Salamis

by Christian Cameron

  ‘Walk with me,’ I said.

  Cimon grinned. It was the phrase his father had used when he had matters of import – and usually, crime – to impart.

  I laughed. ‘No, I didn’t mean it like that,’ I said.

  Cimon looked back at the Lesbians. ‘I sometimes find it difficult to believe that we tried to fight a war on their behalf.’

  I nodded. ‘I love Eressos,’ I said. ‘But there is a soft-handed entitlement to them.’ I shrugged. ‘On the other hand, I don’t have a Persian garrison in the citadel of my city.’ I paused, as if struck. ‘Oh, by Zeus! I do!’ I slapped my forehead in disgust.

  Cimon smiled, and looked like his father. ‘By now, no doubt I do, too.’ He looked back at the Aeolians. ‘Let’s be fair, the Lesbians fought like lions at Lade.’

  I looked back at them too. ‘I wonder …’

  Cimon raised an eyebrow.

  ‘Just the thoughts of an old man,’ I said. ‘Have you ever thought that courage erodes, little by little, fight by fight? Yesterday, when I had to leap from my ship to theirs …’ I looked away in embarrassment. ‘I hesitated. In fact, I find it gets harder and harder to find that spirit – the daimon.’

  Cimon nodded and spread his hands. ‘What can I say? My father loved you, but he thought you Ares-mad, a war child. If he were here, he might say you were … more a man and less a madman.’ He met my eye and gave me a surprisingly gentle smile. ‘I now fear every time I leap.’ After this admission, he looked away.

  We were silent a long time.

  ‘But yes – age – life is sweet,’ he spoke softly.

  ‘Eualcides – do you remember him? The Euboean?’

  ‘My father spoke of him. I never met him. A famous hero.’ Cimon nodded.

  ‘He said the same about running.’

  We didn’t need to say more.

  The waves pounded the beach and the rain began; I wished I had my himation.

  I remembered why I had started this hare.

  ‘I only meant to say that perhaps the Aeolians are, as a race, like men – brave men – whose courage has been tried too often, and now they are shattered. They fought brilliantly at Lade – and got beaten. They fought like lions in defence of their island – and they were massacred, and their women sold as slaves. Perhaps they have been beaten too often.’

  ‘Perhaps their bravest few are dead. The Killers of Men.’ Cimon shrugged. ‘I owe you for yesterday. I don’t know if we’d have made it or not.’

  I shrugged. ‘I will remember it fondly for many years to come,’ I said. ‘After we beat the Persians.’

  ‘By Poseidon and Ajax my ancestor,’ Cimon said. ‘You are a slap of cold seawater on my depression. You think we can win?’

  I bobbed my head back and forth – really, not my most attractive habit, but I do. Hah! You laugh. I laugh too.

  ‘Of course we can win!’ I said, with more eagerness than the prior conversation might have led him to expect.

  ‘I want to believe,’ Cimon said. ‘Please convince me.’ He sat against a rock, a reasonably dry rock, under the cliff. I looked up at a pair of boulders that seemed to be held in place by nothing but the hands of the gods and thought that if the gods intended two of the best trierarchs of the Greek fleet to die here, then that was that. I snuggled in beside him.

  ‘You bring any wine?’ he asked. He winked at Eugenios, who stood in the light rain. ‘Oh, by all the gods, Eugenios, fetch us some wine and I’ll give you a share of the shelter.’

  Eugenios smiled. Slaves are seldom spoken to directly by men like Cimon, members of the old nobility. But in that month, in that year, we were all in the fight together and such things mattered less. I had virtually forgotten that Eugenios was a slave and that thought struck me with some guilt. I, who have been a slave twice, knew that while I might forget, he would never forget.

  He ran off. ‘I should free him,’ I said.

  ‘He’s rowing for you and he’s your steward?’ Cimon laughed. ‘Too valuable to be freed. Want to sell him? I could use a steward who could also row.’

  Sometimes Cimon could be a rich fool, like anyone.

  ‘The Persians,’ I said.

