Salamis Read online

  I was still on the beach, virtually the last man on it, chivvying the Aeolian oarsmen into their ship. Watching the drama at sea play out, my heart in my mouth, desperate to get aboard Lydia. Naiad got under way and began to turn end for end.

  Well out from Ajax the enemy ship turned her bow towards the beach, laying her vulnerable flank open to Ajax’s ram and folding in her oars like a bird preparing for a rough night at sea.

  Ajax turned in a flash of oars – a beautiful display of seamanship – took in her oars and lay longside to longside. But no grapples flew.

  I ran into the shallow water in my armour – how poor Eugenios must have cursed me – and got over the side. Lydia was hovering in the shallow water just over the first drop-off of the beach – another fine art of rowing – and the moment Leukas roared ‘on board’ the oars all dipped and we were away like a sea eagle.

  The other two enemy scouts were running, but Cimon’s brother in Salamis was faster. He had everything in his favour – better ­rowers, better rested, with a drier ship.

  And he dared run the fleeing enemy down, in full view of their oncoming fleet. There were sixty ships bearing down on us.

  Of course, they all had their masts down. Even though the west wind was at their backs, they were rowing.

  Because they were afraid of us.

  But Metiochus was not afraid of them, and while Lydia left the beach and ran upwind under oars to where Cimon and his capture lay, Metiochus caught the fleeing trireme and rammed it in the stern. You seldom see it, even though it is the dream shot of oared combat. But his ram caught her right under the curve of the swan’s neck, and although we could neither see nor hear because we were a dozen stades away, she sank.

  Metiochus turned and came back, seeming to skim the water like a bird of prey.

  Cimon’s capture had, in fact, come right up and raised a branch of laurel. She was from Naxos, crewed with various survivors of the storms of three weeks before, and the crew had voted to change sides.

  Leukas lay us alongside Ajax as prettily as a kore dances at Brauron, and I jumped from helm to helm.

  Cimon’s helmsman laughed. ‘They’re all over there,’ he said. ‘Tell ’is lordship that if we don’t want to join the Persians, we need to get underway.’

  I jumped again, onto the deck of the Naxian ship, Poseidon. She was a fine vessel – a decked trireme, a heavy ship built on the latest Phoenician lines, capable of carrying cargo or fighting. A little slow for running away, though.

  I grabbed Cimon’s arm. He was mobbed by excited Greeks – Euboeans and Ionians. Being a heavy ship, they had more than twenty marines. They also had a pair of Persian captives – two men assigned to the ship by their admiral, Ariabignes.

  ‘They just sailed up and joined us!’ Cimon shouted.

  ‘Your helmsman wants to get out of here,’ I shouted. ‘So do I.’

  Cimon grinned. ‘This is a sign. From Poseidon.’ He slapped my back. ‘You were right!’

  I pointed over the Naxian ship’s starboard bulwark. ‘There is a Persian squadron right there.’ I waved. ‘Can we help Poseidon help us by not fighting them all ourselves?’

  Cimon shook his head. ‘I feel the power,’ he said.

  ‘Feel it when you have two hundred brothers at your back,’ I said. ‘Sixty to ten is long odds.’

  Cimon laughed. ‘Sixty to twelve is only five to one,’ he said. But he shook his head rapidly, indicating he was only leading me on. ‘I agree. Let’s go.’

  He left his marines aboard, however, like the practical old pirate he was, and he took half the Naxian’s marines as hostages. He made it sound like guest-hosting in the most noble and ancient way and the Naxians – well, the Ionians, really – leapt to the Ajax with a will, delighted to be invited aboard.

  We all put our oars in the water. By then the oncoming Persian squadron, all Phoenicians, were ten stades away.

  I had time to see young Pericles in an animated conversation with one of the Ionian marines, a boy only a little older, maybe eighteen.

  Then I jumped back to Lydia and we turned south.

