Long War 04 - The Great King

by Cameron, Christian

  I have to mention that, before I knew that Aristides was coming, I had made the plan to go to Susa or Persepolis via Tarsus. There were a number of reasons for this, but the most important was simple distance. It is much easier to travel by sea than by road. Most Greeks going to the Great King went to Tarsus, which placed a man almost two-thirds of the way to Persia, or at least to Babylon.

  I had also dispatched letters – to Artapherenes, to Briseis, and to my friend Cyrus, asking for letters of safe conduct and permission to use the messenger stations on the Royal Road.

  When Aristides announced his intention of joining us, I told him of my plans, and he agreed.

  ‘I had no notion of safe conducts,’ he said.

  And that was that.

  The sailing weather was perfect. But keeping my men together – that was harder. The voyage offered no chance of heavy profit, but once news of our intention to scout the Great King’s preparations made its way down to the oar benches, every man knew that we were running risks.

  So that night on Skyros, when we were done briefing the officers, I assembled the oarsmen – all of them – and gave a speech. I can’t quote it – but I told them the truth. I told them that we were the first ships of a free Greek navy. That we had to do what we were doing for every free man and woman in all of Greece. And that it was just as important for them to behave themselves well in Asian ports as it was for them to row well as we slipped along the Thracian coast.

  When I was done, no one cheered, but they walked off into the darkness in a sombre mood.

  Aristides shook his head. ‘You could be a fine orator,’ he said. ‘Your voice is high pitched, but you make men listen.’

  Bulis lay on the sand by my fire, his head on his hands. ‘You believe that?’ he asked me.

  ‘Yes,’ I said.

  He nodded. ‘Do you think we can defeat the Great King?’ he asked.

  ‘Yes,’I said.

  ‘Good. So do I. So do all the Spartans. It is the other Greeks for whom I have concerns.’

  We spent the next night at sea. We had the store ship, and she had a bricked hearth for cooking. It is not easy to feed six hundred men out of one hearth, but with cold meat and bread, we got them fed.

  We laid to for as long as it took to get a good rest and get food. I spent the entire time worrying about that fire on Swan. Fire, at sea, is not man’s friend.

  Then we ran almost due north. I had the stars as a guide, but these waters were relatively unfamiliar to me. Not so for Harpagos or Moire, who had sailed to Thrace for slaves and hides and everything else all the years I’d been gone. I followed the Pole Star as the Carthaginians taught, and in the dawn, Sekla slapped my back and called me the king of navigators as Mount Athos rose out of the sea, due north.

  Our warships stood off, well over the horizon from any but a watcher on Athos’s highest peak, or the gods themselves, and the tubby Swan bore in as if sailing for the Chersonese. We sailed parallel and a little farther out to sea – a standard trick of piracy when scouting a potentially profitable coast.

  We didn’t have to close the Athos peninsula to see the Persian preparations. Megakles did, because he’s an excellent sailor and a daring man, but before the mainland was more than a smudge, we could see the shipping all along the coast – small boats, round ships and galleys.

  Perhaps fifty sails in view. For the wilderness of Thrace, that was . . . incredible.

  We swept north on a favourable wind for Thassos, and I began to have real apprehensions about the Persian invasion.

  As in – was it imminent?

  Nor did I any longer think our five ships were the strongest squadron in the Aegean.

  We had our sails down as soon as we began to see warships, and we rowed – oarsmen cursing – under bare poles. Aristides had a different rig from mine and unstepped his masts.

  Nothing irks an oarsman like rowing when the wind is favourable for sailing.

  I lived in fear, moment to moment, that the Persian fleet would send ships to look at us. We were too far for me to see what ships they were, but I had to guess most of them were Phoenician.

  All afternoon, I cheated my steering oars to the north and east, trying to be invisible, while one tiny sailing ship did the work, going right in among them. In late afternoon we landed on Thassos and bought sheep from shepherds so barbaric we couldn’t understand their Greek. We had all our marines in armour, and Aristides – an old campaigner – taught me a new trick by building a small tower on the headland, which would give us precious warning of an attack.

