Marathon: Freedom or Death

6

I was able to help Penelope. I sent my gold home to her, with Idomeneus as my courier. He went with a good grace — he wasn’t missing any killing, and he knew it.

Briseis was another matter. It is harder, when the first flush of love is past, to understand what value to place on that love. I had gone to her rescue before — more than once — and never been better for saving her. In fact, I was never sure I had saved her. Should I cast life aside, crew up my ship and race for Ephesus?

I’d thought about it all autumn. Ephesus is less than six hundred stades from Miletus, and on that night when I’d found myself on a stolen horse, avoiding Persian archers, my first thought had been to ride for Ephesus and find her.

But I was no longer eighteen. I was fulfilling my duty to Apollo, or so I thought. In fact, in my head, it was clear to me that I was one of Apollo’s tools in the success of the Ionian Revolt. Apollo was leading the Greeks to victory. The constant luck of the autumn — the escapes from Miletus, the seizure of the two rich Aegyptians — all pointed to the Lord of the Silver Bow’s favour. And in my head, the needs of the Ionian Revolt outweighed the needs of a single, selfish woman.

Which tells you two things. First, that I still held her refusal of me against her. Second, that I was as much a fool at twenty-five as I was at eighteen. But I could rationalize my irrationality better.

So I spent the winter calling my blonde Briseis and forging excuses as to why I could not possibly go to her rescue.

Spring, when it came, was the longest, wettest, stormiest spring anyone could remember. I took Storm Cutter to sea before the cakes were fully burnt on Persephone’s altar, and I brought him right back in when a combination of wind and wave snapped my boatsail mast like a twig.

We spent four weeks locked in the Bosporus when we should have been at sea, and a rumour started to spread that Miletus had fallen. But no real news came to us at Kallipolis, and we fretted and quarrelled with each other, and my decision not to go to Briseis in the autumn began to look shockingly like faithlessness.

We tired of exercising our crews, of painting our ships, of games and contests. We tired of girls and boys, and we even tired of wine. But the wind howled outside the Bosporus, and every attempt I made to round the point at Troy and head for Lesbos was foiled by a cold, dark wind.

Demeter showed man how to plant grain, and the new grain peeped above the earth, and finally the sun leaped into the heavens like a four-horse chariot, and the ground dried, and the sea was blue.

Miltiades had a good squadron. He had two volunteers from Athens who came in with the first good weather — Aristides, sailing a fine light trireme, and his friend Phrynichus, the playwright, with Cleisthenes, the Spartan proxenos and a powerful man in the aristocratic faction who was, nonetheless, a solid supporter of the Ionian Revolt. Aristides had Glaucon and Sophanes with him, but they didn’t meet my eyes. I laughed. They were in my world now.

The Athenians brought disturbing news.

‘It’s all but open war in the city,’ Aristides said quietly.

‘Are you exiled?’ Miltiades asked.

Aristides shook his head. ‘No. I thought I’d come and do my duty before I was sent away without having the ability to influence the decision. The Alcmaeonids have almost seized control of the assembly. Themistocles is the last man of the popular party to stand against them.’

Miltiades sneered. ‘Our blood is as blue as theirs,’ he said dismissively. ‘Bluer. Why do they get called aristocrats?’

Aristides shook his head. ‘You don’t need me to tell you that the colour of our blood is not the issue. Let’s defeat the Persians first and worry about the political life of our city second.’ He frowned at Miltiades. ‘Don’t pretend you are a byword for democracy, sir.’

Miltiades threw back his head and laughed. I thought the laugh was a trifle theatrical, but he pulled it off well enough. ‘Not much democracy here,’ he admitted. ‘Pirates, Asians and Thracians all living together? By the gods, we should have an assembly, except that the first debate would be on what language to debate in!’ He drank some more wine. ‘And you are a fine one to talk, Aristides the Just! For all you prate of this democracy, you distrust the masses, and when you need company, you run away from the aristocrats — to me!’

Aristides bit his lips.

I stood up. ‘No one has run from anyone,’ I said, raising the wine cup. ‘Tomorrow, we sail against the Great King.’

Aristides looked at me in surprise — a surprise that wasn’t altogether complimentary. ‘Well said,’ he replied. ‘You’ve made your peace with Apollo, or so I hear.’

‘Not yet,’ I answered. ‘But I am working on it.’

‘No man can say fairer when he speaks of the gods,’ Miltiades answered. Miltiades believed in the gods to exactly the same extent at Philocrates — which is to say, not at all — but he spoke piously and offended no one.

Cimon hid a guffaw and Paramanos winked at me. Don’t imagine that because I don’t mention Paramanos I didn’t see him every day, drink with him every night. He’d gone his own way and left my oikia to be a lord in his own right — a lord of pirates — but he was a fine man and still the most gifted son of Poseidon on the wine-dark.

‘Let us drink to the defeat of the Medes,’ Miltiades proposed, as the host.

We all rose from our couches and we drank, each in turn — Aristides; Cimon; Cleisthenes; Paramanos; Stephanos; Metiochos, who was Miltiades’ younger son; Herk, who had been my first teacher on the sea; the Aeolian Herakleides, who now had a trireme of his own; Harpagos and me. Eleven ships — as big a contingent as many islands sent, all in the name of Athens — not that Athens paid an obol. I remember that Sophanes was there, and Phrynichus the poet, his eyes flitting from one man to the next — so that we knew we were living in history, that this cup of wine might be made immortal.

We drank.

In the morning we rose with the dawn and put to sea. We were a magnificent sight, sails full of a good following wind as we passed the cape by Troy and sacrificed to the heroes of the first war between Greeks and barbarians. Miltiades was like a new man — full of his mission, and his place as its leader.

Every night we camped on the headlands and beaches of Ionia — Samothrace, Methymna, Mytilene — and celebrated the unification of the Ionians and the victory we were going to win. Our rowers were at the height of training — a month trapped in the Bosporus had allowed us to work them up as few crews have ever been hardened, and the rich pay of last autumn kept them loyal to their oars. I noted that all the Athenians kept their distance from me.

When we came to Mytilene, the beaches were empty, and in the Boule, the old councillors told us that the storms that had trapped us in the Chersonese hadn’t blown on Lesbos. The allied fleet had gathered three weeks before and sailed for Samos. And they had appointed Dionysius of Phocaea as navarch.

If we hadn’t had Aristides and the Athenians with us, I think Miltiades would have deserted the rebellion right there, but he couldn’t appear petty in front of his Athenian rival, and we sailed south for Samos. Suddenly, we were a surly crew.

Keep that change of daimon in mind, thugater, for we were the best-disciplined of all the Greeks.

We came into the fleet’s anchorage on the beaches of Samos a little before dusk, and my breath caught in my throat. I had never imagined that the Greeks would do as well.

I stopped counting at one hundred and eighty black-hulled triremes. In fact, I was later told by Dionysius that at its height, we had more than three hundred and seventy in the fleet — probably the mightiest gathering of Greek ships that there ever was. Everyone had come — Nearchos, my former pupil from Crete, was there with five ships, and the Samians had a hundred. Miletus itself had crewed seventy, leaving the city with a skeleton army to guard it.

And Miltiades was a great enough man to smile and shake Dionysius’s hand.

However it had been done, the alliance was the work of gods, not men. Never had so many quarrelling Greeks come together. They filled the beaches of Samos, and the Persians ought to have surrendered in terror.

But both Datis and Artaphernes were made of sterner stuff than that. Datis fortified his camp to an even greater degree and sent out the word all along the Asian coast, demanding the service of every vassal that the Great King had. And Artaphernes gathered his guards and his court, and moved his personal army to Miletus. He was not the kind to lead from behind.

Dionysius was a fine admiral and a great sailor, but he was a poor orator and worse leader of men, and his constant harping on the ill-training of the Ionian and Aeolian oarsmen smacked of racial superiority, as his own men were mostly Dorians. The Samians hated him. They hated Miltiades just as much, and openly pressed for a Samian — Demetrios, in fact — to take command of the fleet. Let me just say, thugater, that their claims had a certain justice. They had a hundred ships and no one else had nearly that number. Miletus had but seventy, despite being the richest Greek city in the world, and Histiaeus declined to leave his citadel anyway, even though he was the one man who might have taken command without a voice being raised against him.

At any rate, Dionysius instituted his training programme, and as so often happens, the ships that needed the training least volunteered to undertake it, while those who needed it most — the aristocrats from Crete and the soft-handed volunteers from Lesbos, Chios and Samos — were the most reluctant to work.

I’ll say this, too. Dionysius knew his business. I thought my crew to be the best-trained oarsmen in the world, but Dionysius quickly disabused me of my notions of arete. When he laid out a course with inflated skins, I told him it was impossible for a trireme to row through it, and he put me to shame by showing me how in his Sea Snake.

I spent a week training, and the more of his tricks I learned, the more I disliked his manner of teaching them. He was abusive when he might have been instructional, and abusive when he might have praised. And when I attempted to explain to him how deeply he offended most of his navarchs, he dismissed my criticism as a petty attempt to get back at him for his superior ship-handling.

‘You’re a quick learner,’ he said, ‘but in your heart you are no seaman, just another petty lordling. Don’t linger on the sea when we’ve beaten the Medes, boy — it’s for better men.’

What do you say to that?

I said nothing. But I was searching for an excuse to sail away, at least for a few days.

My excuse came up quickly enough. I was a captain in my own right, for all that I served Miltiades, and I attended the fleet council when I had time — which was all the time.

While Dionysius focused on seamanship, Miltiades and old Pelagius of Chios wanted intelligence. Miltiades had spies in Sardis but no way to contact them, and what we all needed to know was the progress of the Persian fleet — where were they? Did the fleet even exist? Were they forming at Tyre? Sidon? Naucratis?

We imagined that the Persians feared us.

I knew someone who could answer all those questions. She lay on a couch, just a few hundred stades away.

‘Drop me on the beach by Ephesus,’ I said.

Every head in the council turned.

‘I know the town as if I was born to it. And I have friends there — people who are no friends to the Persians. Perhaps I can even contact one of your spies in Sardis, Miltiades.’ I bowed to him. ‘Give me the word.’

One of the great advantages of being a hero is that when you propose something daring, no one will stand in your way. It’s as if everyone assumes that this sort of thing is your destiny.

By early summer, I was growing a trifle cynical about my role as a hero. But the Greeks were sending me to Ephesus. We had spies in the Persian camp at Miletus, and I knew that Briseis had not accompanied her husband to war.

She was alone, in Ephesus.

I set off the next day, free of bloody Dionysius and his sea-wrack tyranny, and free too of the ugly competitions between Miltiades and Aristides and the Samian leaders.

I daydreamed about taking Storm Cutter up the river to the city of Artemis, bold as new-forged bronze, but I didn’t. Instead, I bought a sailing smack from some Samians, and Idomeneus and Harpagos and I sailed him ourselves, with Philocrates our unpaid passenger. The blasphemer had grown on me, and he’d shown no interest whatsoever in returning to Halicarnassus to trade grain for hides and lie when he swore oaths.

‘I was born for this,’ he said, not less than twice a day. And he smiled his curious smile of self-mockery. ‘I miss Teucer, the bastard. He needs to come back aboard so that I can win back my money.’

Teucer’s family were snug in the Chersonese, but the archer himself was back on the walls of Miletus, and we all missed him.

We sailed the fishing boat through easy seas, right around Mycale. We spent the night there, frying fresh sardines on an iron pan and drinking new wine from a leather bag. In the morning we were away again, up the coast and past the ruins of the old town that guard the promontory beyond Ephesus, and in the last light of the second day I could see the Temple of Artemis glow in the sunset, the old granite lit red like sandstone in the setting sun.