  By a good chance, Cimon had scrawled his usual message inviting the Ionians to desert on the rocks above our beach and that’s what the Phoenicians found when they went inshore. They didn’t really bother to chase us. In fact, as we rowed due south, I wondered if they’d make a blunder. If they raced after us, a dozen ships well manned, we might have snapped up their lead ships, especially as I had a sailing rig.

  But they did not. They chose to be cautious and, in truth, their ships were the very antithesis of the ships for a long chase; they were heavy and slow and damp.

  We put them over the horizon in two hours and then turned west at a flash of Cimon’s shield, a loose line abreast to a long, straggling column, but we were old shipmates and we knew the signals. We neatened up the line as we rowed, only one deck at a time to rest the oarsmen. Just in case. It wasn’t just the Phoenicians who were cautious.

  But we made good time. The west wind was gentle, barely rippling the water. We had started the morning with a victory and that put great heart into the men.

  But for all that, the west wind was against us, and by mid-afternoon it was clear we would not make Salamis. We’d come too far west to make Andros and night was coming.

  Cimon and I had the same thought – to find the narrow beach two bays west of Sounion. But we were cautious; just short of the bay we went in lone in Lydia and Alexandros and four mariners swam ashore, naked. They ran up the beach and climbed the ridge behind.

  We hovered, the sun sank, and our oarsmen cursed.

  Alexandros ran back down the sand and did a little dance, the agreed ‘all clear’ signal.

  We landed. It was tight; it required all our seamanship and, to be honest, a great many blasphemies and some splintered wood to get us all ashore. The last ship in, Metiochus’s Salamis, was beached between two big rocks and no sane trierarch would ever have put a ship there.

  Not to mention that we had neither food nor wine.

  We put all our marines together in a body under Brasidas and sent them inland to fetch any forage that could be managed, with two hundred oarsmen to carry it and all our archers as a covering force. Cimon and I went as volunteers and it was as scary as campaigning in a foreign land. North, we could see fires burning unchecked on the ridges and mountains towards Brauron and Marathon. East, the mountains toward Athens were afire.

  Aside from Persians and their slaves, Attica was empty. There wasn’t much food. We found some olives and some grain and, not far from the beach, we found a village that had chosen not to ­evacuate.

  We found it by the busy cries of sea birds and ravens, feasting. We came into the town at sunset, the sky red as blood at our backs, and to my best guess the poor peasants had tried to send a delegation to offer earth and water to the invaders. At least, that’s what it looked like – a tumble of amphorae meant for water, all broken, and two big red clods of Attic earth, dyed redder and browner by the blood of the two young girls who had carried them.

  They had died hard. I will not say more … Bah! I remember one young girl had her eyes open, and the whites were still clear, as only young eyes can be, and I hesitated to touch her, to close them, as if I might hurt her. And the sound of the flies everywhere – they assault your senses with a buzz that warns you not to look … too late.

  There were bodies throughout the village, a village which was more like the sheds of a big farm or a small estate, really just a crossroads. There was a small shrine, with a middle-aged woman dead across it as deliberate desecration, and six houses, all smouldering, with men lying in the road in fly-swarmed sticky puddles and the smell of cooking flesh to tell us where the rest of the people must have been.

  They were, at least most of them, slaves. And the Persians – or Medes or Saka or Egyptians or perhaps even other Greeks –
had used them and killed them.

  All of us were moved. It was impossible to look on it and not hate. I have seldom hated the Persians. The Persians of my youth were great men. But this was like the rape of a whole land. Done apurpose.

  Brasidas stood looking at the two young girls who had carried the earth and water. His face … moved. The muscles of his jaw leaped up and down like a ship on the sea and tears came to his eyes. This, from a Spartan.

  ‘This is despicable,’ he said.

  Ka glanced at the high ridge to the north. I’m going to guess that he had seen more atrocities than I. It is trite to say, but Heraclitus has the right of it: killing in the heat of battle is a very different animal from killing a couple of maidens in a village, much less raping and killing the entire village. A village of slaves. By the rules of war, the Medes might have rounded them all up and carried them away, the same way they took the bronze statues or the silver coins they found.

