Marathon: Freedom or Death lw-2

by Christian Cameron

  Philocrates was fighting the older man and another opponent, and they were both retreating across the rock face. Philocrates was everywhere — his spear was high and low, and he kept moving, facing one and then another, heedless of the bad footing. The two Persians wanted no more of the fight, I could tell, but backed steadily away, abandoning their comrades.

  The fifth Persian shot Phrynichus with his bow. The shot was hurried, and the arrow struck the Athenian in the helmet. Unlike the Persian helmet, Phrynichus’s good Corinthian held the point, but he fell, unconscious from the blow. The archer now put a second arrow to his bow and turned to Philocrates.

  I threw my spear. The range was short, and in those days any spear you carried could be thrown.

  I hit the archer and knocked him flat with the strength of the blow, but even as I threw, Philocrates missed his footing and fell on the rocks, and the younger Persian leaped to finish him.

  I sprang forward, but Idomeneus was faster, throwing his spear. He missed his target, but the tumbling shaft caught the older man in the face. Blood spurted and the man fell to his knees.

  The archer rolled over and cut at me with a heavy knife. He caught my shin and his blow was so hard he dented my greave and almost broke my leg. The pain was intense, and I fell, and then we were grappling on the ground. But I was covered in armour, and he had only the scale shirt that had saved him from my spear. We both had daggers after the first moments, and there was no thought of defence — we both stabbed wildly the way desperate men do.

  I stabbed him five times before he stopped moving. He stabbed me just as often, but every blow caught on my cuirass, because the gods were with me and it was not my hour to die. Even unmanned by death, he tried to stab me again.

  Persians. They can fight.

  I got to my knees to find that Philocrates was also on his, and the younger Persian was hurrying the older Persian across the rocks and a dozen more Persians were on their way.

  I retrieved my spear and stripped the corpse of the man I had killed with my dagger. His scale shirt was a model of perfection, small scales like the scales of a fish, washed in gold, with bronze and silver scales in patterns, edged in purple leather. I stripped him while watching the wary approach of the Persian relief column. They were calling their camp for more men, and a dozen Greeks were coming over the wicker walls to help us, too, but I didn’t want to be rushed while plundering.

  When I had the shirt, I laid the man out neatly, his hands crossed on his chest. I left him his rings. He had fought well, and saved his lord.

  We were all cut up, and shaking — for an ambush, it had been a sharp fight. Idomeneus carried Phrynichus back to the walls. Philocrates was stripping the man I’d killed first. He, too, had a fine scale shirt, and his bow-case was covered in lapis and gold wirework.

  I ran to the site of Philocrates’s combat, and one of the oncoming Persians tried a long shot at me. The arrow skidded on the rocks, missing me by a horse-length or more.

  As I had thought, the old man’s sword was lying between two big rocks. As I reached for it, two arrows passed through my shield. One scratched my hand at the antilabe, and only the heavy leather of the strap kept me from taking a bad wound. The other went right through the shield face and hit my greave, but again the thin bronze held.

  I got my hand on the sword hilt and stumbled back. My left leg would barely take my weight. I took an arrow to my helmet and two or three more hit the rocks around me. I paused, stepped up on to the biggest rock and waved my new sword at them, and then I ran like Achilles for our wall, dodging right and left as I passed through the rocks to make their archery a little more difficult.

  Miltiades was waiting for me at the walls.

  ‘You are a fool,’ he said fondly.

  I handed him the sword. ‘First spoils, my lord,’ I said. Then I hobbled down the wall to Paramanos, who was better than most physicians at bones and such, and showed him my leg. He had to cut the greave off my shin — the arrow had deformed it. Underneath, the shin was red and black, and it wept blood right through the skin.

  Other men — Herakleides, I remember, and his brother — came and helped us out of our armour, and we were brought wine.

  After a while I lay down under a sail and slept. I was exhausted, and my leg throbbed. I remember waking to eat a double helping of barley broth, and then sleeping again — two days’ sleep in a single day. There’s nothing like combat to drain a man.

