Salamis

by Christian Cameron

  I took an aspis off a corpse. it was too heavy for my liking, but there it is, on the wall – Heracles and the Nemean Lion. As if it had been left for me.

  I went forward even as Anaxagoras fell.

  I got a leg forward, got my right arm well back, and stabbed from very close. I had three opponents, and only then did I realise how badly injured my left shoulder was from the impact with the water when I fell over the side because when my opponent bashed his aspis into mine, the blow ran up my arm to my shoulder like a wound.

  But it is when everything is on the line that you show yourself.

  Listen, then.

  Seckla’s long-bladed spear baffled one of my opponents – he turned his head and I stabbed him in the throat-bole with a flip of my wrist, and then I pivoted and swung my sword backhanded. My second opponent was fouled by the falling body of his mate and he allowed himself to be deceived by the reverse my blade made in the air. I struck him full across the face with my blade, which cut the depth of two fingers into his skull, and then, good sword as he was, didn’t snap when I tore the blade free.

  The third adversary got his spear into my helmet; a good blow, but the helmet held, and although I smelled blood, I got my blade over the top of his shield. I did him no damage, but my point lodged at the base of his bronze crest-box on top of his helmet, and the force of my blow moved his head. Where the head goes, the body follows, and he went backward – and straight over the side.

  I found that I was roaring Briseis’s name as a war cry. Well, Aphrodite has turned a battle ere now, and on Crete they have a temple to her as Goddess of War. But by all the gods I was full of new fire, and perhaps it was Briseis and her own unquenchable spirit, or Aphrodite herself.

  Cleitus fell by my side. Anaxagoras was up, pulled to his feet on the bloody deck by Pericles. And down the deck, two oar lengths away, I saw a familiar bulk: Polymarchos, at the head of my marines, pushing towards me, but the Red King’s marines and those of my foe Diomedes were fleeing back into the two triremes that lay, beaks in, amidships.

  I got a foot over Cleitus and parried away his death blow from a Phoenician. Later, I prayed to my Mater that she not be offended. In the press, he was Athenian – indeed, he was my brother and not my foe, as I had promised all my men.

  There must have been fifty men on that deck and another thirty corpses – and Poseidon only knows how many more gone to feed the squid over the sides. That ship was the epicentre of the western end of the battle.

  But like a man waking from long illness, or recovering from injury, I felt the lightening of the pressure, roared my war cry, and baffled Cleitus’s would-be killer with a heavy blow to his head. He raised his shield and I cut his left thigh to the bone. I remember the delicious satisfaction of that cut.

  I put my other leg forward, leaving Cleitus behind me, and Seckla cut a man’s hand right off his arm with the sharp edge of his spearhead – his favourite trick, cutting with a spear, which his people apparently did routinely.

  And then I was chest to chest with Polymarchos and he grinned evilly.

  ‘You stopped for a bath?’ he laughed. ‘You look like a puppy someone tried to drown.’

  ‘Better than being dead,’ I said. I turned to Cleitus, still trapped on his back in the press, gave him my sticky right hand and got him to his feet.

  He didn’t say anything. He just stood there for two breaths. When you go down on the deck in a boarding fight, you are very close to becoming a corpse or fish food. I knew – I’d just been there.

  But there was no time for talk. He took a spear from someone and we pressed up the deck, finished the last Phoenician marines, who died well, and went over the sides. I led my people back aboard Lydia, where Ionian and Phoenician marines were fighting my deck crew and my top-deck rowers. My men were making a fight of it, but rowers are no match for hoplites.

  I say my men, but there was one obvious exception – a tiny girl, dwarfed by the bronze men against her, was fighting with a spear. She mystified them, her steps sure, her movements deceptive, and two trained men could not kill her. She gave ground steadily, stabbing when she could, and even as we boarded she turned and leapt into the sea.

  I knew her immediately – Cleitus’s daughter, Heliodora.

  But the tide had turned. An Athenian ship came in behind Lydia and put marines over her stern even as we went back aboard over the starboard side, and the Phoenicians collapsed, dead, dying, or in the water before I could get my sword on one.

