Long War 04 - The Great King

by Cameron, Christian

  He leaned forward on the kitchen table and held his bronze cup between his hands. ‘Would you take your son?’ he asked. ‘He’s going to kill someone. He’s set on being a warrior, and fishermen’s sons are not warriors on Crete. He fights all the time – with the boys from the warrior societies. He wins, too.’ Troas grinned in pleasure. Then shook his head.

  ‘You do not have the best record around here,’ Gaiana put in. ‘Half the island died at Lades!’

  I shrugged. At thirty, I might have launched into some hot-blooded defence of my actions, and Miltiades and the whole Ionian Revolt – a diatribe against the treasons of Samos. But instead I shrugged and smiled at her.

  And she smiled back.

  ‘Stop looking at me like that,’ she said.

  At twenty, I’d have assumed she meant just that, but there and then, I knew she meant the opposite.

  ‘Will you take him?’ Troas asked.

  ‘Yes,’ I said. I felt good saying it. ‘Bless you for raising my son. I’ll take him to sea and try to keep him alive.’ I looked at Troas. ‘You know there is no guarantee.’

  Troas raised his chin. ‘I lost her husband,’ he said gruffly.

  ‘Pater . . .’ she began, and then paused.

  I think we talked more, but eventually old Troas glared at his daughter. ‘Shall I leave you two lovebirds alone?’ he asked testily.

  ‘Yes,’ she said, defiant.

  And he did.

  Much later, she lay beside me. The gods were smiling – rain was falling on the roof.

  ‘I’m old and fat,’ she said.

  ‘No,’ I said. I spent some time proving my point.

  She laughed and laughed and tickled me. ‘Damn you for coming back,’ she said. ‘I loved my husband. But I’m sick of being in a bed alone.’

  And later still, she said, ‘Keep him alive. I have two other boys. They’ll make good fishermen. But Hipponax is . . . something else. When he’s not a violent fool, he’s . . . like a poet.’

  Like a poet? I liked the sound of that.

  The world is a strange and wonderful place, and one of the ways in which it is strange is this – few women in my life have stirred me as quickly or as deeply as Arwia of Babylon, with her scents and her earthy brilliance and her remarkable body. But while she was an adventure – and a sensual pleasure – Gaiana was . . . better. Truer. Better for my soul, anyway.

  We laughed a great deal. We talked about . . . nothing – but we talked and talked, and then she complained again about her fat, as she called it.

  ‘The answer to weight,’ I said, ‘is exercise.’

  She hit me quite hard.

  Hipponax was a trained sailor, and a remarkably sullen and difficult boy. I’ve known dozens, if not hundreds, of young men, and they have much in common – they do not think, they lie when the truth would have done as well, they think failure is a crime, they think they are the gift of the gods to war, the sea and all of womankind – I’m just getting started, and these views are based mostly on knowing myself.

  But even by that standard, Hipponax was difficult. It was as if he was constantly wrestling with some inner daemon, and losing. He said the most astounding things – out loud. He told Demetrios that he – Hipponax – was the best helmsman on the ship.

  He came to me our second day at sea and said that he ‘wasn’t going to take any more crap’ from my captain of marines. Siberios was probably not the best warrior on the waves – he was a Corinthian sell-sword I’d found on the beach in Aegypt – but he was a good man in a fight, he had scars to prove it, and he could discipline men.

  ‘He’s riding me. Because he knows I’m a better man. I can take him,’ Hipponax said.

  I looked at him for a moment. ‘Are you here on the command deck as my son, or as a marine on my ship?’

  He shrugged. ‘Whatever,’ he said.

  ‘As my son, I’d suggest you learn some humility. As a marine – get the fuck off my deck before I have you bound to an oar, and never approach me again with such whiney crap. Do I make myself clear?’ I did think a moment before I shot that out.

  He turned red. ‘Fuck you,’ he said. ‘I don’t have to take your crap either.’

  Demetrios saved me a lot of trouble by knocking him flat – from the side. I think it was better that Demetrios did it.

