The Great King

I didn’t go straight to Susa. Nor did I mention that when Astylos won the diaulos, our Styges was less than a man’s height behind him, placing third, nor that another Plataean was in the final heat. This was the best performance by Plataeans in the games for many years, and only the endless work of keeping Polypeithes alive and his horses uninjured kept us from the wildest party since the fire was brought to men. And, of course, we were out of wine.

The aftermath of any great event is a terrible crash, and the Olympics are no different. Every day, and every night, had been so fine — so much good talk, so many friends, so much camaraderie — heroism, and even beauty — that to break camp and pack and march with the crowds down to the sea seemed like the descent into Hades, and the want of spirit was dark for most men. But I had announced that I would sail for Athens with Cimon, and together we took many friends home. Aristides had business of his own, but we had Themistocles and all the Plataeans. I’m sure Draco came with me as much to make sure I came home as anything else. My beloved brother-in-law crushed me to him and demanded that I come and guest with him and then strode away after giving me the oddest look. He had business in Argos and would ride home. With his party went Empedocles, who gave me a great embrace and promised to visit me in Plataea.

We sailed south, into the same seas that had been so storm-tossed a month before, but now it was early summer, and the seas were packed with ships — Italiote traders, Illyrian tin ships, Corinthian merchantmen and warships, and Athenians — Athenian ships on every hand. We camped on beaches all the way down the coast of the Peloponnese, rowing all the way under the new summer sun and into constantly adverse winds, and my rowers, fat and hung over from a week at the Olympics playing at being gentlemen, discovered a new talent for grumbling.

But we weathered the Hand, the local name for the promontory, and turned east into the Laconian gulf and the wind changed, and our voyage took on a little bit of a holiday air. We camped on Kythera, enjoyed a feast of greasy mutton, drank the execrable local wine, and probably left a population increase. From Kythera we sailed across the blue water, our oars dry, all the way into Hermione, and spent the night under the pine trees by the temple, listening to a pair of musicians who were training there — beautiful stuff. A pair of oarsmen — Nicolas and Giorgios, who’d been with me since Iberia — left the ship to make a pilgrimage to Epidavros, and I wished them well and directed them to rejoin at Athens if they so desired, and we went due east for Athens, give or take a point, and had sweet weather, making the long blue water crossing in a day and a night so that we raised Piraeus with the rising of the sun.

So I had a week sailing home and another four days crossing the mountains to listen to Draco and Styges and all the other Plataeans tell me about how I should handle my family.

The long and short of it is that my cousin Simonalkes — you may recall him, as he murdered my father and sold me into slavery — took our family farm. When I returned in the year after the sack of Sardis, he hanged himself rather than face justice — or my spear. In Marathon year, his eldest son teamed with my Athenian enemies — actually, not my enemies but those of Miltiades — and came and sacked our farm and killed my mother. Simon, son of Simonalkes, died with Teucer’s arrow in his eye, and we reaped his mercenaries like ripe barley, and I thought that was the end of them, but Simonalkes had other sons — three more, in fact, and Simonides, his second son, had come with Achilles, his third, and Ajax, his fourth, and occupied our farm. They came with force and money, and the archon, Myron, denied them citizenship at first, but they paid fines and went to the shrines and were, for the most part, forgiven.

I was, after all, dead, as far as anyone knew.

Styges, born a Cretan, wanted me to go back, collect some of my men and his master Idomeneaus, and go and wipe them out like a nest of hornets in a vineyard.

Draco wasn’t so sure. I think we were in Attica, near my father-in-law’s estate east of Oinoe, and camping in a sheepfold — the ship was left under Megakles and Leukas and Sekla in Piraeus, with orders to take a cargo no farther than Corinth and run it, and return to Piraeus. I’d wasted a day filling out paperwork for a number of men — such as Sekla, and Megakles — to hold Metic status in Athens, and I had Alexandros and a dozen oarsmen with me crossing the mountains — and Brasidas and Sittonax, who was as delighted to chase Greek girls as he was to chase Gaulish maidens. Giannis went off with Cimon — with the best will in the world I couldn’t employ every young man. He was eager for adventure, and Cimon was pointing his bow for Thrace.

Draco sat on a folding stool and shook his head. ‘You have become a lord,’ he said. He smiled, but his tone was sad. ‘Armed men at your tail, and ships, and cargoes. Like a little Miltiades. And all the great men know you — Cimon and Aristides and Themistocles and even the King of Sparta.’ He drank some good Attic wine and frowned. ‘I’m not sure I should have told you to come home. What can little Plataea offer you?’

In truth, I was thinking of Apollonasia, if that was her true name, whom I’d bedded against the very stone on which I was perched and who had, as far as I can remember, turned into a raven and flown away. My thoughts were not on Plataean politics, but I tore myself from her imaginary arms to listen to the old man speak, and when he asked what Plataea could offer me, I said, ‘A home?’ or something similar.

I wasn’t so surprised, either. Listening to some of the younger men who had competed — Antimenides, son of Alcaeus of Miletus, for example, who had placed in the final heat in the diaulos and whose javelin throw had soared like a falcon — or Teucer’s son Teucer, whose boxing was very good indeed — listening to them told me that my cousins were neither universally hated nor really very bad men. And listening to all the Plataeans reminded me — prompting a smile — that I had lived out in the wide world for a very long time. Plataeans can be ignorant hicks with the best of them, and Teucer’s views on men loving other men would have made him a laughing stock among his father’s friends — young Teucer flinched every time he saw men embrace. Sekla rolled his eyes.

But the next day, after we passed around the flank of Kitharon and rode down through the narrow streets of Eleutheras, none of that mattered, because I was home. Home is where all the fields look right and the grass has that smell and girls. .

For an old man of thirty-five, my mind ran to women a great deal. And to farms.

Boeotia is beautiful. It is a different beauty to that of Attica or Italy or Sicily.

We rode over the last arm of Kitharon. I did not stop to make sacrifice at the peak. Perhaps I should have, but I did not want to see black offerings there from my cousins. I had begun to flirt with the idea of reconciliation.

Does that give you pause? But consider. I have been a warrior all my life, and I have killed many men, but then, returning from Sicily — and Alba — I was tired of blood. I had killed Simonalkes and I had killed Simon — killed them, or caused them to die. One for Pater and one for Mater. Little Plataea — a town of five thousand citizens when it is at its very strongest — is not big enough for a blood feud. To my mind, I had two choices.

I could collect Idomeneaus at the shrine, walk down the road, and kill them to a man — men and children and possibly their women, too. That would end it. Leave none alive to grow to manhood and come back to wreak revenge. Nor did I doubt that I could do it — in my head, or with my arm.

That is who I am, child.

But if you have been listening, you know that for years I had been trying — really, since I went to speak to the god at Delos — trying to reduce the blood on my hands.

We came over the little ridge, then, and past the little mud-hole in the road where I had trapped the bandits. And we could see the low beehive tomb where old Leitos lay enshrined, and Styges ran ahead to warn his former master — and sometime lover — Idomeneaus, who had once been a kohl-eyed catamite and was now one of the deadliest men in Greece. Or the world. And who young Teucer thought a great man. .

I roll my eyes, too.

Draco waved goodbye and headed down the road, but all the young men stayed at the shrine with me for the night, and before the afternoon was many hours older, we had other men I knew coming up the ridge from the town — Ajax, who had fought against us in Asia, but was now a friend, and Bellerophon, who had been with us at Marathon, and Lysius, a veteran who had stayed and watched the town walls while we went to glory at Marathon. Idomeneaus hugged me until my ribs were threatened, and then demanded my whole story.

Before I got done saying that I had thrown myself into the sea, he raised his hand.

‘We never thought you were dead,’ he said. ‘A man came — oh, two years ago — and asked a great many questions about you. I didn’t kill him. He said his master knew you.’

I shrugged. ‘Did this master have a name?’ I asked.

Idomeneaus’s mad eyes glittered. ‘Who could forget a name like Anarchos?’ he said, and I knew. I had shot my mouth off, and Anarchos sent a slave to check up on me — and all that information went straight to the tyrant of Syracusa.

Before I could begin again, a horse — an actual horse — trotted up, its hooves crisp against the stones of the road by the tomb. I felt as if I’d seen a ghost — it was Gelon.

‘You — here?’ I asked.

He laughed. ‘Well — you made me a citizen,’ he said. Gelon had been a mercenary — one of my cousin’s men. I’d enslaved him, but freed him for Marathon. He was Sicilian. He laughed to find that I’d been a slave and a mercenary for years — in Sicily.

‘I’m a farmer,’ Gelon said. ‘I married Hilarion’s daughter.’ He shrugged.

So I told my story — again. It was getting more polished with each telling, but I still couldn’t hide that I’d mistreated Lydia, and men shifted or looked away. Heroes are supposed to be better than that. I left a few things out, but I told the whole of my recent meetings with Briseis and the Medes. Many of the men around the fire had lived through all my early days, and they deserved to know.

It grew quite late — we digressed a great deal. In the end, it was not Idomeneaus, but Gelon, who put the question.

‘What will you do about your cousins?’ he asked.

I shrugged. ‘What do you think I should do?’ I asked.

Idomeneaus spat. ‘Kill them all. Right now, before dawn. Every man here will carry a sword.’ He grinned his mad grin, and his teeth shone in the firelight. ‘Listen, lord, we never stopped having the training just because you were. . gone. We still have hunts on the mountainside. We’ve poured wine on the tomb for you — and every man here is one of ours. The Epilektoi.’

‘You have not changed,’ I said to him, and I smiled in case the mad bastard took it as an insult.

He wagged his head. ‘Is there any other answer?’

I looked at Gelon. He looked away. ‘You could try talking to them,’ he said.

Idomeneaus spat in contempt.

‘Would they talk?’ I asked.

‘They are not bad men, and they have brought money and work,’ Gelon said, and Lysius nodded.

‘They are not like Simon,’ he said simply. ‘They work hard.’

‘By now they know you are alive, and here,’ Idomeneaus said. ‘Strike now, before it is too late. Plataea has politics, now. Myron is not what he was. Strike, and remind all these peasants what you are — who you are. Above the law. A lord.’

Bellerophon winced. ‘Lord, I’ll stand by you,’ he said. ‘But. .’ He met Idomeneaus’s eye. And held it. ‘Glare all you like, priest.’

They all looked at me — even Hector.

I remember how clearly I saw what I would do. ‘Tomorrow, I will go and visit my brother-in-law over by Thespiae. All of you go home.’ I smiled at Idomeneaus. ‘It’s good to see you, you mad bastard, but I won’t stage a bloodbath just to assuage your boredom. Go to sea with me if you need blood — we have buckets of it. I intend to try conversation. If that fails. .’ I nodded. ‘Then I’ll kill them all. Not before.’

Almost everyone nodded. Idomeneaus simply got up, collected his spear, and walked off into the darkness. But I saw on his face that I had disappointed him. He paused. ‘The sea is making you soft,’ he said. ‘These men have insulted you, and you must exterminate them, or be held weak.’

I remember that I shrugged. ‘Only a fool thinks me weak,’ I said. It was not a brag. It was true.

No one rose with the dawn. We’d sat up too late and there were hard heads. I looked around the clearing — now with a fine house and a small tilled field behind the tomb — and thought of Calchas and his cabin and his black broth. The exercises he made me do. I went to the smaller clearing among the great oaks where he used to drill me on my spear fighting, and I stood in the early morning sun and lifted weights and then practised the sword-draw I’d seen the Spartans do. I knew it, but the idea of practising it until the draw, the cut and the return to the scabbard were second nature — that was a very Spartan idea, and yet I liked it.

When everyone was up, we rode west, across the Asopus, skirting the town. I saw our farm. It was odd to see it without the tower I’d built, and with a new stone house stuccoed white in the sun. It was quite a pretty house, and already had a grape arbour.

My cousins had done well, and they’d been there a few years.

We took the road north and west, over the low hills, seventy easy stades to Thespiae, and we arrived at my brother-in-law’s house in the late afternoon to find my sister Penelope waiting in the yard.

She had her hands on her hips, and she started telling me what she thought of my five-year absence as soon as we were inside her gate. And then she burst into tears and threw her arms around me, and I confess I joined her in tears.

‘Don’t you ever!’ she cried, and other things that, when related, sound foolish, but at the time are very painful to hear.

My oarsmen and Brasidas had the good grace to vanish. Antigonus, who had met the Spartan at the Olympics, had beaten us home by a day by the land route, and he led my gentlemen into his elegant courtyard while admiring our horses and shouting for wine — really a superior display of aristocratic social skills, especially as he ruthlessly failed to save me from my sister’s righteous anger.

Pen went on for a bit, describing what she thought of a man who tried to kill himself — she suggested that slavery at a Phoenician oar was better than what I deserved. I hung my head in shame.

Then she embraced me again, calling my name and praising the gods.

‘And you don’t even ask about your daughter,’ she spat.

‘Daughter?’ I asked — rather automatically. I thought of Apollonasia again — a slave girl.

‘My niece,’ Penelope shot at me. Then she put a hand to her mouth.

It must have been on my face.

And then — well, then it all came out.

Euphonia died in childbirth. That I knew. But what I didn’t know — in my post-battle blackness, in the soul-crushing horror that afflicted me when my wife died before I could reach her — what I didn’t know was that she’d borne me a healthy daughter — as it turned out, perfectly healthy, even though she’d had the cord wrapped around her throat and almost died with my poor wife.

And they called the little thing Euphonia. We often do, in Boeotia, when a child takes its mother’s place — that’s a nice way of putting it, anyway.

Suddenly, my hands were shaking.

I had a child?

I do not remember walking into Penelope’s house and into the women’s quarters — only standing by a handsome pine table with a beautiful young girl bowing to me, and Penelope saying, ‘This is your father, child.’

My little blond daughter smiled like an imp, hugged my outstretched hands and let herself be embraced without reserve.

‘Oh!’ she said. ‘I’ve always wanted a father!’

Well.

Call me a fool if you like, but to my mind Euphonia — and her unreserved love, instantly given — was the gift of the gods to me for sparing my cousins. That’s how I saw it then, and time has not changed my mind. Had I exterminated them in a night of blood, I promise you I would have found her cold and indifferent.

Believe what you will!

I’m not sure I had been so happy in all my life as I was that day, and I carried my daughter up and down stairs and hugged her and talked to her. She laughed and talked — and talked and talked — and I learned that she had two dolls, that she could read and write, that she was going to memorise all of the Iliad and the Odyssey and that she hoped to make a pot herself on the potter’s wheel in Thespiae and. .

And suddenly she looked at me. ‘May I go to Brauron, Pater?’ she asked me.

No one had ever called me ‘Pater’.

I swallowed.

My sister stepped in. ‘Your father has a dozen friends to manage,’ she said. ‘Back to the exedra with you, my dear.’

‘No — Pen — let her stay.’ I grinned at her. Brauron is the great temple of Artemis near Athens. Young girls — maidens from age six to age twelve — go there to learn the sacred dances — and they shoot bows and ride horses and probably giggle like fools. My sister had not been rich enough nor had she the connections. Andronicus’s sister Leda had, and she had been a ‘little bear’, as the girls were called — not once but three times. It was all very aristocratic and required an enormous donation of fabric and silver.

And friends in Athens. Phrynicus, the playwright — his relatives were priests at Brauron. I leaned back in my seat — women have much more comfortable quarters than men. ‘Yes,’ I said.

My daughter grinned her impish grin. ‘Really?’ she shrieked.

Pen glared at me. ‘If you plan to spoil her, do it when I’m not here to see it!’ she said, but Leda put an arm around her waist and nodded to me.

‘It’s a fine choice. She’s a beautiful girl and well born. Her grandfather — Euphonia’s father — can host her in Attica, and she’ll have Athenian friends.’

So the next day, I hoisted her on my lap on one of Andronicus’s better horses, and took Brasidas and Alexandros and Lysias and Ajax on other borrowed horses — and my brother-in-law himself. We wore fine cloaks and fine chitons and gold jewellery — well, Brasidas didn’t, but the rest of us did, even Bellerophon — and we rode slowly so as not to raise dust. We crossed the Asopus and ate a pleasant meal in the shade of the sanctuary trees at the temple of Hera. We drew a great deal of comment from my fellow Plataeans, and I met briefly with a very anxious Myron, who was delighted with what I told him. I had a scroll and he signed it.

Then we rode over the hill — to my father’s farm. I sent Hector — unarmed — to announce us.

He cantered back before we came to the fork. ‘Your cousin Simon is waiting for you,’ he said.

My daughter was delightful, chattering all the way and apparently unconcerned that my cousin might greet us with a shower of arrows. I was far more nervous. Twice, she leapt from my horse’s back to investigate things — once, a kitten in the road which needed a scratch, and again, to pick flowers.

The old gate had been completely rebuilt. I rang the small bronze bell — my own work.

A slave opened the gate.

I didn’t know Simon’s sons at all — I’d seen them a few times in public, but never long enough to leave a mark in my head — despite which, I had to guess that the three big men in the stone-flagged yard were my cousins. I dismounted — there’s nothing more aggressive than a man on horseback. My friends all emulated me, dismounting by the water trough where Draco and Diokles and Hilarion and old Epictetus used to sit and drink wine.

My cousins stood in a brooding silence, offering nothing.

I’d rehearsed a few lines, but none of them came to me. But when I reached to hoist my daughter down, I acted. I held her briefly in the air. ‘This is my daughter Euphonia,’ I said. ‘I brought her to show I mean peace.’

Simonides — the man in the middle, and clearly the oldest — raised his chin. ‘Then you are welcome, cousin.’

I stepped forward with my daughter in my left arm. ‘You have done well with the farm,’ I said.

‘We found nothing but a ruin,’ he said.

Achilles, the second brother, glowered. ‘All our work,’ he said.

Ajax, the youngest, shrugged. He was a very handsome young man. ‘They all said you were dead.’ He smiled — alone of his brothers. ‘Well, all except the mad fuck on the mountain.’ He wore a sword, and his right hand was very near the hilt.

I put my daughter down.

‘You brought a great many men,’ Simonides said. ‘I gather we are dispossessed?’

Achilles looked around, as if counting the numbers. His older brother hissed something at him, and he fell back a step.

They were ready to fight.

‘I’m here in peace, and I’m not here to seize the farm,’ I said, and suddenly I was weary of the whole thing. ‘My mother is buried here, and I will always love this place.’ I raised an eyebrow. ‘May I be honest, cousins? I could order you off, and I think the town would agree. I could buy it from you — this, and ten farms like it.’

‘Not for sale,’ bellowed Ajax.

‘Will you shut up?’ Simonides said. ‘That’s not what he’s about at all.’

I looked them over. Achilles looked dangerous — dangerously stupid. Ajax looked handsome and a little shifty, but then, I was not predisposed to love any of them. Simonides was the spitting image of my pater as a young man.

And we are all Corvaxae — the black-haired men. Sometimes, blood is a little thicker than hate.

‘I can buy another farm,’ I said. ‘But I do not really want a farm. I’m a soldier. And a shipowner.’

‘What are you saying?’ Achilles snapped. ‘Say it and get out.’

Andronicus — remember, he was quite an important local man — stepped forward. ‘Simonides, you have made a good impression in Plataea since you arrived,’ he said. ‘But your cousin here led us to Marathon, and his word will carry any council. Courtesy here would be your best path.’

Simonides took his brother by the arm and hissed, ‘Shut up.’

‘I agree that — as you are alive — it is your farm.’ Simonides crossed his arms over his chest. ‘But I want to hear you agree that we’ve done all the work.’

‘I’ll do better,’ I said. I took out a small scroll. ‘There. It is yours in law.’

I wondered whether my pater would send the Furies to pursue me. But really — I had enough enemies, and I didn’t need a farm.

Then — and only then — did Simonides remember his manners and send a slave for wine.