  Then I saw my son.

  Hipponax came down the gangway from the bow, at the head of my people who’d followed Brasidas – indeed, the Spartan’s plumes were just behind him. He fought like one possessed, or maddened, and his spear point was everywhere, his aspis was a battering ram and a trickster’s cloak, and yet he seemed to walk forward unopposed.

  Then I knew where the girl had come from, and whose girlish voice had sung the hymn to Apollo.

  As soon as my deck was clear, I ran to the side, but Hipponax beat me there – and she was not among those swimming.

  Brave soul – to wish to face the Medes. I sent a prayer for her winning, and turned to Leukas, but he had two wounds, and I ordered Seckla gruffly into the oars. Xanthippus was cutting the grapples.

  We were winning. But when you are outnumbered two to one, you cannot stop fighting for a local victory. As oarsmen went back to their cushions, I tried to climb my mast – and could not. Something was awry with my left shoulder, and my missing fingers were not helping. I could not climb at all.

  I could not see Cimon’s Ajax, nor any of the ships of his squadron – nor any of the Corinthians.

  We had stopped the Phoenician counter-attack, but that was all. The Ionians were backing water toward the straits, unbeaten. The survivors of the Phoenicians were gathered around that red and god-giant ship, and it towered above the others like one ship piled atop a second.

  Off to the east there was a great roar, like the sound the crowd makes going to the mysteries at Eleusis – and then again, and then, a third time repeated, and again we heard the paean sung, and then a Laconian cheer, so different from our own.

  Xanthippus, who was covered in blood and certainly one of the day’s heroes, leaned over from his ship’s rowing station. He shouted some words that were lost, and then ‘ … big bastard.’

  I assumed he meant he was going for the big Phoenician.

  I thought that was the best new attack. So I nodded emphatically.

  Seckla was in the steering oars. My son Hipponax was on his knees, weeping.

  Oh, rage. Ares and Aphrodite, together.

  I pulled him to his feet and I struck him. ‘Cease your weeping!’ I shouted. I am ashamed now. I struck my own son, and I said, ‘Avenge her first. And then explain to her father why she died, you useless shit.’

  He stood and looked at me like a whipped dog.

  I struck him again and Seckla and Brasidas dragged me off him. I cannot ever remember being so gripped with rage, and the image of that poor girl, and the bravery of her leap in to the waves – a beautiful defiance.

  But there were arrows in the air again, and Ka and Nemet were in the stern, lofting shafts at the Ionians. I was hit in the aspis and the shards of the cane cut my face and woke me from my rage.

  But I didn’t apologise.

  I turned to Seckla. Most of our rowers were in their positions. Onisandros was wounded but on his feet – by Heracles my ancestor, it seemed to me that every man on my deck was wounded, except my son and Brasidas, who seemed to have had godlike powers that day.

  Leukas was sitting on the port-side helm bench, bleeding, with Polymarchos, stripped of his aspis, trying to staunch the blood and close the wounds. But elsewhere on the aft deck, surviving sailors were slicing cut cables and serving out new oars to men who’d lost theirs in the fighting. The men moved with decision.

 
We were still a fighting ship.

  ‘Fetch me alongside the big Phoenician, or ram him if you can,’ I said to Seckla. Leukas gave a great cry and fainted.

  ‘Hipponax!’ I called. He was standing with Brasidas, head down.

  He came slowly, even as the oars came out raggedly and the once nimble Lydia gathered way.

  He was crying, and he was ashamed.

  I dropped my sword on the deck and put my arms around him.

  ‘That was ill-said,’ I admitted. ‘It was hubris for me to strike you.’

  He looked as shocked as if I’d hit him again. ‘But you are right, Pater,’ he moaned. ‘I might as well have killed her myself.’

  I held him for a moment. So complex are the weavings of the gods. I knew he would now fight like one with no hope – brilliantly. And perhaps take his death wound, uncaring. Killed, in a strange way, by Cleitus. So we are tied together. Yoked, like oxen in a field.

