The Great King (51 page)

As a fleet, we were the worse for lacking Cimon, whose ships were truly the elite of our force. But by the fourth day, as we brought the northern tip of Euboea into sight, where Cape Artemesium with the temple of Artemis rises as a sea mark for navigators, our fleet could row, all together, in formation. We could form the wheel – not very well, but without disaster. And two hundred and fifty triremes is a very grand sight. I stood on my helmsman’s bench and named off the ships to Hector like a rhapsode reciting the ship list from the Iliad, and still my count only reached two hundred and fifty.

‘We had more at Lades,’ I said.

Nicolas was now my oar-master, and his lover Giorgos was my helmsman, with Hector and Hipponax in training under them as officers. The boys were going to become men. I thought a great deal about Hipponax, my son – because somewhere on the coast of Thrace was an enemy fleet. It not only held Dagon, my enemy. It held Archilogos of Ephesus, and on his ship might well be Briseis’ son, who was also mine. Heraklitus would be seventeen, if my maths were good.

I love the gods, but the tragedy of men entertains them all too well – our ironies and injustices spice their feasts. I prayed to Poseidon with a whole heart for a storm, but I prayed to Zeus, father of gods, to spare my sons – and most of all, to spare them the impiety of going helmet to helmet and shield to shield. And despite all this wool-gathering, I was proud of my son, and proud of Hector, who, arrayed in his armour, and two fingers taller and wider than me, looked the part of his name.

The three of us – Hipponax, Hector and I – practised on the deck of the ship. I had had four years to form Hector as a fighting man, and two years with Hipponax, and they were fast, strong and agile. Hipponax was the strongest of the three of us – a blow from his shield rim, perfectly timed, could knock me down. Hector’s heavy spear was like a serpent, darting from behind his aspis to strike. He was deceptive in the subtlest ways, showing movement of his legs and then striking down the opposing line.

I put them in the best armour that money could buy. Why not? I wore the best myself – bronze everywhere, for a ship fight. I wasn’t going to survive a swim, anyway. I had a bronze Athenian-style helmet with hinged cheek pieces and a magnificent crest in red, black and white. And a fine thorax, a bronze breastplate that mated perfectly to the back and rested on my hips and shoulders, the weight evenly distributed. But I also had armour for each thigh, and greaves of polished bronze, and a full set of armour for my right arm – a vambrace of bronze and a rerebrace of bronze with the raven of my house set on it, as on my greaves. I had a bronze knuckle guard such as the Etruscans wear, which I made myself.

I’d never worn so much armour, but I was getting older, and age slows a man and withers his muscles. And – I had sworn an oath. I shall not dwell on this, but I had determined, as a man sometimes does, not to survive defeat. I laid a trail of supplies and beach havens for the Plataeans in the event of disaster. But I would not be there to lead them.

You see, my friends, I had had a year to learn from Jocasta and Aristides, in much the way I taught my young squires. And what I learned was that life is empty without a companion, home, hearth and children. I wanted what they had, and I would have Briseis, or die. It sounds foolish – she wasn’t within a thousand stades of our coming battle.

But I knew in my heart that this was the last gasp of Greece, and if we lost, all was lost. And if all was lost, I planned to perform a deed that would live for ever in the minds of the Persians, so that they would know what the Greeks had been.

Hence, the armour.

I practised in it every day. Some days I wore it from dawn to dusk, preparing my body for the weight of it and the constraints. I danced the Pyricche in it every night, with all of the marines of my squadron and many of the oarsmen.

The day after we passed the narrows, we danced by firelight on the firm, damp strip of the beach nearest the sea. Hermogenes led the ‘reds’ and I led the ‘whites’ and I had Idomeneaus and Stygies on one side of me and Ajax and Peneleos, son of Empedocles and Antimenides, son of Alcaeus of Miletus, on my other side – Hermogenes had Hipponax and Hector, and Teucer, son of Teucer, and Hilarion and Diocles. We all wore our best – all our armour, our plumes and horsehair tails, and we carried our best spears.

Myron stood with the Plataean oarsmen, and old Draco – more than seventy years old, and still rowing for his country – took a spear, and began to tap it on a stone.

