Salamis Read online

  At any rate, that was the plan that seemed best. And the phalanx would march home under Hermogenes. I was determined to go to Plataea and come swiftly back over the mountains to the ships. The sight of thousands of Attic refugees crowding the beaches of Salamis taught me a lesson; I knew from the moment I saw them that Athens would fight. The Athenian fleet was not going to sail to the isthmus to defend Corinth and Sparta. It was going to fight right here.

  Of course, there was another alternative that didn’t bear thinking about – the possibility that Themistocles would sell the alliance out to the Medes. Thebes had, as I have said, already gone over to the Great King. Athens might make the same choice.

  But I doubted it.

  Aristides found all the Brauron girls after Paramanos’s feast, when he met a friend of his wife’s on the beach. The next morning, as the phalanx of Plataea loaded themselves into a dozen Athenian grain ships on our beach, I rode over the headland with my sons to find Euphonia as a skope in a small lookout tower, watching the waters of the Gulf of Salamis for Persians. All her Brauron sisters were living in a camp of Laconian severity, at the foot of the cliff. The girls were very proud of the orderly, military camp. They had stacks of firewood, simple tents, and when I came, they were practising ­dancing on the wet sand.

  Euphonia laughed and embraced me, which brought a lump to my throat, and still does. She was becoming a young woman and not a slip of a girl – becoming, but not yet there, although her body was lean and hard from a summer of dancing and archery, riding and fighting and hunting. Brauron was like a Spartan academy, but for the girls of the wealthy. The women who ran it, the priestesses of Artemis, had been required to abandon their temple with its magnificent ­Pi-shaped stoa and its great dining hall where women learned to recline on couches like their brothers – and not spill their wine, I hope.

  She began talking without sparing her brothers so much as a look. ‘I love to be sentry,’ she said. ‘I pretend I’m Atlanta, running with Heracles. Or perhaps Achilles. And I want to be the first to spot the Persians. I saw your ships, Pater! I was on duty yesterday, too, and I sent my pais running to say that the fleet of Plataea was on the beaches! And I won the younger girls’ dancing, but we had to dance on the sand and not in the great hall, because the Persians are going to burn it, and Mother Bear Europhile says that the dance counts anyway, but Eustratia said it wasn’t fair. And next year I’ll be allowed to wear the red cord! Unless the Persians burn the temple,’ she said in sudden deflation.

  I kissed her. ‘Euphonia, this is your brother, Hipponax, and no doubt you remember Hector.’

  Euphonia gazed at them her usual adoration. ‘I saw them,’ she said. She smiled. ‘Hector is no longer anyone’s hyperetes,’ she added. ‘I can tell, because Mother Bear Thiale lectured us on armour, and that thorax is a very good one. Anyway, I didn’t need the lecture – you own lots of armour, and you even used to make it, so I raised my hand and said—’

  At this point the boys crushed her in two manly, armoured embraces that stopped even her flow of words for a few moments.

  She waved a red shield – a small thing of hide – down at the camp, and instantly, as if they were all Spartan peers, a girl sprinted out of the camp and up the ridge to us. She and Euphonia exchanged salutes – exactly like my own epilektoi! – and my daughter grinned.

  ‘We want to carry swords or at least knives, but Mother Bear Thiale will not let us,’ she said. ‘I want to kill a Persian,’ she added. ‘Anyway, we’re going to do our special “little bear” dances this morning, and I want you to see them. It’s an honour even to be asked to see them,’ she said to the two young men.

  They chose – wisely, I feel – to look respectful and impressed.

  What followed was better than a mere delight. Despite our hurry – and believe me, I felt the beating of the wings of time’s winged horses with the passing of every moment – we sat on stools provided by the priestesses. Wine was brought us, and we poured libations to Artemis and heard them sing her hymns – three of them, one disturbingly like a marching paean.

  Mother Thiale turned to me. ‘You believe that is too warlike for women,’ she said.

  I cocked an eyebrow. ‘No,’ I said. ‘I’m delighted to see what a little Titan you’ve made of my daughter.’

