The Great King (40 page)

The Satrap of Lydia and Ionia returned my bow of thanks and waved his eldest son away. ‘Go and embrace Cyrus!’ he said. ‘I must talk to Arimnestos alone.’

We were served cups of hot cider by a slave who spilled some, and then we were alone.

‘I should ask you about your trip, but you are here, and that is all I need to know. Cyrus says you fought your way out. That Mardonius has put a price on your head. Unofficially, I already know this, and when the courier comes – any day – I will not be able to pretend I don’t know where you are. So you must be gone.’

‘Are my ships in Ephesus?’ I asked.

He looked pained. ‘I don’t know. If I were you, I would not go to Ephesus – Archilogos would like nothing better than to be the means of your arrest.’

He paused, winced, and I thought he looked . . . old.

‘I can go to Phokaia,’ I said. Athens bought alum from Phokaia for her tanning industry. Athenian ships called there all the time.

‘In winter?’ he asked. He raised a hand, clearly tired. ‘My friend, I’m sorry. Sorry for all of it. But we are, to all intents, at war, and any hour now, I will be ordered to seize you. My son wishes you taken immediately.’

I didn’t even know his son. ‘Why?’ I asked.

‘There is a rumour – as yet unconfirmed . . .’ Artapherenes looked at me and scratched his beard. ‘Do I treat you as a friend, or a dangerous enemy? Do I – by telling you this – aid your cause and work against my own king?’

I shook my head. ‘I have no idea of what you speak,’ I said. I took his hand and kissed it, as I would have that of my own father. ‘Thank you for Cyrus and the others. Without them, I would be dead.’

He nodded. ‘Well – without you, we would all be dead. Our tale of exchanged favours goes back many years, young man. You wish to go and pay your respects to Briseis. I recommend that you be brief – and circumspect.’ His voice grew harder.

I got up from my knee. ‘I am always at your service,’ I said.

He laughed. ‘You are a fine man. Try and stay alive in what is coming – and remember that if ever you wish to bend your stiff Greek neck, I have a place for you in my house.’

‘I can certainly serve cider better than the boy you had here – I wouldn’t spill any.’ I laughed, and for the first time since I’d come in, Artapherenes smiled.

‘Oh, Ari,’ he said. ‘When this war comes, it will be the end of everything for which I worked.’

He caught my hand. In a low voice he said, ‘When I die – you must take Briseis. My son will kill her.’ He looked into my eye – not pleading, but with the resolve of the warrior. ‘Swear to me.’

‘I swear by all the gods in Olympus,’ I swore, having learned nothing, apparently, about swearing oaths.

‘And until then, do an old man the grace of keeping your hands off her,’ he said with a hard smile.

I swallowed.

He nodded. ‘Go. I may not see you again – or if I do, it will be in Greece.’

Briseis was, I think, thirty-two that year.

Motherhood had mellowed her – had filled in her stomach a little, perhaps, and made her breasts lusher. It had not changed her eyes, or her neck, or her shoulders, or the quality of her smile – that complicated instrument she wielded as I wield a spear.

She rose with her accustomed grace as I entered, and she kissed me on the lips – a brush of her lips on mine that struck me like a Persian arrow.

Nothing ever changed.

She put the back of her hand on my chest when she kissed me, as if to ensure that I didn’t crush her to me, and even that small warmth went to my heart like a Levin bolt.

‘I must go,’ I said foolishly. ‘Artapherenes asked me to . . . come for you when I hear he is dead.’

‘His son wants me for his own, and hates me for my contempt.’ She shrugged. ‘It is, I think, an old story.’ She took my hand – oh, the softness of that hand, and the cool warmth of her touch – and drew me on to a kline. ‘Cyrus will not let me die so easily, nor be used so ill. Neither will any of the old guard. I am not afraid.’ She smiled. ‘But I will be happy to have you as my last husband, my dear. The Greek ambassador to the Great King! Friend of the King of Sparta and Lord of Plataea!’

‘I am not the Lord of Plataea. Plataea is the size of a large farm and has an assembly of a thousand bickering old men – older than me.’ I laughed. ‘But I served at the Olympics as a priest.’

‘Oh,’ she said, with complete seriousness. ‘You are a great man, now – not just a great sword.’

‘Will you still be my wife if I am a penniless exile in Italy?’ I asked. ‘Because if Xerxes has his way, there will be no Athens, no Sparta – and no Plataea.’