They left me on the coast road, twenty stades from the city. I told them to return for me in three days, and I put on my leather bag, checked the hang of my sword and pulled my chlamys about me. I had two spears and a broad straw hat, like a gentleman hunter.

I walked, and no one paid me a second glance.

As I made my way up the road to the city, I thought of my last journey up that road — delirious with fever, a slave bound to the temple, destined to die hauling stone. Ten years or less separated me from that boy. Indeed, the river of time flows in only one direction, as my master loved to say.

In a few hours, I would see him. He, at least, would never betray me, or any other Greek who served the rebellion.

I had determined to go to Heraclitus first, because I loved him, and because I had no idea what to expect with Briseis, nor had I any notion of where her loyalties would lie. She must have heard by now of my encounters with her brother the previous autumn and winter.

In truth, I was afraid of meeting her. But as always, fear forced me to act. I can never abide to see myself as afraid, and even as a child I would drive myself to do things that I feared, only to prove myself — to myself.

Briseis had always seen through this aspect of my character — and used it against me.

I heard her voice as I walked, and I tasted her tongue on my lips, and other parts of her, too, in my imagination. I thought of the first time she had come to me, fresh from humiliating her enemy for her, just as she had expected me to. And of the reward, although at the time I thought her another woman entirely. See? You are blushing, my dear. Boys only think of one thing, and how to get at it.

Boys are predictable, girls.

When I looked up, I had walked to our gate. To the house of Archilogos, which had been the house of Hipponax. To the house of Briseis. I was standing in full view of the gate, like a fool.

I’d like to say that I did something witty, or wily, like Odysseus. But I didn’t. I stood there in the sun and waited for her. I suppose I thought that the Cyprian one would send her into my arms.

No such thing happened.

Only when the tops of my shoulders started to burn from the sun did I come to my senses and turn away. I walked up an alley, cut north to the base of the temple acropolis and then went to the old fountain building.

It was gone.

That was a shock. In its place was an elegant construction of Parian marble and local granite, with fine statues of women carrying water, cut so that that hydriai on their heads supported the roof.

I didn’t belong there. There were a few free women and a great many slaves, and I was the only free man — the only man armed, and as such, a figure of fear.

Heraclitus’s river had flowed right by, and I could not dip my toe again.

I fled.

I went up to the temple, where hunters were never uncommon, although I was a stranger and I was a man in a city where most of the men were at war. I left my spears with the door warden and I climbed to the palaestra, made a small sacrifice to the goddess and looked around the porticoes for my master.

Thank the gods, he was there. Had he been absent, I think my panic might have killed me.

He knew me immediately. His performance was admirable — he finished his lesson, a point about the way Pythagoras formed a right triangle, then he teased a new student, and finally, as naturally as if we’d planned it, he came to me, took my arm and led me away.

‘You cannot walk abroad here, my boy,’ he said.

‘And yet I have done so all day,’ I said.

‘That others are fools does not make you less a fool,’ he said.

Oh, I had missed you, my master.

He sent all his slaves away before he let me take the cloak from over my head, then we sat for hours, drinking good wine and eating olives. He was thin as a stick, as if he lived in a city under siege, and I forced him to eat olives, and his skin seemed to grow better even as I watched.

‘Why are you starving yourself, master?’ I asked.

‘I fast until Greece is free,’ he said.

‘Then eat!’ I hugged him. ‘We have nigh on four hundred ships at Samos. All the cities of Ionia have united, and the Persians will never find a fleet to stand against us. No later than next spring, you’ll see us sail up the river, and Ephesus will be free.’

He smiled then. ‘Four hundred?’ he asked. And ate olives at a furious rate.

I found olive paste and anchovies and fish sauce in the pantry, and made us a small dinner with bread and lots of opson, and I told him everything from the day that we helped Hipponax die until the start of this mission.

He shook his head. ‘Your life is so full, and mine is so empty.’

‘You teach the young,’ I said.

‘Not one of them is worth a tenth of you or Archilogos. I would trade ten years of my life for one bright spark to shine against the heavens.’ He nodded. ‘But I have had my great pupils, and plenty of them — and the last not the least. You are called Doru — the Spear of the Hellenes. I have heard this name.’ He narrowed his eyes. ‘And you think you have learned something about killing men?’

I shrugged. ‘Nothing different from what you endeavoured to tell me ten years ago.’

‘Sometimes the logos works one way to truth, and sometimes another,’ he said. ‘If we understood everything, we would be gods, not men.’

Too soon, I realized I had nothing left to say. He was not very interested in my forge and my farm, although in his presence, they suddenly gathered a kind of worthiness that they didn’t have when I stood on the command deck of Storm Cutter.

We gazed at each other for a little while.

‘You wish to see Briseis,’ he said suddenly.

My heart beat faster. I expected him to say that she was away from town, resting from childbirth, dead.

‘I often read to her,’ he said. ‘Nor should I have excepted her when I spoke of the bright sparks of intelligence I have brought to the logos — for of the three of you, the logos burns the brightest in her.’

I smiled to hear the most beautiful woman in the Greek world praised for her brain — but what he said was true.

‘Come,’ he said. ‘We will go to her gate.’

In the near dark, Ephesus was inhabited mostly by slaves and men looking for prostitutes. No one paid us any attention as we walked together.

I followed him up to the gate of the house of my youth. This time, my heart slammed against my chest and I was unable to think, much less speak.

My master took me by the hand and led me to the gate as if I was a young student. I didn’t know the slave on duty there, but he bowed deeply to my master and led him into the courtyard, where she lay on a long couch. A younger woman fanned her, and the smell of mint and jasmine filled the garden, and my head. Suddenly, it was as if no time had passed. My eyes met hers, and I remember giving a twitch, as did she, I think — such was the power of our attraction in those days.

She never spared the greatest philosopher of the age a glance.

‘You came,’ she said, after time had passed.

I trembled. ‘You called to me,’ I said. I was surprised at how calm my voice was.

‘You didn’t hurry,’ she said.

‘We are no longer young lovers, playing at the Iliad,’ I said.

‘We never were,’ she returned, and her smile widened by some small fraction of one of Pythagoras’s figures. ‘We never played.’

I nodded. ‘Why have you summoned me, Helen?’ I asked.

She shrugged, and her voice changed, and she tossed her hair, like any other woman. ‘Boredom, I suppose,’ she said lightly. ‘My husband needs captains. It is time you became a great man.’

I was not eighteen. She filled me, just lying on a couch. I could barely breathe. And yet, I was not eighteen. I took a deep breath, bit back my sharp response, turned on my heel and walked away.

You were never promised a happy story, my young friends. I’m afraid that we are coming to the part where you might prefer to stay home.

I headed out of the gate and back to my master’s house. I shivered as if from cold, I was so angry — and so afraid. As I stood in my master’s tiny courtyard, I raised my face to the stars.

‘What have I done?’ I asked.

They didn’t respond.

My head was full of thoughts, like a bag of wool stuffed to the very brim — that I should go back and beg forgiveness, that I should send a note, throw rocks at her window. . kill her.

Yes, that thought came to me, too. That I should kill her. And be free.

Instead, without much conscious thought, I packed up my leather bag, rolled my spare cloak tight and walked out into a quiet night in Ephesus. I had decided that if I could not have her, I might as well test myself or die. It is curious that we do our strangest thinking while we are under the influence of deep emotion. Suddenly I was not a trierarch or a lord. I was a young man bereft, angry, seeking death.

That is love, my friends. Beware of the Cyprian, beware. Ares in his bronze-clad rage has not the power.

I see consternation on your faces — I can only assume that none of you have ever been in love — you, thugater, I’d put a sword in you if I thought that you had, you minx! But listen to me. Love — the all-consuming fire that Sappho tells of, the dangerous game of Alcaeus, the summit of noble virtue and the depth of depravity described by Pythagoras — love is all. The gods fade, the stars grow pale, the sun has no heat to burn, nor ice to freeze, next to the power of love.

When she said that she had written to me from boredom, she struck me with a rod of humiliation. No lover can accept such a blow and remain the same.

I have had many years and many night watches, and the long hours before a hundred fights to think about love, and how each of us might have been, if we were not such proud and insolent animals.

I think — close your ears, girls — I think that men come to love though a mixture of lust and challenge, while women come to love through a different mix of lust and wonder at their own power — and desire to subdue another. As with Miltiades and Dionysius, and many others locked in a competition, there is more dross than gold in the ore, but what is refined in the fire is finer than either of the lovers could have made alone. Men come to love by challenge — the challenge of sex, the challenge of holding the loved one against all comers, the challenge of being the better man in the lover’s eyes.

Briseis never ceased to challenge me. Her company never came free, because she valued herself above any mortal, and her favours were the reward for heroic action, heroic determination — heroic luck. The idea that she would summon me from boredom was a mortal insult to both of us.

So I shouldered my pack and went down the hill, past the sentries on the wall and out of the main gate. The moon was bright enough that I never stumbled. I was walking to Sardis. The Persian capital of Lydia — the heart of the enemy’s power.

Did I say I wasn’t eighteen any more? When Briseis is involved, honey, I’m always eighteen.

Or perhaps fifteen.

I walked all night, and all day the next day. I climbed the great pass alone, my head almost empty of thought from exhaustion, but I stopped and poured a libation for the men who died there fighting the Medes. At the last moment, speaking my prayer, I added the Medes who had fallen there — to my spear, and to others. My voice hung on the air, and I shivered involuntarily. The gods were listening.

I walked down the far side of the pass in a daze, and I didn’t stop to eat or rest, and by the evening of the third day, I came to Sardis. Just as on my first visit, the gates were open. Unlike my first visit, I didn’t kill anyone.

Sardis is a great city, but not a Greek city. There are Greeks there, and Persians, and Medes, and Lydians — a swarthy, handsome people, and the women are dark-haired, with large eyes and beautiful bodies, which they don’t trouble to hide.

I was not of this world when I entered the gates. I must have looked like a madman, but Sardis had plenty of them. My Persian was still good, and I spoke it rather than Greek, and men made way for me. Most probably thought that I was one of the many prophets who afflict Phrygia, wandering and foretelling doom.

In my head, I was locked in a fearful fantasy, where the waking world of shops and handsome women merged with the chaos and death of the battle I had fought here. In the agora, I looked from booth to booth, trying to find the dead men I knew must be lying there.

I sound mad, but even as I was having these thoughts, I knew I needed rest, sleep, food. It occurred to me to hurry back to Heraclitus to tell him that I had found a place where the stream ran twice — that I could be in two times at once, merely by running a few hundred stades without rest or food.

My next memory is of sitting in a cool garden, eating lamb. It is a curious thing — one I have experienced all too often — that as soon as the rich, sweet food passed my lips, the curious half world of battle and gods vanished and I felt like a man again.

I was sitting across a broad cedar table from Cyrus, now captain of a hundred noble cavalrymen in the bodyguard of Datis.

I ate ravenously, and he watched me carefully — a healthy mixture of friendly concern and suspicion. We’d crossed swords often enough in the last years for him to know perfectly well where my sympathies led. On the other hand, I had saved his life and his master’s, and that means more to a Persian than mere nationality.

He watched me eat, and he put me to bed, and the next day his slaves awakened me, and I ate again. I was young, bold and healthy — I recovered swiftly.

On that second day, he was waiting in the courtyard. ‘Welcome to my house,’ he said in Persian.

I knew the ritual, so I made a small sacrifice — barley cakes — to the sun, and ate salt on bread with him.

