The Great King (4 page)

A season later, while my sister went to a finishing school to get her away from my mother’s drunkenness, I went back to Athens because my friend Phrynicus, who had stood in the arrow storm at Lade with me, was producing his play,
The Fall of Miletus.
And Miltiades had been arrested for threatening the state – of which, let me say, friends, he was absolutely guilty, because Miltiades would have sold his own mother into slavery to achieve power in Athens.

At any rate, I used money and some of the talents I’d learned as a slave – and a lot of my friends – to see that Phrynicus’s play was produced. And incidentally, to prise my stolen slave-girl free of her brothel and wreak some revenge on the Alcmaeonidae. In the process, I undermined their power with the demos – the people – and helped the new voice in Athenian politics – Themistocles the Orator. He had little love for me, but he managed to tolerate my success long enough to help me – and Aristides – to undermine the pro-Persian party and liberate Miltiades.

I went home to Plataea feeling that I’d done a lifetime of good service to Athens. My bronze smithing was getting better and better. I spent the winter training the Plataean phalanx in my spare time. War was going to be my hobby, the way some men learn the diaulos or the kithara to while away old age. I trained the young men and forged bronze. Life grew sweeter.

And when my sister Penelope – now married to a local Thespian aristocrat – decided that I was going to marry her friend Euphonia, I eventually agreed. I rode to Attica with a hunting party of aristocrats – Boeotian and Athenian – and won my bride in games that would not have disgraced the heroes of the past. And in the spring I wed her, at a wedding that included Themistocles and Aristides and Miltiades – and Harpagos and Agios and Moir and a dozen of my other friends from every class in Athens. I went back over the mountains with my bride, and settled down to make babies.

But the storm clouds on the horizon were coming on a great wind of change. And the first gusts of that wind brought us a raid out of Thebes, paid for by the Alcmaenoidae and led by my cousin Simon’s son Simonides. The vain bastard named all his sons after himself – how weak can a man be?

I digress. We caught them – my new Plataean phalanx – and we crushed them. My friend Teucer, the archer, killed Simonides. And because of them, we were all together when the Athenians called for our help, because the Persians, having destroyed Euboea, were marching for Athens.

Well, I won’t retell Marathon. Myron, our archon and always my friend, sent us without reservation, and all the Plataeans marched under my command, and we stood by the Athenians on the greatest day Greek men have ever known, and we were heroes. Hah! I’ll tell it again if you don’t watch yourselves. We defeated Datis and his Persians with the black ships. Agios died there on the stern of a Persian trireme, but we won the day. Here’s to his shade. And to all the shades of all the men who died at Lade.

But when I led the victorious Plataeans back across the mountains, it was to find that my beautiful young wife had died in childbirth. The gods stole my wits clean away – I took her body to my house and burned it and all my trappings, and I went south over Kitharon, intending to destroy myself.

May you never know how black the world can be. Women know that darkness sometimes after the birth of a child, and men after battle. Any peak of spirit has its price, and when a man or woman stands with the gods, however briefly, they pay the price ten times. The exertion of Marathon and the loss of my wife unmanned me. I leapt from a cliff.

I fell, and struck, not rocks, but water. And when I surfaced, my body fought for life, and I swam until my feet dragged on the beach. Then I swooned, and when I awoke, I was once again a slave. Again taken by Phoenicians, but this time as an adult. My life was cruel and like to be short, and the irony of the whole thing was that now I soon craved life.

I lived a brutal life under a monster called Dagon, and you’ll hear plenty of him tonight. But he tried to break me, body and soul, and nigh on succeeded. In the end, he crucified me on a mast, and left me to die. But Poseidon saved me – washed me over the side with the mast, and let me live. Set me on the deck of a little Sikel trading ship, where I pulled an oar as a near-slave for a few months. And then I was taken again, by the Phoenicians.

The degradations and the humiliations went on, until one day, in a sea fight, I took a sword and cut my way to freedom. The sword fell at my feet – literally. The gods have a hand in every man’s life. Only impious fools believe otherwise.

