Salamis

When morning broke, we prepared our ships to put to sea. Unbeaten, we prepared to disperse and run.

It didn’t matter particularly just how the Spartans had come to lose such an impregnable position. It’s a well-known story now and I won’t shame us all by telling it. And at the time I did not yet know that my brilliant brother-in-law, Antigonus, had died at the head of his Thespians, taking forty Marathon veterans to die beside the Spartans. They stripped and desecrated his body too, the cowards.

I didn’t know, yet. But I knew that Themistocles was grey with fatigue and shattered hopes, and I knew that Adeimantus scarcely troubled to hide his delight. The great fleet was breaking up. Nothing had been decided except that all the Boeotians — Plataeans like me — were to run for their homes and clear the plains of Boeotia before the Great King came with fire and sword. We knew, even then, what was coming. With the Hot Gates lost there wasn’t another place to stop the Medes. Eurybiades said that there would be another army to fight for Boeotia, but none of us believed him.

Aristides told me in that awful dawn that the Thebans had already offered earth and water to the Great King. I spat, somewhat automatically.

‘We were winning,’ I said. It was said in the sort of voice that young men comment on the ultimate unfairness of the world.

Aristides looked at Brasidas, who happened to be there, cleaning the blood from his greaves in seawater. They exchanged a look.

‘It is the will of the gods,’ Aristides said.

‘Fuck the gods,’ I spat.

Brasidas stepped back and met my eye. ‘You sound like a child,’ he said — a long speech, for him.

But to a Spartan, the essence of nobility is in not showing weakness — and almost any show of emotion, even anger, rage or love — all of these are signs of weakness. A true Spartan hides his thoughts from men.

It’s not an ideal I’ve ever striven for, but I understand it.

Aristides was an aristocratic Athenian and he clearly shared Brasidas’s views. ‘Blasphemy,’ he said.

Together, they made me feel like a small boy who had fled rather than face a beating.

I remember all this because of what Aristides said.

First, he put a hand on my shoulder — an unaccustomed familiarity.

Then he said, ‘Most men praise the gods when they are happy and curse them when they are sad. But piety lies in obeying the will of the gods all the time. It is easy to be a just man when all of your decisions go well and all the world loves you. It is when all is lost that the gods see what you really are.’

I spat again. ‘Let the gods note that I’m tired and wounded, then,’ I said. I had lost fingers on my left hand, and they ached — the ends hurt all the time, making sleeping difficult, and I had trouble closing my hand.

Briseis was lost. For ever, as far as I could tell. Again.

Let me tell you a thing, thugater. I had determined that if the Greeks lost I would not return alive. I had seen too many defeats. My house was too empty, despite my daughter. Yes — despite her.

But we had not lost. Beyond all fears, it was the Spartans who lost. And now I was alive and all my hopes in ruins. In a way, it was worse then Lade.

At Lade, I felt Apollo betrayed us. At Artemisium, I felt as if the whole pantheon deserted us.

Aristides left his hand on my shoulder. ‘Now we show the gods who we are,’ he said.

Brave words, in a moment of despair.

Eurybiades summoned us as the sun rose. Some of the ships had already left — two Athenian dispatch boats, and a whole squadron of Athenians under Xanthippus, one of their navarchs.

We were a grim and silent lot — three hundred captains. Many of us had wounds from the day before, and there were gaps. We had lost almost fifty ships in four days.

Themistocles had his himation wrapped around him and the end pulled over his head, and seemed unwilling to speak. His bluff, man-of-the-people face looked bloated, and he himself seemed crippled.

In that dark hour it was Eurybiades who declined to crack.

‘We will need a fleet rendezvous,’ he said clearly. ‘First, let us make sacrifice to the immortal gods and then let us have some clear counsel.’ He led us up on the headlands to the little temple of Artemis and there he sacrificed a pair of rams. Themistocles played no part, and Aristides hung back.

Adeimantus of Corinth held the sacrifices and walked with the Spartan navarch back down the hill to the small rise where we gathered to talk.

After prayers and some exhortations, Eurybiades raised his arms. ‘Let me hear you,’ he said. ‘What is our next move?’

He looked at Themistocles. The Athenian democrat shook his head.

‘Corinth!’ said Adeimantus. ‘We can hold the isthmus for ever, and if we should lose it, we have the Acrocorinth, which can host a mighty army and hold until the gods come to aid us.’

Themistocles twitched, like a wounded man who is wounded again.

No one was going to listen to me, so I walked around the circle of men slowly, hobbling a little on my second-best spear, until I reached the Athenian orator.

I poked him.

He ignored me.

‘Themistocles!’ I hissed. ‘If you don’t enter into this thing, they’re going to sail away and leave Athens to its fate.’

Themistocles met my eye. ‘Athens is already doomed,’ he said. ‘Don’t you understand? Attica is open. The Persians will come at us now, as they have always desired. It is over.’

I frowned. I wanted to say what Aristides had said to me, but Themistocles was not the man to accept arguments about excellence and the gods.

‘How great would men think you if you stopped the Persians now?’ I asked him. ‘The fleet is not beaten.’ I pointed. ‘Yesterday they flinched, not we Greeks.’

I’m not sure what I believed, thugater. What I meant. I hated that Themistocles would not even make a fight of it, even while I recognised the totality of our defeat.

Aristides had followed me. He and Themistocles hated each other, of course, but in that hour they were both Athenians.

‘We must at least have the fleet to cover the movement of all the demos — the people — to Salamis,’ Aristides said.

That shook me. Of course, they would empty Attica.

My daughter was at Brauron, dancing with the maidens. She was in Attica.

Aristides crossed his arms.

Themistocles slowly straightened, like a man waking from sleep. His voice was carefully pitched. He sounded as if he did not care.

‘None of you can sail to Corinth in a single leg,’ he said. ‘You’ll want to take water on the beaches of mighty Ajax, where Salamis brushes the sea.’

Adeimantus grinned. ‘We can take on water while we watch Athens destroyed!’ he said, and laughed like a boy, so that men turned their heads away in shame, and shuffled away from him. ‘But then, we sail for Corinth.’

Themistocles shrugged as if it was a matter of little moment.

Eurybiades nodded sharply. ‘Salamis it is. Day after tomorrow.’ To the Corinthian, he said, ‘It is not fitting to speak of the destruction of Athens. It is close to blasphemy.’

From the Spartan, these were strong words.

Adeimantus laughed, more of a bark than a laugh, a sound made to gain attention as a child, I’d warrant. ‘Mighty Lacedaemon sent one king and a handful of men to protect Greece. Why pretend? Sparta wants Athens destroyed as much as Corinth does.’

Eurybiades’ face grew red and his reserve showed the first sign of cracking that I had seen.

Adeimantus realised his error and held up a hand, like a man signalling defeat in a pankration bout. ‘No — I spoke only in jest.’

‘An ill jest,’ I said.

Adeimantus turned on me. ‘I do not speak to you.’

I let it go. I wanted to get to my daughter, not to have a fight on the beach.

The gloom engendered by the death of Leonidas stayed on us even as we got our hulls into the water and indeed, my thugater, it was on us for many days thereafter. But I reminded young Pericles, when he was going to return to Cimon, that Heraclitus said, ‘Souls slain in war are purer than those that perish in disease.’

‘What does that mean?’ Pericles asked me. He had a way, comic in a man so young, and yet also a little terrifying, of asking the most direct questions with his big eyes boring into you.

I shrugged. ‘Who am I to tell you what Heraclitus meant by anything?’ I said. ‘But if I had to hazard a guess, I’d say he meant that as the basis of soul is fire, so, in combat, a man’s soul is hottest, and if he dies then, he dies with his soul closest to its natural state. Whereas my master thought that moisture was the antithesis of the soul and that in sickness we become weak and our souls moist.’

Pericles shook his head. ‘I would like to believe that the king of Sparta went straight to Elysium, to walk there with Achilles and Hector. But …’ He met my eye, this adolescent boy. ‘Yet I do not think it is so simple. I think this is the sort of thing men tell each other to console themselves for the loss of a comrade.’

Then he bowed. ‘I am sorry, Lord Arimnestos. I speak as if I was your peer.’

I had to laugh. Even through the pain of losing the king, even in the knowledge that my world was about to be destroyed, there was something antic in the serious, steady-burning arrogance of the boy.

‘Go prate at Cimon,’ I told him. ‘I’ll see you in Attica.’

I said the last because I had determined to go first to Brauron, which is close by the sea, to pick up my daughter. But my oarsmen were Plataeans almost to a man, and they made it clear that they had other priorities.

I couldn’t be angry. First, I knew from Cimon that the great sanctuaries, like Brauron and Sounion, would be evacuated anyway. My daughter had many friends and I had guest friends in Attica. She was not going to be abandoned in the rush to the ships. Athens and Themistocles had been planning their resistance to the Great King for three years and every aspect of defence — and every option — had been examined. One of the few real advantages to democracy in the face of crisis is that the involvement of every free man means that many different points of view are brought to bear on a problem; admittedly, half of them are foolish or even fantastical, but many men bring new ideas and ready wit. Most of the rural population of Attica was already evacuated to Salamis and to the east coast of the Peloponnese. Troezen especially welcomed Athenian refugees, and little Hermione took many Attic farm families (and, as it proved, many Plataeans), but most of the people went across the narrow straits to the island of Salamis.

At any rate, my daughter was safe enough. Or so I had to hope, because unless I wanted mutiny and blood, my oarsmen wanted to go home. At Artemisium we were an easy day’s rowing from the narrows where Euboea nearly connects to the mainland, just another day’s walk or two from Plataea over to the west near Mount Cithaeron. As we had nearly the whole phalanx of Green Plataea and nearly every man of substance either rowing or serving as marines — and as the Persians would be at our gates in three days or less — Plataea represented the more immediate crisis.

We rowed with a will. But as we rowed, I marshalled my arguments for the rowers. When we camped on the beaches of Boeotia that night, I convinced Myron and both Peneleos and Empedocles, sons of Empedocles, and old Draco himself and Myron’s rich friend Timaeus — and Hermogenes and Styges and Idomeneus and the rest — to give me one more day of rowing. I suggested that some men be sent ahead, walking, or riding. I sent Ka and his archers and they found mules and a pair of horses to carry our messengers. I didn’t ask Ka too many questions about where the horses had come from.

‘Let’s take the ships around to Athens,’ I said to the men on the beach. ‘They need them for their evacuation. And we can go as swiftly over the mountains from Eleusis as across Boeotia from here.’

Myron nodded. ‘There might already be Persian troops loose in Boeotia,’ he said. ‘Their cavalry-’

Hermogenes nodded. ‘And the Thebans have already Medised,’ he said, as everyone spat. ‘They’re between us and home, here.’

Styges glared. ‘Traitors,’ he said.

We chose a dozen steady men — well, Idomeneus was one, and no one ever called him steady, but they needed a killer to get them through if the going got rough. Ka stole more horses — let’s call it what it was — and the messengers rode off with careful instructions and Timaeus to see they were obeyed.

The rest of us woke before dawn and rowed. We were in advance of most of the rest of the fleet, because we were rowing to save our goods and families. We passed the headland at Brauron south of Marathon under sail and I could see the temple and the old bridge and I was delighted to see that there was no one moving — no girls dancing in the courtyard, no children playing at goats on the old hill above the cave of the goddess. We had a beautiful wind and we ran towards Sounion on an empty coast, but towards afternoon, as we prepared to weather Poseidon’s promontory, we saw the flash of oars behind us. We knew Cimon’s squadron had stayed to watch the Persians and we guessed the Athenian’s public ships were moving in a body under Xanthippus, rowing as hard for home as they could.

I feel I should explain that, in the years before Artemisium, the Athenians had invested the whole output of their silver mines in building a fleet of more than a hundred well-built triremes. Five of them were being crewed by Plataeans, and had Plataean officers and marines. It seemed to me awkward — at best — to leave these five ships on the beaches of Boeotia while we ran home to save our furniture and I said so.

We were not, as it proved, the first ships of the Allied Fleet to reach the beaches at Phaleron. But we rowed past, despite the late hour, and swept into the narrow channel between the Island of Salamis and the mainland as the sun dropped into the sea beyond Megara to the west.

The Bay of Salamis was covered in ships. Fishing boats, merchant ships of every size, rowing boats, military pentekonters and even older triakonters of thirty-oared ships were going back and forth, turning the sea to froth by the beating of their oars, or so the poets liked to say.

I landed my ships on one of the north-facing beaches on the island of Salamis, and after borrowing a horse and making some hasty arrangements, we gathered the men together — all the Plataeans in one great council. It was, to all intents and purposes, a meeting of the City of Plataea.

Why Salamis? Because that’s where most of the Athenians were. Like I said, I didn’t want to leave their precious ships to rot on the beach or be captured. I handed the five public ships over to a member of the Athenian boule and he was already finding rowers for them while Myron negotiated our passage across to Attica — easy enough, as the Athenians’ shipping was mostly empty going that way. We arranged for all our men to go to Eleusis.

Then I spent time putting my professional crews back together. I had men who were Plataean citizens, but my oarsmen, in several ships; we’d sent them out through the fleet to train other rowers. My Lydia had kept her crack crew, and now I left her under Seckla with a skeleton crew and no marines, but with Ka and all his archers and Leukas as his helmsman. Paramanos was dead but we’d retaken Black Raven and I gave her to Giannis with Megakles as his helmsman. In fact, Black Raven was not my property and eventually a probate court in Athens or Salamis would see to it that someone bought her and Paramanos’s daughters were paid, but that was all in some hazy future where the rule of law applied. In the immediate future, Athens needed every ship. Paramanos had a mostly Athenian crew, including Thracians, Cilicians, and men of Cyrenaica, his port of origin so to speak, but they had taken terrible casualties fighting three Egyptians at Artemisium and we had to refill the benches. Aristides was going to Corinth with his wife, but his helmsman Demetrios had his own long Athena Nike well in hand, and he’d made captures at Artemisium and seemed content. Amastis, our rebuilt Corinthian trireme that has been the source of so much trouble, had come through both battles untouched and her crew was professional and under Moire, who needed no help from me. But Moire, like many of his men, had taken up their Plataean citizenship and had homes or families in Plataea. For some oarsmen it was an empty honour and their families were already on Salamis, but others, and especially my old crews in Lydia and Storm Cutter, crewed by Chian exiles and other men who’d settled at Plataea, had deeper roots — and they were needed. Many of them wanted to go back to Plataea, even for a few hours, to see to their families.

Moire had adjusted to ‘being Greek’ better than many of my other foreign (or barbarian) friends. His name was an allegory for his acceptance. In his own tongue, Moire (or something that sounded that way) meant ‘a jet black horse’ or so he told us, but in Greek, Moira is the Goddess of Fate and Fortune and many newly enfranchised ex-slaves chose to call themselves ‘Moiregeneus’ or ‘Born of Good Fortune’. Moire never changed his name. And that, I think, represents the man. He sacrificed to our gods, especially to Poseidon, Lord of Horses. But he always had his own gods, small images he carried with him at sea. It was his particular skill, or tact, that he seemed to like being Greek, but never ‘needed’ us particularly. In Athens or in Syracusa you could find him squatted down on his heels with a dozen other men of his kind, jabbering in their barbarous tongue and then he’d stand up, pull his himation around himself, and walk off for wine with another kubernetes or helmsman.

As usual, I digress. Harpagos offered to stay with the ships and he was the best kubernetes or trierarch of the lot. I left him in command with good officers and loafing warriors like Sittonax the Gaul and orders to keep the men who stayed busy every day, either training to fight or training to row. He had about three full crews when the rest of us headed for Plataea and I had almost four hundred men.

Brasidas shook his head. ‘I’ll stay and train the marines,’ he said. He meant the ten best oarsmen he’d chosen to replace all the men who’d died on Black Raven. I pitied them. But I also knew I’d sleep better knowing that he and Seckla would run a tight camp with sentries and watchtowers — and that Brasidas, although it hurts me to say it, could command a respect from the Athenian oligarchs that Seckla would not. I was to regret not taking him, but that’s the way decisions go.

That night on the beach we burned Paramanos. We’d saved his body, or rather, Harpagos and Cimon had, in hard fighting, and we put him on a funeral pyre as his people’s traditions’ demanded, sang the paean of Apollo and other hymns, and drank too much. He had been first my captive, then my not-very-willing helmsman; then a rival pirate under Miltiades and, only later, my peer and friend. He was the best navigator I ever knew, except perhaps Vasileus. He was a good father to his daughters and a right bastard to his enemies. Here’s to his shade.

Aristides the Just was in exile. He wasn’t even supposed to be on Salamis, but we all stretched a point. He was eager to get over the mountains to Plataea where his wife awaited, but he wept — openly — to see the whole of the population of Attica gathered on the beaches of Salamis, like a nation of beggars. His words, not mine.

The camps of the Athenians stretched inland, on every path of flat ground the island had to offer. Ajax the Hero may have come from Salamis but it is not the most prosperous place, nor well inhabited, and it lacked the resources to feed the whole population of Attica for any significant time.

But I digress like an old man, which I certainly am! We held our meeting, and our leaders — Myron and Draco, as Timaeus was already gone with the messengers — chose to take the Plataean people over the isthmus to the Peloponnese. Well, Myron had already made that decision and had sent messages to that effect, but sometimes democracy is retroactive tyranny.

In fact, the Spartan navarch had invited all of our people to go to Sparta — probably meant as an honour, it led to a lot of loud talk and some rough jests in our meeting. In the end, they decided to go to Hermione, a small town on the west coast, one of Sparta’s allies, a member of her league. Hermione was five days’ hard walking from Plataea and a man could pack a cart with enough food for that journey. Because many men had gone to Epidauros to be healed at the sanctuary of the God-Hero Asclepius, many knew the roads to Hermione. Myron hoped to find shipping at the isthmus, and although it plays almost no role in this story, I’ll say that my three merchant ships never joined the fleet because they ferried Boeotians — first, people from Thespiae and then Plataeans — to Hermione from the Gulf of Corinth.

At any rate, that was the plan that seemed best. And the phalanx would march home under Hermogenes. I was determined to go to Plataea and come swiftly back over the mountains to the ships. The sight of thousands of Attic refugees crowding the beaches of Salamis taught me a lesson; I knew from the moment I saw them that Athens would fight. The Athenian fleet was not going to sail to the isthmus to defend Corinth and Sparta. It was going to fight right here.

Of course, there was another alternative that didn’t bear thinking about — the possibility that Themistocles would sell the alliance out to the Medes. Thebes had, as I have said, already gone over to the Great King. Athens might make the same choice.

But I doubted it.

Aristides found all the Brauron girls after Paramanos’s feast, when he met a friend of his wife’s on the beach. The next morning, as the phalanx of Plataea loaded themselves into a dozen Athenian grain ships on our beach, I rode over the headland with my sons to find Euphonia as a skope in a small lookout tower, watching the waters of the Gulf of Salamis for Persians. All her Brauron sisters were living in a camp of Laconian severity, at the foot of the cliff. The girls were very proud of the orderly, military camp. They had stacks of firewood, simple tents, and when I came, they were practising dancing on the wet sand.

Euphonia laughed and embraced me, which brought a lump to my throat, and still does. She was becoming a young woman and not a slip of a girl — becoming, but not yet there, although her body was lean and hard from a summer of dancing and archery, riding and fighting and hunting. Brauron was like a Spartan academy, but for the girls of the wealthy. The women who ran it, the priestesses of Artemis, had been required to abandon their temple with its magnificent Pi-shaped stoa and its great dining hall where women learned to recline on couches like their brothers — and not spill their wine, I hope.