The rest of that day was spent in Plataea. I met and embraced a hundred men — starting, of course, with my first true friend — Hermogenes. With Tiraeus, he had purchased the land across from Heron the Ironsmith and started a small bronze smithery. They had done well enough, but they made only small items — strap ends, small bells, buckles, eating knives — because they were poor and the land purchase took all their money.

The smithery was too small and too ill built. Because of that, they didn’t get work that they should have — men like Draco took their work to Thebes or Thespiae. And Styges worked too far away — he admitted it himself — making war gear in a low shed by the Asopus, almost to Eleuthra. I told him I wanted him in the shop.

So after I exchanged signs and told them that I had been raised to master in Sicily, I went next door and offered four hundred drachma in gold darics to the widow of a wine merchant to sell me her house. And then I did the same on the other side.

It is great fun to be able to play the great lord. I spent money like water for a few days, and while my daughter played in the smithy, I hired workmen and was very bossy indeed. I ordered the badly built smith-shed torn down, and I ordered a stone building put up in its place, filling both lots. I had the wine merchant’s house built into one end, and the other house torn down — it was abandoned — and rebuilt. I ordered equipment — anvils, bellows — sent for a carpenter for benches and toolboxes — and when I was done each day, I rode back to stay with Antigonus. I endured Brasidas’s cold looks — he felt it was all helot work — and Andronicus took me aside to say that I should buy farms. Like an aristocrat.

But I was having a fine time.

Myron asked me — one of those days — if I was home to stay.

I shook my head. ‘No,’ I said. ‘But I want a home here. My pater had a foot in the smithy and a foot on the farm. I’m not interested in farming. But I’ll have a foot in the smithy and another on a ship.’ I shrugged. ‘I’d appreciate your help in finding a house.’

Myron nodded. ‘You are still the polemarch,’ he said. ‘It would be good to have you here. There are new. . men in this city. And every time Athens sneezes, we catch cold. We live in. . difficult times.’

‘What new men?’ I asked, and Myron looked away.

‘We lost men at Marathon and before,’ he said. ‘Some of the slaves Athens sent us are good men, and some are not. And many Thebans have purchased land. Some of them are good men, and some are. . Thebans.’

I brought Styges to the building site. He and Hermogenes were not always the best of friends — not all of one’s favourite people can be made to love one another — but I reconciled them to the notion that it was my money going into the smithy. The tool shed was the size of a barn, and copied those I’d seen in Sicily and in Corinth — chimneys, hearths and bellows on the ground floor, lots of light, and space for ten men to work. In the second week, the new bellows came over the mountain from Athens — when you pay silver, you can get things in a miraculous hurry — and the new benches went in along the wall with a row of shuttered windows so that the whole shop smelled of fresh-sawn pine and oak. I had all the shutters painted bright red, and the doors, and I put the raven of the Corvaxae over the door in jet-black ironwork.

Heron was delighted. ‘A place that big will draw business from Thespiae and Thebes,’ he crowed. And he began to expand his own shop. Ironsmiths and bronzesmiths are not in competition for anything but eating knives, so it was fine that we were co-located.

Old Tiraeus laughed and watched the sheds being built. ‘This is the second time you’ve saved me,’ he said. ‘I can work the bronze, but I can’t make money.’

The truth was, Hermogenes was the same. A fine worker, and a gifted hand with the hammer — but not a man who could imagine what would sell, nor who could keep the bins stocked with ingots of bronze, or direct a dozen apprentices in pouring the sheet or pounding it out long before it was needed.

Styges was, though. On the battlefield and in the shop, he was a thinker. And so, while the new shutters went into the windows and the stucco dried on the outside and the two Athenian carpenters put their great pedal-powered bellows into the forge-fire hearths, I took my ‘associates’ out to dinner without Brasidas and his aristocratic notions. We sat and drank Plataean wine and ate oil on our bread and generally acted like the Boeotian bumpkins we really were.

I put Styges in charge of the shop, despite him being the youngest. Both older men frowned. But in the end, it was my money, and they agreed with no good grace despite the wine and the anchovies.

Men are men. You cannot tell a master smith that he should work for a younger man — even when Tiraeus himself admitted he lacked the skills to make and keep the silver.

At the end of the second week, the houses were done — rebuilt. One for Hermogenes and his wife, and one for Tiraeus and Styges, until one or both found a mate. I purchased them four slaves, and we all spent a day in the shop, playing with the bellows.

At the end of the second week, I sent for Empedocles, and that evening, riding home to Thespiae, I met a silversmith on the road. He was just come from a pilgrimage to Delphi. I didn’t know him, but he proved to be a cousin of Diokles and quite a young man.

The next morning, he showed up at the stone smithery, and by the end of the day, he had his tools laid out on a bench and was quickly using up his store of silver making trinkets for the pilgrims who came to the temple of Hera — mostly women, and prone to buy jewellery. But his presence made Styges excited, because now he had someone to work silver, he could make fancier armour.

Myron’s friend Timaeas offered me any of five lots for my own house, and I bought the house across from Myron’s. I spent the money from my tin on that house — new everything, from slaves to statues to household gods. It had two things few houses in Plataea had ever seen — an in-town stable for four horses, and a water trough with flowing water. The house was big and spacious — too big for one man and his small daughter, no matter how rich. But I had the walls painted by professionals, and I spent money — more money — on horses, on silver plates, on good pottery and grain storage and then on grain.

It was like playing house, with real money.

I tell all this, as if all I did was concern myself with buildings, but in the main, what I did was play with my daughter and get to know her, and write letters to Jocasta and to Cimon and to Phrynicus asking for help putting her into the summer dances at Brauron, and before the late flowers were past budding and the first barley crop was in, I had a letter from Jocasta, wife of Aristides, informing me that my daughter had a place in the New Moon as a Little Bear, and that her husband was to be put on trial.

He is too proud to ask your help — but I well remember what you did for Miltiades. Themistocles will stop at nothing to see my husband in exile, and I cannot bear it. Arimnestos, bring your daughter to the temple and come and see what can be done for Aristides, and I will be forever in your debt.

Jocasta

Unlike Gorgo, and the other Spartan women, who lived very much in public, it was almost unheard of for an Athenian woman to write a letter to a man — but Jocasta had a good head on her shoulders, and she had seized the excuse of my writing about my daughter (women’s business) to make her plea.

I knew that things must be desperate indeed.

Cimon’s answer came the very next day, and the tone of desperation was the same.

Of course we can arrange for your daughter to be placed at Brauron. But if you were to see fit to accompany her, you might find yourself requested to perform a miracle, as Aristides is threatened with ostracism.

I felt very wise, what with having made peace with Simon’s sons and having brought some of my prosperity home to Plataea. Three weeks after my arrival, I had every mason in the town at work; the roofer was working from dawn to dusk, there were whole convoys of donkeys bringing goods from Athens, Corinth and even hated Thebes, and the new smithy rang with the music of the hammer on the anvil. My oarsmen — as well as Brasidas and Alexandros — had been formally invested as citizens at my behest. I helped Brasidas purchase a farm and the slaves to run it — never was there a less interested farmer.

I thought that it was foolish of Themistocles to continue the quarrel with Aristides — just when we needed both men for the war with Persia. I was in a fine mood, and I prepared my daughter to travel over the mountain to Attica while preparing in my mind the speeches of reconciliation I planned for Athens.

On the summer feast of Herakles, old Empedocles came and blessed the new building and the whole forge, even including the silversmith in his prayers, and he kindled all our forge fires. He had a Theban journeyman with him, and the young man beamed at everything he saw and helped the old man with the rites.

Then I made a cup. It had been two years since I had worked, and yet the power of the god flowed through me and I made a fine cup — with a flat bottom and sloped sides, and silver rivets on the handle, and the image of a priest blessing an anvil. And Empedocles laughed and then cried and complained that he was an old man, and we all drank a great deal. But I made a second cup and gave it to my daughter, and she shook her head.

‘My uncle Andronicus can’t make anything like this,’ she said.

‘He’s an aristocrat,’ I said.

And the next day, while my new slaves we repacking my new donkeys in my new yard of my new house, yet another messenger came, from the Agiad King of Sparta.

The truth? I rather looked forward to taking the heralds to Susa.

You must know I’d never been. But I had been to Sardis and I knew enough Persian to get good service and good food. I knew enough Persian aristocrats to expect to have friends at the Great King’s court.

So I delayed my trip to Athens by a day so that I could say a proper goodbye — to Hermogenes and Styges and Tiraeus, to Myron and Draco — but most of all, to my sister and her husband. I arranged for my daughter to be retrieved after her time at the temple of Artemis. I promised to return.

‘How long?’ Pen asked. ‘You only just came home!’

I nodded and looked out of the window. ‘Look for me in the spring,’ I said.

‘A year!’ my sister wailed.

My daughter clung to me.

I shrugged and my brother-in-law, who clearly felt I’d endured enough, said, ‘My dears, he’s been commanded by the King of Sparta!’

‘I don’t particularly care if he’s been commanded by Hera or Zeus!’ my sister said, but she relented, asked forgiveness for her blasphemy, and sent me on the road with her blessings.

I suppose I should have worried that Idomeneaus did not come out to wish me well. I prayed at the shrine and Bellerophon told me that the mad Cretan was hunting.

My six-year-old daughter was going to the temple of Artemis, and I was going a hundred times farther, to the court of the Great King. But she had six mules behind her, all heavily laden, and I had one.

And we stopped at the high altar on Kitharon, and I saw that someone had been making black offerings. I could guess which of my cousins was not yet done with our feud. But in my new-found wisdom, I was immune to such petty concerns. I brushed the bits of black wool aside and left my daughter to start a fire on the ash altar with her new hero, Brasidas — who would not worship a Spartan, at age six? Alexandros and I ran the mountaintop trails until we killed a deer. We didn’t see Idomeneaus. We brought the deer’s corpse back and opened it and burned the fat and the thigh bones on my daughter’s fire. She had never sacrificed there, and it was a great adventure for her, and afterwards we all ate fresh venison.

She threw up.

Parenthood.

But in the morning, we went down the mountain into Attica, and the world was waiting for us.

I took Euphonia to see her grandfather. She was very excited to get to Brauron and she rued every day lost, sure that everyone else would be friends and she’d miss everything fun. But her grandfather — her mother’s father — was a fine gentleman, still delighted with me. I was never asked where I had been for the last six years, and I won his heart by telling him that I’d stood next to the King of Sparta during the sacrifices at the Olympic games. And he loved his granddaughter. She was showered with presents — quite wide eyed, and yet perfectly willing to have more.

We stayed two days, and he agreed to fetch her from Brauron and keep her until Leda or Penelope came for her. My second night there I drank too much and cried for my daughter’s mother, whom I truly loved. Her father was solicitous, and a little afraid of my grief.

But grief is only that. And it is better than emptiness or anger.

Ah, my daughter! You yourself learned the sacred dances in the groves and hills of Brauron, but some of your guests may not know the place.

Brauron is just a few stades south of Marathon on the same coast. And how that coast brought back memories for me. We met with Phrynicus and his wife — mounted on mules — just west of the city and we kept going, as a ‘stop’ in Athens could have embroiled us in politics very quickly. I had enemies in the city, among the Alcmaeonidae. The richest family in the world. But it was a great pleasure to revisit the days of our heroism together — how men love to talk about a shared adventure, my daughter! We lied and we lied — much as I’m doing with you now.

Hah, the looks on your faces.

At any rate, we crossed the mountains and rode across the great plain of Attica, and stayed the night in a fine house — that of a friend of both my father-in-law and of Cimon, and no friend of Phrynicus. A countryside aristocrat who swore that he had never in his life been to Athens. He was of the cavalry class, and he felt that the city was rotten with corruption. He all but fawned on Brasidas, asking his opinion on everything from spear fighting to the education of his son. And the man — Peisander — had a girl just seven years old going off to Brauron, as arranged by Cimon, and so we all rode off together the next day — Phrynicus swallowing his political views at every turn in the road, I can promise you.

It is hardly central to my tale, but I’ll bore you with it a little, to help you understand how Greeks actually dealt with the coming of the Persians. Peisander had stood in his tribe’s front rank at Marathon. He was a proven man — brave, and patriotic.

He fairly worshipped Aristides.

And yet, as we rode down the last ridge and saw the sea, he turned to me and shook his head. ‘You are far richer than I — and a friend of the King of Sparta. And yet I understand from your silence that you support this foolishness — this war with the Great King. How can we hope to triumph?’

I smiled — winningly, I hope. ‘Much the same way we carried the day at Marathon,’ I said. ‘Courage, and the love of the gods.’

He nodded. ‘That’s well said — piety like yours is rarer in these godless days, my friend. But — that was a raid. A punitive expedition. Men say that if the Great King comes, he’ll have a million men. On our best day, Athens can raise fifteen thousand hoplites.’

I nodded. ‘Sparta can bring twice that, with her allies. Thebes the same again, and Corinth and Argos the same again. With Athens as allies, we’ll match anything Persia can get here.’ I waved my hands. ‘Greece is not Asia. They will have real trouble feeding and watering a giant army.’

He looked back at our daughters, riding side by side. ‘Perhaps. Perhaps age makes cowards of us. But listen, my lord. Why not send the earth and water? We submit. Persia sends a satrap. So?’ He shrugged. ‘No virgins are raped.’ He looked me right in the eye. ‘No boys die on spear points.’ Then he flushed, and looked back at Brasidas, who was close enough to hear him. ‘I’m sure I sound like a fearful coward to you, sir.’

Brasidas shrugged. ‘No man of Marathon is a coward to me, sir. But — I agree.’ Brasidas looked at me and had the good grace to flash a wry smile. ‘I do not understand, myself, why we must fight. Mere lip-service may suffice.’

‘This from a Spartan!’ my new friend said, and slapped his thigh.

Brasidas raised an eyebrow. ‘I am a Plataean, now.’

I nodded. ‘I can tell — you talk more.’

The priestesses of Brauron were not like other Greek women I knew. They were neither pretty nor ugly — in fact, the dozen I met ran a full gamut of feminine types — but they all had the air of command. Because of my time with the Keltoi, I recognised that they were free. They did not see me as husband, father or lord. But as a peer. Or even less. Interesting.

Sittonax said he found the priestesses to be the most interesting women he’d met in Greece, and one of the senior priestesses invited him to dinner. But not me — which was fine. I saw my daughter’s quarters, which were very like a boy’s military camp on Crete — in fact, my Spartan’s eyebrows shot up and later he said it was like a politer Agoge for girls. And it was.

Euphonia had two advantages — her open disposition, which made friends easily, and Peisander’s daughter Hermione, who was well known, from just across the mountain. I felt that I left my little daughter in good hands. But that night, riding back to a small inn kept for parents, I felt as if I’d just left Briseis. I felt as if a little hole had been ripped in my heart. I had only had a daughter for one single month.

If you are expecting me to talk about how I rescued Aristides from ostracism, I’m sorry to say I did not. Phrynicus and Peisander shared only one political issue — they both detested the ostracism. I kept them to that subject all the way back across the plains of Attica, but it was increasingly clear to me that my friend was doomed.

Despite being in favour of the war with Persia, Aristides fought the creation of a large and powerful Athenian fleet tooth and nail, rising every day in the assembly to rally the old families and the aristocrats against Themistocles. Men said he planned to take the tyranny to stop the democrats.

Men like Peisander thought that would be a fine thing.

We stayed another night with the aristocrat, and then Phrynicus and I and his charming wife rode slowly down towards the sea, crossed the ridges until we could see the magnificent acropolis rising in the distance, and then down again into the city.

‘Themistocles wants to build walls,’ he said.

His wife rolled her eyes.

‘He has been a good friend to us!’ Phrynicus insisted.

‘As long as you write his panegyrics,’ she commented. She smiled at me. ‘He is caught in the middle. He was friends as a boy with both.’

‘You know that when Themistocles was a boy, he was not allowed into the main gymnasium because his mother was foreign,’ Phrynicus said. ‘So he took to exercising at a small palaestra just outside the old walls by the statue of Herakles. More and more of us went there with him, until it turned out we’d basically taken all the students out of the main gymnasium.’ Phrynicus shot me his wry smile. ‘I think we gave him a taste of power and he’s never looked back.’

‘And Aristides was one of the boys who saw him shut out of the aristocratic gymnasium?’ I asked.

Phrynicus wrinkled his nose. ‘Can you imagine Aristides the Just doing any such thing? But they’ve always been rivals. Rivals for girls and sometimes boys, rivals for commands. Aristides is a far better soldier. Themistocles is a better orator and, frankly, sees farther ahead. Aristides is more honourable. Themistocles is more capable of making the hard decisions. Aristides is a better negotiator.’ He rolled his right hand back and forth as he read off this litany.

‘Together, they make one perfect man?’ I asked.

Phrynicus’s wife snorted.

I went and lived with Paramanos, who was very prosperous and had a fine house in Piraeus, with a dozen slaves and sixteen rooms in two storeys — three wings around a tiled courtyard, very elegant. I didn’t recognise it at the time, but my greatest disappointment in Plataea had been that Hermogenes and I were no longer close friends. There was some wall between us — and I blamed silver and fame.

I had no such reserve with Paramanos, and that was all the odder, as we had not started friends and, in fact, we had been closer to allies than philoi. He’d been my slave and then my freedman — helmsman in my ship, and then sub-captain. Now, as a rich Athenian merchant — Miltiades had arranged citizenship for him and his Cyrenian-born daughter — we were peers.

Paramanos had purchased the contract of a beautiful young hetaera — five years. He confessed to me in private that he would probably offer her marriage. She was younger and, like Gorgo and the priestesses at Brauron, very open. She sat in a chair while we dined, made jokes both coarse and clever, and played. She also told Paramanos when he had had too much to drink and laid out for him what he needed to do to help his daughter along towards her wedding.

I liked her. We flirted and debated some philosophy and she fairly doted on me when I said that I had known Heraklitus. She was, for a woman, very well read — she was better educated than some Athenian men.

But I digress.

I had to sail to Sparta to pick up my charges, and time was of the essence because I needed good sailing weather. But — obedient to my orders — none of my ships were available. Storm Cutter and Lydia were both running small cargoes. Paramanos’s Black Raven had once been my ship — but it was Paramanos’s ship now, and he regularly carried silver to the Ionians and brought back dyed wool — an excellent trade for a fast, well-armed ship.

So I had days to wait, and I politicked for Aristides. I went up to the city from Piraeus and visited the assembly. Oh — I was a citizen of Athens. I can’t remember whether I’ve said, but after Marathon, Athens had made me — and a dozen other Plataeans including my brother-in-law — Athenian citizens. Perhaps the finest thing was that they had the priestess of Athena Nike pray every morning for the ‘City of Green Plataea’. I know, because I so swelled with pride when I learned this that I rose the next morning in the dark and walked up to the town. I was the only worshipper in the temple — nothing so fine as what is now planned. Afterwards, an acolyte came and took my donation.

‘Are you by any chance a Plataean?’ he asked, and I grinned and admitted I was. He was delighted.

As I left the little temple, I noted that I was being followed. I did nothing about it — I went down the other side of the acropolis, past the festival site, and walked into the area where the rich had their homes — like a little parkland in the city. My two followers moved from wall corner to wall corner. If they had simply strolled, they’d have been much harder to spot.

I was alone — rare for me, but I hadn’t wanted Brasidas or Alexandros or any of the others at my shoulder in temple. So I moved as if unaware of my tail, and went to Aristides’ house.

We embraced, but we’d just been together for two weeks, and Jocasta gave my hand a squeeze — like a massive embrace from that very proper aristocratic lady. I heard it all over again, but Aristides was resigned and clearly was working to bring Jocasta to this point of view. I had never seen open discord between them, but Jocasta was sufficiently moved to disagree — flatly — with her husband in front of a third party. Aristides looked hurt.

I pretended not to be there.

Eventually, Jocasta walked away to see to a servant’s injury. Aristides waited until we could hear her bare feet on the marble of the foyer, and then he leaned close.

‘I have to say this, my friend. Themistocles and I are not friends — but I have accepted this exile. I will go with you to the Great King. Athens cannot be seen to send an ambassador. But a man in exile — a conservative?’ He nodded.

