Someone shouted, ‘Can we fire the grove?’
‘No time,’ I said. In truth, it was the best solution.
Let me tell you something, young man. I believe in the gods. One of them had just shown me the gully. And that olive grove was sacred to Artemis. And the gods had stood by me all day. To me, this was the test. It is always the test of battle. How good are you when you are wounded and tired? That’s when you find out who is truly a hero, my children. Anyone can stand their ground with a full belly and clean muscles. But at the end of day, when the rim of the sun touches the hills and you haven’t had water for hours and flies are laying eggs in your wounds?
Think on it. Because hundreds of us were measured, and by Heracles, we were worthy of our fathers.
‘You man enough for this, Plataean?’ Cleitus asked, but his voice was merely chiding — almost friendly.
‘Fuck off,’ I said, equally friendly.
‘Let’s get to it,’ Aeschylus said. He put the edge of his aspis between Cleitus and me. ‘This isn’t about you, Cleitus.’
I remember that I smiled. ‘Cleitus,’ I said softly, and he met my eye. ‘Today is for the Medes,’ I said. I offered my hand.
He took it and clasped it hard.
Aeschylus nodded. ‘I ask to be the first into the grove,’ he said. ‘For my brother.’
Athenians and aristocrats. Not a scrap of sense.
So the Athenians formed a deep block the width of the low wall. Behind the screen they provided, I took my Plataeans — household first — in a pair of long files and ran off to the south, around the edge of the low hill. I pushed my legs to do their duty. I think ‘run’ may be a poor description of the shambling jog we managed — but we did it.
We ran around the edge of the hill and there was the entry to the gully, as I’d expected. That gully wasn’t as deep as a man is tall — but it was shaped oddly, with a small bend just before the west wall of the grove, and I trusted my guess and led my men forward — still in a file.
The Persians had formed a line — not, to be honest, a very thick line — facing Aristides’ small phalanx. We could see them, and by a miracle, they still hadn’t seen us. It was, well, miraculous. But on the battlefield, men die because they see what they expect to see.
Then Aristides and Aeschylus led their men forward. They were so tired that they didn’t cheer or sing the Paean, but simply trotted forward, and all the Persians shot into them.
The clatter of the arrows on their shields and the solid impacts drowned the sound of our movement.
‘Form your front!’ I called softly, but my men needed no order.
The men behind me started to sprint forward. I didn’t slow. The neatness of our line was immaterial. And by the gods, Aphrodite was there, or some other goddess, lifting us to one more fight, raising us above ourselves. Two or three times in my life I’ve felt this, and it is. . beyond the human. And at Marathon, every one of us at the grove felt it.
I was at the edge of the gully, and it sloped steeply up, head height, to the base of the stone wall. The Persians had assumed this part was too tricky for us to storm.
I was first. I ran up the gully lip — and at the top a Persian shot me.
His arrow smacked into my aspis at point-blank range, and then I was past him, over the wall in a single leap, and a flood of Plataeans poured in behind me. I have no idea who killed that man, or, to be honest, how I got over the wall — but we were in, past the wall, among the trees.
I crashed into the end of the Persian line — most of them never saw us coming, so focused were they on Aristides and his men to their front.
They died hard.
When they stood, we slew them, and when they ran — some in panic, more just to find a better place to die — we chased them, tree to tree. Those with arrows shot us, and those without protected the archers. Some had spears and a few had aspides they’d picked up from our dead, and many had axes, and they fought like heroes.
No man who survived the fight in the olive grove ever forgot it.
Desperate, cornered men are no longer human. They are animals, and they will grasp the sword in their guts and hold on to it if it will help a mate kill you.
The fight eventually filled the whole grove, and some of them must have climbed the trees — certainly the arrow that killed Teucer came from above, straight down into the top of his shoulder by his neck. And Alcaeus of Miletus, who had come all this way to die for Athens, went down fighting, his aspis against two axemen, and I was just too far away to save him.
A Persian broke my spear, dying on it, and another clambered over his body and his short sword rang off my scales, but didn’t go through or I’d have died there myself. I put my arms around him and threw him to the ground, rolled on top of him to crush him, got my hands on his throat and choked the life out of him. That’s the last moment in the battle I remember — I must have got back on my feet but I don’t remember how, and then I was back to back with Idomeneus, but the fighting was over.
The fighting was over.
All the Persians were dead.
Idomeneus sank to the ground. ‘I’m done,’ he said. I had never heard those words from him, and never did again.
That was Marathon.
Equally, to be honest, I remember nothing of the march over the mountains to Athens, in the dark, save that there was a storm brewing out over the ocean and the breeze of that storm blew over us like the touch of a woman’s cool hand when you are sick.
I must have given some orders, because there were nigh-on eight hundred Plataeans when we came down the hills above Athens to the sanctuary of Heracles. And as each contingent came up, Miltiades met them in person. That part I remember. He was still in full armour, and he glowed — perhaps, that night, he was divine. Certainly, it was his will that got us safely over the mountains and back to the plains of Attica. The Plataeans were the last to leave Marathon apart from Aristides’ tribe, who stayed to guard the loot, and the last to arrive at the shrine of Heracles, and as we came in — not marching, but shuffling along in a state of exhaustion — the sun began to rise over the sea, and the first glow caught the temples on the Acropolis in the distance.
‘We’ve made it, friends,’ Miltiades said to each contingent.
Men littered the ground — shields were dropped like olives in an autumn wind, as if our army had been beaten rather than victorious.
My men were no different. Without a word, men fell to the ground. Later, Hermogenes told me that he fell asleep before he got his aspis off his arm.
I didn’t. Like Miltiades, I was too tired to sleep, and I stood with him as the sun rose, revealing the Persian fleet still well off to the east.
‘Even if they came now,’ he said, ‘Phidippides made it. See the beacon on the Acropolis?’
I could see a smudge of smoke in the dawn light. I nodded heavily.
‘By Athena,’ Miltiades said. He stood as straight as a spear-shaft, despite his fatigue. He laughed, and looked out into the morning. ‘We won.’
‘You should rest,’ I said.
Miltiades laughed again. He slapped my back, grinned ear to ear, and for a moment, he was not ancient and used up — he was the Pirate King I had known as a boy. ‘I won’t waste this moment in the arms of sleep, Arimnestos,’ he said. He embraced me.
I remember grinning, because few things were ever as precious to me as the love of Miltiades, despite the bastard’s way with money, power and fame. ‘Sleep would not be a waste,’ I said.
He shook his head. ‘Arimnestos — right now, this moment, I am with the gods.’ He said it plain — no rhetoric. And he wasn’t talking to a thousand men, feeding on their adulation. I honestly think every man in our army was asleep but us.
No — he was telling the plain truth to one man, and that man was me.
I remember that I didn’t understand. I do now. But I was too young, and for all my scars and the blood on my sword arm, too inexperienced.