She began talking without sparing her brothers so much as a look. ‘I love to be sentry,’ she said. ‘I pretend I’m Atlanta, running with Heracles. Or perhaps Achilles. And I want to be the first to spot the Persians. I saw your ships, Pater! I was on duty yesterday, too, and I sent my pais running to say that the fleet of Plataea was on the beaches! And I won the younger girls’ dancing, but we had to dance on the sand and not in the great hall, because the Persians are going to burn it, and Mother Bear Europhile says that the dance counts anyway, but Eustratia said it wasn’t fair. And next year I’ll be allowed to wear the red cord! Unless the Persians burn the temple,’ she said in sudden deflation.

I kissed her. ‘Euphonia, this is your brother, Hipponax, and no doubt you remember Hector.’

Euphonia gazed at them her usual adoration. ‘I saw them,’ she said. She smiled. ‘Hector is no longer anyone’s hyperetes,’ she added. ‘I can tell, because Mother Bear Thiale lectured us on armour, and that thorax is a very good one. Anyway, I didn’t need the lecture — you own lots of armour, and you even used to make it, so I raised my hand and said-’

At this point the boys crushed her in two manly, armoured embraces that stopped even her flow of words for a few moments.

She waved a red shield — a small thing of hide — down at the camp, and instantly, as if they were all Spartan peers, a girl sprinted out of the camp and up the ridge to us. She and Euphonia exchanged salutes — exactly like my own epilektoi! — and my daughter grinned.

‘We want to carry swords or at least knives, but Mother Bear Thiale will not let us,’ she said. ‘I want to kill a Persian,’ she added. ‘Anyway, we’re going to do our special “little bear” dances this morning, and I want you to see them. It’s an honour even to be asked to see them,’ she said to the two young men.

They chose — wisely, I feel — to look respectful and impressed.

What followed was better than a mere delight. Despite our hurry — and believe me, I felt the beating of the wings of time’s winged horses with the passing of every moment — we sat on stools provided by the priestesses. Wine was brought us, and we poured libations to Artemis and heard them sing her hymns — three of them, one disturbingly like a marching paean.

Mother Thiale turned to me. ‘You believe that is too warlike for women,’ she said.

I cocked an eyebrow. ‘No,’ I said. ‘I’m delighted to see what a little Titan you’ve made of my daughter.’

Thiale seemed ready for a different answer. She looked at me carefully. ‘Report has it that you are a man of blood,’ she said.

I shrugged. ‘I am, at that. So I imagine my daughter bears the same blood that all the Corvaxae bear, and perhaps even the same daimon.’

She frowned. ‘The girls are ready to begin,’ she said.

The girls dancing were between the ages of eight and fifteen. Fifteen was quite old for an aristocratic woman to still be at Brauron — most of them were married by then. But some stayed — some stayed for ever as priestesses, and some remained as guides and junior teachers for the younger girls, summer after summer. In truth, it must have been a fine life for a girl who liked sport, and I know that some weep bitter tears when they leave the sanctuary for the last time. Who encourages women to run the two-stade race after they have borne a child? Who gives new mothers the time to dance the sacred dances or shoot a bow? What of the girls who excel at athletics the way boys do? Well might they be bitter when their fathers announce to them that they must put away childish things and bear children.

Well, I am not one of those fathers. I hope.

At any rate, there they were — big and small, tall and short, long-legged and short-legged, black-haired and brown-haired and red-haired — the height of fashion at the time, let me tell you — and golden-haired like Euphonia. They were beautiful in their coltish innocence, afire with the excitement of their exile and the adventure of the war, and in the rising sun, they looked like so many muses or naiads. Most wore a simple boy’s chitoniskos, worn off one shoulder and thus exposing one breast on a few of the older girls. In the dawn, preparing for their dance, they were all stretching like boys in a gymnasium. In fact, the women’s gymnasium at Brauron was a wonder throughout Attica, and perhaps until that moment I had never seen women as athletes. But closest to me was an older girl whose legs carried the same sort of muscle my legs wore when I could run two stades faster than all the other youths, and her arms showed the same ridges of muscle at biceps and triceps that any well-trained boy had.

My two boys were acting like clods, their mouths open, their teeth showing.

I leaned back on my stool and kicked Hipponax sharply in the shin even as I held my cup out to a young girl of perhaps ten years to have it refilled.

Let me add that if Hector and Hipponax had ever had a thought in their handsome heads about anything but war, I had assumed it was about each other. This is natural enough, especially in war — they were young and tough and together every minute. Perhaps I should have given it more thought. I suppose I assumed they were Achilles and Patrocles, or something like.

As it proved, they were just two boys who’d never seen a girl. Much less twenty girls all on the edge of womanhood, wearing an arm’s length of transparent cloth that revealed one breast, one shoulder, and most everything else, especially when a girl stretched a leg high in the air in a manner than no boy could manage, or did a handstand.

I’ll blush myself if I go on. These girls were young enough to be my daughters. If they were shameless, they were also utterly innocent. Their very shamelessness came of summers of high training with no men about to stare or pry.

Of course, the staring was not entirely one-sided, and one girl, crowned with a magnificent double braid of her own red-brown hair, seemed to need to stretch each of her legs repeatedly just a horse-length from Hipponax, who watched her with the attention he usually saved for an adversary in a ship fight.

‘It’s not polite to drool,’ I said quietly.

Hipponax didn’t seem to hear me.

Hector dug a thumb under his arm. Hipponax squirmed, but he and the girl seemed to have their eyes locked together. I think I actually saw the arrow of Eros’s little bow go into his eye. He was slain dead on the spot.

Hah! That was a lovely morning.

At any rate, the girls began to dance — none too soon, for the boys. And there was nothing lovesome or erotic to their dance — they leapt and crawled, they kicked and growled, little bears indeed. Some of the girls were quite good — to my delight, Euphonia was one of them, her movements pure and graceful, her back straight. Once in a while she’d spoil it by taking her lower lip between her teeth in concentration, but she was good.

I must have been grinning. The priestess leaned over. ‘She’s very good, although a little arrogant.’ She paused. ‘Have you found her a husband already?’ she asked.

Really, if the whole of the Persian fleet had rounded the promontory that instant, I wouldn’t have been more surprised. ‘No,’ I said.

Mother Thiale smiled. ‘Ah,’ she said. ‘She has much spirit,’ she said. ‘Is she to be a priestess?’

‘In Plataea, Mother, most priestesses are wives,’ I said. ‘We are a small city. My mother was hereditary priestess of Hera.’

Mother Thiale looked non-committal. ‘Ah,’ she said.

The girl with the double braid wrapped around her head — a man’s hairstyle meant to pad a helmet — was clearly one of the dance leaders. She did a movement with her legs and hips, exactly as we do it in Pyrrhiche, her feet both performing a sliding turn in place, her hips turning as if to face a new partner — or a new opponent.

All the other girls followed suit. In this portion of the dance, the braided girl did each figure alone, and then the rest of them would copy her. She kicked, jumped, stretched. While she was dancing, she was beautiful. When the figure was done and all the girls took water, she was revealed as being very tall and heavily built — almost as well built as a man. Proportioned — still pretty. But her beauty had been in her dance.

And she drank her water with her eyes on Hipponax.

After they drank water, the dancers came together for one more dance. This was a hymn to the sun and another girl led it, this one smaller, blonde and very serious and grave. But if the first girl’s dancing had been beautiful, this girl’s dancing was divine, or at least direct from the goddess. Her sense of the timing in the music was superb — in fact, I’ve never seen a professional dancer who was her equal. It was as if she understood something in the music that the other girls didn’t hear.

My Euphonia danced well — her movements were crisp and to the music, and this time she didn’t chew on her lip. But she was merely a devotee of the Goddess of the Bears. For the duration of the dance, the blonde girl was the goddess herself, and her legs flashed and moved with a precision that only the very best warriors could match.

They trained well, at Brauron.

The two girls — the braided one and the smaller one — were, as it always proves, best friends. Summers of competition at everything had only made them closer. You could see in the way they stood together, and the way they drank the water from their black ceramic canteens, and giggled.

Hipponax and Hector watched them with something like the adoration that dogs have for their masters.

Euphonia bowed low to her teachers, got a pretty hug from the blonde dancer, and came over to us.

‘You are a very good dancer,’ I said. The first duty of every parent — provide accurate praise. Empty praise is worthless, but children are like soldiers — they need praise to enable their work.

In fact, if you ask me, training soldiers and oarsmen is the very best training for being a parent. Except, come to think of it, women do neither of these things and seem to be very good at mothering, so perhaps my wits are astray.

At any rate, she hugged both her brothers, and accepted their praise.

Hector was the bolder of the two. ‘Who is the blonde girl? The one who danced-’

Euphonia laughed. ‘Heliodora? She’s the best dancer they’ve ever had here.’ She paused. ‘At Brauron I mean. Pater, why is the fleet not fighting at Brauron? The Persians will destroy the temple.’

I suppose I smiled. ‘My little bear, Athens will be lucky if the allied fleet agrees to make its stand here and defend Salamis.’ I looked around at the bay in the growing September sunlight. ‘If we could lure the Persians into fighting inside the bay-’

‘Brauron has a rocky promontory on which all the Persian ships could wreck themselves.’ She all but bounced while she spoke.

‘Perhaps, with Poseidon’s help, they will.’ I tried to make light of it.

Euphonia caught sight of my left hand. I’d been hiding it inside my himation, and she caught me, as children do. She pulled it out.

‘Oh, Pater!’ she said.

Even the priestess winced.

I smiled. You learn, in time, how to play the hero, and how not to say, ‘Yes, it hurts as if all the Furies had stung me themselves, and it’s also clumsy for eating.’ Instead, you smile and say, ‘It’s nothing. I never even needed those fingers.’

Or words to that effect.

Brasidas would, I’m sure, pretend that his hand was uninjured.

‘It only hurts a little,’ I said. To distract her, I drew lines on the sand. ‘Look, Little Bear, if I want to fight the Persians — you know they have a much larger fleet?’

She nodded wisely. ‘Everyone knows that. Everyone knows we beat them at Artemisium, too.’

The priestess smiled, proud of her charge.

‘So we did, girl.’ I went back to my drawing.

‘One of our ships is worth ten of theirs,’ Euphonia said.

That statement distracted Hipponax. He laughed. ‘Don’t you believe it, Little Bear,’ he said. ‘Their ships are mostly just like ours — as well trained, if not better. The Phoenicians are first-rate sailors, and the Ionians are no worse.’

Hector nodded. ‘And either of them is better than the Corinthians,’ he said. He spoke just a little too loudly and his head remained turned towards the two girls who were tying their sandals.

The girl with the braids spent quite a bit of time on her sandals.

The other girl seemed impatient — and unaware of the male attention that her friend was enjoying.

Euphonia put her hands on her hips. ‘They can’t be so good,’ she said. ‘They’re horrible alien barbarians.’

Hector laughed aloud — a little too loud, and he won his wager, because both girls allowed themselves to look at him. ‘The Ionian Greeks are our own cousins. In some cases, literally,’ he said.

‘Too true,’ I said. ‘Look, my sweet. If the Great King’s ships catch us in open water, they can envelop a flank — perhaps even both flanks. They have six or seven hundred ships. All they have to do is back water in the centre and the rest of the ships can take all the time they want. Eventually — ’ I drew arrows around the ends of my hypothetical allied line ‘ — eventually we lose. Brauron is a peninsula; we could only anchor one flank.’

‘And anyway, silly, it doesn’t have any beaches. Where would we camp? Where would all the ships start the day? We’d have to row from here!’ Hector mocked her.

‘I am not silly,’ Euphonia said.

Hipponax had the good sense to look as if he wasn’t there. Hector looked annoyed. ‘War isn’t for girls,’ he said dismissively. ‘It’s complicated.’

Euphonia didn’t burst into tears or anything of the sort. Instead, she crossed her arms. ‘Not as complicated as having a baby,’ she said. ‘Or running a household. But it’s funny that you want to insult me,’ she added wickedly, ‘as I know both their names, and I’m friends with them. And I doubt you’ll convince them to come talk to you by staring like statues.’

Hector, stung, pretended adolescent indifference. ‘Them? I don’t know who you are talking about,’ he said.

‘Oh,’ Euphonia said. ‘Fair enough then.’ She smiled, knowing her power.

I thought I had better step in before blood was shed. ‘You should gather your things, Little Bear. We have a ship for the mainland-’ I was in mid-sentence when I realised that taking Euphonia to Plataea was probably foolish. She would be caught in a column of refugees, dragged to Hermione …

On the other hand, Penelope, my sister, would take her. That made me worry about Antigonus — of course I didn’t know he was dead yet — and that made me think of Leonidas, dead. And other dark things.

Unbidden, I reached out and hugged Euphonia.

‘But my summer isn’t over for two weeks!’ she said. ‘I’m going to stay here and help fight the Persians!’

Unbidden, I had a whole series of pictures — of my daughter as a slave, of the rape of the island of Salamis. Of Adeimantus, delighting in the destruction of Athens.

On the other hand, I didn’t want to drag her across Attica and Boeotia, especially if there really were already Persian cavalry patrols out in Boeotia.

‘Please, Pater?’ she said.

She didn’t squeeze my hand or bat her eyelashes or any of the things you see women do in plays. She just looked at me steadily. ‘Pater? I want to stay here and fight for Greece and dance with my friends,’ she said.

Naturally, I agreed.

She jumped up and down and clapped her hands. Her priestess appeared pleased, too.

I smiled, and then nodded to my young men. ‘Make your bows, gentlemen,’ I said. ‘Euphonia is in good hands and we will return here in a few days.’ I made my own bow to the priestess. ‘I expect to be five days at most. My ships are beached in the next bay and if my daughter needs anything — money, or other things — my friend Seckla has my purse and my ships.’

The priestess nodded with dignity. ‘It is inspiring to the girls,’ she said, ‘for one of the men who fought at Artemisium to watch the dances.’

‘We all three fought at Artemisium,’ Hipponax said.

The priestess looked at him as if he was made of dung. ‘Really?’ she said. ‘I’d have thought you too young.’

Both of them flushed.

Euphonia laughed.

I smiled, I confess. ‘They fought very well — like heroes in the Iliad,’ I said. ‘The two of them cleared a Phoenician ship.’

‘Oh,’ the priestess said with renewed respect. ‘You fought as marines!’ She smiled — she was so dignified that her smile was a contrast and it spread like sunshine. ‘My brother is a marine sometimes.’

The boys didn’t hold a grudge. They bowed, and then turned, almost as one, to watch the two girls, who were still lingering, held by the power of attraction of Eros and youth.

‘Last chance,’ Euphonia whispered. ‘I could introduce you.’

Hipponax looked at her. ‘Please, little sister?’

‘He has to say he’s sorry,’ Euphonia said. ‘I’m not silly.’

Hector smiled and you’d have thought that he was the gift of the sun, his face was so bright. ‘I’m sorry, Little Bear,’ he said. ‘You are not any sillier than the rest of us.’

She grinned. ‘As long as you understand that they’re way too good for either of you,’ she said, in her mature age-ten wisdom. She ran over to the two girls and took their hands, swinging back and forth on the braided girl’s long, muscular arm.

Both girls smiled and, without hesitation, came across the sand to us.

The priestess paused at my back. ‘I don’t let girls talk to boys,’ she said. Then she smiled. ‘But I suppose that if they fought for Greece, they’re men, are they not?’

‘I suppose,’ I said. I tried to let her hear all of my lack of belief in their maturity. She laughed, and I laughed — we were old people of thirty-five or so.

But Hipponax and Hector were lost, aswim in a sea of Eros and Aphrodite. But my daughter, like the good girl she was, walked the two young women right past the boys and to me.

‘Pater, this is Heliodora, the best dancer we have ever had. And this is Iris, who wins every sport.’ She laughed. ‘This is my father, Arimnestos.’

Heliodora looked at her friend and arched a brow. ‘I think I have won some contests outside dancing.’

Iris laughed. ‘Far too often. But it is a great honour to meet a man so famous. Indeed, my father calls you “Ship Killer” and says you are a living hero.’

Any woman’s admiration is worth having. There’s something remarkable about the pure admiration of the young. I smiled at her smile.

Heliodora bowed her head. ‘I won’t repeat what my father says of you, sir,’ she said quietly. ‘My father is Cleitus of the Alcmaeonids.’ Then she raised her eyes.

My daughter nodded with surprising dignity. ‘Heliodora and I decided that it’s nothing to us that her father’s men killed my grandmother,’ she said. ‘Women’s lives do not need to involve revenge, do they, Mother Thiale?’

The priestess met my eye, not my daughter’s. ‘The principal role of women in revenge,’ she said, ‘is as convenient victims.’

‘I’ve known a woman or two to exact a bloody revenge,’ I said. ‘Heliodora, your father and I have renewed our oaths of non-aggression until the Medes are defeated. Please accept my oath that I mean you no harm.’

She smiled. ‘Oh, I like everything I hear about you, except killing our horses,’ she said. She tried to say this with dignity and becoming modesty, all the while trying not to give her attention to young Hector — or Hipponax. It was a pretty fair performance for so young a woman.

I decided to take pity on all of them. ‘Despoinai,’ I said to the two young women, ‘it would be rude of me not to introduce my son Hipponax and his inseparable warrior companion, Hector, son of Anarchos, both of whom serve me as marines. They fought quite well against the Persians.’

My son shot me a look of pure love.

Parenting. Much like military leadership. Certainly.

The next morning, a day behind Hermogenes and the phalanx, we crossed into Attica. We landed on the open beach where pilgrims going to the great mysteries landed, and there were still great crowds there — hundreds of families with their sheep or goats or oxen. And there were ships, two great Athenian grain freighters as big as temples, waiting to load the people and perhaps even the goats.

I purchased horses at the beach. It was a sudden inspiration, directly from Poseidon, no doubt. Many of the refugees waiting to take ship were prosperous people and, as I said, they brought all their animals, but there was no way that all the herds of Attica could fit into those ships, much less be fed on the grass of Salamis. I picked up six horses — all fine animals — for a song, and was blessed into the bargain by the gentleman who owned them. I think he really didn’t want to slit their throats. And I had armour and weapons and three men to move quickly. I promised him that he could have them all back at the end, if all went well.

He was right to fear the slaughtering knife for his animals, though. That’s just what a small body of hoplites was doing to any animal that could not be loaded, butchering them on the spot for meat, and burning the carcasses. Athens meant business: she was not leaving grain or animals to feed the Great King’s army. She was, in a terrible way, destroying herself to hurt her enemy.

But once we left the shore, Attica was a strange land indeed. It was empty. Not only were all the people gone, but so were most of the animals. As we took the road for Plataea over the mountains, I remember passing the tower at Oinoe where my brother died and seeing a cat sleeping in the sun on a wall. That cat was almost the only living thing I saw that day.

Plataea was already emptying by the time I arrived. We made the ride in one day and came in the dark. But Eugenios was there to take my exhausted mare and there were beds made up and sweet-smelling blankets and we collapsed into them, and in the morning there was warm milk heavy with honey and fresh bread.

But there wasn’t a hanging on any of the walls, and the chests that held all my spare armour and all my fine cups and plates, my bronze platters and some nice pieces of loot from my days of piracy — they were all gone. So were the better pieces of Athenian ware, like the krater with the painting of Achilles receiving his armour from his mother, and the kylix with Penelope weaving at her loom, from which our fresco painter took his model.

All gone.

Eugenios smiled in quiet triumph. ‘I sent a mule train to the isthmus under Idomeneus’s orders,’ he said. ‘The slaves packed as soon as your message came.’ He bowed his head. ‘I would like to come with you, lord, if you are going to fight the Persians.’

In fact, there were several dozen men who came that morning, slaves released from service, or sent by their masters. Plataeans are surprisingly generous — many men freed slaves to build the walls in Marathon year, you will recall, and now several of the richer men were freeing farm workers to help Athens. Slaves and servants have a world of their own — look around you, thugater — you think they only talk to you? And Eugenios, my steward, had organised it all.

