The Great King

The Syracusan authorities held us for two horrible days with their pettifogging bureaucracy and foolish made-up taxes, and I thought we’d never leave. But on the morning of the third day we were allowed to go, and we were out of the harbour mouth with dawn — a lucky choice on my part, as it proved. We went south around the heel of Italy and touched at Bari and left the cliffs of the heel behind us. Four days out of Syracusa, as we rowed across the Adriatic from Bari — me all but raging at the helm at every delay, imagining Plataea and Athens afire and Leonidas dead — Hipponax slid down the stubby boat sail mast and picked his way through the benches aft.

‘There’re a pair of ships on the horizon to the south,’ he said. It was a calm day, the sea was like a flat field and the water was warm to the touch. The sky was blue-white with haze and sun, and the rowers were all stripped naked.

I pulled myself up the boat sail mast and had a look.

I had to rest my arms on the narrow trees that we used only when we crossed the yard, and there was no foothold and only the mainstays that braced her. A small ship doesn’t need a heavy mast and thus can’t support a crow’s nest like a hemiola or even a trireme. But a life as a pirate teaches a few tricks.

I watched the spot he indicated. I never saw a ship.

But I did see a rhythmic pulse of light, and I knew it was the sun reflecting on oar backs as they rowed.

‘They’re in the eye of the sun,’ I said. ‘On purpose, I think. Two pirates, hunting us.’

I went back and relieved Hector, who was learning to be the helmsman, and after all the admonishments that sailors make to lubbers, I took the oars and cheated us a little farther north.

And so we ran all day, or rather walked, because without a breath of wind, it was a long, long pull, the kind of back-breaking day that makes your oarsmen curse.

All day I wondered who they were and why they were so slow. My gut feeling was that they were both heavy triremes, and thus should have run me down in four hours. I wavered, changing opinion at every rapid beat of my heart — they were after other prey, they were a Syracusan escort, they didn’t even know we were here, they were rowing just one bank of oars.

Nothing made sense. A small triakonter with thirty oars is utterly at the mercy of a bigger ship unless there’s shallow water in which to hide.

Towards evening, they sprinted at us. At least, that’s my guess — they came on, and they had to have known that the movement of the sun across the sky had cost them their hiding. They were ten stades or more south of us and clear as day.

I didn’t hasten the stroke. I had to save my rowers, for the moment when. .

when. .

. . when Poseidon saved us. It’s hard to explain, except that as the lead trireme gained on us, I could see as plain as the nose on my face that it was Dagon’s Spirit of Baal. The bad rowing was explained.

Gelon had sold me to Dagon. Hence the delay.

I fear death as much as the next man, or perhaps more — I’ve met the gentleman more often than most. But that day, under the cruel sun, I was sure — sure that Poseidon would not let me die at Dagon’s hand.

I watched the sea.

Poseidon provided me with a dead tree.

It may seem odd, given the mighty wars I’m describing, but this encounter was all the work of one huge tree trunk, a product of spring storms in the high Alps north of the lagoons at the top of the Adriatic. It was a huge tree, all its branches intact, and mostly submerged. It was almost the size of my ship.

Hector spotted it first, and Hipponax was the first to guess what it was.

We kept our hull between the Carthaginians and the floating tree for as long as we could. Then we went to full speed, so that the waves seemed to part from our bow. .

. . and the Carthaginians, of course, had no more to give. Their ships were badly crewed — Dagon always killed his crews.

At full racing speed — still, in fact, slightly slower than my pursuers — I turned north as sharply as I dared, losing a ship’s length of my lead and wetting my port-side rowers, but they’d been warned and no one lost the stroke.

How I longed for Ka. How I longed for even one of my archers.

The lead Carthaginian made the turn behind me, closing by another half-ship-length.

‘Ready to turn to starboard!’ I bellowed. By Poseidon, they were close.

And yet, by Poseidon, I felt the power. I felt that I was the master, and not the slave.

Hector motioned from the bow.

I put the steering oars over, the starboard-side rowers bit deep, the port side raised their oars, and we were around — about an eighth of a circle.

Dagon’s ship never saw the log. They started the turn, almost on our stern rail, and they struck at full ramming speed.

The tree had most of its branches intact, and instead of a spectacular collision that broke his bow, instead the first collision checked his way, and then the tree fell off on my enemy’s port side, and rowers caught it — oars snapped, and men screamed, and the whole ship turned to starboard. If I had had anything like a real ram, I might have turned and had him. If he’d had anything like a real crew, he could have carried on. If his companion had a captain worth his salt, he’d have manoeuvred, but instead, the following ship fell afoul of Dagon — wood splintered, and oars broke, and we were running free.

I looked at my rowers — near exhausted, and not a man in armour — and put the helm down for Ithaca and kept running.

Behind us — they followed.

I lost Dagon in the islands off Illyria. If it was Dagon, and I’m pretty sure it was. Despite my fears for Athens and Sparta, I had an easy way out of my predicament, and I ran north, not south — to Neoptolymos. A day in his blood-soaked town convinced me that I would never make an Illyrian, but he rented me his trireme — one I’d built for him, really — and put rowers on the benches.

‘If I come, I’ll have no kingdom when I return,’ he said.

I looked at the heads rotting on his gate and the long lines of slaves loading into ‘my’ trireme.

‘You can be king here until someone puts a knife in your belly,’ I said. ‘Or come with me and be Achilles.’

He chose to treat my words as mere raillery. No light flashed in his eyes, and he looked away when I pressed him.

I rowed away, leaving my triakonter on the beach, with a crew of unwilling slave ‘oarsmen’ and my own thirty professionals as officers and deck crew and marines, and we wallowed about for three days, scraping wood off her keel at every landing, breaking oars on rocks, catching every crab in the water — this in a dead flat, calm sea — Poseidon, we were pitiful. Worse yet, there was worm in the ship’s hull, so that despite all my need for speed and caution, we had to beach for almost a week, barter for timber from barbarous Illyrians and then defend our ship and our slaves.

Really, there are few situations worse than being caught on a hostile coast with the planks off your ship and only thirty trustworthy men to hold your palisade. I cursed my decisions, each of them — to go north to Neoptolymos, to go straight to sea in an untested ship. .

Well, I’m here, so we weren’t all taken or killed. Had we been, we’d have missed the greatest days in the history of Greeks, and the worst.

Never mind. After a long and pointless skirmish with the Illyrians — we stared at each other, they screamed challenges, and we sat tight — suddenly a man appeared who offered us good pine pitch and fine, carefully dried pine for repairs in fair Greek. We bought everything he offered, and rowed away the next day short by twenty oarsmen who deserted in the night. A man has to be particularly desperate or a complete fool to desert in Illyria, but there we were.

That night we beached in waters I knew, and I gathered all the slaves and offered them my usual deal — freedom and wages for six months’ service.

Of course, they all accepted.

I was a more experienced man than I had been. I had Hector record all their names, and I walked among them. ‘You will row for your freedom, every day,’ I said. ‘No grumbling, no lying on your oars. Six months of work, and you are free men. Six months of bad behaviour, and you will remain slaves.’

A handsome man with a square jaw and a crop of brown-blond hair spat. ‘How do we know you’ll keep your word?’ he asked.

There was muttering from my men, but I raised my hand. ‘It’s a fair question. I could answer that you’d better hope that I do, because you have no other choice — eh? You are slaves.’ I let them think about that. ‘But when we reach Piraeus under Athens, I’ll be happy to write it in the form of a contract.’ I shrugged. ‘Until then, trust me or don’t.’

I’m not Themistocles or Miltiades or even Aristides. I’m not an orator.

But the rowing improved.

For three weeks we moved like a mouse under the eye of a cat. We rested at day at Corcyra and found that, for all her fair promises, the city was prevaricating — they were sending sixty ships to sea, but only as far as Sphacteria. I heard a great many excuses, but the Corcyrans didn’t see any possibility that Persia could ever reach them — whereas they saw it as a certainty that Persia would defeat Athens.

We rowed away south, and my heart was as heavy as iron ore. Corcyra, like Syracusa, had a mighty fleet. But she was a former colony of Corinth, and I could see the long arm of Adamenteis at work. Right or wrong, I held him responsible. Certainly I’d heard his name often enough over wine in Corcyra.

Aside from Corcyra, we hid our camp every night and moved close to the coast by day. I assumed that Dagon was still hunting me — I knew his obsessions, and I knew from bitter experience how well he knew these waters. We never let a campfire show from the shore, and even when we passed the entrance to the Gulf of Patras and left it on our port side, sailing with a fair wind down the west coast of the Peloponnesus, I continued to take all the care I could. We saw a pair of ships well out to sea the day we sighted Mount Olympus, and we took down our sail and crept in with the coast.

Every day, my oarsmen got a little better.

I was lucky in my crew. I was also tested. I had never sailed far without a superb sailor at my side — Leukas, Vasilios, Sekla, Megakles, Demetrios, and their ilk. Professionals, born to the role. I always felt like a fake with them — after all, Plataea doesn’t have any ships. I was seventeen before I handled a ship.

But that summer, the best sailor on my ship was me. My son — what a pleasure it is to say that — my son Hipponax was an excellent hand at the steering oar, and he had weather sense, but he couldn’t navigate from one side of a public bath to the other. I assume his grandfather had always handled the navigation.

In a way, that was good. I was still a little unsure of my navigation — I had the pride of a new skill, and I liked to talk about what I was seeing out loud as I took a sighting, or tried to calculate my speed through the water for dead reckoning. Hipponax and I had been entirely distant since the incident when Demetrios knocked him flat. He was correct and polite in my presence, and affected to despise me to Hector while trying very hard to impress me.

You know. Young men.

The day we saw Olympus — and what we thought might be Dagon’s ships — I decided to stay out to sea and steal a march on my enemy. I wanted to fight Dagon, but not against desperate odds. The farther I could lead him from his base, and the better worked up my ship was. .

And my gods were not telling me that I had to fight just then. This is hard to explain, so you must believe me. I trusted I would have him. The floating tree had been where I needed it. So would revenge.

At any rate, my rowers grumbled when I said we’d spend the night at sea, but that was all, and we got the sail up again as soon as it was dark, with my veterans rigging the mast by moonlight while the rowers watched us as if we were the Argonauts. And then it was all a navigation problem. I sat in the stern, and it was Hipponax’s trick at the helm, and we sailed through the moonlit darkness.

I talk to myself. No, it’s true, and sometimes men think I’ve lost my wits, but navigation, for me, is always a conversation with myself, and with Pythagoras and Heraklitus and sometimes with Harpagos, whether he is there or not. So I stood with a spear shaft braced on the helmsman’s rail, taking sightings on stars I knew.

‘You can. . find your way with the stars?’ Hipponax asked, suddenly. His voice carried the message that it had taken him time and effort to frame this question.

You can almost never go wrong with the young by giving them the full truth.

‘Not really,’ I admitted. ‘With the stars, I could tell you where I was in the most general terms. Which we already know. But that star there will always show me north — see it?’

Hipponax snorted that adolescent boy snort. He knew the North Star. Of course he did.

‘Well, it may seem simple to you, but I find it constantly reassuring that I am running south and east, because I’ve been this way before and that’s the way this coast runs. If I make too much way to the east, smack — we’ll hit the Peloponnesus.’

We ran on, the silence punctuated by the sound of water on the steering oars, and the ship-noise; creaking, groans from the wood, snapping noises that always sounded a little threatening.

‘How else do you navigate at night?’ he asked.

‘Sound,’ I said. ‘The look of the waves. The wind. Some stars move less in the wheel of the sky than others and you can use them. Look — right now I’m aimed at the Plough.’

‘Sound?’ Hipponax asked.

It happened that I knew where I was to within a few stades, so I took the steering oars in my hands and turned the ship — very gradually — to the east, and ran in closer to the long beach. It showed like the edge of a road in the moonlight.

‘Listen,’ I said, but my son already had the lesson by heart.

He smiled at me.

‘Do you want a ship of your own?’ I asked.

‘Yes!’ he said.

I smiled at the darkness. ‘Learn to navigate. And to command. That means patience.’ Oh — I could see by his moonlit face I was veering off into the kind of lecture boys hate. ‘You think you could command a ship for me?’ I asked.

He shocked me by looking out over the sea. ‘Someday,’ he said with a snort. ‘Not tomorrow morning.’

Well. We all know where wisdom begins, eh?

The mouth of the Alpheos was once again crowded. Because, of course, it was an Olympic year. I had known this somewhere in my heart — four years had passed since I had sailed here on a bowline from Bari. And it is true that the older you get, the faster time moves. Yet, my visit to Neoptolymos and my sighting of Dagon had made the world of four years before seem very immediate, so that it seemed possible, as I have heard philosophers theorise, that two points in time may not be as far apart as they seem — like wave caps with a trough between.

But there was not a single Athenian ship on the beach, and I could see only Corcyrans and Northerners, and a handful of Peloponnesians. Not a ship from Ionia.

Two from Syracusa.

We ate a very expensive meal on the beach — safe, for one night, from any attempt Dagon might make — and then, loaded to the point that the ship was hard to row, we headed south and stayed at sea for three days and two nights, drinking every amphora in the sand of the hold dry and eating every shred of dried meat, figs, dates and old bread aboard.

We weathered the Hand in fine style, with a beautiful westerly coming under our quarter as we passed the rocks. The seas were as empty as a new-washed bowl, and I worried less about Dagon and more about the Persians.

The seas south of Olympia were empty.

I put in at the port of Sparta for water and grain, and traded some of my Sicilian wines. The seas might be empty, but Sparta was not — I gathered from the traders on the beach that the citizenry of Lacedaemon were preparing for their great festivals. Half the citizen population was away at the Olympics, and the rest were preparing for the great Spartan festival — the one where everyone dances naked.

Well, that’s what Athenians say. I’ve never been.

At any rate, there was no sense of crisis. I did learn that Leonidas was already at Corinth, or somewhere east of Corinth.

A fisherman said that a Megaran fisherman had told him that Xerxes had crossed the Hellespont.

The beachside traders were derisive.

‘There won’t be any fighting this summer,’ one said. ‘If there were, do you think all the Spartiates would be swanning about butt naked at home?’ He made a rude gesture and laughed.

Have I mentioned that the helots and periokoi had no great love for their masters?

We sailed — still cautious, may I add — with the fine west wind at our backs. The fisherman had put a chill into me — I decided to try and navigate directly, Sparta to Athens, without passing up the Gulf of Corinth or touching at Hermione or any of my other favourite ports.

So again we filled the ship with water and food, and I used the profit on my Sicilian wine to buy a small fishing smack. I put Hector and Hipponax and Nicolas — an old oarsman I’ve mentioned before — and two of the slaves into her with a hold filled with food and wine, and we were away.

I was not the least afraid of finding Dagon out in the Great Blue. I spent too much time at the helm, and I didn’t even have Hipponax to teach. Despite which, we made a fine passage for two days, and I liked everything I saw. .

Except a pair of big trireme sails on the horizon.

There are so many factors to a chase at sea. In an extreme, a captain can always abandon his course and run with the wind, or land at the first beach, burn his ship and run inland. I’ve done both.

But my ship was well worked up, my rowers were fresh and healthy and had, from a few good port visits, learned that they were treated like men, given wine and a few coins, and trusted. In return, I felt the first stirrings of a crew becoming. . well, a phalanx. I’d done it so many times by that summer that I could build a crew almost without conscious thought. A storm, or a sea battle — either one would make them mine. They were ready.

And the ship — Neoptolymos called her Andromeda — was no Lydia, but she was a fine ship and better for our rebuilding. She had a tendency to turn to starboard, like a horse with a bad bridle, and she had no brilliant turn of speed, and we’d had her in the water too long, so that her timbers were heavy with water. She needed a drying.

But I felt in my bones that she was faster and better manned than anything Dagon would have.

And I knew where I was — about five hundred stades west and south of Athens. Unless Dagon had found himself a new trierarch, he’d be worried about fighting here — in the Athenian shipping lanes.

I watched the two sails for enough time for the sun to move across the sky, and then I ordered my sails taken in, the mainmast stowed — what a pleasure a good crew is! Many ships had to land on a beach to stow the mainmast. Hah!

And then I turned the bow south, and went at my enemy.

Well! It wasn’t Dagon.

Surprised? So was I. Even two stades away I thought I was watching a pair of Carthaginian triremes, and I had to get quite close — already manoeuvring for a strike — before I caught the flash of a shield from the stern of the nearest galley. It was a Greek aspis, and that gave me a little doubt, so I passed on my oar rake and got upwind of them, passing close.

One of the triremes was badly damaged. The other had a long scar down her paint on the starboard side, and looked familiar, and very Phoenician.

My smaller galley got upwind, and we turned, and the two enemy galleys got their bows around to us — the wounded one took so long I knew she was not any threat at all. But the Greek aspis worried me a little.

I let my lads rest on their oars while I drank a little water. We were low on everything, and I wasn’t going to fight unless it was Dagon. I had the weather gauged — I could engage or run at my leisure.

Something told me they were Greeks. After laying on our oars for as long as it takes an orator to speak in the assembly, my conviction that they were Greeks was growing, and then Giorgios, one of my old sailors, ran back along the catwalk to tell me that he could hear men shouting in Greek.

We were, as I say, upwind. I summoned Hipponax under my stern.

‘Run down and see if they are Greek,’ I yelled. ‘If they are, raise your aspis over your head. If not, turn to port and run free, and I’ll join you, and we’ll leave them here.’

Hector raised his hand in casual salute — the two of them were as brown as old walnut by then, and with their burned-blond hair they really did look like gods. The little fishing smack turned on her heel and ran down the wind — wallowed down it, more like. I saw Hipponax stand up in the bow and I saw someone on the stern of the other ship lean far out to shout.

Hipponax’s shield came up with a flourish, and I saw the little fishing smack come to under the lee of the heavy trireme, and then we were moving. We rowed downwind, still cautious — I still wished I had my archers.

But my guess was correct. They were Greeks — Ithacans — on their way to join the allied fleet.

And they’d taken Dagon’s consort. That took a day to ascertain, but they knew Dagon, and he’d abandoned them when the fight went bad, running due east.

Always a pleasure to have been right. The Ithacans were in an old capture — a heavy Phoenician galley they’d taken ten years before. Possibly in an act of blatant piracy — it takes one to know one. But the other ship they’d taken in a fight, two ships to two, and they were out of water, out of cordage, and desperate — conditions were so bad that the recaptured oarsmen from the Carthaginian had already risen in mutiny once.

