Salamis

I woke from a dream so erotic that I might have been on the point of an indiscretion, and pondered what the gods meant by sending me a dream of making love to Jocasta, for whom I had infinite respect but towards whom I had never felt the least attraction. But my waking mind found the notion humorous, and I rolled out of my cloak looking more like a satyr than a man and threw myself into the sea. I dried myself with my linens in the darkness and woke Seckla, and all around me men blew life into campfires.

I sent Hipponax up the ridge to see what could be seen from our watchtowers, and I walked along the beach until I was sure that the Athenians were in motion. Xanthippus was civil enough and already in his armour, while I was still naked and my hair wet from my swim, but I felt better for it, and better still when Hector put a horn cup of mulled wine in my hand.

The first kiss of dawn touched the sky and I put on my best chiton, milk-white wool with purple stripes and red embroidery, ravens and stars. Then I put on the leather straps that went around my ankles to protect them from the slap of the greaves against my instep, and then I snapped the greaves over my shins, cursing the way they cut into every old wound and new scratch from my last outing. Hector knelt behind me and buckled them on, and then he put armour on my left thigh — the thigh most likely to be hit. Sometimes I wear armour on both, but usually I do not.

Then he hinged open my beautiful bronze thorax that Anaxicles had hammered out of new bronze back in Syracusa, what seemed like many years before. He closed it and slid the pins shut, slipped the arm guard on my right forearm and the shoulder guard on my right shoulder. No man needs a guard on his left shoulder or forearm — that’s what the aspis covers.

Many men were gathered there. It was like a ceremony and a festival, too. I was Achilles being armed, or Ares, or mighty Ajax or Diomedes, or one of the Immortals or the heroes, and the dawn gilded my bronze and made it glow red, as if I’d spilled a fiery immortal blood. Hector brought my helmet and Hipponax, back from his mission and looking furtive for some reason, reported that the Peloponnesians were already arrayed and putting rowers into their ships, and also reported, somewhat unnecessarily, that the Brauron girls were awake and singing hymns. He put my aspis on my arm, and then he and Hector armed together. Brasidas came out of his tent armed, and Idomeneus, who looked more like a god than any, with his perfect body and shining bronze and his old-fashioned high crest nodding like Hector’s in Iliad. And Achilles’ namesake, my cousin, did us no disgrace, despite his recent wound and his surly ways, but he ran down from the upper beach fully armed, and his bronze also lit up in the new sun.

But against our bronze, most of the rowers were naked, or wore loincloths. But the top-deck rowers on Lydia had helmets and thorax of captured Persian linen, stitched tight and hard with embroidery, or quilted, or beautiful leather spolas taken off Ionian ships, or tawed leather yokes made in Athens or Massalia, and spears. A few even sported swords, or axes, or little maces with bronze heads. They watched us arm, as if our bronze plate protected them as well as us — and I like to think it did.

When we were all together, as far as I could see — the marines in neat rows, and Leukas and Onisandros and Polymarchos, standing with Sittonax, the laziest deadly fighter I knew, my old Gaulish friend and my old sparring mate and newest marine — then our ship’s dog condescended to join us, running down the beach. He ran to me with a live rabbit still breathing in his mouth. I gentled him, gave him a hug and a long pat and beckoned Hector to give the dog a sausage, which he clearly craved. But the rabbit was from the gods and I slit its throat, as much a mercy as a sacrifice, and opened it over the fire.

‘Victory!’ I roared, before I had even glanced at its entrails. But the liver was whole and spotless — not all that usual with rabbits, let me tell you. I am no great diviner, but that rabbit was sent by Zeus and told me we would win.

My people cheered and cheered and the men on other ships began to cheer, and the cliff above us echoed hollowly, as if the gods were shouting approval.

One of our Gaulish wine barrels was open and Onisandros was serving a cup of wine to every man. I leapt on it.

‘Lydia!’ I said.

They all froze.

‘Listen, brothers!’ I called. ‘Many times before today, I have heard men argue whether the hoplites or the rowers would save Greece.’ I paused.

By the gods, it was quiet.

‘I tell you, we will only save Greece together. I tell you, today, any man who pulls an oar against the Medes is my brother, a descendent of Heracles, noble in his birth, free to walk the earth and defy his foes. I say that this is our hour, when the world will decide if indeed we are worthy of that freedom our fathers won. I say that those who die today will go with Hector and Achilles and the dead of Marathon, even if they were born of slaves and were themselves unfree, and those who live today having done their duty will be remembered as long as free men in any country walk under the stars. And as I make every one of you noble sons of Heracles, then every one of you must want nothing better than to die in arms, or live victorious. For I promise you, brothers, I will not leave the field today alive and beaten. If Greece, free, is a dream, I will die today, still dreaming. Will you, my friends, be my brothers?’

Zeus, the noise they made. I was carried away — I was already with the gods and Athena said those words in my ear, yet even as their cheers rang like the voice of Poseidon echoing from the cliffs over my head, I heard a curiously high-pitched cheer from close at hand.

I remembered it later.

Themistocles held one last meeting. I confess that I think the man loved a council, where his particular merits shone forth at their best. Or perhaps he just liked to talk.

It was greater than just a council, because he had there most of the trierarchs and navarchs, but also many of the helmsmen and marines, both captains and famous men. No one was forbidden to attend. The sun was not yet fully in the sky when he made his speech, and Eurybiades did nothing but bid us to hold our places, to back water when ordered and not break the line.

I felt that Eurybiades’ speech was more to the point.

But I’ll give Themistocles this, he was calm, dignified, and when he said we were assured of victory, he looked the part of a general.

He gathered two dozen commanders as the marines and helmsmen ran for their ships. The morning breeze was stiffening to a wind, and we could see the Persian army marching along the roads opposite us, under the slopes of Mount Aigeleos.

But between us and the Great King’s army lay one of the most awesome spectacles I have ever seen. The breeze was stiffening to a wind, but over the Bay of Salamis a morning fog lay. It clung to the water like smoke clings to the sacrifice on the altar, and the Persian fleet, their masts down, was only visible in the same way that a sharp-eyed hunter might spot a herd of deer on a foggy morning: by movement, and by fleeting gaps in the haze.

But even with these disadvantages to sight, from our eminence we could see that the Persians had moved silently past the island Psyttaleia and that the island itself was crawling with Persian troops. They were moving to encircle our beaches — indeed, had almost done so already.

Aristides nodded, tall and godlike in his panoply. ‘We’ll take the island,’ he said.

‘Not until I give the signal,’ Eurybiades said. ‘The Persians want a sea battle like a land battle?’ he asked. He didn’t smile or grin — that was not the Laconian way. But he exuded a steady confidence. ‘I will give them a battle that will remind them what is sea, what is land, and what is merely air.’

Then he ordered the Aeginians to stay fully armed and ready to launch, bows out, on their beaches, covered by Aristides and his hoplites and the Athenian corps of four hundred archers — enough skilled bowman to clear the decks of five ships in a single mighty volley.

‘Circumstances have changed, but not so much,’ he said. ‘Note how far their lead group has advanced,’ he said, pointing.

Cimon spoke up. ‘Phoenicians,’ he said, looking under his hand. ‘I’d wager my life on it. Almost to Eleusis.’

‘You may have done,’ Eurybiades said. ‘You, Cimon — and you, Plataean — will take your ships off the beaches and bear away west, as if fleeing. Xanthippus, you will follow them.’ He nodded. ‘When you see the gold shield flash you will engage, and not before. Every stade you can make on them westward that allows you to turn the battle back to the east will be the better for us.’

Men looked confused. ‘You want us to fish-hook to the west and drive back east on your command,’ I said.

‘Exactly,’ he said.

‘Lade in reverse,’ Cimon said cheerfully. ‘We’ll remind the Phoenicians of how well they fought there.’

‘The Corinthians will face east against the Egyptians, in case they weather the island and approach from the west. I have sacrificed and prayed that they may not, as then the Corinthians will be our reserve.’ Eurybiades waited, as there was a babble of complaint. He rode it out with his impassivity. ‘You will not advance until I send a pentekonter for you.’

Adeimantus nodded, pleased, I think, to be held back from the fighting.

He looked at Themistocles. The wily Athenian nodded, as if they’d planned the whole talk like a play, each with his part. Perhaps they had. Themistocles, at least, was committed. No one now talked of surrender or flight. Even Adeimantus — I wish to give the slug his due — was armoured, alert, and committed.

‘What we must do, in the first minutes of the action, is turn the battle,’ he said. He pointed out over the straits.

Below us on the beaches, men were restless. Helmsmen shouted up at us, as if they thought we were not aware of how close the Persians were. It takes strong nerves to talk to your officers in the very face of the enemy, but it also wins battles. Eurybiades was such a man. He seemed as calm as a man about to go hunt hares, or have a walk in his vineyard.

Themistocles went on. ‘The Persians intend to fight with their line from east to west,’ he said. ‘We will turn them and force them to fight with their backs to the straits, and a north-south axis.’

We could see that even as the Persian ships deployed, more ships were passing behind the lead divisions. To my eye it looked as if they’d left themselves too little margin for error, too little rowing room.

And I liked our plan.

I’d heard it in the early hours of the morning. I knew the plan, and I liked it. And I liked that we would start with three of our largest squadrons apparently running west for open water along the coast — deserting. Just as the Persians expected.

‘Not until I raise the gold shield,’ Eurybiades said.

I nodded, and so did Cimon. I assume the rest of the navarchs nodded as well.

‘Let’s do this thing,’ Eurybiades said.

‘Remember,’ Themistocles began, but the older Spartan cut him off.

‘The time for talking is done,’ he said, mildly enough. ‘Now, we fight.’

As we walked away, Adeimantus remarked, as if to the air, ‘The old Spartan knows who he can trust! The Corinthians have the place of honour, in reserve — the balance of the battle.’

Cimon ignored him.

I managed a smile. ‘You know, Adeimantus, I have been in forty or so fights, and no one has ever once suggested that I be in reserve.’

He flushed, Cimon laughed, and several men patted me on the back.

I do get in a good thing from time to time.

The fog still lay over the bay, although it was burning off. The sea smelled beautiful and the breeze was almost a wind — more wind, in fact, than any captain wanted for a sea fight. It made our launching off the beaches tricky, to say the least, catching us broadside the moment the bow anchor-stones came in and threatening every ship with being laid broadside in a light surf. But we didn’t have any trierarchs — or helmsmen — so inexperienced.

We launched well enough, but we were ragged getting into formation and Xanthippus’s helmsman cursed Seckla like a man buying a bad horse in the agora, and his imprecations carried across the water. Strangely, we could hear the Persians, too, even with the thigh-high waves — nothing for a sailor to fear, but unusual in the bay.

My ships came off the beach. I only had four, Lydia included: Harpagos in Storm Cutter, Moire in Amastris, Giannis and Megakles in Black Raven. Athena Nike lay useless, her bows stove in, on the beach of Aegina to the south. My other ships were now crewed by Athenian citizens and not Plataeans. Ah, I lie. I had five — Naiad of Mithymna, my capture turned ‘free Greek’. I left Theognis as the helmsman, but I sent away half of his marines, and replaced them with young Pericles, with his father’s permission, and Anaxagoras, and a captain, a Spartiate provided by Bulis, named Philokles. It was the only ship with an ‘allied’ crew; I added twenty of my Plataean rowers and took twenty men of Lesvos aboard Lydia. But I still didn’t trust Naiad in the first line, and I told Harpagos and Moire to keep eyes on her. Had Aristides not taken command of the hoplites, I’d have offered him the command.

But four ships or five, it wasn’t the sort of fight where I was needed to tell my captains what to do. My duty was simple: to follow Cimon, to row as far west as I could manage; and then to obey the signal.

There’s something every sailor and every oarsman loves about duplicity. Perhaps it is the touch of the criminal in every man, but all our lives we’re told to avoid duplicity, to be honest — and then, when you are told that it is your duty to act a part and deceive your enemies, it can be great fun. I promise you, as our ragged line, a column of triremes three wide and thirty or more ships long, raced west under oars, I heard an oarsman grunt ‘We’ll be at the isthmus in no time, mates!’ and another pretend to weep from fear. It was not, perhaps, good enough for Dionysus and Aeschylus, but I promise you that our ill-kept column that scattered over a third of the bay to the west would have convinced anyone we were fleeing in panic.

The problem was that the Persians couldn’t see us very well. They could hear that something was up, but they couldn’t see.

We kept rowing west, along the beaches of Salamis. The Corinthians were off, now — I passed Lykon, just coming off the beach, and I waved. The bay was full of men I knew. But visibility was a stade or a little more, and while I could see Cimon on his helm-deck just ahead, I couldn’t be positive that the ship two behind me was Ameinias of Pallene in Parthenos, although I was fairly sure.

Every stade gained of westering was good.

Behind us, someone began to sing the paean. I’ve heard dozens of suggestions — some say it was the Athenians behind us, under Themistocles, some say it was Aristides and the hoplites, and some say it was the Aeginians. It didn’t fit with our deceptive plan — in fact, had the Persians only known us, they’d have known when they heard the paean that we meant to fight, and indeed, I heard years later from Artemisia that all the Ionians knew what was up as soon as they heard it.

This too had an effect on the battle, as the Ionians began to deploy out of their columns into their battle lines, facing neither east-west nor north-south, but about halfway between, and opening a large gap between their own westernmost division, led by the ships of Ephesus and Samos, and the Phoenicians who had the vanguard of their fleet and were already level with the town of Eleusis.

What we didn’t know yet was that the Great King himself had set his throne on the cliffs below Mount Aigeleos and was watching, and that every contingent in the Persian fleet knew that he was watching. The Phoenicians had been defeated by us several times — badly handled at Artemisium — and the presence of the Great King stiffened their spines and put them on their honour, if they have any. They were in the lead, the vanguard, and they were determined to be aggressive. After half an hour of listening to the muffled sounds we made with our oars and our shouting getting off our beaches, they heard the paean, and determined to attack. But — and this is important — they were determined to attack in their new manoeuvre, and they came forward in long columns, so that every captain, in turn, could find a hole in our dispositions and break through. This Phoenician tactic — I’ve spoken of it other nights — was called by us diekplous. The captain of the lead ship looked for an opening — like the break in a dam, or the hole in a bridge — and he shot for it with all his speed, passing through the gap, raking the oars of ships on either side, and then wheeling rapidly into a flank if he could, with his mates crowding in behind.

At Artemisium we’d solved this dilemma two ways. In the first fight we formed a great wheel, our hulls so close that we left them no gap through which to exploit us. And in the second fight we were so practised that by backing water we kept our lines closed, and when we attacked, it was we, not they, who exploited errors in their formation.

I was not a great navarch at Artemisium and even less so at Salamis, but I suspected — and now I am sure — that the greatness of the Phoenician fleet was past, possibly gone in the constant drain of their best captains throughout the long years of the struggle for the Ionian and Aeolian cities. While the Great King triumphed in the Ionian Revolt, Phoenicia suffered in every battle — twenty ships here, forty ships there. I am going to guess that there comes a point in the loss of your best captains when you cannot easily recover all that skill.

It was not that the Phoenicians were bad sailors or fighters. It was merely that they had fallen from being the best. But they clung to a set of tactics that had been developed for aggressive, trained trierarchs and superb helmsmen who had long experience of each other and their enemy, and they tried to use it in a choppy sea, against an enemy line they couldn’t make out in the fog.

Remember that there was a stiff breeze blowing, although already, an hour after sunrise, it was dying away. Remember that it brought a choppiness to the bay that none of us had really anticipated. And remember that they had been up all night.

I thought all of these things as I listened and watched to my starboard side, to the north. I heard a horn, and another. There was shouting.

Then I saw a sight that burned itself on my eyes like a view of a god. Two images I can summon in the eye of the mind at will — Briseis’s naked body the first time I saw her undress in Ephesus, and this.

The morning haze flashed.

And then, again. Flash.

Flash.

Flash.

It was — unearthly.

And then, suddenly, the flashes were everywhere, like a line of fire when peasants and slaves burn the weeds out of the fields.

And then, Poseidon! — a line of bows began to emerge from the haze — a line of ram bows that seemed to fill the whole of my eye, and the flash was the sun shining on their oars, carried into the fog. All the oars moved together on each ship, and there were dozens, hundreds of ships, like a swarm of fireflies at nightfall. And these were just the leaders of their columns.

I have never seen anything to match it, except Briseis.

And they were coming at our naked flank, out of the fog, at ramming speed.

Behind me, someone quicker witted or with a better sight line had already turned out of the line, ‘fleeing’ west.

He had the right notion, whoever he was. We had no sea room to back water, and we might have outrun the Persians to the west, but we couldn’t guarantee it.

The man who turned out of the line without orders was Ameinias of Pallene.

Well, I never said I was a Spartan, either. I followed him.

‘Hard to starboard! Ramming speed as soon as she’s round,’ I called.

Seckla nodded. I remember that he used the lean of the ship’s hull to spit over the side. The starboard-side rowers reversed benches smoothly, gave two hard strokes, and reversed again. Hah! I had never commanded such a vessel with such men. She was dry and light as air and rowed by Argonauts.

We went round faster than I can tell it. The heads of the Phoenician columns were flying at us out of the fog, but Moire was with me immediately. Harpagos followed me, and Giannis followed Moire, and Naiad came after, so we were a compact squadron of five, and when we went, the entire ‘western’ Athenian division turned, almost as one, column into line, and in pretty good order, with Ameinias leading a compact wedge on the leftmost flank. Cimon in Ajax was less than a ship’s length behind me, perhaps half a stade to the west, and four of his ships were beyond him, off to the west.

We turned from a mob fleeing west to a line abreast racing north in a few beats of a calm man’s heart, and even at ramming speed the trierarchs and the helmsmen were adjusting their places. We were not in three crisp lines, but rather in a series of compact squadrons as helmsmen closed up tight to ships they trusted.

I remember that I paused, waved to Cimon, and then clapped Seckla on the shoulder. He’d already chosen his first target.

I was merely an elderly marine. He smiled, I smiled, and then I was running forward.

From the bow, I could see the backs of my ten marines and my three archers. And I could see the Phoenicians coming down on us. They were flat out, at the full ramming speed you need to get an instant ship-kill. But they were widely spaced because of their columns, and there were curious gaps between ships — just to the east of me, there was a gap two or three stades wide before the rest of the Phoenician fleet, the Ionians, who’d formed a more traditional line, could be seen. The sun was now burning off the haze rapidly.

My heart beat very fast. I shouted.

It was sheer exuberance. They were scattered over the whole bay east of our beaches and their formation was terrible. The night, the breeze and the fog and their own ambition had not been kind. Or rather, the gods had been kind to us.

Only treason, the treason of Lade and every other great battle against the Persians, only treason or lack of will would save them.

Oh, Poseidon, my heart beat like a hammer, and I was under no threat. The opportunity was there, if only we could grasp it.

Ameinias of Pallene’s ship was first to strike an enemy. I was very close, maybe a hundred paces away. His helmsman yawed and then turned suddenly back into line, as fast as the stoop of an eagle. He caught the Phoenician a third of the way down the side. The enemy ship had its oars in and the angle was too shallow for Ameinias’s beak to bite home, but he jarred the enemy ship, ripped a strip along the side, and grappled.

The Phoenician behind him — second in the column — came forward full speed. Unlike at Artemisium, their files were well closed up, close enough to support each other, but also close enough to be enveloped. The second Phoenician drove for the bow of Ameinias’s ship Parthenos, turning slightly to the east to get a better angle.

I trusted everything to Harpagos. There was a Phoenician bearing down on me for a bow-to-bow attack from their next column, so I ran back along the catwalk over the forward oars, and back along the half-deck. I was not going to be in time, and running has not been the best of my talents since the wound, so I merely pointed at the other Phoenician, the one running at Ameinias’s flank.

