Tides of War (53 page)

The alarm sounded deep into the third watch. I was dead asleep, in the villa at which Telamon and I had been billeted, which housed a dozen other officers and their women. These staggered now into the street. “Is it a drill?” one bawled from a terrace. The harbor lay a quarter mile below; you could see fire ships pouring in over the chain and, in their flare, Athenian triremes pulling fast in two columns with tow arrows and flame catapults arcing fire in all directions.

We armed and raced down the hill. You know the city, Jason. Mount Coressus overstands the eminence, her shoulders embracing the sprawl of suburbs spilling back from the port. The great seawall, the Pteron, spans the harbor mouth. Behind its base extend the commercial wharves, the Emporium, and beyond these the Toll, the inner fortifications, and the naval bastion, Huntress’ Hood. The river Cayster debouches, dense with silt, between the temple of the Amazons and the great square of the Artemisium, with the dredging works and the marsh on the south side, the cavalry grounds, and more suburbs outside the walls. These are all on hills and were all ablaze.

It was clear to any who understood Alcibiades’ frame that this assault was his answer to Lysander’s speech and a leap upon the main chance of Prince Cyrus’ presence on-site. Given the audacity of his generalship, he could have landed every regiment he had or even called in his Thracians, heaven help all who must face them. “I’m not too keen on this,” I shouted to Telamon amid the waterfront crush, meaning I was in no mood to go epitaph-hunting for either side. “Let’s find a rat hole and sit this son of a whore out.”

We cracked into a warehouse adjacent the Armorers’ Lane. You could see the fire ships brilliant as daylight now; crewless galleys stacked with pitch and blazing like Tartarus. I had never experienced an attack
of Alcibiades from the receiving end. It struck like a terror show of shock and thunder, and it was pasting the piss out of the Peloponnesians. Twelve-oared longboats towed their incendiary trailers at a furious clip, sidescreens up to shield the oarsmen from the missile fire of the defenders, so far conspicuous only by its absence. A jig of Spartan six-stickers hauled to intercept the lead towboat. We could see the attacker dump her line; two enemy sixes struck her just as her fire ship, loosed now, ploughed into the roadstead where a dozen Spartan triremes rode at anchor. The impact snapped the incendiary’s booms; they crashed thunderously, dumping their cargo of pitch and sulphur onto the decks of the foe.

Now a second line of fire ships lit up astern of the first. The eruption of these, invisible heretofore, produced among the Peloponnesians a disseverment of the senses both palpable and paralyzing. “Don’t mill about like bloody sheep!” A Spartan colonel waded into the press. “Launch ships, curse you!”

At this instant Lysander himself thundered into the lane, horseback, compassed by his lifeguard of Knights. We could see the colonel dash before him, informing him of his order. Lysander countermanded it. Peloponnesian infantry were pouring onto the site. Athenian pinnaces continued to rake the ship sheds, slinging pinwheels and hello-theres. Shall we rush the Pteron? the colonel cried to Lysander, meaning make for the seawall to repel the landing.

Lysander rejected this as well. One must give the bastard credit. Any other of his race would have hurtled mindlessly into battle’s maw, seeking victory or glorious death. Lysander knew better. As he had baited Alcibiades, now his rival baited him. Lysander would not bite. He hauled toward the Artemisium and the great parade ground fronting the city. “Draw back! Marshal on the square!”

Lysander had built walls dividing the residential quarter of Antenoris from the dockyards, an undertaking scorned even by his own officers as make-work and folly. Now one perceived its brilliance. The ramparts funneled seaborne attackers—those striking from the Pteron, as the Athenians had—onto the Exposition Road, quayside, with water at one hand and wall at the other. Here was a pen made for slaughter. All Lysander need do was wait.

Where Telamon and I hid had become no-man’s-land. From
seaward rushed the Athenians and allies; landside marshaled the Spartans and Peloponnesians. They would clash in the rock-hemmed pound before us, and our troops would be massacred. So futile, however, are all designs of war. At once sprang an overthrow from the last quarter Lysander could have projected, for the lone motive against which he could not contend.

This was Prince Cyrus, on fire for glory.

We heard hooves on the Lane of the Armorers; into the open thundered a cohort of Royal Persian Horse. The troop galloped onto the square of the Artemisium, parting the massed Peloponnesians. The prince reined in before Lysander. The lad himself was but seventeen and slight as a stalk, yet so fired by the nobility of his blood and the impulsion to emulate the deeds of his ancestors that he seemed lit as though aflame.

“The enemy is there, Lysander! Why do you hold?”

Meet him! Attack!

The prince wheeled and spurred. His Guard thundered at his heels. Peloponnesians and allies could not be held; the throng flooded onto the Exposition Road. Our warehouse sat right in its path. Athenian rangers who had advanced thus far now spun and bolted, slinging their brands into every eave and alley.

