“Better? What way? They are getting away. We will never see her again.”
“Maybe you won’t. I’ll see her again.”
“Only in your dreams, my friend.”
We reached the burned out village of Qaryat at the same time as the Spartans. They were just as powerful a sight as the departing triremes. They marched in four columns, with thousands of Lacedaemonians and lightly armed helots strung out behind them all the way down the beach to the Cinyps Wadi.
The auletes sounded the order to halt, and the mora came to a stop. The men stood there watching the Phoenician fleet lift their linen sails and begin gliding west toward their fortress at Oea.
Later, Leonidas would tell me, “You and Battus could not have timed it any better if you’d practiced.” We appeared dragging the heavy lioness along the sand toward our column of men. They were feeling a bit dejected at having lost a day’s work. But their mood changed when the hoplites saw what we were carrying. Several cheered and gave us a spear salute.
Dorieus ordered the army to stand down, break ranks and return to the wadi. A large number of Spartiates crowded around Battus and I. The men looked at the lion in wonder.
“At least the day is not a total loss,” Dorieus said clapping me on the back with a heavy hand. “Not bad.” That was the nicest thing he’d said to me in years.
“Who made the kill?” Leonidas asked kneeling by the beast, examining the holes made by Battus’ arrows and my javelin.
“We both did,” I said looking at Battus who nodded. “We are going to share it. If it is all right with you, I will take the carcass and offer it up as a sacrifice to Heracles and you can keep the hide and do whatever you like with it.”
“You sure?” Battus asked with some surprise. He would make a cape of the skin and a helmet out of the head, both of which would win him great respect among the Nasamones.
I nodded. I had no desire to strut about wearing a lion skin among the Lacedaemonians. One of the things I liked about the Nasamones was their freedom to dress as they chose. Among the Spartans, the State told you exactly what you were permitted to wear and not wear. From ages nine through twelve the pais in the agoge were given one garment a year that was worn only during religious festivals. Spartan men of military age all wore the same scarlet colored chiton, while a Nasamone could wear whatever they could kill, tan and sew. If I wore a lion skin among the Spartans, instead of admiring me, they would ridicule my dress for being different. To stand out by way of clothes or jewelry was strictly forbidden among the Spartans. According to the lawgiver Lycurgus, “Conformity brings equality.” Noble and base-born all dressed alike, so we were equal at least in that sense. By spending time among the Nasamones, I came to admire their individual sense of style and watched enviously as Battus had a lion tattooed across his back and his ears pierced and fitted with the bones from a crocodile we had killed together.
Dorieus ordered four helots to find a longer pole and for them to carry our kill back to the wadi. In a festive spirit the men returned home.
The grey-bearded giant Othryades fell into step beside Battus and I. “Tell me the story of how you slew the lion.”
Battus and I looked at one another. He let me do the lying. I recounted our encounter with the cat on the beach, but left out our meeting Ariatozah and the Persians. I suppose I should have told the truth, but then I would have to explain why I did not attempt to capture the Persian girl and why I had warned their camp. Things I did not understand myself.
That night we sat beside our own cook fire on the beach, eating lion for the first time, thinking it would imbue us with the creature’s strength. I told Battus, “Back in Sparta. There is a temple to the goddess of love. They call her Ishtar here. We call her Aphrodite.”
“What about her?”
“The Spartans put chains around the feet of her statue.”
Chewing on a bone, my friend asked, “Why chain a statue? Does she run away?”
“No. My people think by keeping her bound it will prevent the goddess from making them slaves to their emotions.”
Battus grunted. “I never saw a bigger slave to Ishtar than you today.”
“I didn’t…”
“You threw the girl over your shoulder! Didn’t you tell me, when Spartans marry, it is your custom to kidnap the girl and carry her to your house? That should tell you something. And a Persian girl at that. There are certainly no chains around your heart,” he grinned.
He was right. I wondered what it all meant. Later when I tried to sleep, as I lay on my back looking up at the stars, I began to recount the adventures of the day. I wanted to remember each and every detail about the Persian girl. Watching her rise up glistening from the waves was a moment I would carry with me the rest of my life. She’d called me Euryleon. And said she’d never forget me. I certainly wouldn’t forget her.
