Salamis Read online

  Well. I rose to my feet and put my cup in the hands of a slave.

  Xanthippus turned. ‘Please – I apologise for my rudeness and my son’s. A family quarrel is the most embarrassing thing in which to be caught.’

  I managed a smile. ‘I too have children,’ I said. ‘Truly, I have another errand and sought only to thank you.’

  Xanthippus turned on his son. ‘You have humiliated me in front of a man of consequence. Go to your tent and leave this effeminate Ionian to his own devices.’

  These were not words I’d choose to speak to my own child, in front of witnesses or even alone. In a few sentences, Xanthippus, who had a fine reputation as a sailor, had given me the impression of a hollow man: a man for whom appearances mattered more than anything.

  Pericles stood his ground. ‘He is not effeminate; really, Father, that’s a foolish insult, more suited to a man my age than yours. And if anyone here is offensive, it is you. Oligarchs and pirates? You have, in effect, just insulted your own guest. Few men are more frequently called pirates than our well-beloved Arimnestos of Plataea.’

  He was deadly, with his calm voice, pitched not for beauty but for ease of hearing. You have to imagine that Pericles told his father and every oarsman within a hundred paces that he was a fool.

  I thought perhaps Xanthippus would explode.

  And then a woman appeared. She was no kore, but a mature woman of my own age or a year or two older, strong and tall. She wore a fine blue chiton pinned in gold and her feet were bare for walking on sand, which gave her a touch of informality. She’d thrown a woman’s himation over her chiton for decency. Athenian noblewomen did go out in public, then, but Salamis had made life even more informal. You cannot live on a beach and piss in a common latrine without a certain breakdown of the barriers of class.

  I had never seen her, but one look at her and I knew she was of the Alcmaeonidae. She had Cleitus’s black brows and high forehead and his arrogance stamped around her mouth. But where Xanthippus’s arrogance rested on the soft sand of fear – fear of his status, I’d guess – Agariste’s arrogance rested on the bedrock of wealth, position and a solid belief in her own worth.

  She flashed me a very private smile. It was all the apology I was ever to receive for the embarrassment of being privy to the family quarrel, but it was well done. Then her head turned – gracefully.

  ‘My dear husband,’ she said. ‘Of course our guest is anxious to depart! His daughter is over the ridge with the girls from Brauron. My niece says she is a very accomplished dancer.’

  Her only acknowledgement of the difficulties of the scene, besides her presence, of course, was a single look at her son, Pericles. Their eyes met and she just lifted one eyebrow.

  What she said in that lifted eyebrow I could read, as clearly as if my own mother had done it. ‘Really? Must you provoke your father in front of a famous guest who might be accounted an enemy of our clan?’ All this in one eyebrow.

  And Pericles, the blue blood of all blue bloods, the scion of the very Alcmaeonidae who I had worked so hard to defeat politically on several occasions – I hope you are all staying awake – bowed to his mother. ‘I have not seen my cousin Heliodora in weeks,’ he said, with a respectful nod to me. ‘Perhaps I might accompany the mighty lord of Plataea.’

  ‘I’m not sure that mighty and Plataea can be said together in a sentence,’ I allowed. ‘My father was a bronze-smith.’

  That was very definitely the wrong thing to say. Even Pericles winced.

  However, I was already on my feet and I’d had enough of them.

  ‘Thanks again for the space to beach my ship,’ I said.

  ‘It was nothing,’ Xanthippus said, somehow suggesting the opposite.

  It is remarkable how you can make an enemy of a man merely by being present when he’s made to look weak by his son and his wife.

  I smiled at Agariste, who met my eyes with her own. Most women in those days dropped their eyes when a man looked at them and I’ve said before that I always preferred those who did not. Her eyes were not ‘interested’. Merely – annoyed. As I passed her, she said, ‘Yet even Cleitus says you are a son of Heracles.’

  I nodded, and kept going. I just wanted clear of their family ­quarrel. I left Pericles to his mother but he slipped away.

