As the sea wind blew my hair, I let myself think that I had kissed Briseis in the bath, and – what word suffices? Did I ‘possess’ her? Never. If anyone was the owner, it was she. Did I ‘take’ her? No. Men’s words for sex are often foolish, you’ll find, honey. Briseis was more like a goddess than a woman.
And then, as the good salt wind blew over me and the rain squalls danced to the north, towards where Miltiades might be rising from his bed, it suddenly struck me.
I was free.
Archi was next to me at the bow-rail, over the box where marines might ride in a fight. Today it was full of bull hides for aspides. Every item between our benches had to do with war. The world was going to war, and I was free.
‘I’m free!’ I said.
Archi punched me in the back. ‘You are,’ he said. ‘Will you – leave me at Methymna?’
It is odd, looking back across the years at that boy – oh, aye, I’d have put my fist in a man’s face for calling me a boy then, but I was, and my actions shout it. But in that moment, I knew that I was free – and I had no idea who I was or what I wanted.
No, that’s not right, either. What I wanted was Briseis. Hah. More wine. That’s all I wanted, and all I could keep in front of my eyes. And then there was the little matter of my oath to Artemis. To defend Hipponax and Archilogos. For all that home – Plataea – had begun to seem sweeter, the sudden, heady unwatered wine of freedom washed that dream away.
I shook my head. I couldn’t tell Archi that I loved his sister. ‘No,’ I said. ‘I promised your father I’d watch you for a while.’
Archi smiled. ‘Well, that’s not so bad, I guess,’ he said, but his smile said it was anything but bad.
I bent and started to look at the armour we were carrying. The breastplates were bronze and they were unfinished, but they had fancy decoration worked in, the waist and closure left undone so that the final fitting could be made by a local smith. I shook my head.
‘Mediocre work,’ I said. ‘I want better. I want a panoply. I assume we’re going to fight the Persians!’
Archi grinned. We embraced.
It sounded like fun. We were young.
11
I’ve already said that I think Lesbos is the prettiest island in Ionia, and I still think Methymna is the handsomest town in Hellas. I always swore that if Plataea sent me into exile, I’d go and be a citizen in Methymna.
She’s no Ephesus. Methymna sits high above the sea, yet the sea is at her doorstep. Methymna is where Achilles landed and took the first Briseis as his war bride. The beach is black and the town rises to a high citadel on the acropolis that has foundation stones laid by the old people – or giants. The town itself climbs the hills and sits below the fortress where the lord lives. That fortress is the only reason the men of Methymna are not serfs of Mytilene. It is almost impregnable. Indeed, only Achilles has ever taken it.
We beached on the black gravel and kissed the first good ground. The beach was full of hulls – twenty, stretching along to the east, each black ship with its own fire and two hundred men, so that the beach itself was like a city.
I went to a shrine to Aphrodite and said a prayer that Briseis would not quicken. Archi found the customers who had ordered his goods and began putting things ashore. It was early afternoon before we had the benches clear. We sold every hide we brought and every ingot of copper that hadn’t been ordered. I saw that Archi had kept a full ingot back.
I raised an eyebrow and pointed.
‘Your armour,’ he said. ‘You can pay an armourer and have your metal, too.’
I clasped his hand. ‘Thanks,’ I said. I couldn’t think of a jibe worth giving. Then we climbed into the town, up the steep streets, some with more steps than a temple, and explored, leaving flowers at the shrines. Later we went back to the beach to meet the other shipowners.
The men on the beach were Athenian. When they learned we were from Ephesus, one of their helmsmen came up to us and joined us where we’d started a fire to feed our rowers. Heraklides was a short, powerful man with sandy blond hair and a no-nonsense manner. He looked at our helmsman and spoke to him, and our man sent him to Archi. They clasped hands and Archi had me fetch a cup of wine. Slavery doesn’t just fall away from you.
By the time I’d returned, they’d exchanged all the formulas of guest-friendship. Captains were always careful that way. When you meet a man on a beach, you want to be sure of him.
I handed them both wine, and then defiantly poured my own. Archi smiled.
