Marathon: Freedom or Death lw-2

by Christian Cameron

  I leaped down from the rail into the midship of Storm Cutter, feeling immensely better. The storm was coming in behind us, but I had done my service for the god, and I knew I could weather the storm.

  We turned north and rowed all night, and we constantly lost sight of the other ship, and as often found him again, so that the first fretful grey light, shot with lightning, found the eyes over his ram just a short stade to windward. And about the time that dawn was shining somewhere — it was a grey morning for us, and lashed with rain — I swung the great steering oars to starboard to put the wind astern. I could see a great rock, the size of a castle or the Acropolis, rising from the water to starboard, and I thought that I knew where we were. Somehow we had come two hundred stades north of our target, and we were off the west coast of Lesbos. That rock marked the beach of Eresus, where Sappho had her school.

  Best of all, the beach there was wide and deep, and the rock would break the wind and rain long enough for me to get my ship ashore.

  My oarsmen were spent — used up, long since. The Iberians had put some strength into them, and they weren’t bad men, but I wasn’t going to get a heroic burst of power from them. Not in a month of feast days.

  No way to signal Stephanos, either. But he knew this anchorage as well as I — better, no doubt. So I waved at him and turned my ship, hoping that he would read my mind.

  I got Idomeneus to come aft. Only a few hundred heartbeats left before the crisis.

  ‘Go down the benches and get every man ready. I intend to put him right up the beach, bow first.’ I pointed at the lights shining in the acropolis, high above the beach. ‘Hard to miss.’ I waited until I saw him understand.

  Idomeneus shook his head. ‘You’ll break his back,’ he said.

  I confess that I shrugged. ‘We’ll live.’ I nodded towards Asia, which loomed ahead, ready to catch us on a much less kind coast if we failed to land on the sand of Eresus. ‘We’re out of sea room.’ I pointed again. ‘Every oarsman has to be ready to back water. Tell them to dip lightly, so that they don’t get killed by the oars.’

  Idomeneus nodded and headed forward, shouting as he went.

  I hesitate to say how fast Storm Cutter was moving when we came in under the lee of the rock, but I’d say we were faster than a galloping horse. It’s less than a stade from the rock to the beach. We were going too fast.

  ‘Oars out!’ I shouted across the gale. ‘Back water!’

  It was ragged. I was as scared as the next man — now that we were in flat water, our speed was shocking. The oars bit, and I couldn’t see that we were slowing at all — but the ship yawed and an oarsman screamed as his backed oar bit too deep and slammed into him, breaking his arms.

  Like a wool blanket that unravels in the wind, his failure spread, so that the whole port-side loom of oars began to fall apart. Men struggled to keep their oars clear, but the ship rolled from the mis-strokes, and the port-side oars bit too deep, and men died, or were broken. We turned suddenly, and the port side dipped so low on the roll that we took water. We still had so much way on us that we were racing sideways into the beach.

  The port-side rowers — those still in command of themselves — finally got all their oars clear of the water. The starboard-side rowers were at full stretch and the hull pivoted again, rotating on the starboard oar bank, and the bow hit the sand a glancing blow as the bronze-plated ram caught the trough of gravel just shy of the beach and skipped along it.

  Then we could hear the ram ploughing a furrow in the gravel and suddenly the boatmast snapped with a crack as loud as the lightning, and every man not sitting a bench was thrown flat on the deck as a wave picked up the stern and tossed us — the kindly hand of Poseidon, I like to think — up the beach, stern first.

  ‘Over the side!’ I roared, although I was lying half-stunned. ‘Get her up the beach!’

  It was the ugliest landing I ever saw — we’d been rotated halfway round by the sea, men were badly hurt all along both sides, and I could see broken boards where my ram ought to be.

  But when I jumped over the side, my feet barely splashed.

  We were ashore.

  Stephanos didn’t even try to land. He watched us, and he assumed we were lost in the waves, and he put up his helm and coasted by, a few oar-lengths offshore. In seconds he was past the beach, and before we had our broken hull clear of Poseidon’s reaching tendrils, his ship had gone around the promontory to the north of Eresus.

  I lay by the rope I had been hauling and cursed, because the loss of Stephanos hurt me more than I’d expected. I hadn’t seen him in a year. I wanted him back.