Her smile fell away. ‘Yes,’ she said. She met my eye and bit her lip, and for perhaps the first time in all our years together, I saw her hesitate. ‘Yes, Ari. Our world is coming to an end. The world of Sappho and Thales and Heraklitus – of Melitus and Ephesus and Mytilini.’ She held my eye. ‘What will come after? Imperial Persia, and the Great’s King’s winged lions on every doorstep?’

‘No,’ I said.

She smiled. ‘You truly believe – even after Lades – that Greeks can stop the Great King?’

I nodded. ‘Athens and Sparta,’ I said. ‘We are not ready for what is coming. I have seen the Great King’s preparations. I cannot count his soldiers. I’m sure his fleet will be greater than five hundred hulls.’ I was suddenly bitter. ‘I sailed to Alba – do you know that? For tin. For . . . a pothos. Better that I had been here, working to build a resistance to the Great King among the Greeks. Now – it is too late. In three months, he will march.’

She bit her lip. ‘No,’ she said. She looked around – again, showing fear for the first time I could remember. ‘No, he will not march in the spring.’

I felt the blood rush to my ears as if I’d taken a blow. ‘Why?’ I asked.

She leaned closer – I thought to kiss me. ‘Babylon is in revolt,’ she said.

That was all she knew.

I tore myself from her sight, took my Spartans and my Athenians, and fled for the coast. I learned – much later in life – that the Great King’s messenger came two days later. Artapherenes was sick – and his son turned out all his father’s household troops to pursue us.

But the gods had other ideas. The gods had their own plans for Greece, and for Persia. It was like . . . like living in mythology, except it was real.

We rode across the plains of Sardis and over the mountains to the coast like a storm. By then, even the Spartans were excellent riders – we’d had five months on horseback with expert teachers.

And I have to tell you, my friends, that the sight of the sea – even in winter, blue and blue, rolling away into the west – made us all weep.

Aristides pulled his riding cloak over his head to hide his face. When he had mastered himself, he said, ‘I will never come to Asia again – not willingly.’

We rode down into Phokaia about the time that Artapherenes’ household guards began searching for us in Ephesus.

And there on the beach of Phokaia was my
Lydia
, and when we cantered along the coast road, one of the first men I met was Leukas.

It can seem, in a tale like this, as if I was the hero – the great hero, or perhaps even, if I tell it awry, the only hero. Let me say that I was surrounded by heroes, and that many, many other men said, and did, the right things.

Megakles and Sekla and Leukas were three of them. What might have happened, if they had not used their heads? They took
Lydia
into Ephesus at the turn of the seasons with a cargo of white Athenian hides and Phoenician dyes, and they sailed away two days later, leaving a pair of trustworthy oarsmen and a light boat to find them if I returned. The open hostility of Archilogos – the richest shipowner in Ephesus – made the harbour there unhealthy for them. So they rowed up the coast to the port that had the friendliest relations with Athens, and rented a portion of the beach for the winter – bought a small house, sold their cargo, and settled in. They had men in every port from Samos to Lesvos, and they were collecting rumours like professional spies.

Sekla, as it proved, knew more of what was happening in Babylon than Artapherenes, the satrap. Because Phokaia had alum – most of the dyers’ alum in the world – and thus it had merchants who came from Susa and Babylon and Athens and even Syracusa. Sekla’s news of the revolt was first-hand, from an eyewitness.

I got it as our rowers pulled us out of the harbour into a cold, sunny winter day. There was rain on the northern horizon and storm heads out over the Aegean.

I chose a multitude of compromises. Megakles concurred. We put the bow due north – and sailed within sight of land, all the way around the great bow, as Greeks call it – the coast of Asia, and then the coast of Thrace, under the lee of magnificent Samothrace and then down the coast of Thessaly to Euboea and Athens. It is a very, very long way to sail and row compared to skipping from Lesvos to Skyros and then to the coast of Euboea, but it has the signal advantage that if a squall hits you, you might survive a swim to the shore. And every storm-tossed day, there’s at least the possibility of an anchorage or a beach.

With adverse winds, winter storms and fog, we were almost thirty days sailing home – and our rowers were as thin entering Athens as we had been coming down out of the hills on horseback. No fishing boats in winter means no one from whom to buy fish – no shepherds on the hillsides, no mutton on the fire.

We left Aristides on the coast of Euboea. I sent him to my house with Hector and Alexandros and a pair of marines.

