Marathon: Freedom or Death lw-2

by Christian Cameron

  Dionysius smiled. ‘Spies and women are both liars.’

  That stung me. ‘This spy does not lie.’ But Briseis lied very easily, I thought.

  ‘Spare me your romances,’ the navarch said. ‘Women are for making children, and have no other purpose except to ape the manners of men and manipulate the weak. Are you weak?’

  I summoned up the image of Heraclitus in my head, and refused this sort of petty combat. ‘My lord, I have intelligence on the fleet of Datis. Will you hear it?’

  He waved his hand.

  ‘Datis has six hundred ships at Tyre,’ I said. ‘He has the whole fleet of Cyprus — over a hundred hulls, as well as two hundred or more Phoenicians and as many Aegyptians. He has mercenaries from the Sicels and the Italiotes, and Cilicians in huge numbers.’

  Dionysius nodded. ‘That’s worse than I expected. They cannot, surely, all be triremes.’

  I shrugged. ‘Lord, I did not see them. I merely report what the spies report.’

  He rubbed his beard, all business now. ‘The Cilicians, at least, haven’t a trireme among them. They’ll be in light hulls. And the Aegyptians — light hulls and biremes. But still a mighty fleet.’

  ‘Both spies also report that Datis is sending men — the former tyrants and lickspittles — to buy some of the Ionians’ contingents. Aristides of Athens received such an offer. I suspect other men-’

  The navarch’s face darkened with blood. ‘Useless children, to fritter their freedom away on a few pieces of gold. Tell Aristides he’s welcome to go and fight for his new master-’

  ‘Lord, Aristides of Athens would sooner die than take a bribe on a law case, much less a matter as weighty as the freedom of the Greeks,’ I said. I owed Aristides that much.

  ‘Are you another of them? The schemers?’ Dionysius came off his chair. ‘How do I know these reports aren’t planted by the enemy? Eh?’

  In fact, even blinded by a mixture of love and hate, I had wondered if Briseis had sent me as a poisoned pill, to scare the Greeks with numbers and threats of Persian gold — except that Abrahim had said the same. I stood my ground. ‘My lord — you sent me. Miltiades has been fighting the Persians since the war began — and you, pardon me, have not. For you to doubt me — to doubt him — is sheer folly.’

  ‘Leave my tent and never return,’ Dionysius said.

  ‘You are in the grip of some ill daimon,’ I said. ‘We are all one fleet. Don’t create divisions where none exist.’

  ‘Take your ship and leave!’ he ordered, screaming at me. ‘Traitor!’

  Leagus escorted me out of the door and down the beach. Then he took my arm. ‘He’s the best seaman I know,’ Leagus said. ‘But the power has unhinged him. I have no idea why. The mere sight of so many ships — it did something to him. I thought your words might sober him.’

  I didn’t know what to say. Men come to power in different ways and they react to it in different ways, as they do with wine and poppy juice and other drugs. But when I walked back to Miltiades, I was sombre and my head hurt. I threw myself down on one of the rugs he had laid over the sand.

  ‘I thought you ought to see that for yourself,’ Miltiades said.

  ‘I tried to tell him about the bribes,’ Aristides said. ‘He ordered me killed — then exiled — on and on. He’s lost his mind.’

  Miltiades gave me a tired smile. ‘It is odd — I should have had the command. But now a madman has it, and yet the fleet seems unable to take the command from him, and I can’t seem to rise to the occasion.’ Miltiades looked at me.

  I sat up. ‘Are you suggesting I should do something?’ I asked.

  Miltiades shrugged.

  I looked at Aristides, and he would not meet my eye. Oh, everyone in Athens is so pious, until the moment when the need of the city outweighs all that petty morality. ‘You two want me to kill Dionysius?’ I asked.

  Aristides looked resolutely away.

  Miltiades shrugged again. ‘I certainly can’t do it.’

  ‘Neither can I,’ I said. ‘It would be an offence against hospitality. And I have sworn an oath to Apollo.’

  Aristides turned and met my eye. ‘Good,’ he said, and suddenly I knew that I’d misjudged him. I had passed some sort of test.

