Salamis

That was very definitely the wrong thing to say. Even Pericles winced.

However, I was already on my feet and I’d had enough of them.

‘Thanks again for the space to beach my ship,’ I said.

‘It was nothing,’ Xanthippus said, somehow suggesting the opposite.

It is remarkable how you can make an enemy of a man merely by being present when he’s made to look weak by his son and his wife.

I smiled at Agariste, who met my eyes with her own. Most women in those days dropped their eyes when a man looked at them and I’ve said before that I always preferred those who did not. Her eyes were not ‘interested’. Merely — annoyed. As I passed her, she said, ‘Yet even Cleitus says you are a son of Heracles.’

I nodded, and kept going. I just wanted clear of their family quarrel. I left Pericles to his mother but he slipped away.

Pericles followed me back to my own ships, with his Ionian at his heels. The other man, Anaxagoras, I mean, was tall, handsome, and graceful. I had Eugenios give them both wine while I changed from a bloodstained rag of a chiton in which I should never have been seen in public to a better garment. Eugenios clucked over me and, as a consequence, I strode down to the water’s edge and flung myself in. There was some good-natured cheering — many men were bathing — and I swam up and down. When I came back to the sand, a pair of my oarsmen poured a heavy jug of fresh water over me and I took a towel and dried myself and then strigiled carefully with good oil. Life was simply better with Eugenios close at hand: the clean bronze strigil, the fine oil, the oil bottle clean and well kept …

Well, there’s more to life than blood and war. I needed to be clean.

Hector and Hipponax joined me in swimming and cleaning. As we left the water I saw Brasidas and most of the marines go in. It had been a dirty business. Does seawater make you clean?

Cleaner, at any rate. Blood sticks to you. So does fatigue and pain. I had a feeling in my pectoral muscles, the deep ache caused by fighting in a bronze thorax, and the fatigue in my upper arms from too many sword blows, too many spear casts. I could no longer count the number of fights I’d been in since the first day at Artemisium, but by that day and that hour I had been in the longest sustained campaign of my life. It was as bad as the siege of Miletus. I was tired, and behind fatigue towered the black clouds of low spirits and disillusion like a storm coming in from the sea. Or in this case, from the land. I knew it affected every man and every woman; the danger, the stress, and the rising smoke over Attica that showed the complete mastery of our foe over our homes. Our world was dying, whether we were Athenians or Plataeans. It set us apart from the Corinthians and the men of the Peloponnese.

I only mention this because as I towelled myself and strigiled with oil, I was in the process of admitting that my joints and my hands and my ankles and my torso ached in a way that they had not ached at Lade, and I knew that I was no longer young. The smoke of Attica was not worse than the knowledge that sweet youth was no longer mine, that I could no longer drink all night, fight all day, and then do it again and feel better. Instead — instead, despite victory and fortune, I felt tired, old, and beaten. And if I felt that way, I had little difficulty in imagining how my people felt.

I confess that all these thoughts were the matter of a few beats of my heart. It takes longer to tell than the occurrence. But the knowledge that your youth is gone is alike a little death. I had learned much about myself from Heraclitus, from Pythagoras and his daughter, from Lydia and the way I treated her, from war and slavery and Euphonia and Aristides and Seckla and a hundred other men and women. But in that moment something changed.

The only outward show I made was to put on a fine chiton with embroidery and summon my two young lads to do the same. Pericles and Anaxagoras were both there. The four of them were … amicable. They were still sparring, but having shared a battle and a sea voyage, they were comrades.

‘I’ve changed my mind,’ I said. ‘We will collect Euphonia and then walk to the temple and make sacrifice.’

This seemed to suit my four young men. Now that I put my mind to it, they were already very clean and smelled of perfumed oil, and while I put on a very god piece of cloth I had time to notice that they were already well dressed.

I can be slow. Pericles was visiting his cousin, after all.

We walked over the headland. There were sentries in the improvised tower, a pair of marines off the Storm Cutter and two older girls from Brauron. I took a moment to take my two marines aside and explain to them, in plain terms, what might befall them if anything happened to the Brauron girls.

I’m pleased to say that I left them impressed with my powers of discernment. And other powers.

When we came to the tent camp of the priestesses, I asked to meet with Hippolyta, the High Priestess of Artemis. She was unavailable — in fact, she was performing sacrifices on behalf of the fleet — but one of her sisters came to meet me, a mature woman of my own age or perhaps older who was wearing a man’s chitoniskos, a very short garment indeed. She was tanned and brown and had muscles on her muscles, so to speak.

‘You do not require our permission to visit your daughter,’ she said cheerfully.

‘My lady, I want to speak about the guard tower,’ I said, pointing at the high rocky point.

She took offence immediately. ‘We were here first,’ she said. ‘We do not need help from your men to watch for the Persians.’

I nodded. ‘Yes, my lady, yet I would be a poor commander if I trusted anyone — anyone — with the security of my ships.’ I held up my hand. ‘I’m not suggesting you give up the duty — which you have earned the right to hold!’

That got a hesitant smile.

‘I wonder if we couldn’t have two towers — one watching north and the other south.’ I smiled. ‘Because my people will serve best if I help them to avoid temptation.’

She blushed. And laughed a sweet, free laugh. ‘I think perhaps you may have a point, courteously rendered.’

‘I will order a second post built, closer to my beach, watching north,’ I said. ‘And then perhaps we might tell our people that they should speak to each other’s posts at the beginning and end of each watch … and no more.’

She nodded. ‘I think I can approve this plan without any further discussion. Thanks for coming over!’

‘Now I wish to see my daughter. Dancing?’

The priestess laughed. ‘There is naught to do on this beach’ she said. ‘We have a great deal of dancing.’

‘Don’t you all use bows?’ I asked.

‘We don’t have enough bows,’ she said. ‘They were collected and didn’t make it here. Much of our temple furniture and equipment was sent to safety in the Peloponnese or to the other side of the island.’

‘How many bows would make this better?’ I asked.

‘Hmm,’ she said. ‘Six, I think.’

I liked her. I had to work to avoid looking at her long, naked legs, but inside her handsome body was a fine brain and she thought rapidly and made decisions well. I thought the same as I’d thought among the Keltoi and again with the Spartans. Women, left to themselves, are very different from women carefully trained to be weak.

‘I think I can find you six bows,’ I said. ‘I’ll certainly try.’

‘I have girls who can draw a man’s bow,’ she said, ‘but not so many, either. We need some lighter bows.’

I shrugged. ‘Somewhere on this island are some Attic refugees who brought hunting bows,’ I said.

She smiled. ‘It must be fine to be a man, and famous,’ she said. She said this with no bitterness at all, but in those days, for a woman to roam about asking even the most innocent of questions would have been unthinkable.

Much less a woman in a chitoniskos.

‘I’ll take you to your daughter,’ my priestess said. ‘I was dancing myself.’

So we walked down to the hard-packed sand at the edge of the sea, where forty girls and young women were practising an elaborate festival dance, one of the bear dances, I believe, although ordinarily no man is allowed to see.

We no sooner emerged from the welter of tents than I knew why the four young men were so finely dressed. There were girls. Of course!

What a fool you can be, to forget your own youth.

The four of them immediately launched into a display of sullen boredom, as if, having spent ridiculous care dressing and oiling themselves, and gone to extra effort to be brought along, they now wanted me to believe that they didn’t want to be there.

In the meantime, forty very young women in very short chitons were vividly aware that four handsome young men were standing watching their dance.

Even now I roll my eyes. There are excellent reasons to train the young separately. One is that it’s so painful to watch them together.

Girls preened and hid and shrieked and giggled and pointed at each other, while my boys pretended indifference and then attempted to casually look to see if anyone was paying attention to them.

Now, I noticed that neither Iris nor Heliodora seemed interested in my young men; in fact, the pair of them continued to work on a figure. Their discipline, and their form, probably did them more credit than a storm of giggles and blushes might have, but in plain fact my young men were soliciting their attention and they were not giving it.

I find it delightful, my daughter, that this portion of my story reduces you to laughter. Perhaps, unlike stories of ship fights and sword duels, this part seems like something you have experienced yourself?

At any rate, they danced, and as they danced, I could see Cleitus in Heliodora. He was handsome, however much I hated him, and his daughter was not beautiful, but pretty — at least until she started dancing, and then she was with the gods. And Hipponax was gone, lost to Eros, a slave to Aphrodite, and too young to know what to do about it.

Thankfully for all of us, Despoina Thiale, the dance mistress, came over. She didn’t grin, but her strong face showed more amusement than resentment. ‘You’ll have to take the young men away or I’ll have nothing to show for my day,’ she said.

But Pericles grinned and exchanged kisses with her.

‘My great-aunt,’ he said. Of course, they were all related, all the eupatridae. The well-born.

Anaxagoras bore Thiale’s scrutiny well and clasped her hand as if she was a man.

‘You are my nephew’s new friend?’ she asked.

The Ionian showed very little on his face. He merely bowed his head with dignity, more dignity than Hector and Hipponax had ever shown, I promise you. ‘I value Pericles,’ he said.

‘You have a fine bearing for a man so young,’ Thiale said. ‘Like a Laconian.’

Among Athenian aristocrats, this would pass for a compliment.

The Ionian bowed again. ‘I find that displays of emotion are a waste of effort,’ he said.

Thiale laughed. ‘How … rare.’

I lost the next few exchanges as my own daughter came running across the sand and embraced me — a powerful clasp from a girl already taller by a finger than when I’d last seen her.

‘The dance is even more complicated,’ she said. ‘I’m actually leading my line. I wasn’t actually the leader, but I understood the tempo better than the other girls, and Despoina Thiale said that I could be the leader, and then-’

I kissed her. ‘Hello!’ I said in greeting.

She hugged me again. ‘Hello, Pater,’ she said. She laughed. ‘But I need to tell you-’

‘Sweet, we’re going over the headland to the temple to make sacrifice and I thought that you might like to come,’ I said.

‘May I bring my friend?’ she asked. She indicated another girl — there is a certain sameness to girls — smaller by a head, but also thin and agile and full of smiles. ‘She’s Ariadne and her parents have gone to Corinth for a few days and we’re best friends and-’

I smiled at Thiale. ‘May I have my daughter and her friend for a few hours?’ I asked.

Thiale laughed. ‘Would you like fifteen or twenty more?’ she said.

We walked to the old temple — more than six stades, in fact, and the girls had no trouble keeping up. In fact, they climbed rocks and ran down ravines and righted a turtle that had turned upside down and was grilling in the sun then they poured water on him because they were sure he was parched. I don’t think he appreciated them but I was happy to have my canteen returned to me.

Unbroken.

I had Eugenios purchase a fine, fat black ram and I sacrificed it to Apollo. My prayers and thoughts were about the end of youth, but my prayer was for the salvation of Attica and victory over the barbarians.

When the sacrifice was over, and the priest poured water over my blade, Pericles bowed. ‘That was very elegant,’ he said.

Anaxagoras, who, until that moment had seemed to me to be a self-important prig, also allowed himself a smile. ‘Very impressive,’ he said. ‘I would like to learn how to do that.’

‘Pater says you have to learn to draw the sword before you can use it,’ my daughter said.

There is something funny and very alarming about hearing your views repeated — verbatim — by a ten-year-old. ‘He practises drawing every morning. He says that just as every sacrifice is an offering to the gods, so is the skill you display in making the kill.’

‘I do?’ I asked.

‘You do,’ Euphonia said, with the hint of a sneer.

Eugenios was trying to get my attention, and I needed to escape. I went over to him.

‘That was perhaps the most expensive sacrificial animal in history,’ he said. ‘Forty drachma.’

I shook my head. ‘That will only get worse,’ I said.

He nodded.

We walked back, while I explained — without, I hope, too much pomposity — my thoughts on drawing and cutting with the sword, and what I had learned from the Spartan exercises, their version of Pyrrhiche, and the like.

Anaxagoras looked at me as if I might be human, after all. That was interesting.

‘These are profound thoughts,’ he said. Little knowing what a patronising thing that was to say. ‘You are a philosopher of the sword.’

‘Hmm,’ I said, too polite to openly disagree. Or agree.

He paused and looked at me with his too-serious young face. ‘I have offended you, I think,’ he said.

I shrugged. Hipponax laughed.

Euphonia said something to her friends and both girls shrieked with laughter. Anaxagoras frowned.

She poked Hipponax. ‘Do you want to talk to her, Hip?’ she asked.

Her friend blushed and looked away, embarrassed at my daughter’s temerity.

‘Who?’ he asked.

Hector was always faster on his feet and he smiled and knelt by my daughter. ‘Hipponax wished a secret assignation with your friend here,’ he said. ‘He’s madly in love with the way she giggles, and the way her feet are dirty-’

Euphonia’s friend all but expired in laughter. It is good to be ten years old, still immune to the darts of Eros but aware of their effect on others and find it all funny. Rather like middle age.

Hipponax didn’t like being teased and he expressed himself by tipping his friend over.

Hector shot to his feet, indignant. ‘This is my best chiton!’ he said.

‘You can buy another,’ Hipponax said.

‘We’re not all rich aristocrats,’ Hector said.

Hipponax laughed, suddenly more mature than I’d expected. ‘I’m the son of a fisherman’s wife,’ he said, looking at me.

Pericles winced.

‘You are slumming,’ I said to the young man.

‘I thought he was your son?’ Pericles said.

I nodded. ‘He is my son. I recognise him — he is in every way mine.’

Pericles let go a breath he had held. ‘I’m sorry,’ he said. ‘But my cousin does fancy him. She’s marriageable, and my mother-’ suddenly the wily Pericles was just another adolescent boy.

‘Your mother?’ I asked.

‘My mother favours the match,’ he said.

‘Match?’ I asked softly. We were speaking quietly. Hipponax and Hector had made up and Anaxagoras had shown himself more than a windbag by helping clean Hector’s chiton and his chlamys as we walked.

‘My mother — pardon me — says that your quarrel with Cleitus is foolish and helps to divide the eupatridae when they should be united,’ he said.

I probably growled in my throat. ‘He killed my mother,’ I said.

Pericles showed some of the power he would later display all too often. ‘He did not,’ Pericles said. ‘He supported your cousin in making private war on you, in revenge for your use of humiliation and violence in a political matter.’

‘I-’ I began.

‘Compared to the actions of the Great King, your argument with Cleitus is of little importance,’ he said, as if he was my own age and not seventeen or whatever he was that summer.

He, too, had a great deal of dignity. And he was right.

He shrugged. ‘If Jocasta was here, my mother would have it all arranged,’ he said. ‘Sorry — among the women, Jocasta is treated as your, hmm, patroness.’ He looked away. ‘As you inconveniently have no wife.’ He looked at me. ‘Actually, my mother initially suggested that we get Heliodora as your wife.’

‘She could be my daughter!’ I shot at him.

He shrugged. ‘When my mother gets the bit in her political teeth,’ he said, apologetically. ‘I convinced her that your Hipponax would do as well.’

‘When?’ I asked. ‘We were at sea-’

‘Oh, today,’ he said breezily.

The speed of the transmission of information from woman to woman on Salamis made the Great King’s spies and the priests of Apollo look like amateurs.

‘But they’ve only just met!’ I said.

Pericles, like most Athenian gentlemen, didn’t seem to think it mattered. ‘They’ve seen each other and they like what they see,’ he pronounced, as if he was not, in fact, a year younger than my son.

We might have gone on in that vein, and who knows what might have happened, but we’d been inland on the main road to the town and we were coming to the broad gravel road down to the beach that the Brauron girls used, and the moon was rising in a later afternoons sky and we heard cries. Because of the ridge, we hadn’t been able to see the sea for several stades, but as we came to the top we were looking down into the bay and across into Attica as the sun set to the left, over by Megara.

Both of the beaches we could see and almost every foot of the ridge were packed with people, and they were wailing. Men stood with their arms raised to the gods, and women tore their hair and their outer chitons and wept.

Over Attica, smoke was rising. We had to look to see what all the fuss was about, but when we saw!

The Acropolis was afire.

It must just have happened as we crossed the ridge from the temple of Apollo. While Pericles spoke to me of his mother’s marriage plots, Persian soldiers were climbing the rock of the ancient temples of Athens, her sacred precinct.

They broke in, and massacred the garrison.

We couldn’t hear that.

But we saw the flames as they rose in the clear evening air. The temples of Athens were burning and women lamented as if their children were lost. Screams rent the air as if the Persians were among us.

‘Keep walking,’ I ordered.

It was horrible.

I can’t describe the terrible fascination that ruin has for the eye. It was an awesome sight — the flames shooting hundreds of feet into the air above the Acropolis, which, even twenty stades away, rose so far above the plain that on most days you could see the roof of the temple clearly, and even the glint of gold from the old Erectheion that was.

But that night, they burned like a torch. An immense torch, as if a titan’s fist had broken through the thin crust of earth and raised it aloft to illuminate the world.

The flames went so high that they reflected in the ocean. Dry cedar and other valuable woods, ivory and gold — all were being consumed, along with three hundred people and all the treasures and sacred objects of a mighty and ancient city.

We walked down the road into an evening lit by horror. Eventually we found ourselves on the beach, still watching the Acropolis burn, with all of the women of Brauron and all the girls. By then the High Priestess was back, standing erect despite her seventy years, watching her city burn.

As we came up, one of the younger priestesses said something, apparently suggesting that the girls should not be allowed to watch.

‘No,’ the High Priestess said. ‘No, let them watch. They will be the mothers of the generation that avenges us. Let them see what the Great King has done, and remember.’ Ferocity growled in her voice. ‘I, for one, will never forget this night. I pray we will never make peace. I ask Artemis, under her own moon, to help us to bring fire to their temples, even to Persepolis and his other cities.’ She raised her arms and, for a moment, we could see the massive fire raging between them, almost like a crown on her head, so perfectly was she placed in front of me, and a chill swept me. A god heard her plea, or took her oath — I was there.

My daughter and her friend clutched my knees and wept, and many other women wept, but some stood dry-eyed.

By chance, or perhaps by purpose, Heliodora was standing close to us as the fire burned down, and she stood with her friend Iris — dry-eyed.

Hipponax stepped up close to her, as if moved by some external force, as if pulled by a rope, against his will.

She looked at him: a flick of the eyes, and then a movement of her head as she appreciated who it was standing close to her.

‘You do not weep for Athens?’ my son asked her.

Not bad, I thought.

‘I don’t want to bear sons to avenge Athens,’ Heliodora said. ‘I want to fight the Persians myself.’

