Salamis (33 page)

But Harpagos was still avenging his brother, and his ram had taken the lives of four ships. Moire was just showing the Athenians how good an African helmsman who had once been a slave could be, and he wasn’t done with his demonstration. Giannis was close enough to me that I could see his tight-lipped determination, despite the three desperate fights his ship had seen that day, and Megakles – I had never seen him fatigued by the sea.

We were buoyed by Nike. Indeed, to this day, I think of her, and I think of Cleitus’s daughter leaping into the waves – later I will tell you why. But it was Nike herself who had us in her hand. We weren’t tired.

We were workmen determined to finish the task we’d been set.

Nor were we fools.

I gave no orders. Seckla determined to take one of the outermost Phoenicians and set us to rake her oars. Onisandros, his voice tight with pain, begged the rowers for another burst, and they came on like heroes, so that we went up to ramming speed from very close.

Then it went like a fight between wild dogs in the agora.

Our chosen prey baulked. At ramming speed, her helmsman panicked and yawed well out of line – and like a flash, Onisandros ordered the rowers to slow their stroke and Seckla turned us to port so fast I was thrown onto the deck.
Another
Phoenician flashed past our stern – I hadn’t seen him, screened by the first – and we struck the stern quarter of a third as he tried for the ship from Naxos that had come over to us a week before. Ka stood in the stern, loosing arrows into the Phoenician passing our stern, and even as I shouted for a grapple and a spear, Dy put an arrow into the helmsman and he fell forward into his oars. His ship skidded on the waves and came to a stop with half the rowers injured, all her oars going – and Harpagos cut off her stern, his fifth or sixth kill of the day.

We were gathering way again, all our oars out. We hadn’t hit our opponent very hard, but he was pulling away with all his might, and none of our grapples had clinched the deal. He backed water into the shallows, and men started leaping over the side – where the Great King’s Immortals began to slaughter them.

I didn’t have time to watch or laugh – the Phoenician squadron was gone. Half the ships were running east, and the rest were taken or driving their sterns ashore to be butchered by the Great King’s bodyguard. I assume he was consumed by rage.

Giannis took his ship against the tall flagship. He handled it brilliantly – feinted a head-to-head collision and then went off, forcing the bigger ship to go to ramming speed for nothing. He passed the behemoth’s stern and turned, his archers shooting up into the Persian archers crowding the enemy deck, but in this they were our betters and Giannis took an arrow in his right thigh as he turned and his helmsman was shot down at his side, and two of his marines killed.

But with all of their attention on him, they missed Harpagos, who had cut the stern off one Phoenician like a housewife cutting sausage and then turned, a long, easy turn to port, passed under my bow, and slammed his beak deep into the Phoenician flagship.

Too deep. He struck at a weak place between frames, and his ram went in. Immediately the Persian archers shot down into
his
ship, and the Phoenician marines, from their higher vantage, went to board.

About then, Seckla swept along the enemy flagship’s port side – opposite to where Harpagos had holed it – and raked along their trailing oars, killing oarsmen with their own shafts and breaking their oars or ripping them out of the ship like a man pulling the legs off a crab. And as soon as we were broadside to broadside, we went at the red and gold monster.

Her sides were a man’s height higher than our aft deck.

No one baulked, but it wasn’t like any other boarding action I’ve ever been in.

Usually you go over onto the enemy deck, sometimes off your own ram, like a bridge, and sometimes from your own upper deck or catwalk straight aboard the enemies’. It’s an art, a dance, not a science.

This time we went in through the rowing frames. Only on a ship so big could it even be done, and it meant we couldn’t take spears, and I, for one, left my aspis behind me. Scarcely mattered – my left arm was barely able to function.

As we slowed and our grapples went home – no misses now, because the enemy marines were all on the other deck, watching the wrong ship – Hipponax got to the starboard-side rail, ready to leap.

Bless Brasidas, he simply pulled my son off his feet and flung him to the deck. ‘Another day, boy,’ he said. He gave my son a smile – a smile I still treasure – and then he leapt for the enemy’s side, grabbed the edge of a rowing frame, and flipped over his arms, his feet slamming into the rower.

