I stood by Ka, pointing to Dagon. ‘Don’t kill him,’ I said.
His marines threw grapples, and my men cut them, and we were by, leaving a shambles and blood running over the red and the white, and then our speed picked up as my rowers put their backs into it. Nicolas was shouting, praising them, begging for more speed.
There was a Phrygian pentekonter under Dagon’s stern, and he tried to turn, and we went right over him – pressed his whole ship right under the waves. That’s why small ships cannot stand in the line of battle.
And just clear of the drowned Phrygian was a Lydian from the reserve squadron in a heavy trireme. He was too close to the first line to do anything to help.
I was with Ka. Hermogenes made the call, and we went ram to ram with the Lydian. He was moving at the pace a man might walk, and we, by then, were a little faster than a cantering horse, and our ram struck somewhere on his bronze.
The bow of the Lydian caved in like a broken nose in a fight, and suddenly we were deep in the enemy fleet and our ram was stuck.
‘Reverse your cushions!’ Nicolas screamed.
Already, our stern was starting to rise. The timbers groaned as the strain of a sinking galley fell on the backbone – the keel.
I thought of Vasileos, thousands of stades away, and all the love and work he’d lavished on this ship.
The first oars bit the water.
Dagon’s ship was turning, now. I could see him on the stern, pointing at us.
I could see my ship beginning to torque. I could see deck planks springing out as the immense force of the sinking ship came to bear on the bow and the stern rose another hand’s width from the water. The Lydian was sinking with all hands.
I spread my hands to the gods and roared, ‘Poseidon!’
The ram seemed to explode straight up out of the enemy galley. All the timbers in her cat-head gave at once, and the marine box on the Lydian flew into the air, and my beautiful Lydia righted herself, slapped the water and rocked like a child’s toy in a tub of water.
In a big battle, the trierarch has to make ten decisions every heartbeat. I looked aft, where Dagon was turning – my prey, but too far. To my right, towards the centre, a dozen triremes were turning towards me. To my immediate left, Sekla’s Machaira and the capture Huntress burst out of the Phrygian squadron’s rear. Even as I watched, a Lydian struck Huntress amidships and splintered oars, and Sekla put Machaira into the Lydian’s side – this in ten heartbeats.
I pointed with my spear at the enemy centre. ‘Starboard,’ I said.
Nicolas had the port side reverse benches so that we turned in ten paces, and as the turn started, the starboard-side rowers picked up their cushions and turned, so that, as we faced south into the enemy centre, all our rowers were again facing aft, and rowing forward – and the stroke never faltered.
I could tell you stories of the next hour, but they would be lies.
Twice, I was able to rest my rowers. Once, after we were boarded from three ships – Aegyptians, with their fine marines, and I was only saved when Harpagos slew the biggest ship and put his marines into the rear of the men on my deck.
We just lay on our oars or knelt on the deck in the blood of our enemies and breathed.
And the second time was later, when we saw Eurybiades oar bank to oar bank with a ship that appeared to be made of gold – one of the Ionian tyrants. The Spartan thought the man must be the navarch of navarchs and went for him. I led my son on to the enemy deck, boarding on their undefended side, and ran for the back of the enemy marine line.
Two strides from the enemy, my chosen prey turned.
I slipped in the entrails of a dead man, and before I could recover my balance, a dying Spartan, taking me for the enemy, grabbed at my ankle, and down I went.
Hipponax stood over me. He thrust, he cut, he jumped on his wounded leg and danced like a flute girl – and men died.
I got a spear in my crest that wrenched my neck, but I stumbled to my feet, and watched my son kill.
And then, when he made a mistake, I reached over his shoulder and put my spear in a man’s eyeholes, and put a hand on his shoulder, and Eurybiades came and smiled at us.
We were almost in the centre of the line.
That time, we rested, watching the battle and helping no one, for almost as long as the oration of a dull man.
In that time, I saw Dagon’s ship.
He’d moved rowers about, put oars in empty oarlocks, and he was creeping away. He was not alone – wounded ships on both sides were leaving the fight.