  But they massacred them.

  At any rate, Ka said, ‘They are close. The blood is still wet and red.’

  Brasidas dropped his shield and spear. He lifted one of the dead girls and carried her, tenderly, to the place where the village shrine was. Hard by it was a small graveyard.

  He never gave an order, and neither did Cimon or I, but men found picks and a damaged shovel.

  Ka shook his head. ‘They are close,’ he said.

  I mastered myself, although the smell of the dead, the burned people in the houses, was in my nose and lingers there to this day. Darkness was coming down fast.

  We put out a dozen watchers in the hills around the crossroads and gave them horns. Ka took the archers and hid them along the northern branch of the road.

  Two oarsmen broke into the smouldering barn and found that there was food: sausages, and wine jars. The Medes hadn’t even looted. They had merely killed.

  When the work of burying the dead, all forty or more of them, was well advanced, I sent half the hoplites back to the ships with Cimon. I was worried that the Medes would attack the ships. I was in a black place and nothing made much sense to me. I slept a little and dreamed of the boy whose soul I sent down to Hades with a sharp knife one dark night on a battlefield in Asia …

  When I awoke, Ka had a hand over my mouth.

  ‘They come,’ he said.

  Who knows why they came back. Really, I want them to have been the same men, but perhaps they were another patrol, another group. I can only assume that they smelled our smoke, or saw movement in a valley that should have been dead.

  They were careless, riding abroad in the first hour of the day, spread across the northern fields in a long line of perhaps sixty horsemen with more coming on the road.

  I had perhaps forty hoplites and a dozen archers. And Brasidas, of course.

  They came across the fields at first light and up the road.

  We killed all of them we could reach. It was an ambush and there was nothing worthy about the fighting. Nothing I will tell you. We threw our spears into their horses and Ka and his archers dropped them until they broke.

  It is what came after of which I will speak.

  There were three men taken. All had their horses killed under them.

  I wanted to kill them. In fact, the idea that occurred to me was to bury them alive with the corpses of the town they’d massacred.

  Or perhaps another group massacred them.

  I did not speak to them. One – the youngest – pleaded for his life, to the embarrassment of the other two. They simply waited to be killed.

  The marines watched them with a hollow-eyed rage that told them everything.

  Ka and his archers went out into the fields to collect their arrows. Only Ka looked at me and shook his head, and made a little noise in his throat.

  I would like to say that my urge to destroy these three, to humiliate them and then kill them in their despair, that my urge was defeated by the sayings of my master, Heraclitus, or what I had learned in Sicily about myself and about violence. But in that hour I was merely rage.

  The sparkling, gleaming whites of a young corpse’s eyes. The corpse should have been alive.

  Bah! I tell this badly. I was in a sort of shock and I wanted blood.

  Brasidas walked up to me. His face was … horrible.

  ‘We,’ he said thickly. The word took him effort. ‘We should let these animals go, before we lower ourselves to what they are.’

  It was not at all what I expected him to say.

  Will you believe me if I say that the two of us stood still and yet seemed to have trouble breathing?

  We made it back to the boats. We had lost one man in the fighting, if cutting down surprised men in an ambush can be called fighting. We boarded our ships, a sullen mass of angry, disheartened men. Many of the oarsmen and even a few marines glowered at me.

  I was beginning to breathe. I prayed to Lord Apollo that I had done right, because everything in me screamed that those three Medes should have been killed. But we had, in fact, let them go, and the discipline of the marines had held, although I could tell that Brasidas and I were virtually alone.

  But there, on the white sand of the beach, young Pericles came and put his hand on my shoulder. ‘That was brave,’ he said.

  Behind him was the Ionian I had seen him talking to on the day the Naxian ship came over to us.

  Pericles smiled his too-hard smile. ‘Anaxagoras of Clazomenae,’ he said in introduction. ‘Son of Laertes.’

  The young man bowed. ‘Lord Istes spoke highly of you, sir,’ he said. ‘But releasing the barbarians was an act of pure arete.’