But I never expected packing my house to be my real task. I had people for that, people trained by Jocasta. And in my very clean kitchen, the great lady of Athens looked me in the eye and said, ‘Antigonus died with the King of Sparta. We heard yesterday. Your sister needs you.’

So I took my new mare and road over the Asopus to Thespiae, and there I found Penelope. She had already cut away a great slice of her hair in mourning and her eyes were red with weeping. She didn’t say anything, certainly nothing accusatory.

She just stood in her house-yard with her arms around me while her slaves packed. She cried a little.

The first words she said were, ‘They mutilated his body.’

By then, we had all heard that the mighty King of Persia, King of Kings, reigning over kings, was a petty tyrant who had ordered the heads of the last five hundred hoplites to fight all hacked off, and their bodies cut up. I won’t even describe it. It was — atimnos. Dishonourable. Stupid, too. No Greek who heard of the mutilation of the King and his companions would ever forget it.

It is perhaps one of the curses of warfare that men do such stupid, horrible things and think themselves strong, when in fact, all they prove is that they are weak.

But it told us another story, too. That the Great King intended to mutilate us.

‘Come with me to Salamis,’ I said. ‘Come and help me take care of Euphonia.’

Penelope didn’t smile or laugh or make a joke. ‘I’ll be ready in the morning,’ she said. She shrugged. ‘I think people will need me at the isthmus,’ she said. ‘Your daughter is in good hands.’

‘There’s a rumour that there are Saka cavalry at Thebes.’

We both spat.

‘Come with me now,’ I said. ‘I don’t want to leave you for the Medes.’

She thought a moment, and then she nodded. With surprisingly little fuss she gathered two women and her children and their Thracian nurse and they all mounted horses. Ajax, one of my steadier men from former times and a near neighbour, gave me his handclaps that he’d see her goods safely to Corinth. The phalanx was marching all together, with a long column of baggage carts sandwiched in between, as we’d practised.

And I wasn’t going with them.

I took my sister and her people back to Plataea as the sun went down, the fifth day since we’d left the beaches at Artemisium. There was a watch on the walls of my town and the only people left in it were the freedmen coming with me to row, the rest of my sailors, all armed and having a bit of a feast, and the rearguard of the phalanx under Alcaeus and Bellerophon. They had a hundred men, more or less, to cover the rear of the town’s goods, which had left already.

They’d planned it all without me. Which was as well, because the roads from Thebes were choked with refugees, and Plataea’s gates were shut for the first time in many years.

I left Jocasta with Pen and went to my forge. Styges was there, loading the last of his tools for the baggage train. He was not going back to Salamis with me; many of the Epilektoi were going to the isthmus to be the core of the Plataean phalanx in the new League army. I did not need so many marines on my remaining ships.

He looked up when I came in. Darkness had already fallen and he had a dozen lamps lit to provide light, wasting oil that he would lose anyway, I suppose.

‘Eerie, isn’t it?’ he asked me. ‘So quiet.’

I nodded and pulled out my greaves. In the last fight at Artemisium, someone had put a spear point into my left greave. Or, just possibly, my own sauroter — the bronze point on the butt of a Greek spear — had penetrated the armour. It can happen, when you shift grips. Either way, I had a hole in the armour the size of the tip of my little finger and I needed it repaired.

It was really just an excuse. I needed to do something with my hands. Mourning for loss is an odd thing. It can come and go. I knew that when the King of Sparta fell I had probably lost Briseis, and now, talking to Penelope, seeing her tears, feeling the weight of the loss of her husband — a good man — it was all more real to me.

I knew in my heart that the Athenians would fight for Salamis. I suspected that Adeimantus would make sure that the rest of the allies left them to die alone. I was determined to die with them.

I needed a little time with my god.

‘Fire hot?’ I asked.

Styges smiled. ‘There were still coals when I came back. Tiraeus must have done some work when he came back, and the slaves have been steady. I sent a shipment of finished goods away yesterday.’

It was, after all, our business. We all shared it, although I had paid down the capital to put up the building.

‘Where is Tiraeus?’ I asked. He had not come out to fight at Artemisium. No shame to him — the town picked five hundred men by lot to stay.

‘He took the first mule train towards Corinth, the night Idomeneus arrived.’ Styges frowned. ‘Why do I know all this and you do not?’

‘I’ve been with my sister,’ I said, and explained.

At any rate, I went to the bellows and pumped while he packed fine engraving tools into a leather bag. I told him about Xerxes mutilating the bodies and we both cursed. Probably helped me make the fire hot. When the fire was fierce enough, I rooted around the floor looking for some scrap bronze.

‘This place is too clean,’ I joked.

Styges shrugged. ‘You haven’t been here,’ he said. ‘What are you doing?’

‘Patching greaves,’ I said.

He nodded, looked at mine, and admired the perfection of the workmanship. ‘You made this?’ he asked.

‘No,’ I admitted. ‘A man named Anaxikles, as young as you are yourself. The best armourer I’ve ever seen.’

Styges sniffed. ‘Not so good that you didn’t take a spear point through his work, however.’ He tossed me a rectangle of neatly hammered bronze plate, thinner than parchment. I bent it back and forth between my hands and decided it was suitable.

He grinned. ‘I reckon anything right for mending pots will mend armour.’

I spent a happy hour shaping and planishing my patch. It was a simple process, but soothing. I marked a line right on the greave with a scribing tool for the lower edge of the patch, so that it would always go to the same place as I tried it. Then I began to shape it, first with a simple crease down the middle to match the central ridge on the greave — see here, thugater, where the front of a good greave is like the prow of a ship? The prow of the ship turns water, but the sharp angle at the front of the greave mimics the line of a man’s shin and turns the points of weapons, too.

But of course, the blow had struck where the sharp line of the shin bends away into the soft curve of the top of the foot — a very complex shape, and one that requires forming both by pushing and pulling the metal.

But it was a small patch and soon enough I had it where it would drop over the original like a mask on an actor’s face.

Then I had to planish it to make it as smooth and nice as the original. Anaxikles had been a master at planishing whereas I always found it a little dull, but that night, in an empty Plataea, I worked the bronze willingly, tapping away to make it smooth with my best flat hammer, and then cutting the patch with a file and then polishing it again with a linen cloth full of pumice, and again with ash until it glowed.

And then I punched fourteen holes around the edges and used them to mark fourteen more in the damaged greave itself. By then, Styges was done and his two slaves were waiting for me while I drove the tiny rivets home, nipped them short and widened their ends into conical sockets I’d made with a tool. It was not master work, but it was good, solid work, and when I polished the rivets so flat that they were nothing but faint circles against the bronze, I felt that I had done honour to my god and to Anaxikles who made them. I poured a libation to Hephaestus, and sang one of his hymns, and then I sent a prayer that Lydia and Anaxikles were happy and healthy.

I looked at that greave with real satisfaction. I remember the darkness, the silence, the smell of the burning charcoal, and the spilled wine and the bronze.

Styges was the last man left. We had a ceremony to put out the fire.

‘The Persians will no doubt destroy the town,’ Styges said.

I nodded. ‘Styges,’ I said. ‘I don’t plan to come back. If — when Athens loses — I won’t stay alive to see what comes after.’

Styges nodded. ‘Idomeneus said the same, last night,’ he said.

‘Just so you know.’

Styges nodded again, his young face silhouetted against the darkness by the orange glow of the last of our forge fire.

Then we said the prayers and cursed the Persians. Fire has power, and so does darkness, and any time a man willingly extinguishes fire, he has power.

Or so Heraclitus said.

We walked down the hill in a sombre mood, to my house. North of us, near the small acropolis, I could hear oarsmen singing. I hoped they were welcoming our new freedmen … who were only going to be free a few days anyway, before they died. I hoped a few days of wine and freedom had some value.

The world was as black as my forge.

We rose with the dawn and joined the rearguard at the gates. Styges closed the gate from inside and then came over the wall on an orchard ladder, which we broke to smithereens. No need to make it easy for the Medes to take our town.

Aristides took his wife and went with the column to Corinth. He had many friends there. There was a rumour that all the exiles were to be recalled and indeed he’d been with the fleet at Artemisium. But he meant to follow the law — he always followed the law.

‘We might fight before you come back to us,’ I said.

Aristides shook his head. ‘I doubt it. The Great King’s fleet will not move so fast, and besides, Themistocles will have to convince the Corinthians to fight at Salamis.’

I said nothing. Neither did he.

Neither of us believed that Corinth would fight.

In the end, Pen chose to go with Jocasta — mostly, I suspect, because they were both women.

I held her for a long time and then I gave her an ivory scroll tube that held my will and all my plans for Euphonia.

She bit her lip. ‘I can’t lose you, too!’ she said.

I said nothing. Aristides turned his head away. Even Styges tried to be somewhere else.

‘You think you will lose?’ Penelope asked. ‘You think …’

I was in armour. I motioned to Hector to bring my shield. Penelope understood, and she took wine and blessed it — she was a priestess of Hera — and poured it on the face of my aspis, cleaning it. A little flowed through a place where a Persian arrow had penetrated, at Artemisium. Then she wiped it with a clean cloth, and I took it.

She was dry-eyed, as a proper matron must be.

She touched my hand once more, and then — we were gone.

I had one more encounter that morning. We rode away toward Cithaeron and Athens, and we passed my cousins on the road. Simonalkes, younger brother to the Simonides who Teucer killed, and Achilles, and Ajax. Simonides was tall and cautious, and Achilles — what a terrible name to give a boy — was not very bright and very aggressive. They had a wagon and two oxen and all their wives on donkeys. They were walking, and I was riding the opposite way.

I thought to ride by them, but it was too awkward. I was in armour, of course, on a horse. At any rate, I dismounted.

‘You are going the wrong way,’ Simonides said — with a little ill will, I thought.

‘I’m returning to the allied fleet,’ I said. ‘The Greek ships are at Salamis.’

‘As long as there’s a fight, we can count on it that you’ll be there,’ Simonides said. ‘Will the army ever form, do you think?’

It was a fair question and asked without malice. The Spartans were still slow in getting their army together, and that autumn, with Attica and Boeotia threatened, it seemed suspicious, to say the least.

‘The Spartans said to form the allied army on the isthmus,’ I said. ‘Hermogenes should know more by the time you get there.’

‘Hmmph,’ Ajax said, his arms crossed. ‘So you’ll desert us again?’

Age does have its benefits. I didn’t cut him down on the spot. I sighed — audibly. ‘I’m deserting you to help Athens fight the Persians,’ I said. ‘The best of luck to you, cousins, and may the gods go with you.’

Simonides shocked me. ‘And with you, cousin. You’ve been more than fair with us. May I have your hand?’

We shook.

‘My brother,’ he said quietly, ‘is not much of a farmer and fancies he might be a soldier. Would you take him?’

I looked at Achilles, and saw nothing but a bag of blood and rage. Like many strong young men.

He narrowed his eyes. ‘I don’t need-’ he began.

His brother shook his head. ‘Be silent, brother. Arimnestos, I ask this of you, as head of our family, formally. Please take my brother where his arm may hack at enemies and not friends, and where, if he dies, his blood will go to the gods and not stain our threshold.’

Ouch. Achilles had really angered his brother. I wondered what he had done.

But blood truly is thicker than water. Simonides had referred to me as the head of the family. I had little choice.

‘You have a panoply?’ I asked Achilles.

He nodded.

‘You think I’m mad?’ Idomeneus said quietly.

I turned. ‘This young man is all yours,’ I said.

Idomeneus laughed. ‘I walked into that,’ he said. ‘Lad! You’ll need a mule for your kit!’

From the flanks of Cithaeron, we looked back over the fields of Boeotia. There was smoke rising towards Thebes — but it might just have been a farmer burning his fields. At our feet we could see the rearguard of the Plataeans moving out from the shadow of the old mud-brick walls, the glitter of the late-summer sun reflecting off their spear points and their bronze.

Over towards Thespiae we could see more metal and a cloud of dust.

Horses.

And closer to hand, as well.

Just for a moment, it was hard to get the senses around just exactly what we perceiving. There were matching dust clouds on a number of roads — on the ridge opposite Plataea, across the Asopus, there was one, and then over to my right, looking down towards Eleutherae, there was another.

It took as long as a hurried man might take three breaths.

‘By Poseidon,’ whispered Idomeneus.

It was a veritable cloud of cavalrymen. They were expanding like the ripples in a pond from Thebes, which lay at the centre of all the roads in Boeotia, less than a parasang — that’s thirty-six stades — away. From high enough on Cithaeron, you can see Thebes.

We were seeing hundreds — thousands — of Persian cavalrymen pouring over the fields of Boeotia like water from a rising tide rushing over a beach.

More particularly, the different groups of horsemen on different roads were, at least some of them, converging on Plataea. And they moved — discernibly. Marching men scarcely seem to move, but these dust clouds moved quickly. I looked back at our rearguard, headed for Corinth by the lower Asopus road. The cavalry over by Thespiae would cut them off. No great matter — I expected a hundred hoplites would make short work of the horsemen. But not if they were then taken in the rear by the cavalrymen coming down the main road behind them.

I had almost five hundred men at my back — well-armed, fit men, veterans of a dozen fights. With oars.

‘We need to go back,’ I said. ‘We need to sting this nearest group and draw them up Cithaeron behind us, rather than let them go by and sail into the backs of the hoplites.’

Men were already pulling their weapons off the donkeys and the mules. A few of us had horses and armour and shields, although I’ve never met a man who can manage an aspis and a horse at the same time.

I didn’t fancy facing Cyrus and his war-brothers on a horse, anyway.

‘Follow me!’ I yelled, when I felt I had enough men armed. That’s all the plan I made.

We came back down the mountain on the road past the shrine. There were a dozen of us mounted — all the best-armed men — and we left the rest behind immediately. It was my sense that we needed to do this thing immediately or not at all.

We went down the hill from the shrine to the stream that runs there, where Hermogenes and I swore our friendship many years before. That’s where the mountain road meets the road to Eleutherae.

Only then did the idea strike me: we needed an ambush.

At the tomb, naturally.

I turned to Hector. ‘Back to the men on foot,’ I said. ‘Get to the dip in the road just beyond the tomb and make an ambush. Both sides. Tell Moire to take command.’

Hector nodded. ‘Moire to take command. An ambush from both sides of the road, where you killed the bandits before I was born.’ He smiled to show he knew what I was ordering.

And to show how much fun he was having.

Young men, and war. It is a remarkable thing. I was ready to fall off my horse, my knees were shaking so hard — I was committing myself to be bait for a trap, and on horseback. And Hector was smiling. He didn’t want to go, but he was happy.

He rode away.

My mounted men were a hodgepodge of Plataean gentry, like Teucer, son of Teucer, and Antimenides, son of Alcaeus, on the one hand, and sailors who happened to have armour and a horse, like Giorgos of Epidauros and Eumenes, son of Theodorus, an oarsman. And ten more, including a couple of reliable killers in the persons of Idomeneus and Styges, his apprentice. In war, anyway.

‘We wait here,’ I said. ‘When we see the Persians, we turn and run up the hill. No heroics. All we want to do is lead them off this road.’

Idomeneus drew his sword.

I heard the hoof beats too.

‘No heroics!’ I said again.

‘This from you?’ Idomeneus asked.

They were coming quickly. I assumed they knew what they were about; that their prey was our baggage column. It only took a runaway slave or a traitor.

‘Form across the road as if you mean business,’ I said, and took my spear in my right hand. I didn’t even have a shield, which made me feel naked, despite my shiny bronze armour.

We were on a good spot of road, with a big rock on the right and a bit of a drop on the left, so there was just room to form up two-deep, on horseback.

The lead Persian wore a beautiful scale shirt plated in gold, and a magnificent tiara. The man behind him wasn’t Persian. He was a Saka. I knew his kind immediately from the long flaps on his leather cap and the sheer amount of gold he had. He saw us — and whooped.

That whoop could freeze your blood.

Then everyone did everything wrong.

I had never fought on horseback. That’s not really true; I have been in some fights on horseback, but never willingly, and never against Saka.

If I was committed to this suicidal action, the worst thing I could possibly have done was to remain stationary. I have since learned that the only way to meet a charging horse is on another.

On the other hand, my adversaries should have uncased and loosed their bows. They are the greatest archers in the world. However, they are also the most enthusiastic horse thieves, and I’m going to guess that they didn’t want to hit our horses. They thought we were easy marks.

The result of our mutually bad military decisions was a disastrously deadly melee. We had armour and spears and the Saka could actually ride and were coming fast, but had no armour. Most of them had short swords, a few had much longer swords, and at least one woman had a rope.

We should have run. But it was all too fast. They should have shot at us. But they were too excited.

The Persian slowed, but the Saka leader didn’t crash into us. He threaded between Idomeneus and Hipponax, slashed at Hipponax with his little sword — an akinakes as I later learned — and vanished into the second rank, his superb horsemanship guiding his mount through the narrowest of gaps. Had he used his bow, we’d all have died.

As it was, Idomeneus, no great horseman, nonetheless put his spear point into the man’s back and killed him.

Then the wave front struck us. There were a dozen of them — more — and they panicked our horses when they struck. My nice mare was an Attic riding horse and she had no notion of staying to fight. I struck one blow, a spear blow that missed my target against a man in the most outlandishly barbarous trousers I’d ever seen — purple and yellow diagonal checks. Perhaps he wore them to confuse his enemies. I certainly missed him and he caught the shaft and pulled and I almost lost my seat. The girl came up on my other side — she threw the open loop of her rope and my lovely mare pivoted on her back feet. The rope slid off my arm and I was free. The man in the foolish clothes slammed his spear sideways into my head and I covered it with my own spear and thrust. My spear went into his horse’s neck.

My horse didn’t stay to let me finish him, which is a pity, because now I know I was spear to spear with Masistius, the commander of all Xerxes’ cavalry.

But even as his horse fell, blocking the road, other Saka were all around us. A blow clipped my back plate and another slammed into my helmet, but my good helmet held the point and I got a hand on my sword. Beside me, Hipponax landed a shrewd blow to a Saka’s head and the man fell, although the blade cannot have cut through his heavy leather hat. Then Hipponax’s horse spooked as mine had, and we were both moving down the road, away from the fight. This is why I have no love for horses. I could not get my horse to turn, and so I was fighting while rotated, trying to thrust over my shoulder and under my arm. Try it.

Two of my better-armed sailors were down. Teucer and another man were still fighting.

I had a pair of Saka racing with me. He was one of the men with the long swords, and his was slightly curved. He cut and I had to cover with my sword — my favourite, my long, straight xiphos.

His friend reached for his bow, a small, vicious recurve that sat, strung and deadly, in its own scabbard. A gorytos.

I knew where this was going to end. I also knew that the opening of the uphill road to the shrine was about to appear on my left. I leaned my weight back to slow my mare, and cut — one, two — at my opponent. Our swords rang together and sparks flew, and then I cut again, at shoulder height, and again.

And then, as he stayed with me stride for stride but seemed unable to regain the fighting initiative, I flicked a thrust overhand, my palm down. It just scratched his face — perhaps I took one of his eyes, or he was blinded by the cut, but he threw his arms up and my full back cut put him down — and then I was sawing the reins to slow my mount and turning hard. My second assailant with the bow vanished — still riding flat out at a gallop, he continued on the main road.

His arrow struck. He’d shot almost backwards over his saddle, but his aim was true, and the arrow dug a ridge in my best helmet and lodged between the crest box and the helmet. He turned his horse, reaching for another arrow, and I lost sight of him.

Idomeneus was emerging from the back of the melee, having left his usual red ruin. Another man in bronze armour was down in the road — Antimenides, son of Alcaeus. I knew him by his crest. Our Olympian.

Teucer’s son was fighting over the body and, as I watched, he too was cut down. They were too many for us and we were bleeding good men — men who would rule them on the deck of a ship.

For a terrible, slow beat of my heart, my head was at war with itself. The hero in me longed to save Teucer. The leader in me — or was it the coward — said run. Indeed, we should never have fought. But the sons of my friends were dying.

