Long War 04 - The Great King

by Cameron, Christian

  You can almost never go wrong with the young by giving them the full truth.

  ‘Not really,’ I admitted. ‘With the stars, I could tell you where I was in the most general terms. Which we already know. But that star there will always show me north – see it?’

  Hipponax snorted that adolescent boy snort. He knew the North Star. Of course he did.

  ‘Well, it may seem simple to you, but I find it constantly reassuring that I am running south and east, because I’ve been this way before and that’s the way this coast runs. If I make too much way to the east, smack – we’ll hit the Peloponnesus.’

  We ran on, the silence punctuated by the sound of water on the steering oars, and the ship-noise; creaking, groans from the wood, snapping noises that always sounded a little threatening.

  ‘How else do you navigate at night?’ he asked.

  ‘Sound,’ I said. ‘The look of the waves. The wind. Some stars move less in the wheel of the sky than others and you can use them. Look – right now I’m aimed at the Plough.’

  ‘Sound?’ Hipponax asked.

  It happened that I knew where I was to within a few stades, so I took the steering oars in my hands and turned the ship – very gradually – to the east, and ran in closer to the long beach. It showed like the edge of a road in the moonlight.

  ‘Listen,’ I said, but my son already had the lesson by heart.

  He smiled at me.

  ‘Do you want a ship of your own?’ I asked.

  ‘Yes!’ he said.

  I smiled at the darkness. ‘Learn to navigate. And to command. That means patience.’ Oh – I could see by his moonlit face I was veering off into the kind of lecture boys hate. ‘You think you could command a ship for me?’ I asked.

  He shocked me by looking out over the sea. ‘Someday,’ he said with a snort. ‘Not tomorrow morning.’

  Well. We all know where wisdom begins, eh?

  The mouth of the Alpheos was once again crowded. Because, of course, it was an Olympic year. I had known this somewhere in my heart – four years had passed since I had sailed here on a bowline from Bari. And it is true that the older you get, the faster time moves. Yet, my visit to Neoptolymos and my sighting of Dagon had made the world of four years before seem very immediate, so that it seemed possible, as I have heard philosophers theorise, that two points in time may not be as far apart as they seem – like wave caps with a trough between.

  But there was not a single Athenian ship on the beach, and I could see only Corcyrans and Northerners, and a handful of Peloponnesians. Not a ship from Ionia.

  Two from Syracusa.

  We ate a very expensive meal on the beach – safe, for one night, from any attempt Dagon might make – and then, loaded to the point that the ship was hard to row, we headed south and stayed at sea for three days and two nights, drinking every amphora in the sand of the hold dry and eating every shred of dried meat, figs, dates and old bread aboard.

  We weathered the Hand in fine style, with a beautiful westerly coming under our quarter as we passed the rocks. The seas were as empty as a new-washed bowl, and I worried less about Dagon and more about the Persians.

  The seas south of Olympia were empty.

  I put in at the port of Sparta for water and grain, and traded some of my Sicilian wines. The seas might be empty, but Sparta was not – I gathered from the traders on the beach that the citizenry of Lacedaemon were preparing for their great festivals. Half the citizen population was away at the Olympics, and the rest were preparing for the great Spartan festival – the one where everyone dances naked.

  Well, that’s what Athenians say. I’ve never been.

  At any rate, there was no sense of crisis. I did learn that Leonidas was already at Corinth, or somewhere east of Corinth.

  A fisherman said that a Megaran fisherman had told him that Xerxes had crossed the Hellespont.

  The beachside traders were derisive.

  ‘There won’t be any fighting this summer,’ one said. ‘If there were, do you think all the Spartiates would be swanning about butt naked at home?’ He made a rude gesture and laughed.

  Have I mentioned that the helots and periokoi had no great love for their masters?

  We sailed – still cautious, may I add – with the fine west wind at our backs. The fisherman had put a chill into me – I decided to try and navigate directly, Sparta to Athens, without passing up the Gulf of Corinth or touching at Hermione or any of my other favourite ports.

