Marathon: Freedom or Death lw-2

by Christian Cameron

  It is possible to get lost in a big fight, the way a man may get lost in the woods. Confined in the eye slits of your helmet, it is possible to take a wound or die simply because some bastard turned you around. It is essential to have men at your back whom you trust — men who will turn you back round, or kill the opponent who is circling outside the realm of your helmet. But with such men, anything is possible, and it is incredible how a man can move inside a melee if he has purpose and companions.

  I went at a rider in a rich purple cloak and he turned and jammed his heels in — and when I followed him we burst free and then we were running in a hayfield, and the fight was behind us. The fleeing man took an arrow and fell back over the rump of his horse, and he rode away like that — a surprising distance, as I remember. Then Teucer, at my elbow, grunted and released another arrow, high, and it fell on him and he crashed to earth. He tried to rise, and a third arrow finished him.

  Teucer came out from the cover of Idomeneus’s shield, nocking an arrow, and the Persian cavalry folded up and ran — again — and this time they left half their men or more dead on the ground because we’d burst through them. Then the Medes broke and ran, shooting as they went. There were horses down in the brush, and men screaming, and horses bellowing. Ares, it was grim — blood on the ground, enough of it to splash over your sandals when the man next to you made a kill or died. So much blood that the copper-bronze smell fills your nostrils, more even than the stink of sweat, the smell that men have when they are afraid, the smell of men’s guts like new-butchered deer. Only when you stop do you notice it — the stench of Ares — and then it makes you gag, especially if some unarmoured boy has been cut to death at your feet, his lips already blue-white and bled out, his eyes bulging from the horror and pain.

  War.

  But, as I say, the Medes ran, the Persian cavalry ran or died, and the Sakai, despite their leader’s calls, had not been keen for the second engagement, and the whole mass went back. This time, they went back to the east, down towards the beach, trying to hide themselves among the Sakai of the centre, I think.

  Teucer started shooting into them, and then he was out of shafts. It seems odd to tell it, but the only arrows I remember at that point were his, although I’m told that the Sakai kept shooting until the very end.

  I had other concerns. The Athenians were pushing the Sakai, and the Sakai, whether by intention or by chance, where backing only at our end of the line — so that they swung like a gate, still linked to their centre two stades away.

  At our end, we’d won. The Persians, cavalry and infantry were dead or broken, fleeing, throwing away their shields. Once a man discards his shield, he’s done. The Medes ran, and the Sakai nearest us were — well, mostly they were dead.

  Idomeneus was at my shoulder.

  ‘Sound the rally!’ I panted.

  I could see it — by Ares and by Aphrodite — that’s what I remember best of that whole glorious day. I could see what I needed to do, as if Athena stood at my shoulder, or perhaps Heracles, and whispered it in my ear.

  I pivoted my body to face the beach, twelve stades away, and spear my arms wide. ‘Rally here!’ I called. ‘On me!’

  Idomeneus went into his place, and Gelon and Teucer. In seconds, fifty more men were fitting in, and then a hundred. A long minute, and an arrow slew one of my Plataeans almost at the end of my spear, but by now the whole mass of them was forming up, fifteen hundred men.

  Even the former slaves. Even when the old Plataeans had to show them where to stand.

  The Sakai weren’t stupid. They were shooting at us as fast as they could.

  The far end of the line had Hermogenes and Antigonus. I ran down the front rank and counted off twenty files from the left end, and pulled Antigonus out of the ranks.

  ‘Take them — wheel left, and pursue the beaten men. Stay close enough to keep them running and stay far enough that they don’t turn and kill you. If you reach their camp — stop!’

  Antigonus nodded. ‘Pursue.’ He gave me a tired smile. ‘Have we won?’

  ‘That’s right!’ I slapped his shield. ‘Go!’ If you think I was a good strategos, a just man — I’m no Aristides. I sent my brother-in-law and my closest friend away to a nice safe pursuit. They’d done their part, and Pen would not become a widow this day. I didn’t think that the remnants of the enemy had any fight left in them — nor was I wrong.

  Then back to my own — now formed facing the empty air that hung off the new flank of the Sakai.

