Mission to Marathon

by Geoffrey Trease

  There was a special word for the crazy terror that could seize people if they met the real god. The word was panic.

  It was his own fault, Philip had to admit, for choosing this upland route to his uncle’s, just to save a mile or two. He had to face the unwelcome fact now – he was not going to make it tonight. He must be high up on Mount Pentelicus now. He had often stared up at these massive heights from the farm so far below.

  ‘I get my best marble from Pentelicus,’ Father used to say. The block from which Philip’s statue was now being chiselled must have come from near here. It might have been dragged on a sledge along one of these paved tracks the workmen made to ease their task of getting such weights down to the plain.

  In the failing light he saw one of the quarries ahead. Fine! It would give him shelter overnight from the cool breeze blowing up from the bay. And there was clean water splashing down the rock face from a convenient spring above.

  He chose a corner, ate his last honey cake but one, and stretched out on the hard ground, muffled in his cloak and wishing it was longer. He did not expect sleep to come easily, but it did. Never before in his young life had he walked so many miles in a single day.

  At first it was a heavy, exhausted sleep, untroubled by dreams. But at last came the moment he had come to fear. Pan! The god was actually coming towards him. Playing his pipes—

  Philip woke with a gasp of horror. It was daylight again. It seemed that the dawn, like a pink and gold tapestry, was being drawn up out of the sea.

  It had not been a dream, for the pipes went on. Real footsteps were approaching. Light ones, but human. Not the click of goat hoofs.

  There was a patter too, then a flurry of hot breath, a cold wet nose against his face. Welcoming him.

  The dog knew him, he knew the dog. Argus, named after the dog in Homer. And here was his cousin herself. ‘Nycilla!’ he cried, delighted and deeply relieved.

  She was clearly feeling the same. She had stopped in her tracks at the sight of a huddled stranger on the ground. Now she rushed forward and hugged him as he scrambled to his feet. Argus danced round them, barking in ecstasy.

  4

  Where to Hide?

  Breathless, Philip explained why he was there. After those first minutes of delighted greeting the grim reality of his mission came flooding back.

  ‘The Persians?’ Nycilla cried in alarm. ‘We’ve heard rumours, of course. What’s been happening over in Euboea. Some men came over – they’d escaped – they told people in the village. Awful stories. But nothing about the Persians coming here themselves.’

  ‘They wouldn’t know. Why should they?’

  ‘But why should the Persians come here? There’s nothing! Only our little village and two or three others.’

  ‘It’s a place to land. A place where they can moor all their galleys. And their supply ships. Where else, around here?’

  ‘I see.’ She knitted her brows. ‘We’d better get back – find Father. You must be hungry. We’ll get you some food.’

  He did not say ‘no’. She had already checked that the sheep were all right. They started briskly along the path.

  ‘How is Grandmother?’ he asked.

  ‘Not so well.’

  ‘Could she manage the journey to Athens? My father says—’

  ‘We’ll have to see.’ Nycilla sounded gloomy. ‘Perhaps the Persians won’t come this way.’

  To lighten the conversation he made her laugh. He told her how he had been wakened, and frightened for a moment by the sound of her pipes, and why the shepherds’ god had been so much in his mind lately.

  ‘Uncle Lycon will be missing you,’ she said. ‘All because of us!’

  ‘Because of the Persians, you mean,’ he reassured her.

  ‘Anyhow his work will be at a standstill.’

  ‘Not unless something else has cropped up. Remember – Pan’s half goat. Father doesn’t need my lower half. He’s going to borrow a goat.’ He laughed. ‘It won’t keep as still as I do.’ The goat’s shaggy legs would be a problem too. It needed all a sculptor’s skill to represent soft hair in hard stone. That goat would keep Father fully occupied.

  ‘You must feel proud to be a statue – even half of you!’ She sounded wistful.

  ‘If we get to Athens,’ he said quickly, ‘Father will pounce on you. It’s some time since he saw you. I think he’ll say you’ve grown up into a real young nymph.’

