Salamis Read online

  I spat again. ‘Let the gods note that I’m tired and wounded, then,’ I said. I had lost fingers on my left hand, and they ached – the ends hurt all the time, making sleeping difficult, and I had trouble closing my hand.

  Briseis was lost. For ever, as far as I could tell. Again.

  Let me tell you a thing, thugater. I had determined that if the Greeks lost I would not return alive. I had seen too many defeats. My house was too empty, despite my daughter. Yes – despite her.

  But we had not lost. Beyond all fears, it was the Spartans who lost. And now I was alive and all my hopes in ruins. In a way, it was worse then Lade.

  At Lade, I felt Apollo betrayed us. At Artemisium, I felt as if the whole pantheon deserted us.

  Aristides left his hand on my shoulder. ‘Now we show the gods who we are,’ he said.

  Brave words, in a moment of despair.

  Eurybiades summoned us as the sun rose. Some of the ships had already left – two Athenian dispatch boats, and a whole squadron of Athenians under Xanthippus, one of their navarchs.

  We were a grim and silent lot – three hundred captains. Many of us had wounds from the day before, and there were gaps. We had lost almost fifty ships in four days.

  Themistocles had his himation wrapped around him and the end pulled over his head, and seemed unwilling to speak. His bluff, man-of-the-people face looked bloated, and he himself seemed crippled.

  In that dark hour it was Eurybiades who declined to crack.

  ‘We will need a fleet rendezvous,’ he said clearly. ‘First, let us make sacrifice to the immortal gods and then let us have some clear counsel.’ He led us up on the headlands to the little temple of Artemis and there he sacrificed a pair of rams. Themistocles played no part, and Aristides hung back.

  Adeimantus of Corinth held the sacrifices and walked with the Spartan navarch back down the hill to the small rise where we gathered to talk.

  After prayers and some exhortations, Eurybiades raised his arms. ‘Let me hear you,’ he said. ‘What is our next move?’

  He looked at Themistocles. The Athenian democrat shook his head.

  ‘Corinth!’ said Adeimantus. ‘We can hold the isthmus for ever, and if we should lose it, we have the Acrocorinth, which can host a mighty army and hold until the gods come to aid us.’

  Themistocles twitched, like a wounded man who is wounded again.

  No one was going to listen to me, so I walked around the circle of men slowly, hobbling a little on my second-best spear, until I reached the Athenian orator.

  I poked him.

  He ignored me.

  ‘Themistocles!’ I hissed. ‘If you don’t enter into this thing, they’re going to sail away and leave Athens to its fate.’

  Themistocles met my eye. ‘Athens is already doomed,’ he said. ‘Don’t you understand? Attica is open. The Persians will come at us now, as they have always desired. It is over.’

  I frowned. I wanted to say what Aristides had said to me, but Themistocles was not the man to accept arguments about excellence and the gods.

  ‘How great would men think you if you stopped the Persians now?’ I asked him. ‘The fleet is not beaten.’ I pointed. ‘Yesterday they flinched, not we Greeks.’

  I’m not sure what I believed, thugater. What I meant. I hated that Themistocles would not even make a fight of it, even while I recognised the totality of our defeat.

  Aristides had followed me. He and Themistocles hated each other, of course, but in that hour they were both Athenians.

  ‘We must at least have the fleet to cover the movement of all the demos – the people – to Salamis,’ Aristides said.

  That shook me. Of course, they would empty Attica.

  My daughter was at Brauron, dancing with the maidens. She was in Attica.

  Aristides crossed his arms.

  Themistocles slowly straightened, like a man waking from sleep. His voice was carefully pitched. He sounded as if he did not care.

  ‘None of you can sail to Corinth in a single leg,’ he said. ‘You’ll want to take water on the beaches of mighty Ajax, where Salamis brushes the sea.’

  Adeimantus grinned. ‘We can take on water while we watch Athens destroyed!’ he said, and laughed like a boy, so that men turned their heads away in shame, and shuffled away from him. ‘But then, we sail for Corinth.’

  Themistocles shrugged as if it was a matter of little moment.

