Marathon: Freedom or Death lw-2

by Christian Cameron

  Which tells you two things. First, that I still held her refusal of me against her. Second, that I was as much a fool at twenty-five as I was at eighteen. But I could rationalize my irrationality better.

  So I spent the winter calling my blonde Briseis and forging excuses as to why I could not possibly go to her rescue.

  Spring, when it came, was the longest, wettest, stormiest spring anyone could remember. I took Storm Cutter to sea before the cakes were fully burnt on Persephone’s altar, and I brought him right back in when a combination of wind and wave snapped my boatsail mast like a twig.

  We spent four weeks locked in the Bosporus when we should have been at sea, and a rumour started to spread that Miletus had fallen. But no real news came to us at Kallipolis, and we fretted and quarrelled with each other, and my decision not to go to Briseis in the autumn began to look shockingly like faithlessness.

  We tired of exercising our crews, of painting our ships, of games and contests. We tired of girls and boys, and we even tired of wine. But the wind howled outside the Bosporus, and every attempt I made to round the point at Troy and head for Lesbos was foiled by a cold, dark wind.

  Demeter showed man how to plant grain, and the new grain peeped above the earth, and finally the sun leaped into the heavens like a four-horse chariot, and the ground dried, and the sea was blue.

  Miltiades had a good squadron. He had two volunteers from Athens who came in with the first good weather — Aristides, sailing a fine light trireme, and his friend Phrynichus, the playwright, with Cleisthenes, the Spartan proxenos and a powerful man in the aristocratic faction who was, nonetheless, a solid supporter of the Ionian Revolt. Aristides had Glaucon and Sophanes with him, but they didn’t meet my eyes. I laughed. They were in my world now.

  The Athenians brought disturbing news.

  ‘It’s all but open war in the city,’ Aristides said quietly.

  ‘Are you exiled?’ Miltiades asked.

  Aristides shook his head. ‘No. I thought I’d come and do my duty before I was sent away without having the ability to influence the decision. The Alcmaeonids have almost seized control of the assembly. Themistocles is the last man of the popular party to stand against them.’

  Miltiades sneered. ‘Our blood is as blue as theirs,’ he said dismissively. ‘Bluer. Why do they get called aristocrats?’

  Aristides shook his head. ‘You don’t need me to tell you that the colour of our blood is not the issue. Let’s defeat the Persians first and worry about the political life of our city second.’ He frowned at Miltiades. ‘Don’t pretend you are a byword for democracy, sir.’

  Miltiades threw back his head and laughed. I thought the laugh was a trifle theatrical, but he pulled it off well enough. ‘Not much democracy here,’ he admitted. ‘Pirates, Asians and Thracians all living together? By the gods, we should have an assembly, except that the first debate would be on what language to debate in!’ He drank some more wine. ‘And you are a fine one to talk, Aristides the Just! For all you prate of this democracy, you distrust the masses, and when you need company, you run away from the aristocrats — to me!’

  Aristides bit his lips.

  I stood up. ‘No one has run from anyone,’ I said, raising the wine cup. ‘Tomorrow, we sail against the Great King.’

  Aristides looked at me in surprise — a surprise that wasn’t altogether complimentary. ‘Well said,’ he replied. ‘You’ve made your peace with Apollo, or so I hear.’

  ‘Not yet,’ I answered. ‘But I am working on it.’

  ‘No man can say fairer when he speaks of the gods,’ Miltiades answered. Miltiades believed in the gods to exactly the same extent at Philocrates — which is to say, not at all — but he spoke piously and offended no one.

  Cimon hid a guffaw and Paramanos winked at me. Don’t imagine that because I don’t mention Paramanos I didn’t see him every day, drink with him every night. He’d gone his own way and left my oikia to be a lord in his own right — a lord of pirates — but he was a fine man and still the most gifted son of Poseidon on the wine-dark.

  ‘Let us drink to the defeat of the Medes,’ Miltiades proposed, as the host.