In an agony of indecision, my hands pointed my horse up the hill and I rode for it. Styges was with me for ten strides and then his horse pulled ahead.

The Saka followed us.

My little mare took an arrow in the hindquarters and didn’t falter, but we had only heartbeats to live.

Idomeneus was beside me, and he was angry. He hated to run.

I thought of Eualcides. If you live long enough, you’ll run too. The day comes, and the moment, and life is sweet.

It was horrible. When you flee, you have no idea what the man behind you can do — or is doing. Is this your death blow? Is that arrow the one? You see nothing but the trees in front of you and the hope of the sky.

There were five or six of us left in a little pack and the Saka had lost a few strides on us at the turn. But now they were on a good road, headed uphill, and their superior riding skills, their light weight — most of them were small — and let’s be fair, their better horses, began to tell.

Idomeneus took an arrow between the shoulder blades. He leaned forward and the pain showed.

But we had made it to the tomb. I suppose that Idomeneus wanted to die there.

He turned his horse.

‘No, you mad Cretan!’ I roared, and slapped his horse with the flat of my sword.

His horse ambled a few steps and fell against the side of the priest’s house. The horse had six or seven arrows in him. Idomeneus managed to get to the ground without falling and he was hit again, although the arrow shattered against his helmet and I was showered in cane splinters.

He sat suddenly.

I saw the aspis hanging on the wall of the priest’s house. It was Calchus’s old one, and it had seen better days — the bronze face was now brown and green like sun dapple in the wood, and the face was no longer smooth, because a generation of aspiring warriors had used it as the target of their youthful attempts to be spearmen.

It was on my arm as fast as I could get off my mare.

I took the old spear that leaned next to it and stood over Idomeneus. There was a lot of blood.

The first Saka to burst into the clearing rode right past me, up the trail.

The next three all saw me and they all changed direction together, so fast that I almost missed my cast, but I didn’t, and the heavy spear hit a horse and the horse fell. I took the second spear.

One of the Saka leaped the falling horse and one didn’t.

The clearing was suddenly full of mounted men and they were coming both ways around the old priest’s cabin — the Saka can ride through the woods as easily as riding on a road.

An arrow hit my aspis and shattered. And then another, like the blow of a rock thrown by an angry man, and then two together. And then it was like rain and shafts began to penetrate the surface and search for my arm and hand.

I was going to die, and it was just a matter of when. So I slammed my aspis into the man who had leaped the dying horse — into his mount, really. He cut at me and I cut at him, and we both missed, and he was past. I turned and threw my spear into the next man to come at me, and then I put my back against the priest’s house. That bought me a few heartbeats, and then I slipped around the corner — the clearing was full of men on horseback and summer dust.

Just for a moment, the woods beckoned.

But I had made my decision. Briseis was lost. Greece was lost.

I ran in among them. I was not blood-mad — in fact, I was as fastidious as I have ever been. My long xiphos is a wonderful thrusting weapon, a killing tool beyond compare. Cuts are all very well when you are desperate, but when you want to kill, the thrust is the thing. I thrust quickly, putting the tip three or four fingers into a victim and then pulling it out and moving on. I didn’t discriminate — I struck horses and men, whatever offered. I was determined to keep moving, to do all the damage I could.

Truly, I have no idea how long this went on. I took some cuts, and an arrow went right through my shield and struck my left hand in the antelabe, but by some joke of the gods it emerged where my two missing fingers weren’t.

I remember fighting for hours. I’ll be fair and assume I was in among the horses for as long as a man takes to sprint a stade. Perhaps two.

A horn sounded, and then another, and then all my sailors burst upon them like a wave.

Again, that’s how I remember it. And a delicious thing happened — one of those moments that make you savour your role in the world.

The moment a horn sounded I remembered that I had friends — that I had, in fact, laid an ambush.

And in that moment I went from a serene and very deadly suicide to a man desperately eager to live.

You must laugh. I do now. I don’t know if it was the best I had ever fought, but it was inspired — god inspired. I truly think Athena guided my hand as I passed from Saka to Saka, stabbing this one in the buttock and that one in the kidney and another in the face or arm, a horse in the arse, another in the breast — all while moving like a dancer through them.

But the horn sounded and my godlike powers fell away and left me, terrified and eager to live, in the midst of my enemies.

What saved me was that the sounding of the trumpet seemed to have the same effect on my adversaries. Perhaps they smelled a corpse. Since we moved here, thugater, we’ve come to know many noble Saka, or Sakje as they call themselves, and they are experts at ambush. Perhaps one of the leaders didn’t like what he saw.

Anyway, as soon as the horns sounded, they began to flow away.

Hipponax burst into the clearing and threw his spear, knocking a man into the dust. The man fell from his horse and his head hit one of the boundary stones of the sanctuary and split open with an awful sound — one of the few things of that fight I remember clearly.

And then the clearing was full of my oarsmen and they were cheering. Hipponax says I looked like a hedgehog and that may indeed be true. Certainly I was carrying more than twenty Saka arrows in my aspis and I had blood trickling from two punctures that had come all the way through the shield’s face.

I went back to Idomeneus. He was breathing — slowly, and in odd bursts, like a man snoring. Men took my aspis and other men pursued the Saka down the mountain. I stood and breathed and the sum of all my wounds began to sap at me. I had been hit repeatedly at Artemisium, I’d had very little sleep, and now I’d fought twenty horsemen and my skin was pierced in half a dozen places.

Hipponax got Idomeneus out of his fine thorax. He’d fallen on his back and the fall had broken the shaft of the arrow there. Or perhaps it had already broken — the cane shafts that the Persians and the Saka used were strong, but brittle once they cracked and any sort of resistance seemed to break them, especially when the weather was cold. I had the splinters of a dozen failed arrows in my forearms.

But Idomeneus was alive, if deeply unconscious. The arrow that penetrated his back plate had not gone far through the heavy muscle of his upper back.

Hector tore into the leather bag he wore and produced our salve, made of honey and oregano and a few other things, blessed by a priestess of Hera. He slathered it over the wound, wrapped the sticky stuff in his spare chiton, and he and Hipponax threw the wounded Cretan over the back of a spare horse. There were a dozen Saka horses milling about the clearing, and the more horse-oriented young men were catching them.

My mare, to my astonishment, came to me. She had an arrow standing proud of her rump, but she seemed immune to it. Nonetheless, as the salve was out, I said a prayer to Poseidon, Lord of Horses, and while a pair of my marines held the horse’s head, I made a small cut with my scabbard knife and withdrew the arrow, and then used the salve. She was none too happy with the operation, I can promise you, but I already loved her — such heart! I had never really fancied a horse before. See what a good prayer to Poseidon can get you? Eh?

I realised in the next few minutes how used I had grown to being a great man with many officers. I was unused to having to figure out each aspect of the next step — I had men I trusted for that. But Idomeneus was down and Teucer, son of Teucer, was dead and none of the rest of the Plataeans was ready to command, much less to make the sort of decisions that would allow me to think about the larger issue.

In brief, the larger issue was that Boeotia was alive with Persian cavalry. I had to assume that they were headed for Attica by the same road we were going to use, and they would be much faster than we.

I had not, to be honest, expected Xerxes to move so fast.

But let me add that it was the treason of Thebes that allowed him to do so. Thebes opened her gates, and worse, fed the Medes. So when his advance guard swept down the road they were given fodder and water for their mounts and food and wine for the troopers. Even a day’s hesitation by Thebes would have saved much, slowed the storm, held back the lightning.

In fact, Simonides, my cousin, had his own fight on the road, and his brother Ajax lost his life less than five stades from where we had our fight. Except that Simonides, who had grown to manhood in Thebes, said the men who attacked him were Thebans in a motley collection of false Persian clothes. I believe it. Thebes always hated Plataea, and they were quick to attack us. Certainly we know that it was Thebes who asked the Great King to reduce our town to rubble.

But I get ahead of myself.

I could see we had to retreat. I hoped that we had helped Alcaeus. His noble son had taken three bad wounds, any one of which would have been crippling — I hoped it was not in vain. But I couldn’t venture farther down that road, and in fact I had Hipponax sounding his horn, over and over, to gather the more impetuous oarsmen back. I found Moire and told him to get the men together on the road — I wanted to lie down and go to sleep. How often has that not been the case, friends? You just want to rest for a little, but the world and the gods and your enemies will not have it.

I pulled the boys — who were about to become officers — and Moire into a huddle while the men formed. The oar-masters made passable taxiarchoi. I wished I had Seckla.

I wished I had Ka and his Nubians. Archers — by Apollo, archers are worth their weight in gold.

However, as the women of Plataea say, if wishes were barley cakes, beggars would eat like kings. I had four hundred and fifty oarsmen, all hard men. We had donkeys and mules and food for three days and a lot of experience in war.

I started by stripping the shrine. The old Hero has always been a friend of mine, and a favourite, and I’ve given him many a libation of wine, aye, and blood, too. Styges and Idomeneus had stored grain there, in big pithoi jars set into the floors of the barn I’d built them, and wine, and we took it all, or burned it. I told my men to gather downed branches and pile them over the old entrance to the tomb — you can’t loot what you don’t see. We set fire to the huts ourselves and I took the old window of horn that some donor in the past had made — very well — for Calchus, and I put it in the tomb before we closed it up.

Perhaps I’m not fully explaining, as some of you look so puzzled. The shrine was the centre of our military training for Plataea. We stored food and a few weapons there and we were determined that none of this would aid the enemy. And it was an act of piety, as well, hiding the shrine, denying it to the foe. Besides, we knew it was time to build new sheds. Some of them were pretty foul.

In the middle of all this activity, Onisandros, one of the junior oar-masters, came to me and saluted.

‘I was thinking, Navarch. We could …’ he grinned, ‘chop up them dead Saka. Show ’em what we think of ’em.’

I nodded. ‘No,’ I said.

My feelings must have shown in my face, because Onisandros — a good man — stepped back. ‘Oh — pardon me, Lord!’

I shook my head. ‘Listen up!’ I called, and all the men nearest me fell silent, or stopped dragging branches, or arranging the Saka bodies. And Teucer — the only man who was dead, although a dozen were wounded — they were burying him inside the sanctuary wall.

The best we could do, under the circumstances.

Anyway — most of them turned to me. There was the usual hum — some men will never shut up, and I am one of them, I confess it.

‘We will not desecrate the dead. Why? Because we’re Greek! By Poseidon, men! Do you want to be as guilty of impiety as the Medes? Let them burn in Hades for their sacrilege. We will win this war because we are the better men, because we are above such petty things. I know you are angry. I am angry too. My brother-in-law — his head cut off, his body maimed by cowards — lies in the sand at Thermopylae, exposed by the Persians like a criminal. I am angry — but for my part, I wouldn’t do that to a dog.’

Well — something like that. Thank the gods I’d had time to think about it. And I’d already decided I wouldn’t allow such shit before I was exhausted and angry and lost Teucer’s son.

I still blame myself for that. We didn’t need to fight on the road at all — just run. Not one of my better days. And you’ll note that when I stopped at the tomb to try and save Idomeneus, I wrecked the ambush’s chance of a real victory.

Well, I can’t regret that.

But what I’m getting at in this story is that one of the worst parts of leading men in war — and women, too — is that you make mistakes, people die or are maimed, and then you have to go right on leading them. You want to lie down and sleep, or murder some prisoners, or perhaps just take your own life in shame — and I have known all these moments, friends. The black despair after combat — the abyss, some of us called it then.

But they are all looking at you, waiting for you to give an order, when all you really want to do is cry. Or die.

More wine, here.

Where was I?

Ah — my huddle — Moire and Hipponax and Hector. I told them my plan in some detail. I sent Hector with the fastest runners to go up the trail ten stades and set an ambush. I told Hipponax that he’d be next and that, no matter what happened, he’d be taking the next group of oarsmen another ten stades, to the shoulder of the mountain overlooking Eleutherae and there he’d set another ambush. And that the two of them, each with twenty men, would play leapfrog with the column.

This is how you retreat — with a sting in the tail. Men pursuing quickly become careless. There is some part of the human animal that believes that running forward is winning and running backwards is losing, and perhaps this is even true, but in a well-conducted retreat you can use this against your enemy. I learned all this from Aristides, and some more of it from Brasidas.

Oh, how I missed him, too. I felt a fool for leaving him at the ships.

At any rate, as soon as our plans were made, Hector chose his men and led them off at a run. We loaded the last of the grain on the pack animals.

I got my own, lighter, aspis off my pack mule, replaced its weight with grain, and placed myself at the very back of the column with my picked men. My little mare was going to have an easy time of it for a few hours.

I gave the boys a ten-minute head start and then we marched.

All that time — maybe an hour we were at the shrine, with the sun getting higher in the sky — I worried that the Saka would come straight back at us. If they had, we’d have made a fight, but it would have been ugly.

Once we were moving, though, we were in better shape. A moving column funnels enemy action to the back. It is hard even for cavalry to surround marching infantry, in bad ground. Out on the steppes or on the sands of some open desert I suppose it would be terrible for the hoplites, but in the woods, we could walk almost as fast as they, when we were on a road and they had to infiltrate through the big old trees and rocks of Cithaeron’s lower slopes.

Be that as it may, we didn’t see a man or horse for two hours. We passed through our first ambush and they joined our column, then Hipponax led his men away at a run to form the next one. Tired oarsmen being forced to run half the day in their looted panoplies glared at me with death in their eyes, but I was used to making them row all day and I smiled and shouted words of encouragement, as the Spartans do — ‘Well run, Empedocles! You look like a god, Onisandros!’ — and we continued. When the sun was high in the sky we took an hour’s rest, with skope on all the high points, watching for the enemy. Just when I was picking the sausage skin out of my teeth, Kassander, one of the older oarsmen in a good leather spolas dyed bright red, called me from the rock above the road.

‘Ari! Cavalry!’

‘Arm!’ I shouted. We were resting in our ranks — a very basic precaution I’d learned at Marathon — and we got to our feet and got our aspides on our arms before the sound of hoof beats was clear.

‘Drink water!’ I shouted. It is amazing how fast fatigue and black depression falls away when you can hear your foe advancing.

Obediently, men drank from their canteens and leather water bottles, handing them round to the awkward sods who had none, and then, at my wave, Onisandros got the baggage animals moving.

I was between Alexandros, one of my marines, and Sitalkes, another. I had Styges at my back and all ten of the men who blocked the road were in full panoply. In fact, I’d put on my arm and thigh guards since the last halt. I wasn’t going to eat any more splinters. They hurt.

The Saka were cautious. They came on slowly, stopped as soon as they saw us across the road, and they loosed arrows. My best aspis began to take hits.

The next hour was like a long, brutal fencing match. Between shafts, we’d back step — when we went around a curve in the road, we’d run, our ears cocked for the rush of hooves, but the Saka were too cautious, and we’d gain a hundred paces and halt, breathe. sometimes only to run again. Sometimes they’d come on.

After an hour of this, which included one all-out charge — of course we caught no one, but we surprised them and made them run — as I say, after an hour, my legs were made of rubber and I couldn’t have hurt a Saka if he’d laid down under the edge of my xiphos.

Then we switched with Moire and his ten. He was as wily as I and his ten were faster than we had been. I had to admit, watching them from the massed safety of the column, that his ten-fleet oarsmen in light armour were better at the whole game — until a Saka arrow took a man in his shin, where he had no greave. He went down, and the Saka were on him in a moment, shooting down into his body. A few began loosing light shafts at our column, but the gods had allowed our baggage animals around the next turn and the shafts only rattled around off of shields.

The road was steep. We were only making ten stades an hour and I knew we were running out of daylight and we couldn’t deal with a night on the mountain with the Saka.

I told Styges what I had in mind and I ran off along the column. I wasn’t running very well and I had to stop — often. Not my best day.

But I got to the head of the column and then I ran, still in full panoply with my aspis on my arm. I ran along the road for what seemed like an eternity, worried about what was behind me and afraid that I’d lost contact with my ambushing force …

‘Pater!’

Hipponax was on the grassy slope above me. He came out.

‘Perfect,’ I said. It was. To the left, the road fell away in a cliff that gave a magnificent view of Boeotia — the first one a traveller coming from Attica saw. Above us there were some volcanic rocks and some stubby olive trees, but the slope was gentle enough to a man to run down, and steep enough for a few rocks to be rolled.

‘I need you to stay hidden until the enemy is well past you,’ I said. ‘We can’t just frighten them. We need to kill a few and break contact.’

My son pointed proudly at his hillside. It was true — I couldn’t see a man.

‘What if they try to ride up the hill?’ I asked. But that was rhetorical.

I ran back to the column. Now, on the return run, I had to worry that they’d been savaged in my absence. Losing Teucer loomed again. I thought of Antigonus and Leonidas, their bodies shamed by barbarians.

Philosophers are always praising the solitary life, but I don’t recommend too much reflection for the captain. It can be dark in there.

At any rate, they were all still alive. I ran back to the column and immediately sent the twenty men in the front to join Hipponax — all Hector’s men, and Hector too. There wasn’t going to be another ambush. We were almost at the height of the pass and after that we’d be descending into Attica, the valley would widen, and the Saka would have every advantage.

I ran forward — or back, depending on your point of view — to my rearguard, and then I just walked and breathed for a while.

But there are some things you have to do yourself. I couldn’t send a message to make sure the ambush was ready.

That never works.

When I could breathe well, I took my men forward and relieved Moire.

By my reckoning, we were about three stades from the ambush. The ground was slowly opening to the left as we faced into Boeotia. The ground was beginning to drop away to the right.

We practised a feint charge that Brasidas taught and all of us knew it, so I put all twenty-two of us in one block and we backed around a corner and then charged. We went forward exactly fifty paces and then turned and ran.

They broke away from us, loosing shafts. But they were wary, and their shafts were few. They’d been on us for hours and I suspected they were tired of wasting shafts on fully armoured men with big shields.

But we’d only chased them about thirty of our fifty paces when some of them began to turn outward onto the rising ground to our left, to envelop us. Of course we broke, all together, and ran back; and then, after perhaps a ten-pace pause, we could hear hoof beats behind us.

Well — it was like running the hoplitodromos with your life on the line and I began to fall behind, because I’m no longer that fast, thanks to various wounds. And a lot of armour, I confess it.

But we passed the bend in the road, the last bend before the ambush, without losing a man. Now we had two stades to go and the road climbed away slightly. The cavalry above us on the hillside were suddenly confronted with a narrow gorge and had to come down, and they were their own roadblock for a few long strides, interfering with the rush of our pursuers.

My feet pounded the road. I was last by five strides — I, who had once been the best among an army of Greeks.

Another stride. Another.

It was like running at the Persians in the pass above Sardis, except that I was now running away.

But there are some things you cannot ask your men to do, and one of them is to be the bait in an ambush.

The last hundred strides to the next turn in the road looked very long.

But the last fifty didn’t look so bad, and my feet had wings of fear as I heard the hoof beats. The ground shook. An arrow went into my plume, and another shattered on my thorax, and made me stumble — perhaps twenty strides from the turn, and I was the only target they had. All my men had made the turn. I hoped there was a formed body waiting there, a hundred oarsmen waiting-

I tripped, and fell sprawling. My aspis didn’t break my arm, thank the gods, but I rolled over it the way Istes used to, more by Tyche’s blessing than any plan of my own. My knees were lacerated, and before I could breathe, there were hooves all around me.

A horse struck me as I tried to rise and I fell again, this time pulling my aspis over me as Calchus taught.

Above me in the dust a Saka leaned down and shot straight down. The arrow struck my aspis near the rim and went six fingers through and pricked my thigh. Another man put his bow over the back of his head as he rode by and shot down into me, and his arrow exploded on the oak and bronze of my aspis’s rim. They were so close that I could see their eyes, the sweat on their foreheads. They guided their horses with their knees and they were already concerned about the men around the bend. The man who put the arrow into my thigh had a golden torque and a red leather jacket painted magnificently in tiny patterns; the other man had bright blue eyes …

All that between one beat of my heart and another.

