The Great King (54 page)

Cimon nodded. Even pirates have rules.

Themistocles frowned. ‘None of that foolishness, now. We need their information.’

Everyone looked at me. This is the price of the great reputation – sometimes men expect you to speak, to make decisions, to be the great man.

I bowed to Themistocles. ‘At some point, we define ourselves by what we do. We begged Poseidon for his favour. He answered us with a storm. Is this our thanks?’

Themistocles shot me a glance of scorn mixed with pity – that I was one of
those
men, so easily led, so easily fooled. I hope I shrugged.

Cimon nodded. ‘But surely we can ask them questions?’

That seemed suitable to everyone, even Eurybiades, who clearly approved of my answer. When they were brought, they were seated comfortably, and given wine. They sat listlessly.

‘Can you tell me what happened to your fleet?’ Cimon asked in passable Phoenician.

‘It is all wrecked,’ the younger said. ‘No one could survive such a storm.’

The older man glared at him.

The younger shrugged. ‘What is it to me? Listen, then. The beaches were too narrow for the whole fleet, and our admiral ordered the store ships to have the most protected landings. The army had priority over the navy in all things. The ships of Halicarnassus and Ephesus took the inner moorings, which left us to anchor out in rows of forty ships, eight deep in the bay we chose. Eight deep.’ He shook his head.

The older man stared off over my shoulder. ‘We anchored bow and stern. We are not fools. I had six stones under the bow, and four under the stern – every anchor on my ship. We started to move with the first wind.’

All around my tent, men had begun to babble with relief – with delight.

Poseidon had destroyed the Persian fleet. Or so it appeared.

‘How many ships did the Great King muster, when he sailed this summer?’ I asked.

The older man rocked his head – as Phoenicians do. ‘A thousand? Fifteen hundred?’ He shrugged. ‘I never counted.’

That made me swallow.

A thousand ships?

But the other captains were delighted with their news. When it was clear that the two captives would say no more – at least, not willingly – Eurybiades summoned his messenger and sent him to Leonidas with what we knew. He was careful, and only stated that Poseidon had inflicted a defeat on Xerxes’ fleet.

But the Greek fleet rejoiced.

It was a long night. I heard men – men for whom I had little love and little respect – brag of what they would have done to the Persians had their fleet only endured. I’m an old warrior – I know that no man loves the moment when death is there to look you in the eye, and no man really loves war more than once or twice – that older men have to play the game or be thought cowards, when really they’d like to be at home with their wives. I know this, but the posturing and bragging in the Greek fleet that night was sickening.

Worst of all, I was the hero of the hour. Somehow my salvage of a stricken trireme had become a capture, a conquest, and men would stumble drunkenly to my side to take my hand.

Gah! The fools.

At any rate, Hermogenes was not a fool, nor was Sekla nor any of our captains. Demetrios – the leftmost captain in the line – had commanded the last ship to come in to the beach, and he was insisting he’d seen sails on the eastern horizon.

I had only seen enough wreckage for about forty ships. If they had a thousand ships . . .

I went to sleep to the sound of men working by torchlight on the salvaged ship’s hull. The hammers rang hollow, driving pegs into the side.

I awoke to shrieks and desperate cries, as if the Medes were upon us in the dawn.

And they were.

The sun was barely on the horizon, a red ball that threatened further bad weather, and the sea was like a floating forest to the north and east. It filled the channel as far as the eye could see to the right, all the way out into the open ocean.

I clambered up the headland with Hermogenes, to find Sekla and Sittonax already there, Giannis and Alexandros climbing from the other side, and Themistocles standing apart with Eurybiades.

Aristides emerged from behind Alexandros.

My other friends were climbing up – there was Aeschylus, and there, Phrynicus’s friend Lycomedes, and Cimon and Gelon and Hilarion, of all men.

It was as if all the friends of my life – every man I’d met since Lades – was gathered on one low headland. Lades killed a generation – worse, it killed a culture, a kind, gentle culture.

All the men around me stared in horror at the Great King’s fleet.

However many Poseidon had culled, what was left was three or four times the size of the allied fleet. Perhaps more. It
covered the ocean.
I had been at Lades. I have been told – by Phoenicians – that the Persian fleet at Lades was the greatest fleet of triremes ever assembled.

