The Great King (59 page)

Well, we hadn’t lost. Again. Even as I turned my head, the Ionians in the centre gave in and bolted, and suddenly the Great King’s fleet was running for their beaches.

Only as we closed on Dagon did it strike me that we had won.

But I was not done.

Dagon’s ship ran.

We ate her lead. Three stades, then two, then one. Ka and his men were shooting into the wind, but Dagon had no archers at all.

A hundred paces from Dagon’s stern, I made them stop shooting. I turned to Brasidas.

‘This thing is mine,’ I said. ‘Do not touch him.’

He shrugged and looked pained. In truth, he was too great a man to understand why I needed to kill one opponent, much less one already beaten. But he nodded.

‘And if you fall?’ he asked.

‘See to my son,’ I said. ‘Oh, and kill the bastard. He has it coming.’

‘Why not let me kill him now, then?’ asked Ka.

Hector stood at my shoulder. He smiled.

Hipponax said, ‘I want to come,’ and we all said ‘no’ together, and then – then our marine box started to come alongside his helm station.

Ka leaned out and killed the helmsman. Just like that.

Dagon’s ship yawed, and we slammed into its side. I fell flat – not ready for the collision – and so did Brasidas.

‘Don’t kill any more oarsmen,’ I said. I got to my feet, put my right foot on our gunwale, and had a moment of sheer fear.

Of Dagon.

Of the leap.

Of old age, and being diminished.

And then I jumped.

Once, I had faced Dagon naked, and another time, with a bucket.

Now, I finally faced him on a steady deck, with a spear and an aspis.

Brasidas landed on the deck behind me, and Hector, and Siberios.

‘Ready, Dagon?’ I asked.

He was a big man, and his thighs were like a bull’s, and his arms were as big as my thighs. His spear was red, and he didn’t grunt when he threw it.

He was right behind it, his sword emerging from his scabbard . . .

I threw. He hadn’t expected it, and my throw caught him where the crest meets the helmet, and snapped his head back.

I drew, the underhand cut the Spartans had taught me – and I cut to the right, inside his shield, and scored on his naked arm inside his aspis – and I stepped to the left, pivoted, and slammed my aspis at him.

No matter how strong you are, you cannot block an aspis with a sword.

He put his head down, so my following cut – pivoting and stepping again, as Polymarchos taught – didn’t kill him, but went into his crest, and half of it fell to the deck, and he shouted and got a cut on my left thigh.

I pushed my right hand home. Herakles, he was strong. But my feet were planted and my footing was good, and my sword was against his helmet, pushing.

He rolled and cut at my feet from behind.

I slammed my aspis into his sword. He rolled from under the blow and got to his feet.

I dropped my aspis. He was bleeding then.

‘You!’ he said. ‘Come and take what I have for you.’

His mad eyes showed no defeat.

His right hand dropped the shards of his broken sword and I could see white where he tried to flex his left.

He attacked me, arms reaching for me despite what must have been blinding pain, and I did what I had wanted from the first. I stepped through his arms, locked his right with my left, the high lock of pankration, and he screamed as I broke his arm – I didn’t pause or hesitate, I had done this a hundred times in my sleep, and I pushed my left leg deep behind him and threw him over it – over my leg, over the rail, and into the three decks of slave oarsmen below.

He was alive when he left my hands.

They tore him apart. I would have, if I’d ever had a chance like that.

Then I fell to my knees.

Behind me, Brasidas snapped, ‘Boy! Take the helm!’

For a moment, like Miltiades after Marathon, I was out of my body, but Brasidas brought me back.

Many of my old shipmates have asked me whether I killed Dagon, and I am proud to say – no. I merely took him where he could die the way he deserved.

We lost eighty ships on the fourth day of Artemesium. We lost Gelon. We lost Paramanos – swarmed by Aegyptians when I was far away. Cimon lost a son and two cousins and every Plataean lost someone.

Athens lost forty ships.

Aegina lost twenty ships.

We stood on the beach with our captures and our wounded – Hermogenes, white from blood loss, and Sekla, who had an arrow though his foot and a cut across his head, and Giannis, who lost his left hand to a Phrygian axe that went through his aspis.

It was not a victory to celebrate.

Eurybiades gathered the fit trierarchs, and there were about a hundred, and that included a lot of men with bloody rags, like me.

