Killer of Men

'You thought to take the money for yourself?' he asked, and his voice was dangerous.

I stopped walking. 'What?'

'The ransom for the Phoenicians,' he said. 'You sought to sneak away? You thought that I wouldn't know?' This was a different Miltiades – a sharper, more dangerous man.

'What?' I asked, foolishly. And then, 'What concern is it of yours?'

'Don't try that on me,' he said. 'Half of anything you take is mine. You expect me to squander political capital to save you from Aristagoras and then you try to steal my money?'

I stepped back. 'Fuck off,' I said. I shook my head. 'Those are my ransoms from Amathus. Nothing to do with you.'

'Half,' he said. 'Half of every penny you take. That is the price of being my man. I pay the wages on your ship. You agreed to the contract.' He spat. 'Don't act like a fucking peasant. You got more than a talent.'

I think that my hand went to my sword hilt, because he looked around – suddenly the great Miltiades was afraid to be alone on the beach with me. It wasn't the money, thugater. I am a killer and a lecher, but I have never been a greedy man.

But I thought that he was cozening me, and I can't stand to let other men get the better of me. 'This is my money from before the contract!' I said. 'I've promised part of it to my men!'

'That will have to come from your half, then,' he said. He crossed his arms. He was a little afraid – even then, men saw me as a mad dog. But he was bold, and he must have needed the silver.

If you want to know how great a man truly is, see him talk about money.

I sighed. 'Why didn't you come to me – like a man?' I might have said, like a friend, but I had just discovered that pirates have no friends.

'If you ever speak to me that way again, I'll have you killed,' Miltiades said. 'Now pay up your half, and we can forget all about this.' He was shaking with fury, and yet he was above mere insults of manhood. He didn't point at the boat behind me, but he did jut his chin at it. 'You think it's going to be easy to keep you alive after this? He hates you. And you come sailing back from a rendezvous with his wife.'

Oh, I can be a fool.

I paid. Perhaps you'll think less of me, but Miltiades was the only anchor I had in that world. I had no family and no friends, and I was living far above my birth. So I walked back down the beach, took the rolled cloak out from under the floorboards of my boat and I paid Miltiades half of the ransoms that I had earned without him.

Paramanos watched me do it without a muscle moving on his face, but I knew who the sycophant was by watching. Herakleides wouldn't meet my eye.

I couldn't believe it. He was such an upright man.

But he was an Aeolian, and such men can be bought.

Cheap.

I cursed.

Miltiades counted it out and threw me back a gold bar – an enormous sum of money. 'That's to take the sting out,' he said. 'I'm going to assume you misunderstood. Don't let it happen again, and let's just forget.' He grinned and offered his hand.

I took it and we clasped.

Miltiades looked over his shoulder. Then he looked back. I think he was measuring my value to him. I met his eye. I trusted Miltiades. As I heard it from him, Aristagoras had plotted to kill her, and me, and that was enough.

Later, he came back and told me. 'I earned every penny of the ransom you tried to hide from me, ungrateful boy,' he said. Then he waved, always the great man. 'Forget it,' he chuckled. 'We're going to have some wonderful times together.'

I never forgot, though, and I assume he didn't either. He sent me to sea immediately, that evening, with orders to haunt the Asian coast. It should have been a happy autumn, but the politics of the Ionian camp were vicious, and I would have done better to enquire more closely from where my fountain of gold had come. Now that I served Miltiades, I was tied to the faction that favoured the war. There was a peace faction led by none other than the author of the revolt, Aristagoras, who now espoused a peaceful solution. Men said that he had been bought by the Medes with golden darics, and other men said that he feared the Great King.

I discovered, in between short cruises in the Ionian Sea, that Miltiades had informers everywhere, and that being his man did have benefits. He heard of a pair of Phoenician biremes taking a cargo of copper and ivory up the coast of Asia for Heraklea in the Euxine. We took them off the islands – without so much as a fight – and you can be sure that I had Miltiades' half bagged and ready before my stern touched the beach.

Autumn was well-advanced when we heard that the Ionian cities of the Troad had all fallen in two short weeks, as Artaphernes took the Great King's army and besieged and captured them. Our morale plummeted, and men and ships deserted. The last of the Chians sailed away and only the Aeolians remained.

The tyrant of Mytilene demanded that Miltiades leave. Our piracy – that's what he called it – was bringing the city into ill repute. What the bastard meant was that our ongoing commercial war against the Medes was costing his city, which was losing business to Methymna, around the coast of Lesbos.

Salamis, the last free city of Cyprus, fell in late autumn.

Miltiades called his captains to council. It was a fine day, with a stiff west wind blowing. We'd been beach-bound for ten days with bad weather and no targets. The Asians were staying well clear of Lesbos, and the bad feeling between Aristagoras and Miltiades had reached a new height. Men said I was to blame. Some even said that Briseis had had an affair with Miltiades himself – foolishness, as she was eight months pregnant and hundreds of stades around the coast of the island, but that's the sort of wickedness that spreads in a divided camp.

'We're leaving,' he said. That was it – the whole council reduced to a few words. He wasn't much for a lot of talk, unless it was his own.

'Back home?' Heraklides asked.

'What do you call home, Piraean?' Miltiades asked.

'Chersonese,' Herk said. He grinned. 'Don't act the tyrant with us, lord. The wind is fair for the Chersonese and we can lie on our couches with buxom Thracians before the first snow falls.'

One of Miltiades' captains was Cimon, his eldest son. Metiochos, his second son, was his other most trusted captain. That's how the old aristocratic families worked – plenty of sons who could be trusted as war captains. I love to hear men call the Athenians 'democrats' as if any of them ever wanted to give power to common men. If Miltiades had had his way, he'd have been lord of the Chersonese first and then tyrant of Athens. He only loved democracy when it packed the phalanx with fighters.

Hah! I'm a fine one to talk. Look at me, lording it in Thrace. There's no hypocrite like an old hypocrite.

At any rate, Cimon was my age, a man just coming into his reputation. I liked him. And he was not afraid of his father. 'We're going back to bad wine and blonde Thracian women because Pater is under sentence of death in Athens!' he said – the first the rest of us had heard of it.

Miltiades' look told me that he hadn't intended the rest of us to know, but Cimon just laughed.

I never knew exactly when and where Miltiades and Aristagoras had started to be allies, and I never knew when they had a falling out, although I suspect that Briseis and I played our part. I still don't know. But Miltiades did all the thinking that won us the Battle of Amathus – in that much, I suppose the bastard deserved a share of my spoils. And I guess that Miltiades had no stomach for peace with the Medes – not that he hated them, but because he made his fortune preying on their ships and he needed that money to make himself tyrant at Athens, or that's how I see it now.

I should have said earlier that by the time Miltiades wanted us to leave, Aristagoras had been supplanted by his former master, Histiaeus of Miletus, who had served the Great King as a general for years and then deserted suddenly. He must have been a great fool – the Ionians were all but beaten when he joined us, and many men thought that he was a double traitor come to betray us into the hands of the Persians. In fact, I suspect he was one of those tragic men who make bad decision after bad decision – his betrayal of the Great King was foolish and dishonourable, and all his subsequent behaviour was of a piece. I only met him once, and that was on the beach at Mytilene. He was haranguing Aristagoras as if the latter was a small boy. I stayed to listen and laugh, and Aristagoras saw me, and the hatred in his eyes made me laugh louder. No one respected him by then. His failure to lead us against the Medes – anywhere – and especially to help the men of the Troad, when our fleet was just a hundred stades away, showed that he was a fool, if not a coward.