Marathon: Freedom or Death lw-2

by Christian Cameron

  Half of our army must already have started back across the fields to our camp by the time Miltiades became aware of what was happening, and good men had died — some of them Plataeans — trying to storm the olive grove. The rumour spread that Datis was there, and the Persian command staff.

  I gathered my oikia, and Miltiades gathered his, and Aristides his best men from the wreck of the centre, and we walked north along the beach and then through the Persian camp. We passed beautiful carpets and bronze urns and I saw silk and finely woven wool — but we had no time to loot. I did pause to pick up a silver-studded sword — that one, honey bee. Look at that steel. Too light for me, but so well crafted — Hephaestus’s blessing on the hand that made the blade — that I would use it in preference to a better-hefted blade.

  I found Hermogenes at the edge of the camp, with Antigonus, who had a wound in the foot. Peneleos and Diocles were there, although other men who should have been with them — like Epictetus — were missing.

  ‘Those are some tough bastards,’ Hermogenes said. He had four arrows in his shield. He looked sheepish. ‘The Athenians tried to storm them and got in trouble — we just went in to help them out.’ He looked as if he would cry. ‘I lost a lot of the boys,’ he said quietly.

  ‘They beat us,’ Antigonus said.

  Miltiades took a deep breath. ‘They’re desperate men,’ he said.

  ‘Surround the grove and get them tomorrow,’ Themistocles suggested. He had a dozen hoplites with him, and they looked as tired as the rest of us. ‘Or burn it.’

  ‘They’ll break out in the dark,’ Aeschylus said. His voice was thick. He knew by then that his brother was dead, and he wanted revenge. ‘They’ll break out, and every cottage they burn, every petty farmer they kill will be on our heads.’

  It was true. Tired men have no discipline, and the Athenians were tired. Indeed, every man looked twenty years older. Miltiades looked sixty. Aristides looked — well, like an old man, and Hermogenes looked like a corpse. Ever been exhausted, children? No — you are soft. We were hard like old oaks, but there was little flame left in us. I remember how I walked, forcing each step, because I hurt and because my knees were shaking slightly. My sword wrist burned.

  Miltiades looked around. The sun was setting — where had the day gone? — and we had perhaps two hundred men of all the army standing there at the north edge of the enemy camp. Others were looting. But most were sitting on the ground, or on their aspides — some singing, some tending wounds, but most simply staring at the ground. That’s how it was — how it always is. When you are done, you are done.

  Miltiades watched the ships behind us. ‘Where are they going?’ he asked suddenly.

  The barbarian fleet was forming up out in the bay. And starting not east, towards Naxos or Lemnos or an island safely owned by the Great King, but south — towards Athens.

  ‘They’re making a stab for the city,’ Cleitus said softly. I hadn’t seen him since the fighting started, and there he was, covered in dirt as if he’d rolled in the fields. Perhaps he had. I had. His right arm was caked in crusted blood to the elbow, his spearhead dripped blood, and flies buzzed thickly around his head.

  Miltiades took a deep breath. He was the eldest of us, over forty, in fact, and his face beneath the cheekplates of his Attic helmet was grey with fatigue, and below his eyes he had black lines and pouches like a rich man’s wallet. But as I say, none of us looked much better apart from Sophanes, who looked as fresh as an athlete in a morning race, and Bellerophon, who was grinning.

  ‘We have to clear the olive grove as quickly as we can,’ Miltiades said. ‘We can’t leave them behind us — we’ll have to march for Athens.’

  There was a groan. I think we all groaned at the thought of walking a hundred stades to Athens.

  Miltiades stood straighter. ‘We are not done,’ he said. ‘If the old men and boys we left behind surrender the city to their fleet — and there are people in the town who might do it — then all this would be for nothing.’ He sighed.

  Phidippides, the Athenian herald, pushed forward. ‘Give me leave, lord,’ he said, ‘and I’ll run to Athens and tell them of the battle.’

  Miltiades nodded, his face full of respect. ‘Go! And the gods run with you.’

