Long War 04 - The Great King

by Cameron, Christian

  As they fled from us, they still outnumbered us about four to one.

  But they were not cowards. Many of them were skilled sailors, fine marines, and we’d humiliated them without sinking their ships. We were not done.

  But we won. And winning is a tonic, in war. We had their measure. Our tactics were good, and though the navarchs all knew that the surprise explosion out of the wheel wouldn’t work again, we nonetheless knew we could handle them. In fact, we were not the worse sailors, the worse oarsmen. Victory proved we were better – or made us better.

  I never doubted. Oh, I was terrified, fearful, apprehensive – but I’d sunk and taken enough Phoenicians and Aegyptians and Carians over the years to know that Greeks can handle an oar as well as any man.

  We went back to the beaches, and Eurybiades proved he was a better man than Miltiades. He gathered all the trierarchs – two hundred and seventy-one, as we had not lost a ship – and got silence despite our restive joy. He crowned Lycomedes for being the first to score a kill, and then he hopped up on the rostrum I’d had built.

  ‘Listen, you fools!’ he said. That got our attention.

  ‘They will be back tomorrow, determined to avenge the humiliation of today. They still have a squadron behind us – as big as our own. The last thing I need – that Greece needs – is for you to celebrate victory. By this time tomorrow, a third of you may be dead.’ He looked around. We stood in the torchlight, and we knew he spoke the truth.

  ‘A cup of wine per man – a libation for Poseidon and all the gods – and then to your cloaks. That is my command.’

  We obeyed the way boys obey a schoolmaster. Even Themistocles.

  I confess I had several cups of wine. Every time I saw Brasidas out of the corner of my eye, I had to pound him on the back – I hugged Sekla after the action, and he blushed.

  Giannis’s fine light trireme had burst its seams, so we replaced it with one of the heavy captures – the blue Carian. So men had to stay up caulking and making her all shipshape.

  But when Orestes rose, I went to sleep. I noted as I wedged myself between Hipponax and Hector that Hipponax did not have a fever, his leg wasn’t hot, and the east wind was steady.

  Morning was leaden grey, and the east wind was steady with fitful gusts that cracked the awning like whips and shot whitecaps over the sea to the north.

  Every Plataean groaned. Wounds hurt, and abrasions were raw, and some men had two days of terror to overcome.

  I stood in the wind on the headland during the morning sacrifices of the priests and priestesses, and made my decision with the help of the Huntress, and then I groaned my way down the rocks to the beach, gathered my crew, and took Lydia to sea.

  My oarsmen didn’t even groan. That took too much energy.

  Forty stades across the strait to Aphetae. I put a small boat up my mainmast with two men in it, but they took too much of the gusting wind, swayed like a tower about to fall and threw the ship off course, so I brought them down. I had all the sails laid to the guards on the hemiola deck, ready to run up the masts.

  I tried the boat sail, and it eased the rowing. The gusts could head her, but the main force of the wind came broadside. Triremes do not sail well at the best of times, and we were making so much leeway that we might have ended in Thermopylae, but every so often I’d take in the sails and row.

  The Great King’s fleet was on the beach. I saw them from six stades out, and not a ship was stirring.

  I ran all the way down the beach, east to west, across almost thirty stades of beached ships, and no one offered me a fight.

  I remember that, as we passed the headland at Aphetae itself, Brasidas whistled. The Spartan was smiling.

  I was smiling too.

  We ran a little too far west, because the wind pushed us that way – so my oarsmen, now awake enough to grumble, had to start rowing us back up the channel to Artemesium. I was tempted – sorely tempted – to run down to Thermopylae and see the king, but the Persian camp was under my lee and the wind was strong, and if it kept up for a day, I could be cut off from the fleet. I was like Cimon a week before – I didn’t think the fleet could spare me, and besides

  . . . I didn’t want to miss the greatest victory since Troy.

  From the stern, as we turned, took down our sails and started to row, I could see the fires of the Great King’s army – the little student of Heraklitus in my head started trying to calculate the firewood I was seeing burned, because the campfires were like cabbages in a farmer’s field, a big field that runs off as far as the eye can see.

