The Great King (42 page)

‘As do I,’ I said. ‘But it is a cloak she should be allowed to put off, from time to time.’

Aristides chewed on that for perhaps forty paces, and then said, ‘You get in a good thing, now and then. Dignity as a cloak – that’s good.’

We had the Queen of Sparta in Plataea for five days.

As with Jocasta, one of my favourite moments was created by the cup. Spartan women often sit with men, as I have mentioned, and several times we all sat in the guest house, or the garden, but one night we assembled in the garden and the insects were too much, and we moved into the andron, and there, glowing in golden opulence, was the Queen Mother’s gift.

Gorgo went and took it down from the low shelf on which it sat.

‘I want to drink from this,’ she said. ‘From the Great King?’ she asked.

‘The Queen Mother,’ I admitted.

Bulis laughed. ‘The Persians are so rich they don’t even know they are bribing us,’ he said.

We all laughed. And there we sat – the Queen of Sparta, the just man of Athens, and the heroes of Marathon, and drank to the cause of the liberty of Hellas in the cup we’d been given by the Queen of Persia.

Three of the days she was with us, Gorgo went with Pen and Leda and Jocasta and paid worship to Hera at the temple.

Every day, she was feted – by Myron, by Antigonus, by the temple of Hera itself. She made a great donation, and she was, to all intents, pleased by everything she saw. She kissed Boeotian babies and watched my Epilektoi dance the Pyricche.

Bulis walked among the young men and talked to them. He was like a different man – charming, with compliments for every boy on their physique, their bearing, their skill. Later, he lay with me on a couch.

‘This is a fine town, I think. More like Sparta than I would have believed. Small – and thus good.’ He raised a kantharos cup. ‘See? You make me drunk, and I talk.’

And Sparthius told Ajax and Lysius that the young men were good. This praise, from a Spartiate and a professional warrior, went straight to their heads, and they got very drunk and made fools of themselves very publicly, which was a nine-day wonder in Plataea and had no other effect on any of us – or them.

Early on the last full day, I put all the women up on horses – the splendid horses Moire and Ka had brought – and we rode up to the shrine of Leithos, and Gorgo made a sacrifice of wine. An odd thing happened that I cannot explain. Gorgo poured her libation on the precinct wall, and the tomb rang – as if with laughter. I had known that tomb since I was a boy, and never heard the like. Some of the men flinched.

Idomeneaus came down from his hillside to see the queen. She looked into his mad eyes and spoke quietly to him. He asked her something, and she nodded.

Later he came to me, and nodded. ‘She says you served her well,’ he said. ‘The hero – he is very pleased that she is here.’

I thought he looked madder than ever, and I didn’t linger near him. He smelled odd, and not of the hillside.

Then I took Gorgo up Kitharon, and we rode to my family’s altar – twenty of us, the queen, and Jocasta and Pen and Leda and Artistides and the two Spartan men, Gelon and Alexandros and Idomeneaus and Styges, of all people. And we made a sacrifice of a deer we’d speared on the way – Styges got it – and then we rode slowly down into the gathering twilight of a late spring evening.

I rode side by side with the queen.

‘I do this a great deal,’ she said, as if I’d asked a question. ‘Leonidas is a hero, but sometimes that stands between him and other men. I go to small places and great, and I visit women, and woo men – for the cause.’ She turned to me in the gathering darkness and she did not look downcast. ‘But I tell you, Plataean – this is a fine place. Your people are good people. The Pyricche and the women’s dances, the wine and the barley and the festivals and the temple . . .’

As always, I was tempted to say that I did not need a Spartan’s good opinion to know my home was good. But instead I smiled.

‘I’m glad you see all these things,’ I said. ‘To me, it is merely home.’

She nodded. ‘Next spring, we’ll have an assembly of all the free Greeks. At Corinth, I think. Please come, with Myron.’ She smiled. ‘My husband wants you there as much as I do. Listen – we’ve made a good beginning. Most men accept that we must resist. Your reports and ours have spread far and wide.’

On the last night, she led a torchlight procession around the women’s shrines, and then she returned to my house. I had kline in the garden – all of them I owned and four borrowed from Myron, who joined us. I had a scandalous dinner – a mixed dinner, with men and women together. In Lacedaemon, it was sometimes done, and in Italy it was the norm. In Etrusca, a man and his wife might make love on their couch at the end of a meal and no one would think it odd.

