The Great King

That winter was one of the most delightful of my life. Perhaps it is only warm and full of light in memory — perhaps I see it that way in contrast to the two years of fear and horror that were to come.

But I had my daughter, and my son. I had Aristides all to myself, except for Jocasta, who has always been one of my ideal women. We were a happy house. Hipponax might have made a great deal of trouble, with his tendency to violence and his angry need for my approval, locked in a house with two old heroes, some women, and a lot of wine. But he didn’t. He’d had a strong mother and a strong grandfather — he had good bones, as Plataeans say. And he had Hector.

It was not all ease and light — the two of them stole a sacred bull and drove it through the town; they cut a swathe through the town’s unmarried girls and that had consequences; and when they were caught drunkenly spraying urine on a statue of Pan erected by the victors of Marathon, I decided it was time to send them away for a while. I sent them to Idomeneaus on the mountain.

And Euphonia adored them. It could have gone either way, but she chose to follow them around and gaze adoringly at each in turn — and to brag about their exploits to other girls.

As for me, as I say, I was with Aristides. When you are twenty, men of thirty-five seem quite old — and finished, mature, fully developed. But when you come around to that old age, you find yourself young, fit, hale — and still growing, if not in size, then in skill and maturity and some other ways. At thirty-five, I found Aristides to be more the man I wanted to be than any of them — even Leonidas. Oh, he was still a prig. His sense of honesty was so absolute that he would insist on telling his wife where she had gained weight, or how her breasts had looked when she was a maiden.

You may laugh, but I’d like to suggest to the men present that, unless you are Aristides, this is a foolish way to behave with your wife or anyone else’s.

Yet despite this failing, and his stubbornness, which could be blind and obstinate or pure and noble, he was in every other way the man I wanted to be. I especially admired his calm. I am a good man in a crisis — none better on a blood-drenched deck. But tell me that the house is out of olive oil and the best maidservant is pregnant and guests are at the door, and I am a very difficult man.

One night, with the winter rains pouring on the fields of Green Plataea and Kitharon lost in the dark and clouds, we lay — promiscuously, let me add. One aspect of change that Aristides had accepted was private dinners with the women in chairs. We had lamb in something saffron and sticky, and a slave had dropped the whole platter, and in a spectacular display of terror — he was new — he’d then collapsed across the as-yet-undamaged food, and then, leaping to his feet, managed to smear saffroned mutton on my second-best chiton.

Really, it was as good as Athenian comedy.

But I shot off my kline and struck him. Then I was in the kitchen, demanding that my butler get the mess cleaned up, when Jocasta brushed past me, shot me a withering glare, and snapped her fingers for attention.

They all ignored me and looked at her.

‘That was an accident and nothing to be afraid of,’ she said crisply. ‘Get Paolis cleaned up and see if we can have those nice large beans from last night — eh?’ She smiled at the cook, who had to smile back.

Then she turned on me — the very look that I would give to a helmsman who abused his authority on one of my ships. ‘Would you be kind enough to step in here?’ she asked, stepping into the cook’s tiny office.

I had to bend my head to get in, and I was so close to Jocasta that I could smell the mint on her skin.

‘The trouble with men is that, since they feel they are best at crises, they seek to create a crisis at every turn,’ she snapped. ‘A new slave dropped a platter. The Queen of Sparta was not at your table, and by Aphrodite, sir, even if she had been, there was no cause to strike the boy, who was already terrified. Your anger communicated itself to the servants, and now it will be an hour before we eat.’

Yes, yes.

The nice thing about getting lessoned by Jocasta is that, like a good trierarch, her authority was absolute. I couldn’t even manage male indignation. I merely stood, the hero of a dozen battles, and was dressed down — rightfully so — for cowardice and panic in the face of a dropped platter.

I’m sure a dozen other incidents occurred that winter, but that’s the one that sticks with me.

The three forges roared, too. They made armour and helmets, and the small phalanx of Plataeans grew better and better armed, until we were a fair show. Women complained that pots were not being repaired, and indeed, Myron called our building the ‘Forge of Ares’. Heron the ironsmith took on a pair of journeymen from Thrace — that is, Greeks from the Greek cities of Thrace, not Thracians — and they made magnificent swords, folded and folded again while still white hot so that the breath of the smith god showed on the surface, or that’s what they told me. Their swords were as good as the sword I’d brought from Babylon — flexible, sharp and beautiful. I had one hilted up in ivory.

