Salamis

by Christian Cameron

  I didn’t need to hear a description.

  ‘But her brother means to save her?’ I asked.

  Siccinius shrugged. Even in darkness, that gesture is unmistakable. ‘You ask me as a spy? I do not know. As a judge of events? I would say that both men fear him. He is one of the most famous warriors in the Great King’s forces. They say that, without him, Miletus would still be free, and they say that his ship scored more kills at Artemisium than any other Ionian or Phoenician.’

  I laughed. ‘That’s no surprise,’ I said. ‘He was always best.’

  I admit it – I smiled to think that we were about to be on the same side, to rescue his sister.

  Half a world at war, and heaps of dead men, oceans of blood, and the three of us were about to be at the centre.

  Sometimes, it is like living in the Iliad.

  He told me more, everything he knew about the Great King’s plans to abandon Mardonius and run for Susa. I admit it: I doubted what he was telling me as the Xerxes I’d met was far braver than that. I had a hard time imagining any Persian monarch cutting and running on an unbeaten army and a single naval defeat.

  But it didn’t matter.

  Almost nothing mattered but getting to Ephesus.

  ‘One more thing,’ he said. ‘If my master knew I was telling you this, I’d be dead.’

  I nodded. What more could he tell me?

  I saw his head move, his unconscious glance to left and right to make sure that we were not overheard. ‘Xerxes has lost three ­brothers and two sons in this campaign,’ he said. ‘He’s putting all the rest of his boys on two of the fleet’s fastest ships. They’re running for Sardis via Ephesus. Artemisia is taking two of them, and Diomedes the other two.’

  I could see – I still see – the hand of the gods in all of it, and like any good tragedy I had been manipulated by my own needs and desires, and only allowed, now, at the last hour, to know what the stakes were, and what my role might be.

  I did not dare even allow myself to imagine what fate Artaphernes had in mind for Briseis. It would be horrible, and it would not allow her either dignity or repute. And I knew Diomedes hated her and was weak enough to seek such a horrid revenge.

  Perhaps it says something about me that, until that moment, I had never really considered that either man would exact ‘revenge’, because it’s such a waste of a strong man’s time to do such a thing. But they were both weak men and they needed to hurt something they were strong enough to hurt.

  Artemisia was made of different stuff. I wondered if she could be brought to bargain – if she might mislike the killing of another woman. Or perhaps not. Common gender had never stopped me from killing a man.

  Let me say one thing more as we head for the finish line in an ugly race. Briseis knew the odds against her – had, in fact, warned me herself. And she was not a poor weak woman who needed my sword arm; that is, she might, but she was the mistress of her own life and her own fate. I knew that, short of outright swordplay, she could probably master Diomedes by politics alone. Artaphernes would be trickier – but I knew she would not go lightly.

  I knew that, in the last case, she would kill herself rather than fall into their hands. And that the knife she fell on would be red with the blood of her foes.

  But I wanted her alive. At my side. And that was going to take the luck of the gods and some serious planning.

  The Royal Post was as fast as the wind. Diomedes was at sea and had a full day head start.

  All this was through my head in an instant.

  ‘I will do as I promised,’ I said. ‘Find me in Hermione in a month, or in Plataea in a year, and I will do my part.’

  ‘And if you are killed?’ he asked.

  I laughed. ‘Then I will have to bear my own curse,’ I said.

  In the end, I decided to take all my ships. My people – my oikia, the men who’d been with me for years – they were family, and I was about to tempt the Fates to overthrow me. Indeed, I already had the blackest picture. Diomedes’ head start concerned me most of all.

  And besides, Moire and Seckla and Hector, Hipponax and Brasidas – there were petty rivalries among them, but they were also united, and they made it plain to me that they were coming. All of them. My clever plan of a single ship slipping unnoticed through the rout of the Ionians was derided. And probably with good reason.

  So instead, I led five other ships.