  ‘You mean that?’ She was clearly delighted. ‘Even with all this hair? And marble so hard?’

  ‘He’ll find your head worth the trouble. More than a goat’s hindquarters!’

  They hurried on, laughing. They had to walk in single file now. The track was zigzagging down into a steep-sided valley. At the bottom flowed the Charadra – hardly flowing today, little more than a dried-up watercourse on this September day, though in another month or two it would be a furious mountain torrent.

  The houses of Marathon village were strung along its banks. Philip’s uncle lived in one of the first they came to, his land spread across the head of the valley.

  ‘There’s Father,’ cried Nycilla. She called and waved. Nearchus stood up, shading his eyes with his hand. He shouted back, a shout of deep-voiced surprise from the depths of his black beard.

  ‘Not Philip?’

  ‘Yes, Uncle!’

  Philip broke into a run, shooting past his cousin, loose pebbles flying from under his feet.

  His uncle had been busy among the vines. Nearchus was always busy with something. It was a small family farm. No slaves, just sons and daughters, and two or three poorer neighbours with no land of their own to work on it.

  As the months of the year went round the little patches of almost-level ground had to be ploughed, and sown with barley, and harvested. The olive trees must be pelted with stones to make them drop their fruit. The vine terraces must be pruned, the grapes gathered and laid out like the figs and olives to dry in the sun, or trodden with well-washed feet to make juice for the new season’s wine. There were beans and peas to pick, combs of honey to remove – oh, so carefully! – from the hives. Goats to be milked, eggs collected.

  If the farm didn’t produce something you didn’t have it.

  ‘You have walked all the way? By yourself?’ said Uncle. ‘You must be ravenous!’ He turned to his daughter. ‘Run on, my dear. Tell your mother. This poor lad!’

  ‘Father sent me to warn you. They say the Persians will choose Marathon as a landing place.’ Philip stammered out his urgent message. His uncle’s face clouded as Nycilla’s had done. The girl sped off.

  ‘I don’t know, I don’t know at all. We must consider it. It could be the death of your grandmother, a journey like that.’

  He hadn’t realised that the Persian invaders might come across the straits from Euboea. But he took the warning very seriously. He had great respect for his younger brother in Athens. Lycon’s sculpture had brought him important friends and anyhow that city was a place where news came streaming in from everywhere. If he had heard that the Persians were likely to cross over to Marathon…

  ‘We have got to think, Philip. And quickly.’

  He wasn’t used to that. A farmer had problems sometimes and had to plan. But they usually came with the seasons, not with the speed of a hurrying boy.

  They reached the house. Auntie had food ready and a cup of goat’s milk. Nycilla had gone to see if Grandmother was awake yet. If so, she would be told of Philip’s arrival. But not a word about why he had come – or about the Persians.

  ‘She has aged greatly since your last visit,’ Philip’s aunt explained.

  ‘She can walk only a few steps. She is very weak,’ said the farmer.

  At any time Philip would have been sad to hear this. In this present crisis he was full of foreboding. It sounded like a possible death warrant.

  He gulped down his milk and Nycilla took him in. Grandmother looked better than he had feared. Her eyes were pale but had a glint in them. She welcomed him warmly
, full of questions about his family. She even remembered old Davus.

  Mercifully, she didn’t ask why he had come. His uncle would deal with that tricky question. But time pressed.

  He had to wait until his cousins came back from working in the fields and the problem could be discussed freely out of her hearing.

  His uncle and aunt were emphatic. There was no hope of getting her safely to Athens now. Even in a comfortably padded wagon, crawling at a snail’s pace along the lower track to the city, she might not survive the journey.

  ‘And the Persians might come any day, your father tells me,’ said Nearchus. ‘They are famous for their light cavalry.’

  ‘They’ve brought thousands of them,’ said Philip.

  ‘And once they’re ashore they’ll be galloping along that road catching up with fugitives!’

  Most of the villagers would be too sensible to use that road. They would take to the hills where Persian horsemen would be unable to follow them. But how could Granny take to the hills?