Themistocles looked like a man going to a funeral.

I put a hand on his shoulder. ‘We did not lose,’ I said.

He turned, and the orator was crying.

Eurybiades stood alone. He was not crying, but his face was closed. He was elsewhere.

I thought perhaps they were in battle shock. So did Cimon. He put a hand on Themistocles’ shoulder as I had. ‘We are a trifle singed,’ he said. ‘But the Great King’s fleet will not come off their beaches tomorrow. Listen – Arimnestos and I can put to sea . . .’

I was going to glare at him, but then I saw Abronichus standing with Phrynicus, and both of them were weeping openly.

I assumed that meant Aeschylus was dead, or some other worthy man, and indeed, as I watched, another Athenian, Lycomedes, pulled his chlamys over his head to hide his tears.

Tired men weep easily.

Eurybiades shook himself like an old dog. ‘We must . . . retreat,’ he said.

Cimon was looking at Lycomedes, as flustered as I was. ‘Retreat? We
won.
We lost good men –
great men
– today, so that we would break them and we broke them! Now we must finish the job—’

‘Peace,’ Themistocles said. ‘Be silent, Cimon. We have no choice.’

‘No choice?’ Cimon asked.

Eurybiades sighed. ‘As dawn broke this morning, the Persians seized a pass above Thermopylae,’ he said, like a man reporting on a race at the Olympics he had once seen. ‘King Leonidas sent the allied army away. Then, with all the Thespians, he formed his phalanx.’

No one moved, or spoke, or groaned. The wind itself stopped.

‘The king died this morning. His body was lost twice, and eventually regained.’ He shook himself again. ‘About the time we engaged the enemy today, the last men died. Thermopylae has fallen.’

I can’t remember anything more of that hour except the desolation.

Leonidas was dead. The army was destroyed.

We had fought for four days, for nothing.

We had lost.

No – I’ll leave you there. You know what happens next. But it is always darkest before the dawn, and that night, with King Leonidas dead across the straits, his corpse defiled by King Xerxes in a fury of unmanly pettiness, every Greek thought the same.

But when next we meet, I’ll tell you more – of Salamis, and Plataea. Of how I met the Great King one more time.

Of what we did, we men of Greece.

But tonight, drink to Leonidas of Sparta, who died for Greece – aye, and Antigonus of Thespiae and all his men, who died with the Spartans. And all the men – Corinthians and Plataeans and Athenians and Aeginians and Spartans and Hermionians and Tegeans and every other man of Greece who fell into Poseidon’s waters off Artemesium, fighting for Hellas.

Here is to their shades!

As closely as possible, this novel follows the road of history. But history – especially Archaic Greek history – can be more like a track in the forest than a road with a kerb. I have attempted to make sense of Herodotus and his curiously modern tale of nation states, betrayal, terrorism and heroism. I have read most of the secondary sources, and I have found most of them wanting.

But when I come to tell the story of Artemesium and Thermopylae – one virtually unknown to modern readers, and the other perhaps the most famous military event in Classical history – I find that I am locked in a curious dance with supposition, myth, and popular imagination. This book is, I hope, about cultures; about what it meant to be Greek, but also about the differences that divided Greeks. It has my take on Sparta, and I offer no apology for my less than idealized view of that state. Stripped of propaganda, Sparta was not the epitome of military perfection that modern fascists and poor Thucydides imagined. Nor was Athens effeminate or over-full of philosophy, especially in the Persian Wars. I hope that I have done justice to Sparta and her true greatness, and to Leonidas and Gorgo.

Perhaps most complicated of all, I wanted to give the reader an idea of what Persia was like, and what their empire had that was good. It is too easy to play the ‘Boy’s Own’ genre trick of demonizing one race or nation to create orc-like opponents for the hero, but the world has never worked like that; no nation is actually braver or better, unless they work endlessly to accomplish such a thing, and if any nation of the period could be said to have a superb professional army, it was not Sparta, it was Persia.

Most of the bones of my story are taken, as usual, from Herodotus, and from him I hope I have made a convincing set of interwoven plots. I confess that I have no idea if the Greeks used pan-hellenic celebrations like the Olympics as meeting points to debate the coming war, but I’ve always loved the Olympic Games, ancient and modern, and while watching the games in London, I decided that my book would open with a section on the games at Olympia. I tried to be accurate, but I find that there is as much to know about the ancient Olympics – as and much controversy! – as about trireme tactics, and I doubt I will have pleased every critic.

