The Great King (48 page)

We rowed away south, and my heart was as heavy as iron ore. Corcyra, like Syracusa, had a mighty fleet. But she was a former colony of Corinth, and I could see the long arm of Adamenteis at work. Right or wrong, I held him responsible. Certainly I’d heard his name often enough over wine in Corcyra.

Aside from Corcyra, we hid our camp every night and moved close to the coast by day. I assumed that Dagon was still hunting me – I knew his obsessions, and I knew from bitter experience how well he knew these waters. We never let a campfire show from the shore, and even when we passed the entrance to the Gulf of Patras and left it on our port side, sailing with a fair wind down the west coast of the Peloponnesus, I continued to take all the care I could. We saw a pair of ships well out to sea the day we sighted Mount Olympus, and we took down our sail and crept in with the coast.

Every day, my oarsmen got a little better.

I was lucky in my crew. I was also tested. I had never sailed far without a superb sailor at my side – Leukas, Vasilios, Sekla, Megakles, Demetrios, and their ilk. Professionals, born to the role. I always felt like a fake with them – after all, Plataea doesn’t have any ships. I was seventeen before I handled a ship.

But that summer, the best sailor on my ship was me. My son – what a pleasure it is to say that – my son Hipponax was an excellent hand at the steering oar, and he had weather sense, but he couldn’t navigate from one side of a public bath to the other. I assume his grandfather had always handled the navigation.

In a way, that was good. I was still a little unsure of my navigation – I had the pride of a new skill, and I liked to talk about what I was seeing out loud as I took a sighting, or tried to calculate my speed through the water for dead reckoning. Hipponax and I had been entirely distant since the incident when Demetrios knocked him flat. He was correct and polite in my presence, and affected to despise me to Hector while trying very hard to impress me.

You know. Young men.

The day we saw Olympus – and what we thought might be Dagon’s ships – I decided to stay out to sea and steal a march on my enemy. I wanted to fight Dagon, but not against desperate odds. The farther I could lead him from his base, and the better worked up my ship was . . .

And my gods were not telling me that I had to fight just then. This is hard to explain, so you must believe me. I trusted I would have him. The floating tree had been where I needed it. So would revenge.

At any rate, my rowers grumbled when I said we’d spend the night at sea, but that was all, and we got the sail up again as soon as it was dark, with my veterans rigging the mast by moonlight while the rowers watched us as if we were the Argonauts. And then it was all a navigation problem. I sat in the stern, and it was Hipponax’s trick at the helm, and we sailed through the moonlit darkness.

I talk to myself. No, it’s true, and sometimes men think I’ve lost my wits, but navigation, for me, is always a conversation with myself, and with Pythagoras and Heraklitus and sometimes with Harpagos, whether he is there or not. So I stood with a spear shaft braced on the helmsman’s rail, taking sightings on stars I knew.

‘You can . . . find your way with the stars?’ Hipponax asked, suddenly. His voice carried the message that it had taken him time and effort to frame this question.

You can almost never go wrong with the young by giving them the full truth.

‘Not really,’ I admitted. ‘With the stars, I could tell you where I was in the most general terms. Which we already know. But that star there will always show me north – see it?’

Hipponax snorted that adolescent boy snort. He knew the North Star. Of course he did.

‘Well, it may seem simple to you, but I find it constantly reassuring that I am running south and east, because I’ve been this way before and that’s the way this coast runs. If I make too much way to the east, smack – we’ll hit the Peloponnesus.’

We ran on, the silence punctuated by the sound of water on the steering oars, and the ship-noise; creaking, groans from the wood, snapping noises that always sounded a little threatening.

‘How else do you navigate at night?’ he asked.

‘Sound,’ I said. ‘The look of the waves. The wind. Some stars move less in the wheel of the sky than others and you can use them. Look – right now I’m aimed at the Plough.’

‘Sound?’ Hipponax asked.

It happened that I knew where I was to within a few stades, so I took the steering oars in my hands and turned the ship – very gradually – to the east, and ran in closer to the long beach. It showed like the edge of a road in the moonlight.

‘Listen,’ I said, but my son already had the lesson by heart.