  We all rose from our couches and we drank, each in turn — Aristides; Cimon; Cleisthenes; Paramanos; Stephanos; Metiochos, who was Miltiades’ younger son; Herk, who had been my first teacher on the sea; the Aeolian Herakleides, who now had a trireme of his own; Harpagos and me. Eleven ships — as big a contingent as many islands sent, all in the name of Athens — not that Athens paid an obol. I remember that Sophanes was there, and Phrynichus the poet, his eyes flitting from one man to the next — so that we knew we were living in history, that this cup of wine might be made immortal.

  We drank.

  In the morning we rose with the dawn and put to sea. We were a magnificent sight, sails full of a good following wind as we passed the cape by Troy and sacrificed to the heroes of the first war between Greeks and barbarians. Miltiades was like a new man — full of his mission, and his place as its leader.

  Every night we camped on the headlands and beaches of Ionia — Samothrace, Methymna, Mytilene — and celebrated the unification of the Ionians and the victory we were going to win. Our rowers were at the height of training — a month trapped in the Bosporus had allowed us to work them up as few crews have ever been hardened, and the rich pay of last autumn kept them loyal to their oars. I noted that all the Athenians kept their distance from me.

  When we came to Mytilene, the beaches were empty, and in the Boule, the old councillors told us that the storms that had trapped us in the Chersonese hadn’t blown on Lesbos. The allied fleet had gathered three weeks before and sailed for Samos. And they had appointed Dionysius of Phocaea as navarch.

  If we hadn’t had Aristides and the Athenians with us, I think Miltiades would have deserted the rebellion right there, but he couldn’t appear petty in front of his Athenian rival, and we sailed south for Samos. Suddenly, we were a surly crew.

  Keep that change of daimon in mind, thugater, for we were the best-disciplined of all the Greeks.

  We came into the fleet’s anchorage on the beaches of Samos a little before dusk, and my breath caught in my throat. I had never imagined that the Greeks would do as well.

  I stopped counting at one hundred and eighty black-hulled triremes. In fact, I was later told by Dionysius that at its height, we had more than three hundred and seventy in the fleet — probably the mightiest gathering of Greek ships that there ever was. Everyone had come — Nearchos, my former pupil from Crete, was there with five ships, and the Samians had a hundred. Miletus itself had crewed seventy, leaving the city with a skeleton army to guard it.

  And Miltiades was a great enough man to smile and shake Dionysius’s hand.

  However it had been done, the alliance was the work of gods, not men. Never had so many quarrelling Greeks come together. They filled the beaches of Samos, and the Persians ought to have surrendered in terror.

  But both Datis and Artaphernes were made of sterner stuff than that. Datis fortified his camp to an even greater degree and sent out the word all along the Asian coast, demanding the service of every vassal that the Great King had. And Artaphernes gathered his guards and his court, and moved his personal army to Miletus. He was not the kind to lead from behind.

  Dionysius was a fine admiral and a great sailor, but he was a poor orator and worse leader of men, and his constant harping on the ill-training of the Ionian and Aeolian oarsmen smacked of racial superiority, as his own men were mostly Dorians. The Samians hated him. They hated Miltiades just as much, and openly pressed for a Samian — Demetrios, in fact — to take command of the fleet. Let me just say, thugater, that their claims had a certain justice. They had a hundred ships and no one else had nearly that number. Miletus had but seventy, despite being the richest Greek city in the world, and Histiaeus declined to leave his citadel anyway, even though he was the one man who might have taken command without a voice being raised against him.

  At any
rate, Dionysius instituted his training programme, and as so often happens, the ships that needed the training least volunteered to undertake it, while those who needed it most — the aristocrats from Crete and the soft-handed volunteers from Lesbos, Chios and Samos — were the most reluctant to work.

  I’ll say this, too. Dionysius knew his business. I thought my crew to be the best-trained oarsmen in the world, but Dionysius quickly disabused me of my notions of arete. When he laid out a course with inflated skins, I told him it was impossible for a trireme to row through it, and he put me to shame by showing me how in his Sea Snake.

  I spent a week training, and the more of his tricks I learned, the more I disliked his manner of teaching them. He was abusive when he might have been instructional, and abusive when he might have praised. And when I attempted to explain to him how deeply he offended most of his navarchs, he dismissed my criticism as a petty attempt to get back at him for his superior ship-handling.