  ‘Yes. I love your confidence. But I don’t share it. I spent eight days running and fighting, running and fighting. I left little messages in all the harbours along Boeotia, all the cliff faces, inviting the Ionians to come over to us. So did Themistocles, along the Euboean shore. Not one of them changed sides. You know what I saw every day, every god-cursed day? More ships join the Great King’s fleet. Thirty, the first day. Thirty!’ He shook his head.

  Eugenios came trotting back. It came into my head then: something for the gods, something about Greek freedom, something about who we were and what we were fighting for.

  He had my old canteen – a piece of ceramic with the feet broken off, missing a side-lug, that had been dropped on a dozen decks and never split. It didn’t look like much, but I loved it.

  I poured a libation onto the rain-drenched sand and it looked like blood. ‘To Zeus, the god of kings and princes and free men, and to you, Eugenios, who I make a free man with this libation to the gods. I sacrifice this man’s slavery that Greece may be free.’

  I drank and handed the canteen to Cimon. He straightened up. ‘Arimnestos, you are—’ he laughed. ‘To Eugenios, the very prince of stewards. To your freedom. And to Poseidon, Earth Shaker, Lord of Stallions and the Sea, witness his freedom, and give Athens fair winds.’

  He handed the canteen to Eugenios, who drank it and burst into tears. ‘I was born free,’ he admitted. ‘Indeed – oh, bless you, my lord.’

  ‘I’ll see to it you are made a citizen of Plataea if we survive all this.’ I was gruff. I had not expected hard-eyed Eugenios, terror of my slaves and lord of my household, to weep.

  I think that, in truth, I hate slavery. Oh, I have a phalanx of slaves, do I not? But I free them, too. Some men are better and some are worse, that much I acknowledge. But enough better to own another?

  I’ve been a slave.

  Eugenios wouldn’t snuggle into the cleft with us. His ideas of social station were stronger than Cimon’s. Mock if you will.

  I stepped out into the blowing spray and rain, and threw my ­chiton over my arm like a boy training to be an orator. ‘Hear me, oh Cimon,’ I said.

  He laughed and drank my wine.

  ‘First, before I deliver my argument, let us set the course of our own judging. Are there, on all the seas, any two men who have faced the Persians and the Phoenicians and the Egyptians more often than we?’ I asked.

  ‘My father,’ he said. ‘Miltiades. And perhaps that prig Aristides. And your friend Diodorus of Massalia, for all that I loathe him.’

  ‘Better than we? Or merely the same,’ I asked. ‘Your father I allow.’

  ‘Then I shan’t quibble,’ Cimon, son of Miltiades, said with a smile. ‘We have faced them most often.’

  ‘And does that not make us, in the matter of fighting the Persians at sea, the wisest?’ I raised a hand to forestall argument. ‘If perhaps we had been beaten often, I’d confess that the frequency of our fighting was worthless, but you and I have more often than not triumphed.’

  Cimon nodded. ‘You want me to agree, and of course I do. But I’m sure that Pythagoras would debate with you whether the ­frequency of our contact or even our triumph had anything to do with wisdom.’

  ‘He might, but let’s remember that he was against eating bacon and beware,’ I said, and Cimon roared.

  ‘You have missed your calling, my friend. You should go stand in the agora and preach like a sophist.’ He winked at Eugenios.

  I was play-acting, mostly to raise his humour. ‘Very well then, I’ll pass on the agora, which today is probably full of Persian Immortals uncaring of my heights of wisdom, and we’ll agree that you and I are as fit to jud
ge the capability of the Great King’s fleet as any two men.’

  Cimon laughed again. ‘I have that sinking feeling I get when I listen to Aristides make a speech in which he wins every point but makes all the undecided men hate him, and our party,’ he said.

  ‘Very well, then. Here is why we will defeat the Great King’s fleet,’ I said. ‘First, and simplest, because we have done so already, not once but twice.’

  Cimon bit his lip. ‘But they have replaced their losses and then some.’

  ‘Have they replaced their hearts?’ I asked. ‘By your own admission you kept the sea eight days with ten ships facing all of them – and they only managed to take one of yours while you sank, crippled or captured five.’

  He shrugged. ‘So? What is five ships among a thousand?’

  ‘Answer me this, doubter! If one single Ionian ship had come into our beaches at Artemisium and offered a fight or tried a raid, how many ships would have launched and fought her?’

