Killer of Men (46 page)

I discovered, in between short cruises in the Ionian Sea, that Miltiades had informers everywhere, and that being his man did have benefits. He heard of a pair of Phoenician biremes taking a cargo of copper and ivory up the coast of Asia for Heraklea in the Euxine. We took them off the islands – without so much as a fight – and you can be sure that I had Miltiades’ half bagged and ready before my stern touched the beach.

Autumn was well-advanced when we heard that the Ionian cities of the Troad had all fallen in two short weeks, as Artaphernes took the Great King’s army and besieged and captured them. Our morale plummeted, and men and ships deserted. The last of the Chians sailed away and only the Aeolians remained.

The tyrant of Mytilene demanded that Miltiades leave. Our piracy – that’s what he called it – was bringing the city into ill repute. What the bastard meant was that our ongoing commercial war against the Medes was costing his city, which was losing business to Methymna, around the coast of Lesbos.

Salamis, the last free city of Cyprus, fell in late autumn.

Miltiades called his captains to council. It was a fine day, with a stiff west wind blowing. We’d been beach-bound for ten days with bad weather and no targets. The Asians were staying well clear of Lesbos, and the bad feeling between Aristagoras and Miltiades had reached a new height. Men said I was to blame. Some even said that Briseis had had an affair with Miltiades himself – foolishness, as she was eight months pregnant and hundreds of stades around the coast of the island, but that’s the sort of wickedness that spreads in a divided camp.

‘We’re leaving,’ he said. That was it – the whole council reduced to a few words. He wasn’t much for a lot of talk, unless it was his own.

‘Back home?’ Heraklides asked.

‘What do you call home, Piraean?’ Miltiades asked.

‘Chersonese,’ Herk said. He grinned. ‘Don’t act the tyrant with us, lord. The wind is fair for the Chersonese and we can lie on our couches with buxom Thracians before the first snow falls.’

One of Miltiades’ captains was Cimon, his eldest son. Metiochos, his second son, was his other most trusted captain. That’s how the old aristocratic families worked – plenty of sons who could be trusted as war captains. I love to hear men call the Athenians ‘democrats’ as if any of them ever
wanted
to give power to common men. If Miltiades had had his way, he’d have been lord of the Chersonese first and then tyrant of Athens. He only loved democracy when it packed the phalanx with fighters.

Hah! I’m a fine one to talk. Look at me, lording it in Thrace. There’s no hypocrite like an old hypocrite.

At any rate, Cimon was my age, a man just coming into his reputation. I liked him. And he was not afraid of his father. ‘We’re going back to bad wine and blonde Thracian women because Pater is under sentence of death in Athens!’ he said – the first the rest of us had heard of it.

Miltiades’ look told me that he hadn’t intended the rest of us to know, but Cimon just laughed.

I never knew exactly when and where Miltiades and Aristagoras had started to be allies, and I never knew when they had a falling out, although I suspect that Briseis and I played our part. I still don’t know. But Miltiades did all the thinking that won us the Battle of Amathus – in that much, I suppose the bastard deserved a share of my spoils. And I guess that Miltiades had no stomach for peace with the Medes – not that he hated them, but because he made his fortune preying on their ships and he needed that money to make himself tyrant at Athens, or that’s how I see it now.

I should have said earlier that by the time Miltiades wanted us to leave, Aristagoras had been supplanted by his former master, Histiaeus of Miletus, who had served the Great King as a general for years and then deserted suddenly. He must have been a great fool – the Ionians were all but beaten when he joined us, and many men thought that he was a double traitor come to betray us into the hands of the Persians. In fact, I suspect he was one of those tragic men who make bad decision after bad decision – his betrayal of the Great King was foolish and dishonourable, and all his subsequent behaviour was of a piece. I only met him once, and that was on the beach at Mytilene. He was haranguing Aristagoras as if the latter was a small boy. I stayed to listen and laugh, and Aristagoras saw me, and the hatred in his eyes made me laugh louder. No one respected him by then. His failure to lead us against the Medes – anywhere – and especially to help the men of the Troad, when our fleet was just a hundred stades away, showed that he was a fool, if not a coward.