  Eurybiades nodded sharply. ‘Salamis it is. Day after tomorrow.’ To the Corinthian, he said, ‘It is not fitting to speak of the destruction of Athens. It is close to blasphemy.’

  From the Spartan, these were strong words.

  Adeimantus laughed, more of a bark than a laugh, a sound made to gain attention as a child, I’d warrant. ‘Mighty Lacedaemon sent one king and a handful of men to protect Greece. Why pretend? Sparta wants Athens destroyed as much as Corinth does.’

  Eurybiades’ face grew red and his reserve showed the first sign of cracking that I had seen.

  Adeimantus realised his error and held up a hand, like a man signalling defeat in a pankration bout. ‘No – I spoke only in jest.’

  ‘An ill jest,’ I said.

  Adeimantus turned on me. ‘I do not speak to you.’

  I let it go. I wanted to get to my daughter, not to have a fight on the beach.

  The gloom engendered by the death of Leonidas stayed on us even as we got our hulls into the water and indeed, my thugater, it was on us for many days thereafter. But I reminded young Pericles, when he was going to return to Cimon, that Heraclitus said, ‘Souls slain in war are purer than those that perish in disease.’

  ‘What does that mean?’ Pericles asked me. He had a way, comic in a man so young, and yet also a little terrifying, of asking the most direct questions with his big eyes boring into you.

  I shrugged. ‘Who am I to tell you what Heraclitus meant by anything?’ I said. ‘But if I had to hazard a guess, I’d say he meant that as the basis of soul is fire, so, in combat, a man’s soul is hottest, and if he dies then, he dies with his soul closest to its natural state. Whereas my master thought that moisture was the antithesis of the soul and that in sickness we become weak and our souls moist.’

  Pericles shook his head. ‘I would like to believe that the king of Sparta went straight to Elysium, to walk there with Achilles and Hector. But …’ He met my eye, this adolescent boy. ‘Yet I do not think it is so simple. I think this is the sort of thing men tell each other to console themselves for the loss of a comrade.’

  Then he bowed. ‘I am sorry, Lord Arimnestos. I speak as if I was your peer.’

  I had to laugh. Even through the pain of losing the king, even in the knowledge that my world was about to be destroyed, there was something antic in the serious, steady-burning arrogance of the boy.

  ‘Go prate at Cimon,’ I told him. ‘I’ll see you in Attica.’

  I said the last because I had determined to go first to Brauron, which is close by the sea, to pick up my daughter. But my oarsmen were Plataeans almost to a man, and they made it clear that they had other priorities.

  I couldn’t be angry. First, I knew from Cimon that the great sanctuaries, like Brauron and Sounion, would be evacuated anyway. My daughter had many friends and I had guest friends in Attica. She was not going to be abandoned in the rush to the ships. Athens and Themistocles had been planning their resistance to the Great King for three years and every aspect of defence – and every option – had been examined. One of the few real advantages to democracy in the face of crisis is that the involvement of every free man means that many different points of view are brought to bear on a problem; admittedly, half of them are foolish or even fantastical, but many men bring new ideas and ready wit. Most of the rural population of Attica was already evacuated to Salamis and to the east coast of the Peloponnese. Troezen especially welcomed Athenian r
efugees, and little Hermione took many Attic farm families (and, as it proved, many Plataeans), but most of the people went across the narrow straits to the island of Salamis.

  At any rate, my daughter was safe enough. Or so I had to hope, because unless I wanted mutiny and blood, my oarsmen wanted to go home. At Artemisium we were an easy day’s rowing from the narrows where Euboea nearly connects to the mainland, just another day’s walk or two from Plataea over to the west near Mount Cithaeron. As we had nearly the whole phalanx of Green Plataea and nearly every man of substance either rowing or serving as marines – and as the Persians would be at our gates in three days or less – Plataea represented the more immediate crisis.

  We rowed with a will. But as we rowed, I marshalled my arguments for the rowers. When we camped on the beaches of Boeotia that night, I convinced Myron and both Peneleos and Empedocles, sons of Empedocles, and old Draco himself and Myron’s rich friend Timaeus – and Hermogenes and Styges and Idomeneus and the rest – to give me one more day of rowing. I suggested that some men be sent ahead, walking, or riding. I sent Ka and his archers and they found mules and a pair of horses to carry our messengers. I didn’t ask Ka too many questions about where the horses had come from.

