But on the third night, the city’s defenders sallied out again, and this time I went with them. It is ironic that, once you have the reputation as a great warrior, you must support it constantly. I could no more sit in the acropolis while the men raided than I could abstain from eating.
The city was well appointed with regard to armour, and Lord Histiaeus gave me a bell corslet and a fine Cretan helmet with a magnificent horsehair plume. It was a bit like living in the Iliad. I took my marines, and Philocrates the Blasphemer, who had settled into the life of piracy like a veteran. I got him arms as well, a full panoply.
‘You look like Ares come to life,’ I said to him, when he was dressed in bronze.
‘Ares is a myth to frighten children,’ he said.
‘I see that a storm at sea and a life of war is not enough to restore your respect for the gods,’ I said.
He shrugged. ‘You can’t respect what ain’t there.’
I stood back a little and regarded him. There was something frightening about him. He ignored portents, laughed at talismans and called the gods by foul names. At first only the Iberians would eat with him, but as he continued to blaspheme and the skies never swallowed him up, other men began to accept him. That said, I have to say that he had changed. I couldn’t put my finger on why, but he explained it himself later, as you’ll hear, if you come back for more of this story tomorrow.
At any rate, sixty of us went out of the postern gate nearest the harbour. It was pelting down with rain — we slipped on the mud, and I blessed my good Boeotian boots even as the other men cursed their open sandals. The ground in front of the walls had been churned to a froth by the passage of thousands of men, slaves and soldiers, and both sides dumped their waste and filth into that no-man’s-land. It was foul.
You’d think that after a hundred of these raids, the Persians would have set a watch, but of all their contingents, only the Aegyptians kept a regular guard. Most of their crack troops were cavalrymen who disdained such rigorous pastimes as guard duty, and who am I to comment? I never knew a Greek who was willing to stand a night watch.
We crossed the mud and the ordure in the lashing rain, and then we went over the fresh brush they’d piled in lieu of a wall around their camp. No hope of lighting a fire on this night, but we had a different goal in mind.
We weren’t after Artaphernes. If he’d been at the siege, he might have had Briseis, and my approach would have been very different. Indeed, since I’m trying to tell the whole truth here, I’ll add that I didn’t feel any particular commitment to the rebels. They weren’t Plataeans, for instance. I was loyal enough to Miltiades, but you’ll note that I wasn’t criss-crossing the seas looking for him. Nor was I sailing up and down looking for the rebel fleet to offer my services. Mind you, once I was trapped in Miletus, my options were limited. But I wasn’t an idealist. I was a Plataean, and I was Briseis’s lover — or rather, the same, but in the other order.
But neither the satrap nor his new wife was at the siege that autumn. Datis was Artaphernes’ lieutenant, and our aim was to kill him. His great red and purple tent showed clearly across the lines by day, and we’d worked out a couple of sea-marks — torches mounted at two different heights in the town — to guide us to his tent. He was a relative of the Great King — Artaphernes was one of the king’s many brothers, and this Datis was a cousin, or some such, and a famous warrior, and the rumours were that when he took Miletus, he’d be sent with a great fleet against Chios and Lesbos — and perhaps Athens. Or so men said.
No one expected us to succeed in killing him, but it was this sort of constant pressure that kept the besiegers on edge and encouraged them to pack it up for the winter and head home.
We crept through the dark, soaked to the skin, squelching in mud, turning frequently to get our line of approach from the torches on the walls, and we crept forward, cursed by men in the tents whose ropes we bumped — little knowing, of course, that we were mortal foes. I wondered if this was what Odysseus had felt when he left the Trojan horse to sneak into the town of Troy. The Iliad is very real at times — but no one ever seems to be wet or cold, or have the flux. I find that these three are the proper children of Ares, not Havoc and Panic and whatever else the poets ascribe. Who ever had a war without wet and cold?
We were in the middle of the column, so we had no idea what — or who — alarmed the camp, but suddenly we were discovered. It was raining so hard that no one could light a torch, and as soon as the enemy came out of their tents, they lost all sense of the situation.
Our men killed the first to come close to them, then scattered. That’s what we’d planned. The Milesians simply vanished. They had raided the camp before and knew it well enough. My marines were not so lucky, and in the dark we followed the wrong men. We thought we were following Milesians and we ended up in the horse lines, where a dozen conscientious Persian troopers had run to protect their mounts. Our men started fighting them with no cue from me. My marines were armoured and the Persians were unarmed, and they died — taking two of my men with them. Persians are brave.
‘Cut the halters and undo the hobbles,’ I ordered. My survivors spread out and caused chaos on the horse lines, ripping pickets out of the ground. I ran to the top of a low hill and looked back at the city, and only then did I realize that we had the whole width of the enemy camp between us.
More immediately, men were boiling out of the camp, backlit by the lights on the city wall. Persians love their horses. My ten men weren’t going to last a minute against a regiment of Persian cavalrymen.
I thought of stealing horses and heading inland, but that sort of thing only works in epics. In real life, your enemies have more horses and native guides, and they ride you down. Besides, my men were sailors in armour, not cavalrymen. Most of them had probably never forked a horse.
I was out of ideas, but Poseidon stood by us. Horses scattered in every direction, and I didn’t have to be Odysseus to reckon that we could escape with the herd. A few of us mounted, and others simply clung to manes, even tails — and we flowed with the horses, moving west and north, back towards the city. I got mounted, lost my bearings and my companions, and spent a watch among the rocks south of the city, where my horse left me.
The gods help those who help themselves, or so I’ve heard it said, and while I lay in the rocks watching the city and the force of Persian archers between me and the walls, cursing my fate, I realized that it was a six-stade walk along the ridge of rock to the beach opposite Tyrtarus. And not a sentry on the way.
I took the time to poke along the ridge of rock. Every piece of waste ground has trails, if you know where to look — goats make them, and shepherds, and boys and girls courting or playing at being heroes. The moon came up late and the rain ceased, and I walked to the beach opposite Lade, stripped to my skin and swam to the hulls opposite — really just a few horse-lengths, well less than a stade. I rose up, dripping, by the black hulls, close enough to the enemy camp to hear the snores of Archilogos’s oarsmen, or so I reckoned. Then I swam back and picked my way among the rocks. As I had expected, the Persians had gone back to bed. I crawled through the mud and shit to the walls of the town, and wasted another half an hour persuading the sentry to let me climb the wall without gutting me. Oh, the romance of siege warfare!
I was the last man back from the raid, and my sword had not left its scabbard. There were men in the upper city who were of a mind to laugh at me. I let them laugh. I was no longer a hot-blooded boy, and I didn’t need a blood feud in the town. I wanted to take my gold and go, although I was keen to show Istes what I was made of. He’d killed three Persians, and brought in their bows and arrows as proof.