‘You loved her?’ I asked.
‘I was going to marry her,’ he said. His voice was barely audible for the cheering. ‘I thought you knew.’
I admit that in that moment I understood a great many things I’d been told and to which I’d paid no attention in the past month. ‘You brought her aboard?’ I asked, attempting, and failing, to conceal my anger.
‘She demanded it,’ he said. ‘You didn’t know her, Pater. She was like … a goddess, or a force of nature. She said that if I wanted to wed her, I needed to know that she was of the same – gold as me. That’s what she said. That she could row and oar and fight.’ He was crying again.
It was excruciating to hear him. I knew her only as the best dancer of the girls, nothing more. But Gorgo might have said the same to Leonidas.
‘She claimed it was her bride price …’ He hung his head. ‘I knew she could pull the oar. Onisandros helped me.’
I shook my head. But I could imagine Lydia or Briseis or Euphonia making the same demand and I know I’d have smuggled any of them aboard for the ultimate contest. And I had a sense – maybe because of what happened between me and Lydia – of what a woman’s life was like. How the horizon began wide and narrowed with marriage to become almost a cage with children in it.
But that didn’t assuage my anger, as a father and as a commander.
Anger, fatigue, fear, pain – all close friends. With the black mood that clouds your head after battle, a poisonous gang.
But I was no longer seventeen and I managed to walk away from my son and to help order the landing of the great Phoenician ship. She – he, I suppose, as most Phoenician ships were male – still had most of his rowers aboard with twenty Greek marines watching over them, and I had no intention of letting them be massacred by the crowd, or by Persians or Ionians either.
Brasidas led the unwounded marines ashore, despite his wound. They cheered him and the marines, but he cleared a large space and Xanthippus and his oarsmen pitched in, making space for the Phoenician ship to come ashore. The crowd began to bay for blood like hounds after a hunt, but some of the Priestesses of Athena and of Artemis were there and they silenced the crowd so that we could work the big Phoenician ashore.
We landed well, and the surf was down, and with the help of the priestesses the crowd went from vicious mongrels to willing hands. We got the ship up the beach as if he was made of parchment and a taxis of Athenian hoplites, eager to give us help, took the prisoners away, except the Persian, who I kept. Doctors came with a dozen remedies for wounds; one specialised in arrow removal and was very popular, and another had a preparation of vinegar and honey that he used on wounds, which he said averted the arrows of Apollo. The sheer number of helpers lifted my mood – there was even a man setting bones who looked at my son’s hand and splinted it carefully, and another who, as I have mentioned, used needle and thread to close the flap of skin on Brasidas’s shoulder and then pushed the Gaul down on the beach, knelt by him like a tailor of human flesh, and began on the slash to his neck.
Here is how close Sittonax came to death. While he fought, alone, a Phoenician marine or a Persian came behind him, threw his sword over the Gaul’s head, and was just tightening his grip and cutting my friend’s throat when an Athenian spear took the would-be killer from behind.
Onisandros and Leukas were taken with the rest of our badly wounded men to the big tents going up all along the streams – all made of our sails. Triremes, for the most part, don’t put to sea to fight with their mainmasts or their sails on board. The wood and canvas is heavy and the rowers don’t need the extra work. The handful of trihemiolias, like Lydia, had standing masts and rigging and made up for the weight in other ways. Suffice it to say we left our sails on the beach – most of us – and they made good tents for the wounded.
And then we had to contend with the adoration of the people of Attica. One of the oddest elements of that wonderful, terrible day is that we fought under the very eyes of our people. I don’t think any battle in which I had ever participated so clearly brought home to me the division between a war of justice – the defence of people who would otherwise be made slaves – and a war of injustice like the piracy which I had made for most of my life. To be wrapped in the thanks of thousands, or tens of thousands of people … the blackness of the day evaporated. It was not just me; every man coming off Lydia to pull her ashore lifted his head from the weight of pain and blood, saw the welcome prepared him, and smiled. Matrons kissed me while their husbands pumped my hand; little girls held my knees, and boys gazed on me with the devotion given to gods, and such was the favour shown equally to every marine and every oarsman, too, top deck or bottom deck.