  Cimon was bitter and proclaimed that I would take all the good prizes and leave the seas empty. But he promised to cover me with Themistocles.

  One thing more you need to understand. From the beaches east of Cape Zoster there are two equally good routes to Ephesus. A good trierarch can hop from Attica to Andros, and from Andros to Chios, and then drop down into Ephesus – there’s some blue-water sailing there, but not much, and if you know your landfalls, it’s not that difficult. However, autumn was coming on; we were entering the ‘season of winds’ and ships were lost in autumn. A more cautious trierarch or helmsman would stay in with the land and go along Euboea and then nip past Thessaly and Thrake before turning south, with good beaches and mutton all the way. I’ve done both, as you may have noted.

  But with Briseis’s life on the line there was no question that I’d take the more direct, riskier path. And with six ships, the risk was lesser in every way – but mostly because I assumed the Phoenicians, the best mariners if not the best fighters, would take that route home and we were going to be sharing the same waters and perhaps the same beaches. With six ships I felt I could realistically handle anything that Ba’al had to offer.

  Be that as it may, breakfast was very early. There was no ‘captain’s council’ because my friends presented me with their demands. Moire and Seckla stood in front of the rest, in the dark, and I noticed that for once, Giannis and Brasidas, who were never far from me, were standing with their other friends.

  ‘We’re all coming to Ephesus,’ Seckla said.

  I nodded. ‘Very well,’ I said.

  See? Leadership. Command. Knowing when to follow. Hah! I am only mocking myself. In truth, I was mad as a tanner for a few beats of my heart, merely because they were flouting my wishes, but before a single libation had been spilled, I saw how much easier moving in force would be. Besides, with Phayllos’s ship and Naiad we had some chance of passing as Ionians ourselves.

  Except Lydia. With her heavy mainmast and raked boat-sail mast, she was probably the best-known warship on the ocean that year and there was no disguising her. In the end, I decided we could pretend to be a capture if deception was required.

  The next hours were so frustrating I could barely restrain myself. I wanted to get into motion, but Cimon restrained me until Themistocles let it be known that we were to continue forward. Again I feel I have to explain – I did not want Themistocles to know I was gone. The risk of betrayal was still real.

  So we didn’t leave the beach until the sun was fully above the ­horizon, and those were some of the longest hours of my life, although we all benefited from them by exchanging oarsmen and loading fresh water where we could.

  I was determined to make for Megalos, the islet with the perfect beach where I’d waited for Cimon less than a month before. It was a full day’s sail and required some luck, but it had the signal advantage that I would appear to be Cimon’s vanguard all day, if Themistocles were to watch at all.

  Finally, when I was ready to rage at anyone who stood against me – isn’t waiting the most frustrating thing, thugater? Finally, we put oarsmen to stations and got her keel off the beach. Themistocles and the rest of the fleet were left behind and my ships – Lydia, Naiad, Iris, Black Raven, Storm Cutter, and Amastris – were away, in a loose file led by Lydia and Cimon’s squadron fell in behind us.

  We still had a beautiful wind and when we came to Sounion and turned due west, the wind was perfect, just over the starboard quarter, and Lydia beg
an to pull away. Then we began to use all the tricks we’d learned in fifteen years at sea: wetting sails, using rowers leaning out to stiffen the ship, brailing up parts of the sail to get the perfect drive – a warship can drive too deep with her ram when overpressed by sail and sometimes, just to confuse a landsman, a little less sail is a better rig.

  But it was noon, the sun high in the sky, and our lookout in the basket high above us called down that he could see two sails to the west. The development was sudden, as it always is at sea. In an hour there were forty enemy ships hull up to the north and west, running for the Euboean channel, and another forty running west and south under sail. Either going for Andros or planning to sail up the eastern shore of Euboea – by the way, not a course I’d have chosen, and the wrecks of fifty of the Great King’s ships would show why.

  Right before us were a pair of ill-handled merchantmen. The beautiful west wind that had us racing over the seas was not so kind to them and we were making distance on them five to two.

