and rebuilt the bow, and found a fair amount of rot in the upper timbers. I built a marine platform — like a box, with armoured sides — into the new bow, and a little shelf where an archer or a lookout could stand high above the ram.

I borrowed from the Temple of Aphrodite, and spent the money on tar and pine pitch, and blacked the hull, a fresh, thick coat so that he was armoured in the stuff, watertight and shining. I gave him a stripe of Poseidon’s own blue above the waterline, and we painted the oar shafts to match, all in a day, and the women of the town washed our great sail so that the raven was fresh and stark again.

In such a way we propitiated Poseidon, but there was no sign of Stephanos. So after a week of good food and freely given aid, we prepared to sail away in a fresh ship. I was sombre at the loss of a friend, but the crew was wild with delight.

‘Boys are saying their luck has changed,’ Idomeneus said.

I had appointed two Iberians who could speak some Greek to be officers. My new oar master was Galas, and he had more tattoos than a Libyan, for all that his skin was fairer than mine. He had blue eyes and ruddy hair and his scalp was shaved in whorls, but he knew the sea and his Greek was good enough. And he had taken command of the port-side oars during the disaster of the landing.

My new sailing master had the same tattoos and his name was too barbaric for words, something like ‘Malaleauch’. I called him Mal, and he answered to it. He spoke a pidgin of Greek and Italiote and Phoenician.

I had thirty of the former slaves on my benches now. I’d lost more than a dozen men in that horrible landing — dead, or so badly injured that they still lay in Lady Sappho’s Temple of Aphrodite, waiting to be healed or to die.

The Iberians all viewed me as the author of their freedom. I explained to Galas how small a role I’d played, and how much they owed to the gods, but I was not sorry to benefit from their gratitude.

At any rate, we heaved Storm Cutter into the surf and got the rowers in position as if we knew what we were doing, and then we were away. Galas brought more out of the rowers than I had, and we spent two more days rowing up and down the sea off Lesbos to drill them until their oars rose and fell like the single arm of a single man.

Then we rowed around to Methymna, and I put her stern on the beach and asked after Miltiades and my friend Epaphroditos, the archon basileus of the town. But the captain of the guard told me that Lord Epaphroditos was away at the siege of Miletus.

I needed money, and Epaphroditos’s absence left me no choice. I had to take a prize, and a rich one. My men needed paying, and I was down to no wine and no stores. I got one meal out of Methymna based on their memories of me and my famous name, but we sailed from that town like a hungry wolf.

We ran south along the east coast of Lesbos, and the beaches were empty at Mytilene, where the rebel fleet ought to have been forming up. And just south of Mytilene, we saw a pair of heavy Phoenicians guarding a line of merchantmen — Aegyptians, I thought as I stood on the new bow.

‘Get the mainmast up,’ I called to Mal, and motioned for Galas, who was steering, to take us about. We could no more face a pair of heavy Phoenicians than we could weather another storm. ‘Fuck,’ I muttered.

They were none too happy to see us when we put on to the beach at Mytilene, but men remembered me there, and I arranged for a meal and some oil and wine on credit — Miltiades’ credit.

I was sitting alone at a small fire on the beach, cursing my fate, or rather, my ignorance of events and my inability to accomplish anything, when a pair of local men — traders — came up out of the dark.

‘Lord Arimnestos?’ the shorter one asked.

‘Aye,’ I answered, and offered them wine.

In short, they had a cargo of grain — several cargoes, in fact — and they wondered if I’d like to have a go at smuggling it into Miletus. The rate of exchange they offered was good — good enough to give me some slack. So I loaded grain at their wharf and filled the ship, so that she sat deep in the water and my rowers cursed.

‘We’re fucked if we have to run,’ Idomeneus said.

‘Really?’ I asked, as if the thought had never occurred to me.

We sailed at sunset, ran along the coast of Lesbos before full dark fell and were off Chios in the light of a full moon. My oarsmen were none too happy with me, because this was flirting with Poseidon’s rage and no mistake, or so they said.

I made my sea-marks off Chios, and we passed silently along the beaches I had known like family homes in my youth. Just past false dawn, we passed the beach where Stephanos had lived before he went away to sea to be a killer of men.

There was a long, low trireme beached there.

My heart rose in my chest, and I abandoned my plan and put our stern to the beach, and we went ashore.