He nodded at my bag and gear. ‘You are carrying a fortune,’ he said. My gold and glass Aegyptian bottle was sitting before him on the table. He twirled his moustache. ‘It pains me, but I must ask you how you come to be here.’ He looked into my eyes. ‘And why.’

Slaves brought me a hot drink. Persians drink all sorts of things hot, because mornings are often cold in their mountains, or so I’ve been told. This had the aroma of anise, and tasted of honey. I held his gaze, and I decided that having come all this way, I would behave as a hero and not as a spy.

‘My lord,’ I said, ‘I will tell you everything, and to the utmost degree of honesty — like a Persian, and not like a Greek. But let me first say three things. And then you may decide if you need to know more.’

He nodded. ‘Well spoken. Please, be my guest.’ He waved at bread and honey, which he knew I loved, from the days when I was Doru the slave boy, and he and his friends fed me just to see how much I could eat. He raised a hand. ‘I doubt not that you will tell me the truth. But lest you misunderstand — I know exactly who you are. You are a great warrior.’ He smiled. Persians don’t lie, and it was a genuine grin of admiration. ‘I often dine for free or am given gifts of wine because I can tell stories of when I knew you as a boy. It is an honour to be your friend.’

I stood. Persians are very formal. ‘It is an honour to be the friend of Cyrus, captain of the hundred that guards Artaphernes,’ I said.

He blushed and rose, and I saw that his right arm was swathed in bandages. ‘Wounded?’ I asked.

‘Yes,’ he sighed. ‘A petty skirmish over horses at Miletus.’

‘Last autumn, at the edge of winter?’ I asked.

He nodded.

‘I was there!’ I said.

He nodded. ‘I know, young Doru. So — you will tell me three things. I must hear them.’

I sat back and warmed my hands with the ceramic cup full of hot tea.

‘I serve Miltiades of Athens,’ I said carefully.

Cyrus nodded.

‘I love Briseis, daughter of Hipponax, wife of Artaphernes,’ I said.

Cyrus started, and then slapped his knee. ‘Of course you do!’ he said. ‘May Ahura Mazda blast my sight — I should have known.’ Then he schooled his face. ‘He is my lord, of course.’

‘I am in Sardis seeking news of how Datis will fight us,’ I said. ‘But the bottle of scent is for Briseis, and the money is my own, and none of it is to buy treason.’

Cyrus drank tea, looking at the roses that grew up the wall of his courtyard in the morning sun. ‘If I arrest you,’ he said, ‘you will be sent to Persepolis. The Great King has heard your name. You will be a noble prisoner and a hostage. In time, you might rise in court and be a satrap — you might command me.’

I shrugged.

‘Or I might kill you. You do not deny that you are the enemy of my master?’ He raised his eyebrow.

‘No. Nor do I deny that I am here to learn your weaknesses. You see — I am a bad Greek.’ I laughed.

He did not laugh. ‘I never thought to say this — but a small lie on these matters would have let me sleep better.’

I shrugged. I had the advantage that I didn’t care. I never loved the Ionian Alliance, friends. They were mostly East Greeks to me, soft-handed men who argued about firewood while the flames of their fire died. They had great men among them — Nearchos and Epaphroditos come to mind. But Briseis had hurt me, and I cared for nothing.

But — my role as a hero required me to speak.

‘Instead of a lie, I’ll give you a truth. I am here as a private man. I seek to give my gift to Briseis, and speak with her in Ephesus. I make no war on Sardis.’ I frowned.

‘Unlike the last time, you rebel!’ He slapped his knees again. ‘I was sword to sword with you in the marketplace!’ He looked around. ‘Does she love you, Doru?’

I shook my head. ‘I don’t know, Cyrus. I have loved her — since I was a boy. And she loved me.’ I shook my head. ‘Once, she loved me.’

‘You have lain with her?’ Cyrus asked. Persians are not shy about such things.

‘Many times,’ I assured him.

He nodded. ‘She loves my master,’ he said. He twirled his moustache again.

Now — I have to go off the tale again, to explain that among Persians, adultery, a mortal offence among Greeks, is something of a national aristocratic pastime, like lion-hunting. So my passion for his lord’s wife made me all the more Persian, to Cyrus. I wasn’t in a mood to calculate and manipulate — but I knew that this simple truth would render my mission for Miltiades almost incidental.

‘Why?’ I asked.

‘He ruined her mother, of course.’ Cyrus knew it as well as I. We had both been there. ‘I would say — to a brother — that she tastes the forbidden because it is forbidden. That she loves power, but not Artaphernes.’

I might have rushed to her defence — except that his words struck me as truth.

‘To lie with the mother and the daughter is a sin in Persia,’ Cyrus went on. ‘Many of us want him to leave her.’

I took a breath and let it go, and the balance changed.

‘Let me go, and I will try to take her with me,’ I said.

‘Hmm.’ He put his hand on the table. ‘I am caught between what I want for my lord and what he wants. I will not be the agent of corrupting his wife. Despite my misgivings.’ He contemplated me and combed his beard. ‘I find I cannot order your death, although, to be honest, I have a feeling that would be best for the King of Kings.’

I remember shrugging. A foolish response, but then, what should a man do when his death is proposed?

‘Swear to me that you will do nothing to harm my master, and that you will leave this city in the morning,’ he said.

I put my hand in his. ‘I swear that I will return to Ephesus tomorrow, and once there, my only purpose will be to see her and leave,’ I said. If your wits are quick, you’ll see how full of holes my oath was.

We clasped hands, and he finished his tea. ‘I have business in the marketplace,’ he said. ‘Gather all the news you like. It will only discomfit you. You cannot fight the Great King. His power is beyond your imagination. I should send you to Persepolis as a prisoner — I would be doing you a favour. But I will let you see your doom — and then let you go to it. Perhaps you will save a few Greeks to be the Great King’s subjects.’ He pointed out the gate. ‘Go — learn. And despair. And leave Briseis to her own end, is my advice.’

We embraced like old comrades. It is odd how we saw each other only in snatches, here and there — and how he had known me, not as a great hero, but as a slave boy — and yet we were ever friends, even when our swords were bloody to the wrist and we swung them at each other.

Never believe that Persians were lesser men. Their best were as good as our best — or better.

His permission — and it was that — to go and spy in Sardis chilled me, and I dressed and went out into the agora.

I passed from booth to booth, buying wine at one, a packet of herbs at another, listening to the gossip and the news.

I had been a slave, and I knew how to avoid being watched. Cyrus may have loved me, but he was a professional soldier, and before the sun was above the low houses, I knew he had put two men to watch me — Lydians, dark-haired men. One had a bad scar on his knee that gave him away even at a distance when he walked, and the other had the habit of crowding me too close — afraid he’d lose me.

I had learned about such things when I was a slave. Slaves follow each other, aiming at masters’ secrets. Masters train slaves to follow other slaves, also searching secrets out. Slaves take free lovers and have to hide — or vice versa.

I noticed them before I completed my first tour of the shops and stalls of the agora, and I lost them by the simple expedient of walking into the front of a taverna on the corner of the agora and passing through the kitchens to exit at the back.

Then I walked up a steep street to the top, sat in a tiny wine shop and watched my back trail the way a lioness watches for hunters. I watched for an hour, and then I walked through an alley spattered with someone else’s urine and walked down the hill on another narrow street until I came to the street of goldsmiths. I went into the second shop, kept by a Babylonian, and examined the wares. He had a speciality — tiny gold scroll tubes, for men who wore amulets of written magic. They were beautifully done. I bought one.

The owner had a Syriac accent, a huge white beard like a comic actor and more hand gestures than an Athenian. We haggled for a cup of tea and then a cup of wine. I was buying a tube of gold, not silver or bronze, and my custom was worth ten days’ work, so I played at it as long as he wanted to, although our haggling was largely done in the first five exchanges.

He wrapped it in a scrap of fine Tyrian-dyed leather.

‘Miltiades sent me,’ I said after I counted my coins down.

‘I should have charged you more,’ he shot back. But he raised an eyebrow and winked. And put my coins in his coin box. ‘I’ll send for more wine. I thought the Greek had forgotten me.’

‘When we lost Ephesus, we lost the ability to contact you,’ I said.

He made a face. ‘I have written some notes,’ he said, and went upstairs into his house. I could hear him talking to his wife, and then moving around. Finally he returned.

‘These are written in the Hebrew way,’ he said, ‘and no one — no one not a sage like me — could ever read them.’ He smiled. ‘Would you like a nice spell to go with your pretty amulet, soldier?’

‘It’s not for me,’ I said.

‘Beautiful woman?’ he asked. ‘You’ve been her lover for many years. And she loves you. And both of you too proud to surrender to the other. Eh?’

I stared at him, open-mouthed.

‘Not for nothing am I called Abrahim the Wise, son. Besides, it’s not exactly a rare story, is it?’ He laughed wickedly. And began to make tiny dots on a piece of vellum.

He was making a pattern — a tiny pattern, meticulous and perfect. Of course, he was a goldsmith, and such men can always draw.

‘The Persians?’ I prompted him.

He peered at his work. ‘Datis is forming his fleet at Tyre,’ he said. ‘He intends to have six hundred ships.’

I confess that a curse escaped me, despite my new-found piety.

‘That’s not the worst of it, son,’ Abrahim continued. He glanced at his notes, and shook his head with his lips pursed. ‘Datis has approached each of the islands — and all the leaders — with money. Gold darics. Sacks of them.’ He looked at his work again. ‘I saw the money caravan come through from Persepolis — not three weeks ago. Datis is determined to take Miletus and break the rebellion — even if he has to buy it.’

‘What of Artaphernes?’ I asked.

Abrahim shrugged. ‘I am an old Jew of Babylon, and I live in Sardis,’ he said. ‘Don’t ask me about Ephesus. I don’t live in Ephesus. Datis comes here, and his money and his plans come on couriers from Persepolis. Artaphernes is a different animal. He strives to be great. Datis seeks only to win and curry favour.’

‘Artaphernes’ wife is my love,’ I said. Whatever prompted me to say that, I’ll never know.

‘Briseis, daughter of Hipponax?’ Abrahim asked. He looked up, and our eyes met, and it was as if I was looking into Heraclitus’s eyes. Eyes that were a gate into the secrets of the logos. The man had seemed comic, even while bargaining. Now I felt as if I was in a presence. His eyes stayed on mine. ‘You, then, are Arimnestos. Ahh.’ He nodded. ‘Interesting. I am pleased to have met you.’

I shot an arrow at random. ‘You know my master, Heraclitus,’ I said.

He nodded. ‘I do. Even among the goyim, there are great men.’ He finished his work, and he sat still for a moment, and then he passed his hand over the tiny scroll, rolled it tight and put it in the tube. ‘Like most young men, you are in a war between the man who acts and the man who thinks. Take my advice and think more.’ He tucked the scroll tube into the red leather. ‘Six hundred ships — ready for sea by the feast of Artemis in Ephesus. Datis will command them. Gold to every lord on every island — watch for treason. Understand?’

I nodded. ‘Do I. . owe you something?’ I asked.

He laughed. ‘I am a Jew, boy. The Persians broke my people, and I will help any man who is their foe.’

I clasped arms with him, and in his doorway, he called me back.

‘I don’t know you, boy,’ he said. ‘But I will try to give you advice, nonetheless. Go straight to your own people and never see her again. My scroll cannot protect you from — from what is between you.’