They came against the shield wall and it held. For a moment — perhaps three of my terrified heartbeats — it was othismos, the crossing of the spears. But light horsemen, no matter how powerful their archery, are no match for hoplites, even well-armed oarsmen, in a confined space.

The line pushed them back. Men were calling my name.

I was lying in a forest of horse legs, and I could see nothing.

I had the sense to lie still.

The line pushed again — there were horns on the hillside.

Many of the Saka had spears and they were wielding them overarm, trying to reach the men behind the shields. They pressed forward, and the men and horses pressed into them from behind.

More horns, and more; the low braying, like wolves calling, or dogs sounding from one house to another on an autumn evening when the moon is rising. A sweet sound to any hunting man.

My son’s horn.

They charged. I didn’t see it.

The forest of horse legs began to shift. And then the melee exploded outward.

In fact, only one Saka went over the cliff in the first moments, no matter how the song tells it. The poor bastard was on the far left of the fight, or perhaps he thought himself too clever and tried to put his horse among the rocks, and then he was gone over the edge, with a stade or two to fall to the plains of Boeotia far below.

The rest of the Saka turned like a shoal of fish to run — and Hipponax and Hector struck them in the side. The road was not wide. Panicked horses turned and went over the cliff. This time, no more than four or five, but it was, I confess, spectacular and horrible and there is good reason we all remember it.

One horse scrabbled with its back legs on the brink and screamed, and then the rider in the golden torque was gone.

I was back on my feet by then, in the heart of my oarsmen, and my wounds were forgotten for a moment. I went forward, but I never bloodied my spear. We almost pushed our own front rank over the brink in our eagerness, and men were screaming for all of us to stop moving-

We had six prisoners. They were brave men — and one woman — but they were terrified of the cliff.

We hadn’t lost a man. That is important, when you take captives, especially — I’m sorry to say it — a woman. We made them dismount and we took their horses.

By my command, we let them go. We let them see the first signs of our making camp and we pushed them away down the hill.

But the baggage train had never stopped moving, and now the rest of the column — exhausted, but triumphant — walked away. We were not marching any more, but we moved down the pass into Attica as the sun sank to the west, out over Corinth somewhere. It gets dark early on that road, because of the loom of Cithaeron, but I kept them at it until full darkness. And then by moonlight, two more brutal hours down that road with many a stubbed toe and many a curse, until we saw the tower of Oinoe rising in the darkness, lit silver by the moon.

I let them collapse on their arms and sleep. But at first light we were up, with no food and no fires, and we stumbled forward with some very upset pack animals and some very unhappy horses.

I suppose that the Saka lost perhaps twenty men in those fights, maybe as many as thirty, including wounded. But that was enough. We broke contact, which of course, meant to them, as old and wily campaigners themselves, that they’d have to endure another ambush just to make contact again. They chose to let us go.

A sailor can tell you the most surprising things about another ship in a single glance from almost over the horizon. A sloppy sail or a well-set one, the bow a little down in the water from poor loading, or a crisp entry because a ship is loaded well; the flash of distant oars can show you a ragged crew or a tight one. And in war it is the same.

The Saka were brave and very professional, but I learned a great deal about Xerxes’ army in those hours. The Saka were not particularly motivated. They didn’t press us as hard as they would have if, for example, we’d raided their camp. I have reason to know. In fact, they were almost desultory in their pursuit, as if they had better things to do. And it is worth noting that all their cousins were looting helpless Boeotia while they were getting killed, which must have seemed unfair.

But I found it hopeful that the elite of Xerxes’ army, with the possible exception of the Immortals and the noble cavalry, were so unambitious. Just possibly, they’d lost interest in the contest when Masistius went down, but he must have been re-horsed soon enough.

We did have some bodies to strip, and the Saka wore a great deal of gold. We took it and put it on the wagons and I saw to it that we took all their bows and all their arrows, too.

At any rate, the sun rose over Attica and it was empty. My whole body hurt like dull fire, like I’d lain on my anvil and pounded myself all day with a hammer. My hip was scored by the arrow that had come through my aspis and my head had a laceration where another arrow had passed between the crest box and the helmet, damaging both without penetrating either, and my arm had several punctures, all of them red and angry, and of course I’d lost two fingers on my left hand and my hand was puffy and swollen-

Idomeneus was still stretched overt the back of a horse, breathing like a man snoring in a bad sleep. Alcaeus’s son awoke from his stupor to scream in pain and we had to rig a different mode of travel for him. He’d been stabbed twice with spears, once to the bone in the thigh and once through the back of the shoulder under the wing of his corselet; sheer bad luck.

I didn’t want to lose either of them.

I confess I pushed my oarsmen across the plain of Attica like a madman. We ate garlic sausage from our bags as we walked and we kept moving. It was to my advantage that they were oarsmen, used to extreme performance, and not mere hoplites. Aristides would spit to hear me speak such blasphemy, because aristocrats are supposed to believe that the thetes class will always betray them and cannot be trusted in extremes, but my experience is the opposite — rich men will sell their city while the poor will fight on the walls to the last drop of their blood. After all, unlike the rich, they have nowhere else to go.

And of course, they are used to working hard. My oarsmen were magnificent, in a grumbling, angry, bitter, cynical way.

Leon, one of the oldest oarsmen, a man who had some special tie to me, for all he affected to despise me, was one of the best. He’d been aboard Storm Cutter, the first of the name, in the storm that had earned her the right to be called so. He’d been there when we killed most of the Phoenicians and later when we survived the hardest manoeuvre I’ve ever done in a storm. He lacked the voice or the poise to be an oar-master, but he was a big brute with a ready tongue, and he always seemed to end up with me, no matter how many times he collected his silver and went away to open a taverna.

He’d spent most of the last five years aboard Paramanos’s ships, but now he’d taken citizenship in Plataea and here he was swaggering his way across Attica.

‘Careful he doesn’t get you lost,’ he said aloud to a mate, cocking an eye at me. ‘Lord Arimnestos has been known to take a few long ways to get home, eh, lord?’ He laughed his big laugh.

Men muttered about the lack of rations and the fatigue, but Leon shouted, ‘What’s our hurry, Navarch? We’re running from the fucking Medes so that other Medes can kill us, eh?’

I jogged over alongside him.

‘I notice you’re still alive,’ I said.

‘Not for long,’ he said. But he grinned at me.

Where the road splits for Megara and Eleusis I halted them and let them rest in the olive grove. We fetched water from a well. The owner wasn’t there to ask. No one was there. It was wrong, somehow, to ride through villages with no people, or with one sad dog.

The sad dog was at the crossroads. He was a fine tall brute with a brindle hide, not a farmer’s animal but a hunting dog like those my friend Philip of Thrace raised, or Lykon of Corinth, my sister’s favourite. I fed him and he took the food with considerable dignity for a dog and looked at me that way that good dogs do. As if to say, I trust you, man. Are you worthy of my trust?

I have never been a great man for dogs or cats. But that dog — he was alone. He had known better days, and he deserved better than dignified starvation in a small town in a deserted Attica — or being killed by Persians for food.

I pulled the rope out of the lining of my good aspis and made a quick collar to hold him, but from the moment I fed him, he showed little inclination to run. He just wanted more sausage. I fed him most of what I had, noting that I seemed very hot for a man who had only walked a few stades, and that my left hand was bright red, which worried me.

But the grumbling was quite loud, so I wandered in among the oarsmen. ‘We must have taken four or five mina of gold,’ I said. ‘Tonight on the beach of Salamis, we’ll divide it in shares. I’d be surprised if every man didn’t get a daric.’

I suppose I could have given them a speech about saving Greece, but usually a little loot is better.

Or perhaps I’m just an old pirate.

We had to climb the low ridge that towers above the beach at Eleusis, and we were too strung out. I was conscious that we could meet Persian cavalry going in any direction at that point; they could be behind us, ahead of us, all around us. So I sent mounted men racing to the highest point, closer to Athens, and I ordered men to pick up their spears and shields when I saw two of the prodromoi galloping back to me.

But I smelled it before they reported on it.

‘Attica is on fire!’ they said.

And it was true. The Persians and the Medes must have struck the southern slopes of Mount Parnes that very morning, because we hadn’t seen anything from the top of the pass. From the ridge, though, we could see smoke to the north and east, as far as the eye could see. And we could smell it, too.

My new dog sat and howled.

I patted his head and gave him some sausage, which quieted him. Much like the oarsmen with Saka gold, come to think of it.

Before darkness fell, a pair of tubby tuna boats came and took forty of my people across to the Salamis side, where Harpagos and Seckla were waiting. As soon as they knew we were there, they got the hulls in the water with only the top decks manned, and skimmed across.

We saw them coming — five ships under a third of their oarsmen, and we knew they were for us. We’d only been gone from them a week, but it was like a homecoming. For most of the oarsmen it was more of a homecoming than going to an empty Plataea. We put the oarsmen into the ships, packed the top decks with terrified donkeys — not a story I’ll tell, but also not an experience I’d willingly repeat — got the horses aboard one of the tuna boats, and made it to Salamis before the Great Sickle rose into the heavens. Brasidas had made a tight camp, with sentries, and we landed like champions, stern first, and waded ashore with our menagerie of stock to find a hot dinner and fresh bread waiting.

Eugenios moved into my tent without a backward glance and for the rest of the war my food was hot and my dishes were clean. Styges served out the former slaves to Giannis, commanding Black Raven, who was the shortest-handed.

I’d missed a week of meetings, councils and officers’ calls. Fighting the Persians seemed like a worthwhile way to spend my time.

I was just lying on a pile of straw that Eugenios had produced and had my favourite silver cup in my hand, full of good wine, when Themistocles appeared out of the starlit darkness like a god in some play. Probably a comedy about men’s folly. At his shoulder was his slave — we all assumed he was a slave — Siccinius. We’d all met him, and he was rumoured to be the Athenian’s lover, although Themistocles was not a man to be kept to just one lover, or even just one kind of lover. At any rate, Siccinius was a handsome man, a Phrygian who had been enslaved in war, an educated man. Siccinius went wherever his master went.

‘Where the fuck have you been?’ he asked. Then, before I could sputter, he said, ‘Thank Hermes you’ve made a safe return. The Corinthians insisted you were gone for ever — gone to Hermione.’ He nodded to Brasidas. ‘But this worthy man swore you would return, and none of us has ever met an apostate Spartan.’

‘I am a Plataean,’ Brasidas said.

Home, sweet home.

I followed Themistocles and his pais up the beach and over the next shoulder of land, a high outcropping. There, on the spur of rock that divides the beaches, is a small temple, and half a dozen tents. As it turned out, it was where Eurybiades had set his tent, and with him, a dozen Spartan messes, Themistocles, and some other wealthy Athenians. Sometime I’ll tell you about Themistocles’ tent, which was beautiful.

It was inspiring just to stand there, between the two main beaches. Oh, Salamis has many beaches — dozens if not hundreds. But it has three huge beaches that face Attica, and another at the base of a long finger that points right at Athens. The Aeginians had that beach, as it was closest to their home island, to our south, but the Athenians’ ships filled the other three, with the Spartans. The Corinthians were farther west, on the same beach as my daughter’s school in exile. From Eurybiades’ camp, you could see the campfires stretching away east and west.

We were a mighty fleet.

Eurybiades embraced me, which was an honour in itself. I told a little of our journey and produced some of the gold, lest some naysayer like Adeimantus of Corinth say I’d invented the whole thing, but he was gracious, which suggested to me that he was up to something.

On the other hand, they were all still there, which I took as a very favourable sign indeed. It had seemed possible in my darker hours that we would come to find no one but Athenians on the beaches.

‘So Boeotia has fallen,’ Eurybiades said. He frowned.

‘In Plataea, they say that Thebes gave more than earth and water,’ I said. ‘In Plataea, men are saying they opened their gates and fed the Persian cavalry.’

Eurybiades stood straight. ‘May the Gods curse them,’ he said, the strongest thing I think I ever heard a Spartan say.

Themistocles looked out over the bay. ‘And now they are burning Attica,’ he said.

I nodded. ‘Thebes will do what she can to protect her towns,’ I said. ‘So if they want loot, they won’t lose much time on Plataea.’ I smiled, still, in my heart, a cocky boy. ‘Perhaps we taught them to be careful crossing Cithaeron, though.’

‘And what word from the isthmus?’ Adeimantus asked, as eagerly as any. These men were starved for news, and I noticed that Cimon was not among them.

I hoped he was still at sea, keeping watch on the enemy fleet.

‘My lord, no word, beyond that the wall is being built and we were invited — that is, the Plataeans — to send our goods there.’ I nodded pleasantly. ‘My town’s phalanx went to join the allied army.’

Adeimantus nodded. ‘So … the League is waiting at Corinth. No reason for us to linger here, then. Let’s move the fleet to where the army is.’

This had the ring of an old argument and I knew I’d been used.

Themistocles said, ‘We were told that the League army would march, if not to save Boeotia, then to help defend Attica,’ he said.

‘A foolish dream,’ Adeimantus said. ‘Which I told you days ago. Attica is indefensible. You are lost. Let us take the fleet and save the rest of Greece.’

Themistocles was clearly tired of all this, and yet in those days of his greatness he did not give way to anger. ‘If you go to the beaches of Corinth,’ he said, ‘you will go without the fleet of Athens.’

A man I knew very little, although he commanded thirty ships and had fought brilliantly the last day at Artemisium, stood forth. He had beautiful white hair that flowed like a horse’s mane down his back, and muscles like Heracles. His name was Polycritus of Aegina, son of Crius. He was one of many heroes in our fleet, and men listened when he spoke.

He smiled at Themistocles — a smile of the purest dislike, almost hate. And he laughed, as men will when they laugh at themselves. His lips curled, anyway. ‘It pains me like bad milk in my stomach to agree with Themistocles, or indeed with any man of Athens,’ he said. ‘But Adeimantus, if you take the so-called “Allied Fleet” to Corinth, you take no Aeginian ships, no Megaran ships, no ships of Naxos or any of the islands. While we stand here, we cover our homes. If we follow you to Corinth, our homes are open to rape and sack.’

Adeimantus shrugged. ‘While we wait on these beaches, our homes are undefended.’

Themistocles shook his head vehemently, but his tone was measured. ‘That is not true. While we stand here, the Persians cannot pass us. The beaches of Salamis face in every direction and we can, if we must, be the hub of a wheel — we can move from beach to beach around the island as the Persians try to pass us.’

Adeimantus smiled in triumph. ‘So — you would fight in open water to keep the Persian fleet from moving west? So your argument about fighting at Corinth is a lie — you can fight there as easily as here. Better, with one secure flank.’

Polycritus shrugged as if he didn’t care. ‘If you fall back on Corinth, we will not be with you.’

Adeimantus looked at the Peloponnesian trierarchs standing with him. ‘So be it. Go over to the Medes like the soft Ionians you are. We will defend the isthmus.’

Themistocles shook his head in wonder at the man’s stupidity. And truly, my friends, I have to say that sometimes it is painful to listen to the self-delusion of men who should know better. Aye, and women too, though men excel at it.

‘With your sixty ships?’ he asked. ‘Your sixty ships that we have protected in every fight because you cannot row well or keep in line?’

‘You lie,’ Adeimantus said. ‘My ships keep the best order. My ships are the finest. I have rowers who cannot question my orders, proper captains of gentle birth, and years of victory behind us.’

‘Name one,’ Themistocles said. ‘None against Athens, I guess.’ He made a lewd gesture, indicating broadly what the Persians would do to the Corinthians. Many of the assembled Athenian trierarchs laughed. I noted that one of them was Cleitus, a member of the Alcmaeonid family and a pillar of the conservatives. Laughing with Themistocles. War does make for strange alliances. I caught his eye. He didn’t avoid mine. We neither smiled nor spat. It was a little like seeing a woman you used to love with her new husband. Bah — no, that’s a false allegory, because that sight might give me pleasure, and Cleitus never gave me pleasure.

‘Athens didn’t even have a fleet until a few years ago!’ Adeimantus complained, with some accuracy. ‘You just tell your stupid lies. In a few days, you will be nothing.’

‘At least I will not be a Corinthian,’ Themistocles shot back.

Eurybiades’ face never changed. His eyes did catch mine, for a moment.

I smiled. I knew Spartans better than most men, by then. A year with Brasidas and Bulis and Sparthius had taught me a good deal. The old Spartan prince was letting them talk because, to a Spartan, most Greeks talk far too much but do too little.

I moved to stand by him. He put a hand on my shoulder in greeting and managed a small smile.

He was under enormous pressure and mostly he bore it with grace. I suspected that he wanted to kill Adeimantus with his bare hands, and possibly Themistocles into the bargain. I mostly agreed with the Athenian democrat, but he had the most annoying, patronising, intellectually superior tone that won him no friends among fighting men, even when he had himself fought very well at Artemisium. He always had to demonstrate that he was the smartest man in any assembly and his very demonstrations could make you doubt him. How could a man with so many merits need so much applause?

And just then he began a speech with the words, ‘In Athens …’

Now, friends, I love Athens, but many back then did not — aye, and many hate her today. Athens is not a mellow old nobleman like Sparta, but a brash, pushy vendor hawking sweets at the top of her lungs and willing to show a bit of breast to get you to buy. Let us be frank: there is a lot not to like.

So whenever Themistocles started a speech with the words, ‘In Athens’, he was busy making enemies.

Perhaps the problem, obvious to those of us from the small poleis, and invisible to the mighty, was that when Themistocles talked, he talked for his Athenian audience, and when Adeimantus talked, he talked for his Corinthian audience, and neither was actually speaking to the other.

‘Where is Cimon?’ I asked the navarch.

His eyes narrowed. ‘Not here,’ he said in his Laconian way. And then, ignoring Themistocles, he turned to me.

‘I am concerned that he has been rash,’ he said.

Speaking to Spartans is like visiting the oracles — you have to interpret what they say, because they use as few words as they can.

Eurybiades didn’t look at me, but he spoke carefully, as if I was a slightly slow but well-beloved child. ‘Cimon spoke of “commerce raiding”,’ he admitted.

First I’d heard of it. Commerce raiding always appeals to me.

In fact, if anyone had asked me — and no one had since a memorable night at the Olympics — I would have said that we should make a whole war of attacking their commerce. With the nearly four hundred ships we had on the beaches of Salamis and a few more coming in every day, we could have made it impossible for the Great King to even assemble a fleet.

Also, my rowers were eating my fortune every day, and my town was being sacked by the Persians.

‘Shall I go and fetch him home?’ I said as sweetly as possible.

Eurybiades had not been born yesterday, or even the day before. He looked at me levelly, the way my father used to when I said I could go to town by myself. ‘Yes,’ he said.

Anything was better than listening to Themistocles talk, or Adeimantus shout.

Dawn, and we were off the beach. I took only Lydia so as not to make a stir, and her hull was dry and clean from six days in the warm early autumn sun. A dry hull is, next to a good shipwright and good wood, the most important thing in a ship. I’d left Seckla in charge and he’d turned her over, stripped away all the repairs we’d made in the last year and replaced them with the new wood and professional shipwrights that Athens offered to all the Allies. Then he’d dried the hull for three days in the sun and only then caulked her tight again and coated the now dry hull with shining black pitch, finished with her original scarlet stripe along the oar-ports. Her sails were clean and dry and all her cordage was clean and recently coiled down.

Lydia was, as I have said before, a half-decked trireme with a standing mainmast. This is now popular in all the western parts of the Inner Sea but it was rarer then, favoured by pirates and by the cities of Magna Graecia, where I learned of it. The standing mainmast was braced by the deck and two strong beams, which meant more sail could be made in a stronger wind, the boom of the sail could be braced further round, and the ship itself could point a little closer to the wind. None of that was, to be honest, all that important, although it would have been had I wanted to sail outside the pillars of Heracles again. What mattered most was that the sails were always available, day and night, and that we could use them almost to the very point of battle.

