Killer of Men

by Christian Cameron

  She shook her head. ‘He wants to go, but Pater won’t let him.’

  Pater – Troas – sounded smarter and smarter.

  I gave her my gifts and we made love. It should have been gentle and tragic, but it wasn’t. Gaiana never had tragedy in her. She laughed in my mouth, and she laughed when our fingers last touched.

  ‘What shall I call your boy?’ she asked. ‘If he’s yours?’

  ‘Hipponax,’ I said.

  16

  The Battle of Amathus was my first sea-fight.

  We sailed and rowed the long way around Crete, because Lord Achilles, who hadn’t been to war in ten years, was still a canny old bird and he had a head on his shoulders. So we rowed away towards Italy, and the rowers cursed.

  Lord Achilles knew what he was about. We spent two weeks going around the island, and by the time we put our bows to the deep blue east of Crete, our muscles were hard as rock and our rowing was excellent. Our helmsmen – even me – could handle our ships. We could sprint and we could cruise and we could back-water.

  I have said that Nearchos commanded the Thetis. In fact, I commanded it, while teaching him to command, while Troas taught me to be a seaman. Laugh if you like.

  Lord Achilles commanded the Poseidon and his brother Ajax, a long-limbed nobleman I had only met twice, commanded Triton. We didn’t practise formations much, although we did take turns rowing in the middle of a three-ship line, so that we could get used to the length of another ship’s oars.

  We made the rendezvous off Cyprus just a week late, and found the Council of Ionia in full assembly on the beach of Amathus.

  I stayed at Nearchos’s shoulder. We spent a week listening to Aristagoras talk. Other men talked, too. The leader of the Cyprian rebels was Onesilus, king of Salamis. That’s Salamis on Cyprus, honey – your friend from Halicarnassus knows it, don’t you, lad? Technically, Onesilus had summoned all of us, and he was the leader of the fight on Cyprus. He and his men were laying siege to Amathus, a Cyprian city that had remained fiercely loyal to the Great King while the rest of the island had thrown off the yoke a year earlier.

  Here, boy – fill this with wine. I need to talk about the Ionian rebellion, and that is thirsty talk!

  It was the curse of the gods on the Ionians that they were doomed to listen to Aristagoras and his promises. From one end of Ionia to the other, the army of Artaphernes and the navy of his Phoenician allies, the greatest seamen in the world, defeated the Ionians every time they stood to fight. At Byzantium and in the Troad, at Ephesus, in a dozen ship duels, the Ionians had been worsted every time.

  And yet the rebellion spread.

  It was against all sense, and against all reason, but despite Artaphernes’ fairness and Aristagoras’s arrogance and failure, the rebellion grew with every defeat. The Carians, who had stood against us at Sardis and at Ephesus, were with us now. Cyprus was in revolt and all the Greek cities of Asia were in the Ionian Council, as they called themselves. Aristagoras was their leader and strategos.

  We needed a victory. There really were no more cities to join in, unless Athens or Sparta chose to join. And neither seemed disposed to fight.

  Aristagoras argued that we needed just one victory to convince both Athens and Sparta to join us. I doubted him. I had seen Aristides’ face when he boarded his ship, and I suspected that nothing short of a Persian fleet in the Piraeus would get him to fight again alongside the Ionians. But I was a mere helmsman and no one asked my opinion.

  I had a week to get to know that fleet, and I counted two hundred and twelve ships on the beach. There were ships from Lesbos and ships from Chios, Miletus and Samos, and even exiled ships from the cities already retaken.

  Such as Archilogos of Ephesus. There he was, ablaze in magnificent panoply of blue and gold, looking like a god. I felt the tug of our friendship and my oath. But I stayed away from him.

  I also heard that Briseis was on Lesbos, and that she had borne no children to her husband. I learned this from Epaphroditos, after many an embrace. He had his own ship now. And he and Nearchos became friends in an hour.

  It flattered my vanity that so many men remembered me. We had games on the beach and I won the hoplitodromos, although I didn’t win any of the other events until the duels on the last day, and that was too easy. Ionians don’t really like to fight in the duels. The Cretans did, though – so I found myself exchanging cuts with the very men I had trained, and Nearchos and I fought in the last bout, for the prize.

