Salamis

by Christian Cameron

  In truth, I think part of getting wed is proving to your soon-to-be wife that you will wear whatever it takes. I wore the sandals and the zone. And as I stepped up into my chariot – alone, symbolically – I ran a fond hand over the bronze tyre of the wheel that I had helped forge.

  And all my friends – I mean all of them, all that were living and, I think, a few of my dead – followed my chariot through the steep streets of Hermione, to the house where Archilogos waited. It was by then the edge of evening and the sun was setting red and mighty in the west behind the hills. I have no idea how I spent that day: looking for sandals, apparently. But I remember the light on the ships and the roof of the temple of Poseidon. I remember Aeschylus and Phrynicus becoming shrews as they matched wits against each other; I thought of telling them to be quiet, but I was old enough to realise that they were, in fact, enjoying themselves. And Styges was there, and Tiraesias and Hermogenes and Brasidas and Bulis, and Moire, and Ion who was too young to be one of my friends and was clearly more comfortable with the younger men, my sons.

  And there they were, each more beautiful than the last, if I may say it of them. Hector’s hair was like a blond flame, long like a Spartan’s, and Hipponax, heavier, but strong and calm, with his ringlets oiled and a superb woollen himation that just possibly his bride had made for him. And there with me were most of my marines – Sitalkes was gone to find his wife at Corinth and missed it all – and many oarsmen, too. Kineas strode by one of my chariot wheels like a god and he made me think somehow of Neoptolymos, the friend of my youth, the Cretan.

  There were so many men we filled the streets, and three chariots – I tried to take it all in, but Aristides has told me since that he and some of the more formally dressed men were only just leaving their houses because of the press when I was arriving in the courtyard of Archilogos.

  We had arranged that each of us would go to our bride’s house, pick her up in our chariot and lead a procession of her dowry through the streets to the temple of Poseidon, where we would all make offering and sacrifice, and where, by the courtesy of the town’s elders, we were allowed to make a marriage feast inside the precinct, as it was the only area in the town large enough for so many.

  And it seemed unreal to me that I was going to wed Briseis in this pretty little town that was not my own, or hers, amid the same men who I led onto enemy decks and through enemy formations, all wreathed, all laughing. There was Leukas, who had been born almost in Hyperborea, and there was Seckla, in a magnificent robe of shining white and gold (loot, I suspect, from one of the Carthaginians), and he was from so far south of Thebes (Thebes of Egypt, that is) that he said it was as far from his home to Thebes as it was from Thebes to Athens. And there was Ka, who wore, instead of a himation or a chiton, the skin of a leopard, a fabulous spotted cat, or perhaps it was two, but it made him look even more exotic and even less Greek.

  Of course, he was almost a foot taller than all the other men, as well. It made him easy to find, in a fight. Ka was a contrast to Moire. Ka never tried to be Greek; Moire was as Greek as he sought to be.

  Anyway, I couldn’t quite get my mind around the reality of it. The chariot rolled along well enough, and the horses, for horses, behaved themselves. Cimon was beside himself with what a fine team they were and how magnificent they’d be if he could only replace the offside horse with a bigger one. They were all grey, unmatched and yet somehow matched, and it’s true that the offside horse was smaller. But they filled the street, they obeyed me like slaves, and they didn’t upset my magnificent himation. Listen, when I was a slave boy on Hipponax’s farm, learning to drive a chariot, little did I imagine that the next chance I would have would be in the streets of a tiny town in the Peloponnese, on the road to wedding my master’s daughter!

  Cimon was striding along by the horses. He didn’t seem to think I could be trusted with them. Did you know that when Themistocles proposed that the men of Athens put to sea and defend Attica in ships – that ‘wooden walls’ was the oracle of Delphi’s way of telling them to fight at sea – Cimon went to the temple of Athena and sacrificed his bits and bridles and went from the altar straight to a ship? A magnificent act, and one that helped weld the richest men in Athens to the poorest.