Antiochus pretended to be scandalised, but Myron joined in with a will, dragging his shy wife from her chair and making her lie beside him. After a cup of wine she giggled as much as Gorgo and Jocasta.

We ate and drank. We spoke of nothing deep, or meaningful, except about children, and their upbringing. Gorgo smiled at Jocasta’s description of the perils of choosing tutors. Of course, Jocasta was far more directly involved in her son’s education than Gorgo, who had probably handed hers off to slaves minutes after childbirth. That was the Spartan way.

Yet despite a thousand differences, Jocasta and Gorgo were instant friends. It was odd – and somewhat miraculous – that Gorgo had somehow discerned this from a few descriptions, but their alliance helped all of the events that follow. Leonidas forged an alliance with the democrat, Themistocles. Gorgo made hers with Aristides’ wife.

When Gorgo and her train had ridden away – headed to Thebes for another social visit – Pen fell on to my lap in unpretended exhaustion. Myron sent a slave to ask all of us to dinner – because, the slave explained, he assumed we’d be too shattered to cook. He might have been right, although I suspect it was my cook and Eugenios who needed the night off.

That was the queen’s visit to Plataea. Ever after, Plataea was much more favourable to the Laconians in all their dealings. Thebes was merely polite, and Sparthius stopped with us one more night while Gorgo visited Thisbe – to tell me that the Thebans had been rude.

Nothing pleases a Plataean more than news of foolishness in Thebes.

‘They’re going to accept the Great King,’ Sparthius said.

I shook my head. For a Plataean, that was a major threat.

I took my daughter to spend her summer at Brauron by sea, in
Lydia
, and promised to pick her up again myself and not to spend all summer at sea.

You would think – after all we reported, and after Moire took
Storm Cutter
home early and reported on the Persian fleet in Thrace and the number of ships in the Bosporus – you’d think, I repeat, that all Greece would have rung with the sound of mallets driving pegs into new planks, of men straining to learn how to wield an oar, of legions of Jocastas weaving sails.

You’d think.

You’d think that the knowledge that only the bravery of the men of Babylon had kept the Persians from our doors that very spring might have served to alert Greece.

But Greeks like to talk. And everything had to be talked through, and every one – everyone who mattered – had to be allowed to speak, and when I entered Piraeus that summer, there were, in fact, forty triremes under construction – but only because of Themistocles and his silver mines.

‘I only got these by swearing that if the Persians didn’t come, we’d storm Aegina,’ he said. ‘Before the gods, all men are fools.’

I drank to that, and we discussed what he knew from all the captains who carried goods from Asia or Ionia. He said that the revolt in Babylon had been crushed, and that the Great King had ordered most of the nobles involved, and their wives and children and children’s children, put to death. Every Greek mercenary taken was executed as a rebel.

‘Now he’ll come,’ Themistocles said. ‘And we still won’t be ready.’

‘Gorgo says there is to be an assembly at Corinth,’ I said.

‘Only because Adamenteis is the most ruthless politician of our age,’ Themistocles said – this for a man who exiled all his opponents. ‘He told the Spartans that attendance at the Isthmian games by an entire Spartan delegation was his price for hosting the affair.’

I shrugged. ‘It must be somewhere,’ I noted.

A day later, I was in Piraeus when the sky to the east and south began to turn black – not grey, not even a dark grey, but black, like coal or charcoal. I have seldom seen a sky that colour.

As the winds rose, I gathered what oarsmen I could and got the
Lydia
into one of the new stone ship-sheds, where she was snug, high off the water, and dry. Her hull was waterlogged and had worm, and the ship-sheds were the very best place for my
Lydia
.

What followed was one of the worst storms I’ve ever seen. The wind was from the east, as strong as a northern gale, but longer and shriller. Noon on the second day we had shrill winds and an orange sky, as if the gods meant to burn the earth away.

Seasoned captains got their ships off the seas. Far to the south, off Crete, Harpagos took our pentekonter freighter into a little port for refuge. Moire ran
Storm Cutter
back into Corcyra despite having just left the sea wall. Megakles took
Swan
into Mytilini, and
Lydia
was safely in a ship-shed.

Far to the east, the storm smashed into the bridges on the Hellespont, and wrecked them.