In truth, most of the rowers we faced couldn’t have fought us on their best day, and many were injured by Seckla’s oar-rake. But it is no treat going in an oar-port that is only slightly larger than your shoulders in your bronze thorax, which will not compress. I killed the oarsman in my entry port with my sword, and climbed over his dying body to get inboard – and took a spear full force in my back plate. It penetrated, too. Right here. See? About an inch into this muscle.

That motivated me to move faster.

I had no aspis under which to curl and I was cramped in the rowing frame. My opponent was above me. But I rolled over, which hurt my back wound like blazes, and parried with my sword – and got my weak left hand on his spearhead.

He pulled.

That hurt, but I held on, and he pulled me to my feet, mostly. I slammed the spear down and missed.

I scythed my sword across his ankles, and that was the end of the fight for him. Then I climbed out of the top-deck rowing frame. I was not the first man onto the enemy deck. Hipponax and Brasidas were ahead of me – without shields, and fighting against thirty Phoenician marines.

But the difference was that Nike was with us, and not with them. They already knew they were beaten. Even as I counted the odds, Moire’s
Amastris
grappled bow to bow. Moire had a gangplank for landing men and animals on open beaches, and he used it here, dropping it across to make a bridge for men with a good sense of balance, but Alexandros ran across the gap and onto the deck, and he had both aspis and spear, and suddenly there were a dozen more like him and then deck crew and top-deck oarsmen.

I wasn’t watching. I knew these things must be happening, because of the despair of my foes, but they were not eager to die without taking us with them, and we were locked sword to spear, breast to shield. The lack of aspides was terrible, the press was close and Hipponax went down with a wound to his leg, but Brasidas demonstrated why the elite of the Spartans practise for everything. And I confess that I fought hard over my son, too.

A man with sword alone is not without advantages. Nor were we facing a tide of enemies, but merely three or four at a time. Then I had cause to praise Polymarchos for making me learn to cover myself with the sword as well as with the aspis, and to fight the longer weapon with the shorter, and when I covered a spear-thrust, the man was at my mercy in a turn of my hand, nor was my left so weak I couldn’t catch a spear and pull a man off balance.

And in that hour, Sittonax, the Gaulish loafer, came into his own. He boarded from Harpagos’s vessel, where he’d chosen to be a marine, and he came up the side unseen through the blizzard of arrow shafts with his long Gaulish blade and began to cut his way aft using looping butterfly strokes, both hands on the hilt of the sword, a technique you never see in Greece, and he panicked the men in the stern.

The pressure eased and I caught up a round shield, more like something a peltast would carry than a man’s shield, but better, by far, than having my left side naked. It was light and I could hold it, even missing fingers and with my shoulder a wreck, and I pushed forward with Brasidas and Polymarchos himself, who came up through the catwalk onto the fighting deck, followed by Sitalkes, who had somehow managed to fight his way aboard
with
an aspis, a remarkable feat.

We formed a line, and then Alexandros was next to Brasidas and a rear-rank marine handed the Spartan his shield.

Only then did I see the gaping wound in the flesh of the Spartan’s left shoulder – I swear by Athena you could see the bone. But he got the aspis onto his shoulder and pressed forward.

I didn’t know that Harpagos was dead at the bow of his ship, an arrow in his throat, or that two more Athenians were boarding over the stern, with ladders, incidentally saving Sittonax from certain death as the Great King’s brother and his elite warriors turned on one Gaulish madman. Seen from above, I imagine the great Phoenician ship must have looked like a city under siege.

And being stormed.

The marines closed with us one more time. There were arrows, but there was Ka,
sitting
in the crosstrees of my permanent main mast, loosing shaft after shaft into their archers. He was naked, without cover, alone, and yet untouched. This is what I mean by the presence of Nike. Any Persian might have seen him and, with one calm arrow, dropped him.

Instead, he loosed every arrow he’d carried aloft and half of them found flesh. And then we were pressing them back into their own stern – into our allies, coming round the bend of the swan.