I was close enough to hear every word, hidden by chance and the way we all stood, and I felt like an intruder. At the same time I could see her face, and his. In a moment, it struck me that perhaps they should wed. There was something remarkable to see the two of them, or perhaps this is an old story repeated many times.

And when she made this pronouncement, I feared for how my sometimes desperately immature son would respond. Derision? Mockery?

‘I could get you aboard a ship,’ my son said.

It was a terrible idea. But it was a wonderful, heartfelt reply.

‘You could?’ she asked. ‘I could row all day!’

I did nothing. What a terrible mistake. And yet, so glorious.

We stood and watched until our hips ached and our feet hurt.

It was so terrible that we couldn’t walk away.

Eventually, the fires burned down. Girls took other girls to bed, and the priestesses moved among them.

I can say that I was never more than a few arms’ lengths from my son, but I must have missed something. And when we walked back to our camp, Pericles looked sombre, Anaxagoras kept looking back, and Hector wouldn’t meet my eye.

‘Who is Iris?’ I asked.

Pericles made a dismissive gesture, mostly lost in the dark. ‘My cousin’s friend. She’s nobody; a Thracian or perhaps Macedonian.’

‘She is not nobody!’ Hector said hotly.

‘Boys,’ I said. We were at the guard towers above the bay and a stream of sparks shot into the air over the Acropolis as something enormous collapsed.

We walked down into our own camp silently.

That was the night Athens fell to the Persians.

The next morning, I was unable to sleep in — the usual reasons — and I went up the beach, pissed into the thin belt of bushes and vines, and then went for a run. The beach was not tidy and I had to stay along the water and run into the surf around the bow of every ship. It was a difficult run.

I needed a difficult run. I came back, watching the column of black smoke still rising from the Acropolis, and then I ran into the sea and swam.

Hector was waiting for me on the beach, with a towel.

‘I need to talk to you,’ he said.

Well, he’d brought oil and a strigil and there was almost no one awake. ‘I am at your service.’

‘Am I a gentleman?’ he asked.

I almost cut myself with my strigil. But … these are real questions.

‘Yes,’ I said.

‘Was Anarchos my father?’ he asked.

His face was a frozen mask. ‘Yes,’ I said slowly. ‘That is, I believe so.’

‘A criminal,’ he said bitterly.

‘Pfft,’ I said, or something equally annoying.

‘He was! Seckla says he was a terrible man who broke people to his will, ran prostitutes …’ He was going to cry.

‘Hector,’ I said. I took him in my arms. I was still big enough to prevent him from getting away. ‘Hector, shut up.’

‘No!’ he swore. ‘You-’

‘Shut up, Hector,’ I insisted. ‘Your father did some terrible things, and some good things, like most men.’

‘He got me on some slave and sent me to you as a debt payment!’ he shouted.

An oarsman popped his head out of his tent.

Well, that was one interpretation, sure.

I think that Anarchos, wily as Odysseus, even at the end of his life, sent me his son as a penance and a reward, a threat and a promise. I had given it some thought, but not enough; I wasn’t prepared for this.

But then, who is?

‘I think that you were his only son and he loved you, in his way,’ I said.

‘He was a criminal!’ Hector shouted.

I wished for — of all people! — Jocasta. She would know how to deal with this.

‘What brings this on just now?’ I asked. I thought I’d try humour. ‘As we’re about to try conclusions with the Persians, you thought-’

‘No, you shut up!’ he said. ‘I’m nobody!’

‘Don’t make me hurt you,’ I said, because he was struggling with me. ‘You are not nobody. You are a citizen of Plataea and you have a full share of everything we take. You are a hoplite, a man of valour. You are a man we can count on, on any deck, on any field.’

He didn’t relax all at once. But there was a sea change and his arms moved a fraction.

And then, as suddenly as a storm coming and blowing away, he let go of me, gathered the towel, and walked away, as if he was still my pais and he had chores to do.

I suppose that at some remove I should have expected it, but I hadn’t. To me, he was my second son. He had been with me almost five years by then. He’d been to sea with and without me, and the sea is not for weaklings.

It turned out that there was a great deal I didn’t know, but that’s always true, isn’t it?

That evening there was a command meeting. It was widely attended; the best attended in many days.

The Peloponnesians were anxious to sail.

Eurybiades gave a set of sacrifices, which, I’ll add, he did beautifully, like any Spartan gentleman, and then he invited the Corinthians to speak.

Adeimantus was the orator. He stood forth and I had a moment: because, by chance, Cleitus was standing across the slope from Adeimantus and both were together in my vision. I thought of what Pericles had said about our quarrel, and how it divided the best men, and I considered how much more I hated Adeimantus for what I still view as his treason and how merely habitual my hatred for Cleitus was.

‘It is time to call a vote,’ Adeimantus said. ‘Let all the cities of the alliance vote whether we can leave for the isthmus.’

Themistocles laughed. ‘How do we vote, Adeimantus — one vote for every city, or perhaps by the number of ships we provide?’

Adeimantus turned and looked at Themistocles with contempt. ‘You don’t even have a city. Your city is destroyed. Your gods are thrown down.’ He gestured exactly as one does in dismissing a slave. ‘You are not even Athenians any more. Wait, and we will tell you what we, who have cities, have decided.’

Adeimantus had misjudged. The Spartan trierarchs were appalled; to mock a man for the loss of his city would, under most circumstances, be considered low, but this was terrible, a deliberate insult, hubris committed with forethought.

In fact, even a few of the Corinthians winced.

Themistocles judged the audience like the professional politician he was and responded. He didn’t laugh or frown or curse. He was mild.

‘As long as we have two hundred warships, we have the largest city in Greece,’ he said.

And by implication, of course, he suggested that, unlike their cities, his could go where it pleased. It was, in fact, the most brilliant speech I ever heard: short, to the point, but redolent with other meanings.

And yet, when I think back now, what did he mean? Fully? Now that all is exposed, what was his thinking that fateful night, when the fate of Greece teetered on a razor’s edge?

He carried them, for that night, because Adeimantus had been a fool.

The next morning, the Persian fleet worked its way onto the beaches below Athens, the beaches of Phaleron. They were not opposite us, but north of us and we were spared the vision of their great fleet blackening the sea, but from the northern headlands of Salamis it was easy enough to see them, a near-endless stream of warships landing in ordered chaos on the beaches of Phaleron.

Cimon put to sea in his own Ajax and hovered off the southern edge of their fleet, openly challenging them to single-ship combat, but they stayed on their beaches.

Cimon tells me he counted seven hundred and eleven ships. I have heard counts over a thousand and counts as few as five hundred and fifty, and I’m no help. But I tend to believe Cimon. He had the time, and the view.

The Persian fleet was very careful in its movements. It was odd that they outnumbered us at least two to one and yet they were behaving so cautiously. Of course, their Persian officers had no doubt spent days looking at the scrawled messages we’d left them, inviting the Ionians to come join us, or to betray their Persians in mid-battle. And they’d lost the last few encounters.

Late that afternoon, while I was practising on my own beach with Brasidas and Hipponax and Hector, Pericles and Anaxagoras — a well-trained man for all his quiet arrogance — a dozen ships came in from the south. They came up the Bay of Salamis in fine style and my daughter raced over with three of her friends, including Heliodora, to tell us there was a fleet coming. That created a stir, I promise you. With the Great King’s fleet closing all the passages to the north, an attack from the south loomed as a very real possibility and I ordered my hulls into the water. I ran — mostly not — up the headland and climbed the Brauron tower.

I didn’t know the ships. But there was something about them that appeared Greek; whether the slight outward slant of the cutwaters or the style of the rowing, but I was sure they were Peloponnesian ships. As they came closer, we could see that the lead ship displayed a dozen shields, all those of Spartiates, and men began to cheer.

I don’t usually cheer for Sparta, but more ships are always welcome, aren’t they?

But all the beaches to the north were packed. We had the Corinthians and the Spartans on the beaches to the south, and the only beach not covered in ships was the Brauron beach. I ran down like a boy and into the midst of another dance practice. I bowed low to the High Priestess, as if she was the Great King himself, and begged her permission for men and ships to land on her beach.

She made me wait long enough to let me know that she could refuse, and then she acquiesced graciously. Seckla was still close enough inshore to summon and I dropped my chiton — in front of a hundred virgins! — and swam out to him, and Leukas hauled me aboard and Lydia turned south.

We closed with the lead Spartan ship as quickly as the telling of it, and they all lay to, resting their oarsmen in the gruelling sun, and I leaped again — naked, damn it — onto the helm-deck of the lead ship.

There was Bulis, unchanged by the year we’d been apart. Until I saw him I assumed that he had died with his king. But there he was, and there was Sparthius in full armour. They both embraced me.

‘Naked!’ Bulis said — a long speech, for him.

We all laughed.

‘The beaches are crowded,’ I said. ‘I’ve found you a berth, just there by the headland with the two towers. Those are my ships on the other beach.’

Sparthius nodded. ‘Good. Very good.’

He motioned to the helmsman and orders were given.

I’d never been on a Spartan warship and it was interesting. There were fewer shouted orders than on one of my ships; everything seemed to happen with the gravity of ritual, and yet … everything happened. As an example, given the rather rough nature of the beaches at Salamis, sailors on the small foredeck — almost a castle — began raising a stone anchor and fitting it to a wooden stock in the bow. Then they fitted a pair of lighter stones to the anchor cable. It was a very seamanlike operation, but there were no orders given from the command deck, and the oar-master almost didn’t know the anchor was being prepared.

I was impressed, yet at the same time, I admit to having reservations. The cacophony of my command deck, with shouted orders repeated in all directions, meant that every crew station knew what was being done. In a storm, the helmsman still knew what was happening forward. But the Spartan way was very … intimidating.

Fancy that.

Regardless, we landed prettily, and I took my Spartiate friends to meet the High Priestess. I’m happy to say that Eugenios was waiting with a clean chiton and a fine himation — now that is service. I emerged from the waves like a king, or at least a well-waited on prince, and took my Spartans to their audience, where, of course, they behaved perfectly. It was delightful to see Sparthius, all his front teeth lost in some long-ago encounter, as big as a house and as dangerous as a lion, impressing this tiny but determined old woman with his perfect manners.

She, in turn, was delighted to meet them, and she did as much — or more — than any Athenian I had seen to convince these two men that she, at least, valued them and the alliance for which they stood, and when the trierarchs and helmsmen of the other ships came up to be blessed she spoke to each one, Spartan and Corinthian, with a light in her eye that made them smile. She really was a fine women and her dignity was not so immense that she could not laugh.

I heard that laugh, and another with her, and I turned and found myself looking at Lykon, son of Antinor, who had stood with me at my wedding, and who I accounted among my best friends. He had once been a man so handsome as to be pretty, and much whispered about, but a boar hunt on our mountain had gotten him a scar on his face that turned a feminine beauty into a masculine one.

I waited as he chatted with the High Priestess, and yet our eyes met and we both smiled and years fell away behind me. Lykon and I had been friends before the Medes landed at Marathon — when my lovely wife Euphonia still walked the earth. In fact, back when she was as young as Heliodora …

When he was done speaking to the priestess I swept him into a crushing embrace and he crushed me right back. And then another pair of arms encircled me, and I had to laugh through tears. Lykon’s nearly inseparable friend Philip, son of Sophokles. His grandfather had been a king in Thrace, but he was as Greek as me. At least as Greek — and much richer.

Actually, I wasn’t certain of that. Even with Athens in flames and Plataea the same, I was probably a fairly rich man. When you stop counting, you have reached some level.

Hippolyta was beaming at me and I bowed. But behind her was Aristides. I didn’t get to him in the press of men because Hippolyta took my hand. Hers was old and very delicate, but surprisingly strong.

‘Such lovely young men,’ she said. ‘Please make clear that they are to keep their distance from my girls.’

A bucket of cold water on our reunion. But Hippolyta was correct, of course, and I understood that I had made myself their guarantor in her eyes. So I collected the trierarchs and Bulis introduced me.

‘This is Arimnestos of Plataea. I have fought beside him.’

They were immediately silent. Hah! Praise indeed, eh?

I pointed out the young women of Brauron and how they were trained, and I managed to include the names of a few fathers — including my own. Men smiled, but not like wolves.

‘We will make arrangements,’ Bulis said. He nodded sharply.

Two thousand young oarsmen and hoplites in their physical prime. Somehow, they all kept their hands and their mouths to themselves and they went, unmolested, to bathe in the sea or perform their dances between the black hulls of the Greek ships. We all managed, somehow, as if the presence of so many beautiful maidens was an everyday occurrence. Perhaps it was, in Sparta. But it certainly kept our minds off the Persians.

The coming of Lykon and Aristides and Philip marked the end of my black days and the introduction of busy visiting among the ships. I had a symposium on the sand, with proper couches — kline — loaned by Brauron in exchange for all the spare bows I found in a few visits along the beaches. Aristides was there, and Cimon, and Aeschylus and Phrynicus too, and Philip and Lykon and Brasidas, Bulis and Sparthius. The Spartans almost spoiled my little party by bringing another young man, Callicrates, one of the most beautiful men I had ever seen, tall and heavily muscled. He was a little older than Anaxagoras. Pericles was too young for a symposium, but not too young to fight, and he didn’t miss an opportunity to mention that to his father or mother. Xanthippus, his father, refused the invitation for him, and declined to come himself, so we had an empty couch space and the beautiful Spartan lay down by the stolid Ionian.

We had fish, of course, and some very nice squid. Listen, if you must feast with the richest men in the Greek world, Eugenios is the man to have at your side, like Idomeneus in a fight. Yes, Idomeneus was there as well, sharing his couch with Styges and throwing food at Lykon.

When we were done eating, conversation turned to the war. I cannot, to be honest, remember everything that men said, although most of it was worthy of thought. Callicrates declined to speak, and Anaxagoras spoke very well, prompting Bulis, who was on my couch at the time, to suggest that between the Ionian’s head and the Spartan’s body, we had the makings of a god.

Well, it was funny at the time, I promise you.

Phrynicus was just explaining to the Spartans and Corinthians how Aristides had come to be exiled and how all the exiles had been formally invited back when Bulis said in my ear, ‘I have a message from Queen Gorgo.’

Gorgo was a widow. I had not really considered that Gorgo was as much a widow as Penelope, but I had seen the depth of her bond with her husband. What can I say that I have not said other nights? Leonidas was more exactly like a god than any other man I have met.

Despite which I had a human urge to go to Sparta and see if his widow desired comfort. Bah! Perhaps I am too honest for you. But men are not simple animals — or rather, sometimes we are, are we not?

‘I am to tell you that Artaphernes is dying or already dead.’ Bulis had not met the Persian satrap. But he certainly knew of him.

The words went through me like fire.

Gorgo was not the only beautiful woman to be made a widow that autumn. Briseis’s husband — my friend and sometime patron — Artaphernes, the Satrap of Phrygia.

His death meant that Briseis was free. Briseis was many things — and I will confess that by the standards of Greek womanhood, she was a terrible woman, an adulteress and a shameless user of her body for political ends. Like a man, in fact.

But she was, in her way, absolutely honourable. She had promised me, a year and more before, that when Artaphernes died, she was to marry me. I had prepared a house for her, a house that now lay in ashes. But there could be other houses.

At the time, Artaphernes had himself asked me to come for her when he was dead. His son by another woman, also called Artaphernes, hated her for displacing his own mother. And so it goes: politics and marriage are deeply intertwined, with the Persians as with the Greeks.

His death also meant that the last voice of reason on the Persian side was silenced. That probably meant little, for he had been left behind when Mardonius, his political enemy, marched to triumph in the west.

It made me wonder if Artaphernes had been directly in contact with Gorgo. Certainly she was in contact with the exiled Spartan king, Demaratus.

All the busy plotters. It occurred to me then that Briseis and Gorgo might be very good friends, or deadly rivals. For a moment I thought of what it would be like to introduce Briseis to Jocasta …

‘You are as tense a boy in his first fight,’ Bulis said. ‘This is important news, I take it. I also have this for you.’

What he handed me was a needle case, the sort any poor free woman has, a thing made of wood. This one was agreeable; the turning was excellent, and the lid locked to the base with a little click. But I could buy one in any agora for a drachma or less.

Inside were several fine bronze needles, worth far more than the case. In fact, they were a rich woman’s needles. I was a bronze-smith and I knew how to make a needle, although not as fine as these. These were masterpieces, with long, tapered eyes in a shaft that had been narrowed throughout its length by patient filing with tiny files, themselves carefully made. One of these needles was worth ten or fifteen drachma, almost a month’s pay for an oarsman.

They said Briseis as clearly as a signature.

I dumped them out in my palm. Lykon came and sat on my couch just at that moment.

‘Those are fine!’ he said. ‘Thinking of taking up embroidery?’

We all laughed and I dropped the needles, point first, back into the case. And in doing so, I felt the secret.

I excused myself to order more wine and found Eugenios, and after passing my redundant request (when did Eugenios need an coaching on a symposium?), I passed into my tent. I used an eating pick to reach into the needle case and there, sure enough, I found a single leaf of papyrus. I sent a Thracian slave for vinegar. I was so impatient I could not go back to the party.

The boy came back at a run. He had a small amphora of our own Plataean vinegar, made of our own grapes, pale and watery though it is. I brushed it on the papyrus.

Just for a moment, one word appeared, before the liquid ruined the papyrus leaf. Just for a moment the word burned at me, brown on white.

‘Come.’

I wish that I could claim credit for the brilliant plan to scout the Persian-held beaches that was concocted that night, but as it was, for as long as a runner takes to run the stadion, I considered summoning Seckla and Leukas and all my people and taking Lydia to sea.

It was not my patriotism that saved me, I must tell you. In that moment, I had fought the Persian unceasingly for fifteen years and I owed the alliance nothing. Even with all my friends right there on the beach, I felt pulled to leave immediately.

But thirty-five is a little different from seventeen, and one thing I knew was that the whole Persian fleet lay on the beaches of Phaleron, blocking the only good exit form the Bay of Salamis. Even if I rowed west and went south around the island, I would have to pass in full view of their fleet, or risk some very complicated blue-water navigation at the edge of autumn.

I knew I could do it.

I knew that it would be more noble to help defeat the Medes first.

But by Poseidon and Heracles my ancestor, I burned to get my hull in the water and sail to her that instant. That is what I felt for your mother, child. Perhaps she never launched a thousand ships — although I’d say that, in aggregate, she probably did — but that night, she nearly launched one.