I smiled, embraced the old Jew and went back to the agora, where my shadows picked me up with obvious relief. I let them accompany me as I bought Philocrates a fine knife, and Idomeneus a bronze girdle, and my sister a pair of fine scissors — something the men of Sardis make to perfection. I bought myself a lacquered Persian bow — and then, on impulse, another for Teucer. I bought sheaves of arrows, and I bought a horse — a fine gelding, saddle, bridle and all. It is good to have money. Buying things makes you feel better when someone has just told you that the enemy has six hundred ships.

I bored my shadows to complacence, and then I walked back to Cyrus’s house.

We ate together. Cyrus was quiet and so was I, but we were good companions, pledging each other’s healths, and saying the prayers and libations together.

‘You are as sombre as I am,’ he said at the end of the meal.

‘The rumour of the market says that your Datis has six hundred ships and a mule train of gold,’ I said.

‘What did you expect, little brother?’ Cyrus asked, and he was sad — as if the victory of his master was an unhappy event. ‘You cannot fight the Great King.’

I shrugged. ‘Yes we can.’ I thought of the beaches full of ships at Samos, and the training. ‘Ship to ship, we can take any number of Aegyptians and Phoenicians. Were you at Amathus?’ I asked.

He shook his head. ‘No,’ he said. ‘Artaphernes and I were campaigning in Phrygia.’

I nodded. ‘I took four enemy ships that day, Cyrus. If Datis gathers six hundred ships, half of them will be unwilling allies — like the Cyprians. And after we beat him, the Persian Empire in Ionia will be at an end.’

Cyrus shook his head. ‘It is a noble dream,’ he said. ‘And then all you Greeks will be free — free to be tyrants, free to kill each other, to rape and steal and lie. Free of the yoke of Persia, and good government, low taxes and peace.’ He spoke in quick anger, the way a man speaks when his son or daughter is thoughtless at table.

Now I had to shake my head. Because I knew in my heart that he spoke the truth. The world of Ionia had never been richer — or more at peace — than when Persia ruled the waves.

‘The freedom you prate of benefits the heroes,’ Cyrus said. ‘But the small farmers and the women and children? They would be happier with the King of Kings.’ He drew his beard down to a point, twirled his moustache and grunted. ‘We grow maudlin, little brother. I fear what will happen when we win. I think there will be a reckoning. I think this revolt scared my master, and even the Great King. Blood will flow. And the Greeks will know what an error they have made.’

I swirled the wine in my handleless cup and felt Persian. But I had one more arrow in my quiver, despite the way my head agreed with everything he said.

‘Cyrus?’ I asked, when he had been silent a long time. It was dark in the garden, and no slaves were coming.

‘I am tired of war,’ Cyrus said.

‘Listen, big brother,’ I said. I was pleased I had received this honorific from him — that I was part of his family.

He grunted, a few feet away in the dark.

‘If you were Greek, and not Persian, how would you think then?’ I asked.

He laughed. ‘I would fight the Great King with every weapon and every lie at my disposal,’ he said.

Persians do not lie.

We laughed together.

In the morning, I rode away after we embraced. I thought about him as I came to the pass, and I thought about him when I poured another libation for the dead of the fight there. I thought about Greece and Persia while I stood in the remnants of ruined grape vines at the top of the hill where the Athenians stopped the men of Caria at the Battle of Ephesus, where Eualcidas fell, the greatest warrior and best man of all the Greeks.

And, of course, I thought about Briseis. About her words, and her body, and how often the two are at odds.

It is the terrifying error of all boys to think that a woman’s body cannot lie. That her words may lie, but her kisses are the truth. Chastity is a myth made by men to defend territory for men — women care little for it. Or rather, women like Briseis care little for chastity. Their territory is not lessened when they take a lover but expanded. They are, in fact, like men who are killers. They have learned the thing.

If you don’t know what I mean, I shall not be the one to burden you.

Then I mounted my little horse and rode down the ridge to the river, took the ferry above the town and just after supper I came to Heraclitus’s house.

He embraced me.

I didn’t let him speak, beyond blessing me in the gateway, and told him that Abrahim the Jew of Sardis sent his greetings.

‘Datis has all the gold of Persia and six hundred ships,’ I said. ‘I have to go to Miltiades. But I need to see Briseis. Will you take me to her again?’

He looked at me — a long time, I think. I don’t really remember — or perhaps I don’t really want to remember.

‘Why?’ he asked.

‘I must see her,’ I said.

Even sages make mistakes. ‘Very well,’ he said.

She sat in the dooryard where the porter would usually sit, her face hidden in the dark. Where her father had led me into his house. Where her mother had first toyed with me. Where Artaphernes had befriended me. In truth, if the toe can touch the same water in the stream twice, there were many echoes of the logos there.

‘You left me,’ she said. And then, in a matter-of-fact voice, ‘And now you return.’

I shrugged. The silence deepened, and I realized that she couldn’t see me shrug.

‘I ran all the way to Sardis,’ I said. ‘You hurt me,’ I added, and the honesty of that statement carried more conviction than all my pretend nobility and all the speeches I’d practised.

‘Sometimes I hate you,’ she said.

I remember that I protested.

‘No — listen to me,’ she said. ‘You have all the life I crave. You are the hero — you sail the seas, you kill your enemies. When you feel powerless, you turn and leave. You run to Sardis.’ She laughed, and it was a brittle sound in the dark. ‘I cannot leave. I cannot come or go, kill or leave alive. It is greatly daring of me to come here, to my own gate, but I am a slut and a trull and a traitoress, and no one will think worse of me if I spend the night here, though they may think worse of poor Heraclitus.’

‘Come with me,’ I said.

‘So that I can pine for you from your house? Perhaps I could talk of you with your sister while you make war on the Persians?’

Only then did I realize that she was crying, but when I went to her, her strong right arm pushed into my chest — hard — and she shook her head. Tears flew, and one landed on my cheek and hung there.

‘Come and be a pirate queen, then,’ I said.

She reached out and caught my hand.

At that contact, everything was healed — or rather, all our troubles were pushed away. For a few heartbeats.

‘Datis has six hundred ships, or so I’m told,’ I said.

‘This is courtship?’ she asked. ‘He has what he needs to crush the rebellion. But my husband will win without him.’

Instead of answering her, I kissed her, being not entirely a fool.

She returned my kiss with all her usual passion. Our bodies never indulged in all the foolish pride of our minds. Our bodies united the way tin and copper make bronze.

But lovers must breathe, and when we separated, she pushed me away. ‘Datis has more than six hundred ships,’ she said, her voice a trifle breathy.

I put my hand on her right breast and traced the nipple. She caught my hand, licked it and pushed it back into my lap. ‘Listen, Achilles. I am married now to a man. Not that posturing fart you killed. Artaphernes is my choice.’

I really didn’t care. I imagined that she sought power through her marriages, but I was hardly in a mood to say so.

‘My husband still seeks to reconcile the Greeks to his rule, but Datis wants them broken. Datis has been promised the satrapy to be made of Europe when the Greeks surrender. Datis has enough gold to buy every aristocrat in every city from Thebes to Athens. The tendrils of his power are felt among the ephors in Sparta. And he has bought every pirate on the Great Sea, from Cilicia to Aegypt and Libya.’ She smiled into my eyes. ‘I need to help my husband — see, I don’t even lie. If Datis triumphs, my husband is the loser.’

Every time she said ‘husband’ was like a blow. A wound.

‘Ah,’ she said, and kissed me again. ‘I never mean to hurt you like this.’

Then she pushed me away. She put a smooth ivory tube in my hand. ‘For more than a year I have tried to contact you, you fool. Artaphernes loves you. He speaks of you. He needs you. Most of his captains are fools or simple men. With us, you could be the man you should be. A great man. A lord of men.’ She put a hand behind my head. ‘Why did you take so long to come to me?’

Then I felt defeated, and a fool. And my love and my hate were a deadly brew mixed together.

‘You want me to stay here and serve your husband?’

‘You thought I toyed with you?’ she said, incredulous.

‘No,’ I confessed.

I remember it so well. If only I had walked away from her. If only I had never gone to see her.

‘I thought you wanted to be rescued,’ I said.

‘You fool!’ she muttered. ‘You need saving. As a pirate — Achilles as a pirate? Come — come and be with my lord. And with me.’

‘You spurned me, when I killed Aristagoras!’ I said. ‘And now you propose that I should share you with Artaphernes!’ I shook my head, trying to clear it of the red rage. I had enough sense to see that if I killed Briseis, my life would end.

‘I have children!’ she said softly. ‘I have dependants, women and slaves and family. My brother can’t live without my protection. You expect me to leave all that, abandon my own, so that I could live as a farm wife in Boeotia?’ She sat up. ‘I have said it, Arimnestos — I love you. You, foolish child of Ares. But I will not be a farm wife or a pirate’s trull. I have found a way for all of us to be happy. The Persians — Artaphernes is the best of men. And he loves you. And he is not young.’ She smiled. ‘I have enough honey for both of you,’ she said.

‘Yes,’ I said. I had lived for two days as a Persian, and honesty was coming a little too easily to my lips. I could see it. Taste it. Like poison. ‘You could,’ I said, and my contempt was too obvious.

‘Oh, how I could hate you,’ she said. ‘I should hate you, as you, by your last statement, have told me that you think I’m a faithless whore who lies with men for power — and yet you love me! Which of us is the greater fool?’

I stuck by honesty. ‘I have wronged you,’ I said. ‘But I love you. And I don’t want to lose you through pride. Our pride. Come away with me.’

She stood up. She was tall, and even barefoot her head was just below mine, and her lips were inches from mine, and she pressed close.

‘I have offended you, but I love you, and I don’t want to lose you through pride, either.’ She smiled then, and standing, I could see her face in the torchlight from the garden. ‘But I will not be second to you. You wish to be the hero of Greece? So be it.’ She must have given a sign.

The blow to my head might have been from a rock, or a sword hilt.

I awoke with a pain in my head like a lance driven into one eye — the sort of pain boys get from drinking unwatered wine.

Too many blows to the head can add up, and this second felt as if it had fallen directly on the one received from the oars off Miletus. I couldn’t see very well. I must have moaned.

‘There he is,’ Philocrates said. ‘You all right, mate?’

They were all around me — my friends. Someone caught my hand, and I was gone again.

Recovery from wounds is dull story-telling — and not very heroic, when you find that you’ve been wounded by the woman you love. Not by any barb of Eros, either. Briseis didn’t hit me herself — later I learned that it was Kylix — but it might as well have been her own hand, and she was never a weak woman.

‘Ares and Aphrodite,’ I cursed.

‘Are both figments of the imaginations of men,’ Philocrates blasphemed. ‘We thought you were a corpse.’ He grinned. ‘A pair of slaves brought you to the beach, with that philosopher you prate about — bony thief of a man!’ he laughed.

‘Even in the dark, he was wise,’ Idomeneus said, which was high praise from the Cretan, as he was not much for wisdom, as a rule.

‘Fuck her,’ I muttered.

‘Heraclitus told us to run,’ Philocrates said. ‘We didn’t linger, as you were covered in blood and he told us about the six hundred ships.’

I had been out-generaled by the Lady Briseis, knocked unconscious and sent back. And in my pack was the ivory scroll tube, in which she had meticulously detailed the ships that would serve Datis, the names of the men who she thought had already been bribed. So that I would use the knowledge to crush Datis and help her husband.

I had to laugh. This scene was never going to make my version of the Iliad, I thought. But I’m telling it to you, and I hope your busy lad from Halicarnassus puts it in his book. She played me like a kithara, between love and lust and hate and anger and duty, and I sailed to Miletus with the information she provided, because to withhold it to spite her would have been foolish.

How well she knew me.

I lay in the bottom of the fishing smack and tried not to look at the sun, and the pitching of the waves made me sick for the first and only time of my life, and we sailed along with perfect weather, all the way back to Samos and the rebel fleet.