At any rate, Histiaeus’s arrival was the last straw. I think that Miltiades imagined that he would become the leader of the Ionian Revolt – and eventually the tyrant of all Ionia. And they would have been better for having him, I can tell you, honey. He may have been a bastard about money, but he was a war-leader. Men loved to follow him.

I ramble. Here, mix some of that lovely water from the spring in the bowl, and add apples – by Artemis, girl, do you blush just for the mention of apples? What a delicate flower you must be – thugater, where did you find her? Now pour that in my cup.

We sailed away ahead of the first winter storm, and just as Heraklides predicted, we were soon snug on our couches at Miltiades’ great palace at Kallipolis.

Aristagoras took his own retainers and fled to the mainland of Thrace. He had founded a colony there, at Myrcinus, and he abandoned the rebellion, or so Miltiades’ informers reported. I wondered where Briseis was. She must be bitter, I thought – from the queen of the Ionian Revolt to the wife of a failed traitor in three short years.

The winter passed quickly enough. I bought a pretty Thracian slave and learned the language from her. I taught the Pyrrhiche to all my oarsmen, and kept them at it through the whole rainy winter, and we went together to celebrate the feast of Demeter, and the return of the sailing season.

I was another year older. I dreamed all winter of ravens, and when the flowers began to bloom I saw a pair rise from a day-old kill and fly away west, and I knew that it was an omen, that I should be going home to Plataea, but there was nothing there for me – I thought. I worried more about my oath to Hipponax and Archilogos, which goes to show what fools men are about fate.

In the spring, Histiaeus declared himself commander of the Ionian Alliance, and set the rendezvous of the fleet at Mytilene again, where he had, over the winter, made himself tyrant. He did it the simple way – his picked men infiltrated the citadel, then he killed the old tyrant with his own hands and every one of his children, too. Soaked in blood, he stepped forward to the applause – the terrified applause, I assume – of the town.

Miltiades told us the tale at dinner, shaking his head with disgust. ‘Should have been you,’ I said. I didn’t mean it as flattery – simple fact. ‘Not the killings – the lordship.’

He grinned at me. We were almost friends again – which is to say, he was unchanged, and I had almost forgiven him. Miltiades’ land of the Chersonese was the most polyglot kingdom I’d ever seen – Thracians and Asiatics and Greeks and Sakje at every hand, at dinner and in the temples. If Paramanos was the only black man, he was not the only foreigner. He loved the place, and my fear about his loyalties began to relax. At any rate, that afternoon, we had been joined by Olorus, the king of the local Thracians and Miltiades’ father-in-law.

He grunted. ‘That Aristagoras,’ he said. ‘I visited him over the winter. He’s a greedy fool, and if he keeps taking slaves out of the Bastarnae and the Getae, they’ll kill him.’

Miltiades nodded. ‘He is a greedy fool,’ he said.

‘Does he have his wife with him?’ I asked, trying to sound uninterested.

He grinned. ‘Now, that is a woman!’ he said. ‘By all the gods, Miltiades – count yourself lucky you didn’t marry her. She is all the spine Aristagoras lacks.’

Miltiades shrugged. ‘I met her on Lesbos,’ he said. ‘She is too intelligent to be beautiful.’ He looked at me.

Heh, honey, that’s how men like Miltiades like their women. Dumb. Fear not – I won’t marry you to one of those. Miltiades’ chief wife – he had several concubines – was Hegesipyle, as beautiful as a dawn and as stupid as a cow tied to a post. Olorus’s daughter, in fact. I couldn’t stand to talk to her. She had never read anything, never been anywhere – my Thracian slave was better educated. I know, because I taught her Greek letters in exchange for her teaching me Thracian, and then we read Sappho together. And Alcaeus.

Oh, I’m an old man and I tell these stories like a moth darting around a candle flame.

The point of telling you about that dinner is that Miltiades rose and told us that we would not be joining the rebels. ‘The Ionian Revolt is only dangerous to the fools who play at it,’ he said, and his bitterness was obvious. He was a man who sought constantly for greatness, and greatness kept passing him by.

Cimon was there. He had a lovely girl on his couch, I remember, because she had bright red hair and we all teased him about what her children would look like. Miltiades had red hair, too, remember.

He rose. ‘So what will we do to win honour this summer?’ he asked.

Miltiades shook his head, and he sounded both bitter and old. ‘Win honour? There is no honour in this world. But we’ll fill the treasury while old Artaphernes is busy with his rebellion.’