Perhaps. Certainly, the Great King’s fleet had smaller vessels in hordes – pentekonters, triaconters, even Aegyptian lembi. But it also had triremes in numbers that staggered the eye, so that you had to keep looking away and looking back.

Eurybiades couldn’t tear his eyes away. It was the doom of Greece.

A thousand ships.

Aristides said, ‘Now is Troy avenged.’

At my side, Moire chuckled. ‘He has every ship in the Levant here.’ He glanced at me. ‘Good time to run a cargo to Aegypt.’

I laughed.

As had happened the night before, everyone turned to look at me. Adamenteis of Corinth had just come up the rise from the temple, and he was staggered – as, to be fair, we all were – and he turned as if I’d struck him.

And again I felt the presence of the gods. I had the attention of the commanders.

I’m no orator.

But perhaps Athena whispered into my head, or my ancestor Herakles.

So I finished my laugh by turning to all of them. ‘By Poseidon,’ I said. ‘Did you think it would be easy to defeat the Great King? Did you think that by sailing – unwillingly – a few stades from home, the greatest power under the gods would be defeated?’

I pointed my spear out over the Persian fleet. ‘There they are, my friends. Poseidon struck them a mighty blow. Will we do less?’

I’d like to say that they gave me three mighty cheers and we all ran for our ships, but it wasn’t like that at all.

Adamenteis of Corinth was visibly resistant to my rhetoric. He stood tall and raised his hand. ‘We must abandon this post immediately, before we are all destroyed,’ he said. He looked at me with contempt. ‘If that is what is left after the storm, then Poseidon has done them no damage at all. Perhaps it is the will of the gods. But there is no combination of luck, guile, bravery and tactics that will allow us to defeat that fleet.’

‘I remember men saying the same, at the last war council before Marathon,’ I said. ‘They were neither fools nor cowards, Adamenteis. They were merely . . . wrong. We can defeat that fleet.’

‘Silence, puppet of the Athenians. You are a pirate – a rogue and a criminal – and have no right to speak here.’ Adamenteis turned. ‘He has more friends among the Medes than any man here – he’ll fall soft no matter what eventuates. Listen to me! We have lost. The Great King will stamp us under his foot like insects.’

I was considering putting my fist in his face when Eurybiades snapped, ‘Silence.’

Every eye went to him.

‘Neither Arimnestos nor Adamenteis has been appointed by the League of Allies to command this fleet,’ he said simply. ‘I have.’

He could not stop glancing at the Persian fleet. Even after ten minutes of looking at it, it was still a shock.

‘I will hold a council in my tent after sacrifices have been made,’ he said. He turned to Adamenteis. ‘Courtesy and dignity are essential tools of good debate,’ he said.

Spartans know how to put the knife in, and how to twist it, too.

Our camp was right there. We had been making our sacrifices on the outdoor altar for the temple of Artemis – no man of Plataea has any quarrel with the virgin goddess, and Hermogenes, quite wisely, dedicated our new ship to her, with the name
Huntress.

So we lingered on the headland. Ever seen the results of a street riot? Or an earthquake? Where men and women lie dead, or mangled, and you can’t tear your eyes away?

A thousand ships.

I made a good sacrifice, as did Aristides. I thought of my daughter, who was no doubt dancing for the huntress at that moment far to the south at Brauron. I watched Sekla – who was very much a devotee of the virgin goddess – perform his sacrifice.

Each sacrifice was as nearly perfect as men could make them. The lambs we had purchased from the locals went willingly, heads up, without a bleat.

By the time Ajax, the man who’d served in Persia as a mercenary, made his cut, Aristides was shaking his head.

‘I have never seen such a favourable omen,’ he said.

Draco came over on his stick – far and away the oldest man of the Plataeans. ‘I just killed a lamb with a single blow,’ he cackled, wiping the blood from his hands. ‘Not a spot on her liver or her kidneys.’ He winked at me. ‘You hear about these things from old priests, and then you think they’re full of shit.’ He shrugged.

We all looked out to sea.

The Persian ships were landing at Aphetai. It couldn’t really be seen in the haze, so that the vast seaborne forest seemed to slip over the edge of the world and vanish.

