Marathon: Freedom or Death lw-2

by Christian Cameron

  The hedgerows, which seemed to run straight by day, were like the maze of the Minotaur by night. I’d follow one for a distance and then realize that I had gone close to the sea rather than closer to the enemy — and time was passing. I could all but hear Clotho’s shears trimming the wick of Miltiades’ life.

  When the Pleiades were high in the sky, I took my bearings like a sailor, found the north star and realized that, again, I was leading the long file of my men away from our camp and towards the sea — and not closer to the enemy encampment.

  Resolutely I put my right shoulder to the sound of the sea — close now — and searched the next wall for a gate. I crossed, the rest of the men stumbling behind me and making enough noise for an army, which I guess was the idea, and found myself walking across a hayfield in the full light of the moon — towards the sea.

  Of course, the beach curves — radically, in come places — and I’d simply missed my mark. Again.

  My heart was pounding, my anxiety had reached a lethal intensity, my helmet burned my head and I was sweating through my armour — and we still weren’t within long bowshot of the enemy.

  Idomeneus came up beside me. ‘You thinking we should go on the beach?’ he asked.

  ‘No,’ I said. Because there was no cover at all on the beach. We’d be seen two stades away, even at night.

  Of course, even as I thought that, I realized that being seen two stades away might be a fine thing.

  ‘Actually, yes,’ I said. ‘We’re going along the beach.’

  Idomeneus laughed. ‘Good — I was worried you were lost.’

  I chuckled — I remember the falsity of my laugh, how it caught in my throat. When you are the fearless leader, it is important to appear fearless — and knowledgeable. I thought of all the stupid things I’d seen other leaders do. Now I knew why they did it. Somehow, command on land was not like command at sea — too many choices, perhaps. Maybe it’s just that your men can simply walk away if they lose trust in you.

  Down to the beach.

  As soon as we reached the beach, I could see the enemy camp — the ships, drawn up as thickly as fleas on a dog, and the fires inland from the beach all the way past the marsh to the hills. We seemed incredibly close, although in reality we were five long stades from the ships — but because of the curve of the beach, we were looking at the ships across the water, and they were close.

  As soon as we were down the dune, I hissed the order to form front by files. We were strung out, but the boys were fast and probably as eager to get formed up — to feel the comfort of the next man’s shield — as I was to get them formed.

  Still no alarm. So we moved forward. Sand filled my sandals, and I had to remind myself that the beach was, despite the labour, easier on me, and easier on the lads, than tying to cross the farms of the Marathon plain.

  After two stades, we seemed to be level with the first Persian ships — and still there was no alarm. I tried to reassure myself that if Miltiades were attacking, I’d hear something from him — the hills were visible as a loom of dark against the paler darkness of the sky to the north and west.

  Another stade, and the ships were so close that it seemed we could swim to them. We were just two stades — less, I think — from the ships that were beached when a man on one of the anchored ships, a Greek, called out, asking who we were.

  ‘Men!’ I responded, but in Persian.

  ‘What?’ he asked, his voice echoing over the water.

  ‘Men!’ I called back again, this time in Greek.

  And that satisfied him.

  By such threads do empires hang.

  Now we were running — stumbling more like — through the dark. I had a new notion — that I’d put fire into some of their ships. I’d done it before, at Lade, and it had done the trick, and there were plenty of fires near the ships.

  Less than a stade — no alarm.

  How the gods must have laughed.

  We came to the first fires — a line of blazes long since burned down to coals — and my men broke ranks and began to slaughter the oarsmen at the fires without my orders. The whole situation slipped away from me in those moments — one second, I had a column of trained warriors running through the dark, and the next, there were screams and all my men had gone.

  Or that’s how it seemed to me.

  To my mind, killing the oarsmen was a complete waste of time, but as a diversion, it did well enough. The problem was that there were about a hundred of us, and almost sixty thousand oarsmen. With the best will in the world, my men couldn’t make a dent in them. And then they began to fight back.