  Pericles followed me back to my own ships, with his Ionian at his heels. The other man, Anaxagoras, I mean, was tall, handsome, and graceful. I had Eugenios give them both wine while I changed from a bloodstained rag of a chiton in which I should never have been seen in public to a better garment. Eugenios clucked over me and, as a consequence, I strode down to the water’s edge and flung myself in. There was some good-natured cheering – many men were bathing – and I swam up and down. When I came back to the sand, a pair of my oarsmen poured a heavy jug of fresh water over me and I took a towel and dried myself and then strigiled carefully with good oil. Life was simply better with Eugenios close at hand: the clean bronze strigil, the fine oil, the oil bottle clean and well kept …

  Well, there’s more to life than blood and war. I needed to be clean.

  Hector and Hipponax joined me in swimming and cleaning. As we left the water I saw Brasidas and most of the marines go in. It had been a dirty business. Does seawater make you clean?

  Cleaner, at any rate. Blood sticks to you. So does fatigue and pain. I had a feeling in my pectoral muscles, the deep ache caused by fighting in a bronze thorax, and the fatigue in my upper arms from too many sword blows, too many spear casts. I could no longer count the number of fights I’d been in since the first day at Artemisium, but by that day and that hour I had been in the longest sustained campaign of my life. It was as bad as the siege of Miletus. I was tired, and behind fatigue towered the black clouds of low spirits and dis­illusion like a storm coming in from the sea. Or in this case, from the land. I knew it affected every man and every woman; the danger, the stress, and the rising smoke over Attica that showed the complete mastery of our foe over our homes. Our world was dying, whether we were Athenians or Plataeans. It set us apart from the Corinthians and the men of the Peloponnese.

  I only mention this because as I towelled myself and strigiled with oil, I was in the process of admitting that my joints and my hands and my ankles and my torso ached in a way that they had not ached at Lade, and I knew that I was no longer young. The smoke of Attica was not worse than the knowledge that sweet youth was no longer mine, that I could no longer drink all night, fight all day, and then do it again and feel better. Instead – instead, despite victory and fortune, I felt tired, old, and beaten. And if I felt that way, I had little difficulty in imagining how my people felt.

  I confess that all these thoughts were the matter of a few beats of my heart. It takes longer to tell than the occurrence. But the knowledge that your youth is gone is alike a little death. I had learned much about myself from Heraclitus, from Pythagoras and his daughter, from Lydia and the way I treated her, from war and slavery and Euphonia and Aristides and Seckla and a hundred other men and women. But in that moment something changed.

  The only outward show I made was to put on a fine chiton with embroidery and summon my two young lads to do the same. Pericles and Anaxagoras were both there. The four of them were … amicable. They were still sparring, but having shared a battle and a sea voyage, they were comrades.

  ‘I’ve changed my mind,’ I said. ‘We will collect Euphonia and then walk to the temple and make sacrifice.’

  This seemed to suit my four young men. Now that I put my mind to it, they were already very clean and smelled of perfumed oil, and while I put on a very god piece of cloth I had time to notice that they were already well dressed.

  I can be slow. Pericles was visiting his cousin, after all.

  We walked over the headland. There were sentries in the improvised tower, a pair of marines off the Storm Cutter and two older girls from Brauron. I took a momen
t to take my two marines aside and explain to them, in plain terms, what might befall them if anything happened to the Brauron girls.

  I’m pleased to say that I left them impressed with my powers of discernment. And other powers.

  When we came to the tent camp of the priestesses, I asked to meet with Hippolyta, the High Priestess of Artemis. She was unavailable – in fact, she was performing sacrifices on behalf of the fleet – but one of her sisters came to meet me, a mature woman of my own age or perhaps older who was wearing a man’s chitoniskos, a very short garment indeed. She was tanned and brown and had muscles on her muscles, so to speak.

  ‘You do not require our permission to visit your daughter,’ she said cheerfully.

  ‘My lady, I want to speak about the guard tower,’ I said, pointing at the high rocky point.

  She took offence immediately. ‘We were here first,’ she said. ‘We do not need help from your men to watch for the Persians.’