I could not tell my father what had happened that day, but I did tell Phile. Other than Battus, my mother was the only person I could confide in and I valued her counsel. My actions on that day worried me. I’d allowed the enemy to escape, all because of a girl. When I told Phile what I’d done she grabbed my wrist like I was a little pais and pulled me inside our small wooden one-room house that was built just like every other house on the street with furniture made by my father’s own hand.
“Don’t tell anyone about this. Especially not your father,” Phile said. She grabbed my hair and gave it a single hard yank, which was her way of punishing me. “Dorieus would beat you within a breath of your life. And maybe he should. One day you will probably have to fight those same Persians.” For a woman nearing her fortieth summer my mother was still an attractive, fit woman. Her shoulder length blonde hair was streaked with grey, but there were no lines on her face except for the two around her mouth that showed when she laughed or cried. “Though, maybe you did right. Maybe you saved your father from getting struck by an arrow. You did what you thought was right and I cannot fault you for that.”
Phile smiled, embraced me and kissed me on the forehead. “My boy is in love. And of all the women in the world, you pick a Persian girl. I don’t want to dampen your spirits my son, but you’ve given your heart to the worst possible woman. This girl is an enemy and will only bring you pain. Still, I am happy for you. It is good to be in love. It will make a man of you in ways they do not teach in the agoge. Only beware Aphrodite. Like all the gods, the goddess of love gives and takes away. Let the goddess into your heart, but don’t let her run off with your senses. Love has made many a man look like a fool. Aphrodite can bring the greatest happiness you will ever know, but it comes at a price, for your pretty Persian princess is only mortal.” She pinched me on the cheek. “Don’t worry about your father. This will be our little secret, Euryleon.”
Phile and Battus were right. I was indeed under Aphrodite’s spell and it scared me. The last thing I wanted was the Spartans to consider me a fool. So I convinced Battus to help me carve a rough statue of Aphrodite out of soft palm wood and build a crude shrine out of sticks, elephant ears and the purple lilies that grew wild on the Hill of Graces. I bound my image of Aphrodite with vines trying her feet to a flat rock so that the goddess of love and beauty would hold no power over me any longer. Or so I prayed.
5. The Siege of Oea
A war like no other: a colossal absurdity.
Thucydides, The History of the Peloponnesian War
After that day at Qaryat, Dorieus began securing triremes from his allies in the Pentapolis. He said that if he’d had a squadron of warships when the Phoenicians were sighted he could have chased them at sea.
Our first great warship, called the Agreuousa, the ‘Huntress,’ came with an Apollonian sea captain named Agathon. King Arcesilas told us that Agathon was his most experienced trierarch and best suited to train us on how to operate one of the big ships. I thought it was all a simple matter of just filling the benches with rowers, but it was a bit more complicated than that.
A trireme supports a crew
of two hundred and twenty men. The one hundred and seventy nautai, or oarsmen, were separated into three tiers of benches, the thranites on top, zygites in the middle and thalamians at the bottom, almost in the hold. The ship carried twenty marines called epibatai, ten toxotai or archers, and ten sailors known as hyperesia. The ship needed a bow officer and his five crew to keep the ship from crashing into rocks and gauge water depth. A ship’s carpenter called a naupegos to repair damage. A purser to keep the crew fed. An aulete to play the pipes. A keleustes acted as boatswain and kept the oarsmen in time. And of course the kubernetes to steer the ship and a trierarch to command all.
Battus and I sat on the beach of our little cove with a crowd of men and women watching the Agreuousa flounder forward and backward. The thranites oars are slightly longer than that of the zygites and thalamians, and getting the stroke right so that all three banks of oars moved together was like trying to get giants to march in perfect unison with dwarves. On a trireme, if just one man is out of step, he can foul the oars of all the men around him, knocking off the speed of the entire side, affecting the course of the ship. Each time the men banged oars the trierarch Agathon screamed at the top of his lungs. He yelled for so long and so loud, the man began to grow hoarse.