Seckla bet with me, on Harpagos saving us, and Lydia turned a few degrees, perhaps an eighth of a circle, to point at the place where Seckla guessed that the Phoenician would be, in the time it would take a good man to run the stadion.

I can only describe this in terms of bronzeworking. When you make greaves, with all the intricate curves of the human leg, you can only guess how to hit the metal so that it curves in two ways. You cannot know. Seckla had to aim where the Phoenician might be, while his flanker came for us, and we trusted Harpagos to take him.

To my port side aft, I heard Harpagos roar an order.

His crew pulled harder.

He was at ramming speed, and he got them to row faster.

It is hard to describe what happened without some almonds and a big table. But let me try.

We were turning to our starboard side — not far, but enough to become the hypotenuse of a triangle. The Phoenician opposite us kept coming, but had to turn off his intended line, too.

Harpagos, who had been so close behind us that we might have leapt from ship to ship, began to pass us.

Onisandros, at my urging, let the men rest for three strokes. Let me add that only the finest oarsmen can do this. Most ships can only go from a crawl to cruising speed, and from cruising speed to ramming speed, with time for the stroke to change. But a really good ship with rowers and officers long together can stop and start rowing at almost any speed. Remember, friends, that any hesitation by an oarsman can mean death: if he catches a crab at ramming speed, he’s going to get his oar shaft in his teeth at least, and he may do the same to other men.

We drifted at top speed for the time it would take a man to leave his house and call to his wife.

Harpagos went straight at the Phoenician who came straight for us.

‘Now!’ I called.

Onisandros began to pound his spear on the deck.

We shot forward.

‘We have to bring in the port-side oars,’ Onisandros shouted.

‘No! Everything you have!’ I roared.

Off to starboard, Ameinias’s marines were storming along the narrow catwalk above the Phoenician’s rowers.

The Phoenician headed for his flank was so close …

We slammed into his cathead, and before you could count to five, Harpagos’s beak went into the second about fifty paces before his beak slammed into me. Thus, the margin between victory and defeat.

Ameinias’s oarsmen were cheering us. Our Phoenician broke in two as our oars came in — we hit him so hard that our ram scraped paint off Parthenos.

On my port bow, Harpagos’s marines, all men I knew, were going into the third Phoenician. I had no idea how the rest of the battle was going, but within a hundred paces of me we were winning.

Their third ships were coming up, but so were ours, and Cimon led his ships in from the west. The gods — and good fortune, and good planning, and strong rowing, had put us just off their western flank, and now, like sharks closing for the kill, Cimon’s veterans came into the flank of the oncoming Phoenician charge and scattered them. They had to turn to meet his attacks, and then we were free. Seckla, without orders from me, turned us back west, where a dozen Phoenicians were going head-to-head with Cimon’s ships — and exposing their flanks to us.

It was glorious.

We sank a second ship, catching him flat-footed, trying to face in two directions at once.

We ran down the side of a third, coming up from behind his stern — I can’t remember how we lay, or how we got there — it was too fast. The marines leapt before the ships touched, so eager they were, and I followed them, the last man aboard, which felt odd. But I leapt aboard amidships, my old trick, right in among their rowers. I got a foot on each of the beams nearest me and killed the two oarsmen closest and then stabbed up at the catwalk, putting my spear into the legs and feet of the Phoenician marines. I watched Hector go forward like a man ploughing a field, and his spear was like one of the thunderbolts of the Lord of Olympus. He was not a big man like Hipponax, but lithe and so quick that each step forward seemed to baffle his opponents, and he gathered himself so that he seemed to sway side to side like a maiden walking in the marketplace, except that each sway was a deception, and his spear always struck home — left foot forward, right foot forward, a brilliant series of strokes, each delivered with the fastidious precision of a cat and the power of Ares come to earth.

I was so proud.

Behind him came Hipponax, who threw his spear to give Hector room to breathe and got another handed over his shoulder from Brasidas, who was third.

With such marines as these, what need of me?

I contented myself with tripping the men behind the men my Hector was killing, and in a moment — a moment of pure glory — the survivors broke and fled for the false safety of the stern, where they threw down their weapons and begged mercy.

They were lucky they were facing me and Brasidas and men we had trained. There was not much mercy for the Great King’s looters and rapists that day, but we gave it, perhaps because our hearts were high and perhaps because we’d stormed their ship without a man lost or a single wound.

I gave the ship to Hector to get it to the Greek beaches, and gave him two sailors to help him. We disarmed the marines and put them to the row benches, and then we were cutting our grapple-ropes and poling off.

Brasidas was the last man off the enemy vessel. He told them in good Persian that if they rose against Hector, we would capture them again and kill every man aboard, with no exceptions.

But that had all taken time. A sea fight, as I have said too often, is an odd corruption of the way a man perceives time. Nothing seems to happen, and everything is, as it were, trapped in honey and sluggishly crawling, and then everything seems to accelerate, the way a horse goes from a walk to a trot, and a trot to a canter, and then suddenly to a gallop, faster and faster. But then it can slow again, more than a land fight.

I wasn’t even winded, and only the very tip of my spear was red. My armour had not even begun to seem heavy. I went up my mainmast. It was left standing on a trihemiolia, as I have said before, and we had built a little platform amidships, by the mast — only two steps up, like a ladder, but it could give an officer a greater view. I went up it, and then up the pegs we’d set into the mast.

The sun had burned away the last of the fog while we stormed our victim, and now every part of the battle was laid bare to me.

To the west of Lydia, who, by the fortune of the last fight, was pointed south and east, were the little islets off the coast of Attica and the slopes of Mount Aigeleos. Locals call them the Pharmacussae and no, I don’t know why. I could have struck the nearer with a spear if I’d thrown well. Our original beach was only three stades away, almost due south. We had, I believe, travelled almost six stades west and then come as far back east in our sweep and our first three fights. At least, I think that’s what happened.

From my ship, which, together with Cimon’s a few oar lengths to the south, was the westernmost of the entire fleet, the straits of Salamis wound away like the point of an arrow towards the Saronic Gulf to the east, and every cup of salt water seemed to have a ship in it. In that hour a man might have walked dry-shod from Salamis to Piraeus on the decks of triremes, there were so many and they were packed so close. The thickest press was away east, near the tip of the Cynosura Peninsula where we had had our meeting just a few hours before. The most open water was around us — in truth, we’d crushed the westernmost Phoenicians and their supports had already fled. A handful of combats continued: just to the north of me, Harpagos’s marines were clearing a Phoenician ship from the stern while Moire’s marines boarded them from the bow.

Indeed, we were victorious. The western thrust of the Persians was not just broken, but wrecked. But we all knew we had the elite of our fleet. And to the east, all was not well. Or rather, numbers had to tell. The Greek fleet, including every capture and every Ionian who changed sides — and many did in those last days — was still fewer than four hundred vessels, and even that ‘few’ was a huge number and a mighty fleet. But the Great King could muster, by the account of my friends Cyrus and Darius, both of whom had reason to know, at least six hundred and eighty vessels and now, as the sun rose and the fog burned off, any errors they had made in disposition were revealed, but so was the might of their armada and the presence of the Great King himself. At the moment I climbed my mast he was visible, perhaps three hundred paces from me, a little to the east, sitting on a great golden throne under a canopy of Tyrian purple red that itself was worth the price of a ship, I suspect.

I would like to say that I called out to him, shook my fist, but in truth I could only see the throne, and anyway, I had more important concerns.

To the east, as close as the Great King’s throne, was Xanthippus. He had a magnificent ship, touched up with gilt, and easily picked out among his foes. He was already grappled to a heavy Phoenician and the ships that had broken away from us were now making a counter-attack, supported by some Ionians. I took this in faster than I can tell it.

Nearer the beaches of Attica — the north shore — floated the largest warship I’d ever seen. A trieres, yes, but both longer and heavier-built than any other, and with a full deck of wood crowded with men. The upper works were painted red, and some was touched in gold. The ship itself was almost directly under the towering imperial throne.

Someone important was on that ship. It had a distinctly Phoenician look to it, but it was too far away to be certain. It might have been the toy of any of the great Ionian tyrants, or it might have been their grand-admiral’s ship. I couldn’t be sure.

And to the south and slightly to the west of us, unengaged, lay our Corinthians — heavier ships than ours, with good crews, sitting on their oars. Taking no part.

As I say, I had time only for a long glance, turning from horizon to horizon. Cimon was getting his Ajax underway behind me as I completed my scan and let myself down the mast — go ahead, climb in a breastplate and thigh guard and tell me how well you do — and I ran to my own rail by Seckla as Cimon had his rowers fold their wings and his beautiful, unscarred ship came to rest, bow-to-bow, beside mine.

‘Like Lade!’ he said, his voice full of excitement.

‘Better than Lade,’ I said. ‘The Samos bastards are on the other side!’

We both laughed, but in truth, betrayal haunted us like a spectre at a wedding feast. And both of us had lost so many friends — a whole world — at Lade. Harpagos lost his brother, my best friend. I lost so many friends that even now I drink to them and pour this wine to their shades. And I did not trust Themistocles.

I mention this because as we lay on the waves, side by side, Moire and Harpagos came up and formed a line with me and Cimon’s squadrons began to fall in as crisply as hoplites going to parade before the gods. The boarding actions had given the oarsmen time to drink down some wine and water, to spit on their hands, to stretch. And winning is a tonic.

One of my youngest, fittest rowers, a fine youngster named Phylakes, rubbed the small of his back and shook his head. ‘How many more sprints, Grandfather?’ he asked Giorgos, one of the older rowers, who sat close by.

Giorgos laughed and drank wine from a pottery flask. ‘You boys!’ he shouted. ‘This is just the warm-up!’

Men laughed. And with men who can laugh after three ship fights, you can accomplish anything.

I missed Hipponax, though. The marines were stretching and drinking water and my son was not to be seen.

I asked Onisandros, who looked remarkably blank. ‘Don’t know, lord,’ he said, staring off into space. He knew something and wasn’t telling me.

I had no time for more questions, because Cimon was beckoning.

‘You ever see the signal to start the battle?’ he asked.

I shook my head. We both knew this was bad. Eurybiades had in mind a more complicated battle than Themistocles and had wanted to control the pace — the lack of signalling might mean the Spartan was already dead or taken.

‘I think we should commit the Corinthians,’ Cimon shouted.

‘Better you than me,’ I shouted back, meaning that Cimon was the man to give orders, and that Adeimantus was more likely to follow the aristocratic Cimon than to follow me, who he’d made a public career of disparaging.

Cimon was silent a moment.

He was looking past me, and I turned. We could see Xanthippus’s Horse Tamer take a great blow, her oars splintered. The press was growing so close that no trierarch could see every threat.

‘Give me the ships we have and you go fetch the Corinthians,’ I yelled.

Cimon nodded. ‘Go!’ he roared. He leaned over his starboard side, opposite me, and shouted something to Eumenes of Anagyrus, who was a powerful aristocrat of Cimon’s party, although not a sea wolf. But I saw the man wave his spear at me, and point, and I took that for his acceptance of my lead.

Remember, too, that my ships and Cimon’s, alone of all the ships in either fleet, had a signal book, evolved in almost twenty years of piracy and sea war. It did not have many signals, but it had more signals than any other.

I motioned to Seckla, but he was coming out of the steering oars, handing over to Leukas. The Alban nodded. Onisandros needed no orders; so well trained was Lydia that the first thud of his spear against the deck brought out the oars without another word. My deck crew was poling off from Ajax, careful not to foul oars. It speaks a great deal that Cimon turned on the spot, half his rowers forward and half reversed, and shot away west and south for the Corinthians, even as the rest of us moved cautiously eastward and began to form two lines for battle on my signals — and no two ships collided or even had to deviate to avoid one another.

I had a round dozen warships — even in a battle of a thousand ships, a dozen is a fair force, and an important moment was at hand. The Phoenician counter-attack, straight into the heart of the Athenians, directly under the Great King’s eye, was an attempt to restore their ‘east-west’ line and force the Greeks back on their beaches. The fog was gone, the breeze was gone, and the small advantages we’d derived from the wind and fog and the chop of waves in the bay — that was over. Now the Great King and his admirals could see all we did, and the whole sweep of our line, and our plan, if any part of it survived, was laid bare. Fools say the Great King sat on his throne to enjoy the battle the way a god would watch the actions of mere mortals, but the Great King and Mardonius his cousin were far cannier than that, and a constant stream of imperial messengers came down the hill bearing news of exactly how our fleet moved.

It was a brilliant counterstroke. Twenty Athenian ships were taken or sunk in the blink of an eye, and then the Phoenicians were in among the lesser ships of the Athenian second and third lines, making the breakthrough that we’d robbed them of in the early going, forcing the open-water fight our lesser captains dreaded. You could see the Athenian line stretch and sag as trierarchs and helmsmen in the back lines tried to manoeuvre, and friends collided with friends. Ships moved backwards — crews backed water for their lives — and other ships, struck hard by rams, recoiled. The noise was like nothing I’d ever heard, because water allows sound to travel more easily than ground — hundreds of thousands of men roaring for the approval of the gods, or screaming for mercy, or both, and the snap of oars, the heavy, crushing thud of the bronze ram at impact, the zip of arrows, the clash of bronze and iron.

I made myself take my time to bring my little squadron into action where it would matter most, and in the best possible order. I considered all my signals, while at the same time I considered what had to be done. It is true that for a fleeting moment the flank of the Phoenicians was vulnerable, but it was very close to the beach, on purpose, and a regiment of Immortals stood there, with arrows to bows. To fight a boarding action in the shallows was to take a heavy risk and to abandon Xanthippus and the Athenians’ centre to their dooms.

It is a maxim of many navarchs and strategoi to always make the bold stroke and never reinforce failure and this is, I confess, often true. But in this case, it appeared to me — and there was no one with whom to share my decision — that if Xanthippus and the Athenian centre were not saved, the Persians would restore their line, win a morale advantage, and be able to isolate us to the west and reinforce at will. I could not even have said this then. I had heartbeats to decide and a very limited number of codes to tell my trierarchs what I fancied.

What I decided was that I had a dozen of the finest captains on the waves and I’d let every man go for his own kill. Athens was not a great sea power in those days: many of her ships were officered by cavalrymen, if you take my meaning, and rowed by desperate lower-class men who had never touched an oar before that summer. They had strict rules and manoeuvres, taught over the summer and autumn, by Eurybiades and Themistocles.

But, with a couple of exceptions, the men under my hand were old sea wolves who didn’t need formations to kill. We were in a formation, a pretty one, sweeping west and a little south.

It was time for us to act like Phoenicians, in fact.

We had a signal from pirate days. We’d used it enough times that I hoped every captain would know it. After battle a pennon from my masthead summoned all the captains to my ship by saying the traditional ‘Now we divide the spoils of war.’ But in the midst of an action, against a Carthaginian tin convoy or Egyptian merchants, it meant ‘Pick one and take her.’ In effect, it allowed every trierarch to use his head.

Hector usually handled the signals, such as they were, but he was gone with our capture, so I pulled the wicker basket from under Seckla’s bench and found the little red pennon, and put it on the halyard kept for the purpose. We were two hundred paces from where Xanthippus’s ship was being taken. His marines were fighting and dying like Olympians or titans, but he had four ships on his one.

I ran my signal up.

I leaned out over the side to Eumenes of Anagyrus, who was not really one of us, and shouted, ‘Pick a target and take or kill her! Forget formation!’

He smiled. He raised his arm in the salute Olympic athletes give the judges and shouted an order.

I leaned the other way and got Harpagos’s attention, but he’d already seen it. He pointed up, said something to his helmsman, and waved to me with his kopis in his hand. He was smiling, and his face was full of light — that very fire, I think, that Heraclitus thought made us greater than mere men when in battle.

So having formed, we broke apart, like a pack of wolves breaks when they see the deer.

I ran back to Leukas. ‘Pick one by Xanthippus and put me where I can board Horse Tamer,’ I said.

Then I ran forward to the marines. ‘Let me past,’ I grunted. Hipponax was there — wherever he’d been off to, he was back. He wouldn’t meet my eye — the young man personified. He was up to something, and it did not matter in that moment.

Brasidas grinned at me — very un-Laconian. ‘Good to have you here.’

‘We’ll make you a Plataean yet, with all these displays of wild emotion,’ I said, but I clapped him on his armoured shoulder and smiled at the men around us.

‘We winning, boss?’ Achilles, my cousin, asked. As if we were friends.

So we were. ‘When we clear the centre,’ I began. Then I realised they had no notion what was happening. ‘We’re going aboard Xanthippus’s ship,’ I said. ‘Clear the Medes off Horse Tamer and I promise you we will win. This is it. All or nothing.’

I stood up and an arrow slammed into my aspis. We were close. But the gesture is everything. Men had to know.

I pointed to the golden throne, less than a stade away.

‘Want to show the Great King what you think?’ I roared. ‘He’s right there, watching us.’

Arrows came past me. Ka and his pair were using us as cover, shooting carefully. They had their own orders — to kill archers. Every marine with an aspis was a shield, and we practised this.

My marines began to sing the paean — just ten men. But by the gods … by the gods, my eyes fill with tears to say it, the sailors and the oarsmen took it up. Oh, that moment, and that day.

The paean of Apollo came off my benches and spread to other ships. I have met men from Horse Tamer who said that the sound of the paean coming towards them was the sound of salvation, that they joined in who could.

Leukas put our bow into the bow of a Phoenician ship that was grappled alongside. It was a daring, precision strike, and the result was spectacular. We smashed into his bow, our own oars safely in, and we were just a few finger widths to the inside of his bow, so that after the shattering first blow, our ships went between Horse Tamer and the enemy ship, popping the grapnels and breaking the ropes, smashing the enemy ship’s cathead and heaving it away, oars smashed, rowers injured, and cutting all its marines off from their ship. It wasn’t as instantly satisfying as the strikes that sank ships immediately, but it was one of the two or three finest ship-strikes I’ve ever witnessed.

We boarded Horse Tamer. We were long side to long side, stern to stern, and Seckla led the sailors in grappling close and then boarding. Seckla did not wait for me to tell him to go. My big deck gave me the power of carrying more marines and more sailors than most, and as I’ve said, most of my sailors were better armoured than more people’s marines.

We went from our bow into his bow, right into the teeth of an Ionian contingent coming from another ship directly opposite us. The press of ships was amazing — like nothing I’ve ever seen.

No time to think about it. No time to worry that my own ship was going to be boarded — unavoidable.

I leapt first. I went aspis to aspis with a man as big as me or bigger. He lost his footing in the blood, and down he went.

That one to Ares, and no doing of mine.

Brasidas, despite the terrible footing and the three-sided fight in a densely packed foredeck, got his shield lapped with mine like the veteran he was.

It took the Ionians too long to realise we were not on their side. They were Samians — oh, the delicious revenge on that nest of traitors! I killed three before they fully understood and Brasidas heaved them off the forward gangway, back onto their own ship, and I lost him there. He chose to board into the Ionian ship. You must imagine that Xanthippus’s ship had three enemies bow to bow, like limpets stuck to a fish, and the Ionian was one, we were one, and the third was a sleek ship with a red hull.

Again, there was no time to think. Brasidas went forward into the Ionian and Hipponax went with him, and Alexandros and Sitalkes.

Idomeneus was in his old accustomed place at my shoulder. Achilles came with me, and the others.

There was no quarter asked or given. They were under the eyes of their emperor, and we knew we were fighting for everything.

Nor can I pretend to remember every blow. I know my spear broke and instead of going for my sword I hammered away at my opponent, a smaller man, with my butt spike, hitting him again and again, stunning him with my blows until his strong left arm sank. I hit him with the sauroter to his helmet and he staggered, limbs loosed, but I hit him again and his helmet collapsed into his skull, and it too gave way.

I took a wound there — he may have been the one who got me, as he was a canny fighter. It was in my sword arm, and the bronze saved most of it. But not all.

