Salamis (18 page)

We walked down the road into an evening lit by horror. Eventually we found ourselves on the beach, still watching the Acropolis burn, with all of the women of Brauron and all the girls. By then the High Priestess was back, standing erect despite her seventy years, watching her city burn.

As we came up, one of the younger priestesses said something, apparently suggesting that the girls should not be allowed to watch.

‘No,’ the High Priestess said. ‘No, let them watch. They will be the mothers of the generation that avenges us. Let them see what the Great King has done, and remember.’ Ferocity growled in her voice. ‘I, for one, will never forget this night. I pray we will never make peace. I ask Artemis, under her own moon, to help us to bring fire to their temples, even to Persepolis and his other cities.’ She raised her arms and, for a moment, we could see the massive fire raging between them, almost like a crown on her head, so perfectly was she placed in front of me, and a chill swept me. A god heard her plea, or took her oath – I was there.

My daughter and her friend clutched my knees and wept, and many other women wept, but some stood dry-eyed.

By chance, or perhaps by purpose, Heliodora was standing close to us as the fire burned down, and she stood with her friend Iris – dry-eyed.

Hipponax stepped up close to her, as if moved by some external force, as if pulled by a rope, against his will.

She looked at him: a flick of the eyes, and then a movement of her head as she appreciated who it was standing close to her.

‘You do not weep for Athens?’ my son asked her.

Not bad
, I thought.

‘I don’t want to bear sons to avenge Athens,’ Heliodora said. ‘I want to fight the Persians
myself.’

I was close enough to hear every word, hidden by chance and the way we all stood, and I felt like an intruder. At the same time I could see her face, and his. In a moment, it struck me that perhaps they
should
wed. There was something remarkable to see the two of them, or perhaps this is an old story repeated many times.

And when she made this pronouncement, I feared for how my sometimes desperately immature son would respond. Derision? Mockery?

‘I could get you aboard a ship,’ my son said.

It was a terrible idea. But it was a wonderful, heartfelt reply.

‘You could?’ she asked. ‘I could row all day!’

I did nothing. What a terrible mistake. And yet, so glorious.

We stood and watched until our hips ached and our feet hurt.

It was so terrible that we couldn’t walk away.

Eventually, the fires burned down. Girls took other girls to bed, and the priestesses moved among them.

I can say that I was never more than a few arms’ lengths from my son, but I must have missed something. And when we walked back to our camp, Pericles looked sombre, Anaxagoras kept looking back, and Hector wouldn’t meet my eye.

‘Who is Iris?’ I asked.

Pericles made a dismissive gesture, mostly lost in the dark. ‘My cousin’s friend. She’s nobody; a Thracian or perhaps Macedonian.’

‘She is not nobody!’ Hector said hotly.

‘Boys,’ I said. We were at the guard towers above the bay and a stream of sparks shot into the air over the Acropolis as something enormous collapsed.

We walked down into our own camp silently.

That was the night Athens fell to the Persians.

The next morning, I was unable to sleep in – the usual reasons – and I went up the beach, pissed into the thin belt of bushes and vines, and then went for a run. The beach was not tidy and I had to stay along the water and run into the surf around the bow of every ship. It was a difficult run.

I needed a difficult run. I came back, watching the column of black smoke still rising from the Acropolis, and then I ran into the sea and swam.

Hector was waiting for me on the beach, with a towel.

‘I need to talk to you,’ he said.

Well, he’d brought oil and a strigil and there was almost no one awake. ‘I am at your service.’

‘Am I a gentleman?’ he asked.

I almost cut myself with my strigil. But … these are real questions.

‘Yes,’ I said.

‘Was Anarchos my father?’ he asked.

His face was a frozen mask. ‘Yes,’ I said slowly. ‘That is, I believe so.’

‘A criminal,’ he said bitterly.

‘Pfft,’ I said, or something equally annoying.

‘He was! Seckla says he was a terrible man who broke people to his will, ran prostitutes …’ He was going to cry.

‘Hector,’ I said. I took him in my arms. I was still big enough to prevent him from getting away. ‘Hector, shut up.’