“You are all dead men!” Agathon rasped. “Dead men! If we met a Phoenician warship at sea—you would be fish food. Stay together. Stay with the flutes. Keep a steady rhythm. If you want to outflank or ram a Phoenician ship, first you need to learn how to row straight! All right. Now we are going to increase the speed. The music is getting faster. Try to stay with the pipes. That’s it. Steady. Faster now. Pick up the pace. Keep it together. No, no, no! You bang another oar and I’ll bang your heads together!”
After two months of practice Dorieus and Agathon took the Agreuousa on its maiden voyage. They left before sunrise and rowed west until they came to a Macae fishing village. After they landed, all two hundred and twenty crewmen served as hoplites and missile troops.
Their first attack did not go well. The Macae hid in the jungles and among their shacks firing at our men with their bows and arrows. This didn’t stop Dorieus from setting their village on fire and destroying it entirely, but he lost eight men in the process.
Two more triremes arrived, the Okeia, the ‘Swift,’ and the Aithiopia, the ‘Black,’ so more crews needed to be trained. This time Dorieus had Agathon add something new to the program. Night sailing. No ships sail after dark. Traditionally they sail during the day, drag their sterns up on the beach at night and sleep on the ground. Sea travel in the dark involved additional complications like avoiding rocks in strange waters and navigating by the stars.
Thessalus took a great interest in the project and worked with Agathon to create detailed maps of the coastline. The maps were based on the positions of the stars which enabled our little squadron to start out before dawn, so they reached their target before sunrise. This gave them the element of surprise and eliminated casualties among our men.
With his three triremes, Dorieus began conducting lightning raids all along the coast between the Cinyps Wadi and the Phoenician fortress at Oea. He destroyed a walled Phoenician way station where they had docks and warehouses filled with grain and silver. My father pillaged as much as he could carry and burned the rest. He even hit the larger settlements around Oea, all of which terrorized the local Phoenician and Macae population.
Once Oea was surrounded by a huge refugee camp, Dorieus deemed the time right to lay siege to the Phoenician fortress. My father sent word to King Arcesilas and the leaders of the Pentapolis to gather their armies. Now was the time to attack Oea and either capture or destroy the Phoenician castle.
Sadly, Histeaus’ estimates about the size of the army the Pentapolis could field did not take into account that each city refused to send out all of their men. They were so afraid of the Persians they each left a large garrison of soldiers at home to guard their walls. Thus the army that slowly gathered at the Cinyps Wadi consisted of about ten thousand hoplites, including men from the Pentapolis, Sicily, Crete and Thera, along with two thousand native tribesmen from among the Nasamones, Asbystae, Garamante and Lotophagi. The allies also provided sixty triremes for blockading Oea’s twin harbors.
The Punic stronghold sat perched atop a high, rocky peninsula that jutted out like a finger into the sea. The sheer cliffs on its seaward side and encircling walls made it an impregnable position. It was only approachable from one side, the landward side. Here the Phoenicians had built a huge mud-brick wall in the eastern style, with four great towers jutting out into the plain, platforms from which archers and missile troops could rain down a deadly fire on attackers’ flanks. From what our scouts said, the walls were as tall as seven men standing on one another’s shoulders, and wide enough at the top to drive two ox carts side-by-side.
Rising up behind the curtain wall, stood a sun-bleached acropolis protected by a second wall built right into the rock. At the top stood their Temple to Baal, where Battus told me the Phoenicians conducted human sacrifices in a pit there where they burnt alive criminals, captives and even babies.
Kleombrotus’ informants estimated there were about two thousand Phoenician fighting men inside the city and many times that number of women and children crammed inside the citadel and outside the walls in the sprawling upper town and lower towns. Surrounding all were ten thousand Macae refugees living in tents and lean-tos.
