Salamis

by Christian Cameron

  Polycritus shrugged as if he didn’t care. ‘If you fall back on Corinth, we will not be with you.’

  Adeimantus looked at the Peloponnesian trierarchs standing with him. ‘So be it. Go over to the Medes like the soft Ionians you are. We will defend the isthmus.’

  Themistocles shook his head in wonder at the man’s stupidity. And truly, my friends, I have to say that sometimes it is painful to listen to the self-delusion of men who should know better. Aye, and women too, though men excel at it.

  ‘With your sixty ships?’ he asked. ‘Your sixty ships that we have protected in every fight because you cannot row well or keep in line?’

  ‘You lie,’ Adeimantus said. ‘My ships keep the best order. My ships are the finest. I have rowers who cannot question my orders, proper captains of gentle birth, and years of victory behind us.’

  ‘Name one,’ Themistocles said. ‘None against Athens, I guess.’ He made a lewd gesture, indicating broadly what the Persians would do to the Corinthians. Many of the assembled Athenian trierarchs laughed. I noted that one of them was Cleitus, a member of the Alcmaeonid family and a pillar of the conservatives. Laughing with Themistocles. War does make for strange alliances. I caught his eye. He didn’t avoid mine. We neither smiled nor spat. It was a little like seeing a woman you used to love with her new husband. Bah – no, that’s a false allegory, because that sight might give me pleasure, and Cleitus never gave me pleasure.

  ‘Athens didn’t even have a fleet until a few years ago!’ Adeimantus complained, with some accuracy. ‘You just tell your stupid lies. In a few days, you will be nothing.’

  ‘At least I will not be a Corinthian,’ Themistocles shot back.

  Eurybiades’ face never changed. His eyes did catch mine, for a moment.

  I smiled. I knew Spartans better than most men, by then. A year with Brasidas and Bulis and Sparthius had taught me a good deal. The old Spartan prince was letting them talk because, to a Spartan, most Greeks talk far too much but do too little.

  I moved to stand by him. He put a hand on my shoulder in greeting and managed a small smile.

  He was under enormous pressure and mostly he bore it with grace. I suspected that he wanted to kill Adeimantus with his bare hands, and possibly Themistocles into the bargain. I mostly agreed with the Athenian democrat, but he had the most annoying, patronising, intellectually superior tone that won him no friends among fighting men, even when he had himself fought very well at Artemisium. He always had to demonstrate that he was the smartest man in any assembly and his very demonstrations could make you doubt him. How could a man with so many merits need so much applause?

  And just then he began a speech with the words, ‘In Athens …’

  Now, friends, I love Athens, but many back then did not – aye, and many hate her today. Athens is not a mellow old nobleman like Sparta, but a brash, pushy vendor hawking sweets at the top of her lungs and willing to show a bit of breast to get you to buy. Let us be frank: there is a lot not to like.

  So whenever Themistocles started a speech with the words, ‘In Athens’, he was busy making enemies.

  Perhaps the problem, obvious to those of us from the small poleis, and invisible to the mighty, was that when Themistocles talked, he talked for his Athenian audience, and when Adeimantus talked, he talked for his Corinthian audience, and neither was actually speaking to the other.

  ‘Where is Cimon?’ I asked the navarch.

  His eyes narrowed. ‘Not here,’ he said in his Laconian way. And then, ignoring Themistocles, he turned to me.

  ‘I am concerned that he has been rash,’ he said.

  Speaking to Spartans is like visiting the oracles – you have to interpret what they say, because they use as few words as they can.

  Eurybiades didn’t look at me, but he spoke carefully, as if I was a slightly slow but well-beloved child. ‘Cimon spoke of “commerce raiding”,’ he admitted.

  First I’d heard of it. Commerce raiding always appeals to me.

  In fact, if anyone had asked me – and no one had since a memor­able night at the Olympics – I would have said that we should make a whole war of attacking their commerce. With the nearly four ­hundred ships we had on the beaches of Salamis and a few more coming in every day, we could have made it impossible for the Great King to even assemble a fleet.