‘Doru, this is Heraklides of Athens, senior helmsman of Aristides or Athens. He commands three ships.’ Archi was excited.
‘Arimnestos of Plataea,’ I said. ‘Son of Technes.’
‘Technes the war-captain of Plataea?’ the older man asked. His clasp tightened. ‘Aye, you have the look, lad. Every man who stood his ground against the fucking Euboeans knows your father.’
I wept. On the spot, without preamble, as if I’d been struck. I was free, and on the first beach I landed as a free man, I met men who knew my home and honoured my father. Heracles was with me – even in the name of our new friend.
‘I was there,’ I said, perhaps more coldly than was warranted. ‘I saw him fall.’ Suddenly I was chilled on the beach. And afraid, as if it was all happening again.
Archi looked at me as if he’d never seen me before.
‘You were there?’ Heraklides asked. He wasn’t exactly suspicious, but he gave me a queer look. ‘He died. There was a fight over his body. Aye,’ he said, peering at me. ‘I remember you. You took a blow, eh? We sent you home in a wagon. My uncle, Miltiades, said you were to get special treatment. We sent you home with your cousin. Cimon? Simon?’
‘Simonalkes?’ I said, and a terrible suspicion came to me. ‘I fell at the bridge when they tried to strip Pater’s armour,’ I said. ‘When I awoke, I was a slave in a pit.’
That took him aback. He looked at Archi. Archi shook his head. ‘I’ve never even heard this story,’ he said. ‘We just freed him, the day before yesterday.’ He looked at me. ‘Why didn’t you tell me?’
I drank some wine. I knew Pater was dead – but there is knowing and knowing.
Heraklides shrugged. ‘Aye, I too was a slave for a year when pirates took my ship. What’s to tell? Masters don’t give a rat’s shit, eh?’ He nodded at me. ‘Thing is, you’re free now. Miltiades will want to know. He was – an admirer of your father, eh?’
‘I’ve met Lord Miltiades,’ I said. But I had to sit. My knees grew weak, and down I sat on the sand, unmanned.
It’s all very well to say I never mourned Pater. In a way, that’s all crap. Cold bastard that he was, he was my father. And the next thought that came unbidden – unworthy – was that the farm was mine, and the forge. Mine, not anyone else’s.
I needed to get my arse home and see what was what. Because if they’d sent me home with Cousin Simonalkes – why, then, what if the bastard had sold me into slavery himself? That thought came to me from a dark fog, as if the furies were signalling my duty through a cloud of raven feathers. What if he was sitting on my farm, eating my barley?
I stood up so quickly that I bumped my head against Archi’s chin where he’d leaned down to comfort me.
I think I’d have gone for home that very night – that hour – if I could have walked. Or – and the gods were there – if there hadn’t been war. But war was all around me, and Ares was king and lord of events.
I took to Heraklides very quickly. Most men who’ve been slaves never admit to it – you flinch every time I mention it, honey. He had it worse than me – pirates and a lot of ill treatment – but it never broke him, and you’ll get to know him as the story goes on. He was a few years older than me, but young to be a helmsman already, and getting a name as one of the best. He wasn’t really any relation of Miltiades at all, but his father’s brother had died in the family service and that made them like family – Athenians are like that.
The Athenians were on their way to Mi
letus, because Aristagoras had convinced them that the town was ready to revolt. That evening, over roast pig, I met Aristagoras for the first time. A few weeks ago we’d called him the traitor of the Ionians – running off to Athens, revolting against the King of Kings – and now I was standing behind him on a beach of black sand and toasting the success of the war.
He was not the leader I would have chosen. He was handsome enough, and he pretended to be a solid man, a leader of men, bluff and honest, but there was something hollow about him. I saw it that night on the beach – even with everything at the high tide of success, he looked like a stoat peering around for a bolthole.
He promised them all the moon. Greeks can be fools when they hear a good dream, and Ionian independence was like that. What did Ionians need with independence? They were hardly ‘oppressed’ by the Medes and the Persians. The taxes laid by the King of Kings were nothing – nothing next to the taxes that the Delian League lays on them now, honey.
More wine.