  I had Megakles aboard – a precaution in case of a storm – and I waved to Brasidas and then summoned both of them aft.

  ‘There’s what we need to make Ephesus,’ I said. ‘Take either one, collect mutton and grain at Megalos, and no one will starve.’

  Brasidas nodded.

  I turned to Megakles. But he shook his head.

  ‘Seckla’s been to Megalos and I ain’t,’ he said. ‘I’ll steer this girl and Seckla can have the tub all day.’

  That was sense too. I had the oddest feeling that my friends were taking charge of me, that I was not, strictly speaking, ‘in command’, but Megakles was correct – Megalos had a tricky beach, especially if he should come in after the sun set, which it did earlier every ­evening.

  We came down on the pair of them like falcons taking rabbits and they did not fight. Since we had to lose way to take them, I let Hector blood his crew by taking the nearer while we took the farther, but he had shouted orders only to take ransoms and strip any valuables and leave them – orders which, as the afternoon lengthened, we watched him disobey.

  But the kind wind threw all my calculations out the window, and we were on the beach when the sun was a fine red ball over Attica to the west, and the two round ships were already visible as sails. They came in on sweeps well before darkness fell. We had fires roaring on the beach and a little drama as two triremes appeared and gave them chase – two triremes who proved to be Cimon’s and not Ionians.

  Hector had picked up a supply ship belonging to Artemisia. He took a fair amount of teasing from my friends about whoring after a prize and getting rich too young, but then he led me aside.

  ‘Summon Phayllos,’ he said.

  He was so serious I knew he must be in earnest. So I went and fetched Phayllos and his young friend Lygdamis. The Chian trierarch was not pleased to be summoned and his face froze when Hector came up the beach with a small man with a nose like an eagle’s beak – the captain of the merchantman.

  ‘Aye,’ he said, in Phoenician-accented Greek. ‘That’s him. The Queen’s son. Like I said.’

  I had Artemisia’s son.

  The two ships were full of food and had almost a thousand gold darics in back pay for various Ionian crews. I took it, served out the money instantly as pay to my own oarsmen, and kept the food, packing it all into one hull. Then I graciously put the two crews into the slower of the two ships and let them go without ransom.

  In thanks, the Phoenician captain showed me where another thousand gold darics were dangling from an oar-port into the water on a rope. I had never seen that one before.

  The gods were with us. I was sailing to redeem my oath, and by Poseidon and my ancestor Heracles, the capture of two fat prizes – useful little ships – and the good west wind made me feel that it was possible after all. And – I freely admit it – my friends held me up. It wasn’t anything I can describe – no backslapping, very few words.

  But they were all there, save Cimon himself and Aristides, and they had other responsibilities.

  To cap my good luck, the villagers on the back of the islet sold me most of what was left of their flocks and grain. The Medes had never come near them – that islet was a long row east of the channel, as my oarsmen had cause to know.

  We were up before dawn and the hulls were wet as soon as we could see the two rocks that made the beach a hazard. Then we rowed south – not a long row, but far enough to warm up our ­bodies and give the oarsmen a sense of how lucky they were to have a favour­able wind, which today, as if Poseidon and the zephyrs were my personal friends, blew from the north and west to the south and east, wafting us, once we weathered the southern tip of Euboea, almost due west, leaving Andros on our starboard side, and then – with the sun still low in the east – we coasted out into the deep blue and turned south and east, and dolphins came and played by our bows – a huge pod of dolphins that leapt and leapt, playing like people in the waves, so that we knew the gods were with us.

  Then I really began to hope. My fertile mind could imagine every horror – torture, rape, degradation – inflicted on her. But my rational head said that she was as brave as a lion and had a cool head, and would not be an easy mark for any man.

  The dolphins were a good sign. Indeed, all the auguries that day were favourable, and the birds of the air were from Zeus, and as we passed the east coast of Andros – probably less than sixty sea stades from where Themistocles was even then demanding that the allied fleet lay siege to Andros town – my heart rose again, as it had the day before.

