Salamis Read online

  She poked Hipponax. ‘Do you want to talk to her, Hip?’ she asked.

  Her friend blushed and looked away, embarrassed at my ­daughter’s temerity.

  ‘Who?’ he asked.

  Hector was always faster on his feet and he smiled and knelt by my daughter. ‘Hipponax wished a secret assignation with your friend here,’ he said. ‘He’s madly in love with the way she giggles, and the way her feet are dirty—’

  Euphonia’s friend all but expired in laughter. It is good to be ten years old, still immune to the darts of Eros but aware of their effect on others and find it all funny. Rather like middle age.

  Hipponax didn’t like being teased and he expressed himself by tipping his friend over.

  Hector shot to his feet, indignant. ‘This is my best chiton!’ he said.

  ‘You can buy another,’ Hipponax said.

  ‘We’re not all rich aristocrats,’ Hector said.

  Hipponax laughed, suddenly more mature than I’d expected. ‘I’m the son of a fisherman’s wife,’ he said, looking at me.

  Pericles winced.

  ‘You are slumming,’ I said to the young man.

  ‘I thought he was your son?’ Pericles said.

  I nodded. ‘He is my son. I recognise him – he is in every way mine.’

  Pericles let go a breath he had held. ‘I’m sorry,’ he said. ‘But my cousin does fancy him. She’s marriageable, and my mother—’ suddenly the wily Pericles was just another adolescent boy.

  ‘Your mother?’ I asked.

  ‘My mother favours the match,’ he said.

  ‘Match?’ I asked softly. We were speaking quietly. Hipponax and Hector had made up and Anaxagoras had shown himself more than a windbag by helping clean Hector’s chiton and his chlamys as we walked.

  ‘My mother – pardon me – says that your quarrel with Cleitus is foolish and helps to divide the eupatridae when they should be united,’ he said.

  I probably growled in my throat. ‘He killed my mother,’ I said.

  Pericles showed some of the power he would later display all too often. ‘He did not,’ Pericles said. ‘He supported your cousin in ­making private war on you, in revenge for your use of humiliation and violence in a political matter.’

  ‘I—’ I began.

  ‘Compared to the actions of the Great King, your argument with Cleitus is of little importance,’ he said, as if he was my own age and not seventeen or whatever he was that summer.

  He, too, had a great deal of dignity. And he was right.

  He shrugged. ‘If Jocasta was here, my mother would have it all arranged,’ he said. ‘Sorry – among the women, Jocasta is treated as your, hmm, patroness.’ He looked away. ‘As you inconveniently have no wife.’ He looked at me. ‘Actually, my mother initially suggested that we get Heliodora as your wife.’

  ‘She could be my daughter!’ I shot at him.

  He shrugged. ‘When my mother gets the bit in her political teeth,’ he said, apologetically. ‘I convinced her that your Hipponax would do as well.’

  ‘When?’ I asked. ‘We were at sea—’

  ‘Oh, today,’ he said breezily.

  The speed of the transmission of information from woman to woman on Salamis made the Great King’s spies and the priests of Apollo look like amateurs.

  ‘But they’ve only just met!’ I said.

  Pericles, like most Athenian gentlemen, didn’t seem to think it mattered. ‘They’ve seen each other and they like what they see,’ he pronounced, as if he was not, in fact, a year younger than my son.

  We might have gone on in that vein, and who knows what might have happened, but we’d been inland on the main road to the town and we were coming to the broad gravel road down to the beach that the Brauron girls used, and the moon was rising in a later afternoons sky and we heard cries. Because of the ridge, we hadn’t been able to see the sea for several stades, but as we came to the top we were looking down into the bay and across into Attica as the sun set to the left, over by Megara.

  Both of the beaches we could see and almost every foot of the ridge were packed with people, and they were wailing. Men stood with their arms raised to the gods, and women tore their hair and their outer chitons and wept.

  Over Attica, smoke was rising. We had to look to see what all the fuss was about, but when we saw!

  The Acropolis was afire.