‘I thought you were done for,’ Stephanos said. ‘And I thought I could weather the cape by Methymna and run free in the channel, with the two islands to break the fury of the storm.’ He shrugged. ‘Those Iberians don’t know how to row, but they have a lot of guts. I got us around the corner, and they kept the bow into the seas, and we determined to land at Mytilene, but there was a current — I’ve never seen anything like it. We went past Mytilene in the blink of an eye, and north of Chios we hit a log that was drifting, broke a board amidships and started to take on water.’ Stephanos was a big, plain-spoken sailor who had grown to manhood as a fisherman, and his hands moved like an actor’s as he told the story.

His sister Melaina was beaming up at him. She, too, was a friend of my youth, from the heady days when I was newly freed, just finding my power as a man-at-arms. We kept grinning at each other.

‘Then what happened?’ Idomeneus asked.

‘The back of the ship snapped like a twig, we sank and the fishes ate us!’ Stephanos laughed. His sister swatted him, and he ducked. ‘One of the rowers shouted that we weren’t done yet — a Greek fellow, Philocrates. He put some heart in the boys and we got the head around, then the wind let up for a few moments, and in that time we got into a cove on the north shore — it was as if Poseidon agreed to let us live. I put the bow on the shingle, and to Hades with the ram — which took a right battering, and we’ve been a week repairing her. But we lived!’

‘As did we,’ I said, and we embraced again. I looked at his ship. ‘What do you call him?’ I asked.

Stephanos grinned his easy grin. ‘Well, we thought of calling him Storm Cutter, but that’s taken, so we opted for Trident.’

The sign of Poseidon. ‘A fine name.’

He grinned again. ‘So — how do we make some money?’ He kissed his sister and pointed up the beach. ‘Go and find Harpagos, dear.’

Harpagos proved to be Stephanos’s cousin. Melaina brought him down to the beach, and he was no smaller than Stephanos and his hands were hard as rock. Stephanos introduced him with flowery compliments.

‘This is my useless layabout cousin Harpagos, who wants to ship with me. He’s never been to sea.’ Stephanos spat on the sand and laughed.

Harpagos had the look of a man who’d kept the sea his entire life. His hair was full of salt. But he stood, abashed.

I winked at Stephanos. It was like old times. ‘You’re a trierarch now, my friend. No need to consult me on every raw man.’

‘I’ve been helmsman on a grain ship,’ Harpagos said.

‘I want him as my helmsman,’ Stephanos admitted. Then he said, ‘I need him where I can see him.’

I liked Harpagos. His embarrassment at all this attention shouted of the sort of solid, quiet confidence that makes a man able to go to sea and fish every day for forty years. ‘On your head be it,’ I said. ‘Harpagos, can you fight?’

He shrugged. ‘I wrestle,’ he said. ‘I teach the boys in the village. I can take this big fool.’ He indicated Stephanos.

‘Hmm,’ I allowed. ‘Well, he can take me, and that would be bad for discipline. Ever used a spear and shield?’ I asked.

Harpagos shook his head. ‘Can’t say I have.’

‘Ever killed?’ I asked.

Harpagos looked out to sea. ‘Yes,’ he said, voice flat.

We all stood together in silence, and the fine wind blew across us. ‘Well,’ I said, ‘welcome aboard. We’re pirates, Harpagos. Sometimes we fight for the Ionian rebels, but mostly we take other people’s ships for profit. Can you do that?’

He grinned — the first grin I’d seen. ‘Yes, lord.’

Melaina listened to this exchange and brought more wine, and we ate fresh sardines and a big red fish I hadn’t eaten often — with flesh like lobster. We drank too much wine. Melaina pressed herself on me, and I flirted with her, smiled, even held her for a time while standing by the fire on the beach. But I didn’t take her into the dark. My head was full of Briseis, and Melaina wasn’t a beach girl. She was Stephanos’s sister, and she dressed like a woman of property. Somewhere, she had a man she was going to marry. And to bed her would have been to betray my guest-friendship with Stephanos.

In the morning, I gave him half the grain, and the next evening, full of food and a little too much wine, we were off the beach, rowing soft in the moonlight for Miletus.

Our plan was simple, like most good plans. We both had Phoenician ships — both newly repaired and looking fairly prosperous. We sailed due south, got behind the coastal islands, west around Samos, rowing all the way, and came into the Bay of Miletus from the south-west — that is, from the direction of Tyre and Phoenicia — as the sun set in the west, mostly behind us. We stood straight down the bay, bold as brass, apparently a pair of their own ships bound for the blockade fleet at Tyrtarus on the island of Lade.