  ‘Slow and steady. Keep together.’ I shouted these things. I wanted the Sakai to see us coming. ‘Sing the Paean!’ I yelled, and men took it up — all along the line. There had been no time to sing the Paean or give much of a war cry before our first charge. Now — now we had all the time in the world.

  We sang, and our lines stiffened, bent, righted themselves — it is hard to keep the line on rough ground, and the plains of Marathon in early autumn are like farm fields the world over. We had to flow around clumps of trees, bushes, rocks — it was not like the painting in the stoa, children. There were no straight lines at Marathon.

  But the Sakai saw us and gave more ground. They tried to run and re-form to face us, but the Athenians stayed on them, and they died. Those Sakai were gallant, and they tried, again and again, to make a stand and hold the line.

  As we passed the edge of their formation, we saw why.

  Our own centre was shattered, as if a herd of cattle had passed through. Where Aristides had stood, there were only victorious Persians, Datis’s bodyguard and dead Greeks.

  I cursed under my breath, trying to see. Had we lost? I faltered, and my voice roared ‘Forward!’ without my volition — some god took my throat, I swear. I went forward.

  Then, as we turned the flanks of the Sakai, they folded as fast as a man can lose a boxing match. One moment they were outmatched, but still game, their line backing away but their men fighting hard, and the next they were finished, flying for their lives. They started to run in earnest because we were behind them. I didn’t want to fight the Sakai anyway. I wanted to come to grips with Datis. The day was neither lost nor won, and with everything in the balance, my men were not going to stop and fight men in flight.

  ‘Paean! Again!’ I roared, and they obeyed — although as long as I have been a soldier, I have never heard the Paean sung twice in the same action.

  Now I could see the Greek centre — well back, almost where we had started our charge, and only clumps of men. I could see horsehair crests there, and Persian felt hats. And men looking towards us.

  It all happened in moments, heartbeats of time, too little for me to give an order or change our front. The Persian centre was killing the Antiochae — and then they were running, racing over the stubble of the hay for their camp. The sight of us behind them — however ill-formed our phalanx really was — terrified them the way our charge apparently had not.

  The Sakai had held the flanks for Datis and his picked men to wreck the Athenian centre, and the dead were everywhere, or so it seemed. But by the gods, when they saw us coming behind, threatening to cut them off from the ships, I saw men grab the satrap — hard to miss in his scarlet and gold — and run him to a horse. His picked killers ran at his heels like dogs on a hunt.

  They were too far away for my formed men to reach. They ran through the hole in our lines and down towards the beach. Some of their men ran west, away from the beach, following an officer. More — I didn’t see this — ran west and north — around behind our lines.

  The right wing — our right, Miltiades’ men — had fought as hard as we had and been just as victorious, and even as we came up to the Persians, Miltiades’ men began to form a new phalanx facing us — one of the strangest sights I’ve seen on a battlefield, two victorious phalanxes from the same side facing each other over three stades of ground, with Persians streaming away between us.

  There was no holding my men then. It started with the rear-rankers — the freedmen. They saw their for
tunes running by, hundreds and hundreds of gold-laced Persians running for their camp, and they left their ranks and started in pursuit. I called for them to halt — and more men joined them.

  All my men streamed away after them. I stopped, popped my helmet on the back of my head, took a swig of water and spat it out, and bandaged my knee. By my side, Idomeneus was panting, bent double, staring fixedly at the stubble, and Teucer was humming to himself, scouring the grass for spent shafts.

  When I raised my head, I could see all the way to the ships. There was haze in the distance, but I could see that the barbarians had formed again, well down the field, and there was fighting there, and over in the olive grove west of the swamp, too.

  Most of my oikia — my own men — stood around me. Styges had a cut on his sword arm, Gelon looked as fit as a statue, and a dozen of my new freedmen had chosen to loot the corpses in the area. So I had maybe twenty men, and there were knots of fighting all over the field. Men were leaving the field, too — dribs and drabs of Greeks, wounded or just too tired too continue. Not everyone lived the life of the palaestra and the gymnasium. And there was no real discipline — man who felt he’d done enough could just turn and walk away.