  Thiale seemed ready for a different answer. She looked at me carefully. ‘Report has it that you are a man of blood,’ she said.

  I shrugged. ‘I am, at that. So I imagine my daughter bears the same blood that all the Corvaxae bear, and perhaps even the same daimon.’

  She frowned. ‘The girls are ready to begin,’ she said.

  The girls dancing were between the ages of eight and fifteen. Fifteen was quite old for an aristocratic woman to still be at Brauron – most of them were married by then. But some stayed – some stayed for ever as priestesses, and some remained as guides and junior teachers for the younger girls, summer after summer. In truth, it must have been a fine life for a girl who liked sport, and I know that some weep bitter tears when they leave the sanctuary for the last time. Who encourages women to run the two-stade race after they have borne a child? Who gives new mothers the time to dance the sacred dances or shoot a bow? What of the girls who excel at athletics the way boys do? Well might they be bitter when their fathers announce to them that they must put away childish things and bear children.

  Well, I am not one of those fathers. I hope.

  At any rate, there they were – big and small, tall and short, long-legged and short-legged, black-haired and brown-haired and red-haired – the height of fashion at the time, let me tell you – and golden-haired like Euphonia. They were beautiful in their coltish innocence, afire with the excitement of their exile and the adventure of the war, and in the rising sun, they looked like so many muses or naiads. Most wore a simple boy’s chitoniskos, worn off one shoulder and thus exposing one breast on a few of the older girls. In the dawn, preparing for their dance, they were all stretching like boys in a gymnasium. In fact, the women’s gymnasium at Brauron was a wonder throughout Attica, and perhaps until that moment I had never seen women as athletes. But closest to me was an older girl whose legs carried the same sort of muscle my legs wore when I could run two stades faster than all the other youths, and her arms showed the same ridges of muscle at biceps and triceps that any well-trained boy had.

  My two boys were acting like clods, their mouths open, their teeth showing.

  I leaned back on my stool and kicked Hipponax sharply in the shin even as I held my cup out to a young girl of perhaps ten years to have it refilled.

  Let me add that if Hector and Hipponax had ever had a thought in their handsome heads about anything but war, I had assumed it was about each other. This is natural enough, especially in war – they were young and tough and together every minute. Perhaps I should have given it more thought. I suppose I assumed they were Achilles and Patrocles, or something like.

  As it proved, they were just two boys who’d never seen a girl. Much less twenty girls all on the edge of womanhood, wearing an arm’s length of transparent cloth that revealed one breast, one shoulder, and most everything else, especially when a girl stretched a leg high in the air in a manner than no boy could manage, or did a handstand.

  I’ll blush myself if I go on. These girls were young enough to be my daughters. If they were shameless, they were also utterly innocent. Their very shamelessness came of summers of high training with no men about to stare or pry.

  Of course, the staring was not entirely one-sided, and one girl, crowned with a magnificent double braid of her own red-brown hair, seemed to need to stretch each of her legs repeatedly just a horse-length from Hipponax, who watched her with the attention he usually saved for an adversary in a ship fight.

  ‘It’s not polite to drool,’ I said quietly.

  Hipponax didn’t seem to hear me.

  Hector dug a thumb under his arm
. Hipponax squirmed, but he and the girl seemed to have their eyes locked together. I think I actually saw the arrow of Eros’s little bow go into his eye. He was slain dead on the spot.

  Hah! That was a lovely morning.

  At any rate, the girls began to dance – none too soon, for the boys. And there was nothing lovesome or erotic to their dance – they leapt and crawled, they kicked and growled, little bears indeed. Some of the girls were quite good – to my delight, Euphonia was one of them, her movements pure and graceful, her back straight. Once in a while she’d spoil it by taking her lower lip between her teeth in concentration, but she was good.

  I must have been grinning. The priestess leaned over. ‘She’s very good, although a little arrogant.’ She paused. ‘Have you found her a husband already?’ she asked.

  Really, if the whole of the Persian fleet had rounded the promontory that instant, I wouldn’t have been more surprised. ‘No,’ I said.