  Idomeneus had his marines in hand and was driving oarsmen to work, gathering wood to put supports under the hull timbers. We propped Storm Cutter on sand that was only wet with rain, and then we drove the oarsmen into the sea to fetch the ram before it got buried in storm-wrack and sand. The ram was heavy bronze plate, but with thirty men helping we hauled it above the tide line. Then we collapsed.

  I sent Idomeneus to the citadel to get us help and hospitality, then I sat in my sodden chlamys and watched the storm, and sang a hymn to Poseidon and prayed that Stephanos might live.

  The news came back that Sappho’s daughter had died — an old, old woman, but a great teacher, as awe-inspiring and god-touched in her way as Heraclitus in his — and had been succeeded by another woman, Aspasia, who now led the school of Sappho. So much had changed in just a few years. But Aspasia was supported by Briseis’s largesse, and she accepted me without question when I told her who I was, and she lodged my men and fed them.

  I let myself into Briseis’s house and sat by her shuttered window, drinking her wine and eating her food. Surely it was she, and not Artaphernes, who had sent me that message. Hence, she must have need of me, I reasoned. And not a need she dared commit to paper. I reasoned — with a brain clouded by Eros, let me add — that she must need me.

  I would find Miltiades soon enough. But if I could get Storm Cutter rebuilt, I would cross the straits and run down the coast to Ephesus and visit my love, and see why she had summoned me.

  The storm took three days to blow out, and my men praised me openly for bringing them to such a safe haven, with lamb stew every night and good red wine for every man, as if they were a crew of lords. The folk of Eresus treated us like gods — as well they might, since it was Briseis’s gold that kept the school going, and her political power that kept it free of outside control. And they feared us.

  When the storm was gone, we had beautiful weather for autumn. I put men on the headlands to keep watch, and I prayed to Poseidon every day and gave offerings of cakes and honey on the Cyprian goddess’s altar, too — anything to bring back Stephanos. We cut good wood on the hillsides east of the town and rebuilt the bow, with two carpenters from the town helping us with the main beams that had cracked. We stripped the hull clean and rebuilt the bow, and found a fair amount of rot in the upper timbers. I built a marine platform — like a box, with armoured sides — into the new bow, and a little shelf where an archer or a lookout could stand high above the ram.

  I borrowed from the Temple of Aphrodite, and spent the money on tar and pine pitch, and blacked the hull, a fresh, thick coat so that he was armoured in the stuff, watertight and shining. I gave him a stripe of Poseidon’s own blue above the waterline, and we painted the oar shafts to match, all in a day, and the women of the town washed our great sail so that the raven was fresh and stark again.

  In such a way we propitiated Poseidon, but there was no sign of Stephanos. So after a week of good food and freely given aid, we prepared to sail away in a fresh ship. I was sombre at the loss of a friend, but the crew was wild with delight.

  ‘Boys are saying their luck has changed,’ Idomeneus said.

  I had appointed two Iberians who could speak some Greek to be officers. My new oar master was Galas, and he had more tattoos than a Libyan, for all that his skin was fairer than mine. He had blue eyes and ruddy hair and his scalp was shaved in whorls,
but he knew the sea and his Greek was good enough. And he had taken command of the port-side oars during the disaster of the landing.

  My new sailing master had the same tattoos and his name was too barbaric for words, something like ‘Malaleauch’. I called him Mal, and he answered to it. He spoke a pidgin of Greek and Italiote and Phoenician.

  I had thirty of the former slaves on my benches now. I’d lost more than a dozen men in that horrible landing — dead, or so badly injured that they still lay in Lady Sappho’s Temple of Aphrodite, waiting to be healed or to die.

  The Iberians all viewed me as the author of their freedom. I explained to Galas how small a role I’d played, and how much they owed to the gods, but I was not sorry to benefit from their gratitude.

  At any rate, we heaved Storm Cutter into the surf and got the rowers in position as if we knew what we were doing, and then we were away. Galas brought more out of the rowers than I had, and we spent two more days rowing up and down the sea off Lesbos to drill them until their oars rose and fell like the single arm of a single man.

  Then we rowed around to Methymna, and I put her stern on the beach and asked after Miltiades and my friend Epaphroditos, the archon basileus of the town. But the captain of the guard told me that Lord Epaphroditos was away at the siege of Miletus.