  Also, my rowers were eating my fortune every day, and my town was being sacked by the Persians.

  ‘Shall I go and fetch him home?’ I said as sweetly as possible.

  Eurybiades had not been born yesterday, or even the day before. He looked at me levelly, the way my father used to when I said I could go to town by myself. ‘Yes,’ he said.

  Anything was better than listening to Themistocles talk, or Adeimantus shout.

  Dawn, and we were off the beach. I took only Lydia so as not to make a stir, and her hull was dry and clean from six days in the warm early autumn sun. A dry hull is, next to a good shipwright and good wood, the most important thing in a ship. I’d left Seckla in charge and he’d turned her over, stripped away all the repairs we’d made in the last year and replaced them with the new wood and professional shipwrights that Athens offered to all the Allies. Then he’d dried the hull for three days in the sun and only then caulked her tight again and coated the now dry hull with shining black pitch, finished with her original scarlet stripe along the oar-ports. Her sails were clean and dry and all her cordage was clean and recently coiled down.

  Lydia was, as I have said before, a half-decked trireme with a standing mainmast. This is now popular in all the western parts of the Inner Sea but it was rarer then, favoured by pirates and by the cities of Magna Graecia, where I learned of it. The standing mainmast was braced by the deck and two strong beams, which meant more sail could be made in a stronger wind, the boom of the sail could be braced further round, and the ship itself could point a little closer to the wind. None of that was, to be honest, all that important, although it would have been had I wanted to sail outside the pillars of Heracles again. What mattered most was that the sails were always available, day and night, and that we could use them almost to the very point of battle.

  The rig has bad points too. You can still lose your mast over the side when you ram. That’s a serious problem and a risk every time, because when you lay a seaborne ambush, that standing pole can give you away to a sharp-eyed lookout. On the other hand, our mast had a small basket like a bird’s nest, forty feet above the waves, where our lookout could stand. Perhaps worst for a sailor on the Inner Sea is that in the event of a big storm, you cannot simply bring your mast down on deck and a high wind puts an incredible pressure on even a bare pole.

  Oarsmen love them, though. They don’t have to work so hard. The deck allowed me to have more marines and more deck crew as well as some archers – every pirate’s dream.

  I mention all this now because, thanks to Seckla’s tireless work – well, and everyone else who stayed behind – our five ships were in a magnificent material state of readiness, and when I rowed away into the dawn the other ships were completing the same process. Many of the Athenian ships were doing the same, and even the Peloponnesian ships, a few of them anyway. Lydia was in as pretty a state as she’d ever been, at least since she was launched.

  The other major factor in handling a warship besides her design, the quality of her wood, and how dry her hull is, is the men in the hull. As we rowed off the beach at Salamis, I think I had the best crew I had ever had. Listen to my ship list, thugater. I had Seckla and Leukas as helmsmen, both brilliant sailors, both able to command a ship. I had Onisandros as our oar-master, the best lungs in the fleet, and Brasidas commanding my marines.

  And what marines! Idomeneus, another man who could command his own ship, and Styges; Sitalkes the Thracian and Alexandros, a brilliant hoplite in magnificent equipment, Hector my sometime hypaspist and Hipponax my son, and Achilles, my cousin. I�
�ll take a moment to say that Achilles had fought in the actions against the Saka, neither badly nor brilliantly. He tried to be a sullen loner, but Brasidas and Idomeneus wouldn’t let him. The Cretan and the Spartan were rivals, but only in the best way, and they competed to bring Achilles up to our standard.

  I was short by two marines. Teucer, son of Teucer, was dead, and Antimenides, son of Alcaeus, was on the beach with the doctors, badly wounded.

  Oh, and what of Idomeneus, you ask? On the beach of Eleusis, when they took him down from his horse, he woke, spat in the sand, and demanded water. He drank pints of it, and more that night at Salamis, and he was with us the next morning – with a headache like the hangover after the feast of Dionysus and no more. I have had my share of fortune in war, but I have never been more surprised to see a man survive a wound then Idomeneus in the fight at Leithos’s shrine.

