Salamis

by Christian Cameron

  We rowed nearer the land. We were merely cruising; a slow, steady pace with only two banks of oars rowing, so that we moved only twenty-five stades an hour or so.

  After about as much time as it takes an orator to deliver a speech, we were coming up on the west end of their beach. We were close enough to hear men calling out. Seckla was in the bow and he waved and shouted in his African tongue and in Phoenician.

  We turned east and followed Cimon along the edge of the beach, so close in we might have thrown fire into the ships. Cimon’s daring plan was that we would imitate a newly arrived squadron looking for a landing place while we crept along, bold as a Piraeus waterfront girl, and counted our enemies.

  We made it a third of the way around the Bay of Phaleron before they smoked us. But when they did, forty ships came off the beach all together, from every compass point. It happened so quickly that we passed from stealth to terror in two beats of the heart. The water was suddenly so full of enemies that it seemed as if we were blood poured into an ocean full of sharks.

  The ships nearest me were Egyptian – excellent ships with highly trained crews who nonetheless hated the Great King as much as I did and perhaps more. Egypt had only recently revolted and the revolt had been suppressed savagely. The Egyptians were among the first in the water, but they approached cautiously, giving my ship time to turn end for end. As soon as my bow was pointed at the open sea and I had the wind behind me, I motioned at Leukas and he put the mainsail onto the yard in record speed while the oarsmen pulled us hard to the south.

  To my port side, over to the west, lay Athena Nike. Aristides made his turn and then, by ill-luck, fouled something, and it took him precious heartbeats to free his ram-bow. He had a crowd of Ionians coming up on his port side, and he had to turn towards me to escape being boarded even as his ship finally leapt into motion.

  I found myself gnawing on one of my fingers. A dreadful habit, but the tension of watching that race – if it can be called a race when no one is yet moving at full speed – was more than I could bear. Athena Nike was slowly moving east and south, but the Ionians were pulling closer with every stroke.

  I took a breath and looked to my starboard side. There were my two Corinthians, about two stades away and already setting their sails. Tyche had decreed that the Ionians on the western beaches were the slowest of all to guess who we were, and the ships of Miletus and Mycale and Ephesus were the last off their beach, so that Lykos and Philip pulled effortlessly away.

  Leaving me with some empty ocean under my starboard side.

  I beckoned to Seckla and got him between the steering oars and gave him a notion of my intentions and then ran down the half-deck to the platform amidships. The sail was set to the yard, but I shouted to Leukas to keep it all on deck, something easier in a trihemiolia than in a trireme, I promise you, because you have a deck under your feet and room to spread the sail without fouling the rowers.

  ‘Prepare to turn to starboard,’ I said. I held up my right hand to make sure I did not give the wrong order. I have been known to mix left and right at inconvenient times. I remember because I stared at my right hand and breathed to make sure I called the correct direction.

  Right under my bare feet, a rower looked up – Sikli. He grinned.

  ‘Five minutes rowing and you’re done for the day,’ I said.

  He grunted and men around him laughed. Always a good sign.

  ‘Hard to starboard,’ I roared.

  I saw Sikli dip his oar and push, holding the blade steady against the whole impulse of the ship, as did every starboard-side rower, and as the blades bit, the ship turned. It turned very rapidly, losing momentum as it turned, so that the bow went from pointing due south very quickly to east, and then more slowly around to north, the port-side rowers still pulling. The ship heeled a long way, and as we went broadside on to the now northern wind we took on some water through the lowest tier of oar-ports.

  I watched my pursuers.

  This was going to be close, even by my standards.

  I was delighted to see the Egyptians hesitate as I went bow on to them, offering combat. While a dozen of them had exploded off the beach, there were only two in range. The rest were trailing away to the north, rather like the Carthaginians when we caught the tin fleet.