  Phidippides was not a rich man, and had only his leather cuirass, a helmet and his aspis. He dropped the aspis and helmet on the ground and eager hands helped him out of his cuirass. He stripped his chiton off and put his sword belt on his naked shoulder.

  Someone handed him a chlamys, and he gave us a grin. ‘Better than mine in camp!’ he said. ‘I’ll be there before the sun sets, friends.’

  He’d fought the whole day, but he ran off the field, heading south, his legs pumping hard — not a sprint, but a steady pace that would eat the stades.

  Miltiades turned to me — or perhaps to Aristides. ‘I have to get the army ready to march,’ he said. ‘I need one of you to lead the assault on the grove.’

  I’ll give Miltiades this much — he sounded genuinely regretful.

  ‘I’ll do it,’ I said.

  ‘Then we do it together,’ Aristides said. He looked at his men — the front-rankers of his tribe. ‘We need to do this,’ he said quietly. ‘We broke. We must find our honour in the grove.’

  Miltiades nodded curtly. ‘Go with the gods. Get it done and follow me.’ He took his hyperetes and began to walk across the fields. The boy at his side blew his trumpet, and all across the field, Athenians and Plataeans looked up from their fatigue, summoned back to the phalanx.

  Many of my Plataeans were right there — perhaps a hundred men. They were a mix of front- and rear-rankers, the best and the worst, and the Athenians were in the same state, although there were more of them, and they had more armour and better weapons.

  Mind you, the Plataeans were working hard to remedy that, stripping the Persians at our feet.

  ‘They can’t have many arrows left,’ I said.

  ‘Why not?’ Cleitus asked.

  ‘They’d be shooting us,’ Teucer answered.

  Aristides smiled a little sheepishly. Then he frowned. ‘You have a plan, Plataean?’

  I shrugged, and the weight of my scale corslet seemed like the weight of the world. Even Cleitus — bloody Cleitus, who I hated — looked at me, waiting.

  The truth is, I didn’t have enough energy to hate Cleitus. He was one more spear — and a strong spear, too. So I raised my eyes and looked at the grove. The precinct wall was about half a man tall, of loose stones, but well built, and beyond the wall the grove climbed a low hill — completely inside the wall, of course. It was a virtually impregnable position.

  ‘Seems to me they’re as tired as we are — and their side lost. Nothing for them now but death or slavery.’ I was buying time, waiting for Athena or Heracles to put something in my head besides the black despair that comes after a long fight.

  I remember I walked a little apart, not really to think, but because the weight of their expectations was greater than the weight of my scale thorax and my aspis combined, and I wanted to be free of it for a moment.

  And it was as if a goddess came and whispered in my ear, except that I still fancy it was Aphrodite, whose hymn had been on my lips when I fell asleep. Because I turned my head, and there it was.

  I put my helmet back on my head and my shield on my arm. I was only a few steps from the others. ‘I see a way to distract them and save some fighting. I think you Athenians should go for them — right over the wall, at the low point by the gate. The rest of us — you see the little dip in the ground there?’ I nodded my head. ‘Don’t point. If fifty of us go there, up that little gully, I doubt they’ll see us coming. The rest of you form up twenty shields wide and ten deep. When we hit the grove, well, you come at the gate, and it’s every man for himself.’

  Aristides nodded. ‘If they see you coming, you’ll be shot to pieces,’ he said.

  ‘Then we’d best hope they’re low on arrows,’ I said. ‘No time for anyth
ing fancy.’

  Someone shouted, ‘Can we fire the grove?’

  ‘No time,’ I said. In truth, it was the best solution.

  Let me tell you something, young man. I believe in the gods. One of them had just shown me the gully. And that olive grove was sacred to Artemis. And the gods had stood by me all day. To me, this was the test. It is always the test of battle. How good are you when you are wounded and tired? That’s when you find out who is truly a hero, my children. Anyone can stand their ground with a full belly and clean muscles. But at the end of day, when the rim of the sun touches the hills and you haven’t had water for hours and flies are laying eggs in your wounds?

  Think on it. Because hundreds of us were measured, and by Heracles, we were worthy of our fathers.