  It was chaos on the beach, and Tartarus, too — arrows falling from the sky as the Medes who had camped just to the north shot into the confusion, and the thousands of oarsmen, unable to believe there were so few of us, fell on each other — Phoenicians against Cilicians, Greeks against Aegyptians.

  I pulled Idomeneus out of the fighting and dragged him clear the way you pull a dog out of a fight.

  ‘Order the rally!’ I remember shouting at him. He had a horn and I did not.

  He looked at me with dull, lust-filled eyes. ‘I was fighting,’ he said reproachfully.

  ‘Order the rally!’ I said again.

  He lifted the horn and sounded three long blasts.

  All along the beach, men heard it. Some understood and some were lost in the fog of combat.

  I put my spear in the gut of a man with no shield — I had to assume in the dark that anyone without a shield was one of theirs — and ran back a few paces.

  ‘Plataea! On me!’ I roared, again and again.

  Men came to me in dribs and drabs, some bringing their little swirl of combat with them, some alone.

  It took for ever. Everything takes for ever in the dark. Idomeneus sounded the horn again, and again later, and still I had fewer than half of my men — my picked, best armoured men. I could not afford to leave them on the beach.

  The trouble — my fault — was that I had not set a rally point or explained to them what I wanted after we hit the enemy. I had to trust that they would know the signal from the hunting expeditions.

  In the end, most did, but men died because I didn’t know enough to plan the recall as part of the attack. Another lesson learned at bloody Marathon.

  Every time we blew the rally, we ran back down the beach, a little farther from the ships. By the time I had eighty men — perhaps a few more — we were a stade from the enemy. We should have been clear.

  We weren’t. We had taken too long — far too long. And the sun was coming up in the east — still only a line of grey-pink out over the ocean towards Euboea, but it was going to rise like the hand of doom. We were just eighty men, caught a long way from our camp.

  I cursed and killed a man. By then we were fighting Medes — real soldiers. They weren’t swarming us, but their braver souls started to come in close while others shot at us from a distance. The light was still bad, their bowstrings were damp and Teucer and his lads were shooting back, so we were relatively unscathed, but I could see better with every passing minute, and that meant that they could, too.

  I was in the centre of my own line. Nothing for it — we needed a miracle.

  ‘Ready to charge!’ I called out.

  There was that reassuring sound as every man closed a little to the centre and the shields tapped together. Perhaps you’ve heard it in drill — it is a sound that always gives you heart, that rattle. It means your friends are still together — still in good order, still with enough heart to fight.

  I took a deep breath. We were fighting Medes — they couldn’t understand me.

  ‘When I say charge,’ I bellowed, as loud as my throat and lungs could manage, ‘you go fifty paces forward, turn and run as if the hound Cerberus was at your heels. Hear me, Plataeans!’

  There was a cry — something like a war cry, something like a sigh.

  ‘Charge!’ I called, and we went at them.

  The Medes were ready for it.
They broke as soon as they saw us come, and only our boldest and fastest caught any of them. I certainly didn’t — the Mede I had my eye on vanished into the near-dark of the bushes up the beach.

  Idomeneus, bless him, sounded a single blast as I hit my forty-seventh stride, and we turned together, like a figure in the Pyrrhiche — which it is — and ran. We were off down that beach like frightened boys chased by an angry parent, and every man understood that we had to break contact now, or die when the sun rose.

  But Persians have good soldiers, too. Somewhere in the scrub was an officer who knew his business, and within seconds of us running, they were chasing us and arrows began to fall. Then it was every man for himself. Some of my boys cut inland, across country. A few ditched their shields. Most didn’t — when archers are shooting you, the last thing you want to give up is your shield.

  I stuck to the beach, and most of the Medes followed, worse luck. Had they stayed a little longer, run away from our false charge a little further, we might have made a clean exit, but we were not so lucky.

  After a few minutes of running, I looked back and they were gaining. After all, they had light body armour, which most of them were not wearing anyway, as they’d been awakened by our attack. They had neither helmets nor greaves.