  Mother Thiale smiled. ‘Ah,’ she said. ‘She has much spirit,’ she said. ‘Is she to be a priestess?’

  ‘In Plataea, Mother, most priestesses are wives,’ I said. ‘We are a small city. My mother was hereditary priestess of Hera.’

  Mother Thiale looked non-committal. ‘Ah,’ she said.

  The girl with the double braid wrapped around her head – a man’s hairstyle meant to pad a helmet – was clearly one of the dance leaders. She did a movement with her legs and hips, exactly as we do it in Pyrrhiche, her feet both performing a sliding turn in place, her hips turning as if to face a new partner – or a new opponent.

  All the other girls followed suit. In this portion of the dance, the braided girl did each figure alone, and then the rest of them would copy her. She kicked, jumped, stretched. While she was dancing, she was beautiful. When the figure was done and all the girls took water, she was revealed as being very tall and heavily built – almost as well built as a man. Proportioned – still pretty. But her beauty had been in her dance.

  And she drank her water with her eyes on Hipponax.

  After they drank water, the dancers came together for one more dance. This was a hymn to the sun and another girl led it, this one smaller, blonde and very serious and grave. But if the first girl’s dancing had been beautiful, this girl’s dancing was divine, or at least direct from the goddess. Her sense of the timing in the music was superb – in fact, I’ve never seen a professional dancer who was her equal. It was as if she understood something in the music that the other girls didn’t hear.

  My Euphonia danced well – her movements were crisp and to the music, and this time she didn’t chew on her lip. But she was merely a devotee of the Goddess of the Bears. For the duration of the dance, the blonde girl was the goddess herself, and her legs flashed and moved with a precision that only the very best warriors could match.

  They trained well, at Brauron.

  The two girls – the braided one and the smaller one – were, as it always proves, best friends. Summers of competition at everything had only made them closer. You could see in the way they stood together, and the way they drank the water from their black ceramic canteens, and giggled.

  Hipponax and Hector watched them with something like the adoration that dogs have for their masters.

  Euphonia bowed low to her teachers, got a pretty hug from the blonde dancer, and came over to us.

  ‘You are a very good dancer,’ I said. The first duty of every parent – provide accurate praise. Empty praise is worthless, but children are like soldiers – they need praise to enable their work.

  In fact, if you ask me, training soldiers and oarsmen is the very best training for being a parent. Except, come to think of it, women do neither of these things and seem to be very good at mothering, so perhaps my wits are astray.

  At any rate, she hugged both her brothers, and accepted their praise.

  Hector was the bolder of the two. ‘Who is the blonde girl? The one who danced—’

  Euphonia laughed. ‘Heliodora? She’s the best dancer they’ve ever had here.’ She paused. ‘At Brauron I mean. Pater, why is the fleet not fighting at Brauron? The Persians will destroy the temple.’

  I suppose I smiled. ‘My little bear, Athens will be lucky if the allied fleet agrees to make its stand here and defend Salamis.’ I looked around at the bay in the growing September sunlight. ‘If we could lure the Persians into fighting inside the bay—’

  ‘Brauron has a rocky promontory on which all the Persian ships could wreck themselves.’ She all but bounced while she spoke.

  ‘Perhaps, with Poseidon’s help, they will.’ I tried to make light of it.

  Euphonia caught sight of my left hand. I’d been hiding it inside my himation, and she caught me, as children do. She pulled it out.

  ‘Oh, Pater!’ she said.

  Even the priestess winced.

  I smiled. You learn, in time, how to play the hero, and how not to say, ‘Yes, it hurts as if all the Furies had stung me themselves, and it’s also clumsy for eating.’ Instead, you smile and say, ‘It’s nothing. I never even needed those fingers.’

  Or words to that effect.

  Brasidas would, I’m sure, pretend that his hand was uninjured.

  ‘It only hurts a little,’ I said. To distract her, I drew lines on the sand. ‘Look, Little Bear, if I want to fight the Persians – you know they have a much larger fleet?’

  She nodded wisely. ‘Everyone knows that. Everyone knows we beat them at Artemisium, too.’