I didn’t know. I powered forward down the narrow catwalk. Behind me my people were still singing the paean, which was wonderful, because by the blessing of Poseidon the Athenian rowers by my feet knew I was on their side, and they began to foul the enemy and stabbed up into the catwalk with daggers and javelins, and suddenly the Phoenicians in front of me collapsed. Few survived to run — they were literally pulled down, as if by the tentacles of a monster called oarsmen, except one or two brave men, who stabbed down with their spears and leapt back to gain space to make a stand.

But another ship disgorged its marines into us from behind me.

The first I knew was that I could not feel Idomeneus pressing into my back. Long practice taught me to turn if he was gone, and there were plumes, towering plumes, the kind that our forefathers wore, the kind I wore in our first contests, a dozen or more of them, and lots of armour, and red cloth, red paint, red enamel. Very showy.

Idomeneus was adding to their red display. His face was lit by a beautiful, godlike smile, very like the one that Harpagos had worn. His right arm was poised high when I glanced at him, his smile like that of a man who has seen a god or found true joy, as he batted a thrown spear out of the air with his spear shaft, in just a twitch of his hand. His aspis licked out, caught his opponent’s, rim to rim, and pulled it aside, and his high right hand shot forward — his spear point went in under his opponent’s chin, buried to the base, so that when Idomeneus pulled, his wretched adversary tried to grab the point and was dragged forward; the spear shaft shattered, and Idomeneus used it like a club, as I had earlier, and then threw it overhand at the man behind his current opponent — all this in the time a runner would take two breaths. I couldn’t look longer.

I still had men in front of me. I had to be sure of them, and the man who’d backed away now dropped his spear and fell to his knees. His eyes pleaded for life. Behind him, another Phoenician was cut down from behind by a Greek, while a third was almost buried in my sailors.

I hate killing prisoners. It is against the will of the gods, against the justice men demand from men, and against the code by which warriors should act.

But I had a shipload of marines coming behind me and I could not leave this man to pick up his spear and attack me. And past me, my friends.

I killed him. I hate that I did, but there were other lives dependent on my actions. Probably he would have stayed in submission — or perhaps the sailors or the oarsman would have finished him. Or perhaps he’d have killed me, then Idomeneus, and then the rest, turning the tide of battle.

It does not matter. It was my choice, between one beat of my heart and the next, the way a man must choose inside the battle haze.

This is why we all despise the war god and his rage. But I did it, and then I turned, leaving remorse for other times, and put my shoulder behind Idomeneus’s back, and began to stab underhand with my victim’s spear, attacking his opponents in their thighs and feet.

And then he was down. He was standing, fighting like a statue of Poseidon come to life, and then a well-thrown javelin from his open side caught him in the side, under his sword arm. He finished his cut, sending one more foe ahead of him to Hades, and then he fell, with blood spurting far into the rowers’ benches — heart’s blood.

I got my left foot over him as he fell and squirmed, face down, the spear shaft still in him, and I went shield to shield with his killer. That blow broke mine, the laths of wood that supported the bronze face all cracking in against the layers of rawhide and linen. But his rim cracked and I stepped as far as I dared off to my right with my right foot, the ruin of my shield flapping like a sail in an adverse wind, but his spear stroke, overhand, couldn’t penetrate the bronze and rawhide wreckage as I tabled my shield, gathered my left leg to my right and reached over our locked shields and pounded my point down into the place where the shoulder and neck meet. My spear went in so effortlessly and so far that I lost hold of it, and Idomeneus’s killer fell, blood gushing from his mouth, and by the gods, he was in Hades before my friend.

But the marines in red were big, well armed, confident and capable, and the next man came forward undaunted. I was overextended, still amazed at the power of my overhand blow and its success, and he pushed his shoulder into me and knocked me over, and then only Ka saved me, as my adversary grew a black feathered arrow in his chest and fell over Idomeneus and his killer.

There were so many men on Xanthippus’s ship by then that it tipped back and forth like a living thing, and I began to wonder if a trireme could capsize from too many men on her fighting deck.

Like some of the newest Athenian ships, the heavy ones, Xanthippus’s Horse Tamer had a full top deck, so that the rowers sat in their boxes protected from arrows — and so that Xanthippus could carry twenty marines. But all this weight was high, which was bad for stability, and had to be countered with more ballast, which in turn made the ship harder to row and slower. Storm Cutter had been a similar ship, in her earliest form, and I confess that the full deck gave an element of protection to the rowers that was lacking when all they had was a canvas screen — and that deck also allowed a series of beams that helped stiffen the hull much better in heavy weather. But against that, the more difficult diekplous tactics of the Phoenicians required a lighter ship with a faster turn. Both fleets had every kind of trireme. Big and small, high and low, every shipwright had to try his hand at the perfect arrangement of rowers and oars, fighting deck and mast space.

When the Athenians built their new navy they made the rational decision to build heavy ships with big decks so that they could dominate boarding actions against the lighter, better-rowed ships of their traditional nautical enemy, Aegina. Of course, the sea wolves preferred the lighter, faster ships — and those of us who had fought in the west, off Magna Graecia, had come to prefer the hemiolas, which seemed to me then, and still seem to me, the best compromise of rowing, sailing, heavy hull and fighting platform.

I mention all of this because it is otherwise difficult for you youngsters to imagine that we were twenty feet above the water on a slightly convex deck that shed water and blood to the sides, and the sides had no real bulwarks, but just a narrow ‘catch-all’ the width of a man’s hand. In other words, a man who fell had a tendency to go overboard. My backplate was pressed against the ‘catch-all’ and my right arm dangled — empty-handed — over the sea.

The red marine towered over me, or so it seemed to me. And there, in utmost vulnerability, I knew him. It was Diomedes.

He recognised me, and just for a moment hesitated — savouring the moment of triumph? Wanting to take me prisoner to torment me? Who knows. His arm was poised for the kill — I was flat on my back in the blood at the deck edge and had no weapon and my aspis was broken and mostly off my arm.

I rolled over the side. It is hard to say exactly why. I think my last thought was to deny my boyhood foe his triumph. Or perhaps I had the sense to take my chance on Poseidon, who had saved me before.

I hit the water before I had time for another thought.

What’s that? Yes, sweet, I drowned — went to the Elysian Fields, met Achilles, and was then brought back by beautiful naiads, a dozen of them, who led me to an underwater cave, armed me in fresh armour, and then swam me to the surface.

No.

Impact with the water finished my aspis and wrenched my left shoulder, but I didn’t notice it. I was barefoot, and my armour weighted me down, but I had time to catch a breath and I had the wreck of my aspis off my arm in a heartbeat — and then I was swimming. Just for a moment I was deep, under the hull of Horse Tamer and looking up at the surface. There were dozens of men in the water, and blood — and sharks. And the hulls of ships as far as the eye could see, projecting down into the water with sunbeams slanting away into the depths.

Poseidon, it was terrifying down there, and the more so as I was afraid I was sinking, and I panicked, thrusting my arms out like a fool. But before I breathed water and gave myself to Poseidon, I made myself take a stroke, and I shot up — I could match my progress against the wreckage — and then I was close enough to the surface to raise my heart, and then I was breathing, the plumes of my helmet a sodden, hairy mess in my face, and I didn’t care.

I couldn’t rest. I had to keep swimming.

But Pericles and his friend Anaxagoras saved me. Naiad, the Lesbian ship, had come in to Xanthippus’s stern to put marines into the back of the fight and save the men still fighting around the helm. Anaxagoras had been the first man aboard Horse Tamer over the stern, and Pericles saw me go over the side. And saw — still waiting for his turn to go aboard the Horse Tamer — that I came to the surface. He grabbed a boarding pike and held it over the side from the marines’ box of Naiad. I grabbed it, and young Pericles hauled me aboard.

It took two Aeolian oarsmen and Pericles to pull me up the side — I was already spent. I know a man who swam to Salamis from one of the stricken Athenian ships, in his armour, and he deserves much praise for his swimming. I was only in the water for two hundred heartbeats and I was tired.

Hah! But I was alive.

I was on one knee on the catwalk for a long time — long enough for twenty more men to die aboard Horse Tamer. That fight had become the centre of the maelstrom.

I looked about. Pericles left me to go onto Horse Tamer. Even as I discovered my sword was still strapped to my side, and none the worse for a little salt water, I saw that my riposte into the Phoenician counter-attack had sufficed. Hipponax had killed again; his ship was backing water. Cimon’s brother was finishing off an Ionian ship that looked familiar, but I could not place her. Megakles and Eumenes were both taking ships.

It was here, and now. The Phoenicians were pouring men into this boarding fight and now there were more than a dozen ships all grappled together, and there were Phoenician marines aboard Lydia — I could see Leukas fighting in the stern with his bronze axe. I could see Brasidas’s plume two ships away, on board an Ionian which itself had a Phoenician boarding it over the stern, and behind him my son Hipponax’s spear went back and forth like a woman working wool on a loom.

Seldom have I had so much of a feeling that the gods were all about me. I drew my good sword — my long xiphos — and leapt down onto the ram of Naiad and then cambered up the stern of Horse Tamer. Once again, the enemy had pressed the ship’s defenders into the stern — there was Seckla, and there Pericles, and there Anaxagoras and beside him Cleitus, of all people, with Xanthippus roaring orders and throwing well-aimed javelins from the helmsman’s bench.

I took an aspis off a corpse. it was too heavy for my liking, but there it is, on the wall — Heracles and the Nemean Lion. As if it had been left for me.

I went forward even as Anaxagoras fell.

I got a leg forward, got my right arm well back, and stabbed from very close. I had three opponents, and only then did I realise how badly injured my left shoulder was from the impact with the water when I fell over the side because when my opponent bashed his aspis into mine, the blow ran up my arm to my shoulder like a wound.

But it is when everything is on the line that you show yourself.

Listen, then.

Seckla’s long-bladed spear baffled one of my opponents — he turned his head and I stabbed him in the throat-bole with a flip of my wrist, and then I pivoted and swung my sword backhanded. My second opponent was fouled by the falling body of his mate and he allowed himself to be deceived by the reverse my blade made in the air. I struck him full across the face with my blade, which cut the depth of two fingers into his skull, and then, good sword as he was, didn’t snap when I tore the blade free.

The third adversary got his spear into my helmet; a good blow, but the helmet held, and although I smelled blood, I got my blade over the top of his shield. I did him no damage, but my point lodged at the base of his bronze crest-box on top of his helmet, and the force of my blow moved his head. Where the head goes, the body follows, and he went backward — and straight over the side.

I found that I was roaring Briseis’s name as a war cry. Well, Aphrodite has turned a battle ere now, and on Crete they have a temple to her as Goddess of War. But by all the gods I was full of new fire, and perhaps it was Briseis and her own unquenchable spirit, or Aphrodite herself.

Cleitus fell by my side. Anaxagoras was up, pulled to his feet on the bloody deck by Pericles. And down the deck, two oar lengths away, I saw a familiar bulk: Polymarchos, at the head of my marines, pushing towards me, but the Red King’s marines and those of my foe Diomedes were fleeing back into the two triremes that lay, beaks in, amidships.

I got a foot over Cleitus and parried away his death blow from a Phoenician. Later, I prayed to my Mater that she not be offended. In the press, he was Athenian — indeed, he was my brother and not my foe, as I had promised all my men.

There must have been fifty men on that deck and another thirty corpses — and Poseidon only knows how many more gone to feed the squid over the sides. That ship was the epicentre of the western end of the battle.

But like a man waking from long illness, or recovering from injury, I felt the lightening of the pressure, roared my war cry, and baffled Cleitus’s would-be killer with a heavy blow to his head. He raised his shield and I cut his left thigh to the bone. I remember the delicious satisfaction of that cut.

I put my other leg forward, leaving Cleitus behind me, and Seckla cut a man’s hand right off his arm with the sharp edge of his spearhead — his favourite trick, cutting with a spear, which his people apparently did routinely.

And then I was chest to chest with Polymarchos and he grinned evilly.

‘You stopped for a bath?’ he laughed. ‘You look like a puppy someone tried to drown.’

‘Better than being dead,’ I said. I turned to Cleitus, still trapped on his back in the press, gave him my sticky right hand and got him to his feet.

He didn’t say anything. He just stood there for two breaths. When you go down on the deck in a boarding fight, you are very close to becoming a corpse or fish food. I knew — I’d just been there.

But there was no time for talk. He took a spear from someone and we pressed up the deck, finished the last Phoenician marines, who died well, and went over the sides. I led my people back aboard Lydia, where Ionian and Phoenician marines were fighting my deck crew and my top-deck rowers. My men were making a fight of it, but rowers are no match for hoplites.

I say my men, but there was one obvious exception — a tiny girl, dwarfed by the bronze men against her, was fighting with a spear. She mystified them, her steps sure, her movements deceptive, and two trained men could not kill her. She gave ground steadily, stabbing when she could, and even as we boarded she turned and leapt into the sea.

I knew her immediately — Cleitus’s daughter, Heliodora.

But the tide had turned. An Athenian ship came in behind Lydia and put marines over her stern even as we went back aboard over the starboard side, and the Phoenicians collapsed, dead, dying, or in the water before I could get my sword on one.

Then I saw my son.

Hipponax came down the gangway from the bow, at the head of my people who’d followed Brasidas — indeed, the Spartan’s plumes were just behind him. He fought like one possessed, or maddened, and his spear point was everywhere, his aspis was a battering ram and a trickster’s cloak, and yet he seemed to walk forward unopposed.

Then I knew where the girl had come from, and whose girlish voice had sung the hymn to Apollo.

As soon as my deck was clear, I ran to the side, but Hipponax beat me there — and she was not among those swimming.

Brave soul — to wish to face the Medes. I sent a prayer for her winning, and turned to Leukas, but he had two wounds, and I ordered Seckla gruffly into the oars. Xanthippus was cutting the grapples.

We were winning. But when you are outnumbered two to one, you cannot stop fighting for a local victory. As oarsmen went back to their cushions, I tried to climb my mast — and could not. Something was awry with my left shoulder, and my missing fingers were not helping. I could not climb at all.

I could not see Cimon’s Ajax, nor any of the ships of his squadron — nor any of the Corinthians.

We had stopped the Phoenician counter-attack, but that was all. The Ionians were backing water toward the straits, unbeaten. The survivors of the Phoenicians were gathered around that red and god-giant ship, and it towered above the others like one ship piled atop a second.

Off to the east there was a great roar, like the sound the crowd makes going to the mysteries at Eleusis — and then again, and then, a third time repeated, and again we heard the paean sung, and then a Laconian cheer, so different from our own.

Xanthippus, who was covered in blood and certainly one of the day’s heroes, leaned over from his ship’s rowing station. He shouted some words that were lost, and then ‘ … big bastard.’

I assumed he meant he was going for the big Phoenician.

I thought that was the best new attack. So I nodded emphatically.

Seckla was in the steering oars. My son Hipponax was on his knees, weeping.

Oh, rage. Ares and Aphrodite, together.

I pulled him to his feet and I struck him. ‘Cease your weeping!’ I shouted. I am ashamed now. I struck my own son, and I said, ‘Avenge her first. And then explain to her father why she died, you useless shit.’

He stood and looked at me like a whipped dog.

I struck him again and Seckla and Brasidas dragged me off him. I cannot ever remember being so gripped with rage, and the image of that poor girl, and the bravery of her leap in to the waves — a beautiful defiance.

But there were arrows in the air again, and Ka and Nemet were in the stern, lofting shafts at the Ionians. I was hit in the aspis and the shards of the cane cut my face and woke me from my rage.

But I didn’t apologise.

I turned to Seckla. Most of our rowers were in their positions. Onisandros was wounded but on his feet — by Heracles my ancestor, it seemed to me that every man on my deck was wounded, except my son and Brasidas, who seemed to have had godlike powers that day.

Leukas was sitting on the port-side helm bench, bleeding, with Polymarchos, stripped of his aspis, trying to staunch the blood and close the wounds. But elsewhere on the aft deck, surviving sailors were slicing cut cables and serving out new oars to men who’d lost theirs in the fighting. The men moved with decision.

We were still a fighting ship.

‘Fetch me alongside the big Phoenician, or ram him if you can,’ I said to Seckla. Leukas gave a great cry and fainted.

‘Hipponax!’ I called. He was standing with Brasidas, head down.

He came slowly, even as the oars came out raggedly and the once nimble Lydia gathered way.

He was crying, and he was ashamed.

I dropped my sword on the deck and put my arms around him.

‘That was ill-said,’ I admitted. ‘It was hubris for me to strike you.’

He looked as shocked as if I’d hit him again. ‘But you are right, Pater,’ he moaned. ‘I might as well have killed her myself.’

I held him for a moment. So complex are the weavings of the gods. I knew he would now fight like one with no hope — brilliantly. And perhaps take his death wound, uncaring. Killed, in a strange way, by Cleitus. So we are tied together. Yoked, like oxen in a field.

‘No time for tears,’ I said gruffly. I might have said — stay, live. But I did not.

‘No,’ he said. He straightened. ‘Only revenge.’ He managed a crooked, terrible smile. ‘Let me go up the side first,’ he said.

Brasidas shook his head.

‘Perhaps,’ I said. I turned away. I had once been young — how would I have felt if I had caused the death of Briseis? Who was I to tell my son that there would be other loves?

The Ionians deployed well, but now the battle had turned completely along the narrow north-south axis that Themistocles and Eurybiades had wanted. The Phoenician flagship was still closer to the coast of Attica than I liked, almost under the Great King’s throne, but the chaos of the fight had put us hard by and Themistocles was going into the remnants of the Phoenicians even as the Laconians — and the Corinthians, although I could not see them — were smashing into the Ionian centre.

And still there were mighty cheers coming from beyond our centre.

As Lydia went forward, Naiad, Storm Cutter and Black Raven joined us. There was a brief pause — the Great King’s fleet was collapsing in two directions, back against the coast of Attica for the Phoenicians and westernmost Ionians, and back towards Phaleron for the rest of them. Many ships were simply trapped. Ameinias in his Parthenos made another spectacular kill just then, right in the centre, far from us, but under the eyes of the main fleet, and as his doomed adversary broke in half, the Athenian main squadron gave a huge cheer.

There were no cheers from our adversaries. And we knew we were winning. We knew that, after many days of defeat, and some hard-fought draws and one victory squandered by the death of brave Leonidas, that now was our hour. Now was our moment. Now we were going to win. And yet, no one shirked. It is easy in the hour of victory to turn aside, to feel the weight of your wounds and wait for another man to do the final work and cut the throat of the downed enemy, but no one shirked.

Nothing needed to be said. From the fight at Sardis to this day in the Bay of Salamis, all had been defeat and retreat and now we had men who were willing to give their lives to be sure it was done.

I was one.

The Phoenician squadron under the Great King’s throne had to be beaten. It stood off our new flank as the battle turned, and if left unfought, it could change the tide again. And yet … they had no room to manoeuvre. Indeed, their sterns were almost on the beaches, and the Persian Immortals guarding the Great King were in position to bury us in arrow shafts.

But they had their own crisis, and the flagship suddenly had its oars out and was coming at us, trailing escorts the way a mother duck trails ducklings. It was badly coordinated and to this day I can only assume that the Phoenicians were humiliated that we were going to attack them without any response.

It was a foolish decision, because they came out from under the screen of their archers.

But it was also the closest thing to an open-water engagement that day: a dozen of theirs against about the same of ours. That was when I discovered that Xanthippus was not there. He’d gone to the big fight in the centre.

War is often like tragedy — the Fates walk, and dooms are laid, and what happens often seems either incredible or easily predictable. We had the same number of ships on either side, in that engagement. Our ships had fought two or three or four engagements that day, and most of theirs — the Phoenician reserve — were as fresh as a child waking from sleep.