I had had ten minutes to watch. There were huge holes in the allied fleet.
But again, the Great King’s fleet had had the worst of it, and was retreating, and Eurybiades and Themistocles were on them – the Peloponnesians and the Athenians and the Aeginians found their second wind, and I limped down the length of my ship to where Hermogenes stood with an arrow in his bicep.
‘You have to take the oars,’ he said.
Brasidas got him free of the leather harness.
I was back to being a helmsman. My helmet burned my brow, my plume hurt my head every time the wind caught it, my armour weighed like the world on the shoulders of Atlas, my hips had developed a strange new pain and I had a wound somehow under my right greave, which was cutting a bloody groove in the top of my foot.
I was better off than many.
‘Friends!’ I roared. Perhaps I squeaked it, but it was loud in my ears. ‘The day is ours. Now – we can rest on our oars, or we can go and help the Athenians finish the Great King’s fleet.’
One of the old salts laughed. ‘Easy, mate – I’ll rest here.’
Other men laughed, too.
‘By Poseidon!’ I roared, with a little of my old battle lust. ‘Then help me get my revenge!’
The old man cackled and flexed his muscles, and in that moment he was like Poseidon himself – old and solid.
‘Revenge, is it?’ he said. He cracked his hands, spat on his palms, and took his oar.
Men around him shook themselves as if they were coming awake.
Men understand revenge. It is easier than patriotism or love or strategy or tactics or even the rough world of consequence.
And revenge is a universal language.
I left the oars to walk the deck. ‘Most of you know I was a slave,’ I said. ‘The man who made me a slave and tried to break my body lies yonder, and there is nothing between me and him but five stades of water.’
Maybe I should make more speeches.
I got between the steering oars and aimed us astern of Dagon’s ship.
And now I had the bit in my teeth.
We passed another Phoenician, wallowing with a bank of dead oarsmen. Easy pickings, and we passed her by. And a Carian full of men who had probably once been my allies – they could scarcely row, and we passed them hand over fist, because of revenge. My oarsmen were heroes, the very Argonauts themselves, and we swept east, the sun under our quarter. I had time to drink some water, to pour more over the wound under my greave, time to take my son’s greave strap – his wound had opened. Greave straps are padded rolls of leather you wear on your ankles – fashionable Athenian boys wear them to parties now.
I walked forward, feeling better. Like a man who had fought hand to hand every day for four days. I spared a thought for the allied army, who would be fighting the Persians again in rotation.
Well, we hadn’t lost. Again. Even as I turned my head, the Ionians in the centre gave in and bolted, and suddenly the Great King’s fleet was running for their beaches.
Only as we closed on Dagon did it strike me that we had won.
But I was not done.
Dagon’s ship ran.
We ate her lead. Three stades, then two, then one. Ka and his men were shooting into the wind, but Dagon had no archers at all.
A hundred paces from Dagon’s stern, I made them stop shooting. I turned to Brasidas.
‘This thing is mine,’ I said. ‘Do not touch him.’
He shrugged and looked pained. In truth, he was too great a man to understand why I needed to kill one opponent, much less one already beaten. But he nodded.
‘And if you fall?’ he asked.
‘See to my son,’ I said. ‘Oh, and kill the bastard. He has it coming.’
‘Why not let me kill him now, then?’ asked Ka.
Hector stood at my shoulder. He smiled.
Hipponax said, ‘I want to come,’ and we all said ‘no’ together, and then – then our marine box started to come alongside his helm station.
Ka leaned out and killed the helmsman. Just like that.
Dagon’s ship yawed, and we slammed into its side. I fell flat – not ready for the collision – and so did Brasidas.
‘Don’t kill any more oarsmen,’ I said. I got to my feet, put my right foot on our gunwale, and had a moment of sheer fear.
Of Dagon.
Of the leap.
Of old age, and being diminished.
And then I jumped.
Once, I had faced Dagon naked, and another time, with a bucket.
Now, I finally faced him on a steady deck, with a spear and an aspis.
Brasidas landed on the deck behind me, and Hector, and Siberios.