We were four days sailing back, and my head was better by the time we landed on Samos. I put on clean clothes, then Idomeneus and I went directly to Miltiades. He was sitting under an awning with Aristides, playing at knucklebones.

‘Datis has six hundred ships,’ I said. ‘They are forming at Tyre and they intend to crush us here, at Samos, in two weeks’ time.’ I looked around, ignoring the consternation on their faces. ‘Datis has men in our camp, offering huge sums of gold to the commanders to desert, or even to serve the Persians,’ I said.

Aristides nodded. ‘I was offered ten talents of gold to take the Athenians and go home,’ he said.

I was deflated. ‘You already know?’ I asked.

Miltiades laughed grimly. ‘To think that Datis offered such a treasure to Aristides and not to me!’ He shook his head. ‘I think I’m offended.’ He made his throw and rubbed his beard. ‘Where has he got six hundred ships, eh?’

So I told them everything I’d heard from the old Jew and from Briseis.

They listened to me in silence, and then went back to their game.

‘Should I tell Dionysius?’ I asked.

Aristides nodded. ‘You should,’ he said. ‘But I doubt he’ll pay you much attention.’

‘I suffered through his classes,’ I said. ‘He’ll listen to me.’

So I walked across the beach, my fighting sandals filling with sand at every step. Dionysius had a tent made of a spare mainsail, an enormous thing raised on a boatsail mast with a great kantaros cup in Tyrian red decorating the middle.

There were armed guards at the door of the tent. Idomeneus spat with contempt, and we almost had a fight right there, but Leagus, Dionysius’s helmsman, was coming out, and he separated the men and then faced me.

‘Can I help you, Plataean?’ he asked.

‘I have news of the Great King’s fleet,’ I said. And immediately he ushered me into the tent. Idomeneus followed me after a parting shot at the guards.

‘Act your age,’ I spat at him. ‘We’re all Greeks here.’

Dionysius was sitting on a folding stool of iron, looking like any great lord. He was surrounded by lesser men — no Aristides or Miltiades here.

‘So, Plataean. How went the mission on which I sent you?’ he asked.

I saluted him — he liked that, and it cost me nothing. ‘Lord, I went to Ephesus and contacted a spy paid by Miltiades. And another, a woman.’ I didn’t love him, and saw no reason to mention Briseis.

Dionysius smiled. ‘Spies and women are both liars.’

That stung me. ‘This spy does not lie.’ But Briseis lied very easily, I thought.

‘Spare me your romances,’ the navarch said. ‘Women are for making children, and have no other purpose except to ape the manners of men and manipulate the weak. Are you weak?’

I summoned up the image of Heraclitus in my head, and refused this sort of petty combat. ‘My lord, I have intelligence on the fleet of Datis. Will you hear it?’

He waved his hand.

‘Datis has six hundred ships at Tyre,’ I said. ‘He has the whole fleet of Cyprus — over a hundred hulls, as well as two hundred or more Phoenicians and as many Aegyptians. He has mercenaries from the Sicels and the Italiotes, and Cilicians in huge numbers.’

Dionysius nodded. ‘That’s worse than I expected. They cannot, surely, all be triremes.’

I shrugged. ‘Lord, I did not see them. I merely report what the spies report.’

He rubbed his beard, all business now. ‘The Cilicians, at least, haven’t a trireme among them. They’ll be in light hulls. And the Aegyptians — light hulls and biremes. But still a mighty fleet.’

‘Both spies also report that Datis is sending men — the former tyrants and lickspittles — to buy some of the Ionians’ contingents. Aristides of Athens received such an offer. I suspect other men-’

The navarch’s face darkened with blood. ‘Useless children, to fritter their freedom away on a few pieces of gold. Tell Aristides he’s welcome to go and fight for his new master-’

‘Lord, Aristides of Athens would sooner die than take a bribe on a law case, much less a matter as weighty as the freedom of the Greeks,’ I said. I owed Aristides that much.

‘Are you another of them? The schemers?’ Dionysius came off his chair. ‘How do I know these reports aren’t planted by the enemy? Eh?’

In fact, even blinded by a mixture of love and hate, I had wondered if Briseis had sent me as a poisoned pill, to scare the Greeks with numbers and threats of Persian gold — except that Abrahim had said the same. I stood my ground. ‘My lord — you sent me. Miltiades has been fighting the Persians since the war began — and you, pardon me, have not. For you to doubt me — to doubt him — is sheer folly.’

‘Leave my tent and never return,’ Dionysius said.

‘You are in the grip of some ill daimon,’ I said. ‘We are all one fleet. Don’t create divisions where none exist.’

‘Take your ship and leave!’ he ordered, screaming at me. ‘Traitor!’

Leagus escorted me out of the door and down the beach. Then he took my arm. ‘He’s the best seaman I know,’ Leagus said. ‘But the power has unhinged him. I have no idea why. The mere sight of so many ships — it did something to him. I thought your words might sober him.’

I didn’t know what to say. Men come to power in different ways and they react to it in different ways, as they do with wine and poppy juice and other drugs. But when I walked back to Miltiades, I was sombre and my head hurt. I threw myself down on one of the rugs he had laid over the sand.

‘I thought you ought to see that for yourself,’ Miltiades said.

‘I tried to tell him about the bribes,’ Aristides said. ‘He ordered me killed — then exiled — on and on. He’s lost his mind.’

Miltiades gave me a tired smile. ‘It is odd — I should have had the command. But now a madman has it, and yet the fleet seems unable to take the command from him, and I can’t seem to rise to the occasion.’ Miltiades looked at me.

I sat up. ‘Are you suggesting I should do something?’ I asked.

Miltiades shrugged.

I looked at Aristides, and he would not meet my eye. Oh, everyone in Athens is so pious, until the moment when the need of the city outweighs all that petty morality. ‘You two want me to kill Dionysius?’ I asked.

Aristides looked resolutely away.

Miltiades shrugged again. ‘I certainly can’t do it.’

‘Neither can I,’ I said. ‘It would be an offence against hospitality. And I have sworn an oath to Apollo.’

Aristides turned and met my eye. ‘Good,’ he said, and suddenly I knew that I’d misjudged him. I had passed some sort of test.

‘Well,’ Miltiades said, ‘I guess we’re with the gods.’

That was all right with me. I trusted Apollo to save the Greeks.

The next week saw more training. I had Storm Cutter in the water constantly, working on various manoeuvres. Most of the Lesbians did the same, and a few of the Samians, and all the Cretans. We may not have been the paragons that Dionysius wanted, but we were a hardened fleet, and the rowers were in condition.

Miltiades insisted that we learn some squadron manoeuvres, so we practised every day as a squadron, and Nearchos chose to throw in his lot with us. Nearchos was the boy I had trained to manhood, son of Achilles, Lord of Crete. He was no longer an arrogant, whiny puppy of seventeen, either. He was a man now, a hero of the sea-fight near Amathus in Cyprus, and he led five ships.

He was popular with the Athenians, and it was through him that I became friends with Phrynichus the poet. Phrynichus went about collecting stories every afternoon when men lay down for a nap, and after he had met Nearchos and heard his version of the deck-to-deck fighting at Amathus, the two of them sought me out.

I was lying on a carpet in Miltiades’ tent, my head on a rolled chlamys, unable to sleep. To be honest, those days were as black for me as the days after Hipponax sent me from his house and tried to kill me. My head hurt, and pain is often part of low spirits. But I could not get the thought of her out of my head — as if her image and the pain were one thing.

‘Arimnestos?’ Nearchos asked.

I sprang to my feet, went out into the sun and we embraced. For two men encamped on the same beach, we hardly ever saw each other. He introduced the playwright, who asked me about the fight at Amathus, and I sat by the fire and told my story.

When I was done, Phrynichus asked me how many men I thought I had put down that day.

I shrugged. ‘Ten?’ I said. ‘Twenty?’ I must have frowned, because he smiled.

‘I mean no offence,’ he said. ‘You have the reputation as a great killer of men. Perhaps the greatest in this fleet.’

What do you say to that? I thought that I probably was, but it would have been hubris to say as much. ‘Sophanes of Athens is a fine warrior,’ I said. ‘And Epaphroditos of Lesbos is a killer, too.’

Phrynichus raised an eyebrow.

I leaned forward. He was a great poet, a man of honour. Moreover, his words could make a man immortal — if you believe that word-fame lasts for ever, and I do. ‘You have fought in a close battle?’ I asked.

He rolled his hand. ‘I’ve been in a few ship fights,’ he said. ‘I faced a man on a deck once. Never a big fight, in phalanx.’

I smiled. ‘But you know how it is, then. When you ask me how many men I put down — how can I answer? If I cut a man’s hand, does he fall? Is he finished? If I put my spear in his foot, he’ll stay down for the whole fight, but I suspect he’ll till his fields next season. Yes?’

He nodded.

‘When I fight my best, I don’t even know what’s happening around me. In my last fight — off Miletus — I put a man down with a blow from my shield, and he was behind me.’ I shook my head, because I wasn’t putting this well. ‘Listen, I’m not bragging. I just don’t know. I fight by area, not by numbers. In a ship fight, I work to clear an area, and then I move.’

He smiled. ‘You are a craftsman of war,’ he said.

I met his grin. ‘Perhaps.’

He leaned forward. ‘May I serve with you in the battle? I’d like to see you in action.’

Look, short of Pindar or Simonides or Homer risen from the grave, he was the most famous poet of our day, and he was asking to watch me in the great battle where we were going to break Persia. What was I to say?

By an irony that I have long savoured, young Aeschylus and his brother were both in Cleisthenes’ ship as marines — so that we had in one squadron the greatest living poet and the next. They had not yet competed head to head — but young Aeschylus could be seen haunting the same fires as Phrynichus, so that no sooner did I befriend the playwright than I met his young rival.

This is the thing that makes the Greeks strong, it seems to me. Aeschylus admired Phrynichus — so he sought to best him. Admiration begets emulation and competition. And in the same way, I was already a famous fighter, and men already sought to emulate me — and best me.

Never mind. I speak of Phrynichus.

Truth to tell, Simonides was a better poet. And Aeschylus wrote better plays. But Phrynichus made me immortal, and besides, he was a quicker man with a pun or a rhyme than either of the others — he could compose a drinking song on the spot. It must have been that same week that we were on the beaches of Samos, and we were all lying around a campfire — a huge fire — having a beachside symposium. There must have been a hundred men there — oarsmen and aristocrats mingled, as it used to be in those days. We had Samian girls waiting on us, paid for by Miltiades, and they were fine girls — not prostitutes, but farm girls, brisk and flirtatious, despite their mothers hovering nearby.

But one girl stood out. She was not a beauty, but she stood square and straight like a young ash. She had a beautiful body, muscled like an athlete, firm breasts, broad hips and a narrow waist. And she talked like a man, straight at you, if you asked for wine or some such. When she played at jumping the fire — showing her muscled legs and leaping high enough to fly away into the smoke-filled dark — all the men wanted her, even those who usually preferred men. She had that spark — that in Briseis is a raging fire. I felt it too, though I was only a week from my love, and in that week I hated all women with equal fervour.

The girl moved among us, and we all admired her, and then Phrynichus leaped to his feet and seized a kithara that one of the boys had been playing, and he sang us a song.

How I wish I could remember it!

He called her Artemis’s daughter, of course, and he sang that her portion and her dowry was time, honour, the word-fame of man, and that her sons would conquer the world and be kings, and her daughters would sacrifice to the Muses. He sang of her in a parody of the elegies that men receive when they win games at Olympus or Nemea, and he praised her skill at jumping fires.