  But marines do not power a ship, my friends. That is down to oarsmen. I won’t name them all – I probably couldn’t, but that morning I knew all their names. They were a homogeneous body, had been together for more than a year without a pause, and although we had a few new men and a few awkward sods, everyone was in top shape and most men were well fed and believed in what we were doing.

  Especially after we served out the Saka gold.

  Leon was the oldest and had the biggest mouth. But he was a man who could row through the whole of a storm and still make a foul joke to the man on the next bench. Giorgos and Nicolas had rowed for me for years and both were capable of being officers when required – they commanded rowing divisions. Sikli, a leering monster from Sicily; Kineas, a handsome young man from Massalia who was tired of fishing and never wanted to go back; and Kassander – and a hundred and seventy more. They had made, every one of them, enough gold to buy a farm. More than seventy of them actually owned property in Plataea, a couple enough to qualify as hoplites.

  But oarsmen and sailors do not easily come to wealth. They spend freely, on wine, on lotus flowers, on poppy juice and hemp seeds and women and men and jewellery and tattoos and cats and dogs and monkeys and pretty knives and any other blessed thing that enters their heads. Why?

  Men who use the sea know that life is sweet – and can be short. What use the farm, when your mouth fills with the salt water that will drown you? Why save? The next storm may be your last.

  And if you spend all today’s gold, and you do not die, then perhaps another fat Egyptian merchant will appear through your oarlock tomorrow, eh?

  Bah. I should have been a philosopher instead of a pirate.

  Finally, we had Ka, and Nemet, and Ithy, and Di and Pye. They were Nubians – actual Nubians. Men called Seckla Nubian but he was from some outlandish place further east, or so he claimed. Anyway, they were from south of Egypt, and they were professional archers. They’d been slaves, and Egyptian soldiers, and then slaves again. They were as talkative as Spartans. I think Ka liked me, but I know he fairly worshipped Seckla. The five of them were expert archers and all improved by having the captured Saka bows, with which they’d been shooting since dawn.

  We got Lydia off the beach well enough. And when we were skimming across the Bay of Salamis with little wind and almost no waves, she handled as sweetly as I’ve ever known her. There were some men up on the headland of Cynosura, and they cheered us. They were erecting a lookout tower. I thought of my daughter, and we swept on.

  But as soon as we were abreast of Phaleron, where a dozen merchant ships were loading the last refugees and all the naval stores that could be rescued from Athens military port, I turned two points to starboard and put the coast over my left shoulder, and we continued at a good pace. The wind was wrong for sailing, but by noon it came under our quarter off the hot fields of Attica. We couldn’t see any burning from the seaward, or smell it. But we ran up the mainsail and braced the boom hard, and the rowers sat back and drank water and cursed the sea.

  In truth, it was a beautiful day and the breeze was, if not perfect, certainly enough. We ran along at about the pace a strong man walks, watching the coast, which I kept about ten stades distant, with a boy up at the masthead in a huge straw hat. We sent him water from time to time.

  We had the sea to ourselves, which came as no surprise. As the afternoon wore on, I cheated the helm more and more to seaward until we lost the coast altogether in the late afternoon haze.

  A few benches forward of the helmsman’s bench, Leon’s deep voice spoke up from under the half-deck like a disembodied god. ‘Poseidon’s dick,’ he said. ‘Here we go out of sight of land, and off into the deep green.’

  Men around him laughed.

  I smiled.

  We landed, a little late for my taste, but the western sky was still ­orange, on the island of Kea about a parasang south of Cape Sounion. I half-expected to find Cimon there, on that very beach, because it made a fine position from which to watch the coast of Attica and retreat to the open sea if something went wrong. In the morning we put a tower on the headland made of fir trees and dried our hull while we had a big meal. It had been a long pull and a longer sail. The peasants were happy enough to see us and to sell us some sheep, which we consumed after making an appropriate sacrifice in a nice little temple to the Sea God. But despite our sacrifices, the breeze came against us at the height of the sun and in the afternoon we had a heavy rain. Our tents were all back on the beach at Salamis, so we were wet.