  He thought that he knew me.

  I gave him a nice scratch on his forearm as a reminder that he didn’t.

  We laughed about it afterwards, and Lord Achilles came and took my hand. ‘You are too good a man to hold in Crete,’ he said. ‘You could have your own ship with any lord here.’

  Indeed, several men had offered me ships – Epaphroditos first among them.

  ‘Yes, lord,’ I said.

  ‘I would keep you in my service until we face the Medes,’ he said.

  ‘I will stay, lord,’ I said. ‘After the battle, I will go.’

  ‘Thank you. You are a fine young man, whatever your tastes. And may I add another thing? As long as you serve with my son, you will keep him safe. Eh? All young men seek to be Achilles. My son will be a king. Do not let him off the leash. Am I clear?’

  I nodded.

  He looked around, then looked back at me. ‘What have you done to Aristagoras?’ he asked.

  I shrugged. There are some things best left unspoken. ‘Why?’

  ‘He asked me if you were my man. I said yes, and he said that he would not have you killed until you left my service. So – watch your back. He hates you. It’s in his eyes when he speaks of you.’

  I frowned. What had someone told him?

  I thought of how Briseis could be when angered. Oh, yes.

  My thoughts must have been on my face, because he chuckled. ‘Our fearless leader is hardly a man to fear,’ Achilles said. ‘But he strikes me as the womanish sort who would cut your throat in the dark or put poison in a cup. When you leave me, watch yourself.’

  We left a great deal unsaid. He knew things, and I knew things. He was not altogether comfortable with the loyalty his warriors showed to me, and he was not always happy with the man I had made of his son, either. But I’m a father now and I understand him better – and he never used me ill. Here’s to him.

  I had a man in the host repaint my shield, which was battered from a year of weapons drill. He made the raven all but leap from the bull’s hide. ‘An old Boeotian,’ he said. ‘You don’t see many of those!’

  The three of us – that’s me, Idomeneus and Lekthes – we probably had half the Boeotians in the whole army. But I wanted reputation and I wanted men to know me.

  The Persians landed across the island, as we expected, and they marched towards us by slow, careful stages.

  Their fleet, the cream of the Phoenician cities, accompanied them, and both travelled every day in battle order, daring us to fight. They approached us slowly, and any day we might have met them, if we chose.

  A Persian army and a Phoenician fleet. I could hear the gods laughing.

  The Cyprians were gentlemen, and they offered the Ionian allies a choice – man our ships and face the Phoenicians, or form our phalanx and face the Persians. The Persian commander was not a man I knew. Artybius, he was called, and he had a strong force of cavalry. So did the Cyprians, and they had chariots as well, which made me feel as if I was serving in the Trojan War – no one but Cyprians and Libyans use chariots any more. And yet – I had trained as a charioteer, and they made me smile. I had never seen a chariot used for anything but a parade or a wedding or local travel, or for races, and the Cyprians were good. They had over a hundred of them. Everyone seemed to be excited by the prospect of using chariots in combat – even I thought it sounded marvellous, which goes to show how little I knew of war.

  Aristagoras chose to take on the fleet. I suspected that he made the choice so that it would be easier
to cut and run, but I was in the minority. Most of the rest still worshipped him, and he wore his purple cloak at every meeting, as if he was the King of Kings.

  After making the decision, we had three days of rough weather, and we put out every day, struggled to form our lines and suffered from the wind and waves. The Phoenicians stayed on their beaches by their camp and jeered at us. The Great King’s commander was cautious – he fortified his camp and would not risk battle until his fleet was there to cover his flank.

  The fourth day dawned like a proper summer day on Cyprus, the sort of golden pink dawn when you can imagine the Cyprian goddess coming across the foam to your beach. We rose, cooked our breakfasts and sang a hymn to that goddess and to Zeus, and then to all the gods, and finally we boarded our ships.