And I understood.

It had always seemed odd to me that, whatever their differences, these two leaders of the resistance party were at loggerheads. I had smelled the rat, but I hadn’t come to the correct conclusion.

‘You should tell Jocasta,’ I said. ‘She keeps all your other secrets.’

I said it deadpan, and he, being Aristides the prig, didn’t find it funny. But I did.

Eventually, I left, being unwilling to invite myself to dinner. I’d had three cups of wine and I wore no weapon, and so I picked up one of Aristides’ sticks by the door and flourished it at him. ‘I need to borrow one,’ I said.

‘He never leaves home with them,’ Jocasta said. ‘But every time he visits our farms outside the walls, he walks home with a new one.’

‘I like them!’ Aristides said ruefully.

You might think that, as one of the richest men in the world, Aristides could be allowed to own as many walking staffs as he liked — but if you think that, you’ve never been married.

They were waiting in the near-dark, just north of Aristides’ house, and they had knives.

I slipped through Aristides’ house as silently as a thief and left by the back gate, which Jocasta held for me while looking as if she doubted my sanity.

I poured a little oil on the fire by saying, ‘Your husband has something to tell you,’ and once out through the back gate I walked through the alley — used only by slaves and tradesmen — with twelve-foot stone walls towering over me on either side. It was almost dark.

I lay down at the corner and looked around it at ground level. That’s how I know there were four of them, all well armed. I assumed they were sent by bloody Cleitus, of the Alcmaeonidae. I didn’t feel like fighting three younger men, and besides, I didn’t need to fight them.

I slipped across the alley and vanished into the sacred precinct of the unfinished temple of Olympian Zeus. The Pisistradae had started it and left the drums for the columns lying around like children’s toys. Young couples came to. . well, to use the columns. I was treated to more than my share of erotic breathing as I crossed the space, and emerged on the east slope of the acropolis, which I skirted. Twice I doubled back in the dense street grid, and I sat in one of the fountain houses, watching my back trail. Things you learn as a slave stay with you for life.

That night I ate with Paramanos and my people — and with Giorgios and Nicolas, returned from their pilgrimage. Next day I attended the Athenian assembly and voted against ostracism for Aristides.

We lost. Aristides was exiled for ten years.

His exile did not include forfeiture of any property — his wife could continue to live on the east slope of the acropolis and his managers could continue to run his farms. By Athenian standards, it was lenient, if you left out the crushing unfairness of it. The problem was that men like Aristides had had the habit of making themselves tyrants for more than a hundred years. Aristides had it all — money, good looks, a war record, and oratory skills. I suspect that, even if he had not been chosen as the secret ambassador, he would have had to go. Perhaps the secret mission to the Great King was a sop.

Frankly, Athenian politics always appals me. They punish the best men and raise fools.

Mind you, in the same assembly, I voted in favour of spending the year’s excess from the silver mines on building new triremes — the second or third year they’d done that. I must have been one of the few men in that assembly to vote that way — against ostracism, in favour of the fleet. Most Athenians saw these as conflicting interests, because they were too close to the problems.

Well.

Late that afternoon, Lydia swept into Piraeus with a hull full of hides and Ionian wine, and the next morning I had her laded with white Athenian leather, fine bronze wares and pottery. I arranged a farewell dinner with Phrynicus, and sailed away west, for Sparta.

I don’t remember anything about the sea voyage. I suspect it was fraught with the usual perils and probably had as many irritated rowers and magnificent dolphins as every other trip across the Aegean, but what I remember is Sparta itself.

I suspect that most people do not imagine Sparta as beautiful; Athens is beautiful — she has the acropolis and two hundred years of magnificent architecture. Plataea is beautiful because of Kitharon and because of the green fields that stretch away, the visible signs of Demeter’s blessing to man and Hera’s blessing to Green Plataea.

Sparta is also beautiful. Did she not give birth to Helen? And are not the women of Lacedaemon all Helen’s daughters? High up the vale, with mountains rising on either hand, the carpet of olive trees rolling across the valley — Sparta has a unique wonder.

But I cannot abide the helots. Or rather, the Spartans themselves. On every hand in Sparta, one sees them — and they are somehow more wretched than slaves in Athens or Plataea. Perhaps that is merely my own prejudice, but few helots are ever freed, and the enslavement is racial, not by chance or war-capture. Many have been slaves for so many generations that they think their state is natural — as do their masters. I admire Sparta for many things — but the enslavement of the helots casts a shadow, and that shadow, to me, is at the core of who they are.

I left Brasidas on the ship with Sekla. Spartans are less forgiving than other Greeks in matters of skin colour. I took only Alexandros and Hector, and we purchased horses by the beach at Gytheio where Lydia was selling her wares. When we came in stern first, there were a pair of Carthaginian triremes on the beach to trade, and two more over by the Migonion. But they wanted nothing more from us than to buy our goods, and there was not a sign of Dagon. I rode north to Sparta with no greater concern than to pick up my passengers and make haste before the autumn storms hit.

We entered the city on the main road, as well paved as the Panathenaic way, and rode past the temple of the Dioscuri, which was every bit as elegant as anything in Athens — the local stone lent itself to the remarkable quality of the Peloponnesian sunshine. It was high summer, and just before midday, when most Spartan citizens rested in the shade, and even slaves seemed to dart from shadow to shadow. The three of us wore straw hats with brims so wide we seemed to be in tents.

The agora was as busy as any in Greece — the goods unloaded on the beach at Gytheio were already on sale in the capital. In the agora, the midday sun was ignored — there were hundreds of men and women moving about, and long awnings. It was here that I saw the main difference between Sparta and Athens. Sparta has magnificent temples but too little shade, and Spartans are too proud to pretend to need a stoa. In fact, I saw mostly helots sitting under the old oak trees that ringed the agora. Citizens stood proudly in the sun, as if daring Helios to do his worst.

I wore a big hat.

We dismounted at the edge of the agora, and it was there that I got my first taste of helot life. An adolescent Spartiate — probably in the last years of the Agoge — demanded water from a helot woman, and when he didn’t get it fast enough, he said, ‘Obey, bitch,’ and struck her.

Instead of screaming for help, she cringed away and fetched him water.

Perhaps it was not a representative incident. Perhaps I misjudge them.

At any rate, we asked directions.

If I expected a palace for the two kings, I was wrong. The kings live well — they have the kind of staff one associates with the richest Athenians. But their homes are private houses, and Leonidas lived in a beautiful house with three wings around a courtyard with its own olive tree and a small fountain. The courtyard had three arcades of columns, one on each side, for shade. A wall and a set of barracks for slaves, and a small warehouse, took up the fourth side of the complex.

We were ushered in by a helot butler, and brought into the courtyard. There we were served a marvellous water, full of bubbles from some god-touched spring. The helots served Hector as freely as they served Alexandros and me.

Alexandros smiled at Hector. ‘I think you are in for an easy few days.’

I laughed. ‘Am I such a hard master? But perhaps we could send him to the Agoge.’

Another helot came in. ‘Masters, the Lady Gorgo wishes you to know that she will join you directly.’

Indeed, the lady herself followed hard on the slave’s message. She was dressed simply, in a long yellow chiton pinned in the Dorian manner. She wore a girdle of gold tied with a Herakles knot and wore a diadem in her hair.

‘Ah, Helen,’ I said. I said it lightly.

Her eyes crossed mine the way a man’s do when he is ready to draw a weapon.

‘In Sparta, no woman is ever compared to Helen,’ she said. She nodded agreeably. ‘Pardon me. Your words took me aback, and I should have nothing for you but praise. The king is at exercise and will join us soon, as will some of your other friends here.’ She nodded pleasantly enough to Alexandros and to young Hector.

I intervened to make introductions. ‘My lady, this is my captain of marines, Alexandros, a gentleman of Plataea, and this is my hypaspist, Hector, son of Anarchos, now also a citizen of Plataea.’

‘Ah, Green Plataea. I intend to make a pilgrimage to the temple of Hera in the spring.’ Gorgo smiled. ‘I love to travel. But I thought that you had another captain of marines?’

I was a little shocked that she should mention him. ‘I have several ships,’ I said.

By this time, slaves were appearing with nuts, honeyed almonds and wine. Gorgo led us, as if in a procession, through the courtyard to another wing and in under the portico to a tiled alcove not unlike the edge of the Athenian paleastra — stone benches like those athletes use. The benches lined two walls, so that quite a number of people could sit and converse — a very civilised notion.

We sat and munched nuts.

‘We must speak of payment,’ Gorgo said quickly, as if discussing a distasteful ailment with a physician. ‘I realise that a man does not run a ship the length of the Inner Sea for nothing.’

I had already discussed this in Athens with Cimon and Aristides — and Jocasta, who was more interested in the life of the Spartan queen than any story I’d ever told her. We’d agreed that I would charge the Spartans nothing.

This is politics. Generosity matters. In fact, I could ill afford to sail for several months without making a profit, but with some ‘help’ from rich Athenians, we — the Athenians, in this case — could appear generous and supportive.

‘I will carry a cargo each way,’ I said airily. I met her eye — so odd to look a woman in the eye every time you spoke. I think that’s why Gorgo reminded me so much of Briseis. ‘I do not intend to charge you anything for taking your heralds to Susa.’ I nodded. ‘Think of it as little Plataea’s contribution to the defence of Greece.’

This obviously pleased Gorgo a great deal, and she took my hand and pressed it.

Leonidas returned from exercise, wearing only a chlamys, like an Athenian ephebe. His body was as near perfect as a man’s can be — although his lower legs and shins were a mass of ugly bruises.

I took his hand. ‘Pankration?’ I asked.

The King of Sparta laughed. ‘How did you guess? And worse tomorrow.’ He raised his eyebrows briefly in an expression of self-knowledge. ‘It is harder at my age to pretend to be a hero of twenty-five.’ In fact, the Agiad King of Sparta was nearer sixty than fifty.

I nodded ruefully.

‘You should come!’ Leonidas said. ‘Many men here would seek to measure themselves against you.’

I laughed. ‘I’m sure they’d beat me black and blue,’ I answered.

‘Better you than me,’ said the king.

Leonidas was introduced to Alexandros and to Hector, who was open mouthed with wonder at being in the presence of the Great King of Sparta. I confess that I was more than a trifle awed myself.

He turned to me and sat on the bench where Gorgo had been sitting. ‘You know I sent a delegation to Delphi last year?’ he asked. ‘I wanted to hear from the oracle what was to come for us if we resisted. And do you know what she answered?’

‘No,’ I said.

‘Good, because if you did, I’d have quite a breach in my security arrangements.’ The king smiled ruefully. He was very easy to like — he had a kind of magnetic charm coupled with humour that was very appealing. He nodded and lowered his voice. ‘She said that if Greece was freed, she would owe her freedom to Green Plataea. And she said, “The strength of bulls or lions cannot stop the foe. No, he will not leave off, I say, until he tears the city or the king limb from limb.”’

I winced. ‘That’s. . not the prophecy I’d have wanted to hear,’ I agreed.

Leonidas shrugged. ‘The gods do as they will. But when I heard that you spoke Persian and had ships, I wondered if you were the tool by which Green Plataea would serve Greece.’

I suspect I grinned. ‘I’ll do my best, o King,’ I said, and bowed.

I had expected to pick up my two heralds and go, but in fact we dawdled a week in Sparta, and I’d have stayed longer. There is much to love there, as I, as a man who enjoyed watching women, must tell you that there are more beautiful women in Sparta than most places, and when you stare at them they stare back. One old hag of thirty, fresh from hard exercise and wearing nothing over her loveliness but a chiton of linen, caught my eye and shocked me by crossing the agora and asking me my name.

That wouldn’t happen in Athens.

‘Arimnestos of Plataea,’ I said.

‘I guess you like what you see,’ she said. She laughed. ‘At my age, it is always a pleasure to catch a worthy man’s eye.’

Indeed, my eye was caught. She turned away, but her eyes didn’t leave mine until her head was fully turned.

I almost followed her up the hill.

Men — Spartiates — mostly live in barracks like Cretan noblemen, and their wives keep house (with helot slaves) and mind the children (mostly done by slaves) and run the estates by which the men pay their mess bills. Odd as this arrangement might seem, it works as well as any other. To a Plataean, every Spartan woman seemed like the very epitome of athletic beauty, and Hector spoke for us all when he said (watching the old crone of thirty sway delightfully away from us), ‘If I were a Spartiate, I’d never spend a minute in those barracks.’

I suspect we all three of us sighed.

It was also impossible to guess whether any of these remarkable women were available. By the standards of Athens or Plataea, they were all so forward that they might have been porne. And I could remember Plataeans who had been to Sparta on pilgrimage making claims about their lusty infidelities — but none of the women I met seemed — somehow — the types. They were direct — it is true. And sensual and athletic. But not, more’s the pity, licentious.

Like upper-class Athenians, the men were more prone to run mad over a pretty boy than over their wives, but — just as in Athens — it was hard to tell how much of that was emulation and prowess, and how much was really. . love. Or whatever passed for love in the hothouse world of barracks and Agoge.

At any rate, on my second day in Sparta, the king took me to meet his mess and dine with them, which was accounted one of the highest honours in the Greek world. It’s good that it is such an honour, because the food was terrible. I think they make a special effort whenever a foreigner comes. The black broth tasted as if pig excrement had been involved in making it. I never had such foul bread in all the years of my slavery. The Phoenicians give better food to their oarsmen.

But I digress.

I was also invited to the exercise field, a little less civilised than one of the better Athenian gymnasiums, but you have to realise that the Athenian upper class often emulates the Spartan aristocracy. So the gymnasiums are not so different. The sun is hotter, and you cannot smell the sea air.

I boxed a little with the king. That was a great honour, too — despite his bruises, he didn’t spar with everyone. And by boxing with me, he made me anyone’s equal, and so men virtually queued up to fight me. An older man — one of the king’s guard — slipped past me with a beautiful feint and broke my nose — this in the first minute — and then was most solicitous in fixing it. He said something, reached out and pulled hard, and reset it.

And then he expected to go back to our contest.

Spartans.

I took a dip in their cold water to clear the pain — I don’t think I impressed my opponent at all — and to get the pain-fatigue out of my muscles, and then I went back, towelled dry by helots, and chose a younger man for a bout of pankration. I knew I had to — there’s no avoiding pankration in Sparta, and if I ever planned to walk among these men with my head high, I had to endure it.

Spartans, of course, bite and gouge and do other things in a pankration match that are forbidden elsewhere. My young opponent was quite heavily built and fresh from the Agoge, and I’m pretty sure, given my swollen nose and the ease with which my first opponent had downed me, that he saw me as easy prey. He was very polite.

I let him catch my arms, gave a twist I’d learned from Polymarchos, and threw him.

He bounced to his feet. I got a nice cheer — a buzz — from the other men watching.

I backed up a couple of steps, and my opponent came at me.

Now that I’d taught him not to grab at my hands, I raised them, and when he refused the bait, I threw a flurry of punches. I caught him twice and stunned him, which allowed me to catch his right arm in my left and then pass my left hand under his elbow.

And down he went. He tried to resist, and got some muscles pulled for his pains. I could have dislocated his shoulder or dropped him on his head, but I was a guest.

And he tried to grab my testicles.

I had been warned — many times — and I had fought the helot at Olympia. I really should have known. He hit my testicles a glancing blow as I rolled my hips away, and kneed him — all the while wrenching his right shoulder, which must have been in agony.

So I rolled the arm down, hit him in the ear with my left hand — pretty viciously, I confess — and then put him in the sand face first, with a knee in the small of his back.

He tried to kick me — backwards.

I looked at the king. I had my opponent in the full hold — and his kicks were only ruining his own shoulder.

‘How do I make him stop?’ I asked.

Men laughed.

One of the older men stepped forward with a polite nod to me and tapped the young man with his staff. Instantly, the young man went limp.

I got up.

He tried to bounce to his feet, but his right arm wasn’t fully responding to his commands. Nonetheless, he stretched forth his hands as if ready for another bout.

I looked at the older man with the staff. I saw a slave with a water ewer, and held up my hand — walked to the edge of the sand and took a drink of water.

The king waved at the sky as if stating a pleasantry about the weather. ‘You have to go a third fall. It will humiliate him otherwise.’

I suppose brave and foolish young men are much the same everywhere. Just more so, in Lacedaemon.

I stepped back on to the sand, nodded to him, and we circled a few times. In fact, I was not going to rush him — both for his ego and because I had a suspicion that Spartans practised fighting hurt.

Sure enough, when I offered him an opening he raised his right hand, all but offering it to me, with all the prospect of pain that would go with it — and then stepped in deep with his left side, intending a fast throw and using his own injury as bait.

I snap-kicked his left knee. I hit his right bicep with my left fist, and turned, making him follow me. It had been an excellent move, for a wounded man, and he responded well, but he had almost no strength in his right side and now he was a little white around the nostrils.

I caught him on the turn — and pinned his right hand low with my left, a wrist grab. I meant to avoid further injury to his right. I can be a good man.

My right hand went for a lock on his left, but he was too quick, so I thrust it deep, so that my right hand clipped his jaw and went past, all but touching his left shoulder as my right foot went behind his feet, and then I threw him — backwards — with my out-thrust right hand. I followed him down, pinned his left under my knee, and put my right hand to his throat.

He tried to hit me with his right fist.

I think I shook my head. He had no strength in that fist at all. But he was still fighting.

I had just spent fifty days training with Polymarchos. I’d probably never been as good as I was just then.

At any rate, the ephor with the stick came and tapped him, and again he went limp, but he sprang up again, and took my hand. And I noted the way men looked at him when he strode — strode — away.

He’d made the grade. Spartans aren’t all about winning. It is more, for them, about the manner of the contest. When it became clear that he couldn’t beat me, then it was a different kind of contest, and in the eyes of all the Spartiates — all of us, really — he had triumphed. Over his own pain.

That was Sparta.

I wrestled a fall with old Calliteles. He stepped through the crowd and said, ‘So far you haven’t faced our best. I’m an old man, but I’d be pleased to fight a throw.’

He was big — he had two inches of reach on me, and few men can say that, and he outweighed me by several stone. I was careful while we circled, and I was in my fifth or sixth fight of the day and blessing Polymarchos and all the exercise I’d got building things in Plataea.

We circled for a long time.

Twice he grabbed for me, and twice I evaded him. This was wrestling, so I couldn’t keep him at a distance with kicks and punches, and at the third attack, I saw an opening and pounced.

Hah, hah! I was face down in the sand a moment later with his whole weight atop me. Some opening. But he forbore to break my arm, and he slapped me as I rose. I took up a guard and he shook his head.

‘One fall a day. That’s all my old knees can take,’ he said.

‘Mine too,’ I said, somewhat ruefully.

And then Bulis appeared. He came through the crowd quickly, and pushed into the space in front of the king.

‘I’d like a go,’ he said. ‘Unless you are too tired.’

His delivery was Laconian — flat. In fact, I was tired — the broken nose had taken a great deal out of me, and the young pankrationist had been very strong. And I thought Bulis meant me harm.

‘Of course,’ I said. It occurred to me, in a somewhat reptilian moment of which I’m not proud, that if Bulis broke my arm or injured me, I could save six months of my life and not take him to Sardis or Susa.

It was hard to read Bulis. He was not giving off the signals I’d have taken for violent aggression. His face registered very little emotion, and he merely inclined his head. He might have been cold, angry — or shy.

‘What would you like to do?’ he asked.

‘Pankration,’ I answered. I’m not a great boxer, witness the nose.

Bulis stepped straight in with a punch aimed at my nose.

I tried to trap his punch.

Neither one of us was successful. He rotated on the balls of his feet and threw his left, and I kicked at his left knee, and both of us half turned and returned to our guards — and backed away.

He grabbed for my throat.

I grabbed for his, and we had several very intense heartbeats while our arms intertwined, looking for a hold.