  We built big fires and slept soundly, then woke to stiff muscles and a beautiful day, and launched into the light surf. There was no sign of yesterday’s foul weather, and the wind was a stiff southerly with a little hint of sand in it.

  I ran north to Chalkis, but with the wind so strong from the south, I didn’t dare risk being embayed. That is, it’s not that the waters off Marathon are really a bay, but the narrows at Chalkis are so narrow that a few Persian ships could snap us up, and I needed to watch my back. So we sailed – pure, sweet sailing without toughing a halyard or a line – from Kea north to the southern tip of Euboea, and then we rowed back west, carefully, with the masthead manned and many an invocation to the Sea God. We didn’t see anyone, except a pair of Euboean fishing boats. We ran them down and bought all their catch, transforming their terror into wonder. Which was good fun.

  We ate their fish on the beach of a little volcanic island in the gulf opposite Marathon, which I estimated was hull down and due west about two parasangs. That little islet was sent by the gods. There was a small village of very poor people, who nonetheless had some store of grain and dry fish to sell us, and from their peak we could see right across the gulf and all the way north to Chalkis, or near enough. The gods gave us a clear day on our fourth day from Salamis. Now we could see smoke over Attica, but no Cimon and no enemy fleet.

  Now I cursed that I hadn’t brought another vessel. I had the perfect watching post, unless the Persians had decided to go the other way around Euboea, and even then we’d see them as they passed across the southern end of the gulf.

  I wasn’t too worried about Cimon, who had ten ships and could handle himself. In fact, he was probably the best ship-killer alive at the time, very much his father’s son. My only fear for him was that he might try some doomed action, like holding the narrows at Chalkis with ten ships.

  I needn’t have worried. Or rather, I knew him all too well.

  The next morning, the fifth, we saw nothing all morning and we dried our hull, but around the height of the sun the lookout way above us on the mountain signalled with a piece of bright bronze that he saw something.

  I went and climbed the mountain myself.

  From the top of Megalos, as the locals called the islet, the Gulf of Marathon was like a big Spartan lambda, or an inverse V. The point at the top was the narrows of Chalkis. The opening at the bottom was the Aegean. The left arm was the coast of Marathon and the right arm was the coast of Euboea.

  Attica was afire. You could smell it, forty stades away and more,
and see the smudges of grey and black.

  But what interested us was in the water. Up at the edge of our vision, where the land and water seemed to meet in the noontime haze, there was rhythmic flashing.

  For once, there was no hurry. They were half a day away, at least. So I sent for wine and lay in the shade of the little grass shelter we’d built, and watched.

  The longer I watched, the more I became convinced that I was looking at Cimon’s ships, and the Persians – actually, Ionians – pressing them hard.

  But then I’d tell myself another story: that I was seeing a Persian advance guard in front of the Persian fleet.

  Aye, but you really can identify some things a great way off, just as you know the silhouette and the movements of an old friend so far away you could never see their face – just the set of the shoulders tell you everything. Yes?

  I was sure that one of the lead ships was Ajax.

  I’d known that ship through three major refits and almost twenty years.

  Of course, our strong southerly wind had stayed on, so Cimon – if that was him – was rowing into the teeth of it.

  As they came down the coast of Attica, I could see it better. There were nine ships out in front, and two dozen coming behind. My eyes were already too old to pick so many out of the sun dazzle, but Hector and Achilles seemed to be able to look into the very eye of the sun and pick out details, and Leukas claimed to see that the lead ship was red.

  Ajax.

  Cimon was in trouble. Or, at worst, I was wrong, and that was the Ionian vanguard of the Great King’s fleet. Either way, my hull was dry and my crew superb, and I was pretty sure I could outrun any ship on the sea.

  ‘Let’s go,’ I said. We went down the mountain in a sliding stumble and it was a miracle no one broke their ankles.

  I remember cursing, because we looked like idiotes or untrained slaves coming off the beach. Too eager, I suppose, but we caught crabs, our hill slewed right and left and the strong southerly almost pushed the head around and broached us too – in calm water.