Instead, I returned to my friends and my couch next to Bulis, and discovered that in my absence they’d decided to have a look into Phaleron and tease the Great King’s fleet. It was Cimon’s plan, but I thought it had some of the madness of Idomeneus and they were all excited. I poured them one more bowl of wine well-mixed with water and sent them to bed as soon as they explained to me that we were all putting to sea before the sun rose.

Aristides lingered with the two Spartans. ‘It’s the same as the days before Marathon,’ he said.

‘And Lade,’ I noted. ‘This war has seen many defeats and almost as many barren victories.’

Aristides shook his head. ‘The word on the beaches to the south is that the Peloponnesian allies are threatening to cut and run for the isthmus,’ he said.

‘Not the Spartans!’ I spat.

Bulis reached out and touched my arm, silently.

Aristides shook his head. ‘Led by the Corinthians,’ he said. ‘I truly hope this raid gets us the favour of the gods.’ He shrugged.

We all went to bed.

Rosy-fingered dawn had not yet risen in her charming dishabille to touch the horizon when my oarsmen put Lydia’s bow into the waves. Salamis Bay is a tricky piece of water; the breeze brought a heavy chop from the south as we weathered the long point men now call the Dog’s Grave — you know that story?

Eh? Well, Themistocles had ordered that all domestic animals be left in Attica to starve. He set the example, leaving a beautiful hunting dog to die. The dog supposedly followed him down to the water’s edge and then, after some howling, swam after the great man’s ship. Themistocles hardened his heart — not hard for him, I suspect — and rowed on, but the dog followed, swimming all the way across the bay to the long point of Salamis that seems to aim like an accusing hand at the harbour of Piraeus. Themistocles landed his ship and the dog swam up, utterly faithful, got itself up on the point: and then died. I heard the story a dozen times that week, as an example of bad omens and how untrustworthy Themistocles was. In fact, most families brought their dogs, and even a few cats. The Themistocles I knew would have told all the Athenians to leave their pets and then bribed someone else to carry his. I’m not sure I believe the story, even now, but that point is still called the ‘Dog’s Grave’.

We could smell the burning over Attica. We could smell a carrion smell from slaughtered animals and a spicy smell, and over it all that sharp tang that we perceive after a fire.

We put six ships to sea. Aristides was there in his Athena Nike with Demetrios at the helm, and I had Lydia. Astern of us in a short column of twos were Bulis and Sparthius in their Lacedaemonian Ares, with Cimon in Ajax and Philip and Lykon in Corinthian ships. It was a deliberate attempt to involve the whole fleet and I know, without being told, that Themistocles and Cimon hoped to provoke a general action.

We were also the fastest ships available, at various points of sailing and rowing.

Or perhaps that’s an excuse. We were six ships whose men and trierarchs trusted each other. Good ships, aye, and good oarsmen, were thick on the beaches that autumn, but trust was as thinly spread as good Olbian caviar at a poor man’s party.

So as we weathered the long point, passing the island of Psyttaleia to our port side. The island cut off any view of Piraeus and kept the Persians around Athens from watching our movements. As soon as we entered the straits between Cynosura, the Dog’s Grave, and the island of Psyttaleia we felt the chop; it hit us for the first time, broadside on. It wasn’t so bad at first, because of the loom of the main island, but once we were in the open ocean, it was quite a swell. Good fortune and years of following Cimon and his father around the sea caused me to watch him as he passed the gap, and I saw that he put his helm over and turned south as soon as he weathered the point. I assumed he was being cautious about the placement of the Persians, but when it was my turn and I felt the first wave and we took water amidships because our sides were so low, I too turned sharply to the south, so that the morning waves came at my protected bow. On this side of the cape we could see, quite close to us, the ships of Aegina on their beaches. We waved and called in Greek to prevent an accident, and rowed south into the wind with every oarsman cursing. There’s another small island almost due west of Psyttaleia, and if it has a name I don’t know it, but we passed between it and Psyttaleia in water so shallow I had Seckla in the bow throwing a lead.

Dawn was just staining the skies. The south wind moderated as the sun rose and in an hour, as the rowers cursed and the hoplites began to cook their sausages back on the beaches, we passed the promontory of Piraeus and opened the Bay of Phaleron — you know what that phrase means, honey? When you are close in with the land, sailing or rowing, the land all looks about the same and a headland can completely hide a small harbour, a bay, or an inlet. As you pass along the land, you may pass a headland, and then, all of a sudden, a ‘hole’ opens in the coast and you can see into the bay, the same way that you cannot see into the garden until you pass the first pillar there and get a peak through the door — see?

So we opened the bay.

And in it, on the beaches there, were all the ships in the world, or so it seemed. I had Seckla to do the counting — he was always a good counter, and the man doing the counting needs to have no other work. It’s hard enough, when all the enemy ships are black, and all about the same size and far away.

We bore down on them. We’d been crawling west by south under oars, but now that morning was coming, a land breeze rose off Attica, a breeze full of ash. We rowed into it, but all six of us had our main sails laid along on our decks or half-decks.

No one seemed to be stirring on shore.

We rowed in. I found the promontory at Munychia, just south of Athens itself, and aimed at it, to come up the windward side of the enemy fleet, which filled every beach from the rocky tumble at the sea edge by Munychia all the way over to Phaleron herself, a good nine stades. They filled those beaches, west to east, as solidly as tuna fill the Bosporus in the spring.

By my estimate, if every ship beached at two oars’ lengths from the next, the minimum safe distance to get a fleet off the beach, then there could be about one hundred ships to every stade, or nine hundred enemy ships. They were not all triremes, either; they had more pentekonters and small fry than we did, but there were also some enormous ships among them, including a great trireme of Phoenician make, high-sided and as big as any two of our ships, which sat right in the centre of the great curving beach.

It was an awe-inspiring sight; a larger fleet than the enemy had at Artemisium. It was both more, and less, impressive than their fleet at sea. It was certainly better ordered than their anchorages and landing beaches had been in Thessaly.

We rowed nearer the land. We were merely cruising; a slow, steady pace with only two banks of oars rowing, so that we moved only twenty-five stades an hour or so.

After about as much time as it takes an orator to deliver a speech, we were coming up on the west end of their beach. We were close enough to hear men calling out. Seckla was in the bow and he waved and shouted in his African tongue and in Phoenician.

We turned east and followed Cimon along the edge of the beach, so close in we might have thrown fire into the ships. Cimon’s daring plan was that we would imitate a newly arrived squadron looking for a landing place while we crept along, bold as a Piraeus waterfront girl, and counted our enemies.

We made it a third of the way around the Bay of Phaleron before they smoked us. But when they did, forty ships came off the beach all together, from every compass point. It happened so quickly that we passed from stealth to terror in two beats of the heart. The water was suddenly so full of enemies that it seemed as if we were blood poured into an ocean full of sharks.

The ships nearest me were Egyptian — excellent ships with highly trained crews who nonetheless hated the Great King as much as I did and perhaps more. Egypt had only recently revolted and the revolt had been suppressed savagely. The Egyptians were among the first in the water, but they approached cautiously, giving my ship time to turn end for end. As soon as my bow was pointed at the open sea and I had the wind behind me, I motioned at Leukas and he put the mainsail onto the yard in record speed while the oarsmen pulled us hard to the south.

To my port side, over to the west, lay Athena Nike. Aristides made his turn and then, by ill-luck, fouled something, and it took him precious heartbeats to free his ram-bow. He had a crowd of Ionians coming up on his port side, and he had to turn towards me to escape being boarded even as his ship finally leapt into motion.

I found myself gnawing on one of my fingers. A dreadful habit, but the tension of watching that race — if it can be called a race when no one is yet moving at full speed — was more than I could bear. Athena Nike was slowly moving east and south, but the Ionians were pulling closer with every stroke.

I took a breath and looked to my starboard side. There were my two Corinthians, about two stades away and already setting their sails. Tyche had decreed that the Ionians on the western beaches were the slowest of all to guess who we were, and the ships of Miletus and Mycale and Ephesus were the last off their beach, so that Lykos and Philip pulled effortlessly away.

Leaving me with some empty ocean under my starboard side.

I beckoned to Seckla and got him between the steering oars and gave him a notion of my intentions and then ran down the half-deck to the platform amidships. The sail was set to the yard, but I shouted to Leukas to keep it all on deck, something easier in a trihemiolia than in a trireme, I promise you, because you have a deck under your feet and room to spread the sail without fouling the rowers.

‘Prepare to turn to starboard,’ I said. I held up my right hand to make sure I did not give the wrong order. I have been known to mix left and right at inconvenient times. I remember because I stared at my right hand and breathed to make sure I called the correct direction.

Right under my bare feet, a rower looked up — Sikli. He grinned.

‘Five minutes rowing and you’re done for the day,’ I said.

He grunted and men around him laughed. Always a good sign.

‘Hard to starboard,’ I roared.

I saw Sikli dip his oar and push, holding the blade steady against the whole impulse of the ship, as did every starboard-side rower, and as the blades bit, the ship turned. It turned very rapidly, losing momentum as it turned, so that the bow went from pointing due south very quickly to east, and then more slowly around to north, the port-side rowers still pulling. The ship heeled a long way, and as we went broadside on to the now northern wind we took on some water through the lowest tier of oar-ports.

I watched my pursuers.

This was going to be close, even by my standards.

I was delighted to see the Egyptians hesitate as I went bow on to them, offering combat. While a dozen of them had exploded off the beach, there were only two in range. The rest were trailing away to the north, rather like the Carthaginians when we caught the tin fleet.

Ka and his lads began to loft arrows into the lead Egyptian even as Brasidas stepped forward with half a dozen marines and provided them with shields from behind which they could shoot. This is one of the few innovations for which I can really claim credit, and even then it’s really an idea I had while looking at a piece of Assyrian art north of Babylon. The Assyrians, apparently, had shield men to cover their archers. It was a good idea. May Apollo, Lord of the Silver Bow, accept my words of praise that the idea never, apparently, entered the heads of the Persians.

But I wander from my point. Ka hated Egyptians more than Persians or Phoenicians; his people, I gather, were always at feud with them about something. At any rate, all of his archers, who were usually quiet, dignified men, were suddenly voluble, shouting insults, screaming down the wind and loosing shaft after shaft.

I didn’t see any sign that they hit anything. Perhaps they did, or perhaps their shouts and curses had some effect — perhaps one of their gods was listening. At any rate, both Egyptians turned west, declining the engagement.

The archers went mad, cheering, and the marines joined them. You would not have thought fifteen men could make so much noise. Most of the deck crew roared, as well.

All I could see was two Egyptian captains with no more reason to love Persia and the Great King than I had myself. Perhaps less.

At any rate, I tapped my spear butt against the deck. ‘Prepare to turn to starboard!’ I called again. I leaned over to Onisandros, raised my spear, and pointed it at the three Ionian triremes pursuing Aristides.

He nodded.

‘Hard to starboard!’ I called, and the ship began to swing, the same rotation as before, so that, having started with our head due south, and passed to the west and north, we now began to slant away east. I ran back up the tilted deck as the marines and archers sat down to avoid overbalancing. Seckla had the steering oars and was leaning forward like a warhorse in a chariot harness.

He needed no order from me. He had known all along what I intended.

I have said before, I think, that a fight at sea, all fights, at that, begin as slowly as the gentle fall of new snow, and then gather momentum as the ships close, so that not only does everything seem to go faster, but the speed of engagement, of orders, of your very heart, all seem to rush towards a climax as the ships near. I’m sure a sophist like Anaxagoras would make something of the idea, but to me it is like a play that begins with the chorus singing about some seemingly unimportant bit of myth, but by the end you are weeping your eyes out as Oedipus hurtles toward his ruin …

Anyway.

Between them, the hundred and eighty rowers, the oar-master and my helmsman brought our bow dead on line and a little ahead of Aristides’ ship. We were at least three stades away.

Even as we watched, the lead Ionian, a ship of Halicarnassus, may I add — you know this story, young man? Hah. Well, here’s my side of it. The lead Ionian was a ship’s length aft of Aristides’ magnificent Athena Nike and something was slowing the rowers on his ship. Usually it was one of the best of all the Athenians vessels, but today the ship was sluggish.

In fact, Aristides was taking on water from a badly damaged bow.

The Ionian was coming up on him fast.

We were hurtling into the Ionian’s flank much, much faster. But we were farther away.

It was like a problem in arithmetic and geometry, except that everything was variable. The wind was fickle, the waves slowed the ships, the oarsmen were getting tired and sometimes you just have to guess.

The lead Ionian slapped his ram into Aristides’ stern. It wasn’t a very hard hit, but Athena Nike yawed and seemed to skid.

Ka stood in my bow and began to shoot. He was shooting from the bow platform into the amidships of the enemy, and the Ionians were high-sided compared to any but Phoenicians, so that it took great skill and Tyche to drop a shaft in among the benches.

But broadside on gave Ka and his four archers the best opportunity and they loosed shafts at a great rate. The Persians aboard the lead Ionian returned shaft for shaft.

The second Ionian tried to turn towards us. But the now northerly wind caught him and accelerated his turn, so that he was pushed downwind. A well-built trieres has almost no keel — if you build one with any keel at all, the way I’d built Lydia, you began to wear it away every time you ran the ship up a beach.

The newly designed ships were unhandy with the wind abeam. That was interesting.

I didn’t think of any of that as we hurtled like Poseidon’s spear towards the lead Ionian, who had lost way ramming Aristides’ stern.

Aristides complicated matters by turning to starboard. The lead Ionian wasn’t going fast, but she was fast enough to overshoot Athena Nike before she made her own turn, so that now, as Seckla followed the action by a long, curving turn to starboard to bring us back round the circle to due north, we were behind the enemy ships, and they lay almost across our course.

Astern, about forty ships were coming on as fast as their oarsmen would pull them.

I could not stop for a ramming attack, or a boarding action. Even an oar-rake would conceivably slow me too much.

Aristides was raising his mainsail.

The nearest Ionian was locked in an archery duel with my ship, and the further vessel was trying to get a grapnel aboard Aristides.

I looked all the way around the horizon, but Poseidon was not coming to the rescue.

But in the bow Ka was screaming his war cry. One of his men lay dead, two shafts in his corpse, but the other three were loosing at an incredible tempo as we closed the distance. Now we were less than half a stade, coming up on the Ionian from behind and at an oblique angle that cramped his archers. That is, would have cramped his archers, but Ka and his lads had put them all down. Now they were flaying the helm and the oarsmen and the deck crew. It is, as I’ve said before, incredible what a handful of archers can do when they have no opposition — four or five arrows a minute, all aimed, at a close range, from four men.

So they did it, not I. The Ionian fell off, oars in confusion. As we passed his stern, Ka ran down the length of our ship from the bow, loosing a shaft every few paces — truly, a magnificent feat of arms. When he reached the stern, he leaped high on the curved gunwale of the swan’s neck and loosed a final shaft into his stricken victim.

The Ionian was scarcely damaged, but bad luck and a long, thin trail of blood from her oar decks suggested she’d lost too many starboard-side oarsmen and now she was turning to starboard against the pull of their dead hands on oars stranded in the water.

The original pursuer, the former lead ship, had a superb helmsman. Even as Pye, our tallest archer, loosed his first shaft at the new adversary, he turned downwind even as Seckla jinked for the stern rake.

Onisandros was more awake to the crisis than I. ‘Oars in starboard side!’ he roared. Leukas joined him.

The oars were coming in.

Ka was loosing. He was standing by the helmsman’s rail and I raised the aspis I’d taken from a sailor so that my raven flashed in the morning sun. The rail, just near the stern, had few supports and no bulwark, and Ka knelt suddenly so that I had to lean over him with the shield.

An arrow slammed into it. The shaft exploded and sprayed us both with splinters of cane.

Oars came in. All this in two or three heartbeats.

Another arrow slammed into my aspis, then skidded off the face and up into my helmet, knocking my head back.

Another screamed into the face of my aspis. My left hand burned as a shaft went through the front face and into my antelabe, the bronze head pressed against my hand.

We began to pass down the length of the enemy ship. We were moving faster, and both vessels were now coasting. We were perhaps a man’s height apart, gunwale to gunwale.

It was terrifying.

The Persians on the enemy deck were higher. They were noblemen in scale armour — men like my friend Cyrus, bred from birth to shoot straight and tell the truth.

But they were all together in a huddle in the stern because of the Ionian’s design with high sides and only a catwalk amidships.

I’m guessing they’d never faced a trihemiolia before. My half-deck was perfect for archery, and the low bulwarks nonetheless provided some cover.

It was the grimmest archery duel I have ever witnessed, made more chilling because I could cover my archer but I could do nothing to strike at the enemy. When you are shot at without the means to reply, you are in a different position from a man facing mere combat.

We passed the length of that ship in perhaps five breaths. In that time, I don’t think I breathed at all.

This is what I saw.

A Persian leaned out over his stern to shoot down into our amidships. He killed an oarsman but, luckily, the man’s oar was in.

Ka killed the Persian, putting an arrow into the man’s back.

Pye, the tallest of the Nubians, shot almost straight up into a second Persian and hit him and the man collapsed back, but a third Persian drove an arrow down into Pye’s neck, killing him instantly. Ka’s second arrow caught the third Persian, again in the back, and then we were helm to helm for a moment — side by side, the two ships not quite colliding, all the oars in on both sides.

Ka and the Persian loosed together, ten feet apart. The arrow went through my aspis, splinters exploded off the inside, and Ka went down, his face all blood. The arrow went into the top of my thigh, but I wear leg armour and it did not penetrate the bronze.

I threw my spear.

A woman knocked it down.

There was no hiding that she was a woman. She was tall and strong and she wore a fine thorax of bronze that had been fitted perfectly to her very obvious woman’s breasts. I had never seen such a thing.

I had the sense to get my aspis up as we blew past her, which was as well, because she threw my spear back at me. I batted the spear down onto the deck with my aspis. My left hand hurt, but the rest of me was intact.

It was one of my best spears. No need to drop it into the ocean.

Then we were past them. I looked back around the swan of the stern, heedless of the arrows that might have flown, but there were none. She was a woman, a tall woman in a plumed helmet, and she was pushing her way into the steering oars where the oarsman had apparently been killed, and then I lost her behind the curve of the swan as she began to scream orders in Greek.

Artemisia, Queen of Halicarnassus. I’m sure you know all about her. Well, there she was, the most bloodthirsty of the Great King’s captains. But we’d cleared her deck of archers and we’d killed her helmsman, which had a curious result I’ll share with you later.