  Her son and grandsons might carry her bodily, struggling up those steep winding paths with their uncertain footholds. Could she stand the strain? And then the days and nights exposed on the unsheltered mountain tops? Ordeal enough to any one, even the young and healthy. Probably fatal to an old woman in her state.

  They were at their wits’ end. Suddenly Nycilla came up with the answer. ‘The cave! Couldn’t we hide her – couldn’t we all hide – in Pan’s Cave?’

  5

  The Cave of Pan

  At once there was joy and relief on every face.

  ‘Clever girl!’ cried her father. ‘Why didn’t I think of that myself?’

  ‘We could hide lots of things,’ said her brother Lichas. ‘If the Persians come they’ll loot the whole village, probably burn our houses too.’

  There was no sense in upsetting Grandmother yet. Let her enjoy another night in her own bed. But at the first sign of the invaders tomorrow Nearchus and his sons could pick up that bed, use it as a litter, and carry her up the valley to safety. Even with that burden, picking their way ever so carefully up the zigzag path, they should not take much more than an hour.

  Tonight, though, there was plenty to be done. Nycilla and her mother would sort out everything that would be needed – food supplies, quantities of olive oil, both for cooking (if they dared risk a fire) and for the little saucer-shaped lamps they would need to light the darkness of the cave.

  Philip joined his uncle and cousins in carrying things. Bags of flour and beans, armfuls of bedding and spare clothing, skins full of wine. Walking at a normal pace they managed two journeys each before night fell.

  ‘We may be wasting our time,’ Nycilla grumbled, though it had been her idea in the first place.

  ‘We must be thankful if we are,’ said her father.

  It was Philip’s first visit to the cave. Nycilla explained that it had always been out of bounds to children lest they lose themselves inside or otherwise come to harm. Also when they were small, it would have been a long way from home.

  Seeing it now, he was struck by its beauty. Outside, it looked a mere crack in the limestone cliff. Once within, you realised how lofty and spacious it was, stretching on mysteriously into the very heart of the mountain.

  Even now, at the end of the hot dry summer, occasional drops of water splashed down from overhead. They seemed to creep lazily down the thin shiny fingers of rock that dangled there like icicles.

  ‘Some drops never seem to fall off,’ said Uncle. ‘I think they dry and turn solid and make the stalactite longer.’ That was the word for these rocky icicles.

  The drops that fell to the floor dried in the same way and over the years stood up spikily, like upside-down stalactites, only these were called stalagmites.

  ‘They’re beautiful,’ said Philip.

  ‘You’ll have time enough to admire them,’ said Lichas grimly, ‘if we’re all cooped up in here for days with the Persian army raging about outside.’

  Between them they shifted most of their food stores and the family’s cherished possessions. ‘Think yourselves lucky,’ Nearchus told his sons when they grumbled, ‘that it’s not your Uncle Lycon’s workshop we’re clearing.’

  Next morning they were thankful they had stuck to their work so long.

  Philip and Nycilla gladly obeyed her father’s bidding and walked up the mountain to get a clear view out to sea. What they saw sent them racing down again.

  The blue straits were dotted with black specks – at that distance looking like water-beetles – coming over from the long island opposite. War galleys and transports, there must be hundreds of them.

  The foremost vessels were heading for the northern, left-hand side of the bay, where a long, very narrow, strip of land stretched out into the sea.

  ‘They’re making for the other side of the Dog’s Tail,’ the girl panted. ‘It’ll give them the best anchorage. And shelter from the wind.’

  From the near side of this cape, the bay swept back towards them in a curve for five or six miles. From the water’s edge to the foot of the mountains on which they were standing the land stretched out, more or less flat, for a width of two or three miles. Parts of this were marshy, particularly to the left, close to the Dog’s Tail, so hardly anyone built houses there. Like Nycilla’s family, most people had their homes on the lower slopes of the hills.

  Just as well, thought Philip, now that the nightmare of barbarian invasion had become real!