There were a dozen musicians – Ka, my archer captain, was quite skilled at the diaulos, and so we had more than just rhythm.

As the music began, men started to come down the beach. The flames licked at our bronze, and men came running. Two hundred triremes fill almost six stades of beach.

We’d danced the Pyricche on other nights, and men had come. But that night we had a curtain of stars and the whisper of the sea, and the air was hushed, and the musicians came.

We had learned my new, Spartan-style Pyricche with new motions and new tactics, but that night, we danced the old Plataean dance. It is not so complicated. At the opening, all the dancers form a small phalanx – or a great one – eight files deep and as wide as there is space and men to fill it. That night we had two groups of sixty-four – eight files by eight ranks. That was all the marines off all eleven ships and most of the officers, so that Moire and Paramanos and Gelon were all in the ranks.

The two groups started at opposite ends of the dance ground. We marched to the beat of Draco’s spear, until the lead rank of my whites almost collided with the lead rank of Hermogenes’ red, and then we turned – all together – to face the crowd, and all our spears came up together like a flock of steel birds rising into the moonlight, and we gave a great shout.

Many men in the crowd fell back a step.

In that moment, I saw Alexandros smile under his Corinthian, and realised that the Plataean at his shoulder in the second rank was Aristides the Just. I almost lost a step in delight.

Then we turned to the right together, and to the left. We knelt behind our shields and sprang to our feet, thrust low and thrust high.

The diaulos began to play, and four more joined – a wild chant to freeze the blood or make it soar – and we faced the crowd, then turned to face each other, whites against reds, and each small taxis stepped back – once, and again.

And then the dance really began. First the reds swept forward, and collided with the whites, and spears licked out, thrust high, and were turned on white’s aspides, and we were pushed back – rotating our front rank as we went, so fresh men could face the next attack, every front-rank man pivoting on his hips to slip between two new men. Then the whites retaliated, dancing forward, their spears held high, and we in turn sent them stumbling back.

We attacked again, this time with spears held low and thrust underarm. Now the whites exchanged their ranks.

Again our blows were turned, and the whites counter-attacked.

By this time, the Greeks on the beach had begun to sing the paean of Apollo. There were forty
thousand
Greeks on that beach.

Then both teams stepped back – one, two – and the whites faced about as the reds danced forward, so once more we were one phalanx, sixteen men deep in files and eight men wide. Older Plataeans had acted to clear the beach to the north of us, so that we could finish in our old, old way – and the former rear rank of the whites – now the front rank of the whole, facing the empty beach – leaped forward two fast steps and threw their spears – turned outward and ran to the rear, drawing their swords. In rapid succession – as fast as I can tell it – every rank hurled their heavy spears – not javelins, but fighting spears, so that the sand grew a forest of spear shafts.

And as the last rank re-formed, the whole stepped forward eight steps.

Hermogenes roared, ‘The ravens! Of Plataea!’

And every man pushed forward one step more.

And the dance was done.

I have danced that dance since I was thirteen years old – more than twenty years – but that night in Euboeoa . . . that night, we danced for men and gods.

Much later, when other men were asleep, I walked the beach. I found Eurybiades checking his sentries, and offered him wine from my canteen.

He poured a libation. ‘It is my greatest fear,’ he said, pointing at two young men on the headland, ‘to lose all Greece in a moment’s inattention – the Phoenicians coming down on us like wolves in the dawn.’

He drank, and handed me my canteen.

‘Poseidon watched your dance,’ he said. He nodded sharply. ‘Goodnight.’

The next day, we left the beaches in much better order and went north. Having secured a whole set of operational beaches at Artemesium, Themistocles wanted to manoeuvre the fleet in the waters where Leonidas wanted us to fight. Simple ideas like this are the very sinews of strategy. It was a brilliant concept – to rehearse the fleet where we intended to fight. We spent two days learning the shoals and the anchorages north and south of the channel, and the narrows and the current and the tides.

The weather was superb – for Persia. Either Poseidon was spurning our prayers, or busy elsewhere. But the habit of praying to Poseidon with every cup of wine had spread to the whole fleet, so that every night when the watches were set and the fires alight, we had forty thousand men pouring their first drops of wine on the sands and shouting Poseidon’s name.