  I needed money, and Epaphroditos’s absence left me no choice. I had to take a prize, and a rich one. My men needed paying, and I was down to no wine and no stores. I got one meal out of Methymna based on their memories of me and my famous name, but we sailed from that town like a hungry wolf.

  We ran south along the east coast of Lesbos, and the beaches were empty at Mytilene, where the rebel fleet ought to have been forming up. And just south of Mytilene, we saw a pair of heavy Phoenicians guarding a line of merchantmen — Aegyptians, I thought as I stood on the new bow.

  ‘Get the mainmast up,’ I called to Mal, and motioned for Galas, who was steering, to take us about. We could no more face a pair of heavy Phoenicians than we could weather another storm. ‘Fuck,’ I muttered.

  They were none too happy to see us when we put on to the beach at Mytilene, but men remembered me there, and I arranged for a meal and some oil and wine on credit — Miltiades’ credit.

  I was sitting alone at a small fire on the beach, cursing my fate, or rather, my ignorance of events and my inability to accomplish anything, when a pair of local men — traders — came up out of the dark.

  ‘Lord Arimnestos?’ the shorter one asked.

  ‘Aye,’ I answered, and offered them wine.

  In short, they had a cargo of grain — several cargoes, in fact — and they wondered if I’d like to have a go at smuggling it into Miletus. The rate of exchange they offered was good — good enough to give me some slack. So I loaded grain at their wharf and filled the ship, so that she sat deep in the water and my rowers cursed.

  ‘We’re fucked if we have to run,’ Idomeneus said.

  ‘Really?’ I asked, as if the thought had never occurred to me.

  We sailed at sunset, ran along the coast of Lesbos before full dark fell and were off Chios in the light of a full moon. My oarsmen were none too happy with me, because this was flirting with Poseidon’s rage and no mistake, or so they said.

  I made my sea-marks off Chios, and we passed silently along the beaches I had known like family homes in my youth. Just past false dawn, we passed the beach where Stephanos had lived before he went away to sea to be a killer of men.

  There was a long, low trireme beached there.

  My heart rose in my chest, and I abandoned my plan and put our stern to the beach, and we went ashore.

  ‘I thought you were done for,’ Stephanos said. ‘And I thought I could weather the cape by Methymna and run free in the channel, with the two islands to break the fury of the storm.’ He shrugged. ‘Those Iberians don’t know how to row, but they have a lot of guts. I got us around the corner, and they kept the bow into the seas, and we determined to land at Mytilene, but there was a current — I’ve never seen anything like it. We went past Mytilene in the blink of an eye, and north of Chios we hit a log that was drifting, broke a board amidships and started to take on water.’ Stephanos was a big, plain-spoken sailor who had grown to manhood as a fisherman, and his hands moved like an actor’s as he told the story.

  His sister Melaina was beaming up at him. She, too, was a friend of my youth, from the heady days when I was newly freed, just finding my power as a man-at-arms. We kept grinning at each other.

  ‘Then what happened?’ Idomeneus asked.

  ‘The back of the ship snapped like a twig, we sank and the fishes ate us!’ Stephanos laughed. His sister swatted him, and he ducked. ‘One of the rowers shouted that we weren’t done yet — a Greek fellow, Philocrates. He put some heart in the boys and we got the head around, then the wind let up for a few moments, and in that time we got into a cove on the north shore — it was as if Poseidon agreed to let us live. I put the bow on the shingle, and to Hades with the ram — which took a right battering, and we’ve been a week repairing her. But we lived!’

  ‘As did we,’ I said, and we embraced again. I looked at his ship. ‘What do you call him?’ I asked.

  Stephanos grinned his easy grin. ‘Well, we thought of calling him Storm Cutter, but that’s taken, so we opted for Trident.’

  The sign of Poseidon. ‘A fine name.’

  He grinned again. ‘So — how do we make some money?’ He kissed his sister and pointed up the beach. ‘Go and find Harpagos, dear.’

  Harpagos proved to be Stephanos’s cousin. Melaina brought him down to the beach, and he was no smaller than Stephanos and his hands were hard as rock. Stephanos introduced him with flowery compliments.

  ‘This is my useless layabout cousin Harpagos, who wants to ship with me. He’s never been to sea.’ Stephanos spat on the sand and laughed.