The fishermen of Chios had been able to lay the whole siege out like a scroll for us, because they smuggled fish to the rebels and sold them openly to the Medes, Persians, Greeks and Phoenicians who served the Great King, too. Miletus is an ancient city, founded before Troy, and she stands at the base of a deep inlet of the sea, just south of Samos, although the bay over towards Mycale is starting to silt up. Miletus has a steep acropolis, impregnable, or so men used to say, and her outer town is protected by a circuit of stone walls with towers. The Persians began by moving their fleet to Ephesus, just a hundred stades up the coast. Once they had a base there, they moved in and stormed Tyrtarus, a fishing village with a small fort, and used it as their forward base, so that ships from there could easily launch into the narrow channel and catch any vessel heading into Miletus.

Mind you, it is possible to row north around Lade. The problem is that anyone holding the fort on Lade can see you coming fifty stades away, and when you turn north, they’re waiting — and the currents around the island favour the side that holds it.

Once the Persians had the fort at Tyrtarus, they brought up their land forces on the landward side of the peninsula. Artaphernes came in person, and they built a great camp in the hills overlooking Miletus. After a few weeks of skirmishing, he started on the siege mound.

Men tell me the Assyrians invented the siege mound, and perhaps they did, although as usual the Aegyptians claim they invented it. Either way, it was not the Greeks, who prefer a nice flat field and a single day of battle to a year’s siege. But the Ionians and Aeolian Greeks have fortified cities, and when the Lydians or the Medes come against them, they fight a war of shovels. The Persians dig a giant hill that runs from the flat of the plain to the top of the walls, and the Greeks in the city counter-dig, trying either to raise the wall by the mound or to destroy the Persian mound. And while both sides dig, the men outside make sure that the men inside receive no help, no weapons and, most of all, no food.

Sometimes the men inside the walls triumph, boring their opponents into backing off. And sometimes a single load of grain can be a mighty weapon. First, because the men inside the walls can eat, and their hearts rise; second, because the men outside the walls know they must struggle for so much longer each time a cargo reaches their enemies.

But in my experience, sieges are rarely settled by the hand of man. Usually, the Lord Apollo hurls his fearsome arrows of disease into one side or the other — or sometimes into both — and the dead pile up as if Ares had reaped them with a sword, but faster. Sieges eat men.

I didn’t know that then, as the sun set over my stern. I was twenty-five years old, and I had never seen a siege.

South of Samos, and no guard ship came to look at us. We stood straight on, and as we entered the Bay of Miletus, we bore up and sailed along the south coast of the bay, as if bound for the island of Lade. We were sailing in light airs, but every bench was manned and we were ready to run.

In the last light of the day, two of their ships headed out to meet us. They took a long time coming off the beach, and we didn’t hurry towards them.

‘Oar-rake and past,’ I called softly to Stephanos, and he nodded and repeated my orders to Harpagos, whose hooked nose could just be seen above the stem of the ship. We could see Miletus in the distance now, rising on the next headland, due east down the channel.

There’s a world of difference between being ready for action and expecting nothing to happen, and that world of difference separated our ships and theirs. They came out thinking we were Phoenicians. We knew exactly what we intended to do, and when we were at hailing distance and the lead ship called to us in their Phoenician tongue, I clapped my hands once — I remember that the sound carried over the water and made a little echo against the nearer enemy hull — then every back bent on my ship, and the oars twinkled in the setting sun. If they had been ready, they’d have leaped into action right there, but many heartbeats passed while their navarch and his officers tried to work out why we were rowing so hard.

The lead Phoenician was so ill-prepared that his crew caught a crab and he fell away from his course, which was almost the end of my plan. I wanted to oar-rake the pair, Stephanos taking the port-side enemy and I the starboard, and my plan was that we’d crush their oars and race through before any other ships could launch off the beach.

But the lead Phoenician turned broadside on to us, and we had no choice but to ram him or abandon our attempt. The channel was too narrow to avoid him, so I caught him just aft of amidships and Stephanos caught him a few heartbeats later, well forward, and together we rolled him over, dumping his rowers in the water.

We’d turtled one ship, but the impacts tested our bows and cost us all our speed and hard-earned momentum, and we were all a-stand for the second ship.