Worst of all, they had no idea where they were. They had fought off Ithaca — the irony was that I’d been creeping about for days while Dagon and his consort looked for me in the wrong places, caught the Ithacans, and lost their fight.

At any rate, it took me days of conversations — and interrogations — to discern all this, and to learn that the Carthaginians were not on a voyage of private vendetta. They had indeed been sold information about me — the notorious pirate. But they were en route to join Xerxes with dispatches.

I gave them almost all our remaining water, and exchanged half of my rowers for half of the Carthaginian capture’s rowers, and I led them north and east to Piraeus. We saw the Acropolis of Athens in the first light of the new day, and even the sickest rowers came back to life — one of the best pieces of navigation of my life, friends. By the time that girls were doing their dances at Brauron, we were ashore, and a hundred old men were embracing us.

After all, we had at our tail the first capture of the war. The first fruits of Nike.

We might have been feasted like heroes, but all the other news was grim. The worst was the thing I’d feared most — Xerxes was loose, across the Hellespont and marching at speed.

The allied fleet was forming all along the east coast of Attica — we hadn’t seen it coming in the dark, but as soon as the sun was well up we could see Athenian ships on all the beaches from Pireaus east to the headland at Sounion. The Spartan navarch was already around Sounion at Marathon, and the fleet already had a squadron of light ships scouting the north coast of Euboea for anchorages.

Themistocles came back from Sounion to see our capture and to embrace us all. I was put in the oddest postion — I hadn’t won the sea fight or taken the prize, but everyone treated me as if I had — I finally brought the Ithacan trierarch forward, a middle-aged pirate named Helios, and introduced him.

‘This is the man who actually took the Carthaginian,’ I said.

He shook his head. ‘We’d all be dying of lack of water right about now but for yon,’ he claimed.

That evening, over wine at Paramanos’ house in Piraeus, Themistocles laid out his plan.

‘I’d like you to crew all your own ships and five more from Athens,’ he said. ‘Can Plataea do it?’

I began to count in my head. ‘Not and send a single man with Leonidas,’ I said.

Themistocles made a gesture of dismissal. ‘Leonidas has eight thousand men to hold a pass less than half a stade wide,’ he said. ‘He’ll have Thebans and Thespians and his own Spartans and thousands of local men. It is at sea we need men.’

I sat back on my kline and sipped wine. ‘Where are my ships?’ I asked.

Themistocles nodded. ‘All at Sounion, on the beaches there, and around below Brauron,’ he said. ‘I will put all of your ships, and all the Plataeans, and Aristides’ ship under you.’

I fingered my beard and ate a date. I’d gone three days without food and I was permanently hungry and every old wound and muscle-pull ached or burned. Some ached and burned. Lack of food can really hurt.

‘I’ll send over the mountains,’ I said. ‘But none of my Plataeans will know how to row.’

He shrugged. ‘Half our fleet doesn’t know how to row,’ he said.

The next week I’ll pass over like the blur of exhausted activity that it was.

I sent a professional runner to Plataea for the Phalanx, and told them they’d be serving on ships — the Epilektoi as marines, the rest as oarsmen. I asked Myron to put it to the assembly. Then I took Andromeda around the long point of Attica and gathered ‘my’ ships at Marathon. Why not? It was the site of my greatest day. All of my best men had been there except Moire and a few of the young.

The Plataeans knew how to get there.

We towed five empty hulls, light as cockleshells with nothing aboard but cordage and oars, around. We got them ready for sea.

I took back from the fleet all of the men who were serving elsewhere. Cimon cursed me for taking Giannis back, but I had a place for him better than serving as a marine.

I had Lydia. She was five years old, but dry, sound as a nut, and had a crew — like no other crew I’ve ever had. After I shifted men around I still kept her old crew, so that out of a hundred and eighty rowers, I had only forty new men of Plataea.

Andromeda I gave to Megakles.

Demetrios had Aristides’ superb Athena Nike. The great man himself was still not allowed ‘home’ from exile and, stubborn and obedient to the letter of the law, refused even to board an Athenian ship as a marine. But, as you’ll see, he went aboard a Plataean ship.

Taciturn Harpagos had Storm Cutter.

Moire of Plataea — as he now called himself — had my troublesome Corinthian Amastis.

Paramanos — who should have been with Cimon — chose to be with me. He had Black Raven, the third ship of that name. He owned her, too.

Then I stripped my friends of their command elements to captain new ships. As an aside, you will have noticed that the first ships I’ve mentioned were all privately owned. I owned Storm Cutter, although years of careful maintenance (and that costs silver) may have made her Harpagos’s ship — in fact, we all behaved as if she belonged to him. Lydia was mine, pure and simple, and Amastis was mine in law — at least, in Plataean and Athenian law. Paramanos owned his ship and Aristides owned his — he had owned more, once, but they’d been lost.

The five ships I endeavoured to man were ‘public’ ships, purchased and fitted out by Athens as a state. This was a new arrangement. Demetrios told me that he’d commanded a state galley in the war with Aegina and he admitted that often they were indifferent ships — because there was no rich man to keep watch on the shipwrights. But of the five hulls they sent us, three were excellent and the other two merely average — all a little lighter than I’d have preferred.

Again, I’ve heard men claim that Athens built her light triremes because of her superior crews. It makes me smile. That summer, half the allied fleet was rowed by men who’d never seen an oar before that summer — like Boeotian farmers! Athens built light ships because they’d be easier for untrained men to handle, and because, to crew two hundred ships and send a phalanx, Athens had to skimp on marines. And finally, lightly built ships required less wood, and wood is expensive.

I just want you to get all this.

We were going to fight a fleet that outnumbered us two or three to one. They had professional crews and heavier ships and many, many more marines. They’d been together for almost a year and most of our oarsmen had never been out of sight of land.

I’d like to tell you that our advantage was that we were fighting for freedom, but I’m an old pirate and I’ll tell you that men fight wonderfully well for loot. Xerxes had promised his men the rape of Greece.

The morale of the fleet was not good when I joined it. News that the Corcyrans — whose numbers would have been a wonderful addition — were prevaricating off Ithaca came as a blow.

Adamenteis of Corinth said openly that the Peloponnesian League should fall back to the isthmus and leave Athens to its fate. Themistocles made all his usual arguments.

But then, the Plataeans arrived.

They came down the mountain from the direction of Athens, singing the paean, and all the work on the beach of Marathon stopped, even though they were ten stades away.

Did I mention that time doesn’t run straight?

The Plataeans’ paean rang against the mountainsides, but it also rang through time, and every one of us who had stood in the stubble on that day, ten years before, raised his head like an old dog smelling a much-loved master.

And the Plataean phalanx came down the mountain singing, song after song, as if a march of three hundred stades was nothing to them, as perhaps it was not.

Men went back to work on the beach, but some men smiled. Oh, my friends, no one called us bumpkins and sheep lovers that day, and when the bronze dog caps were close, the Athenians gathered on the edge of the beach and cheered and cheered — ring after ring until my throat ached and my heart was full.

Idomeneaus brought them to the very edge of the beach, where the Persians had had their ships. He halted, and despite being a small army of Boeotian bumpkins, they halted like Spartiates and grounded their spears, all together.

Of course, it was a piece of theatre. If you’ve been paying attention, you know that Greek armies seldom march in their armour, much less with their aspides on their shoulders. But Idomeneaus, for all that he is mad with violence, is no one’s fool.

He halted, as I say, and the men grounded their spears. The cheering Athenians fell silent, and the Corinthians were silent from curiosity, and the Megarans too. Aeginians came and stood.

Idomeneaus saluted me. ‘Well!’ he said, loud enough to carry to Athens. ‘Here we are again. Are the Persians here?’ he asked.

Men laughed.

‘No,’ I said. ‘They’re over by Thrace.’

His whole face lit up. ‘Really?’ he said. ‘Let’s go!’

That story was retold ten times an hour over the next days.

It is easy for any Greek to make great claims for his city. We are all hopelessly partial. Biased. I admit it. I would put Plataea before Athens or Corinth or Syracusa in everything; even while I suspect our temple of Hera is really small and provincial, I will never admit it. So I’m biased.

But I think we transformed the fleet.

Our men came singing. A thousand men who had faced the Persians — and beaten them. Not one Plataean complained about having to row. Men of fifty winters climbed down into the sweltering benches, took up the oars with the same practical interest as they used the spear, the plough or the potter’s wheel, and learned.

The second night, when the aches were pounding away — when some of the older hoplites had discovered that I was only putting my youngest, fittest Plataeans in armour, and that meant many older men were going to row — we were gorging on Athenian mutton on the beach of Marathonas, and a young Athenian from Cimon’s flagship was complaining about the work — and the dishonour.

Myron — who had come in person — stood up and put a hand on his back like the old man he was. ‘Dishonour, is it?’ he asked. ‘The only dishonour would be to be left behind. In a hundred years, men will no longer claim descent from the gods. They will only say — my grandsire was there when we warred down the Great King.’

All conversation stopped.

‘But!’ a young man wailed — half in self-mockery, I think — ‘But it’s hot and it stinks of piss down in the benches! My shoulders hurt and I’ve no skin on my hands!’

Empedocles, son of Empedocles the Old, laughed. ‘I don’t disagree, young man,’ he said. ‘Let’s all take an oath, then. After we beat the Medes, we’ll never row again!’

The laughter went on for a long time.

Every commander knows that laughter is precious.

Mostly, we rowed up and down.

I confess that I found some irony in the time I’d spent training my phalanx to Spartan-like perfection so that we could use them as oarsmen instead. At least every oarsman understood the basic tactics.

And because they were my phalanx, and not slaves, I got all my people together on the beach every morning, and told them what we’d do — every signal, every manoeuvre. Most of them didn’t understand a bit of it, at first, but by the end of the first week, when we had our first rumours of contact with the Persian fleet, most men knew when to reverse their benches and when to rest on their oars before the orders were passed. Citizens can be much better oarsmen than ‘professionals’, who are too often broken ex-slaves.

And farmers are strong.

Every night, Themistocles hammered home that our tactics must be simple and pure. All the Athenian helmsmen understood the complexity of the diekplous, where you pass through the enemy formation breaking oars and then turn back to envelop their second line. But Themistocles knew better than most men how few of our oarsmen could handle a complex ramming attack.

It will also help explain things if I say that I took eighty veteran oarsmen from each of my other ships — including Demetrios’s magnificent long killer, the Athena Nike, and I put those, almost one hundred each, into the Athenian public ships and replaced them with Plataeans. In this way, ten of my eleven ships had lower-deck oarsmen who were raw beginners, but upper-deck men and full deck crews of veterans. It also eliminated any possibility of rivalry, and I told them all the first night we were together that we’d share the loot equally — no extra for the officers — a very popular move on my part, let me add. Men love freedom, but loot is. . more immediate. I put ten Plataean Epilektoi on every deck as marines, saving only Athena Nike and Lydia, which got their own marines back.

Gelon got a ship. As she was a public ship and had only a number, he called her Nemesis.

Idomeneaus got a ship. After all, he’d had one before. He called her Hera.

Leukas got a ship. After much thought, he called her Parthenos, which he claimed was the Greek for a goddess in faraway Alba.

I gave the fastest of my public ships to Giannis. He called her Sea Horse. He had, after all, sailed and led and fought his way into the Outer Sea and back. He knew almost everything. And I let him have Alexandros to command his marines.

And of course, I gave the best of the public ships to Sekla. He consulted with a priest of Poseidon and called her Machaira.

So as soon as we felt that our oarsmen could manoeuvre from column to line and back, Themistocles had us practise forming close together for defence. He assumed we’d always be on the defensive. The strategy that he and Leonidas had evolved was brutally simple — we’d hold out all summer and force Xerxes to retreat before winter came. None of us could imagine that Xerxes was rich enough to keep his army fed and in the field all winter.

After a few days of practising the most essential single skill of fleet combat — that’s rowing backwards all together, if you don’t know — Themistocles ordered us to try the ‘wheel’.

It was almost the end of the fleet.

The wheel is a complex manoeuvre that depends on perfect timing and brilliant control.

When complete, every ship comes to rest with the stern posts touching and their oars in — you can form as few as fifteen ships like this. It forces your opponents to run in against your bow and to concede the initiative of any boarding action. It allows the force that has formed the wheel to move marines from ship to ship in perfect freedom while every attacking ship has to fight individually. The advantage of the wheel is so great that when a defender forms one, the attacker usually just sails around the outside. There’s not much he can do, unless he can somehow attack from every direction all at once — and even then, remember that the wheel’s defenders have the advantage of interior lines.

That’s the good part.

Here’s the bad part. To form the wheel from line ahead, you have to row backwards, get up enough speed to make it to your final resting spot and no more, pull your oars in and steer. If you are going too fast astern, you foul another ship and you may even damage each other. If you don’t pull hard enough, you come to a complete stop on the water in the face of the enemy and, for a bonus, you may be between two other ships with no room to deploy your oars.

Now throw in untrained oarsmen and hundreds of ships trying to do this all at once.

The first time we tried, we had formed a grand crescent off the point of Marathon, and my squadron was on the left of the line — that’s where we’d been at Marathon. Greeks can be creatures of habit.

First we all backed water together — as I said, this is the single most essential tactic of sea warfare, and we did it well enough.

Themistocles blew a trumpet — a Persian trumpet, no less — and we all began to form the wheel.

We were in the most difficult position, because we had to retreat, folding the crescent in the other way and ending on the back side of the wheel — a long pull rowing the wrong way. But on that day, it was entirely to our advantage, as the ships in the centre — and how vociferously they’d demanded that position, the Corinthians, of course — were ruthlessly crushed by the amateur crews of the Athenians and the Aeginians. We backed and backed and heard the screams and oars were splintered. Men died.

A Corinthian trireme rolled and sank, her back broken.

And the nearest Persian was a thousand stades away.

It was like Lades.

The Corinthians and the Megarans were the worst sailors — no, that’s not fair. They had the worst officers. But they had not suddenly raised a hundred new warships as Athens and Aegina, the real sea powers, had done, and consequently they affected to despise all the other ships. Like the Lesbians before Lade, they said they needed no further practice — that their crews were fully trained.

The Corinthians threatened to go home.

Our Spartan navarch arrived. Eurybiades brought ten ships from the Peloponnesus, and he came almost straight from the Olympics. I have heard him denigrated, and I have heard his leadership derided.

Men are odd animals. Eurybiades, like Leonidas, and like Arisitides and like Themistocles, wanted nothing but the victory of the allies. Because he was willing to listen to Themistocles — because he was ready to learn from all of us who had more experience of the sea — men deride him. In fact, I believe that he was the best navarch we could have had. He was cautious. He was mature. He would not hurry a judgement.

He was a Spartan, and would not hear of a contingent refusing to drill, and most importantly, he was a senior officer of the Peloponnesian League. I was present the morning he landed. Themistocles met him on the beach, and Adamenteis hurried across the beach to complain to the Spartans about what he perceived as poor treatment at the hands of Athens.

He came off his ship into the surf and waded ashore. A pair of helots came and stripped his wet armour and began to dry it. He embraced Themistocles and took my hand.

‘You appear to have done well,’ he said, in his dry way.

Themistocles nodded.

Just then, Adamenteis came up. ‘He has not done well, and he and his Athenian cabal will wreck everything. Listen — they’ve sent the dregs of their oarsmen and kept all their best men home. Look at the Plataeans! Let them drill. We’ll sit and laugh.’

The navarch looked at him — a look that I hope no Spartan ever gives me. ‘Are you refusing to drill?’ he asked.

Adamenteis paused. ‘Refusing? No, but-’

Eurybiades nodded. ‘Good. We will drill. The king has marched. He depends on this fleet to hold his flank.’

‘We’re ready now!’ Adamenteis insisted.

Spartans do not sneer. I’ve never seen one do so, because to sneer is to mock, and to mock is to be weak — the Spartans know this. They are too proud to mock anyone.

Eurybiades didn’t smile or frown or change facial expression at all. He merely said, ‘We will sail when I say. You are ready when I decide.’ He paused. ‘Yes? Any questions?’

Spartans have many failings, but they are good, reliable commanders. We had been unlucky at the Vale of Tempe, but now we had a simple, plain-spoken man who’d served overseas — in Aegypt and Ionia. He was not a master sailor, but he knew the sea and he’d fought ten battles, and he spoke with absolute assurance.

We spent a third week at drills. Every day. He came aboard each of the squadron flagships and watched our squadrons manoeuvre — usually with Themistocles at his shoulder. Far from ignoring the Athenian democrat, he turned the man into his. . it’s hard to name the office. His right hand. Many of the innovations that Themistocles lays claim to — even now, the filthy traitor — came from the Spartan navarch, who did not himself care a whit who got credit for anything, so long as the battles were won and the fleet stayed together.

We had games. After all, we had ten times the men that Leonidas had with the vanguard of the army. The fleet had at least forty thousand men. So, as we did before Lades and before every major military effort, we gave games.

For the first time, I did not participate.

I was thirty-five years old. Men of fully mature age sit in the shade and watch the beautiful youths. We don’t compete, and we tell ourselves it is because that would be unfair. I would like to suggest that it is because older men fear to learn that skill and age cannot defeat youth and strength.

Peisander of the Philaedae won our games, a young Athenian of Cimon’s family. He ran like a deer, jumped as if he had wings and his javelin flew like a bolt from the hand of Zeus. Or so Phrynicus said.

An Athenian youth — Pericles, an ugly boy with a big head who talked all the time — nonetheless won the two-stade sprint. He was serving as Cimon’s hypaspitos, and poor Niceas had to do all the work and was jealous.

And off to the west, other men were at the Olympics as if nothing had happened. As if there was no invasion. No Great King.

At any rate, we all lay in tents on the beach the night after the games — a dinner for all the navarchs commanding the ships and all the victors, crowned in olive. And Eurybiades laid out his strategy.

‘We are smaller, and worse trained,’ he said. ‘But all we have to do is to continue to exist — to retreat after every loss, never allow ourselves to be routed or encircled — and we will not lose.’

It was a long speech for a Spartan.

And Themistocles followed him. ‘No matter what the disparity in numbers, Xerxes cannot afford to let us separate one piece of his fleet. As long as we always have a clear retreat and sea room, we can win a string of little victories while we train up our rowers. And never risk a big fight. This is why we must master the wheel.’

No one liked the wheel.