  ‘Well,’ Miltiades said, ‘I guess we’re with the gods.’

  That was all right with me. I trusted Apollo to save the Greeks.

  The next week saw more training. I had Storm Cutter in the water constantly, working on various manoeuvres. Most of the Lesbians did the same, and a few of the Samians, and all the Cretans. We may not have been the paragons that Dionysius wanted, but we were a hardened fleet, and the rowers were in condition.

  Miltiades insisted that we learn some squadron manoeuvres, so we practised every day as a squadron, and Nearchos chose to throw in his lot with us. Nearchos was the boy I had trained to manhood, son of Achilles, Lord of Crete. He was no longer an arrogant, whiny puppy of seventeen, either. He was a man now, a hero of the sea-fight near Amathus in Cyprus, and he led five ships.

  He was popular with the Athenians, and it was through him that I became friends with Phrynichus the poet. Phrynichus went about collecting stories every afternoon when men lay down for a nap, and after he had met Nearchos and heard his version of the deck-to-deck fighting at Amathus, the two of them sought me out.

  I was lying on a carpet in Miltiades’ tent, my head on a rolled chlamys, unable to sleep. To be honest, those days were as black for me as the days after Hipponax sent me from his house and tried to kill me. My head hurt, and pain is often part of low spirits. But I could not get the thought of her out of my head — as if her image and the pain were one thing.

  ‘Arimnestos?’ Nearchos asked.

  I sprang to my feet, went out into the sun and we embraced. For two men encamped on the same beach, we hardly ever saw each other. He introduced the playwright, who asked me about the fight at Amathus, and I sat by the fire and told my story.

  When I was done, Phrynichus asked me how many men I thought I had put down that day.

  I shrugged. ‘Ten?’ I said. ‘Twenty?’ I must have frowned, because he smiled.

  ‘I mean no offence,’ he said. ‘You have the reputation as a great killer of men. Perhaps the greatest in this fleet.’

  What do you say to that? I thought that I probably was, but it would have been hubris to say as much. ‘Sophanes of Athens is a fine warrior,’ I said. ‘And Epaphroditos of Lesbos is a killer, too.’

  Phrynichus raised an eyebrow.

  I leaned forward. He was a great poet, a man of honour. Moreover, his words could make a man immortal — if you believe that word-fame lasts for ever, and I do. ‘You have fought in a close battle?’ I asked.

  He rolled his hand. ‘I’ve been in a few ship fights,’ he said. ‘I faced a man on a deck once. Never a big fight, in phalanx.’

  I smiled. ‘But you know how it is, then. When you ask me how many men I put down — how can I answer? If I cut a man’s hand, does he fall? Is he finished? If I put my spear in his foot, he’ll stay down for the whole fight, but I suspect he’ll till his fields next season. Yes?’

  He nodded.

  ‘When I fight my best, I don’t even know what’s happening around me. In my last fight — off Miletus — I put a man down with a blow from my shield, and he was behind me.’ I shook my head, because I wasn’t putting this well. ‘Listen, I’m not bragging. I just don’t know. I fight by area, not by numbers. In a ship fight, I work to clear an area, and then I move.’

  He smiled. ‘You are a craftsman of war,’ he said.

  I met his grin. ‘Perhaps.’

  He leaned forward. ‘May I serve with you in the battle? I’d like to see you in action.’

  Look, short of Pindar or Simonides or Homer risen from the grave, he was the most famous poet of our day, and he was asking to watch me in the great battle where we were going to break Persia. What was I to say?

  By an irony that I have long savoured, young Aeschylus and his br
other were both in Cleisthenes’ ship as marines — so that we had in one squadron the greatest living poet and the next. They had not yet competed head to head — but young Aeschylus could be seen haunting the same fires as Phrynichus, so that no sooner did I befriend the playwright than I met his young rival.

  This is the thing that makes the Greeks strong, it seems to me. Aeschylus admired Phrynichus — so he sought to best him. Admiration begets emulation and competition. And in the same way, I was already a famous fighter, and men already sought to emulate me — and best me.

  Never mind. I speak of Phrynichus.

