The Great King (50 page)

First we all backed water together – as I said, this is the single most essential tactic of sea warfare, and we did it well enough.

Themistocles blew a trumpet – a Persian trumpet, no less – and we all began to form the wheel.

We were in the most difficult position, because we had to retreat, folding the crescent in the other way and ending on the back side of the wheel – a long pull rowing the wrong way. But on that day, it was entirely to our advantage, as the ships in the centre – and how vociferously they’d demanded that position, the Corinthians, of course – were ruthlessly crushed by the amateur crews of the Athenians and the Aeginians. We backed and backed and heard the screams and oars were splintered. Men died.

A Corinthian trireme rolled and sank, her back broken.

And the nearest Persian was a thousand stades away.

It was like Lades.

The Corinthians and the Megarans were the worst sailors – no, that’s not fair. They had the worst
officers.
But they had not suddenly raised a hundred new warships as Athens and Aegina, the real sea powers, had done, and consequently they affected to despise all the other ships. Like the Lesbians before Lade, they said they needed no further practice – that their crews were fully trained.

The Corinthians threatened to go home.

Our Spartan navarch arrived. Eurybiades brought ten ships from the Peloponnesus, and he came almost straight from the Olympics. I have heard him denigrated, and I have heard his leadership derided.

Men are odd animals. Eurybiades, like Leonidas, and like Arisitides and like Themistocles, wanted nothing but the victory of the allies. Because he was willing to listen to Themistocles – because he was ready to
learn
from all of us who had more experience of the sea – men deride him. In fact, I believe that he was the best navarch we could have had. He was cautious. He was mature. He would not hurry a judgement.

He was a Spartan, and would not hear of a contingent refusing to drill, and most importantly, he was a senior officer of the Peloponnesian League. I was present the morning he landed. Themistocles met him on the beach, and Adamenteis hurried across the beach to complain to the Spartans about what he perceived as poor treatment at the hands of Athens.

He came off his ship into the surf and waded ashore. A pair of helots came and stripped his wet armour and began to dry it. He embraced Themistocles and took my hand.

‘You appear to have done well,’ he said, in his dry way.

Themistocles nodded.

Just then, Adamenteis came up. ‘He has not done well, and he and his Athenian cabal will wreck everything. Listen – they’ve sent the dregs of their oarsmen and kept all their best men home. Look at the Plataeans! Let them drill. We’ll sit and laugh.’

The navarch looked at him – a look that I hope no Spartan ever gives me. ‘Are you refusing to drill?’ he asked.

Adamenteis paused. ‘Refusing? No, but—’

Eurybiades nodded. ‘Good. We will drill. The king has marched. He depends on this fleet to hold his flank.’

‘We’re ready now!’ Adamenteis insisted.

Spartans do not sneer. I’ve never seen one do so, because to sneer is to mock, and to mock is to be weak – the Spartans know this. They are too proud to mock anyone.

Eurybiades didn’t smile or frown or change facial expression at all. He merely said, ‘We will sail when I say. You are ready when I decide.’ He paused. ‘Yes? Any questions?’

Spartans have many failings, but they are good, reliable commanders. We had been unlucky at the Vale of Tempe, but now we had a simple, plain-spoken man who’d served overseas – in Aegypt and Ionia. He was not a master sailor, but he knew the sea and he’d fought ten battles, and he spoke with absolute assurance.

We spent a third week at drills. Every day. He came aboard each of the squadron flagships and watched our squadrons manoeuvre – usually with Themistocles at his shoulder. Far from ignoring the Athenian democrat, he turned the man into his . . . it’s hard to name the office. His right hand. Many of the innovations that Themistocles lays claim to – even now, the filthy traitor – came from the Spartan navarch, who did not himself care a whit who got credit for anything, so long as the battles were won and the fleet stayed together.

We had games. After all, we had ten times the men that Leonidas had with the vanguard of the army. The fleet had at least forty thousand men. So, as we did before Lades and before every major military effort, we gave games.

For the first time, I did not participate.

I was thirty-five years old. Men of fully mature age sit in the shade and watch the beautiful youths. We don’t compete, and we tell ourselves it is because that would be unfair. I would like to suggest that it is because older men fear to learn that skill and age cannot defeat youth and strength.