The rig has bad points too. You can still lose your mast over the side when you ram. That’s a serious problem and a risk every time, because when you lay a seaborne ambush, that standing pole can give you away to a sharp-eyed lookout. On the other hand, our mast had a small basket like a bird’s nest, forty feet above the waves, where our lookout could stand. Perhaps worst for a sailor on the Inner Sea is that in the event of a big storm, you cannot simply bring your mast down on deck and a high wind puts an incredible pressure on even a bare pole.

Oarsmen love them, though. They don’t have to work so hard. The deck allowed me to have more marines and more deck crew as well as some archers — every pirate’s dream.

I mention all this now because, thanks to Seckla’s tireless work — well, and everyone else who stayed behind — our five ships were in a magnificent material state of readiness, and when I rowed away into the dawn the other ships were completing the same process. Many of the Athenian ships were doing the same, and even the Peloponnesian ships, a few of them anyway. Lydia was in as pretty a state as she’d ever been, at least since she was launched.

The other major factor in handling a warship besides her design, the quality of her wood, and how dry her hull is, is the men in the hull. As we rowed off the beach at Salamis, I think I had the best crew I had ever had. Listen to my ship list, thugater. I had Seckla and Leukas as helmsmen, both brilliant sailors, both able to command a ship. I had Onisandros as our oar-master, the best lungs in the fleet, and Brasidas commanding my marines.

And what marines! Idomeneus, another man who could command his own ship, and Styges; Sitalkes the Thracian and Alexandros, a brilliant hoplite in magnificent equipment, Hector my sometime hypaspist and Hipponax my son, and Achilles, my cousin. I’ll take a moment to say that Achilles had fought in the actions against the Saka, neither badly nor brilliantly. He tried to be a sullen loner, but Brasidas and Idomeneus wouldn’t let him. The Cretan and the Spartan were rivals, but only in the best way, and they competed to bring Achilles up to our standard.

I was short by two marines. Teucer, son of Teucer, was dead, and Antimenides, son of Alcaeus, was on the beach with the doctors, badly wounded.

Oh, and what of Idomeneus, you ask? On the beach of Eleusis, when they took him down from his horse, he woke, spat in the sand, and demanded water. He drank pints of it, and more that night at Salamis, and he was with us the next morning — with a headache like the hangover after the feast of Dionysus and no more. I have had my share of fortune in war, but I have never been more surprised to see a man survive a wound then Idomeneus in the fight at Leithos’s shrine.

But marines do not power a ship, my friends. That is down to oarsmen. I won’t name them all — I probably couldn’t, but that morning I knew all their names. They were a homogeneous body, had been together for more than a year without a pause, and although we had a few new men and a few awkward sods, everyone was in top shape and most men were well fed and believed in what we were doing.

Especially after we served out the Saka gold.

Leon was the oldest and had the biggest mouth. But he was a man who could row through the whole of a storm and still make a foul joke to the man on the next bench. Giorgos and Nicolas had rowed for me for years and both were capable of being officers when required — they commanded rowing divisions. Sikli, a leering monster from Sicily; Kineas, a handsome young man from Massalia who was tired of fishing and never wanted to go back; and Kassander — and a hundred and seventy more. They had made, every one of them, enough gold to buy a farm. More than seventy of them actually owned property in Plataea, a couple enough to qualify as hoplites.

But oarsmen and sailors do not easily come to wealth. They spend freely, on wine, on lotus flowers, on poppy juice and hemp seeds and women and men and jewellery and tattoos and cats and dogs and monkeys and pretty knives and any other blessed thing that enters their heads. Why?

Men who use the sea know that life is sweet — and can be short. What use the farm, when your mouth fills with the salt water that will drown you? Why save? The next storm may be your last.

And if you spend all today’s gold, and you do not die, then perhaps another fat Egyptian merchant will appear through your oarlock tomorrow, eh?

Bah. I should have been a philosopher instead of a pirate.

Finally, we had Ka, and Nemet, and Ithy, and Di and Pye. They were Nubians — actual Nubians. Men called Seckla Nubian but he was from some outlandish place further east, or so he claimed. Anyway, they were from south of Egypt, and they were professional archers. They’d been slaves, and Egyptian soldiers, and then slaves again. They were as talkative as Spartans. I think Ka liked me, but I know he fairly worshipped Seckla. The five of them were expert archers and all improved by having the captured Saka bows, with which they’d been shooting since dawn.

We got Lydia off the beach well enough. And when we were skimming across the Bay of Salamis with little wind and almost no waves, she handled as sweetly as I’ve ever known her. There were some men up on the headland of Cynosura, and they cheered us. They were erecting a lookout tower. I thought of my daughter, and we swept on.

But as soon as we were abreast of Phaleron, where a dozen merchant ships were loading the last refugees and all the naval stores that could be rescued from Athens military port, I turned two points to starboard and put the coast over my left shoulder, and we continued at a good pace. The wind was wrong for sailing, but by noon it came under our quarter off the hot fields of Attica. We couldn’t see any burning from the seaward, or smell it. But we ran up the mainsail and braced the boom hard, and the rowers sat back and drank water and cursed the sea.

In truth, it was a beautiful day and the breeze was, if not perfect, certainly enough. We ran along at about the pace a strong man walks, watching the coast, which I kept about ten stades distant, with a boy up at the masthead in a huge straw hat. We sent him water from time to time.

We had the sea to ourselves, which came as no surprise. As the afternoon wore on, I cheated the helm more and more to seaward until we lost the coast altogether in the late afternoon haze.

A few benches forward of the helmsman’s bench, Leon’s deep voice spoke up from under the half-deck like a disembodied god. ‘Poseidon’s dick,’ he said. ‘Here we go out of sight of land, and off into the deep green.’

Men around him laughed.

I smiled.

We landed, a little late for my taste, but the western sky was still orange, on the island of Kea about a parasang south of Cape Sounion. I half-expected to find Cimon there, on that very beach, because it made a fine position from which to watch the coast of Attica and retreat to the open sea if something went wrong. In the morning we put a tower on the headland made of fir trees and dried our hull while we had a big meal. It had been a long pull and a longer sail. The peasants were happy enough to see us and to sell us some sheep, which we consumed after making an appropriate sacrifice in a nice little temple to the Sea God. But despite our sacrifices, the breeze came against us at the height of the sun and in the afternoon we had a heavy rain. Our tents were all back on the beach at Salamis, so we were wet.

We built big fires and slept soundly, then woke to stiff muscles and a beautiful day, and launched into the light surf. There was no sign of yesterday’s foul weather, and the wind was a stiff southerly with a little hint of sand in it.

I ran north to Chalkis, but with the wind so strong from the south, I didn’t dare risk being embayed. That is, it’s not that the waters off Marathon are really a bay, but the narrows at Chalkis are so narrow that a few Persian ships could snap us up, and I needed to watch my back. So we sailed — pure, sweet sailing without toughing a halyard or a line — from Kea north to the southern tip of Euboea, and then we rowed back west, carefully, with the masthead manned and many an invocation to the Sea God. We didn’t see anyone, except a pair of Euboean fishing boats. We ran them down and bought all their catch, transforming their terror into wonder. Which was good fun.

We ate their fish on the beach of a little volcanic island in the gulf opposite Marathon, which I estimated was hull down and due west about two parasangs. That little islet was sent by the gods. There was a small village of very poor people, who nonetheless had some store of grain and dry fish to sell us, and from their peak we could see right across the gulf and all the way north to Chalkis, or near enough. The gods gave us a clear day on our fourth day from Salamis. Now we could see smoke over Attica, but no Cimon and no enemy fleet.

Now I cursed that I hadn’t brought another vessel. I had the perfect watching post, unless the Persians had decided to go the other way around Euboea, and even then we’d see them as they passed across the southern end of the gulf.

I wasn’t too worried about Cimon, who had ten ships and could handle himself. In fact, he was probably the best ship-killer alive at the time, very much his father’s son. My only fear for him was that he might try some doomed action, like holding the narrows at Chalkis with ten ships.

I needn’t have worried. Or rather, I knew him all too well.

The next morning, the fifth, we saw nothing all morning and we dried our hull, but around the height of the sun the lookout way above us on the mountain signalled with a piece of bright bronze that he saw something.

I went and climbed the mountain myself.

From the top of Megalos, as the locals called the islet, the Gulf of Marathon was like a big Spartan lambda, or an inverse V. The point at the top was the narrows of Chalkis. The opening at the bottom was the Aegean. The left arm was the coast of Marathon and the right arm was the coast of Euboea.

Attica was afire. You could smell it, forty stades away and more, and see the smudges of grey and black.

But what interested us was in the water. Up at the edge of our vision, where the land and water seemed to meet in the noontime haze, there was rhythmic flashing.

For once, there was no hurry. They were half a day away, at least. So I sent for wine and lay in the shade of the little grass shelter we’d built, and watched.

The longer I watched, the more I became convinced that I was looking at Cimon’s ships, and the Persians — actually, Ionians — pressing them hard.

But then I’d tell myself another story: that I was seeing a Persian advance guard in front of the Persian fleet.

Aye, but you really can identify some things a great way off, just as you know the silhouette and the movements of an old friend so far away you could never see their face — just the set of the shoulders tell you everything. Yes?

I was sure that one of the lead ships was Ajax.

I’d known that ship through three major refits and almost twenty years.

Of course, our strong southerly wind had stayed on, so Cimon — if that was him — was rowing into the teeth of it.

As they came down the coast of Attica, I could see it better. There were nine ships out in front, and two dozen coming behind. My eyes were already too old to pick so many out of the sun dazzle, but Hector and Achilles seemed to be able to look into the very eye of the sun and pick out details, and Leukas claimed to see that the lead ship was red.

Ajax.

Cimon was in trouble. Or, at worst, I was wrong, and that was the Ionian vanguard of the Great King’s fleet. Either way, my hull was dry and my crew superb, and I was pretty sure I could outrun any ship on the sea.

‘Let’s go,’ I said. We went down the mountain in a sliding stumble and it was a miracle no one broke their ankles.

I remember cursing, because we looked like idiotes or untrained slaves coming off the beach. Too eager, I suppose, but we caught crabs, our hill slewed right and left and the strong southerly almost pushed the head around and broached us too — in calm water.

Suitably humbled, we managed to get moving west, across the gulf.

An hour of rowing and everyone was calmer, and my name was being cursed, which was fine. We were rowing at a fast cruise and the wind was no help, but Seckla had the ship and he was doing his best to keep the rowers together and the wake straight. The marines were armed, and Ka and his ebony archers were all over the ship — Nemet, the smallest man, was in the bird’s nest, naked but for his bow and two quivers. All the Nubians had acquired very Athenian tawed thoraxes and helmets. Ka’s was magnificent, a capture from Artemisium, a bronze helmet made to look like a lion’s head, with ostrich plumes. It was outlandish, but a seven-foot tall black archer can look as outlandish as he pleases.

Nemet was calling down to the deck what he saw.

‘Red ship, boss. Sure eno’!’ he called.

Then, ‘That’s Ajax and astern of him is Dawn and Golden Nike.’ Remember, we’d all been together many times.

‘Point at them!’ I shouted up to the masthead, several frustrating times, as my words were carried away in the freshening wind. But after some antics not to be repeated, Nemet got my intention and pointed his bow staff almost due west.

We rowed on. I didn’t want to use a sail, which would give us away to even a lubberly lookout. It seemed reasonable — I’ve seen it before — that the pursuers wouldn’t notice us.

For a little while.

I summoned all my officers amidships. ‘Here is what I plan,’ I said. ‘We sweep in, go to ramming speed and try to break up the pursuers.’

Leukas narrowed his eyes. ‘If we come in from the flank, the second ship will have us in the flank.’

‘We oar-rake, nip some steering oars, and go past,’ I said. ‘Then we turn end for end, raise the mainsail and run as fast as we can — north by east.’ I nodded over the side at the water. ‘There’s a gap between the Ionians and the main fleet. We run through it.’

Leukas shook his head. ‘You are still a madman,’ he said. ‘But it certainly sounds like fun.’

Seckla nodded, seeing it.

Brasidas looked disappointed. Perhaps he thought we were going to go hull to hull with the whole Persian fleet.

‘Just keep their marines off our decks,’ I said. ‘Ka, kill the helmsmen. Onisandros, get some fire pots on deck.’

He made a face. Sailors hate fire, even as a weapon used against others. But we had a small firebox in the bows, lined in brick and sand, for making hot wine when we spent the night at sea, and other pirate tricks, and he put ten fire pots into it with their oiled wicks hanging free.

Hector closed my bronze thorax after I popped my greaves on my legs. I remember that it took me two tries to get my left greave on, because my left side hurt and I lacked the fingers to get the best grip on the damned thing.

By the time Hector pushed the pins through their keyholes in the thorax, the Persian fleet was hull up and visible in the sunlight.

Poseidon’s Spear, there were so many of them!

They were spread over the Gulf of Marathon like athletes in a long race. The Ionians, the best sailors, were in the lead, and then there was a gap, and then the rest of the divisions in an untidy muddle trailing away to the narrows in the north beyond the edge of sight. A thousand ships?

I confess that for a moment, I couldn’t breathe.

There was Cimon, though, plain as the nose on your face and ten stades away. There was his younger brother in Dawn and a few other old pirates I knew. Just for a moment, I imagined I could see Agios there, on the stern of Ajax. In fact, he’d died at Marathon, but my eyes filled with tears anyway.

Anyway.

We were well north of Ajax already.

Someone on the Ionian ships saw us. Well, it’s the law of the sea — if you can see him, he can see you. My rowers were perfect and the sails were laid to the boom amidships and ready to raise, and every archer had an arrow on his bow. The marines were sitting on the deck, not forward in the boarding box but sitting where they had some cover and where movement wouldn’t throw off the rowing.

There was a flash, and another flash, from the Ionians and three ships — beautiful ships, with long, elegant lines and Tyrian red in their sails — turned out of their race or their pursuit, and came for us.

Remember, we’d already been fighting these men all summer. I knew the ships almost immediately. The lead ship was from Ephesus and had the half-moon of Artemis on her bow, and so did the third ship. The middle ship was bigger, higher out of the water, and bright vermilion. I suspected it was Damasithymus of Calynda, in Caria. The Carians had been against us in the early days of the Ionian War, and then our allies, and now that the Great King had conquered them again — well, there they were. The ‘Red King’ was one of their most famous fighters, by sea and by land.

They wore a lot of armour and they had the reputation of carrying the very best marines. But I didn’t spend much time looking at the red ship, because any ship from Ephesus interested me. I’d never been close to the Ionians in the fighting at Artemisium.

But the nearer trireme had to be Archilogos. He had the sign of the logos on his sail. His stern curve was painted in a livid and expensive blue, the colour of the house in which I grew up.

I walked aft to Seckla. The three ships had lost way in the turn and now their oars beat the water to bring them to ramming speed.

Archilogos — if it was he — had made the turn last and was behind the other two. The rightmost, or most northerly ship, was in front, so that the three made an echeloned line. We were running head-on for Archilogos.

‘I want you to stay on this track as long as you can — but I want you to oar-rake the lead vessel on her north side,’ I said.

That would mean a dangerous yaw to starboard at ramming seed. But Lydia did such stuff as routine, or so we bragged.

Seckla grinned. ‘Good,’ he said.

He gave the signal to Onisandros and we went to ramming speed. Seckla made a motion with both hands and every oar stopped at the height of the pull-

Seckla leaned into his turn, and I pulled the port oar to help him let go. His foot slapped the wood and the oars dipped together-

Poseidon, they were good! And now Onisandros increased the stroke past ramming speed.

We shot ahead. Seckla gave the signal, Onisandros barked, and all the oars lifted and stopped — and we turned back to our original course, almost due west. Perhaps we had turned a point further south …

The northmost adversary — the other Ephesian — struggled to match our manoeuvre. They were at ramming speed and most ships don’t manoeuvre at all at that speed. But the helmsman saw the danger and flicked his oars to move his beak, and oarsmen, unwarned, lost the stroke or missed the water — it happens. On deck, a marine fell flat.

Their oar loom began to fall apart, still rowing, as one or two failures spread. This was pure inexperience.

Ka gave a shrill cry and arrows began to connect the two ships like invisible ropes tipped in bronze. Either the Ionians had no archers or they didn’t trust their bows.

We were almost bow to bow. Our ship was cocked just a little off their path, like a swordsman attacking off line.

Onisandros roared ‘In!’ and every oar came across the catwalks. I was up on the half-deck, and safe, but any sailor unlucky enough to be on the amidships walk forward was likely to get beaten to death by oar shafts.

But we’d done all this before, hadn’t we, my lovelies?

Their oar-master never said a word. He was dead on the deck and black blood flowed from his throat with the arrow Ka had sent him. And because he was dead, their oars lay on the water when we struck, and their whole ship seemed to scream as the long poles were broken by our bow and our port-side cathead, and the shipboard end of every oar struck its rower with all the strength of our ship.

Above me, Nemet shot and shot, straight down into their exposed decks. At my side, Ka emptied a whole quiver of Saka arrows as we passed.

The Ionian fell off in the direction of her now missing oars and as soon as she lost way the south wind took her and spun her like a top.

It was then that I had the idea of how to make this even better. It was too late to employ it right there, but I sent Hector to find a light rope, a grappling hook and an axe.

I was just looking over the port-side bulwark from laying the coil of rope down when I saw him.

My first boyhood enemy. The man who gave up Briseis. Diomedes of Ephesus. He had three of our arrows in his aspis and he’d managed to protect his helmsman — until that moment, when Nemet, high above, feathered the man through the top of his shoulder, and the arrow went in almost to the fletching, and the helmsman — just a few oar lengths from me — died before his head touched the deck. Ka put another arrow into his aspis — one of the last in his quiver.

He looked at us.

‘Diomedes, you cur!’ I roared. ‘How is Aphrodite!’ I had once roped him to the pillars of the temple of Aphrodite. Well, he tried to have me killed. You all know the story!

I could see the blood rush to his face as he recognised me, and then we were gone, Onisandros was calling and the oars were coming out.

Diomedes’ ship kept turning because no one had told his starboard side rowers to stop rowing.

So his bow fell afoul of the red trireme’s bow and the Red King, as we’d called him at Artemisium, had to pull in his oars and turn sharply to port himself. Archilogos, also trying to line up on us, now almost fell afoul of the Carian ship and had to pull in his own oars and turn away to port, losing us out of the melee altogether.

I laughed. For a moment, I was the king of the sea.

But we hadn’t yet accomplished a thing, except a sort of sea-jest.

But the collisions gave me a new option. I turned to Seckla.

‘Turn to port,’ I said.

He nodded, and before Onisandros even had our oars back in the water, we were turning — a shallow, easy turn, because there was no enemy that could touch us. We passed Archilogos’s ship, flank to flank, half a stade out, and I waved as I passed and forbade my archers to shoot.

I could see him — my boyhood friend — standing on his command deck. Even as I passed, he tilted the helmet back off his head.

So he knew I wouldn’t shoot.

But then he lifted his helmet — a beautiful Corinthian with hinged cheek plates — and waved. I waved back.

Then he shouted something and a heavy arrow punched into the face of my aspis.

And then his ship was falling away astern as my rowers pushed us forward. We were now heading south and west.

Now I was behind the leading Ionian ships that were pursuing Cimon and presenting them a dreadful tactical problem.

But that southerly wind was, if anything, rising, and turning our bow into it was a labour. The oarsmen had stopped curing to save their breath, but they were tired. Not dead tired — that was a long way off. But tired.

However, the Ionians — and Cimon — had been pulling into the teeth of that wind all day.