  When I awoke the next day, men had brought me a new pair of greaves. It is good to be a hero. Every man is your friend, and men you have never met will work hard to win your praise — or merely to perform some good act for you, as if you were one of the gods. Those greaves were a poor fit, but they were better than nothing, and some other Greek went bare-legged to combat that day.

  Idomeneus cut sheepskin from my bedding to make the greaves fit against my legs, and he rewrapped my leg, which was clearly infected, or poisoned. I felt fine — elevated, even — and that can be a sign of fever.

  What I remember best was my eagerness to try that fine scale shirt. It fitted me the way a shield cover fits a shield. It weighed nothing, and I felt like a god.

  One of the smiths had pounded the dents out of my helmet and someone had repaired my poor battered Boeotian shield, which now had a small bronze plate riveted to the rawhide to cover where the arrows had punched through.

  We were all armouring up, because the sun was rising in the east, across the bay. Where the Persian fleet was putting to sea.

  I’ve seldom been with men so elated before a battle. What the four of us had done the day before was to show the Athenians, at least, that we could take the Persians man to man. The success of our venture — a palpable success, I’d add, with looted armour, a bow-case and a magnificent sword — had a powerful effect on every man on our beach, Athenians, Chians, even the mercenaries. The personal wealth of the Persians was legendary — but we’d just proven it.

  I’ll say this for Dionysius of Phocaea: his ship was the first off the beach, and he rowed up and down, coaxing us to greater efforts, telling every division, and even every ship, where to take their place in the line.

  We formed in the bay with Lade behind us, and our line formed with the Samians on the left, with the Lesbians next. These two contingents made up more than half our line, one hundred and eighty triremes. Erythrae and Phocaea only contributed ten ships between them, but they were the best trained, and they were in the centre. Then came the Chians — a hundred ships under old Pelagius and his nephew, Neoptolemus, the finest of men and the proudest single force for size and beauty. On the right, we had the smaller contingents from Teos, Priene and Myos — about thirty ships altogether, perhaps the worst of our entire fleet. The smaller islands were hard-pressed to raise and crew a trireme. It was as if they had exhausted themselves by providing the thing, and had no energy left for training.

  To the right of the mixed squadron were the Milesians, sixty-eight ships. On this day, Histiaeus came out of his city and led them in person. Some said that the men of Miletus had told him to go and not come back — his madness had worsened, and men feared him. But he left Istes in command of the Windy Tower.

  And finally, to the right of the Milesians, there was Miltiades’ contingent and the Cretans under Nearchos. They called us the Athenians, but unlike the force that Aristides had led at Sardis five years before, we were really pirates. None of my rowers was an Athenian citizen, although many of them had been born under Athena’s gaze. More were Thracians, or Byzantines, or broken men from Boeotia and the Peloponnese. Even our marines were a polyglot bunch.

  Nearchos’s contingent was another fine one, with five well-built ships and highly trained crews. I had drummed it into the boy to take war seriously, and he did. He had spent a fortune on his oarsmen, and his ships were painted red, his helmet was painted red and he had a red shield with gold fittings.

  A group of us — my friends and old comrades, and Miltiades’ officers — met on t
he beach as if by common consent, to pour libations and pray and drink wine in the new dawn. It is nice to be the last squadron to form. There’s plenty of time to make sure that all the rowers have their cushions, that all the thole pins are sound and secure, the hulls are smooth, every buckle is buckled and every lace fresh, new and strong. The vanguard must hurry out in the dark, leaving their canteens behind, or some other thing that irritates you all day in a big fight.

  Paramanos got us together, going from group to group as we armed and inviting us to Miltiades’ awning. When I arrived, I accepted the congratulations of every man on my feat of arms the day before.

  ‘Nice thorax,’ Aristides said. He took my hand. ‘And a noble fight,’ he added with a smile.

  As Istes said, what would it be like to awaken one morning and find that you had forfeited all that adulation? And from such a man as Aristides?