  ‘You’re a quick learner,’ he said, ‘but in your heart you are no seaman, just another petty lordling. Don’t linger on the sea when we’ve beaten the Medes, boy — it’s for better men.’

  What do you say to that?

  I said nothing. But I was searching for an excuse to sail away, at least for a few days.

  My excuse came up quickly enough. I was a captain in my own right, for all that I served Miltiades, and I attended the fleet council when I had time — which was all the time.

  While Dionysius focused on seamanship, Miltiades and old Pelagius of Chios wanted intelligence. Miltiades had spies in Sardis but no way to contact them, and what we all needed to know was the progress of the Persian fleet — where were they? Did the fleet even exist? Were they forming at Tyre? Sidon? Naucratis?

  We imagined that the Persians feared us.

  I knew someone who could answer all those questions. She lay on a couch, just a few hundred stades away.

  ‘Drop me on the beach by Ephesus,’ I said.

  Every head in the council turned.

  ‘I know the town as if I was born to it. And I have friends there — people who are no friends to the Persians. Perhaps I can even contact one of your spies in Sardis, Miltiades.’ I bowed to him. ‘Give me the word.’

  One of the great advantages of being a hero is that when you propose something daring, no one will stand in your way. It’s as if everyone assumes that this sort of thing is your destiny.

  By early summer, I was growing a trifle cynical about my role as a hero. But the Greeks were sending me to Ephesus. We had spies in the Persian camp at Miletus, and I knew that Briseis had not accompanied her husband to war.

  She was alone, in Ephesus.

  I set off the next day, free of bloody Dionysius and his sea-wrack tyranny, and free too of the ugly competitions between Miltiades and Aristides and the Samian leaders.

  I daydreamed about taking Storm Cutter up the river to the city of Artemis, bold as new-forged bronze, but I didn’t. Instead, I bought a sailing smack from some Samians, and Idomeneus and Harpagos and I sailed him ourselves, with Philocrates our unpaid passenger. The blasphemer had grown on me, and he’d shown no interest whatsoever in returning to Halicarnassus to trade grain for hides and lie when he swore oaths.

  ‘I was born for this,’ he said, not less than twice a day. And he smiled his curious smile of self-mockery. ‘I miss Teucer, the bastard. He needs to come back aboard so that I can win back my money.’

  Teucer’s family were snug in the Chersonese, but the archer himself was back on the walls of Miletus, and we all missed him.

  We sailed the fishing boat through easy seas, right around Mycale. We spent the night there, frying fresh sardines on an iron pan and drinking new wine from a leather bag. In the morning we were away again, up the coast and past the ruins of the old town that guard the promontory beyond Ephesus, and in the last light of the second day I could see the Temple of Artemis glow in the sunset, the old granite lit red like sandstone in the setting sun.

  They left me on the coast road, twenty stades from the city. I told them to return for me in three days, and I put on my leather bag, checked the hang of my sword and pulled my chlamys about me. I had two spears and a broad straw hat, like a gentleman hunter.

  I walked, and no one paid me a second glance.

  As I made my way up the road to the city, I thought of my last journey up that road — delirious with fever, a slave bound to the temple, destined to die hauling stone. Ten years or less separated me from that boy. Indeed, the river of time flows in only one direction, as my master loved to say.

  In a few hours, I would see him. He, at least, would never betray me, or any other Greek who served the rebellion.

  I had determined to go to Heraclitus first, because I loved him, and because I had no idea what to expect with Briseis, nor had I any notion of where her loyalties would lie. She must have heard by now of my encounters with her brother the previous autumn and winter.

  In truth, I was afraid of meeting her. But as always, fear forced me to act. I can never abide to see myself as afraid, and even as a child I would drive myself to do things that I feared, only to prove myself — to myself.

  Briseis had always seen through this aspect of my character — and used it against me.

