defeated.
He nodded. ‘We was told to wait until we saw fires at
He nodded. ‘We was told to wait until we saw fires at
Chalcis,’ he said. ‘Runner came in yesterday morning.’
Teucer nodded. ‘See?’ he asked.
I did see. If there was smoke rising over Chalcis – why then,
the Persians must be in Euboea.
If the Persians were in Euboea, then the attack on Attica was
close – two or three weeks away, at most.
If the Persians were about to attack Attica, then Athens
would be paralysed, and it was safe for Simon to attack Plataea.
Secrets inside secrets, like the boxes which nest inside other
boxes, smaler and smaler, until there’s a tiny nut or a silver bel
in the centre of seven or eight of them. Someone had plotted this
very carefuly – as I had suspected.
‘Want to be free?’ I said.
‘You bet,’ he said.
‘Hmm. We’l see. That corpse is my mother. That one is a
man who saved my life fighting. That’s my best friend’s father.
Those women? My slaves.’ I looked at him, and he grew pale.
‘I—’ he sputtered.
‘Do as you’re told,’ I said. ‘I know you’re a hoplite.
Somewhere, you are probably a gentleman.’ I looked around.
‘Right now, you’re a slave, and if you fuck up, someone wil kil
you. Now – truth now – did you rape?’
He shook his head. ‘No,’ he said. And as I said – it was
obvious he had been a gentleman. I believed him.
‘Good. Then go and start helping.’
I sent Styges and one of my forge boys running for Myron, and I
asked him to order the muster of the whole phalanx on my say-
so.
Myron arrived on a mule, without ordering the muster.
‘Why?’ he asked, as soon as he had his leg over the beast’s
back. ‘You slaughtered Thebans on their own ground. We’re in
for it now.’
I shook my head. ‘Bold front, archon. I don’t think that we
did wrong – ask any man here, whose wife is lying with her
throat slit. That’s my mother over there.’
He spat. ‘Fucking Thebans. Very wel. What do you suggest,
polemarch?’
I had the advantage that al the epilektoi were together, so
that my officers – that is, my real officers – were there to advise
me.
We’d had two hours to plan, and we’d hammered it out
while we waited for Myron and cleared the rubble of the house.
A hundred men – even a hundred tired men – can accomplish a
great deal in a short time. My burned barn was now a dark
smudge on the ground and my ruined house was a pile of fire-
blackened stone out beyond the house wal. The burned beams
had been stacked and three pyres of scrap wood from al the
surrounding farms built on the hiltop. Al that in a few hours.
By now I was much calmer. I’d had time to breathe, and no
one let me do any work – nor did Idomeneus do any, as he was
a lord now and a priest. Alcaeus was the same, so the three of
us watched other men lift stones while we debated the campaign.
us watched other men lift stones while we debated the campaign.
And when Myron asked, we were ready.
‘How are the towers?’ I asked.
‘The west tower is done, and the east wil be complete
tomorrow or the next day, if the wind continues to blow dry.’ He
shrugged. ‘They’l be done before Thebes can march.’
That confirmed what we’d hoped. ‘Then this is our plan,’ I
said. ‘First, we free al the slaves who built the towers.’
‘Zeus Soter!’ the archon said. ‘That’s the whole year’s
profits gone.’
I nodded. ‘Not just for you, lord. But listen. We lost ten men
yesterday – we’l lose ten times that in the next month, and that is
if we win. We need those men as citizens. Yes?’
He shook his head. ‘Perhaps later—’
I disagreed. ‘We need them now. Because we want to put
them in the armour of the dead hired men, instal Lysius as their
officer and leave them with another fifty picked men to guard the
wals. In fact, we don’t want them to sit within the wals. We
want them to march down to the ford and camp, with light-
armed men prowling around. If you dare—’ I looked around,
‘I’d send Teucer tonight to burn some barns in Thebes.’
Myron shook his head. ‘You are talking about kicking a
hornets’ nest,’ he said.
Idomeneus raised a long, plucked eyebrow. ‘Ever faced
down a bul in a meadow, archon?’ he asked.
Myron nodded slowly. ‘I have, too. You think that as long as
we look tough, they’l back down.’
Alcaeus laughed. ‘Not realy, lord. The truth is, they have
Alcaeus laughed. ‘Not realy, lord. The truth is, they have
twelve thousand hoplites and we do not. But a show of
aggression – especialy after the tanning we gave those hired men
– might slow them up for a week or two.’ He shrugged. ‘Lysius
can always pul inside the wals later, when he sees the dust
cloud coming.’
Myron gave a grim smile. ‘Al this planning suggests that you
won’t be here – with the phalanx.’
‘That’s right,’ I said. ‘According to our prisoners, Euboea
was burning yesterday. Chalcis is being served up to the
Persians. By the time we march, Euboea wil have falen.’