  But we were not disturbed in our sleep, and in the morning we watched the sun rise in the east and we dried our hulls, all our cargo stacked in the bright sun on the beach – waiting for Megakles.

  And waiting.

  Noon passed, and the oarsmen slept, and the Spartans ran up and down the beach. My marines didn’t exercise – they were still on duty, sleeping in watches. As Bulis – well ahead of his friend – turned at the rocky promontory to run back, I saw him pause.

  He was saying something to Brasidas.

  Brasidas shrugged and continued towards the tower – really, just a set of poles tied together with a floor of boughs, but it placed a man at treetop height.

  Bulis came running back down the beach, but during the time that he and Brasidas spoke, Sparthius had passed him, and now they were both sprinting, flat out, for the campfires and the line of boats. Men got up from their midday naps to cheer the Spartans, who looked like gods.

  And that started a whole set of contests. Men wrestled and boxed and even fenced with oars – a very popular and very dangerous oarsmen’s game.

  I stood on the beach and worried.

  I was still in shock at what I had seen the day before.

  After midday, Aristides came with several of his young men. He sat on a rock, and his hypaspist poured wine from a skin.

  ‘You worry too much,’ he said, but he had the same lines under his eyes as I had.

  I shrugged. I remember looking around at his friends – I didn’t know most of them, although I knew his nephew, and I knew Aeschylus’s younger brother and of course I knew Heraklides. ‘I saw a great many Persian ships yesterday,’ I said.

  Aristides rubbed the top of his nose – a much-imitated facial tic in the Athenian assembly.

  ‘One thing to hear of it and another to see it,’ he said.

  We shared the wine, and I heard that Aeschylus’s younger brother was planning to go into politics, that the youngest man was actually my enemy Cleitus’s youngest sibling Alcibiades. He was a handsome devil, and he had that look – arrogance, yes, but also a total disregard for the opinions of others – that sets young men apart and makes them so easy to hate. He and his older brother Cleinias were both followers of Aristides. They were also rich and powerful enough to own ships, and they were with us to ‘learn the ropes’. Athenian aristocrats worked pretty hard, back then.

  The two Alcmaeonidae watched me like hawks, but their fascination wasn’t devoid of respect. If Aristides even deigned to notice, he paid them no heed.

  And while I thought all these thoughts, distracted for the first time in hours, Megakles crept over the horizon in his little Swan.

  ‘Elaeus is full of ships,’ Megakles shouted, before he leapt over the side of Swan and swam ashore like the fisherman he was.

  Naked and dripping, he emerged like Poseidon himself. ‘There’re fifty warships in Elaeus bay, and another six or seven rowing guard. All Phoenicians. Nicolas saw two more hulls he thought that he knew – Samian Greeks.’

  ‘Could be worse,’ I said. Athens had as many ships. Aristides and I exchanged looks and then we were off, gathering our athletic oarsmen, pulling down the tower, and racing to sea – like pirates.

  From Thassos we ran downwind, under sail, to Samothrace, and we kept the shoreline out of sight to the north all the way. We saw fishing boats twice, but no more warships, and we made camp on the south side of Samothrace, with a tower and guards,
and doused fires as soon as the food was cooked.

  And in the dawn – a cold, grey dawn with rain in it – we were off again, this time running under sail into the mouth of the Hellespont. If the Medes saw us – well, they saw us. You cannot hide in a body of water six miles wide.

  It was late afternoon by the time we were near Troy. And now, despite our efforts at stealth, it was impossible to hide our presence. We had fishing boats all around us from the towns on the Bosporus, and we had a dozen military triremes – Ionian Greeks – patrolling the waters in the difficult, choppy sea just south of Troy.

  I watched the ships as we ran in, looking for a sign that one of them was Archilogos, once my master, then my friend, and now my sworn enemy. It was hard to define how we all knew that these were Greek ships and not Phoenicians or Carthaginians or Aegyptians, but Sekla knew, I knew, and Aristides knew, and we ran down on them with all our rowers at their stations and all of our marines in harness.