For the immediate future, she yawed suddenly to the north to avoid our grapnels — we weren’t, in fact, throwing any. Hipponax had a Persian arrow through his aspis and his left bicep and Brasidas was cutting the head off and pushing it through. Achilles, son of Simonides, was down, with blood all over the deck, and three of my oarsmen were dead or maimed; as vicious an exchange as I’ve ever seen.

I looked down at Ka. To my joy, he was plucking splinters out of his face. One was through both cheeks. But he had not lost an eye and he was far from dead.

Close abeam, Aristides was turning back into the open sea, due south. He had the wind in his great mainsail and he had some sort of temporary steering oar out, a normal pulling oar tied to the rail. Together, the two sufficed to bring his head round, and the wind on the sail and the long side of his ship gave him considerable speed.

I saw his stern, crowded with men packed close like a tub of new-caught sardines. I knew then what must have happened: he was raising his bow by pushing the stern down, and that meant he’d opened a seam.

Poseidon!

That was the longest hour I’d known in some years. We ran south on the wind and Leukas got our sail, laid ready to the spar, up the mainmast in record time, and followed Aristides across the Saronic Gulf. Behind us, the Great King’s ships fell behind, but as we sailed south the northern horizon became filled with the Great King’s ships. They were still pouring off the beaches, and we watched Artemisia abandon the chase and turn west, and even saw the rest of her Ionian squadron close around her before we sunk them over the rim of the world. The whole Persian fleet was off the beaches and moving.

Leukas watched with me, under his hand. He shook his head. ‘They can’t all be coming for us,’ he said.

Odd, given the way they’d refused engagement, but the Egyptians stayed with us longest, and there were a fair number of them. But as the sun reached its highest point in the sky, the Egyptians also turned west. We gradually left them behind.

But, best we could make out in the sunny autumn haze, the whole Persian fleet was forming an enormous line at the mouth of the Bay of Salamis and we were off their left or port-side flank. Only when we left them all over the horizon did we turn west across the seas, which by then, just after midday, even though every one of us felt as if it had been a month since morning, were calm and gentle.

Aristides and all his crew bailed as if the Furies were aboard them. I could do little more than hang off his starboard rail and hope to save what could be saved.

I won’t repeat a dozen frustrating shouted conversations, but eventually we understood that he could not point any nearer the wind than due west — and that he was running for Aegina before his ship sunk under him.

It looked to me as if the Persians were forming for a fight. It was an afternoon of anguish, for over the horizon to the north the Great King’s fleet was offering battle to the league. Would they fight? By Poseidon, I was missing the great contest!

But Aristides, that prig, some might say, was the best man I knew.

We prepared what we could to lighten ship suddenly. Lydia had a dozen contrivances to make her a better ship — one of them was a small bricked-in hearth forward of the boat-sail mast, and we prepared to heave that over the side, as well as armour, weapons, and spares. If Aristides foundered, he’d have two hundred men desperate for life in the water — veteran men, and our friends, too.

Aside from preparing for disaster, there was little we could do but watch and fret and speculate about what was happening to the north. I looked at my son’s wound, but Brasidas had done a thorough job and he’d even come up with honey to put in the bloody slit. My boy behaved well — his head was high and he swore he was ready to fight again. Hector hovered about and looked miserable.

We’d run Attica under the horizon long before, lost the last Egyptian, and there was a high, blue sky almost without clouds, and we were alone on an empty ocean just a parasang from the largest fleet in history.

West we ran, and west, losing our northing as the world’s wind blew us farther south despite our best efforts. But along toward early afternoon, we sighted Aegina, and as the day began to wane we got Athena Nike on one of that island’s beaches, bow first, as gently as could be managed. As soon as the sail came down, Aristides’ magnificent ship began to take water, so that for a heart-stopping moment we thought we might lose her before we got her bow on the beach. Both our crews went ashore and dragged the Nike up the gravel.

Aristides shook his head in sadness — and perhaps awe.

His ram was gone, the bronze sunk in the depths of the ocean. He’d struck a floating log, perhaps some great tree ripped up by Poseidon’s wrath and sent far out to sea, and the blow had ripped away the ram, and somehow, by luck, one of the bow’s planks had been crushed inward with such force as to wedge it into the framing of the bow, so that the ship didn’t fill and sink instantly.

One by one, all his marines and oarsmen came and touched the bow.

Many raised their arms to heaven, faced the sea, and sang the hymn to Poseidon.

Aristides chose to remain on Aegina. We’d been seen coming in and he had access to some of the best shipwrights in the world to repair his beloved warship. After several embraces I took my own ship back toward Salamis. It was late afternoon. I was — desperate.

I admit that I considered, once again, taking Lydia down the Saronic Gulf and out into the open ocean and running for Ephesus. At Aegina, the war seemed far removed from our concerns. The Persian fleet was over the horizon, and they would never catch us, never even pursue us. I had waited my whole life, or so it felt, for Briseis, and now she waited perhaps as little as five days’ sailing away, with a fair wind.

But to do so seemed like desertion. Or perhaps I wasn’t sure what I wanted. Perhaps, after all those years of waiting, the achievement of my desire was … frightening. Does this surprise you? And yet, I was no longer the blood-mad boy I had once been. What would Achilles have been, if he had lived? Thetis offered him a long, happy life, or a brief life and immortal fame and I often think of Achilles. What would he have been, in his long, happy life? A bronze-smith in sunny Achaea? A prince of a happy realm, with his Briseis making babies and supporting him, ruling by his side, performing the dances of the goddess?

No man is simple, and desire is as complex as anything else. So is duty.

And at the same time that I could consider deserting the cause of Greece for my woman, I could also be distraught at the notion that I was missing the greatest sea fight in history. Oh, Poseidon, my heart beat faint to think I was missing it! I roamed the deck of my Lydia like a lion stalking prey, up and down the deck, and my sailors stayed clear of me.

Did I want Briseis? Did I want the undying glory of the great battle? Did I want a peaceful, happy life?

I wanted them all!

We came in through the mouth of the bay at the islands and there were no wrecks. The Aeginian ships were snug on their beaches, and there wasn’t a Persian to be seen.

We landed at the very edge of darkness. It wasn’t hard; there were so many fires lit along the beaches of Salamis that the navigation was, if anything, easier rather than harder, and many willing hands came down to the water’s edge to help warp Lydia ashore.

I landed my ship at Salamis.

Pericles came down to fetch me from the tedious business of getting my ship ashore. Lydia was landed, but she needed to be hauled clear of the water and dried so that her fine, light hull caught the full sun in the morning, and she had a small leak forward.

The things you remember! I can tell you almost anything about that ship, and yet, when I close my eyes, I cannot see my Lydia’s face very clearly; really, just a soft pale smudge of memory. But every splintered oar shaft and every bubble in her hull’s pitch is marked on my brain. That ship was more my lover than her namesake, I suspect. But …

Pericles came down wearing a himation that made him look even younger than he was.

‘Eurybiades has summoned all the trierarchs,’ the boy said. ‘Cimon is speaking even now.’

I picked up a spear — a little affectation, I admit, as no one carries a spear to a council any more but me — and walked up the sand. I remember my calf muscles hurting and my ankles complaining — too little exercise, and too much time sitting at campfires or standing on the half-deck.

It was a long walk, up over the first headland and along to the temple; long enough for me to consider that I was wearing an old chiton meant only to keep my armour off my naked skin, and a chlamys that had begun life as a fine shade of dark blue and now resembled the sky on a late autumn day; there was some blue in it, but not much, and the rest was a sort of muddy pale grey with a great deal of sea-salt and some spots of pine pitch. It was, in fact, the fine chlamys I’d purchased with my earnings on Sicily, at Syracusa, when I was first courting Lydia. Lydia was suddenly much in my thoughts.

In fact, that walk was … dark. Too much fighting can have this effect on any man, and I had reached my limit. My fingers burned on my left hand — isn’t it odd how a new injury seems to aggravate the old ones? The stumps of my missing fingers were livid and they throbbed in the darkness because of the new wound from the Persian arrow, a wound so inconsiderable that in youth I might never have mentioned it. Facing the Persian arrows had been exhausting and I have no idea why. The entire experience had lasted less than a minute, but I was stumbling on the sandy road and near weeping with the sullen darkness that often infected me after a fight.

Well.

Ahead of me in the darkness, a hundred men or more were gathered on the steps of the temple. They were surrounded by torchlight, as if a festival was going on, and in the clear air I saw the ruddy light before I saw the temple. I could smell the scent of pines and the reek of ash from Attica, and the sound of men’s voices stirred me somehow.

I stopped and looked up at the stars. I remember this very well — that surge of pure emotion, as I felt … something. It is difficult to describe, but my loss emptied a little, and my sense of the rightness of the world returned, looking at the stars. Some men see the gods in the stars, and others see the rational turning of the creation of the gods. Sometimes I see only the points of light by which a man navigates the deep at night and a sailor knows that everywhere you go, the stars change. Think on that. The stars change.

Bah! Enough of my musings. I only mean that when I strode up to the council, I was in an odd place in my head. I will not say I had seen a god, but I would not be surprised if one had been at my shoulder.

By chance, Themistocles had just spoken, and men were honouring his words with silence. I know now that Cimon had spoken about the might of the enemy fleet, and Themistocles had laid out the reasons why we had to fight. Adeimantus waited. He was a fair orator and he knew that to speak too soon would be to lose his audience.

But when he started, he had no mercy.

‘Themistocles, perhaps what you say is good for Athens.’ He smiled. ‘Good for your people, rather. Athens is gone.’ He looked around allowing the import of that statement to sink in. ‘But if the enemy has nine hundred ships, if all our fighting at Artemisium has only served to make them stronger, I say it is time to retreat. You saw them today! They filled the horizon and they offered battle! By all the might of Poseidon, do you really expect us to face that? You have threatened us with desertion; you say, if we retreat, you and the Aeginians will sail away and found new cities in Magna Graecia.’ The Corinthian spread his arms. ‘Go, then. Betray Greece. We — the Achaeans, the men of Pelops — we are the real Greeks, anyway. We will hold at the isthmus. Even if Xerxes passes the wall, he will never take the Acrocorinth, never take Sparta, never survive the long march to reach Olympia. Who knows if the Great King will even pursue us? He promised to punish Athens, and he has done so.’ Adeimantus nodded. ‘Join us and retreat to the isthmus. When the Great King retreats, then perhaps you can found new cities, or creep back to the ruins of Athens. But I can tell you that we, the men of Pelops, are leaving. It would be foolish to stay, so far from the army.’

‘Where is the army?’ I asked. It was the first many men knew that I was there.

Adeimantus looked puzzled. ‘How would I know?’

I looked around and caught Lykon’s eye. ‘Was there an army at the isthmus when you left?’ I called loudly.

Lykon shook his head vehemently. ‘No, Arimnestos,’ he called. ‘No army. Corinth has not even raised its phalanx yet. Men are still travelling home from the Olympics.’

There was bitter laughter.

‘Listen, Adeimantus,’ I said. ‘I am the polemarch of Green Plataea, and my city is already destroyed, and yet I am here. Eurybiades swore that an army of the League would protect Boeotia, but no army came. Plataea, Hisiae, Thespiae — all burned. Attica is burning, and Corinth has not yet raised their phalanx.’ I put a hand to my beard, as if in puzzlement.

‘The only way the League can even resist right now is at sea. If we lose at sea, as has been said over and over, the Great King’s fleet will land wherever they please — from the vale of Olympia to the fields of Argos. And Adeimantus, we all know you speak only to inflame the men of the Peloponnese. I will not ask why you seek to persuade men to desert us. You claim that Athens threatens desertion while you yourself declare that you will desert! Black is white, and sophistry is the order of the day, I guess.’ I laughed. Men laughed with me. ‘But don’t take us for fools, Adeimantus. You say that only you Achaeans are Greeks? Not Alcaeus? Not Sappho? Not Hipponax? You mean that the men of Boeotia are not Greek? Hesiod is not Greek? Or do you mean that mighty Homer was not Greek?’ I spat. ‘You are a fool. I speak only for my few Plataeans, but I say — run away. This is men’s work, and when we have defeated the Great King, we will mock you until you die of shame.’

He drew his sword — there, in the temple precinct.

I stood with my arms by my sides.

Eurybiades stepped between us, and the look he gave me was hard — a look of disappointment and even hatred.

‘I expected better of you, Plataean,’ he said. ‘High words and personal insult are not the way to sway a council.’

I made myself exhale. ‘Are they not? I am only a Boeotian bumpkin. I only emulate my teachers.’ I pointed to Adeimantus.

Men laughed, but the Spartan navarch was not amused. ‘We cannot fight at odds of worse than three to one,’ he said.

Themistocles held his head high. ‘We can!’ he said.

Cimon pushed forward. ‘We can,’ he insisted. ‘I can tell you how we can do it. By Poseidon, gentlemen, numbers mean nothing in narrow waters, you saw that at Artemisium. They fear us. Today we outfaced them with six ships against their nine hundred. Ask Arimnestos. We interfered with their launching — with six ships. They do not speak the same languages and half of them hate Persia more than we do. By the GODS! You beat them at Artemisium! Why do you fear them now!’

‘And you lost the man of justice, Aristides,’ Adeimantus spat. ‘Very convenient for your democrat here, who sent his worthy opponent to die.’

‘Aristides and his ship survived the encounter by the will of the gods,’ I shouted. ‘Even now his ship is beached on the north coast of Aegina, a few hours’ rowing away.’

Adeimantus shook his head. ‘You are the democrat’s slave and will say anything for him,’ he spat. ‘But I say this: even if we fight this battle, even if we win, it is a foolish victory. A victory of rowers and slaves! What will we be then, when the hoplites are not men of valour, but the little men are? They will rise and take our cities and drive them to extinction for their own petty pleasures. That is what this man wants. Themistocles the democrat wants this war won by his little petty men so that he can be like a god among them. And if Aristides was here he would agree with me.’

Themistocles all but exploded. ‘You — you!’ he roared. ‘You would rather be a slave of the Great King than see the little men do their share to earn victory? Where are your precious hoplites, Corinthian? Your noble Spartiates and the aristocrats of Thebes and Thespiae failed. King Leonidas died. Now the fate of Greece is in the hands of the oarsmen, the little men, and they will save us!’

Eurybiades pulled the hem of his cloak over his head. As a Spartan he was insulted, desperately insulted, by Themistocles’ last words. He walked, alone, to the altar.

I had time to think of the irony of it all, that in fact, Aristides did agree with Adeimantus about the role of the hoplites. And that Leonidas, had he been alive, would have agreed with Themistocles. They formed their conspiracy to save Greece on the notion that it would have many ugly turns and twists. Leonidas had a clear view of the end, I think.

I had time to think these thoughts, and then Eurybiades turned, a grave figure, tall and strong, full of dignity.

‘We will retreat to the isthmus,’ he said. ‘It was always my intention. And without unity, we will only die here for nothing.’

Adeimantus grinned.

‘Adeimantus has ordered all the Corinthian ships to gather on the western beaches,’ Lykon said. We were at Themistocles’ fire, in front of his pavilion, the beautiful tent that had got him in so much trouble after the last Olympics, where the Spartans won the chariot race with a little help from the Athenians. Themistocles’ tent was remarkable; dyed blue and red, with woven edges, internal hangings, toggles to hold the walls, it really was a thing of beauty. It was also probably very comfortable to live in. The problem was that it was much more lavish than the tents used by, say, the King of Sparta or the priests of Apollo, and so it was much remarked on.

But he had good slaves and wine, and many stools — very elegant stools. Siccinius, Themistocles’ steward, poured us wine. Xanthippus was there, and Cimon, and some of the other Athenians; Idomeneus was there, and Lykon, but none of the Spartans.

Themistocles sat back and blew out through his cheeks. ‘Aristides truly is alive?’ he asked.

He was a man who lived in such an artificial world that he assumed the rest of us lied as easily as he did himself. Well.

I nodded. ‘He is alive. I’m sure he’ll come tomorrow.’

Themistocles shook his head. ‘I was a fool to speak ill of the King of Sparta, whom I too loved,’ he said.

Cimon nodded. ‘Yes,’ he said. ‘You lost Eurybiades there.’

Themistocles all but glowed in the firelight and his eyes were wide — almost mad. ‘I’ll go to him and reason with him,’ he said. He leapt to his feet and all but ran into the darkness.

Well, as I said, their tents were close together on the headland.

I sipped my wine and thought, or rethought, many of the thoughts I’ve just related to you. Undying fame. Briseis. My house in Plataea. My son and my daughter, my future and the battle.

Siccinius paused by me and poured. ‘May I ask my lord a question?’ he asked.

Sycophantic slaves are annoying, but think of how hard it is to be them, eh? I have been. To always get the right tone — does this one want slavish manners or straight talk? How about this one?

I tried not to snap at him. ‘Speak up,’ I said, or something equally surly. No man enjoys having his deep thoughts interrupted by a slave.

‘Do you truly speak Persian?’ he asked.

‘I do,’ I answered, in that language.

‘As do I,’ Siccinius said. ‘You led the embassy of the Greeks to Susa, did you not?’

I was suddenly suspicious of this man, and suspicious that Themistocles had a Persian-speaking slave.

Listen — Themistocles never wanted anything but his own glory. There were men among us who whispered that he would be perfectly content to lead the Athenian fleet into exile, because he would be the chief of it, and the lord of the new city. If you have been listening all these nights, you know that I think that most of the Athenians — certainly the whole current crop, Pericles included — would sell their own mothers to lord it as tyrant of Athens.

At any rate, before I could question the man further, Themistocles returned from Eurybiades.

‘He refused to listen to me,’ he said.

Cimon moaned.

Themistocles pounded one fist into his other hand. ‘By the gods,’ he swore, ‘there must be another way.’

Cimon looked up. ‘It is the curse of the gods on the Greeks,’ he said. ‘We can never be as one. We compete against each other in all things and we hate each other. We cannot unite.’

‘Think of Lade,’ I said. ‘We would have won there and saved all this fighting, had only the men of Samos not betrayed us.’

‘Think how often we were betrayed during the fighting in Ionia,’ Cimon said. ‘By my ancestor Ajax, my father was a pirate, but he kept his word better than many lords.’

Themistocles looked at me across the fire. ‘The Persians use our petty quarrels against us,’ he said. ‘And there is always Persian gold to help the cause of treason. It is part of their way of conquering and holding an empire.’ He was speaking aloud, but he was thinking — I could see it.