Perhaps it was the cheering and the smiles that gave Hipponax the courage to face Cleitus.
I’m thankful that at the last moment, I stripped my sword over my head – lest it be misconstrued – and followed him. I could not leave him to face Cleitus alone. I admit it: I feared Cleitus would cut him down on the spot, and my enemy – I still thought of him as such – was still in his panoply, very much the aristocratic warrior.
I had seen him on the deck of Xanthippus’s Horse Tamer, but I lost him when he leapt into the shallows to help drag his own ship ashore. And I had other things to which I needed to attend; anyway, I trotted a little although my shoulder burned and caught my son on the wet sand.
‘I’ll come with you,’ I said.
He gave me such a look. So many meanings.
I stayed with him.
We went through the crowd around our own ship – every slap on my back hurt me – and then out of it, and then through the admiring crowd around the capture: ‘Did you help take this monster? Was this the Great King’s ship? Did you fight in the war, mister?’
Out the back of that crowd, trailing admirers. I confess that I was proud of my son. He was determined to face the consequences, even while attractive maidens threw themselves at his feet.
We came to the edge of the crowd around Horse Tamer. We plunged into the back of the crowd and Hipponax pushed people aside ruthlessly; he was in that hurry of spirit that drives a man to face something terrible and get it over, I imagine. And we trailed a few curses, except that the blood flowing over my left hip and the cuts all over Hipponax’s forearms made it obvious we’d fought, and no one cursed us twice.
We pushed forward and I could hear Xanthippus, good Athenian aristocrat as he was, giving a speech. Of course he was giving a speech.
Somewhere, Themistocles was no doubt also giving a speech.
And to be fair, so was Aristides.
That’s who they were.
Anyway, suddenly Hipponax slammed to a stop as if he faced a line of Phoenician spear points. I collided with him from behind.
A cry – an odd, barking cry – escaped him.
I pushed past.
There was Cleitus. He stood a few paces from Xanthippus.
And in his arms was Heliodora, his daughter.
Very much alive.
Of course she, a Brauron girl of eight summers’ experience, had swum ashore. In fact to this day, she derides us for ever thinking otherwise – eh, honey? I have often been told that I was a great fool, as was her lover, for imagining that a little three-stade swim would even be a challenge.
On that day, however, she tore herself from her father’s arms and threw her arms around my bloodstained son, who had been born a fisherman and was now publicly embracing the bluest blood in Athens.
Cleitus looked at me. ‘I gather your wastrel son kidnapped my daughter aboard your ship,’ he said calmly.
‘I gather that your daughter possesses all your arrogance,’ I answered.
His eyes met mine. ‘By Zeus, imagine our grandchildren,’ he said. ‘My arrogance and yours, my hubris and yours,’ he added.
But he offered me his hand.
By his orders, my mother
died.
But she died a hero, after a misspent life. And as I have said before, revenge is mostly for weak men without enough to do. Like tend grapes and bounce babies.
I took his hand.
And there, on a beach in Attica, ended a feud that began in the market below the temple of Hephaestus in Marathon year, or perhaps before that, at the tomb of the Hero in Plataea. I won’t pretend it wasn’t mentioned again, in drunken anger, several times. I am only a man. But Achilles stood at my back in the fight at Salamis and put Simon’s shade to rest, I think, and I took Cleitus’s hand in the same spirit.
That was the beginning, for me, of the realisation that we had won.
So many defeats and so many wasted victories. But that day in early autumn, as the sun headed for the western mountains, the whole world looked different to me – to all of us, I think. The people of Attica saw hope fleeting by and began to believe they might return to their farms. And I? I saw my son, openly kissing Heliodora, and I thought of Briseis.
Briseis, whose needle case I had carried as a talisman. Who had called for me.