  They were cautious, but they were getting the measure of us.

  An arrow hit the middle of the back of the yoke of my armour. Thanks to Ares’ hand, it turned on the two layers of bronze, but the power knocked me flat. As I rose, another arrow hit the same place, then another glanced off my shield, heavy arrows, and another rang on my helmet, and I thought — Fuck, this is it.

  I got my feet under me and turned.

  One of the Medes fell to the beach, his life leaking out between his fingers as he grabbed at the shaft embedded in his guts.

  Teucer was right at my shoulder, shooting calmly. One, two — and men fell.

  ‘Turn a little left,’ he said.

  I did, and two arrows hit the face of my shield, and he shot back — zip, pause, zip.

  With every shot, a Mede fell.

  Another arrow into my shield, but now the Medes were scrambling for cover — Teucer dropped four right there, coughing their lungs out in the sand.

  ‘Run,’ I said. I gave him three steps while I stayed — another arrow off the top of my helmet — and then I turned and ran.

  My breath was coming like a horse’s after a gallop — I sucked in air the way a drunkard sucks wine and my legs burned as if I had run ten stades. The wound Archilogos had given me in the fall of Miletus had a curious numbness to it against the pain of all my other muscles, and sweat rolled down my forehead and into my eyes.

  The light was growing. I was running down a beach that was well enough lit for target practice, and I was going more and more slowly.

  Ares, it makes me want to spit sand to remember it: fleeing like a coward, and knowing — knowing — that in a few moments I would be dead anyway. When it is your last — when all is lost — it doesn’t matter whether you were a demonstration or a deception or a last stand, friends. No one worth a shit wants to die with his back to the foe.

  So I turned.

  An arrow meant for my back screamed off the face of my shield.

  I meant to take one with me, but I was out of everything, the daimon had no more to give me, and I — the great fighter of the Plataeans — slumped down behind my shield. I got smaller and smaller as the arrows thudded in.

  But I could breathe, and I did. I panted like a dog, and I couldn’t think of anything, and arrows fell on my shield like hail on a good crop — twice, arrowheads blew right through the face of my aspis.

  Oh, children, that hour was dark. When I had my breath back, I knew it was just a matter of how I chose to die. I could make it last, down under the rim of my aspis, until they got a man into the brush to my left who could shoot me in the hip or the arse. No laughing matter. I could try to turn again, but to Hades with that. My legs were gone. It seemed to me that the best course was to attack them. It would get the whole thing over with the quickest, and if anyone watched me — if there was a single bard left in Greece to sing after this debacle — at least men would say that Arimnestos died with his face to the foe.

  I took a dozen more breaths, rationing them, taking the air in deep. Then I allowed myself five more — the margin of life and death. Five breaths.

  Arrows continued to slam into the face of my shield.

  On the edge of the fifth, I rose to my feet. I sneaked a last glance down the beach behind me — and my heart leaped with joy. It was empty. My men had got away.

  In some situations, nothing would be grimmer than to die alone, but in this one, it filled me with power. Being alone made me feel less a failure. More a hero.

  I leaned forward, into the arrow storm, summoned up power in my legs I didn’t think I had and charged.

  Anyone asleep?

  Hah! You flinched, thugater. You think perhaps I died there, eh?

  Pour me a little more wine, lad.

  Yes, I charged. As soon as I got my face over the rim of my aspis, I could see that they were well bunched up, about fifty strides away — that’s why so few arrows missed, I can tell you.

  I remembered running with Eualcidas, at the fight in the pass. Here, like there, my feet crunched on gravel. I kept my shield up, and the arrows fell on it like snow on a mountain.

  And then they stopped.

  There were screams — screams of pain and screams of terror. I lowered my aspis a finger’s breadth and peered forward, though the pre-dawn murk, the sweat, the slits of my helmet.

  The Medes were falling — a dozen of them were down and the rest were scattering. When I reached them — alive, of course, you daft woman — not a man was alive, and they looked like porcupines for the arrows in them.