Peisander of the Philaedae won our games, a young Athenian of Cimon’s family. He ran like a deer, jumped as if he had wings and his javelin flew like a bolt from the hand of Zeus. Or so Phrynicus said.

An Athenian youth – Pericles, an ugly boy with a big head who talked all the time – nonetheless won the two-stade sprint. He was serving as Cimon’s hypaspitos, and poor Niceas had to do all the work and was jealous.

And off to the west, other men were at the Olympics as if nothing had happened. As if there was no invasion. No Great King.

At any rate, we all lay in tents on the beach the night after the games – a dinner for all the navarchs commanding the ships and all the victors, crowned in olive. And Eurybiades laid out his strategy.

‘We are smaller, and worse trained,’ he said. ‘But all we have to do is to continue to exist – to retreat after every loss, never allow ourselves to be routed or encircled – and we will not lose.’

It was a long speech for a Spartan.

And Themistocles followed him. ‘No matter what the disparity in numbers, Xerxes cannot afford to let us separate one piece of his fleet. As long as we always have a clear retreat and sea room, we can win a string of little victories while we train up our rowers. And never risk a big fight. This is why we must master the wheel.’

No one liked the wheel.

We didn’t sink any more ships, but we had some very ugly times – somewhere in the third week, I lost almost a quarter of my oars and Nicolas had his collarbone broken when a ship from the Sicyon contingent popped out of the wheel like a pomegranate seed from between a boy’s hands and struck us in the stern – which led to a long series of foulings and a great many curses. Luckily our deck crews were better than our oarsmen, and poled us off before men died – but had the Persians been close, we’d all have died or been made slaves.

At the end of the third week, Eurybiades admitted he was waiting for other contingents. We had two hundred and sixty-nine triremes and a dozen pentekonters as messengers and scouts, as well as a hundred small merchantmen to keep us supplied.

Athens supplied a hundred and twenty-five ships, of which eleven were in my squadron, and technically they were Plataean. I’d prefer to say that Athens supplied one hundred and sixteen including Paramanos, and Plataea supplied nine, but you may count us any way you like.

Corinth promised sixty ships and supplied forty; and two of them slipped away before the fleet sailed and never returned.

Chalcis in Thrace supplied no ships but manned another twenty hulls built by Athens.

Megara supplied twenty triremes.

Aegina, which had sixty ships, supplied eighteen, and those with inferior crews.

We had a dozen good ships from Sicyon and ten ships from Sparta, or at least led by Spartan officers, and another eight from Epidavros in the eastern Peloponnesus. There was one ship from Hermione and two from far-off Ithaca. Troezen, Styra and Ceos all sent ships. Not many, but what they had.

If you count your way through them, you’ll find that it was an Athenian fleet with a handful of allies, commanded by a Spartan and full of internal divisions. When Harpagos and I compared it to the Greek fleet at Lades – where we’d had Miltiades and a dozen other first-rate pirates I could name, where we’d had the elite of every Ionian Greek seagoing city – well, we were like to have wept.

But we didn’t.

We just talked carefully through what we’d do when the rout began. We worked out where we’d go, and where we’d land. We sent Giorgos back to Piraeus to commandeer one of our merchant tubs, fill it with water and food, and bring it round. Not to share, either. But to give us food and water to outdistance pursuit the first night after the fleet broke up.

We were by no means the only doomsayers. We were merely the most practical.

Well, except the Corinthians, some of whom gave up and sailed for home, and the Corcyrans, who never came.

Practicality, of course, never won anyone their freedom. Caution is seldom the virtue needed
in extremis
.

After three weeks on the beaches south of Euboea, Eurybiades ordered us to sea.

Poseidon, what a mess that was.

I had good officers and willing men. My ships came off the beach quickly and in good order, and my squadron formed as it rowed, so that we reached our place on the left of the line about an hour after we were ordered to sea.

There is a current off the point of Schinias, and my oarsmen were kept busy for the next two hours trying to keep us on-station against the flow of the sea. I pitied them, but it was excellent practice, and I tried not to interfere. Besides, I had a Dionysian comedy of epic proportions playing out to my right, seaward, as the great fleet of the allies crept off the beaches, rammed each other, and slunk to their places in line. It was a wonderful thing that we all spoke Greek, so that the curses, imprecations and rage of the helmsmen could be clearly communicated.