But Harpagos was still avenging his brother, and his ram had taken the lives of four ships. Moire was just showing the Athenians how good an African helmsman who had once been a slave could be, and he wasn’t done with his demonstration. Giannis was close enough to me that I could see his tight-lipped determination, despite the three desperate fights his ship had seen that day, and Megakles — I had never seen him fatigued by the sea.

We were buoyed by Nike. Indeed, to this day, I think of her, and I think of Cleitus’s daughter leaping into the waves — later I will tell you why. But it was Nike herself who had us in her hand. We weren’t tired.

We were workmen determined to finish the task we’d been set.

Nor were we fools.

I gave no orders. Seckla determined to take one of the outermost Phoenicians and set us to rake her oars. Onisandros, his voice tight with pain, begged the rowers for another burst, and they came on like heroes, so that we went up to ramming speed from very close.

Then it went like a fight between wild dogs in the agora.

Our chosen prey baulked. At ramming speed, her helmsman panicked and yawed well out of line — and like a flash, Onisandros ordered the rowers to slow their stroke and Seckla turned us to port so fast I was thrown onto the deck. Another Phoenician flashed past our stern — I hadn’t seen him, screened by the first — and we struck the stern quarter of a third as he tried for the ship from Naxos that had come over to us a week before. Ka stood in the stern, loosing arrows into the Phoenician passing our stern, and even as I shouted for a grapple and a spear, Dy put an arrow into the helmsman and he fell forward into his oars. His ship skidded on the waves and came to a stop with half the rowers injured, all her oars going — and Harpagos cut off her stern, his fifth or sixth kill of the day.

We were gathering way again, all our oars out. We hadn’t hit our opponent very hard, but he was pulling away with all his might, and none of our grapples had clinched the deal. He backed water into the shallows, and men started leaping over the side — where the Great King’s Immortals began to slaughter them.

I didn’t have time to watch or laugh — the Phoenician squadron was gone. Half the ships were running east, and the rest were taken or driving their sterns ashore to be butchered by the Great King’s bodyguard. I assume he was consumed by rage.

Giannis took his ship against the tall flagship. He handled it brilliantly — feinted a head-to-head collision and then went off, forcing the bigger ship to go to ramming speed for nothing. He passed the behemoth’s stern and turned, his archers shooting up into the Persian archers crowding the enemy deck, but in this they were our betters and Giannis took an arrow in his right thigh as he turned and his helmsman was shot down at his side, and two of his marines killed.

But with all of their attention on him, they missed Harpagos, who had cut the stern off one Phoenician like a housewife cutting sausage and then turned, a long, easy turn to port, passed under my bow, and slammed his beak deep into the Phoenician flagship.

Too deep. He struck at a weak place between frames, and his ram went in. Immediately the Persian archers shot down into his ship, and the Phoenician marines, from their higher vantage, went to board.

About then, Seckla swept along the enemy flagship’s port side — opposite to where Harpagos had holed it — and raked along their trailing oars, killing oarsmen with their own shafts and breaking their oars or ripping them out of the ship like a man pulling the legs off a crab. And as soon as we were broadside to broadside, we went at the red and gold monster.

Her sides were a man’s height higher than our aft deck.

No one baulked, but it wasn’t like any other boarding action I’ve ever been in.

Usually you go over onto the enemy deck, sometimes off your own ram, like a bridge, and sometimes from your own upper deck or catwalk straight aboard the enemies’. It’s an art, a dance, not a science.

This time we went in through the rowing frames. Only on a ship so big could it even be done, and it meant we couldn’t take spears, and I, for one, left my aspis behind me. Scarcely mattered — my left arm was barely able to function.

As we slowed and our grapples went home — no misses now, because the enemy marines were all on the other deck, watching the wrong ship — Hipponax got to the starboard-side rail, ready to leap.

Bless Brasidas, he simply pulled my son off his feet and flung him to the deck. ‘Another day, boy,’ he said. He gave my son a smile — a smile I still treasure — and then he leapt for the enemy’s side, grabbed the edge of a rowing frame, and flipped over his arms, his feet slamming into the rower.

In truth, most of the rowers we faced couldn’t have fought us on their best day, and many were injured by Seckla’s oar-rake. But it is no treat going in an oar-port that is only slightly larger than your shoulders in your bronze thorax, which will not compress. I killed the oarsman in my entry port with my sword, and climbed over his dying body to get inboard — and took a spear full force in my back plate. It penetrated, too. Right here. See? About an inch into this muscle.

That motivated me to move faster.

I had no aspis under which to curl and I was cramped in the rowing frame. My opponent was above me. But I rolled over, which hurt my back wound like blazes, and parried with my sword — and got my weak left hand on his spearhead.

He pulled.

That hurt, but I held on, and he pulled me to my feet, mostly. I slammed the spear down and missed.

I scythed my sword across his ankles, and that was the end of the fight for him. Then I climbed out of the top-deck rowing frame. I was not the first man onto the enemy deck. Hipponax and Brasidas were ahead of me — without shields, and fighting against thirty Phoenician marines.

But the difference was that Nike was with us, and not with them. They already knew they were beaten. Even as I counted the odds, Moire’s Amastris grappled bow to bow. Moire had a gangplank for landing men and animals on open beaches, and he used it here, dropping it across to make a bridge for men with a good sense of balance, but Alexandros ran across the gap and onto the deck, and he had both aspis and spear, and suddenly there were a dozen more like him and then deck crew and top-deck oarsmen.

I wasn’t watching. I knew these things must be happening, because of the despair of my foes, but they were not eager to die without taking us with them, and we were locked sword to spear, breast to shield. The lack of aspides was terrible, the press was close and Hipponax went down with a wound to his leg, but Brasidas demonstrated why the elite of the Spartans practise for everything. And I confess that I fought hard over my son, too.

A man with sword alone is not without advantages. Nor were we facing a tide of enemies, but merely three or four at a time. Then I had cause to praise Polymarchos for making me learn to cover myself with the sword as well as with the aspis, and to fight the longer weapon with the shorter, and when I covered a spear-thrust, the man was at my mercy in a turn of my hand, nor was my left so weak I couldn’t catch a spear and pull a man off balance.

And in that hour, Sittonax, the Gaulish loafer, came into his own. He boarded from Harpagos’s vessel, where he’d chosen to be a marine, and he came up the side unseen through the blizzard of arrow shafts with his long Gaulish blade and began to cut his way aft using looping butterfly strokes, both hands on the hilt of the sword, a technique you never see in Greece, and he panicked the men in the stern.

The pressure eased and I caught up a round shield, more like something a peltast would carry than a man’s shield, but better, by far, than having my left side naked. It was light and I could hold it, even missing fingers and with my shoulder a wreck, and I pushed forward with Brasidas and Polymarchos himself, who came up through the catwalk onto the fighting deck, followed by Sitalkes, who had somehow managed to fight his way aboard with an aspis, a remarkable feat.

We formed a line, and then Alexandros was next to Brasidas and a rear-rank marine handed the Spartan his shield.

Only then did I see the gaping wound in the flesh of the Spartan’s left shoulder — I swear by Athena you could see the bone. But he got the aspis onto his shoulder and pressed forward.

I didn’t know that Harpagos was dead at the bow of his ship, an arrow in his throat, or that two more Athenians were boarding over the stern, with ladders, incidentally saving Sittonax from certain death as the Great King’s brother and his elite warriors turned on one Gaulish madman. Seen from above, I imagine the great Phoenician ship must have looked like a city under siege.

And being stormed.

The marines closed with us one more time. There were arrows, but there was Ka, sitting in the crosstrees of my permanent main mast, loosing shaft after shaft into their archers. He was naked, without cover, alone, and yet untouched. This is what I mean by the presence of Nike. Any Persian might have seen him and, with one calm arrow, dropped him.

Instead, he loosed every arrow he’d carried aloft and half of them found flesh. And then we were pressing them back into their own stern — into our allies, coming round the bend of the swan.

Hipponax tried to get past Brasidas and Alexandros tried to get past me. The last moments of the fight for the big trireme … I can’t say everything that happened, except that I took a long cut on my right leg, which I think might have been caused by my own people. Hipponax fought like a mad thing — which he was. He had a round target, much like the one I’d picked up, and he used it well, in among the last Phoenician marines. I was afraid for him; for a few heartbeats he was alone.

He battled a spear-thrust aside on his target and wrapped his shield arm around the man’s outstretched arms then threw the man, armour, weapons and all, over his hip and over the side of the ship.

The Phoenician to his right swung an axe-

Hipponax pushed forward, took the shaft on his buckler, and Brasidas threw his spear — and killed the man about to kill Hipponax. The shaft broke several of Hipponax’s fingers, and he roared — a surprising sound — and went down on one knee from the pain, but Brasidas and I muscled past him.

There was a man standing in gold, head-to-toe gold: gold armour, a golden helmet, with a golden bow in his hand. I knew him to be Ariabignes, Xerxes’ brother. But my marines didn’t need to know anything but that he was the one covered in gold.

I’d like to say I killed him in single combat, but too many of my friends were there for me to get away with such a lie. We all killed him. I got my sword into him, Moire put his spear into the man’s eye, Sitalkes and Alexandros, Hipponax and Polymarchos and Achilles my cousin and Sikli the oarsman were all there, and two Athenian marines, Diodorus, son of Eumenes, and Kritias, son of Diogenes, and Sittonax the Gaul, with a cut across his neck that should have been a death wound.

And then a strange silence fell for a moment. Far off, we could hear cheers and, closer, we could see Persian Immortals on the land, loosing arrows into the Athenian triremes under the Phoenicians’ stern, although their arrows fell short. Persians were walking into the sea, shaking their fists in their impotence.

I pulled the golden helmet off its dead owner and went to the side. I looked up the hill — the Great King’s throne was the closest it had been all day. The sun was high in the sky.

I knew he’d be watching. Where else could his eyes be?

I raised the golden helmet high, gave the Greek battle scream eleu eleu eleu, and hurled the golden thing into the sea.

That was not the end of the fight. But it was the end of the part of the fight I saw myself. It was too great a battle for any one man to see, so I’ll tell you a little that I know from my friends about what happened elsewhere.

The fog fooled Eurybiades as well as fooling the Phoenicians. He never gave the signal for the attack — nor, in fact, would we ever have seen it for the haze. So much for signals.

In fact, what happened was better than our plan. When the Ionians abandoned their own plan, which I know from captives and even friends who were with them, was to move in long columns along the coast of Attica, west, until they encircled all our beaches, and then to press forward in a milling fight, forcing us right back until they could massacre us in shallow water; when it was clear that we were going to fight, from our paean, the Ionians turned in place, going from three long files of ships headed west to three long ranks headed south, and they met the Peloponnesian ships and some of the Aeginians ram to ram. They beat the first line and pushed the Peloponnesians’ ships back.

But we broke the Phoenicians and, in fact, the western flank of the Ionians. The survivors retreated — and hopelessly muddled the Ionian centre, so that it was then vulnerable to the Peloponnesians. Cimon led the Corinthians — late, but we’ll leave that go — into the maelstrom of the centre, trusting us to beat the Phoenicians against odds.

And then there were four hundred ships packed into a very small stretch of ocean, and that fight was at least as dense and deadly as the fight we had around Horse Tamer. No, I will not tell you that my ships won the day. Every ship in the League won the day. It was all vital: every ram, every marine, every oarsman.

But when we swept Xanthippus’s deck clear, he chose to lead his ships back east into the same maelstrom that Cimon had adventured with fifty Corinthians. And at the same time, as we all reckon, though no one can quite tell anyone else for sure, Aristides accomplished a great deed — one of the day’s finest. In small boats, and swimming and wading, four hundred hoplites crossed to the shores of Psyttaleia. It should not have been possible. But the Persian garrison was trying to use their bows to support the hard-pressed Cilicians, who were losing steadily to the Aeginians, and suddenly they were taken in the flank by Aristides and the Athenian hoplites. Certainly the Aeginians landed some men on the island and Phrynicus says that they used a captured Phoenician freighter, a tubby thing, to bring the Athenian archer corps to the island without wetting their bows.

The Persians were cut down to a man. And then the Athenian archers began to flay any ship that came within range.

And, finally, the Aeginians on the eastern-facing beaches of Cape Cynosura gave up on waiting for their signal to act as the eastward arm of the trap and attacked out into the channel. Or, according to others, they supported Aristides’ attack. I wasn’t there. But either way, the retreat of the Cilicians became a rout.

There is tragedy even in victory and the heroes of the Persian retreat were Greeks. The Ionian Greeks, who had been led so ill at Lade, held together, and fought like lions for their ill master. They killed almost as many Athenian ships as they lost themselves; the only Aeginian casualties that day were from Ionians. The Red King’s ship sank at least two of ours and perhaps five, although many blamed him for things he could not have done. And Diomedes, his henchman, sank an Aeginian ship at the very moment of victory.

But it was to Artemisia of Halicarnassus that the honour of the day must go. Not only was she the leading Killer of Men for the Great King, but when the Phoenicians broke, she was caught in their rout. It is interesting to me that I must have been within a few ship lengths of her, watching Heliodora leap with dignity into the depths, when she got her ship free of the wreck of their van, and fled east. But when Ameinias of Pallene pursued her, eager to take the Great King’s female captain, she escaped by ramming one of her own ships! Now, I have since heard from men of that region that the ship she rammed was a political enemy of hers; some say it was the Red King, but as you’ll hear, I promise you it was not. Others say she was just a wily woman. I raise my cup in respect. It was a trick worthy of Odysseus himself, and when she rammed the Ionian ship — some say a Phoenician — Ameinias naturally assumed she was Athenian and let her go.

Such was that combat; it was in many ways easier to fight the Phoenicians when we could always tell their ships from ours, than Ionians — every ship full of Greeks.

The Ionians fought us as the rest of the Great King’s fleet fled. But exhaustion kept us from destroying their fleet utterly. Too many of them made the beaches of Phaleron.

But that was for another day.

I remember standing by Seckla. Brasidas and Hipponax had Leukas out of his armour and to everyone’s great relief there was a lot of blood but danger only of infection; he had a bad cut all across one buttock, which makes you all giggle but is, I promise you, not a light matter, and a deep but clean penetration of the back of his left thigh and another in his guts, almost certainly a death blow. Brasidas had a deep cut across the top of his shoulder that bled like mad, and required him to be stitched up like a sail. Sittonax looked as if he’d been decapitated and his head sewn back on — a horrible-looking wound. We were all gathered around Leukas, as his wounds were the worst that were still saveable. Perhaps.

I mention this because Leukas had, for one reason and another, been sure he was to die in the battle, and despite that he’d fought very well — but he was sure that the wounds were mortal, until Brasidas began to wash them.

‘Men got behind me,’ Leukas said. He was, apparently, afraid we would think he’d turned his back and fled.

‘So I see,’ Hipponax said politely. He was holding the honey pot in his unbroken right hand and helping Brasidas, who was keeping him busy despite, or perhaps because of, his own pain. I knew that when the despair of battle’s end hit him, added to the death of the girl, he would be in a bad place.

Hipponax’s hand had swelled up like a melon. But I’m digressing.

Onisandros was not doing as well. The farther he got from the fire of battle, the worse his wound seemed, and I suspected he was slipping away on us. And he was in pain, and pain robs a man of courage. He had two deep stab wounds and a dozen cuts.

His screams were not helping young Kineas, whom Seckla had appointed acting oar-master. Kineas admired Onisandros and wanted to help him and we were trying to get a ship full of wounded men underway.

I think Brasidas wanted me to put him out of his misery, but I was in a black mood — I hadn’t liked killing the man who had raised his hands for mercy and as I grew older, the blackness after battle grew worse, not better. And I had been with Onisandros and Leukas too long.

War is a terrible mistress. I have given so many friends into the maw of Ares. And I could not forget that Seckla took a belly wound and lived.

But Onisandros’s screams and whimpering were not the trumpets of victory that we deserved and there were twenty other men as badly off or worse, and neither were they silent.

I went to Onisandros’s side, and held his hand a while, and my son brought the honey and we anointed him as best as we could.

He screamed.

I could only think of my master, Hipponax, when I found him after the fight at Ephesus, when we stopped the Carians and the Persians broke the other rebels. He’d been in a worse case, and a life of nobility was screamed out in fear and despair.

War is terrible. Let no one doubt it.

I knelt by Onisandros and considered cutting his throat — for his own good. For the good of all. And I decided that the man who was afraid was me and that I needed to be strong and listen to him scream and do what I could for him, and not be afraid of his screams.

But by luck, or the grace of the gods, when we wrapped a clean length of Egyptian linen around his belly, he grew quieter. His eyes fluttered open — and then closed.

He took a few breaths.

‘Just remember,’ I said to my son, ‘that this could as easily be you or I.’

Hipponax was crying.

I stood up, and looked over the sea. Kineas had the oars in the water — about two-thirds of our benches were manned, so that he’d emptied the bottom rowing deck. We were moving steadily, but slowly, because we were towing the great Phoenician trireme we’d taken.

As far as the eye could see to the east there were dead men, floating wrecks — triremes rarely sink when they are hit. Usually they just turn over and float like giant turtles or huge basking sharks.

Wrecks, corpses, and broken oars, a hideous carpet. As with everything else about Salamis, I had never seen anything like it — after Lade, the dead sank and the water hid the horror, but it was as if the Bay of Salamis wanted men to see what they had wrought.

The Great King’s throne was gone.

It was late afternoon. Over towards Phaleron the Ionians fought a desperate rearguard action with the Aeginians, who came in like sharks to kill the weakest ships, and harried the Great King’s fleet almost to their landing beaches. But around the island of Psyttaleia, the rest of the Greek fleet lay on their oars in an agony of exhaustion and victory.

In a wing beside me rowed Moire, in Amastris, with Naiad next outboard, followed by Storm Cutter with fewer benches manned than I had — Harpagos was dead and his nephew Ion was at the helm, and every marine aboard had died, except Sittonax, and many oarsmen and sailors, too. Then came Giannis and Megakles in Black Raven. I’d say we lost almost a quarter of our manpower without losing a single ship — the worst casualties I can remember taking in a sea fight, win or lose, except Lade.

The other Athenians whose ships ended the fight over by the coast of Attica gathered round me and Eumenes of Anagyrus, and we began to move slowly southward. The unwounded marines fished for living men as we rowed, and brought aboard a Persian nobleman and a dozen Ionians. We spared them — everyone had had a surfeit of blood, and men swimming in the water offer no threat.

The Persian was white and pasty from being in the water — he said his ship had been among the first struck. I gave him wine and fresh water and set him by Onisandros, because he was pretty far gone. He’d been in the water a long time.

Touchingly, he knew who I was. So I leaned over him, shading him from the sun, while Brasidas got me out of my armour.

I screamed too.

Blood from the earlier wound to my lower back had dried, making a great scab pressed between the back plate of bronze and my flesh. Brasidas tried to use water to break the scab away, but in his haste he got salt water.

I screamed for some time, I promise you. And no one offered to put me down.

But my recovery was swifter because I’d been wounded — often — and knew that the wound had only gone into fat and muscle. In fact, my wrenching of my left shoulder when I hit the water was to prove the worst wound I took that day, but that’s another matter. Age magnifies wounds. Youth, however, fears them.

Eventually — and I swear it took us half the afternoon to cross six stades of water — we were nearing our landing beach, and the beach was full, crowded beyond belief with people. The whole population of Attica was there.

They were cheering and cheering. Xanthippus was just beaching — he came up from the east as we came from the north — and I saw Cleitus with a pang, knowing that the death of his daughter aboard my ship would reignite our feud. That is how men are. Someone must be blamed, and truly, my Hipponax was to blame.

He was by me, and I was glad he was alive. But I was going to make him do this thing.

I pointed at Cleitus’s golden head. The man looked magnificent and still had his armour on. I was stripped to a terrible old chiton and my greaves.