  I nodded. ‘Yes, my lady, yet I would be a poor commander if I trusted anyone – anyone – with the security of my ships.’ I held up my hand. ‘I’m not suggesting you give up the duty – which you have earned the right to hold!’

  That got a hesitant smile.

  ‘I wonder if we couldn’t have two towers – one watching north and the other south.’ I smiled. ‘Because my people will serve best if I help them to avoid temptation.’

  She blushed. And laughed a sweet, free laugh. ‘I think perhaps you may have a point, courteously rendered.’

  ‘I will order a second post built, closer to my beach, watching north,’ I said. ‘And then perhaps we might tell our people that they should speak to each other’s posts at the beginning and end of each watch … and no more.’

  She nodded. ‘I think I can approve this plan without any further discussion. Thanks for coming over!’

  ‘Now I wish to see my daughter. Dancing?’

  The priestess laughed. ‘There is naught to do on this beach’ she said. ‘We have a great deal of dancing.’

  ‘Don’t you all use bows?’ I asked.

  ‘We don’t have enough bows,’ she said. ‘They were collected and didn’t make it here. Much of our temple furniture and equipment was sent to safety in the Peloponnese or to the other side of the island.’

  ‘How many bows would make this better?’ I asked.

  ‘Hmm,’ she said. ‘Six, I think.’

  I liked her. I had to work to avoid looking at her long, naked legs, but inside her handsome body was a fine brain and she thought rapidly and made decisions well. I thought the same as I’d thought among the Keltoi and again with the Spartans. Women, left to themselves, are very different from women carefully trained to be weak.

  ‘I think I can find you six bows,’ I said. ‘I’ll certainly try.’

  ‘I have girls who can draw a man’s bow,’ she said, ‘but not so many, either. We need some lighter bows.’

  I shrugged. ‘Somewhere on this island are some Attic refugees who brought hunting bows,’ I said.

  She smiled. ‘It must be fine to be a man, and famous,’ she said. She said this with no bitterness at all, but in those days, for a woman to roam about asking even the most innocent of questions would have been unthinkable.

  Much less a woman in a chitoniskos.

  ‘I’ll take you to your daughter,’ my priestess said. ‘I was dancing myself.’

  So we walked down to the hard-packed sand at the edge of the sea, where forty girls and young women were practising an elaborate festival dance, one of the bear dances, I believe, although ordinarily no man is allowed to see.

  We no sooner emerged from the welter of tents than I knew why the four young men were so finely dressed. There were girls. Of course!

  What a fool you can be, to forget your own youth.

  The four of them immediately launched into a display of sullen boredom, as if, having spent ridiculous care dressing and oiling themselves, and gone to extra effort to be brought along, they now wanted me to believe that they didn’t want to be there.

  In the meantime, forty very young women in very short chitons were vividly aware that four handsome young men were standing watching their dance.

  Even now I roll my eyes. There are excellent reasons to train the young separately. One is that it’s so painful to watch them together.

  Girls preened and hid and shrieked and giggled and pointed at each other, while my boys pretended indifference and then attempted to casually look to see if anyone was paying attention to them.

  Now, I noticed that neither Iris nor Heliodora seemed interested in my young men; in fact, the pair of them continued to work on a figure. Their discipline, and their form, probably did them more credit than a storm of giggles and blushes might have, but in plain fact my young men were soliciting their attention and they were not giving it.

  I find it delightful, my daughter, that this portion of my story reduces you to laughter. Perhaps, unlike stories of ship fights and sword duels, this part seems like something you have experienced yourself ?

  At any rate, they danced, and as they danced, I could see Cleitus in Heliodora. He was handsome, however much I hated him, and his daughter was not beautiful, but pretty – at least until she started dancing, and then she was with the gods. And Hipponax was gone, lost to Eros, a slave to Aphrodite, and too young to know what to do about it.

  Thankfully for all of us, Despoina Thiale, the dance mistress, came over. She didn’t grin, but her strong face showed more amusement than resentment. ‘You’ll have to take the young men away or I’ll have nothing to show for my day,’ she said.