  I tried to smile, but very little came to my face. In fact, rather than feeling flattered, I felt nothing. Have you ever lost someone you loved? Mother, father, sister? You know that between weeping and recovery there is a time when you feel … nothing. No desire for sex, no desire for war. Nothing.

  I was in that place. I felt nothing. My disdain for their youthful arrogance was but a distant echo of my true feeling.

  The Ionian man would have said more, but Cimon, close behind him, had better skills in reading me and pushed him along brusquely. ‘Best get aboard your ship, boys,’ he said. He used an offensive word – pais, the same word we use for a juvenile or a slave.

  Pericles flashed him a look of undisguised, adolescent anger.

  Cimon met his look steadily. ‘Feel free to go back to your precious father,’ he said.

  I didn’t understand the reference. I had, by then, been living and fighting alongside the scions of the Athenian noble families for more than fifteen years, but I still barely understood them.

  At any rate, we got our ships to sea. It was a pretty day, utterly at odds with the revulsion I felt – that we all felt.

  Seckla told me later that Brasidas threw his sword into the sea.

  Salamis was crowded and had begun to develop the same smell as the vale of Olympus during the games – part cooking, part sacrifices, part men’s piss. But the place was alive, perhaps more thoroughly alive than Attica usually was, because of the crowds. I got my ships ashore and there was almost a quarrel over beaching our Ionian capture, because space on the beaches was at a premium. But Seckla worked a miracle of humble negotiation and convinced one of Xanthippus’s trierarchs to float and re-ground his vessel and so we all had room.

  When I saw my people ashore and into their tents – it was excellent to have a pre-built camp and food ready to be served, and I pitied Cimon’s oarsmen, competing with every man in Athens for bread – I walked across the beach to find Xanthippus. I knew of him – oh, I had no doubt shared wine with him somewhere, but I didn’t know him well.

  By the time I reached him, his young son was there, speaking in his usual slightly high-pitched, calm, clear voice, an almost unnatural voice for a man so young. He had the young Ionian by him.

  He
summoned me under an awning with a wave of his hand and a pair of Thracian slaves hurried to place a stool for me and put a cup of wine in my hand. Xanthippus was a big man, with a broad face and heavy muscles. He had the sandy fair hair common in his family and he had humour, which many rich men lack. I knew him as a friend and sometimes ally of Themistocles.

  ‘Arimnestos of Plataea. My son sings your praises. My wife – a member of the Alcmaeonidae! – sings me your praises.’ He nodded.

  I returned his nod. ‘I have come only to thank you for giving me room to beach my spare ship.’

  ‘Spare!’ Xanthippus laughed. ‘Ah, you are a shame on us, Plataean. You mean, the Ionian ship you took in the very teeth of the Great King’s fleet!’

  What does one say? I love praise all too well, and praise from a navarch as famous as Xanthippus was praise indeed. But it was laid too thick.

  ‘How do we do here?’ I asked, waving my wine familiarly. ‘In council?’

  Xanthippus barked a mirthless laugh. ‘Oh, the Corinthians loathe Themistocles. It might be better for us if we had young Cimon represent us, or best of all, Aristides.’

  ‘He is in exile,’ I said, probably a little too quickly.

  ‘I know he’s your friend, for all he’s the leader of our opposition,’ Xanthippus said.

  Through all this, the two young men stood silently. They had not been offered wine.

  ‘Your son served with distinction,’ I said. It was true, and besides, I’ve never known a man displeased by praise heaped on his child.

  ‘Cimon was kind enough to say the same. For myself, I’m still trying to understand why my son would go to sea with a pirate in a fleet of oligarchs rather than his own father.’ His bluff face filled with colour.

  He was actually angry, not merely pretending.

  ‘Can’t you let men praise me for once, Father, and not you?’ Pericles said.

  ‘Can’t you tell the difference between a man who fights for his country and a killer who fights to steal other men’s gold?’ Xanthippus shot back.