Alcaeus nodded. ‘And Datis has the heart of the sailing
season at his back,’ he said. ‘He’l move straight on to Athens.’
‘And Athens wil fal without my phalanx?’ Myron asked
softly.
I laughed. ‘A thousand hoplites?’ I made a face. ‘Athens can
find twelve thousand, and perhaps fifteen. They don’t need the
weight of our spears.’ Secretly, I suspected that they did need
the weight of our spears. ‘But Athens has factions, Myron –
factions the like of which you can’t imagine. If we appear – to
honour our agreements, and without being asked – we wil
strengthen Miltiades’ hand. Enormously.’
He looked at me, and I looked at him.
‘Archon,’ I said, ‘please. If Athens fals, or Medizes, Plataea
is doomed. Thebes wil eat us the way a gul eats a snail. Our
only hope of preservation is to act – aggressively – for Athens.’
Myron looked out from our hiltop. Men were stil carrying
brush for the pyres to burn the bodies, and below, other men –
brush for the pyres to burn the bodies, and below, other men –
my neighbours – were breaking up the biggest chunks of rubble
with iron tools.
‘When I was a much younger man,’ he said, after a while, ‘I
stood in your forge yard with your father and a few other men,
and we agreed to make an aliance with Athens to preserve our
city from the yoke of Thebes.’ He turned, and met my eye. ‘I
think the decision for today was made that day. I was wrong to
slow the muster. I wil see to it, and you wil take my citizens
over the mountain and do what you can.’ He stood straight, as if
ten years had falen from his shoulders. ‘May Zeus and Are
s and
Grey-Eyed Athena stand by you, for if you lose the phalanx,
even in victory, why then our city wil fal.’
When he went back to his mule, Alcaeus looked at me.
‘Plataea is lucky to have so many great men in so smal a city.
Would that Miletus had done as wel.’
‘We may yet fail,’ I said.
He shrugged. ‘Of course. But not for the lack of trying.’
‘Let’s go and kil some Medes,’ Idomeneus said, and he
grinned.
We burned Mater, Bion and Cleon on the hiltop that afternoon,
with wine and sacrifices and a priestess of Hera from the temple.
And when they were ash, and the fires were great smoking
columns not unlike the pilars of smoke that the raiders had left
behind, the priestess came to me and proposed that I pay for a
statue of Mater in the temple.
‘She was a great woman,’ the priestess said. She was a
matron with iron at her temples and a vast reserve of dignity.
‘Young women need examples of how to live – and die.’
I al but spat at her. ‘She was drunk every day of her wedded
life,’ I said.
The priestess stepped back. ‘Speak no il of the dead!’ she
commanded. ‘Is that the way you wil speak of her? Or as the
hero who fel defending your home?’
I gave her the money. There’s a new statue that bears no
resemblance to her – the Persians broke the one a local man
made, smashing it to gravel with hammers. But in Plataea, the
new temple honours Mater as an avatar of Hera. Take from that
what you wil.
While I mourned, the phalanx mustered.
A thousand men may not sound like many, but every man
needs a slave and a donkey or a mule to carry his kit, to cook
for him and keep him in fighting trim. And a thousand mules with
two thousand men is a long column to lead over mountain tracks.
It takes time for men to put their houses in order, and time to
gather enough food for thirty days, and time for the slave to kiss
his own wife. Time to make sure you have your second-best
cloak as wel as your war cloak, time to make sure that someone
packed you some garlic sausage and some fresh onions from the
garden.
My packing was done – my mule was stil picketed high
above Eleutherai, and my friends had rescued my kit from where
I left it by Asopus. My good Persian shirt of scale was on
I left it by Asopus. My good Persian shirt of scale was on
Lysius’s back, and my old helmet with the raven crest was on his
head to puzzle the Thebans – and he did it no dishonour.
Euphoria fussed about, finding me oil with lavender in it, and
retrieving – as if by a miracle – my father’s heavy walking stick
from the colapsed celar of the house, charred a little but stil
strong as iron. And when she had seen me cared for, she took
me by the hand and led me to our spring, up by the vineyard,
and then she bathed with me, in the deep hole by the spring.
There were men al about us on the hil, but none came near, and
the olive grove hid us. There’s no modesty when you bathe in an
open sink of rock, and pregnancy or none, we made love. And
then we washed again, and she put on the robe Mater had saved
– a beautiful thing of red-purple, with gold embroidery. And I
helped her put up her hair in a net of linen.
In the dooryard where Mater had falen, she poured the
libations on my shield and wiped it with a new linen towel, and
then she did the same to my sword and my spear, and finaly,
defying convention, to my helmet.
I longed to crush her to me, but I did not. We were Greeks,
not barbarians. Our women send us to war with dry eyes, and
we left as if going to the fields and not to face death.
