It is a maxim of many navarchs and strategoi to always make the bold stroke and never reinforce failure and this is, I confess, often true. But in this case, it appeared to me – and there was no one with whom to share my decision – that if Xanthippus and the Athenian centre were not saved, the Persians would restore their line, win a morale advantage, and be able to isolate us to the west and reinforce at will. I could not even have said this then. I had heartbeats to decide and a very limited number of codes to tell my trierarchs what I fancied.
What I decided was that I had a dozen of the finest captains on the waves and I’d let every man go for his own kill. Athens was not a great sea power in those days: many of her ships were officered by cavalrymen, if you take my meaning, and rowed by desperate lower-class men who had never touched an oar before that summer. They had strict rules and manoeuvres, taught over the summer and autumn, by Eurybiades and Themistocles.
But, with a couple of exceptions, the men under my hand were old sea wolves who didn’t need formations to kill. We were in a formation, a pretty one, sweeping west and a little south.
It was time for us to act like Phoenicians, in fact.
We had a signal from pirate days. We’d used it enough times that I hoped every captain would know it. After battle a pennon from my masthead summoned all the captains to my ship by saying the traditional ‘Now we divide the spoils of war.’ But in the midst of an action, against a Carthaginian tin convoy or Egyptian merchants, it meant ‘Pick one and take her.’ In effect, it allowed every trierarch to use his head.
Hector usually handled the signals, such as they were, but he was gone with our capture, so I pulled the wicker basket from under Seckla’s bench and found the little red pennon, and put it on the halyard kept for the purpose. We were two hundred paces from where Xanthippus’s ship was being taken. His marines were fighting and dying like Olympians or titans, but he had four ships on his one.
I ran my signal up.
I leaned out over the side to Eumenes of Anagyrus, who was not really one of us, and shouted, ‘Pick a target and take or kill her! Forget formation!’
He smiled. He raised his arm in the salute Olympic athletes give the judges and shouted an order.
I leaned the other way and got Harpagos’s attention, but he’d already seen it. He pointed up, said something to his helmsman, and waved to me with his kopis in his hand. He was smiling, and his face was full of light – that very fire, I think, that Heraclitus thought made us greater than mere men when in battle.
So having formed, we broke apart, like a pack of wolves breaks when they see the deer.
I ran back to Leukas. ‘Pick one by Xanthippus and put me where I can board Horse Tamer,’ I said.
Then I ran forward to the marines. ‘Let me past,’ I grunted. Hipponax was there – wherever he’d been off to, he was back. He wouldn’t meet my eye – the young man personified. He was up to something, and it did not matter in that moment.
Brasidas grinned at me – very un-Laconian. ‘Good to have you here.’
‘We’ll make you a Plataean yet, with all these displays of wild emotion,’ I said, but I clapped him on his armoured shoulder and smiled at the men around us.
‘We winning, boss?’ Achilles, my cousin, asked. As if we were friends.
So we were. ‘When we clear the centre,’ I began. Then I realised they had no notion what was happening. ‘We’re going aboard Xanthippus’s ship,’ I said. ‘Clear the Medes off Horse Tamer and I promise you we will win. This is it. All or nothing.’
I stood up and an arrow slammed into my aspis. We were close. But the gesture is everything. Men had to know.
I pointed to the golden throne, less than a stade away.
‘Want to show the Great King what you think?’ I roared. ‘He’s right there, watching us.’
Arrows came past me. Ka and his pair were using us as cover, shooting carefully. They had their own orders – to kill archers. Every marine with an aspis was a shield, and we practised this.
My marines began to sing the paean – just ten men. But by the gods … by the gods, my eyes fill with tears to say it, the sailors and the oarsmen took it up. Oh, that moment, and that day.
The paean of Apollo came off my benches and spread to other ships. I have met men from Horse Tamer who said that the sound of the paean coming towards them was the sound of salvation, that they joined in who could.