  Despite which, he didn’t really think I was any good with horses. And he was right.

  Then we were there.

  At the last moment a little of my boyhood flowed into my hands, and despite my himation and my gilded sandals, I napped the reins. My four greys leapt forward – like most horses, they wanted to run. The street in front of me was empty; well, mostly empty, and I enjoyed making Cimon leap for a sausage stall, and we moved down the last hundred paces at a fast trot and I left my crowd behind.

  The entrance to the yard of the house that Archilogos had rented was not very wide, and at right angles to the street. I had, naturally enough, never been in the yard, but I knew I was to take the chariot in. And I do like to make an entrance.

  One of the tricks you learn when you learn to race a chariot, or to be a charioteer in combat – you paying attention, ladies? I trained for this as a slave – is to stop one wheel and pivot the whole chariot on the other. It takes great horses and good timing, and some terrible daimon of youth invaded me and made me try to do it entering the courtyard of the house of my bride.

  I checked the horses with my voice, threw all my weight to the right, and reined in the lead horse, and he all but pivoted on his back feet.

  By Poseidon, Lord of Horses, the gate seemed narrower than the wheels of my chariot. It was a foolish chance to have taken with a vehicle my friends and I had rebuilt from worm-eaten wood and rotted rawhide.

  My right hub clipped the doorpost hard enough that white plaster fell like a little shower of snow, and then we were through, still moving very fast.

  There’s a thing you do, as a charioteer, to pick up your master: you pivot the chariot all the way around and rein in, all but scooping the man off his feet with the back deck of woven cords. The daimon was strong in me, and I now reined my offside leader and my back wheels skidded on the smooth marble.

  It was almost perfect.

  Unfortunately, the axle clipped a small, very elegant standing column.

  And knocked it over. It took a long time to fall, and it broke into several sections and lay there, accusingly.

  Archilogos – by the eternal irony of the gods, the master for whom I would have driven my chariot in combat, had the world ever gone that way – stood under the stoa of the courtyard and laughed very hard. He was beautifully dressed, and his ruddy curls bounced with his mirth. He tried to say something – and was off again in another paroxysm of laughter.

  Behind me, my crowd of friends and about a thousand oarsmen approached the gate. They made a roar like the sea.

  And then Briseis stepped out into the open.

  It was not what she was wearing; it was not the magnificent gold earrings she had in her ears, the crown of a priestess on her head, the gold bracelet she wore or the gilded sandals that cradled her arched feet.

  It was her eyes, which were only for me.

  Somehow, in that moment, we were wed. Never before, not ever, anywhere, had those eyes been entirely intent on me and no one else – no ‘next thing’, no plot, no intrigue. Her brother was laughing, and as she passed him, her right hand reached out and viciously poked him in the side – a very sisterly act. Remember that they had not been together in many years.

  He reached for her arm to respond in kind, and froze, aware that three hundred or more men were watching him.

  They grinned at one another.

  And then she reached out a hand, and the smell of musk and jasmine and mint embraced me. I took her hand and she rose into the chariot like Venus riding the dawn.

  ‘Please do not hit another column,’ she said very quietly. Her lips parted, and sound emerged, and it was all I could do not to stare at her
for ever, or take her in front of all those people!

  Instead, training and good breeding took hold, and I snapped the reins. My horses leapt forward and by luck – or the grace of Aphrodite – we sailed through the doorposts without blemish, although I was ashamed to note a long white gouge on the one as we passed. Men flattened themselves to be out of my way, and called out.

  Oh, in those days, thugater, men and women said such things.

  She swayed, and I put a hand around her waist. And the fingers of my left hand found that her chiton was open-pinned, not sewn down the side, and at the contact with the smooth skin of her hip, I almost lost my horses.

  ‘Drive the chariot, my husband,’ she said. ‘Drive me later, if you will.’