The Oean peninsula separated the water on either side into an East Harbor and West Harbor, each of which contained large, busy docks—until we arrived. Half of our fleet blockaded the East Harbor while the other half cut off the West Harbor. Our transports dropped off us off on the docks, where we met little to no resistance. Instead of mounting a defense of their seaport or outlying villages, the Phoenicians were too busy trying to stop the thousands of refugees that were pouring through the Punic Gate. They did not have room for thousands of additional residents, nor could they feed them. So they closed the gates and were quickly under siege by hordes of panic-stricken natives, who by that time thought the Lacedaemonians were demons that sprang from the sea.
Uncontested, Dorieus and his allies easily sealed the port. They captured six triremes and several small craft. Plus they confiscated all the livestock the Phoenicians had been unable to bring inside their walls. After he’d secured the land around the fortress, Dorieus directed the men to begin burning the outlying refugee camps and villages. The natives left outside the walls were poorly armed and did not put up any sort of organized resistance. Nor did the Oeans in the fortress come to their aid. The Phoenicians stood on their walls watching in horror as we burned their outlying towns, tents, wooden hovels, crops and orchards, massacred the men, and gathered up the women and children to be sold into slavery.
In the smoke and confusion Dorieus tried a frontal assault against Oea with ladders and a battering ram, but he quickly discovered the great doors of the Punic Gate were made of iron. Our men were repelled with heavy losses. There was not much else the allies could do but set up camp and attempt to starve the Phoenicians out.
“How long will we have to wait?” asked Titus of Syracuse. “No one fights at the height of summer. Soon it will be harvest time. My men will want to return home to their farms…”
“We know they’re overcrowded,” Dorieus said. “We also know they have a well, so they have plenty of fresh water. It takes a man three weeks to starve to death. How long can they last? A month? Two months?”
“We stick to the plan,” Thessalus nodded. “No food gets in. No people get out. At the end of every day, we send a herald to the front gate telling them they are free to go unharmed. All they have to do is drop their weapons and walk away. Sooner or later we’ll beat them. It just takes patience.”
“I won’t wait forever,” said King Arcesilas. He was a well dressed young man with a closely trimmed black beard, who wore a jeweled crown of gold. The Spartans considered him effeminate because he liked to wear expensive, elaborately embro
idered silk robes, oversized gold chain necklaces and gaudy rings encrusted with sapphires. Beneath his long robes he wore a light copper breastplate engraved with an image of Jason and the Argonauts, from whom Arcesilas claimed descent. “Titus is right. In a few weeks we’ll lose the olives. After that the wheat.” Shifting nervously on his pillow, the King of Cyrene said with a wave of a jeweled hand, “In a matter of days they will know in Carthage. Then Tyre. Then Susa. In a month’s time the Great King will be marching against us. The Macae will inform him as to our numbers. In two month’s time there will be two hundred Phoenician and Carthaginian ships sailing into the West Harbor and twice our number of soldiers telling us to drop our weapons and walk away.”
Still the allies agreed to wait. For how long, no one could agree.
To pass the time Battus and I explored and hunted inland. Beyond the burned out villages and the blackened farmland surrounding Oea to the south were league upon league of gently rolling hills and grassland dotted with herds of antelope, including fat pigari, long-horned zorcas and hornless bubalies. There were hyenas, wild rams and poisonous one-horned serpents. Large mice that ran on two-legs. And ostriches from whose white feathers the Nasamones fletched their arrows. There were even herds of great oryes, which are as large as oxen, and from whose horns people made a stringed instrument called the cithera.
I quickly learned it was fruitless to attempt to sneak up on a nimble, alert gazelle with a javelin. Battus laughed at my efforts. “You are only chasing them away. At least let me get a shot first.”
Which I did. And quickly came to admire my friend’s skill.
Excelling at archery went against the grain of everything I’d ever been taught in the agoge. The true warrior never picked up a bow or a sling. Such weapons were for inferiors, cowards that kill from afar. Until now. As I watched Battus bend his mighty bow, take careful aim, and let fly—I shared his joy and excitement when he made a hit. Especially if he struck the beast through the heart. No matter where you strike an antelope, they will still run for a while. If Battus hit them in the shoulder we might have to track it for a dozen stadia until we finally caught up with it and slit its throat. An arrow through the heart or the jugular and the creature slowed, faltered and fell after only a short run.
The Wandering King Page 9