‘Ready, Dagon?’ I asked.
He was a big man, and his thighs were like a bull’s, and his arms were as big as my thighs. His spear was red, and he didn’t grunt when he threw it.
He was right behind it, his sword emerging from his scabbard . . .
I threw. He hadn’t expected it, and my throw caught him where the crest meets the helmet, and snapped his head back.
I drew, the underhand cut the Spartans had taught me – and I cut to the right, inside his shield, and scored on his naked arm inside his aspis – and I stepped to the left, pivoted, and slammed my aspis at him.
No matter how strong you are, you cannot block an aspis with a sword.
He put his head down, so my following cut – pivoting and stepping again, as Polymarchos taught – didn’t kill him, but went into his crest, and half of it fell to the deck, and he shouted and got a cut on my left thigh.
I pushed my right hand home. Herakles, he was strong. But my feet were planted and my footing was good, and my sword was against his helmet, pushing.
He rolled and cut at my feet from behind.
I slammed my aspis into his sword. He rolled from under the blow and got to his feet.
I dropped my aspis. He was bleeding then.
‘You!’ he said. ‘Come and take what I have for you.’
His mad eyes showed no defeat.
His right hand dropped the shards of his broken sword and I could see white where he tried to flex his left.
He attacked me, arms reaching for me despite what must have been blinding pain, and I did what I had wanted from the first. I stepped through his arms, locked his right with my left, the high lock of pankration, and he screamed as I broke his arm – I didn’t pause or hesitate, I had done this a hundred times in my sleep, and I pushed my left leg deep behind him and threw him over it – over my leg, over the rail, and into the three decks of slave oarsmen below.
He was alive when he left my hands.
They tore him apart. I would have, if I’d ever had a chance like that.
Then I fell to my knees.
Behind me, Brasidas snapped, ‘Boy! Take the helm!’
For a moment, like Miltiades after Marathon, I was out of my body, but Brasidas brought me back.
Many of my old shipmates have asked me whether I killed Dagon, and I am proud to say – no. I merely took him where he could die the way he deserved.
We lost eighty ships on the fourth day of Artemesium. We lost Gelon. We lost Paramanos – swarmed by Aegyptians when I was far away. Cimon lost a son and two cousins and every Plataean lost someone.
Athens lost forty ships.
Aegina lost twenty ships.
We stood on the beach with our captures and our wounded – Hermogenes, white from blood loss, and Sekla, who had an arrow though his foot and a cut across his head, and Giannis, who lost his left hand to a Phrygian axe that went through his aspis.
It was not a victory to celebrate.
Eurybiades gathered the fit trierarchs, and there were about a hundred, and that included a lot of men with bloody rags, like me.
Themistocles looked like a man going to a funeral.
I put a hand on his shoulder. ‘We did not lose,’ I said.
He turned, and the orator was crying.
Eurybiades stood alone. He was not crying, but his face was closed. He was elsewhere.
I thought perhaps they were in battle shock. So did Cimon. He put a hand on Themistocles’ shoulder as I had. ‘We are a trifle singed,’ he said. ‘But the Great King’s fleet will not come off their beaches tomorrow. Listen – Arimnestos and I can put to sea . . .’
I was going to glare at him, but then I saw Abronichus standing with Phrynicus, and both of them were weeping openly.
I assumed that meant Aeschylus was dead, or some other worthy man, and indeed, as I watched, another Athenian, Lycomedes, pulled his chlamys over his head to hide his tears.
Tired men weep easily.
Eurybiades shook himself like an old dog. ‘We must . . . retreat,’ he said.
Cimon was looking at Lycomedes, as flustered as I was. ‘Retreat? We won. We lost good men – great men – today, so that we would break them and we broke them! Now we must finish the job—’
‘Peace,’ Themistocles said. ‘Be silent, Cimon. We have no choice.’
‘No choice?’ Cimon asked.
Eurybiades sighed. ‘As dawn broke this morning, the Persians seized a pass above Thermopylae,’ he said, like a man reporting on a race at the Olympics he had once seen. ‘King Leonidas sent the allied army away. Then, with all the Thespians, he formed his phalanx.’