  They paid us no heed at all, so with a flash of oars, we turned on the opposite tack and sailed north into the main channel. I can only assume that they thought we were part of the Persian fleet. Why would they not?

  Who expected Athenian ships in these waters? Cimon and Miltiades had been driven from here six years before.

  We ran north, but again, we already knew what we would find.

  The reality, however, was far more chilling even than what we had seen off Mount Athos.

  First, the narrow Hellespont was choked with shipping. I stopped counting at a hundred boats – warships, merchant ships, fishermen. Access to the Euxine makes this one of the busiest pieces of water under the sun – I had lived and sailed here for years – but this was extreme.

  And fifty stades north of Troy, we came in sight of the greatest concentration of shipping I had seen since we fled from the Persian fleet in the disaster at Lades.

  I turned to Leukas, at the helm, and made a turning motion with my hand.

  ‘Ready about!’ Leukas screamed. Marines on the top deck threw themselves flat so as not to go over the side – neither triremes nor trimiolas have railings on most of the deck – and the deck crew ran about like ants in a disturbed nest trying to get the mainsail down.

  The port-side rowers reversed their cushions, and Hector signalled frantically to Harpagos, the next ship aft of us.

  There were at least two hundred warships at Abydos on the Asian side. I didn’t wait to learn more.

  Xerxes was coming.

  Two days later, we were sitting in the palace in Mythymna, on Lesvos. My hands had stopped shaking, but the terror was real. We had seen three hundred warships. Off Mount Athos, it had been possible to see an Athenian fleet stopping the Great King’s fleet, but with three hundred ships already at sea, and they only the harbingers . . .

  ‘It doesn’t matter whether he’s going to build bridges or simply ferry his army a taxeis at a time,’ I insisted to Aristides. The Athenians were a talkative lot, and they were debating what the great fleet meant, and whether Xerxes was really bold enough to try and bridge the Hellespont.

  Bulis fingered his beard. ‘I would like the kings to know of this,’ he said.

  So we agreed to send Moire home in Storm Cutter with a cargo of Lesbian wine and oil and some Chian wine and mastic. He was ordered to touch at Athens and speak only to Cimon, and then go on to Sparta. Bulis wrote him a letter on papyrus.

  Aristides was shaken. ‘Is there any point in going to Susa, if the Great King has set his mind on war?’ he asked. ‘I do not want to be cooling my heels at the Great King’s court while his troops lay siege to my city.’

  The Spartans felt the same way, but the lords of Mythymna had some useful knowledge. Lesvos was Persian – it had been conquered and treated harshly. Mythymna had no Persian garrison because Mytilini had resisted so long and the Persians were spread thin in Ionia, and we were welcomed there. I had friends all over Lesvos, and the son of Epaphroditos, Axiochus, came from Mytilini in a fishing boat when he heard I was there.

  They gave us all the news they had. And what they knew was a little reassuring. Their ships had been summoned for the next season. They were to attack Athens in the next spring.

  We rested our rowers for another day and Sekla sold most of our cargo on the beach – not the luxury goods, but all the heavy stuff. We made a good profit, which was mostly consumed by the oarsmen.

  We ran down to Chios, and Harpagos saw his cousin, as did I. The Persians had been even harsher on Chios than on Lesvos, and we had to be very careful. Most of the Chians I knew were dead, but when we asked men, they admitted they’d been summoned for service in the next spring. Harpagos got us a copy of the letter from the satrap.

  Let me add that none of this was meant to be secret. But some news travelled quickly, and other news hardly travelled at all. It is one thing to hear a rumour of war, and another thing to see the satrap’s letter. Signed by Artapherenes.

  I will say a little of Harpagos’s cousin. I had offered to take her to Plataea, once. She and I had been lovers – not for long, and mostly because of the death of her older brother, which hit her hard. She had been a wonderful, cheerful, lawless girl – a fisherman’s daughter, and a fine young kore. Now she was a silent, bitter woman, aged before her time, with nothing to say but curses.

  Friends, I have said before that the Persians are men like us, and in many ways more honourable. But I have to also say – in her eyes, I saw pain and humiliation, and the future of Greece, if Persia ruled.