And we made money. Aristides mocked me and said I was now a true aristocrat — my forges made money, my farms made money, and my ships, captained by other men who took the risks — Moire made a winter voyage to Aegypt — made yet more money, so that I sat and learned to be calm and dignified at home while other men worked.

Ah, but I worked too.

I polished the phalanx of Plataea the way Hermogenes was polishing breastplates — the bronze thorakes that keep men safe in the storm of iron. I had my Epilektoi out in the hills after deer, over the fields after a wolf, up the mountain for boar — every week. I organised them into Spartan-style messes, as I’d learned from Brasidas, and I made up three new Pyricche that winter; first I taught them to my elite, and then to the entire phalanx.

There was considerable grumbling. Hilarion objected that he didn’t want to be a hero in the Iliad and had a farm to manage. Draco’s grandson Andromachos thought that he was too good a warrior to need to drill.

The sons and cousins of Simon stood in a group at drills and glowered.

But they did the dances. And I tried to be fair, but I refused to have faction in my ranks. It is the principal duty of a strategos — or a polemarchos — to choose a place in the phalanx for each man, and to assign the places. A weak leader causes dissent. A strong leader can cause unease. Not every man appointed to the front rank truly wants to be there. The front rank is the place of honour, but it is a terrifying place to endure a battle, even for me.

That said, I had some superb warriors, and a good number of warriors who were ‘merely’ fine, and veteran. With my marines and sailors added in — all citizens, now, and some had bought property with their profits — I could muster sixteen hundred men, and the front two ranks of eight were almost all veterans of a dozen fights.

I concentrated on teaching them a variety of simple manoeuvres and a few complex ones. I was determined that they would be able to form at a run, from a long file of men into a phalanx, and in any direction, because my experience of war said that this one talent was better for the group than that every man present be Achilles come to earth as an individual. I made them march with their aspides on their shoulders or on their arms — everywhere. As often as I could, I made them run.

Draco’s sons built us carts, and we hoarded sacks for grain, so that we could march out of Plataea with our food and our weapons and move at a donkey’s speed. My understanding was that we’d be marching all the way to Thessaly in the spring, and I was determined to be ready.

Listen — when Greek armies march, they take no food. They expect to fight within a day of home, and so they expect farmers to come to the camp, make a small, rude agora and open stalls to sell food. The small pay a hoplite receives is supposed to buy the food for him and his slave or hypaspitos.

None of us had ever marched a great army of Greeks over the mountains — anywhere, really. But when we lay on our kline and imagined it, or talked it through, we all agreed — all of us being Aristides and me and Leonidas and Adamanteis and a dozen more leaders of military contingents — we all agreed we’d need carts and food and baggage like a Persian army, and this would make us slower and more vulnerable to their cavalry.

Bulis came twice that winter, both times with different Spartans — bringing messages about the allied army assembly points, and collecting information on the Great King. It was from Bulis I learned that Carthage was still trading with Athens, and it was from Bulis that we learned that the Great King’s army had marched. And that he had appointed an assembly for his fleet.

That made my heart flutter.

Leonidas was sending the Plataeans with the land army. Bulis reviewed all my phalanx and was complimentary — by which I mean that, after watching two hours of sweating middle-aged men deploying from file to column, column to phalanx and back, sudden movements to the flank, oblique marching, and running charges and step-by-step retreats and closing with a mass dancing of my new, Spartan-style Pyricche, he turned to me and nodded.

‘Good,’ he said.

The reward for all our efforts was to be sent away from our friends, the Athenians, who, with Corinth and Aegina and Corcyra, were mostly forming the fleet. We would march with the men of the Peloponnesus and Boeotia, to face the Persian land army at Tempe.

I was very much of two minds about this. Like most Greeks, I am equally at home on land or sea, but I owned two fighting ships and had two more ‘in my tail’, as we say, and I wanted to lead them in person. Further, by sending my best-armed marines and sailors off to Tempe, I was depriving my squadron of their marines and officers.

Almost every contingent had this problem. I solved mine by sending all my marines and sailors to the fleet and filling their places with Athenian exiles led by Aristides.

To add to my troubles, my brother-in-law was one of my best officers, but in this crisis he was with the men of Thespiae — really his home, not Plataea — and suddenly I lost him, forty armoured men and two veteran officers. The Thespians were the better for all those Marathon men, but I was the worse for it, and I cursed a great deal in early spring. Antigonus seemed equally disgruntled, and my sister Penelope cried, worried that without me to protect him — you had to see Antigonus, who was a head taller than me — without me to protect her husband, he’d be lost.