We didn’t sink any more ships, but we had some very ugly times — somewhere in the third week, I lost almost a quarter of my oars and Nicolas had his collarbone broken when a ship from the Sicyon contingent popped out of the wheel like a pomegranate seed from between a boy’s hands and struck us in the stern — which led to a long series of foulings and a great many curses. Luckily our deck crews were better than our oarsmen, and poled us off before men died — but had the Persians been close, we’d all have died or been made slaves.

At the end of the third week, Eurybiades admitted he was waiting for other contingents. We had two hundred and sixty-nine triremes and a dozen pentekonters as messengers and scouts, as well as a hundred small merchantmen to keep us supplied.

Athens supplied a hundred and twenty-five ships, of which eleven were in my squadron, and technically they were Plataean. I’d prefer to say that Athens supplied one hundred and sixteen including Paramanos, and Plataea supplied nine, but you may count us any way you like.

Corinth promised sixty ships and supplied forty; and two of them slipped away before the fleet sailed and never returned.

Chalcis in Thrace supplied no ships but manned another twenty hulls built by Athens.

Megara supplied twenty triremes.

Aegina, which had sixty ships, supplied eighteen, and those with inferior crews.

We had a dozen good ships from Sicyon and ten ships from Sparta, or at least led by Spartan officers, and another eight from Epidavros in the eastern Peloponnesus. There was one ship from Hermione and two from far-off Ithaca. Troezen, Styra and Ceos all sent ships. Not many, but what they had.

If you count your way through them, you’ll find that it was an Athenian fleet with a handful of allies, commanded by a Spartan and full of internal divisions. When Harpagos and I compared it to the Greek fleet at Lades — where we’d had Miltiades and a dozen other first-rate pirates I could name, where we’d had the elite of every Ionian Greek seagoing city — well, we were like to have wept.

But we didn’t.

We just talked carefully through what we’d do when the rout began. We worked out where we’d go, and where we’d land. We sent Giorgos back to Piraeus to commandeer one of our merchant tubs, fill it with water and food, and bring it round. Not to share, either. But to give us food and water to outdistance pursuit the first night after the fleet broke up.

We were by no means the only doomsayers. We were merely the most practical.

Well, except the Corinthians, some of whom gave up and sailed for home, and the Corcyrans, who never came.

Practicality, of course, never won anyone their freedom. Caution is seldom the virtue needed in extremis.

After three weeks on the beaches south of Euboea, Eurybiades ordered us to sea.

Poseidon, what a mess that was.

I had good officers and willing men. My ships came off the beach quickly and in good order, and my squadron formed as it rowed, so that we reached our place on the left of the line about an hour after we were ordered to sea.

There is a current off the point of Schinias, and my oarsmen were kept busy for the next two hours trying to keep us on-station against the flow of the sea. I pitied them, but it was excellent practice, and I tried not to interfere. Besides, I had a Dionysian comedy of epic proportions playing out to my right, seaward, as the great fleet of the allies crept off the beaches, rammed each other, and slunk to their places in line. It was a wonderful thing that we all spoke Greek, so that the curses, imprecations and rage of the helmsmen could be clearly communicated.

At my elbow, Sittonax fingered his beard and laughed. ‘Just imagine, brother, what it is like in the other fleet. Greeks and Persians and Aegyptians and Phoenicians all together, by all accounts!’

Harpagos, who was aboard by virtue of having jumped from his own transom to mine, shook his head in silence. I met his eye.

‘We’re doomed,’ he said, with Laconic brevity.

We ran up the coast of Euboea with a fair wind, but Eurybiades forbade us to sail, which was good officering but bad for his popularity. We rowed. We rowed in various formations, and none of them was very good, but it was our first day moving as a fleet.

Our scouts — Locrians, for the most part, and some Ionians who’d come over from Lesvos and Chios with pentekonters — had chosen us a set of beaches on the western shore of Euboea. Euboea is like a sea-girt extension of my homeland of Boeotia, with beautiful farmland and sandy beaches, too — as close to a paradise as Greece ever gets south of Thessaly. On the western shore, there are broad beaches, but on the eastern shore it is far rockier, and a ship is exposed to the eastern winds and summer storms. The channel between Boeotia and Euboea is so narrow that there’s a bridge — you may recall my father died there.

We camped, and the next day we passed the narrows two ships at a time. And camped again.

The Euboeans had been badly handled by the Persians in Marathon year, their two principal cities taken, most of their men of worth killed or sold as slaves, and while there had been talk of recolonising it from Thebes or Athens, no real moves had been made. It is an island half the size of Attica, occupied only by shepherds, and they had done nothing to prepare for the Persians. In fact, before we made our first camp and bought whole herds of sheep, I don’t think they were fully aware of the threat.

Immediately their assembly met and started to make demands of the allied fleet — a fleet to which they contributed not a single vessel.

We ate their mutton and prepared for sea. Eurybiades sent Cimon’s squadron of Athenians forward, all the way to Chalcis, to find the enemy. He didn’t send Themistocles. He and Themistocles sailed side by side, and camped together — a visible symbol of the amity of Athens and Sparta.

We met, from time to time, formally or informally, and the occasion that I remember was of the latter kind — I was having wine with Themistocles when the Spartan navarch was announced, and he came in, wearing a faded scarlet chiton and no sandals — a slave brought a stool, which he looked at with a certain hesitation, and then he sat on it.

‘Still nothing from the Medes,’ he said.

‘Where is Leonidas?’ Themistocles asked. He indicated that the Spartan should have wine.

Eurybiades took the cup, poured a libation, and drained it. ‘Delphi or close enough. The Thebans are late.’ He looked at me. ‘I’m sure that comes as a surprise.’ He smiled.

The slave poured him another fill of watered wine. Again he rose, poured a libation, and emptied the cup. ‘Good wine,’ he said to Themistocles.

‘I have an idea,’ Themistocles began, and Eurybiades smiled.

‘Another stratagem?’ he asked, with the fondness of a father for a son.

‘Without stratagems, what chance have we against the Great King?’ Themistocles leaned forward with his fingers steepled.

Eurybiades nodded. ‘I will try every trick and every deception that your fertile mind provides,’ he said. ‘But in the end, for all our planning, we will fight — ship to ship, man to man. There is no trick that will save us then.’

‘How will we defeat them, then?’ Themistocles asked. He put his face in his hands. ‘You saw the formations today!’

‘Pray to the immortal gods,’ Eurybiades said. ‘Every cup of wine I drink, I pray to Poseidon for a storm.’

I held up my cup. When the slave filled it, I rose, and poured a libation to Poseidon, shaker of the earth and master of horses. And then I drained the cup.

Eurybiades nodded. ‘Not by the hand of man alone will the Great King be bested,’ he said.

Themistocles made a face. But he rose, poured a libation, and drank. ‘I do not like to beg the gods.’

‘Beg?’ asked the Spartan. ‘I will fight to the last breath in my body, regardless of what the gods choose. I merely ask.’

Themistocles thought of something — opened his mouth, and thought better of it. So instead, he smiled his cunning smile. ‘Besides,’ he said, ‘as you say, the wine is good.’

As a fleet, we were the worse for lacking Cimon, whose ships were truly the elite of our force. But by the fourth day, as we brought the northern tip of Euboea into sight, where Cape Artemesium with the temple of Artemis rises as a sea mark for navigators, our fleet could row, all together, in formation. We could form the wheel — not very well, but without disaster. And two hundred and fifty triremes is a very grand sight. I stood on my helmsman’s bench and named off the ships to Hector like a rhapsode reciting the ship list from the Iliad, and still my count only reached two hundred and fifty.

‘We had more at Lades,’ I said.

Nicolas was now my oar-master, and his lover Giorgos was my helmsman, with Hector and Hipponax in training under them as officers. The boys were going to become men. I thought a great deal about Hipponax, my son — because somewhere on the coast of Thrace was an enemy fleet. It not only held Dagon, my enemy. It held Archilogos of Ephesus, and on his ship might well be Briseis’ son, who was also mine. Heraklitus would be seventeen, if my maths were good.

I love the gods, but the tragedy of men entertains them all too well — our ironies and injustices spice their feasts. I prayed to Poseidon with a whole heart for a storm, but I prayed to Zeus, father of gods, to spare my sons — and most of all, to spare them the impiety of going helmet to helmet and shield to shield. And despite all this wool-gathering, I was proud of my son, and proud of Hector, who, arrayed in his armour, and two fingers taller and wider than me, looked the part of his name.

The three of us — Hipponax, Hector and I — practised on the deck of the ship. I had had four years to form Hector as a fighting man, and two years with Hipponax, and they were fast, strong and agile. Hipponax was the strongest of the three of us — a blow from his shield rim, perfectly timed, could knock me down. Hector’s heavy spear was like a serpent, darting from behind his aspis to strike. He was deceptive in the subtlest ways, showing movement of his legs and then striking down the opposing line.

I put them in the best armour that money could buy. Why not? I wore the best myself — bronze everywhere, for a ship fight. I wasn’t going to survive a swim, anyway. I had a bronze Athenian-style helmet with hinged cheek pieces and a magnificent crest in red, black and white. And a fine thorax, a bronze breastplate that mated perfectly to the back and rested on my hips and shoulders, the weight evenly distributed. But I also had armour for each thigh, and greaves of polished bronze, and a full set of armour for my right arm — a vambrace of bronze and a rerebrace of bronze with the raven of my house set on it, as on my greaves. I had a bronze knuckle guard such as the Etruscans wear, which I made myself.

I’d never worn so much armour, but I was getting older, and age slows a man and withers his muscles. And — I had sworn an oath. I shall not dwell on this, but I had determined, as a man sometimes does, not to survive defeat. I laid a trail of supplies and beach havens for the Plataeans in the event of disaster. But I would not be there to lead them.

You see, my friends, I had had a year to learn from Jocasta and Aristides, in much the way I taught my young squires. And what I learned was that life is empty without a companion, home, hearth and children. I wanted what they had, and I would have Briseis, or die. It sounds foolish — she wasn’t within a thousand stades of our coming battle.

But I knew in my heart that this was the last gasp of Greece, and if we lost, all was lost. And if all was lost, I planned to perform a deed that would live for ever in the minds of the Persians, so that they would know what the Greeks had been.

Hence, the armour.

I practised in it every day. Some days I wore it from dawn to dusk, preparing my body for the weight of it and the constraints. I danced the Pyricche in it every night, with all of the marines of my squadron and many of the oarsmen.

The day after we passed the narrows, we danced by firelight on the firm, damp strip of the beach nearest the sea. Hermogenes led the ‘reds’ and I led the ‘whites’ and I had Idomeneaus and Stygies on one side of me and Ajax and Peneleos, son of Empedocles and Antimenides, son of Alcaeus of Miletus, on my other side — Hermogenes had Hipponax and Hector, and Teucer, son of Teucer, and Hilarion and Diocles. We all wore our best — all our armour, our plumes and horsehair tails, and we carried our best spears.

Myron stood with the Plataean oarsmen, and old Draco — more than seventy years old, and still rowing for his country — took a spear, and began to tap it on a stone.

There were a dozen musicians — Ka, my archer captain, was quite skilled at the diaulos, and so we had more than just rhythm.

As the music began, men started to come down the beach. The flames licked at our bronze, and men came running. Two hundred triremes fill almost six stades of beach.

We’d danced the Pyricche on other nights, and men had come. But that night we had a curtain of stars and the whisper of the sea, and the air was hushed, and the musicians came.

We had learned my new, Spartan-style Pyricche with new motions and new tactics, but that night, we danced the old Plataean dance. It is not so complicated. At the opening, all the dancers form a small phalanx — or a great one — eight files deep and as wide as there is space and men to fill it. That night we had two groups of sixty-four — eight files by eight ranks. That was all the marines off all eleven ships and most of the officers, so that Moire and Paramanos and Gelon were all in the ranks.

The two groups started at opposite ends of the dance ground. We marched to the beat of Draco’s spear, until the lead rank of my whites almost collided with the lead rank of Hermogenes’ red, and then we turned — all together — to face the crowd, and all our spears came up together like a flock of steel birds rising into the moonlight, and we gave a great shout.

Many men in the crowd fell back a step.

In that moment, I saw Alexandros smile under his Corinthian, and realised that the Plataean at his shoulder in the second rank was Aristides the Just. I almost lost a step in delight.

Then we turned to the right together, and to the left. We knelt behind our shields and sprang to our feet, thrust low and thrust high.

The diaulos began to play, and four more joined — a wild chant to freeze the blood or make it soar — and we faced the crowd, then turned to face each other, whites against reds, and each small taxis stepped back — once, and again.

And then the dance really began. First the reds swept forward, and collided with the whites, and spears licked out, thrust high, and were turned on white’s aspides, and we were pushed back — rotating our front rank as we went, so fresh men could face the next attack, every front-rank man pivoting on his hips to slip between two new men. Then the whites retaliated, dancing forward, their spears held high, and we in turn sent them stumbling back.

We attacked again, this time with spears held low and thrust underarm. Now the whites exchanged their ranks.

Again our blows were turned, and the whites counter-attacked.

By this time, the Greeks on the beach had begun to sing the paean of Apollo. There were forty thousand Greeks on that beach.

Then both teams stepped back — one, two — and the whites faced about as the reds danced forward, so once more we were one phalanx, sixteen men deep in files and eight men wide. Older Plataeans had acted to clear the beach to the north of us, so that we could finish in our old, old way — and the former rear rank of the whites — now the front rank of the whole, facing the empty beach — leaped forward two fast steps and threw their spears — turned outward and ran to the rear, drawing their swords. In rapid succession — as fast as I can tell it — every rank hurled their heavy spears — not javelins, but fighting spears, so that the sand grew a forest of spear shafts.

And as the last rank re-formed, the whole stepped forward eight steps.

Hermogenes roared, ‘The ravens! Of Plataea!’

And every man pushed forward one step more.

And the dance was done.

I have danced that dance since I was thirteen years old — more than twenty years — but that night in Euboeoa. . that night, we danced for men and gods.

Much later, when other men were asleep, I walked the beach. I found Eurybiades checking his sentries, and offered him wine from my canteen.

He poured a libation. ‘It is my greatest fear,’ he said, pointing at two young men on the headland, ‘to lose all Greece in a moment’s inattention — the Phoenicians coming down on us like wolves in the dawn.’

He drank, and handed me my canteen.

‘Poseidon watched your dance,’ he said. He nodded sharply. ‘Goodnight.’

The next day, we left the beaches in much better order and went north. Having secured a whole set of operational beaches at Artemesium, Themistocles wanted to manoeuvre the fleet in the waters where Leonidas wanted us to fight. Simple ideas like this are the very sinews of strategy. It was a brilliant concept — to rehearse the fleet where we intended to fight. We spent two days learning the shoals and the anchorages north and south of the channel, and the narrows and the current and the tides.

The weather was superb — for Persia. Either Poseidon was spurning our prayers, or busy elsewhere. But the habit of praying to Poseidon with every cup of wine had spread to the whole fleet, so that every night when the watches were set and the fires alight, we had forty thousand men pouring their first drops of wine on the sands and shouting Poseidon’s name.

We heard that King Leonidas had reached Thermopylae, and Eurybiades sent an Athenian in command of a scout ship, a pentekonter, to Thermopylae to make sure that the fleet and army were in constant contact. The Athenian was Abronichus, son of Lysicles, who was a patron of Phrynicus and a friend of Miltiades. At Artemesium one of our volunteer Ionians, Polyas, kept a pentekonter in constant alert, ready to row for Thermopylae to report any victory or defeat we suffered. He even camped a headland separate from us, to prevent his being taken in the event of a surprise. In this way, the army and fleet of the allies could act in concert, even though they were many stades apart.

The boats went back and forth almost every day, so that we knew that although Leonidas had only three hundred Spartans with him — because of the festival, or so the Spartans would have it — he had another four hundred Thebans; he had the whole phalanx of Thespiae, almost two thousand men, including almost a hundred veterans of Marathon and my brother-in-law Antigonus, and the Phocians — almost two thousand of them, and a further two thousand Locrians.

Leonidas, then, had fewer than six thousand hoplites, where we had almost fifty thousand men with the fleet. But that seemed reasonable to the men who had designed the allied plan of campaign. All of us feared a sudden stroke from the Phoenician element of the Persian fleet — a landing in the Peloponnesus, let us say, or in Attica — that would endanger all of our plans. On the other hand, the rumours of the enormous size of Xerxes’ army — most men set the number at a million — caused us to dread it, but not to respect its speed. We knew how slow a Greek army was, and how disorganised. We assumed that with Xerxes marching so late — nearly harvest time — we need only delay him a few months. And we assumed it would take him one or two of those months to reach us. So the Greek states celebrated the Olympic games, and even Athens sent a large contingent. Sparta threw her efforts not into war, but into the Carneia.

The fleet waited to fight the Persian fleet.

And Leonidas settled down to hold the fifty-foot-wide pass of Thermopylae until the main army came up and he could have the battle that all the Spartans wanted, to try the worth of men.

Cimon’s squadron returned from their scout along the coast of Thrace. They had not found the Persian fleet, but they had made contact with refugees fleeing the Great King’s army, and they had spoken to boats whose crews claimed to have seen the enemy fleet. Cimon feared to be away too long — like the rest of us, he feared the Phoenicians’ blue-water navigational powers. He feared that while he scouted the Thracian coast, which he knew so well, they would go to sea, the bowstring to his bow — slip past him and attack us, and we could not spare a dozen crack triremes manned by professional crews with ten years’ experience.

Cimon’s closest friend was Lycomedes, son of Aeschrydus, who had been one of his father’s captains. Lycomedes came in the evening of our fifth day at Artemesium.

I saw him come in, grabbed a spear and ran to Eurybiades’ awning. All the navarchs were gathering — we were starved of news.

The young Athenian — younger than me, at any rate — shook his head in answer to a question I hadn’t heard. ‘We can’t be sure. We never saw them. But if the fishermen are to be believed, they sailed from Therma yesterday.’

Themistocles gnawed a fingernail. ‘Where are our scouts? We have three ships at Skiathos.’

Lycomedes shrugged. ‘The fishermen say that there’re Persians and Phoenicians at Skiathos,’ he said.

Themistocles looked in a bad way.

Eurybiades didn’t panic. But he did turn to one of his Spartan officers and whisper, and the man sprinted away into the gathering darkness.

‘And the land army?’ Eurybiades asked.