  He bounded to his feet, ready to fight. He really was incredible – fast, brave, strong.

  Overweight Demetrios dropped him a second time, and he didn’t move.

  ‘I should apologise,’ Demetrios said.

  ‘Don’t bother,’ I said.

  But I was wise enough to send Hector to look after him. Hector got him under the awning and kept him cool, and was waiting with water.

  I can guess some of the things they said to each other – but they became friends. Hector was younger, but as my right hand, he knew me better. Hipponax craved my good opinion but had all the wrong notions of how to achieve it.

  They became . . . inseparable. We had a day in port on a tiny island west of Lesvos, and they did something that must have been insanely reckless and stupid, because I still haven’t been told.

  At any rate, Hipponax became manageable, although, as you will hear, this did not apply to combat.

  A day west of Thasos, with all my rowers well rested and a deck full of marines, a pair of pirates came out of the morning haze and were foolish enough to try us – two ships to two, in the open ocean.

  I won’t bother with the fight. I’ll only say that I would have loved to be aboard their lead ship when we turned and attacked them.

  See? I still laugh.

  They were brutal animals with a dozen women chained to their midships deck and the corpse of a man rotting against a boat sail mast. Neither ship had any recognisable identity – they weren’t Samian aristocrats making a little money, or Phoenicians or Carthaginians. These were scum. I’ll only relate one incident. I was standing in the bows, waiting to climb on to the rail of the marines’ box and leap on to the enemy deck. My marines were all formed behind me, and we were silent with the tension. That heart-grabbing tension that never changes. Every fight.

  We bore down, with Demetrios’s powerful hand on the tiller, and we made the little leap to the side that Demetrios always makes about fifty feet out from a strike – and my fool son pushed past me and clambered on to the rail.

  Even as we struck, he leapt. A full twenty heartbeats before I would have gone – and no one was ready to support him.

  No one but Hector.

  Hector ran along the side rail – you try that in bronze – and leaped.

  It was many, many years since I had been the third man on to an enemy deck.

  We killed every free man. The slaves caught the last of their marines – he tried to hide among them, and they killed him. I won’t describe it, but I’m going to guess he had it coming.

  The whole incident reminded me of Dagon. As I have said before, I’m sure you’d like me to have sailed the seas looking for him and for revenge, but by Poseidon and by Herakles, I had better things to do with my time.

  But seeing the ruins of the women chained to the deck did something in my chest. I dreamed of Dagon that night, and the next night, and the next. The gods were telling me something.

  We were close to Delos. We had a good cargo and time. I put the helm down and took the women we’d saved – if indeed they were saved – to the sanctuary of Delos. I found Dion of Delos, who had helped me with dreams before.

  After some time, I decided, with the help of the worthy priest, that I had been commanded to avenge the women – the women who leaped into Poseidon’s arms. That’s what the priest of Apollo concluded, and I think he had the right of it.

  It is one thing to pursue a personal revenge. It is another – I hope – to be told by the Sea God to right a wrong.

  But the fight made the bond between the boys as strong as Chalcidian steel. And it confirmed my notion that my ships, despite their lading with luxury goods, were fast
enough to run. So I bore away north on a favourable wind for a little spying along the Thracian coast. West of the Dardanelles, it is flat – the delta of the Evros river is rich in birds and fish and mosquitoes. We beached, built hasty stockades to protect our ships against the locals, and stood guard all night, but some of the Thracians traded with us, and we had a good look into the Great King’s preparations.

  Zeus and Poseidon sent the storm that wrecked the bridges, but the Great King was equal to the challenge. I got close enough to see one span of ships already rebuilt, and another laid out along the Asian coast.

  Men say that Xerxes ordered the waters beaten with whips. I think that sounds unlikely, but he was a man not fully in control of his passions, and I suppose he might have given way to a fit of rage.

  I also counted almost three hundred and fifty military ships.

  I touched at Athens to sell my cargoes and pick up hides and salt for Corinth, but I was in a hurry and all my friends were gone. We were late for the Council, and everyone was already there.