I offer all this wealth of petty detail not because it will truly interest you, but because today, when you young people think of us going to fight the Persians, there is a myth — the myth is that there was a mighty allied army. There was no allied army. That spring, as we prepared to march off to Thessaly, we were a hundred contingents, and however good willed we were about being Greek, we had no experience outside our own phalanxes — except a handful of men, like me, who’d served as mercenaries. And the mercenaries became the glue that bound the whole together.

Nor did we march as an army. Indeed, many contingents were transported from the isthmus — my own, for example — by ship to Thessaly, while other contingents marched overland. The allies had failed to nominate an assembly point because, despite our best efforts, most Greeks still thought of this as a fight between two poleis. They imagined that we could assemble our army in the Vale of Tempe, send a herald to the Persians, and fight.

And because we did not march together, we never had a chance to drill together, or form a phalanx together.

So we assembled, one contingent at a time, in Thessaly, at the base of the major pass into Macedon. It was cold — still winter in the passes. Our commander was a Spartan — Euanetus, son of Carenus. The Athenian contingent, which was surprisingly large given the number of ships Athens was manning, was commanded by Themistocles in person. We had, among all of us, almost fourteen thousand hoplites and another six thousand Thessalian cavalry, and we could fill the pass with a phalanx eight men deep and still have the Spartan contingent in reserve and half the cavalry hidden. Leonidas was rallying the main army behind us, but I think we assumed that the great army of forty thousand hoplites would never be needed.

My Plataeans were one of the first contingents to arrive at Tempe, and we used the time to drill. Even my young men hated me after two weeks looking at the mountains of Macedon through the eye-slots of their helmets, and the new Athenian helmets with cheek pieces that raised were suddenly very popular, because no matter how cold the nights and mornings, by midday a man in armour was like a lobster boiled in his shell.

Xerxes, had he been quick enough, could have walked over us any time he liked. The Spartans were late, the Athenians later — in fact, although Aristides and I knew nothing of it, the Athenians were outraged at being required to send sixty ships and a phalanx too, and, as Themistocles said to me the night the Athenians arrived, there were seventy triremes beached in Piraeus for want of marines and officers.

Nor was Euanetus an inspiring commander. He was stuck with an army that had expected godlike Leonidas, and he was himself no god. He had a snappish temper; he was a large man and tended to use force when persuasion might have been better. He savaged Themistocles for being late, although we had no news of the Persian host, and that was an error, and he compounded it by ordering the Athenians punished, which was a little like punishing a man for being late for a party.

He changed his mind repeatedly about how he intended to cover the pass. First we were close up, and then we retreated six miles, and then we closed up into the pass again. The Thessalian lord Euripides had assumed temporary command when it was only his cavalry and my hoplites on the scene, and he had scouted the pass rigorously, sent two parties off into Macedon and Thrace to find the approaching army, in general had performed the duties of the strategos of an army. Euanetus wanted to be acclaimed and saluted, but he was not an active commander.

My men had been in the pass for three weeks when the Persians struck.

A pair of Persian heralds came to our camp to get safe conducts. They were the first Persians most of our men had ever seen, and we lined the roads like peasants to gawk. Euanetus was anxious to do the right thing and not commit an act of sacrilege, so he allowed the Persian heralds access to Greece and gave them a safe conduct to Delphi, to the oracle, or so they claimed.

The day after they left, a rumour began that the Persian army had marched a month before, and that we were in the wrong pass.

Two days later, while I fed Demetrios and Themistocles and Aeschylus on a deer I’d killed on the mountain, another herald came into our camp, this one from Amyntas, the King of Macedon. Macedon had been among the first kingdoms to submit earth and water to Xerxes, and yet Amyntas always attempted to act as a friend to the Greeks. In this case, he sent his herald to tell us that the Persians were marching by the other pass, near Gonnus.

In vain did the Thessalian lord Euripides complain that his scouts had not returned — that the Persians could not be so close. In a matter of four days, the allied army collapsed. No — there was no great battle. We heard a rumour that Persia was marching, and we scattered.

It was worse than Lades. Almost every contingent ran for home — the Spartans as fast as anyone. Not one contingent wanted to wait with our Thessalian allies and try conclusions with the Persians.

We stayed. I decided that if the rumour was accurate, the army — such as it was — would need a rearguard. And I liked Euripides the Thessalian and wanted his good opinion, and to be honest, I didn’t really think that the Persian army of a million men and another million slaves was going to sneak up on us at Tempe. But by the fourth day after the Persian heralds left our camp, the cause was lost. We stood with three hundred Tegeans where the whole allied army had stood two days before.