We landed in Piraeus, and while Sekla sold our cargo, I rushed to Themistocles.

I think that what I remember best is that when I said Babylon was in revolt, he slammed his right fist into his left.

‘Now,’ he said. ‘Now we have a chance.’

In which of the local glories of the past, divinely blessed Thebe, did you most delight your spirit? Was it when you raised to eminence the one seated beside Demeter of the clashing bronze cymbals, flowing-haired Dionysus? Or when you received, as a snow-shower of gold in the middle of the night, the greatest of the gods, when he stood in the doorway of Amphitryon, and then went in to the wife to beget Heracles? Or did you delight most in the shrewd counsels of Teiresias? Or in the wise horseman Iolaus? Or in the Sown Men, untiring with the spear?

Pindar, Seventh Isthmian Ode, 454 BCE

After Athens, I returned to Plataea for the longest time I had spent there since my wife died.

In my heart, I was preparing my home for a bride again. And my bride was to be Briseis.

By now, some of you must wonder whether I am a complete fool, that I should seek this woman’s favour so often, and so often be turned away. But however brief our encounter in Artapherenes’ house in Sardis, I knew – I
knew
that the contract was signed.

And my house in Plataea was beautiful. The frescoes were done, and the house was stocked with grain and oil and full of light and life, because my daughter was there with her nurse Phoebe, a charming local girl, a priestess at the temple of Hera. Phoebe had made the mistake any girl can make, and had a baby without a father – but her milk had saved Euphonia, and as my daughter grew, Phoebe had, in some ways, matured with her.

I confess that, besides my daughter, her body slave and Phoebe, mine was a very masculine household. I had found a place to beach my ships in the Corinthian gulf – over by Thisbe – and with my brother-in-law I’d bought warehouses and barracks there. Because that put my oarsmen so close, and because they were – with Myron’s help – all Plataeans, I tended to have a dozen of them around at any given time – on errands, or simply seeing the city of which they were (miraculously, to many) now citizens.

Sekla – who had collected quite a bit of money over the preceding few years – purchased a house in Plataea that spring.

I unpacked my few treasures from Persia – some silk, which went into stores, and my lapis, and the cedarwood box from the Queen Mother. I had never opened it, and when I did, I convinced my new slave butler that I really was a man of consequence.

It was a two-eared cup, as tall as a man’s hand to the wrist, big enough to serve to ten guests at a drinking party, made of solid gold. On one side, a mounted man – a king, from his high crown – killed a lion with his bow. One the other side, a pair of winged lions were engraved surrounding an enormous emerald, the largest I’d ever seen, and beryls and other stones were set all the way around the rim – just below it, so that a man could comfortably drink from it. It was slightly bent, from where I’d fallen on it in the fight in the mountains, and I shocked my major-domo by taking it directly to the shop and truing the circle of the rim. My silversmith saved me from cracking the mounts that held the jewels – what does a bronzesmith know of such work? – and then we all marvelled over the quality of the workmanship. It was worth . . . well, about as much as the whole town of Plataea.

I exaggerate. Perhaps only half as much.

It impressed Aristides. He looked at it for a long time, and even put it tentatively to his lips. And then he looked at me over the rim.

‘The hillside of Kitharon is more beautiful,’ he said.

I had Aristides as a long-term guest – I had returned from Susa to find him in one of my rooms with a pile of scrolls under his elbow, reading Anaxamander as if he, not I, was the owner. But he was an excellent guest, and – having run a rich household for many years – he was an endless fund of information.

Aristides, Sekla, Megakles, Leukas, Sittonax – who had a dozen tales to tell of his adventures in Asia; Hector and Nikeas and Alexandros – and all my local friends, such as Ajax and Gelon and Lysieus and the three smiths, who had made more money in one year than they had imagined possible – Tiraeus and Styges and Hermogenes, much recovered in his old self thanks to prosperity—they were all present. Wealth may not buy happiness, but it certainly beats poverty.

And I had truly begun to enjoy wealth.

We went through a great deal of wine as that winter gave way to spring, and the bitter rains gave way to warm sun. The sun dried the stones, and my gardener – a freedman from Sicily, of all places – provided me with jasmine and roses and a hundred other flowers and shrubs, as well as making my olive tree shine like Athena’s gift to my house. Aristides – as anxious for his wife to arrive as I was – helped me with every detail, and when the guest house was finished, we watched the fresco painter – and annoyed him mightily, so that he muttered at us every day.