And he did all this while rhyming inside every line, so that his pentameters rolled like a marching army. We were spellbound.

The girl wept when it was done. ‘What have I to live for that will compare to this?’ she asked, and we all applauded her.

There were some good times.

I asked Phrynichus later if he had bedded her, and he looked at me as if I was a child and told me that grown men do not kiss and tell, which shows you that I still had a great deal to learn.

Another night, Phrynichus debated with Philocrates about the gods. Philocrates dared us to consider a world where there were no gods, and he suggested — through good argument and some sly inversion — that such a world would bear a remarkable resemblance to our own. Then Phrynichus rose and proposed that we consider a world where the gods did not believe in Philocrates. His satire was brilliant and so funny that I can’t remember a word of it, except that I threw up from too much wine and laughing so hard.

Phrynichus drank when he wasn’t using his head, and he and Philocrates and Idomeneus formed a drinking club whose members had to swear to be drunk every day as an offering to Dionysus. I tried to make fun of Philocrates for this display of piety, but he refused to be mocked — saying that Dionysus was the one god whose effects were palpable.

Just after the local feast of Hera, our navarch bestirred himself from his tent and ordered us to sea, to seize the island of Lade before the Persian fleet arrived. By now we received daily reports from merchant ships and outlying galleys — and the Lesbians had a dozen fast biremes and a pair of light sailing hemioliai on hand, and they did what scouting got done.

So on the morning after the feast of Hera, we rose, manned our ships — a scene of complete chaos, let me tell you — and sailed in a surprisingly orderly manner down the coast of Samos to Lade — the enemy squadron, led by Archilogos, slipping away ahead of us. We had so many ships that we filled the island. The Samians landed first, and they took all the good ground, so that by the time the Lesbians and Chians had landed, we, the extreme right of the line and the last in sailing order, were left with the rocks near the fort and nowhere else to camp.

I was leading Miltiades’ ships and Nearchos’s squadron, and I directed them to follow me to the beach opposite the island — the beach from which I’d launched my raid a year before. We were not sorry to be separated by half a stade of water from the excesses of Dionysius and the growing tensions of the camp.

Later, Aristides was listening to Phrynichus recite the Iliad, which always delighted him, and when he reached the scene where Diomedes takes the army forward and routs the Trojans, he turned to me and frowned.

‘We need to get to grips with the Medes before the fleet collapses,’ he said. ‘The Samians have refused to train any more. They’ve mutinied, and the Lesbians are just as bad.’

That night, Epaphroditos and a few of his warriors swam over to us, drank wine and complained of how mad our navarch had become.

‘We’re not pirates,’ Epaphroditos said. ‘The man’s notions of training are insane.’

Secretly, I suspected that all the Ionians could have used harder hands and stronger backs. But they were brave, and as far as I could see, this was one fight that would be settled through courage, not tactics.

‘Besides,’ he went on, ‘I hear the Persians are on the way. We need a rest.’

I talked with him half the night, and Phrynichus listened to every word he said as if he were Hector returned.

Dionysius declared that we should have games to propitiate the gods in preparation for the contest against the Persians. It was the most popular decision he’d made since he ordered us to Lade. Men were bored, restless and yet listless. I felt that the Ionians were dangerously lazy. We were on the edge of victory, and they wanted to behave like men who had already won.

The prospect of games didn’t excite me the way it had when I was younger. It makes me laugh now, to think that at twenty-three or twenty-four I imagined myself a hardened old man.

I had already triumphed in a set of military games, you’ll recall, back on Chios when the revolt was young. Five years before. So I decided not to compete in every event, or to strive to win the whole competition. But events decided otherwise.

Next morning, Phrynichus said that he wanted to see Miletus before we fought. I had business there, so I collected a heavy bag and a letter for Teucer and we walked across the mudflats into the city, slipping past the Persian archers in the last gloom of morning to have a cup of wine with Istes. He depressed me by showing me the siege mound, now all but level with the height of the wall. ‘Twenty days,’ he said.

‘Care to come with us?’ I asked, and Istes shook his head.

‘My place is here, with my brother,’ he said. ‘We will die here.’

‘Cheer up!’ I insisted. ‘Apollo will not let us fail.’ I could see the future so clearly that I was surprised other men worried so much. ‘We will destroy their fleet, and then we will liberate all of Asia.’

Istes had lines around his eyes that were not there a year ago, and pouches from sleepless nights. He looked twenty years older than me. And he drank constantly.

I glanced at Phrynichus. ‘This is the greatest swordsman in the Greek world,’ I said.

Istes grinned. ‘Someday, perhaps we can measure each other,’ he said. I agreed — it would be good to face such a gifted man. That is the admiration by competition that makes Greece great. ‘But I would rather stand beside you as we smite the Persians.’

‘Flattery will get you anywhere, Plataean,’ he said. ‘You think we’ll win this naval battle?’

‘I do,’ I said. We would win, I would take Briseis as my war bride and that would be that. My spear-won wealth would make a palace for her on my farm. That’s what I had decided — to have her and punish her as well.

Feel free to laugh.

‘I have to say that I’ve now fought the Persians every fucking day for a year,’ Istes said. ‘If you destroy every ship in their fleet — kill Datis, drown their navarchs — this war still won’t be over. They’re much, much tougher than that.’ He yawned. ‘But if you lose, Miletus falls — and the revolt is fucked.’

‘You are tired,’ I said.

‘You know how it feels after a fight?’ he asked me, one killer to another.

‘Of course,’ I allowed.

‘Imagine fighting every day,’ he said. ‘Every fucking day. I’ve been at it a year, and I’m starting to go mad. My brother is worse — he was never the fighter I am, and fear is getting into his gut.’

Of course, you are familiar with the character of Istes in the play. Phrynichus knew his business. He was a great man, and he knew greatness when he saw it.

I left him to study his new hero, and I went out on the walls and found Teucer. He was at the top of a tower — a rickety thing of hides and wood and stone fill, just completed behind a section of wall that had been mined from beneath. The stonework of Miletus was so old and so good that the wall simply subsided without breaking. That’s why we didn’t use mortar in those days — mortar adds strength, but when a mortared wall is undermined, it collapses. Not so heavy stones fitted by master masons. Often, the old way is the better way — something for you children to remember.

They’d built a tower behind the subsided wall, and I had to climb a dreadful ladder to reach him, far above the battle. He had a big Persian bow, and he shot carefully at the slaves who were working to clear the rubble in the not-quite breach. He seldom missed, and very little work was happening. He had another man spotting for him, too, and they passed comments on individuals as they shot them.

‘See red-scarf? He’s got a death wish — oops! Wish come true.’

‘White-belt? He’s getting ready to step out to get that fascine — here he comes. You missed left. Now he’s going to come around the other side of the wicker shield — ooh, nice. Dropped like a sack of barley.’

‘Teucer?’ I asked.

‘Oh!’ He put his bow down and embraced me. ‘A pleasure to see you, my lord.’

I sat on my haunches after an enemy arrow ruffled my chlamys. ‘Hot work here.’

Teucer laughed. ‘This is my life, these days.’

‘Care to ship out for the battle?’ I asked as casually as I could manage.

He glanced at me, shot another arrow and exchanged a long look with his spotter. ‘We can’t,’ he said, after a delay so long I thought I’d offended him.

The spotter was Kreusis, a younger archer who’d also served aboard my ship. His face was marked with soot and I hadn’t recognized him at first. ‘Sorry, lord. Histiaeus would cut our ears off. We’re to hold the Windy Tower while you sailors fight their fleet. Our lord is afraid of an escalade during the sea-fight.’

I couldn’t argue with that. It was the sort of thing I’d have tried myself.

I handed Teucer a bag of things from his friends on the Storm Cutter — a skin of wine, a sack of dried Athenian sausage and other delicacies — for a city under siege. He and Kreusis ate bread and sausage as I watched.

I also had a letter from his wife, who had wintered in Kallipolis and who I’d sent to Plataea when the weather broke with a pouch of money and a long letter.

He wept a little as he read it, then folded it away.

Finally, I gave him the fine Persian bow I’d bought for him at Sardis. He took it without acknowledgement. It was just a tool to him — a sign of how far gone he was in his head.

‘We’re going to die here,’ he said. ‘But I know now — thanks to you — that my wife and son will live. Means a lot to me. Wish I could sail with you — sail away.’

I told him to stop talking nonsense — that the Persians were as good as beaten. But I could tell he was beyond such things. I’ve been there: when the horizon is no longer the next week, or the next day even — it is merely the next instant. When you are there, you cannot see out.

We embraced again and I climbed down the tower, thinking dark thoughts.

Phrynichus was still talking to Istes. I hugged the swordsman. ‘We’ll win,’ I said.

‘You’d better,’ he answered.

As Phrynichus and I walked back from the harbour, a couple of Persian archers had a go at us, racing along the rocks above us. That’s terror — being shot at from long range with no chance of reply. We had to wade to get around the end of their lines and we couldn’t move fast, and I cursed my arrogance in going by day. And not bringing a shield.

One of the Persians gave a great scream and plummeted from his rock into the sea. I walked over and retrieved his bow and arrows — soaked, but not ruined.

I saw Teucer waving from the wall. He’d shot the man at some incredible distance — Phrynichus has that shot in the play, of course.

Phrynichus shrugged — he was a cool man in the rage of Ares. ‘It’s a little like living in the Iliad,’ he said.

‘Imagine what a jumpy bunch they were, after ten years at Troy,’ I said, and the poet nodded.

‘I was thinking of Istes,’ he said.

‘Exactly,’ I said.

Idomeneus claimed my new bow as soon as I reached the ship — dried it, restrung it and shot at everything that he could. He was an excellent bowman, as I’ve said before, and he’d decided that he needed a bow in the coming sea-fight, which was fine with me. After all, Archilogos’s archers had unsettled me in the fight by the harbour.

He told us that the Persians were coming. ‘They’re camped just down the coast,’ he said. ‘Epaphroditos has seen them.’

Later that afternoon, Leagus, Dionysius’s helmsman, came across in a skiff and went to Miltiades for permission to hold the games on our beach. We were delighted, and Miltiades and Aristides competed to build fires, lay out courses and prepare an altar and sacrifices.

The next day dawned grey, with weather threatening from the west. But the athletes came across in boats, and more than a few swam the half-stade in their exuberance, arrogance or poverty.

Miltiades acted as host, and he and Dionysius sat together in apparent camaraderie, made sacrifices with the priests and watched the competitions as if they were brothers. All of us were delighted by this display of propriety. We were further delighted when the men of Miletus sent a contingent to compete, led by Histiaeus and his brother Istes. They, too, sat under the great red awning that Miltiades had set up, and watched.

The competitions were, in order, the one-stade run, the two-stade run, the javelin throw for distance, the throw for accuracy, the discus, archery for accuracy, the run in armour — the hoplitodromos, the pankration, the fight in armour. I had intended to enter only the fight in armour, but as I lay on my bearskin by the awning where the judges watched, young Sophanes of Athens came up, naked and glistening with oil, and squatted next to me.

‘You are the most famous man — as a fighter — in this host,’ he said. He gave me a shy smile. We had not been friends since I killed the thug in Athens. ‘I want to compete against you. These Ionians — most of them are hardly fit.’

‘Wait until you run against my friend Epaphroditos,’ I said. But his desire was genuine.

‘I. .’ He paused and looked around. ‘I think that I blamed you — that I had killed a man. It made me feel. .’ He stopped, blushed and looked at the ground between his feet.

I nodded. ‘It made you feel greater and less than a man yourself, eh?’