Telamon and I peered about our coop. Paint. Our rat hole was a hive of pitch and encaustic. We flushed from this covert the instant she exploded. I felt hair and beard erupt; flaming turpentine spewed upon me. I careened into the lane, beating at the flames with my cloak, but it, too, was drenched with oil and blazing. Telamon pitched me into a mound of pumice, annexed to a construction site, moments before the hordes overran it. A Peloponnesian sergeant rounded upon us, beating at us with his staff to join the affray. My entire left side had been incinerated; I could not see nor feel of my face aught but charred meat. Telamon defended me. “By the gods, this man cannot fight!” He drew on the sergeant. “Go!” I propelled him, before he got himself arrested or worse.

Down the Exposition Road prince Cyrus galloped with the troops from the Artemisium, above thirty thousand, while Lysander in fury drove his Knights in the youth’s train, to deliver the lad from his own mad valor….

Polemides continued his narration, to which we shall return. However, his object for the remainder of this action was clearly neither to participate nor to report, but to preserve his life. Let us shift narrators, then.

It was the younger Pericles’ assignment, under Alcibiades, to command the wave of assault ships succeeding Antiochus’, those vessels which Polemides recounted as breaching the harbor chain and carrying the assault to the waterfront. I have drawn already from these logs, given me by his wife after his trial following Arginousai. In addition she placed in my care several of the journals Pericles penned in those hours, for his children, that they might not credit the slanders of his accusers, and also, I believe, to preserve his reason during that ordeal, whose chronicle I shall relate in its course. But to return to Ephesus, and Pericles’ journal:

The plan was Alcibiades’, drafted in a single night by the trierarchs and squadron commanders working under his direction. Its impetus was receipt of the transcript of Lysander’s address at the Games. Here was the Spartan’s rejoinder, final and beyond appeal, to Alcibiades’ overtures of alliance. He would slug it out to the finish, would Lysander, putting his faith less in God, as Alcibiades observed, than in the impatience of the Athenian electorate. Lysander understood this monster as well as his rival. Victories in the hinterlands, even the sack of mighty cities, would not slake the beast’s rapacity, not now, inflamed as it was by expectations of its all-conquering commander. Alcibiades must attack, and attack Lysander. No meaner object would serve. The monster would have its enemy’s head, or his who failed to produce it.

Such was the strategic objective. Tactical were three: to raze the shipyards and repair facilities; to destroy or carry off as many battleships as possible, in as spectacular a manner as possible; to capture the Pteron and despoil its superstructure. The assault was an amphibious operation comprising twelve thousand four hundred troops, ninety-seven capital ships, and a hundred and ten support vessels. It involved the coordination of eleven assault elements across a front of twenty miles. Forty-six objectives were assigned. The signal rolls were as thick as your wrist.

Preliminary movements had commenced two days prior. A squadron of twenty-four under Aristocrates and another of twenty-eight under Adeimantus embarked from Samos, manned not by conventional
crews, but by armored infantry doubling as oarsmen, with slingers and javelineers, as many as the vessels could bear without betraying their numbers by their draught, prone topside behind sidescreens. Aristocrates’ squadron made southeast as for Andros, Adeimantus’ north to the Hellespont. Both permitted their movements to be observed by Lysander’s lookouts on Mounts Coressus and Lycon. They stood out to sea, beyond sight, doubling back on the second night to land their companies, Aristocrates in the planters’ country between Priene and Ephesus, Adeimantus north at the resort colony called the Crook, deserted in this season on account of the Etesian winds.

The horse transports crossed by night from Samos and Lade, putting ashore at an inhabited cove called the Crescent. Alcibiades commanded these. Detaining all who might dash ahead with the alarm, the units proceeded by back tracks across country, linking with Adeimantus’ companies landed at the Crook. From there Alcibiades advanced on the city. So swiftly were all pickets overwhelmed that he was into the suburbs before any warning apprised Lysander.

Aristocrates’ companies landing to the south not only cut the causeway by which reinforcements could be brought up from the city but released the canal gates, flooding the plain. They cut the chain at Fort Cylon. Swimmers captured the twin islets, the Yolk and the White, which comprised the suspensors of the cable. By this time the first incendiaries were lighting up the suburbs. Erasinides’ marines broke apart the gate north of Exposition Road. Antiochus’ battleships swept past Cylon into the harbor. My twenty-four lay-to seaward of the chain. Should Antiochus be repulsed, we would form the bulwark through which he would withdraw. Should he signal the advance, we would strike in his wake with everything we had. Bonfires at Cylon and the Yolk lit the channel. No more need be told of the ravagement than this: the blazes set upon the shipyards, seawall, and Emporium were on such a scale that their flare could be seen from Chios, sixty miles away.

Alcibiades at this time, one learned later, was very nearly losing his life in the following manner. His cavalry had swept through the suburbs, outpacing Adeimantus’ infantry, and were making for the northern gate to link with the marine companies landed on the Pteron by Antiochus and Erasinides.
They had a guide, Alcibiades’ troop did, who led them through the maze of lanes and alleys which constitute that quarter. They emerged to a square. Astonishingly a corps of women had seized this choke point and, barricading its lone egress with benches and overturned wagons, made bold to defend it. These were no Amazons but dames of the district, marshaling to preserve their hearths and infants.