He knew his business, and now that he’d had a moment to think, he was ready. He loosed a flight of arrows, and some of my rowers were hit, but Galas had them in hand and we were moving forward.

‘Oars in!’ I called.

It was sloppy, but we had all our oar shafts in as our bow slammed into the second ship. We weren’t moving fast — neither was he — and the two ships didn’t have the power to get past each other. As we came to a dead stop, broadside to broadside, Idomeneus got grapples over the side, but at the cost of three marines. The Phoenicians were poling us off while their archers flayed us. Galas went down with an arrow in him, and my deck crew was melting — men were taking cover behind the masts, behind screens, anything. And this from four or five archers.

I had the helm, but we had stopped. On the beach, men were pushing ships into the water — a dozen slim hulls launching all together.

‘Fuck,’ I said aloud. I remember, because there was a lull, and my imprecation carried clearly across the water.

I drew my sword and caught up my big hide shield, a simple Boeotian I’d bought on the beach at Chios. I didn’t have my armour or my good war gear or my new helmet, and I was carrying a shield just two goat hides thick. Even as I raised it, an arrow punched through, tore my hair and carried on to sink into the sternposts.

I ran down our central platform. A running man is a hard target for archers, but that didn’t stop them — they knew I was the helmsman. Every archer fixed on me, and two arrows hit my shield, but neither pinked me.

Amidships, Idomeneus had two grapples fixed and guarded by his marines, their big shields covering him and his ropes. Opposite, a pair of Phoenicians sawed with swords at the hawsers that held us fast. I saw all of this in a glance and pivoted on one heel. I leaped from the command platform to the gunwale by Idomeneus, covered for a valuable moment by the two aspides of his marines, and without pause — hesitation would have been death — I was across the gap, my left foot on their gunwale and then both feet firm on a rower’s bench, and I started killing.

I took the men who were sawing at our grapples in two blows, and then I cleared the rowing bench by beheading the oarsman. His blood sprayed back on the men behind him, and I punched with the rim of my light shield, caught one of the Phoenician marines who was surprised at the length of my arms and knocked him flat, and I was on their command platform.

‘Hellas!’ I shouted.

I was fuelled by desperation and the elation of a starving man offered food. I hadn’t fought like this in more than a year — and I was better than a mere man, thugater. My shield and my sword were everywhere, as if they had eyes and thoughts of their own. I remember rotating my hips and punching back with my shield rim, catching a sailor in the groin, and glowing with the joy of fighting so well. A winter of training the Plataeans had not been wasted. Each blow, each parry, blended seamlessly into another. It was like dance. It might have gone on for ever.

And then Idomeneus was shouting my name, and I raised my hand, and the enemy deck was clear. I had my blade in the air and there was a half-naked sailor under the edge — but I stayed my hand, as Dion had asked.

‘Apollo!’ I called, and let the man live.

Idomeneus and the marines had followed me aboard. There were a dozen warships in the water, and Stephanos was already past us, rowing hard for Miletus. That’s what he was supposed to do.

‘Mal!’ I called. He turned his head, and I waved at him. At the same time, I cut the grapples that held the two ships together. ‘Go!’

It took three shouts, but he got it. He started striking men with his stick, and the oarsmen on the starboard side began to push against our hull with poles and spears and even their oars.

Idomeneus was on the stern of the ship I’d just taken. I saw him grasp the oars, and I picked up a javelin that one of the enemy marines had dropped — or thrown.

‘Reverse your benches,’ I ordered in Greek. A few men obeyed, and others looked blank, or mutinous.

I threw my javelin into one of those who was refusing his duty, and he fell across his oar. Then I pulled the spear free of his corpse. ‘Reverse your benches!’ I roared.

They obeyed.

I pounded the oar-beat against the mast with the spear-butt, and they rowed. It wasn’t good rowing, but the men coming off the beaches weren’t eager to fight in the dark and they weren’t any too sure what had just happened, either. We backed down the channel — first a stade, and then another stade — and then the arrows from Miletus began to fall on the enemy ships following us.

One bold ship made a last try. Before the final bend in the channel, a beautiful long trireme with a red stripe went to full speed in half a dozen ship-lengths — a superb crew — and tried to ram us, bow to bow.

Idomeneus had the ship, and he steered well, so that the two rams rang together like a hammer and an anvil, and our ship bounced away, apparently undamaged.

Arrows fell from the near bank, so many that they were visible against the faint light of the sky, and there were screams from the red ship, and it fell away. I could hear a familiar voice cursing and ordering men to reverse their cushions — a Greek voice.