We rowed a stade, and then another.

And another.

All the Ionians edged away from me.

You have to picture this — here, I’ll do it in almonds — no, too sticky. Like this, then. Cimon’s ten ships are fleeing from a thousand. Thirty of them are far out in the lead, but of those only a dozen are swift enough to be right on him and three of those turned out of line to stop me. So there are nine ships left, all rowing as hard as they can to catch Cimon. But now I’m between the nine and their fellows, and I’m faster than they, and my rowers are far fresher.

Of course they edged away.

I let Nemet have all the arrows. He was higher, and despite the sway of the mast I knew he could drop arrows into the oar benches of the Ionians. Onisandros and Seckla and Leukas, who took the helm somewhere in this part, raised the stroke to being firmly faster than the Ionian stroke. And our hull was drier and better built to start.

We began to pull in on the last of the nine Ionians like fisherman landing a big tuna. Nemet began to loose arrows. Shooting into the wind — at an angle, no less — was tricky.

But when he got one clear of the enemy stern, the result was immediate. Oars went every which way on the port side and the ship fell off to port and we passed them, my other archers all shooting three or four shafts as we did so. We left them five oar lengths to our starboard side and swept on.

We began to catch the second ship of nine. But he simply turned away towards the coast of Attica. We passed him in a flash of oars and Ka dropped a well-shot arrow into the command station but we didn’t linger to see its effect.

This was intoxicating, like fine wine after a great day.

Seckla shook his head. ‘How long can we continue?’ he asked. ‘Surely they’ll all turn on us?’

I laughed. ‘More fool they, if they do!’ I said.

And then … they turned.

But it wasn’t the Ionians that turned.

It was Cimon. His ships seemed to come around by magic. It was close, but because all the Ionians had cheated their helms to starboard, they’d lost the angle that would give them immediate raking rams, and so Cimon’s ships slowed and spun end for end.

The Ionians were not our equals, but they were good sailors. They scattered like whitefish when the tuna attack them. And they went in almost every direction.

One slim trireme chose badly and turned towards us. He misjudged his turn. I looked over my shoulder at the big red trireme and Archilogos.

Archi was too far away to get his ram in my hull.

‘Take him,’ I said to Leukas. ‘Marines!’

He got his oars in and managed to retrieve his turn, but he’d lost too much way and our beak hit his cathead and splintered it, pushing his bow deep in the water. It bounced back out of the water like a leaping fish and then our bow scraped down his side and our grapples flew and Brasidas was over the side. I ran along my own half-deck until I liked the distance and then leapt.

It was over before my feet were on his catwalk. They were Aeolians of Lesvos, from Eressos, and they wanted no part of the Great King. When Brasidas killed their trierarch, the rest of the men surrendered and some cheered.

‘Greece!’ called a rower.

I leaned down into the oar decks. ‘Will you row for Greece?’ I roared.They were pressed men — always an error in a sea fight — and among the top-deck rowers were men who knew me and one or two I remembered from happier days.

I kept my marines aboard. I was too old to take chances on trust.

I waved to Leukas and summoned Seckla to take the helm. The Lesbian helmsman protested, but I ordered him to sit down on the deck and put Seckla into the steering rig, and then Cimon — a Cimon with a bad sunburn and dark circles under his eyes — was calling from under my lee.

We bellowed back and forth like fishwives. But when he understood, we all turned broadside on to the rising waves, something we didn’t think the Ionians would attempt, and we ran east.

Ran is probably the wrong word. We crept east for a few stades and then we raised sail and ran north and east, and then, when we felt safe, at the edge of darkness, we lowered our sails and rowed along the coast of Euboea. We landed on the first good beach we could find and lit no fires. It was a long, bad night.

But as Cimon said, while drinking my wine, it was not a night he’d expected to live to see.

As soon as there was enough light to navigate, we got off the beach, unfed, and rowed south. That was a hard morning, and fifteen stades rowing into that damned south wind without food used up my poor Ionians.

But by noon, in lowering skies and rising seas, I got them all onto the beaches below Megalos and we landed with two thousand hungry men.

There are many ways people supported the cause of Greek freedom. That village on Megalos didn’t supply a single row boat for the fleet, but by Heracles and Demeter, they fed every man that day, and again the next morning — a whole winter’s worth of salt fish and sheep and goats, consumed in a day. Bless them. When we piled back into our ships, every man had enough food in him to row home to Salamis and enough wine to have made the night before passable.

The Persian fleet stayed the night on the beaches at Makri and Marathon — there must have been officers who remembered their last adventure there. Certainly Archilogos had been at Marathon. And they waited there — it’s a fine anchorage — until their supply ships caught them up.

I wish I could say that Cimon and I caught all their supplies emerging from the narrows and carried them off, but our crews were tired and Cimon was disheartened by ten days of raids and ambushes that had lost him a ship and gained him very little. He had made captures and lost them again; he had sunk a pair of merchantmen, but suspected they’d been empty, already unloaded.

Sometimes it does seem that Tyche and Ares are the same god.

The seventh day out from Salamis came up in a red dawn of wrath and we stayed on our beaches, ate our barley soup and mutton, and drank the last of the wine. My Lesbian crew were unsure of their status, somewhere between volunteers and prisoners, and they murmured. I spent the day sitting with them and I wished I had Harpagos or Herk or any of my other Aeolian friends — living or dead. It was, besides them, a very Athenian beach.

What I mean by that, my honeys, is that the Athenians, despite everything, or perhaps because of it, were growing rather more than less cocky and self-assured. I had just had a cup of wine with Theognis, the helmsman of the Naiad, our capture. He seemed a little too eager — there was something about him I didn’t quite like, but then, I’ve never been a captive on a potentially hostile beach, trying to plead my loyalty to my new masters.

As usual, I digress. Cimon came, wrapped in a himation that was never going to grace a party in Athens or any other city that prized cleanliness. His timing was perfect — I was just rising from my folding seat and Eugenios had just picked up the stool and slapped it closed.

‘Walk with me,’ I said.

Cimon grinned. It was the phrase his father had used when he had matters of import — and usually, crime — to impart.

I laughed. ‘No, I didn’t mean it like that,’ I said.

Cimon looked back at the Lesbians. ‘I sometimes find it difficult to believe that we tried to fight a war on their behalf.’

I nodded. ‘I love Eressos,’ I said. ‘But there is a soft-handed entitlement to them.’ I shrugged. ‘On the other hand, I don’t have a Persian garrison in the citadel of my city.’ I paused, as if struck. ‘Oh, by Zeus! I do!’ I slapped my forehead in disgust.

Cimon smiled, and looked like his father. ‘By now, no doubt I do, too.’ He looked back at the Aeolians. ‘Let’s be fair, the Lesbians fought like lions at Lade.’

I looked back at them too. ‘I wonder …’

Cimon raised an eyebrow.

‘Just the thoughts of an old man,’ I said. ‘Have you ever thought that courage erodes, little by little, fight by fight? Yesterday, when I had to leap from my ship to theirs …’ I looked away in embarrassment. ‘I hesitated. In fact, I find it gets harder and harder to find that spirit — the daimon.’

Cimon nodded and spread his hands. ‘What can I say? My father loved you, but he thought you Ares-mad, a war child. If he were here, he might say you were … more a man and less a madman.’ He met my eye and gave me a surprisingly gentle smile. ‘I now fear every time I leap.’ After this admission, he looked away.

We were silent a long time.

‘But yes — age — life is sweet,’ he spoke softly.

‘Eualcides — do you remember him? The Euboean?’

‘My father spoke of him. I never met him. A famous hero.’ Cimon nodded.

‘He said the same about running.’

We didn’t need to say more.

The waves pounded the beach and the rain began; I wished I had my himation.

I remembered why I had started this hare.

‘I only meant to say that perhaps the Aeolians are, as a race, like men — brave men — whose courage has been tried too often, and now they are shattered. They fought brilliantly at Lade — and got beaten. They fought like lions in defence of their island — and they were massacred, and their women sold as slaves. Perhaps they have been beaten too often.’

‘Perhaps their bravest few are dead. The Killers of Men.’ Cimon shrugged. ‘I owe you for yesterday. I don’t know if we’d have made it or not.’

I shrugged. ‘I will remember it fondly for many years to come,’ I said. ‘After we beat the Persians.’

‘By Poseidon and Ajax my ancestor,’ Cimon said. ‘You are a slap of cold seawater on my depression. You think we can win?’

I bobbed my head back and forth — really, not my most attractive habit, but I do. Hah! You laugh. I laugh too.

‘Of course we can win!’ I said, with more eagerness than the prior conversation might have led him to expect.

‘I want to believe,’ Cimon said. ‘Please convince me.’ He sat against a rock, a reasonably dry rock, under the cliff. I looked up at a pair of boulders that seemed to be held in place by nothing but the hands of the gods and thought that if the gods intended two of the best trierarchs of the Greek fleet to die here, then that was that. I snuggled in beside him.

‘You bring any wine?’ he asked. He winked at Eugenios, who stood in the light rain. ‘Oh, by all the gods, Eugenios, fetch us some wine and I’ll give you a share of the shelter.’

Eugenios smiled. Slaves are seldom spoken to directly by men like Cimon, members of the old nobility. But in that month, in that year, we were all in the fight together and such things mattered less. I had virtually forgotten that Eugenios was a slave and that thought struck me with some guilt. I, who have been a slave twice, knew that while I might forget, he would never forget.

He ran off. ‘I should free him,’ I said.

‘He’s rowing for you and he’s your steward?’ Cimon laughed. ‘Too valuable to be freed. Want to sell him? I could use a steward who could also row.’

Sometimes Cimon could be a rich fool, like anyone.

‘The Persians,’ I said.

‘Yes. I love your confidence. But I don’t share it. I spent eight days running and fighting, running and fighting. I left little messages in all the harbours along Boeotia, all the cliff faces, inviting the Ionians to come over to us. So did Themistocles, along the Euboean shore. Not one of them changed sides. You know what I saw every day, every god-cursed day? More ships join the Great King’s fleet. Thirty, the first day. Thirty!’ He shook his head.

Eugenios came trotting back. It came into my head then: something for the gods, something about Greek freedom, something about who we were and what we were fighting for.

He had my old canteen — a piece of ceramic with the feet broken off, missing a side-lug, that had been dropped on a dozen decks and never split. It didn’t look like much, but I loved it.

I poured a libation onto the rain-drenched sand and it looked like blood. ‘To Zeus, the god of kings and princes and free men, and to you, Eugenios, who I make a free man with this libation to the gods. I sacrifice this man’s slavery that Greece may be free.’

I drank and handed the canteen to Cimon. He straightened up. ‘Arimnestos, you are-’ he laughed. ‘To Eugenios, the very prince of stewards. To your freedom. And to Poseidon, Earth Shaker, Lord of Stallions and the Sea, witness his freedom, and give Athens fair winds.’

He handed the canteen to Eugenios, who drank it and burst into tears. ‘I was born free,’ he admitted. ‘Indeed — oh, bless you, my lord.’

‘I’ll see to it you are made a citizen of Plataea if we survive all this.’ I was gruff. I had not expected hard-eyed Eugenios, terror of my slaves and lord of my household, to weep.

I think that, in truth, I hate slavery. Oh, I have a phalanx of slaves, do I not? But I free them, too. Some men are better and some are worse, that much I acknowledge. But enough better to own another?

I’ve been a slave.

Eugenios wouldn’t snuggle into the cleft with us. His ideas of social station were stronger than Cimon’s. Mock if you will.

I stepped out into the blowing spray and rain, and threw my chiton over my arm like a boy training to be an orator. ‘Hear me, oh Cimon,’ I said.

He laughed and drank my wine.

‘First, before I deliver my argument, let us set the course of our own judging. Are there, on all the seas, any two men who have faced the Persians and the Phoenicians and the Egyptians more often than we?’ I asked.

‘My father,’ he said. ‘Miltiades. And perhaps that prig Aristides. And your friend Diodorus of Massalia, for all that I loathe him.’

‘Better than we? Or merely the same,’ I asked. ‘Your father I allow.’

‘Then I shan’t quibble,’ Cimon, son of Miltiades, said with a smile. ‘We have faced them most often.’

‘And does that not make us, in the matter of fighting the Persians at sea, the wisest?’ I raised a hand to forestall argument. ‘If perhaps we had been beaten often, I’d confess that the frequency of our fighting was worthless, but you and I have more often than not triumphed.’

Cimon nodded. ‘You want me to agree, and of course I do. But I’m sure that Pythagoras would debate with you whether the frequency of our contact or even our triumph had anything to do with wisdom.’

‘He might, but let’s remember that he was against eating bacon and beware,’ I said, and Cimon roared.

‘You have missed your calling, my friend. You should go stand in the agora and preach like a sophist.’ He winked at Eugenios.

I was play-acting, mostly to raise his humour. ‘Very well then, I’ll pass on the agora, which today is probably full of Persian Immortals uncaring of my heights of wisdom, and we’ll agree that you and I are as fit to judge the capability of the Great King’s fleet as any two men.’

Cimon laughed again. ‘I have that sinking feeling I get when I listen to Aristides make a speech in which he wins every point but makes all the undecided men hate him, and our party,’ he said.

‘Very well, then. Here is why we will defeat the Great King’s fleet,’ I said. ‘First, and simplest, because we have done so already, not once but twice.’

Cimon bit his lip. ‘But they have replaced their losses and then some.’

‘Have they replaced their hearts?’ I asked. ‘By your own admission you kept the sea eight days with ten ships facing all of them — and they only managed to take one of yours while you sank, crippled or captured five.’

He shrugged. ‘So? What is five ships among a thousand?’

‘Answer me this, doubter! If one single Ionian ship had come into our beaches at Artemisium and offered a fight or tried a raid, how many ships would have launched and fought her?’

He winced. ‘A hundred.’

‘Yet you went right in off their beaches,’ I said. ‘They are afraid.’

Cimon shrugged. ‘I want to believe you.’

‘The Ionians are probably the weakest part of their fleet,’ I asserted.

Cimon shook his head. ‘The best and worst,’ he said. ‘There are fine captains and ships among them. Don’t go beak to beak with the Queen of Halicarnassus — Artemisia.’ He stroked his beard. ‘There’s a woman with a fine helmsman. They say she’s Xerxes’ Greek mistress. I’m not sure.’

‘But the ship we took yesterday?’ I asked.

‘Not very good,’ he admitted.

‘Yet it was leading the chase for your ships, while the Phoenicians and the Egyptians — who have every reason to hate the Great King — lagged well back in the narrows.’ I waved at the Lesbians, sitting disconsolately in the rain. ‘What am I to make of that?’

Cimon laughed. ‘You are persuasive,’ he said, laughing. He almost sounded … guilty.

‘My last piece of evidence requires only that you believe me,’ I said. ‘Yesterday, when I came out of the morning sun into their flank, I saw them cringe.’

‘You took everyone by surprise,’ he said.

‘First, most of their ships, more then twenty ships, turned a point or two away,’ I said. ‘Then, when three of their ships turned out of the general chase, the rest used the time they bought to get closer to the coast. None of them was trained well enough to manoeuvre at close range against me, and in fact all their hulls are wet through and slow.’ I grinned like the wolf I am at times. ‘I had them in speed, in tactics, in rowing quality, and they knew it. They were like boys facing men. And that was their best.’

Cimon was smiling steadily now. ‘I’d forgotten how you can be, Plataean,’ he said.

‘And last is a matter of tactica,’ I said. ‘The number of ships means nothing. We saw this at Lade, even. Confess it; you defeat the first line and the rest run. It is always this way. The Phoenicians distrust the Ionians and loathe the Egyptians. The Egyptians want to defeat the Great King and be independent. Every Ionian ship has men on board, oarsmen and marines, who were our comrades at Lade.’

‘By Poseidon, Arimnestos, you make me feel as if it is the Great King who is to be pitied, not the Athenians!’ Cimon crossed his arms.

‘Say rather: the Greeks,’ I said. ‘You Athenians have taken to forgetting, in your desperate hubris, that you have allies.’

He winced. ‘We will never forget Plataea,’ he said.

‘In this case, the ally I would remember is Aegina,’ I said. ‘They have almost fifty ships available and they have decided to fight.’ I deflated myself. ‘Even if the Peloponnesians run.’

I’m not sure that I changed Cimon’s mind. I know I made him feel better.

But Poseidon sent us a better sign. Well — first I think that I should say that my elation was not just from the combat and the deed of the day before. Archilogos had waved at me.

You smile. I sound like one of you girls, delighted that the handsomest boy waved? No. Archilogos was the friend of my childhood and he had been my foe for many years. I had sworn never to do him harm and such oaths have power. This was the first time he had offered me anything but violence in return and I was irrationally cheered. I replayed the moment over and over, trying to test it for more or less meaning. Had he actually waved? Was he merely pointing me out to his archers?

Come to think of it, thugater, you are correct, I am sounding like a blushing maiden. But I loved him. The weight and injustice of his hate lay heavy on me. So I took his wave as a sign. I took the whole encounter as a sign. I was no longer despondent. In an hour of manoeuvre and combat I had allowed myself to be convinced, completely, that we had the upper hand, regardless of the numbers.

And then, on the ninth day out from Salamis, the sun was rising on a glorious day. The wind had lowered after sunset and the rain had stopped, and when I rose to piss in the night the stars were out and we had a gentle westerly.

We rose in the darkness and warmed ourselves at our fires and ate re-warmed mutton stew and some oysters. There was no wine. I got up on a rock and addressed the oarsmen, which I now did almost every morning.

‘Today we should get back to Salamis,’ I said. ‘It’ll be rowing all the way. And the Persian fleet is just over there.’ I waved at the distant dark coast of Attica, as the eastern sky behind me began to lighten. ‘But you are all better men than they. Just row. Fear nothing. If they come at us we can always turn south.’

Men nodded. They grinned and laughed and muttered darkly — and in that moment I loved them.

I had decided to send Seckla and Brasidas and twenty of my rowers to the Lesbian ship, and I had promoted six men from the oar decks to the rank of marines under Alexandros.

Brasidas hopped up on a rock and held up a wax tablet. ‘I am given to understand that the following men have the great fortune to have been promoted to being marines,’ he called. He read out six names. ‘To welcome all of them to our ranks, all marines can meet me in full panoply for a little run and a little dance.’ He didn’t grin. Spartans didn’t punctuate their unspoken threats with grins. They just said things and did them.

All through the crowd of oarsmen there was backslapping and good-natured cursing as the lucky six — perhaps feeling less fortunate — hurried to find their helmets.

I walked down in my own panoply. Perhaps it was penance for the day before, but I felt I needed to exercise. And Eugenios, perhaps because of his new freedom, had polished my whole kit so that the bronze shone like gold. I sparkled in the firelight and the rising sun.

So did Brasidas, and we began to exercise, first in simple stretches and then in a run up the beach to the headland and back, sprinting all the way.

Oh, for youth. I was last — last! And the new marines laughed at me. In a good-natured way. Naturally, I hated the lot of them.

And then we began to dance the Pyrrhiche. I probably forget to say everything important, but by that time, thanks to my time with the Spartans and Brasidas joining us, we had more than a dozen dances. In fact, sometimes when only the veterans did them, we improvised, adding elements, or took turns in a dance game where one of us would lead and the others would imitate the leader’s motions: thrusts, cuts, throws. Armed and unarmed, swords and spears and shields, drawing and sheathing, footwork …

But the first dance was still the old dance of the spear from Plataea, with some Spartan modification, and we began to teach it. Many oarsmen knew it and some did it every morning, hoping to be promoted, but none knew it in the detail with which Brasidas preached it. Now the worm turned; the biters were bit and Brasidas and I pointed out any small errors — phalanxes of them — to our new marines.

One man, Polydorus, shook his head. ‘What does it matter whether I turn my foot or not?’ he whined.