‘You must tell him,’ I said.

Hipponax’s eyes were red and his whole face was so puffy that he might have been badly beaten in a boxing match.

His head sank.

‘You loved her?’ I asked.

‘I was going to marry her,’ he said. His voice was barely audible for the cheering. ‘I thought you knew.’

I admit that in that moment I understood a great many things I’d been told and to which I’d paid no attention in the past month. ‘You brought her aboard?’ I asked, attempting, and failing, to conceal my anger.

‘She demanded it,’ he said. ‘You didn’t know her, Pater. She was like … a goddess, or a force of nature. She said that if I wanted to wed her, I needed to know that she was of the same — gold as me. That’s what she said. That she could row and oar and fight.’ He was crying again.

It was excruciating to hear him. I knew her only as the best dancer of the girls, nothing more. But Gorgo might have said the same to Leonidas.

‘She claimed it was her bride price …’ He hung his head. ‘I knew she could pull the oar. Onisandros helped me.’

I shook my head. But I could imagine Lydia or Briseis or Euphonia making the same demand and I know I’d have smuggled any of them aboard for the ultimate contest. And I had a sense — maybe because of what happened between me and Lydia — of what a woman’s life was like. How the horizon began wide and narrowed with marriage to become almost a cage with children in it.

But that didn’t assuage my anger, as a father and as a commander.

Anger, fatigue, fear, pain — all close friends. With the black mood that clouds your head after battle, a poisonous gang.

But I was no longer seventeen and I managed to walk away from my son and to help order the landing of the great Phoenician ship. She — he, I suppose, as most Phoenician ships were male — still had most of his rowers aboard with twenty Greek marines watching over them, and I had no intention of letting them be massacred by the crowd, or by Persians or Ionians either.

Brasidas led the unwounded marines ashore, despite his wound. They cheered him and the marines, but he cleared a large space and Xanthippus and his oarsmen pitched in, making space for the Phoenician ship to come ashore. The crowd began to bay for blood like hounds after a hunt, but some of the Priestesses of Athena and of Artemis were there and they silenced the crowd so that we could work the big Phoenician ashore.

We landed well, and the surf was down, and with the help of the priestesses the crowd went from vicious mongrels to willing hands. We got the ship up the beach as if he was made of parchment and a taxis of Athenian hoplites, eager to give us help, took the prisoners away, except the Persian, who I kept. Doctors came with a dozen remedies for wounds; one specialised in arrow removal and was very popular, and another had a preparation of vinegar and honey that he used on wounds, which he said averted the arrows of Apollo. The sheer number of helpers lifted my mood — there was even a man setting bones who looked at my son’s hand and splinted it carefully, and another who, as I have mentioned, used needle and thread to close the flap of skin on Brasidas’s shoulder and then pushed the Gaul down on the beach, knelt by him like a tailor of human flesh, and began on the slash to his neck.

Here is how close Sittonax came to death. While he fought, alone, a Phoenician marine or a Persian came behind him, threw his sword over the Gaul’s head, and was just tightening his grip and cutting my friend’s throat when an Athenian spear took the would-be killer from behind.

Onisandros and Leukas were taken with the rest of our badly wounded men to the big tents going up all along the streams — all made of our sails. Triremes, for the most part, don’t put to sea to fight with their mainmasts or their sails on board. The wood and canvas is heavy and the rowers don’t need the extra work. The handful of trihemiolias, like Lydia, had standing masts and rigging and made up for the weight in other ways. Suffice it to say we left our sails on the beach — most of us — and they made good tents for the wounded.

And then we had to contend with the adoration of the people of Attica. One of the oddest elements of that wonderful, terrible day is that we fought under the very eyes of our people. I don’t think any battle in which I had ever participated so clearly brought home to me the division between a war of justice — the defence of people who would otherwise be made slaves — and a war of injustice like the piracy which I had made for most of my life. To be wrapped in the thanks of thousands, or tens of thousands of people … the blackness of the day evaporated. It was not just me; every man coming off Lydia to pull her ashore lifted his head from the weight of pain and blood, saw the welcome prepared him, and smiled. Matrons kissed me while their husbands pumped my hand; little girls held my knees, and boys gazed on me with the devotion given to gods, and such was the favour shown equally to every marine and every oarsman, too, top deck or bottom deck.

Perhaps it was the cheering and the smiles that gave Hipponax the courage to face Cleitus.

I’m thankful that at the last moment, I stripped my sword over my head — lest it be misconstrued — and followed him. I could not leave him to face Cleitus alone. I admit it: I feared Cleitus would cut him down on the spot, and my enemy — I still thought of him as such — was still in his panoply, very much the aristocratic warrior.

I had seen him on the deck of Xanthippus’s Horse Tamer, but I lost him when he leapt into the shallows to help drag his own ship ashore. And I had other things to which I needed to attend; anyway, I trotted a little although my shoulder burned and caught my son on the wet sand.

‘I’ll come with you,’ I said.

He gave me such a look. So many meanings.

I stayed with him.

We went through the crowd around our own ship — every slap on my back hurt me — and then out of it, and then through the admiring crowd around the capture: ‘Did you help take this monster? Was this the Great King’s ship? Did you fight in the war, mister?’

Out the back of that crowd, trailing admirers. I confess that I was proud of my son. He was determined to face the consequences, even while attractive maidens threw themselves at his feet.

We came to the edge of the crowd around Horse Tamer. We plunged into the back of the crowd and Hipponax pushed people aside ruthlessly; he was in that hurry of spirit that drives a man to face something terrible and get it over, I imagine. And we trailed a few curses, except that the blood flowing over my left hip and the cuts all over Hipponax’s forearms made it obvious we’d fought, and no one cursed us twice.

We pushed forward and I could hear Xanthippus, good Athenian aristocrat as he was, giving a speech. Of course he was giving a speech.

Somewhere, Themistocles was no doubt also giving a speech.

And to be fair, so was Aristides.

That’s who they were.

Anyway, suddenly Hipponax slammed to a stop as if he faced a line of Phoenician spear points. I collided with him from behind.

A cry — an odd, barking cry — escaped him.

I pushed past.

There was Cleitus. He stood a few paces from Xanthippus.

And in his arms was Heliodora, his daughter.

Very much alive.

Of course she, a Brauron girl of eight summers’ experience, had swum ashore. In fact to this day, she derides us for ever thinking otherwise — eh, honey? I have often been told that I was a great fool, as was her lover, for imagining that a little three-stade swim would even be a challenge.

On that day, however, she tore herself from her father’s arms and threw her arms around my bloodstained son, who had been born a fisherman and was now publicly embracing the bluest blood in Athens.

Cleitus looked at me. ‘I gather your wastrel son kidnapped my daughter aboard your ship,’ he said calmly.

‘I gather that your daughter possesses all your arrogance,’ I answered.

His eyes met mine. ‘By Zeus, imagine our grandchildren,’ he said. ‘My arrogance and yours, my hubris and yours,’ he added.

But he offered me his hand.

By his orders, my mother died.

But she died a hero, after a misspent life. And as I have said before, revenge is mostly for weak men without enough to do. Like tend grapes and bounce babies.

I took his hand.

And there, on a beach in Attica, ended a feud that began in the market below the temple of Hephaestus in Marathon year, or perhaps before that, at the tomb of the Hero in Plataea. I won’t pretend it wasn’t mentioned again, in drunken anger, several times. I am only a man. But Achilles stood at my back in the fight at Salamis and put Simon’s shade to rest, I think, and I took Cleitus’s hand in the same spirit.

That was the beginning, for me, of the realisation that we had won.

So many defeats and so many wasted victories. But that day in early autumn, as the sun headed for the western mountains, the whole world looked different to me — to all of us, I think. The people of Attica saw hope fleeting by and began to believe they might return to their farms. And I? I saw my son, openly kissing Heliodora, and I thought of Briseis.

Briseis, whose needle case I had carried as a talisman. Who had called for me.

I suppose that I had thought of her earlier, as I had kept my Persian prisoner. I think that as soon as I heard him speak of Cyrus, I thought of how I might use him. And let me add, do him a favour as well.

At any rate, Xanthippus pressed my hand and said some pretty things to his crowd about Plataea and me, and then a cup of wine was pressed into my hand. I remember Hector, all false contrition, telling me of how he’d landed our first capture and then taken part in Aristides’ assault on Psyttaleia. He had Heliodora’s friend Iris under his cloak, she pretending not to be there and sometimes nuzzling his neck, so that they seemed one creature with two heads. And I remember lying beside Brasidas and listening to an old-style rhapsode sing the Iliad, and then hearing Themistocles make a speech to a great crowd on our beach, by torchlight. I remember Anaxagoras of Clazomenae and young Pericles talking about what the victory would mean, while my daughter, up far past her bedtime, snuggled against me and asked me to tell her what the battle had been like. The stars wheeled overhead and I was on my sixth or seventh bowl of wine when Cimon tugged at my chiton.

‘Council,’ he said. ‘Why aren’t you at it?’

So I rose carefully and moved my sleeping daughter into my tent. There was there enacted a brief scene straight from a comedy; Heliodora was in my tent and so was her mother. They were hissing at each other — that’s my memory, which both deny. My son, fully dressed, may I add, was reclining on my kline, his hand bound to his side and his eyes a little glazed in the lamplight — by poppy, I think.

I tucked Euphonia into bed beside her brother.

Heliodora thrust out her chin and whispered something very emphatically, and then leaned over and kissed my daughter — ah, I loved her for that, and for her fighting and rowing, now that she’d survived it — and then kissed my son in a very different way, and her mother made a noise of exasperation.

Her mother dragged her away.

Who was I to protest?

I went out into the star-strewn darkness and followed Cimon up the beach.

‘You angry at me?’ he asked.

I stopped. People believe the oddest things, especially after a fight. ‘No,’ I said.

He hugged me. ‘Good. It took me for ever to get the Corinthians into the fight. Your friend Lykon offered to fight Adeimantus on the spot and he still wouldn’t move. And when we did start rowing-’ he shrugged. ‘You weren’t the worst off.’

We both knew what it was like to make those decisions. Life and death for friends and foes, done without time to ponder or weigh.

We walked into the darkness in more perfect understanding than most lovers ever reach.

About halfway to the headland, he said, ‘We won.’

I think those were the only words we exchanged.

The council was confused and very loud — what a surprise.

Many of the navarchs were there, but not all. I embraced Lykon and Bulis, delighted that more of my friends had escaped the embrace of death.

Themistocles was talking, but then, he always was.

In fact, he was demanding that we rise in the morning and attack the enemy beaches at Phaleron to finish the job.

He went on and on. In truth, I think he was drunk — drunk on a heady mixture of wine and victory. Well, most of us were. But Themistocles lacked our years of fighting and he had seen the fleet rise and fight again and again at Artemisium. I think he imagined we’d come off our beaches the next morning, fresh as flowers or perhaps tired but capable. And he had a point.

‘Make no mistake,’ he said. ‘What is left of their fleet is still larger than our fleet.’

‘No ship that fought today will fight well tomorrow,’ I said.

Many men muttered agreement.

Cimon spoke up. ‘I had an easy day,’ he said, though most of us knew he was lying. ‘I’ll have a look at their beaches in the morning.’

I nodded. ‘I’ll go with you,’ I said. ‘But I’ll have to pull the best rowers out of four ships to row Lydia.’

I went to bed. Men drank well into the night and the crop of babies born nine months later suggests that drinking was not the evening’s only sport. Heh! I can see a pair of you from here.

Born in the summer of Plataea?

But I get ahead of myself.

It was sad and yet delightful to go to sea the next morning as dawn broke. I had Moire as my oar-master and Megakles in the steering oars and Giannis standing with Alexandros as marines. I’d sent young Kineas and old Giorgos to pick the best of the unwounded oarsmen, and many were the drink-fuelled curses that morning. And as we pulled away from the beach to meet up with Cimon I wondered briefly if we’d suddenly find ourselves off Massalia, or coasting along the tall white cliffs of Alba.

‘The Argonauts,’ I whispered.

Seckla smiled.

I’d like to say we did some great deed, worthy of being sung for ever — and the time was not wasted, as you’ll hear — but in fact we made our rendezvous with Cimon’s long black Ajax and rowed out of the Bay of Salamis against the wind, experiencing a little of what the Persians had felt the day before when the wind had been the other way, and then we pulled across the open water for Phaleron with our sails laid to the battens and ready to raise for the run back. The risk was very small.

And as it proved, the enemy fleet was gathered at the eastern edge of the Phaleron beaches. Of course Cimon wanted to scout them and perhaps even put fire into their ships, and of course I wanted to as well.

But our rowers spoke in loud grumbles and some very slow rowing. So we promised them a quick trip home and contented ourselves with a distant reconnaissance, safely out of bowshot. We could see that Mardonius had moved much of the army down onto the plains above Phaleron, so they clearly feared that we would attack. There was even a stockade, and we could see slaves digging and others bringing up cut olive trees — cutting olive trees, curse them!

But there we were, perhaps ten plethora off the beach, beyond extreme bowshot, anyway. The day was clear, the wind soft and steady, and no one was coming off the beach.

But the bastards were busy. And I could now pick out individual ships — there was the Red King, for example, and there was Artemisia’s elegant ship — and there was Archilogos’s ship.

If I hadn’t seen his trireme, beached bow out and with Briseis’s beautiful eyes painted either side of the ram, I might not have noticed. But I stepped up on the platform amidships, wishing my shoulder was good enough to climb, watching Archilogos’s ship. Three hulls to the west was Diomedes’ ship.

There were men moving around all of them, all the best Ionians.

I looked for as long as a man might speak in the agora to a friend. Then I waved for Seckla’s attention. I didn’t want to move my eyes and lose my targets.

‘Take us in,’ I said.

Kineas thumped for the oarsmen, but close by me old Giorgos spat. ‘You said, “easy day”,’ he commented — not to me precisely, which might have been bad for discipline. His head was turned away, as if he was speaking to the air.

‘I won’t get us in a fight, and I’ll serve out good wine with my own hands,’ I said quietly.

‘And a drachma per man,’ old Giorgos said. He shrugged. ‘I could be gettin’ me dick wet. ’Stead of getting all of me wet, so to speak. Eh? Lord?’

‘And a drachma per man. But not paid today, mate.’ I was not a rich man just then.

He spat over the side and looked along the gangway at one of his own mates.

‘Well, then, since yer so agreeable, like,’ he said.

And they all started rowing.

We crept for ten strokes and then, at a shouted command, we went for it — straight to a fast speed — faster than a long cruise, anyway. We covered the stade to shore like a good runner and turned end for end even as the first arrows began to fly from the Persian troops on the beach. They were well shot, but passed over us — a dozen went into our canvas screens along the forwards rowers’ banks, but not a man was hit, thank all the gods.

In the time we turned, I had confirmed what I suspected.

Then we raised our sails and raced for home and oarsmen came on deck. It was a free day, and after the victory, only a fool or a very bad officer indeed would have forbidden anything to an oarsman, so they came and went, and laughed, and discipline was almost nonexistent. Seckla looked worried and I think Brasidas, whose wounds made him stiff, would have been appalled, but I had some notion of what they’d done the day before and what it took to go out again, and I let men loll on deck, watching the headland reach by — I even let young Kineas and two of his friends try their hands as steering, with Seckla and Megakles giving laconic advice and encouragement. The ship had a festive atmosphere that was marred briefly by the dead washed up like sea wrack after a storm on the Cynosura headland and we had to pull down the sails and row carefully after we struck a submerged wreck and almost lost Megakles over the side.

He looked at me wryly — he was probably the oldest man aboard.

‘I think I’m for home,’ he said. No preamble, and no argument.

‘I need you for one more thing,’ I said.

He shrugged. ‘Will you give me a boat to take home?’

I nodded. I owed him too much to make conditions.

‘Just the triakonter,’ he said. ‘I’ll take her in lieu of my wages and my shares.’ He shrugged again. ‘What thing, boss?’

I pulled at the knots in my beard. ‘I’m going to Ephesus,’ I said.

He nodded. ‘Course you are.’ The men who’d been with me for years knew it all. ‘Fighting?’

‘I expect,’ I admitted.

He shrugged a third time. ‘Triakonter?’ he asked.

‘Yours,’ I said. ‘And anything else you ask for.’

He laughed. ‘You’re like a story,’ he said. Perhaps the best compliment I’ve ever been paid.

That afternoon we saw Xerxes come down, in person, to the beaches opposite. I didn’t see it, but others rowing our guard ships say so. And the Persians began to salvage any wreck close enough to the beach to be pulled ashore. They immediately began to fill the hulls with earth.

You could see all this activity as a smudge of busy, distant ants over by Piraeus.

‘He’s trying to build a bridge,’ Themistocles said. I think there was genuine admiration in his tone.

Aristides sat on his heels — still, I think, exhausted from the day before. ‘Can’t be done,’ he said. ‘Insane hubris.’

Themistocles and Eurybiades took the threat seriously, however, and were discussing sending ships and archers to attack the workmen.

Anaxagoras had a different point of view. He was silent for a long time, unusual for him. Then he raised his hand cautiously, like a schoolboy afraid to speak.

Our Spartan navarch was not a fan of the Ionian boy. ‘What, youngster? In my home, a ten-year man doesn’t speak at all unless invited.’ The ten years were in the first phase of manhood — older, in fact, than Anaxagoras.

Anaxagoras nodded. ‘That’s interesting, sir. But what I wanted to say is — it cannot be done.’

Eurybiades was never very fond of being brought up short, even by men he saw as his peers. ‘Oh?’ he asked. Spartans see sarcasm as a form of weakness (I think they’re wrong) but short answers often betray anger.

‘If you would consider,’ Anaxagoras said, ‘the volume of mythemnoi of earth required to fill a basket that is six stades long and, say, a plethora wide?’

The mythemnos was a volume of grain that Athenians used to measure a man’s wealth. In Athens they sell grain by that measure, and many other things. You can put a mythemnos of grain into a basket as big around as two men’s arms in a circle and knee-high.

We all tried to do the maths.

‘It’s millions,’ Anaxagoras said, using the Persian word. ‘Tens of thousands times tens of thousands of mythemnoi and all that has to be dug and moved and rolled out over the jetty as it forms. Can’t be done.’

Aristides was a fair head at arithmetic and I had studied with Heraclitus and read my Pythagoras, and we looked at each other — and frowned.

‘I think he’s right,’ Aristides said. ‘Even if he does talk too much.’

‘I agree,’ I said.

Themistocles stroked his beard. ‘Then why is he doing it?’ he asked.

We all passed a bowl of watered wine — Cimon’s — and I watched Themistocles and his slave and tried to decide if he’d intended to betray Greece or not. To be honest, it no longer seemed to matter.

It was Eurybiades who spoke. ‘He’s covering something,’ he said. ‘He wants us to watch him build that bridge. Or he’s run mad with anger, which I hear from Bulis is well within his character.’

Cimon looked at me. ‘Someone’s boiling to tell a tale,’ he said with his usual light mockery. ‘Go ahead, Plataean.’

I shrugged. ‘We went in close when we scouted their ships,’ I said.

Eurybiades nodded.

‘I went close because there were men moving on the ships — on the Ionian ships.’

‘Do you think they mean to fight again?’ Eurybiades asked.

‘I’m telling this badly,’ I admitted. I am often guilty of trying to make a good story of everything, I confess it.

I looked around the fire. ‘They were getting masts and sails aboard,’ I said.

‘By Poseidon!’ Eurybiades said. ‘They can’t mean to fight, then.’

It was just a feeling I had — a feeling that had something to do with my own mission to Ephesus and my fears for it. ‘I think the Ionians are running for home,’ I said.

Themistocles wore an odd face.

‘Perhaps we should stop them,’ he said. Even as he said it I could see him considering some other angle. By then, despite our out-and-out victory, I distrusted him all the time. ‘We could give chase.’