  As I looked under my hand, I caught a glimpse of sails to the south in the main channel, just exactly between Euboea and the mainland. I was rowing east into the wind, and they were sailing north on a broad reach, so that for the next whole leg, they were gaining on me as fast as a big boy catches a little one.

  The Persian squadron.

  But a number of factors were against it being the enemy. First, there were not two hundred ships, and Brasidas, of all men, is not prone to exaggerate. Second, I didn’t think they could have run all the way down Euboea, weathered the great point there, and come up the main channel without any of our scouts seeing them – without the Ionian packet boat at Thermopylae giving us warning.

  It was young Pericles – who had now become a member of our crew – who made the call.

  ‘Those are Athenian ships,’ he said.

  Now, I’ve mentioned before that Aegina and Athens both left ships in home waters. Ostensibly, this was to cover Attica if the Persians sent a Phoenician squadron out into the Great Blue and straight in on the coast – I, for one, feared landing at Marathon or Brauron more than anyone. But the sad truth is that neither state trusted the other, and both left heavy squadrons to watch the other’s heavy squadron.

  Something had changed, then. When we were within a dozen stades, Pericles was sure that the nearest ship belonged to his family. I thought I saw public ships like the ones Themistocles had built – smaller and lighter that anything in the Persian fleet.

  I was the first man off my Lydia. Not a ship had moved off the opposite shore.

  Cimon’s spot on the beach was empty, as were those of half a dozen other enterprising captains, and when I went up the beach, Eurybiades met me hand on hip.

  ‘Next time you wish to scout, ask permission.’

  From many other men, that would have earned sharp words or even a blow. But Eurybiades was not one of them, and I was rueful.

  ‘Of course, I want your news,’ he said.

  There were cries from the main beach.

  I raised my hand. ‘Ignore them,’ I said. ‘It’s the Athenian reserve squadron. I’m . . . almost sure.’

  Eurybiades listened to my explanation and shook his head. ‘I will not wager Greece on the word of a fifteen-year-old Athenian boy,’ he said, and the whole weary fleet was ordered to sea – into the teeth of the rising wind.

  We were better men in every way than we had been four weeks before off the beach of Marathon. And Eurybiades was absolutely correct. If we were seeing the two hundred Persian ships of their flanking force, it was our best hope to crush them before they made camp behind us – or even reunited with the main fleet at Aphetae.

  But of course, they were Athenians and Aeginians. That night, they explained how the storm – a storm we’d scarcely felt – had savaged the Persian flanking manoeuvre and blown the Athenian and Aeginian squadrons ashore by Marathon and the north, all intermingled – and how, when the Persian wreckage began to come ashore, the Aeginian commander had suggested that they run up the channel together.

  ‘They cheered us off Thermopylae!’ they said.

  Before we got to hear all their news, we had another stroke of luck – or the gods’ will – in that a dozen Cilician triremes and another dozen smaller ships – all that was left of the rearguard of the flanking fleet – rounded the coast of Euboea and ran towards Artemesium – the same error again, mistaking the landings. Their rowers were exhausted
.

  They didn’t put up much of a fight.

  The Plataeans let the Corinthians do it all. We watched, nearly asleep on our oars. I was rowing, because I was not overtly popular just then, having had my Lydia at sea all day – For nothing and nothing, as a disgruntled oarsman said from two benches behind me.

  But when we landed that night and had the trierarchs’ assembly, we had more than three hundred trierarchs.

  Themistocles was elated. ‘We have more ships by a fifth of our total,’ he said, ‘and they have fewer by a fifth of theirs.’

  It was a pretty piece of sophistry, and we all laughed.

  When it was my turn to speak, I said, ‘I am happiest that the enemy felt they couldn’t come off their beaches today.’

  Many of the old salts nodded.

  In a fight, when you have the upper hand, you are ruthless, lest the other man discover you are not so very tough.

  ‘I think we must attack again tomorrow,’ I said, and Themistocles nodded.

  Eurybiades stroked his beard.