‘Marched from Therma in Thrace fourteen days ago,’ Lycomedes said. ‘A refugee from Thessaly — a gentleman — said the Persians are making a hundred stades a day.’

‘Impossible!’ shouted Ademanteis.

Eurybiades ran his fingers through his beard. ‘That means that Xerxes is — at most — a week away.’

That got a storm of protest.

Eurybiades ignored the murmurs and turned — I’m not sure who he was looking for, but his eye fell on me. ‘You Plataeans are always ready for sea,’ he said.

Well — we tried. He didn’t need to know how long Gelon’s ship had taken to get off the beach that morning, or that the two Ithacans had decided to join my squadron — ignoring the navarch’s order of battle — and they were always late.

‘At your service, sir,’ I said.

‘I’ve already sent a dispatch boat to Leonidas today. But he needs to know this immediately.’

I snapped my fingers and Hector appeared at my elbow. At my whisper he pulled out a pair of wax tablets.

Eurybiades nodded in Laconian satisfaction and dictated a rapid message.

Midway through, he turned. ‘Is that all?’ he asked Lycomedes.

The younger captain raised both eyebrows.

‘Cimon is lying at Aphetae tonight,’ he said. ‘He thinks the weather is about to turn bad.’

‘Why Aphetae?’ I asked. ‘Why not here?’

Lycomedes laughed. ‘I promised not to tell,’ he said, and grinned wickedly. ‘When you are out to the east, the headlands look like one single stretch of land — eh?’ He drew them on the sand, and I could see how, if you had too much southing, Artemesium and Aphetae would look like one peninsula.

He put his stick into the sand. ‘We missed Artemesium and landed at Aphetae. Cimon was one of the last to come up — he knew the error, and sent me here. We’re all still mocking Callisthenes, who led the way to the wrong beach.’

It was, as you’ll see, an easy error to make.

We didn’t have any Euboean triremes, but for the last five days we’d been fed a great deal of fish by Euboean fishermen, and Eurybiades summoned all those in camp to our impromptu council.

I walked down the beach at sunset. The sky was the warm pink of a beautiful evening. There was nothing that might have piqued my weather sense except the merest flash of white, far off on the eastern horizon, and a cool breeze out of the east. We had olive groves all the way down to the beach on the headland of Artemesium, and suddenly, like the voice of the god, all the leaves moved together.

I walked back to the council.

One of the older fishermen was humming and hawing, clearly anxious at speaking in front of so many great men. Another tall brute in a Phrygian cap pushed him gently aside.

‘Weather might be ugly the next four days, gents.’ He shrugged. ‘And it might not. Storms come off Africa — sometimes right down the channel.’ He looked at me for some reason. ‘If you are worried about the anchorage — an’ you should be — just slip back to Troezen.’

Themistocles slammed his fist in his palm. ‘We can’t anchor both flanks at Troezen. We cannot cover Leonidas from Troezen. We must be here!’

Adamenteis shoved his way forward. ‘Leonidas can’t hold the Gates against a million men! We should go back to the isthmus — now, while we have a fleet.’

Isocles of Aegina, their navarch, shook his head. ‘We should do what we should always have done — press forward and strike them when they don’t expect us, on the Thracian coast.’

‘Are you mad?’ said another — one of the Peloponnesian captains. ‘They’ll slip past us and burn our farms.’

‘Four hundred triremes don’t slip anywhere, you fool!’

‘Back to the isthmus where we can command our own fates!’

Eurybiades didn’t seem to straighten up, or fill his lungs. But his voice was like the voice of brazen-lunged Ares. ‘Ears!’ he shouted.

Men stood silent, stunned.

‘Gentlemen,’ he said into the silence, in a voice that expected their continued cooperation. ‘The allied fleet needs Poseidon’s help. If that help is going to take the form of a storm from the north and east, we do not want to be caught on a beach facing north and east.’ He nodded courteously to Adamenteis. ‘Our strategy is set, and will no longer be discussed. In the morning, we will retire to Troezen. We can be back here in six hours. No one is permitted to send dispatches home, or to leave the fleet under any circumstances. Arimnestos of Plataea will take my messages to King Leonidas and meet us at Troezen.’ He nodded.

No one offered any protest. Greece was not lost or won in that moment, but it is the moment I think of, when men say that Themistocles defeated the Medes.

His message, which Hector wrote out and I read ten times, said just this.

Xerxes left Therma fourteen day ago and makes good time.

I will retire to Troezen to allow the gods to save us, if they will.

Running down a channel at night is never easy. The wind was rising slightly and I didn’t care to use the sails, and so my oarsmen got still more practice. I left Paramanos in charge of my squadron, because he had more experience of command than any, even Demetrios, Aristides’ helmsman.

At any rate, we rowed down the dog-leg passage. From the open sea and the coast of Thessaly, it runs due west, and then turns south around the island of Euboea and then runs at an angle towards Attica.

There is a deep bay on the western shore of the dog-leg, and the narrow gates of Thermopylae — the so called ‘hot gates’ where the hot water flows from deep in the earth into shallow bowls — the gates, as I say, were formed by the mountains coming almost to the edge of the sea. Men had walled the pass many times, to stop various invasions from Thessaly and Thrace, with varying degrees of success.

At any rate, we rowed in at first light, and I won’t pretend I wasn’t very relieved to have made the voyage without touching a rock. There was a light surf running as we turned Lydia to land her stern first — the first taste of the easterly blowing down the coast of Thrace from the Hellespont. I am ashamed to admit that I was not at the helm, where I ought to have been, but amidships, shitting away my relief at a successful night navigation with Hermogenes, when we struck a rock.

We weren’t moving fast, but we started taking water immediately. The wound was bad enough that I could see where two planks had broken.

We were in no danger of sinking — we were in four feet of water, half a stade off a beautiful beach. It was a simple accident, but it angered me.

We got the ship ashore, rowing like heroes to overcome the weight of water and keep her bottom strakes off the sand, and then my rowers piled over the sides with a will and rolled her dry and carried her up the beach. It wasn’t as bad as it might have been, but we had two strakes broken and a third cracked. By the will of the gods — or blessed by Moira — I had not sold my cargo of Illyrian timber and pitch. It had seemed wiser to keep it for emergency repairs, and I had divided the cargo among the ships of my squadron, so that before I went up the beach to find the camp of the Greeks, Hermogenes and Stygies had axes in their hands and splitting wedges and two dozen willing Plataean farmers were giving them advice.

I took both of my boys and walked up the beach, and found the ancient wall, and a very alert sentry from Corinth, in full panoply. This pleased me almost as much as the rock had annoyed me, and I shouted my name and my errand with a will.

The Corinthian sent for a superior. He leaned over the low wall. ‘I’m sorry, Plataean. But the king gave orders that we admit no man until daylight.’

I waved at the sky.

The Corinthian shrugged. ‘Are you not the notorious pirate?’ he asked.

Of course, in Corinth I was a notorious pirate.

‘I have certainly been a pirate,’ I said. ‘But that Corinthian ship? I found her high and dry, sold for scrap timber in Aegypt.’

‘Really?’ he asked, and leaned out over the wall again. ‘I hear you killed all the oarsmen and officers and took her south of Cyprus.’

I shrugged. ‘Believe as you will. But all my men will back my version, and I could get priests from Aegypt to swear to it as well.’

The Corinthian nodded. ‘Of course, all that could be lies and fakery,’ he said.

I nodded.

‘So it could. What would convince you?’ I asked.

Someone came up behind him, and he had a whispered conference. A ladder was lowered.

I climbed it. At the top, the Corinthian peered at me. ‘You don’t look like a man who would massacre a citizen crew for the sake of a hull,’ he said.

The man behind him on the wall was the King of Sparta. He didn’t look the worse for sleep, and his hair was long and curly and his beard oiled. He nodded to the Corinthian. ‘What is it that engages the two of you so hotly?’ he asked.

‘A lawsuit in Corinth,’ I muttered.

The King of Sparta laughed. ‘Truly, you are Greeks,’ he said. ‘Xerxes marches, and we argue lawsuits.’

‘Xerxes is very close,’ I said. I handed the king my tablets.

He took them and nodded. ‘So I assumed from the moment my sentries reported your ship,’ he said. ‘No one sends a trireme with good news.’

That day, while the allied fleet retreated from the possibility of a storm, we worked on Lydia. We dried her hull upside down in the sun, which was good for her, and Hermogenes led the self-appointed carpenters. We had good tools, but no adze, and the Locrians brought us one, bless them.

While my friends worked, I walked through the camps, and visited. I knew men in many contingents, and I got news of the Olympics, and sat with Antigonus for a cup of wine.

We drank, and talked of farming and lawsuits.

When we’d bored his neighbours into leaving us alone, he leaned close to me — we were lying in the dry grass behind his tent. ‘Can the fleet hold?’ he asked.

I nodded. ‘Every day, we are better. We have good officers and good oarsmen. When the Olympics end, we’ll have another fifty ships.’ I leaned on my elbow. ‘We can hold the Medes for a few days. That’s all we need.’

‘And the storm?’ Antigonus asked. ‘Everyone is praying to Poseidon for a storm.’

I remember that I shrugged. Rather impiously, my outswept arm indicated the blue sea and cloudless eastern horizon. ‘The fleet is seeking anchorage from Poseidon’s wrath,’ I said in mockery. ‘Tomorrow, no doubt, we’ll go back to our station at Artemesium.’

‘A sign from the gods would hearten us all,’ he said. He drank some neat wine from a canteen and held it out to me. ‘But barring the direct involvement of the Olympians, I suppose we’ll just have to dig in our heels and fight. Are you any good at mathematics?’

I laughed. ‘Fair enough. I can work geometry.’

Antigonus nodded. ‘Well — figure this. We have six thousand hoplites and Xerxes has a million. How many do I have to kill?’

‘Two hundred, give or take a few,’ I said.

He whistled. ‘Well,’ he said. He looked at me. ‘If I fall, tell Penelope that she was. . everything I ever desired in a wife.’

There is something embarrassing about seeing another man’s love for your sister, even when you think very highly of him. So I slapped his shoulder and shrugged. ‘Tell her yourself,’ I said. ‘I’d never get it out without mocking her.’

‘Fine, then. I’ll stay alive to spite you.’ He laughed, and I laughed.

We were sharing a third cup of unwatered wine — war is hell — when there was a stir by the forward posts across the wall. There was a party of Tegeans cutting palisades, and they all stopped. There were Spartan helots cutting grass for their master’s bedding, out in the wide part of the pass, where there was a low hill and two good broad fields. The helots’ heads came up like those of horses scenting danger.

Antigonus and I started walking towards the wall.

There was dust, over to the east.

I remember putting a hand to my eyes to shade them from the sun — Hekatombaion is a cruel month for the eyes. On the beach at my feet, Hermogenes was doing the same.

All the Greeks stopped what they were doing and looked east.

The dust cloud was like a thunderhead. It swam in my vision — shimmered in the heat. My first thought was that Poseidon had sent us a storm after all.

There was a sudden gust of wind from the east with a breath of coolness and all the tents and awnings snapped, like the shields of two armies in the first moments of a battle.

My eyes began to appreciate the scale of the dust cloud I was seeing to the east.

The Tegeans were standing to arms, out on the plain, and suddenly the helots broke and ran — carrying, I might add, the forage fodder they’d been sent to fetch.

The wind stirred again, and for a moment the front of the dust cloud vanished, and I saw the flash of bright sun on steel and bronze.

I was not looking at a storm of Poseidon. I was looking at the armed might of the Great King, and it filled the horizon like a thundercloud.

Below me, on the plain, a hundred Persian cavalrymen swept past the Tegeans contemptuously, and began to shoot the fleeing helots with bows. I couldn’t tell whether they were Persians, Medes or Saka, but they rode like centaurs and shot like Apollo, and a pair of helots went down — fell face forward, and heartbeats later were speared through the back like new-caught fish.

The Tegeans formed an orb — a tiny island of defence.

The Persian cavalry came all the way down the plain at a gallop, but the helots had vanished into the dust and the brush.

Below me, I saw Ka and six Numidians draw their bows.

They loosed.

It is very difficult to shoot a man over a long range. Arrows — especially the lightest flight arrows that master-archers carry — can fly over two hundred paces, and some over three hundred paces, but such light darts are moved by every breath of wind. Further, it takes long enough for an arrow to fly two hundred paces that a galloping horse has moved ten paces in the interval.

So the lead riders came at us unscathed.

But about midway down the squadron of Persians, two riders fell backwards into the dust, and another horse screamed its trumpet cry of rage and pain and threw its rider on the ground, and the compact Persian troop burst apart like a nest of hornets stoned by boys.

The helots leapt to their feet and dashed for the wall, and the guard — all Mantineans — turned out like heroes, formed under the wall, and covered the helots as they ran.

My sailors and marines were formed and ready to move, with Hermogenes, adze in hand, in his moment of glory.

Ka’s archers loosed.

All the armed Greeks on the plain before the walls charged the Persian cavalry at a run, the way we’d done at Marathon. Another Persian fell, and someone waved a sword — and they ran.

Horse archers run all the time. It means nothing. They run so that they can find a better position from which to fill you full of arrows. But that day, when they ran, it was Greece that had carried the day. Two helots lay dead, and three Persians had gone to Hades with them.

If there was irony in that little victory, it might be that all the killing had been done by a handful of Numidian archers, but let us not parse this too carefully. The Tegeans and the Mantineans and the Plataean oarsmen met far out on the plain, slapped each other’s backs, and marched into the gates like the heroes of the Iliad. The Persian cavalry ran all the way back to Xerxes.

Xerxes made camp across the plains, at Trachis, where there was room to camp his army.

Antigonus and I had shouted ourselves hoarse like spectators at the Olympics, cheering on our hoplites, too far from the action to even trouble for our armour. But when the Persians ran, we cheered with everyone else.

When the Mantineans returned, we discovered that they had a prisoner. He was the man whose horse had taken so many arrows — he’d been knocked unconscious by a direct hit on his helmet.

I went down to translate. King Leonidas was far too much the gentleman to interrogate a prisoner, but all the Greeks crowded around — the Spartans as much or more than anyone — seeking to touch the Persian. He was quite muddle-headed from the blow, and when we showed him his peaked bronze helmet with a dent three fingers deep, he shuddered.

‘Are you Persian?’ I asked.

His head turned in shock. ‘I am Hyperanthes, son of Hydarnes, friend of the king!’ he said bravely. ‘You speak Persian brilliantly.’

I nodded. ‘I am Arimnestos of Plataea.’

‘The ambassador! Mardonius said you were dead!’ The young man shook his head and then sank it in his hands.

I gave him water. ‘You needn’t fear. When you feel better, the king has decreed you will be returned to your host. King Leonidas wishes the Great King to see that Greeks behave according to the laws of the gods.’

The young man brightened up considerably. Perhaps he thought we’d torture him, or kill him and eat him — who knows what lies the Persians told about us? Certainly we told a few about them.

We were standing on the low hill behind the wall, which gave the best view of the enemy. He got to his feet to see.

‘Sit!’ I said. ‘When you feel better — when your army has stopped marching. .’ I pointed at the dust cloud.

He laughed. ‘You think that is the army?’ he exclaimed. ‘That is my father’s regiment — the Immortals. They have marched forward to cover the camp while the slaves build it. The army is behind them.’

Leonidas exclaimed in delight, like a man seeing a beautiful treasure. ‘Those are the Immortals?’ he asked.

The Spartans all crowded to the wall to look. You’d have thought a beautiful woman was walking down the beach to bathe.

The Tegeans and Mantineans and Thespians and Plataeans all looked at each other. And then they looked at the dust cloud that seemed to float all the way back to Asia.

There is a particular arrogance to the humility of some men, and most especially those who claim for themselves the will of the gods. But I will claim that Poseidon favoured me that day — wth the rock under his water, and the damage to my ship.

Because, thanks to the rock, my ship was pulled all the way up the beach of Thermopylae, fifty feet above the waterline, when the storm struck.

Had we been at sea — perhaps we might have weathered the storm. But it blew straight from the east down the first leg of the channel and struck the beach at Thermopylae with gale-force winds and waves as tall as a man. The pass — never very wide — was closed to the width of a wagon in some places by the fierce run of water.

The first night that the storm blew, I walked down to the bow of my ship and watched the waves roll in. The storm hit us with no harbinger but those odd, cool gusts of wind, and I stood in the darkness and blessed the fishermen of Artemesium, and Cimon, who knew these waters better than any of the rest of us.

Hermogenes came and stood with me in the dark.

The wind began first to tug at my chlamys, and then — with the force of a blow — tore my cloak right out of its pin. Hermogenes caught it before it vanished.

A wave broke at our feet, and the water came to within six feet of the ram.

Hermogenes turned and ran. I wondered what madness had seized him, but he came back with a skin of Plataean wine and my fine Persian cup of beaten gold, which I’d had from the Queen Mother. And behind him were my oarsmen, leaning into the wind, with resined torches and the ship’s four great oil lanterns, all lit.

We stood on the beach and sang the hymn to Poseidon. We were farmers, not sailors — or most of us were — so we praised him as the creator and breaker of horses, and the shaker of the earth. The rushing monster of the storm drowned most of our song, but I stood there — my chiton soaked by waves and the first lashing of rain, as the lightning forked on the horizon, over and over — and I filled my brave gold cup with the agates and lapis and the largest emerald in Greece to the brim with the wine grown in my own fields in Green Plataea, and then I hurled it as far as I could into the sea.

Let me tell you a thing.

The waters off Thermopylae are as shallow and clear as the waters off any great beach in all of Hellas.

But no man has ever found my cup of gold, or the rock that tore a hole in Lydia.

Only fools doubt that the gods walk with men.

For three days, the Hellesponter storm blew like Poseidon’s will — and for three days, the Persian army sat opposite us and did nothing. The Spartans champed at the bit like racehorses waiting for the Olympic races, eager and ready, fully exercised. They sat on the wall and combed out their hair, danced their dances, ran races, and waited for their battle.

The Tegeans and Mantineans and the rest were perhaps a little less eager, but Xerxes’ hesitation heartened everyone.

Because I had drunk wine with the taxiarchs, I knew that the Great King’s apparent hesitation was created by the weather. Unless the enemy were planning to cross the pass and attack us one at a time — one file — they had to wait for the abnormally high waves to subside.