Leukas put our bow into the bow of a Phoenician ship that was grappled alongside. It was a daring, precision strike, and the result was spectacular. We smashed into his bow, our own oars safely in, and we were just a few finger widths to the inside of his bow, so that after the shattering first blow, our ships went between Horse Tamer and the enemy ship, popping the grapnels and breaking the ropes, smashing the enemy ship’s cathead and heaving it away, oars smashed, rowers injured, and cutting all its marines off from their ship. It wasn’t as instantly satisfying as the strikes that sank ships immediately, but it was one of the two or three finest ship-strikes I’ve ever witnessed.
We boarded Horse Tamer. We were long side to long side, stern to stern, and Seckla led the sailors in grappling close and then boarding. Seckla did not wait for me to tell him to go. My big deck gave me the power of carrying more marines and more sailors than most, and as I’ve said, most of my sailors were better armoured than more people’s marines.
We went from our bow into his bow, right into the teeth of an Ionian contingent coming from another ship directly opposite us. The press of ships was amazing – like nothing I’ve ever seen.
No time to think about it. No time to worry that my own ship was going to be boarded – unavoidable.
I leapt first. I went aspis to aspis with a man as big as me or bigger. He lost his footing in the blood, and down he went.
That one to Ares, and no doing of mine.
Brasidas, despite the terrible footing and the three-sided fight in a densely packed foredeck, got his shield lapped with mine like the veteran he was.
It took the Ionians too long to realise we were not on their side. They were Samians – oh, the delicious revenge on that nest of traitors! I killed three before they fully understood and Brasidas heaved them off the forward gangway, back onto their own ship, and I lost him there. He chose to board into the Ionian ship. You must imagine that Xanthippus’s ship had three enemies bow to bow, like limpets stuck to a fish, and the Ionian was one, we were one, and the third was a sleek ship with a red hull.
Again, there was no time to think. Brasidas went forward into the Ionian and Hipponax went with him, and Alexandros and Sitalkes.
Idomeneus was in his old accustomed place at my shoulder. Achilles came with me, and the others.
There was no quarter asked or given. They were under the eyes of their emperor, and we knew we were fighting for everything.
Nor can I pretend to remember every blow. I know my spear broke and instead of going for my sword I hammered away at my opponent, a smaller man, with my butt spike, hitting him again and again, stunning him with my blows until his strong left arm sank. I hit him with the sauroter to his helmet and he staggered, limbs loosed, but I hit him again and his helmet collapsed into his skull, and it too gave way.
I took a wound there – he may have been the one who got me, as he was a canny fighter. It was in my sword arm, and the bronze saved most of it. But not all.
I didn’t know. I powered forward down the narrow catwalk. Behind me my people were still singing the paean, which was wonderful, because by the blessing of Poseidon the Athenian rowers by my feet knew I was on their side, and they began to foul the enemy and stabbed up into the catwalk with daggers and javelins, and suddenly the Phoenicians in front of me collapsed. Few survived to run – they were literally pulled down, as if by the tentacles of a monster called oarsmen, except one or two brave men, who stabbed down with their spears and leapt back to gain spac
e to make a stand.
But another ship disgorged its marines into us from behind me.
The first I knew was that I could not feel Idomeneus pressing into my back. Long practice taught me to turn if he was gone, and there were plumes, towering plumes, the kind that our forefathers wore, the kind I wore in our first contests, a dozen or more of them, and lots of armour, and red cloth, red paint, red enamel. Very showy.
Idomeneus was adding to their red display. His face was lit by a beautiful, godlike smile, very like the one that Harpagos had worn. His right arm was poised high when I glanced at him, his smile like that of a man who has seen a god or found true joy, as he batted a thrown spear out of the air with his spear shaft, in just a twitch of his hand. His aspis licked out, caught his opponent’s, rim to rim, and pulled it aside, and his high right hand shot forward – his spear point went in under his opponent’s chin, buried to the base, so that when Idomeneus pulled, his wretched adversary tried to grab the point and was dragged forward; the spear shaft shattered, and Idomeneus used it like a club, as I had earlier, and then threw it overhand at the man behind his current opponent – all this in the time a runner would take two breaths. I couldn’t look longer.