‘No!’ he swore. ‘You—’

‘Shut up, Hector,’ I insisted. ‘Your father did some terrible things, and some good things, like most men.’

‘He got me on some slave and sent me to you as a debt payment!’ he shouted.

An oarsman popped his head out of his tent.

Well, that was one interpretation, sure.

I think that Anarchos, wily as Odysseus, even at the end of his life, sent me his son as a penance and a reward, a threat and a promise. I had given it some thought, but not enough; I wasn’t prepared for this.

But then, who is?

‘I think that you were his only son and he loved you, in his way,’ I said.

‘He was a criminal!’ Hector shouted.

I wished for – of all people! – Jocasta. She would know how to deal with this.

‘What brings this on just now?’ I asked. I thought I’d try humour. ‘As we’re about to try conclusions with the Persians, you thought—’

‘No, you shut up!’ he said. ‘I’m nobody!’

‘Don’t make me hurt you,’ I said, because he was struggling with me. ‘You are
not
nobody. You are a citizen of Plataea and you have a full share of everything we take. You are a hoplite, a man of valour. You are a man we can count on, on any deck, on any field.’

He didn’t relax all at once. But there was a sea change and his arms moved a fraction.

And then, as suddenly as a storm coming and blowing away, he let go of me, gathered the towel, and walked away, as if he was still my pais and he had chores to do.

I suppose that at some remove I should have expected it, but I hadn’t. To me, he was my second son. He had been with me almost five years by then. He’d been to sea with and without me, and the sea is not for weaklings.

It turned out that there was a great deal I didn’t know, but that’s always true, isn’t it?

That evening there was a command meeting. It was widely attended; the best attended in many days.

The Peloponnesians were anxious to sail.

Eurybiades gave a set of sacrifices, which, I’ll add, he did beautifully, like any Spartan gentleman, and then he invited the Corinthians to speak.

Adeimantus was the orator. He stood forth and I had a moment: because, by chance, Cleitus was standing across the slope from Adeimantus and both were together in my vision. I thought of what Pericles had said about our quarrel, and how it divided the best men, and I considered how much more I hated Adeimantus for what I still view as his treason and how merely habitual my hatred for Cleitus was.

‘It is time to call a vote,’ Adeimantus said. ‘Let all the cities of the alliance vote whether we can leave for the isthmus.’

Themistocles laughed. ‘How do we vote, Adeimantus – one vote for every city, or perhaps by the number of ships we provide?’

Adeimantus turned and looked at Themistocles with contempt. ‘You don’t even
have
a city. Your city is destroyed. Your gods are thrown down.’ He gestured exactly as one does in dismissing a slave. ‘You are not even Athenians any more. Wait, and we will tell you what we, who
have
cities, have decided.’

Adeimantus had misjudged. The Spartan trierarchs were appalled; to mock a man for the loss of his city would, under most circumstances, be considered low, but this was terrible, a deliberate insult, hubris committed with forethought.

In fact, even a few of the Corinthians winced.

Themistocles judged the audience like the professional politician he was and responded. He didn’t laugh or frown or curse. He was mild.

‘As long as we have two hundred warships, we have the largest city in Greece,’ he said.

And by implication, of course, he suggested that, unlike their cities, his could go where it pleased. It was, in fact, the most brilliant speech I ever heard: short, to the point, but redolent with other meanings.

And yet, when I think back now, what did he mean? Fully? Now that all is exposed, what was his thinking that fateful night, when the fate of Greece teetered on a razor’s edge?

He carried them, for that night, because Adeimantus had been a fool.

The next morning, the Persian fleet worked its way onto the beaches below Athens, the beaches of Phaleron. They were not opposite us, but north of us and we were spared the vision of their great fleet blackening the sea, but from the northern headlands of Salamis it was easy enough to see them, a near-endless stream of warships landing in ordered chaos on the beaches of Phaleron.

Cimon put to sea in his own
Ajax
and hovered off the southern edge of their fleet, openly challenging them to single-ship combat, but they stayed on their beaches.

Cimon tells me he counted seven hundred and eleven ships. I have heard counts over a thousand and counts as few as five hundred and fifty, and I’m no help. But I tend to believe Cimon. He had the time, and the view.