  ‘Let’s take the ships around to Athens,’ I said to the men on the beach. ‘They need them for their evacuation. And we can go as swiftly over the mountains from Eleusis as across Boeotia from here.’

  Myron nodded. ‘There might already be Persian troops loose in Boeotia,’ he said. ‘Their cavalry—’

  Hermogenes nodded. ‘And the Thebans have already Medised,’ he said, as everyone spat. ‘They’re between us and home, here.’

  Styges glared. ‘Traitors,’ he said.

  We chose a dozen steady men – well, Idomeneus was one, and no one ever called him steady, but they needed a killer to get them through if the going got rough. Ka stole more horses – let’s call it what it was – and the messengers rode off with careful instructions and Timaeus to see they were obeyed.

  The rest of us woke before dawn and rowed. We were in advance of most of the rest of the fleet, because we were rowing to save our goods and families. We passed the headland at Brauron south of Marathon under sail and I could see the temple and the old bridge and I was delighted to see that there was no one moving – no girls dancing in the courtyard, no children playing at goats on the old hill above the cave of the goddess. We had a beautiful wind and we ran towards Sounion on an empty coast, but towards afternoon, as we prepared to weather Poseidon’s promontory, we saw the flash of oars behind us. We knew Cimon’s squadron had stayed to watch the Persians and we guessed the Athenian’s public ships were moving in a body under Xanthippus, rowing as hard for home as they could.

  I feel I should explain that, in the years before Artemisium, the Athenians had invested the whole output of their silver mines in building a fleet of more than a hundred well-built triremes. Five of them were being crewed by Plataeans, and had Plataean officers and marines. It seemed to me awkward – at best – to leave these five ships on the beaches of Boeotia while we ran home to save our furniture and I said so.

  We were not, as it proved, the first ships of the Allied Fleet to reach the beaches at Phaleron. But we rowed past, despite the late hour, and swept into the narrow channel between the Island of Salamis and the mainland as the sun dropped into the sea beyond Megara to the west.

  The Bay of Salamis was covered in ships. Fishing boats, merchant ships of every size, rowing boats, military pentekonters and even older triakonters of thirty-oared ships were going back and forth, turning the sea to froth by the beating of their oars, or so the poets liked to say.

  I landed my ships on one of the north-facing beaches on the island of Salamis, and after borrowing a horse and making some hasty arrange­ments, we gathered the men together – all the Plataeans in one great council. It was, to all intents and purposes, a meeting of the City of Plataea.

  Why Salamis? Because that’s where most of the Athenians were. Like I said, I didn’t want to leave their precious ships to rot on the beach or be captured. I handed the five public ships over to a member of the Athenian boule and he was already finding rowers for them while Myron negotiated our passage across to Attica – easy enough, as the Athenians’ shipping was mostly empty going that way. We arranged for all our men to go to Eleusis.

  Then I spent time putting my professional crews back together. I had men who were Plataean citizens, but my oarsmen, in several ships; we’d sent them out through the fleet to train other rowers. My Lydia had kept her crack crew, and now I left her under Seckla with a skeleton crew and no marines, but with Ka and all his ­archers and Leukas as his helmsman. Paramanos was dead but we’d retaken Black Raven and I gave her to Giannis with Megakles as his helmsman. In fact, Black Raven was not my property and eventually a probate court in Athens or Salamis would see to it that someone bought her and Paramanos’s daughters were paid, but that was all in some hazy future where the rule of law applied. In the immediate future, Athens needed every ship. Paramanos had a mostly Athenian crew, including Thracians, Cilicians, and men of Cyrenaica, his port of ­origin so to speak, but they had taken terrible casualties fighting three Egyptians at Artemisium and we had to refill the benches. Aristides was going to Corinth with his wife, but his helmsman Demetrios had his own long Athena Nike well in hand, and he’d made captures at Artemisium and seemed content. Amastis, our rebuilt Corinthian trireme that has been the source of so much trouble, had come through both battles untouched and her crew was professional and under Moire, who needed no help from me. But Moire, like many of his men, had taken up their Plataean citizenship and had homes or families in Plataea. For some oarsmen it was an empty honour and their families were already on Salamis, but others, and especially my old crews in Lydia and Storm Cutter, crewed by Chian exiles and other men who’d settled at Plataea, had deeper roots – and they were needed. Many of them wanted to go back to Plataea, even for a few hours, to see to their families.