He rolled — a feint, and I caught that it was a feint in time to raise my leg and block the kick to my crotch. I’d been shown a beautiful move by Polymarchos — a kick-lock — and since I had my left leg up, I flicked my own kick at his testicles and then tried to catch his left leg and encircle it with my right. But I hadn’t practised it enough, and I missed the hold. We passed each other, and he got a weak left into my gut, and my structure held.

In truth, we were well matched.

I knew a few tricks that I didn’t think were taught in Sparta, and it was time to dust them off. But I needed another clench or a flurry of boxing blows, and so, of course, I got neither. We circled, and then we exchanged kicks, and then circled.

I stepped in. It was the first time I’d initiated the action, and he was ready — but a little over-eager, and I deceived his right hand, and got my left in a smashing blow to his shoulder, and I tried my gambit, passing deeply with my left foot. I went for a left armlock which he easily evaded, and he caught me a fine left jab to the temple.

It was my turn to fight through pain. I got my instep around his right heel, passed my left arm behind his head, missed my jab as he ducked his head — and then I pivoted on the balls of my feet, so that my left knee came in behind his right knee, and I bore him down to the ground. Gaining control of his left arm as he struggled for his balance.

He tried to reverse the hold and to throw me left to right, but the grip is inexorable, and I had him face down in the sand.

He tapped. Like a normal person.

Later I learned that Spartiates — full Spartiates, who have seen battle — are allowed, even encouraged, to tap, while the young are forced to fight to full submission or unconsciousness. I suppose I see the point, although they must lose some good youngsters that way.

He got up and smiled at me.

I’ve seldom been so surprised. It wasn’t a ‘now I kill you’ smile, but merely a smile of appreciation.

Then he came at me hard.

We had a ten-heartbeat flurry — fists, kicks, and then a fast series of grabs — he got me over his hip, and I rolled rather than fight it, and he wasn’t — quite — fast enough to pin me as I rolled through his fall.

That drew applause, which was my downfall. I like applause, and I slowed -

bang.

Down I went. Of course he was right behind me as I rose from my roll, and he got my shoulders from behind as I hesitated in my turn and threw me — literally pulled me on my back and fell across me.

I laughed.

He laughed.

I dived at him, got a knee in my thigh, and then tried the same infighting technique I’d just used — but from the front — using my shin to force his shin back. He stumbled away — but he broke my attempt. I threw a strong right at his retreating face and caught him, and he threw a right — I grabbed his arm, we both missed holds and stumbled together and then — I can’t remember how — we were on the sand, grappling on the ground like boys.

The Spartans know all about ground fighting, but they disdain it, because on the battlefield it can get you killed, and combat sports, for Spartans, are about battle, not about games. I might have had an edge, but my opponent — sheer luck — caught my broken nose with his elbow, and I was fighting in a red haze and anger and pain.

I have no idea how long it went on.

But the ephors separated us. I was tapped on the shoulder, but I didn’t know the signal, so the next thing I felt was a blow to my calf.

I stopped struggling, realising that my opponent was not moving.

Luckily, the gods have graced me with good wits and some humour — so I got to my feet as best I could and embraced Bulis before he could say anything.

He smiled again. ‘Good fight,’ he said.

I didn’t fight in the king’s gymnasium again. It took me two days to recover from the first time, and my nose took weeks to recover fully. But after that day, men greeted me in the agora and in the streets, usually calling out, ‘Khairete, Xenos!’

And I received an offer to dine with Bulis and his mess.

Sparta is not devoid of small talk, gossip, song or good fellowship. I lay on a couch in this, a more ‘average’ mess, and was served food that was merely bad and entertained by Sparthius, who was Bulis’s partner and a very funny man. Sparthius was irreverent and sometimes nasty, mocking Gorgo’s mismatched eyes and my limp, suggesting in some fairly obvious ways that as I was Hephaestus, all my women would cheat on me. He told a story about a drunk buying a fine wine to pour as a libation on the grave of a friend, and then offering to pass it through his body once first — he mocked Sparta and he mocked Athens.

At the same time, he mocked the gods. And he knew songs — ribald songs, dirty songs, marching songs. .

Bulis just lay beside him and smiled from time to time and sipped his wine.

We all drank a great deal, and I came to know the other men in his mess. They weren’t average, all being members of the elite Hippeis. All of them were handsome, and all of them were over thirty, and married. They struck me as being. . young. Most were my age, and yet — the Spartan lifestyle allowed them a boyishness that I had probably lost while I was a slave, or perhaps at Sardis. They laughed at farting. They mocked a helot with a misformed penis, but it was not particularly cruel, especially when they offered to send him to Corinth to get it ‘treated’ at the temple of Aphrodite. They drank like boys, too — on and on, mixed only one to one with water. As the wine flowed, Sparthius became louder, and, I confess it, funnier, kneeling on the tiled floor and begging (in the character of a Macedonian) for Helios to stay away, stay away. ‘Oh, it burns!’ he shrieked, and everyone laughed.

Macedonians, of course, come from a land of rain and clouds and their fair skin burns in the sun.

Bulis turned to me. ‘My wife finds you very attractive,’ he said. ‘She enjoyed your flattery.’

Gulp.

I hope I smiled. ‘The lady I met in the agora is your wife?’

He nodded. ‘We were married young. Our fathers arranged it — almost as soon as we were born. They were. . you know. Erastes and Eromenos.’ He sipped more wine, his eyes elsewhere.

That was all. At the door, when I was handed my cloak by a helot, he embraced me. ‘We should fight again,’ he said. ‘My wife was right about you.’

Leonidas had a number of meetings with my passengers, and I assume he briefed them extensively on his views on a number of subjects. I was not invited, and in truth, I can’t imagine why I would have been included. I went riding with Gorgo — the closest I’ve ever come to loving horses — and I drilled with Bulis’s mess on three different days. Their Pyricche was different from ours — different music, and much more chorography. In fact, I learned that where Plataea has a single, fairly complicated dance, Sparta has seven. I learned one well enough to practise it with Bulis and Sparthius on board ship.

I also began to practise their quick draw with the sword. On one of their practice fields, they use a row of polished shields so men can watch themselves as they train, and I did so, cutting a post, and several times men would stop and correct my posture or my footwork. It was one of the curious things about Sparta that training is seldom done by one man. In Athens, as you probably know, each taxeis hires a professional trainer to improve their spear fighting or their drill. But in Sparta, any man who has seen battle can correct any other man, especially if that man is younger. Virtually all of the older hoplites were very capable men, and they tended to wander around the drill field, like a hundred hoplomachia teachers instead of just one or two. As long as I was on their field, they trained me as willingly.

And in the agora, I heard more — and better — philosophy than I heard in Athens. Well, in Athens before Anaxagoras came, but that’s another story. But with the helots to do all the work, men had little to do but exercise, and in Sparta they exercised their minds as well as their bodies.

In truth, Briseis should have been born a Spartan.

Late in the week, I was introduced to Leotychidas, the other king — the Eurypontid king. He was sober and very grave — almost sixty years old, and still as solid as an oak tree. He lacked Leonidas’ charm, but he had a great dignity, and I could tell that Polypeithes, who was kind enough to introduce me, fairly worshipped him.

‘Ah,’ he said. ‘You are the foreigner that Gorgo fancies.’ He frowned. ‘That woman always gets her way.’

There really wasn’t an answer to that, so I bowed.

‘You speak Persian?’ he asked.

I admitted that I did.

He nodded, lips pursed. ‘I suppose someone must. Do you think Xerxes will march an army into Greece?’

‘Yes,’ I said.

He nodded. ‘As do I. Nor do I think that sending a pair of my best men to die will help in any way.’ He shrugged. ‘Can you keep them alive? Are you a friend of the Great King’s?’

I had to shake my head. ‘No, my lord,’ I said. ‘I knew his father’s brother. And a few of his soldiers.’

He rocked his head from side to side, as if considering me from different angles.

‘Hmm,’ he said. ‘Well, if you knew a few of my Spartiates and my father’s brother, I’d give you a hearing. That’s the best news I’ve heard all day. What will you say on our behalf?’

I almost choked on my tongue. ‘I’m sorry, lord?’

He was watching me as if I were a not-very-bright boy. ‘If you gain the ear of the Great King before my two Spartiates wander in, what will you say? I tell you, I’d rather they weren’t killed.’

I thought it through for a number of heartbeats. I could hear Polypeithes breathe by my side. Finally I shook my head. ‘I’m sorry, lord. I can’t say anything on the part of Sparta. I am not a Spartan.’

The Eurypontid king’s eyes were fixed on mine. ‘Would you be shocked if I gave you my permission to say anything? Be my guest, Xenos. Say what you like, and claim it comes from me. If you think that it will buy us peace, or keep these two young men alive. Anything but my submission.’

He said more, but that was the gist, and when I had a last dinner with Polypeithes, Leonidas and my two passengers, the Agiad king said much the same, and after dinner, when the mess was drinking toasts, I was summoned to the king’s house and found Gorgo sitting in the courtyard under the stars.

Nearly invisible helots brought wine and nuts.

I have no doubt belaboured this point, but if an Athenian matron had invited me to her house and met me in the garden with a chiton open down the sides, drinking wine neat and eating honeyed almonds, I would assume I was welcome to more than the nuts.

Gorgo did not seem that way. So I sat on a bench and repeated some of Sparthius’s jokes, and eventually she came to the point.

‘What have the kings told you? About the Great King?’ she asked.

I shrugged. ‘I’m not a Spartan, lady. I am not your ambassador.’

Gorgo wouldn’t be swayed. ‘You speak Persian.’ She raised an eyebrow — an impossibly attractive look, given the very slight unevenness of her eyes. Impossible to explain why, if you haven’t seen her. ‘Do you know that there is a Spartan king living in the Great King’s court?’ she asked.

‘Yes,’ I said. ‘Demaratus.’

She looked away — not as if evading me, but as if seeing events unfold. ‘He was deprived of his kingship — illegally,’ she said. ‘Bah. It had to be done. But he is not such an evil man. I wonder if you would carry a message to him from me.’

How in the name of all the gods had I got mixed up in this?

‘Of course!’ I said.

She gave me a wax tablet. It was blank. She smiled.

I didn’t want to know. I handed the tablet to Hector after summoning him.

We sat up for some time, and eventually she sat on her bench with her knees drawn up to her chest and listened as I spoke of Sicily. Somehow we got on to Athens.

‘How they hate us,’ she said.

I shrugged. ‘Athens and Sparta are similar enough that, like angry brothers, when they look at each other, they see only their own flaws.’

She grinned. ‘Did you make that up yourself?’

If Spartan men were boyish, Gorgo was very ‘girlish’. She was spontaneous and mercurial, and often hard to follow. But I smiled back. ‘In fact, just this once, I did.’

She nodded. ‘I like it. I should like to go to all the places you have been. Sicily. Athens. Perhaps Athens most of all.’

I laughed. ‘My friend Aristides — do you recall him?’

‘A fine man,’ she said. ‘My husband admires him.’

‘As do I,’ I answered. When he’s not an insufferable prig. ‘His wife longs to meet you.’

‘Really!’ she said. She giggled. But I think she was flattered. ‘You should ask her to meet me at Plataea. I go in the spring, to the temple of Hera. If Plataea is to be the saviour of Greece, I wish to know why.’ And she shrugged. ‘I have a son, but I should like another child.’ Her eyes met mine.

I didn’t get it. I still do not. Was that a proposition? I could not tell. But I began to think. .

‘You do not speak of Brasidas,’ she said.

It was the second time she’d brought him up.

I shrugged. ‘He’s my friend, but it does not seem to be in good taste to mention him.’

Gorgo nodded. She sat back. It was very dark, and the air itself was perfumed with summer.

My hands shook a little. I was preparing myself to kiss the Queen of Sparta.

‘I’m arranging to lift the ban of his exile,’ she said.

I sighed. ‘He will no doubt be delighted,’ I said. Somewhat annoyed.

‘He will no doubt throw my husband’s offer in his face like the stiff-necked bastard of a dog that he is,’ she said pleasantly. ‘But we owe you a great deal already.’

We were almost nose to nose. I could feel her breath on my face.

A hand came to rest on my shoulder.

‘Sir?’ Hector said. ‘Alexandros is very drunk.’

I got up and clasped her hand. In a flash, I had decided that. . that Hector’s arrival was from the gods.

She laughed. ‘You are a good man, Arimnestos.’

In the morning, we rode south. We were on the beach before darkness fell, and we ate lobster and fresh fish with the oarsmen, who had eaten and drunk their fill for a week and were, all taken together, penniless and hung over.

And we took another five days returning to Athens, because we had to land for food and water every night, and the wind was resolutely against us. I had a good load of Phoenician goods purchased by Sekla in the markets, and there were not many Athenian ships that called at Sparta. I hoped to be first into the Athenian agora with my goods.

Nor was I disappointed. Indeed, I never made it to the Athenian agora — a pair of middlemen, friends of Paramanos, bought my whole cargo, but my profit was enough to suggest that piracy was not the best way to make money at sea.

My Spartans were good passengers. They took turns at the oars when they saw that the rest of us did, and they were better than polite to Brasidas. He was the one who seemed rude — he was aloof with them in a way he never was with young Apollodorus or the others. And Sparthius continued to be a comic, while Busis was mostly silent. When he did open his mouth, it was to ask questions. He’d never been to sea before, and he wanted to know everything.

After we sold our cargo, I arranged that the Spartan heralds should be housed by Cimon, and I purchased a small, tubby merchantman. In our expeditions in the western Mediterranean and the Outer Sea, we’d learned how handy it was to have a store ship to carry water and food — even running to Sparta and back across the Gulf of Corinth had brought that lesson home, with wasted days crawling around the periphery. I gave the command to Megakles, and gave him Giorgios and Nicolas from the oarsmen and a couple of my Syracusan deck crewmen. We fitted the merchantman out with a cargo of Athenian luxury goods — mostly pottery — and a deep tier of water amphorae. I bought dried meat and dried fish and grain, and stored them in layers, mostly in pottery with waxed tops.

Moire and Harpagos came in with their ships, and I got them cargoes, although by now I was dealing in credit — Cimon’s credit. I was out of money.

I rode over the mountains to Brauron, and paid my daughter a final visit. She was tanned and hard muscled as only a young girl can be, and while she was happy to see me, she was anxious to go back to her friends.

I didn’t know enough about children then not to be hurt, but I let her go. I stayed the night with Peisander and on the way back I stayed with Jocasta and Aristides, who was ten days from starting his exile. He seemed quite light hearted. She did not.

Whenever I visited Aristides, there always came a moment when, by common consent, I would go off to the women’s area and sit in the late afternoon sun with Jocasta and help with her wool. It was when we talked — when she gave me her marching orders for her husband, usually.

‘The Queen of Sparta would like to meet you,’ I said.

Whatever she was going to say, it went right out of her head. She laughed. ‘That’s lovely!’ she said.

‘Queen Gorgo asked me to say that your husband is a fine man, whom her husband admires, and she’d be delighted to meet you at the temple of Hera at Plataea in the spring, after the feast of Demeter.’

She clapped her hands together. ‘I’m sure. . oh!’ she said. ‘I could see Aristides then, as well!’

I nodded. ‘I thought of that at sea. Come and stay with us — my daughter and me. Or with my sister Penelope and her husband Antigonus.’

‘Aristides has spoken of them. Is it really possible?’ she asked.

I grinned. ‘I’ll come and get you myself,’ I said.

She nodded. ‘I like having some hope of seeing him again. He’s very “stiff upper lip”. I’m not so cold.’ And then she leaned closer. ‘You know he’s coming to Susa with you,’ she said.

Piraeus, at dawn.

My ships had taken on stores at Zea and then been rowed around the night before to wait on the beach. My oarsmen were rowing heavily laden ships — they didn’t need the additional weight of a hull soaked all night in water.

Bulis and Sparthius were as curious as cats, prowling among the last hemp nets of cargo, unfolding a linen boat sail, and inspecting the equipment of my marines. I had eight men in each ship and a pair of professional archers, and then I had Ka and his six men — all good archers, and also willing deck crewmen.

Aristides owned his own ships — not just one, but two, big, long, narrow sharks. The very height of Athenian shipbuilding, which, back then, six years after Marathon, was just developing into the very best in the world. He had his own oarsmen and his own followers who turned out as marines. The splendour of their equipment utterly eclipsed that of my men, who looked merely practical — although through the influence of Brasidas, my men had matching rust-red cloaks and matching red, black and white horsehair crests. The Spartans are great ones for uniformity of equipment.

But if Aristides wanted to tell the voters of the assembly what they were doing when they exiled him, the display of his two warships — only the very richest men could own warships — fully manned with citizen oarsmen whose wages he paid, and protected by marines who were his ‘gentlemen’. .

Let me pause in my story for a moment. I, in fact, owned three warships and a round ship. Those of you who have been listening know that I didn’t pay for any of them except the merchanter. I took them from other men. When I took slaves, I often used them as oarsmen for six months or a year in lieu of the price of their freedom. I have been a pirate for most of my life — a pirate whose actions were often sanctioned by Athens or one of the other states. But Aristides was a true aristocrat, who spent his fortune on the good of his city, sponsoring athletic contests, contributing to temples, paying for the chorus in the Dionysian plays, and buying warships.

Themistocles didn’t come to gloat. But Phrynicus did, and he was one of the orator’s closest friends. He came down to the beach and hugged me, and he gave Aristides a letter. They talked for some time, and in the end embraced.

I tried not to stare, but what I saw confirmed my notion that Aristides’ exile was, at some level, contrived.

I had Harpagos and Moire under me as trierarchs, and Megakles as the captain of the Swan. Aristides had Heraclides, one of my oldest mentors, as his second trierarch.

With five triremes and a stores ship, we were probably the most powerful squadron in the Aegean that summer, and the pity of it was that we were bound on nothing more profitable than an embassy to the Great King — and even I suspected that pillaging some Egyptian ships and a few Carthaginian or Tyrian freighters would not enhance our reception at Susa.

But as we ran along the coast of Euboea and east to Skyros, on the balmy summer zephyrs, the sea was full of potential prizes, and my oarsmen looked at me as I stood amidships — watching a pair of Carthaginian biremes bound for the Hellespont, watching a Tyrian merchantman wallow in the soft breeze, downwind and easy prey.

When they grumbled, I’d catch someone’s eye and point to the wreath of olive at the bow.

I had in mind a little scouting on my way to Tarsus. In fact, all the men who could navigate were scratching their heads. Tarsus is south of Rhodos and around the corner from Cyprus and beyond.

On the beach below the temple on the rock — I never caught its name — Aristides and I laid out our plans for our officers.

‘Our first intention is to see if Xerxes is really building a canal behind Mount Athos,’ Aristides said bluntly. ‘Second, to see if he is bridging the Hellespont.’

Bulis’s face gave nothing away, but Sparthius laughed. ‘So — we’re suddenly hoplites in an Athenian naval expedition?’ he asked.

Aristides got along well with both of my Spartans — of course he did. He admired their way of life. So he shook his head. ‘Nothing of the sort. On the one hand, we all learn about how advanced the Great King’s plans are; on the other hand, we look at his defences. The sailing season is young. We have more than a month to reach Tarsus and start inland.’

I have to mention that, before I knew that Aristides was coming, I had made the plan to go to Susa or Persepolis via Tarsus. There were a number of reasons for this, but the most important was simple distance. It is much easier to travel by sea than by road. Most Greeks going to the Great King went to Tarsus, which placed a man almost two-thirds of the way to Persia, or at least to Babylon.

I had also dispatched letters — to Artapherenes, to Briseis, and to my friend Cyrus, asking for letters of safe conduct and permission to use the messenger stations on the Royal Road.

When Aristides announced his intention of joining us, I told him of my plans, and he agreed.

‘I had no notion of safe conducts,’ he said.

And that was that.

The sailing weather was perfect. But keeping my men together — that was harder. The voyage offered no chance of heavy profit, but once news of our intention to scout the Great King’s preparations made its way down to the oar benches, every man knew that we were running risks.

