The Great King (25 page)

On the summer feast of Herakles, old Empedocles came and blessed the new building and the whole forge, even including the silversmith in his prayers, and he kindled all our forge fires. He had a Theban journeyman with him, and the young man beamed at everything he saw and helped the old man with the rites.

Then I made a cup. It had been two years since I had worked, and yet the power of the god flowed through me and I made a fine cup – with a flat bottom and sloped sides, and silver rivets on the handle, and the image of a priest blessing an anvil. And Empedocles laughed and then cried and complained that he was an old man, and we all drank a great deal. But I made a second cup and gave it to my daughter, and she shook her head.

‘My uncle Andronicus can’t make anything like this,’ she said.

‘He’s an aristocrat,’ I said.

And the next day, while my new slaves we repacking my new donkeys in my new yard of my new house, yet another messenger came, from the Agiad King of Sparta.

The truth? I rather looked forward to taking the heralds to Susa.

You must know I’d never been. But I had been to Sardis and I knew enough Persian to get good service and good food. I knew enough Persian aristocrats to expect to have friends at the Great King’s court.

So I delayed my trip to Athens by a day so that I could say a proper goodbye – to Hermogenes and Styges and Tiraeus, to Myron and Draco – but most of all, to my sister and her husband. I arranged for my daughter to be retrieved after her time at the temple of Artemis. I promised to return.

‘How long?’ Pen asked. ‘You only just came home!’

I nodded and looked out of the window. ‘Look for me in the spring,’ I said.

‘A year!’ my sister wailed.

My daughter clung to me.

I shrugged and my brother-in-law, who clearly felt I’d endured enough, said, ‘My dears, he’s been commanded by the King of Sparta!’

‘I don’t particularly care if he’s been commanded by Hera or Zeus!’ my sister said, but she relented, asked forgiveness for her blasphemy, and sent me on the road with her blessings.

I suppose I should have worried that Idomeneaus did not come out to wish me well. I prayed at the shrine and Bellerophon told me that the mad Cretan was hunting.

My six-year-old daughter was going to the temple of Artemis, and I was going a hundred times farther, to the court of the Great King. But she had six mules behind her, all heavily laden, and I had one.

And we stopped at the high altar on Kitharon, and I saw that someone had been making black offerings. I could guess which of my cousins was not yet done with our feud. But in my new-found wisdom, I was immune to such petty concerns. I brushed the bits of black wool aside and left my daughter to start a fire on the ash altar with her new hero, Brasidas – who would not worship a Spartan, at age six? Alexandros and I ran the mountaintop trails until we killed a deer. We didn’t see Idomeneaus. We brought the deer’s corpse back and opened it and burned the fat and the thigh bones on my daughter’s fire. She had never sacrificed there, and it was a great adventure for her, and afterwards we all ate fresh venison.

She threw up.

Parenthood.

But in the morning, we went down the mountain into Attica, and the world was waiting for us.

I took Euphonia to see her grandfather. She was very excited to get to Brauron and she rued every day lost, sure that everyone else would be friends and she’d miss everything fun. But her grandfather – her mother’s father – was a fine gentleman, still delighted with me. I was never asked where I had been for the last six years, and I won his heart by telling him that I’d stood next to the King of Sparta during the sacrifices at the Olympic games. And he loved his granddaughter. She was showered with presents – quite wide eyed, and yet perfectly willing to have more.

We stayed two days, and he agreed to fetch her from Brauron and keep her until Leda or Penelope came for her. My second night there I drank too much and cried for my daughter’s mother, whom I truly loved. Her father was solicitous, and a little afraid of my grief.

But grief is only that. And it is better than emptiness or anger.

Ah, my daughter! You yourself learned the sacred dances in the groves and hills of Brauron, but some of your guests may not know the place.

Brauron is just a few stades south of Marathon on the same coast. And how that coast brought back memories for me. We met with Phrynicus and his wife – mounted on mules – just west of the city and we kept going, as a ‘stop’ in Athens could have embroiled us in politics very quickly. I had enemies in the city, among the Alcmaeonidae. The richest family in the world. But it was a great pleasure to revisit the days of our heroism together – how men love to talk about a shared adventure, my daughter! We lied and we lied – much as I’m doing with you now.