And unless the Phoenicians had better access to Poseidon than we had, the Great King had to be waiting to see where his fleet was. We all prayed that it had been caught on the sea by the storm, but I suspected otherwise. It had struck us at the edge of darkness. Farther east, it would still have struck after any sane navarch had all his ships on the beach.

All we could do was wait. The same sea that closed the pass made it impossible for us to sail. To make matters worse, we had to guard the ship day and night, because we’d beached her too far along the beach — when we’d landed, it had been Greece, but now it was the no man’s land between the hosts.

I wore myself out, walking on the soft sand back and forth between the wall, the army and my ship.

Three times parties of Persian horsemen came along the beach, or along the coast road above it, testing the footing for their horses. They would ride up close to the wall, and the Spartans would wave at them.

The third day, Ka strung his bow. The rain was dying away, but I put a hand on his arm. ‘They don’t even have their bows,’ I said.

‘They are still spies,’ Ka spat.

I shrugged. ‘Plenty of time for killing later,’ I said.

Later on that third day, as the sea began to recede, I led a party of Greeks with a herald and the prisoner. We rode all the way to the edge of the Persian camp, and no one challenged us until we left the road for the open ground north of it. Then a party of horsemen appeared, as if by magic. They’d been hidden by a fold of earth and a rock outcropping. I knew they were great horsemen, but it was an excellent reminder.

I knew the troop’s commander immediately, and I rode up to the giant, Amu, and saluted him, and he embraced me. This came as a shock to all the Greeks.

‘How is your son?’ I asked. ‘Araxa?’

‘Hah! He outranks me!’ he shouted with the delight of a father. ‘In the Guards, leaving me to outpost duty like this. And who is this lordling?’

I waved him over. ‘We took him the first day. He seems to be recovered, and so we send him back. King Leonidas of Sparta wishes the Great King to know that we will abide by the laws of war.’

Amu frowned. He looked around, saw horsemen coming from the camp, and shook his head. ‘The word is all of you are to be treated as rebels. No prisoners.’ He spat. ‘Because Mardonius is a fool. Those are his men coming. Best ride away.’ He smiled. ‘I’ll delay them. Listen, my friend. This will be ugly. Take your women and go somewhere else — eh?’

This disquieted me. I had expected better of the Great King than to have Greeks — win or lose, we were not rebels — treated as criminals.

We rode away.

I left Leonidas that evening, because I thought I could get my ship to sea, and because the Persian outposts were pushing forward as the sea retreated. I didn’t want to lose my ship to cavalrymen.

Leonidas did me the honour of clasping my hand.

‘Any message for Eurybiades?’ I asked.

The king shrugged. ‘No — not until we taste their bronze will we know what we have to do.’

I nodded at the sea. ‘I have a fast, dry ship and a good crew. I intend to run east and see if I can find the enemy fleet before I go south to Eurybiades.’ I smiled. ‘Just in case I don’t come back.’

He slapped me on the back with Spartan goodwill, and I ran for my ship. Even as I clambered over the stern, there were Persian cavalry and some odd-looking psiloi prowling down the beach.

The Persian camp stretched over forty stades.

The Greek camp covered a little less than two.

The patch held beautifully, and we had minimal stores, a dry hull and a favourable wind. Lydia was a trihemiolia, so I raised the yard, hung the mainsail, and we were away. The Greek army cheered.

It is roughly three hundred stades from the coastline at Thermopylae to the headland at Artemesium — perhaps not as the raven flies or the seabird, but as my oarsmen row. We crossed to the Euboean shore before full darkness set in, to be free of the Medes, and made a hasty camp and ate mutton we didn’t pay for, and we rose before dawn, had her sternpost wet before the rosy fingers of the most beautiful young goddess danced across the world, and the west wind held and we ran before the wind once we were out in the channel.

We hadn’t travelled a parasang before we found the first wreck — a Phoenician turned turtle. Her oars were still in the oar leathers. She’d been rolled while at sea, and there were dead men — bloated, horrible dead men — trapped in her lines and under her deck.

An hour later and we’d seen enough floating wreckage for it to be the whole Persian fleet.

My rowers sang a hymn to Poseidon.

We passed six more floating wrecks, and the last two had no oars in them — they’d been anchored.

That told me a story.

We ran along the south coast of Thessaly, and just north of Artemesium we met up with Cimon, on the same errand but on the opposite tack and headed for the fleet.

‘You beach at Artemesium and keep watch!’ he called. ‘I’m for Malia.’

The end of his shout was lost as his ship swept by at the speed of a galloping horse, but his intent was clear enough.

We beached at Artemesium and put up a tower on the headland. We were alone, where a few days before there had been two hundred triremes. The northernmost beach was full of driftwood and dead men.

Hermogenes drafted a watch schedule and Hector wrote it all down on the wax, and we pulled Lydia clear of the water to keep her dry.

Hermogenes pointed at the tower — an old trick from my time with Miltiades.

‘Like old times,’ he said.

The next morning, I took Lydia to sea as soon as there was enough light to get her off the beach. We ran north and east under the boat sail, keeping well out into the fairway and with two men slung in a small boat from the mainmast, a trick I’d learned on Sicily.

The sea to the north was empty. We found another trireme, turned turtle, all her oars still aboard, some smashed. I hove to, fingered my beard, and then salvaged her.

Imagine our shock to find two Phoenicians alive under the capsized hull. They’d been in the water three days. They were as weak as kittens and out of their wits, but to Greeks, the men Poseidon preserves are sacred. We hauled them aboard and they drank water until I thought they might explode — in fact, Hermogenes took the water from them, afraid they’d die of it. It was hours before they could talk.

In the meantime, with a dozen men to help me, we got ropes on the gunwales of the Phoenician and rolled her upright, and then, with half the oarsmen in her, we baled her dry enough to tow, with two dozen oarsmen aboard just to keep her head up and land her. We only had thirty stades to make, but it took us until nightfall, and we had to row all the way, as our mast was down. The setting sun showed us the allied fleet coming up the channel. Eurybiades had them practising a reverse crescent. They could fill fifteen stades of water and still have a small reserve, and they looked magnificent, and my throat tightened.

I turned to Hermogenes. ‘We may yet do this, brother,’ I said.

He grinned. ‘There are the Plataeans!’ he called, and sure enough, on the left of the line, there were ten ships all as neat as a farmer’s furrow.

We wallowed our way to the beach and landed before the first ships to the right of the line — Athenians under Cimon — got ashore. I had claimed the spots right by the olive groves — better shade, and a deeper beach. Cimon cursed, but he leaped ashore and we embraced.

‘You have a capture!’ he said, envious but happy for me.

I shook my head. ‘She’s Poseidon’s capture,’ I said. ‘The storm got her. I have two men who were alive in the wreck.’

I was gathering a crowd. Cimon took my shoulder and we went along the beach to where I’d had my tent set in the olive grove, and Hector gave Cimon wine. We sent Hipponax for Eurybiades and Sittonax condescended to walk off and find Themistocles — moving slowly, to show that he was above such vulgar considerations as crisis or work.

Themistocles came first. He hugged me close.

‘You two!’ he said, including Cimon. ‘I thought we’d never get the fleet back here. Adamenteis is still threatening to sail for the isthmus. And then Cimon shows up off the beach and says that the Persians are wrecked and Greece is saved, and all our cowardly allies. . that is to say. .’ He nodded to Eurybiades.

The Spartan nodded and looked at me. ‘Prisoners?’ he asked.

I saluted. ‘Navarch, while they are prisoners, they were rescued after three days’ shipwreck. To us, that makes them sacred.’

Cimon nodded. Even pirates have rules.

Themistocles frowned. ‘None of that foolishness, now. We need their information.’

Everyone looked at me. This is the price of the great reputation — sometimes men expect you to speak, to make decisions, to be the great man.

I bowed to Themistocles. ‘At some point, we define ourselves by what we do. We begged Poseidon for his favour. He answered us with a storm. Is this our thanks?’

Themistocles shot me a glance of scorn mixed with pity — that I was one of those men, so easily led, so easily fooled. I hope I shrugged.

Cimon nodded. ‘But surely we can ask them questions?’

That seemed suitable to everyone, even Eurybiades, who clearly approved of my answer. When they were brought, they were seated comfortably, and given wine. They sat listlessly.

‘Can you tell me what happened to your fleet?’ Cimon asked in passable Phoenician.

‘It is all wrecked,’ the younger said. ‘No one could survive such a storm.’

The older man glared at him.

The younger shrugged. ‘What is it to me? Listen, then. The beaches were too narrow for the whole fleet, and our admiral ordered the store ships to have the most protected landings. The army had priority over the navy in all things. The ships of Halicarnassus and Ephesus took the inner moorings, which left us to anchor out in rows of forty ships, eight deep in the bay we chose. Eight deep.’ He shook his head.

The older man stared off over my shoulder. ‘We anchored bow and stern. We are not fools. I had six stones under the bow, and four under the stern — every anchor on my ship. We started to move with the first wind.’

All around my tent, men had begun to babble with relief — with delight.

Poseidon had destroyed the Persian fleet. Or so it appeared.

‘How many ships did the Great King muster, when he sailed this summer?’ I asked.

The older man rocked his head — as Phoenicians do. ‘A thousand? Fifteen hundred?’ He shrugged. ‘I never counted.’

That made me swallow.

A thousand ships?

But the other captains were delighted with their news. When it was clear that the two captives would say no more — at least, not willingly — Eurybiades summoned his messenger and sent him to Leonidas with what we knew. He was careful, and only stated that Poseidon had inflicted a defeat on Xerxes’ fleet.

But the Greek fleet rejoiced.

It was a long night. I heard men — men for whom I had little love and little respect — brag of what they would have done to the Persians had their fleet only endured. I’m an old warrior — I know that no man loves the moment when death is there to look you in the eye, and no man really loves war more than once or twice — that older men have to play the game or be thought cowards, when really they’d like to be at home with their wives. I know this, but the posturing and bragging in the Greek fleet that night was sickening.

Worst of all, I was the hero of the hour. Somehow my salvage of a stricken trireme had become a capture, a conquest, and men would stumble drunkenly to my side to take my hand.

Gah! The fools.

At any rate, Hermogenes was not a fool, nor was Sekla nor any of our captains. Demetrios — the leftmost captain in the line — had commanded the last ship to come in to the beach, and he was insisting he’d seen sails on the eastern horizon.

I had only seen enough wreckage for about forty ships. If they had a thousand ships. .

I went to sleep to the sound of men working by torchlight on the salvaged ship’s hull. The hammers rang hollow, driving pegs into the side.

I awoke to shrieks and desperate cries, as if the Medes were upon us in the dawn.

And they were.

The sun was barely on the horizon, a red ball that threatened further bad weather, and the sea was like a floating forest to the north and east. It filled the channel as far as the eye could see to the right, all the way out into the open ocean.

I clambered up the headland with Hermogenes, to find Sekla and Sittonax already there, Giannis and Alexandros climbing from the other side, and Themistocles standing apart with Eurybiades.

Aristides emerged from behind Alexandros.

My other friends were climbing up — there was Aeschylus, and there, Phrynicus’s friend Lycomedes, and Cimon and Gelon and Hilarion, of all men.

It was as if all the friends of my life — every man I’d met since Lades — was gathered on one low headland. Lades killed a generation — worse, it killed a culture, a kind, gentle culture.

All the men around me stared in horror at the Great King’s fleet.

However many Poseidon had culled, what was left was three or four times the size of the allied fleet. Perhaps more. It covered the ocean. I had been at Lades. I have been told — by Phoenicians — that the Persian fleet at Lades was the greatest fleet of triremes ever assembled.

Perhaps. Certainly, the Great King’s fleet had smaller vessels in hordes — pentekonters, triaconters, even Aegyptian lembi. But it also had triremes in numbers that staggered the eye, so that you had to keep looking away and looking back.

Eurybiades couldn’t tear his eyes away. It was the doom of Greece.

A thousand ships.

Aristides said, ‘Now is Troy avenged.’

At my side, Moire chuckled. ‘He has every ship in the Levant here.’ He glanced at me. ‘Good time to run a cargo to Aegypt.’

I laughed.

As had happened the night before, everyone turned to look at me. Adamenteis of Corinth had just come up the rise from the temple, and he was staggered — as, to be fair, we all were — and he turned as if I’d struck him.

And again I felt the presence of the gods. I had the attention of the commanders.

I’m no orator.

But perhaps Athena whispered into my head, or my ancestor Herakles.

So I finished my laugh by turning to all of them. ‘By Poseidon,’ I said. ‘Did you think it would be easy to defeat the Great King? Did you think that by sailing — unwillingly — a few stades from home, the greatest power under the gods would be defeated?’

I pointed my spear out over the Persian fleet. ‘There they are, my friends. Poseidon struck them a mighty blow. Will we do less?’

I’d like to say that they gave me three mighty cheers and we all ran for our ships, but it wasn’t like that at all.

Adamenteis of Corinth was visibly resistant to my rhetoric. He stood tall and raised his hand. ‘We must abandon this post immediately, before we are all destroyed,’ he said. He looked at me with contempt. ‘If that is what is left after the storm, then Poseidon has done them no damage at all. Perhaps it is the will of the gods. But there is no combination of luck, guile, bravery and tactics that will allow us to defeat that fleet.’

‘I remember men saying the same, at the last war council before Marathon,’ I said. ‘They were neither fools nor cowards, Adamenteis. They were merely. . wrong. We can defeat that fleet.’

‘Silence, puppet of the Athenians. You are a pirate — a rogue and a criminal — and have no right to speak here.’ Adamenteis turned. ‘He has more friends among the Medes than any man here — he’ll fall soft no matter what eventuates. Listen to me! We have lost. The Great King will stamp us under his foot like insects.’

I was considering putting my fist in his face when Eurybiades snapped, ‘Silence.’

Every eye went to him.

‘Neither Arimnestos nor Adamenteis has been appointed by the League of Allies to command this fleet,’ he said simply. ‘I have.’

He could not stop glancing at the Persian fleet. Even after ten minutes of looking at it, it was still a shock.

‘I will hold a council in my tent after sacrifices have been made,’ he said. He turned to Adamenteis. ‘Courtesy and dignity are essential tools of good debate,’ he said.

Spartans know how to put the knife in, and how to twist it, too.

Our camp was right there. We had been making our sacrifices on the outdoor altar for the temple of Artemis — no man of Plataea has any quarrel with the virgin goddess, and Hermogenes, quite wisely, dedicated our new ship to her, with the name Huntress.

So we lingered on the headland. Ever seen the results of a street riot? Or an earthquake? Where men and women lie dead, or mangled, and you can’t tear your eyes away?

A thousand ships.

I made a good sacrifice, as did Aristides. I thought of my daughter, who was no doubt dancing for the huntress at that moment far to the south at Brauron. I watched Sekla — who was very much a devotee of the virgin goddess — perform his sacrifice.

Each sacrifice was as nearly perfect as men could make them. The lambs we had purchased from the locals went willingly, heads up, without a bleat.

By the time Ajax, the man who’d served in Persia as a mercenary, made his cut, Aristides was shaking his head.

‘I have never seen such a favourable omen,’ he said.

Draco came over on his stick — far and away the oldest man of the Plataeans. ‘I just killed a lamb with a single blow,’ he cackled, wiping the blood from his hands. ‘Not a spot on her liver or her kidneys.’ He winked at me. ‘You hear about these things from old priests, and then you think they’re full of shit.’ He shrugged.

We all looked out to sea.

The Persian ships were landing at Aphetai. It couldn’t really be seen in the haze, so that the vast seaborne forest seemed to slip over the edge of the world and vanish.

But one heavy squadron was coming up from a different angle. I counted sixteen triremes in two columns. They were in a disciplined formation, sails down, and rowing.

Hermogenes was eating olives. He shrugged. ‘Scouting?’ he asked.

Paramanos shook his head. ‘They’ve mistaken the anchorage. Look — they were flanking the main fleet, out to sea, and they’ve gone too far south.’

They were thirty stades away. My guess was that the nearest ship was Carian or Aeolian — perhaps even Lesbian. But that was only a gut feeling from years at sea.

‘Could they be changing sides?’ I asked.

‘Would you?’ asked Paramanos.

Humour is a useful antidote to fear.

I had all my captains at hand. And my ships were ready.

‘Let’s get them,’ I said.

As the oarsmen poured into the hulls and ran them off the beach, I knelt in the sand and sketched my plan. Listen, friends — when you fight, some men say a good sword is best, and some say a good spear — but I say friends, comrades and dependable officers are the things I most love.

Thanks, Sappho. .

‘My intention is to double the head and tail of their line and never let it become a line fight,’ I said. ‘Paramanos will lead the western squadron against their left, and I’ll take the eastern against their right.’ I directed them into two groups. I would lead the right hand, with Lydia, Huntress, Hera, Nemesis, Parthanos, Sea Horse and Machaira.

Paramanos would lead the left with his own Black Raven, and he had Athena Nike, Andromeda, Storm Cutter and Amastis.

Sekla — who would be at the extreme right of my group — fingered his short, curly beard. ‘You don’t want us to engage,’ he said.

‘No — envelop. Sweep wide.’ I was watching the ships get off the beach. The battle had already begun, for me. The Persians were fully hull up, now, even in the haze. You could see that the lead ship in the western column was painted a bright blue.

A runner came along the beach — I knew him at a distance to be Cimon’s big-headed cousin Pericles, running as if he were racing for laurel. Closer to hand, Eurybiades himself was coming down the low cliff that separated us from the olive groves.

‘They will expect a head-to-head fight. We have lighter ships. Our ships are dry and our rowers are at least eager. I want to try them in a running fight.’

I didn’t speak my innermost mind, which was this; in a running fight, at worst we’d lose one or two ships, and none would be lost to the sort of amateur errors that our oarsmen might make in their first fight. My greatest fear was friends fouling friends.

My other innermost thought was that the gods were with us, and I was going to give them the opportunity to show us an omen. Why attempt a small victory?

Sekla nodded sharply.

Paramanos grinned. ‘You are still a mad bastard,’ he said. ‘You mean, of all these fine ships, only you and I are going beak to beak.’

I smiled. Eurybiades was ten steps away and Pericles was coming in for the finish and all my men were aboard. The marines had their thorakes on.

‘That’s what I mean,’ I said quietly, and clasped his hand.

‘Because we won’t cock it up,’ he said.

‘That’s right,’ I agreed.

Eurybiades came up with a dozen officers. ‘You intend to engage?’ he asked.

Pericles stood and panted.