  Corinth is a fine city. The magnificent acropolis towers over the town itself, and it is a long climb to the temples, and the pottery workshops aren’t what they were in my father’s youth, but they have beautiful buildings and superb bronzesmiths. To say the least.

  As we beached, a runner came down to invite me to drink wine with Adamenteis. I would not have been suspicious, even though I disliked the man, but the runner would not meet my eye. The whole thing sounded odd, and I read the message tabled several times.

  ‘Please tell our lordly host that I will attend him after I report to Themistocles,’ I said.

  He cringed. ‘No! That is, lord, he needs to see you – immediately.’

  Never make a slave improvise.

  ‘Why?’ I shot out.

  The man’s eyes were everywhere. ‘I . . . lord, I don’t know. Perhaps about Persia?’ He still didn’t look at me, and I smelled a dead rat. Perhaps several dead rats.

  I turned to Hipponax. ‘Set this man ashore,’ I said.

  ‘No!’ he said, but he went quietly enough. I sent a runner to Themistocles, and sat tight.

  Before the sun set the width of a finger, a small army of magistrates and armed men came down to the beach.

  It was all about the ship – the wreck we found in Aegypt. A pair of Corinthians claimed her – and said that I had no doubt attacked her and taken her, as I was a notorious pirate.

  Adamenteis supported them. I suppose he’d intended to take me when I went to visit him.

  Let me explain that men in Greece do not recognise the laws of other cities, so no man of Plataea cares a fig for the laws of Corinth, least of all me. I told the two magistrates to go about their business or I’d have them thumped by my marines. I was informed that I could not land or sell my cargoes.

  This sort of thing happens. I sent Hipponax to Aristides and Hector to Gorgo and got my ships off the beach.

  That should have been enough. It should have worked. Adamanteis should have, at the very least, put the interests of the League ahead of his own and let the matter go, but he did not, and by that action revealed himself, at least to me. I still think he took a bribe from the Great King. I know that other men dispute this.

  But I say he was a traitor, and he was hosting the conference.

  I lost six days in Adamanteis’s pettifogging labyrinth of accusations. Among other things, it became apparent – to me – that he had known I had the ship before I landed. A priest on Delos, perhaps? But my innate sense of self-preservation said that something was not right, and that this was the long arm of Xerxes reaching across the waves for me.

  Neither Aristides nor Cimon would accept a word of it. They saw me as deluded, and while they worked tirelessly to rid me of the burden of accusations, they declined to accept that the Corinthian was an enemy.

  So I didn’t hear any of the opening orations, and I missed it when the whole delegation of Thebes – a delegation of oligarchs that excluded some of the cities’ aristocrats – spoke against resistance. I missed the King of Sparta – Leonidas – giving what Themistocles insisted was the best speech he’d ever heard.

  Instead, I took my ships along the isthmus, landed in the Peloponnesus at Hermione, and took a horse back with all my marines trailing away behind me in a cacophony of curses – most of them had never forked a horse before. I lost two more days riding through the Peloponnese – beautiful, but not for riding. We came down out of the mountains and I saw Corinth in the distance, and sent Hector ahead to see whether the way was clear.

  Themistocles had bought a Corinthian ally – Diotus, who had had business dealings with me and was the proxenos for little Plataea, and he and Myron had done the best they could – they’d wrapped the accusations in wool, as we like to say in Plataea. So when I arrived, I had to put up almost a third of my profits from the voyage east as a bond, and then I was allowed to go about my business – which was to attend the conference.

  One more detail to explain my frame of mind. I went to the great temple of Zeus to swear an oath to answer the charges against me, and there I saw Calisthenes – one of the mighty Alcmaeonidae of Athens. That was like a splash of icy water.

  He smiled at me. I know that smile – I’ve smiled it at other men. He wanted me to know that he was involved in the charges against me.

  I was concerned, to say the least.