  And she laughed, and all the happiness that a man could feel, that the gods allow, flooded me. By Zeus Sator, by all the gods who sit in Olympus, what more can we ask? Victory in war, and the woman you love …

  The street cleared. I made the turn at the base of the hill and it was flat for two hundred paces until the promontory rose away with the temple of Poseidon sitting atop it, and I tightened my grip on her waist and snapped the reins and gave a shout – and my horses obeyed.

  From a walk to a trot, trot straight to a gallop, and we tore along that stade of a street, scattering a few bystanders, and our clothes and hair billowed, dust rose in a cloud, and for the length of the time it takes a man to sing a hymn, we were gods. And then, as the horses began to take the rise in the road and I reined them in, perhaps not beautifully, but competently, and they slowed, so that they were shiny with sweat, composed and walking elegantly, as we entered the sacred precinct.

  ‘That is my answer,’ I said. And was rewarded with her smile, and her blush. Who knew she could blush like that?

  And we walked up into the temple.

  I had, of course, forgotten to bring a sword. But you need a sword for sacrifices, and I felt a fool until Eugenios stepped out of the crowd and put my own sword belt over my head as if the whole thing was planned.

  I did not behead a bull. The chariot-driving had been as much adventure as I needed on my wedding day and I killed a ram fastidiously, raising the hem of my himation before the blood could flow.

  But the auspices were brilliant, in birds of the air and in the ­livers of dead animals, and my sons made their kills and the smell of roasting fat rose to the gods. The sun on the pine trees all around the shrine – the last of the summer was ours for that day, and the scent of pines and the smell of cooking meat, the salt air, the spilled wine …

  We did not short the gods. Libations were poured to many gods and many absent friends: Paramanos, Onisandros, Idomeneus, and many others. We prayed and then we ate, we drank and then we danced.

  I won’t relate the whole. I could make it longer than the Battle of Salamis, for truly, it was better in every way. Weddings are about life, while battles are about death.

  But I will say that the three brides, Iris and Heliodora and Briseis, danced together. And I confess that, for once, Briseis was not best. She was beautiful, and she was all I wanted, but the Brauron girls danced the dance of Artemis for the last time, and they were superb. And then we all danced together, men in the outside ring, women in the inside, and wine and the flash of limbs and the open sides of many a chiton began to work on me, so that passion became very like lust. I remember a woman, who looked very much like Gorgo but insisted that her name was Io, which made me laugh. She and Jocasta danced and talked and danced and talked. I saw the two of them with my bride at one point, and they all laughed together, and I worried.

  I danced until my head was clear, and then I went and sat and I found myself with Cimon and Aristides, and Eugenios and Ka – a very eclectic group of couches indeed. I ate a barley roll, the white kind we call ‘of Lesvos’, and chased it with some wine.

  ‘You should take your bride to your house,’ Aristides said. He was watching his wife dance again. ‘Because if you do not, there will be Lapiths and Centaurs on this very grass.’

  ‘Indeed,’ Cimon said, ‘I just saw a lass with her back all pine ­needles, and I do not think she was napping.’

  So I made my rounds, hugging Cleitus, embracing Agariste, who was, if not very drunk, certainly jolly, and Xanthippus, who suddenly, full of wine, began to propound to me a forward naval strategy – an attack on the Persians in Ionia.

  His wife pulled him down on their couch.

  And I kissed my new daughters-in-law, who watched me with downcast eyes, as my leaving would mean that they were to leave too.

  We walked to the chariots and the noise increased so acutely that I knew we were in for a loud night.

  There was a moment … again, just as she mounted the chariot … half a hush, and Briseis put her hand on my arm where it rested as if it had been there all my life. I thought she might admonish me like a wife – you know, that I was drunk and needed to drive slowly.

  Instead, she smiled into my eyes. Her own were huge and deep. And in a voice suffused with emotion, she said, ‘You are now related to two of the three most powerful families in Athens, my love.’

  ‘So we are,’ I said.