  The sea was as calm as a sheet of hammered bronze, and I knew that this time we would fight. My hands shook, my stomach did flips inside my scale thorax and I drank a little too much wine.

  We formed up well, though, and that counts for a great deal in a sea-fight. North and west of us, on the beaches north of the city where the Persians had their camp, we could see them forming, and their allies with them, and the Cyprians forming against them, two great phalanxes and a taxis of cavalry on either flank, with the chariots farthest from the sea.

  We Cretans were untried, and our heavy Phoenician-style ships were slower than the other Ionians, so they put us in the second line. It was an insult, if you like, but the fleet was well ordered and there was a rumour that Aristagoras was receiving advice from a Samothracian navarch. Whoever he was, I thought that he knew his business. We Cretans were on the landward flank, the left of our line, so far out from the centre that my ship was second from the beach, and by the whim of the gods, Archi’s ship was in the first line, just seaward and ahead of us.

  I swore to myself that if I had a chance to make good my oath to his family, I would do it.

  Nearchos was shaking with nerves. I hugged him, our breastplates rubbing together oddly. ‘Relax, O phile pai. The fear falls from you with the first arrow.’

  He gave me a shaky smile, and we began to row forward with our line, as did the enemy, until we could see the eyes painted on their bows as clearly as we could see our own rowers. But then, before we could come to grips, I had cause to bless all the training Achilles had done with us, because the Phoenicians tried the oldest trick in naval warfare – they backed water. They were professionals, and we were amateurs, and they assumed that if they backed far enough, we’d lose our order and they’d kill us in small groups.

  And indeed, our line did begin to break up after half a dozen stades – keeping a line at sea is hard enough, and every wave and current is against you. We split our first line into three, because there was a current off the rivermouth by the city and the rowers couldn’t stay in the midst of it.

  But the strong current from the river split the enemy, too. And they didn’t break into three even groups, as we did – again, the whim of the gods and no cleverness of man. But their beachward division was the smallest, and it seemed to be out of order – caught in some indraught near the beach by their camp, or so it appeared to me.

  ‘Troas!’ I called, and he came to my side. We were rowing lower bank only, creeping across the great bay and saving our men for ramming. I pointed at the chaos among the landward Phoenicians. And now that they were closer, I could see that they weren’t Phoenicians, either – they were Greeks.

  There were plenty of cities who served Artaphernes, of course.

  ‘Tide rip,’ Troas said before he even reached the command deck. ‘Not much, but enough to pull them apart. They should row faster – they’d be fine.’

  ‘Stand by me,’ I said. I nodded at Lekthes. ‘Take his bench.’

  Lekthes was used to this, but the look he shot me was full of reproach. He’d had a year of feasting as a warrior in the great hall – he had no desire to go back to rowing. But he went.

  Ahead of me, the Samian ships to the seaward of Archi suddenly dashed from the line. They were twenty strong, and they acted in concert. They went from the slow cruise all the way to the fastest attack stroke so quickly that we were watching them pull away before we were sure what they were doing.

  But the other ships in our part of the first line followed them.

  Nearchos looked at me blankly.

  ‘The Samians are going for the enemy Greeks!!’ I stood on the rail and bellowed to Lord Achilles. He could see it as well as I could, but in my youthful arrogance, I assumed he wouldn’t know any more than his son.

  He nodded.

  Ahead of us, the exiled Ephesians and Lemnians followed the Samians.

  Lord Achilles had his squire raise a banner of red cloth and wave it.

  ‘Up tempo to fast cruise,’ I said. I ran to the midships fighting platform, leaving my ‘navarch’ with the steering oars. We didn’t need to stay up with the first line, or so I’d been told, but I was anxious to get forward and I wanted to go faster than Lord Achilles had ordered.

  Speed changes require orders, and now I was amidships I couldn’t see as well. I got Thetis to fast cruise and then ran to the bow.

  The Samians were just putting their beaks into the enemy. You could hear the collisions clearly across the water.

  I watched Archi’s ship, but he was cut off from the first impacts by the rush of Samians, and he and the other exiles were rowing diagonally across the beach, going to seaward, north and east across the current, to try and find an opening.