  He winced. ‘A hundred.’

  ‘Yet you went right in off their beaches,’ I said. ‘They are afraid.’

  Cimon shrugged. ‘I want to believe you.’

  ‘The Ionians are probably the weakest part of their fleet,’ I asserted.

  Cimon shook his head. ‘The best and worst,’ he said. ‘There are fine captains and ships among them. Don’t go beak to beak with the Queen of Halicarnassus – Artemisia.’ He stroked his beard. ‘There’s a woman with a fine helmsman. They say she’s Xerxes’ Greek mistress. I’m not sure.’

  ‘But the ship we took yesterday?’ I asked.

  ‘Not very good,’ he admitted.

  ‘Yet it was leading the chase for your ships, while the Phoenicians and the Egyptians – who have every reason to hate the Great King – lagged well back in the narrows.’ I waved at the Lesbians, sitting disconsolately in the rain. ‘What am I to make of that?’

  Cimon laughed. ‘You are persuasive,’ he said, laughing. He almost sounded … guilty.

  ‘My last piece of evidence requires only that you believe me,’ I said. ‘Yesterday, when I came out of the morning sun into their flank, I saw them cringe.’

  ‘You took everyone by surprise,’ he said.

  ‘First, most of their ships, more then twenty ships, turned a point or two away,’ I said. ‘Then, when three of their ships turned out of the general chase, the rest used the time they bought to get closer to the coast. None of them was trained well enough to manoeuvre at close range against me, and in fact all their hulls are wet through and slow.’ I grinned like the wolf I am at times. ‘I had them in speed, in tactics, in rowing quality, and they knew it. They were like boys facing men. And that was their best.’

  Cimon was smiling steadily now. ‘I’d forgotten how you can be, Plataean,’ he said.

  ‘And last is a matter of tactica,’ I said. ‘The number of ships means nothing. We saw this at Lade, even. Confess it; you defeat the first line and the rest run. It is always this way. The Phoenicians distrust the Ionians and loathe the Egyptians. The Egyptians want to defeat the Great King and be independent. Every Ionian ship has men on board, oarsmen and marines, who were our comrades at Lade.’

  ‘By Poseidon, Arimnestos, you make me feel as if it is the Great King who is to be pitied, not the Athenians!’ Cimon crossed his arms.

  ‘Say rather: the Greeks,’ I said. ‘You Athenians have taken to forgetting, in your desperate hubris, that you have allies.’

  He winced. ‘We will never forget Plataea,’ he said.

  ‘In this case, the ally I would remember is Aegina,’ I said. ‘They have almost fifty ships available and they have decided to fight.’ I deflated myself. ‘Even if the Peloponnesians run.’

  I’m not sure that I changed Cimon’s mind. I know I made him feel better.

  But Poseidon sent us a better sign. Well – first I think that I should say that my elation was not just from the combat and the deed of the day before. Archilogos had waved at me.

  You smile. I sound like one of you girls, delighted that the handsomest boy waved? No. Archilogos was the friend of my childhood and he had been my foe for many years. I had sworn never to do him harm and such oaths have power. This was the first time he had offered me anything but violence in return and I was irrationally cheered. I replayed the moment over and over, trying to test it for more or less meaning. Had he actually waved? Was he merely pointing me out to his archers?

  Come to think of it, thugater, you are correct, I am sounding like a blushing maiden. But I loved him. The weight and injustice of his hate lay heavy on me. So I took his wave as a sign. I took the whole encounter as a sign. I was no longer despondent. In an hour of manoeuvre and combat I had allowed myself to be convinced, completely, that we had the upper hand, regardless of the numbers.

  And then, on the ninth day out from Salamis, the sun was rising on a glorious day. The wind had lowered after sunset and the rain had stopped, and when I rose to piss in the night the stars were out and we had a gentle westerly.

  We rose in the darkness and warmed ourselves at our fires and ate re-warmed mutton stew and some oysters. There was no wine. I got up on a rock and addressed the oarsmen, which I now did almost every morning.