At the time, I stood at the eastern edge of the Piraeus harbour and let the storm soak me to the skin as I watched it come in. I could feel its deadliness and the force of its winds and I prayed to Poseidon to preserve my friends and my ships. And eventually, I was wise enough to pray for any man at sea in such a storm, with a little more humility.

For four days the waves pounded Piraeus. For four days that late summer storm wrecked ships, ruined houses, flooded towns and river estuaries – it killed birds and fish and men. And then the skies dawned pink, and the storm was gone, and we were left to wonder whether it had all been a dream.

But to Xerxes’ plans, it was no dream, and ten days later, when an Athenian ore freighter came back in from the mines on Samothrace, he reported to us – and the priests of Poseidon and any other who would listen – that Zeus had broken the chain at the Hellespont, shattering ships and drowning men.

I spent the summer running cargoes. It was a piece with my life in general that I went from hosting royalty to helping a dozen oarsmen muscle sacks of Boeotian barley into the hold of a round ship in just a few weeks, but I’m a poor aristocrat. I can’t sit on my hands and watch other men work. I could either drive ships through the water or pound bronze, and I was not man enough to resist the look my sister gave me – or my domesticos. That man – supposedly a slave – had taken over my house and made it all too easy for me to live there. Food appeared as if by magic – wine flowed, or stopped, with more or less water.

When oil jars ran low, more was purchased. Floors were cleaned. No servant or slave approached me for any reason.

Well – I’d been a slave, and I was not a very good master – too involved, I suspect. But my joke to Pen as I paused at her great house to sip wine en route to the Gulf of Corinth was that the house would run best of all if I wasn’t there.

I saw Aegypt that summer. Sekla had
Lydia
, so I paid rent to Aristides and took his beautiful
Athena Nike
from where he’d laid her up in Corinth. I got to spend the summer with Demetrios, one of my earliest mentors – one of Aristides’ helmsmen. He, too, was rich.

We had a fine voyage. I had learned a great deal of pure navigation in the Western Ocean, and I was no longer cautious about using it. Demetrios was still – like Vasileos and Megakles – a much better dead-reckoning sailor than I, and we challenged each other all summer. I suspect our rented oarsmen loathed us – we spent too much time over the horizon from any land, but we had fun, and we had some very fast passages.

In Aegypt, we found a Corinthian trireme – badly damaged by a storm and abandoned. In fact, locals were starting to pick her apart for firewood. How I wished for Vasileos! But I got her off the beach, towed her into the delta and got some linen patches on her sides – the Aegyptian revolt had cut them off from any source of wood unless Greeks brought it, so that their shipbuilding industry was at a standstill.

We left her there to get new rigging, and we ran a small cargo of perfumes and wines and some finished papyrus to Lebanon – and came back with the whole centreline of the ship burdened with timber. I think that Aristides would have cried to see his magnificent warship, her fine entry to the water ruined by overloading, her beautiful midship catwalk unusable because of fifty great pine logs. We all had to run down the ship’s sides with ropes, and it was a dead uncomfortable voyage – rowing all the way, no wind, terrible heat.

But out of it, I got a trireme – a heavy merchant trireme, well built and beautifully rebuilt by men happy to have work. We made a small fortune on the wood – the best cargo in the world is a cargo that your buyer needs desperately and for which you have no competition.

We called her
Astarte
for her new timbers, and we crewed her from rowers stranded in Aegypt by the revolt and loaded her with papyrus and linen, and we used all our profits on the wood to load
Athena Nike
’s narrow holds with glass – Aegyptian faience, mostly perfume bottles.

Summer was wearing on to autumn. We had our ‘home cargo’ and we also knew that there was a squadron of Phoenicians preying on Greek merchants – there was the biter bit – off the delta. So we ran out of the eastern mouth of the delta – for the south coast of Crete. I’d done it before when desperate – this was simply good navigation, and I put into Gortyn’s port as if I’d had a Pole Star over it all the way. Permit me a little bragging. It was a pretty piece of navigation, given two hard blows and a couple of grey days with no sun sighting.

We’d slipped the pirates – who were, according to the Cretans, the Persian navy enforcing a blockade on Aegypt, which was being punished for revolt. I’ll waste a little of your time to say that Aegypt – one of the richest lands in the world – was not in ‘revolt’. According to their own way of thinking, they were throwing off the yoke of oppression. To Xerxes, they were rebels.