No one moved, or spoke, or groaned. The wind itself stopped.
‘The king died this morning. His body was lost twice, and eventually regained.’ He shook himself again. ‘About the time we engaged the enemy today, the last men died. Thermopylae has fallen.’
I can’t remember anything more of that hour except the desolation.
Leonidas was dead. The army was destroyed.
We had fought for four days, for nothing.
We had lost.
Epilogue
No – I’ll leave you there. You know what happens next. But it is always darkest before the dawn, and that night, with King Leonidas dead across the straits, his corpse defiled by King Xerxes in a fury of unmanly pettiness, every Greek thought the same.
But when next we meet, I’ll tell you more – of Salamis, and Plataea. Of how I met the Great King one more time.
Of what we did, we men of Greece.
But tonight, drink to Leonidas of Sparta, who died for Greece – aye, and Antigonus of Thespiae and all his men, who died with the Spartans. And all the men – Corinthians and Plataeans and Athenians and Aeginians and Spartans and Hermionians and Tegeans and every other man of Greece who fell into Poseidon’s waters off Artemesium, fighting for Hellas.
Here is to their shades!
Historical Afterword
As closely as possible, this novel follows the road of history. But history – especially Archaic Greek history – can be more like a track in the forest than a road with a kerb. I have attempted to make sense of Herodotus and his curiously modern tale of nation states, betrayal, terrorism and heroism. I have read most of the secondary sources, and I have found most of them wanting.
But when I come to tell the story of Artemesium and Thermopylae – one virtually unknown to modern readers, and the other perhaps the most famous military event in Classical history – I find that I am locked in a curious dance with supposition, myth, and popular imagination. This book is, I hope, about cultures; about what it meant to be Greek, but also about the differences that divided Greeks. It has my take on Sparta, and I offer no apology for my less than ideali
zed view of that state. Stripped of propaganda, Sparta was not the epitome of military perfection that modern fascists and poor Thucydides imagined. Nor was Athens effeminate or over-full of philosophy, especially in the Persian Wars. I hope that I have done justice to Sparta and her true greatness, and to Leonidas and Gorgo.
Perhaps most complicated of all, I wanted to give the reader an idea of what Persia was like, and what their empire had that was good. It is too easy to play the ‘Boy’s Own’ genre trick of demonizing one race or nation to create orc-like opponents for the hero, but the world has never worked like that; no nation is actually braver or better, unless they work endlessly to accomplish such a thing, and if any nation of the period could be said to have a superb professional army, it was not Sparta, it was Persia.
Most of the bones of my story are taken, as usual, from Herodotus, and from him I hope I have made a convincing set of interwoven plots. I confess that I have no idea if the Greeks used pan-hellenic celebrations like the Olympics as meeting points to debate the coming war, but I’ve always loved the Olympic Games, ancient and modern, and while watching the games in London, I decided that my book would open with a section on the games at Olympia. I tried to be accurate, but I find that there is as much to know about the ancient Olympics – as and much controversy! – as about trireme tactics, and I doubt I will have pleased every critic.
I’d also like to say a bit on the role of women in the Olympics and indeed in every walk of life in the ancient world. I have tried to use Jocasta and Gorgo to illuminate some very deep divides in Spartan and Athenian attitudes to women. Women were not ‘equal’ to men in any ancient society and to make them so would be to write anachronism. Yet some women achieved very real power, and current research (Portrait of a Priestess by Joan Breton Connelly is especially good) suggests that women were not as thoroughly segregated from public and private life as we were led to imagine – by prudish and misogynistic Victorian historians. I’ll add to that a short rant on my favourite subject as an historian – that there is no ‘period’ called ‘Ancient Greece.’ Ancient Greek culture was at least as malleable and fast-moving as modern culture. In every way from cultural artefacts like military technology to fashion, women’s empowerment, and views of homosexuality, the Greek world changed. I mention this because even if we believe Roman descriptions of the exclusion of women from the Olympics, they appear to date to the fourth century – a very different time from the period I’m describing.
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