Hah, the looks on your faces.

At any rate, we crossed the mountains and rode across the great plain of Attica, and stayed the night in a fine house – that of a friend of both my father-in-law and of Cimon, and no friend of Phrynicus. A countryside aristocrat who swore that he had never in his life been to Athens. He was of the cavalry class, and he felt that the city was rotten with corruption. He all but fawned on Brasidas, asking his opinion on everything from spear fighting to the education of his son. And the man – Peisander – had a girl just seven years old going off to Brauron, as arranged by Cimon, and so we all rode off together the next day – Phrynicus swallowing his political views at every turn in the road, I can promise you.

It is hardly central to my tale, but I’ll bore you with it a little, to help you understand how Greeks actually dealt with the coming of the Persians. Peisander had stood in his tribe’s front rank at Marathon. He was a proven man – brave, and patriotic.

He fairly worshipped Aristides.

And yet, as we rode down the last ridge and saw the sea, he turned to me and shook his head. ‘You are far richer than I – and a friend of the King of Sparta. And yet I understand from your silence that you support this foolishness – this war with the Great King. How can we hope to triumph?’

I smiled – winningly, I hope. ‘Much the same way we carried the day at Marathon,’ I said. ‘Courage, and the love of the gods.’

He nodded. ‘That’s well said – piety like yours is rarer in these godless days, my friend. But – that was a raid. A punitive expedition. Men say that if the Great King comes, he’ll have a million men. On our best day, Athens can raise fifteen thousand hoplites.’

I nodded. ‘Sparta can bring twice that, with her allies. Thebes the same again, and Corinth and Argos the same again. With Athens as allies, we’ll match anything Persia can get here.’ I waved my hands. ‘Greece is not Asia. They will have real trouble feeding and watering a giant army.’

He looked back at our daughters, riding side by side. ‘Perhaps. Perhaps age makes cowards of us. But listen, my lord. Why not send the earth and water? We submit. Persia sends a satrap. So?’ He shrugged. ‘No virgins are raped.’ He looked me right in the eye. ‘No boys die on spear points.’ Then he flushed, and looked back at Brasidas, who was close enough to hear him. ‘I’m sure I sound like a fearful coward to you, sir.’

Brasidas shrugged. ‘No man of Marathon is a coward to me, sir. But – I agree.’ Brasidas looked at me and had the good grace to flash a wry smile. ‘I do not understand, myself, why we must fight. Mere lip-service may suffice.’

‘This from a Spartan!’ my new friend said, and slapped his thigh.

Brasidas raised an eyebrow. ‘I am a Plataean, now.’

I nodded. ‘I can tell – you talk more.’

The priestesses of Brauron were not like other Greek women I knew. They were neither pretty nor ugly – in fact, the dozen I met ran a full gamut of feminine types – but they all had the air of command. Because of my time with the Keltoi, I recognised that they were free. They did not see me as husband, father or lord. But as a peer. Or even less. Interesting.

Sittonax said he found the priestesses to be the most interesting women he’d met in Greece, and one of the senior priestesses invited him to dinner. But not me – which was fine. I saw my daughter’s quarters, which were very like a boy’s military camp on Crete – in fact, my Spartan’s eyebrows shot up and later he said it was like a politer Agoge for girls. And it was.

Euphonia had two advantages – her open disposition, which made friends easily, and Peisander’s daughter Hermione, who was well known, from just across the mountain. I felt that I left my little daughter in good hands. But that night, riding back to a small inn kept for parents, I felt as if I’d just left Briseis. I felt as if a little hole had been ripped in my heart. I had only had a daughter for one single month.

If you are expecting me to talk about how I rescued Aristides from ostracism, I’m sorry to say I did not. Phrynicus and Peisander shared only one political issue – they both detested the ostracism. I kept them to that subject all the way back across the plains of Attica, but it was increasingly clear to me that my friend was doomed.

Despite being in favour of the war with Persia, Aristides fought the creation of a large and powerful Athenian fleet tooth and nail, rising every day in the assembly to rally the old families and the aristocrats against Themistocles. Men said he planned to take the tyranny to stop the democrats.

Men like Peisander thought that would be a fine thing.

