I scythed my sword across his ankles, and that was the end of the fight for him. Then I climbed out of the top-deck rowing frame. I was not the first man onto the enemy deck. Hipponax and Brasidas were ahead of me – without shields, and fighting against thirty Phoenician marines.
But the difference was that Nike was with us, and not with them. They already knew they were beaten. Even as I counted the odds, Moire’s Amastris grappled bow to bow. Moire had a gangplank for landing men and animals on open beaches, and he used it here, dropping it across to make a bridge for men with a good sense of balance, but Alexandros ran across the gap and onto the deck, and he had both aspis and spear, and suddenly there were a dozen more like him and then deck crew and top-deck oarsmen.
I wasn’t watching. I knew these things must be happening, because of the despair of my foes, but they were not eager to die without taking us with them, and we were locked sword to spear, breast to shield. The lack of aspides was terrible, the press was close and Hipponax went down with a wound to his leg, but Brasidas demonstrated why the elite of the Spartans practise for everything. And I confess that I fought hard over my son, too.
A man with sword alone is not without advantages. Nor were we facing a tide of enemies, but merely three or four at a time. Then I had cause to praise Polymarchos for making me learn to cover myself with the sword as well as with the aspis, and to fight the longer weapon with the shorter, and when I covered a spear-thrust, the man was at my mercy in a turn of my hand, nor was my left so weak I couldn’t catch a spear and pull a man off balance.
And in that hour, Sittonax, the Gaulish loafer, came into his own. He boarded from Harpagos’s vessel, where he’d chosen to be a marine, and he came up the side unseen through the blizzard of arrow shafts with his long Gaulish blade and began to cut his way aft using looping butterfly strokes, both hands on the hilt of the sword, a technique you never see in Greece, and he panicked the men in the stern.
The pressure eased and I caught up a round shield, more like something a peltast would carry than a man’s shield, but better, by far, than having my left side naked. It was light and I could hold it, even missing fingers and with my shoulder a wreck, and I pushed forward with Brasidas and Polymarchos himself, who came up through the catwalk onto the fighting deck, followed by Sitalkes, who had somehow managed to fight his way aboard with an aspis, a remarkable feat.
We formed a line, and then Alexandros was next to Brasidas and a rear-rank marine handed the Spartan his shield.
Only then did I see the gaping wound in the flesh of the Spartan’s left shoulder – I swear by Athena you could see the bone. But he got the aspis onto his shoulder and pressed forward.
I didn’t know that Harpagos was dead at the bow of his ship, an arrow in his throat, or that two more Athenians were boarding over the stern, with ladders, incidentally saving Sittonax from certain death as the Great King’s brother and his elite warriors turned on one Gaulish madman. Seen from above, I imagine the great Phoenician ship must have looked like a city under siege.
And being stormed.
The marines closed with us one more time. There were arrows, but there was Ka, sitting in the crosstrees of my permanent main mast, loosing shaft after shaft into their archers. He was naked, without cover, alone, and yet untouched. This is what I mean by the presence of Nike. Any Persian might have seen him and, with one calm arrow, dropped him.
Instead, he loosed every arrow he’d carried aloft and half of them found flesh. And then we were pressing them back into their own stern – into our allies, coming round the bend of the swan.
Hipponax tried to get past Brasidas and Alexandros tried to get past me. The last moments of the fight for the big trireme … I can’t say everything that happened, except that I took a long cut on my right leg, which I think might have been caused by my own people. Hipponax fought like a mad thing – which he was. He had a round target, much like the one I’d picked up, and he used it well, in among the last Phoenician marines. I was afraid for him; for a few heartbeats he was alone.
He battled a spear-thrust aside on his target and wrapped his shield arm around the man’s outstretched arms then threw the man, armour, weapons and all, over his hip and over the side of the ship.
The Phoenician to his right swung an axe—
Hipponax pushed forward, took the shaft on his buckler, and Brasidas threw his spear – and killed the man about to kill Hipponax. The shaft broke several of Hipponax’s fingers, and he roared – a surprising sound – and went down on one knee from the pain, but Brasidas and I muscled past him.
