The Great King (3 page)

The first night, I told you of my youth, and how I went to Calchas the priest to be educated as a gentleman, and instead learned to be a spear fighter. Because Calchas was no empty windbag, but a Killer of Men, who had stood his ground many times in the storm of bronze. And veterans came from all over Greece to hang their shields for a time at our shrine and talk to Calchas, and he sent them away whole, or better men, at least. Except that the worst of them the Hero called for, and the priest would kill them on the precinct walls and send their shades shrieking to feed the old Hero, or serve him in Hades.

Mind you, friends, Leithos wasn’t some angry old god demanding blood sacrifice, but Plataea’s hero from the Trojan War. And he was a particularly Boeotian hero, because he was no great man-slayer, no tent-sulker. His claim to fame is that he went to Troy and fought all ten years. That on the day that mighty Hector raged by the ships of the Greeks and Achilles skulked in his tent, Leithos rallied the lesser men and formed a tight shield wall and held Hector long enough for Ajax and the other Greek heroes to rally.

You might hear a different story in Thebes, or Athens, or Sparta. But that’s the story of the Hero I grew to serve, and I spent years at his shrine, learning the war dances that we call the Pyricche. Oh, I learned to read old Theogonis and Hesiod and Homer, too. But it was the spear, the sword and the aspis that sang to me.

When my father found that I was learning to be a warrior and not a man of letters, he came and fetched me home, and old Calchas . . . died. Killed himself, more like. But I’ve told all this – and how little Plataea, our farm town at the edge of Boeotia, sought to be free of cursed Thebes and made an alliance with distant Athens. I told you all how godlike Miltiades came to our town and treated my father, the bronzesmith – and Draco the wheelwright and old Epiktetus the farmer – like Athenian gentlemen, how he wooed them with fine words and paid hard silver for their products, so that he bound them to his own political ends and to the needs of Athens.

When I was still a gangly boy – tall and well muscled, as I remember, but too young to fight in the phalanx – Athens called for little Plataea’s aid, and we marched over Kitharon, the ancient mountain that is also our glowering god, and we rallied to the Athenians at Oinoe. We stood beside them against Sparta and Corinth and all the Peloponnesian cities – and we beat them.

Well – Athens beat them. Plataea barely survived, and my older brother, who should have been my father’s heir, died there with a Spartiate’s spear in his belly.

Four days later, when we fought again – this time against Thebes – I was in the phalanx. Again, we triumphed. And I was a hoplite.

And two days later, when we faced the Euboeans, I saw my cousin Simon kill my father, stabbing him in the back under his bright bronze cuirass. When I fell over my father’s corpse, I took a mighty blow, and when I awoke, I had no memory of Simon’s treachery.

When I awoke, of course, I was a slave. Simon had sold me to Phoenician traders, and I went east with a cargo of Greek slaves.

I was a slave for some years – and in truth, it was not a bad life. I went to a fine house, ruled by rich, elegant, excellent people – Hipponax the poet and his wife and two children. Archilogos – the elder boy – was my real master, and yet my friend and ally, and we had many escapades together. And his sister, Briseis—

Ah, Briseis. Helen, returned to life.

We lived in far-off Ephesus, one of the most beautiful and powerful cities in the Greek world – yet located on the coast of Asia. Greeks have lived there since the Trojan War, and the temple of Artemis there is one of the wonders of the world. My master went to school each day at the temple for Artemis, and there the great philosopher, Heraklitus, had his school, and he would shower us with questions every bit as painful as the blows of the old fighter who taught us pankration at the gymnasium.

Heraklitus. I have met men – and women – who saw him as a charlatan, a dreamer, a mouther of impieties. In fact, he was deeply religious – his family held the hereditary priesthood of Artemis – but he believed that fire was the only true element, and change the only constant. I can witness both.

It was a fine life. I got a rich lord’s education for nothing. I learned to drive a chariot, and to ride a horse and to fight and to use my mind like a sword. I loved it all, but best of all—

Best of all, I loved Briseis.

And while I loved her – and half a dozen other young women – I grew to manhood listening to Greeks and Persians plotting various plots in my master’s house, and one night all the plots burst forth into ugly blossoms and bore the fruit of red-handed war, and the Greek cities of Ionia revolted against the Persian overlords.