  We were very wary, south of Chios. Once, we Greeks had owned these waters. Now, all of them belonged to Persia.

  Tarsus is one of the oldest cities in the world. They worship the horned and winged lion, Sandon, there, and it is a very rich province of the Persian empire.

  I had never had reason to touch at Tarsus before, and our squadron was careful on approach, all of the other ships hanging well off the port while I took Lydia in with all my benches manned. But as soon as the somewhat withered olive wreaths were visible, a pilot boat came out of the harbour and on board was a senior officer of Hydarnes’ household – Hydarnes was the Satrap of Tarsus and the surrounding region, and one of Xerxes’ favourites according to rumour. From my Persian friends, I knew he came from one of the oldest families and that his father had helped put Darius on the throne.

  His steward bowed low on my command deck. ‘My lord, I am commanded by him whose servant I am to present you with these safe conducts, issued by the Great King under his imperial seal. And with this writ commanding that you and your servants be allowed to pass down the Royal Road and to be served at the post houses. And I also offer you this letter from the satrap Artapherenes, who has further sent you an escort of his noble cavalry to take you all the way to Susa.’

  Hector stepped forward and took all the scrolls and tablets.

  The steward bowed deeply once again.

  I returned his bow, in the Persian way. When you bow to a man’s servant, you are bowing to him – the Persians only throw themselves on their faces for the Great King in person, but they salute a senior servant almost as if he were the man or woman themselves.

  ‘I thank you for your prompt service. May I add that I have a cargo?’

  The steward, a Babylonian by his olive-skinned good looks, smiled. I gathered he’d dealt with Greeks before. From his own belt he pulled a very small scroll. ‘My master has decreed that your cargoes will be passed uninspected and untaxed, as part of an embassy.’ He handed me the scroll. ‘There is a berth for your ship.’

  ‘I have five ships,’ I said, as much to see whether I could puncture his smooth delivery as because I was afraid we’d swamp Hydarnes’ hospitality.

  ‘So many?’ the steward asked. He looked out to sea.

  ‘The Ionian sea is full of pirates,’ I said. I tried not to smile.

  He was a young, fit man, despite his odd trousers and perfumed beard, and he wore a sword. And he met my gaze without hesitation, and smiled.

  ‘That’
s what I hear,’ he said, looking pointedly at my rowers.

  I liked him.

  Ashore, on the open ground, paved in marble, that ran down to the military piers of the harbour, stood an escort of twenty armoured men. They wore tall, conical helmets that tapered to points, and armour of bronze scales. The officer had blue enamelled scales of Aegyptian work in alternating rows, and a magnificent beard, and he slid from his horse and embraced me. In truth, it had been less than a year since I had seen Cyrus – but we met like long-lost brothers, or at least cousins.

  ‘Let me look at you,’ he said. ‘You look like a king, or a prince.’

  I had hoped that Artapherenes would send me an escort. Persians measure power in many ways but most of them have to do with favour – with the power of your relationships. Artapherenes, by loaning me his own household cavalry, was putting me ‘under his shield’, as we say in Greece. I hadn’t expected Cyrus in person, but I had hoped for him. He would help me avoid foolish pitfalls on my way to Susa, and deeper and subtler ones once I made it into the Great King’s presence. I raised my hands and prayed to Zeus and Hermes right there in the seaside agora, and then I began to introduce my own friends.

  Bulis was as closed as a locked trunk. I had learned enough of the man to know that he was merely being careful, dignified, giving nothing away that an enemy might make use of. Sparthius was open, effusive and talkative, and he exchanged hand clasps with Cyrus.

  ‘My first real Persian!’ he said. ‘He is your friend?’ Sparthius asked me.

  ‘Friend and guest-friend,’ I said in Greek, and then translated into Persian.

  Aristides was almost as cautious as Bulis, but he had better manners, and he was not unwilling to bow as the Persians do, although neither of the Spartans would bend even by an inch. Sallis, the steward, was introduced, and provided each of us with an interpreter. Every one of them was an Ionian Greek slave.