‘Before you finish singing the hymn to Athena,’ I said.

‘Gods go with you, Plataean.’ He leaned close. ‘You must not lose.’

I looked at Pericles. He nodded with unusual deference. ‘Cousin Cimon says he’ll have five ships off the beach before the sun sets a finger’s breadth,’ he said. ‘He says to tell you,’ the boy had the grace to flush, ‘that Athens can’t trust a bunch of Boeotian farmers to get this right.’

I laughed. ‘Come along, boy, and see how we do.’ I saluted the navarch, who stood in his scarlet chiton at the edge of the beach and watched us.

All my ships were afloat. It was the turn of the tide in a light wind, and my oarsmen held Lydia just at the edge of the surf so that I was only wet to my crotch getting aboard. Young Pericles soaked his chiton.

I ran for the bow. The enemy squadron were still coming on, four stades away, with bow waves. It struck me as possible that they had not made a navigation error — that rather, they had brave men who held the allied fleet in contempt and had come to show it.

I looked at my own ships. Waved, and Hector raised my bronze-covered shield and gave a signal, and my squadron’s oars dipped — all together, or close enough, so that there was a mighty flash, the setting sun on all the blades together.

Nothing for it now.

We were the seventh ship from the right — the centre of the line coming off the beach, with Paramanos three horse-lengths away, but we began to angle east and west immediately.

The enemy squadron was in two columns of eight ships, and just as we came off the beach they began to spread out from their rowing columns into a single line. There was no way of knowing whether they had detected our enmity or whether they were merely preparing to land on the beach.

Sekla was heading north and east aggressively, and the rest of my half of the squadron held station on him, using the light westerly to push our hulls east, which caused us to move faster and farther to the flank than Paramanos, who also had to fight the current.

Three stades. In a sea fight, everything seems to take for ever, and then, suddenly, everything happens at once.

Ka and his archers pushed past me into the bow. Every one of them had two quivers, now, and they hung on pegs that hadn’t been there before.

Hipponax and the marines waited on the catwalk. Hector’s face was as white as chalk. But he and Hipponax were grinning, all their teeth showing, refusing to let each other see their fears, like young men since the siege of Troy. Behind them stood Siberios, who watched them with an intent, half-amused look.

I ignored the boys. ‘When we strike, we’re going to take. Get aboard and keep her. Take command and make the rowers go for the beach.’

He was watching the enemy over my shoulder. ‘You won’t have any marines,’ he said.

‘Let me worry about that. You’ll be on your own.’ I slapped him on the shoulder, and he laughed.

‘Oh, as to that, I’ll have Hector and Achilles,’ he mocked.

I got to the midships platform, where the main deck begins and all the sailors stand. They were armed. We were a rich ship — every deck man had a cuirass and greaves and a sword and spear and helmet.

One stade out, the enemy had formed something like a line, and they had recognised that we were not friends. I could see three ships that looked Phoenician, and the rest looked Ionian or Aeolian — Greeks. The blue ship had Asian decoration under her beak and looked Carian.

The last ship in the leftmost squadron had red sides over dirty white.

Dagon.

I almost changed course, but it is a pitiful navarch who can’t follow his own plan, even for revenge, even for Apollo. But I watched that ship for many beats of my heart, and I didn’t think about my son, my daughter, Archilogos, mortality, or even Briseis. I watched the evil Carthaginian.

The squadron facing me began to break up.

You must understand, to understand all that follows — you have only the tactics and signals you have practised in advance. You cannot change a plan at sea. You can’t tell all your trierarchs if you suddenly have a better idea. If something unexpected happens, every trierarch has to think for himself. In a line fight, no one has to think.

As they woke up to the fact that we were enemies, we were also forcing them to make decisions. We weren’t going to go ram to ram in line.

In another place and time, they might simply have run through our centre — but five stades behind us was a beach full of Greeks, with ships arming and coming off. None of them was actually ready yet except Cimon’s pirates, and they, of course, were twenty stades to the south along the beach.

Most of the ships facing me turned outward to fight. Two of the eight turned end for end and ran for it.

Instead of going seven of ours against eight of theirs, now we were seven to six, and not a blow had been struck.

I was going ram to ram against the blue ship with the gold decoration. It was a very heavy ship — pretty, with heavy cat-heads intended to break my oars and kill my rowers.

I ran back to Hermogenes like a mother hen.

‘You see those beams?’ I asked.

He withered me like Medusa — which I deserved.

Because we had a superb crew, we’d left our ramming speed to very late. And our opponent wasn’t superb — he’d practised about as much as the Ionians practised before Lades. You make an opponet ten feet tall in your mind — and then, in reality. .

Ka and his men began to pour arrows over the bow at such a quick pace that it looked as if our ships had a thick black rope connecting the bows.

The enemy helmsman flicked his bow to his right. Helmsmen generally do, just before going bow to bow.

I said, ‘Now!’ and Nicolas, now the oar-master, slammed his staff on the deck and our ship leaped.

It was a high-risk manoeuvre. Ships generally try to go slightly off line just before contact, but Hermogenes used speed, instead.

The enemy helmsman had to assume he’d turn slightly off line and then turn back at the last moment, but he misjudged our speed, and our ram struck the shoulder of his ship just aft of the cedar beams of his cat-head — a steep angle, and not a quick kill, but our sharp bow swept down his oar-bank even as we got our oars inboard and men were screaming and Ka was standing in the bow shooting down into the enemy oar-deck and then Hipponax and Hector leaped together. .

Ka ran along the catwalk, shooting. .

My armoured deck crew poured grapples into their midships bulwarks and Siberios led the marines over the bow. .

My son and his friend stood back to back on the enemy catwalk and killed men. A tall man in armour covered in gold — who was he, the Great King himself? — flung a javelin and it went through my son’s thigh and he fell, and Hector stood over him. .

Hermogenes’ hand closed on my arm. ‘You aren’t in your armour. You are the navarch.’

Both were true.

But my son was lying in a pool of his own blood on an enemy deck.

All of my marines were away. To the north and east, Sekla was running free, past the easternmost Phoenician, and all my other ships were engaged. A glance to the west — Paramanos had broken an Aeolian ship in half. He was, after all, the best helmsman in the world. None of the other ships was engaged yet.

‘Cut the grapples!’ I roared, leaving my son to whatever fate awaited him.

Deck crewmen cut the ropes of the very grapples they’d thrown. Others used pikes to push us off.

Siberios killed the man in gold armour, hammering his teeth into his throat with the pommel of his sword.

Hipponax hamstrung a Carian marine in full panoply from his postion lying on the deck, and Hector stabbed the man in his open-faced helmet with his spear — Hector fought fastidiously, like a cat, his spear flicking out.

I wanted to bandage my son’s wound. I wanted to fight.

‘Oars out!’ roared Hermogenes. Hermogenes, who could not command his way out of a linen sack. He glared at me.

Well he might.

‘Arm me,’ I snapped at young Pericles.

He didn’t bother to protest. He opened my bronze thorakes and got it on me.

Sekla was turning in, and Machaira was indeed going to cut like a knife.

The two fleeing ships had their sails up.

Paramanos was turning Black Raven to the west, where Harpagos lay oar bank to oar bank with a bigger Phoenician, their marines clearly engaged.

The red and white ship — it had to be Dagon, it had a Phoenician build — turned suddenly away from Athena Nike. I had to assume that Dagon had found a good helmsman. Or perhaps it wasn’t Dagon at all.

But the red and white ship turned so fast her starboard oars were buried in the water and Athena Nike swept by to ram Harpagos’s opponent amidships, killing that ship instantly.

I had a moment to regret that we were Greeks killing Greeks.

I turned west, against an unengaged Carian. He was rowing desperately, at full ramming speed, while turning as fast as he could, and all he managed to do was to lose the turning contest to me. We turned in place, our starboard cushions reversed — and again, the quality of Lydia’s oarsmen allowed us to leap to ramming speed and catch him just forward of the helmsman’s station. We didn’t have enough way to break the hull, but our ram caught his gunwale and began to roll his ship over, and Ka’s archers cleared the Carian’s command deck. We came to a stop — I’d ordered the oars in rather than risk them — and there we lay, our bow against his helm.

I ran down the catwalk and leaped over the marine box — the gate was still open from the first attack — and I stepped down on to our ram rather than leaping.

Ka’s arrows flicked over my head.

No marines waited for me, and I put my back to the enemy gunwale and rolled on to their deck at the stern, and everyone there was dead.

The rowers were in shock.

Nicolas — the oar-master — came behind me, with a dozen sailors, but there was no resistance from the oarsmen.

‘Greeks!’ I roared. ‘We are your liberators, not your enemies!’

No one looked relieved, but no one came at me with a sword, either.

‘Get her ashore,’ I said. I stepped up on to the gunwale amidships and leaped for my own ship — and barely made it, scrambling up the side like a terrified cat.

I used to leap from ship to ship without a qualm for the fate that awaited me if I missed.

I looked west. The red and white ship was running. The blue and gold Carian was now rowing sedately for the allied beach.

Cimon’s ships were angling into the flank of Paramanos’ melee.

It was over.

Gelon was in the only boarding fight still burning, and Hermogenes put the helm down even while I acted as my own oar-master and we turned, under way again. Lydia’s dry, light hull seemed to be powered by the gods.

Gelon had caught a tiger. He’d got the worst of a ramming exchange with a big-hulled Phoenician and had then been flooded with the other ship’s desperate marines. Giannis, in the lightest and fastest of the Athenian public ships, had also gone head to head with a Phoenician and couldn’t help. Sekla had brought Machaira into Sea Horse’s adversary.

I went for Nemesis. I could see Gelon fighting hand to hand by his helm. He didn’t have time for me to manoeuvre.

I pointed to Hermogenes. ‘Our bow to his stern,’ I said. Then I ran forward and grabbed all the best armed sailors. Armoured like hoplites, they had the most remarkable assortment of weapons — chains, axes, a trident. I had no idea how we’d do against real Phoenician marines.

Hermogenes kissed the stern of Nemesis as if he’d been a helmsman all his life and not a farmer. I was ready, standing over the ram. I went sideways, from the top of the marine box into the helmsman’s bench. .

Nemesis was almost taken.

The first Tyrian made the simple mistake of thinking he could finish Gelon before I was on him. Gelon got a foot on the man’s spear against the deck, and he turned to see my spear take his life, and then I was beside my former slave, and suddenly, everything felt right — my armour, the sun on my back, the deck under my feet.

As if my body said, Ah! This!

There was a rush — a press. I punched repeatedly with the rim of my aspis, putting my opponents against the rail, bouncing one man so hard that he stumbled and Giorgos got a chain over his head and put a dagger in his neck, and then we went at them. I rifled my spear at an officer and killed him and then I had my lovely long sword in my hand — thrust, change feet, slip on the blood and cut to cover the loss of balance.

Feint, and see my effort wasted as a long black arrow kills my opponent.

I punch with my aspis, and the spear shaft of his weapon crosses my chest and I get it in my shield hand and my enemy is wide open for my thrust. I have time to watch him watch his death.

I punch with the shield rim and cut with the sword, taking a spearhead cleanly off its shaft, and a spear comes from behind me to finish him. Young Pericles, with no armour on, is fighting as my hypaspist.

What joy.

I go sword to sword with a Phoenician. He is a big man in red, with gold on his armour, and at some point I have moved from Nemesis to his ship. He bashes at me with his shield, his shoulder in the top of the rim, and I meet him shield to shield and I flick my long blade up into his eyes. I don’t score, but the blow to his helmet rocks his head back and he stumbles. I thrust, passing my right foot forward over my left even as he backs away a step, and he sweeps his sword across his body because his shield is committed — I roll my wrist over the parry, and I can see his eyes as he tries to reverse his parry. .

I roll my sword over his again, the double deception I learned in Sicily from Polymarchos, and my thrust goes in just under his ribs, right through his gold-plated bronze scales and into his gut and down into his pelvis — one of the prettiest blows of my life.

Unfortunately, I have to leave my beautiful sword in his body.

Bah — sometimes I relive it. Is it terrible, that ripping a man’s life from his body and throwing it through the iron gates to Hades can be such a joy?

I took his spear from his fingers even as he screamed and his entrails loosed and his feet pounded the deck, and stood, but my pirates had cleared the enemy marines and the Phoenician oarsmen had had a long day, a long pull, and had no fight in them.

I stood and panted, and only then noticed that my left leg was covered in blood.

I turned, and blood sprayed. I look desperately at my mid-section, at my armour. There was blood there, too, but no glistening wound, no death blow.

I dropped my sword — my vision was tunnelling — and reached for my neck, and only then did I see it. .

My left hand was cut to the bone and two fingers were severed.

I fell to my knees. Men were running to help me. .

I wasn’t in the darkness when we ran up the beach. Hermogenes bound the hand tight while Pericles got my armour off.

The old chiton was turning red.

But I managed to stay upright, as the allied fleet cheered us. I heard later that the Medes could hear our cheers across the straits at Aphetae.

We beached under the eyes of the commander and I watched as Siberios brought the blue ship in — Hector was at the helm. He waved, and I knew from his face my son was alive.

I gave thanks to the gods.

We all went ashore in a great mass, and if the Medes had chosen that moment to attack, they could have had us all. But they had other plans, as you’ll hear, and we went up the beach to the altars and made a sacrifice, and Aristides came and embraced me, his right hand as sticky and brown as mine.

‘What happened?’ he asked.

But what I remember best was Nicolas, who had just had his first command. He rolled up to me with his fisherman’s gait and his lopsided grin, and jerked his thumb over his shoulder.

‘You’ll never guess what I found in that ship,’ he said, indicating our last capture.

‘Gold?’ I guessed.

He barked his odd laugh. The man behind him was Brasidas, the Spartan.

We had a plethora of high-ranking prisoners, but the best report was from Brasidas. For reasons that will become clear later, we covered him with a report that a diver, Scyllias, a native of Sicyone, had swum all the way from Aphetae. In fact, the famous swimmer stole a small boat and sailed to us, and his report was nowhere near as complete as Brasidas’.

What we heard was that the Persians had lost almost two hundred fighting ships in the storm, most of them north of the passage of Artemesium — despite which, their spies had reported us as having abandoned the beaches at the temple, and they had sent a heavy squadron — two hundred ships — to envelop us by rowing all the way around Euboea.

That report might have created consternation. We were about to be attacked from behind.

But we had just gone head to head with sixteen Persian ships and we’d sunk three and taken six of the enemy and lost not a single ship.

Even Adamenteis was silent.

Themistocles had a long discussion with Eurybiades. It is a picture of the two men that sticks in my mind — Themistocles gesturing like a boy, and the Spartan navarch sitting calmly, his hands on his knees.

And then Themistocles came and grabbed my hand like a forward maiden at a party and took me out into the olive trees.

‘I’m a little old to kiss strange men in the dark,’ I said.

The Athenian laughed. ‘No older than I am. Listen, Plataean. The old Spartan will ask you first what course of action we should take. You are the hero of the day, after all.’

I nodded. My son was alive and everything seemed possible. I regretted Dagon, but his flight was an admission of sorts. What can I say? I thought I’d have him in the end.

‘What will you tell him?’ Themistocles asked.

‘What would you like me to say?’ I asked. I meant to sound ironical, but Themistocles was a politician, and he took me at my word and leaned forward eagerly. ‘You must tell him to attack,’ he said.

‘Attack?’ I asked. I had in mind a set of raids, some burned hulls, perhaps a night attack on an outlying camp. .

‘If we attack, the Corinthians and Aeginians have to fight,’ he said.

I scratched my beard. ‘Aren’t we outnumbered four to one?’

‘Worse when they come behind us. And as you showed today — when one side does something unexpected, the other side can make mistakes. Poseidon, you took a risk today. If you’d lost-’

‘I didn’t lose,’ I said.

But as was often the case between me and Themistocles — I agreed. He was right. An attack with all our ships would commit us, and if Leonidas was winning on land, this was the time. And anyway. .

Morale matters. Ours soared. My little victory was insignificant. Think of the thousand Persian ships. Two hundred lost in a storm. Two hundred sailing to take us in the rear.

We took eight.

We walked back through the grove.

‘You really were quite marvellous,’ Themistocles said suddenly. And for a moment I saw past his mask. Under the orator, the politician, the democrat, was a man who wanted to be a hero.

These things always surprise me. So instead of making a good answer, I shrugged like a pretty girl given an unwanted compliment and went back to the commanders.

In the end, Eurybiades asked each of a dozen of us what we ought to do. We had two hundred and seventy-one ships plus the captures. Paramanos and Harpagos went among the captives and identified all the Aeolian and Ionians from families we knew, or men we thought we could trust, and Cimon sent a helmsman and four marines, and Demetrios sent four more marines and a cloaked man to be trierarchos, which was how Aristides came to command a ship not his own while pretending to be in exile.

At any rate, Eurybiades came to me with a crown of laurel he’d twisted with his own hands, and settled it on my brow. There it is, on the wall with the fourth aspis.

‘So, Plataean?’ he asked me, first of all the navarchs.

I looked at Themistocles. I didn’t love him, but he was the strategist.

‘First let me ask, what news from the army?’ I asked.

Eurybiades smiled with satisfaction. ‘The Persians and Medes attacked the army all day today,’ he said. ‘When the packet boat rowed, the king had been engaged twice, and every Greek had fought with honour. There is a pile of Persian corpses by the Hot Gates, and the king says they all saw the Great King in a rage.’

We all cheered.

We were doing it. Saving Greece.

Eurybiades nodded happily and turned back to me. ‘Well?’

‘I think we should attack,’ I said.

It is much harder to fight on the second day.

Every time a man wears his armour, it hurts. The shoulders chafe, and no matter how well made it is, the muscles of the chest are bruised by bronze at the edges of the arms — every cross-body cut, every Harmodius blow, every spear-parry forces your pectoral muscles against the edges of your cuirass. Greaves bite into the instep. All of this is covered by the spirit of battle, the elation of the moment, fear and fatigue.

But when you fight on a second day, the sores are still raw, the bruises fresh. If you have a wound, as I had, it is raw and red, and you worry still about an arrow from Apollo’s fickle bow.

The oarsmen had, every one of them, endured the fear of imminent death and had exerted some kind of maximum effort.

Every Plataean marine and all of Cimon’s had faced an enemy sword or spear and the horror of drowning in armour.

And some of us had sat up and drunk too much the night before.

There was cursing.