Now, as tonight’s story will be about war with the Persians, let me take a moment to remind you of the roots of the conflict. Because they are ignoble, and the Greeks were no better than the Persians, and perhaps a great deal worse. The Ionians had money, power and freedom – freedom to worship, freedom to rule themselves – under the Great King, and all it cost them was taxes and the ‘slavery’ of having to obey the Great King in matters of foreign policy. The ‘yoke’ of the Persians was light and easy to wear, and no man alive knows that better than me, because I served – as a slave – as a herald between my master and the mighty Artapherenes, the satrap of all Phrygia. I knew him well – I ran his errands, dressed him at times, and one dark night, when my master Hipponax caught the Persian in his wife’s bed, I saved his life when my master would have killed him. I saved my master’s life, as well, holding the corridor against four Persian soldiers of high repute – Aryanam, Pharnakes, Cyrus and Darius. I know their names because they were my friends, in other times.

And you’ll hear of them again. Except Pharnakes, who died in the Bosporus, fighting Carians.

At any rate, after that night of swords and fire and hate, my master went from being a loyal servant of Persia to a hate-filled Greek ‘patriot’. And our city – Ephesus – roused itself to war. And amidst it all, my beloved Briseis lost her fiancé to rumour and innuendo, and Archilogos and I beat him for his impudence. I had learned to kill, and to use violence to get what I wanted. And as a reward, I got Briseis – or to be more accurate, she had me. My master freed me, not knowing that I had just deflowered his daughter, and I sailed away with Archilogos to avoid the wrath of the suitor’s relatives.

We joined the Greek revolt at Lesvos, and there, on the beach, I met Aristides – sometimes called the Just, one of the greatest heroes of Athens, and Miltiades’ political foe.

That was the beginning of my true life. My life as a man of war. I won my first games on a beach in Chios and I earned my first suit of armour, and I went to war against the Persians.

But the God of War, Ares, was not so much in charge of my life as Aphrodite, and when we returned to Ephesus to plan the great war, I spent every hour that I could with Briseis, and the result – I think now – was never in doubt. But Heraklitus, the great sage, asked me to swear an oath to all the gods that I would protect Archilogos and his family – and I swore. Like the heroes in the old stories, I never thought about the consequence of swearing such a great oath and sleeping all the while with Briseis.

Ah, Briseis! She taunted me with cowardice when I stayed away from her and devoured me when I visited her, sneaking, night after night, past the slaves into the women’s quarters, until in the end – we were caught. Of course we were caught.

And I was thrown from the house and ordered never to return, by the family I’d sworn to protect.

Three days later I was marching up-country with Aristides and the Athenians. We burned Sardis, but the Persians caught us in the midst of looting the market, and we lost the fight in the town and then again at the bridge, and the Persians beat us like a drum – but I stood my ground, fight after fight, and my reputation as a spear fighter grew. In a mountain pass, Eualcides the Euboean and I charged Artapherenes’ bodyguard, and lived to tell the tale. Three days later, on the plains north of Ephesus, we tried to face a provincial Persian army with the whole might of the Ionian Revolt, and the Greeks folded and ran rather than face the Persian archery and the outraged Phrygians. Alone, on the far left, we the Athenians and the Euboeans held our ground and stopped the Carians. Our army was destroyed. Eualcides the hero died there, and I went back to save his corpse, and in the process found that Hipponax, my former master, lay mortally wounded. I gave him the mercy blow, again failing to think of the oath I’d sworn, and my once near-brother Archilogos thought I’d done it from hate, not love. And that blow stood between us and any hope of reconciliation. To Archilogos, I’d raped his sister and killed his father after swearing an oath to the gods to protect them. And that will have bearing on tonight’s tale.