‘You slaughtered that thief like a lamb. And made me look like a boy.’ He shrugged. ‘I am a boy. But I want to win today, and I want to win against the best. The noblest. And I came to say that I wronged you over the killing. I didn’t like what I had done — I made that part of you.’

‘Nicely put,’ I said. Goodness, he was earnest and polite and handsome and probably brave and morally good, to boot. He made me feel old at twenty-three. ‘But I have spent a year coming to terms with killing. What I did that day was ill done. I don’t regret the man I killed in the fight. But the man in the cellar — what Aristides says is true. That was murder. I have spent a year atoning to Lord Apollo, and all the gods, for my hubris.’

Sophanes grinned. ‘Then you should run, lord. Competition is a sacrifice to the gods.’

What could I do? He was right. Besides, he made me feel like a slacker. So I pulled my chlamys over my head, and Idomeneus came up with my aryballos, oiled me and smacked me on the back.

‘About time you got off your arse,’ he growled. He was very tender of my reputation, which in a way was his, as well.

A word about exercise — though I normally try not to drone on about how much time I spent on my body every day — still do. When we were at sea, I rowed at least an hour a day with the oarsmen. The Pyrrhiche of Plataea included a set of exercises with an aspis, and I did that portion of the dance every day, lifting the shield over my head, and moving it back and forth across my body. On a full exercise day I would run eighteen to twenty stades and lift heavy stones in the way that Calchas taught me at the tomb of Leitos. In addition, I would practise against one of my marines with a wooden sword — some days, against all of them. My favourite sparring partner had become Philocrates. He was by no means the best of them, but he fought hard, and had long arms and was a dangerous opponent — with surprising inventiveness.

At any rate, I tell you this so that you won’t think that I went soft between bouts of combat. None of us could afford to be soft in those days, when freedom from slavery depended on your ability to cut a rival down.

I made the final heat in the one-stade run, and again in the two-stade run, where I finished second, to my own delight. Sophanes won the one-stade, and finished behind me in the two-stade, which Epaphroditos won. I was surprised, and pleased, to see Stephanos’s cousin Harpagos run well in both events. He was, by virtue of his position, a gentleman now, and he rose to it. Some men cannot. I shared a canteen with him and Epaphroditos after the second heat. We laughed together and told each other that we were still the men we had been five years before.

Stephanos placed well in the javelin throw for distance, and I lost the throw for accuracy by the width of a finger.

I think it was at this point that I recognized I might win. For those of you who have drunk the heady wine of victory, you know this moment — when you start to pull away from the pack.

The next contest was a surprise, as Philocrates — my Philocrates — won the discus throw with his first throw, a throw so far and so mighty that much bigger men simply shook their heads and declined to throw. They put the olive wreath on his head before the last men had thrown, and men said the gods had filled him, which made me laugh. But the victory made him a different man — open-faced and beaming with good will.

‘I have no idea where that throw came from!’ he said. ‘I’m still not sure it was me.’

‘Have you made your victor’s offering?’ I asked.

‘No,’ he said.

‘Do not forget,’ I said. ‘Blaspheme in private if you like, but if you serve on my ship, you make public obeisance.’

When you are in command, you are always in command, children. Even when a man you call friend wins at the games. It pleased me to do well — but as commander, it pleased me more that many of my people were also doing well. I walked around and congratulated them.

The sun was still high in the sky, and the judges declared an hour’s rest for all competitors. Then the archery started. The Lesbians had several fine archers, and the Samians had one, Asclepius, whose shots were so strong that I didn’t think he could be beaten. Most men’s arrows lofted into the target at fifty paces, but Asclepius’s arrows flew straight as if shot from Apollo’s bow. But as a group, the Cretans were the best.

I was out in the first round. I can shoot a bow, but not with archers like these.

Teucer was there, and he shot patiently and seriously. He just made the first cut and went on to the second round, the lowest-ranked man there. In the second round, he had to shoot against Asclepius. That was a bout to see — every arrow thudding home into the stretched hide at fifty paces, every shot inside the charcoal marking of the highest score. None of us had ever seen shooting like this. The judges sent both men to the third round with the issue undecided.

Idomeneus also went to the third round, and one Lesbian, an archer in service to Epaphroditos. The four of them poured libations and drank wine together, and then the target hides were moved to one hundred paces.

At that distance, even Asclepius had to loft his arrows. He shot first, and hit the charcoal every time. Idomeneus was next, and he placed two of his three arrows within the charcoal, but the third was caught by a flutter of breeze and sailed high over the target. We all sighed together, and Idomeneus bowed and was applauded by two thousand men — out of the competition, but with great honour. The Lesbian shot next, and only hit the charcoal once. He, too, received the applause of the whole army. Finally, Teucer stood to the line. He shot all three arrows so fast that a man who turned his head to speak to his neighbour might have missed the whole performance, and every shot went home in the charcoal.

Now there was open argument about how to carry on — whether to award both men, or to move the target. Miltiades rose to his feet and held up the baton of the judges.

‘For the honour of Lord Apollo, we will have both of these men shoot again,’ he said. ‘Although we deem both worthy of holding the prize.’

There was much applause, and the hides were moved to one hundred and fifty paces.

At that range, a bull’s hide is smaller than the nail on your little finger. A moment’s inattention and your arrow drops short. At a hundred and fifty paces, a man with a Greek bow must aim it at the heavens to drop the arrow into the target.

It was Teucer’s turn to shoot first. He used the Persian bow I had brought him, which pleased me. He shot one arrow, as directed, and it hit the charcoal.

We roared for him.

Asclepius took a long time with his shot. By his own admission, the Samian was an expert at close, flat shooting, and he didn’t excel at the long shots. He waited patiently for the breeze to die. There was no rule against it.

I drank water.

Suddenly, without warning, Asclepius lifted his bow and shot. His arrow went high — very high — and came down at a steep angle into the target. Dionysius proclaimed it in the charcoal and we roared again. This was competition, dear to the gods. I remember slapping Phrynichus on the back and saying that now he had something to write about.

And then an arrow came from behind us. It lofted high over the spectators and the red awning where the judges sat, and it plummeted to earth like a stooping falcon to strike the target just a few feet from where Dionysius stood. He leaped in the air, and stumbled away.

Because I was near the awning, drinking water, I turned and saw the archer, who had shot from at least two hundred and fifty paces. In fact, I counted later two hundred seventy paces. His shot hit the charcoal. He raised his bow in triumph, gave a long war cry and ran.

He was a Persian. He must have slipped over the mudflats while we all watched the competition. He killed no Greek. He shot further, and better.

Miltiades awarded him the prize — an arrow fletched in gold.

We roared our approval — even Teucer and Asclepius, both of whom had shot like gods.

But later — much later — I saw Teucer pace off the distance. Night was falling, and he thought that no man watched him. He raised his bow and his shaft fell true, but a fist of breeze moved it, and later he told me that he missed the charcoal by the width of his hand.

We were elated by the shooting — the sort of heroism in which any Greek (and apparently, any Persian) might take joy.

I put on my armour with some trepidation. It wasn’t really mine — it was a good bronze bell cuirass that Miltiades had given me, and while I liked it, it lacked the flexibility and lightness of the scale cuirass I had won in my first games — a cuirass that was hanging on its wooden form in my hall in Plataea with my shield and my war spears. A bronze cuirass never seems to fit just right over the hips. It flares there, so that the hips have full play in a long run, but that same flare makes a waist where much of the weight of the armour is borne, just over the hard muscles of the stomach, and that can make running uncomfortable.

Worse by far is running in ill-fitting greaves. They snap over the lower leg, covering a warrior from the ankle to the knee, and if they are too big they slip and bite your arches, and if they are too small, they pinch your ankles and leave welts that bleed — even in one stade. I’d spent all my spare time fitting and refitting those greaves — a plain pair in the Cretan style, worn over linen wraps.

It was a strong field — Epaphroditos, Sophanes, Stephanos, Aristides himself, Lord Pelagius’s nephew Nestor, Nearchos of Crete and his younger brother, Neoptolemus, Sophanes’ friend Glaucon, and Dionysius of Samos’s son Hipparchus, a fine young man without his father’s arrogance. He was next to me in the first heat, and I made the mistake of giving way at the first step — I never caught him. But I placed second, and went on to the next round.

The men I named had all gone on in their rounds. We were down to two eights, and the men running were the heroes of our army, the champions of the East Greeks and their allies. I was proud just to run with them. I drank water, pissed some of it away and lined up, the aspis on my arm as heavy as lead after just one race.

I was between Epaphroditos and Aristides, chatting with both, waiting for Miltiades to start us, when the cry went up.

The Persian fleet was sailing around the point. Their fleet was immense, and it came and came and came. They crossed the bay under sail and put in to the beaches at the foot of Mycale, and I stood on the shore and counted them.

Five hundred and fifty-three ships, first to last, biremes and hemioliai included. Just two hundred more ships than we had, including all of our lighter ships.

On the other hand, the Cyprians sailed like fools, and the Aegyptians were so wary that they edged away from us, though we didn’t launch a single ship.

We took it as an omen, that the Persians had come while we competed. We watched them, and we laughed and called out to them to come and join us, and then, as if by common consent, we turned our backs on their display of imperial power and went back to our athletics.

I remember that walk away from the shore, because I hated the aspis I had on my arm, an awkward thing with a badly turned bowl and an ill-fitting bronze porpax. I still had the cheap wicker Boeotian I had purchased on the beach at Chios a year before, a far less pretty shield with a split-ash face and a plain leather porpax, but it weighed nothing. In those days, there was no rule about competitions and shields, and besides, the Boeotian was, in fact, the shield I would carry to fight. I dropped my heavy aspis on my blanket roll, picked up my Boeotian and trotted to the start line.

Aristides looked at my shield with interest. ‘Surely that big thing will impede your running,’ he said.

I shrugged. ‘It weighs less on my arm,’ I said.

‘I seem to remember that you beat me in this race four years ago,’ he said.

I grinned. ‘Luck, my lord. Good fortune.’

Aristides smiled. ‘You are rare among men, Arimnestos. Most men would tell me that they were about to beat me again.’

I shrugged, watching Miltiades go to the start line. ‘In a few heartbeats, we will know,’ I said.

Epaphroditos laughed. ‘Listening to you two is like an education in arete,’ he said. ‘Me, I’ll just run my best. But for the record, Aristides, he may have beaten you in this race,’ he grinned, and his teeth sparked, ‘but I beat him, as I remember.’

We all laughed. I remember it well, the eight of us laughing. In all the Long War, there were a few moments like that, that sparkled like bronze in the sun. We weren’t fighting for our lives. We weren’t freezing cold or burning hot. No one was going to die. We were comrades — captains, leaders, but men who stood together. Later, when all Greece was at the point of extinction, we never laughed like that.

There is a Spartan joke, that eirene — peace — is an ideal men discern from the observation that there are brief intervals between wars.

You laugh, children. Hmm.

I wish I could end this story right there — with eight of us lined up on the sand, ready to race. I remember it so well. Young Hipparchus, the Samian, was retying his sandals when Miltiades called us to order, and the poor boy fumbled the retie and ended up running with one sandal.

Miltiades held his cane even with the ground, and then swept it away like a sword cut, and we were off.

The race itself was an anticlimax of the worst sort, because Aristides and Epaphroditos became entangled within a few lengths of the starting line, and although neither fell, they never caught the rest of us — and they should probably have been first. Or perhaps not. But they were the two I had expected to have to outperform, and their removal gave me wings.

I passed Sophanes in the first five steps and ran easily, knees high, arms pumping, because my greaves fitted perfectly. In the race in armour, the armour is part of the contest, and my armour fitted.