We had the longest pull to our place in the line, but I was conscious that this was for everything. I, who seldom give speeches, had my marines make a small platform for me, like a speakers’ rostrum on the Pnyx, and I mounted it, and spoke to all of them — fifteen hundred Plataeans and five hundred former slaves, prisoners and Athenian exiles.

I mentioned the gods, and I talked about Hellas — the idea of being Greek.

It probably wasn’t much a speech, but here’s the part that I remember. ‘You all hurt,’ I said. ‘Many of you took a wound yesterday, and we face odds of three ships to one.’ I pointed off to the west — towards Thermopylae. ‘The King of Sparta is fighting today at odds of ten to one or more, and he’s on his third day.’

That got their attention.

‘If we lose today, we will be done. The Persians will have us, and our cities will burn, and Leonidas will be forced to retreat.’ I looked at them, and they were silent. It was cool and pleasant, despite the time of year — a strong east wind was coming up, and the sun was red, like a big grape on the horizon.

‘If we win today, we will win the right to fight again tomorrow!’ I said. ‘That is all we will win today. And if we win tomorrow. .’ I smiled. ‘Then we win the right to fight again the next day — and the next and the next until the Great King wearies of the contest or he runs out of slaves or we run out of free men to face him. And if we win? If we defeat the Great King?’ I held up my wounded hand.

Some men cheered.

‘Then we win the right to fight him again the next time he comes against us. This is what freedom is. The Great King has no idea how poor we are, or what we have in herds or in olive trees. He seeks only to own us.’ I smiled to think of Xerxes in his hall in Susa, who was attacking us mostly to satisfy Mardonius.

And for pride.

‘We must win today, and tomorrow, and again the day after, and then we must go home and train our sons to win again,’ I said.

How they cheered.

I stumbled off my rostrum, and Themistocles took my hand — and hurt me, as it was my left hand he grabbed.

‘That was remarkable!’ he said. ‘You hide your light too much!’

I laughed, uncomfortable, but let’s be honest, pleased with his praise, and I saw his eyes harden.

Aristides came up to me.

Themistocles let go of my hand. He didn’t glance away, but said, ‘By now, the exile must have been lifted.’

‘Until the assembly informs me so, I serve only as a Plataean,’ Aristides said.

Themistocles nodded. He turned to me, and said one of the few genuine, unposturing things I ever heard from him. He said, ‘When Athens exiles me, will I too be welcome in Plataea?’

‘How’re your farming skills?’ I asked.

Aristides laughed and slapped my shoulders. ‘I hope you give him shelter, when I have him sent away. He is dangerous — but he may have saved Greece.’

When you think of us — Athenians and Corinthians and Aeginians and Spartans and all — remember this.

We didn’t agree about anything except that the Great King had to be defeated.

We formed well. The oarsmen were tired, but I had us go to ramming speed for about sixty heartbeats, all together, on the way to our station, and then everyone’s muscles were loose — like men stretching for the Olympics, really.

By the time Eurybiades raised his shield in the centre of the line, the Persians were coming off their beaches. I have heard since that they were amazed that we were coming to fight with such a small fleet, and came into the water in no great order, each eager to make a kill.

That’s what it looked like to us. They had so many ships that I couldn’t begin to know, but we think — now that years have passed and all the Ionians are friends again — that there were about six hundred of them facing two hundred and seventy-one of us. But instead of forming a line, they came at us in a long mass, shaped like an egg — the first ships off the beach in the lead. And then they split — every captain for himself — to encircle us.

As soon as we were sure they were coming — and by the gods, my friends, it was hard to swallow! I’m not sure I have ever known such pure fear as that morning, watching that behemoth come for our little fleet — Eurybiades signalled for the wheel.

I had Brasidas with me. He was in a good panoply. Bless rich men — my Cimon had a full spare panoply that fitted our Spartan escapee. Brasidas passed the navarch’s signals, and we began to back-water.

The lead Ionian ships went to ramming speed, despite being twenty stades away. They were that eager. Never doubt, my friends, that they wanted to defeat us. I have heard a great deal since Artemesium about how we won because the Ionians fought badly. That’s foolishness. No one fights ‘badly’ in a sea fight where all the losers drown.

We backed faster, and I watched the front face of the wheel form up. The Corinthians were going to face the first rush. And by Poseidon, for all the crap I’ve said about Adamenteis, that day he was a Greek. Perhaps I’m wrong, and he was never a traitor. Or perhaps, confronted with the choice to fight or die, he fought well.

Either way, we had longer to form the wheel than we’d ever had in practice, because the fool Ionians charged into what had been our centre, instead of going for the edges where the ships weren’t in the formation yet — and then flinched away. They turned away rather than face the serried phalanx of the Corinthians, and only then did they begin to circle like sharks — but by then, Lydia’s stern was nestled against Black Raven on one side and Nemesis on the other, and I could see Aristides coasting in beside Cimon’s magnificent Ajax as we, the outermost arms of the fleet, closed and locked.

We were in.

I’m not sure any Greek fleet — or any fleet anywhere — had ever formed such a big wheel. I suppose it was awesome — Ionians and Phoenicians who were there have told me so — but to us, it seemed very small, and the fleet against us surrounded us, and I, for one, began to doubt the strategy we’d adopted. Because we went after the Persian fleet, we were well across the straight, far from our camp and unable to swim for shore.

Only then, trapped in the wheel, did it occur to me that my captures and my camp and all our spare masts and all of our food were sitting on the beach, and all the Persians needed to do to win the war was to dispatch twenty ships to burn our camp.

War is the strangest of man’s endeavours, ruled by the whims of the gods and men’s foolishness more than by stratagems and intellect. The Persians never sent a ship to burn our camp. They wanted to fight us ship to ship.

Twice, whole squadrons of them rushed our wheel.

A lone trireme out on the water is barely stable. It has to be balanced. When ten marines cross the deck, the oarsmen curse. Eh? And the ram has to be powered to do damage — at least the speed of a cantering horse.

But tie two hundred ships in a circle, and the decks are steady, moving only up and down with the swell, and the rams — in close series like spears — are steady. They don’t move backwards or bounce. The rowers — all free men — don’t need to row. If every one of them has a spear or a javelin, you have, in effect, two hundred marines in every ship.

Did I mention the swell? The wind was mild, from the east, but the sea was running higher and higher, and the swell was beginning to make it difficult to maintain formation.

At any rate, as I say, they rushed us twice — once the Samians and once Carians.

They retreated and we didn’t pursue. But they made no impression whatsoever.

The sun passed the top of the sky. I passed out water and watched Aegyptians watching us.

We were doing it. We were holding the whole might of Persia.

Brasidas had been regaling us — if a nearly silent man who speaks fifteen words an hour can be said to regale — with the Babylonian revolt. He turned and handed young Pericles, who had apparently joined our ship, his water. ‘Eurybiades is signalling “attention!”’ he said.

‘Rowers to your cushions!’ I called. ‘Marines forward! Ka!’

He held up a thumb and pointed with an arrow.

Hermogenes took a deep breath.

I could see his fear, and he, no doubt, could see mine.

‘Everyone ready!’ I called.

I knew the plan. After all, Themistocles, for all his failings, was a genius. And Eurybiades, for all his caution, was a Spartan.

The bronze aspis in the centre of the fleet flashed three times.

I thumped my spear’s saruater into the deck hard enough to put a small hole in the planking and shouted, ‘Row!’

And while I pulled down the cheek plates on my helmet, the allied fleet went over to the attack.

The Persians weren’t a Persian fleet. I doubt that there were fifty Persians aboard six hundred ships. There were Carians, and Phrygians, and Ionians and Aeolians and Samians and Paphalogians and Syrians and Phoenicians and Carthaginians and Aegyptians, but they were so very large that they weren’t really a fleet. They were really six fleets under six very powerful Persians, and not a one of those powerful men spoke the language of the trierarchs and navarchs under him.

Not a one of them expected us to attack.

And suddenly, on a majestic scale, it was the battle of the day before. No lines, and every trierarch forced to make his own decisions.

Lycomedes made the first kill. He was the first ship out of the circle, his rowers straining like hounds, and he struck a Cypriote, the King of Salamis’s ship — shattered the enemy oar bank, and his marines stormed the ship in a hundred beats of a hoplite’s heart.

The enemy collapsed in chaos. We took forty ships in as long as it would take for the assembly to vote on something routine — Hermogenes misjudged our little trick, and we sank a Syrian trireme, our bow climbing so high out of the water that I was terrified that we’d capsize, and we lost a marine over the side and he sank away into the depths, armour sparkling. That was grim, but the enemy fled like whitefish from tuna.

And it was more than flight. A Lemnian and a pair of Lesbian ships deserted as soon as we struck — raised their oars. The Lesbians were from Eressos and Mythymna — ancient enmies of Mytilini, and thus willing enough to side with us. The Lemnian attacked a Phoenician to show his true intent.

I knocked my son down and refused to let him board our second engagement. I had ordered him to stay behind, and he had boarded with the oarsmen, and his wound was open, his thigh bleeding on my deck.

‘You fool,’ I said, but the blood from my hand wound was falling in quick drops on his blood on the deck, and he gave me the mocking glance of the young man who detects the hypocrisy of the old.

Fair enough, my son.

That was a glorious day for Greece. Lydia fought four ships and took one, killed one, and the other two fled and my oarsmen were, in truth, too tired to run them down and take them. As the sun began to set, they broke.

As they fled from us, they still outnumbered us about four to one.

But they were not cowards. Many of them were skilled sailors, fine marines, and we’d humiliated them without sinking their ships. We were not done.

But we won. And winning is a tonic, in war. We had their measure. Our tactics were good, and though the navarchs all knew that the surprise explosion out of the wheel wouldn’t work again, we nonetheless knew we could handle them. In fact, we were not the worse sailors, the worse oarsmen. Victory proved we were better — or made us better.

I never doubted. Oh, I was terrified, fearful, apprehensive — but I’d sunk and taken enough Phoenicians and Aegyptians and Carians over the years to know that Greeks can handle an oar as well as any man.

We went back to the beaches, and Eurybiades proved he was a better man than Miltiades. He gathered all the trierarchs — two hundred and seventy-one, as we had not lost a ship — and got silence despite our restive joy. He crowned Lycomedes for being the first to score a kill, and then he hopped up on the rostrum I’d had built.

‘Listen, you fools!’ he said. That got our attention.

‘They will be back tomorrow, determined to avenge the humiliation of today. They still have a squadron behind us — as big as our own. The last thing I need — that Greece needs — is for you to celebrate victory. By this time tomorrow, a third of you may be dead.’ He looked around. We stood in the torchlight, and we knew he spoke the truth.

‘A cup of wine per man — a libation for Poseidon and all the gods — and then to your cloaks. That is my command.’

We obeyed the way boys obey a schoolmaster. Even Themistocles.

I confess I had several cups of wine. Every time I saw Brasidas out of the corner of my eye, I had to pound him on the back — I hugged Sekla after the action, and he blushed.

Giannis’s fine light trireme had burst its seams, so we replaced it with one of the heavy captures — the blue Carian. So men had to stay up caulking and making her all shipshape.

But when Orestes rose, I went to sleep. I noted as I wedged myself between Hipponax and Hector that Hipponax did not have a fever, his leg wasn’t hot, and the east wind was steady.

Morning was leaden grey, and the east wind was steady with fitful gusts that cracked the awning like whips and shot whitecaps over the sea to the north.

Every Plataean groaned. Wounds hurt, and abrasions were raw, and some men had two days of terror to overcome.

I stood in the wind on the headland during the morning sacrifices of the priests and priestesses, and made my decision with the help of the Huntress, and then I groaned my way down the rocks to the beach, gathered my crew, and took Lydia to sea.

My oarsmen didn’t even groan. That took too much energy.

Forty stades across the strait to Aphetae. I put a small boat up my mainmast with two men in it, but they took too much of the gusting wind, swayed like a tower about to fall and threw the ship off course, so I brought them down. I had all the sails laid to the guards on the hemiola deck, ready to run up the masts.

I tried the boat sail, and it eased the rowing. The gusts could head her, but the main force of the wind came broadside. Triremes do not sail well at the best of times, and we were making so much leeway that we might have ended in Thermopylae, but every so often I’d take in the sails and row.

The Great King’s fleet was on the beach. I saw them from six stades out, and not a ship was stirring.

I ran all the way down the beach, east to west, across almost thirty stades of beached ships, and no one offered me a fight.

I remember that, as we passed the headland at Aphetae itself, Brasidas whistled. The Spartan was smiling.

I was smiling too.

We ran a little too far west, because the wind pushed us that way — so my oarsmen, now awake enough to grumble, had to start rowing us back up the channel to Artemesium. I was tempted — sorely tempted — to run down to Thermopylae and see the king, but the Persian camp was under my lee and the wind was strong, and if it kept up for a day, I could be cut off from the fleet. I was like Cimon a week before — I didn’t think the fleet could spare me, and besides

. . I didn’t want to miss the greatest victory since Troy.

From the stern, as we turned, took down our sails and started to row, I could see the fires of the Great King’s army — the little student of Heraklitus in my head started trying to calculate the firewood I was seeing burned, because the campfires were like cabbages in a farmer’s field, a big field that runs off as far as the eye can see.

As I looked under my hand, I caught a glimpse of sails to the south in the main channel, just exactly between Euboea and the mainland. I was rowing east into the wind, and they were sailing north on a broad reach, so that for the next whole leg, they were gaining on me as fast as a big boy catches a little one.

The Persian squadron.

But a number of factors were against it being the enemy. First, there were not two hundred ships, and Brasidas, of all men, is not prone to exaggerate. Second, I didn’t think they could have run all the way down Euboea, weathered the great point there, and come up the main channel without any of our scouts seeing them — without the Ionian packet boat at Thermopylae giving us warning.

It was young Pericles — who had now become a member of our crew — who made the call.

‘Those are Athenian ships,’ he said.

Now, I’ve mentioned before that Aegina and Athens both left ships in home waters. Ostensibly, this was to cover Attica if the Persians sent a Phoenician squadron out into the Great Blue and straight in on the coast — I, for one, feared landing at Marathon or Brauron more than anyone. But the sad truth is that neither state trusted the other, and both left heavy squadrons to watch the other’s heavy squadron.

Something had changed, then. When we were within a dozen stades, Pericles was sure that the nearest ship belonged to his family. I thought I saw public ships like the ones Themistocles had built — smaller and lighter that anything in the Persian fleet.

I was the first man off my Lydia. Not a ship had moved off the opposite shore.

Cimon’s spot on the beach was empty, as were those of half a dozen other enterprising captains, and when I went up the beach, Eurybiades met me hand on hip.

‘Next time you wish to scout, ask permission.’

From many other men, that would have earned sharp words or even a blow. But Eurybiades was not one of them, and I was rueful.

‘Of course, I want your news,’ he said.

There were cries from the main beach.

I raised my hand. ‘Ignore them,’ I said. ‘It’s the Athenian reserve squadron. I’m. . almost sure.’

Eurybiades listened to my explanation and shook his head. ‘I will not wager Greece on the word of a fifteen-year-old Athenian boy,’ he said, and the whole weary fleet was ordered to sea — into the teeth of the rising wind.

We were better men in every way than we had been four weeks before off the beach of Marathon. And Eurybiades was absolutely correct. If we were seeing the two hundred Persian ships of their flanking force, it was our best hope to crush them before they made camp behind us — or even reunited with the main fleet at Aphetae.

But of course, they were Athenians and Aeginians. That night, they explained how the storm — a storm we’d scarcely felt — had savaged the Persian flanking manoeuvre and blown the Athenian and Aeginian squadrons ashore by Marathon and the north, all intermingled — and how, when the Persian wreckage began to come ashore, the Aeginian commander had suggested that they run up the channel together.

‘They cheered us off Thermopylae!’ they said.

Before we got to hear all their news, we had another stroke of luck — or the gods’ will — in that a dozen Cilician triremes and another dozen smaller ships — all that was left of the rearguard of the flanking fleet — rounded the coast of Euboea and ran towards Artemesium — the same error again, mistaking the landings. Their rowers were exhausted.

They didn’t put up much of a fight.

The Plataeans let the Corinthians do it all. We watched, nearly asleep on our oars. I was rowing, because I was not overtly popular just then, having had my Lydia at sea all day — For nothing and nothing, as a disgruntled oarsman said from two benches behind me.

But when we landed that night and had the trierarchs’ assembly, we had more than three hundred trierarchs.

Themistocles was elated. ‘We have more ships by a fifth of our total,’ he said, ‘and they have fewer by a fifth of theirs.’

It was a pretty piece of sophistry, and we all laughed.

When it was my turn to speak, I said, ‘I am happiest that the enemy felt they couldn’t come off their beaches today.’

Many of the old salts nodded.

In a fight, when you have the upper hand, you are ruthless, lest the other man discover you are not so very tough.

‘I think we must attack again tomorrow,’ I said, and Themistocles nodded.

Eurybiades stroked his beard.

‘How goes it with the army?’ Cimon asked.

‘There have been more than twenty attacks on the pass. Each contingent goes forward and fights the Medes by turns. No attack has come to the wall yet,’ Eurybiades said, and men cheered. But he held his hand up. ‘Leonidas is beginning to lose men. He warns me,’ he looked up from a tablet, ‘that if the main army does not come in ten days, he will have to retire.’

Themistocles stepped forward to speak, and Eurybiades held up his hand again. ‘The king also reports that Xerxes was openly enraged by the defeat of his fleet, and warns us to expect the most desperate measures. The barbarians execute leaders who fail.’

He turned and nodded to the Athenian, who stepped eagerly on to the rostrum. ‘Brothers!’ he said, a little too brightly and a little too eagerly. We were not a crowd of out-of-work labourers. We were tired men.

‘Brothers!’ he said again, looking for more effect. ‘If we can win again — tomorrow — as we won yesterday. .’ He grinned. ‘. . the Ionians will change sides. I promise it. And then,’ he was grinning like a boy, ‘perhaps we can convince the Great King to retreat without the main army ever reaching King Leonidas!’

A few men cheered, but we were, as I say, weary trierarchs, and I think we all knew what it would take to fight again — a fourth straight day for my oarsmen, at any rate.

I walked down the beach to pray to Herakles and Poseidon, and I threw wine and a fine cup into the sea, and I thought of my son with Archilogos — dead in the storm? Dead in the fighting? Alive, and waiting for the morning?

Where had I acquired all these entanglements?