We heard that King Leonidas had reached Thermopylae, and Eurybiades sent an Athenian in command of a scout ship, a pentekonter, to Thermopylae to make sure that the fleet and army were in constant contact. The Athenian was Abronichus, son of Lysicles, who was a patron of Phrynicus and a friend of Miltiades. At Artemesium one of our volunteer Ionians, Polyas, kept a pentekonter in constant alert, ready to row for Thermopylae to report any victory or defeat we suffered. He even camped a headland separate from us, to prevent his being taken in the event of a surprise. In this way, the army and fleet of the allies could act in concert, even though they were many stades apart.

The boats went back and forth almost every day, so that we knew that although Leonidas had only three hundred Spartans with him – because of the festival, or so the Spartans would have it – he had another four hundred Thebans; he had the whole phalanx of Thespiae, almost two thousand men, including almost a hundred veterans of Marathon and my brother-in-law Antigonus, and the Phocians – almost two thousand of them, and a further two thousand Locrians.

Leonidas, then, had fewer than six thousand hoplites, where we had almost fifty thousand men with the fleet. But that seemed reasonable to the men who had designed the allied plan of campaign. All of us feared a sudden stroke from the Phoenician element of the Persian fleet – a landing in the Peloponnesus, let us say, or in Attica – that would endanger all of our plans. On the other hand, the rumours of the enormous size of Xerxes’ army – most men set the number at a million – caused us to dread it, but not to respect its speed. We knew how slow a Greek army was, and how disorganised. We assumed that with Xerxes marching so late – nearly harvest time – we need only delay him a few months. And we assumed it would take him one or two of those months to reach us. So the Greek states celebrated the Olympic games, and even Athens sent a large contingent. Sparta threw her efforts not into war, but into the Carneia.

The fleet waited to fight the Persian fleet.

And Leonidas settled down to hold the fifty-foot-wide pass of Thermopylae until the main army came up and he could have the battle that all the Spartans wanted, to try the worth of men.

Cimon’s squadron returned from their scout along the coast of Thrace. They had not found the Persian fleet, but they had made contact with refugees fleeing the Great King’s army, and they had spoken to boats whose crews claimed to have seen the enemy fleet. Cimon feared to be away too long – like the rest of us, he feared the Phoenicians’ blue-water navigational powers. He feared that while he scouted the Thracian coast, which he knew so well, they would go to sea, the bowstring to his bow – slip past him and attack us, and we could not spare a dozen crack triremes manned by professional crews with ten years’ experience.

Cimon’s closest friend was Lycomedes, son of Aeschrydus, who had been one of his father’s captains. Lycomedes came in the evening of our fifth day at Artemesium.

I saw him come in, grabbed a spear and ran to Eurybiades’ awning. All the navarchs were gathering – we were starved of news.

The young Athenian – younger than me, at any rate – shook his head in answer to a question I hadn’t heard. ‘We can’t be sure. We never saw them. But if the fishermen are to be believed, they sailed from Therma yesterday.’

Themistocles gnawed a fingernail. ‘Where are our scouts? We have three ships at Skiathos.’

Lycomedes shrugged. ‘The fishermen say that there’re Persians and Phoenicians at Skiathos,’ he said.

Themistocles looked in a bad way.

Eurybiades didn’t panic. But he did turn to one of his Spartan officers and whisper, and the man sprinted away into the gathering darkness.

‘And the land army?’ Eurybiades asked.

‘Marched from Therma in Thrace fourteen days ago,’ Lycomedes said. ‘A refugee from Thessaly – a gentleman – said the Persians are making a hundred stades a day.’

‘Impossible!’ shouted Ademanteis.

Eurybiades ran his fingers through his beard. ‘That means that Xerxes is – at most – a week away.’

That got a storm of protest.

Eurybiades ignored the murmurs and turned – I’m not sure who he was looking for, but his eye fell on me. ‘You Plataeans are always ready for sea,’ he said.

Well – we tried. He didn’t need to know how long Gelon’s ship had taken to get off the beach that morning, or that the two Ithacans had decided to join my squadron – ignoring the navarch’s order of battle – and they were always late.

‘At your service, sir,’ I said.

‘I’ve already sent a dispatch boat to Leonidas today. But he needs to know this immediately.’