Sophanes wasn’t going to surrender meekly, however, and after fifteen paces, we were side by side, well in advance of the other runners. He tried to cut inside me at the turning post, and I shoved him with my big Boeotian shield, and he had to fall back a step.

Hipparchus, running with one sandal flapping, was still game, and he came on past the men who should have been the front-runners — because they were disheartened by their collision, I suspect. But his badly tied sandal finally fell away, tripping him, and he went down. He let out a cry as he fell, and I think Sophanes must have looked back, and that was the step he never retrieved. I ran to the finish and crossed first by the length of my leg.

Then I had a long rest while the other heats ran — three of them. The final eight had me and Sophanes of Athens, as well as my own man, the Aeolian Herakleides, Nearchos of Crete and some Chians I didn’t know.

Nearchos came and put an arm around me. ‘This is the life,’ he said. ‘Better than ploughing fields on Crete.’

‘You’ve never ploughed a field in your life, lord,’ I said, and they all laughed.

‘He was my war tutor,’ Nearchos told Sophanes.

‘No wonder you are a hero now,’ Sophanes said — the boy had a nice turn of phrase.

That was a race. No one fell, and no one clashed at the start line, where most mishaps happen. We all went off at full stride, and in that final race, no one had a loose sandal strap, a bad shield, a pebble.

We ran for the gods. I don’t remember much of it — I was tired, and I was flying like a ship before the wind, without a thought in my head. But I remember that as we came to the turning post, all in a clump, Nearchos was first by a hand’s breadth — but his paces were a little too long, and he landed his left foot well past the post and started his turn late. Quick as a shark takes bait, I turned inside him, my light shield almost catching the post as I scraped by, so that Sophanes, Nearchos and I were exactly together as we came out of the turn and ran for the spear Miltiades held out across the finish.

What can I say? We ran. We flew. We were in step, stride for stride, all the way home, and the army roared its approval at us, although I remember none of that. What I remember is how fast that spear grew, and how nothing mattered but reaching it. Nothing.

I won because my shield was a palm’s breadth larger than theirs, and touched the spear first. Nothing else. Rather than arrogance, my victory made me feel humble, and I embraced both of them.

I’m not ashamed to say that I wept. As they say at Olympia, for a moment I had been with the gods. I think that all three of us had been.

The rest is a blur of exhaustion. Stephanos took me out in the second round of pankration, but Sophanes of Athens put him down in the third round before losing to Aeschylus the poet’s brother in the finals. Athenians are good at games. They train harder than other men — even the Spartans.

I passed at boxing, and I watched a big Lesbian brute — Callimachus, no less, and never was a fighter better named — beat his way through other men like a plough through a field on its second pass, when all the big chunks are broken and the bad rocks already pulled. Aristides caught him again and again, but he was big enough to shake off the blows and continue, and he finally wore Aristides down and hit him hard, and Aristides raised his hand in surrender.

And then we were lighting the fires, and men were preparing for fighting in armour. I was tired, and I suspected that I had won the games. I was surprised at my own hesitation.

Is this how cowardice begins, I wondered, or how youth ends?

But I tied my corslet back on my torso, picked up my shield and went down the beach to the fires, with Idomeneus carrying my shield and my sword.

Aristides grinned sheepishly at me and shook his head. He was wearing a clean chitoniskos, and no armour.

‘That brute almost killed me,’ he said ruefully. He grinned at the ‘brute’ to take the sting out of his remark. ‘I want to live to fight the Medes.’

I nodded. I felt the same way myself, but I also felt that as one of the best fighters, I would be seen to shirk if I balked at the armoured combat. Paramanos helped me into my armour and gave me a drink of wine.

‘I think the gods have stolen your wits,’ he said. ‘Fighting your friends in the dark with sharp weapons. Grow up!’ But he cuffed me on the back and wished me good fortune. ‘Not much of a field, eh?’

There were only a couple of dozen men brave enough, or foolish enough, to fight with sharp weapons, in armour, at the edge of dark. Many of them were Athenians and Milesians. ‘The fewer the men, the greater the honour,’ I said, but I remember giving him a sarcastic grin to go with the line from Pindar.

I faced Aeschylus’s brother in the first round, and he hit hard, cutting pieces from the oak rim of my shield, but I ticked him in the pectoral under his sword arm on our third engagement, drawing blood from a place that showed when he overexposed his side in a long sweeping cut. The cut itself was under his armour, and I had to make him take the breastplate off to show it, and he was as surprised as Dionysius. I was awarded the victory, and the young man apologized for doubting my word.

I had a long rest, and my muscles started to stiffen before my second bout — which was against another Athenian.

Sophanes. Of course.

He was good — fast, light on his feet, careful. He wanted to dance.

I faced him with the opposite strategy. I stood my ground, barely reacting, offering nothing, allowing him to dance while I waited with bovine patience.

There isn’t much to hit on a man wearing Greek armour and greaves and fighting behind an aspis or a Boeotian. I stood my ground, backing from his wilder rushes, and waited him out. After a number of engagements — some men were booing me, because I was so dull — my blade licked out and cut him on the bicep, and it was over.

‘You fight like an old man,’ Miltiades said to me.

‘I plan to be one,’ I said, which got a good response.

Most men felt I had won the games by that time, and my friends began to gather, dumping wine on my head, kissing me or throwing their arms around me. Epaphroditos and two of his men picked me up, carried me to the edge of the water and threw me in. Then a small crowd came and fished me out, and I cursed them for the effect on my armour.

The third round was just two of us. Too many bouts resulted in double hits, or real wounds, and knocked both men out of the competition. In our rules then, a double hit disqualified both men.

So it was me — and Istes.

He was reputed to be the greatest swordsman in Greece.

So was I.

It was still bright enough to fight, and we had fires lit on either side of us, and I think almost every man in the fleet was on that beach for our fight. If I had thought I had word-fame before that fight, I realized that every oikia in Greece would know me after this.

When we faced each other, we reached out our blades and touched them together. Istes grinned under his helmet, and I grinned back.

‘Let’s show them what excellence is,’ he said.

What can I say? He was a great man.

Both of us must have decided the same thing — to dispense with the slow testing that most swordsmen employ in a bout. When Dionysius lowered his spear, we closed — instantly — and the crowd roared.

I threw three blows in as many heartbeats, and he fought back, a blur of motion, and our swords left sparks in the air. Then we circled apart, and neither of us was touched, and the crowd roared.

As if by consent, we closed again immediately, and this time I launched a combination — an overhead cut to draw his shield and then a punch with my shield rim and a back-cut to score on his thigh. I have no idea what he planned, but our shields struck — rim to rim, a jar like an earthquake up your arm — and my back-cut fouled with his overhead cut as I turned my body. I kicked out with my right foot as we both rotated on our hips and I caught him behind the knee — luck, I suspect — and he went down, rolling away. He rolled right over his aspis, something that, up until then, I had never seen a man do, and came to his feet a horse-length away.

If I had thought the crowd loud before, they were a force of nature now.

We saluted each other, and charged — shield to shield. Both of us cut high, and our blades rang together — back-cut, fore-cut. For the third time we fell back, and still neither of us bore a wound.

I had never faced anyone like him. He was as graceful as a dancer and as fast as me, with arms as long as mine.

Our next engagement was as cautious as the first three had been heroic, and we both tried counter-cuts at each other’s wrists.

He was a bit faster. And he could do a wrist movement I had never seen — a roll of the blade that caused a direction change so fast I couldn’t believe Calchas hadn’t known it.

I gave ground at his next rush and tried a complex feint to get a cut at his shoulder — the same combination I’d used so successfully against Sophanes.

Instead, we had a chaotic muddle, as he was feinting into my feint. Both of us closed, our shield rims slipped inside each other and suddenly we were chest to chest.

I rotated on my hips to get away and saw my opening as I stepped back. I kicked with my left foot, straight to his hip, and he leaned out, went flat on his back — and the tip of his sword caught me on the sandal.

He was down, and I stepped over him — he’d gone down on his shield. He was mine — but he was grinning.

‘Well fought, brother,’ he said.

Then I felt the cold/hot of a cut — on my ankle, but my head resisted it for a heartbeat.

I’m proud to say that no man would ever have seen that wound. I wore Spartan shoes, as I always did to fight, and his blade, by some ill fate, had slid between the leather and the ankle bone to cut me. The wound was invisible, and darkness was falling. I’m proud, because although I felt the sly temptation to act the coward’s part, I stepped back from Istes, the best swordsman I ever faced in a contest, and saluted him as he got to his feet. Then I put my sword and shield on the ground, unlaced my sandal and showed him the cut.

Perhaps some sighed for disappointment, but most approved. And Istes wrapped his arms around my shoulder and headbutted me, helmet to helmet — not in anger, but in elation.

He got the crown of olives. I got a cut on the foot. But we both felt like heroes.

The sun was a red ball on the horizon when all the winners sacrificed — even Philocrates — and I was declared winner of the games. I suspect Istes would have won if he had competed in two or three more contests, and I think Aristides would have won if he had had better fortune. Fortune is so much a part of a contest. But I won — my second games.

When I had sacrificed again, and put my crown on my head, I offered to take the archer’s crown to the Persian camp.

People seemed to think that fitting.

I wore a chiton, because the Medes aren’t big on nudity, and I wore my crown, and I ran across the no-man’s-land with a torch.

The sentries were waiting. They were all Persians of the satrap’s guard, led by Cyrus, and they had, apparently, watched the games all day. They cheered me.

I bowed to Cyrus.

‘Are you the man who shot the arrow?’ I asked.

Cyrus gave a dignified smile. ‘Don’t you think that would be the feat of a younger, more foolish man?’ he said.

And then I saw that Artaphernes was there. And my heart almost stopped.

Artaphernes came forward, and I bowed, as I had been taught as a slave. I was never one of those Greeks who refused obeisance. Foolishness. I bowed to him, and he smiled at me.

‘Young Doru,’ he said. ‘It is no surprise to any of us that you are the best of the Greeks. Why have you come here?’

‘I come bearing the prize for archery, voted by acclamation of all the Greeks to the Persian archer who dared to wade to our shore and shoot — a magnificent shot. I am to say that had he remained, only honour would have come to him.’ I handed the chaplet of olives and the arrow to the satrap of Lydia.

Artaphernes had tears in his eyes. ‘Why are we at war?’ he asked. ‘Why are you Greeks not one with us, who love honour? Together, we could conquer the world.’

I shook my head. ‘I have no answer, lord. Only a prize, and the good wishes of our army for the man who shot that arrow.’

He presented the prizes to Cyrus — as I had expected. And while the Persians cheered their man, Artaphernes stood next to me.

‘Have you seen our fleet?’ he asked.

‘We will defeat it,’ I said, with the daimon still strong on me.

‘Oh, Doru,’ he said. He took my hand and turned me to face him, despite the crowd of men around us and his guards. ‘You saved my life and my honour once. Please allow me to save yours. You have no hope at all of winning this battle.’

‘I honour you above all the men of the Parsae I have known,’ I said. ‘But we will defeat you tomorrow.’

He smiled. It was a wintry smile, the sort of smile a man gives a woman who has refused his hand in marriage.

He clasped my hand like an equal — a great honour for me, even among Greeks — and kissed my cheek.

‘If you survive the battle,’ he said into my ear, ‘I would be proud to have you at my side.’

I started as if he had spat poison in my ear. ‘If I capture you, I will treat you like a prince,’ I responded. And he laughed.

He was the best of the Persians, and he was Briseis’s husband. The world is never simple.