  ‘How goes it with the army?’ Cimon asked.

  ‘There have been more than twenty attacks on the pass. Each contingent goes forward and fights the Medes by turns. No attack has come to the wall yet,’ Eurybiades said, and men cheered. But he held his hand up. ‘Leonidas is beginning to lose men. He warns me,’ he looked up from a tablet, ‘that if the main army does not come in ten days, he will have to retire.’

  Themistocles stepped forward to speak, and Eurybiades held up his hand again. ‘The king also reports that Xerxes was openly enraged by the defeat of his fleet, and warns us to expect the most desperate measures. The barbarians execute leaders who fail.’

  He turned and nodded to the Athenian, who stepped eagerly on to the rostrum. ‘Brothers!’ he said, a little too brightly and a little too eagerly. We were not a crowd of out-of-work labourers. We were tired men.

  ‘Brothers!’ he said again, looking for more effect. ‘If we can win again – tomorrow – as we won yesterday . . .’ He grinned. ‘. . . the Ionians will change sides. I promise it. And then,’ he was grinning like a boy, ‘perhaps we can convince the Great King to retreat without the main army ever reaching King Leonidas!’

  A few men cheered, but we were, as I say, weary trierarchs, and I think we all knew what it would take to fight again – a fourth straight day for my oarsmen, at any rate.

  I walked down the beach to pray to Herakles and Poseidon, and I threw wine and a fine cup into the sea, and I thought of my son with Archilogos – dead in the storm? Dead in the fighting? Alive, and waiting for the morning?

  Where had I acquired all these entanglements?

  Aristides came up with me, and we walked the shingle in silence.

  I thought of Briseis. I prayed again, this time to Aphrodite.

  ‘Tomorrow,’ Aristides said.

  I agreed.

  The swell was down when I awoke, far too early. My whole body hurt – my shoulder burned, and my hand was infected. It throbbed, and my arm was hot, and I could not get back to sleep.

  I opened the bandage, found the red spot, and picked at it with my eating knife until I drained it, and then poured wine on it until the pain was unbearable. And then, again. And then put it in the salt water until the pain was, again, unbearable.

  It was to be a fine day.

  We sacrificed, and the sacrifices were all confused – some excellent omens and some poor and some merely acceptable. One black ram – a royal animal, to the Spartans – made Eurybiades cringe. When the sun was a third of the way up the sky, the sacrifices grew better, and we were ordered to sea. Eurybiades had given simple orders. We put our rigging aboard the ships so that we didn’t have to protect the camp, and then we set sail, offering battle.

  Not an oar touched the water. We used our sails to reach across the channel.

  And the Persian fleet began to come off the beach. It was not like the first day. They came off and formed their squadrons neatly, even as we manouevred under sail in sloppy, lubberly confusion. Again, this is what Themistocles had designed and Eurybiades ordered.

  We used the sails to preserve our rowers. And to slip east, deeper into the channel.

  And they followed us.

  Where the channel narrows suddenly to twenty-five stades wide, we turned and formed line of battle. We formed in a great crescent with the centre advanced – the Corinthians and other Peloponnesians – and the flanks refused.

  The Great King’s fleet came out and formed in a great crescent facing us, and they were very great. Even with two full lines of fighting ships, they had reserve squadrons at the tips and behind the centre.

  They still had us, two ships to one.

  The biggest difference was that while we were still as fearful as ever men are when they face death – still, we were confident. When Eurybiades signalled for us to row backwards, we did. Our centre stretched away first, and gaps opened. But we righted ourselves, and our whole fleet coasted back, and back, into the narrowing channel, forcing the overweighted ends of the enemy crescent to compact on the centre.

  I had Phoenicians opposite me – the right of their line. Lucky Plataea, we always face the very best the enemy has to offer. The flanking squadron was second-rate ships – some Lydians and some Carians – and they began to foul the Phoenicians. The coast of Thessaly was getting closer and closer, and it was not beached, but steep, rocky and still dangerous, like an animal gnashing its teeth from the remnants of the swell.

  The Carians were good seamen, but the Lydians were not, and they flinched away from the surf and fouled the line.