There was stil smoke rising to the heavens from the funeral pyres
when we marched. As we climbed the hils towards Cithaeron,
we were joined by the main body from the agora of the city
itself. In the distance, as we climbed, we could see smoke rising
over Theban territory, and there were wolfish smiles as we went.
over Theban territory, and there were wolfish smiles as we went.
The epilektoi marched first, up the same road they’d marched
just ten days before on their way to the late-summer hunt.
They weren’t boys any more. When they had torn into the
hired men, they took losses – ten kiled outright, another dozen
dying of wounds. In a community as smal as ours, the loss of
twenty young men was a knife wound in the gut. Everyone was
the friend, the lover, the wife, the sister or brother of one of the
dead.
But they had kiled, and won, and that changed them most of
al. When we walked up the trails to the tomb of the hero, every
man in my front rank knew that he was worthy of the blood of
his fathers. He knew that he had been proven in fire, and like
bronze, hardened by the working.
I could make you an argument that the hired men did us a
favour by attacking us, but I’d be ful of shit. There is no ‘good
war’.
We stopped at the shrine, as Plataeans have since the Trojan
War, and we poured libations. Some men shouted for me to
sacrifice my new slave on the tomb. His name was Gelon, and he
was a Greek from Sicily. He heard them cal for his blood and he
stood there with my shield on his shoulder, watching me.
I looked at Idomeneus. It was his choice, realy. He shook
his head.
‘No,’ he said. ‘We have shed enough blood, and the hero
craves no more.’
He sacrificed a ram we’d brought for the purpose, looked at
its entrails and shook his head.
its entrails and shook his head.
‘This isn’t going to be good,’ he said.
I spat. ‘I didn’t need entrails to tel me that,’ I said.
We slept in our cloaks, and in the morning, after Teucer and
the light-armed men rejoined from their raid into Thebes, we
marched away over the mountains.
16
It was hot on the plains of Boeotia, and cold in the passes above
Cithaeron. But when we came down off the passes, the
sweltering sea-heat nearly choked us, and the humidity was such
that a man could sweat through his chiton before he had it over
his head.
I intended to keep to the high roads as long as possible. I
didn’t want to give away my march. This sounds odd, in light of
what transpired, but I was very conscious of the passage of
days, and it seemed al too possible, to me, that we would arrive
to find Athens surrendered, or beaten – in which case I needed
to get away unmolested by the Persian cavalry. I was very aware
– as Myron wanted me to be – that I held the future of Plataea
under my hand.
So we were wary, and stayed to the north of Attica as the
shadows lengthened and the summer ended. We turned east as
shadows lengthened and the summer ended. We turned east as
we came down the main pass, and marched for two days across
uncultivated land, skirting Oinoe. Men saw us, but they did not
come forward to speak to us, and I had a handful of my light-
armed mounted on horses to keep me informed of the terrain,
and we made good time.
A week into our march, and we were in Attica proper – an
Attica bereft of citizen men. Doors were locked against us, and
there were only slaves and women, and few enough of them,
too. It was as if a dread disease had swept the land and kiled
them. There was even wheat left in some fields. One night when
we camped, my men reaped a whole field with their swords and
left three silver coins on the doorstep of the empty house in
payment, and we baked bread the next night after grinding it in
an empty grist mil and baking it in ovens we found cold.
A day’s march from Athens, and we could see the Acropolis
as clear as day on the horizon. It was not on fire, and I assumed
that if Athens had surrendered or made peace, al these folk
would have come flooding back down the roads to their farms.
So I left my brother-in-law in charge, took my new slave and
rode hard for Athens as the sun rose.
The gates were stil open.
The streets were packed with people – al the farmers from
the farms I’d just marched past, I expect. Most of them didn’t
pay me a glance as I rode by, because the only men who would
have been interested in me were in the Agora, voting. Any man
stil on the streets was a slave, a freedman or a foreigner.
stil on the streets was a slave, a freedman or a foreigner.
If I had thought that the Agora was ful for Phrynichus’s play,
I was shocked to see how packed it was that late-summer day. I
had to dismount and leave my horse with Gelon. Then I
shouldered my way forward – I’m not a smal man, but neither
am I a giant, and no one wanted to make way for me. It took me
an hour – five speeches – to make my way from the Tholos to
the centre of the Agora, where the speakers stood.
For most of that time, I could see Miltiades.
He stood virtualy alone. The men who stood by him were
unknown to me, except Aristides and Sophanes, both of whom
stood so proudly that they looked like men fighting in a
desperate last stand.
When I was close enough, I could hear a man argue from the
bema – the speaker’s platform – that there was no need for
Athens to march to the aid of Eretria, that Euboea was an
ancient enemy of Athens (true enough, friends) and the Great
Marathon Page 43