He smiled at me.

‘Do you want a ship of your own?’ I asked.

‘Yes!’ he said.

I smiled at the darkness. ‘Learn to navigate. And to command. That means patience.’ Oh – I could see by his moonlit face I was veering off into the kind of lecture boys hate. ‘You think you could command a ship for me?’ I asked.

He shocked me by looking out over the sea. ‘Someday,’ he said with a snort. ‘Not tomorrow morning.’

Well. We all know where wisdom begins, eh?

The mouth of the Alpheos was once again crowded. Because, of course, it was an Olympic year. I had known this somewhere in my heart – four years had passed since I had sailed here on a bowline from Bari. And it is true that the older you get, the faster time moves. Yet, my visit to Neoptolymos and my sighting of Dagon had made the world of four years before seem very immediate, so that it seemed possible, as I have heard philosophers theorise, that two points in time may not be as far apart as they seem – like wave caps with a trough between.

But there was not a single Athenian ship on the beach, and I could see only Corcyrans and Northerners, and a handful of Peloponnesians. Not a ship from Ionia.

Two from Syracusa.

We ate a very expensive meal on the beach – safe, for one night, from any attempt Dagon might make – and then, loaded to the point that the ship was hard to row, we headed south and stayed at sea for three days and two nights, drinking every amphora in the sand of the hold dry and eating every shred of dried meat, figs, dates and old bread aboard.

We weathered the Hand in fine style, with a beautiful westerly coming under our quarter as we passed the rocks. The seas were as empty as a new-washed bowl, and I worried less about Dagon and more about the Persians.

The seas south of Olympia were
empty.

I put in at the port of Sparta for water and grain, and traded some of my Sicilian wines. The seas might be empty, but Sparta was not – I gathered from the traders on the beach that the citizenry of Lacedaemon were preparing for their great festivals. Half the citizen population was away at the Olympics, and the rest were preparing for the great Spartan festival – the one where everyone dances naked.

Well, that’s what Athenians say. I’ve never been.

At any rate, there was no sense of crisis. I did learn that Leonidas was already at Corinth, or somewhere east of Corinth.

A fisherman said that a Megaran fisherman had told him that Xerxes had crossed the Hellespont.

The beachside traders were derisive.

‘There won’t be any fighting this summer,’ one said. ‘If there were, do you think all the Spartiates would be swanning about butt naked at home?’ He made a rude gesture and laughed.

Have I mentioned that the helots and periokoi had no great love for their masters?

We sailed – still cautious, may I add – with the fine west wind at our backs. The fisherman had put a chill into me – I decided to try and navigate directly, Sparta to Athens, without passing up the Gulf of Corinth or touching at Hermione or any of my other favourite ports.

So again we filled the ship with water and food, and I used the profit on my Sicilian wine to buy a small fishing smack. I put Hector and Hipponax and Nicolas – an old oarsman I’ve mentioned before – and two of the slaves into her with a hold filled with food and wine, and we were away.

I was not the least afraid of finding Dagon out in the Great Blue. I spent too much time at the helm, and I didn’t even have Hipponax to teach. Despite which, we made a fine passage for two days, and I liked everything I saw . . .

Except a pair of big trireme sails on the horizon.

There are so many factors to a chase at sea. In an extreme, a captain can always abandon his course and run with the wind, or land at the first beach, burn his ship and run inland. I’ve done both.

But my ship was well worked up, my rowers were fresh and healthy and had, from a few good port visits, learned that they were treated like men, given wine and a few coins, and trusted. In return, I felt the first stirrings of a crew becoming . . . well, a phalanx. I’d done it so many times by that summer that I could build a crew almost without conscious thought. A storm, or a sea battle – either one would make them mine. They were ready.

And the ship – Neoptolymos called her
Andromeda
– was no
Lydia
, but she was a fine ship and better for our rebuilding. She had a tendency to turn to starboard, like a horse with a bad bridle, and she had no brilliant turn of speed, and we’d had her in the water too long, so that her timbers were heavy with water. She needed a drying.

But I felt in my bones that she was faster and better manned than anything Dagon would have.