  I could no longer see the other end of our line in the haze. The sun was almost directly overhead, and I was hot, very tired and a little fevered.

  But I knew what was coming next, and with the calm acceptance of the fatalist – not my usual role – I could see a certain ship.

  I turned to Brasidas and Hermogenes. ‘See the dirty red and white ship?’ I said.

  Pericles, my acting hypaspist, was laying my armour out on the deck. I had a new bandage on my hand and I felt light headed and prickly, but so did every man on the deck.

  You can only face the fire so many days in a row, friends.

  Pericles got the thorakes around my body and Brasidas closed it with pins.

  ‘When I give the word, go for that ship,’ I said.

  ‘So we’re going to attack,’ Hermogenes said.

  I nodded.

  He sighed. ‘I really want to be old,’ he said. ‘I have a good life and a good place. But . . .’ he smiled so sweetly ‘. . . I owe it to you. So if this is the price . . .’ he shrugged ‘. . . red and white it is.’

  I went around the deck, informing men and shaking hands.

  Brasidas turned and waved. ‘Signal!’ he called.

  I’d really like to leave this tale here.

  But the gods love tragedy, and we’ll play this one to the end.

  I saw the three flashes.

  So, of course, did the enemy.

  It was our last ruse. It didn’t wreck any ships, but it bought us another hour, as we backed water again, and the Great King’s fleet suddenly closed up on the centre to repel our attack. We backed water. They collided and lost spacing – six hundred hulls scattered over forty stades of water. Ships lost oars and fell away behind.

  We fed our oarsmen water and some honeyed sesame seeds and garlic sausage.

  Again, Eurybiades’ ship flashed once.

  ‘Signal!’ Brasidas called.

  This time, I pulled down my cheek pieces.

  This time, men loosed their swords in scabbards and checked their spearheads one more time. Oarsmen spat on their hands.

  Aft of me, an old salt looked at the man on the cushion on the other side and winked.

  They both grinned.

  Men shook hands.

  ‘Ready!’ I called. I looked at Hermogenes.

  ‘Red and white,’ he said. ‘I have him.’

  Eurybiades fl
ashed his bronze aspis three times.

  We attacked. Let the world remember that when we were outnumbered two to one, we attacked. We waited until the sun was in the west – in their eyes. We tired their rowers all day.

  And then we turned like the desperate dogs we were, and went for their throats.

  Who knows whether Dagon knew me. He should have known Lydia, but it is possible that my fixation on him was not returned.

  Bah – I doubt it.

  Lydia had the best, fittest rowers, and we leaped ahead of our line and went for the enemy line like an arrow from a string. Nor was the red and white trireme directly opposite us, but a little closer to the enemy centre, so that we ran a little south of east as we started our ramming attack.

  You wouldn’t think we could have surprised them again. But we’d been retreating for three hours, and we hadn’t offered any fight, and then, suddenly . . .

  The Phoenicians were up to it. Their ships went to ramming speed so fast that their oars beat a froth as if the sea were boiling. And their big ships were fast.

  ‘Show ram,’ I said quietly to Hermogenes. ‘But go for the oar rake, not the ram. We won’t board. We’ll sheer off and go through.’

  Dagon must have expected me to go for him. To go for the epic fight, the head-to-head ram, the boarding action.

  He never had good oarsmen, though, because he ruined his slaves. And I wanted that to tell against him. This was not my revenge. This was the revenge of the gods.

  A hundred paces out, I saw him and my body moved like a lute string. I knew him and, at some level, my body feared him. No man had ever hurt me so. No man had ever made me feel so weak.

  But I had planned this moment for a month, and I would not be tempted.

  Fifty paces from his ship, Hermogenes suddenly veered hard to the right, and our oarsmen pivoted us brilliantly – right, left, out of the other ship’s line completely like a good swordsman. We lost a great deal of speed, but we weren’t ramming his ship.

  We rammed her oars, and of course his poor slaves and down-trodden thugs couldn’t get their sticks in the ports in time. We went by in an orgy of arrow shafts.