So that night on Skyros, when we were done briefing the officers, I assembled the oarsmen — all of them — and gave a speech. I can’t quote it — but I told them the truth. I told them that we were the first ships of a free Greek navy. That we had to do what we were doing for every free man and woman in all of Greece. And that it was just as important for them to behave themselves well in Asian ports as it was for them to row well as we slipped along the Thracian coast.

When I was done, no one cheered, but they walked off into the darkness in a sombre mood.

Aristides shook his head. ‘You could be a fine orator,’ he said. ‘Your voice is high pitched, but you make men listen.’

Bulis lay on the sand by my fire, his head on his hands. ‘You believe that?’ he asked me.

‘Yes,’ I said.

He nodded. ‘Do you think we can defeat the Great King?’ he asked.

‘Yes,’I said.

‘Good. So do I. So do all the Spartans. It is the other Greeks for whom I have concerns.’

We spent the next night at sea. We had the store ship, and she had a bricked hearth for cooking. It is not easy to feed six hundred men out of one hearth, but with cold meat and bread, we got them fed.

We laid to for as long as it took to get a good rest and get food. I spent the entire time worrying about that fire on Swan. Fire, at sea, is not man’s friend.

Then we ran almost due north. I had the stars as a guide, but these waters were relatively unfamiliar to me. Not so for Harpagos or Moire, who had sailed to Thrace for slaves and hides and everything else all the years I’d been gone. I followed the Pole Star as the Carthaginians taught, and in the dawn, Sekla slapped my back and called me the king of navigators as Mount Athos rose out of the sea, due north.

Our warships stood off, well over the horizon from any but a watcher on Athos’s highest peak, or the gods themselves, and the tubby Swan bore in as if sailing for the Chersonese. We sailed parallel and a little farther out to sea — a standard trick of piracy when scouting a potentially profitable coast.

We didn’t have to close the Athos peninsula to see the Persian preparations. Megakles did, because he’s an excellent sailor and a daring man, but before the mainland was more than a smudge, we could see the shipping all along the coast — small boats, round ships and galleys.

Perhaps fifty sails in view. For the wilderness of Thrace, that was. . incredible.

We swept north on a favourable wind for Thassos, and I began to have real apprehensions about the Persian invasion.

As in — was it imminent?

Nor did I any longer think our five ships were the strongest squadron in the Aegean.

We had our sails down as soon as we began to see warships, and we rowed — oarsmen cursing — under bare poles. Aristides had a different rig from mine and unstepped his masts.

Nothing irks an oarsman like rowing when the wind is favourable for sailing.

I lived in fear, moment to moment, that the Persian fleet would send ships to look at us. We were too far for me to see what ships they were, but I had to guess most of them were Phoenician.

All afternoon, I cheated my steering oars to the north and east, trying to be invisible, while one tiny sailing ship did the work, going right in among them. In late afternoon we landed on Thassos and bought sheep from shepherds so barbaric we couldn’t understand their Greek. We had all our marines in armour, and Aristides — an old campaigner — taught me a new trick by building a small tower on the headland, which would give us precious warning of an attack.

But we were not disturbed in our sleep, and in the morning we watched the sun rise in the east and we dried our hulls, all our cargo stacked in the bright sun on the beach — waiting for Megakles.

And waiting.

Noon passed, and the oarsmen slept, and the Spartans ran up and down the beach. My marines didn’t exercise — they were still on duty, sleeping in watches. As Bulis — well ahead of his friend — turned at the rocky promontory to run back, I saw him pause.

He was saying something to Brasidas.

Brasidas shrugged and continued towards the tower — really, just a set of poles tied together with a floor of boughs, but it placed a man at treetop height.

Bulis came running back down the beach, but during the time that he and Brasidas spoke, Sparthius had passed him, and now they were both sprinting, flat out, for the campfires and the line of boats. Men got up from their midday naps to cheer the Spartans, who looked like gods.

And that started a whole set of contests. Men wrestled and boxed and even fenced with oars — a very popular and very dangerous oarsmen’s game.

I stood on the beach and worried.

I was still in shock at what I had seen the day before.

After midday, Aristides came with several of his young men. He sat on a rock, and his hypaspist poured wine from a skin.

‘You worry too much,’ he said, but he had the same lines under his eyes as I had.

I shrugged. I remember looking around at his friends — I didn’t know most of them, although I knew his nephew, and I knew Aeschylus’s younger brother and of course I knew Heraklides. ‘I saw a great many Persian ships yesterday,’ I said.

Aristides rubbed the top of his nose — a much-imitated facial tic in the Athenian assembly.

‘One thing to hear of it and another to see it,’ he said.

We shared the wine, and I heard that Aeschylus’s younger brother was planning to go into politics, that the youngest man was actually my enemy Cleitus’s youngest sibling Alcibiades. He was a handsome devil, and he had that look — arrogance, yes, but also a total disregard for the opinions of others — that sets young men apart and makes them so easy to hate. He and his older brother Cleinias were both followers of Aristides. They were also rich and powerful enough to own ships, and they were with us to ‘learn the ropes’. Athenian aristocrats worked pretty hard, back then.

The two Alcmaeonidae watched me like hawks, but their fascination wasn’t devoid of respect. If Aristides even deigned to notice, he paid them no heed.

And while I thought all these thoughts, distracted for the first time in hours, Megakles crept over the horizon in his little Swan.

‘Elaeus is full of ships,’ Megakles shouted, before he leapt over the side of Swan and swam ashore like the fisherman he was.

Naked and dripping, he emerged like Poseidon himself. ‘There’re fifty warships in Elaeus bay, and another six or seven rowing guard. All Phoenicians. Nicolas saw two more hulls he thought that he knew — Samian Greeks.’

‘Could be worse,’ I said. Athens had as many ships. Aristides and I exchanged looks and then we were off, gathering our athletic oarsmen, pulling down the tower, and racing to sea — like pirates.

From Thassos we ran downwind, under sail, to Samothrace, and we kept the shoreline out of sight to the north all the way. We saw fishing boats twice, but no more warships, and we made camp on the south side of Samothrace, with a tower and guards, and doused fires as soon as the food was cooked.

And in the dawn — a cold, grey dawn with rain in it — we were off again, this time running under sail into the mouth of the Hellespont. If the Medes saw us — well, they saw us. You cannot hide in a body of water six miles wide.

It was late afternoon by the time we were near Troy. And now, despite our efforts at stealth, it was impossible to hide our presence. We had fishing boats all around us from the towns on the Bosporus, and we had a dozen military triremes — Ionian Greeks — patrolling the waters in the difficult, choppy sea just south of Troy.

I watched the ships as we ran in, looking for a sign that one of them was Archilogos, once my master, then my friend, and now my sworn enemy. It was hard to define how we all knew that these were Greek ships and not Phoenicians or Carthaginians or Aegyptians, but Sekla knew, I knew, and Aristides knew, and we ran down on them with all our rowers at their stations and all of our marines in harness.

They paid us no heed at all, so with a flash of oars, we turned on the opposite tack and sailed north into the main channel. I can only assume that they thought we were part of the Persian fleet. Why would they not?

Who expected Athenian ships in these waters? Cimon and Miltiades had been driven from here six years before.

We ran north, but again, we already knew what we would find.

The reality, however, was far more chilling even than what we had seen off Mount Athos.

First, the narrow Hellespont was choked with shipping. I stopped counting at a hundred boats — warships, merchant ships, fishermen. Access to the Euxine makes this one of the busiest pieces of water under the sun — I had lived and sailed here for years — but this was extreme.

And fifty stades north of Troy, we came in sight of the greatest concentration of shipping I had seen since we fled from the Persian fleet in the disaster at Lades.

I turned to Leukas, at the helm, and made a turning motion with my hand.

‘Ready about!’ Leukas screamed. Marines on the top deck threw themselves flat so as not to go over the side — neither triremes nor trimiolas have railings on most of the deck — and the deck crew ran about like ants in a disturbed nest trying to get the mainsail down.

The port-side rowers reversed their cushions, and Hector signalled frantically to Harpagos, the next ship aft of us.

There were at least two hundred warships at Abydos on the Asian side. I didn’t wait to learn more.

Xerxes was coming.

Two days later, we were sitting in the palace in Mythymna, on Lesvos. My hands had stopped shaking, but the terror was real. We had seen three hundred warships. Off Mount Athos, it had been possible to see an Athenian fleet stopping the Great King’s fleet, but with three hundred ships already at sea, and they only the harbingers. .

‘It doesn’t matter whether he’s going to build bridges or simply ferry his army a taxeis at a time,’ I insisted to Aristides. The Athenians were a talkative lot, and they were debating what the great fleet meant, and whether Xerxes was really bold enough to try and bridge the Hellespont.

Bulis fingered his beard. ‘I would like the kings to know of this,’ he said.

So we agreed to send Moire home in Storm Cutter with a cargo of Lesbian wine and oil and some Chian wine and mastic. He was ordered to touch at Athens and speak only to Cimon, and then go on to Sparta. Bulis wrote him a letter on papyrus.

Aristides was shaken. ‘Is there any point in going to Susa, if the Great King has set his mind on war?’ he asked. ‘I do not want to be cooling my heels at the Great King’s court while his troops lay siege to my city.’

The Spartans felt the same way, but the lords of Mythymna had some useful knowledge. Lesvos was Persian — it had been conquered and treated harshly. Mythymna had no Persian garrison because Mytilini had resisted so long and the Persians were spread thin in Ionia, and we were welcomed there. I had friends all over Lesvos, and the son of Epaphroditos, Axiochus, came from Mytilini in a fishing boat when he heard I was there.

They gave us all the news they had. And what they knew was a little reassuring. Their ships had been summoned for the next season. They were to attack Athens in the next spring.

We rested our rowers for another day and Sekla sold most of our cargo on the beach — not the luxury goods, but all the heavy stuff. We made a good profit, which was mostly consumed by the oarsmen.

We ran down to Chios, and Harpagos saw his cousin, as did I. The Persians had been even harsher on Chios than on Lesvos, and we had to be very careful. Most of the Chians I knew were dead, but when we asked men, they admitted they’d been summoned for service in the next spring. Harpagos got us a copy of the letter from the satrap.

Let me add that none of this was meant to be secret. But some news travelled quickly, and other news hardly travelled at all. It is one thing to hear a rumour of war, and another thing to see the satrap’s letter. Signed by Artapherenes.

I will say a little of Harpagos’s cousin. I had offered to take her to Plataea, once. She and I had been lovers — not for long, and mostly because of the death of her older brother, which hit her hard. She had been a wonderful, cheerful, lawless girl — a fisherman’s daughter, and a fine young kore. Now she was a silent, bitter woman, aged before her time, with nothing to say but curses.

Friends, I have said before that the Persians are men like us, and in many ways more honourable. But I have to also say — in her eyes, I saw pain and humiliation, and the future of Greece, if Persia ruled.

We were very wary, south of Chios. Once, we Greeks had owned these waters. Now, all of them belonged to Persia.

Tarsus is one of the oldest cities in the world. They worship the horned and winged lion, Sandon, there, and it is a very rich province of the Persian empire.

I had never had reason to touch at Tarsus before, and our squadron was careful on approach, all of the other ships hanging well off the port while I took Lydia in with all my benches manned. But as soon as the somewhat withered olive wreaths were visible, a pilot boat came out of the harbour and on board was a senior officer of Hydarnes’ household — Hydarnes was the Satrap of Tarsus and the surrounding region, and one of Xerxes’ favourites according to rumour. From my Persian friends, I knew he came from one of the oldest families and that his father had helped put Darius on the throne.

His steward bowed low on my command deck. ‘My lord, I am commanded by him whose servant I am to present you with these safe conducts, issued by the Great King under his imperial seal. And with this writ commanding that you and your servants be allowed to pass down the Royal Road and to be served at the post houses. And I also offer you this letter from the satrap Artapherenes, who has further sent you an escort of his noble cavalry to take you all the way to Susa.’

Hector stepped forward and took all the scrolls and tablets.

The steward bowed deeply once again.

I returned his bow, in the Persian way. When you bow to a man’s servant, you are bowing to him — the Persians only throw themselves on their faces for the Great King in person, but they salute a senior servant almost as if he were the man or woman themselves.

‘I thank you for your prompt service. May I add that I have a cargo?’

The steward, a Babylonian by his olive-skinned good looks, smiled. I gathered he’d dealt with Greeks before. From his own belt he pulled a very small scroll. ‘My master has decreed that your cargoes will be passed uninspected and untaxed, as part of an embassy.’ He handed me the scroll. ‘There is a berth for your ship.’

‘I have five ships,’ I said, as much to see whether I could puncture his smooth delivery as because I was afraid we’d swamp Hydarnes’ hospitality.

‘So many?’ the steward asked. He looked out to sea.

‘The Ionian sea is full of pirates,’ I said. I tried not to smile.

He was a young, fit man, despite his odd trousers and perfumed beard, and he wore a sword. And he met my gaze without hesitation, and smiled.

‘That’s what I hear,’ he said, looking pointedly at my rowers.

I liked him.

Ashore, on the open ground, paved in marble, that ran down to the military piers of the harbour, stood an escort of twenty armoured men. They wore tall, conical helmets that tapered to points, and armour of bronze scales. The officer had blue enamelled scales of Aegyptian work in alternating rows, and a magnificent beard, and he slid from his horse and embraced me. In truth, it had been less than a year since I had seen Cyrus — but we met like long-lost brothers, or at least cousins.

‘Let me look at you,’ he said. ‘You look like a king, or a prince.’

I had hoped that Artapherenes would send me an escort. Persians measure power in many ways but most of them have to do with favour — with the power of your relationships. Artapherenes, by loaning me his own household cavalry, was putting me ‘under his shield’, as we say in Greece. I hadn’t expected Cyrus in person, but I had hoped for him. He would help me avoid foolish pitfalls on my way to Susa, and deeper and subtler ones once I made it into the Great King’s presence. I raised my hands and prayed to Zeus and Hermes right there in the seaside agora, and then I began to introduce my own friends.

Bulis was as closed as a locked trunk. I had learned enough of the man to know that he was merely being careful, dignified, giving nothing away that an enemy might make use of. Sparthius was open, effusive and talkative, and he exchanged hand clasps with Cyrus.

‘My first real Persian!’ he said. ‘He is your friend?’ Sparthius asked me.

‘Friend and guest-friend,’ I said in Greek, and then translated into Persian.

Aristides was almost as cautious as Bulis, but he had better manners, and he was not unwilling to bow as the Persians do, although neither of the Spartans would bend even by an inch. Sallis, the steward, was introduced, and provided each of us with an interpreter. Every one of them was an Ionian Greek slave.

Take what message you like from that.

We climbed up the streets of the lower town and Sallis showed us a few of the sights. The temple of Sardon was magnificent, if a little gaudy even by Boeotian standards.

‘The central sacred precinct is more than a thousand years old,’ Sallis told us. I suspect we craned our necks like hicks, because he laughed aloud. ‘If you pass Babylon, you can climb the temple of Marduk. It is more than three thousand years old.’ He shrugged.

Something crossed Bulis’s face. He glanced at me.

I walked next to him for a while.

‘It is not what I expected,’ he muttered. ‘I have been to Mycenae and it might have an old wall that is a thousand years old.’

I remember nodding. ‘These people are very, very old. But not the Persians. They are as young as we Greeks, or even younger. Indeed, some say we are related.’

Sparthius laughed behind me. ‘Nothing worse than near relations, in a blood feud.’

Hydarnes did everything in his power to welcome us. We were housed in the satrapal palace. Hector laid out a fresh linen chiton — it was hotter than any place I’d ever been, and damp, and everything seemed to droop in the heat. A slave took me to the bath, and a musician came in and began to play.

In the bath.

Musicians will sometimes play in public baths in Greece. But I’d never had one all to myself, and he played almost anything I knew. He, too, was Greek.

A pair of women came in. They were fine-looking women, with good breasts and small waists, muscled legs — really, I was very interested. They came naked, and there could be no doubt of their roles.

But they were both Aeolian Greeks. As soon as they saw I was Greek, they threw themselves at my knees and begged me to rescue them. It was, just possibly, the most humiliating moment of my life, because I fancy myself the sort of man who rescues the weak, not oppresses them further.

Hector heard their story later. They were a Chian nobleman’s daughters, and they had been ‘employed’ in the satrap’s palace for four years.

In fact, as we moved around the corridors and unpacked, it became obvious that every low-level slave in the palace was Greek.

We met Hydarnes in person just before dinner. He had a great feast prepared — iced wine, whole deer, antelope, and the head of a lion. Whole sheep in saffron and raisins, and a dozen more dishes. It was a dinner for six hundred men — and women.

We could smell the feast, and Hydarnes sat on a low throne flanked by golden statues of the local god. I went first, and I bowed — as an equal to another equal.

He waved a hand, as if dismissing my insolence as puerile. ‘I gather you are guest-friend to Artapherenes,’ he said. He leaned forward. ‘I gather you were once a slave.’ He meant it to put me in my place.

I bowed again. ‘Two years ago, I was a slave of a Carthaginian tin trader,’ I said. ‘The gods decide men’s fates.’ A year of dealing with the bigotries of Sicilians had made me immune to this sort of thing.

He looked at my friends. ‘It is interesting to meet so many free Greeks. I only know them as slaves. Greeks make excellent slaves.’

I nodded. ‘As do Persians,’ I said. So much for diplomacy.

But he threw back his head and roared. ‘Hah! Good for you. Yes — I suppose that if I was taken, I would make a fine slave. I know how to give orders and to take them. This is the power of our empire.’

After me, he was introduced to Aristides. He smiled and rose from his throne and came down to take Aristides’ hand. ‘I understand you have been exiled,’ he said. ‘My king offers you his hand in friendship.’ Aristides took the proffered hand. ‘For myself, I would like nothing better than to be the king’s friend,’ he said. ‘But I remain an Athenian.’

Hydarnes nodded. ‘So few Greeks seems to feel as you do. They come to us and betray their homes for a few pieces of silver. But you are a nobleman.’

Aristides frowned, but Hydarnes went on to the Spartans. ‘And you — men of Lacedaemon! Will you be friends of the Great King? Are you exiles?’

Bulis looked at me. We’d discussed some responses to questions like this. He said, ‘We are heralds of the Kings of Sparta, with a message to the Great King,’ he said.

‘A message of friendship?’ Hydarnes pressed on. ‘From the Kings of Sparta?’

Bulis looked as cold as ice. ‘The message,’ he said slowly, ‘is for the king your master, and not for you.’

Hydarnes frowned.

Soon after, we went into the great hall to dinner. We lay on couches in the Greek manner, but women sat in chairs. There were at least a dozen Persian, Median and Babylonian women. Not many among six hundred men, but enough to draw comment from the Greeks.

Aristides was sharing my couch, and Hector was waiting on us with Aristides’ hypaspist, Nikeas.

I remember that the wine was odd. First, too sour, and then too sweet.

‘You know who would love this?’ Aristides asked me, while using a fold of bread to shove more mutton in saffron into his mouth. He laughed like a boy and chewed politely.

‘Cimon?’ I asked. ‘Miltiades?’

‘Jocasta,’ Aristides said. ‘She craves travel and adventure. For her, this would be like. . meeting Odysseus.’ He leaned closer, as Hector poured wine and thus covered us from observation. ‘Do you think all the Greek slaves are a message?’ he asked.

‘Yes,’ I said.

‘I pray to Zeus you are wrong. And to Hermes, god of heralds and ambassadors.’ He sat back. ‘You no longer think it can be stopped.’

I shook my head. ‘I never did, once Artapherenes said the Great King was determined to make war. He’s already spent the money. Can you imagine how much it costs to have three hundred triremes at sea a year before you plan to attack?’

Greek slaves averted their eyes while serving us, so that we would not look into their faces. But some cried.

One young boy broke down while serving Bulis. Bulis put a hand on his head and whispered something in his ear.