You’d have thought that Persians had come to Methymna and raped every virgin. The men on the beach were ready for war. They had their own ships, and they’d already met with their tyrant and held an assembly. Methymna manned only three ships, but they were all joining the Athenians, and so were the eight ships from Mytilene. And you knew, back then, that if the men of Methymna and Mytilene were on the same side, something was in the wind.
But what really excited the Athenians was that Ephesus – mighty Ephesus – had sent the satrap packing.
‘We could have this war over in a month,’ the Athenian leader said.
He too was no Miltiades. In fact, at the ripe old age of seventeen, I looked at the Athenians – good men, every one – and the rest and thought that we were forming a mighty fleet, but we didn’t have a man as good as Hipponax – or Artaphernes or Cyrus, for that matter – to lead.
Even a seventeen-year-old is right from time to time.
I never did get that panoply made, and that ingot of copper sat in our hull as ballast – well, you’ll hear soon enough – until she went to the bottom. None of the smiths in Methymna were armour-makers. They made good things – their bowls are still famous – but none had ever shaped the eyeholes on a Corinthian. I did buy an aspis, though – not a great one, but a decent one.
We took on a cargo of men – men of Methymna. We took the hoplites who hadn’t made the grade to go on the town’s three ships. Archi counted as a lord of the town – he was a property owner there, and his mother’s people were citizens, so they treated us as relatives.
A trireme can take about ten marines – more if you don’t plan to do a lot of rowing, fewer if you plan to stay at sea for days and days. When you fit a fleet, you pick and choose your marines, at least in Ionia – it’s different in Athens, as I may have cause to explain later, if I live to tell that part. Even little Methymna had three hundred hoplites. Her ships rowed away with thirty of them. We took another ten and left good men on the beach. Then we cruised south, weathered the long point by the hot springs and beached at Mytilene. We picked up ships there and drank wine. It was more like a party than a war.
The next night we were on Chios. I had rowed all day and felt like a god. The rowers were all paid men, but one was sick with a flux and I wasn’t proud. I was free.
Heraklides approved and offered me a place on his ship.
‘Hard to be a free man with your former master,’ he said. He made a motion that suggested that he assumed we were lovers. No, I won’t show you!
I laughed. ‘I swore an oath,’ I said. One thing all Greeks respect, from Sparta to Thebes and all the way to Miletus, is an oath.
‘Will Miltiades join us?’ I asked.
He rubbed his beard. ‘Heh,’ he said. ‘Good question. Miltiades is fighting his own war in the Chersonese. You might say he’s been fighting the Persians for five years.’
‘In Ephesus, Heraklides, we called him a bandit,’ I said.
Heraklides grinned. ‘Aye. Well, one man’s pirate is another man’s freedom-fighter, right enough.’ He laughed. ‘And you can drop the formality and call me Herk. Everyone does.’
That gave me something to think about. Miltiades was a soldier – a real soldier. And he wasn’t coming. And Herk’s friendship was worth something.
The next night, we were on another Chian beach. The Chians had a lot of ships, and a lot of men, and they were powerful and had never been conquered. They were going to have seventy or eighty hulls to put in the water. The Athenians were delighted, and decided to wait. The local lord, Pelagius, declared a day of games on the beach, and offered prizes. Really good prizes, so that even Archi wanted them. There was a full panoply for the winner. Spectacular stuff – a scale shirt, the smith’s nightmare, six months to make. The aspis was fair, nothing spectacular, but with a worked bronze face to it, and the helmet was fine, although not as good as the shirt and nothing on my father’s work.
There was a race in armour – just becoming the fashion, then – as well as a fight with swords, wrestling and javelin-throwing.
I was a free man, and Archi encouraged me, so we walked down the beach to where Lord Pelagius had his ship pulled in by the stern. We wrote our names on potsherds while his steward watched us, and the lord himself came up – an old man, as old as I am now, but sound.
‘Now, there’s a pair of handsome boys, that the gods love to watch compete. You’ll race?’ he asked Archi. Archi had the best body of anyone our age. He had surpassed me in size by a finger’s breadth, and his muscles had a sharp edge that mine never had.