Euripides rode to me. ‘Do as you please. We can’t face the Persians with fifteen hundred infantry, no matter how dedicated we are. We’ll surrender. The craven behaviour of this army has convinced us all that we made a mistake. We will submit to Persia.’ He shrugged. He was very angry. ‘I have little interest in being Greek, just now.’

But he clasped my hand and offered me a last meal, which I accepted.

We marched back across Thessaly, fearing the peasants and the wild animals, and we found our ships waiting, to our enormous relief. I landed my men south of Thespiae, on the stony beach there, and found a messenger from Themistocles ordering me to report to the League at Corinth.

Like every other man in Greece that spring, I truly considered going to my farm. The disaster at Tempe had put it all in perspective. I’d wasted almost two months of my life so an incompetent allied commander and a pair of Persian spies could bury Greek independence. I had many friends in the Great King’s camp, and in one sentence, I could have both worldly power and the complete protection of my friends and my polis.

I actually imagined going to Artapherenes, giving him the kiss of peace and bowing to the Great King — by Zeus, I’d already done it! And requesting a command. ‘I tried fighting alongside the Greeks,’ I’d say. ‘But they ran for home at the very rumour of your coming, o King.’

I was angry, and young.

Aristides was angry too, and much older. And in no mood to submit to the Great King, and I think he held me steady. I was prepared to grumble my way across Thessaly, and he forbade me to speak my mind in front of the troops. He was right. Had I grumbled what I thought, those men would not have been there for us later.

At any rate, we arrived at Thespiae and I stood on the beach for half an hour — angry, confused and feeling ill done by. Just down the beach, an Illyrian slaver was unloading — his own relatives, it appeared, since the slaves were all blond.

The gods work in the oddest ways.

Aristides came and clasped my arm. ‘Will you go to Corinth?’ he asked.

Just in that moment I hated him and his calm assurance and his dignified maturity, his stubbornness. I was going to lose Briseis again. I could feel it, and the pent-up anger of a decade of frustration — the trauma of Lade, the fear of betrayal — it all boiled up inside me. My refusal was on the tip of my tongue. I drew breath, to give him what I thought of Greeks, the alliance and the gods.

Just off to my left, the Illyrian slavemaster struck a slave woman so hard that he broke her jaw. I heard the crack. Then he kicked her — savagely. Brutally.

She just lay and accepted pain.

The gods flooded me with power — like the onset of love — but suddenly I forgot Aristides and Xerxes and Corinth. I ran, bad leg and all, like Achilles.

The Illyrian saw me coming and reached for his sword.

I killed him with a cut from my scabbard — up into the underside of his arms, rotating my wrist, driving home through his nose in a final thrust. I stepped on his sword-hand to make sure there was no death-thrust, and wrenched my good new sword out of his head.

I had never seen the woman before — she was just another blond slave, and I had four. But I knew what Poseidon was telling me — on a beach, where all kingdoms meet. The Illyrian slaver looked nothing like Dagon, but in that moment, his casual savagery made him the Carthaginian’s brother.

I am pious. I worship the gods. I have seen them act among men.

Among the Illyrian slaves was a blond man who did not stoop or cringe. He was beautifully muscled, perhaps twenty or even younger. He caught my eye.

He seemed to glow like solid gold. His mouth moved.

I looked away, because it was hard to look at him — that sounds foolish, but go and look at the most beautiful woman you know — meet her eye. Hold it.

When I looked back, he was gone.

I knew I had seen my lord Apollo in the flesh, on the beach. And although he did not speak, I knew what he said. He said, ‘Omen.’

I went and embraced Aristides. ‘I’m for Corinth,’ I said, or something equally banal. Then I blurted, ‘I saw Apollo! Right here on the beach!’

Aristides looked deeply impressed, which was not a look you saw often on the Just Man. ‘Ah!’ he said. He didn’t ruin it by saying more, but embraced me and sent me on my way.

I took one of my own triakonters — thirty-oared ships, good for trade or raiding, too small to lie in the line of battle. I didn’t fill her with my best men, either. All my best marines were in Piraeus. There’s no room for marines in a triakonter, but usually every man rowing is a fighter, or at least that’s how it was in the old days. I had a polyglot collection of professional oarsmen, a former Massalian shepherd, a pair of Africans — but I knew them all well enough, and we passed the isthmus of Corinth like a blade through oil, and I was on the northern beach of Corinth a day later.