Hydarnes looked at the Spartan from his dais. ‘Come, my friend,’ he said. ‘You must talk to us, and not to our slaves. Tell us all why you men of Lacedaemon decline to say you will be the friends of the Great King. You have but to look at me and my fortune to see that the king knows well how to honour merit. In like manner you yourselves, if you would only make your submission to the Great King, would receive great gifts and land from his hands, seeing that he deems you men of merit.’

Bulis rose to his feet. ‘Hydarnes,’ he said, ‘you understand less than half of the story. You tell me that if I am a good slave, I will be rewarded for surrendering my freedom, and that may have been your own experience.’

I had never heard Bulis speak so well. But Spartans are full of surprises. Bulis’s interpreter stumbled when he reached the insult — the sting in the tail, as we Greeks say. He fell silent.

I stood up and finished Bulis’s statement in Persian.

Bulis raised his voice to continue. ‘I am merely a citizen of Sparta, and perhaps I misunderstand. But it seems to me that you have all your life been a slave to this king, and since you have never been free, you have no idea how sweet liberty might be. Because if you had tasted it,’ Bulis said, and he smiled at the boy who had cried, ‘then, as I see you are a man, you would have fought not just with your spear for freedom, but with axes and knives and even with the nails on your fingers.’

So he answered Hydarnes. As I translated, I was quite sure that I had the same smile on my face that I wear when I fight.

Hydarnes was obviously annoyed, and equally obviously unwilling to show it. But at the end of dinner, he stood and waved at me in a way that had to have been insulting.

‘Tomorrow I hunt lion,’ he said. ‘A great man-killer is preying on my slaves. Come ride with me, and let us see who is a man, and who is a slave.’

He hadn’t included the Spartans. That made sense — as heralds, they were exempt from all challenges and all contests. And sacred.

I was not, so I rose and bowed. ‘I would be delighted,’ I said.

Later that night, I lay in bed and listened as Greek slaves were beaten with rods in the courtyard. I’m sure they beat the boy — he had laughed aloud when Bulis spoke, and Hector liked him.

But there are ways and ways of scoring one’s victories. The next day, I hunted in the mountains with Cyrus and Hydarnes. I could tell that neither liked the other — indeed, I had seen Cyrus grin like a daemon when Bulis’s insult went home, so I understood that we had some latitude here. But I was determined that I would rescue something from here.

My goods — Athenian goods — had fetched shockingly high prices on the wharves. Sekla reported to me in the dawn as we mounted our horses for the hunt, and I knew that I had silver. So, when our dogs had run the lion and it was cornered in a stand of trees — alien trees, of a kind I’d never seen before, with yellow flowers — while the party sorted out their weapons, I turned to Sallis, who was with me most of the time.

‘If I wanted to buy a few of the Greek slaves who have pleased me, what then?’ I asked.

Sallis made a face — the face Asians make when they are prepared to haggle. ‘If they are the Great King’s slaves, we may not sell them,’ he said. ‘If they are my master’s slaves, all is well.’

I described the boy and I named the two Aeolian women — Sappho and Lysistrata.

Sallis shrugged. ‘But you didn’t lie with either of them,’ he said.

I found Sallis to be — it is hard to say what I found him to be. Comprehensible? Easier to understand than Hydarnes? A fellow sufferer under the yoke of Persia? A man with a sense of humour? Perhaps all of these things.

‘They are the daughters of a man who was my friend,’ I said. That stretched the matter a little, but not much.

He nodded in complete understanding. ‘Ah! If you appealed so to Hydarnes, he might give them to you.’

‘I would prefer to buy them,’ I said.

‘You do not want to owe my master anything?’ he asked. He looked past me to where one of Hydarnes’ guardsmen was handing out spears. ‘You are wise, for a Greek.’ He looked away. ‘Babylon revolted just last year, and one of my cousins was taken for the Great King’s house.’ He shrugged. ‘Among us, it is no dishonour.’

A guardsman, face wrapped against the dust and wearing the most ridiculous trousers I’d ever seen — and I had seen Gallic noblemen — handed me a spear so magnificent that I lost the thread of our conversation for a moment. It was steel, blued with care, inlaid with gold, and the sarauter was of solid silver. It was a lonche, just seven feet long, and the head was sharp enough to cut like a good sword.

‘My master bids you take this spear and join him for the kill,’ the guardsman said.

I slid from my horse. Sallis was suddenly fighting his.

It was the terror of Sallis’s mare that gave me space in which to live.

I have to tell this tale backwards and say that the lion, cornered by dogs in a stand of trees, was an old and wily campaigner, and he had, in fact, killed two dogs and then slipped away from the pack, gone down the ravine behind the woods — a ravine we hadn’t seen — and now, like the man-killer he was, he was stalking us.

He’d come up the ravine, and his scent panicked all the horses at once. Men were thrown. Better riders, like Sallis, had their hands full.

In Persia, one is supposed to kill the lion with a spear, from horseback or on foot — usually after the dogs have softened it up a bit.

I saw the beast. He was coming at us through the grass, with the swagger of a killer and the eyes of a madman. His head was low, but he was scarcely troubling himself with concealment. He’d picked his quarry, and he was intent only on his kill.

Hector.

Hector saw him. But he froze — his feet seemed to have grown roots.

I’d never faced a lion before, so I did everything wrong. I didn’t expect it to be so fast, and I rather expected it to. . I don’t know, to hesitate, or to pause, or to ready itself before attacking.

Instead, two horse-lengths from Hector, it went from its swaggering lope to a leap. It was in the air.

Calchas and Polymarchos saved Hector. A lifetime of training and nothing else. I don’t remember anything but its stinking breath and the cat dead, my spear cleanly impaled so deep in its neck that it emerged at the back, and I had to do a little bit of undignified scrambling to avoid the dying energy of its claws, which still got my thigh — see these scars, thugater? Four lines all parallel.

It was a three-day wonder, and the infection that Apollo shot into my thigh was a two-week wonder and more, giving me strange dreams and making riding an agony. But that was in the future. At that moment, I stood in the grass with the dead lion at my feet, and turned to find Hydarnes behind me, empty handed because in the commotion caused by the panicking horses he hadn’t got a spear.

I’d been living with the Spartans for some time, at that point. I’m very proud of what came next. I turned to my host and bowed, with the dead lion at my feet and my own blood running down my leg.

‘Good spear,’ I said.

That night I was feasted like a god. The wound had not yet begun to trouble me. And when the feast was over, and Hector had cleared away my gifts — a fortune in cups and the spear I had used — I went back to my chambers only to find Sallis standing at the entrance.

He handed me three clay tablets. ‘I have arranged that all three shall be sold to you. My master accepted your offer of three mina of silver without quibble, and your slave Sekla has already paid me.’

Sekla was no man’s slave, but he was a good actor.

I offered my hand. ‘May I offer you my guest-friendship? Among Greeks, this is a sacred thing.’

He looked surprised. But he took my hand. ‘With thanks, my lord. I am but a servant-’

‘You are a good man,’ I said. ‘Come and feast with me in Greece, when all this is over.’

Sallis bowed. ‘My lord — I will.’ He nodded. ‘And I. . if you pass Babylon, let me send a letter to my sister.’

So I made Sallis a friend. And went into my chambers, to find two beautiful women and an eleven-year-old boy, all weeping together. They had Hector weeping too.

All of them — except Hector — came to me on their knees, thanking me and praising me. Now, every man craves the good opinion of others, whether he admits it or not, but these three — it was too much.

I was gruff, and sent them away.

Hector came to me a little later. The wound was just starting to bother me. Hector waited silently until I gave him leave to speak, which I did with a wave.

‘I could take the boy,’ he said. ‘I could use the help. You are a demanding master.’ He spoke solemnly.

It is true that Hector was my manservant and my armour carrier and my signals officer and sometimes my secretary. And like most men with slaves and servants, I’d provided him with freedom and some real benefits, but I hadn’t really noticed how much he did.

‘He’s free. I suspect he’s nobly born. He may not want to be the hypaspist to a hypaspist.’ I raised my eyebrows.

‘He wants to be a warrior,’ Hector said.

I nodded. ‘He was born in the right time,’ I said.

Hector frowned and looked at the floor. ‘So do I,’ he said. ‘But the lion. . I was. . I was. .’ He turned his head away and the word came out as a sob. ‘Afraid.’

I laughed. I agree, it was probably the wrong thing to do, but really — adolescent boys and their fancies. As bad as girls. The same as girls. Who puts these ideas in their heads?

Homer, that’s who.

He flinched from my anger and I grabbed his shoulders. It was really the first time I’d hugged him. I know that sounds odd, but he was a very grave boy, and he’d lost his father. His reserve was very. . adult.

But I grabbed him and wrestled him into an embrace as he burst into angry, humiliated tears. I said all the things older men say to boys about courage, and he didn’t listen — like all boys.

Lysistrata and her sister appeared with their bedding. They drew the wrong conclusions and withdrew, but as Hector began to recover, Lysistrata came back with a bowl and a towel. She paused in the doorway and met my eyes. She was a fine woman — intelligent and sensitive and tough enough to survive in a harem.

Hector fled.

Lysistrata came in and made the sort of bow that women make to fathers or husbands at religious ceremonies — at least in Plataea. I agree that in Ionia they can be both more and less formal.

‘I have some small skill at healing, my lord,’ she said. ‘And the wound on your thigh is more dangerous than you think.’

I took the bowl and started to wash my thigh, and considered how to get her into my bed without taking advantage of my power over her. Of course, we all know the answer to that. But I am as human as the next man, and just then, I didn’t want her healing powers. Or rather, I wanted her to heal me of the stare of the lion’s eyes, because they held my death.

She mistook my hesitation. ‘I will not fawn on you, my lord. But. . what care has this wound received?’

I shook my head, embarrassed by my own desire. ‘I wiped it with grass,’ I said.

She shook her head, all business. ‘Lion’s claws carry every kind of disease,’ she said. She had me lie down, and then, with Hector and her sister helping, scrubbed the wounds until it was all I could do not to scream. She put honey into each wound after dribbling wine on them.

I suspect she saved my life.

When the other two were gone, sex was the farthest thing from my mind. I hurt. She rubbed my upper back for a little while. ‘My sister and I would like to sleep in your apartment, lord,’ she said, somewhat dreamily.

I agreed. Of course they wanted to escape.

The next day, I was almost speechless with fever. The fever lasted three days, and when it passed, I was as weak as a child. Despite which, our party was ready to ride for Susa via Babylon, three thousand stades away.

I sent the two Greek women to my ships. I had a farewell conference with Sekla, and directed him to meet me at Ephesus in late winter. I gave him a letter for Artapherenes and another for Briseis, and wished him — and Meglakles and Harpagos — well. I took Brasidas and left the rest of the marines.

If it came to a fight, we weren’t going to cut our way out of Persia.

I sat my three Spartans down on the tiled porch of my magnificent apartment in the palace. My thigh was alternating cold and hot, and I had had two dreams of Herakles and one of the lion’s eyes. But I wasn’t dead, and I needed these men. Because of my wound, I was blunt.

‘I need all three of you to get along well enough to serve together. This is not about Sparta only, but about all of Greece. Bulis, I ask you to treat Brasidas with honour.’

Bulis’s face was as absent of emotion as the lion’s had been. ‘I will do Brasidas all honour,’ he said in his eerily flat voice.

I looked at Sparthius and he laughed his comedian’s laugh. ‘Don’t look at me. I have always honoured Brasidas.’

Brasidas looked at me with the slight smile of a man who has received an unexpected injury from a friend.

I thought, Damn it! Why did I get this wrong?

But the three exchanged a kiss of peace and a hand clasp, and I thought Bulis and Brasidas lingered for a moment.

When they were gone, Hector approached me cautiously. He looked at Brasidas, just walking down the front steps and being greeted by Cyrus. The two were obviously discussing the pack animals.

‘You tell me never to listen to the gossip of slaves,’ Hector said.

I raised an eyebrow. ‘I agree that it’s hard advice to follow,’ I said.

‘Sparthius’s helot has been teaching me some wrestling,’ he said, which neatly implied that I hadn’t. The young are very good at placing the knife. ‘He says. . he says Brasidas exiled himself. He says that Brasidas refused to pay his mess bill and left. But he doesn’t know why, except. .’ Hector had the good manners to blush, since he was now repeating pure hearsay. ‘. . Except that he’s heard of Brasidas referred to as the only man in the world who hates Leonidas.’

I nodded. I could barely think — I was still fevered.

‘And I want to thank you for saving my life,’ he went on, as if that was the less important item. ‘I want to apologise for breaking down last night. Sappho says. .’

I raised both eyebrows.

He turned bright red.

‘Oh,’ I said. ‘It’s like that, is it?’ I shook my head. ‘I’m sending her home to Chios, my lad. I’ll send you to the ship to say your goodbyes.’

He stammered something, but he went to the ship eagerly enough.

Youth. Wasted on the young. Or perhaps not.

Riding was agony — first because of my thigh, and second because I was dizzy all the time, but I couldn’t send them on without me, as Cyrus was my escort, not theirs. And the first three days were all climbing — up and up and up into the highlands. We passed a number of ancient monuments in those three days — a statue of an Assyrian king, lording over a slave; a small pyramid that marked some feat of arms by an Aegyptian king — it was like a road of wonders. Truly, northern Syria is where all worlds meet — Persia and Babylon, Urarit and Phrygia and Palestine and Aegypt — and Greece.

Lysistrata had left Hector with thorough directions on my wound, and we put infusions on it, and I drank tea — tea made of something like sage, although it had a bitter taste that was only saved by honey. But the first two weeks of that journey are lost to me, and even the Spartans commiserated, which suggested to me that I was doing well in the endless contest of manhood.

In fact, my recovery dated from the first day we reached a post house on the Royal Road. The Royal Road runs from Susa to Sardis, and does not go south to Tarsus. So we spent two weeks riding north to catch it in central Lydia.

My fever broke — for good — in a small stone post house at what appeared to be the top of the world. I ate, and Hector pressed my hand, and Cyrus admitted that he had feared for my life. It was all very gratifying.

I also discovered that I had slowed them all down. Because after two days on the Royal Road, when I’d eaten a huge meal of mutton and then demanded a few gallops to cheer my restless horse, Cyrus announced we were going to move faster — and suddenly, despite our forty men and ten pack animals, we began to make real time, travelling as far as two hundred stades a day.

The second or third night on the Royal Road, I found that Aristides had put his bedroll next to mine. And Bulis moved Nikeas’s bedroll over two places, and he and Sparthius moved into my corner. Only important royal guests received the right to live in the post houses — which were like small inns. Most people slept outside them, and indeed there were rows of small shelters of varying degrees of craft built outside, and while some post houses were empty of visitors, others were packed with people and herds.

Indeed, the roads and the post houses were among the greatest wonders of the empire.

At any rate, when the satrap’s guardsmen settled down, Aristides rolled as close to me as a lover. ‘It is good to have you back,’ he said. ‘Have you looked in the store houses?’

I hadn’t even seen a store house.

‘They’re stuffed with grain,’ he said. ‘I looked in the grain barn here — it is also packed. There is enough grain in that barn to feed ten thousand men.’ He squeezed my shoulder. ‘I know what I’m saying — I’m a farmer.’

Bulis spoke out of the dark behind me. ‘He’s getting the road ready for his army,’ he said.

I chuckled. ‘Perhaps we could arrange for an army of rats,’ I suggested.

Bulis all but hissed. ‘That would not lead to the contest we desire,’ he said.

As we descended from the mountains into the valleys of the Tigris and the Euphrates, the preparations of the Persians and Medes became more obvious. At every town, men were conducting inspections. Every forge was busy making spears and armour. Horse herds were being moved into the autumn grazing, and the harvest was coming in, and there were government men everywhere, collecting, enforcing — the power of the Persian bureaucracy was staggering compared to anything I’d seen in Greece, and their taxation was the heaviest I could imagine on the Babylonians.

It was hot and sticky, and my hip still hurt. I had aches in my back that seemed to connect with my pelvis, and even regular massage — in this, at least, the Persians are our brothers — didn’t seem to fix the injury. Muscles had been damaged. My body was far more deeply hurt than I had thought.

The area between the rivers was the most intensely cultivated I had ever seen. It made Boieotia and Green Plataea appear a howling wilderness. Laced with canals and irrigation ditches, the fields rolled away in an endless embroidery of man’s handiwork on the face of the earth, and the canals and irrigation ditches were old. We passed the ruins of cities that our guides told us were more than two thousand years old — one they claimed was four thousand years old.

Cyrus rode by my side. It was the longest time we’d spent together since my youth, and he was eager to see his home and his father. And we were delighted to find that the friendship of youth had been built on stone, not sand. We fenced with sticks and wrestled and raced our horses and even shot bows, and we were well matched at all but the last, where he was utterly my master.

And I began to be serious about Hector’s training. With no less than three Spartans, we were quite the travelling school of martial prowess, and as the three Spartans seemed disposed to share their knowledge, Hector had two months of the finest instruction that a man could have on wrestling, boxing, grappling, the use of the sword and knife, the spear and the bow. Cyrus joined us every day, although public martial exercise was not a Persian notion, and men — and women — would emerge from their travel shelters, or in town would come out of their houses to watch us exercise.

In one town in Mesopotamia, Brasidas spent the evening hours in the most mosquito-infested place I’d ever been, teaching spear fighting to Babylonian youths. There was some wrestling, and when he finally joined us, he looked grave.

‘These men are very well trained,’ he said. ‘They are not Spartans, but they are not soft.’ He glanced at Bulis. ‘Who is it who says the Medes are soft?’

Bulis shook his head. ‘Only a fool,’ he agreed.

It was an hour before I realised that I had seen Brasidas and Bulis speak to each other.

But Cyrus, who shared my chamber, laughed. ‘These are not Persians or Medes,’ he said. ‘These are Babylonians. By our standards, they are soft.’

Because of my letters for Sallis, we detoured a little off the Royal Road to visit Babylon. Greeks have been coming to Babylon since the time of the poetess Sappho or before — her brother served there, as you all know. We’ve all heard of the hanging gardens and the temple of Marduk and we know that Greeks lie.

The men who had seen Babylon only lied by diminution.

First, it was the most populous city I have ever seen — even more so than Thebes in Aegypt. I cannot imagine how many men and women live in Babylon — slaves and free, they are uncountable. But the temple of Marduk towers over all, and the gardens are like a mountain covered in plants, as the designer intended, for the story is that they were built by a great king of Babylon for his wife, who missed her home in the mountains.

And the temple of Marduk? Or, to be specific, the ziggurat? It is a mountain made by men for the gods. Perhaps it is as tall as the acropolis of Athens. Perhaps it is not.

Neither one was the greatest marvel of this city.

And on the plains outside the gates was an army — a magnificent army of horsemen and chariots and armoured infantry. Cyrus told me that Babylon was on the edge of revolt — that despite being one of the core kingdoms of the Persian Empire, Babylon craved its independence.

We were breakfasting on the walls, drinking the very sweet date wine and eating little rolls of wheat flower with butter and honey. If Babylonians are a little soft, they should be forgiven. Truly, it is a land of plenty.

Cyrus was watching the army drill.

‘It was a mistake for the Great King to permit them to assemble,’ he grumbled.

Now, to be honest, I had almost never heard Cyrus criticise Xerxes. That’s merely good policy — I might rant against bad government in Plataea, to another Plataean, but I would not air my dirty laundry to a Spartan or a Persian.

Nonetheless, I had seen signs that Cyrus and his men did not love the current regime. For one thing, it was as plain as the nose on his face — and Cyrus had quite the nose — that he detested Hydarnes. Cyrus, far from resenting the Spartan heralds, seemed to enjoy Hydarnes’ discomfiture.

And there had been a day or so at Hydarnes’ court when it appeared that the satrap would be with us on the road, and Cyrus had writhed in annoyance.

But this was overt criticism.