Hipponax tried to get past Brasidas and Alexandros tried to get past me. The last moments of the fight for the big trireme … I can’t say everything that happened, except that I took a long cut on my right leg, which I think might have been caused by my own people. Hipponax fought like a mad thing – which he was. He had a round target, much like the one I’d picked up, and he used it well, in among the last Phoenician marines. I was afraid for him; for a few heartbeats he was alone.

He battled a spear-thrust aside on his target and wrapped his shield arm around the man’s outstretched arms then threw the man, armour, weapons and all, over his hip and over the side of the ship.

The Phoenician to his right swung an axe—

Hipponax pushed forward, took the shaft on his buckler, and Brasidas threw his spear – and killed the man about to kill Hipponax. The shaft broke several of Hipponax’s fingers, and he roared – a surprising sound – and went down on one knee from the pain, but Brasidas and I muscled past him.

There was a man standing in gold, head-to-toe gold: gold armour, a golden helmet, with a golden bow in his hand. I knew him to be Ariabignes, Xerxes’ brother. But my marines didn’t need to know anything but that he was the one covered in gold.

I’d like to say I killed him in single combat, but too many of my friends were there for me to get away with such a lie.
We all killed him.
I got my sword into him, Moire put his spear into the man’s eye, Sitalkes and Alexandros, Hipponax and Polymarchos and Achilles my cousin and Sikli the oarsman were all there, and two Athenian marines, Diodorus, son of Eumenes, and Kritias, son of Diogenes, and Sittonax the Gaul, with a cut across his neck that should have been a death wound.

And then a strange silence fell for a moment. Far off, we could hear cheers and, closer, we could see Persian Immortals on the land, loosing arrows into the Athenian triremes under the Phoenicians’ stern, although their arrows fell short. Persians were walking into the sea, shaking their fists in their impotence.

I pulled the golden helmet off its dead owner and went to the side. I looked up the hill – the Great King’s throne was the closest it had been all day. The sun was high in the sky.

I knew he’d be watching. Where else could his eyes be?

I raised the golden helmet high, gave the Greek battle scream
eleu eleu eleu
, and hurled the golden thing into the sea.

That was not the end of the fight. But it was the end of the part of the fight I saw myself. It was too great a battle for any one man to see, so I’ll tell you a little that I know from my friends about what happened elsewhere.

The fog fooled Eurybiades as well as fooling the Phoenicians. He never gave the signal for the attack – nor, in fact, would we ever have seen it for the haze. So much for signals.

In fact, what happened was better than our plan. When the Ionians abandoned their own plan, which I know from captives and even friends who were with them, was to move in long columns along the coast of Attica, west, until they encircled all our beaches, and then to press forward in a milling fight, forcing us right back until they could massacre us in shallow water; when it was clear that we were going to fight, from our paean, the Ionians turned in place, going from three long files of ships headed west to three long ranks headed south, and they met the Peloponnesian ships and some of the Aeginians ram to ram. They beat the first line and pushed the Peloponnesians’ ships back.

But we broke the Phoenicians and, in fact, the western flank of the Ionians. The survivors retreated – and hopelessly muddled the Ionian centre, so that it was then vulnerable to the Peloponnesians. Cimon led the Corinthians – late, but we’ll leave that go – into the maelstrom of the centre, trusting us to beat the Phoenicians against odds.

And then there were four hundred ships packed into a very small stretch of ocean, and that fight was at least as dense and deadly as the fight we had around
Horse Tamer.
No, I will not tell you that my ships won the day. Every ship in the League won the day. It was all vital: every ram, every marine, every oarsman.

But when we swept Xanthippus’s deck clear, he chose to lead his ships back east into the same maelstrom that Cimon had adventured with fifty Corinthians. And at the same time, as we all reckon, though no one can quite tell anyone else for sure, Aristides accomplished a great deed – one of the day’s finest. In small boats, and swimming and wading, four hundred hoplites crossed to the shores of Psyttaleia. It should not have been possible. But the Persian garrison was trying to use their bows to support the hard-pressed Cilicians, who were losing steadily to the Aeginians, and suddenly they were taken in the flank by Aristides and the Athenian hoplites. Certainly the Aeginians landed some men on the island and Phrynicus says that they used a captured Phoenician freighter, a tubby thing, to bring the Athenian archer corps to the island without wetting their bows.