  That is what it is to be a hero. Unless you never deserved it, once you go up that ladder, you cannot come down.

  At any rate, we were all there — all the best men of our contingent. Aristides made the sacrifices, and Cimon stood on one side of me, while Paramanos stood on the other, and Agios, Miltiades’ personal helmsman and my former mentor, winked at me across the sacrificial fire.

  They were all there, the friends of my first life, and some from my second — my pirates. Miltiades, and Phrynichus, and Nearchos whom I had trained, and his brother, and Idomeneus stood behind me with Phrynichus, and Philocrates took his share of the prayer without a ribald comment, and Herakleides the Aeolian, one of my first men, now commander of a trireme, and Stephanos. I smiled, because my men had done well.

  We sang the paean of Apollo, and we made sacrifice, and then Miltiades handed round a great kylix of unwatered wine.

  ‘Today, we are not pirates,’ he said. ‘Today, we fight for the freedom of the Greeks, although we are far from home and hearth.’

  Let me tell you, Miltiades was always my model of a man — of greatness. He stood taller, acted taller, than other men. I still ape his manners — the way I swirl a cloak and the way I put my hand on the hilt of my sword are his. And when the sense of occasion was on him, he was not like a god. He was a god. Even Aristides was like a pale, priggish shadow next to the blazing sun of his glory.

  We all drank, and when the kylix came back to Miltiades, he raised it on high. ‘May we all be heroes,’ he said, and poured the rest into the sand.

  My ship was the last one in the water — the rightmost ship in the rightmost division. It meant that we had to row far to the east, well down the bay.

  I must explain the way of it, or you young people will never understand what happened in the battle. First I’ll draw the bay — a great shape like an empty sack, open on the west and with the bottom at the east. Up near the mouth of the sack — the lower side of the mouth, see? — is the island of Lade, and Miletus sticks into the mouth of the sack by the island, like a man pushing his thumb in. And the Persian camp, the siege, was south and west of the city, so that, as we formed our line, west to east, from the top of the sack to the bottom as it were, the city and the Persian camp were both behind us. We were, in effect trying to keep the Persian fleet from getting to the city and the camp.

  Our line extended from the island all the way along the bay to well east of the Persian camp. Our line stretched for almost thirty stades.

  There’s an irony, too. We fought there again — at Mycale. But I’ll tell that story when I get to it.

  The Persians started forming earlier than we did and were still forming when my men rowed us the last few ship-lengths to form to the right of Stephanos in Myrmidon. So we rested on our oars and watched as the Aegyptian contingent formed opposite us, and then more Phoenicians beyond them.

  Facing nothing.

  Their line was, in fact, almost twice as long as ours. Part of that was because they left gaps between their divisions, and part was because aside from the Phoenicians, who were great sailors, and well trained, the rest of their ships had as little notion of keeping formation as the worst of ours. I could see the Cilicians, away at the Samian end of the line, and they were more like a cloud of gnats than a squadron.

  For all that, I didn’t like being outflanked by the Phoenicians. They’d split their best contingent, putting a hundred Phoenician ships at either end of their great crescent. They put their worst ships in the middle. Their plan was clear — to close rapidly on our flanks and crush us before we broke their centre.

  We were still lying on our oars when Miltiades came out of the line under his boatsail. He was the leftmost ship in our squadron, hard by Nearchos. Together, we and the Cretans had sixteen ships — the best manned, and probably the best trained except for the Phocaeans.

  Miltiades passed down the line and hailed each captain as he came up. When he got to me, he turned his ship under oars so that it came to rest on my right, usurping my place of honour.

  ‘When we go forward, follow me,’ Militades called. ‘We’re going to form a column, race downwind to the east, and try to sting the Phoenicians.’ He laughed.

  Fifteen of us against a hundred Phoenicians. ‘Long odds,’ I called back.

  Whatever he replied was carried away by the rising wind, but I heard the word ‘hero’, and I waved.

  Idomeneus had a mad grin on his face. ‘This’s what I came for,’ he said.