  Ka and his lads began to loft arrows into the lead Egyptian even as Brasidas stepped forward with half a dozen marines and provided them with shields from behind which they could shoot. This is one of the few innovations for which I can really claim credit, and even then it’s really an idea I had while looking at a piece of Assyrian art north of Babylon. The Assyrians, apparently, had shield men to cover their archers. It was a good idea. May Apollo, Lord of the Silver Bow, accept my words of praise that the idea never, apparently, entered the heads of the Persians.

  But I wander from my point. Ka hated Egyptians more than Persians or Phoenicians; his people, I gather, were always at feud with them about something. At any rate, all of his archers, who were usually quiet, dignified men, were suddenly voluble, shouting insults, screaming down the wind and loosing shaft after shaft.

  I didn’t see any sign that they hit anything. Perhaps they did, or perhaps their shouts and curses had some effect – perhaps one of their gods was listening. At any rate, both Egyptians turned west, declining the engagement.

  The archers went mad, cheering, and the marines joined them. You would not have thought fifteen men could make so much noise. Most of the deck crew roared, as well.

  All I could see was two Egyptian captains with no more reason to love Persia and the Great King than I had myself. Perhaps less.

  At any rate, I tapped my spear butt against the deck. ‘Prepare to turn to starboard!’ I called again. I leaned over to Onisandros, raised my spear, and pointed it at the three Ionian triremes pursuing Aristides.

  He nodded.

  ‘Hard to starboard!’ I called, and the ship began to swing, the same rotation as before, so that, having started with our head due south, and passed to the west and north, we now began to slant away east. I ran back up the tilted deck as the marines and archers sat down to avoid overbalancing. Seckla had the steering oars and was leaning forward like a warhorse in a chariot harness.

  He needed no order from me. He had known all along what I intended.

  I have said before, I think, that a fight at sea, all fights, at that, begin as slowly as the gentle fall of new snow, and then gather momentum as the ships close, so that not only does everything seem to go faster, but the speed of engagement, of orders, of your very heart, all seem to rush towards a climax as the ships near. I’m sure a sophist like Anaxagoras would make something of the idea, but to me it is like a play that begins with the chorus singing about some seemingly unimportant bit of myth, but by the end you are weeping your eyes out as Oedipus hurtles toward his ruin …

  Anyway.

  Between them, the hundred and eighty rowers, the oar-master and my helmsman brought our bow dead on line and a little ahead of Aristides’ ship. We were at least three stades away.

  Even as we watched, the lead Ionian, a ship of Halicarnassus, may I add – you know this story, young man? Hah. Well, here’s my side of it. The lead Ionian was a ship’s length aft of Aristides’ magnificent Athena Nike and something was slowing the rowers on his ship. Usually it was one of the best of all the Athenians vessels, but today the ship was sluggish.

  In fact, Aristides was taking on water from a badly damaged bow.

  The Ionian was coming up on him fast.

  We were hurtling into the Ionian’s flank much, much faster. But we were farther away.

  It was like a problem in arithmetic and geometry, except that everything was variable. The wind was fickle, the waves slowed the ships, the oarsmen were getting tired and sometimes you just have to guess.

  The lead Ionian slapped his ram into Aristides’ stern. It wasn’t a very hard
hit, but Athena Nike yawed and seemed to skid.

  Ka stood in my bow and began to shoot. He was shooting from the bow platform into the amidships of the enemy, and the Ionians were high-sided compared to any but Phoenicians, so that it took great skill and Tyche to drop a shaft in among the benches.

  But broadside on gave Ka and his four archers the best opportunity and they loosed shafts at a great rate. The Persians aboard the lead Ionian returned shaft for shaft.

  The second Ionian tried to turn towards us. But the now northerly wind caught him and accelerated his turn, so that he was pushed downwind. A well-built trieres has almost no keel – if you build one with any keel at all, the way I’d built Lydia, you began to wear it away every time you ran the ship up a beach.

  The newly designed ships were unhandy with the wind abeam. That was interesting.

  I didn’t think of any of that as we hurtled like Poseidon’s spear towards the lead Ionian, who had lost way ramming Aristides’ stern.