  So again we filled the ship with water and food, and I used the profit on my Sicilian wine to buy a small fishing smack. I put Hector and Hipponax and Nicolas – an old oarsman I’ve mentioned before – and two of the slaves into her with a hold filled with food and wine, and we were away.

  I was not the least afraid of finding Dagon out in the Great Blue. I spent too much time at the helm, and I didn’t even have Hipponax to teach. Despite which, we made a fine passage for two days, and I liked everything I saw . . .

  Except a pair of big trireme sails on the horizon.

  There are so many factors to a chase at sea. In an extreme, a captain can always abandon his course and run with the wind, or land at the first beach, burn his ship and run inland. I’ve done both.

  But my ship was well worked up, my rowers were fresh and healthy and had, from a few good port visits, learned that they were treated like men, given wine and a few coins, and trusted. In return, I felt the first stirrings of a crew becoming . . . well, a phalanx. I’d done it so many times by that summer that I could build a crew almost without conscious thought. A storm, or a sea battle – either one would make them mine. They were ready.

  And the ship – Neoptolymos called her Andromeda – was no Lydia, but she was a fine ship and better for our rebuilding. She had a tendency to turn to starboard, like a horse with a bad bridle, and she had no brilliant turn of speed, and we’d had her in the water too long, so that her timbers were heavy with water. She needed a drying.

  But I felt in my bones that she was faster and better manned than anything Dagon would have.

  And I knew where I was – about five hundred stades west and south of Athens. Unless Dagon had found himself a new trierarch, he’d be worried about fighting here – in the Athenian shipping lanes.

  I watched the two sails for enough time for the sun to move across the sky, and then I ordered my sails taken in, the mainmast stowed – what a pleasure a good crew is! Many ships had to land on a beach to stow the mainmast. Hah!

  And then I turned the bow south, and went at my enemy.

  Well! It wasn’t Dagon.

  Surprised? So was I. Even two stades away I thought I was watching a pair of Carthaginian triremes, and I had to get quite close – already manoeuvring for a strike – before I caught the flash of a shield from the stern of the nearest galley. It was a Greek aspis, and that gave me a little doubt, so I passed on my oar rake and got upwind of them, passing close.

  One of the triremes was badly damaged. The other had a long scar down her paint on the starboard side, and looked familiar, and very Phoenician.

  My smaller galley got upwind, and we turned, and the two enemy galleys got their bows around to us – the wounded one took so long I knew she was not any threat at all. But the Greek aspis worried me a little.

  I let my lads rest on their oars while I drank a little water. We were low on everything, and I wasn’t going to fight unless it was Dagon. I had the weather gauged – I could engage or run at my leisure.

  Something told me they were Greeks. After laying on our oars for as long as it takes an orator to speak in the assembly, my conviction that they were Greeks was growing, and then Giorgios, one of my old sailors, ran back along the catwalk to tell me that he could hear men shouting in Greek.

  We were, as I say, upwind. I summoned Hipponax under my stern.

  ‘Run down and see if they are Greek,’ I yelled. ‘If they are, raise your aspis over your head. If not, turn to port and run free, and I’ll join you, and we’ll l
eave them here.’

  Hector raised his hand in casual salute – the two of them were as brown as old walnut by then, and with their burned-blond hair they really did look like gods. The little fishing smack turned on her heel and ran down the wind – wallowed down it, more like. I saw Hipponax stand up in the bow and I saw someone on the stern of the other ship lean far out to shout.

  Hipponax’s shield came up with a flourish, and I saw the little fishing smack come to under the lee of the heavy trireme, and then we were moving. We rowed downwind, still cautious – I still wished I had my archers.

  But my guess was correct. They were Greeks – Ithacans – on their way to join the allied fleet.

  And they’d taken Dagon’s consort. That took a day to ascertain, but they knew Dagon, and he’d abandoned them when the fight went bad, running due east.

  Always a pleasure to have been right. The Ithacans were in an old capture – a heavy Phoenician galley they’d taken ten years before. Possibly in an act of blatant piracy – it takes one to know one. But the other ship they’d taken in a fight, two ships to two, and they were out of water, out of cordage, and desperate – conditions were so bad that the recaptured oarsmen from the Carthaginian had already risen in mutiny once.