  But I was the polemarch of Plataea, and there was still fighting. The Greeks around me were saying ‘Nike, Nike.’

  Maybe. But to me, the sound from the north was an ominous one. It suggested that the battle wasn’t over yet.

  I tested my wounded leg, and it was solid enough. Pain is pain. Fatigue is fatigue.

  ‘Zeus Soter,’ one of the new men said. He had a wound on his hand with blood flowing out of it, despite the rag he’d put on it. ‘I feel like shit!’ he said. ‘I need to sit.’

  I grabbed his shoulder. ‘You feel bad?’ I asked. ‘Think how they feel!’ I pointed to the row of dead Sakai, naked now and their white bodies lying in a row where our rear-rankers had stripped them.

  Idomeneus barked his battle laugh.

  ‘More fighting,’ he said.

  We all drank our canteens dry, and then Greeks came up from the wreck of the Athenian centre — some ashamed, and others proud. Many had run, and others fought on until the Persians were forced back — and you can guess which group included Aristides.

  ‘By the gods, Plataean, I think we have won!’ he shouted as he ran up. He had the cheekplates of his helmet cocked back to give him a better view. There was blood flowing down his leg, and Idomeneus and I insisted he be bandaged before we went forward again. Aristides brought a hundred men with him — they were weary, but they wanted to be in at the kill.

  We moved down to the beach. The fighting seemed heaviest by the ships, and we could see black hulls launching all along the bay. It seemed too good to be true, but one after another, ships pushed their sterns off the sand and their oars came out. Some stayed in close, rescuing men from the water.

  Others simply fled.

  That was when we knew we’d won.

  The barbarians had formed a line by the ships — whether by intention or merely in desperation — and Miltiades’ men were fighting there. Most of my men and many of Miltiades’ went up into the camp and started to loot.

  The fighting by the ships was deadly. Aeschylus’s brother fell there, and Callimachus, the polemarch of Athens. Cimon, Miltiades’ eldest son, took a wound there, and Agios was wounded when he leaped aboard an enemy ship and started to clear it.

  We were walking — I can hardly call it a march — along the beach, passing over the wreckage of the Persians — corpses of men and horses as thick as seaweed after a storm, dead Medes cut down by Miltiades’ men. And as clear as an actor on the stage of the Agora, I heard Agios calling. Then I saw him, on the stern of an enemy ship half a stade away.

  I wasn’t going to let him die while I had breath in my body. I started to run.

  At my back, all my oikia followed me.

  Aristides and Miltiades heard him, too.

  And like a flood, the best spears of the army converged on the stern of that ship. We weren’t far — a hundred paces.

  How long does it take to cut your way through a hundred paces of panicked Medes and desperate Persians?

  Too long.

  I went through the remnants of the Medes with my trusted men at my shoulders, but then we hit the Persians, and we slowed. There were a dozen of them — not men I knew, thank the gods, but the same sort of men as Cyrus and his friends, and they fought like demons, and we slowed.

  Agios probably died then, while I was face to face with an armoured Persian. The Persian fought well. We must have exchanged four or five cuts before my spear ripped his forearm and my next thrust sent his shade down to Hades. As I stepped past him, the Persians backed away, grabbing at a man with a hennaed beard. His helmet was gold and set with lapis, and I’d seen him before.

  Datis.

  I thrust at him and saw my spear drive home under the skirts of his armour, and then his men were all around him. I was an arm’s length from the ship where Agios lay dying, pierced fifty times, shot with arrows and continuing to call the battle cry of Athens, so that the whole army heard him, and men pressed forward, possessed with the rage of Ares. The barbarians could have rallied — they certainly should never have lost a ship. But we cut into them the way the sickle cuts into the weeds at the edge of a garden.

  Agios’s shouts grew weaker, and my blows fell faster, and I got a Mede against the stern of the ship and punched my spear at him so hard that my spearhead stuck in the tar-coated wood. Then I dropped my shield and jumped. As I got my leg over the thwart a Sakai archer cut at me. His short knife caught in my chlamys and turned against my scale armour. With that axe in my right hand I cut into him, and he fell away, and I got my feet under me.