So could Cimon.

‘You aren’t proposing we sell ourselves to the Persians,’ he asked. His voice was light, but I could hear the steel in it.

Themistocles shot to his feet. ‘By Zeus, lord of kings and free men, I propose the very thing — and tonight, at that.’

There is a point at which a mad, bad plan is merely a good, if daring, plan. It is a tribute to our desperation that when Themistocles outlined his notion, there was almost no argument.

My part in the plan was simple. And I knew the way, and I had a triakonter on my part of the beach, ready for sea.

Walking back over the headland, Xanthippus laughed bitterly. ‘Is this how we have to behave to do what is right?’ he asked. ‘By Poseidon, I hate the Spartans.’

It was dark, but not yet late, and there were people at most of the fires, eating and drinking. The whole of the beaches of Salamis had something of the air of a desperate festival.

We walked together, mostly in silence. Xanthippus had decided that he didn’t like me, and yet he craved company. We were about to do a reckless thing that could dishonour us all. I could tell he had little stomach for it and I, in turn, didn’t like him much either, but we were allies.

War is complicated.

At his tents, we stopped. ‘Let me offer you a cup of wine,’ he said, with poor grace. He didn’t really want to offer one to me, I could tell, and I didn’t want his wine anyway.

‘No,’ I said. I had a mission, and I would need most of the dark part of night to accomplish it. ‘My thanks, Xanthippus,’ I said, although I owed him no thanks.

‘Is that the Plataean, my dear?’ called a woman’s voice from the darkness.

‘Please keep your voice down, my dear,’ Xanthippus said to the tent.

Agariste appeared from the tent door. ‘Arimnestos,’ she said, taking my hand. ‘What a pleasure to see you.

‘He is on an urgent errand and can scarcely linger,’ her husband shot back.

Agariste waved a ladylike hand and a beautiful young Thracian girl appeared — dark hair piled on her head and a tattoo of a horse inside her wrist that touched me. The Thracian girl smiled and poured me wine — wine I didn’t need — and like the Thracian woman, it was unwatered and very strong.

A stool was placed behind me.

‘I really must be away,’ I said.

Agariste nodded. ‘Of course, but this will only take a moment,’ she said. ‘Hipponax is your son?’

‘Of course!’ I said.

‘But you have no wife,’ she went on.

‘My wife died,’ I said.

‘Euphonia — yes. A most elegant and well-bred young woman. We were all surprised when she chose you.’

Well, what do you say to that?

But Agariste smiled in the near darkness. ‘I understand her better now, perhaps,’ she said. ‘Jocasta speaks very highly of you. Very highly indeed.’

I shook my head, far more confused by one Athenian oligarchic matron than by all the manoeuvres of the Persian fleet. ‘Jocasta?’ I asked.

She looked at me, her eyes narrowed. ‘The lady wife of Aristides?’ she said, her voice rising.

‘Of course,’ I said, feeling slow.

‘She is here, now,’ Agariste said. She smiled at her husband, but it was only to make him feel as if he was included in the conversation.

I really had no idea where all this was going. I rose to my feet and gave the Thracian girl my cup. Really, it was just an excuse to look at her.

She wasn’t looking at me, either. There’s age for you.

‘We have decided that it is time for you and Cleitus to end this foolish quarrel,’ Agariste said.

‘Of course,’ I answered. I smiled. ‘I really must go. I have a duty to perform. Perhaps your husband can explain.’

‘Well!’ she said. She also rose to her feet. ‘I shan’t keep a guest who is so very anxious to leave, but really!’

Xanthippus accompanied me a few steps into the darkness. ‘I apologise for my wife,’ he began.

‘Please!’ I said. ‘Please explain to her why I must go — I think she sees me as some sort of barbarian.’

I thought it was possible that Xanthippus, for all his democratic politics, also saw me as a bore and a bumpkin. Or as a notorious killer with a very thin veneer of manners.

Most of the time, that’s a fine reputation to have.

I slipped away, kicked off my sandals, and ran across the beach to my ships.

Leukas was the best small-boat handler. We chose thirty oarsmen, the best men, and I took Ka. A well-shot arrow might save us, but no amount of sword work was going to save anyone. It probably took us an hour to get that little triakonter to sea.

We ran west along the beaches to the headland and there we picked up Siccinius. He was waiting on the beach with Themistocles, and they embraced, and then Themistocles came aboard for a moment and clasped my hand. We unstepped the mast and while we waited we muffled every oar, which made them heavier but almost completely silent.

Then the great man stepped ashore and we put our bow towards Piraeus and rowed. It was not a long row. We stayed close to the island of Psyttaleia for as long as we could and then we pulled almost due east into the harbour mouth. It was terrible and dark; and very strange to enter a mighty harbour with no people. It had the feeling of a trap.

We were very cautious, and it took us an hour to find a landing spot.

Siccinius was shaking with nerves. I went ashore with him.

‘I can do this,’ I said. Except that I could not, because half the court and all the major Persians knew me. It was a daft notion: the Great King would probably recognise me.

‘No,’ he said. ‘No, they’ll know who I come from.’

That was enigmatic and perhaps a little scary.

‘I could go with you,’ I said.

He paused. He was a brave man, going to do a terrible thing that was almost certain to get him killed. I had all the time in the world to make him feel better about it.

He looked at me. ‘What I don’t understand,’ he said slowly, ‘is why a man of your reputation would do this.’

I knew my role. ‘I agree with your master,’ I said. ‘It is better this way.’

Siccinius let go a breath. ‘I was born a free man,’ he said. ‘If it were me, I’d die fighting the Great King rather than face again the life of a slave.’

I really admired him, but the man I was playing needed to feign disgust and impatience. ‘We’ll see when you have carried our message,’ I said.

‘I’m ready,’ he allowed.

I walked a few paces with him.

‘If this succeeds,’ I said, ‘I’ll see to it that you are freed.’

He paused. ‘You have a great reputation as a freer of slaves,’ he said. His voice was — better. ‘Thank you. I would love to be free. Even if my freedom comes at such a price.’

He walked off into the darkness.

What he carried was a message from Themistocles to the Great King.

The message was wholly accurate. On four sheets of wax, Themistocles laid out, in my crisp Persian, the dissent and despair of the Greek fleet. He told the Great King the whole of the truth — that the fleet would break up the next night, in the dark of the moon, and run for the isthmus.

Themistocles offered to lead the whole of the Athenian and Aeginian contingents to change sides if the Great King would accept Athens and Aegina as allies and friends.

And I had agreed to it.

Within an hour, Siccinius was back, frightened and angry. ‘I can’t find anything but military posts,’ he said. ‘I’ll simply be taken and enslaved or killed.’

This had, I confess, always seemed to me to be the weakest part of the plan, getting Siccinius to the Great King.

Let me explain — I see your confusion.

We didn’t know where the Great King was camped. That may sound as if we were blind, but Attica is vast and the King’s army, despite its size, was not so large. We knew from spies and refugees that Mardonius had led some cavalry as far west as Megara and we knew that Masistius had another body of cavalry north, by Marathon, probably to reap the symbolic victory there. But the Great King himself had watched the destruction of the Acropolis and then moved north, or so we thought. No one knew. We didn’t think he was with the fleet. One of Xerxes’ few real errors in the whole of his campaign in Greece was to treat his fleet as auxiliary to his forces instead of as a major contributor.

I hadn’t expected to have to work hard to betray the Hellenic world, but now it seemed that I would.

I went ashore again, hung a sword over my shoulder, put on a heavier chlamys borrowed from Giannis, and waved to Brasidas.

Brasidas came ashore. He looked at me by the starlight, his face almost formless.

‘What are we doing here?’ he asked.

It was past midnight and we had until the darkness lifted to deliver the slave to the Great King.

‘We need to get this man to the Great King,’ I said. ‘You speak Persian; I speak Persian. You know the former Spartan King; I know the Great King. If we tell the guards that we intend to betray the Greek fleet, we will be believed.’

Brasidas fingered his beard. ‘And do we?’ he asked in his Laconic manner.

By which he meant Do we indeed intend to betray the Greek fleet?

It can be difficult to be a commander. The process of command — the habit of requiring obedience instead of discussion — can erode a man’s finer sentiments and his judgement, too. In addition, or perhaps first, the position of command settles a yoke of responsibility on the commander, so that he must make decisions that will cause pain and death and he must accept the consequence.

Yet, when leading Greeks, who almost to a man seek the undying glory of Achilles, it is seldom a moral question. You take them where they can fight, and they fight.

But in this matter, only I knew the truth. We had deliberately kept Siccinius from the truth — a slave will invariably betray a secret, if he feels he can derive advantage from it. Did I have the right to keep Brasidas from the truth? Brasidas, who had sacrificed a year of his life to raise rebellion in Babylon? Who had left his mess and his country because he felt that the Kings had made a dishonourable decision about Demaratus?

I leaned very close. I said, ‘No. Trust me.’

The Spartan nodded. ‘So,’ he said. That was all.

What I am telling here is that, when you come to the point, there is no substitute for the absolute trust of your people, and you can only earn that by working to keep it every day. Seckla and I have a number of jokes about the Long War: about where and when it was won and lost; sometimes we say that we won the Long War with a load of tin from Alba, and sometimes we think that we changed the world on a beach in Syracusa. But one of the pivotal moments of the war was when Brasidas accepted, with a single question, that mission.

We weren’t even quiet. The three of us walked up the main street from Piraeus, deserted but for a pair of dogs who followed us. I confess that I fed them — they were so sad, so abandoned by their people. They seemed to me to embody the spirits of the household gods of Attica.

At the old temple of Demeter, the Persians had a guard post just at the base of the steps, right on the road. As I had hoped, it was a large post and manned entirely by cavalrymen.

I stepped up boldly. ‘Hello!’ I called out in Persian. ‘Gentlemen, I need an escort!’

They sprang to arms with the guilty alacrity of men who have been playing knucklebones while on duty. We were surrounded and stripped of our weapons, but not manhandled.

‘I would like to speak to an officer,’ I said.

‘Silence, slave,’ snapped one of the Persian cavalrymen. He slapped me with his riding whip — not particularly hard, but it stung me all the way to my soul, and I thought, this may be the stupidest thing I’ve ever done.

‘We have a message for the Great King,’ I said, and got hit again.

Brasidas grunted.

Siccinius was silent.

One of the Persians put a hand on my tormentor’s shoulder. ‘We were told to watch out for traitors,’ he said.

‘Balls, we were told to watch for spies. Greeks are all liars anyway,’ my guard said.

Brasidas shot me a look, which suggested to me that he thought it was time to try and break away.

Looking at them, I didn’t think so. They were alert, and I had reason to know that the Persian elite cavalry were among the best soldiers in the world. Two of them had their bows strung and arrows on their bows, their thumbs cocked round the string in their strange draw.

I gave Brasidas the smallest of head shakes.

Siccinius summoned his courage. ‘I come from the Lord Themistocles,’ he said.

I think my guard was one of those who simply like to hit people; he had that look to him, and his riding whip shot out and caught Siccinius in the face, but the smaller guard caught his arm.

‘Don’t be an arse, Archarnes!’ he said. He stepped between us. ‘Who sent you?’ he asked.

‘Lord Themistocles,’ I said.

‘He’s lying,’ said the bully. ‘He’s only saying that because the other Greek said it. Split them up, beat the crap out of them, and we’ll get some answers.’

‘Ask yourself why we all speak Persian, then,’ I spat. My upper lip was split and already throbbing from the whip blow.

My ‘friend’ raised his whip again, his face flushed in the torchlight. But the smaller man stayed between us.

‘He insulted me,’ raged the bully.

‘Shut up, Archarnes!’ said the smaller Persian. He went to the steps of the temple, picked up a horn, and blew it.

Almost instantly there were two answering horns. He blew again — a long call.

Archarnes came over and kicked me in the shin. As I started to fall, he struck me again with his whip.

‘Never take that tone with a Persian, slave,’ he said.

I lay on the ground and thought of how I’d kill him.

If I ever got free.

Hoof beats heralded the next phase. An officer came, had a whispered conference with the smaller cavalryman and nodded sharply.

‘Which one claims to be from Themistocles?’ he asked. He butchered the name, but to be fair, the Greeks were not so good at Persian names, either.

‘They all do,’ spat Archarnes.

‘Then I’ll take them all,’ said the officer. He chose four cavalrymen from the troop at the guard post and they roped the three of us together and took us up the hill towards Athens.

At a run.

They were all mounted on fine horses and we were running at the ends of ropes. I fell once and hot pain went through my knee. Siccinius fell several times and was dragged a bit. Brasidas simply ran. If I had been a Persian, I’d have identified him immediately as the most dangerous man among us.

To be honest, I was cold, and afraid. I knew we’d made a terrible error. I would greatly have preferred to die fighting than this humiliation, and I had wounded fingers, a bad cut on one leg, and months of constant fighting, poor sleep, and endless fatigue. I was not at my most heroic. As we ran up that hill, my breath burning in my lungs, I cursed Themistocles for a fool.

And myself as well. It always hurts most when you have no one to blame but yourself.

At the Piraeus Gates of Athens there is a small temple of Nike and an even smaller temple of Aphrodite; really just a statue in a niche. But the temple of Nike was the headquarters of the guard, with fifty horses tied outside and a substantial number of slaves and messengers attached, even in the middle of the second watch of the night.

We were questioned as soon as we were brought into the torchlight of the headquarters, and those were cursory questions. I could tell that neither of the junior officers barking at us cared a whit for our answers. Then we were taken out of the headquarters, past the city walls, and put into a house — it had, in fact, been a brothel. I knew the neighbourhood well enough. The house was full of prisoners, mostly very old men.

There was a woman who had been raped so often she could not speak.

There were two male children who were completely silent, their faces closed.

Bah! I shan’t say more. No army is composed of priests and philosophers, but this was grim even by the standards of Ionian piracy. Someone had beaten one of the old men until his nose was smashed flat and his skull broken, yet he was alive.

We three, despite our bruises, were the healthiest people in that house. Siccinius, who was growing on me as a man, found the covered well, and the three of us raised water and took it to all the battered people who would accept it.

I looked down into the well’s cistern and glanced at Brasidas.

He nodded.

We could jump into the cistern and, with a little luck, escape. Many of the houses in this quarter shared common cisterns — big commercial establishments had them cut back into the hillside.

Or we’d drown in the darkness.

Siccinius was trying to coax the woman to take water when the guards returned. There were four of them, and they simply opened the door and shouted for us in Persian.

‘All three Greeks who speak the tongue!’ a man called. ‘If I have to come and find you, you won’t like it.’

I remember, again, locking eyes with Brasidas. I wasn’t sure whether to be pleased they’d come for us, or terrified.

We left the house. I suppose I thought we’d be brought back after questioning.

They marched us back to the small temple outside the gate, and there was an officer, sitting in torchlight on a good chair, no doubt stolen out of a home.

I knew him immediately, of course. It was Cyrus, the friend of my youth.

It’s not so remarkable, either. When last I’d seen him he had been a commander of one hundred. He’d held important positions under Artaphernes, too — he’d been captain of Sardis for a while. And I knew that Artaphernes’ son of the same name had led a thousand cavalrymen of Lydia to join the Great King; I’d had to assume my old friend would be in the field.

Nonetheless, it was a shock to see him and I confess I was immediately at a loss as to how to proceed. Friends, guest friendship, duty, honour, truth and lies.

But I may have a touch of the wits of wily Odysseus, because after a moment’s terror, I bowed like a nobleman, one hand to the floor of the temple.

‘Lord Cyrus,’ I said in my good camp Persian.

He had not recognised me until then, and who would, with a split lip already puffy and some other lacerations, in an old brown cloak and a fair amount of blood?

But he rose. ‘Arimnestos!’ he said. Then he was suddenly cautious.

He sat. ‘What are you doing here?’ he asked harshly.

He looked at Brasidas.

I swear before the gods, in that moment he saw through the whole of our plot.

But Siccinius stepped forward, brave when it counted. ‘My lord, I come from Themistocles the Athenian with a report for the Great King, and an offer of a tremendous service that my lord would like to offer the King.’

Siccinius had been forced to give his wax tablet to the first guards but he saw it lying in front of Cyrus and he waved at it. ‘My lord has written-’ he began.

Cyrus rose, his face closed. He did not meet my eye. ‘Have these men watched closely, but not harmed,’ he snapped at a guard. ‘These are very dangerous men, and very important to the Great King.’

Damn him!

All the guards stepped a little away from us. The cavalryman nearest me looked at Brasidas, smiled, licked his lips and loosened his akinakes, his short sword, in his belt. He used his thumb, pushing against the throat of the scabbard, to loosen the blade — a man of skill.

Now that they were warned, they no longer treated us as slaves. Which meant that our options for escape were nearly nil.

‘Lord Cyrus tells me you can all ride. Is this true?’ a soldier asked.

We all agreed, and received mounts.

‘Where are we going?’ I asked.

‘To see the Great King himself,’ the soldier replied. ‘And the gods have mercy on your poor spirits.’

Irony is present in all the affairs of gods and men. That night’s irony lay in the location of the Great King.

He was living in Aristides’ house.

When you think of it, it makes perfect sense; it was one of the finest houses in Athens and located well away from the centre, over past the Pnyx in a walled compound with its own stable. Few Athenians had what was, in essence, a small farm in the heart of the city, and fewer still had such a fine garden.

But it seemed very odd indeed to be taken in total darkness through Aristides’ outer hall. It was all well lit — the Great King, apparently, had been awakened.

A eunuch took charge of us. He was tall and clear-skinned, with the kind of tanned skin and lush dark hair that makes Babylonians so beautiful. His voice was low and deep and resonant — he’d have made a fine orator.

Eunuchs only keep their boyish voices if you cut their stones away while they’re boys, honey. Cut them older and they’re just angry men.

While the guards watched us with arrows on their bows, the eunuch instructed us on how to greet the king. It didn’t matter, as it turned out — as soon as we were taken into the garden, soldiers of the Immortals slammed us to the ground.

A foot was placed on the middle of my back and a spear point placed in the hollow at the base of the back of my skull where the neck meets it. It was very sharp.

I could see nothing but Siccinius. I couldn’t even see Brasidas, and I despaired; I wished I had told Themistocles to go himself (which had occurred to me). You know why I didn’t?

I didn’t really trust him.

‘The Great King bids you speak,’ said a voice. It wasn’t someone I knew.

Nor was the voice directed at us.