But one heavy squadron was coming up from a different angle. I counted sixteen triremes in two columns. They were in a disciplined formation, sails down, and rowing.

Hermogenes was eating olives. He shrugged. ‘Scouting?’ he asked.

Paramanos shook his head. ‘They’ve mistaken the anchorage. Look – they were flanking the main fleet, out to sea, and they’ve gone too far south.’

They were thirty stades away. My guess was that the nearest ship was Carian or Aeolian – perhaps even Lesbian. But that was only a gut feeling from years at sea.

‘Could they be changing sides?’ I asked.

‘Would you?’ asked Paramanos.

Humour is a useful antidote to fear.

I had all my captains at hand. And my ships were ready.

‘Let’s get them,’ I said.

As the oarsmen poured into the hulls and ran them off the beach, I knelt in the sand and sketched my plan. Listen, friends – when you fight, some men say a good sword is best, and some say a good spear – but I say friends, comrades and dependable officers are the things I most love.

Thanks, Sappho . . .

‘My intention is to double the head and tail of their line and never let it become a line fight,’ I said. ‘Paramanos will lead the western squadron against their left, and I’ll take the eastern against their right.’ I directed them into two groups. I would lead the right hand, with
Lydia
,
Huntress
,
Hera
,
Nemesis
,
Parthanos
,
Sea Horse
and
Machaira.

Paramanos would lead the left with his own
Black Raven
, and he had
Athena Nike
,
Andromeda
,
Storm Cutter
and
Amastis.

Sekla – who would be at the extreme right of my group – fingered his short, curly beard. ‘You don’t want us to engage,’ he said.

‘No – envelop. Sweep wide.’ I was watching the ships get off the beach. The battle had already begun, for me. The Persians were fully hull up, now, even in the haze. You could see that the lead ship in the western column was painted a bright blue.

A runner came along the beach – I knew him at a distance to be Cimon’s big-headed cousin Pericles, running as if he were racing for laurel. Closer to hand, Eurybiades himself was coming down the low cliff that separated us from the olive groves.

‘They will expect a head-to-head fight. We have lighter ships. Our ships are dry and our rowers are at least eager. I want to try them in a running fight.’

I didn’t speak my innermost mind, which was this; in a running fight, at worst we’d lose one or two ships, and none would be lost to the sort of amateur errors that our oarsmen might make in their first fight. My greatest fear was friends fouling friends.

My other innermost thought was that the gods were with us, and I was going to give them the opportunity to show us an omen. Why attempt a
small
victory?

Sekla nodded sharply.

Paramanos grinned. ‘You are still a mad bastard,’ he said. ‘You mean, of all these fine ships, only you and I are going beak to beak.’

I smiled. Eurybiades was ten steps away and Pericles was coming in for the finish and all my men were aboard. The marines had their thorakes on.

‘That’s what I mean,’ I said quietly, and clasped his hand.

‘Because we won’t cock it up,’ he said.

‘That’s right,’ I agreed.

Eurybiades came up with a dozen officers. ‘You intend to engage?’ he asked.

Pericles stood and panted.

‘Before you finish singing the hymn to Athena,’ I said.

‘Gods go with you, Plataean.’ He leaned close. ‘
You must not lose.
’

I looked at Pericles. He nodded with unusual deference. ‘Cousin Cimon says he’ll have five ships off the beach before the sun sets a finger’s breadth,’ he said. ‘He says to tell you,’ the boy had the grace to flush, ‘that Athens can’t trust a bunch of Boeotian farmers to get this right.’

I laughed. ‘Come along, boy, and see how we do.’ I saluted the navarch, who stood in his scarlet chiton at the edge of the beach and watched us.

All my ships were afloat. It was the turn of the tide in a light wind, and my oarsmen held
Lydia
just at the edge of the surf so that I was only wet to my crotch getting aboard. Young Pericles soaked his chiton.

I ran for the bow. The enemy squadron were still coming on, four stades away, with bow waves. It struck me as possible that they had not made a navigation error – that rather, they had brave men who held the allied fleet in contempt and had come to show it.

I looked at my own ships. Waved, and Hector raised my bronze-covered shield and gave a signal, and my squadron’s oars dipped – all together, or close enough, so that there was a mighty flash, the setting sun on all the blades together.