  Truth to tell, Simonides was a better poet. And Aeschylus wrote better plays. But Phrynichus made me immortal, and besides, he was a quicker man with a pun or a rhyme than either of the others — he could compose a drinking song on the spot. It must have been that same week that we were on the beaches of Samos, and we were all lying around a campfire — a huge fire — having a beachside symposium. There must have been a hundred men there — oarsmen and aristocrats mingled, as it used to be in those days. We had Samian girls waiting on us, paid for by Miltiades, and they were fine girls — not prostitutes, but farm girls, brisk and flirtatious, despite their mothers hovering nearby.

  But one girl stood out. She was not a beauty, but she stood square and straight like a young ash. She had a beautiful body, muscled like an athlete, firm breasts, broad hips and a narrow waist. And she talked like a man, straight at you, if you asked for wine or some such. When she played at jumping the fire — showing her muscled legs and leaping high enough to fly away into the smoke-filled dark — all the men wanted her, even those who usually preferred men. She had that spark — that in Briseis is a raging fire. I felt it too, though I was only a week from my love, and in that week I hated all women with equal fervour.

  The girl moved among us, and we all admired her, and then Phrynichus leaped to his feet and seized a kithara that one of the boys had been playing, and he sang us a song.

  How I wish I could remember it!

  He called her Artemis’s daughter, of course, and he sang that her portion and her dowry was time, honour, the word-fame of man, and that her sons would conquer the world and be kings, and her daughters would sacrifice to the Muses. He sang of her in a parody of the elegies that men receive when they win games at Olympus or Nemea, and he praised her skill at jumping fires.

  And he did all this while rhyming inside every line, so that his pentameters rolled like a marching army. We were spellbound.

  The girl wept when it was done. ‘What have I to live for that will compare to this?’ she asked, and we all applauded her.

  There were some good times.

  I asked Phrynichus later if he had bedded her, and he looked at me as if I was a child and told me that grown men do not kiss and tell, which shows you that I still had a great deal to learn.

  Another night, Phrynichus debated with Philocrates about the gods. Philocrates dared us to consider a world where there were no gods, and he suggested — through good argument and some sly inversion — that such a world would bear a remarkable resemblance to our own. Then Phrynichus rose and proposed that we consider a world where the gods did not believe in Philocrates. His satire was brilliant and so funny that I can’t remember a word of it, except that I threw up from too much wine and laughing so hard.

  Phrynichus drank when he wasn’t using his head, and he and Philocrates and Idomeneus formed a drinking club whose members had to swear to be drunk every day as an offering to Dionysus. I tried to make fun of Philocrates for this display of piety, but he refused to be mocked — saying that Dionysus was the one god whose effects were palpable.

  Just after the local feast of Hera, our navarch bestirred himself from his tent and ordered us to sea, to seize the island of Lade before the Persian fleet arrived. By now we received daily reports from merchant ships and outlying galleys — and the Lesbians had a dozen fast biremes and a pair of light sailing hemioliai on hand, and they did what scouting got done.

  So on the morning after the feast of Hera, we rose, manned our ships — a scene of complete chaos, let me tell you — and sailed in a surprisingly orderly manner down the coast of Samos to Lade — the enemy squadron, led by Archilogos, slipping away ahead of us. We had so many ships that we filled the island. The Samians landed first, and they took all the good ground, so that by the time the Lesbians and Chians had landed, we, the extreme right of the line and the last in sailing order, were left with the rocks near the fort and nowhere else to camp.

  I was leading Miltiades’ ships and Nearchos’s squadron, and I directed them to follow me to the beach opposite the island — the beach from which I’d launched my raid a year before. We were not sorry to be separated by half a stade of water from the excesses of Dionysius and the growing tensions of the camp.

  Later, Aristides was listening to Phrynichus recite the Iliad, which always delighted him, and when he reached the scene where Diomedes takes the army forward and routs the Trojans, he turned to me and frowned.

  ‘We need to get to grips with the Medes before the fleet collapses,’ he said. ‘The Samians have refused to train any more. They’ve mutinied, and the Lesbians are just as bad.’

  That night, Epaphroditos and a few of his warriors swam over to us, drank wine and complained of how mad our navarch had become.