  It must just have happened as we crossed the ridge from the ­temple of Apollo. While Pericles spoke to me of his mother’s marriage plots, Persian soldiers were climbing the rock of the ancient temples of Athens, her sacred precinct.

  They broke in, and massacred the garrison.

  We couldn’t hear that.

  But we saw the flames as they rose in the clear evening air. The temples of Athens were burning and women lamented as if their ­children were lost. Screams rent the air as if the Persians were among us.

  ‘Keep walking,’ I ordered.

  It was horrible.

  I can’t describe the terrible fascination that ruin has for the eye. It was an awesome sight – the flames shooting hundreds of feet into the air above the Acropolis, which, even twenty stades away, rose so far above the plain that on most days you could see the roof of the temple clearly, and even the glint of gold from the old Erectheion that was.

  But that night, they burned like a torch. An immense torch, as if a titan’s fist had broken through the thin crust of earth and raised it aloft to illuminate the world.

  The flames went so high that they reflected in the ocean. Dry cedar and other valuable woods, ivory and gold – all were being consumed, along with three hundred people and all the treasures and sacred objects of a mighty and ancient city.

  We walked down the road into an evening lit by horror. Eventually we found ourselves on the beach, still watching the Acropolis burn, with all of the women of Brauron and all the girls. By then the High Priestess was back, standing erect despite her seventy years, watching her city burn.

  As we came up, one of the younger priestesses said something, apparently suggesting that the girls should not be allowed to watch.

  ‘No,’ the High Priestess said. ‘No, let them watch. They will be the mothers of the generation that avenges us. Let them see what the Great King has done, and remember.’ Ferocity growled in her voice. ‘I, for one, will never forget this night. I pray we will never make peace. I ask Artemis, under her own moon, to help us to bring fire to their temples, even to Persepolis and his other cities.’ She raised her arms and, for a moment, we could see the massive fire raging between them, almost like a crown on her head, so perfectly was she placed in front of me, and a chill swept me. A god heard her plea, or took her oath – I was there.

  My daughter and her friend clutched my knees and wept, and many other women wept, but some stood dry-eyed.

  By chance, or perhaps by purpose, Heliodora was standing close to us as the fire burned down, and she stood with her friend Iris – dry-eyed.

  Hipponax stepped up close to her, as if moved by some external force, as if pulled by a rope, against his will.

  She looked at him: a flick of the eyes, and then a movement of her head as she appreciated who it was standing close to her.

  ‘You do not weep for Athens?’ my son asked her.

  Not bad, I thought.

  ‘I don’t want to bear sons to avenge Athens,’ Heliodora said. ‘I want to fight the Persians myself.’

  I was close enough to hear every word, hidden by chance and the way we all stood, and I felt like an intruder. At the same time I could see her face, and his. In a moment, it struck me that perhaps they should wed. There was something remarkable to see the two of them, or perhaps this is an old story repeated many times.

  And when she made this pronouncement, I feared for how my sometimes desperately immature son would respond. Derision? Mocke
ry?

  ‘I could get you aboard a ship,’ my son said.

  It was a terrible idea. But it was a wonderful, heartfelt reply.

  ‘You could?’ she asked. ‘I could row all day!’

  I did nothing. What a terrible mistake. And yet, so glorious.

  We stood and watched until our hips ached and our feet hurt.

  It was so terrible that we couldn’t walk away.

  Eventually, the fires burned down. Girls took other girls to bed, and the priestesses moved among them.

  I can say that I was never more than a few arms’ lengths from my son, but I must have missed something. And when we walked back to our camp, Pericles looked sombre, Anaxagoras kept looking back, and Hector wouldn’t meet my eye.

  ‘Who is Iris?’ I asked.

  Pericles made a dismissive gesture, mostly lost in the dark. ‘My cousin’s friend. She’s nobody; a Thracian or perhaps Macedonian.’

  ‘She is not nobody!’ Hector said hotly.

  ‘Boys,’ I said. We were at the guard towers above the bay and a stream of sparks shot into the air over the Acropolis as something enormous collapsed.

