I was sitting alone at a small fire on the beach, cursing my fate, or rather, my ignorance of events and my inability to accomplish anything, when a pair of local men — traders — came up out of the dark.
‘Lord Arimnestos?’ the shorter one asked.
‘Aye,’ I answered, and offered them wine.
In short, they had a cargo of grain — several cargoes, in fact — and they wondered if I’d like to have a go at smuggling it into Miletus. The rate of exchange they offered was good — good enough to give me some slack. So I loaded grain at their wharf and filled the ship, so that she sat deep in the water and my rowers cursed.
‘We’re fucked if we have to run,’ Idomeneus said.
‘Really?’ I asked, as if the thought had never occurred to me.
We sailed at sunset, ran along the coast of Lesbos before full dark fell and were off Chios in the light of a full moon. My oarsmen were none too happy with me, because this was flirting with Poseidon’s rage and no mistake, or so they said.
I made my sea-marks off Chios, and we passed silently along the beaches I had known like family homes in my youth. Just past false dawn, we passed the beach where Stephanos had lived before he went away to sea to be a killer of men.
There was a long, low trireme beached there.
My heart rose in my chest, and I abandoned my plan and put our stern to the beach, and we went ashore.
‘I thought you were done for,’ Stephanos said. ‘And I thought I could weather the cape by Methymna and run free in the channel, with the two islands to break the fury of the storm.’ He shrugged. ‘Those Iberians don’t know how to row, but they have a lot of guts. I got us around the corner, and they kept the bow into the seas, and we determined to land at Mytilene, but there was a current — I’ve never seen anything like it. We went past Mytilene in the blink of an eye, and north of Chios we hit a log that was drifting, broke a board amidships and started to take on water.’ Stephanos was a big, plain-spoken sailor who had grown to manhood as a fisherman, and his hands moved like an actor’s as he told the story.
His sister Melaina was beaming up at him. She, too, was a friend of my youth, from the heady days when I was newly freed, just finding my power as a man-at-arms. We kept grinning at each other.
‘Then what happened?’ Idomeneus asked.
‘The back of the ship snapped like a twig, we sank and the fishes ate us!’ Stephanos laughed. His sister swatted him, and he ducked. ‘One of the rowers shouted that we weren’t done yet — a Greek fellow, Philocrates. He put some heart in the boys and we got the head around, then the wind let up for a few moments, and in that time we got into a cove on the north shore — it was as if Poseidon agreed to let us live. I put the bow on the shingle, and to Hades with the ram — which took a right battering, and we’ve been a week repairing her. But we lived!’
‘As did we,’ I said, and we embraced again. I looked at his ship. ‘What do you call him?’ I asked.
Stephanos grinned his easy grin. ‘Well, we thought of calling him Storm Cutter, but that’s taken, so we opted for Trident.’
The sign of Poseidon. ‘A fine name.’
He grinned again. ‘So — how do we make some money?’ He kissed his sister and pointed up the beach. ‘Go and find Harpagos, dear.’
Harpagos proved to be Stephanos’s cousin. Melaina brought him down to the beach, and he was no smaller than Stephanos and his hands were hard as rock. Stephanos introduced him with flowery compliments.
‘This is my useless layabout cousin Harpagos, who wants to ship with me. He’s never been to sea.’ Stephanos spat on the sand and laughed.
Harpagos had the look of a man who’d kept the sea his entire life. His hair was full of salt. But he stood, abashed.
I winked at Stephanos. It was like old times. ‘You’re a trierarch now, my friend. No need to consult me on every raw man.’
‘I’ve been helmsman on a grain ship,’ Harpagos said.
‘I want him as my helmsman,’ Stephanos admitted. Then he said, ‘I need him where I can see him.’
I liked Harpagos. His embarrassment at all this attention shouted of the sort of solid, quiet confidence that makes a man able to go to sea and fish every day for forty years. ‘On your head be it,’ I said. ‘Harpagos, can you fight?’
He shrugged. ‘I wrestle,’ he said. ‘I teach the boys in the village. I can take this big fool.’ He indicated Stephanos.
‘Hmm,’ I allowed. ‘Well, he can take me, and that would be bad for discipline. Ever used a spear and shield?’ I asked.
Harpagos shook his head. ‘Can’t say I have.’
‘Ever killed?’ I asked.
Harpagos looked out to sea. ‘Yes,’ he said, voice flat.
We all stood together in silence, and the fine wind blew across us. ‘Well,’ I said, ‘welcome aboard. We’re pirates, Harpagos. Sometimes we fight for the Ionian rebels, but mostly we take other people’s ships for profit. Can you do that?’
He grinned — the first grin I’d seen. ‘Yes, lord.’
Melaina listened to this exchange and brought more wine, and we ate fresh sardines and a big red fish I hadn’t eaten often — with flesh like lobster. We drank too much wine. Melaina pressed herself on me, and I flirted with her, smiled, even held her for a time while standing by the fire on the beach. But I didn’t take her into the dark. My head was full of Briseis, and Melaina wasn’t a beach girl. She was Stephanos’s sister, and she dressed like a woman of property. Somewhere, she had a man she was going to marry. And to bed her would have been to betray my guest-friendship with Stephanos.
In the morning, I gave him half the grain, and the next evening, full of food and a little too much wine, we were off the beach, rowing soft in the moonlight for Miletus.
Our plan was simple, like most good plans. We both had Phoenician ships — both newly repaired and looking fairly prosperous. We sailed due south, got behind the coastal islands, west around Samos, rowing all the way, and came into the Bay of Miletus from the south-west — that is, from the direction of Tyre and Phoenicia — as the sun set in the west, mostly behind us. We stood straight down the bay, bold as brass, apparently a pair of their own ships bound for the blockade fleet at Tyrtarus on the island of Lade.
The fishermen of Chios had been able to lay the whole siege out like a scroll for us, because they smuggled fish to the rebels and sold them openly to the Medes, Persians, Greeks and Phoenicians who served the Great King, too. Miletus is an ancient city, founded before Troy, and she stands at the base of a deep inlet of the sea, just south of Samos, although the bay over towards Mycale is starting to silt up. Miletus has a steep acropolis, impregnable, or so men used to say, and her outer town is protected by a circuit of stone walls with towers. The Persians began by moving their fleet to Ephesus, just a hundred stades up the coast. Once they had a base there, they moved in and stormed Tyrtarus, a fishing village with a small fort, and used it as their forward base, so that ships from there could easily launch into the narrow channel and catch any vessel heading into Miletus.
Mind you, it is possible to row north around Lade. The problem is that anyone holding the fort on Lade can see you coming fifty stades away, and when you turn north, they’re waiting — and the currents around the island favour the side that holds it.
Once the Persians had the fort at Tyrtarus, they brought up their land forces on the landward side of the peninsula. Artaphernes came in person, and they built a great camp in the hills overlooking Miletus. After a few weeks of skirmishing, he started on the siege mound.
Men tell me the Assyrians invented the siege mound, and perhaps they did, although as usual the Aegyptians claim they invented it. Either way, it was not the Greeks, who prefer a nice flat field and a single day of battle to a year’s siege. But the Ionians and Aeolian Greeks have fortified cities, and when the Lydians or the Medes come against them, they fight a war of shovels. The Persians dig a giant hill that runs from the flat of the plain to the top of the walls, and the Greeks in the city counter-dig, trying either to raise the wall by the mound or to destroy the Persian mound. And while both sides dig, the men outside make sure that the men inside receive no help, no weapons and, most of all, no food.