He had a grand plan for a raid down the Asian coast, all the way past Tyre to the harbour of Naucratis. I frowned when I heard it, because I knew the idea must have come from Paramanos.

We sailed after the spring storms seemed to have blown themselves out. We sailed right past the beach at Mytilene. They must have thought we were on our way to join them, but we didn’t so much as spend the night. We stayed on Chios instead, and Stephanos gave money to his mother and impressed all his friends with his riches and then sailed away, and I was a little jealous of the ease with which he returned home and left. His sister was married now and had three sons, and I held one on my knee and thought about how quickly the world was changing. And I wondered if Miltiades was right, that there was no more honour to be had.

We fell on the Aegyptian merchants like foxes on geese. All the cities of Cyprus had fallen by then, and they didn’t think there was a Greek within a thousand stades. We came out of a grey dawn, five warships, our rowers hard and strong from the trip south, and they didn’t have a single trireme to protect them. I didn’t even get blood on my sword. Greeks have a name for when a wrestler wins a match without getting his back dirty – we call it a ‘dustless’ victory. We took those poor bastards and we were dustless.

I took three merchants myself.

When a squadron came out of the port, too late to save their merchants, we scattered.

I ran south, at the advice of Paramanos. I dumped the rowers from the ships we’d taken on the low dunes of Aegypt and kept the gold and bronze and the gigantic eggs of some fabulous animal – Africa is full of monsters, or so I’m told. There was a slave girl, too – ill-use all over her, and a flinch reflex like a beaten dog. I kept her and treated her well, and she brought me luck.

We picked up another pair of Aegyptian merchants just north of Naucratis the day after the raid, ships inbound with no idea of what had happened. More silver and gold, and Cyprian copper. The bilge of
Storm Cutter
was filled so deep that we had a hard time beaching the ship, and rowing was a horror.

I beached again, carefully, fed my crew on stolen goat meat and sent the newly captured crewmen to walk back to Naucratis. Then I went west, to Cyrene. That was for Paramanos. He’d found a girl he fancied in the Chersonese, a free Thracian woman, and he’d decided to pick up his children, which filled me with joy – because that meant that he was committed to me. It was touch and go in Cyrene – the authorities knew us for what we were, but Paramanos was a citizen, and they chose not to tangle with my marines. His sister brought his daughters to the boat, clutching their rag dolls, the poor little things – they wept and wept to be put on a boat full of men, and hard men at that. But some things earn the smiles of the gods, and my Aegyptian slave girl turned out to be a fine dry-nurse. She was ridiculously thankful, now that she found she wasn’t to be raped every night. And I have noticed this, honey – animals and people repay good treatment. And the gods see.

We put to sea with a strong south wind coming hot and hard off Africa. We hadn’t dared to sell even an ostrich egg out of the hold in Cyrene – they didn’t like us, and Paramanos feared that the council would seize the ship. I spent the whole night afraid that he would change his spots and betray us. Which shows that I had something to learn about men.

The wind was fair for Crete. We had a hold full of copper and gold and I knew a good buyer. Besides, I wanted to know how Lekthes was doing, the bastard.

I’m laughing, because most Greek captains thought that it was a great thing just to go down the coast of Asia, or across the deep blue from Cyprus to Crete, but thanks to Paramanos, I sailed the wine-dark as if I owned it, and every night he showed me the stars and how to read them the way the Phoenicians read them.

Good times.

Paramanos was showing off for his daughters and they reciprocated, turning into a pair of little sailors. Ten days at sea and they could climb masts. The elder girl, Niobe, had a trick that scared me spitless every time I saw her do it – when we were under way, rowing full out, she would run along the oar looms, a foot on each oar.

The oarsmen loved her. Every ship needs a brave, funny, athletic eleven-year-old girl.

Probably as part of his showing-off for his girls, Paramanos made a disgustingly accurate landfall on Crete, and was insufferable as a result. We walked up the beach at Gortyn’s little port and were welcomed like Homeric heroes – better, in that quite a few of them were murdered. Nearchos embraced me as if he’d forgotten that we weren’t lovers, and his father was decidedly warmer than I feared.

‘Tell me everything!’ Nearchos said. ‘Nothing has happened here, of course,’ he said, glowering at his father.