I still had men in front of me. I had to be sure of them, and the man who’d backed away now dropped his spear and fell to his knees. His eyes pleaded for life. Behind him, another Phoenician was cut down from behind by a Greek, while a third was almost buried in my sailors.
I hate killing prisoners. It is against the will of the gods, against the justice men demand from men, and against the code by which warriors should act.
But I had a shipload of marines coming behind me and I could not leave this man to pick up his spear and attack me. And past me, my friends.
I killed him. I hate that I did, but there were other lives dependent on my actions. Probably he would have stayed in submission – or perhaps the sailors or the oarsman would have finished him. Or perhaps he’d have killed me, then Idomeneus, and then the rest, turning the tide of battle.
It does not matter. It was my choice, between one beat of my heart and the next, the way a man must choose inside the battle haze.
This is why we all despise the war god and his rage. But I did it, and then I turned, leaving remorse for other times, and put my shoulder behind Idomeneus’s back, and began to stab underhand with my victim’s spear, attacking his opponents in their thighs and feet.
And then he was down. He was standing, fighting like a statue of Poseidon come to life, and then a well-thrown javelin from his open side caught him in the side, under his sword arm. He finished his cut, sending one more foe ahead of him to Hades, and then he fell, with blood spurting far into the rowers’ benches – heart’s blood.
I got my left foot over him as he fell and squirmed, face down, the spear shaft still in him, and I went shield to shield with his killer. That blow broke mine, the laths of wood that supported the bronze face all cracking in against the layers of rawhide and linen. But his rim cracked and I stepped as far as I dared off to my right with my right foot, the ruin of my shield flapping like a sail in an adverse wind, but his spear stroke, overhand, couldn’t penetrate the bronze and rawhide wreckage as I tabled my shield, gathered my left leg to my right and reached over our locked shields and pounded my point down into the place where the shoulder and neck meet. My spear went in so effortlessly and so far that I lost hold of it, and Idomeneus’s killer fell, blood gushing from his mouth, and by the gods, he was in Hades before my friend.
But the marines in red were big, well armed, confident and capable, and the next man came forward undaunted. I was overextended, still amazed at the power of my overhand blow and its success, and he pushed his shoulder into me and knocked me over, and then only Ka saved me, as my adversary grew a black feathered arrow in his chest and fell over Idomeneus and his killer.
There were so many men on Xanthippus’s ship by then that it tipped back and forth like a living thing, and I began to wonder if a trireme could capsize from too many men on her fighting deck.
Like some of the newest Athenian ships, the heavy ones, Xanthippus’s Horse Tamer had a full top deck, so that the rowers sat in their boxes protected from arrows – and so that Xanthippus could carry twenty marines. But all this weight was high, which was bad for stability, and had to be countered with more ballast, which in turn made the ship harder to row and slower. Storm Cutter had been a similar ship, in her earliest form, and I confess that the full deck gave an element of protection to the rowers that was lacking when all they had was a canvas screen – and that deck also allowed a series of beams that helped stiffen the hull much better in heavy weather. But against that, the more difficult diekplous tactics of the Phoenicians required a lighter ship with a faster turn. Both fleets had every kind of trireme. Big and small, high and low, every shipwright had to try his hand at the perfect arrangement of rowers and oars, fighting deck and mast space.
When the Athenians built their new navy they made the rational decision to build heavy ships with big decks so that they could dominate boarding actions against the lighter, better-rowed ships of their traditional nautical enemy, Aegina. Of course, the sea wolves preferred the lighter, faster ships – and those of us who had fought in the west, off Magna Graecia, had come to prefer the hemiolas, which seemed to me then, and still seem to me, the best compromise of rowing, sailing, heavy hull and fighting platform.
I mention all of this because it is otherwise difficult for you youngsters to imagine that we were twenty feet above the water on a slightly convex deck that shed water and blood to the sides, and the sides had no real bulwarks, but just a narrow ‘catch-all’ the width of a man’s hand. In other words, a man who fell had a tendency to go overboard. My backplate was pressed against the ‘catch-all’ and my right arm dangled – empty-handed – over the sea.