  ‘You man enough for this, Plataean?’ Cleitus asked, but his voice was merely chiding — almost friendly.

  ‘Fuck off,’ I said, equally friendly.

  ‘Let’s get to it,’ Aeschylus said. He put the edge of his aspis between Cleitus and me. ‘This isn’t about you, Cleitus.’

  I remember that I smiled. ‘Cleitus,’ I said softly, and he met my eye. ‘Today is for the Medes,’ I said. I offered my hand.

  He took it and clasped it hard.

  Aeschylus nodded. ‘I ask to be the first into the grove,’ he said. ‘For my brother.’

  Athenians and aristocrats. Not a scrap of sense.

  So the Athenians formed a deep block the width of the low wall. Behind the screen they provided, I took my Plataeans — household first — in a pair of long files and ran off to the south, around the edge of the low hill. I pushed my legs to do their duty. I think ‘run’ may be a poor description of the shambling jog we managed — but we did it.

  We ran around the edge of the hill and there was the entry to the gully, as I’d expected. That gully wasn’t as deep as a man is tall — but it was shaped oddly, with a small bend just before the west wall of the grove, and I trusted my guess and led my men forward — still in a file.

  The Persians had formed a line — not, to be honest, a very thick line — facing Aristides’ small phalanx. We could see them, and by a miracle, they still hadn’t seen us. It was, well, miraculous. But on the battlefield, men die because they see what they expect to see.

  Then Aristides and Aeschylus led their men forward. They were so tired that they didn’t cheer or sing the Paean, but simply trotted forward, and all the Persians shot into them.

  The clatter of the arrows on their shields and the solid impacts drowned the sound of our movement.

  ‘Form your front!’ I called softly, but my men needed no order.

  The men behind me started to sprint forward. I didn’t slow. The neatness of our line was immaterial. And by the gods, Aphrodite was there, or some other goddess, lifting us to one more fight, raising us above ourselves. Two or three times in my life I’ve felt this, and it is. . beyond the human. And at Marathon, every one of us at the grove felt it.

  I was at the edge of the gully, and it sloped steeply up, head height, to the base of the stone wall. The Persians had assumed this part was too tricky for us to storm.

  I was first. I ran up the gully lip — and at the top a Persian shot me.

  His arrow smacked into my aspis at point-blank range, and then I was past him, over the wall in a single leap, and a flood of Plataeans poured in behind me. I have no idea who killed that man, or, to be honest, how I got over the wall — but we were in, past the wall, among the trees.

  I crashed into the end of the Persian line — most of them never saw us coming, so focused were they on Aristides and his men to their front.

  They died hard.

  When they stood, we slew them, and when they ran — some in panic, more just to find a better place to die — we chased them, tree to tree. Those with arrows shot us, and those without protected the archers. Some had spears and a few had aspides they’d picked up from our dead, and many had axes, and they fought like heroes.

  No man who survived the fight in the olive grove ever forgot it.

  Desperate, cornered men are no longer human. They are animals, and they will grasp the sword in their guts and hold on to it if it will help a mate kill you.

  The fight eventually filled the whole grove, and some of them must have climbed the trees — certainly the arrow that killed Teucer came from above, straight down into the top of his shoulder by his neck. And Alcaeus of Miletus, who had come all this way to die for Athens, went down fighting, his aspis against two axemen, and I was just too far away to save him.

  A Persian broke my spear, dying on it, and another clambered over his body and his short sword rang off my scales, but didn’t go through or I’d have died there myself. I put my arms around him and threw him to the ground, rolled on top of him to crush him, got my hands on his throat and choked the life out of him. That’s the last moment in the battle I remember — I must have got back on my feet but I don’t remember how, and then I was back to back with Idomeneus, but the fighting was over.

  The fighting was over.

  All the Persians were dead.

  Idomeneus sank to the ground. ‘I’m done,’ he said. I had never heard those words from him, and never did again.

  That was Marathon.