I heard Cyrus. I should have expected that he would be there. I suppose that I should have expected what he would say, but I was shocked.

‘Great King, King over Kings, Lord of Lords, these three miserable Greeks are nothing. They are a bold ruse by your enemies to attempt to pull a hood over your eyes. I can’t even guess to what lengths the Greeks would go, or what foolishness they intend. I can only say that I know two of these men, and they are lying.’

I knew Xerxes’ voice as soon as he spoke.

‘Cyrus, captain of Artaphernes of Sardis, are you not?’ he asked. His voice was careful and controlled, and yet I swear he hinted that as a captain of Artaphernes, who had been against the war, he was not fully to be trusted.

‘I have that honour,’ Cyrus replied.

Xerxes cleared his throat. ‘Bring me a cup of wine with honey,’ he said. ‘Tell me what message they bring?’

By the Lord of the Silver Bow and my ancestor Heracles, I’d have given a year of my life to be able to see. I thought the next voice might be Mardonius, although we’d been told he was south and west by Megara.

‘They bring an offer of fealty, King of Kings, from that rascal Themistocles.’ The voice was smooth, cultured, deeply Persian, and held the kind of malicious humour that delighted the oriental mind. ‘The slave on the left is Siccinius, Great King. Him we have seen before.’

Even in that moment of terror and apprehension, I noted that the Great King had seen Siccinius before.

For the first time it dawned on me that I had been used. That Themistocles might be a traitor and he was actually telling the Great King the truth — he was betraying the fleet.

Zeus, god of free men, protect me, I thought.

‘The man on the right is a Spartan soldier who fought against you, Great King, in the war in Babylon. He fled and survived, but he is utterly your enemy.’ This from Cyrus, my so-called friend. Perhaps he didn’t mention me to protect me.

Brasidas shocked me, even in that state. ‘You lie,’ he said clearly. ‘Send for your ally Demaratus, King of Sparta, and ask him who I am.’

Cyrus took a step and was stopped by the Immortals. ‘I do not lie!’ he said. ‘These are dangerous men who intend no good thing for you, Great King!’

‘Be silent,’ Xerxes said. ‘I have been told repeatedly that Athens would have traitors. I have also sent for Hippias.’

There is something horrifying about lying on a mosaic floor for long minutes, a spear in your neck and your hands bound. It was cold, and it was, in its own way, agonising.

I thought of Hippias, whose lustful advances I had avoided when I had been a slave as a boy. He’d been a loathsome worm then.

Hate can help you, in despair. I hated Hippias as a traitor, as a tyrant, and as a fat, ugly man, and that hate buoyed me up. It’s not pretty to say — better that I had been suffused with a desire for glory, or love for Briseis, but in all that time on the cold floor I never thought once of Briseis.

And then he came, fatter, uglier, and more perfumed than I remembered. He was like a caricature of himself. I saw him as he passed across the area of wall my eyes could see.

He made the full proskinesis on the floor and then rose, his fat arse an embarrassment to all Greeks.

‘How may I serve the Great King?’ he asked.

Mardonius spoke again. ‘Demaratus has been tested many times and found loyal,’ he said. ‘He predicted that men of Sparta would come to him. Let us send for him as well.’

Xerxes nodded and pointed at an Immortal. I assume he ran — certainly it seemed no time at all before I heard the deposed Spartan king’s voice.

‘Great King?’ he asked, without much formality. Unlike the worm, Hippias, he didn’t abase himself, but merely bowed deeply, one hand to the floor, like a Persian nobleman.

‘Unpick this riddle for me,’ Xerxes said. ‘Here is your man, Brasidas, with a suspicious character and a slave. The slave claims to offer me the allegiance of Themistocles the Athenian. The other two are guarantors of this pact, or perhaps offered to me as hostages.’

‘Or it is a trick-’ Cyrus took a breath.

Xerxes all but patted Hippias like a dog. ‘This slave comes to me from Themistocles. He brought this letter. Read it and tell me what you think?’

Hippias took the tablets and read them. It took him a long time; I don’t think his Persian was very good. Demaratus read the letter in half the time.

‘I think his offer is genuine,’ the old tyrant said, delighted. ‘I told you men would come over to you when they saw how powerless they were!’

Xerxes chuckled. ‘You promised me they would throw flowers when I entered Athens, and that men would demand that you be restored to power,’ he said with Persian honesty. ‘I have not seen any flowers, and there was no one left in Attica to demand your restoration, so I’m delighted that in this, at least, you are correct.’

‘Great King, if they had not driven the common people into the ships with whips, there would have been cheering crowds to greet your arrival.’ Hippias spoke unctuously, the way one would speak to Zeus, if Zeus came to earth.

Demaratus grunted.

‘You disagree?’ Xerxes asked.

Demaratus made some noise. I couldn’t see him, but I’m going to guess he gave a Laconian shrug. ‘If the offer were genuine, surely Themistocles would have come in person? I did.’

Cyrus’s voice rose. ‘Great King, I beg permission to speak.’

Xerxes made a noise in his throat. ‘Speak, then.

‘Great King, all these Greeks are liars. They do not see lying as a sin, the way we do. This Themistocles — what can he gain by betraying his own fleet?’ Cyrus paused and then threw me to the wolves. ‘Great King, the man in the centre is Arimnestos the Plataean, who was their ambassador at Persepolis. You remember him? Can we imagine him as a traitor?’

Xerxes chuckled. ‘Is it he, indeed? Well, some of his arrogance has been rubbed off him, anyway. Arimnestos, not so stiff-necked now, are you? Speak, Plataean. Speak well for your life. What do you here?’

‘Great King, you have burned my city. I have come to save what I can,’ I said.

‘You have come to serve me?’ Xerxes asked.

‘Great King, ask Cyrus — indeed, ask Artaphernes how often he has asked me to command his ships or his soldiers. I have never been an enemy to his house, or yours, Great King. Or why do you think the Greeks chose me as ambassador?’

Xerxes coughed. ‘Cyrus? What say you to that?’

Cyrus paused. ‘It could be as he says,’ he admitted slowly. ‘In which case I will owe him a great apology. But ask him only this, Great King. Ask him to swear an oath to the gods to be your slave.’

Xerxes laughed aloud. ‘Cyrus, you are to be commended for your caution, but you have said yourself that Greeks are great liars and one oath more or less will not keep them from plummeting into the great darkness. These men speak our tongue but have no idea how men should behave. Siccinius? What does your master bid me do?’

Siccinius spoke up. ‘Great King, my master bids you do what you would have done anyway — attack! In the dark of the moon, bring your forces into the Bay of Salamis so that the Greeks are surrounded on every side, and then fall on them in the dawn. My master will lead the ships of Athens over to you — he will change sides, and the League will collapse. He asks only that now that you have fulfilled your vow to destroy the temples of Athens that you will allow him to restore them.’

‘Him, or some other of my choice,’ Xerxes said. I had raised my head from the floor when I spoke, and now I saw Xerxes cast an affectionate look at Hippias, the sort of look a man gives his favourite dog.

For a Great King, Xerxes was a very fragile man. Even from the miserable cold of Aristides’ best mosaic floor, I could see that he needed the Greeks to be coming over to his side. His intimates had promised him triumph. Men like Hippias had insisted that the miserable Greeks longed for his enlightened rule.

Every man desires to be the hero in his own epic, thugater. Even the Great King. And he was more the victim of his own desires than most.

And if you want to lie to a man, promise him what he most desires. Think, if you will, of the horse the Achaeans sent to the Trojans as tribute, a sort of huge trophy of victory. The Trojans desired nothing more than to have won.

Siccinius, greatly daring, went on. ‘My master bids you set up your throne where you can see the Bay of Salamis,’ he said. ‘To watch and truly see how he conducts himself, and what reward he deserves.’

I thought he’d overplayed our hand, myself. Perhaps it was best to send a slave — a slave understands how obsequiously a master wants to hear his dreams laid out. I would not have dared.

Xerxes sighed with satisfaction. ‘What a beautiful notion,’ he said.

I managed to see Mardonius out of the corner of my eye. He was staring at me and Cyrus was whispering to him.

Damn Cyrus and his honesty.

‘When does my new servant Themistocles think I should attack?’ Xerxes asked.

‘Tomorrow night, which is the dark of the moon,’ Siccinius said. ‘There is no better night for your fleet to surround the beaches of the Greeks.’ He paused. ‘And my master will need time to prepare. He needs to know by morning. We … lost much time with your guards.’

Mardonius laughed. ‘Slave, you expect that we will send you back?’

Siccinius spoke again. ‘If you want Athens to defect to you, Great King, we will all three have to be sent back. I am but the herald: these two men are greater than I, and were sent as proof for me. They are Themistocles’ friends.’

At first I thought he’d spoken in our favour. In retrospect, though, it sounded as if he’d offered us as hostages.

Mardonius shook his head and I was slammed back to the floor and lost sight of him. ‘I say no!’ he said with some force. ‘Let this Themistocles do as he will; we will surround and shatter this little fleet regardless.’

But Xerxes had the bit in his teeth. ‘Be calm, Mardonius. Gentle yourself. If we defeat this fleet, a fleet which has beaten mine twice, if we defeat it, we will have to fight the survivors again, and perhaps again and again. But if the Athenians and the Aeginians change sides, their League will be no more and every one of their little towns will make peace. I know it. I feel this in my bones.’

Demaratus agreed. ‘Great King, in this I agree. The defection of Athens would finish the League. Even the Spartans would have to sue for peace. Whereas — I speak only as a soldier — as long as their fleet exists somewhere, it forces you to a long and expensive land campaign. Sparta will not be beaten easily.’

Mardonius laughed. ‘Demaratus, you vastly exaggerate the power and importance of a tiny state with no real power, because it was once yours. We defeated the Spartans at the Hot Gates and killed their king. They are nothing.’

Hippias spoke up. He saw a change in his fortunes — Athen’s treason meant his own restoration, perhaps. ‘Trust this man, Great King. You have little to lose; as Great Mardonius says, your fleet will win anyway.’

The lickspittle knew he’d get some of the credit, too.

‘Send the slave back, then, and leave the Spartan and the Plataean as hostages.’ Mardonius’s suggestion made far too much sense. I began to suspect I was going to die for Greece.

The worst of it was that I no longer trusted Siccinius or Themistocles, for all that the slave had done his level best to have us returned.

Xerxes nodded. ‘That is reasonable,’ he said.

I raised my head and was not killed. ‘Great King,’ I said. ‘I beg leave to speak.’

‘Now you are more polite,’ he said. ‘Speak.’

‘Great King, many Spartans, and many other ships, will follow Themistocles, if we are there. If we are not — if you keep Brasidas, who leads the party of men who support the exiles — the Spartans will fight. I too command ships, and they will fight.’ I was making things up as fast as I could.

Mardonius laughed. ‘Let them fight — the whole Plataean fleet!’ he mocked. ‘How many ships? None? One?’

‘Or perhaps they will all sail away,’ I said. ‘Tomorrow morning when I do not return.’

‘That is a small risk I will accept,’ the Great King said. ‘Take the Spartan and the Boeotian and throw them in the storehouse. If Themistocles does as he promises, they will be released with honours. If not, I will have them dragged to death by chariots.’ He smiled.

Siccinius was taken away. He did not protest again. I don’t think he was sorry to leave us behind. After all, he was being led to freedom.

I had never been in Jocasta’s storage shed. It was getting light outside and they threw us in, none too gently.

When they were gone, we found some sacking and used it to get warm. And bless Jocasta, there were old blankets, no doubt moth-eaten, and we made ourselves as comfortable as we might on a chilly autumn morning.

It would be hot when day came, but at the very break of day it was cold, and the floor had been cold — and of course, nothing is colder than fear.

Then we sat back to back, for warmth, bundled in old sacking and blankets.

‘I am not afraid to die for Greece,’ I said.

Brasidas grunted.

‘But I am worried that Themistocles is fucking us all,’ I said.

Brasidas, who never swore or talked bawdy, stiffened. ‘What?’ he asked.

I spoke very quietly. ‘I worry that I have been used, that Siccinius just did exactly what he appeared to do, that Themistocles used the veil of honesty to pull the wool over our eyes, and that Themistocles will, in fact, attempt to betray the League tomorrow the same way Samos betrayed us at Lade.’

Brasidas grunted.

‘And you and I will be seen as traitors to the end of time,’ I noted.

Brasidas grunted again. ‘That is bad,’ he admitted.

I sighed. ‘Brasidas, I apologise for bringing you into this.’

He made no comment. After a long while, he said, ‘We must escape.’

I suspect I rolled my eyes, even in the darkness.

‘Listen, brother,’ I said. ‘If we escape too early, we ruin the plan — if Themistocles was telling me the truth. And it is, in fact, the only plan that might have a chance of giving us a battle that we still, of course, have to win.’

Yet even as I spoke, I could see a plan shaping in my head.

‘But if we escape at nightfall,’ I said. I paused and tried to find a stitch in my logic, but the net held. ‘If we escape at nightfall, his fleet orders will already be issued and we’ll have time to warn the Greeks.’

There was a long pause.

‘That’s quite good,’ Brasidas said. In fact, he chuckled. ‘I see it. By arriving, we force Themistocles to behave as if he meant to fight for the League all along.’ For Brasidas this was a long speech. He was deeply amused.

‘Perhaps he did,’ I said.

We were both silent for a while.

Brasidas laughed aloud. ‘Gods, you Athenians,’ he said.

‘I’m a Plataean,’ I said.

‘Oh, so am I,’ Brasidas said, and laughed again, as long and hard as I’d ever heard him laugh.

To say that the day that followed was long does not do it justice. I am not a man given over to worry, but that day my whole existence seemed to have been focused down to a nested set of tensions, rather the way that Empedocles’ glass focused the rays of the sun into a beam of light and heat. I feared Themistocles was a traitor and yet I simultaneously feared that Siccinius had not reached the Greek fleet. I feared that the Greek League might already have fallen apart, the Corinthians rowing away to the isthmus, and yet I feared that Adeimantus was pouring more poison into the ears of the council. I had time, between naps, to consider the possibility that Themistocles and Adeimantus were allies in treason — an idea that I could not make hold water.

In fact, if they were both traitors, they did it in a typically Greek and fractious way, each man striving to be the one who delivered the League to the Great King.

But surely Themistocles was not a traitor? He was the architect of the naval strategy and the originator of the League, with Gorgo and Leonidas and to a lesser extent Aristides. It made no sense that, having built an alliance and a fleet that seemed capable of resisting the Great King to the bitter end, he should betray his own creation.

And yet … and yet. I have said before, other nights, that I sometimes think that courage is a limited thing; that a man can squander it while young, and then one day find the reservoir empty. Indeed, I observe as I get older that my muscles will no longer respond the way they once would; that even if I train every day, I am more likely to injure something than to become massively strong. I suspect that it might be the same with courage. I think perhaps men can reach a state where they have wrung their courage dry, and then, when they need it, it is no longer there — or no longer there in the abundance that it had formerly been.

And make no mistake, my friends, the creation of an alliance requires immense personal courage — the courage and the confidence to recognise the needs of others, articulate them, and subsume your own needs to cement the good of the whole. When, for example, Athens allowed Sparta to win the chariot race at the Olympics — if that is in fact what happened — Themistocles and Aristides were putting the needs of their allies above their own needs.

But when I thought about it on that long and hot day in early autumn — I had nothing to do but think, and that can be a curse to a man — Themistocles had given unstintingly, and failed. He had surrendered command of the allied fleet, when by any calculation it should have been his. He had recalled the conservative exiles, when by rights it was obvious that his policy had been the correct one. Despite these and other sacrifices, the Greeks had not triumphed at Artemisium — or if we had, it was to no avail. And now, on the beaches of Salamis, it was increasingly obvious that the Greek fleet would splinter as it had at Lade and in other summers.

Was it not possible that at some point, perhaps after Artemisium, when I had observed him to be shattered, almost unable to think, that he gave up? Or perhaps when we all saw the fires raging over his beloved Athens — did he then admit defeat? Was it the serpent Adeimantus, with his assertion that the destruction of Athens robbed Athenians of their right to vote or speak because they had no city?

Was all this the imagining of a fevered, anxious mind, and even now Themistocles was preparing a master stroke?

Perhaps most annoying to me on that endless day was that Brasidas simply slept, the bastard.

I should have trusted my friends more.

Brasidas awoke in mid-afternoon when the guards were changed and brought us water. Our new guards were not Persians or Medes but Sakje, the steppe nomads of the far east, beyond the Euxine sea. There were four of them, and they walked badly — their very legs seemed formed to grasp the back of a horse and they walked with a rollicking gait, like sailors too long at sea.

They did not speak Greek and they didn’t seem to speak Persian; one of them struck me with his whip when I tried to ask for food.

They were extremely careful of us. They had clearly been told that we were dangerous men. But as the afternoon wore away, a Mede came and spoke to them in their own tongue. He wore a great deal of gold and was quite tall. The four of them grunted and put arrows on their bows, and the new man came and summoned us out into the yard. We were allowed water to wash and slaves brought us towels to dry ourselves, and fresh wool chitons from Aristides’ clothes press. I rather fancied the one I received, with a magnificent flame pattern on the hems, a tribute, I suspected, to Jocasta’s skill.

Then we were taken back to the courtyard of the house, where Xerxes sat enthroned. Around the margins of the garden, in among the pillared portico, stood a dozen men and one woman. I knew the woman — or rather, given her presence and her aura of authority, I knew she must be the same Artemisia who had returned my thrown spear. There stood the Phoenician commander, Tetramnestos, who some Greeks called the ‘King of Sidon’. There stood Ariabignes, son of Darius and brother of Xerxes, commander of their whole fleet. He stood close by Tetramnestos, as if they were brothers. Theomestor, son of Androdamas, a Samian, one of the traitors who helped the Great King beat us at Lade, stood by Artemisia, with another man who I knew better than all the others — Diomedes of Ephesus.

Men like to say of such and such that their blood ran cold, but so, as I watched him, did I feel his eyes come to me, and so, as our eyes locked, did the hairs on my neck begin to stand as if I was in bitter cold water.

Behind me stood four Sakje with their bows slightly bent and arrows on them, and in front of me, a garden full of my enemies.

And there, over by Ariaramnes — a man I had met as a boy, a friend of Artaphernes and a member of his faction — stood Hippias, the broad smile of a merchant selling used goods stamped on his greasy face, and close by them, the deposed King of Sparta, Demaratus, who looked as if he’d eaten a bad egg.