  Worst of all, they had no idea where they were. They had fought off Ithaca – the irony was that I’d been creeping about for days while Dagon and his consort looked for me in the wrong places, caught the Ithacans, and lost their fight.

  At any rate, it took me days of conversations – and interrogations – to discern all this, and to learn that the Carthaginians were not on a voyage of private vendetta. They had indeed been sold information about me – the notorious pirate. But they were en route to join Xerxes with dispatches.

  I gave them almost all our remaining water, and exchanged half of my rowers for half of the Carthaginian capture’s rowers, and I led them north and east to Piraeus. We saw the Acropolis of Athens in the first light of the new day, and even the sickest rowers came back to life – one of the best pieces of navigation of my life, friends. By the time that girls were doing their dances at Brauron, we were ashore, and a hundred old men were embracing us.

  After all, we had at our tail the first capture of the war. The first fruits of Nike.

  We might have been feasted like heroes, but all the other news was grim. The worst was the thing I’d feared most – Xerxes was loose, across the Hellespont and marching at speed.

  The allied fleet was forming all along the east coast of Attica – we hadn’t seen it coming in the dark, but as soon as the sun was well up we could see Athenian ships on all the beaches from Pireaus east to the headland at Sounion. The Spartan navarch was already around Sounion at Marathon, and the fleet already had a squadron of light ships scouting the north coast of Euboea for anchorages.

  Themistocles came back from Sounion to see our capture and to embrace us all. I was put in the oddest postion – I hadn’t won the sea fight or taken the prize, but everyone treated me as if I had – I finally brought the Ithacan trierarch forward, a middle-aged pirate named Helios, and introduced him.

  ‘This is the man who actually took the Carthaginian,’ I said.

  He shook his head. ‘We’d all be dying of lack of water right about now but for yon,’ he claimed.

  That evening, over wine at Paramanos’ house in Piraeus, Themistocles laid out his plan.

  ‘I’d like you to crew all your own ships and five more from Athens,’ he said. ‘Can Plataea do it?’

  I began to count in my head. ‘Not and send a single man with Leonidas,’ I said.

  Themistocles made a gesture of dismissal. ‘Leonidas has eight thousand men to hold a pass less than half a stade wide,’ he said. ‘He’ll have Thebans and Thespians and his own Spartans and thousands of local men. It is at sea we need men.’

  I sat back on my kline and sipped wine. ‘Where are my ships?’ I asked.

  Themistocles nodded. ‘All at Sounion, on the beaches there, and around below Brauron,’ he said. ‘I will put all of your ships, and all the Plataeans, and Aristides’ ship under you.’

  I fingered my beard and ate a date. I’d gone three days without food and I was permanently hungry and every old wound and muscle-pull ached or burned. Some ached and burned. Lack of food can really hurt.

  ‘I’ll send over the mountains,’ I said. ‘But none of my Plataeans will know how to row.’

  He shrugged. ‘Half our fleet doesn’t know how to row,’ he said.

  The next week I’ll pass over like the blur of exhausted activity that it was.

  I sent a professional runner to Plataea for the Phalanx, and told them they’d be serving on ships – the Epilektoi as marines, the rest as oarsmen. I asked Myron to put it to the assembly. Then I took Andromeda around the long point of Attica and gathered ‘my’ ships at Marathon. Why not? It was the site of my greatest day. All of my best men had been there except Moire and a few of the young.

  The Plataeans knew how to get there.

  We towed five empty hulls, light as cockleshells with nothing aboard but cordage and oars, around. We got them ready for sea.

  I took back from the fleet all of the men who were serving elsewhere. Cimon cursed me for taking Giannis back, but I had a place for him better than serving as a marine.

  I had Lydia. She was five years old, but dry, sound as a nut, and had a crew – like no other crew I’ve ever had. After I shifted men around I still kept her old crew, so that out of a hundred and eighty rowers, I had only forty new men of Plataea.