There was a man standing in gold, head-to-toe gold: gold armour, a golden helmet, with a golden bow in his hand. I knew him to be Ariabignes, Xerxes’ brother. But my marines didn’t need to know anything but that he was the one covered in gold.
I’d like to say I killed him in single combat, but too many of my friends were there for me to get away with such a lie. We all killed him. I got my sword into him, Moire put his spear into the man’s eye, Sitalkes and Alexandros, Hipponax and Polymarchos and Achilles my cousin and Sikli the oarsman were all there, and two Athenian marines, Diodorus, son of Eumenes, and Kritias, son of Diogenes, and Sittonax the Gaul, with a cut across his neck that should have been a death wound.
And then a strange silence fell for a moment. Far off, we could hear cheers and, closer, we could see Persian Immortals on the land, loosing arrows into the Athenian triremes under the Phoenicians’ stern, although their arrows fell short. Persians were walking into the sea, shaking their fists in their impotence.
I pulled the golden helmet off its dead owner and went to the side. I looked up the hill – the Great King’s throne was the closest it had been all day. The sun was high in the sky.
I knew he’d be watching. Where else could his eyes be?
I raised the golden helmet high, gave the Greek battle scream eleu eleu eleu, and hurled the golden thing into the sea.
That was not the end of the fight. But it was the end of the part of the fight I saw myself. It was too great a battle for any one man to see, so I’ll tell you a little that I know from my friends about what happened elsewhere.
The fog fooled Eurybiades as well as fooling the Phoenicians. He never gave the signal for the attack – nor, in fact, would we ever have seen it for the haze. So much for signals.
In fact, what happened was better than our plan. When the Ionians abandoned their own plan, which I know from captives and even friends who were with them, was to move in long columns along the coast of Attica, west, until they encircled all our beaches, and then to press forward in a milling fight, forcing us right back until they could massacre us in shallow water; when it was clear that we were going to fight, from our paean, the Ionians turned in place, going from three long files of ships headed west to three long ranks headed south, and they met the Peloponnesian ships and some of the Aeginians ram to ram. They beat the first line and pushed the Peloponnesians’ ships back.
But we broke the Phoenicians and, in fact, the western flank of the Ionians. The survivors retreated – and hopelessly muddled the Ionian centre, so that it was then vulnerable to the Peloponnesians. Cimon led the Corinthians – late, but we’ll leave that go – into the maelstrom of the centre, trusting us to beat the Phoenicians against odds.
And then there were four hundred ships packed into a very small stretch of ocean, and that fight was at least as dense and deadly as the fight we had around Horse Tamer. No, I will not tell you that my ships won the day. Every ship in the League won the day. It was all vital: every ram, every marine, every oarsman.
But when we swept Xanthippus’s deck clear, he chose to lead his ships back east into the same maelstrom that Cimon had adventured with fifty Corinthians. And at the same time, as we all reckon, though no one can quite tell anyone else for sure, Aristides accomplished a great deed – one of the day’s finest. In small boats, and swimming and
wading, four hundred hoplites crossed to the shores of Psyttaleia. It should not have been possible. But the Persian garrison was trying to use their bows to support the hard-pressed Cilicians, who were losing steadily to the Aeginians, and suddenly they were taken in the flank by Aristides and the Athenian hoplites. Certainly the Aeginians landed some men on the island and Phrynicus says that they used a captured Phoenician freighter, a tubby thing, to bring the Athenian archer corps to the island without wetting their bows.
The Persians were cut down to a man. And then the Athenian archers began to flay any ship that came within range.
And, finally, the Aeginians on the eastern-facing beaches of Cape Cynosura gave up on waiting for their signal to act as the eastward arm of the trap and attacked out into the channel. Or, according to others, they supported Aristides’ attack. I wasn’t there. But either way, the retreat of the Cilicians became a rout.