Archilogos’s voice. A man I’d sworn to protect — now leading the ships of my enemies.

The men of Miletus greeted us like brothers — better than brothers. We’d killed an enemy ship and seized another right under the eyes of their blockade, in full view of the walls, and we would have been drunk as lords in a few hours if there had been any wine in the lower city.

As it was, my first hours in the siege of Miletus showed me all the things I’d never wanted to know about sieges. The people were as thin as cranes — the children looked like old people, and the women looked like children. A handful of the town’s best fighters still looked like men — they got extra food, and they needed it. The rest looked like starved dogs, and Histiaeus, the tyrant of the town, had to set his fighters as guards to get our grain ashore.

I took our pay in gold darics. ‘I’ll be back,’ I promised.

Histiaeus was a tall, beautiful man with a mane of black hair and golden skin and a heavy scar across his face. His brother Istes was another of the same — they had been raised at the Great King’s court and spoke Persian as well as Greek, and they looked like gods. I liked Istes better — he was less addicted to power and a better man — but he laughed at me. ‘No one comes back a second time,’ he called as my men got the stern off the beach. ‘But thanks!’

That stung. ‘I’ll be back in ten days, by the fires of Hephaestus and the bones of the Corvaxae!’ I shouted to Istes. I craved his good opinion. In those days, men said Istes was the best sword in Ionia. He was a few years older than me, and we had never been matched against each other. But we were instant friends, that night in Miletus.

So, having sworn my oath before men and the gods, I ordered my men to row. We were heavily laden — I’d filled the ship with all the women and children that dared to come with us. We headed straight back to sea.

It was dark as pitch. I reckoned that Archilogos wouldn’t expect me to try again immediately, and I was right. We rowed out of the harbour at ramming speed, made the turn at the harbour-mouth in fine style and tore up the estuary, and the Medes and traitorous Greeks on the beaches at Tyrtarus must have watched us go by and felt like fools, but none opposed us. I stood on my stern and laughed at them, and the sound of my mockery carried over the water and bounced back from the bluffs above the town.

Probably a stupid taunt, but it felt good, and it still makes me smile to think of how Archilogos must have writhed at the sound of my laughter.

And then we were out to sea and running before a freshening wind.

All our rowers were exhausted by the time we made Chios. We disgorged our cargo of refugees, and the people of the fishing villages fed them. But they wouldn’t keep them, and we still had them aboard when we headed back north to Mytilene.

I had to give command of the new ship to Harpagos. I was out of officers, and Idomeneus, for all that he was a skilled killer, had no interest in the sea and could no more inspire men than I could play a flute. Harpagos was a good seaman, and his quiet solidity was the sort of thing men trust in a storm or a fight. I gave him a try, and I never regretted it.

I took all three ships back into the great harbour at Mytilene, and still there was no sign of the rebel fleet. Nor had anyone heard a word of Miltiades. It was as if the Persians had already won.

I paid my grain merchants from the gold I’d received in Miletus.

‘And I’ll buy the rest of your grain,’ I said. I offered them a handsome profit, for men who never had to move from the comfort of their own homes, and I filled three ships with grain in sacks and jars. I’ll say this for them — for all the Lesbians — they took the shiploads of refugees from Miletus and treated them like citizens.

This time, we sailed in broad daylight. My crew trusted me now. And weeks of action had made them better men. I knew the process and I used it for my own ends. We rowed when we might have sailed, and I hardened their muscles as if they were athletes, and I promised them a gold daric a man if they got us in and out of Miletus again.

I waited for the dark of the moon, and the gods sent me a dark night and heavy seas. We had lights on our sterns, and we rowed across in the dark, with the rowers cursing their ill-luck and praying with every stroke — but after a month of constant adventure, my crew could row in the dark.

We went down the bay with the wind at our backs, under boatsails alone, north around Lade. The wind defeated the currents and allowed us to move quickly, and the Phoenicians were snug in their blankets when we went past, because it was raining and winter had come. But some fool laughed aloud and alerted them, and when we had unloaded and turned our bows to the open sea, they were formed across the bay, fifteen ships waiting for our three. And they were good sailors. I watched them for a while from the safety of the Milesian archers, and then I took my little squadron back into the harbour.

All the gold darics in the world weren’t going to save me. I was blockaded in Miletus, and it looked as if our luck had run its course.