  Andromeda I gave to Megakles.

  Demetrios had Aristides’ superb Athena Nike. The great man himself was still not allowed ‘home’ from exile and, stubborn and obedient to the letter of the law, refused even to board an Athenian ship as a marine. But, as you’ll see, he went aboard a Plataean ship.

  Taciturn Harpagos had Storm Cutter.

  Moire of Plataea – as he now called himself – had my troublesome Corinthian Amastis.

  Paramanos – who should have been with Cimon – chose to be with me. He had Black Raven, the third ship of that name. He owned her, too.

  Then I stripped my friends of their command elements to captain new ships. As an aside, you will have noticed that the first ships I’ve mentioned were all privately owned. I owned Storm Cutter, although years of careful maintenance (and that costs silver) may have made her Harpagos’s ship – in fact, we all behaved as if she belonged to him. Lydia was mine, pure and simple, and Amastis was mine in law – at least, in Plataean and Athenian law. Paramanos owned his ship and Aristides owned his – he had owned more, once, but they’d been lost.

  The five ships I endeavoured to man were ‘public’ ships, purchased and fitted out by Athens as a state. This was a new arrangement. Demetrios told me that he’d commanded a state galley in the war with Aegina and he admitted that often they were indifferent ships – because there was no rich man to keep watch on the shipwrights. But of the five hulls they sent us, three were excellent and the other two merely average – all a little lighter than I’d have preferred.

  Again, I’ve heard men claim that Athens built her light triremes because of her superior crews. It makes me smile. That summer, half the allied fleet was rowed by men who’d never seen an oar before that summer – like Boeotian farmers! Athens built light ships because they’d be easier for untrained men to handle, and because, to crew two hundred ships and send a phalanx, Athens had to skimp on marines. And finally, lightly built ships required less wood, and wood is expensive.

  I just want you to get all this.

  We were going to fight a fleet that outnumbered us two or three to one. They had professional crews and heavier ships and many, many more marines. They’d been together for almost a year and most of our oarsmen had never been out of sight of land.

  I’d like to tell you that our advantage was that we were fighting for freedom, but I’m an old pirate and I’ll tell you that men fight wonderfully well for loot. Xerxes had promised
his men the rape of Greece.

  The morale of the fleet was not good when I joined it. News that the Corcyrans – whose numbers would have been a wonderful addition – were prevaricating off Ithaca came as a blow.

  Adamenteis of Corinth said openly that the Peloponnesian League should fall back to the isthmus and leave Athens to its fate. Themistocles made all his usual arguments.

  But then, the Plataeans arrived.

  They came down the mountain from the direction of Athens, singing the paean, and all the work on the beach of Marathon stopped, even though they were ten stades away.

  Did I mention that time doesn’t run straight?

  The Plataeans’ paean rang against the mountainsides, but it also rang through time, and every one of us who had stood in the stubble on that day, ten years before, raised his head like an old dog smelling a much-loved master.

  And the Plataean phalanx came down the mountain singing, song after song, as if a march of three hundred stades was nothing to them, as perhaps it was not.

  Men went back to work on the beach, but some men smiled. Oh, my friends, no one called us bumpkins and sheep lovers that day, and when the bronze dog caps were close, the Athenians gathered on the edge of the beach and cheered and cheered – ring after ring until my throat ached and my heart was full.

  Idomeneaus brought them to the very edge of the beach, where the Persians had had their ships. He halted, and despite being a small army of Boeotian bumpkins, they halted like Spartiates and grounded their spears, all together.

  Of course, it was a piece of theatre. If you’ve been paying attention, you know that Greek armies seldom march in their armour, much less with their aspides on their shoulders. But Idomeneaus, for all that he is mad with violence, is no one’s fool.

  He halted, as I say, and the men grounded their spears. The cheering Athenians fell silent, and the Corinthians were silent from curiosity, and the Megarans too. Aeginians came and stood.

  Idomeneaus saluted me. ‘Well!’ he said, loud enough to carry to Athens. ‘Here we are again. Are the Persians here?’ he asked.