The red marine towered over me, or so it seemed to me. And there, in utmost vulnerability, I knew him. It was Diomedes.
He recognised me, and just for a moment hesitated – savouring the moment of triumph? Wanting to take me prisoner to torment me? Who knows. His arm was poised for the kill – I was flat on my back in the blood at the deck edge and had no weapon and my aspis was broken and mostly off my arm.
I rolled over the side. It is hard to say exactly why. I think my last thought was to deny my boyhood foe his triumph. Or perhaps I had the sense to take my chance on Poseidon, who had saved me before.
I hit the water before I had time for another thought.
What’s that? Yes, sweet, I drowned – went to the Elysian Fields, met Achilles, and was then brought back by beautiful naiads, a dozen of them, who led me to an underwater cave, armed me in fresh armour, and then swam me to the surface.
No.
Impact with the water finished my aspis and wrenched my left shoulder, but I didn’t notice it. I was barefoot, and my armour weighted me down, but I had time to catch a breath and I had the wreck of my aspis off my arm in a heartbeat – and then I was swimming. Just for a moment I was deep, under the hull of Horse Tamer and looking up at the surface. There were dozens of men in the water, and blood – and sharks. And the hulls of ships as far as the eye could see, projecting down into the water with sunbeams slanting away into the depths.
Poseidon, it was terrifying down there, and the more so as I was afraid I was sinking, and I panicked, thrusting my arms out like a fool. But before I breathed water and gave myself to Poseidon, I made myself take a stroke, and I shot up – I could match my progress against the wreckage – and then I was close enough to the surface to raise my heart, and then I was breathing, the plumes of my helmet a sodden, hairy mess in my face, and I didn’t care.
I couldn’t rest. I had to keep swimming.
But Pericles and his friend Anaxagoras saved me. Naiad, the Lesbian ship, had come in to Xanthippus’s stern to put marines into the back of the fight and save the men still fightin
g around the helm. Anaxagoras had been the first man aboard Horse Tamer over the stern, and Pericles saw me go over the side. And saw – still waiting for his turn to go aboard the Horse Tamer – that I came to the surface. He grabbed a boarding pike and held it over the side from the marines’ box of Naiad. I grabbed it, and young Pericles hauled me aboard.
It took two Aeolian oarsmen and Pericles to pull me up the side – I was already spent. I know a man who swam to Salamis from one of the stricken Athenian ships, in his armour, and he deserves much praise for his swimming. I was only in the water for two hundred heartbeats and I was tired.
Hah! But I was alive.
I was on one knee on the catwalk for a long time – long enough for twenty more men to die aboard Horse Tamer. That fight had become the centre of the maelstrom.
I looked about. Pericles left me to go onto Horse Tamer. Even as I discovered my sword was still strapped to my side, and none the worse for a little salt water, I saw that my riposte into the Phoenician counter-attack had sufficed. Hipponax had killed again; his ship was backing water. Cimon’s brother was finishing off an Ionian ship that looked familiar, but I could not place her. Megakles and Eumenes were both taking ships.
It was here, and now. The Phoenicians were pouring men into this boarding fight and now there were more than a dozen ships all grappled together, and there were Phoenician marines aboard Lydia – I could see Leukas fighting in the stern with his bronze axe. I could see Brasidas’s plume two ships away, on board an Ionian which itself had a Phoenician boarding it over the stern, and behind him my son Hipponax’s spear went back and forth like a woman working wool on a loom.
Seldom have I had so much of a feeling that the gods were all about me. I drew my good sword – my long xiphos – and leapt down onto the ram of Naiad and then cambered up the stern of Horse Tamer. Once again, the enemy had pressed the ship’s defenders into the stern – there was Seckla, and there Pericles, and there Anaxagoras and beside him Cleitus, of all people, with Xanthippus roaring orders and throwing well-aimed javelins from the helmsman’s bench.
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