I suppose that I had thought of her earlier, as I had kept my Persian prisoner. I think that as soon as I heard him speak of Cyrus, I thought of how I might use him. And let me add, do him a favour as well.
At any rate, Xanthippus pressed my hand and said some pretty things to his crowd about Plataea and me, and then a cup of wine was pressed into my hand. I remember Hector, all false contrition, telling me of how he’d landed our first capture and then taken part in Aristides’ assault on Psyttaleia. He had Heliodora’s friend Iris under his cloak, she pretending not to be there and sometimes nuzzling his neck, so that they seemed one creature with two heads. And I remember lying beside Brasidas and listening to an old-style rhapsode sing the Iliad, and then hearing Themistocles make a speech to a great crowd on our beach, by torchlight. I remember Anaxagoras of Clazomenae and young Pericles talking about what the victory would mean, while my daughter, up far past her bedtime, snuggled against me and asked me to tell her what the battle had been like. The stars wheeled overhead and I was on my sixth or seventh bowl of wine when Cimon tugged at my chiton.
‘Council,’ he said. ‘Why aren’t you at it?’
So I rose carefully and moved my sleeping daughter into my tent. There was there enacted a brief scene straight from a comedy; Heliodora was in my tent and so was her mother. They were hissing at each other – that’s my memory, which both deny. My son, fully dressed, may I add, was reclining on my kline, his hand bound to his side and his eyes a little glazed in the lamplight – by poppy, I think.
I tucked Euphonia into bed beside her brother.
Heliodora thrust out her chin and whispered something very emphatically, and then leaned over and kissed my daughter – ah, I loved her for that, and for her fighting and rowing, now that she’d survived it – and then kissed my son in a very different way, and her mother made a noise of exasperation.
Her mother dragged her away.
Who was I to protest?
I went out into the star-strewn darkness and followed Cimon up the beach.
‘You angry at me?’ he asked.
I stopped. People believe the oddest things, especially after a fight. ‘No,’ I said.
He hugged me. ‘Good. It took me for ever to get the Corinthians into the fight. Your friend Lykon offered to fight Adeimantus on the spot and he still wouldn’t move. And when we did start rowing—’ he shrugged. ‘You weren’t the worst off.’
We both knew what it was like to make those decisions. Life and death for friends and foes, done without time to ponder or weigh.
We walked into the darkness in more perfect understanding than most lovers ever reach.
About halfway to the headland, he said, ‘We won.’
I think those were the only words we exchanged.
The council was confused and very loud – what a surprise.
Many of the navarchs were there, but not all. I embraced Lykon and Bulis, delighted that more of my friends had escaped the embrace of death.
Themistocles was talking, but then, he always was.
In fact, he was demanding that we rise in the morning and attack the enemy beaches at Phaleron to finish the job.
He went on and on. In truth, I think he was drunk – drunk on a heady mixture of wine and victory. Well, most of us were. But Themistocles lacked our years of fighting and he had seen the fleet rise and fight again and again at Artemisium. I think he imagined we’d come off our beaches the next morning, fresh as flowers or perhaps tired but capable. And he had a point.
‘Make no mistake,’ he said. ‘What is left of their fleet is still larger than our fleet.’
‘No ship that fought today will fight well tomorrow,’ I said.
Many men muttered agreement.
Cimon spoke up. ‘I had an easy day,’ he said, though most of us knew he was lying. ‘I’ll have a look at their beaches in the morning.’
I nodded. ‘I’ll go with you,’ I said. ‘But I’ll have to pull the best rowers out of four ships to row Lydia.’
I went to bed. Men drank well into the night and the crop of babies born nine months later suggests that drinking was not the evening’s only sport. Heh! I can see a pair of you from here.
Born in the summer of Plataea?
But I get ahead of myself.