At my elbow, Sittonax fingered his beard and laughed. ‘Just imagine, brother, what it is like in the other fleet. Greeks and Persians and Aegyptians and Phoenicians all together, by all accounts!’

Harpagos, who was aboard by virtue of having jumped from his own transom to mine, shook his head in silence. I met his eye.

‘We’re doomed,’ he said, with Laconic brevity.

We ran up the coast of Euboea with a fair wind, but Eurybiades forbade us to sail, which was good officering but bad for his popularity. We rowed. We rowed in various formations, and none of them was very good, but it was our first day moving as a fleet.

Our scouts – Locrians, for the most part, and some Ionians who’d come over from Lesvos and Chios with pentekonters – had chosen us a set of beaches on the western shore of Euboea. Euboea is like a sea-girt extension of my homeland of Boeotia, with beautiful farmland and sandy beaches, too – as close to a paradise as Greece ever gets south of Thessaly. On the western shore, there are broad beaches, but on the eastern shore it is far rockier, and a ship is exposed to the eastern winds and summer storms. The channel between Boeotia and Euboea is so narrow that there’s a bridge – you may recall my father died there.

We camped, and the next day we passed the narrows two ships at a time. And camped again.

The Euboeans had been badly handled by the Persians in Marathon year, their two principal cities taken, most of their men of worth killed or sold as slaves, and while there had been talk of recolonising it from Thebes or Athens, no real moves had been made. It is an island half the size of Attica, occupied only by shepherds, and they had done nothing to prepare for the Persians. In fact, before we made our first camp and bought whole herds of sheep, I don’t think they were fully aware of the threat.

Immediately their assembly met and started to make demands of the allied fleet – a fleet to which they contributed not a single vessel.

We ate their mutton and prepared for sea. Eurybiades sent Cimon’s squadron of Athenians forward, all the way to Chalcis, to find the enemy. He didn’t send Themistocles. He and Themistocles sailed side by side, and camped together – a visible symbol of the amity of Athens and Sparta.

We met, from time to time, formally or informally, and the occasion that I remember was of the latter kind – I was having wine with Themistocles when the Spartan navarch was announced, and he came in, wearing a faded scarlet chiton and no sandals – a slave brought a stool, which he looked at with a certain hesitation, and then he sat on it.

‘Still nothing from the Medes,’ he said.

‘Where is Leonidas?’ Themistocles asked. He indicated that the Spartan should have wine.

Eurybiades took the cup, poured a libation, and drained it. ‘Delphi or close enough. The Thebans are late.’ He looked at me. ‘I’m sure that comes as a surprise.’ He smiled.

The slave poured him another fill of watered wine. Again he rose, poured a libation, and emptied the cup. ‘Good wine,’ he said to Themistocles.

‘I have an idea,’ Themistocles began, and Eurybiades smiled.

‘Another stratagem?’ he asked, with the fondness of a father for a son.

‘Without stratagems, what chance have we against the Great King?’ Themistocles leaned forward with his fingers steepled.

Eurybiades nodded. ‘I will try every trick and every deception that your fertile mind provides,’ he said. ‘But in the end, for all our planning, we will fight – ship to ship, man to man. There is no trick that will save us then.’

‘How will we defeat them, then?’ Themistocles asked. He put his face in his hands. ‘You saw the formations today!’

‘Pray to the immortal gods,’ Eurybiades said. ‘Every cup of wine I drink, I pray to Poseidon for a storm.’

I held up my cup. When the slave filled it, I rose, and poured a libation to Poseidon, shaker of the earth and master of horses. And then I drained the cup.

Eurybiades nodded. ‘Not by the hand of man alone will the Great King be bested,’ he said.

Themistocles made a face. But he rose, poured a libation, and drank. ‘I do not like to beg the gods.’

‘Beg?’ asked the Spartan. ‘I will fight to the last breath in my body, regardless of what the gods choose. I merely ask.’

Themistocles thought of something – opened his mouth, and thought better of it. So instead, he smiled his cunning smile. ‘Besides,’ he said, ‘as you say, the wine is good.’