  I heard her voice as I walked, and I tasted her tongue on my lips, and other parts of her, too, in my imagination. I thought of the first time she had come to me, fresh from humiliating her enemy for her, just as she had expected me to. And of the reward, although at the time I thought her another woman entirely. See? You are blushing, my dear. Boys only think of one thing, and how to get at it.

  Boys are predictable, girls.

  When I looked up, I had walked to our gate. To the house of Archilogos, which had been the house of Hipponax. To the house of Briseis. I was standing in full view of the gate, like a fool.

  I’d like to say that I did something witty, or wily, like Odysseus. But I didn’t. I stood there in the sun and waited for her. I suppose I thought that the Cyprian one would send her into my arms.

  No such thing happened.

  Only when the tops of my shoulders started to burn from the sun did I come to my senses and turn away. I walked up an alley, cut north to the base of the temple acropolis and then went to the old fountain building.

  It was gone.

  That was a shock. In its place was an elegant construction of Parian marble and local granite, with fine statues of women carrying water, cut so that that hydriai on their heads supported the roof.

  I didn’t belong there. There were a few free women and a great many slaves, and I was the only free man — the only man armed, and as such, a figure of fear.

  Heraclitus’s river had flowed right by, and I could not dip my toe again.

  I fled.

  I went up to the temple, where hunters were never uncommon, although I was a stranger and I was a man in a city where most of the men were at war. I left my spears with the door warden and I climbed to the palaestra, made a small sacrifice to the goddess and looked around the porticoes for my master.

  Thank the gods, he was there. Had he been absent, I think my panic might have killed me.

  He knew me immediately. His performance was admirable — he finished his lesson, a point about the way Pythagoras formed a right triangle, then he teased a new student, and finally, as naturally as if we’d planned it, he came to me, took my arm and led me away.

  ‘You cannot walk abroad here, my boy,’ he said.

  ‘And yet I have done so all day,’ I said.

  ‘That others are fools does not make you less a fool,’ he said.

  Oh, I had missed you, my master.

  He sent all his slaves away before he let me take the cloak from over my head, then we sat for hours, drinking good wine and eating olives. He was thin as a stick, as if he lived in a city under siege, and I forced him to eat olives, and his skin seemed to grow better even as I watched.

  ‘Why are you starving yourself, master?
’ I asked.

  ‘I fast until Greece is free,’ he said.

  ‘Then eat!’ I hugged him. ‘We have nigh on four hundred ships at Samos. All the cities of Ionia have united, and the Persians will never find a fleet to stand against us. No later than next spring, you’ll see us sail up the river, and Ephesus will be free.’

  He smiled then. ‘Four hundred?’ he asked. And ate olives at a furious rate.

  I found olive paste and anchovies and fish sauce in the pantry, and made us a small dinner with bread and lots of opson, and I told him everything from the day that we helped Hipponax die until the start of this mission.

  He shook his head. ‘Your life is so full, and mine is so empty.’

  ‘You teach the young,’ I said.

  ‘Not one of them is worth a tenth of you or Archilogos. I would trade ten years of my life for one bright spark to shine against the heavens.’ He nodded. ‘But I have had my great pupils, and plenty of them — and the last not the least. You are called Doru — the Spear of the Hellenes. I have heard this name.’ He narrowed his eyes. ‘And you think you have learned something about killing men?’

  I shrugged. ‘Nothing different from what you endeavoured to tell me ten years ago.’

  ‘Sometimes the logos works one way to truth, and sometimes another,’ he said. ‘If we understood everything, we would be gods, not men.’

  Too soon, I realized I had nothing left to say. He was not very interested in my forge and my farm, although in his presence, they suddenly gathered a kind of worthiness that they didn’t have when I stood on the command deck of Storm Cutter.

  We gazed at each other for a little while.

  ‘You wish to see Briseis,’ he said suddenly.

  My heart beat faster. I expected him to say that she was away from town, resting from childbirth, dead.

  ‘I often read to her,’ he said. ‘Nor should I have excepted her when I spoke of the bright sparks of intelligence I have brought to the logos — for of the three of you, the logos burns the brightest in her.’

  I smiled to hear the most beautiful woman in the Greek world praised for her brain — but what he said was true.