I leaned out over the railing. We were guests in one of the Great King’s many palaces. Slaves bustled about, seeing to our needs with a level of obsequious fear that I found unpleasant.

‘Why?’ I asked. ‘They seem like a mighty host.’

Cyrus shook his head. ‘Xerxes seeks always to please all men,’ he said. ‘He is not as sure of himself as a Great King must be. The Babylonians remain loyal to us only when they fear us. Babylon and Persia are not friends. If these men drill together, they will only convince each other that they must resist us.’ He met my eye.

I smiled. ‘Which would be the best thing for Greece, would it not?’ I asked. That famous Persian honesty could be used.

Cyrus was no fool. ‘Oh, revolt in Babylon would stop the invasion, at least for a time.’

In fact, what I saw out there on the plains of Mesopotamia was an army of almost fifty thousand men, most of whom were armoured. Almost a quarter of them were mounted. The charioteers outnumbered the entire phalanx of Plataea.

I watched them exercise, and Bulis joined me. We watched them all day.

Towards evening, they passed back into the city through the main gate to the cheers of a crowd so huge I couldn’t count them.

‘Do you want to fight them?’ I asked Bulis.

He smiled — the man who never changed expression.

‘Yes,’ he said.

The army of Babylon was incredible. Vast, well armoured, and beloved of their people. But that was not the most magnificent spectacle Babylon had to offer.

I was lying about in Babylon because the heat and the insects had put me back into my fevers, and I was sick for several days, and spent them watching the army drill. But on my fourth day in the largest city in the world, I rose, took Hector and a pair of local slaves, and went to the house of Sallis’s sister with his letters to her.

I have no notion of what Sallis said to his sister in those letters. But like saving Polypeithes’ chariot on the plains of Alpheos, it was one of the pivotal moments of the war. The world turns on the whims of the gods, and on the actions of men of whom no one will ever hear.

Sallis had impressed me as a gentleman, but he’d never mentioned wealth or power, and he seemed to me to be a senior servant, so I suppose that I had imagined his sister as a portly matron of forty, living with her husband the dye merchant in some narrow but attractive street. Indeed, when I gathered my little group to attend her, I worried that Hector and two slaves might appear too long a tail for her and might make me seem arrogant.

In fact, Sallis’s sister was the wife and widow of a man who might have been King of Babylon, and she lived in a palace larger than the one in which I was housed, hard by the great temple. It occupied the whole of a low hill, and had its own garden — this inside the walls of the most densely populated place in the world. Nor was the complex a single building or even three or four around a central yard. It was a dozen buildings — a hall, a small temple, a stables, a barracks for slaves, another for soldiers.

I stood and gaped like a hick. In fact, Babylon made me feel a bumpkin every minute.

I was rescued by my borrowed slaves, who ran — in the most intense heat I’d ever known — into the slave barracks and came back with directions to the ‘main’ palace. And a further escort. And then we were briefly interrogated by military retainers in fine armour — coats of bronze plates, some tinned to look like silver. They wore pointy helmets that made them look like exotic animals, and officers wore turbans of linen wound around the peaks.

No one spoke Persian but my borrowed slaves. So all conversations were three sided.

In the end, I met a supercilious major-domo who took my letters and dismissed me like a slave. I shrugged — I still, at that point, was not sure that Sallis’s sister wasn’t the wife of a senior servant. I really wasn’t any too sure what my slaves were telling me, and Hector was as confused as I, and we had a good laugh about it when we returned to the Great King’s palace.

Ah, what a fine question, thugater! Of course, the Great King almost never came to Babylon, and at that moment, Xerxes, King over Kings, was hunting lions in the valley below Susa, another thousand stades away. But his palace in Babylon was kept open for visitors and messengers and ambassadors.

At any rate, Hector and I lay on a couple of kline and mocked ourselves to Brasidas and Cyrus and Aristides, who were entertained. Aristides actually broke through his reserve and had to swing his feet to the floor as Hector described the Hero of Marathon, stammering to a bored Babylonian slave driver.

But that was not the end of the letters. Before the evening came and the oil lamps could be lit, the very same major-domo appeared, ushered in by the Master of the Palace, a Persian gentleman who’d greeted us on arrival and had scarcely been seen since.

Aristides was still there, helping Hector with his rhetoric.

The major-domo threw himself on the floor at my feet.

I laughed. Greeks always do, when foreigners do this thing. It’s comic. A man’s arse sticks up in the air — anyway, it is most certainly not Greek.

But the Persian fetched Cyrus, and we had a four-sided conversation, from which I eventually understood that the major-domo had mistaken me for an unimportant slave, and his mistress, upon reading the letters, had sent him with a sword that I could use to kill him if I so desired.

The Master of the Palace — yet another Darius, of course — told me that this was merely good manners, and assured me that I was welcome to kill the man.

‘Are you a slave?’ I asked the man.

He raised his head. ‘No, lord.’

‘He sounds like a slave to me,’ Aristides said.

I raised the man and took the sword. ‘Translate for me,’ I said to one of the Babylonian slaves. ‘In Greece, from where I come, one of the greatest sins a man can commit is to treat a free man like a slave. We call it hubris.’

The man closed his eyes and tensed his neck muscles.

‘But no one is allowed to execute a free man for hubris.’ I shrugged. ‘I forgive you. I am a foreigner and you had no idea who I was.’

It was a superb sword. It was made with that pattern welding that the chalcedonies do so well. The hilt was odd — not my style at all, with no cross-guard to protect the hand. I gave it to him.

‘Please keep the sword, master, as a gift from my lady. And I thank you for the gift of my life, and it would be my extreme pleasure to escort you to her. In fact,’ he said, suddenly quite cheerful, ‘in fact, unless you have another engagement, she insists.’

His change of demeanour was very much in keeping with everything and everyone I knew in Babylon. They were. . mercurial.

I took a little trouble over clothes and cloak, although without trousers I looked like a freak to every man and woman on the streets — no one wants to wear an embroidered wool cloak on a hot summer night in Babylon. I wore the sword I’d been given.

The Master of the Palace, who seemed to be quite slow to Cyrus, provided me with a train of slaves — a dozen — and I took both Hector and his young apprentice, who had filled out on the road and shot up a foot with the plentiful meat that came from the bows of my Persian escort.

To make a better show — at the Master of the Palace’s suggestion — we rode horses.

This time, our greeting at the gate was utterly different, and we were ushered directly to the main hall after a very embarrassed captain of the guard had given me his personal apologies in the most astoundingly bad Persian. I left Brasidas to attempt conversation, and one of my multilingual borrowed slaves.

After all, it seemed like a golden opportunity to gather some information. I no longer believed we had a chance of convincing the Great King to keep his armies out of Greece, and that, in turn, meant that our next duty was the collection of information.

And then I went to meet Sallis’s sister.

The main hall was ablaze with torches and lined in heavy columns of green marble shot with white. Two of the columns had gold — actual gold — inlaid in them, and they framed the lady as she sat in splendour on a dais, surrounded by women in magnificent layered robes.

Not a fat merchant’s wife, then.

There were a dozen armoured men in the spaces between the heavy pillars. The warm air was spiced with incense, and the women around her were beautiful. She herself was no older than twenty-five, and she wore enough gold to pay a taxeis of mercenaries for a year. Her eyes were slightly slanted in the Eastern way, almond-shaped and black. Her brows were also jet black and they shone against her skin, which seemed as if it was golden in the torchlight.

I gave her the bow I had not given to Hydarnes, touching my right knee briefly to the marble floor.

She rose from her throne — it looked like a throne to me — and came forward and took my hand and kissed me — on the mouth.

‘A guest-friend of my brother! Staying with the Persians! I assume you found my house unacceptable, and I am mortified.’

A clever person can say one thing and mean another. She spoke excellent Persian — better than mine — and to me, her meaning was clear — We’ve had a misunderstanding and it is time to move on.

Her kiss burned on my lips.

I met her eye, and like Gorgo, she looked back without flinching or dropping her eyes.

‘I am very sorry for any misunderstanding, my lady. Your brother asked me to carry his letters, but said nothing further.’

She smiled at me. ‘Of course he did not. And I understand that you are guests of the Great King, and thus it may be more politic to stay in the Great King’s palace and not share my poor food and flea-ridden beds.’ She curtsied. ‘I am flattered that you have come at all, and hope my poor house is worthy to receive you.’

I sighed. ‘I am but a foolish barbarian and your sarcasm is wasted on me,’ I said.

She leaned in close. ‘I have never found sarcasm to be wasted on a Greek,’ she said. She made a motion with her hand, and the soldiers marched away. ‘We will be served a private dinner. Will you dismiss your slaves?’

‘Yes,’ I said. ‘But several of them are not slaves. The young man and the boy are free men — my shield bearer and helmet bearer. Noble youths.’

Women came forward. ‘They will be suitably entertained,’ she said.

As private dinners go, it was tolerably public. I think I counted forty servants waiting on us. We dined in a tent made of gauze, which admitted the light of sunset and the breeze, but kept the insects at bay, although every tray of food coming into the tent probably brought a new battalion. We had six courses and wines, and as the evening wore on, the need for privacy seemed tolerably remote.

Despite which, Sallis’s sister Arwia was beautiful. It was more than beauty, however. I was captivated as soon as I heard her speak, and nothing about her was less than desirable, so that as the meal wore on, I had to count horses and stare at servants and at one point excused myself and walked around her garden.

Nor did the lady in question do anything to encourage me, beyond meeting my eye from time to time and laughing a great deal. Few things encourage a man like a woman who will laugh at his jokes.

She was a fine listener, and not just a slavish one. I have known women who ask questions automatically, because they have learned that it is their role to entertain men, and men like few things better than to talk about themselves. No — you needn’t deny it. But Arwia asked questions and then asked further questions, searching, probing — sometimes mocking, sometimes dismissive or even acerbic.

She would stare into my eyes and ask another question, and another, and it was as if she were getting closer to me. She was not. She sat cross-legged on the other side of a low table and each of us also had a sort of elbow table where slaves placed our wine. We were separated by the table and by cushions, as both of us half sat and half reclined, and for part of the meal, owing to a religious custom, she sat partially screened by a fine net.

It did not screen her eyes, or her voracious questions.

‘You are Jawan?’ she asked, quite early.

We had to feel our way through Jawan, which turned out to have a meaning not too dissimilar to ‘Ionian’. In fact, it turns out to be the Babylonian/Assyrian word for Greeks — if you allow that Asian Ionians are Greeks.

When I thought about it, it was rather the way we kept expecting Persians to behave like their cousins, the Scythians.

We then passed half an hour as I described the Greek world, and the Mediterranean. She listened with perfect attention and at one point summoned a slave to write some things down.

‘Where is Sparta?’ she asked. Sparta was, it turned out, the only western Greek city of which she’d heard, and when I told her that it was scarcely a city, but more like an assembly of four rural towns, and that the greatest cities in the Greek world were Athens and Corinth, she shrugged. She’d heard of Corinth, and sent a slave to get a jar, which proved to be the old Corinthian ware of my grandfather’s time.

‘There used to be just such a pitcher on my mother’s table,’ I said.

‘What happened to it?’ she asked.

‘My brother knocked it off the table with his elbow,’ I admitted.

‘Ah! You have a brother. How old is he?’ she asked.

In truth, I scarcely ever thought of him, but I said, ‘He has been dead since I was thirteen. Twenty years or so.’

‘How did he die?’ she asked, tearing at a round of unleavened bread with which to take her next course of food.

‘A Spartan killed him,’ I said.

‘And then your people were conquered by the Spartans?’ she asked. ‘And yet you are the lord of the embassy, and the Spartans are your servants.’

I think I nearly spat my wine, and I’m glad that none of my Spartan friends were there to hear her. ‘We are allies,’ I said. ‘The Spartans never conquered us. We came to an equitable peace.’

She snorted. ‘Equitable peace?’ she asked. ‘What’s that?’

Occasionally I used the wrong Persian word. It was not my first language, or hers, so we had some very funny confusions.

And through it all, she ate. This woman, who was not very much above five feet in height, managed to eat every bit as much as I ate. She drank wine, and the wine was particularly odd — heavily spiced, with odd ingredients. The more of it I drank the more awake I became, the more fluent I felt, and the more intoxicated I became with my hostess.

Her eyes had begun to shine in a way that women’s eyes are spoken of by the poets, but seldom appear. I had just paid her some compliment — flattered her beauty, I suspect, and she put a hand to her mouth and giggled like a girl.

‘Among the Jawan, do you use the poppy in wine?’ she asked.

I shook my head. ‘No. We water our wine, and sometimes we add spice or honey if the wine is a trifle off. Poppy juice is for medicine.’

‘Hemp seeds?’ she asked. ‘Lotus flowers?’

I shook my head. ‘I have heard of all these things being given to wounded men,’ I said, ‘Or women in childbirth.’

She giggled again.

We drank more wine.

We had some amazing confection of ground pistachio and almond in honey — at least, that’s what I think it was. It filled me with energy, and I began to talk very quickly. By then we were on to war, and I was explaining — probably with wide-mouthed pomposity — the manner in which Greeks made war.

She nodded. And asked about our siege equipment.

‘How would a Greek army go about taking Babylon?’ she asked.

I remember being amused. ‘No Greek army could get here,’ I said.

‘We have had Jawan mercenaries. Good men — as good as Carians. Head to toe in bronze.’ She was lying back, now, and her eyes were almost slits.

‘And you have an army many times as great as any Greek army I’ve ever seen,’ I said.

She waved dismissively. ‘The Persians beat us like a drum,’ she said. ‘They killed my oldest brother and my husband. And unlike you, my dear, I do not forgive or forget.’

A slave came and removed the screen that separated us, and the table.

Another slave put an iced dish next to me. I ate it. It was superb. It was iced berries in some sort of frozen water, like snow. It may even have been snow. On a hot summer night amidst incense burners, an iced drink makes you feel you are one with the gods.

‘If the army were beaten, my Greeks would still not be great enough to surround this city,’ I said.

She was half asleep. ‘The Persians can surround us utterly. They can bring a hundred thousand men — two hundred thousand.’

‘No king on earth can feed two hundred thousand men and all their slaves and pack animals,’ I said.

She sat up. ‘Yes, he can,’ she said. ‘He can fill the plains from here to Ninivet with men. The Great King can raise a million men — and feed them.’ She lay back. ‘I know. You must believe me.’

I shrugged. Always humour a lady. ‘I’m not sure there are a million Greek hoplites,’ I said. ‘Or even a hundred thousand.’

She shook her head lazily. ‘But you have a great fleet,’ she said.

I thought of Athens and Aegina — mortal foes. ‘Only if we can agree among ourselves,’ I said.

About this time it began to dawn on me that I was very drunk. And further, that all the lights were gone except the oil lamps on our elbow tables. And finally — that we were alone.

She rose on one elbow and looked at me. ‘You have fewer than a hundred thousand soldiers?’ she asked.

I nodded.

‘And ships? Five hundred triremes?’ she asked.

‘In the whole world of the Hellenes, there are not four hundred triremes,’ I said. ‘Perhaps if we were allied to Gelon of Syracusa.’

‘He is Jawan?’ she asked.

It was my turn to wave dismissively. ‘Not really,’ I answered.

‘How many soldiers does your city command?’ she asked, and for the first time she leaned towards me. Her unbound breasts pressed down against the fabric of her gown — a very fine linen.

‘Fifteen hundred on her best day,’ I said proudly.

She laughed — surprised and not well pleased. ‘And the Spartans?’ she asked.

I shrugged. ‘Five thousand Spartans. Perhaps thirty thousand Peloponnesian allies.’ I leaned forward too.

I knew she was working me for information. But I could not see her as an ally of the Great King. And I wanted her. I just kept leaning a little closer.

She laughed, and her breath was warm and wine-scented on my face. ‘You will fight the Great King with four hundred ships and fifty thousand men!’ she said. ‘You are insanely stupid or very brave.’

I leaned one more inch and put my lips on hers.

For a long time — perhaps three or four beats of our hearts — our lips just touched.

And then she gave a little moan of pleasure and rolled off her pillows and into my arms.

We kissed for a long time. I had just moved my hand to roll my thumb around her nipple when she looked up into my face.

‘How soon could your fleet attack?’ she asked.

Perhaps the most erotic question I’ve ever been asked.

No one interrupted us. Allow me to say that as a nobly born widow in Babylon, the lady had no strictures to her behaviour — she entertained me quite publicly, and bragged that she’d set a fashion for having a foreign soldier as a lover.

Let me also say that she was beautiful. Her shoulders and neck were muscular — she was, in fact, a passionate huntress and archer — and her great dark eyes and shining black hair were magnificent.

She never stopped. In the middle of the most indecent intimacy, she would turn her head almost all the way around and say, ‘Where do the Jawans get their golden hair?’ or equally, ‘Can you sail from the Jawan seas to our sea?’

Her passion — besides the obvious — was revenge on Persia for the death of her husband, whom she had obviously loved very much. He had been a senior military commander, and had been executed. She could tell me about him while I fondled her. She could chat about the possibility of a Babylonian revolt. . Never mind. I’ll make you all blush. And it was the possibility of the Babylonians revolting again that got me to tell all this in the first place.

She wanted me to bring my fleet to the aid of her city.

I related all this — less the salacious details — the next day to my Athenian and Spartan friends while we played Polis in the sunshine. I had had no sleep at all, and somewhere deep in the morning, Arwia had admitted to me that I’d been drinking drugged wine since the evening began.

Brasidas snorted his wine.

Bulis looked away.

Sparthius laughed his easy laugh. ‘Trust you to get a princess while the rest of us are bitten by insects.’

Aristides raised an eyebrow. ‘I will leave to the side the abrogation of your responsibility to your guest-friend for the preservation of his sister’s honour,’ he said coldly.

For perhaps the first and last time, Bulis rolled his eyes.

I looked down. ‘I promise you that the lady’s reputation will suffer no harm from me,’ I said. ‘Customs here are different.’

Aristides sniffed.

Bulis leaned towards me. ‘If the Babylonians are really ready to revolt,’ he said. He looked around.

Sparthius nodded. ‘Everything I see says that the Great King is ready to march on us in the spring. Everything is ready. Armies, food, roads, ships — the canal and the bridges.’

I nodded. ‘Everything but the adversary,’ I said. ‘We Greeks are not ready.’

Aristides rubbed the top of his head. ‘Just so,’ he said. ‘And we wouldn’t be ready in the spring if we flew home now under Hermes’ outstretched arms.’

Later that afternoon, Cyrus kept me from a nap that might have saved me and sat me down in the courtyard.

‘You spent the night with the Lady Arwia,’ he said.

I smiled a smug and probably unwise smile.

He nodded. ‘She is wicked, that one,’ he said. ‘She is a rebel, and the Great King should have shortened her by a head when he killed her husband. What did she tell you?’

I shrugged.

‘Come, brother. What did she ask you to do?’

I chuckled. ‘Modesty forbids,’ I said.

Cyrus smiled, then. ‘You pleasured each other? That is all?’

‘She asked me a thousand thousand questions about the Jawan and their lands, even when I was riding her,’ I said.

He nodded. ‘But no. . politics?’

I shrugged. ‘I heard her speak fifty kinds of treason. Who minds what a woman says, when she is willing?’

He nodded. Bluff, empty-headed, woman-using Arimnestos — eh?

‘I hope to see her again tonight,’ I said.

‘Indeed, your invitation — with all your Spartans and Athenians — is in the palace even now.’ He rose and we exchanged bows. ‘Tomorrow we will ride for Susa. I need to get my head out of this crotch of pests. Into the mountains where the air is clean and cool.’

There are women — I’m sorry even to repeat this, but I’ve had some wine — there are women who you desire with all your being — until you’ve had them, and then the charm wears away. In the cold light of day, you see a thousand flaws — sometimes in them, and sometimes in yourself.

There’s a brilliant Persian poem about it, which I can’t remember.

But Arwia was not one of those women. The thought of her inflamed me, and when I was in her presence, I was like a boy — unable to take my eyes off her, nor to behave myself.