  As soon as the first Persians disembarked there would be raiding parties fanning out all over the plain. It might be death for any Greek caught there, man, woman or child. Or future slavery, which might be worse.

  By the time the invaders reached the hills the people would have had time to escape inland, carrying possessions and driving their stock in front of them. The Persians might console themselves by burning empty houses, but it would hardly be worth their while to chase after the fugitives, even if their officers allowed them.

  The children had no need to shout warnings as they reached the first cottages. The alarming news Philip had brought from Athens yesterday had gone round the whole neighbourhood and put everyone on the alert. The rush of refugees had begun as other people had sighted the first ships and brought word of them.

  Philip’s aunt was making Grandmother comfortable on her bed. The men stood waiting to carry her up the valley to the cave.

  ‘Even if she’d been fit for the journey to Athens,’ said Uncle, ‘I think the Persians would have caught up with us.’

  Most of their neighbours, if they had no one sick or disabled, preferred to put more miles between themselves and the invaders. Some thought of shelter in the marble quarries. Others might cross the whole mountain range and make their way down into the friendly country on the other side.

  It was a mercy, for their grandmother’s sake, that there was this well-hidden cavern so handy for her refuge.

  Once Uncle had seen her safely installed there, he became the hard-working farmer again, angry at this threat to his land and crops and the interruption to all the jobs waiting to be done.

  Some it was impossible to tackle with the threat of the Persians hanging over him. Others it would be pointless to do if the enemy immediately came along and wrecked everything. But in a few days or weeks they would be gone – and the land would remain.

  ‘And so must we,’ he told the family sternly. ‘Philip will keep his eyes open, but you must all be on the alert. No risks! There’s so much at stake.’

  There had been jobs waiting to be done. There always were. The men would work as best they could, not showing themselves to any observer at a distance, keyed up and ready for immediate flight.

  ‘You must be our watchman,’ Nearchus told his nephew. ‘Sit among those bushes up on the hill. Take this horn – give us a good long blast if you see any soldiers coming this way. Then get back to the cave. Only don’t let ’em see you.’ He turned to Nycilla. ‘You can keep him company, so long as your
mother doesn’t need you.’

  The two of them passed the next few hours pleasantly enough, shaded and screened by the bushes, talking in low voices but never taking their eyes off the plain spread at their feet.

  In the distance, beyond the long low spit of land, the moored vessels became an ever-thickening mass. Squadrons of cavalry began to thread their way across the marshy pastures at that end of the bay, but none of them swung alarmingly inland towards the encircling foothills. Rather did they keep parallel with the curving shore, dipping into the stony bed of the dried-up Charadra and pushing forward into the broad plain that backed the middle of the bay.

  ‘This is where they’re going to have their camp,’ Philip whispered.

  The horsemen were fanning out and coming to a halt, till they formed a thin line reaching to the water’s edge. Into the space they guarded, columns of foot soldiers were now pouring as they disembarked from the ships. Tents were going up. Soon smoke was rising from innumerable fires.

  Some of the figures were near enough for the sharp-eyed cousins to study them in more detail. They looked brightly dressed, in longer, more colourful clothes than the Greeks. There was less gleam of armour. Instead of splendid bronze helmets like those Philip had helped to polish for his brothers they wore dull padded headgear. Instead of bare legs, covered in front with metal greaves from the knee downwards, the barbarians wore cloth garments, often with separate legs, down to the ground.

  It must be their sheer numbers, thought Philip, that had made them such conquerors. They were like giant bees, swarming over the plain.

  He exchanged glances with Nycilla. They shared a sudden urge to creep away and get back to their own folk.

  In the evening they went back for another look. The invaders seemed to be settling down for the night. Once darkness fell they would not stray far from the light of their camp fires, for every step would take them into the perilous unknown. By tomorrow they would be sending out foot patrols. They would search the deserted village, plunder and probably destroy the houses. But if they saw no signs of life they might not trouble to trudge far up the hills.