  Moire had adjusted to ‘being Greek’ better than many of my other foreign (or barbarian) friends. His name was an allegory for his acceptance. In his own tongue, Moire (or something that sounded that way) meant ‘a jet black horse’ or so he told us, but in Greek, Moira is the Goddess of Fate and Fortune and many newly enfranchised ex-slaves chose to call themselves ‘Moiregeneus’ or ‘Born of Good Fortune’. Moire never changed his name. And that, I think, represents the man. He sacrificed to our gods, especially to Poseidon, Lord of Horses. But he always had his own gods, small images he carried with him at sea. It was his particular skill, or tact, that he seemed to like being Greek, but never ‘needed’ us particularly. In Athens or in Syracusa you could find him squatted down on his heels with a dozen other men of his kind, jabbering in their barbarous tongue and then he’d stand up, pull his himation around himself, and walk off for wine with another kubernetes or helmsman.

  As usual, I digress. Harpagos offered to stay with the ships and he was the best kubernetes or trierarch of the lot. I left him in command with good officers and loafing warriors like Sittonax the Gaul and orders to keep the men who stayed busy every day, either training to fight or training to row. He had about three full crews when the rest of us headed for Plataea and I had almost four hundred men.

  Brasidas shook his head. ‘I’ll stay and train the marines,’ he said. He meant the ten best oarsmen he’d chosen to replace all the men who’d died on Black Raven. I pitied them. But I also knew I’d sleep better knowing that he and Seckla would run a tight camp with sentries and watchtowers – and that Brasidas, although it hurts me to say it, could command a respect from the Athenian oligarchs that Seckla would not. I was to regret not taking him, but that’s the way decisions go.

  That night on the beach we burned Paramanos. We’d saved his body, or rather, Harpagos and Cimon had, in hard fighting, and we put him on a funeral pyre as his people’s traditions’ demanded, sang the paean
of Apollo and other hymns, and drank too much. He had been first my captive, then my not-very-willing helmsman; then a rival pirate under Miltiades and, only later, my peer and friend. He was the best navigator I ever knew, except perhaps Vasileus. He was a good father to his daughters and a right bastard to his enemies. Here’s to his shade.

  Aristides the Just was in exile. He wasn’t even supposed to be on Salamis, but we all stretched a point. He was eager to get over the mountains to Plataea where his wife awaited, but he wept – openly – to see the whole of the population of Attica gathered on the beaches of Salamis, like a nation of beggars. His words, not mine.

  The camps of the Athenians stretched inland, on every path of flat ground the island had to offer. Ajax the Hero may have come from Salamis but it is not the most prosperous place, nor well inhabited, and it lacked the resources to feed the whole population of Attica for any significant time.

  But I digress like an old man, which I certainly am! We held our meeting, and our leaders – Myron and Draco, as Timaeus was already gone with the messengers – chose to take the Plataean people over the isthmus to the Peloponnese. Well, Myron had already made that decision and had sent messages to that effect, but sometimes democracy is retroactive tyranny.

  In fact, the Spartan navarch had invited all of our people to go to Sparta – probably meant as an honour, it led to a lot of loud talk and some rough jests in our meeting. In the end, they decided to go to Hermione, a small town on the west coast, one of Sparta’s ­allies, a member of her league. Hermione was five days’ hard walking from Plataea and a man could pack a cart with enough food for that journey. Because many men had gone to Epidauros to be healed at the sanctuary of the God-Hero Asclepius, many knew the roads to Hermione. Myron hoped to find shipping at the isthmus, and although it plays almost no role in this story, I’ll say that my three merchant ships never joined the fleet because they ferried Boeotians – first, people from Thespiae and then Plataeans – to Hermione from the Gulf of Corinth.