And I knew where I was – about five hundred stades west and south of Athens. Unless Dagon had found himself a new trierarch, he’d be worried about fighting here – in the Athenian shipping lanes.

I watched the two sails for enough time for the sun to move across the sky, and then I ordered my sails taken in, the mainmast stowed – what a pleasure a good crew is! Many ships had to land on a beach to stow the mainmast. Hah!

And then I turned the bow south, and went at my enemy.

Well! It wasn’t Dagon.

Surprised? So was I. Even two stades away I thought I was watching a pair of Carthaginian triremes, and I had to get quite close – already manoeuvring for a strike – before I caught the flash of a shield from the stern of the nearest galley. It was a Greek aspis, and that gave me a little doubt, so I passed on my oar rake and got upwind of them, passing close.

One of the triremes was badly damaged. The other had a long scar down her paint on the starboard side, and looked familiar, and very Phoenician.

My smaller galley got upwind, and we turned, and the two enemy galleys got their bows around to us – the wounded one took so long I knew she was not any threat at all. But the Greek aspis worried me a little.

I let my lads rest on their oars while I drank a little water. We were low on everything, and I wasn’t going to fight unless it was Dagon. I had the weather gauged – I could engage or run at my leisure.

Something told me they were Greeks. After laying on our oars for as long as it takes an orator to speak in the assembly, my conviction that they were Greeks was growing, and then Giorgios, one of my old sailors, ran back along the catwalk to tell me that he could hear men shouting in Greek.

We were, as I say, upwind. I summoned Hipponax under my stern.

‘Run down and see if they are Greek,’ I yelled. ‘If they are, raise your aspis over your head. If not, turn to port and run free, and I’ll join you, and we’ll leave them here.’

Hector raised his hand in casual salute – the two of them were as brown as old walnut by then, and with their burned-blond hair they really did look like gods. The little fishing smack turned on her heel and ran down the wind – wallowed down it, more like. I saw Hipponax stand up in the bow and I saw someone on the stern of the other ship lean far out to shout.

Hipponax’s shield came up with a flourish, and I saw the little fishing smack come to under the lee of the heavy trireme, and then we were moving. We rowed downwind, still cautious – I still wished I had my archers.

But my guess was correct. They were Greeks – Ithacans – on their way to join the allied fleet.

And they’d taken Dagon’s consort. That took a day to ascertain, but they knew Dagon, and he’d abandoned them when the fight went bad, running due east.

Always a pleasure to have been right. The Ithacans were in an old capture – a heavy Phoenician galley they’d taken ten years before. Possibly in an act of blatant piracy – it takes one to know one. But the other ship they’d taken in a fight, two ships to two, and they were out of water, out of cordage, and desperate – conditions were so bad that the recaptured oarsmen from the Carthaginian had already risen in mutiny once.

Worst of all, they had no idea where they were. They had fought off Ithaca – the irony was that I’d been creeping about for days while Dagon and his consort looked for me in the wrong places, caught the Ithacans, and lost their fight.

At any rate, it took me days of conversations – and interrogations – to discern all this, and to learn that the Carthaginians were not on a voyage of private vendetta. They had indeed been sold information about me – the notorious pirate. But they were en route to join Xerxes with dispatches.

I gave them almost all our remaining water, and exchanged half of my rowers for half of the Carthaginian capture’s rowers, and I led them north and east to Piraeus. We saw the Acropolis of Athens in the first light of the new day, and even the sickest rowers came back to life – one of the best pieces of navigation of my life, friends. By the time that girls were doing their dances at Brauron, we were ashore, and a hundred old men were embracing us.

After all, we had at our tail the first capture of the war. The first fruits of Nike.

We might have been feasted like heroes, but all the other news was grim. The worst was the thing I’d feared most – Xerxes was loose, across the Hellespont and marching at speed.

The allied fleet was forming all along the east coast of Attica – we hadn’t seen it coming in the dark, but as soon as the sun was well up we could see Athenian ships on all the beaches from Pireaus east to the headland at Sounion. The Spartan navarch was already around Sounion at Marathon, and the fleet already had a squadron of light ships scouting the north coast of Euboea for anchorages.