  I turned away from rosy-fingered dawn and the pale sea. There were men coming out of the bush — a hundred men, with bows.

  The Athenian archers had found me.

  I laughed.

  I mean, what in Hades can you do but laugh?

  When you write this, I suppose you’ll leave out all the little men — the archers and peltastai. And when I say ‘little’, I mean small in the eyes of the great. But they were good men, as you’ll see. The psiloi. The ‘stripped’ men who wear no armour. This is the story of the little men, and you can ignore what happened next if you wish. But it had more effect on the battle than most of the heavily armed men and the gentry would ever want to admit.

  The archers were elated — they’d saved a famous hero and laid waste to the Medes, and I knew that as long as those men lived in their little houses and their shacks on the flank of the Acropolis, they’d tell and retell that story in their wine shops, at the edge of the Agora, in the bread stalls.

  Several of them — the boldest — sprinted down the beach and tore a souvenir loose from the huddle of corpses. The first man to pass me shot me a grin.

  ‘You alive, boss?’ he asked as he ran by.

  I had fallen to one knee. I gave him a smile, got to my feet and wandered after him.

  In the distance, the Medes began to rally. Did I mention that they were first-rate soldiers? Just lost half their numbers in an ambush, and they were coming back. I hate any man who says the Medes and Persians were cowards.

  The Medes on the sand were wearing gold and silver — professional soldiers wearing their pay. The Athenian archers were poor men and my friend, the first who passed me, whooped when he reached the bodies. But he was a public-spirited man, and he held something aloft that flashed in the new sun and he shouted ‘Gold!’ and the rest of the archers came pouring out of the scrub at the edge of the beach, some men jumping down the bluffs and sand dunes.

  They stripped those corpses like men who knew their way around a corpse. I cast no aspersions, but by the time I caught up with them, there was nothing left but skin, gristle and bone.

  ‘Better look to your bows, lads,’ I said, pointing down the be
ach. I stepped forward and fielded an arrow that might have hit a man, scooping it on the face of my shield, and the muscles in my shield arm protested hard.

  ‘Lad, my arse,’ an older man said, but he grinned. He had thick arms and heavy shoulders — an oarsman, I suspected. ‘You’re that Plataean, then, eh?’

  ‘I am,’ I said. Then I put some iron in my voice. ‘Bows!’ I shouted.

  Most men jump when I say jump. The archers did.

  ‘Who’s the master archer, then?’ I asked.

  After most of them had loosed a couple of arrows — with no effect beyond driving the Medes back up the beach — the older man turned to me again. ‘With the other half of the boys — they went for the centre of the camp. We couldn’t find you. And I kept getting lost — so I made for the beach.’ He gave a lopsided grin. ‘I’m a sailor — or was. Beaches make sense to me.’

  I had to laugh. ‘We need to get out of here,’ I said.

  ‘That’s sense, too. We’ve had our lick at the Persians.’ He looked around. ‘And we’ve got whatever they brought.’ He called to the men by the bodies, ‘Got all the bows? All their quivers? Arrows?’

  To me, he said, ‘All their kit is better than ours — better bows, by far.’

  ‘I know,’ I said.

  ‘Give me a Persian bow anytime,’ he said, flourishing his own.

  ‘These aren’t Persians,’ I said. I pointed at the low felt hats and boots. ‘They’re Medes, a subject people of the Persians — similar, but not the same. They wear less armour. Sakai are different again — bigger beards, more leather and better bows.’

  ‘Ain’t you the sophist, though.’ The former sailor held out his arm. ‘Leonestes of Piraeus.’ Arrows began to drop all around us.

  ‘Let’s run,’ I said.

  We did. After a few hundred strides, they had to carry me — I was mortified, to say the least. One young sprig took my aspis and another peeled off my helmet.

  We left the beach when it began to angle away from our camp and we ran inland. It was easier in daylight — I could see the line of hills and mountains at the far edge of the plain and the rising ground that marked the shrine and sanctuary of Heracles.