It was sad and yet delightful to go to sea the next morning as dawn broke. I had Moire as my oar-master and Megakles in the steering oars and Giannis standing with Alexandros as marines. I’d sent young Kineas and old Giorgos to pick the best of the unwounded oarsmen, and many were the drink-fuelled curses that morning. And as we pulled away from the beach to meet up with Cimon I wondered briefly if we’d suddenly find ourselves off Massalia, or coasting along the tall white cliffs of Alba.
‘The Argonauts,’ I whispered.
Seckla smiled.
I’d like to say we did some great deed, worthy of being sung for ever – and the time was not wasted, as you’ll hear – but in fact we made our rendezvous with Cimon’s long black Ajax and rowed out of the Bay of Salamis against the wind, experiencing a little of what the Persians had felt the day before when the wind had been the other way, and then we pulled across the open water for Phaleron with our sails laid to the battens and ready to raise for the run back. The risk was very small.
And as it proved, the enemy fleet was gathered at the eastern edge of the Phaleron beaches. Of course Cimon wanted to scout them and perhaps even put fire into their ships, and of course I wanted to as well.
But our rowers spoke in loud grumbles and some very slow rowing. So we promised them a quick trip home and contented ourselves with a distant reconnaissance, safely out of bowshot. We could see that Mardonius had moved much of the army down onto the plains above Phaleron, so they clearly feared that we would attack. There was even a stockade, and we could see slaves digging and others bringing up cut olive trees – cutting olive trees, curse them!
But there we were, perhaps ten plethora off the beach, beyond extreme bowshot, anyway. The day was clear, the wind soft and steady, and no one was coming off the beach.
But the bastards were busy. And I could now pick out individual ships – there was the Red King, for example, and there was Artemisia’s elegant ship – and there was Archilogos’s ship.
If I hadn’t seen his trireme, beached bow out and with Briseis’s beautiful eyes painted either side of the ram, I might not have noticed. But I stepped up on the platform amidships, wishing my shoulder was good enough to climb, watching Archilogos’s ship. Three hulls to the west was Diomedes’ ship.
There were men moving around all of them, all the best Ionians.
I looked for as long as a man might speak in the agora to a friend. Then I waved for Seckla’s attention. I didn’t want to move my eyes and lose my targets.
‘Take us in,’ I said.
Kineas thumped for the oarsmen, but close by me old Giorgos spat. ‘You said, “easy day”,’ he commented – not to me precisely, which might have been bad for discipline. His head was turned away, as if he was speaking to the air.
‘I won’t get us in a fight, and I’ll serve out good wine with my own hands,’ I said quietly.
‘And a drachma per man,’ old Giorgos said. He shrugged. ‘I could be gettin’ me dick wet. ’Stead of getting all of me wet, so to speak. Eh? Lord?’
‘And a drachma per man. But not paid today, mate.’ I was not a rich man just then.
He spat over the side and looked along the gangway at one of his own mates.
‘Well, then, since yer so agreeable, like,’ he said.
And they all started rowing.
We crept for ten strokes and then, at a shouted command, we went for it – straight to a fast speed – faster than a long cruise, anyway. We covered the stade to shore like a good runner and turned end for end even as the first arrows began to fly from the Persian troops on the beach. They were well shot, but passed over us – a dozen went into our canvas screens along the forwards rowers’ banks, but not a man was hit, thank all the gods.
In the time we turned, I had confirmed what I suspected.
Then we raised our sails and raced for home and oarsmen came on deck. It was a free day, and after the victory, only a fool or a very bad officer indeed would have forbidden anything to an oarsman, so they came and went, and laughed, and discipline was almost nonexistent. Seckla looked worried and I think Brasidas, whose wounds made him stiff, would have been appalled, but I had some notion of what they’d done the day before and what it took to go out again, and I let men loll on deck, watching the headland reach by – I even let young Kineas and two of his friends try their hands as steering, with Seckla and Megakles giving laconic advice and encouragement. The ship had a festive atmosphere that was marred briefly by the dead washed up like sea wrack after a storm on the Cynosura headland and we had to pull down the sails and row carefully after we struck a submerged wreck and almost lost Megakles over the side.
Salamis Page 29