  Aristides complicated matters by turning to starboard. The lead Ionian wasn’t going fast, but she was fast enough to overshoot Athena Nike before she made her own turn, so that now, as Seckla followed the action by a long, curving turn to starboard to bring us back round the circle to due north, we were behind the enemy ships, and they lay almost across our course.

  Astern, about forty ships were coming on as fast as their oarsmen would pull them.

  I could not stop for a ramming attack, or a boarding action. Even an oar-rake would conceivably slow me too much.

  Aristides was raising his mainsail.

  The nearest Ionian was locked in an archery duel with my ship, and the further vessel was trying to get a grapnel aboard Aristides.

  I looked all the way around the horizon, but Poseidon was not coming to the rescue.

  But in the bow Ka was screaming his war cry. One of his men lay dead, two shafts in his corpse, but the other three were loosing at an incredible tempo as we closed the distance. Now we were less than half a stade, coming up on the Ionian from behind and at an oblique angle that cramped his archers. That is, would have cramped his archers, but Ka and his lads had put them all down. Now they were flaying the helm and the oarsmen and the deck crew. It is, as I’ve said before, incredible what a handful of archers can do when they have no opposition – four or five arrows a minute, all aimed, at a close range, from four men.

  So they did it, not I. The Ionian fell off, oars in confusion. As we passed his stern, Ka ran down the length of our ship from the bow, loosing a shaft every few paces – truly, a magnificent feat of arms. When he reached the stern, he leaped high on the curved gunwale of the swan’s neck and loosed a final shaft into his stricken victim.

  The Ionian was scarcely damaged, but bad luck and a long, thin trail of blood from her oar decks suggested she’d lost too many starboard-side oarsmen and now she was turning to starboard against the pull of their dead hands on oars stranded in the water.

  The original pursuer, the former lead ship, had a superb helmsman. Even as Pye, our tallest archer, loosed his first shaft at the new adversary, he turned downwind even as Seckla jinked for the stern rake.

  Onisandros was more awake to the crisis than I. ‘Oars in starboard side!’ he roared. Leukas joined him.

  The oars were coming in.

  Ka was loosing. He was standing by the helmsman’s rail and I raised the aspis I’d taken from a sailor so that my raven flashed in the morning sun. The rail, just near the stern, had few supports and no bulwark, and Ka knelt suddenly so that I had to lean over him with the shield.

  An arrow slammed into it. The shaft exploded and sprayed us both with splinters of cane.

  Oars came in. All this in two or three heartbeats.

  Another arrow slammed into my aspis, then skidded off the face and up into my helmet, knocking my head back.

  Another screamed into the face of my aspis. My left hand burned as a shaft went through the front face and into my antelabe, the bronze head pressed against my hand.

  We began to pass down the length of the enemy ship. We were moving faster, and both vessels were now coasting. We were perhaps a man’s height apart, gunwale to gunwale.

  It was terrifying.

  The Persians on the enemy deck were higher. They were noblemen in scale armour – men like my friend Cyrus, bred from birth to shoot straight and tell the truth.

  But they were all together in a huddle in the stern because of the Ionian’s design with high sides and only a catwalk amidships.

  I’m guessing they’d never faced a trihemiolia before. My half-deck was perfect for archery, and the low bulwarks nonetheless provided some cover.

  It was the grimmest archery duel I have ever witnessed, made more chilling because I could cover my archer but I could do nothing to strike at the enemy. When you are shot at without the means to reply, you are in a different position from a man facing mere combat.

  We passed the length of that ship in perhaps five breaths. In that time, I don’t think I breathed at all.

  This is what I saw.

  A Persian leaned out over his stern to shoot down into our amidships. He killed an oarsman but, luckily, the man’s oar was in.

  Ka killed the Persian, putting an arrow into the man’s back.

  Pye, the tallest of the Nubians, shot almost straight up into a second Persian and hit him and the man collapsed back, but a third Persian drove an arrow down into Pye’s neck, killing him instantly. Ka’s second arrow caught the third Persian, again in the back, and then we were helm to helm for a moment – side by side, the two ships not quite colliding, all the oars in on both sides.