As a slave, I had developed new friendships. Or rather, new alliances, which, when I was free, ripened into friendship. My new friends were a polyglot rabble – an Etruscan of Roma named Gaius, a couple of Kelts, Daud and Sittonax, a pair of Africans from south of Libya, Doola and Seckla, a Sikel named Demetrios and an Illyrian kinglet-turned-slave called Neoptolymos. We swore an oath to Poseidon to take a ship to Alba and buy tin, and we carried out our oath. As I told you last night, we went to Sicily, and while my friends became small traders on the coast, I worked as a bronzesmith, learning and teaching. I fell in love with Lydia, the bronzesmith’s daughter, and betrayed her, and for that betrayal – let’s call things by their proper names – I lost confidence in myself, and I lost the favour of the gods, and for years I wandered up and down the seas, until at last we redeemed our oaths, went to Alba for the tin, and came back rich men. I did my best to see Lydia well suited, and I met Pythagoras’s daughter and was able to learn something of that great man’s mathematics and his philosophy. I met Gelon the tyrant of Syracusa and declined to serve him, and sailed away, and there, on a beach near Taranto in the south of Italia, I found my friend Harpagos and Cimon, son of Miltiades, and others among the friends and allies of my youth. I confess, I had sent a message, hoping that they would come. We cruised north into the Adriatic, because I had promised Neoptolymos that we’d restore him to his throne, and we did, though we got a little blood on it. And then the Athenians and I parted company from my friends of Sicily days – they went back to Massalia to till their fields, and I left them to go back to being Arimnestos of Plataea. Because Cimon said that the Persians were coming. And whatever my failings as a man – and I had and still have many – I am the gods’ own tool in the war of the Greeks against the Persians.

For all that I have always counted many Persians among my friends, and the best of men – the most excellent, the most brave, the most loyal. Persians are a race of truth-telling heroes. But they are not Greeks, and when it came to war . . .

We parted company off Illyria, and coasted the western Peloponnesus. But Poseidon was not yet done with me, and a mighty storm blew up off Africa and it fell on us, scattering our little squadron and sending my ship far, far to the south and west, and when the storm blew itself out, we were a dismasted hulk riding the rollers, and there was another damaged ship under our lee. We could see she was a Carthaginian. We fell on that ship and took it, although in a strange, three-sided fight – the rowers were rising against the deck crew of Persians.

It was Artapharenes’ own ship, and he was travelling from Tyre to Carthage to arrange for Carthaginian ships to help the Great King to make war on Athens. And I rescued him – I thought him a corpse.

So did his wife, my Briseis, who threw herself into my arms.

Blood dripped from my sword, and I stood with Helen in my arms on a ship I’d just taken by force of arms, and I thought myself the king of the world.

How the gods must have laughed.

‘Water is best, and gold, like a blazing fire in the night, stands out supreme of all lordly wealth. But if, my heart, you wish to sing of contests, look no further for any star warmer than the sun, shining by day through the lonely sky, and let us not proclaim any contest greater than Olympia.’

Pindar. 476 BCE

Artapharenes stubbornly refused to die.

After an hour, it was plain to any man who’d known as much strife as I that, despite the six deep sword-cuts in his side, he was not mortally wounded. He had a contusion on his head where a pike haft had laid open his scalp, and he’d been hacked at by desperate men, but he was merely unconscious.

Don’t imagine I hovered at his side like Hermes attending on Zeus. Despite the sea fight, my ship still needed repair, and we were uncomfortably close to Africa – a strong north wind and we’d have been wrecked. And the coast of Africa was the coast of Libya – Carthage’s coast, and all hostile to me and mine. Megakles was between the steering oars. I had Sekla watch the coast – he knew Libya better than any man in my crew. Ka, my new African master bowman, had two men wounded, and he was doctoring them, and Leukas, my Alban oar-master, was with me in the water, patching the two man-lengths of riven wood where the storm had opened
Lydia
’s seams along the starboard side.

It was Brasidas – my former Spartan marine – who was left with the complex job of watching the vessel we’d taken. Complicated because, in truth, we hadn’t taken her – we’d rescued her. The presence of Briseis, the love of my life, made everything complicated. But the Persians aboard – my three friends, Darius, Cyrus and Arayanam, and Artapherenes himself – complicated things still more. We were not at war with Persia, that summer. And the Persians were clearly an embassy, and embassies were sacred to all the gods. I’m a pious man, even when I’m a fool – I could see the boughs of ivy and laurel in the bow, and I wasn’t going to betray my guest oaths and friendship oaths with these Persians, but I was hard put to decide just what to do with them. Or my love.