Themistocles sent for me as soon as I arrived. He was not in my good graces — despite the various arguments he had been offered, the Athenians were one of the first contingents to march away from the Vale of Tempe and they had caused the break-up of the army.

And Themistocles had made the decision to retreat.

Now he sat on a canvas and iron stool in a tent — a large tent like those the Etruscans use in war. While his slaves served me wine, a herald announced the King of Sparta.

‘Do you have my nemesis Aristides with you?’ Themistocles asked.

I shook my head. I tried never to discuss the one with the other.

‘When you see him, please tell him that I will be sending out an amnesty asking all the exiles to return,’ he said.

‘He was at Tempe, with the Plataeans,’ I said.

Themistocles had the good grace to look away. ‘I know,’ he said. ‘Let me tell you the worst of it, Arimnestos. The Persians have not yet marched. Only their first division is even in Europe. The Great King is still in Asia.’ He looked at the ground. ‘Amyntas of Macedon thought he was sending good information.’

Leonidas entered and we rose to our feet, but he made a motion that sent us back to our stools. ‘Xerxes and Amyntas have done us a favour,’ Leonidas said. ‘We sent an army to Tempe for a contest of equals. Xerxes has no interest in such a contest. He would have marched around our army — and thus trapped it. To us — this is dishonourable. It solves nothing. We all know that war is about one group of strong men convincing another group of which is in the right. Xerxes does not. As he is a tyrant, so he believes that by manoeuvre and outright murder, he can cow us. And he may be correct.’ Leonidas ran his fingers though his beard. ‘I will not forget this lesson.’

Silence fell. ‘And Euanetus was not the man to command an army.’

‘He is an excellent commander for an army of Spartans,’ Leonidas said mildly. ‘He complained of you, sir. He said you refused to know your place.’

I considered a variety of answers, and elected to smile. ‘I’m sure he is correct,’ I said.

Not quite the dignity of Aristides, but I was learning.

Leonidas either didn’t understand my answer or chose to ignore it. ‘I will lead the next effort in person.’ He glanced at me. ‘Gorgo has another mission for you, if you will accept it.’

‘Another peace offer for Persia?’ I asked.

Themistocles leaned forward. ‘We want to try Gelon again,’ he said. ‘Gelon offered us two hundred ships if we would give him the command, and we spurned him. Gorgo has proof that Xerxes has almost twice the number of ships we have.’

He looked around.

I did a quick count in my head. ‘Xerxes has seven hundred ships?’ I asked.

Leonidas looked up, and Gorgo entered the tent. She smiled at me, and I rose and bowed, and she raised her odd eyebrow.

‘Men bow more deeply to my wife than to me,’ Leonidas said, with real humour. In another man, it might have been a bitter statement. Not from the king.

I had a nice piece of flattery ready to deploy, but Gorgo beat me to it and shook her head. ‘Men bow to you,’ she said. ‘They only bow to my beauty.’

He looked at her lovingly. ‘Nay, woman,’ he said. ‘Men bow to the King of Sparta, but they turn and bow to Gorgo.’

She showed her dimples, then.

And turned to me, a little too brusquely. ‘Carthage is sending a hundred ships to Tyre,’ she said. ‘Even as she sends three hundred against Syracusa.’

That was bad news. Mind you, until that moment I hadn’t imagined that Carthage had four hundred ships.

‘Syracusa is a mighty city,’ Gorgo said. ‘Go and beg Gelon in my husband’s name to bring his fleet here, and we’ll give him the command — and when we stop Persia, we will send a Spartan army to Sicily to defeat Carthage.’

Leonidas winced. ‘I detest asking a favour of any man,’ he admitted. ‘But you know this man.’

Themistocles winked. ‘He knows everyone,’ he said.

‘All my ships are at Piraeus,’ I said. But I knew I would do it. I knew that this was what Apollo had sent me to do.

I was two weeks sailing from Corinth to Syracusa, laden in wine and Corinthian pottery. The Spartans couldn’t believe I was sailing fully laden, but no one was paying me to play Hermes to the tyrant of Sicily, and as far as we could tell when I left, we had a year. We knew a fair amount about the Great King’s preparations in Asia, and his ships gathering — indeed, although I didn’t know it, Sekla made a similar decision at Piraeus and took a ship all the way to Aegypt and back on the first good winds, because it was obvious that despite the Greek failure at Tempe, Xerxes was not going to march that year. The season was advancing, but Xerxes’ army was still near Sardis.