  We walked down into our own camp silently.

  That was the night Athens fell to the Persians.

  The next morning, I was unable to sleep in – the usual reasons – and I went up the beach, pissed into the thin belt of bushes and vines, and then went for a run. The beach was not tidy and I had to stay along the water and run into the surf around the bow of every ship. It was a difficult run.

  I needed a difficult run. I came back, watching the column of black smoke still rising from the Acropolis, and then I ran into the sea and swam.

  Hector was waiting for me on the beach, with a towel.

  ‘I need to talk to you,’ he said.

  Well, he’d brought oil and a strigil and there was almost no one awake. ‘I am at your service.’

  ‘Am I a gentleman?’ he asked.

  I almost cut myself with my strigil. But … these are real questions.

  ‘Yes,’ I said.

  ‘Was Anarchos my father?’ he asked.

  His face was a frozen mask. ‘Yes,’ I said slowly. ‘That is, I believe so.’

  ‘A criminal,’ he said bitterly.

  ‘Pfft,’ I said, or something equally annoying.

  ‘He was! Seckla says he was a terrible man who broke people to his will, ran prostitutes …’ He was going to cry.

  ‘Hector,’ I said. I took him in my arms. I was still big enough to prevent him from getting away. ‘Hector, shut up.’

  ‘No!’ he swore. ‘You—’

  ‘Shut up, Hector,’ I insisted. ‘Your father did some terrible things, and some good things, like most men.’

  ‘He got me on some slave and sent me to you as a debt payment!’ he shouted.

  An oarsman popped his head out of his tent.

  Well, that was one interpretation, sure.

  I think that Anarchos, wily as Odysseus, even at the end of his life, sent me his son as a penance and a reward, a threat and a promise. I had given it some thought, but not enough; I wasn’t prepared for this.

  But then, who is?

  ‘I think that you were his only son and he loved you, in his way,’ I said.

  ‘He was a criminal!’ Hector shouted.

  I wished for – of all people! – Jocasta. She would know how to deal with this.

  ‘What brings this on just now?’ I asked. I thought I’d try humour. ‘As we’re about to try conclusions with the Persians, you thought—’

  ‘No, you shut up!’ he said. ‘I’m nobody!’

  ‘Don’t make me hurt you,’ I said, because he was struggling with me. ‘You are not nobody. You are a citizen of Plataea and you have a full share of everything we take. You are a hoplite, a man of valour. You are a man we can count on, on any deck, on any field.’

  He didn’t relax all at once. But there was a sea change and his arms moved a fraction.

  And then, as suddenly as a storm coming and blowing away, he let go of me, gathered the towel, and walked away, as if he was still my pais and he had chores to do.

  I suppose that at some remove I should have expected it, but I hadn’t. To me, he was my second son. He had been with me almost five years by then. He’d been to sea with and without me, and the sea is not for weaklings.

  It turned out that there was a great deal I didn’t know, but that’s always true, isn’t it?

  That evening there was a command meeting. It was widely attended; the best attended in many days.

  The Peloponnesians were anxious to sail.

  Eurybiades gave a set of sacrifices, which, I’ll add, he did beautifully, like any Spartan gentleman, and then he invited the Corinthians to speak.

  Adeimantus was the orator. He stood forth and I had a moment: because, by chance, Cleitus was standing across the slope from Adeimantus and both were together in my vision. I thought of what Pericles had said about our quarrel, and how it divided the best men, and I considered how much more I hated Adeimantus for what I still view as his treason and how merely habitual my hatred for Cleitus was.

  ‘It is time to call a vote,’ Adeimantus said. ‘Let all the cities of the alliance vote whether we can leave for the isthmus.’

  Themistocles laughed. ‘How do we vote, Adeimantus – one vote for every city, or perhaps by the number of ships we provide?’

  Adeimantus turned and looked at Themistocles with contempt. ‘You don’t even have a city. Your city is destroyed. Your gods are thrown down.’ He gestured exactly as one does in dismissing a slave. ‘You are not even Athenians any more. Wait, and we will tell you what we, who have cities, have decided.’