  Ka and the Persian loosed together, ten feet apart. The arrow went through my aspis, splinters exploded off the inside, and Ka went down, his face all blood. The arrow went into the top of my thigh, but I wear leg armour and it did not penetrate the bronze.

  I threw my spear.

  A woman knocked it down.

  There was no hiding that she was a woman. She was tall and strong and she wore a fine thorax of bronze that had been fitted perfectly to her very obvious woman’s breasts. I had never seen such a thing.

  I had the sense to get my aspis up as we blew past her, which was as well, because she threw my spear back at me. I batted the spear down onto the deck with my aspis. My left hand hurt, but the rest of me was intact.

  It was one of my best spears. No need to drop it into the ocean.

  Then we were past them. I looked back around the swan of the stern, heedless of the arrows that might have flown, but there were none. She was a woman, a tall woman in a plumed helmet, and she was pushing her way into the steering oars where the oarsman had apparently been killed, and then I lost her behind the curve of the swan as she began to scream orders in Greek.

  Artemisia, Queen of Halicarnassus. I’m sure you know all about her. Well, there she was, the most bloodthirsty of the Great King’s captains. But we’d cleared her deck of archers and we’d killed her helmsman, which had a curious result I’ll share with you later.

  For the immediate future, she yawed suddenly to the north to avoid our grapnels – we weren’t, in fact, throwing any. Hipponax had a Persian arrow through his aspis and his left bicep and Brasidas was cutting the head off and pushing it through. Achilles, son of Simonides, was down, with blood all over the deck, and three of my oarsmen were dead or maimed; as vicious an exchange as I’ve ever seen.

  I looked down at Ka. To my joy, he was plucking splinters out of his face. One was through both cheeks. But he had not lost an eye and he was far from dead.

  Close abeam, Aristides was turning back into the open sea, due south. He had the wind in his great mainsail and he had some sort of temporary steering oar out, a normal pulling oar tied to the rail. Together, the two sufficed to bring his head round, and the wind on the sail and the long side of his ship gave him considerable spee
d.

  I saw his stern, crowded with men packed close like a tub of new-caught sardines. I knew then what must have happened: he was raising his bow by pushing the stern down, and that meant he’d opened a seam.

  Poseidon!

  That was the longest hour I’d known in some years. We ran south on the wind and Leukas got our sail, laid ready to the spar, up the mainmast in record time, and followed Aristides across the Saronic Gulf. Behind us, the Great King’s ships fell behind, but as we sailed south the northern horizon became filled with the Great King’s ships. They were still pouring off the beaches, and we watched Artemisia abandon the chase and turn west, and even saw the rest of her Ionian squadron close around her before we sunk them over the rim of the world. The whole Persian fleet was off the beaches and moving.

  Leukas watched with me, under his hand. He shook his head. ‘They can’t all be coming for us,’ he said.

  Odd, given the way they’d refused engagement, but the Egyptians stayed with us longest, and there were a fair number of them. But as the sun reached its highest point in the sky, the Egyptians also turned west. We gradually left them behind.

  But, best we could make out in the sunny autumn haze, the whole Persian fleet was forming an enormous line at the mouth of the Bay of Salamis and we were off their left or port-side flank. Only when we left them all over the horizon did we turn west across the seas, which by then, just after midday, even though every one of us felt as if it had been a month since morning, were calm and gentle.

  Aristides and all his crew bailed as if the Furies were aboard them. I could do little more than hang off his starboard rail and hope to save what could be saved.

  I won’t repeat a dozen frustrating shouted conversations, but eventually we understood that he could not point any nearer the wind than due west – and that he was running for Aegina before his ship sunk under him.

  It looked to me as if the Persians were forming for a fight. It was an afternoon of anguish, for over the horizon to the north the Great King’s fleet was offering battle to the league. Would they fight? By Poseidon, I was missing the great contest!