She seemed to revel in it, and we flirted outrageously.

But she was so skilled as a hostess that she could flirt to the point of open licentiousness with me, and still make Aristides love her. He was not besotted, but he never spoke slightingly of her again. The Spartans were utterly charmed.

Something happened which, among other men, might have led to blood. I tell this that you may better understand the Spartans.

Sparthius decided he wanted her. He knew full well I’d bedded her the night before, but he set himself to win her — with humour, with flattery, with anecdotes. He showed his muscles, he won her laughter.

He was very good.

Nor did he hide his intentions from me. As Arwia was in no way ‘mine’, I didn’t make some feeble remark to that extent, but at one point, I did poke him sharply in the arm.

He grinned at me. ‘Let the best man have her,’ he said. ‘I’ve seldom seen her like.’

She entered fully into the spirit of the thing, too. Once she realised she had both of us captivated. .

There are some powers one should not grant to mortals.

With Aristides doting and Sparthius and I besotted, she began to target Bulis. He drank steadily, but his face remained carved in stone. I had seen him turn his head to hide his amusement at his friend, and perhaps at me, but with the lady he was careful, cautious and correct.

She had dancers. They danced. To say that they danced lasciviously would be like suggesting that the sun gives light.

First girls. .

Then boys. .

Then boys with girls.

At some point Aristides excused himself. It was all tasteful — none of your flute-girl tricks with vegetables — but he went for a turn in the garden.

The Spartans sat and watched.

I realised that Arwia was using her erotic dancers to measure them. I watched her watch them, and I thought — This is a very dangerous woman indeed. Dangerous, and yet. .

And yet, we were on the same side.

After the iced drink was served, Arwia went and sat by Sparthius. He reached for her and she laughed and slipped away and put a hand on his arm. She said something.

He laughed very hard.

Then she sat by Bulis. He met her gaze with level gravity. She whispered in his ear, and he nodded — and smiled.

And finally she went and sat by Aristides. From her neck, she took a magnificent necklace of lapis and gold. She put it in his hands. ‘This is for your wife,’ she said.

He tried to laugh. ‘How do you know I’m married?’ he asked.

‘Oh, for all I know, all these gentlemen have wives,’ she said lightly. ‘But you love yours.’

Aristides beamed. I had no wife, but I knew what she had just said, and I felt its justice.

A dangerous woman indeed.

An hour later I lay in her arms — under the stars. Under a billowing tent of gauze. With a bowl of iced fruit by my elbow.

Pah! I brag like a pimply boy. It was. . wonderful.

She lay back, snapped her fingers, and a slave disconcerted me enormously by appearing, wiping her all over with a moist towel, and vanishing into the perfumed darkness. A second slave began to wash me.

I almost leaped out of the tent.

She laughed. She laughed a great deal.

She grabbed my ankle and pulled me back into her arms. ‘I know you have no fleet,’ she said. ‘And I know that you cannot sail from Sparta to Babylon.’ She pressed her lips to my ear. ‘But let me pretend you can.’

I would like to take credit for what came after. But the truth is, Arwia saved Greece, and I had very little to do with it. We did spend the rest of the night pretending that I was going to lead a great army of Greeks through the Persian empire. She made suggestions about where they were weak, and I promised to rescue Babylon from bondage.

Oh, Babylon.

I never did learn what she said to Bulis. I know she told Sparthius that she was not woman enough to lie with both of us together. He laughed about that until his dying day.

The next morning, we rode away from the insects and the perfume and the sticky heat of love, and started up the roads into the mountains of Persia, on the last lap to Susa. Cyrus had a message from court. We were wanted.

Until then, Susa had seemed impossibly remote. Now we were less than two weeks away. And my Spartan friends, who were each as brave as men could be, suddenly seemed a little more detached. Bulis spent more time training Hector. It became a passion, pothos. Sparthius began to purchase strumpets in the way stations. He had never done any such thing.

One night Brasidas accused him of comforting the enemy. Sparthius reacted angrily. They were outside, and I began to pull my cloak around me.

Brasidas laughed. ‘Every child you make with these women will be half a Spartan,’ he said.

Sparthius laughed — and laughed.

At some point, Brasidas and Sparthius and Bulis had come to terms. I’d seen it happen, but it had been so gradual that I’d missed the nuances, and I didn’t know what had divided them in the first place.

The trip from Babylon to Susa is not so far — a little less than two thousand stades, and all on excellent roads. Susa is the Persian winter capital — in summer, they move high in the mountains to Persepolis, which, I regret to say, I never saw. A day out from Susa, and we were on cooler plains with the mountains visible in the distance and the river at our feet, and the air, as promised, was crisper and clear and cool, even though we could all but see Babylon behind us. I exaggerate, but we could see far across the plains before the daytime heat shimmer struck.

We had ridden for eight days through a flood of soldiers — slingers, archers, spearmen — horse and foot.

I missed Arwia. I mention this because, for a two-night affair that a man might dismiss, I was still beyond smitten or besotted. At every stopping point, I considered making an excuse to ride back. Only Gorgo’s words — that we were a conspiracy to save Greece — held me to my task.

Brasidas rode next to me as we ploughed a furrow through the soldiers of the Persian Empire.

‘Do you still think that Greece can match the power of the Great King?’ he asked.

‘No,’ I said.

He laughed. ‘We’re wearing off on you, Plataean. That was a Laconian answer.’

I shrugged.

‘Will you try to buy peace from the Great King?’ he asked.

‘No,’ I said. I smiled. I was getting better at playing Laconian.

‘What, then?’ he asked.

‘We’ll fight,’ I said.

‘And then?’ he asked.

‘I suppose we’ll die,’ I said. I was riding in a river of potential enemy spearmen. The road to Susa and Persepolis was choked with soldiers. They were everywhere — Assyrians, Elamites, Mesopotamians and Medes, horse and foot.

That night, I dreamed of Arwia, her magnificent shoulders glistening with sweat, riding atop my hips. She was, by far, the greatest wonder of Babylon. Not just as a lover — but as the force that saved Greece.

You’ll see.

Susa was beautiful. It lacked the majesty and the squalor of Babylon. And the size. In truth, Susa was a fine city with a noble waterfall and two beautiful bridges, but it wasn’t a great deal bigger than Plataea and it was certainly smaller than Corinth, for all that it had a more cosmopolitan population than any city in Greece save possibly Athens. The agora teemed with men — and women — from every part of the empire and many parts adjacent, and there were Greeks — and everyone else.

It is not important to this story — but I need to mention that in Susa I met both Aethiopians and Indians. I met an Indian merchant who told me that his country was one hundred and forty-four thousand stades distant, and that, on the Outer Ocean, there was a current and a set of constant winds that would move a ship from Aethiopia to India in the summer and back in the winter. His name was Abha, and we talked for days — I told him how to sail west from Ephesus, and he told me how to sail east from Bahrain. He sold me some fabric and a fine quantity of pepper, and I traded to him my last Athenian arybolos, some British pearls and a Rhodian perfume. We agreed that it did not really matter what we exchanged — our goods would be priceless rarities at their destinations at opposite ends of the earth.

Abha’s role — well, if I continue to tell this, you’ll meet him again.

Pardon my digression. We were met at the gates by soldiers. They were ‘Immortals’, as the Greeks call them. In Persian, they are called Anûšiya. Which has the same meaning as our Hetaeroi. They march with the Great King, everywhere — on campaign, on the hunt, and even in the bedchamber. There are ten thousand of them — that’s true — but they come in two ranks. The Outer Companions are armed with a short spear that carries, as its sarauter, a silver apple that makes a deadly mace. The Inner Companions, the true Anûšiya, number only one thousand men, and they carry the spear with the golden apple.

There is no ‘Horse Anûšiya’ or hippeis, as we would call them. Every Persian noble has his own retainers, and the Great King has his own, as well, but as the Great King — at least among Persians — is far more a ‘first among equals’ (rather like the Kings of Sparta, in fact!) his cavalrymen are also his friends. And the Immortals are soldiers — some are nobly born, but most are commoners and some are foreign despite their Persian dress — Medes, Babylonians, even a few Greeks. They are chosen purely by military merit.

We were met at the gates by six of the Inner Guard, with golden apples on their spears, magnificent scale corselets — but without our shoulder yokes, which makes them appear far slimmer — and beautiful over-robes. Their over-robes were wool, embroidered with silk.

Silk is a kind of textile — or just possibly a form of metal — woven by spiders far to the East. I bought some in the market. It is sometimes available in Aegypt, but all of it comes from India and even farther east, in legendary Kwin.

Well! It was a day of wonders. You must let me tell it my own way.

All traffic through the gate stopped for us. Six imperial guardsmen were sufficient to guarantee us instant passage through every checkpoint. The leader of the Anûšiya chatted with Cyrus.

Suddenly he turned to me and bowed. ‘I am sorry,’ he said. ‘My lord tells me you speak Persian, and I was treating you as an ignorant person. We never see Greeks who speak our tongue.’

I nodded. ‘May the light of the sun always shine on your face,’ I said.

He grinned. ‘You have the accent of my home!’ he cried, and slapped his thigh in delight. ‘Did you learn from a man of Fars?’

I nodded. ‘I have the honour to be a friend of Artapharenes, brother of Darius the Great,’ I said.

Cyrus nodded. ‘It is true. He was a young scamp, but we took to him. Only the gods know why. He saved my lord’s life, too.’

The Anûšiya bowed low. ‘Truly,’ the leader admitted, ‘we seldom meet a Greek of worth. Most are slaves — and better so.’

One of the soldiers looked up at me — we were mounted. ‘Are you a Spartan?’ he asked. ‘We hear they are very good. Good fighters — men of honour.’

I pointed at Brasidas, who was just behind me. ‘He is a Spartan.’

The leader nodded. ‘The Spartans will be with us, when we fight. Their king-in-exile is close to our king. They hunt together.’ He nodded as if stating a profound truth. ‘The Spartan king is an honourable man — and a fine hunter. Very brave.’

Well, we all delude ourselves in war. Why should not the Persians delude themselves?

‘What are they saying?’ asked Brasidas, and the two heralds pushed their horses forward. I translated.

The Spartans all smiled, and Sparthius slipped down from his horse. ‘Immortals? These are Persian Immortals?’ He looked over the officer’s equipment like a man buying an ox at a fair. ‘Ask him if I can hold his spear.’

The Persian courteously handed the Spartan his spear.

Sparthius — ignoring the crowd of onlookers we’d drawn at the edge of the Susan agora — began to whirl the spear.

‘Superb balance,’ he said. ‘Short — but a good head.’ He tested it with his thumb and smiled. He handed it to Bulis, and who looked at the head — and smiled.

‘Good steel,’ he said.

Before the gods, the Immortals made the Spartans happier than Arwia’s beauty and all her wit. Bulis called to me — in Greek — his voice full of life, lilting like a boy’s.

‘These are worthy men.’

By which, if you haven’t figured out the Spartan mindset, he meant — these are men worth matching spears with.

In truth, the Great King’s palace at Susa was splendid, and had I seen it before Babylon, I would have gaped. But I’d been to Babylon, and Arwia’s great hall with its winged lions and green marble columns was — truthfully — grander than Darius’s palace at Susa. And when you left the temple-like hall for the guest quarters — it was more like a stone-built barracks, which, in fact, it was. The Great King had almost a thousand guests, and we were packed in like travellers in the caravanserai along the Royal Road, with Indians and Bactrians and Jews. .

At the same time, the guest barracks was wonderful, because we all mixed together at mealtimes as if we were some kind of exotic army, and the conversation was a delight. I didn’t meet a fool there, and I met many men far better travelled than I. Aristides all but held court — his wisdom was apparent to all, and he quickly gathered a group of high-minded men who discussed issues like the value of excellence and the purpose of human life.

I don’t want to suggest that I wasn’t interested. But I was in the capital of the greatest empire on the aspis of the world, and I was there to learn all I could about the enemy, not about the mind of man. Each day, when the sun was halfway to the middle of the sky and the shadow of the horse statue in the Foreigners’ Courtyard reached a certain point, the palace major-domo would come and announce the list of guests who would be received by the Great King. And as soon as this ceremony was performed, Brasidas and I would pack ourselves cloaks and hat and go out into the agora. We visited Cyrus at his father’s house and had a tremendous meal with a man who had ridden with Cyrus the Great and had, himself, been to the borders of India. He was a courteous, dignified old gentleman who was nonetheless not too fine to flourish his akinakes and show us just how he slew a prince of the Scythians.

We went with Cyrus to the barracks of the noble cavalry and watched them at exercise.

Cyrus said, ‘It might seem foolish of us to show you everything — our armament, our tactics. But the Great King believes that if other nations see our power, we can avoid bloodshed by your submission.’

In truth, just on the plains around Susa, the Great King had more — and better — cavalry than all of Thessaly and all of Greece could ever raise, better mounted, better equipped, with bows which none of our horsemen had. One day, Cyrus took us to see Persian archers.

I grew up watching Persian archers, but the Spartans had not.

Brasidas stood silently while twenty men lofted shafts so fast that the third one was in the air before the first struck. And when they struck, they struck deep. Persian bows were bigger and more powerful even than Scythian bows, as those of us who had faced noble Persian archers at sea had every reason to know.

And Cyrus embarrassed me by telling the men on the archery range that I had charged Artapherenes’ guard at Sardis — and lived.

‘Tell us!’ men insisted, so I told the story, hiding, as much as possible, the fact that there had been only ten of us in the charge.

‘And Marathon?’ asked another. ‘The battle on the plains of Athens? Were you there, as well?’

I admitted I had been, and then we were swapping lies — or at least half-truths — because he had ridden with the cavalry at our end of the line.

In the end, we agreed that no two men see a battle the same way, But I agreed with him that, had the ends of the Greek line not pressed forward so fast, the Persians would have triumphed. This seemed to satisfy him that I was a reliable witness.

They served us wine, and we were like comrades.

The next day, in the market, a street sweeper — a low-caste half-Mede — told me that soon I would have his job.

‘Now you are an ambassador,’ he said. ‘Soon, you will be a slave, lower than me. I see it every day. Put your neck under his foot and get it over with!’ The man laughed a gap-toothed smile. ‘I need the help.’

And that day or the next we were invited by Shahvir and Mayu — I think I have those names correctly, they were officers of the Anûšiya — to a mess dinner at the barracks. I was enjoined to bring all the Spartans, and I did.

Shahvir was a fine companion, but as soon as we’d had a cup of wine, he showed us several sets of Greek panoply. ‘You have seen us ride and shoot,’ he said. ‘Let us see the Greek way of war.’

I protested that he must have seen hoplites — in Babylonian service, if nowhere else.

‘I myself have fought the Ionians several times,’ he said. He shrugged. ‘Too much armour, too little training.’

I turned to Bulis. ‘He’d like us to demonstrate the phalanx.’

Bulis nodded. ‘With three men and a foreigner?’ he asked. Note that well, friends — we were in Susa, in Persia, and he called me a foreigner. It is hard to love the men of Lacedaemon. At any rate, he shook his head at me.

‘You do not know our dances,’ he said.

‘I know the seventh dance,’ I said. ‘I learned it from Sparthius.’

Sparthius nodded. ‘He’s better than most boys,’ he said. ‘I say let’s do it. With four of us we can look like something.’

Brasidas looked as displeased as I. ‘I am a Plataean,’ he said.

In that moment, I loved him.

Bulis didn’t change expression. ‘Of course. Your view is noted. Will you dance with us, Plataeans?’

I looked at Brasidas, and he nodded. ‘Yes,’ he said.

It is one thing to dance the Pyricche in the agora of your city, or some clear space under the walls. At Plataea, we dance it at the corner of the enclosure of Hera, and the goddess herself, I think, watches us when we are at our best.

But even when we stumble or miss the time, we dance for three thousand men and women, and we know them all by name. When a young man is particularly skilled or good, women — and some men — cry, ‘Kalos! Kalos!’

It is different, when you dance the war dance for enemies. And you must believe me, friends. By that night in Susa, we knew that we were a few Greeks in a sea of enemies. They were good men and women — decent, honourable — but they were — from the Great King we had not met to the meanest slattern — cocksure that they would conquer us and make us slaves.

Nor was the armour good stuff, nor did it fit well. In the end, I asked Mayu for his scale shirt — we were of a size.

‘But it is not like your gear,’ he said.

‘I have one just like it hanging from the rafters of my house,’ I said.

‘Where from?’ he asked.

‘Marathon,’ I said wickedly. No one should ever have sent me as a diplomat.

Bulis commanded us. He made us stand perfectly still and simply tap the floor with our sarauters for what seemd like an eternity. He wanted us to have the rhythm correct.

I have said that the Spartan Pyricche is not like ours. I’ll say more now. In Sparta, they have ten — or, for all I know, fifty — Pyricche, not just one. Each dance has a particular storyline, and each dance teaches a set of lessons to a boy — or a man.

So the seventh dance of the Lacedaemonians is the dance of the shield press. In it, the two lines exchange thrusts, but only to offer the opportunity to use the aspis as a weapon. It is the one I chose to learn because it teaches the lessons so well — how to turn your aspis like a table, how to cut with the outer rim, how to break an opponent’s body-structure with a push offline.

For a moment, as we stood ready, I couldn’t think of the opening sequence, and so I was late — terribly late — entering the first step.

Hah! But after that, I was into the rhythm of the thing, and we were like gods.

There is a moment — just as in the Plataeans’ Pyricche — where we all step together, stomping our right foot heavily as we push. Our four feet were like one foot — or like hundreds, all together.

And on the last step, we stopped. All together, and no shuffling.

The Persians applauded us. Mayu hefted an aspis and made an odd motion with his head. ‘You couldn’t do any of that in combat, of course,’ he said. ‘You’d be too closely pressed together.’

I translated for Bulis, who shrugged. It was a shrug of contempt. ‘Only militia and slaves huddle together,’ he said. ‘Our men keep their places in the line.’

Quite a long speech for him.

I’d like to say that the Persians were so impressed with us that they stayed home and didn’t invade Greece. But we all know that’s not what happened. Instead, Mayu made it clear that he thought our dance was pretty, but nothing to do with war, and over food and wine, Shahvir explained to me that Marathon had been a fluke caused by the unreliability of some of their Greek subjects.

Well.

Bulis sat in silence, and Brasidas asked for translations, and sometimes smiled. Sparthius looked angry, and drank too much. I suspect we were sullen — I was surprised at how hostile the Anûšiya were, and as we walked home, Cyrus apologised.

‘They are not gentlemen. Merely warriors. I see what your dance teaches.’ He shrugged. ‘I suspect in time, Mayu will see, too.’

We cooled our heels for two weeks. It was a glorious time, and if I hadn’t been pining for Babylon, I suspect it might be one of the favourite times in my life. Everything at Susa was an adventure, and I tasted saffron, drank rare wine, eyed noble beauties, and saw the most beautiful horses I’d ever seen.

Really, Persia is a fine place.

A little less than two weeks after we’d arrived, Brasidas disappeared. He left a note to say that he was going to visit a friend. Bulis and Sparthius looked. . knowing.

And told me nothing.

A few hours after he left us, Hector brought me a message he’d received from a slave.

‘A Greek slave,’ he said.

It invited me to a meeting at a time and place. There was no signature.

I have been a slave, and that gives me a natural tendency to caution in these matters. Besides, after our somewhat hostile reception by the Anûšiya, I had become aware that I was sometimes followed.

I shrugged. ‘No,’ I said.

The next day, a helot — I’d know those Messenian features anywhere — plucked at my elbow in the Foreigners’ Courtyard of the palace.

I ignored him.

‘Just come with me?’ he asked.

‘No!’ I said. It had to be a provocation. They’d pretend there was a slave revolt, or ask for money — we all knew our turn with the Great King was coming, and we all knew about Xerxes’ little ways. He tested his guests. And then killed a few.

‘My master asks to see you,’ he said.

‘Who is your master?’ I asked.