We both blushed at such praise. ‘We’ll enter all the contests,’ Archi said.
The old nobleman smiled but he shook his head. ‘Not the swordplay, lads. That’s for men.’
Archi nodded, but that was my best event, I thought in my youthful arrogance. I spluttered.
‘Fancy yourself a swordsman, do you?’ the old man asked. He peered at me. ‘Well, you look old enough to take a cut. If there’s a place left, I’ll put you in. But we don’t fight past the first cut, and if you die, or kill a man, it’s your fault. We expect careful men, not wild boys.’
I blushed again, and nodded. ‘I’ve trained since I was ten, lord,’ I said.
He looked at me again. ‘Really?’ he said, and smiled. ‘That might be worth seeing.’
Archi put an elbow in my ribs as we turned away. ‘Trained since you were ten? The gods will curse you for a liar, my friend. Even though you are the best sword I know.’
Archi was a typical master. He’d never asked where I came from or what I’d done. Never. I loved him like a second older brother – but he never knew me well.
We walked back along the beach, and I was pleased to see men looking at us and, I think, taking our measure. Games are good. Competition is good. That’s how men measure themselves and others.
The games were still a few days away, though. So I walked around the promontory to exercise alone. I had a sword of my own, although nothing like what I wanted. It was short and heavy, a meat cleaver. I wanted a longer thrusting blade, because that’s what I’d learned with, but Ares had not seen fit to help me.
When I’d worked up a healthy sweat and swum it off in the ocean, I walked back. Slaves cooked for us, and that made me think, every time I took bread from a boy, that I was lucky – and free. Honey, once you’re a slave, you never forget it.
Anyway, Heraklides came and sat with me.
‘How many ships does Athens have?’ I asked my new friend.
‘Mmm,’ he said. ‘A hundred?’ he answered, before spotting a pretty Chian girl up the beach. I let him go.
Athens had a hundred ships, and Miltiades alone, or with his father, had another twenty. Then there were other Athenian noble families with ten or fifteen ships of their own.
Athens was half-committed to the Ionians. Not even half. They sent a tithe of their strength. I had spent enough evenings listening to Artaphernes to believe him when he said that the weight of Persia would
crush the Greeks like so many lice between his fingers. He always said this in sadness, never in boastfulness.
I looked at our fleet, and it seemed very great to me. We filled the beach at Chios, and by the time the levy came in and all the Chian nobles and traders brought their warships, we had a hundred hulls – I counted them myself.
That night, while men sang Ionian songs around the fires and chased Chian girls up the sand, I sat on my new aspis with Archi.
‘I think Athens is using us,’ I said.
Archi laughed. ‘Stop being a slave!’ he said, which made me angry. ‘These men have great souls. I have talked to a dozen of the Athenian captains, and they are gentlemen. Why, one or two of them are rich enough to be Ephesians!’
I shook my head, stung by his slave comment and sure that he was wrong. ‘Athenians are the most grasping bastards in the world,’ I said. I had watched the slow seduction of Plataea – I had been there as Miltiades brought the men of Plataea to his way of thinking. I could imagine him doing the same from island to island across the Aegean.
Archi sat back, took a long drink of wine from a skin and laughed. ‘We’re going to go home heroes,’ he said.
‘Has it occurred to you that we’re going home just weeks after we left? Diomedes won’t be over his injuries yet. His father will be panting for revenge. Niobe’s children will be nothing on us, Archi!’ I was growing louder and angrier because his good humour and cheerfulness were like the feathers on a heron’s back, and my words rolled off him.
Archi laughed. ‘I understand that you are a good companion, warning me of dangers ahead. But I’m the hero – I won’t be worried. You can whisper good advice in my ear and I’ll use my spear to cut my way to glory.’
He looked very much the hero on that beach, by firelight. He’d been homesick for the first few days, but he loved the sea life, camping on beaches and drinking wine by the fire every night.
‘Soon we’ll be home,’ he said, watching a pair of Chian girls run by, their oiled hair swinging and their linen chitons plastered to their bodies. One looked back over her shoulder. She knew just how to play the game. Archi shot me a look. Then he rose to his feet and chased her.
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