When we entered the courtyard, most of the men there fell silent. Mardonius continued speaking to the Great King in a low tone, and Artemisia looked at me and kept talking. She had a low, pleasant voice, deeper than many men’s and not less feminine for it. She was speaking to Diomedes of Ephesus, and her last words before she was shushed to silence were ‘beat us like a drum’.

And then they all looked at us.

Demaratus winced and looked away and I saw my fate sealed. And Diomedes grinned at me.

Without being pushed by the Sakje, I made my obeisance to the Great King, exactly as I had done at Persepolis, with one hand on the ground. No one pushed me down into proskynesis.

Xerxes made no reaction and I didn’t know whether to rise unbidden or stay in this uncomfortable posture. I was sure he meant me to be uncomfortable, but I held it. I was, after all, supposed to be a willing conspirator, not an arrogant Greek.

Mardonius continued speaking in a low voice. I caught only a little of what he said for he spoke quietly and quickly. He said ‘captains’ and he said ‘council’ and he went on with real animation about altars.

Of course, I could not see him.

Eventually, Xerxes must have bored of his harangue.

‘Rise, Arimnestos. Be at ease.’ I rose. ‘And your Spartan, who is, I believe, dear to my good friend Demaratus.’

Brasidas rose.

Demaratus bowed his head. ‘My thanks, Great King.’

Xerxes nodded civilly enough to me, as one gentleman might to another in the street.

‘Mardonius and Ariabignes thought that we should question you about the Greek fleet before my captains discussed tonight,’ the Great King said.

I bowed. ‘Ask me anything,’ I said with as much panache as I could manage.

Xerxes shook his head. ‘No. Tell me everything, Plataean.’

I looked around, surprised by the quality of hate focused at me. Perhaps I am dispassionate when I make war; certainly, I have made a business of it sometimes, and I feel little hate and even some compassion for my victims — once they are beaten. But Diomedes bared his teeth, almost in a snarl — fair enough, since I tried to turn him into a temple prostitute once, his hate did not surprise me, but the look on Ariabignes’ face was remarkable: a rictus of anger. And Mardonius’s brows were furrowed, his mouth set, as if we were about to go sword to sword, edge to edge.

I had no friends there.

And I was supposed to act the part of the traitor?

I thought of Odysseus. It is hard, forcing your mind when men hate you. When your cause appears hopeless. Or, just possibly, my mind focused well because my cause was hopeless.

‘It is a better fleet than yours, Great King,’ I said.

With that, the anger on faces was translated to hisses and mutterings, with the sole exception of a woman’s laugh, which cut through the other sounds like a sword through spider web.

Artemisia was laughing.

‘Tell us what is so funny,’ Xerxes said, somewhat pettishly.

Artemisia was apparently without fear — or at least, without fear of the Great King. She gave the slight shrug of a modest woman and cast her eyes down. ‘I thought this Boeotian bumpkin you all described was a great liar,’ she said. Then she chuckled, a lovely sound. ‘I find instead that he tells the truth, and thus I suspect he may be what he claims.’

‘You think the Greek fleet is greater than ours? These rebels?’ Xerxes asked. It’s worth noting here that to the Persians, we were all rebels against the authority of the Great King. Xerxes turned to me. ‘How many ships in your fleet?’ he asked.

I met his eye. ‘Almost four hundred trieres,’ I said. ‘Some pentekonters and triakonters, too.’

Xerxes sat back and clasped the arms of what had once been Jocasta’s favourite chair. I could not tell whether he was genuinely relieved or mocking relief, as if what I had said had no worth.

‘My fleet is more than twice the size,’ Xerxes said. ‘So I have little to fear.’

‘If that were so,’ I asked, ‘we would not be having this conversation, mighty king. But as it is, your fleet has lost to the League’s fleet twice, and never beaten it.’

‘He lies in everything he says,’ Ariabignes said. ‘Their fleet is fewer than three hundred trieres, and it has never beaten the fleet of the Empire.’

I met Xerxes’ eyes and held them. ‘I would guess that your slaves have chosen not to trumpet their defeats to you,’ I said.

‘Silence him!’ Mardonius said. ‘This is no turncoat, but one of their partisans.’

A spear was placed at my neck and I was kicked hard in the back of my knees and I fell. A man’s foot was placed in my back and I felt the point of his spear.

The only sound was that of Artemisia laughing.

I could see Xerxes’ feet and I could see under his chair. It was the oddest view of the room, and I remember thinking that Jocasta had the cleanest floors in Greece. And that I was going to die in the midst of public humiliation. And be thought a traitor.

In fact, I was so terrified, so very sure that this was death, that I had few coherent thoughts at all, and so there was room in the temple of my head for the cleanliness of the floor. I lay and waited for death, Artemisia laughed, and I looked at Xerxes’ very clean feet.

He adjusted his position, drawing his feet together under him.

‘What defeats, Greek?’ he asked. ‘Let him speak.’

‘Great King,’ I began. I had passed the point of no return. I was going to die and I had to see if I could help my comrades a little, sow some dissension, and goad him to the fight.

If Themistocles was not a traitor …

But I couldn’t see Cimon or Ameinias of Pallene, or Eumenes of Anagyrus simply following Themistocles blindly into treason, or so I hoped.

‘If you were to ride to Phaleron and review your fleet,’ I said, ‘you might find it smaller than you imagine, Great King.’

‘He lies!’ Mardonius and Ariabignes said together.

‘And if you were to count all the Greek captures on the beach, you might count them with the fingers of one hand,’ I added. In fact, they had captured almost thirty ships at Artemisium, but I knew he was unlikely to go and count. ‘If you were to climb Mount Aigeleos and look across the bay to Salamis, you might count the Greek ships on their beaches for yourself, and you might count the captures there — Phoenicians and Ionians.’ I couldn’t shrug, but I tried to sound derisive. It’s not easy with a man’s foot in your back and a spear tip pricking you in the cheek.

‘He lies!’ spat the King of Sidon.

‘He says nothing but the truth,’ Artemisia said.

‘What does a woman know of war?’ spat Mardonius. ‘Keep your words to yourself if you have nothing reasonable to say, woman.’

‘I know the difference between victory and defeat,’ the woman said. ‘Which is apparently beyond you.’

Silence reigned. I lay on the floor for the second time in two days and tried not to think.

Finally, the Great King sighed. ‘You did not break the Greeks at Artemisium?’ he asked.

Ariabignes was a son of Darius by a different mother than Xerxes, which made him both a blood relative and just possibly a competitor. He certainly showed fear. ‘We would have, given another day,’ he said. His tone betrayed him.

‘In another day you would have had no fleet,’ I said. ‘And I will be honest if others are not. Had we had another day at Artemisium, I would not be here!’ I remember every word — note that I spoke nothing but the truth, and yet …

‘Let the lady of Halicarnassus speak,’ Xerxes said.

She came and stood not far from me. She was dressed in women’s clothes, not armour, and she was tall, taller than most men, and well muscled, and had copper-red hair, whether by artifice or nature I know not. She stood where I could see her. ‘I think the Greek exaggerates,’ she said. ‘But only by a day or two. Great King, we have not beaten these Greeks. I am your majesty’s loyal slave and I promise you that the Greeks are masters of your fleet at sea.’

‘Silence,’ Xerxes said to the rising protests. ‘Why?’

Artemisia didn’t shuffle or hesitate. ‘You have many poor trierarchs,’ she said. ‘The Phoenicians are afraid to take further losses and it makes them cautious. The Egyptians hate you. Your only reliable ships are the Ionians, and your own Persians seem to hate us. These divisions mean that each contingent succeeds or fails alone.’

Well. Just then, I loved her. And she was saying what I had suspected; indeed, what I had observed.

‘Ship for ship, we are better sailors than most of theirs, and any ship of Sidon can beat any Greek in a race or probably any other contest. But my father used to tell me that what made the Greeks mighty and made the hoplites great was that no one fighter had to be particularly skilled, but only the whole of all the hoplites needed to know the way to fight as a group. And this is what I observe with the Greeks — they fight in answer to a single will, as horses yoked together to a chariot, whereas your ships fight the way foals race, each according to his own will. Is this not humorous, Great King? Your will rules all of us, and yet your fleet is leaderless; the Greeks are all democrats and little men, and yet their fleet acts according to a single will. Worse, because of their cohesion, they pack in close and make the sea battle into a land battle. They put more marines on their decks than many of your ships, and the lack of manoeuvre in close tells to their advantage, as we are the better seamen.’

Silence.

The woman had silenced a dozen men, all tried warriors. Of course, what she said was true — and damningly accurate.

Xerxes leaned forward and put his chin in his hand. ‘What do you recommend, Artemisia?’

She looked down at me. ‘If you can take the Greek fleet by treachery, do so. Their captains are as superior to yours as men are superior to women in matters of war.’

I remember laying there and thinking, but you are a woman, and the wisest captain here.

‘Is that all your advice?’ Mardonius asked, his voice silky. It seemed to me that he wanted the woman’s destruction and saw her walking straight into the Great King’s bad graces.

She looked at him, her head high. ‘Break the Greeks with time and money and avoid another contest at sea or by land. Every fight makes them look better, puffs up their sense of their own importance, brings them allies and admiration — little Greece contending with the might of the Great King? Whereas, with time and gold, you can let their natural fractiousness rule them and their league will collapse, then you can impose any peace you want.’

‘A woman’s advice!’ Mardonius said with deep contempt. ‘Stay in the bedroom where you belong, comb your hair and speak not concerning things beyond your babies and your hand mirror. The Great King needs to show his power and crush these maggots so that other men know his might. That is how a man thinks.’

Artemisia let half her mouth smile. ‘No, Mardonius. That is how you think. I am a woman and I have born babies, with more pain than you will ever know in battle. And I say unto you — you squander the children born of women and yet your way will fail against the Greeks; I protect the children of women, and yet my way will bring triumph for the Great King and for the Empire.’

She spoke like Athena herself and I wondered: in the Poet there are moments when gods and goddesses take the mouths of mortals. My heart soared, because I could see that Athena had already pronounced the Great King’s doom, and yet, as the gods love to show mortals their folly, the Parthenos spoke, herself, through this woman, giving him the best possible advice. Even I, listening to her, approved. She was more dangerous than Mardonius. I think it is lucky for Greece that she was almost forty years old, her face lined with laughter and life. She was attractive enough for her age, but not much younger than Xerxes’ mother. Had she been twenty and beautiful …

But she was not.

Xerxes’ sandals moved again and I looked up in time to see him smile. He put out a hand and placed it on the elbow of Mardonius. ‘She speaks well, and from love of me,’ he said. ‘You believe the Plataean?’ he asked.

She looked at me. In one enigmatic half smile I saw how little I fooled her. She was wise.

But she bowed her head. ‘I believe he tells the truth,’ she said.

Diomedes spoke up. ‘He was at sea, fighting us, just a few days ago!’ he said. ‘He is our enemy!’

Xerxes looked around the room. ‘Is this true?’

I spoke up. ‘It is but three days since I threw a spear at this lady,’ I said.

Xerxes laughed. ‘Ah!’ he said.

Mardonius looked at me. ‘Let me give him to the Immortals. They will beat the truth from him.’

Diomedes said, ‘Great King, give him to me. I have promised that this man, who was once a slave, would meet a vile death. I will wring from him anything he has to say that will serve you.’

Apparently, men at Xerxes’ court demanded deaths of other men all the time, because the Great King ignored them as if they were small boys. ‘Three days ago you threw a spear at one of my captains in a sea fight,’ he said. ‘Today you kiss my slipper. Why?’

I thought of Themistocles. ‘Because three days ago I still believed that the westerners, the men of the Peloponnese, would fight; now I think that they will abandon us — perhaps they already have. So I agreed with Themistocles to make a different offer to you, and have peace.’

‘You sell them to me?’ Xerxes asked.

I raised my head more, and looked at him. ‘No,’ I said. ‘They will betray themselves and you will take them.’ It was the sort of defensive they did it to themselves crap I’d heard from other traitors.

‘I think perhaps my cousin and my brother are mistaken in you,’ Xerxes said. ‘Take him outside where he cannot hear us. I will decide his fate later.’

I was pulled ungently to my feet and pushed out of the room. Diomedes stopped us under the portico by the simple expedient of standing in the way of my Sakje guards.

‘Doru,’ he said, almost caressing me with his voice, ‘I will buy you from the Great King. Rest assured that I will.’ He pursed his lips and leaned towards me. ‘I will have you raped by my slaves, do you hear me? And then I’ll feed your polluted corpse to pigs. That is what I promise you, Doru.’

As he spoke, the veneer of his urbanity peeled away and his spittle flecked my face, as hot as his hatred.

I’d like to say that I met his eyes calmly and snapped some retort — I’ve thought of many over the years — but age has granted me a little honesty, and I have to say that his words made me afraid — to die in so much shame, and be thought a traitor too?

But I managed to keep my head high. I made as if his words puzzled me, and the Sakje pushed me along.

‘You are dead and defiled even now, Greek!’ he shouted.

One of the Sakje said something to the other, and they both grunted.

As soon as we were clear of the main building, Brasidas flicked his eyes at me. ‘Old friend?’ he asked.

I was shaken, and trying hard not to show it. ‘Yes,’ I said.

‘No talk!’ the larger of the two Sakje said.

The next two hours were unmemorable, except that they were miserable. The Sakje didn’t leave us, and did not allow us to talk. We could see and hear nothing of what went on inside Aristides’ house, and we simply sat. I think I remember Brasidas going outside with one of the guards and relieving himself.

A troop of Immortals arrived up the back road that servants used for deliveries in happier times and began to replace the guards around the perimeter of the small estate. They did it with a great deal of talking and even some argument.

After they were done, an officer went into the house, and then the captains began to emerge. Each had a tail of one or two men, and it was … instructive … to observe them from so far that their comments could not be heard and they were, themselves, merely a sort of mime. They postured a fair amount, once all their flunkies were gathered. I wondered if I looked like this from a distance, if this was merely an ugly part of command. Perhaps this was what the vaunted Spartan discipline avoided.

I saw Diomedes gather a pair of hoplites, both in full armour, and by full I mean head-to-toe bronze, the kind I wore for serious fighting. He put his arms around them both like a port-side gang boss in Syracusa, and he spoke to them briefly, and then he came among the cook’s garden — it filled the back of the house, and all these memories are touched with the scent of oregano…. Anyway, Diomedes came along the edge of the garden and walked up to the summer house and looked in. He called out to one of the Immortals who was still on guard, and the man pointed his spear at the shed.

Diomedes and his two soldiers came towards us. The Immortal headed back towards the alley behind the estate. The Great King was going, and taking his guards with him.

Diomedes would have no witnesses.

In Persian, I said to the older of the two Sakje men, ‘This man is my enemy and means me harm.’

He looked at him, tilted his head to one side for a moment, and then shrugged.

I repeated myself, more slowly. This time I pointed at Diomedes for effect.

Diomedes stopped outside the shed door. It was propped open by a piece of wood — the axle of a chariot, I believe.

‘Take him,’ he said. He pointed to the two hoplites.

One began to push in.

I stepped back, and the older Sakje man raised his bow, drew it, and put the arrow in Diomedes’ face. He said something. It was in his own barbaric tongue. Then, in Greek, he said, ‘Away! Go!’

Diomedes had counted on force and effrontery. ‘Just give him to me,’ he said.

The younger Sakje put a bone whistle between his teeth and blew. Both hoplites froze.

Diomedes suddenly had a dagger in his hand. He didn’t turn it on the Sakje, but suddenly thrust at me, holding the dagger like a sword.

I got both hands on his wrist, thumbs up. He leaned against me, pushing at the blade, and got my back against the shed wall.

But I got the arm against the shed wall and my body across it, and in one twist I had the dagger. I tossed it to Brasidas even as the rest of the Sakje wrenched open the door.

Diomedes raised his hands. He smiled at the five barbarians. ‘Just a misunderstanding,’ he said. He looked at me. ‘I’ll come back with enough marines to take care of the riff-raff,’ he said. ‘And then — oh, how I have longed for this, slave boy.’

He was going to say more, but the Sakje were angry and they all waved their bows. Two men drew again and put their arrowheads close to the Ionian hoplites’ faces.

Diomedes walked away.

Brasidas and I tried to tell them of the danger for as long as it takes to put new tiles on a roof and perhaps longer. The sun began to set and the five Sakje pushed us back into our shed and slammed the door. Then they began a furious debate outside.

I had not been alone with Brasidas in hours. He showed me the dagger he’d concealed — the Sakje had either never seen it or lost track.

‘We have to go now,’ he said carefully. ‘I use the dagger. You run.’

He was right, of course. First, he was, if only marginally, the better man with a weapon. With almost any weapon except a bow, or with no weapon at all. And second, we both knew that I was the one who needed to make it to the fleet — not Brasidas.

That didn’t make it any better.

‘I want-’ I said. I’ll never know what I wanted to say. I wasn’t sure then, and I still don’t know.

There was a sharp grunt and a low shriek outside, and then shouting, and then a bellow of rage.

I looked out.

Three of the Sakje were face down in the dust at the edge of Jocasta’s garden with arrows in them, and the leader was kneeling with his back to me and aiming his bow.

Sometimes, to see is to act. I slammed my shoulder into the door and it flew open. It hadn’t been locked or attached, but merely held with a bit of wood that turned on a copper nail. The door slapped into the Sakje leader and he went over and I was on him.

Because his bow arm — his left — was outflung, he fell that way, and I got my left arm in under his and around it in a joint lock then I pinned his arm back. He had to give it to me or have it broken, and I used it to put him face down. He tried to spin out, and he tried to get a leg between my legs.

I got my left hand on his neck when he tried to roll flat and kneed him hard in the guts when he tried to curl to me. Even as his free fist slammed into my left thigh — an agony of simple pain — mine went into his groin, and he was done.

The fifth man was nowhere to be seen. Brasidas came out warily, marked me, and came forward, knife out and ready. He knelt by my assailant. I put a hand on his wrist. Elation was stealing over me — I could see that the arrows were Ka’s and his friends.

No need to kill the Sakje.

Before I could explain all this to Brasidas, Ka was dropping out of one of the olive trees. He loped towards us, head low, almost inhuman he was so low to the ground.

I grabbed his hand, right hand to right hand, and he surprised me by leaning in and embracing me, touching his forehead to mine.

‘One got away,’ he said.

‘Allow this one to live,’ I said.