  But Pericles grinned and exchanged kisses with her.

  ‘My great-aunt,’ he said. Of course, they were all related, all the eupatridae. The well-born.

  Anaxagoras bore Thiale’s scrutiny well and clasped her hand as if she was a man.

  ‘You are my nephew’s new friend?’ she asked.

  The Ionian showed very little on his face. He merely bowed his head with dignity, more dignity than Hector and Hipponax had ever shown, I promise you. ‘I value Pericles,’ he said.

  ‘You have a fine bearing for a man so young,’ Thiale said. ‘Like a Laconian.’

  Among Athenian aristocrats, this would pass for a compliment.

  The Ionian bowed again. ‘I find that displays of emotion are a waste of effort,’ he said.

  Thiale laughed. ‘How … rare.’

  I lost the next few exchanges as my own daughter came running across the sand and embraced me – a powerful clasp from a girl already taller by a finger than when I’d last seen her.

  ‘The dance is even more complicated,’ she said. ‘I’m actually leading my line. I wasn’t actually the leader, but I understood the tempo better than the other girls, and Despoina Thiale said that I could be the leader, and then—’

  I kissed her. ‘Hello!’ I said in greeting.

  She hugged me again. ‘Hello, Pater,’ she said. She laughed. ‘But I need to tell you—’

  ‘Sweet, we’re going over the headland to the temple to make sacrifice and I thought that you might like to come,’ I said.

  ‘May I bring my friend?’ she asked. She indicated another girl – there is a certain sameness to girls – smaller by a head, but also thin and agile and full of smiles. ‘She’s Ariadne and her parents have gone to Corinth for a few days and we’re best friends and—’

  I smiled at Thiale. ‘May I have my daughter and her friend for a few hours?’ I asked.

  Thiale laughed. ‘Would you like fifteen or twenty more?’ she said.

  We walked to the old temple – more than six stades, in fact, and the girls had no trouble keeping up. In fact, they climbed rocks and ran down ravines and righted a turtle that had turned upside down and was grilling in the sun then they poured water on him because they were sure he was parched. I do
n’t think he appreciated them but I was happy to have my canteen returned to me.

  Unbroken.

  I had Eugenios purchase a fine, fat black ram and I sacrificed it to Apollo. My prayers and thoughts were about the end of youth, but my prayer was for the salvation of Attica and victory over the barbarians.

  When the sacrifice was over, and the priest poured water over my blade, Pericles bowed. ‘That was very elegant,’ he said.

  Anaxagoras, who, until that moment had seemed to me to be a self-important prig, also allowed himself a smile. ‘Very impressive,’ he said. ‘I would like to learn how to do that.’

  ‘Pater says you have to learn to draw the sword before you can use it,’ my daughter said.

  There is something funny and very alarming about hearing your views repeated – verbatim – by a ten-year-old. ‘He practises drawing every morning. He says that just as every sacrifice is an offering to the gods, so is the skill you display in making the kill.’

  ‘I do?’ I asked.

  ‘You do,’ Euphonia said, with the hint of a sneer.

  Eugenios was trying to get my attention, and I needed to escape. I went over to him.

  ‘That was perhaps the most expensive sacrificial animal in history,’ he said. ‘Forty drachma.’

  I shook my head. ‘That will only get worse,’ I said.

  He nodded.

  We walked back, while I explained – without, I hope, too much pomposity – my thoughts on drawing and cutting with the sword, and what I had learned from the Spartan exercises, their version of Pyrrhiche, and the like.

  Anaxagoras looked at me as if I might be human, after all. That was interesting.

  ‘These are profound thoughts,’ he said. Little knowing what a patronising thing that was to say. ‘You are a philosopher of the sword.’

  ‘Hmm,’ I said, too polite to openly disagree. Or agree.

  He paused and looked at me with his too-serious young face. ‘I have offended you, I think,’ he said.

  I shrugged. Hipponax laughed.

  Euphonia said something to her friends and both girls shrieked with laughter. Anaxagoras frowned.