From the rout of Ephesus, I escaped with the Athenians, but the curse of my shattered oath lay on me and Poseidon harried our ship, and in every port I killed men who annoyed me until Hagios, my Athenian friend, put me ashore on Crete, with the King of Goryton, Achilles, and his son Neoptolymos, to whom I was war tutor. I tutored him so well that in the next great battle of the Ionian War, Neoptolymos and I were the heroes of the Greek fleet, and we helped my once-friend Archilogos to break the Persian centre. It was the first victory for the Greeks, but it was fleeting, and a few days later, I was a pirate on the great sea with my own ship for the first time. Fortune favoured me – perhaps, I think, because I had in part redeemed my oath to the gods by saving Archilogos at the sea battle. And when we weathered the worst storm I had ever seen, Poseidon had gifted me the African-Greek navigator Paramanos and a good crew in a heavy ship. I returned to Lesvos and joined Miltiades – he who had wooed the Plataeans at the dawn of this tale. And from him, I learned the facts of my father’s murder and I determined to go home and avenge him.

I found Briseis had married one of the architects of the Ionian Revolt, and he was eager to kill me – the rumour was that she called my name when he was with her at night. And I determined to kill him.

After two seasons of piracy with Miltiades and further failures of the rebels to resist the Persians, I found him skulking around the edge of a great melee in Thrace and I killed him. I presented myself to Briseis to take her as my own – and she spurned me.

That’s how it is, sometimes. I went back to Plataea, an empty vessel, and the Furies filled me with revenge. I found Simon and his sons sitting on my farm, Simon married to my mother, planning to marry his youngest son Simonalkes, to my sister Penelope.

I’ll interrupt my own tale to say that I did not fall on Simon with fire and sword, because four years of living by the spear had taught me that things I had learned as a boy from Calchus and heard again from Heraklitus were coming to seem important and true – that justice was more important than might. I let the law of Plataea have its way. Simon hanged himself from the rafters of my father’s workshop, and the Furies left me alone with my mother and my sister.

That would make a fine tale, I think, by itself – but the gods were far from done with Plataea, and by the next spring, there were storm clouds brewing in all directions. An Athenian aristocrat died under my hypaspist’s sword – Idomeneaus, who comes all too often into these stories, a mad Cretan – he had taken up the priesthood of the old shrine. I went off to see to the crisis, and that road took me over the mountains to Athens, and into the middle of Athenian politics – aye, you’ll hear more of that tonight, too. There I fell afoul of the Alcmaeonidae and their scion Cleitus, because it was his brother who had died in our sanctuary and because my cowardly cousin Simon’s sons were laying a trap for me. He stole my horse and my slave girl – that’s another story. Because of him, I was tried for murder – and Aristides the Just got me off with a trick. But in the process, I committed hubris – the crime of treating a man like a slave – and Aristides ordered me to go to Delos, to the great temple of Apollo, to be cleansed.

Apollo, that scheming god, never meant me to be cleansed, but instead thrust me back into the service of Miltiades, whose fortunes were at an all-time low. With two ships, I reprovisioned Miletus – not once but twice – and made a small fortune on it, and on piracy. I took men’s goods, and their women, and I killed for money, took ships, and thought too little of the gods. Apollo had warned me – in his own voice – to learn to use mercy, but I failed more often than I succeeded, and I left a red track behind me across the Ionian Sea. And in time, I was a captain at the greatest sea battle of the Ionian Revolt – at Lade. At Lade, the Great King put together an incredible fleet, of nearly six
hundred
ships, to face the Greeks and their allies with almost three hundred and fifty ships. It sounds one-sided, but we were well trained, we should have been ready. I sailed with the Athenians and the Cretans, and we beat the Phoenicians at one end of the line and emerged from the morning fog expecting the praise of our Navarch, the Phokaian Dionysus – alongside Miltiades, the greatest pirate and ship-handler in the Greek world. But when we punched through the Phoenicians, we found that the Samians – our fellow Greeks – had sold out to the Persians. The Great King triumphed, and the Ionian Revolt collapsed. Most of my friends – most of the men of my youth – died at Lades.

Briseis married Artapherenes, who had slept with her mother – and became the most powerful woman in Ionia, as she had always planned.

Datis, the architect of the Persian victory, raped and plundered his way across Lesvos and Chios, slaughtering men, taking women for the slave markets, and making true every slander that Greeks had falsely whispered about Persian atrocities.

Miletus, which I had helped to hold, fell. I saved what I could. And went home, with fifty families of Miletians to add to the citizen levy of Plataea. I spent my fortune on them, buying them land and oxen, and then – then I went back to smithing bronze. I gave up the spear.

How the gods must have laughed.