Ka shrugged. He produced a rope, well decorated with pale blue glass beads and bright wool thread. He often wore it — I’d never seen him use it and I’d assumed it was a zone or belt. In fact, it turned out to be a rope for tying prisoners.

The Sakje man simply watched us, his eyes blank.

Ka pushed a gag made of a dead man’s loincloth deep into the old Sakje’s mouth. The man almost choked.

Ka nodded regretfully.

‘Too soon, his friend find him, eh?’ Ka said. ‘Faster to kill.’

I shrugged. ‘Perhaps,’ I said.

We were gone in less time than it would take a man to sing a hymn, over the back wall, and along the back of the houses.

I am not sure I’ve ever been happier. No, I lie. I have been happier once or twice, and if you remain, I’ll tell you about these good times, too. But by the gods, friends, I all but flew over the ground.

I was so sure I’d had it. Sure I was a dead man — shamed, degraded, and my memory blackened for ever. Pluton and Tyche, gods of good fortune, hear me: to this day, I praise you for my release.

The night was dark and silent. I had never known Athens so silent. There were fires on the Acropolis — there were troops there, apparently — and men were camped north of the city. But in among the estates of the rich, and the small rows of hovels and simple wattle houses where slaves and freed men lived, there was only silence. Dogs barked, angry, starving dogs, left by their masters. There were more rats than I’d ever seen in Athens and they moved constantly, drawing the eye.

I suppose we might have gone into Aristides’ home and looked for the sword I’d been wearing, or my rings, or my clothes — or some secret writing of the Medes that would betray all their plans, but honestly, friends, all I wanted was away.

When we were well clear of the house, we worked our way along the edge of the cliff under the Pnyx. Then, using the Acropolis as a guide, we moved south. Ithy and Nemet joined us when we passed the Pnyx and crossed the open ground to the edge of the Keramiki. Then we ran, with me the slowest, constantly lagging. The Africans ran like champions and Brasidas ran — well, like a Spartan.

It took us three hours to work our way west and south, past the long walls, and onto the Megara road — the road to Eleusis that many called the Sacred Way.

It was full night when we came to the edge of the beach. There was a row boat, a light shell built for six oarsmen, and every spot was manned, bless them all, by good oarsmen off my ship. Lydia herself was just off the beach and we were aboard her ten minutes later and on the beaches of Salamis before another hour passed.

When we were all aboard, the lights of the Persian camps just visible on our left and the fires on the beach visible on the right, I turned to Seckla at the helm. ‘How did you find me?’ I asked him.

He shrugged. ‘Ka followed you,’ he said.

I looked at Ka.

Ka shrugged. ‘This Siccinius,’ he said. And shrugged. ‘We don’t trust him. So I follow you — yas. Yas!’

I do not, in fact, know what ‘yas’ means, but it is said for emphasis like ‘heh’, except more so.

‘Last night you go to guard post? I follow. See you talk, move past temple. When Parsi and Medes move you, I follow.’

‘Bless you, Ka.’ I hugged him.

He laughed. ‘Hah! It was easy — yas. Easier then hunting antelope, by far.’ He smiled.

‘You knew that was Aristides’ house?’ I said.

Ka frowned. ‘I know Aristides,’ he said. ‘His house?’

Of course Ka had never been to his house. Who takes his head archer to parties?

Me, that’s who. I was going to take Ka anywhere he wanted to go for a long time.

‘You saved my life,’ I said.

‘And mine,’ Brasidas said.

Ka smiled. ‘I did, yas!’ He grinned.

Seckla picked up the tale. ‘Late last night he came back to the pentekonter. He told us what happened.’ Seckla leaned over and spoke very quietly indeed. ‘You know that the Medes let Siccinius go?’

‘I know,’ I said.

‘They escorted him right to the guard posts,’ he said. ‘Ka stayed on him all the way and gave him the fright of his life as soon as he had him alone.’

I thought about that.

‘I rowed him back to his master. He only told us that the Medes kept you as hostages. He said he tried to save you.’ He looked at me in the darkness. We were lit by two oil lanterns in the stern and it was difficult to read a face.

I shrugged. ‘He tried, as much as a slave tried to save anyone,’ I said.

Brasidas raised an eyebrow, a very un-Spartan gesture he’d learned from us, I suspect. I think he had already decided at that point that Themistocles was a traitor. I wasn’t sure.

I wasn’t sure, but the evidence was building.

We landed on the Athenian beach, as close to the tents of the commanders as we could, although ships were all but wedged in there. Seckla put our stern between two rocks and I hopped down, dry-shod, with Brasidas. Even from the beach we could hear that the ‘council’ was over-full. The murmur of voices and the shouts cut the dark air like Persian arrows, and they were so loud that the gulls that roosted on the point complained, which might have been the voice of the gods, for all I know.

We climbed the headlands into a melee of oratory.

One of the Peloponnesian trierarchs was talking, saying he had his ships laden and he was leaving in the morning, no matter what the council decided.

I looked for Themistocles, and found him near the speaker’s rostrum, standing with Eurybiades. He wore the slight smile of the superior man.

I continued to watch him while first Phrynicus reviled the Corinthians as traitors — not, perhaps, the most politic speech, but Phrynicus, much as I love him, was a hothead. In fact, his heat made him the greatest playwright of his day. But he offended some waverers, and the Peloponnesians began to shout at the Athenians that they were a conquered people.

Still Themistocles smiled to himself. If anything, he looked bored, his eyes moving from one man to the next as if savouring their reactions.

I was careful to remain hidden.

Eumenes of Anagyrus spoke up, repeating, in effect, what other Athenians and Aeginians had said — that if the fleet broke up, the Great King would win.

Adeimantus watched Themistocles.

It was, by then, very late indeed. The oarsmen were, one hoped, asleep. But here were two hundred captains, bellowing like fishwives, screeching, and twice there were blows given.

For perhaps the hundredth time that autumn, I considered leaving. My town was already burned. I had property in Massalia, and I could trade tin and marry a buxom Keltoi girl or keep five for my pleasure.

But I wanted two things. I wanted to beat the Great King, because he had humiliated me, and because he meant to humiliate Greece, and because, to be honest, I was a man of Marathon and I had tasted the fruit of the gods in that victory and I wanted it again. And because I wanted Briseis, and she had called me to her, and the road to her lay through the Great King’s fleet.

And I had escaped. They had had me, the Persians and Medes. My escape seemed to me a sign from Heracles, my ancestor, that I should fight. By Zeus, I have always taken omens as signs I should fight, I confess it. But why free me to die an empty death, or flee to some forgotten grave in Gaul?

So the real question was how to make sure that the fleet fought and didn’t run. I knew that it came down to men — a few men. Really, it came down to two men — Adeimantus and Themistocles. Perhaps Eurybiades, but I thought him both sound and just. Adeimantus I thought a traitor, although I never heard a word from Mardonius or any of the Medes to suggest that he was. But he had just sixty triremes.

Themistocles — was he a traitor? Or was he playing both sides for his own profit? Did he, in fact, even have a plan?

I made my decision. It depended on Eurybiades. I suppose it says something about me, and the situation, that when the dice were thrown, I trusted a Spartan. I said a few words to Brasidas and the Spartan nodded and went off to my right, into the crowd.

I walked around the outside of the council fire and moved cautiously through the crowd of Athenian captains behind the great man. Ameinias of Pallene recognised me, as did Cleitus. Both started.

I pulled my chlamys over my head. Ameinias shrugged.

Cleitus stepped closer. He was tense; his entire body conveyed his tension, so that my body reacted as if he was about to attack me. I didn’t believe he would, but such were our feelings for each other.

‘Where have you been?’ he hissed, an odd greeting from a sworn enemy. And in this case, ‘sworn enemy’ is not an empty phrase. He had sworn my death to Olympian Zeus. ‘Everyone is looking for you!’

That told me a great deal. It told me, unless Cleitus was lying, that Themistocles had kept my capture a secret. To cover his own treason?

I still don’t know.

‘I need to get to Themistocles,’ I said. ‘Victory and death depend on it.’

Hate is akin to love, all the poets say it. Men who truly hate, men who have gone word to word and sword to sword, can know each other like lovers, or be as ignorant as fools. These are the only ways to hate, and Cleitus and I knew each other so well … He looked into my eyes by firelight and then he turned without a word and began shoving men out of my way.

Just at that moment, I forgot that he was the engine of my mother’s death and saw that he put Greece before his enmity.

Then I followed him. He burrowed through the retainers, the captains, the desperate men. Off to the left, I saw Siccinius and he saw me, despite my filthy chiton and the chlamys over my head like a beaten slave. His eyes grew wide and he started for his master.

But he was too late. And Cleitus, as if he was my partner and not my adversary, stepped past Themistocles, blocking his view of the council and forcing him to turn by the sort of pressure you exert when you put a hand in a man’s face and make him be silent without speaking.

Themistocles turned and saw me. His expression flickered. In that moment, I tried to read him — and failed. There was no open hostility, no guile, no obvious guilt.

Just that flicker of change, as if, for a moment, he was several different men.

Quietly, I spoke to him, leaning my head close. ‘My friend,’ I said, ‘I have just come from the Great King. We can talk here, if you like, or in private.’

Cleitus couldn’t help but hear the words ‘Great King’. Again, our eyes met. What passed then?

Both of us made decisions, that’s what passed.

Themistocles sighed. ‘Always I am at your service, brave Arimnestos,’ he said. ‘Let us hold a private parley.’

I took his hand like a maiden leading a man to a dance, and I would not let go of it. I pulled him free of the crowd, and when men began to follow, Cleitus — Cleitus! — bade them go back to the council.

But Cleitus himself followed us under an old oak tree by the sacred well. There was a stone bench there and I sat. Themistocles sat.

Cleitus leaned against the tree.

‘Your plan is working perfectly,’ I said. ‘Even now, the Great King’s ships are loading their rowers. They are on the way.’

Cleitus folded his arms, but his right hand was close to the hilt of the small, Spartan-style xiphos he wore under his left arm.

‘My plan?’ Themistocles asked.

‘Your plan to force the Greek fleet to fight by luring the Persians into the bay,’ I said. ‘In an hour, they will be at sea.’

The skin around Cleitus’s eyes tightened. Crow’s feet appeared at the corners of his eyes. He was a brilliant man — I think he understood everything.

Themistocles sat very still. ‘What — how — how do you know?’ he asked.

‘Brasidas and I have just escaped from the Great King,’ I said. ‘We escorted a certain slave to the Great King himself, and he took us prisoners. Hostages.’

‘I knew nothing of this!’ he said suddenly. He was lying, and it was a foolish lie, but Themistocles was such an able politician and so contemptuous of other men’s minds that he thought — and perhaps he was right — that anything my friends said after the fact would be forgotten.

I shrugged. ‘It is true. Not a few hours ago, I lay on my face before the Great King while his commanders discussed their attack and a spear was pressed into my neck.’

‘This is — incredible!’ Themistocles said.

I almost hit him.

His hands were shaking.

Let me pause here, on the edge of saving Greece, and say again: I think he was as guilty as an adulterer caught in the act. So why not expose him?

Think about it. If I exposed him, who would fight? The Athenians would shatter instantly into pro- and anti-Themistoklean factions. What? You think the democrats and the oarsmen would convict him out of hand? You must be joking. Facts? There were no facts. It was all intuition and supposition. Heraclitus did not train me to think for nothing. The only hope for Greece was to pretend that Themistocles had all along planned to force the Greek fleet to fight. Perhaps it was even true.

Perhaps he intended the Greek fleet to cut and run — into the closing jaws of the Persians. Perhaps he imagined that the Corinthians and Peloponnesians would be caught and destroyed piecemeal, leaving Athens and Aegina in a powerful bargaining position and making his position tenable.

It makes my head hurt.

‘The Persians will be at sea any moment,’ I said. ‘It’s time to reveal this to the fleet, so that we can prepare. To fight.’

Themistocles allowed his eyes to meet mine. He was searching me. I knew, just the way a girl knows when a man is looking at her breasts and not into her eyes. He wanted to know what I knew.

Cleitus tugged at his beard. ‘Reveal what?’ he asked.

Themistocles stiffened, and then rose to his feet. ‘I have a plan to save Greece,’ he said portentously.

Well, whatever else might have been true, from that moment he bent his will to save Greece.

The gods play a role in most affairs of men, so it will not surprise you that they had some part in that night. The first was probably my rescue by Ka, but the most vital was to come. We were walking back to the council, which was still loud. My friend Lykon was speaking, promising the men of Athens that Adeimantus did not speak for all Corinthians. We were twenty paces from the firelight, near the outer ring of listeners where men stood to piss against the trees and slaves waited with wine skins. Out of the darkness came Aristides.

‘Themistocles,’ he said.

‘Aristides,’ the democrat answered.

If I wanted to know what Cleitus and I looked like when speaking to one another, here it was — a tableau of mutual antipathy. Yet they had worked together from the first for the liberation of Greece. If I was correct, Themistocles had changed his mind or given up. But Aristides had not.

‘We are surrounded,’ Aristides said. ‘Do you know?’

‘Surrounded?’ Themistocles asked.

Aristides nodded. Behind him, two of his slaves held torches. ‘I left my Nike back on Aegina,’ he said. ‘I came with a pair of Aeginian triremes carrying sacred statues of their gods. Aeginian fishing boats reported to us after sunset.’ He looked around. Cleitus stepped closer, and other men began to gather; Cimon was there, and Xanthippus too. It was Aristides’ voice gathering them, his friends and his enemies too.

‘The entire Persian fleet is at sea,’ he said. ‘The beaches at Phaleron must be empty. We came through the Egyptians. We were challenged repeatedly, but one of my oarsmen speaks Egyptian and Persian as well.’ He shrugged.

Themistocles gave a false laugh. ‘Ah, Aristides, we may be adversaries, but you are the man to appreciate my cleverness. I have brought the Persians.’

‘You?’ Aristides asked.

‘I sent for them,’ Themistocles joked. He looked at me. ‘Ask Arimnestos.’

Oh, he was clever. Aristides would never believe I was involved in a treason plot. Themistocles had just played me — again.

I could not allow myself to care. This was for everything. ‘Now we have to fight,’ I said.

Themistocles took Aristides by the hand. ‘You saw the Medes?’

‘Medes, Persians, Phoenicians and Egyptians, and far too many Greeks,’ Aristides said.

Themistocles pumped his hand. ‘You must tell the council. No one will believe me. But all know how you hate me — you will be believed.’

‘Say rather that I will be believed because I do not make a habit of telling lies,’ Aristides said. It was true and false, too — Greeks have a foolish habit of believing men that they would like to be telling the truth, rather than those they know to be honest.

Themistocles winced but did not let go of my friend’s hand.

Cleitus came up behind me, and very softly said, ‘What in the name of black Tartarus is going on?’ he growled.

‘We’re saving Greece from the barbarians,’ I said.

Cleitus laughed. ‘Not the first time,’ he said.

I roared with laughter. Men turned, and saw me laughing, and before the gods, I embraced the bastard. ‘Too right, mate,’ I said.

He returned the embrace and Aristides smiled in the torchlight.

‘If those two can be at peace,’ he said, ‘I will make peace with you. And it is only the truth, after all. Take me to the council.’

So it was that Themistocles, the arch-democrat, led Aristides the Just, the priggish, snobbish arch-conservative and my best friend, to the rostra in front of three hundred captains. It was deep in the night.

Themistocles pointed to the man standing ready to speak.

‘There is my nemesis, Aristides, returned from exile to speak to the captains,’ he said. ‘Pay heed, and know that I support his every word.’

Aristides looked around. His eye met mine, and then passed over — he was never a man to wink. He was silent for long enough that men coughed and the silence became edgy.

‘The Persian fleet is already at sea,’ he said softly. ‘They are all around us. They have ships on the beaches opposite us to the north, and they have sent a squadron to close the western passages to the isthmus.’

Now the silence was absolute.

‘There is no longer a choice to be made,’ he said. ‘I will argue nothing. Unless you choose to submit and be slaves, we must fight.’

The silence stayed, and then a babble began, the usual Greek game of finding whose fault it must have been, might have been. It rose all about us, and then Eurybiades struck the speaker’s rostra with his staff — I remember the sound like a thunderbolt.

‘Are you children?’ he asked.

He was going to say more, and Themistocles stepped past him into the firelight. ‘I have a plan,’ he began.

‘Silence, or I strike,’ Eurybiades said, raising his stick. He was angry, as any commander would have been.

‘Strike, but only listen,’ Themistocles begged. He actually bent his knee like a beggar requesting alms.

Zeus, it was a masterful performance.

There stood the Spartan, stick raised, and there the Athenian knelt before him in supplication.

‘Speak,’ growled the Spartan.

Themistocles leapt to his feet. ‘The Persians think this is a land battle,’ he said. ‘They think that having their right overmatch our left will lead them to collapse us. They imagine that we will fight with our lines spread east to west. They don’t know the waters, and their ships will have been at sea all night, their hulls damp, men tired. We can win.’

Say what you will — and I have — once he was committed, he was brilliant. I saw it immediately. Other men had to be convinced; some had to hear the whole thing two or three times, and all the while Eurybiades was sending the lesser men to bed, and ordering heralds to wake the rowers an hour before sunrise.

It was not in any way my plan, although in its relation I knew that my words had played a part. Certainly Themistocles planned to use the dawn chop and the breeze, but his notion that we could form the trap by backing water, despite having inflicted two defeats this way at Artemisium, was entirely his own. He told them that the Great King expected the treason of whole bodies of Greeks and thus would expect us to flee.

Well. I still had an eye on the Corinthians.

But it was a good plan, simple enough, with the flexibility so that if the weather went our way, he’d make use of it, and if the day was calm, we had alternatives.

Aristides, without a ship, as his beautiful Athena Nike was still being repaired, added a wrinkle. We had far more hoplites than we could fit on ships. Aristides was given command of all the hoplites left on Salamis. He said he would attempt to take the two islets in the middle of the straits. Neither is very considerable, but the larger is big enough for a thousand men to stand in formation and archers on that island would be able to wreck our centre. We gave him all the pentekonter and all the fishing boats.

In fact, once the decision was made to fight, we moved along at a great rate. I want to say that it was Eurybiades who decided to fight. He never called for another vote. Perhaps he thought it was obvious or perhaps he was tired of oratory. I know I was.

We trudged back to our camp and I laid out my panoply and woke two of my slaves to shine it. I planned to wear the whole thing — shin guards and thigh guards and arm guards and everything. To shine like a god. Because in war, these things matter.

And then I rolled in my cloak and went to sleep without another thought.