But it was Cimon who made the lucky guess. ‘What if the Great King is running for home?’

‘We didn’t beat them that badly,’ the Spartan navarch said.

‘We did, though,’ Themistocles said. He was picking his teeth and looking out to sea. ‘He is a long way from Susa.’

Bulis laughed, by which I took him to mean ‘don’t I know it,’ but Lacedaemonians don’t say everything that comes to their minds.

The fire crackled. We all drank some wine and slaves ran and fetched more and I saw a look pass between Themistocles and Siccinius.

‘We could run them all down,’ he said, with rising excitement. ‘We could capture the Great King!’

‘In a running fight across a thousand stades of ocean?’ I asked. Cimon said almost the same thing, while Aristides crossed his eyes and looked discontented.

Eurybiades looked especially thoughtful. ‘We could break the bridge at Hellespont,’ he said. ‘And trap his army in Europe.’

That stopped us all.

Cimon grinned. ‘Now you are talking, sir!’ He leapt to his feet. ‘I wanted the forward strategy to begin with. This is — beautiful.’

‘I’m just thinking aloud,’ Eurybiades said primly. ‘You Athenians are so hot-headed.’

Themistocles looked troubled. ‘And yet that might not be the best notion,’ he said.

We all looked at him. He’d won a brilliant victory — it was largely his fleet and his plan — and yet we didn’t trust him, and he could feel our want of regard and that, in turn, made him more difficult. He fed on adulation, like the gods eat ambrosia and nectar.

He stood up. ‘Think!’ he said, suggesting we were all fools. I think he really did think that. ‘Think! The Great King, trapped in Europe, has no choice but to win or die. He has all Thessaly to provide grain and remounts, and he has Macedon at his back as well. He can fight a long time here and many cities that are with us are also expecting winter to bring an end to the war. Trap the Great King here and we could fight him for ever, as a neighbour.’ He looked around. ‘Don’t you see? If he’s panicked, all the better! If he runs, his troops will lose heart.’

‘If we took him, we could all be rich,’ I said. I admit it — I said it out loud.

Even Cimon glared at me in distaste.

‘Oh, you fine gentlemen,’ I said. ‘Not a one of you doesn’t like a ransom?’

‘Ransom the Great King?’ Eurybiades asked. There it is, friends — a Spartan officer saw the Great King as perhaps the enemy, but still the ‘first among equals’ of all royalty.

I made a disgusted noise.

So did some of them, although Cimon gave me a slight shake of his head. He meant that I was a fool to say such a thing aloud. And I was.

‘No, we must not do such a thing,’ Themistocles said.

And he carried the vote. The Corinthians didn’t want to give chase and neither did any of the Peloponnesians. The Aeginians, on the other hand, were for immediate pursuit.

I began to make my own plans.

When I went back to camp, I patted our dog — he’d moved in and was as much part of the company as Seckla — and then nabbed Ka. I gave him instructions and he rolled his eyes.

‘I fight yesterday too,’ he said.

‘Then send one of the others,’ I said.

He shook his head.

I went to the next beach, where I had heard the Brauron girls would perform the sacred dances they had practised all summer.

That was a beautiful night, if you could ignore the smell rolling off the waves that told of the deaths of many men, and frankly, I could. As a well-known priest of Hephaestus I was invited to lie on one of the few actual couches after the sacrifices — a great honour that night.

Of course they danced brilliantly!

My daughter had, in fact, a very small part, but she did it flawlessly, and she was summoned back by one of the priestesses to take a crown of olive to Iris, who was flawless in her dancing, and another to Heliodora, who really looked like a goddess — she had something that is difficult to describe, something I had seen the day before in the fighting, from my son, from Brasidas, from Harpagos — some inner glow, a smile that was more than confidence. It was as if watching her dance made us all better people and I think that in fact, despite all the competitive crap and the hard words and the anger, it is this that is true arête, the excellence that makes men — and apparently women too — better than they were.

And I smiled to think that this goddess would wed my son, who excelled at temper tantrums and collecting expensive swords — and war. He was going to need to find other talents.

I suppose there might be a version of this story where Hector moped while Hipponax courted but, if anything, Hector moved faster than his sword brother. Or rather — I was there and it seems possible to me that Iris moved faster than Hipponax or Hector. There was a different fire in her and, once lit, I suspect it was not easily quenched. I’ll say no more, as she lives yet, and might grace us with her presence!

But the dance was superb. Euphonia would only tease me with how little I remember of what was danced and how; suffice it to say I was entranced. The priestesses were in many ways the best of all — mature, flowing, controlled, like the best athletes. The two priests of Apollo sacrificed. There was a huge crowd — I was lucky to be with the priests — and the roars went on and on. Men began to serve out cooked meat to the crowd and other men brought more animals to sacrifice, and I suspect they killed a hecatomb before the night was through.

The High Priestess came and lay by me after she made the last dance and oversaw the sacrifices. It was a great honour, considering all the powerful men around us on the beach, lying on improvised couches. Themistocles was sitting on a camp stool and Aristides gave up looking for a spot and sat on the end of my straw-stuffed mattress and stuck his legs out in front of him like an oarsman catching a nap, about two heartbeats after the elegant old woman lowered herself with the grace of a maiden.

Thiale nodded to him as he sat. ‘Hail to thee, best of the Athenians.’

Aristides’ head jerked around, looked down his long nose at her, saw something he liked, and let his tone lighten. ‘I am not the best of the Athenians this night. That honour goes to Ameinias of Pallene. My pardon, Lady — I mistook you for one of Arimnestos’s friends.’

Thiale looked at me. Then at Aristides. ‘I can’t say I’m flattered,’ she said, and we all laughed. ‘But then,’ she went on, ‘I can’t say that I’ve been on a kline with a man recently, either.’

Priestesses of Artemis were not generally fond of men at all, of course.

‘Your girls were superb,’ I said.

‘Weren’t they?’ she said brightly, like a much younger woman. She had the face of an old matron, like a ripe apple with a few wrinkles, and twinkling eyes that could be hard as granite, but the legs and feet of a young woman, and her facial expressions were also young: passionate, fluid. ‘I think this was a miraculous year, but, I confess, I almost always think so.’

‘They will not soon forget dancing the ritual on the beaches of Salamis,’ I said.

She nodded. ‘Will you, gentlemen? Soon forget? Because, I must tell you, I can be a mean-spirited old woman when I must, and tonight, on this holy night when all the gods are watching, I’m trying to raise funds to rebuild our temple when you have moved the Persians out.’

Of course. In the moment of victory, I had all but forgotten what any true Athenian or Attic farmer knew in his bones — the sea was won, but Attica was still in the hands of the Medes.

Aristides nodded. ‘I will find a talent of silver for you, Lady.’

She put a hand to her breast. ‘A talent! By my goddess, sir, you are generous.’

‘You may have to wait until I have a functioning farm or two to raise it,’ Aristides said.

‘At least your house is intact,’ I joked.

She looked at me.

Hector, who was still a good boy despite his infatuation, appeared by my couch with a pitcher of very good wine and three cups — not a bowl. Upper-class women did not drink from a kalyx, at least, not in Greece when lying with men. He brought little egg-shaped cups such as we use in Boeotia to have a dram when the work is done. Iris appeared as if my magic and held the cups while he poured.

The High Priestess accepted the wine and smiled at Iris.

‘Yes,’ Iris said.

Some message passed between their eyes.

I put a hand on her arm. ‘I too will give a talent of silver, if my ships have survived the last month,’ I said. ‘If Poseidon, and Artemis and all the gods are kind. It will take me a year.’

She smiled — a smile which lit her face.

I noted that Iris was still standing there, and Hector.

The High Priestess nodded. ‘I am acting as mother to Iris,’ she said. ‘Her father is a famous man — I cannot say his name aloud. Her mother is a Thracian slave.’

‘Freed woman,’ Iris said. Those two words carried so much content. Iris was tall, beautiful and handsome at the same time, the most athletic of the girls and you could see her Thracian mother in her strength and her oddly light eyes with black rings around the iris. She was one of those people whose intelligence shone forth from her eyes, and the two words she said told me that she accepted her mother’s status, and her mother, without bitterness.

The more I looked at her, the more likely it seemed to me that Xanthippus was her father.

‘Am I acting as father to Hector?’ I asked.

Aristides laughed. It was not like him to laugh at such a time. He rose to his feet. ‘My friend,’ he said, ‘you are in fact acting as his mother — a position we will all be in if we do not re-conquer Attica and get our wives back in our houses. I miss Jocasta.’

‘I miss her too,’ I admitted. It is hard to talk to a woman who is so close she can smell your breath. But I turned to her. ‘My lady, I view Hector as my son.’

She nodded. ‘If you had a wife …’ she said.

‘I may have one by the end of winter,’ I said.

She nodded, and gave a slight smile. ‘Very well. May I ask — what age will this wife be?’

I frowned, calculating. ‘I believe she is but one year younger than me, my lady.’ In that moment my mind had a flash of Briseis, naked in a chlamys, pinned under my body in a garbage-strewn alley in Ephesus when I thought she was my rival and a man.

‘Ah,’ the High Priestess said, obviously surprised. ‘A woman your own age?’

‘My first love,’ I said.

‘The things one learns at feasts,’ Aristides said.

I motioned to my friend for peace. I looked at Hector. His face said everything it needed to say.

‘My Hector is eligible, free of entanglement, clean of mind and body, and will have a small fortune from me when I die,’ I said, ‘unless the Medes have it all, of course. And he also has money of his own — shares in our last captures, for example. He is a citizen of Green Plataea.’

‘My Iris is not a citizen woman of Athens,’ the priestess said. ‘But I can promise a fine dowry, and I suspect Athenian citizenship for her husband could be arranged.’ She looked at Aristides.

He was still standing, trying hard to pretend he was not there. I knew the look — I had shared it.

But he nodded. ‘I suspect that Themistocles will offer citizenship to many of the metics and allies who served in Athenian ships. That would be a just action,’ he said primly, ‘and young Hector of Syracusa has risked as much as any man here.’

The High Priestess rose as gracefully as she had lain down and kissed Iris on the brow. ‘Do you consent to wed her, young man?’ she said to Hector.

‘Oh — yes!’ he said, for once at a loss for words.

She nodded, satisfied. ‘Iris, you are one I might have kept to be a priestess. But I think the life of the world is for you.’

Iris smiled, but she was crying. ‘My daughters will come to you, Mother.’

Well, by the gods, I cried too.

As soon as the young people went off into the dark to celebrate their engagement, and the High Priestess went away lightly over the sand, Aristides lay full length at my side. ‘You are going for Briseis,’ he said.

I nodded.

‘I can’t be party to it,’ he said. ‘I am needed here.’

I nodded and gave him a small hug, to show that I understood. ‘I don’t need men,’ I said. ‘In fact, I have a different role for you — and Jocasta — if you will accept it.’

He nodded.

‘Will you winter here or in Hermione?’ I asked. Hermione was where many Athenians and almost all of the Plataeans had gone, you’ll recall.

‘I will go back to Hermione to fetch Jocasta as soon as I understand what our military plans might be,’ he said.

‘Will you and Jocasta arrange — things — for me in Hermione?’ I asked. ‘I’ll guess that both my sons will wed. And I will wed Briseis. Or, alternatively, I will be dead, and you will see to it that my estate is divided, and that the boys marry.’

Aristides nodded, his eyes on mine. ‘Yes,’ he said.

‘I will be back in a month,’ I said.

Later that night, and I was sober and alert and busy choosing crew and talking to men I wanted. I was sitting on a camp stool beside Brasidas. Euphonia was asleep in her bed and Cleitus had sent me a slave asking me to come to his tent for wine. I knew what that conversation would be about, but I put him off with a message of my own.

Ka appeared. He made a sign, which I understood.

I nodded to Brasidas and Polymarchos, who was close by, sober enough, and the three of us hung swords over our shoulders and walked across the sand, through the milling crowds, to where Cleitus was camped, well up the ridge and nearer to Xanthippus. I was welcomed into his temporary home.

I introduced Brasidas and Polymarchos. Cleitus was not just polite, but welcoming, as was his wife. She was small and quick, like a bird — very pretty, and sharp as the kopis under my arm.

She put a hand under my arm. ‘I do not think you need to wear a sword to visit my husband ever again,’ she said. ‘Although when I heard you let my daughter aboard a warship-’

She was not really joking. She was both pleasant and furious at once.

People are not simple, and had I been in her place I believe I might have been the same.

‘I did not know,’ I said. ‘In fact, I should have known — I heard them begin to plan it, and I thought it was all … childish stuff.’

She shook her head. ‘Heliodora has never been childish,’ she said. ‘And what keeps me from grabbing for your sword like Medea is that I know her well enough to know that it must have been her notion and her hand at the tiller.’

Considering that I had previously only known her as the matron pulling her daughter out of my tent — as I say, that could have been a scene in a nasty comedy — I thought that she was both wise and very well-spoken.

I bowed to both of them. ‘We are wearing swords for a purpose,’ I said. ‘Because Cleitus and I are well known to be foes, I would ask him to come with us — armed.’ I nodded to Aspasia, Cleitus’s wife. ‘I am more than willing to discuss wedding terms,’ I said. ‘But this is a question of the future of Athens and perhaps Greece.’

Cleitus didn’t quite trust me. ‘May I bring a friend?’ he asked carefully.

‘Or two,’ I said.

He disappeared out his pavilion’s back door and returned with a sword and thorax and two large men — marines.

I eyed the fine wine and cheese and round cakes carefully piled by couches, clearly prepared for a nice upper-class wedding discussion, with remorse. ‘With luck I’ll be back in a few minutes,’ I said to Aspasia.

She sighed. ‘Is this a sample of our shared family lives?’ she asked.

Then we were off across the sand, to the headland.

Cleitus didn’t even ask who Ka might be.

Instead, he asked, ‘What’s this about?’

I looked at him a moment. ‘I may be wrong in everything I’m about to say,’ I said. ‘But I have suspected Themistocles for a month. He is in contact with the Great King and right now, unless we’ve taken too long, he is preparing to send his slave Siccinius to the King across the bay.’

Cleitus walked on for several paces.

‘Shit,’ he said.

We surrounded his tent. It was past midnight. I could hear his voice and that of Siccinius. He was drilling Siccinius on what the man should say.

Even now, it’s difficult to be sure. Is it treason to hedge your bets?

I say yes. I say, when most men cannot build themselves two beds, it is treason to do so.

I had Ka knock on his tent pole and then I went in, followed by Brasidas, Polymarchos, Cleitus and his friends. We were quite a crowd.

‘Gentlemen,’ Themistocles said. His voice was even, but I heard the catch.

‘Themistocles,’ I said, ‘there is a boat prepared on the beach with two slaves to row it — and you ordered it prepared. You are telling your slave what to say to the Great King — we all heard you. I accuse you of treason.’

‘I am used to dealing with small minds incapable of understanding my mind,’ he said slowly, as if puzzled and hurt. ‘But you are a subtle fox, a man of deep thought, and I expect better of you.’ Then he saw Cleitus and he reacted as if in surprise. ‘And you, Cleitus,’ he said, as if this was even more of a disappointment.

‘Treason,’ I said.

‘There is more to life than sword cuts, spear blows and boarding actions,’ he said to me. ‘I am working to panic the Great King into a hasty decision.’

‘By telling him that you have kept us from launching an assault on the Hellespont,’ I said. I’d just heard the bastard drilling his minion on his plan.

‘Yes!’ he said. ‘We need him to run, Arimnestos. Imagine five years of war fought in Attica and Boeotia. Imagine all the olive trees cut, all the farms burned, every house ruined, every temple thrown down.’

‘I can imagine all that, and not send messages to the Great King.’

‘And yet you have spoken to him three — or is it four, times?’ he asked. ‘And I have never spoken to him once. Which of us is a traitor? You went to him of your own free will — against our instructions!’

Cleitus looked back and forth. ‘I am not this Plataean’s greatest friend,’ he said, ‘but I’ve never heard anyone sane accuse him of being an ally of the Medes.’

Brasidas nodded. ‘Have you informed Eurybiades of your plan to deceive the Great King?’ he asked.

The two men locked eyes, and it was Themistocles who flinched.

Brasidas nodded at me. ‘Before you make more accusations, Athenian, let me say this. I can speak to Demaratus any time I want. He has long been the Great King’s confidante. Shall I ask him how he views you?’

I had brought the former Spartan for muscle. I tended to forget who he was.

It was silent in the tent.

‘I play a deep game,’ Themistocles said, which made me smile. It was probably true. ‘We have been starved for news this whole campaign. Remember the Vale of Tempe! I will not let that happen again.’

And again, I was on the horns of dilemma. Was he lying? I was sure he was.

Or he wasn’t.

Gods — or he didn’t know himself.

‘What news do we gain?’ I asked. ‘Wait. Will you allow me to speak to your slave?’

Themistocles shrugged. ‘Be my guest,’ he said wearily.

I took Siccinius outside, to a campfire, and Brasidas came with me, and Ka. Polymarchos stayed with Cleitus, and one of Cleitus’s marines, Antiphon, came with us.

Siccinius was shaking. ‘I only do what he tells me,’ the man said. ‘And by Hades, it is killing me with fear. I am a slave — the Great King can have me burned alive, pulled apart by horses. What can you do to me?’

I knelt on one knee by him. He was on a camp stool, and my other friends were close around him. But by arrangement, Ka pulled out his beautiful bronze canteen — loot, I fear, from Artaphernes’ trireme — and gave him some wine, good, Chian wine.

‘I can make you a citizen of Plataea,’ I said. ‘I can see to it that you have a shop or a small farm or a school in which to teach children. All you need to do is answer my questions.’

‘Hades,’ the man said. He sounded miserable.

But he answered all our questions.

Listen, friends, a man like Themistocles can either lie without changing his face, or worse, make himself believe anything he says is true. Such men are as dangerous as mad dogs, even when they lead you to great victories, or perhaps especially then. But Siccinius was really just a bright, brave man of otherwise average merit, enslaved by war and circumstance. Spying had burned away a great deal of his courage, and you must understand: everyone comes to the end of courage. It is one thing to face the spears one day — I have said this before — and another to live in fear every day until your whole life is a curse and nothing is real, nothing is good, there are no gods. Blessed father Zeus, friends, if you have not fought a long war, you cannot imagine how dark the bottom of that pit can be.

Eh, lads?

I won’t bore you with everything he said. I’ll only say that nothing he said damned his master absolutely. Some of it was pretty dark — he’d been ten times to visit Mardonius or the Great King, and he’d made a trip before Artemisium.

But … many of Themistocles’ best notions had been products of Siccinius’s spying.

In effect, there was no easy answer. Was Themistocles a traitor?

I was, in fact, no wiser, except that his lover and slave did not think his master was a traitor — thought him, in fact, the architect of the greatest and most complex deception ever planned.

I cannot love Themistocles. But I could not, in honour, find him guilty.

‘You go to the Great King tonight?’ I asked Siccinius.

‘Yes, lord,’ the younger man said.

‘You know the Lord Cyrus, a soldier?’ I asked.

‘He that spoke against you?’ Siccinius asked.

‘I still cannot discern whether you tried for our release or not,’ Brasidas said.

‘Lord, I did as I was bid, for the good of Greece,’ Siccinius said.

Brasidas nodded, rising. ‘I will vote to make him a citizen of Plataea,’ he said. ‘He’s a man, if nothing else.’ He walked off to the tent of Themistocles.

I took the slave by a shoulder. I reached into my chiton and withdrew, from the fold I’d made, the needle case and handed it to him. I, too, could plot, and make arrangements. ‘Give this to Lord Cyrus,’ I said. ‘I give you my word that it is not treason. He is an old friend.’

He took it.

‘Nor is it a poison pill. Read the message yourself, if you must, but give it to him and I will guarantee my eternal gratitude and your freedom.’