  With all that hanging over my head, I was a poor delegate – a week late, and I hadn’t made a sacrifice. The conference was actually held in the precinct of the temple complex where they held the games – the Isthmian games, I mean. And even though I’d missed eight days of talk, they were still talking.

  The issue was not resistance. Greece had already chosen to resist. Thanks to the gods, men had used their heads and seen that we had to fight.

  The issue was command. All were agreed that Sparta should lead the allied army. Why not? The Spartiates were the closest things to professional soldiers that we had. Spartan kings had more experience of planning major campaigns than anyone else. There really wasn’t much argument – the only man I could possibly have considered to put up against Leonidas was Aristides, and he wanted the Spartans to command.

  So Leonidas would lead the field army.

  But the naval component was another story. And we all knew that the navy was going to be important. The largest navy belonged to Athens, which, in fifteen years, had gone from a fairly small navy to the largest in the Aegean and perhaps in the whole of the eastern Mediterranean – except Persia, of course. That summer, Athens could put more than a hundred hulls in the water, and Aegina could scarcely muster seventy, and Corinth about fifty. Only Syracusa on Sicily had more.

  And no one wanted Athens to have the command.

  In vain did Themistocles politic. And let me add – Gorgo and Leonidas were unshakeable in supporting him. Leonidas wanted Themistocles to be the navarchos.

  There were other candidates.

  Gelon of Syracusa was one. He offered one hundred and twenty ships to the cause if he could be the commander on land and sea.

  Adamanteis of Corinth was another, and he scarcely bothered to conceal his loathing of Athens – That upstart city, he said in a speech. It was an impious exaggeration – even in myth, Athens pre-dates Corinth, and in fact the evidence of your eyes will show you how long Athens has been a mighty citadel, but other men – our foes – agreed with him. Only a few decades before, Athens had been a minor city-state with a tyrant who could be bought and a small fleet and a small army. The new democracy had flooded her phalanx with new muscle and had made her rowers into citizens, and many of the oligarchs who ruled the cities of mainland Greece felt deeply threatened, no little bit by the growth of the very fleet that Athens swore to use for the common good.

  After a day of it, all I could think of was the captains’ conferences before Lades. We had supposedly all been on the same side, for the same purposes, and the Samians had betrayed us. Here, we weren’t done with the co
nference and some men – the Corinthians and the men of Argos – were open in saying that they would prefer to see Athens destroyed than to see an Athenian command the allied fleet.

  The problem – and it was a problem – was that there were not many compromise candidates. No one was going to accept an Aeginian in command. They had tried to Medise – that is, to support the Great King – at the time of Marathon, and they made no secret of their hatred for Athens. But they were the only other state with a navy large enough to train officers who could direct major sea operations.

  Except Corinth. And Adamanteis wanted that command very badly. He fought tooth and nail in the discussions to arrange that a stinging message was sent to Gelon.

  For myself, I could have served under Gelon. But the rumour was that the Great King was flinging Carthage at Syracusa to pin the great Syracusan fleet in place, and men worried that Gelon would sacrifice Greece to save Sicily, and of course they were right. I agreed with them – I knew that Artapherenes had gone to Carthage. But I thought that with one mighty fleet, we could probably control the whole of the sea.

  At any rate, no one listened to me. Gelon was sent an icy message of refusal, and went back to fighting Carthage.

  But Themistocles was no more willing to send the Athenian fleet to sea under a Corinthian than under an Aeginian. So the bickering continued, while the Persians built their second bridge and while their ships and lead elements of their armies moved into Thrace.

  I could see it falling apart before my very eyes. The whole alliance – so promising a month before – was going to break up over the issue of the fleet. Half the cities present had no fleets and couldn’t imagine what it was all about.

  About two weeks into the conference, I was sitting on the steps of the shrine of Herakles with two dozen men – really, the whole of the ‘Athenian’ faction. We were tired, and we sat drinking watered wine, our slaves and hypaspists gathered around us.

  We’d come out of the temple still debating the command. Two of the representatives from Megara had come out – we were trying to dissuade them from their pro-Corinthian stance.