  I didn’t whip my horses to a gallop. I did move along briskly, however, purely to leave the more boisterous elements behind us, and I confess that I went down the hill a little too fast and almost missed the turn along the northern beach, but Poseidon stayed by me and I did not. And I let the horses run a few strides and then calmed them, my hand already searching in the folds of her Ionian chiton.

  She leaned into me with her whole body. Until a women does this, no man knows what a kiss is. I was driving horses, but Briseis was always as mad as I, or madder. We kissed; the world went by in a blur, and only Eros, who protects lovers, kept us from a foolish death.

  And then we rolled to a stop in front of ‘my’ house. I jumped down, and lifted her. Behind me there was shouting. Hundreds of men and many women were pouring down the hill, but the chariots had kept them back, and we had a stade or more head start.

  I carried her across the threshold of my borrowed house. My hands were already on her pins.

  I did not put her down until I crossed the garden. I carried her into the tiny house and past the table where Eugenios had set cakes and wine and, as I tore at her clothes, I said:

  σφαίρῃ δηὖτέ με πορφυρέῃ

  βάλλων χρυσοκόμης Ἔρως,

  νήνι ποικιλοσαμβάλῳ

  συμπαίζειν προκαλεῖται.

  ἣ δ’ — 5 ἐστὶν γὰρ ἀπ’ εὐκτίτου

  Λέσβου — τὴν μὲν ἐμὴν κόμην —

  λευκὴ γάρ — καταμέμφεται,

  πρὸς δ’ ἄλλην τινὰ χάσκει.

  Golden-haired Eros once again

  hurls his crimson ball at me:

  he calls me to come out and play

  with a girl in fancy sandals.

  But she’s from civilised Lesvos:

  she sneers at my hair because it’s grey …

  I was quoting Anacreon. She rolled away from me on the bed and took off her magnificent sandals and threw them at me, laughing, and she reached between my legs and said, ‘I am, however, unlikely to turn in wonder for another girl.’ Then she was on me.

  And it was she, not I, as the sound of copper pots and bronze ladles and wooden spoons beaten on iron kettle lids filled the garden outside our door, as voices suggested positions, and others asked how big I might be, and a few made ruder jokes at her expense – it was she, who, already astride me, gathered all our clothes, a fortune in dyed wool and linen, leaned back so that I could see every inch of her splendour in the moonlight, and cast the whole ball of Tyrian red and indigo blue, glinting with gold, straight out of our garden window to the crowd below.

  They
roared. They roared like oarsmen in the moment of victory and like hoplites in the last push at Marathon. And I looked up into her face, still crowned with Aphrodite’s golden tiara, still wearing her earrings and nothing else …

  Ah … Good night, friends. The rest you will have to guess for yourselves.

  Epilogue

  You’ll make me blush if you demand more. Hah! Pour cool wine over the hot coals of lust and tomorrow night, the last night, I’ll tell you one more tale, how the men of Greece, free Greece, stood against the Medes and Persians and men of a hundred nations, spear against arrow as my friend Aeschylus has said, and fought until the dust and haze of Ares covered all. How the men of Plataea danced the dance of Ares one last time. And how close we came to losing everything. Indeed, many of us lost life, and others lost all they owned.

  But leave me to remember the happiest night of my life. Because although I never promised you a happy story, some days it was as full of glory as sunrise over the ocean, and some nights, too. And if there is sadness to come … well, here’s to your mother, my dear, the love of my life.

  Το τέλος

  Historical Note

  When I set out to write this novel, I thought that I knew a fair amount about warfare under oars and the Battle of Salamis. Today I completed the novel feeling considerably less sanguine. The Battles off of Artemisium and the Battle of Salamis were, almost inarguably, pivotal events for Greece, and quite possibly, despite hyperbole, for the whole history of the world. And I’m still not sure how many ships were engaged, how exactly the fighting went, or even, at Artemisium, who really won. I still can’t tell you the names of most of the ships engaged, where they beached, or what, exactly, the intentions of the commanders were.