Had Artapharenes just died . . .

He wasn’t going to die. And that being plain, I dived into the cold seawater to help repair my ship and to clear my head, despite a wounded hand and the stares of Briseis’ women at my naked body, or perhaps because of them.

Leukas, bless him, had no worries beyond the ship, and he went down under the hull and back up, again and again, shaking his head until, with ten men hauling the sodden remains of the other ship’s boat sail, we managed to get at our sprung timbers and bind the sail over it. It didn’t stop the leak, but it reduced it.

We still had six oarsmen at the wooden pumps all day and all night.

The Carthaginian ship we’d taken was in even worse shape. The mast had been down when the storm hit, but my guess – all the officers were dead – was that the tackle hadn’t been stowed properly and had blown loose in the night, rolling and pitching, driving the oarsmen mad and finally blowing over the side in the darkness, after swamping the ship and tearing a grisly hole in the side. The boat sail spar had smashed half the oars and stove a hole right through the side, and when dawn showed them calmer water and the coast of Africa under their lee, the oarsmen revolted.

That ship was finished. I thought perhaps I could get it on to the beach of Libya, but that was the last place I wanted to go myself. Good sense told me to take my own and row away. But Artapherenes held my guest oath and had given me my life, and I had worn his ring for years.

When we had the hole in our side patched, I rolled aboard and dried myself, and stood in the sun. Thirty feet away, Briseis smiled at me across the water.

Damn her.

I puffed out my chest, no doubt.

Why are men such simple creatures? Eh?

Sekla had the deck. The steering oars were inboard, waiting until there was way on the ship, but Sekla stood between them, the traditional command space, at least on my ships. He leaned forward.

‘That’s the famous Briseis,’ he said. He had the temerity to laugh.

‘Yes,’ I said.

He shook his head. ‘Beautiful,’ he said. ‘She never took her eyes off you, while you were in the water.’ He shrugged.

I was watching Briseis.

He elbowed me. ‘Are you the mighty pirate Arimnestos, or some spotty boy?’ he asked.

I glared at him. I’d saved him from lovesickness – I thought,
How dare you
.

He laughed in my face.

I had to laugh with him. ‘A spotty boy,’ I agreed. ‘That’s what she always does to me.’

Leukas was drying himself on his chiton. The Alban shook his head but remained silent.

Megakles didn’t. His broad Italiote accent added emphasis to his comic delivery. ‘While we all drool at her, my lord, any Liby-Phoenician in these waters will snap us all up. And we’ll all be slaves.’

Sittonax – my lazy Gallish friend – stretched like a cat. ‘That is one well-formed woman,’ he agreed. ‘Not worth dying for, though.’ He nodded at Megakles. ‘You know he’s right.’

‘They’re an embassy,’ I said. ‘Even the Carthaginians respect an embassy.’

I gathered that my friends didn’t agree. Their intransigence made me angry, and I remember biting my lip and trying to keep my temper. I was thrice tired – awake all night at the helm, fighting a boarding action, and now I’d helped fother the hull – and it was all I could do to stay on my feet, and their teasing got under my skin far too easily.

I stood there, watching my oarsmen pump water out of my damaged hull. I couldn’t see us making any of the southern Peloponnesian ports – too far, and too much chance of another spring storm.

Brasidas motioned with his usual economy of effort – a single flick of the hand.

I leaned over the port-side rail. ‘What do you need?’ I called.

‘Nothing,’ he said. ‘But the woman wants you.’

In any other man’s mouth, that might have sounded like ribaldry, but the Spartan was carefully spoken. We don’t call them Laconic for nothing.

On any other day, I’d have ordered the oarsmen to use boarding pikes to pull the ships closer. But Briseis was watching, and so, despite fatigue, I seized a chiton and pulled it on, belted it with a corded zone, pulled my sword belt over my head, and leapt – leapt, I say – from one oar bank to the next. I noted as I landed that the other ship was lower in the water.

I managed to jump inboard over the terrified survivors among the slave oarsmen – what was left after the fight, watched like hawks by my own marines – and I tried not to swagger too much as I went aft to Briseis.