  Harpagos had the look of a man who’d kept the sea his entire life. His hair was full of salt. But he stood, abashed.

  I winked at Stephanos. It was like old times. ‘You’re a trierarch now, my friend. No need to consult me on every raw man.’

  ‘I’ve been helmsman on a grain ship,’ Harpagos said.

  ‘I want him as my helmsman,’ Stephanos admitted. Then he said, ‘I need him where I can see him.’

  I liked Harpagos. His embarrassment at all this attention shouted of the sort of solid, quiet confidence that makes a man able to go to sea and fish every day for forty years. ‘On your head be it,’ I said. ‘Harpagos, can you fight?’

  He shrugged. ‘I wrestle,’ he said. ‘I teach the boys in the village. I can take this big fool.’ He indicated Stephanos.

  ‘Hmm,’ I allowed. ‘Well, he can take me, and that would be bad for discipline. Ever used a spear and shield?’ I asked.

  Harpagos shook his head. ‘Can’t say I have.’

  ‘Ever killed?’ I asked.

  Harpagos looked out to sea. ‘Yes,’ he said, voice flat.

  We all stood together in silence, and the fine wind blew across us. ‘Well,’ I said, ‘welcome aboard. We’re pirates, Harpagos. Sometimes we fight for the Ionian rebels, but mostly we take other people’s ships for profit. Can you do that?’

  He grinned — the first grin I’d seen. ‘Yes, lord.’

  Melaina listened to this exchange and brought more wine, and we ate fresh sardines and a big red fish I hadn’t eaten often — with flesh like lobster. We drank too much wine. Melaina pressed herself on me, and I flirted with her, smiled, even held her for a time while standing by the fire on the beach. But I didn’t take her into the dark. My head was full of Briseis, and Melaina wasn’t a beach girl. She was Stephanos’s sister, and she dressed like a woman of property. Somewhere, she had a man she was going to marry. And to bed her would have been to betray my guest-friendship with Stephanos.

  In the morning, I gave him half the grain, and the next evening, full of food and a little too much wine, we were off the beach, rowing soft in the moonlight for Miletus. />
  Our plan was simple, like most good plans. We both had Phoenician ships — both newly repaired and looking fairly prosperous. We sailed due south, got behind the coastal islands, west around Samos, rowing all the way, and came into the Bay of Miletus from the south-west — that is, from the direction of Tyre and Phoenicia — as the sun set in the west, mostly behind us. We stood straight down the bay, bold as brass, apparently a pair of their own ships bound for the blockade fleet at Tyrtarus on the island of Lade.

  The fishermen of Chios had been able to lay the whole siege out like a scroll for us, because they smuggled fish to the rebels and sold them openly to the Medes, Persians, Greeks and Phoenicians who served the Great King, too. Miletus is an ancient city, founded before Troy, and she stands at the base of a deep inlet of the sea, just south of Samos, although the bay over towards Mycale is starting to silt up. Miletus has a steep acropolis, impregnable, or so men used to say, and her outer town is protected by a circuit of stone walls with towers. The Persians began by moving their fleet to Ephesus, just a hundred stades up the coast. Once they had a base there, they moved in and stormed Tyrtarus, a fishing village with a small fort, and used it as their forward base, so that ships from there could easily launch into the narrow channel and catch any vessel heading into Miletus.

  Mind you, it is possible to row north around Lade. The problem is that anyone holding the fort on Lade can see you coming fifty stades away, and when you turn north, they’re waiting — and the currents around the island favour the side that holds it.

  Once the Persians had the fort at Tyrtarus, they brought up their land forces on the landward side of the peninsula. Artaphernes came in person, and they built a great camp in the hills overlooking Miletus. After a few weeks of skirmishing, he started on the siege mound.

  Men tell me the Assyrians invented the siege mound, and perhaps they did, although as usual the Aegyptians claim they invented it. Either way, it was not the Greeks, who prefer a nice flat field and a single day of battle to a year’s siege. But the Ionians and Aeolian Greeks have fortified cities, and when the Lydians or the Medes come against them, they fight a war of shovels. The Persians dig a giant hill that runs from the flat of the plain to the top of the walls, and the Greeks in the city counter-dig, trying either to raise the wall by the mound or to destroy the Persian mound. And while both sides dig, the men outside make sure that the men inside receive no help, no weapons and, most of all, no food.