He smiled. ‘I swear this is my last trip,’ he said. Then he looked away. ‘I’ve sworn that since the first trip.’

‘May the goddess stand by you,’ I said.

I went then and bowed to Themistocles. ‘I will neither publicly accuse you nor apologise,’ I said. I looked at Cleitus, who nodded. ‘I will watch you. If your story proves out — well, you may apply to me and I will praise your subtlety as the greatest since Hermes stole cattle from Lord Apollo. If I catch you in direct treason …’ Again I shrugged. ‘I will take some action.’

‘But you will tell no one,’ Themistocles said. His smile as he said it was, to me, proof, and led me to wonder if Themistocles was enough of a player to have me killed.

‘Imagine how long you would last if I told Aristides,’ I said.

Themistocles looked away.

I had asked Cleitus because he was not really a member of any party except the eupatridae. He turned his head towards me — trying to read if I was tricking him, I think. But when we had left and were wallowing along the sand of our beach, he paused beyond the firelight.

‘What was all that about?’ he asked.

‘Everyone knows you and I do not see eye to eye,’ I said. ‘I wanted you to see and hear, so that I had an impartial witness.’

Cleitus winced. ‘I’ve never liked him. A democrat of the most vulgar style. No one will believe me-’

‘Aristides would, if it came to that,’ I said.

Cleitus paused, and then motioned to his marines to step away.

‘This is poison,’ he said. ‘If men thought that Themistocles was betraying us, our League could collapse.’

‘I know,’ I said.

‘What do you propose to do now?’ he asked.

‘Go plan my son’s wedding,’ I said.

Cleitus laughed. ‘Well,’ he said. ‘Probably the best course.’

I awoke with the dawn for the usual reasons and dragged my aching limbs out of my blankets. The morning had a chill to it but the sun rose into a cloudless sky and the wind was from the west. I walked down to the edge of the sea where many men were already about their business. In the bustle, Siccinius bumped into me and, rather cleverly, handed me back the wooden needle case. He bowed, apologised for being clumsy, and went to attend his master while I returned to my tent and read the message in the case.

Greeting, Doru.

My new master, Artaphernes son of Artaphernes, rides in the morning. He is going all the way to Ephesus. He will go very quickly. He will leave my war-brothers and me because he knows we will fight him in this.

He means to kill her and her children.

Doru, I owe my honour to my king. But I will pray that you save her. And I remain your friend.

It was plainly written in Persian, in the new script that the soldiers used. I knew it well enough, and I knew who would have written it — Cyrus. I wondered at it though. Why on earth would young Artaphernes, who’d already, I assumed, been accepted as Satrap, need to kill Briseis? Why would he ride home to do so?

I found Seckla just rising, and visited Leukas, who was still in agony. But not dead. Onisandros, however, was. Seckla had just closed his eyes.

I put a hand on his forehead, and it was already cold. Death is … death.

I went and knelt by Leukas. He looked terrible — grey instead of fleshy. He was in control of his voice though, and he locked my right hand in a grip of adamant.

‘I want to come to sea,’ he said.

I knelt by him. ‘You’re better off here — look at all these pretty girls,’ I said with, I confess it, false humour.

Leukas pulled me close. ‘I want to die at sea,’ he said. ‘Clean. Put my body in the water. Float home. Closer to my gods. You owe me, sir. Promise me!’

I gave my oath and Seckla and Brasidas had him taken aboard. We also shipped Harpagos’s corpse. I intended to return him to his sister.

We rigged a big awning forward of the helmsman’s station and made Leukas as comfortable as we could.

That is, Seckla did. I went and visited the other wounded men. A dozen had died but now the rest would probably make it. That’s what I thought at the time — the horrible maths of the butcher’s bill. If a man lives a week, he’s probably going to make it. Apollo takes a few in the third week, from infection, but if you live even three days your odds are much better.

I thought about Leukas. And about Seckla. About Briseis and Artaphernes and even about Xerxes; and war, and men who inflict war.

And then I moved on. This is one of the hardest aspects of leading men, and women. You cannot stop, not to mourn, not to admit defeat or even to rest on the laurels of a well-won victory. Because people need to be fed and clothed and motivated, and you just cannot stop. Sometimes, when my spirits are low, all I want is sleep, and yet … there are wounded men to visit, there’s the supply list to check, there’s Seckla feeling the darkness and needing a friend.

Don’t start on the road of leading men unless you plan to finish, or die trying. Because when you accept responsibility for them — by the gods, if you fail, they all fall with you, and on your head be it.

I drink now to my own dead. If you could see them, if, like Odysseus, I might pour out a libation of blood and see them come to drink it, what a crowd there would be in this room, my friends!

Anyway, I asked all the oarsmen to gather on the beach. While they were coming in, many with hard heads and some looking almost green, we heard cheering from the headland and before I had my people together, news had come that the whole of Xerxes’ fleet was putting to sea.

I wasn’t surprised — they’d been getting their masts and sails aboard the day before — and yet I was surprised. These days, when people speak of Salamis, it is as if our big fight won the war. I know better. Until we saw them running, most of us assumed we’d have to fight again. When they ran, they still outnumbered us.

The problem, of course, was that the part of the fleet that had been destroyed was the part most loyal to the Great King, and the part now cutting and running for home was mostly Ionian. They had fought well — many were ships commanded by the Tyrants and their families, who would lose everything if a democratic government arose. But at the same time they had little love for the Persians. And no interest in taking further losses fighting us.

War is complicated because it is politics.

I gave up on speaking to my people. We all ran, pell-mell, to the peninsula and looked out over the sea, where hundreds of sails covered the ocean to the east, as far as the eye could make them out — not just triremes, either, but smaller ships, all the Egyptians who’d never been engaged and all the hundreds of merchantmen who had supplied the fleet.

Most of the men saw in that stampede of enemy ships the moment of victory.

Cimon was by me. He grabbed my chiton. ‘Look at that!’ he said. ‘A fortune for any pirate quick enough to snap them up.’

‘But we’re not to pursue them,’ Lykon said.

As events proved, Eurybiades and Themistocles had already decided on the next step. We had a brief conference near the ashes of the altar fire.

Eurybiades didn’t need advice. He simply reiterated the ideas put forth the day before as to why we should not race the enemy for the Hellespont.

‘But,’ he said, ‘it would be foolish for us to let them go without any pursuit. If those more eager for freedom see our ships coming behind, some may yet defect.’

That made sense, too. A half-dozen Ionians had defected before the battle.

Eurybiades looked around. ‘I ask you gentlemen to make one more throw. The weather is fair. Let us pursue them a few days at least.’

Themistocles wouldn’t meet my eye, but he waved for attention. ‘Nor can we simply give chase,’ he said. ‘We must be prepared to fight. I would like to put to sea in three columns: the Athenians under Xanthippus, the Corinthians and Peloponnesians under Adeimantus, and the Aeginians under Polycritus.’

Polycritus smiled without mirth. ‘I can be off the beaches before the sun rises another finger’s width,’ he said. ‘See that you Athenians keep up.’

Cimon caught me as other men began to race for their ships. ‘Let’s form together,’ he said.

‘When Themistocles turns,’ I said, ‘I’ll be going on. All the way to Ephesus.’

Cimon knew why. But he was still hesitant. ‘You could find yourself alone in a sea of enemies.’

‘Perhaps you’ll come too,’ I said.

He scratched his beard. ‘Prizes,’ he said aloud.

And then he turned and ran for his ships.

The squadrons were putting every hull in the water — indeed, the Athenians were fitting out half a dozen captures from the battle, although none of them was fit for sea quite yet. But we had volunteers that morning — hoplites and other middle-class men who offered to pull an oar. I had intended to take only Lydia, but it became plain to me that, again, Themistocles was right, traitor or no — we had to be ready to fight again. So I lost an hour putting together crews for all five of my ships. I put Megakles into the ship Hector had taken, with Hector and half a dozen Athenian archers and as many hoplites as marines. We promised the oarsmen their freedom at the right end of the sea if they would row, and they did, at least that day. We renamed the ship, and Hector called her Iris, to no one’s surprise.

We were not the last ships off the beach, but Xanthippus’s Horse Tamer was making the turn by the island and preparing to enter the open sea by the time my column was formed, with Naiad and Iris in the lead where I could watch them, and Black Raven and Amastris and Storm Cutter behind me. There were almost two hundred Athenian ships in four columns, over stades of sea. We rowed from the beaches to Psyttaleia, and there I caught up with Cimon’s squadron.

Then we saw the difference between the old sea wolves and the new ships made plain. Eurybiades had done well to train this fleet — better than many I had seen in action — and they could row, they could back water, and they could manoeuvre. But sailing and sea-keeping in a pursuit are very different from keeping a careful line, forming an orb, and backing water. Now the new Athenian ships with their heavier, slower design were struggling, and their deck crews fumbled with raising sail.

Cimon turned out of the column. We had come off the beach as a mob and then made our way through the narrows at Psyttaleia in single file, but now he turned north towards Phaleron and raised his sails in ten beats of a calm man’s heart — beautiful seamanship. And every trireme in his squadron followed suit, so that they seemed to blossom like flowers.

We followed his lead. I could hear Hector and Megakles shouting at a new and unwilling crew and I didn’t want to pass them, so we lost distance on our leader, but soon enough their boat-sail set, and then their mainsail, and Naiad was twice as fast with her good Ionian crew. Lydia had the sails on the wood already and they went up like glory, and the three old pirates behind me were as fast, and then we were running along Xanthippus’s inboard column, passing ship after ship. Xanthippus waved, or perhaps shook his fist, as we passed — certainly Cleitus looked none too pleased, but if I was going to contribute my part of the wedding, I needed some ready money and there it was, four hours’ sailing ahead of me.

It became clear as we ran down on the enemy that they were in no condition to fight. They had almost no formation — indeed, three hours into the morning, I could have snapped up a pair of little merchant tubs, but they weren’t worth the bother. The Ionians weren’t stopping to protect anything, the Phoenicians had their morale broken, and the Egyptians, although we didn’t know it, had been stripped of their marines by Mardonius — Egyptian marines are crack troops and no mistake — and consequently the Egyptians didn’t dare try any kind of conclusion with us, but simply ran downwind.

It was glorious.

Cimon and I exchanged just two signals all day, one query from me and his answer that we’d stick together.

But it was heady stuff, to be at sea on a perfect autumn day, not a cloud in the sky, the sea blue, the sky bluer, the wind behind us, the sun warm — running at a fleeing enemy! I wish I could tell you some great event, but it was simply beautiful to go along, to eke every scrap of speed out of the hull, only to have to slow again to avoid over-reaching the slower ships. Naiad was a fine ship, but Iris had a curve to her hull — a common enough flaw in hasty boatbuilding, or so Vasileos used to tell me — and she sagged off to starboard all the time, keeping Megakles and Hector busy.

Well before evening, I let Lydia have her head, and we raced past the ships ahead of us and caught Cimon’s Ajax. Because of the perfect wind and the oars all being in, Seckla was able to lay me alongside Ajax in easy hailing range.

‘Are — you — going — to — weather — Cape — Zoster?’ I roared.

Cimon vanished for a moment and then reappeared. ‘Yes!’ he called back. ‘Good idea!’

I had my people brail up the corners of my great sail until Lydia proceeded at a more sedate pace and we dropped back into our slot in line. The ships were now spread over the seas — we had, for the most part, six or seven ships’ lengths between each ship in our column, and half a dozen stades between the columns; indeed, the seaward column was more like a flock of birds. As the day went on, it became obvious that there would be no fight. Our enemies were running.

Our course had been south of west all day, past Phaleron and Aegina just visible on the starboard side. In fact, some ships of the seaward column turned due south and camped on Aegina’s beaches, but kept on a more westerly course. Cape Zoster protected a set of beaches, the last really good beaches before Sounion, and I promise you, not a man in my ships or Cimon’s was eager to return to those beaches.

We had plenty of daylight left. I remember this mostly because what came next surprised me. My head was down, looking after Leukas, who was in great pain despite a draught of poppy from one of the doctors on the beach. All I could do was hold his hand and sacrifice to the gods. I did both. Something bad was happening in his guts.

‘Better have a look,’ Seckla called. I thought perhaps he was just trying to give me a break — is it horrible to say that spending time with a dying friend is hard on the soul?

But Seckla was not just buying me a minute’s reprieve from my conscience. Technically speaking, we didn’t have to ‘weather’ Zoster, because the westerly allowed us to swing past without much course change. But when we were well past we could see a big portion of the enemy fleet — and we knew there were no allied ships north of us.

‘Ten, fifteen, eighteen, twenty-four,’ I counted. I looked back at Seckla. Brasidas came up.

I thought that they were Ionians. I didn’t recognise any ships, but they were still many stades ahead of us. The problem was that we were no longer in company with the rest of the allied fleet; they were well over the horizon already, headed for anchorages and beaches on Aegina and the islets.

Cimon gave the signal for us to form line.

We obeyed. But we were under sail, and before the ships came up with him he’d turned further north, so that we formed our line at a narrow angle to the coastline.

After almost an hour of very tense sailing Cimon flashed our signal for taking our sails down and preparing to fight. Naturally this slowed us a good deal, but our oarsmen had had a picnic all day and were happy to get a little exercise, or so the wags phrased it. Still, by the time we had all twenty ships in line, oars out and in good order, the Ionians were gone. They didn’t stop or slow or threaten. They just ran.

Except the three that were coming towards us with men waving olive branches in the bows.

I didn’t know any of them, but we picked one up, and Cimon’s ships took the other two. Mine was Chians — that is, men of Chios. The navarch’s name was Phayllos and he knew me — knew my ship, in fact.

I was in armour, and so was Brasidas, but I didn’t even take an aspis when I leapt from my ship into his. We clasped arms and I was glad for us both that we had not gone ship to ship a few days before — there was no hatred between us, or even anger.

‘I don’t want to run any more,’ he said with a shrug. ‘And the Phoenicians didn’t play fair this morning with fresh water, so my crew is parched. I have heard you are a fair man and have men of Chios among your people.’

Brasidas looked him over. ‘Did you fight at Salamis?’ he asked.

Phayllos shrugged. ‘We fought, and fought well,’ he said.

Brasidas gave me the movement of his eyebrows with which he expressed approval and admiration.

‘Are you worth a ransom?’ I asked.

‘I am, and so is my nephew,’ he said. He pulled under his arm a very thin, not very handsome young man in beautiful armour. The fit of the armour almost made the boy — and I use the term carefully — look like a man.

But despite his spotty face and his starveling build, the boy had a certain presence and good manners. He bent his knee. ‘It is an honour to be taken captive by the famous Arimnestos of Plataea,’ he said.

Brasidas laughed outright. He didn’t speak, but his laughter spoke volumes.

‘You made no bargain,’ I said. ‘I could take the two of you and clear your benches over the sides — in pursuit, it’s within the laws of war.’

Phayllos was a brave man. He was afraid, but he bore it with nobility. ‘Yes,’ he said. ‘I told the oarsmen and the marines that very thing.’

I nodded. Brasidas did his eyebrow thing again. We were in agreement that these were good men and deserved decent treatment. I’m not saying that, had they been oily or arrogant, we’d have massacred their crews. Merely that honour calls out to honour, and dishonour encourages the same, or so I have often found it.

The time it took us to take those three ships cost us any chance of snapping up any more Ionians. So we turned, left our masts down, and rowed a little north of west onto the beaches by Cape Zoster. We landed early enough, but it was a major chore fetching water from the one creek big enough and deep enough to water us, and there were neither shepherds nor sheep to feed more than three thousand men.

However, we were well prepared, with dried meat and sausage. I saw to it my own people were fed and then we squandered our reserves on our captives.

Cimon and I had a meeting over garlic sausage and onions and very, very good wine.

‘It’s like going to a good symposium at a poor man’s house,’ Cimon joked. ‘We spent all our money on the wine!’

‘We need some merchants full of supplies. Mine are all running in the Bay of Corinth.’ I shrugged.

Cimon nodded. ‘What are we going to do with our captures?’ he asked.

‘Ransom the trierarchs and let the rest go,’ I said. ‘If we’re lenient, we might pick up more and we won’t have to fight.’

Cimon chewed a bit of gristle and spat. ‘Just what I was thinking. I’m going to be a very poor oligarch, friend. I enjoy this far too much.’

‘Stealing money from those too weak to defend it and spending it all on symposia and flute girls?’ I chided him. ‘You’ll be the perfect oligarch.’

‘You were right, too,’ he said. ‘We beat the Medes.’

The stars were rising. I could hear Phayllos, who was already friends with Brasidas, laughing his deep laugh.

‘I don’t want to be Tyrant in Athens,’ Cimon said suddenly. ‘I don’t give a shit. I’m ruined, and my father would be enraged. I want this — for ever. I want to sail and sail, to beat Persia every day, to conquer them and rule a great empire.’ He paused. And grinned — self-knowledge is always the best tonic, or so Heraclitus used to say. ‘All that on one cup of good wine. I’m sorry, my friend. What do you want?’

‘I want Briseis,’ I said. Indeed, I felt like a young man, with his first woman before him — and I felt the cold hand of time and fortune on me, too. She might already be dead, with some eunuch’s hands round her lovely throat. I had not hurried, or so I told myself when I was honest.

Cimon laughed. ‘You are consistent, I’ll give you that.’

After a pause, he said, ‘I expect we’ll get more surrenders tomorrow.’

I sat with my back against a rock, still warm from the sun. ‘I can take the Chians home and the Lesbians too. I can use them as cover when I move into Ephesus. If I get ransoms out of them, so much the better.’

Cimon nodded. ‘Well, I got two good ones, ten days’ pay for all my rowers in each ship.’

I smiled. I knew something Cimon did not know and I had no reason to tell him. I remembered his father all too well. All Cimon had to do was say ‘walk with me’ and he’d be Miltiades come to life.

‘So you are content that I keep mine and you keep yours?’ I asked.

‘Seems simple,’ Cimon said.

While we were talking, more allied ships appeared. They were from the northern column, and we had Themistocles with us, and Eurybiades, in an hour. I fed them both sausage and Eurybiades opened an amphora of good Aeolian wine and we sat at a small campfire. Siccinius waited on us.

Probably the most remarkable thing was that as we all settled in to drink, Brasidas came up — and Eurybiades greeted him by name, rising as if Brasidas was one of the peers.

After a hesitation so brief that I think I’m the only one to have noticed it, Brasidas accepted this and saluted Eurybiades as one man does another and then settled comfortably, as if this was not an epochal event in his relations with his former city.

It was a fine fire, and just because I know that Themistocles was a black traitor didn’t mean he could not be good company, especially when he was relaxed and victorious. Eurybiades treated him with deference, which he craved. I was polite.

But when the opportunity came, I pounced. I made the face men make when they want to piss, and leaped to my feet. Then I followed Siccinius a few paces into the darkness, to where he and two of my sailors had set a couple of boards over three small rocks and put wine on them for serving — like a crude symposium, in truth.

But I didn’t have to chase him. In fact, when he saw me coming, he placed his amphora on the side table, gave orders about mixing the water and the wine, and then beckoned me, and we went around a great boulder — some god or some titan had thrown it there, no doubt — and it was he, not I, who began.

‘Will you truly see me a free man?’ he asked.

‘I will,’ I said, not only because I would, but because I knew he had something important to say. Even in the darkness, everything from his posture to his voice betrayed his tension and his emotion.

‘The Great King is running for home,’ he said. ‘He is going overland — with half his army.’

I stroked my beard. ‘How do you know?’ I said. I raised my hand for silence. ‘I mean, do you know, or were you simply told?’

‘I saw the horses prepared, I heard him order Mardonius into motion, and I heard the orders he gave Artaphernes.’

It was too dark to read his face, but I could guess.

‘You know how important Artaphernes is to me,’ I said.