  Adeimantus had misjudged. The Spartan trierarchs were appalled; to mock a man for the loss of his city would, under most circumstances, be considered low, but this was terrible, a deliberate insult, hubris committed with forethought.

  In fact, even a few of the Corinthians winced.

  Themistocles judged the audience like the professional politician he was and responded. He didn’t laugh or frown or curse. He was mild.

  ‘As long as we have two hundred warships, we have the largest city in Greece,’ he said.

  And by implication, of course, he suggested that, unlike their cities, his could go where it pleased. It was, in fact, the most brilliant speech I ever heard: short, to the point, but redolent with other meanings.

  And yet, when I think back now, what did he mean? Fully? Now that all is exposed, what was his thinking that fateful night, when the fate of Greece teetered on a razor’s edge?

  He carried them, for that night, because Adeimantus had been a fool.

  The next morning, the Persian fleet worked its way onto the beaches below Athens, the beaches of Phaleron. They were not opposite us, but north of us and we were spared the vision of their great fleet blackening the sea, but from the northern headlands of Salamis it was easy enough to see them, a near-endless stream of warships landing in ordered chaos on the beaches of Phaleron.

  Cimon put to sea in his own Ajax and hovered off the southern edge of their fleet, openly challenging them to single-ship combat, but they stayed on their beaches.

  Cimon tells me he counted seven hundred and eleven ships. I have heard counts over a thousand and counts as few as five hundred and fifty, and I’m no help. But I tend to believe Cimon. He had the time, and the view.

  The Persian fleet was very careful in its movements. It was odd that they outnumbered us at least two to one and yet they were behaving so cautiously. Of course, their Persian officers had no doubt spent days looking at the scrawled messages we’d left them, inviting the Ionians to come join us, or to betray their Persians in mid-battle. And they’d lost the last few encounters.

  Late that afternoon, while I was practising on my own beac
h with Brasidas and Hipponax and Hector, Pericles and Anaxagoras – a well-trained man for all his quiet arrogance – a dozen ships came in from the south. They came up the Bay of Salamis in fine style and my daughter raced over with three of her friends, including Heliodora, to tell us there was a fleet coming. That created a stir, I promise you. With the Great King’s fleet closing all the passages to the north, an attack from the south loomed as a very real possibility and I ordered my hulls into the water. I ran – mostly not – up the headland and climbed the Brauron tower.

  I didn’t know the ships. But there was something about them that appeared Greek; whether the slight outward slant of the cutwaters or the style of the rowing, but I was sure they were Peloponnesian ships. As they came closer, we could see that the lead ship displayed a dozen shields, all those of Spartiates, and men began to cheer.

  I don’t usually cheer for Sparta, but more ships are always welcome, aren’t they?

  But all the beaches to the north were packed. We had the Corinthians and the Spartans on the beaches to the south, and the only beach not covered in ships was the Brauron beach. I ran down like a boy and into the midst of another dance practice. I bowed low to the High Priestess, as if she was the Great King himself, and begged her permission for men and ships to land on her beach.

  She made me wait long enough to let me know that she could refuse, and then she acquiesced graciously. Seckla was still close enough inshore to summon and I dropped my chiton – in front of a hundred virgins! – and swam out to him, and Leukas hauled me aboard and Lydia turned south.

  We closed with the lead Spartan ship as quickly as the telling of it, and they all lay to, resting their oarsmen in the gruelling sun, and I leaped again – naked, damn it – onto the helm-deck of the lead ship.

  There was Bulis, unchanged by the year we’d been apart. Until I saw him I assumed that he had died with his king. But there he was, and there was Sparthius in full armour. They both embraced me.

  ‘Naked!’ Bulis said – a long speech, for him.

  We all laughed.

  ‘The beaches are crowded,’ I said. ‘I’ve found you a berth, just there by the headland with the two towers. Those are my ships on the other beach.’