I had a fine voyage, and we ran up the great harbour of Syracusa with the wind at our backs, having scarcely touched an oar all the way. We’d sighted a Carthaginian blockading squadron to the south, but the wind was in their faces and they never had a chance to snap us up. I landed my wares and had Hector and Hipponax — who had now rowed for two solid weeks and looked like Achilles and Patrokles — sell them on the dock. I pinned on a salt-stained cloak, identified myself to the tyrant’s bodyguard, and was escorted to the citadel.

It had occurred to me twenty times during my trip that, having extracted Lydia from the tyrant’s clutches, I was probably not the right man to flatter him and beg his indulgence. But I stood before him in his magnificent rose garden, high above the city. He looked as hard as rock — he clearly expected to spend the summer in harness, and he had trained hard.

‘I thought you would bring me five triremes, and you have come with one triakonter?’ he asked.

‘Two of my ships are serving Athens against the Medes,’ I said. ‘Doola should be here with his ship, and Caius with his.’

The tyrant relented and offered me an embrace. ‘Dionysus and his contingent have come and gone and come again,’ he said. ‘Massalia is a loyal ally this summer, and I count your dues as paid. You are here to beg for the Greeks?’

In some ways, it was harder to speak to Gelon than to Xerxes. Gelon looked a bit like my idea of a god, and he was absolutely his own master. He would not ever have ordered the waves lashed. And yet, of all the men who led armies that fateful year, it was Gelon who most likely thought he was a god, himself.

I nodded. ‘Lord, I am here to beg for all Greece.’

He nodded. ‘The answer is no. Save your breath, my friend. My fleet has sailed — did you see a single galley in the harbour? The dice are thrown. My fleet will try a pre-emptive raid on Carthage which may save us all. I have heard that the Libyphoenicians have sent a hundred ships to Xerxes in exchange for Persian help against me.’

‘We hear the same,’ I confessed.

He sat back against a marble bench — shoulders still upright, not ever truly relaxed.

‘This is the war of the world,’ he said. ‘Our names will live for ever.’

I didn’t roll my eyes, but only from Jocasta’s training. ‘We will face the Medes without your might, then, lord.’

He shrugged. ‘Sparta and Athens wanted my help and didn’t want to pay my price,’ he said.

‘So in the end, you, too, are a huckster,’ I said.

He flushed. ‘Where is my Lydia?’ he asked.

‘I do not have her,’ I said. ‘She is now a wife — probably a mother. I beg you let her go.’

He tapped his marble bench with one hand — the greatest sign of agitation I ever saw from him.

‘Confess that you stole her,’ he said.

Some sinners never relent.

I stood as straight as I could. ‘I confess that I stole her to return her to the life that should have been hers,’ I said. ‘You had no more right to her than Anarchos, or me. I merely restored her to what she ought to have had.’

He turned to me a bland actor’s mask. ‘Ah, very well. What’s a strumpet more or less? You are forgiven.’

In that moment, I knew that I’d rather die beside Leonidas than defeat Persia with this man. I bowed. ‘I must take your answer to the League,’ I said.

Gelon shrugged. ‘They know my answer, and it is a sign of their desperation that they sent you. Who was it — Gorgo?’ He made a moue. ‘Gorgo thinks I can be persuaded. But it is now too late, and you might as well remain here. Be one of my captains. Athens and Sparta are done — indeed, Athens may already be afire.’

That blow struck home. ‘What?’

He nodded, pleased as a cat. ‘An Aegyptian ship came in here yesterday. The captain says that Xerxes marched a month ago, and that the ports of Asia are empty. The Persian fleet is at sea.’

I didn’t bow. He wasn’t Xerxes. ‘I must go,’ I said.

He smiled at his guard captain. ‘And if I order you held — for your own good?’

My breath came tight, and I felt that power from the gods on my shoulders. I looked back at the mercenary.

Gelon was serious. Or rather, he was prepared to hold me, merely to spite me. Because I’d stolen Lydia. He was not a god, but a petty man with the powers and will of a god.

But I knew there were real gods, and I knew that I was needed. Elsewhere.

Very quietly, and I hope without bluster, I said, ‘If you order me held, everyone in this garden will die, starting, my lord, with you.’

I give the tyrant his due — he didn’t stiffen, or flush. He met my eye — man to man.

‘Perhaps and perhaps not,’ he said easily. ‘Very well. You may go.’