‘I know he is your enemy,’ he said. ‘Lord Cyrus could scarcely hide that. And let me say, my lord — I have earned your citizenship. I took a risk, a very real risk, in approaching Lord Cyrus.’

‘Really?’ I asked as urbanely as I could manage. ‘A smart boy like you should have used my request as a cover for his whole mission.’

Silence passed, like time, but heavier.

‘What do you want me to say?’ he asked.

‘I want you to tell me the truth,’ I said. ‘Did you speak face to face with Cyrus?’

‘Yes,’ he said.

Most men give themselves away when they lie. It is a simple thing, but liars tell stories and truth-tellers say things like ‘yes’ and ‘no’. Some men are verbose by nature so it is not an absolute law, but it is a good guide.

‘And what order did Xerxes give to Artaphernes?’ I asked.

‘My lord, I can tell you more than that — I can relate to you what conversation Artaphernes had with Diomedes of Ephesus,’ he said. ‘But then I will require your oath, and some reward, because I will be leaving my own lord.’

I was, in my turn, silent. Just by pairing Artaphernes and Diomedes he made my blood run cold and my heart beat fast. In fact, I didn’t really need to know what they said to each other. But the mere idea that they had talked was a terror to me. And the fact that this spy knew my affairs so well that he knew that these two names would affect me meant that, on the one hand, he must be telling the truth, and on the other, than he was appallingly well-informed.

‘Freedom, citizenship in Plataea or Thespiae, and a farm and ten talents of silver,’ I said. ‘But that’s all I can ever offer. Be bought, or do not be bought.’

He moved, and I realised that he — as slave — was holding out his hand for a gentleman’s hand clasp.

I’d been a slave, and I gave it.

‘I give you my word, and my oath to Zeus, Lord of Kings, and Poseidon, my master every day at sea, Horse Tamer and Giant Killer, that I will give you your full reward, citizenship, ten talents of silver, and a good farm, or I shall be accursed, if you will aid me to your fullest in the recovery of the woman I love and the saving of her children,’ I said. I had learned a little about oaths.

‘Wow,’ he said, or words to that effect. ‘Very well, lord. All know you are a man of his word. Here is what I have. Diomedes and Artaphernes are allies in this — they both hate Archilogos and his sister too. Archilogos was to be held as long as possible on the beaches to let Diomedes have the start of him. Artaphernes is racing to Ephesus on the Royal Post, taking the place of the messenger the Great King was sending to Sardis.’

‘Heracles!’ I swore. ‘Artaphernes is putting his revenge on his father’s wife over the Great King’s commands?’

Siccinius shrugged. ‘I find Persians even harder to understand than Greeks,’ he admitted. ‘But he hates her, and he claims she has humiliated him. He means her to die very badly.’

I didn’t need to hear a description.

‘But her brother means to save her?’ I asked.

Siccinius shrugged. Even in darkness, that gesture is unmistakable. ‘You ask me as a spy? I do not know. As a judge of events? I would say that both men fear him. He is one of the most famous warriors in the Great King’s forces. They say that, without him, Miletus would still be free, and they say that his ship scored more kills at Artemisium than any other Ionian or Phoenician.’

I laughed. ‘That’s no surprise,’ I said. ‘He was always best.’

I admit it — I smiled to think that we were about to be on the same side, to rescue his sister.

Half a world at war, and heaps of dead men, oceans of blood, and the three of us were about to be at the centre.

Sometimes, it is like living in the Iliad.

He told me more, everything he knew about the Great King’s plans to abandon Mardonius and run for Susa. I admit it: I doubted what he was telling me as the Xerxes I’d met was far braver than that. I had a hard time imagining any Persian monarch cutting and running on an unbeaten army and a single naval defeat.

But it didn’t matter.

Almost nothing mattered but getting to Ephesus.

‘One more thing,’ he said. ‘If my master knew I was telling you this, I’d be dead.’

I nodded. What more could he tell me?

I saw his head move, his unconscious glance to left and right to make sure that we were not overheard. ‘Xerxes has lost three brothers and two sons in this campaign,’ he said. ‘He’s putting all the rest of his boys on two of the fleet’s fastest ships. They’re running for Sardis via Ephesus. Artemisia is taking two of them, and Diomedes the other two.’

I could see — I still see — the hand of the gods in all of it, and like any good tragedy I had been manipulated by my own needs and desires, and only allowed, now, at the last hour, to know what the stakes were, and what my role might be.

I did not dare even allow myself to imagine what fate Artaphernes had in mind for Briseis. It would be horrible, and it would not allow her either dignity or repute. And I knew Diomedes hated her and was weak enough to seek such a horrid revenge.

Perhaps it says something about me that, until that moment, I had never really considered that either man would exact ‘revenge’, because it’s such a waste of a strong man’s time to do such a thing. But they were both weak men and they needed to hurt something they were strong enough to hurt.

Artemisia was made of different stuff. I wondered if she could be brought to bargain — if she might mislike the killing of another woman. Or perhaps not. Common gender had never stopped me from killing a man.

Let me say one thing more as we head for the finish line in an ugly race. Briseis knew the odds against her — had, in fact, warned me herself. And she was not a poor weak woman who needed my sword arm; that is, she might, but she was the mistress of her own life and her own fate. I knew that, short of outright swordplay, she could probably master Diomedes by politics alone. Artaphernes would be trickier — but I knew she would not go lightly.

I knew that, in the last case, she would kill herself rather than fall into their hands. And that the knife she fell on would be red with the blood of her foes.

But I wanted her alive. At my side. And that was going to take the luck of the gods and some serious planning.

The Royal Post was as fast as the wind. Diomedes was at sea and had a full day head start.

All this was through my head in an instant.

‘I will do as I promised,’ I said. ‘Find me in Hermione in a month, or in Plataea in a year, and I will do my part.’

‘And if you are killed?’ he asked.

I laughed. ‘Then I will have to bear my own curse,’ I said.

In the end, I decided to take all my ships. My people — my oikia, the men who’d been with me for years — they were family, and I was about to tempt the Fates to overthrow me. Indeed, I already had the blackest picture. Diomedes’ head start concerned me most of all.

And besides, Moire and Seckla and Hector, Hipponax and Brasidas — there were petty rivalries among them, but they were also united, and they made it plain to me that they were coming. All of them. My clever plan of a single ship slipping unnoticed through the rout of the Ionians was derided. And probably with good reason.

So instead, I led five other ships.

Cimon was bitter and proclaimed that I would take all the good prizes and leave the seas empty. But he promised to cover me with Themistocles.

One thing more you need to understand. From the beaches east of Cape Zoster there are two equally good routes to Ephesus. A good trierarch can hop from Attica to Andros, and from Andros to Chios, and then drop down into Ephesus — there’s some blue-water sailing there, but not much, and if you know your landfalls, it’s not that difficult. However, autumn was coming on; we were entering the ‘season of winds’ and ships were lost in autumn. A more cautious trierarch or helmsman would stay in with the land and go along Euboea and then nip past Thessaly and Thrake before turning south, with good beaches and mutton all the way. I’ve done both, as you may have noted.

But with Briseis’s life on the line there was no question that I’d take the more direct, riskier path. And with six ships, the risk was lesser in every way — but mostly because I assumed the Phoenicians, the best mariners if not the best fighters, would take that route home and we were going to be sharing the same waters and perhaps the same beaches. With six ships I felt I could realistically handle anything that Ba’al had to offer.

Be that as it may, breakfast was very early. There was no ‘captain’s council’ because my friends presented me with their demands. Moire and Seckla stood in front of the rest, in the dark, and I noticed that for once, Giannis and Brasidas, who were never far from me, were standing with their other friends.

‘We’re all coming to Ephesus,’ Seckla said.

I nodded. ‘Very well,’ I said.

See? Leadership. Command. Knowing when to follow. Hah! I am only mocking myself. In truth, I was mad as a tanner for a few beats of my heart, merely because they were flouting my wishes, but before a single libation had been spilled, I saw how much easier moving in force would be. Besides, with Phayllos’s ship and Naiad we had some chance of passing as Ionians ourselves.

Except Lydia. With her heavy mainmast and raked boat-sail mast, she was probably the best-known warship on the ocean that year and there was no disguising her. In the end, I decided we could pretend to be a capture if deception was required.

The next hours were so frustrating I could barely restrain myself. I wanted to get into motion, but Cimon restrained me until Themistocles let it be known that we were to continue forward. Again I feel I have to explain — I did not want Themistocles to know I was gone. The risk of betrayal was still real.

So we didn’t leave the beach until the sun was fully above the horizon, and those were some of the longest hours of my life, although we all benefited from them by exchanging oarsmen and loading fresh water where we could.

I was determined to make for Megalos, the islet with the perfect beach where I’d waited for Cimon less than a month before. It was a full day’s sail and required some luck, but it had the signal advantage that I would appear to be Cimon’s vanguard all day, if Themistocles were to watch at all.

Finally, when I was ready to rage at anyone who stood against me — isn’t waiting the most frustrating thing, thugater? Finally, we put oarsmen to stations and got her keel off the beach. Themistocles and the rest of the fleet were left behind and my ships — Lydia, Naiad, Iris, Black Raven, Storm Cutter, and Amastris — were away, in a loose file led by Lydia and Cimon’s squadron fell in behind us.

We still had a beautiful wind and when we came to Sounion and turned due west, the wind was perfect, just over the starboard quarter, and Lydia began to pull away. Then we began to use all the tricks we’d learned in fifteen years at sea: wetting sails, using rowers leaning out to stiffen the ship, brailing up parts of the sail to get the perfect drive — a warship can drive too deep with her ram when overpressed by sail and sometimes, just to confuse a landsman, a little less sail is a better rig.

But it was noon, the sun high in the sky, and our lookout in the basket high above us called down that he could see two sails to the west. The development was sudden, as it always is at sea. In an hour there were forty enemy ships hull up to the north and west, running for the Euboean channel, and another forty running west and south under sail. Either going for Andros or planning to sail up the eastern shore of Euboea — by the way, not a course I’d have chosen, and the wrecks of fifty of the Great King’s ships would show why.

Right before us were a pair of ill-handled merchantmen. The beautiful west wind that had us racing over the seas was not so kind to them and we were making distance on them five to two.

I had Megakles aboard — a precaution in case of a storm — and I waved to Brasidas and then summoned both of them aft.

‘There’s what we need to make Ephesus,’ I said. ‘Take either one, collect mutton and grain at Megalos, and no one will starve.’

Brasidas nodded.

I turned to Megakles. But he shook his head.

‘Seckla’s been to Megalos and I ain’t,’ he said. ‘I’ll steer this girl and Seckla can have the tub all day.’

That was sense too. I had the oddest feeling that my friends were taking charge of me, that I was not, strictly speaking, ‘in command’, but Megakles was correct — Megalos had a tricky beach, especially if he should come in after the sun set, which it did earlier every evening.

We came down on the pair of them like falcons taking rabbits and they did not fight. Since we had to lose way to take them, I let Hector blood his crew by taking the nearer while we took the farther, but he had shouted orders only to take ransoms and strip any valuables and leave them — orders which, as the afternoon lengthened, we watched him disobey.

But the kind wind threw all my calculations out the window, and we were on the beach when the sun was a fine red ball over Attica to the west, and the two round ships were already visible as sails. They came in on sweeps well before darkness fell. We had fires roaring on the beach and a little drama as two triremes appeared and gave them chase — two triremes who proved to be Cimon’s and not Ionians.

Hector had picked up a supply ship belonging to Artemisia. He took a fair amount of teasing from my friends about whoring after a prize and getting rich too young, but then he led me aside.

‘Summon Phayllos,’ he said.

He was so serious I knew he must be in earnest. So I went and fetched Phayllos and his young friend Lygdamis. The Chian trierarch was not pleased to be summoned and his face froze when Hector came up the beach with a small man with a nose like an eagle’s beak — the captain of the merchantman.

‘Aye,’ he said, in Phoenician-accented Greek. ‘That’s him. The Queen’s son. Like I said.’

I had Artemisia’s son.

The two ships were full of food and had almost a thousand gold darics in back pay for various Ionian crews. I took it, served out the money instantly as pay to my own oarsmen, and kept the food, packing it all into one hull. Then I graciously put the two crews into the slower of the two ships and let them go without ransom.

In thanks, the Phoenician captain showed me where another thousand gold darics were dangling from an oar-port into the water on a rope. I had never seen that one before.

The gods were with us. I was sailing to redeem my oath, and by Poseidon and my ancestor Heracles, the capture of two fat prizes — useful little ships — and the good west wind made me feel that it was possible after all. And — I freely admit it — my friends held me up. It wasn’t anything I can describe — no backslapping, very few words.

But they were all there, save Cimon himself and Aristides, and they had other responsibilities.

To cap my good luck, the villagers on the back of the islet sold me most of what was left of their flocks and grain. The Medes had never come near them — that islet was a long row east of the channel, as my oarsmen had cause to know.

We were up before dawn and the hulls were wet as soon as we could see the two rocks that made the beach a hazard. Then we rowed south — not a long row, but far enough to warm up our bodies and give the oarsmen a sense of how lucky they were to have a favourable wind, which today, as if Poseidon and the zephyrs were my personal friends, blew from the north and west to the south and east, wafting us, once we weathered the southern tip of Euboea, almost due west, leaving Andros on our starboard side, and then — with the sun still low in the east — we coasted out into the deep blue and turned south and east, and dolphins came and played by our bows — a huge pod of dolphins that leapt and leapt, playing like people in the waves, so that we knew the gods were with us.

Then I really began to hope. My fertile mind could imagine every horror — torture, rape, degradation — inflicted on her. But my rational head said that she was as brave as a lion and had a cool head, and would not be an easy mark for any man.

The dolphins were a good sign. Indeed, all the auguries that day were favourable, and the birds of the air were from Zeus, and as we passed the east coast of Andros — probably less than sixty sea stades from where Themistocles was even then demanding that the allied fleet lay siege to Andros town — my heart rose again, as it had the day before.

Noon, and I could see the cape at the south end of Andros. As I had expected, the channel between Andros and Tenos had ships, both merchants and triremes, emerging on the wind and spreading their sails. It is a narrow channel, and I came down on them as if I’d planned the ambush for a week.

Six ships — only four warships. Easy pickings. A fortune in ransoms and gold.

We passed across their bows and left them in our wakes, with a new pod of dolphins escorting us. As the sun rolled down the sky we lost the wind against the island and began to row. Our attendant, the captured merchant, went far to leeward on the wind. I missed Megakles, but he was the best ship-handler among us.

We began to pass Tenos. I was going south of my intended track because of the wind. I had a feeling for it, and I wanted to have one more meal on land. But I needed to beat the fastest of the enemy ships across the deep blue. My choices in navigation were severely limited and the knowledge that I was wagering Briseis’s life and honour was always with me.

I do not seek your sympathy, but some among you wish to know what it was like for us, then. So let me say — my left hand was still not healed of the loss of fingers, and when I rolled over the side of the trireme in the Bay of Salamis I wrenched my left shoulder, and a day of fighting — again and again — is more wearing that even the blind poet Homer could tell. It was, I think, three or four days since the great battle, and I was only starting to feel like a man, and my moods swung wildly between elation and depression, so that I had to watch my words the way a good shepherd watches his flock, for fear of speaking dung to a friend, or spitting bile on someone I loved. To add to this the burden of a long seaward chase against odds -

I only say this to say that, despite the years and the events, I loved Briseis enough to try. With everything I had.

We made the southern tip of Tenos and the beach there was empty. We were now south of the track of the fleeing Ionians and we’d made a remarkable passage.

We landed well before sunset. I gathered my people and laid it out for them: we were going into the Deep Blue in the darkness. This had always been my plan, my secret weapon to beat Artemisia and the Red King into Ephesus.

And I wanted them all to eat well first. We slaughtered the sheep and boiled the grain and drank the wine — thin stuff, but infinitely better than no wine at all, I promise you.

No one was grim. Indeed, a day of fair sailing and dolphins made even the superstitious old men like Sikli and Leon pronounce the night crossing of the open ocean to be ‘something to remember, boys and no mistake’.

We left Megakles on the beach. He chose the role, and he was most fit for it — to hold tight three days and if we did not return, to bolt for Salamis or Hermione. He still had a day’s food for my whole squadron, and that could be our salvation. I had to plan for the escape, too, not just the rescue.

And then we were away, running east into the darkening sky.

I hadn’t tried this exact trick before, but it stood to reason, and even Megakles voted for it. My thought was that the rising sun should show us the mountains of Samos at the very least. It is ten parasangs, more or less, from the southern tip of Andros due east to the southern tip of Chios. A day’s sail with a perfect wind. Why not a night’s? And thus, no worries about navigation with the stars.

Men slept.

I did not.

There is nothing to tell. The rising sun showed me Chios on my port bow, and well it should have — I had a dozen of the best navigators on the ocean with me, and all perfectly willing to tell me if my heading went from their reckoning. We raised Chios in the first dawn and then the race was on.

Full dawn showed me more than Chios.

Away to the north of me, as I turned north on the morning breeze to run up the west coast of Chios while I had a favourable wind, I saw ships coming off the beaches of Chios.

I knew the Red King as soon as there was enough light in the sky, and I was fairly certain that I knew Artemisia.

They were at least a parasang — thirty-six stades — away. But it was no coincidence, if you do your reckoning. They’d had a few hours’ jump, and we’d just earned that back running all night on the Great Blue, and now they were under my lee. I had the wind, and the initiative.

Artemisia had the Great King’s sons, and six ships — a perfect match for my people, except that we’d just beat them like a drum at Salamis.

I went into the bow with Brasidas and Seckla, leaving Hipponax in the steering oars, where he was almost competent.

I had a great many choices. At the start of an engagement, especially when you are upwind, you have a full range of choices, like the first guest to arrive at a banquet. My views were coloured by the knowledge that my oarsmen were rested but without sleep, and that five of my six ships would be forced to fight with their masts aboard, a useless weight of canvas and wood. My ship was built for it — a different matter.

Against that, whatever Artemisia might want, I suspected her oarsmen’s morale would be low, to say the least. Beaten men do not wage battle. And believe it or not, morale is far more important than equipment. Every fight sees dead men in superb armour, but high-hearted people win battles. And my people had had two days of leaping dolphins and fat prizes and other men’s gold.

All that was the thought of ten beats of the heart.

I took a sip of wine and handed the clay canteen to Brasidas. He already had his armour on, the bastard.

‘I’d be happy to hear your thoughts,’ I said. ‘Please don’t drone on in your usual long-winded way.’

Brasidas looked out over the sea, a thousand sun-dazzles sparkling away in the new sun.

‘Fight,’ he said. ‘But don’t forget what you are here for.’

‘Sometimes you sound like an oracle,’ I said.

He shrugged.

Seckla merely winked. ‘Do the thing,’ he said.

I went aft and armoured, keeping my own council. I nodded to Seckla, who pointed our bow at the Red King, and we sailed after them in a file, with Lydia still in the lead and Black Raven tailing, but the trierarchs closed up on me. I never even flashed a signal.

Even with Lydia in hand like a restive mare, we were coming down on them rapidly. The Ionians had choices, but they were all bad. They clearly wanted to weather the southern tip of Chios and run for the coast of Samos and an easy reach into the delta of the Kaystros and up to Ephesus, now only half a day’s sail or a full day’s rowing away. But to weather the headland of Chios at Dotia, they had to come south and east, a little too much into the wind for sailing in a trireme, and that meant rowing. Not quite straight at me, but close as it made little difference.

Or they could run north with the wind on their quarters, but of course then they’d be coming off the beach with their masts in.

In fact, that’s the choice they made.

But as we raced forward into the sparkling waves they didn’t make much of a job of getting their masts up.

Now we could see them all quite clearly and I no longer thought they had any chance of escape. Nor did my lookout report any other sails.