If we hadn’t had Aristides and the Athenians with us, I think
Miltiades would have deserted the rebelion 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 al 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 wel.
I stopped counting at one hundred and eighty black-huled
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 aliance was the work of
gods, not men. Never had so many quarreling Greeks come
gods, not men. Never had so many quarreling Greeks come
together. They filed 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 al 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 il-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.
Lesbos, Chios and Samos – were the most reluctant to work.
I’l 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 al that I served Miltiades, and I attended the fleet
council when I had time – which was al the time.
While Dionysius focused on seamanship, Miltiades and old
Pelagius of Chios wanted inteligence. Miltiades had spies in
Sardis but no way to contact them, and what we al needed to
know was the progress of the Persian fleet – where were they?
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 al 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 wil 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 wals of Miletus, and we al 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 c
ity. I
told them to return for me in three days, and I put on my leather
bag, checked the hang of my sword and puled 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.
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 rebelion.
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 ful 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
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
aley, 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 smal
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 kiled me.
He knew me immediately. His performance was admirable –
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 finaly, as
naturaly 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 al 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 al 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. Al the cities of Ionia have united, and the
Persians wil never find a fleet to stand against us. No later than
next spring, you’l see us sail up the river, and Ephesus wil 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 smal 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 ful, 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
caled Doru – the Spear of the Helenes. I have heard this name.’
He narrowed his eyes. ‘And you think you have learned
something about kiling men?’
I shrugged. ‘Nothing different from what you endeavoured to
tel 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
‘I often read to her,’ he said. ‘Nor should I have excepted
her when I spoke of the bright sparks of inteligence 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.
‘Come,’ he said. ‘We wil go to her gate.’
In the near dark, Ephesus was inhabited mostly by slaves and
men looking for prostitutes. No one paid us any attention as we
walked together.
I folowed him up to the gate of the h
ouse of my youth. This
time, my heart slammed against my chest and I was unable to
think, much less speak.
My master took me by the hand and led me to the gate as if I
was a young student. I didn’t know the slave on duty there, but
he bowed deeply to my master and led him into the courtyard,
where she lay on a long couch. A younger woman fanned her,
and the smel of mint and jasmine filed the garden, and my head.
Suddenly, it was as if no time had passed. My eyes met hers,
and I remember giving a twitch, as did she, I think – such was
the power of our attraction in those days.
She never spared the greatest philosopher of the age a
glance.
‘You came,’ she said, after time had passed.
I trembled. ‘You caled to me,’ I said. I was surprised at how
calm my voice was.
‘You didn’t hurry,’ she said.
‘We are no longer young lovers, playing at the Iliad,’ I said.
‘We are no longer young lovers, playing at the Iliad,’ I said.
‘We never were,’ she returned, and her smile widened by
some smal fraction of one of Pythagoras’s figures. ‘We never
played.’
I nodded. ‘Why have you summoned me, Helen?’ I asked.
She shrugged, and her voice changed, and she tossed her
hair, like any other woman. ‘Boredom, I suppose,’ she said
lightly. ‘My husband needs captains. It is time you became a
great man.’
I was not eighteen. She filed me, just lying on a couch. I
could barely breathe. And yet, I was not eighteen. I took a deep
breath, bit back my sharp response, turned on my heel and
walked away.
You were never promised a happy story, my young friends.
I’m afraid that we are coming to the part where you might prefer
to stay home.
I headed out of the gate and back to my master’s house. I
shivered as if from cold, I was so angry – and so afraid. As I
stood in my master’s tiny courtyard, I raised my face to the stars.
‘What have I done?’ I asked.
They didn’t respond.
My head was ful of thoughts, like a bag of wool stuffed to
the very brim – that I should go back and beg forgiveness, that I
should send a note, throw rocks at her window . . . kil her.
Yes, that thought came to me, too. That I should kil her. And
be free.
Instead, without much conscious thought, I packed up my
Instead, without much conscious thought, I packed up my
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