There is tragedy even in victory and the heroes of the Persian retreat were Greeks. The Ionian Greeks, who had been led so ill at Lade, held together, and fought like lions for their ill master. They killed almost as many Athenian ships as they lost themselves; the only Aeginian casualties that day were from Ionians. The Red King’s ship sank at least two of ours and perhaps five, although many blamed him for things he could not have done. And Diomedes, his henchman, sank an Aeginian ship at the very moment of victory.
But it was to Artemisia of Halicarnassus that the honour of the day must go. Not only was she the leading Killer of Men for the Great King, but when the Phoenicians broke, she was caught in their rout. It is interesting to me that I must have been within a few ship lengths of her, watching Heliodora leap with dignity into the depths, when she got her ship free of the wreck of their van, and fled east. But when Ameinias of Pallene pursued her, eager to take the Great King’s female captain, she escaped by ramming one of her own ships! Now, I have since heard from men of that region that the ship she rammed was a political enemy of hers; some say it was the Red King, but as you’ll hear, I promise you it was not. Others say she was just a wily woman. I raise my cup in respect. It was a trick worthy of Odysseus himself, and when she rammed the Ionian ship – some say a Phoenician – Ameinias naturally assumed she was Athenian and let her go.
Such was that combat; it was in many ways easier to fight the Phoenicians when we could always tell their ships from ours, than Ionians – every ship full of Greeks.
The Ionians fought us as the rest of the Great King’s fleet fled. But exhaustion kept us from destroying their fleet utterly. Too many of them made the beaches of Phaleron.
But that was for another day.
I remember standing by Seckla. Brasidas and Hipponax had Leukas out of his armour and to everyone’s great relief there was a lot of blood but danger only of infection; he had a bad cut all across one buttock, which makes you all giggle but is, I promise you, not a light matter, and a deep but clean penetration of the back of his left thigh and another in his guts, almost certainly a death blow. Brasidas had a deep cut across the top of his shoulder that bled like mad, and required him to be stitched up like a sail. Sittonax looked as if he’d been decapitated and his head sewn back on – a horrible-looking wound. We were all gathered around Leukas, as his wounds were the worst that were still saveable. Perhaps.
I mention this because Leukas had, for one reason and another, been sure he was to die in the battle, and despite that he’d fought very well – but he was sure that the wounds were mortal, until Brasidas began to wash them.
‘Men got behind me,’ Leukas said. He was, apparently, afraid we would think he’d turned his back and fled.
‘So I see,’ Hipponax said politely. He was holding the honey pot in his unbroken right hand and helping Brasidas, who was keeping him busy despite, or perhaps because of, his own pain. I knew that when the despair of battle’s end hit him, added to the death of the girl, he would be in a bad place.
Hipponax’s hand had swelled up like a melon. But I’m digressing.
Onisandros was not doing as well. The farther he got from the fire of battle, the worse his wound seemed, and I suspected he was slipping away on us. And he was in pain, and pain robs a man of courage. He had two deep stab wounds and a dozen cuts.
His screams were not helping young Kineas, whom Seckla had appointed acting oar-master. Kineas admired Onisandros and wanted to help him and we were trying to get a ship full of wounded men underway.
I think Brasidas wanted me to put him out of his misery, but I was in a black mood – I hadn’t liked killing the man who had raised his hands for mercy and as I grew older, the blackness after battle grew worse, not better. And I had been with Onisandros and Leukas too long.
War is a terrible mistress. I have given so many friends into the maw of Ares. And I could not forget that Seckla took a belly wound and lived.
But Onisandros’s screams and whimpering were not the trumpets of victory that we deserved and there were twenty other men as badly off or worse, and neither were they silent.
I went to Onisandros’s side, and held his hand a while, and my son brought the honey and we anointed him as best as we could.
He screamed.
I could only think of my master, Hipponax, when I found him after the fight at Ephesus, when we stopped the Carians and the Persians broke the other rebels. He’d been in a worse case, and a life of nobility was screamed out in fear and despair.