The Persian fleet was very careful in its movements. It was odd that they outnumbered us at least two to one and yet they were behaving so cautiously. Of course, their Persian officers had no doubt spent days looking at the scrawled messages we’d left them, inviting the Ionians to come join us, or to betray their Persians in mid-battle. And they’d lost the last few encounters.

Late that afternoon, while I was practising on my own beach with Brasidas and Hipponax and Hector, Pericles and Anaxagoras – a well-trained man for all his quiet arrogance – a dozen ships came in from the south. They came up the Bay of Salamis in fine style and my daughter raced over with three of her friends, including Heliodora, to tell us there was a fleet coming. That created a stir, I promise you. With the Great King’s fleet closing all the passages to the north, an attack from the south loomed as a very real possibility and I ordered my hulls into the water. I ran – mostly not – up the headland and climbed the Brauron tower.

I didn’t know the ships. But there was something about them that appeared Greek; whether the slight outward slant of the cutwaters or the style of the rowing, but I was sure they were Peloponnesian ships. As they came closer, we could see that the lead ship displayed a dozen shields, all those of Spartiates, and men began to cheer.

I don’t usually cheer for Sparta, but more ships are always welcome, aren’t they?

But all the beaches to the north were packed. We had the Corinthians and the Spartans on the beaches to the south, and the only beach not covered in ships was the Brauron beach. I ran down like a boy and into the midst of another dance practice. I bowed low to the High Priestess, as if she was the Great King himself, and begged her permission for men and ships to land on her beach.

She made me wait long enough to let me know that she
could
refuse, and then she acquiesced graciously. Seckla was still close enough inshore to summon and I dropped my chiton – in front of a hundred virgins! – and swam out to him, and Leukas hauled me aboard and
Lydia
turned south.

We closed with the lead Spartan ship as quickly as the telling of it, and they all lay to, resting their oarsmen in the gruelling sun, and I leaped again – naked, damn it – onto the helm-deck of the lead ship.

There was Bulis, unchanged by the year we’d been apart. Until I saw him I assumed that he had died with his king. But there he was, and there was Sparthius in full armour. They both embraced me.

‘Naked!’ Bulis said – a long speech, for him.

We all laughed.

‘The beaches are crowded,’ I said. ‘I’ve found you a berth, just there by the headland with the two towers. Those are my ships on the other beach.’

Sparthius nodded. ‘Good. Very good.’

He motioned to the helmsman and orders were given.

I’d never been on a Spartan warship and it was interesting. There were fewer shouted orders than on one of my ships; everything seemed to happen with the gravity of ritual, and yet … everything happened. As an example, given the rather rough nature of the beaches at Salamis, sailors on the small foredeck – almost a castle – began raising a stone anchor and fitting it to a wooden stock in the bow. Then they fitted a pair of lighter stones to the anchor cable. It was a very seamanlike operation, but there were no orders given from the command deck, and the oar-master almost didn’t know the anchor was being prepared.

I was impressed, yet at the same time, I admit to having reservations. The cacophony of my command deck, with shouted orders repeated in all directions, meant that every crew station knew what was being done. In a storm, the helmsman still knew what was happening forward. But the Spartan way was very … intimidating.

Fancy that.

Regardless, we landed prettily, and I took my Spartiate friends to meet the High Priestess. I’m happy to say that Eugenios was waiting with a clean chiton and a fine himation – now that
is
service. I emerged from the waves like a king, or at least a well-waited on prince, and took my Spartans to their audience, where, of course, they behaved perfectly. It was delightful to see Sparthius, all his front teeth lost in some long-ago encounter, as big as a house and as dangerous as a lion, impressing this tiny but determined old woman with his perfect manners.

She, in turn, was delighted to meet them, and she did as much – or more – than any Athenian I had seen to convince these two men that she, at least, valued them and the alliance for which they stood, and when the trierarchs and helmsmen of the other ships came up to be blessed she spoke to each one, Spartan and Corinthian, with a light in her eye that made them smile. She really was a fine women and her dignity was not so immense that she could not laugh.