  Equally, to be honest, I remember nothing of the march over the mountains to Athens, in the dark, save that there was a storm brewing out over the ocean and the breeze of that storm blew over us like the touch of a woman’s cool hand when you are sick.

  I must have given some orders, because there were nigh-on eight hundred Plataeans when we came down the hills above Athens to the sanctuary of Heracles. And as each contingent came up, Miltiades met them in person. That part I remember. He was still in full armour, and he glowed — perhaps, that night, he was divine. Certainly, it was his will that got us safely over the mountains and back to the plains of Attica. The Plataeans were the last to leave Marathon apart from Aristides’ tribe, who stayed to guard the loot, and the last to arrive at the shrine of Heracles, and as we came in — not marching, but shuffling along in a state of exhaustion — the sun began to rise over the sea, and the first glow caught the temples on the Acropolis in the distance.

  ‘We’ve made it, friends,’ Miltiades said to each contingent.

  Men littered the ground — shields were dropped like olives in an autumn wind, as if our army had been beaten rather than victorious.

  My men were no different. Without a word, men fell to the ground. Later, Hermogenes told me that he fell asleep before he got his aspis off his arm.

  I didn’t. Like Miltiades, I was too tired to sleep, and I stood with him as the sun rose, revealing the Persian fleet still well off to the east.

  ‘Even if they came now,’ he said, ‘Phidippides made it. See the beacon on the Acropolis?’

  I could see a smudge of smoke in the dawn light. I nodded heavily.

  ‘By Athena,’ Miltiades said. He stood as straight as a spear-shaft, despite his fatigue. He laughed, and looked out into the morning. ‘We won.’

  ‘You should rest,’ I said.

  Miltiades laughed again. He slapped my back, grinned ear to ear, and for a moment, he was not ancient and used up — he was the Pirate King I had known as a boy. ‘I won’t waste this moment in the arms of sleep, Arimnestos,’ he said. He embraced me.

  I remember grinning, because few things were ever as precious to me as the love of Miltiades, despite the bastard’s way with money, power and fame. ‘Sleep would not be a waste,’ I said.

  He shook his head. ‘Arimnestos — right now, this moment, I am with the gods.’ He said it plain — no rhetoric. And he wasn’t talking to a thousand men, feeding on their adulation. I honestly think every man in our army was asleep but us.

  No — he was telling the plain truth to one man, and that man was me.

  I remember that I didn’t understand. I do now. But I was too young, and for all my scars and the blood on my sword arm, too inexperienced.

  He laughed
again, and it was a fell sound. ‘I have beaten the Persians at the gates of my city. I have won a victory — such a victory.’ He shrugged. ‘Since Troy. .’ he said, and burst into tears.

  We stood together. I cried too, thugater. I cried, and the sun rose on the Persian fleet, turning away in defeat. Many men were dead, and many more would die. But we had beaten the Great King’s army, and the world would never be the same again. Truly, in that hour, we were with the gods.

  Epilogue

  A day later, the Spartans marched in on the road from Corinth. Their armour was magnificent, and their scarlet cloaks billowed in the west wind, and the head of their column was just in time to see the last of the barbarian fleet as it turned away from the channel by Salamis and started back for Naxos.

  They marched over the mountains to Marathon and saw the barbarian dead, and then they marched back to Athens to shower us with praise. I think most of the bastards were jealous.

  Many men died at Marathon — my friends, and men who had followed me. And worse awaited me at home, although I didn’t know it.

  As soon as our lightly wounded could walk, I took our men back over the mountains to Plataea. We still feared that Thebes might move against us. Indeed, Athens sent us a thousand hoplites to accompany us home, to show Thebes that they had backed the wrong horse. Athens could not do enough for us — to this day, thugater, the priestess of Athena blesses Plataea every morning in her first prayer — and within the year, we were made citizens of Athens, with the same citizen rights as Aristides and Miltiades, so that all those freed slaves were able, if they wished, to go back to Athens as free men.

  We came down the long flank of Cithaeron, three thousand men, new citizens and old, and the valley of the Asopus was laid out before us, the fields like the finest tapestry a woman could weave in soft colours of gold and pale green.