  ‘No time for tears,’ I said gruffly. I might have said – stay, live. But I did not.

  ‘No,’ he said. He straightened. ‘Only revenge.’ He managed a crooked, terrible smile. ‘Let me go up the side first,’ he said.

  Brasidas shook his head.

  ‘Perhaps,’ I said. I turned away. I had once been young – how would I have felt if I had caused the death of Briseis? Who was I to tell my son that there would be other loves?

  The Ionians deployed well, but now the battle had turned completely along the narrow north-south axis that Themistocles and Eurybiades had wanted. The Phoenician flagship was still closer to the coast of Attica than I liked, almost under the Great King’s throne, but the chaos of the fight had put us hard by and Themistocles was going into the remnants of the Phoenicians even as the Laconians – and the Corinthians, although I could not see them – were smashing into the Ionian centre.

  And still there were mighty cheers coming from beyond our ­centre.

  As Lydia went forward, Naiad, Storm Cutter and Black Raven joined us. There was a brief pause – the Great King’s fleet was collapsing in two directions, back against the coast of Attica for the Phoenicians and westernmost Ionians, and back towards Phaleron for the rest of them. Many ships were simply trapped. Ameinias in his Parthenos made another spectacular kill just then, right in the centre, far from us, but under the eyes of the main fleet, and as his doomed adversary broke in half, the Athenian main squadron gave a huge cheer.

  There were no cheers from our adversaries. And we knew we were winning. We knew that, after many days of defeat, and some hard-fought draws and one victory squandered by the death of brave Leonidas, that now was our hour. Now was our moment. Now we were going to win. And yet, no one shirked. It is easy in the hour of victory to turn aside, to feel the weight of your wounds and wait for another man to do the final work and cut the throat of the downed enemy, but no one shirked.

  Nothing needed to be said. From the fight at Sardis to this day in the Bay of Salamis, all had been defeat and retreat and now we had men who were willing to give their lives to be sure it was done.

  I was one.

  The Phoenician squadron under the Great King’s throne had to be beaten. It stood off our new flank as the battle turned, and if left unfought, it could change the tide again. And yet … they had no room to manoeuvre. Indeed, their sterns were almost on the beaches, and the Persian Immortals guarding the Great King were in position to bury us in arrow shafts.

  But they had their own crisis, and the flagship suddenly had its oars out and was coming at us, trailing escorts the way a mother duck trails ducklings. It was badly coordinated and to this day I can only assume that the Phoenicians were humiliated that we were going to attack them without any response.

  It was a foolish decision, because they came out from under the screen of their archers.

  But it was also the closest thing to an open-water engagement that day: a dozen of theirs against about the same of ours. That was when I discovered that Xanthippus was not there. He’d gone to the big fight in the centre.

  War is often like tragedy – the Fates walk, and dooms are laid, and what happens often seems either incredible or easily predictable. We had the same number of ships on either side, in that engagement. Our ships had fought two or three or four engagements that day, and most of theirs – the Phoenician reserve – were as fresh as a child waking from sleep.

  But Harpagos was still avenging his brother, and his ram had taken the lives of four ships. Moire was just showing the Athenians how good an African helmsman who had once been a slave could be, and he wasn’t done with his demonstration. Giannis was close enough to me that I could see his tight-lipped determination, despite the three desperate fights his ship had seen that day, and Megakles – I had never seen him fatigued by the sea.

  We were buoyed by Nike. Indeed, to this day, I think of her, and I think of Cleitus’s daughter leaping into the waves – later I will tell you why. But it was Nike herself who had us in her hand. We weren’t tired.

  We were workmen determined to finish the task we’d been set.

  Nor were we fools.

  I gave no orders. Seckla determined to take one of the outermost Phoenicians and set us to rake her oars. Onisandros, his voice tight with pain, begged the rowers for another burst, and they came on like heroes, so that we went up to ramming speed from very close.

  Then it went like a fight between wild dogs in the agora.