War is terrible. Let no one doubt it.
I knelt by Onisandros and considered cutting his throat – for his own good. For the good of all. And I decided that the man who was afraid was me and that I needed to be strong and listen to him scream and do what I could for him, and not be afraid of his screams.
But by luck, or the grace of the gods, when we wrapped a clean length of Egyptian linen around his belly, he grew quieter. His eyes fluttered open – and then closed.
He took a few breaths.
‘Just remember,’ I said to my son, ‘that this could as easily be you or I.’
Hipponax was crying.
I stood up, and looked over the sea. Kineas had the oars in the water – about two-thirds of our benches were manned, so that he’d emptied the bottom rowing deck. We were moving steadily, but slowly, because we were towing the great Phoenician trireme we’d taken.
As far as the eye could see to the east there were dead men, floating wrecks – triremes rarely sink when they are hit. Usually they just turn over and float like giant turtles or huge basking sharks.
Wrecks, corpses, and broken oars, a hideous carpet. As with everything else about Salamis, I had never seen anything like it – after Lade, the dead sank and the water hid the horror, but it was as if the Bay of Salamis wanted men to see what they had wrought.
The Great King’s throne was gone.
It was late afternoon. Over towards Phaleron the Ionians fought a desperate rearguard action with the Aeginians, who came in like sharks to kill the weakest ships, and harried the Great King’s fleet almost to their landing beaches. But around the island of Psyttaleia, the rest of the Greek fleet lay on their oars in an agony of exhaustion and victory.
In a wing beside me rowed Moire, in Amastris, with Naiad next outboard, followed by Storm Cutter with fewer benches manned than I had – Harpagos was dead and his nephew Ion was at the helm, and every marine aboard had died, except Sittonax, and many oarsmen and sailors, too. Then came Giannis and Megakles in Black Raven. I’d say we lost almost a quarter of our manpower without losing a single ship – the worst casualties I can remember taking in a sea fight, win or lose, except Lade.
The other Athenians whose ships ended the fight over by the coast of Attica gathered round me and Eumenes of Anagyrus, and we began to move slowly southward. The unwounded marines fished for living men as we rowed, and brought aboard a Persian nobleman and a dozen Ionians. We spared them – everyone had had a surfeit of blood, and men swimming in th
e water offer no threat.
The Persian was white and pasty from being in the water – he said his ship had been among the first struck. I gave him wine and fresh water and set him by Onisandros, because he was pretty far gone. He’d been in the water a long time.
Touchingly, he knew who I was. So I leaned over him, shading him from the sun, while Brasidas got me out of my armour.
I screamed too.
Blood from the earlier wound to my lower back had dried, making a great scab pressed between the back plate of bronze and my flesh. Brasidas tried to use water to break the scab away, but in his haste he got salt water.
I screamed for some time, I promise you. And no one offered to put me down.
But my recovery was swifter because I’d been wounded – often – and knew that the wound had only gone into fat and muscle. In fact, my wrenching of my left shoulder when I hit the water was to prove the worst wound I took that day, but that’s another matter. Age magnifies wounds. Youth, however, fears them.
Eventually – and I swear it took us half the afternoon to cross six stades of water – we were nearing our landing beach, and the beach was full, crowded beyond belief with people. The whole population of Attica was there.
They were cheering and cheering. Xanthippus was just beaching – he came up from the east as we came from the north – and I saw Cleitus with a pang, knowing that the death of his daughter aboard my ship would reignite our feud. That is how men are. Someone must be blamed, and truly, my Hipponax was to blame.
He was by me, and I was glad he was alive. But I was going to make him do this thing.
I pointed at Cleitus’s golden head. The man looked magnificent and still had his armour on. I was stripped to a terrible old chiton and my greaves.
‘You must tell him,’ I said.
Hipponax’s eyes were red and his whole face was so puffy that he might have been badly beaten in a boxing match.
His head sank.
Salamis Page 28