  Somewhere in the enemy line, some oily Phoenician made a decision and the battle changed in the twinkling of their oars. Their centre broke up like an egg under a hammer, and the bulk of the centre turned landward – into the flank of the Samians. Our very aggression would now count against us, and our vulnerable flanks would be open to the rams of the heavy Phoenician ships.

  That’s why you keep a second line, of course.

  I ran back down the centre plank between the upper-deck benches. To the north and west, our front left, the Phoenician centre was turning south and Archi’s exiles were all that stood in their way. The Milesians and Chians seemed paralysed – just as they had been at every other battle.

  ‘We need to turn north!’ I shouted across the strip of sea between our ships at Lord Achilles, ignoring his son by my side.

  Either the lord didn’t hear me or he chose to ignore me. If we held our course, we’d enter the winning part of the combat close to the beach, a position where even in the event of a disaster, the Cretans could beach their ships and escape. Lord Achilles was thinking like a king.

  I was thinking like a nineteen-year-old with an oath to fulfil.

  I turned to Nearchos. ‘If those ships are crushed, we lose the battle,’ I said, pointing to the north. And the gods sent me an inspiration, because ships were sprinting out of the centre to help the exiles – Lesbian ships. ‘Epaphroditos is going too! We have to support him!’

  Nearchos rose to the moment. ‘Go!’ he said. ‘Let my father follow me!’

  I was sure that I had been hired to prevent just this sort of incident.

  ‘Troas! Take the oars!’ I pushed him into the steering rig. ‘Nearchos – get forward with the marines and be ready to lead the boarders.’ Lord Achilles would have a fit, I knew – but I wasn’t sending the boy anywhere I wasn’t going myself.

  Troas got between the steering oars, and we were turning even as I ordered the last increase in speed. All our decks were rowing now, and the oar masters were thumping the deck with their canes, so that the whole ship rang with the tempo.

  We were turning out of the second line, heading across the bows of other Cretan lords. It was exhilarating. There is something to war at sea – the speed of a ramming ship, the brilliance of the sea, the wind, the oarsmen singing the Paean. I felt like a god come to Earth. My fear fell away, our bow swept north and then we slipped into our new course as if it was carved like a trough in the sea, and we were moving as fast as a galloping horse.

>   ‘You have it?’ I asked Troas. My not-quite-father-in-law was, in effect, commanding the ship.

  ‘Never done this before!’ he said, but he laughed. Some men rise to their moment. Troas – a man who could bargain for his daughter’s virtue – was ready for his, and we stooped on the Phoenicians like a hawk on doves.

  I saw the first engagements in the centre. Archi got his ship turned in plenty of time and up to full speed. He had a light trireme and he turned like a cat, passing between the first Phoenicians he met. One ship got his oars in, but the other got oar-raked, the broken shafts of the oars ripping men’s arms and the splinters flying like arrows. Men die when their oars are shattered.

  It was a brilliant stroke, but Archi would have a professional helmsman, as good as any Phoenician – indeed, the man might be a Phoenician. He was through in five heartbeats, right through their first line.

  ‘Follow that ship,’ I said to Troas. ‘At all costs. Ram what you have to.’

  Troas grinned.

  The faster of the two Phoenicians – the one that hadn’t lost his oars – was now closing with us at a terrific rate. A sea-fight is a scary thing, friends. It starts very slowly, but once everyone decides to engage, the speed is bewildering. Two ships at full stretch come together as fast as two galloping horses. Imagine it in your head – we were ram to ram with this enemy, our ships the same weight.

  I paused and turned back to Troas. ‘Diekplous?’ I asked. ‘Ram to ram?’

  He shook his head. ‘At the last minute, I’ll go left,’ he said. ‘A little flick to port and we’re into his oars.’

  ‘I’ll warn the rowers!’ I said, and ran to the command platform. ‘On my command – all starboard-side oars inboard!’ I roared.

  The oar masters all raised hands, showing me they’d heard. Otherwise, their attention was on the stroke. One missed beat here and we were all drowned men.