  The priestess smiled, proud of her charge.

  ‘So we did, girl.’ I went back to my drawing.

  ‘One of our ships is worth ten of theirs,’ Euphonia said.

  That statement distracted Hipponax. He laughed. ‘Don’t you ­believe it, Little Bear,’ he said. ‘Their ships are mostly just like ours – as well trained, if not better. The Phoenicians are first-rate sailors, and the Ionians are no worse.’

  Hector nodded. ‘And either of them is better than the Corinthians,’ he said. He spoke just a little too loudly and his head remained turned towards the two girls who were tying their sandals.

  The girl with the braids spent quite a bit of time on her sandals.

  The other girl seemed impatient – and unaware of the male attention that her friend was enjoying.

  Euphonia put her hands on her hips. ‘They can’t be so good,’ she said. ‘They’re horrible alien barbarians.’

  Hector laughed aloud – a little too loud, and he won his wager, because both girls allowed themselves to look at him. ‘The Ionian Greeks are our own cousins. In some cases, literally,’ he said.

  ‘Too true,’ I said. ‘Look, my sweet. If the Great King’s ships catch us in open water, they can envelop a flank – perhaps even both flanks. They have six or seven hundred ships. All they have to do is back water in the centre and the rest of the ships can take all the time they want. Eventually – ’ I drew arrows around the ends of my hypothetical allied line ‘ – eventually we lose. Brauron is a peninsula; we could only anchor one flank.’

  ‘And anyway, silly, it doesn’t have any beaches. Where would we camp? Where would all the ships start the day? We’d have to row from here!’ Hector mocked her.

  ‘I am not silly,’ Euphonia said.

  Hipponax had the good sense to look as if he wasn’t there. Hector looked annoyed. ‘War isn’t for girls,’ he said dismissively. ‘It’s complicated.’

  Euphonia didn’t burst into tears or anything of the sort. Instead, she crossed her arms. ‘Not as complicated as having a baby,’ she said. ‘Or running a household. But it’s funny that you want to insult me,’ she added wickedly, ‘as I know both their names, and I’m friends with them. And I doubt you’ll convince them to come talk to you by staring like statues.’

  Hector, stung, pretended adolescent indifference. ‘Them? I don’t know who you are talking about,’ he said.
r />   ‘Oh,’ Euphonia said. ‘Fair enough then.’ She smiled, knowing her power.

  I thought I had better step in before blood was shed. ‘You should gather your things, Little Bear. We have a ship for the mainland—’ I was in mid-sentence when I realised that taking Euphonia to Plataea was probably foolish. She would be caught in a column of refugees, dragged to Hermione …

  On the other hand, Penelope, my sister, would take her. That made me worry about Antigonus – of course I didn’t know he was dead yet – and that made me think of Leonidas, dead. And other dark things.

  Unbidden, I reached out and hugged Euphonia.

  ‘But my summer isn’t over for two weeks!’ she said. ‘I’m going to stay here and help fight the Persians!’

  Unbidden, I had a whole series of pictures – of my daughter as a slave, of the rape of the island of Salamis. Of Adeimantus, delighting in the destruction of Athens.

  On the other hand, I didn’t want to drag her across Attica and Boeotia, especially if there really were already Persian cavalry patrols out in Boeotia.

  ‘Please, Pater?’ she said.

  She didn’t squeeze my hand or bat her eyelashes or any of the things you see women do in plays. She just looked at me steadily. ‘Pater? I want to stay here and fight for Greece and dance with my friends,’ she said.

  Naturally, I agreed.

  She jumped up and down and clapped her hands. Her priestess appeared pleased, too.

  I smiled, and then nodded to my young men. ‘Make your bows, gentlemen,’ I said. ‘Euphonia is in good hands and we will return here in a few days.’ I made my own bow to the priestess. ‘I expect to be five days at most. My ships are beached in the next bay and if my daughter needs anything – money, or other things – my friend Seckla has my purse and my ships.’

  The priestess nodded with dignity. ‘It is inspiring to the girls,’ she said, ‘for one of the men who fought at Artemisium to watch the dances.’