  I could see the faces of the panicked oarsmen — and Agios, collapsed across the helm. A spearman stood over him, having just stabbed him, and my axe licked out and cut the back of his knee so that his leg gave way and he fell, spraying blood — but I hit him again, and again, and again, until the side of his helmet caved in.

  Now the blows of five men fell on my armour, and I had no shield. I took a wound in the thigh — just a pin-prick — but enough to snap me out of the blood rage. Suddenly Aristides was beside me — using his spear two-handed — and then Miltiades came over the other gunwale, then Styges, Gelon, Sophanes, Bellerophon, Teucer, Aeschylus, and we stormed that ship, the living wrath of Athena.

  Six more ships were taken and cleared before they could get to sea. The Athenians and the Plataeans were no longer an army — nor were the barbarians. They were a fleeing mob, and we were in the red rage of Nike and Ares, when men die because they care about nothing but more blood. Our fire burned hot, and many were consumed. Indeed, I’ve heard it said that more Athenians died by the ships than when the centre broke — but I’ve heard a great many things said by Athenians about the battle, and a few of them are true, but most are pig shit. We lost a lot of men, and so did Athens, although Cimon will tell you otherwise.

  We burned like a bonfire in a high wind, and then their last ship was away, and we burned to ash. We were spent.

  We came to a stop, so that a hush fell over the field. I suppose that wounded men screamed, and gulls screeched, and horses trumpeted their pain, but I remember none of that. What I remember is the hush, as if the gods had decided that all of us deserved a rest.

  I leaned on the haft of my looted axe, and breathed. I don’t know how long I was out of it — but ask any man who’s been in the battle haze, and he’ll tell you that when you are done, you don’t cheer. You just stop. When I came back to myself, I was sitting on the blood-soaked planks of the marine box. My thigh wound was open and bleeding again, and Miltiades was beside me. We’d cut our way from the stern, by Agios’s corpse, to the bow. I was covered in blood — sticky, stinking blood.

  ‘I think we’ve won,’ Miltiades said. He didn’t sound proud, or arrogant, or in any way like the hero of the hour. He sounded awestruck.

  We all were, childr
en. I don’t think that we really believed we could win — or perhaps the issue was so much in doubt that we couldn’t separate what we dreaded from what we hoped for.

  But as we watched the last shreds of the Persian cavalry swimming their horses out, and the ships closing round them to save them, we knew that these Persians were not coming back. Especially when they abandoned their horses in the water.

  I remember then, watching the ships creep past us from the north. Many had lost oarsmen as well as hoplites, and they didn’t move fast. Behind me, the victorious Athenians had started to sing — some hymn to Athena I didn’t know.

  Out across the water, a ship’s length away or less, I saw the scorpion shield standing on the stern of a light trireme. The enemy ship was going past us, picking men out of the water, bold as brass.

  Teucer had an arrow, and he drew it to his chin, but I put my axe head in front of his arrowhead just when he went to loose, and he cursed.

  Archilogos saw it all. His mouth formed an O and his head tracked me as my eyes must have followed him. He raised his shield.

  ‘Tell Briseis I send my greetings!’ I called across the water.

  His men rowed him away and he didn’t reply.

  It was harder to leap down from that hull than it had been to climb aboard — my muscles were seizing, and I remember Aeschylus catching me as I stumbled. We were much of an age, he and I. He was a good man, despite his jealousy of Phrynichus’s success.

  Idomeneus had my shield. ‘You alive, boss?’ he asked. ‘You’ve got a cut.’

  So we bandaged my thigh again and then we looked after the dozen cuts he had — one in his bicep so deep I couldn’t see how he could use his sword arm. Aeschylus helped. I didn’t realize then that he was standing a few paces from the corpse of his brother.

  Miltiades came up to me.

  ‘I need the best men,’ he said quietly. ‘We’re not done.’

  Just north of the plain was an extensive stand of olive trees surrounded by a stone boundary wall. The Persians who had run north and west when their line gave way ran all the way around our army, but were cut off from the beach by the ruin of their camp. Being true Persians, they refused to surrender. They went into the walled olive grove and determined to die like men.