Brasidas didn’t smile or frown. He merely paused. ‘It only matters,’ he said, ‘if you would rather live, than die.’

‘Ouch,’ muttered Sitalkes.

Cimon emerged out of the murk of the early morning with young Pericles at his shoulder. He swirled his cloak to get my attention and I trotted over to him.

Pericles nodded at the new marines. ‘You train them,’ he said, ‘as if training can make a man into a gentleman.’

‘Young man, the Spartans, held as the noblest of all the Greeks, train relentlessly, and so do you.’ I shrugged.

‘When this is over, we are going to be in debt to our oarsmen,’ Cimon said. He was looking out to sea.

‘When we faced the Medes at Marathon, your father used the little men to shame the hoplites,’ I said. ‘Are you more of an aristocrat than your father?’

‘What in the name of Pluton is that?’ Cimon said. My stinging remark was blown away on the west wind. Pericles heard it and raised an eyebrow

I saw it too. The flash of oars, coming from the north-east.

‘Poseidon’s dick,’ Cimon said. ‘ALARM!’ he roared.

We were off the beach faster than a boy drops his chiton for a run. Cimon’s Ajax was first off and that annoyed me, but I was trying to help Seckla get his less-than-piratical Aeolians into their places while my own Lydia, in the very peak of training, waited for orders.

There were three ships. They were spread over a wide swathe of the ocean, as if not really together. And because of the sun rising in the east behind us, our hulls were black against the black rock of the coast, an old pirate’s trick, and they didn’t see us for a long time.

Farther out there was a line of ships, perhaps sixty, but they were hull down, just a flash of oars on the horizon.

Then things grew more complicated.

The closest enemy ship turned towards Cimon’s Ajax and ran right at her. But they ran something up to their masthead and they didn’t take down their mast, which almost any trireme did before combat.

I was still on the beach, virtually the last man on it, chivvying the Aeolian oarsmen into their ship. Watching the drama at sea play out, my heart in my mouth, desperate to get aboard Lydia. Naiad got under way and began to turn end for end.

Well out from Ajax the enemy ship turned her bow towards the beach, laying her vulnerable flank open to Ajax’s ram and folding in her oars like a bird preparing for a rough night at sea.

Ajax turned in a flash of oars — a beautiful display of seamanship — took in her oars and lay longside to longside. But no grapples flew.

I ran into the shallow water in my armour — how poor Eugenios must have cursed me — and got over the side. Lydia was hovering in the shallow water just over the first drop-off of the beach — another fine art of rowing — and the moment Leukas roared ‘on board’ the oars all dipped and we were away like a sea eagle.

The other two enemy scouts were running, but Cimon’s brother in Salamis was faster. He had everything in his favour — better rowers, better rested, with a drier ship.

And he dared run the fleeing enemy down, in full view of their oncoming fleet. There were sixty ships bearing down on us.

Of course, they all had their masts down. Even though the west wind was at their backs, they were rowing.

Because they were afraid of us.

But Metiochus was not afraid of them, and while Lydia left the beach and ran upwind under oars to where Cimon and his capture lay, Metiochus caught the fleeing trireme and rammed it in the stern. You seldom see it, even though it is the dream shot of oared combat. But his ram caught her right under the curve of the swan’s neck, and although we could neither see nor hear because we were a dozen stades away, she sank.

Metiochus turned and came back, seeming to skim the water like a bird of prey.

Cimon’s capture had, in fact, come right up and raised a branch of laurel. She was from Naxos, crewed with various survivors of the storms of three weeks before, and the crew had voted to change sides.

Leukas lay us alongside Ajax as prettily as a kore dances at Brauron, and I jumped from helm to helm.

Cimon’s helmsman laughed. ‘They’re all over there,’ he said. ‘Tell ’is lordship that if we don’t want to join the Persians, we need to get underway.’

I jumped again, onto the deck of the Naxian ship, Poseidon. She was a fine vessel — a decked trireme, a heavy ship built on the latest Phoenician lines, capable of carrying cargo or fighting. A little slow for running away, though.

I grabbed Cimon’s arm. He was mobbed by excited Greeks — Euboeans and Ionians. Being a heavy ship, they had more than twenty marines. They also had a pair of Persian captives — two men assigned to the ship by their admiral, Ariabignes.

‘They just sailed up and joined us!’ Cimon shouted.

‘Your helmsman wants to get out of here,’ I shouted. ‘So do I.’

Cimon grinned. ‘This is a sign. From Poseidon.’ He slapped my back. ‘You were right!’

I pointed over the Naxian ship’s starboard bulwark. ‘There is a Persian squadron right there.’ I waved. ‘Can we help Poseidon help us by not fighting them all ourselves?’

Cimon shook his head. ‘I feel the power,’ he said.

‘Feel it when you have two hundred brothers at your back,’ I said. ‘Sixty to ten is long odds.’

Cimon laughed. ‘Sixty to twelve is only five to one,’ he said. But he shook his head rapidly, indicating he was only leading me on. ‘I agree. Let’s go.’

He left his marines aboard, however, like the practical old pirate he was, and he took half the Naxian’s marines as hostages. He made it sound like guest-hosting in the most noble and ancient way and the Naxians — well, the Ionians, really — leapt to the Ajax with a will, delighted to be invited aboard.

We all put our oars in the water. By then the oncoming Persian squadron, all Phoenicians, were ten stades away.

I had time to see young Pericles in an animated conversation with one of the Ionian marines, a boy only a little older, maybe eighteen.

Then I jumped back to Lydia and we turned south.

By a good chance, Cimon had scrawled his usual message inviting the Ionians to desert on the rocks above our beach and that’s what the Phoenicians found when they went inshore. They didn’t really bother to chase us. In fact, as we rowed due south, I wondered if they’d make a blunder. If they raced after us, a dozen ships well manned, we might have snapped up their lead ships, especially as I had a sailing rig.

But they did not. They chose to be cautious and, in truth, their ships were the very antithesis of the ships for a long chase; they were heavy and slow and damp.

We put them over the horizon in two hours and then turned west at a flash of Cimon’s shield, a loose line abreast to a long, straggling column, but we were old shipmates and we knew the signals. We neatened up the line as we rowed, only one deck at a time to rest the oarsmen. Just in case. It wasn’t just the Phoenicians who were cautious.

But we made good time. The west wind was gentle, barely rippling the water. We had started the morning with a victory and that put great heart into the men.

But for all that, the west wind was against us, and by mid-afternoon it was clear we would not make Salamis. We’d come too far west to make Andros and night was coming.

Cimon and I had the same thought — to find the narrow beach two bays west of Sounion. But we were cautious; just short of the bay we went in lone in Lydia and Alexandros and four mariners swam ashore, naked. They ran up the beach and climbed the ridge behind.

We hovered, the sun sank, and our oarsmen cursed.

Alexandros ran back down the sand and did a little dance, the agreed ‘all clear’ signal.

We landed. It was tight; it required all our seamanship and, to be honest, a great many blasphemies and some splintered wood to get us all ashore. The last ship in, Metiochus’s Salamis, was beached between two big rocks and no sane trierarch would ever have put a ship there.

Not to mention that we had neither food nor wine.

We put all our marines together in a body under Brasidas and sent them inland to fetch any forage that could be managed, with two hundred oarsmen to carry it and all our archers as a covering force. Cimon and I went as volunteers and it was as scary as campaigning in a foreign land. North, we could see fires burning unchecked on the ridges and mountains towards Brauron and Marathon. East, the mountains toward Athens were afire.

Aside from Persians and their slaves, Attica was empty. There wasn’t much food. We found some olives and some grain and, not far from the beach, we found a village that had chosen not to evacuate.

We found it by the busy cries of sea birds and ravens, feasting. We came into the town at sunset, the sky red as blood at our backs, and to my best guess the poor peasants had tried to send a delegation to offer earth and water to the invaders. At least, that’s what it looked like — a tumble of amphorae meant for water, all broken, and two big red clods of Attic earth, dyed redder and browner by the blood of the two young girls who had carried them.

They had died hard. I will not say more … Bah! I remember one young girl had her eyes open, and the whites were still clear, as only young eyes can be, and I hesitated to touch her, to close them, as if I might hurt her. And the sound of the flies everywhere — they assault your senses with a buzz that warns you not to look … too late.

There were bodies throughout the village, a village which was more like the sheds of a big farm or a small estate, really just a crossroads. There was a small shrine, with a middle-aged woman dead across it as deliberate desecration, and six houses, all smouldering, with men lying in the road in fly-swarmed sticky puddles and the smell of cooking flesh to tell us where the rest of the people must have been.

They were, at least most of them, slaves. And the Persians — or Medes or Saka or Egyptians or perhaps even other Greeks — had used them and killed them.

All of us were moved. It was impossible to look on it and not hate. I have seldom hated the Persians. The Persians of my youth were great men. But this was like the rape of a whole land. Done apurpose.

Brasidas stood looking at the two young girls who had carried the earth and water. His face … moved. The muscles of his jaw leaped up and down like a ship on the sea and tears came to his eyes. This, from a Spartan.

‘This is despicable,’ he said.

Ka glanced at the high ridge to the north. I’m going to guess that he had seen more atrocities than I. It is trite to say, but Heraclitus has the right of it: killing in the heat of battle is a very different animal from killing a couple of maidens in a village, much less raping and killing the entire village. A village of slaves. By the rules of war, the Medes might have rounded them all up and carried them away, the same way they took the bronze statues or the silver coins they found.

But they massacred them.

At any rate, Ka said, ‘They are close. The blood is still wet and red.’

Brasidas dropped his shield and spear. He lifted one of the dead girls and carried her, tenderly, to the place where the village shrine was. Hard by it was a small graveyard.

He never gave an order, and neither did Cimon or I, but men found picks and a damaged shovel.

Ka shook his head. ‘They are close,’ he said.

I mastered myself, although the smell of the dead, the burned people in the houses, was in my nose and lingers there to this day. Darkness was coming down fast.

We put out a dozen watchers in the hills around the crossroads and gave them horns. Ka took the archers and hid them along the northern branch of the road.

Two oarsmen broke into the smouldering barn and found that there was food: sausages, and wine jars. The Medes hadn’t even looted. They had merely killed.

When the work of burying the dead, all forty or more of them, was well advanced, I sent half the hoplites back to the ships with Cimon. I was worried that the Medes would attack the ships. I was in a black place and nothing made much sense to me. I slept a little and dreamed of the boy whose soul I sent down to Hades with a sharp knife one dark night on a battlefield in Asia …

When I awoke, Ka had a hand over my mouth.

‘They come,’ he said.

Who knows why they came back. Really, I want them to have been the same men, but perhaps they were another patrol, another group. I can only assume that they smelled our smoke, or saw movement in a valley that should have been dead.

They were careless, riding abroad in the first hour of the day, spread across the northern fields in a long line of perhaps sixty horsemen with more coming on the road.

I had perhaps forty hoplites and a dozen archers. And Brasidas, of course.

They came across the fields at first light and up the road.

We killed all of them we could reach. It was an ambush and there was nothing worthy about the fighting. Nothing I will tell you. We threw our spears into their horses and Ka and his archers dropped them until they broke.

It is what came after of which I will speak.

There were three men taken. All had their horses killed under them.

I wanted to kill them. In fact, the idea that occurred to me was to bury them alive with the corpses of the town they’d massacred.

Or perhaps another group massacred them.

I did not speak to them. One — the youngest — pleaded for his life, to the embarrassment of the other two. They simply waited to be killed.

The marines watched them with a hollow-eyed rage that told them everything.

Ka and his archers went out into the fields to collect their arrows. Only Ka looked at me and shook his head, and made a little noise in his throat.

I would like to say that my urge to destroy these three, to humiliate them and then kill them in their despair, that my urge was defeated by the sayings of my master, Heraclitus, or what I had learned in Sicily about myself and about violence. But in that hour I was merely rage.

The sparkling, gleaming whites of a young corpse’s eyes. The corpse should have been alive.

Bah! I tell this badly. I was in a sort of shock and I wanted blood.

Brasidas walked up to me. His face was … horrible.

‘We,’ he said thickly. The word took him effort. ‘We should let these animals go, before we lower ourselves to what they are.’

It was not at all what I expected him to say.

Will you believe me if I say that the two of us stood still and yet seemed to have trouble breathing?

We made it back to the boats. We had lost one man in the fighting, if cutting down surprised men in an ambush can be called fighting. We boarded our ships, a sullen mass of angry, disheartened men. Many of the oarsmen and even a few marines glowered at me.

I was beginning to breathe. I prayed to Lord Apollo that I had done right, because everything in me screamed that those three Medes should have been killed. But we had, in fact, let them go, and the discipline of the marines had held, although I could tell that Brasidas and I were virtually alone.

But there, on the white sand of the beach, young Pericles came and put his hand on my shoulder. ‘That was brave,’ he said.

Behind him was the Ionian I had seen him talking to on the day the Naxian ship came over to us.

Pericles smiled his too-hard smile. ‘Anaxagoras of Clazomenae,’ he said in introduction. ‘Son of Laertes.’

The young man bowed. ‘Lord Istes spoke highly of you, sir,’ he said. ‘But releasing the barbarians was an act of pure arete.’

I tried to smile, but very little came to my face. In fact, rather than feeling flattered, I felt nothing. Have you ever lost someone you loved? Mother, father, sister? You know that between weeping and recovery there is a time when you feel … nothing. No desire for sex, no desire for war. Nothing.

I was in that place. I felt nothing. My disdain for their youthful arrogance was but a distant echo of my true feeling.

The Ionian man would have said more, but Cimon, close behind him, had better skills in reading me and pushed him along brusquely. ‘Best get aboard your ship, boys,’ he said. He used an offensive word — pais, the same word we use for a juvenile or a slave.

Pericles flashed him a look of undisguised, adolescent anger.

Cimon met his look steadily. ‘Feel free to go back to your precious father,’ he said.

I didn’t understand the reference. I had, by then, been living and fighting alongside the scions of the Athenian noble families for more than fifteen years, but I still barely understood them.

At any rate, we got our ships to sea. It was a pretty day, utterly at odds with the revulsion I felt — that we all felt.

Seckla told me later that Brasidas threw his sword into the sea.

Salamis was crowded and had begun to develop the same smell as the vale of Olympus during the games — part cooking, part sacrifices, part men’s piss. But the place was alive, perhaps more thoroughly alive than Attica usually was, because of the crowds. I got my ships ashore and there was almost a quarrel over beaching our Ionian capture, because space on the beaches was at a premium. But Seckla worked a miracle of humble negotiation and convinced one of Xanthippus’s trierarchs to float and re-ground his vessel and so we all had room.

When I saw my people ashore and into their tents — it was excellent to have a pre-built camp and food ready to be served, and I pitied Cimon’s oarsmen, competing with every man in Athens for bread — I walked across the beach to find Xanthippus. I knew of him — oh, I had no doubt shared wine with him somewhere, but I didn’t know him well.

By the time I reached him, his young son was there, speaking in his usual slightly high-pitched, calm, clear voice, an almost unnatural voice for a man so young. He had the young Ionian by him.

He summoned me under an awning with a wave of his hand and a pair of Thracian slaves hurried to place a stool for me and put a cup of wine in my hand. Xanthippus was a big man, with a broad face and heavy muscles. He had the sandy fair hair common in his family and he had humour, which many rich men lack. I knew him as a friend and sometimes ally of Themistocles.

‘Arimnestos of Plataea. My son sings your praises. My wife — a member of the Alcmaeonidae! — sings me your praises.’ He nodded.

I returned his nod. ‘I have come only to thank you for giving me room to beach my spare ship.’

‘Spare!’ Xanthippus laughed. ‘Ah, you are a shame on us, Plataean. You mean, the Ionian ship you took in the very teeth of the Great King’s fleet!’

What does one say? I love praise all too well, and praise from a navarch as famous as Xanthippus was praise indeed. But it was laid too thick.

‘How do we do here?’ I asked, waving my wine familiarly. ‘In council?’

Xanthippus barked a mirthless laugh. ‘Oh, the Corinthians loathe Themistocles. It might be better for us if we had young Cimon represent us, or best of all, Aristides.’

‘He is in exile,’ I said, probably a little too quickly.

‘I know he’s your friend, for all he’s the leader of our opposition,’ Xanthippus said.

Through all this, the two young men stood silently. They had not been offered wine.

‘Your son served with distinction,’ I said. It was true, and besides, I’ve never known a man displeased by praise heaped on his child.

‘Cimon was kind enough to say the same. For myself, I’m still trying to understand why my son would go to sea with a pirate in a fleet of oligarchs rather than his own father.’ His bluff face filled with colour.

He was actually angry, not merely pretending.

‘Can’t you let men praise me for once, Father, and not you?’ Pericles said.

‘Can’t you tell the difference between a man who fights for his country and a killer who fights to steal other men’s gold?’ Xanthippus shot back.

Well. I rose to my feet and put my cup in the hands of a slave.

Xanthippus turned. ‘Please — I apologise for my rudeness and my son’s. A family quarrel is the most embarrassing thing in which to be caught.’

I managed a smile. ‘I too have children,’ I said. ‘Truly, I have another errand and sought only to thank you.’

Xanthippus turned on his son. ‘You have humiliated me in front of a man of consequence. Go to your tent and leave this effeminate Ionian to his own devices.’

These were not words I’d choose to speak to my own child, in front of witnesses or even alone. In a few sentences, Xanthippus, who had a fine reputation as a sailor, had given me the impression of a hollow man: a man for whom appearances mattered more than anything.

Pericles stood his ground. ‘He is not effeminate; really, Father, that’s a foolish insult, more suited to a man my age than yours. And if anyone here is offensive, it is you. Oligarchs and pirates? You have, in effect, just insulted your own guest. Few men are more frequently called pirates than our well-beloved Arimnestos of Plataea.’

He was deadly, with his calm voice, pitched not for beauty but for ease of hearing. You have to imagine that Pericles told his father and every oarsman within a hundred paces that he was a fool.

I thought perhaps Xanthippus would explode.

And then a woman appeared. She was no kore, but a mature woman of my own age or a year or two older, strong and tall. She wore a fine blue chiton pinned in gold and her feet were bare for walking on sand, which gave her a touch of informality. She’d thrown a woman’s himation over her chiton for decency. Athenian noblewomen did go out in public, then, but Salamis had made life even more informal. You cannot live on a beach and piss in a common latrine without a certain breakdown of the barriers of class.

I had never seen her, but one look at her and I knew she was of the Alcmaeonidae. She had Cleitus’s black brows and high forehead and his arrogance stamped around her mouth. But where Xanthippus’s arrogance rested on the soft sand of fear — fear of his status, I’d guess — Agariste’s arrogance rested on the bedrock of wealth, position and a solid belief in her own worth.

She flashed me a very private smile. It was all the apology I was ever to receive for the embarrassment of being privy to the family quarrel, but it was well done. Then her head turned — gracefully.

‘My dear husband,’ she said. ‘Of course our guest is anxious to depart! His daughter is over the ridge with the girls from Brauron. My niece says she is a very accomplished dancer.’

Her only acknowledgement of the difficulties of the scene, besides her presence, of course, was a single look at her son, Pericles. Their eyes met and she just lifted one eyebrow.

What she said in that lifted eyebrow I could read, as clearly as if my own mother had done it. ‘Really? Must you provoke your father in front of a famous guest who might be accounted an enemy of our clan?’ All this in one eyebrow.

And Pericles, the blue blood of all blue bloods, the scion of the very Alcmaeonidae who I had worked so hard to defeat politically on several occasions — I hope you are all staying awake — bowed to his mother. ‘I have not seen my cousin Heliodora in weeks,’ he said, with a respectful nod to me. ‘Perhaps I might accompany the mighty lord of Plataea.’

‘I’m not sure that mighty and Plataea can be said together in a sentence,’ I allowed. ‘My father was a bronze-smith.’