I’d also like to say a bit on the role of women in the Olympics and indeed in every walk of life in the ancient world. I have tried to use Jocasta and Gorgo to illuminate some very deep divides in Spartan and Athenian attitudes to women. Women were not ‘equal’ to men in any ancient society and to make them so would be to write anachronism. Yet some women achieved very real power, and current research (
Portrait of a Priestess
by Joan Breton Connelly is especially good) suggests that women were not as thoroughly segregated from public and private life as we were led to imagine – by prudish and misogynistic Victorian historians. I’ll add to that a short rant on my favourite subject as an historian – that there is no ‘period’ called ‘Ancient Greece.’ Ancient Greek culture was
at least
as malleable and fast-moving as modern culture. In every way from cultural artefacts like military technology to fashion, women’s empowerment, and views of homosexuality, the Greek world
changed
. I mention this because even if we believe Roman descriptions of the exclusion of women from the Olympics, they appear to date to the fourth century – a very different time from the period I’m describing.

I pride myself on research and, for want of a better phrase, ‘keeping it real.’ I spend an inordinate amount of time wearing various historical kits in all weathers – not just armoured like a taxiarch, but sometimes working like a slave. If there is a subject as complex as the Olympics in the ancient world, it would be the ancient mariner. So I wish to hasten to say that I have rowed a heavy boat (sixteen oars) in all weathers; I have sailed, but not as much or as widely as I would like; I have been in all the waters I discuss, but often on the deck of a US Navy warship and not, I fear, in a pentekonter or a trireme. Because of this, I have relied – sometimes heavily – on the words of ancient sailors and their excellent modern reenactors, like Captain Severin and a dozen other authors from the last two centuries. I am deeply indebted to him, to a dozen sailors I’m lucky enough to count as friends, and to the Hakluyt Society, of which I’m now a member. All errors are mine, and any feeling of realism or accuracy in my nautical ‘bits’ belongs to their efforts. I have at times deliberately used the anachronistic English words of Falconer’s Maritime Dictionary (about 1800) because the constant use of Greek nautical terms is, in my opinion, too much of a struggle for the reader’s enjoyment.

I also have to note that while working on this book, I am working with friends in Greece to create the re-enactment of the 2505th anniversary of the Battle of Marathon. We hope to double our attendance from the last time, the 2500th. You can find the pictures on our website at
www.amphictyonia.org
and you really should. It was a deeply moving experience for me, and what I learned there – because every reenactor brings a new dose of expertise and amazing kit – has affected this book and will affect the rest of the series. I have now worn Greek armour for three solid days. Fought in a phalanx that looked like a phalanx. You’ll spot the changes in the text. I wish to offer my deep thanks to every reenactor who attended, and all the groups in the Amphictyonia. I literally couldn’t write these books without you.

And, of course, if, as you read this, you burn to pick up a xiphos and an aspis – or a bow and a sparabara! Go to the website, find your local group, and join. Or find me on my website or on facebook. We’re always recruiting.

I’ll close with a return to the politics of the day and the writing of fiction. Neither the Phoenicians nor the Persians were ‘bad’. The Greeks were not ‘good’. But Arimnestos is a product of his own world, and he would sound curious if he didn’t suffer from some of the prejudices and envies we see in his contemporaries.

At the risk of repeating what I said in the afterwords to
Marathon
and
Poseidon’s Spear
– the complex webs of human politics that ruled the tin trade and Carthage’s attempts to monopolize it – the fledgling efforts of Persia (perhaps?) to win allies in the far west to allow them to defeat the Greeks on multiple fronts – these are modern notions, and yet, to the helmsmen and ship owners of Athens and Tyre and Carthage and Syracuse, these ideas of strategy must have been as obvious as they are to armchair strategists today. Sparta and Athens must have tried for peace – Herodotus suggests it. Some part of the war must have been about trade – again, Herodotus suggests it. If my novels have a particular
point
it is that the past wasn’t simple. In Tyre and Athens, at least, the leading pirates were also the leading political decision makers.