  ‘We’re not pirates,’ Epaphroditos said. ‘The man’s notions of training are insane.’

  Secretly, I suspected that all the Ionians could have used harder hands and stronger backs. But they were brave, and as far as I could see, this was one fight that would be settled through courage, not tactics.

  ‘Besides,’ he went on, ‘I hear the Persians are on the way. We need a rest.’

  I talked with him half the night, and Phrynichus listened to every word he said as if he were Hector returned.

  Dionysius declared that we should have games to propitiate the gods in preparation for the contest against the Persians. It was the most popular decision he’d made since he ordered us to Lade. Men were bored, restless and yet listless. I felt that the Ionians were dangerously lazy. We were on the edge of victory, and they wanted to behave like men who had already won.

  The prospect of games didn’t excite me the way it had when I was younger. It makes me laugh now, to think that at twenty-three or twenty-four I imagined myself a hardened old man.

  I had already triumphed in a set of military games, you’ll recall, back on Chios when the revolt was young. Five years before. So I decided not to compete in every event, or to strive to win the whole competition. But events decided otherwise.

  Next morning, Phrynichus said that he wanted to see Miletus before we fought. I had business there, so I collected a heavy bag and a letter for Teucer and we walked across the mudflats into the city, slipping past the Persian archers in the last gloom of morning to have a cup of wine with Istes. He depressed me by showing me the siege mound, now all but level with the height of the wall. ‘Twenty days,’ he said.

  ‘Care to come with us?’ I asked, and Istes shook his head.

  ‘My place is here, with my brother,’ he said. ‘We will die here.’

  ‘Cheer up!’ I insisted. ‘Apollo will not let us fail.’ I could see the future so clearly that I was surprised other men worried so much. ‘We will destroy their fleet, and then we will liberate all of Asia.’

  Istes had lines around his eyes that were not there a year ago, and pouches from sleepless nights. He looked twenty years older than me. And he drank constantly.

  I glanced at Phrynichus. ‘This is the greatest swordsman in the Greek world,’ I said.

  Istes grinned. ‘Someday, perhaps we can measure each other,’ he said. I agreed — it would be good to face such a gifted man. That is the admiration by competition that makes Greece great. ‘But I would rather stand beside you as we smite the Persians.’

  ‘Flattery will get you anywhere, Plataean,’ he said. ‘You think we’ll win this naval battle?’

&
nbsp; ‘I do,’ I said. We would win, I would take Briseis as my war bride and that would be that. My spear-won wealth would make a palace for her on my farm. That’s what I had decided — to have her and punish her as well.

  Feel free to laugh.

  ‘I have to say that I’ve now fought the Persians every fucking day for a year,’ Istes said. ‘If you destroy every ship in their fleet — kill Datis, drown their navarchs — this war still won’t be over. They’re much, much tougher than that.’ He yawned. ‘But if you lose, Miletus falls — and the revolt is fucked.’

  ‘You are tired,’ I said.

  ‘You know how it feels after a fight?’ he asked me, one killer to another.

  ‘Of course,’ I allowed.

  ‘Imagine fighting every day,’ he said. ‘Every fucking day. I’ve been at it a year, and I’m starting to go mad. My brother is worse — he was never the fighter I am, and fear is getting into his gut.’

  Of course, you are familiar with the character of Istes in the play. Phrynichus knew his business. He was a great man, and he knew greatness when he saw it.

  I left him to study his new hero, and I went out on the walls and found Teucer. He was at the top of a tower — a rickety thing of hides and wood and stone fill, just completed behind a section of wall that had been mined from beneath. The stonework of Miletus was so old and so good that the wall simply subsided without breaking. That’s why we didn’t use mortar in those days — mortar adds strength, but when a mortared wall is undermined, it collapses. Not so heavy stones fitted by master masons. Often, the old way is the better way — something for you children to remember.

  They’d built a tower behind the subsided wall, and I had to climb a dreadful ladder to reach him, far above the battle. He had a big Persian bow, and he shot carefully at the slaves who were working to clear the rubble in the not-quite breach. He seldom missed, and very little work was happening. He had another man spotting for him, too, and they passed comments on individuals as they shot them.