  I looked at the mass of Phoenician ships and smiled.

  Like most pirates, most of my rowers were pretty well armed. Every man had a javelin at least, and many had a pelte or a buckler. A good number had better gear — a helmet, a leather hat, an aspis. On board the mighty Ajax, every man had a helmet and a spear, and some had swords. The older and more successful a pirate was, the better kit his rowers had, and that gave us a huge advantage in a boarding fight. On the Phoenicians, their rowers were slaves or captives or paid freedmen, but none of them had arms. Not that that ever seemed to cause them to row any worse, but if a boarding fight lasted more than a few minutes, our ships would always overwhelm theirs. In fact, one of our ships could put two hundred trained fighters against ten of theirs. That’s why they preferred a fight of manoeuvre.

  We’d also killed most of the best Phoenician crews at Amathus. They were shy now, and cautious of engagement.

  But fifteen to a hundred was long odds at the best of times.

  I pondered this, gathered my marines and my officers amidships on the fighting platform and told them what I knew. I pitched my voice to carry so that my oarsmen could hear everything I said.

  ‘We’re going to sail downwind on our boatsails, so lay everything on deck and stand ready,’ I said to my sailing master. He was a black Libyan with a barbaric name like a noseful of snot, but we all called him ‘Black’ and he answered to it. I’d bought him on the beach at Lade and freed him on the spot — he’d been a helmsman way out west at Sicily, and I knew quality when I saw it, for all that he was new to my ship. Paramanos was black, and look how good he was.

  ‘Then we’re going to drop sails, turn back west and attack the tip of their pincer,’ I said. ‘I’m going to guess that Lord Miltiades will try to lure them into a luffing match upwind — their rowers against ours — until we hit the shore. If we do that, nothing matters except how far east and north of the battle we can lure the bloody Phoenicians. Don’t get locked in a boarding fight if you can con your enemy into trying to outsail you. And friends — we in Storm Cutter can outsail anything they offer, can we not?’

  They shouted back at me, and then I went forward to watch as Black had his sailors lay out the boatsail and Mal coached his rowers while Galas took the helm. I had promoted him to helmsman when I purchased Black. He watched Black with a critical eye.

  I kept my eye on the Persians — though there probably wasn’t a Persian among them, except for a dozen noble archers on twenty or so of their command ships. Somewhere was Datis himself. He’d have a deck full of them. But the rest of their fleet’s people were vassals and slaves — and Cilician
pirates, of course. Men just like us.

  As I watched, there was a flash and a ripple all along the front of the Persians as their oars came out. It wasn’t neat, or well drilled, but the mass of their great half moon began to move. It was a terrifying sight, truth to tell — they outnumbered us so badly, and their line filled your eye, almost horizon to horizon. They must have taken up fifty stades of ocean — more than five hundred ships. Until then, no one had ever seen such a fleet.

  I refused to be terrified. Today was the day Apollo would smile on the Greeks, the day I would win Briseis, fulfil my destiny and go to glory. I had half a notion that I might die in the victory — it would suit all I had heard of fates that I die achieving my ambition, and my curse to Briseis.

  Death held little fear for me.

  I was still young then.

  Heads up, sailors!’ I called from the bow. ‘Attention to orders!’

  Miltiades was turning out of the line, and he had a square torn from his big red awning flapping at his stern.

  ‘Hoist the boatsail,’ I called, and Black echoed it in his curious singsong accent.

  We turned with the steering oars, the rowing oars held clear of the water but ready to engage — all to save the rowers’ strength. I looked back along our line, and I saw them come from line abreast pointed north to line ahead pointed east in fine style — one of the very manoeuvres that Dionysius had made us practise, in fact. Nearchos followed us, and eight of the Chians came out of their line and followed us — Neoptolemus and his contingent, I later learned. That made me grin — twenty-five ships were shorter odds, and now the Phoenicians couldn’t just ignore us or we’d wreck them. I wondered what the Samians were doing to avoid envelopment at their end of the line, but fifty stades is a long way to see on a hazy morning.