  Noon, and I could see the cape at the south end of Andros. As I had expected, the channel between Andros and Tenos had ships, both merchants and triremes, emerging on the wind and spreading their sails. It is a narrow channel, and I came down on them as if I’d planned the ambush for a week.

  Six ships – only four warships. Easy pickings. A fortune in ransoms and gold.

  We passed across their bows and left them in our wakes, with a new pod of dolphins escorting us. As the sun rolled down the sky we lost the wind against the island and began to row. Our attendant, the captured merchant, went far to leeward on the wind. I missed Megakles, but he was the best ship-handler among us.

  We began to pass Tenos. I was going south of my intended track because of the wind. I had a feeling for it, and I wanted to have one more meal on land. But I needed to beat the fastest of the enemy ships across the deep blue. My choices in navigation were severely limited and the knowledge that I was wagering Briseis’s life and honour was always with me.

  I do not seek your sympathy, but some among you wish to know what it was like for us, then. So let me say – my left hand was still not healed of the loss of fingers, and when I rolled over the side of the trireme in the Bay of Salamis I wrenched my left shoulder, and a day of fighting – again and again – is more wearing that even the blind poet Homer could tell. It was, I think, three or four days since the great battle, and I was only starting to feel like a man, and my moods swung wildly between elation and depression, so that I had to watch my words the way a good shepherd watches his flock, for fear of speaking dung to a friend, or spitting bile on someone I loved. To add to this the burden of a long seaward chase against odds –

  I only say this to say that, despite the years and the events, I loved Briseis enough to try. With everything I had.

  We made the southern tip of Tenos and the beach there was empty. We were now south of the track of the fleeing Ionians and we’d made a remarkable passage.

  We landed well before sunset. I gathered my people and laid it out for them: we were going into the Deep Blue in the darkness. This had always been my plan, my secret weapon to beat Artemisia and the Red King into Ephesus.

  And I wanted them all to eat well first. We slaughtered the sheep and boiled the grain and drank the wine – thin stuff, but infinitely better than no wine at all, I promise you.

  No one was
grim. Indeed, a day of fair sailing and dolphins made even the superstitious old men like Sikli and Leon pronounce the night crossing of the open ocean to be ‘something to remember, boys and no mistake’.

  We left Megakles on the beach. He chose the role, and he was most fit for it – to hold tight three days and if we did not return, to bolt for Salamis or Hermione. He still had a day’s food for my whole squadron, and that could be our salvation. I had to plan for the escape, too, not just the rescue.

  And then we were away, running east into the darkening sky.

  I hadn’t tried this exact trick before, but it stood to reason, and even Megakles voted for it. My thought was that the rising sun should show us the mountains of Samos at the very least. It is ten parasangs, more or less, from the southern tip of Andros due east to the southern tip of Chios. A day’s sail with a perfect wind. Why not a night’s? And thus, no worries about navigation with the stars.

  Men slept.

  I did not.

  There is nothing to tell. The rising sun showed me Chios on my port bow, and well it should have – I had a dozen of the best navigators on the ocean with me, and all perfectly willing to tell me if my heading went from their reckoning. We raised Chios in the first dawn and then the race was on.

  Full dawn showed me more than Chios.

  Away to the north of me, as I turned north on the morning breeze to run up the west coast of Chios while I had a favourable wind, I saw ships coming off the beaches of Chios.

  I knew the Red King as soon as there was enough light in the sky, and I was fairly certain that I knew Artemisia.

  They were at least a parasang – thirty-six stades – away. But it was no coincidence, if you do your reckoning. They’d had a few hours’ jump, and we’d just earned that back running all night on the Great Blue, and now they were under my lee. I had the wind, and the initiative.

  Artemisia had the Great King’s sons, and six ships – a perfect match for my people, except that we’d just beat them like a drum at Salamis.