  Our chosen prey baulked. At ramming speed, her helmsman panicked and yawed well out of line – and like a flash, Onisandros ordered the rowers to slow their stroke and Seckla turned us to port so fast I was thrown onto the deck. Another Phoenician flashed past our stern – I hadn’t seen him, screened by the first – and we struck the stern quarter of a third as he tried for the ship from Naxos that had come over to us a week before. Ka stood in the stern, loosing arrows into the Phoenician passing our stern, and even as I shouted for a grapple and a spear, Dy put an arrow into the helmsman and he fell forward into his oars. His ship skidded on the waves and came to a stop with half the rowers injured, all her oars going – and Harpagos cut off her stern, his fifth or sixth kill of the day.

  We were gathering way again, all our oars out. We hadn’t hit our opponent very hard, but he was pulling away with all his might, and none of our grapples had clinched the deal. He backed water into the shallows, and men started leaping over the side – where the Great King’s Immortals began to slaughter them.

  I didn’t have time to watch or laugh – the Phoenician squadron was gone. Half the ships were running east, and the rest were taken or driving their sterns ashore to be butchered by the Great King’s bodyguard. I assume he was consumed by rage.

  Giannis took his ship against the tall flagship. He handled it brilliantly – feinted a head-to-head collision and then went off, forcing the bigger ship to go to ramming speed for nothing. He passed the behemoth’s stern and turned, his archers shooting up into the Persian archers crowding the enemy deck, but in this they were our betters and Giannis took an arrow in his right thigh as he turned and his helmsman was shot down at his side, and two of his marines killed.

  But with all of their attention on him, they missed Harpagos, who had cut the stern off one Phoenician like a housewife cutting sausage and then turned, a long, easy turn to port, passed under my bow, and slammed his beak deep into the Phoenician flagship.

  Too deep. He struck at a weak place between frames, and his ram went in. Immediately the Persian archers shot down into his ship, and the Phoenician marines, from their higher vantage, went to board.

  About then, Seckla swept along the enemy flagship’s port side – opposite to where Harpagos had holed it – and raked along their trailing oars, killing oarsmen with their own shafts and breaking their oars or ripping them out of the ship like a man pulling the legs off a crab. And as soon as we were broadside to broadside, we went at the red and gold monster. />
  Her sides were a man’s height higher than our aft deck.

  No one baulked, but it wasn’t like any other boarding action I’ve ever been in.

  Usually you go over onto the enemy deck, sometimes off your own ram, like a bridge, and sometimes from your own upper deck or catwalk straight aboard the enemies’. It’s an art, a dance, not a science.

  This time we went in through the rowing frames. Only on a ship so big could it even be done, and it meant we couldn’t take spears, and I, for one, left my aspis behind me. Scarcely mattered – my left arm was barely able to function.

  As we slowed and our grapples went home – no misses now, because the enemy marines were all on the other deck, watching the wrong ship – Hipponax got to the starboard-side rail, ready to leap.

  Bless Brasidas, he simply pulled my son off his feet and flung him to the deck. ‘Another day, boy,’ he said. He gave my son a smile – a smile I still treasure – and then he leapt for the enemy’s side, grabbed the edge of a rowing frame, and flipped over his arms, his feet slamming into the rower.

  In truth, most of the rowers we faced couldn’t have fought us on their best day, and many were injured by Seckla’s oar-rake. But it is no treat going in an oar-port that is only slightly larger than your shoulders in your bronze thorax, which will not compress. I killed the oarsman in my entry port with my sword, and climbed over his dying body to get inboard – and took a spear full force in my back plate. It penetrated, too. Right here. See? About an inch into this muscle.

  That motivated me to move faster.

  I had no aspis under which to curl and I was cramped in the rowing frame. My opponent was above me. But I rolled over, which hurt my back wound like blazes, and parried with my sword – and got my weak left hand on his spearhead.

  He pulled.

  That hurt, but I held on, and he pulled me to my feet, mostly. I slammed the spear down and missed.