We stayed another night with the aristocrat, and then Phrynicus and I and his charming wife rode slowly down towards the sea, crossed the ridges until we could see the magnificent acropolis rising in the distance, and then down again into the city.

‘Themistocles wants to build walls,’ he said.

His wife rolled her eyes.

‘He has been a good friend to us!’ Phrynicus insisted.

‘As long as you write his panegyrics,’ she commented. She smiled at me. ‘He is caught in the middle. He was friends as a boy with both.’

‘You know that when Themistocles was a boy, he was not allowed into the main gymnasium because his mother was foreign,’ Phrynicus said. ‘So he took to exercising at a small palaestra just outside the old walls by the statue of Herakles. More and more of us went there with him, until it turned out we’d basically taken all the students out of the main gymnasium.’ Phrynicus shot me his wry smile. ‘I think we gave him a taste of power and he’s never looked back.’

‘And Aristides was one of the boys who saw him shut out of the aristocratic gymnasium?’ I asked.

Phrynicus wrinkled his nose. ‘Can you imagine Aristides the Just doing any such thing? But they’ve always been rivals. Rivals for girls and sometimes boys, rivals for commands. Aristides is a far better soldier. Themistocles is a better orator and, frankly, sees farther ahead. Aristides is more honourable. Themistocles is more capable of making the hard decisions. Aristides is a better negotiator.’ He rolled his right hand back and forth as he read off this litany.

‘Together, they make one perfect man?’ I asked.

Phrynicus’s wife snorted.

I went and lived with Paramanos, who was very prosperous and had a fine house in Piraeus, with a dozen slaves and sixteen rooms in two storeys – three wings around a tiled courtyard, very elegant. I didn’t recognise it at the time, but my greatest disappointment in Plataea had been that Hermogenes and I were no longer close friends. There was some wall between us – and I blamed silver and fame.

I had no such reserve with Paramanos, and that was all the odder, as we had not started friends and, in fact, we had been closer to allies than philoi. He’d been my slave and then my freedman – helmsman in my ship, and then sub-captain. Now, as a rich Athenian merchant – Miltiades had arranged citizenship for him and his Cyrenian-born daughter – we were peers.

Paramanos had purchased the contract of a beautiful young hetaera – five years. He confessed to me in private that he would probably offer her marriage. She was younger and, like Gorgo and the priestesses at Brauron, very open. She sat in a chair while we dined, made jokes both coarse and clever, and played. She also told Paramanos when he had had too much to drink and laid out for him what he needed to do to help his daughter along towards her wedding.

I liked her. We flirted and debated some philosophy and she fairly doted on me when I said that I had known Heraklitus. She was, for a woman, very well read – she was better educated than some Athenian men.

But I digress.

I had to sail to Sparta to pick up my charges, and time was of the essence because I needed good sailing weather. But – obedient to my orders – none of my ships were available.
Storm Cutter
and
Lydia
were both running small cargoes. Paramanos’s
Black Raven
had once been my ship – but it was Paramanos’s ship now, and he regularly carried silver to the Ionians and brought back dyed wool – an excellent trade for a fast, well-armed ship.

So I had days to wait, and I politicked for Aristides. I went up to the city from Piraeus and visited the assembly. Oh – I was a citizen of Athens. I can’t remember whether I’ve said, but after Marathon, Athens had made me – and a dozen other Plataeans including my brother-in-law – Athenian citizens. Perhaps the finest thing was that they had the priestess of Athena Nike pray every morning for the ‘City of Green Plataea’. I know, because I so swelled with pride when I learned this that I rose the next morning in the dark and walked up to the town. I was the only worshipper in the temple – nothing so fine as what is now planned. Afterwards, an acolyte came and took my donation.

‘Are you by any chance a Plataean?’ he asked, and I grinned and admitted I was. He was delighted.

As I left the little temple, I noted that I was being followed. I did nothing about it – I went down the other side of the acropolis, past the festival site, and walked into the area where the rich had their homes – like a little parkland in the city. My two followers moved from wall corner to wall corner. If they had simply strolled, they’d have been much harder to spot.

I was alone – rare for me, but I hadn’t wanted Brasidas or Alexandros or any of the others at my shoulder in temple. So I moved as if unaware of my tail, and went to Aristides’ house.