Aristides came up with me, and we walked the shingle in silence.

I thought of Briseis. I prayed again, this time to Aphrodite.

‘Tomorrow,’ Aristides said.

I agreed.

The swell was down when I awoke, far too early. My whole body hurt — my shoulder burned, and my hand was infected. It throbbed, and my arm was hot, and I could not get back to sleep.

I opened the bandage, found the red spot, and picked at it with my eating knife until I drained it, and then poured wine on it until the pain was unbearable. And then, again. And then put it in the salt water until the pain was, again, unbearable.

It was to be a fine day.

We sacrificed, and the sacrifices were all confused — some excellent omens and some poor and some merely acceptable. One black ram — a royal animal, to the Spartans — made Eurybiades cringe. When the sun was a third of the way up the sky, the sacrifices grew better, and we were ordered to sea. Eurybiades had given simple orders. We put our rigging aboard the ships so that we didn’t have to protect the camp, and then we set sail, offering battle.

Not an oar touched the water. We used our sails to reach across the channel.

And the Persian fleet began to come off the beach. It was not like the first day. They came off and formed their squadrons neatly, even as we manouevred under sail in sloppy, lubberly confusion. Again, this is what Themistocles had designed and Eurybiades ordered.

We used the sails to preserve our rowers. And to slip east, deeper into the channel.

And they followed us.

Where the channel narrows suddenly to twenty-five stades wide, we turned and formed line of battle. We formed in a great crescent with the centre advanced — the Corinthians and other Peloponnesians — and the flanks refused.

The Great King’s fleet came out and formed in a great crescent facing us, and they were very great. Even with two full lines of fighting ships, they had reserve squadrons at the tips and behind the centre.

They still had us, two ships to one.

The biggest difference was that while we were still as fearful as ever men are when they face death — still, we were confident. When Eurybiades signalled for us to row backwards, we did. Our centre stretched away first, and gaps opened. But we righted ourselves, and our whole fleet coasted back, and back, into the narrowing channel, forcing the overweighted ends of the enemy crescent to compact on the centre.

I had Phoenicians opposite me — the right of their line. Lucky Plataea, we always face the very best the enemy has to offer. The flanking squadron was second-rate ships — some Lydians and some Carians — and they began to foul the Phoenicians. The coast of Thessaly was getting closer and closer, and it was not beached, but steep, rocky and still dangerous, like an animal gnashing its teeth from the remnants of the swell.

The Carians were good seamen, but the Lydians were not, and they flinched away from the surf and fouled the line.

I could no longer see the other end of our line in the haze. The sun was almost directly overhead, and I was hot, very tired and a little fevered.

But I knew what was coming next, and with the calm acceptance of the fatalist — not my usual role — I could see a certain ship.

I turned to Brasidas and Hermogenes. ‘See the dirty red and white ship?’ I said.

Pericles, my acting hypaspist, was laying my armour out on the deck. I had a new bandage on my hand and I felt light headed and prickly, but so did every man on the deck.

You can only face the fire so many days in a row, friends.

Pericles got the thorakes around my body and Brasidas closed it with pins.

‘When I give the word, go for that ship,’ I said.

‘So we’re going to attack,’ Hermogenes said.

I nodded.

He sighed. ‘I really want to be old,’ he said. ‘I have a good life and a good place. But. .’ he smiled so sweetly ‘. . I owe it to you. So if this is the price. .’ he shrugged ‘. . red and white it is.’

I went around the deck, informing men and shaking hands.

Brasidas turned and waved. ‘Signal!’ he called.

I’d really like to leave this tale here.

But the gods love tragedy, and we’ll play this one to the end.

I saw the three flashes.

So, of course, did the enemy.

It was our last ruse. It didn’t wreck any ships, but it bought us another hour, as we backed water again, and the Great King’s fleet suddenly closed up on the centre to repel our attack. We backed water. They collided and lost spacing — six hundred hulls scattered over forty stades of water. Ships lost oars and fell away behind.

We fed our oarsmen water and some honeyed sesame seeds and garlic sausage.

Again, Eurybiades’ ship flashed once.

‘Signal!’ Brasidas called.

This time, I pulled down my cheek pieces.

This time, men loosed their swords in scabbards and checked their spearheads one more time. Oarsmen spat on their hands.

Aft of me, an old salt looked at the man on the cushion on the other side and winked.

They both grinned.

Men shook hands.

‘Ready!’ I called. I looked at Hermogenes.

‘Red and white,’ he said. ‘I have him.’

Eurybiades flashed his bronze aspis three times.

We attacked. Let the world remember that when we were outnumbered two to one, we attacked. We waited until the sun was in the west — in their eyes. We tired their rowers all day.

And then we turned like the desperate dogs we were, and went for their throats.

Who knows whether Dagon knew me. He should have known Lydia, but it is possible that my fixation on him was not returned.

Bah — I doubt it.

Lydia had the best, fittest rowers, and we leaped ahead of our line and went for the enemy line like an arrow from a string. Nor was the red and white trireme directly opposite us, but a little closer to the enemy centre, so that we ran a little south of east as we started our ramming attack.

You wouldn’t think we could have surprised them again. But we’d been retreating for three hours, and we hadn’t offered any fight, and then, suddenly. .

The Phoenicians were up to it. Their ships went to ramming speed so fast that their oars beat a froth as if the sea were boiling. And their big ships were fast.

‘Show ram,’ I said quietly to Hermogenes. ‘But go for the oar rake, not the ram. We won’t board. We’ll sheer off and go through.’

Dagon must have expected me to go for him. To go for the epic fight, the head-to-head ram, the boarding action.

He never had good oarsmen, though, because he ruined his slaves. And I wanted that to tell against him. This was not my revenge. This was the revenge of the gods.

A hundred paces out, I saw him and my body moved like a lute string. I knew him and, at some level, my body feared him. No man had ever hurt me so. No man had ever made me feel so weak.

But I had planned this moment for a month, and I would not be tempted.

Fifty paces from his ship, Hermogenes suddenly veered hard to the right, and our oarsmen pivoted us brilliantly — right, left, out of the other ship’s line completely like a good swordsman. We lost a great deal of speed, but we weren’t ramming his ship.

We rammed her oars, and of course his poor slaves and down-trodden thugs couldn’t get their sticks in the ports in time. We went by in an orgy of arrow shafts.

I stood by Ka, pointing to Dagon. ‘Don’t kill him,’ I said.

His marines threw grapples, and my men cut them, and we were by, leaving a shambles and blood running over the red and the white, and then our speed picked up as my rowers put their backs into it. Nicolas was shouting, praising them, begging for more speed.

There was a Phrygian pentekonter under Dagon’s stern, and he tried to turn, and we went right over him — pressed his whole ship right under the waves. That’s why small ships cannot stand in the line of battle.

And just clear of the drowned Phrygian was a Lydian from the reserve squadron in a heavy trireme. He was too close to the first line to do anything to help.

I was with Ka. Hermogenes made the call, and we went ram to ram with the Lydian. He was moving at the pace a man might walk, and we, by then, were a little faster than a cantering horse, and our ram struck somewhere on his bronze.

The bow of the Lydian caved in like a broken nose in a fight, and suddenly we were deep in the enemy fleet and our ram was stuck.

‘Reverse your cushions!’ Nicolas screamed.

Already, our stern was starting to rise. The timbers groaned as the strain of a sinking galley fell on the backbone — the keel.

I thought of Vasileos, thousands of stades away, and all the love and work he’d lavished on this ship.

The first oars bit the water.

Dagon’s ship was turning, now. I could see him on the stern, pointing at us.

I could see my ship beginning to torque. I could see deck planks springing out as the immense force of the sinking ship came to bear on the bow and the stern rose another hand’s width from the water. The Lydian was sinking with all hands.

I spread my hands to the gods and roared, ‘Poseidon!’

The ram seemed to explode straight up out of the enemy galley. All the timbers in her cat-head gave at once, and the marine box on the Lydian flew into the air, and my beautiful Lydia righted herself, slapped the water and rocked like a child’s toy in a tub of water.

In a big battle, the trierarch has to make ten decisions every heartbeat. I looked aft, where Dagon was turning — my prey, but too far. To my right, towards the centre, a dozen triremes were turning towards me. To my immediate left, Sekla’s Machaira and the capture Huntress burst out of the Phrygian squadron’s rear. Even as I watched, a Lydian struck Huntress amidships and splintered oars, and Sekla put Machaira into the Lydian’s side — this in ten heartbeats.

I pointed with my spear at the enemy centre. ‘Starboard,’ I said.

Nicolas had the port side reverse benches so that we turned in ten paces, and as the turn started, the starboard-side rowers picked up their cushions and turned, so that, as we faced south into the enemy centre, all our rowers were again facing aft, and rowing forward — and the stroke never faltered.

I could tell you stories of the next hour, but they would be lies.

Twice, I was able to rest my rowers. Once, after we were boarded from three ships — Aegyptians, with their fine marines, and I was only saved when Harpagos slew the biggest ship and put his marines into the rear of the men on my deck.

We just lay on our oars or knelt on the deck in the blood of our enemies and breathed.

And the second time was later, when we saw Eurybiades oar bank to oar bank with a ship that appeared to be made of gold — one of the Ionian tyrants. The Spartan thought the man must be the navarch of navarchs and went for him. I led my son on to the enemy deck, boarding on their undefended side, and ran for the back of the enemy marine line.

Two strides from the enemy, my chosen prey turned.

I slipped in the entrails of a dead man, and before I could recover my balance, a dying Spartan, taking me for the enemy, grabbed at my ankle, and down I went.

Hipponax stood over me. He thrust, he cut, he jumped on his wounded leg and danced like a flute girl — and men died.

I got a spear in my crest that wrenched my neck, but I stumbled to my feet, and watched my son kill.

And then, when he made a mistake, I reached over his shoulder and put my spear in a man’s eyeholes, and put a hand on his shoulder, and Eurybiades came and smiled at us.

We were almost in the centre of the line.

That time, we rested, watching the battle and helping no one, for almost as long as the oration of a dull man.

In that time, I saw Dagon’s ship.

He’d moved rowers about, put oars in empty oarlocks, and he was creeping away. He was not alone — wounded ships on both sides were leaving the fight.

I had had ten minutes to watch. There were huge holes in the allied fleet.

But again, the Great King’s fleet had had the worst of it, and was retreating, and Eurybiades and Themistocles were on them — the Peloponnesians and the Athenians and the Aeginians found their second wind, and I limped down the length of my ship to where Hermogenes stood with an arrow in his bicep.

‘You have to take the oars,’ he said.

Brasidas got him free of the leather harness.

I was back to being a helmsman. My helmet burned my brow, my plume hurt my head every time the wind caught it, my armour weighed like the world on the shoulders of Atlas, my hips had developed a strange new pain and I had a wound somehow under my right greave, which was cutting a bloody groove in the top of my foot.

I was better off than many.

‘Friends!’ I roared. Perhaps I squeaked it, but it was loud in my ears. ‘The day is ours. Now — we can rest on our oars, or we can go and help the Athenians finish the Great King’s fleet.’

One of the old salts laughed. ‘Easy, mate — I’ll rest here.’

Other men laughed, too.

‘By Poseidon!’ I roared, with a little of my old battle lust. ‘Then help me get my revenge!’

The old man cackled and flexed his muscles, and in that moment he was like Poseidon himself — old and solid.

‘Revenge, is it?’ he said. He cracked his hands, spat on his palms, and took his oar.

Men around him shook themselves as if they were coming awake.

Men understand revenge. It is easier than patriotism or love or strategy or tactics or even the rough world of consequence.

And revenge is a universal language.

I left the oars to walk the deck. ‘Most of you know I was a slave,’ I said. ‘The man who made me a slave and tried to break my body lies yonder, and there is nothing between me and him but five stades of water.’

Maybe I should make more speeches.

I got between the steering oars and aimed us astern of Dagon’s ship.

And now I had the bit in my teeth.

We passed another Phoenician, wallowing with a bank of dead oarsmen. Easy pickings, and we passed her by. And a Carian full of men who had probably once been my allies — they could scarcely row, and we passed them hand over fist, because of revenge. My oarsmen were heroes, the very Argonauts themselves, and we swept east, the sun under our quarter. I had time to drink some water, to pour more over the wound under my greave, time to take my son’s greave strap — his wound had opened. Greave straps are padded rolls of leather you wear on your ankles — fashionable Athenian boys wear them to parties now.

I walked forward, feeling better. Like a man who had fought hand to hand every day for four days. I spared a thought for the allied army, who would be fighting the Persians again in rotation.

Well, we hadn’t lost. Again. Even as I turned my head, the Ionians in the centre gave in and bolted, and suddenly the Great King’s fleet was running for their beaches.

Only as we closed on Dagon did it strike me that we had won.

But I was not done.

Dagon’s ship ran.

We ate her lead. Three stades, then two, then one. Ka and his men were shooting into the wind, but Dagon had no archers at all.

A hundred paces from Dagon’s stern, I made them stop shooting. I turned to Brasidas.

‘This thing is mine,’ I said. ‘Do not touch him.’

He shrugged and looked pained. In truth, he was too great a man to understand why I needed to kill one opponent, much less one already beaten. But he nodded.

‘And if you fall?’ he asked.

‘See to my son,’ I said. ‘Oh, and kill the bastard. He has it coming.’

‘Why not let me kill him now, then?’ asked Ka.

Hector stood at my shoulder. He smiled.

Hipponax said, ‘I want to come,’ and we all said ‘no’ together, and then — then our marine box started to come alongside his helm station.

Ka leaned out and killed the helmsman. Just like that.

Dagon’s ship yawed, and we slammed into its side. I fell flat — not ready for the collision — and so did Brasidas.

‘Don’t kill any more oarsmen,’ I said. I got to my feet, put my right foot on our gunwale, and had a moment of sheer fear.

Of Dagon.

Of the leap.

Of old age, and being diminished.

And then I jumped.

Once, I had faced Dagon naked, and another time, with a bucket.

Now, I finally faced him on a steady deck, with a spear and an aspis.

Brasidas landed on the deck behind me, and Hector, and Siberios.

‘Ready, Dagon?’ I asked.

He was a big man, and his thighs were like a bull’s, and his arms were as big as my thighs. His spear was red, and he didn’t grunt when he threw it.

He was right behind it, his sword emerging from his scabbard. .

I threw. He hadn’t expected it, and my throw caught him where the crest meets the helmet, and snapped his head back.

I drew, the underhand cut the Spartans had taught me — and I cut to the right, inside his shield, and scored on his naked arm inside his aspis — and I stepped to the left, pivoted, and slammed my aspis at him.

No matter how strong you are, you cannot block an aspis with a sword.

He put his head down, so my following cut — pivoting and stepping again, as Polymarchos taught — didn’t kill him, but went into his crest, and half of it fell to the deck, and he shouted and got a cut on my left thigh.

I pushed my right hand home. Herakles, he was strong. But my feet were planted and my footing was good, and my sword was against his helmet, pushing.

He rolled and cut at my feet from behind.

I slammed my aspis into his sword. He rolled from under the blow and got to his feet.

I dropped my aspis. He was bleeding then.

‘You!’ he said. ‘Come and take what I have for you.’

His mad eyes showed no defeat.

His right hand dropped the shards of his broken sword and I could see white where he tried to flex his left.

He attacked me, arms reaching for me despite what must have been blinding pain, and I did what I had wanted from the first. I stepped through his arms, locked his right with my left, the high lock of pankration, and he screamed as I broke his arm — I didn’t pause or hesitate, I had done this a hundred times in my sleep, and I pushed my left leg deep behind him and threw him over it — over my leg, over the rail, and into the three decks of slave oarsmen below.

He was alive when he left my hands.

They tore him apart. I would have, if I’d ever had a chance like that.

Then I fell to my knees.

Behind me, Brasidas snapped, ‘Boy! Take the helm!’

For a moment, like Miltiades after Marathon, I was out of my body, but Brasidas brought me back.

Many of my old shipmates have asked me whether I killed Dagon, and I am proud to say — no. I merely took him where he could die the way he deserved.

We lost eighty ships on the fourth day of Artemesium. We lost Gelon. We lost Paramanos — swarmed by Aegyptians when I was far away. Cimon lost a son and two cousins and every Plataean lost someone.

Athens lost forty ships.

Aegina lost twenty ships.

We stood on the beach with our captures and our wounded — Hermogenes, white from blood loss, and Sekla, who had an arrow though his foot and a cut across his head, and Giannis, who lost his left hand to a Phrygian axe that went through his aspis.

It was not a victory to celebrate.

Eurybiades gathered the fit trierarchs, and there were about a hundred, and that included a lot of men with bloody rags, like me.

Themistocles looked like a man going to a funeral.

I put a hand on his shoulder. ‘We did not lose,’ I said.

He turned, and the orator was crying.

Eurybiades stood alone. He was not crying, but his face was closed. He was elsewhere.

I thought perhaps they were in battle shock. So did Cimon. He put a hand on Themistocles’ shoulder as I had. ‘We are a trifle singed,’ he said. ‘But the Great King’s fleet will not come off their beaches tomorrow. Listen — Arimnestos and I can put to sea. .’

I was going to glare at him, but then I saw Abronichus standing with Phrynicus, and both of them were weeping openly.

I assumed that meant Aeschylus was dead, or some other worthy man, and indeed, as I watched, another Athenian, Lycomedes, pulled his chlamys over his head to hide his tears.

Tired men weep easily.

Eurybiades shook himself like an old dog. ‘We must. . retreat,’ he said.

Cimon was looking at Lycomedes, as flustered as I was. ‘Retreat? We won. We lost good men — great men — today, so that we would break them and we broke them! Now we must finish the job-’

‘Peace,’ Themistocles said. ‘Be silent, Cimon. We have no choice.’

‘No choice?’ Cimon asked.

Eurybiades sighed. ‘As dawn broke this morning, the Persians seized a pass above Thermopylae,’ he said, like a man reporting on a race at the Olympics he had once seen. ‘King Leonidas sent the allied army away. Then, with all the Thespians, he formed his phalanx.’

No one moved, or spoke, or groaned. The wind itself stopped.

‘The king died this morning. His body was lost twice, and eventually regained.’ He shook himself again. ‘About the time we engaged the enemy today, the last men died. Thermopylae has fallen.’

I can’t remember anything more of that hour except the desolation.

Leonidas was dead. The army was destroyed.

We had fought for four days, for nothing.

We had lost.