  ‘Today we should get back to Salamis,’ I said. ‘It’ll be rowing all the way. And the Persian fleet is just over there.’ I waved at the distant dark coast of Attica, as the eastern sky behind me began to lighten. ‘But you are all better men than they. Just row. Fear nothing. If they come at us we can always turn south.’

  Men nodded. They grinned and laughed and muttered darkly – and in that moment I loved them.

  I had decided to send Seckla and Brasidas and twenty of my ­rowers to the Lesbian ship, and I had promoted six men from the oar decks to the rank of marines under Alexandros.

  Brasidas hopped up on a rock and held up a wax tablet. ‘I am given to understand that the following men have the great fortune to have been promoted to being marines,’ he called. He read out six names. ‘To welcome all of them to our ranks, all marines can meet me in full panoply for a little run and a little dance.’ He didn’t grin. Spartans didn’t punctuate their unspoken threats with grins. They just said things and did them.

  All through the crowd of oarsmen there was backslapping and good-natured cursing as the lucky six – perhaps feeling less fortunate – hurried to find their helmets.

  I walked down in my own panoply. Perhaps it was penance for the day before, but I felt I needed to exercise. And Eugenios, perhaps because of his new freedom, had polished my whole kit so that the bronze shone like gold. I sparkled in the firelight and the rising sun.

  So did Brasidas, and we began to exercise, first in simple stretches and then in a run up the beach to the headland and back, sprinting all the way.

  Oh, for youth. I was last – last! And the new marines laughed at me. In a good-natured way. Naturally, I hated the lot of them.

  And then we began to dance the Pyrrhiche. I probably forget to say everything important, but by that time, thanks to my time with the Spartans and Brasidas joining us, we had more than a dozen dances. In fact, sometimes when only the veterans did them, we improvised, adding elements, or took turns in a dance game where one of us would lead and the others would imitate the leader’s motions: thrusts, cuts, throws. Armed and unarmed, swords and spears and shields, drawing and sheathing, footwork …

  But the first dance was still the old dance of the spear from Plataea, with some Spartan modification, and we began to teach it. Many oarsmen knew it and some did it every morning, hoping to be promoted, but none knew it in the detail with which Brasidas preached it. Now the worm turned; the biters were bit and Brasidas and I pointed out any small errors – phalanxes of them – to our new marines.

  One man, Polydorus, shook his head. ‘What does it matter whether I turn my foot or not?’ he whined.

  Brasidas di
dn’t smile or frown. He merely paused. ‘It only matters,’ he said, ‘if you would rather live, than die.’

  ‘Ouch,’ muttered Sitalkes.

  Cimon emerged out of the murk of the early morning with young Pericles at his shoulder. He swirled his cloak to get my attention and I trotted over to him.

  Pericles nodded at the new marines. ‘You train them,’ he said, ‘as if training can make a man into a gentleman.’

  ‘Young man, the Spartans, held as the noblest of all the Greeks, train relentlessly, and so do you.’ I shrugged.

  ‘When this is over, we are going to be in debt to our oarsmen,’ Cimon said. He was looking out to sea.

  ‘When we faced the Medes at Marathon, your father used the ­little men to shame the hoplites,’ I said. ‘Are you more of an aristocrat than your father?’

  ‘What in the name of Pluton is that?’ Cimon said. My stinging remark was blown away on the west wind. Pericles heard it and raised an eyebrow

  I saw it too. The flash of oars, coming from the north-east.

  ‘Poseidon’s dick,’ Cimon said. ‘ALARM!’ he roared.

  We were off the beach faster than a boy drops his chiton for a run. Cimon’s Ajax was first off and that annoyed me, but I was trying to help Seckla get his less-than-piratical Aeolians into their places while my own Lydia, in the very peak of training, waited for orders.

  There were three ships. They were spread over a wide swathe of the ocean, as if not really together. And because of the sun rising in the east behind us, our hulls were black against the black rock of the coast, an old pirate’s trick, and they didn’t see us for a long time.

  Farther out there was a line of ships, perhaps sixty, but they were hull down, just a flash of oars on the horizon.

  Then things grew more complicated.

  The closest enemy ship turned towards Cimon’s Ajax and ran right at her. But they ran something up to their masthead and they didn’t take down their mast, which almost any trireme did before combat.