So I spent the winter calling my blonde Briseis and forging excuses as to why I could not possibly go to her rescue.
Spring, when it came, was the longest, wettest, stormiest spring anyone could remember. I took Storm Cutter to sea before the cakes were fully burnt on Persephone’s altar, and I brought him right back in when a combination of wind and wave snapped my boatsail mast like a twig.
We spent four weeks locked in the Bosporus when we should have been at sea, and a rumour started to spread that Miletus had fallen. But no real news came to us at Kallipolis, and we fretted and quarrelled with each other, and my decision not to go to Briseis in the autumn began to look shockingly like faithlessness.
We tired of exercising our crews, of painting our ships, of games and contests. We tired of girls and boys, and we even tired of wine. But the wind howled outside the Bosporus, and every attempt I made to round the point at Troy and head for Lesbos was foiled by a cold, dark wind.
Demeter showed man how to plant grain, and the new grain peeped above the earth, and finally the sun leaped into the heavens like a four-horse chariot, and the ground dried, and the sea was blue.
Miltiades had a good squadron. He had two volunteers from Athens who came in with the first good weather — Aristides, sailing a fine light trireme, and his friend Phrynichus, the playwright, with Cleisthenes, the Spartan proxenos and a powerful man in the aristocratic faction who was, nonetheless, a solid supporter of the Ionian Revolt. Aristides had Glaucon and Sophanes with him, but they didn’t meet my eyes. I laughed. They were in my world now.
The Athenians brought disturbing news.
‘It’s all but open war in the city,’ Aristides said quietly.
‘Are you exiled?’ Miltiades asked.
Aristides shook his head. ‘No. I thought I’d come and do my duty before I was sent away without having the ability to influence the decision. The Alcmaeonids have almost seized control of the assembly. Themistocles is the last man of the popular party to stand against them.’
Miltiades sneered. ‘Our blood is as blue as theirs,’ he said dismissively. ‘Bluer. Why do they get called aristocrats?’
Aristides shook his head. ‘You don’t need me to tell you that the colour of our blood is not the issue. Let’s defeat the Persians first and worry about the political life of our city second.’ He frowned at Miltiades. ‘Don’t pretend you are a byword for democracy, sir.’
Miltiades threw back his head and laughed. I thought the laugh was a trifle theatrical, but he pulled it off well enough. ‘Not much democracy here,’ he admitted. ‘Pirates, Asians and Thracians all living together? By the gods, we should have an assembly, except that the first debate would be on what language to debate in!’ He drank some more wine. ‘And you are a fine one to talk, Aristides the Just! For all you prate of this democracy, you distrust the masses, and when you need company, you run away from the aristocrats — to me!’
Aristides bit his lips.
I stood up. ‘No one has run from anyone,’ I said, raising the wine cup. ‘Tomorrow, we sail against the Great King.’
Aristides looked at me in surprise — a surprise that wasn’t altogether complimentary. ‘Well said,’ he replied. ‘You’ve made your peace with Apollo, or so I hear.’
‘Not yet,’ I answered. ‘But I am working on it.’
‘No man can say fairer when he speaks of the gods,’ Miltiades answered. Miltiades believed in the gods to exactly the same extent at Philocrates — which is to say, not at all — but he spoke piously and offended no one.
Cimon hid a guffaw and Paramanos winked at me. Don’t imagine that because I don’t mention Paramanos I didn’t see him every day, drink with him every night. He’d gone his own way and left my oikia to be a lord in his own right — a lord of pirates — but he was a fine man and still the most gifted son of Poseidon on the wine-dark.
‘Let us drink to the defeat of the Medes,’ Miltiades proposed, as the host.
We all rose from our couches and we drank, each in turn — Aristides; Cimon; Cleisthenes; Paramanos; Stephanos; Metiochos, who was Miltiades’ younger son; Herk, who had been my first teacher on the sea; the Aeolian Herakleides, who now had a trireme of his own; Harpagos and me. Eleven ships — as big a contingent as many islands sent, all in the name of Athens — not that Athens paid an obol. I remember that Sophanes was there, and Phrynichus the poet, his eyes flitting from one man to the next — so that we knew we were living in history, that this cup of wine might be made immortal.
We drank.
In the morning we rose with the dawn and put to sea. We were a magnificent sight, sails full of a good following wind as we passed the cape by Troy and sacrificed to the heroes of the first war between Greeks and barbarians. Miltiades was like a new man — full of his mission, and his place as its leader.
Every night we camped on the headlands and beaches of Ionia — Samothrace, Methymna, Mytilene — and celebrated the unification of the Ionians and the victory we were going to win. Our rowers were at the height of training — a month trapped in the Bosporus had allowed us to work them up as few crews have ever been hardened, and the rich pay of last autumn kept them loyal to their oars. I noted that all the Athenians kept their distance from me.
When we came to Mytilene, the beaches were empty, and in the Boule, the old councillors told us that the storms that had trapped us in the Chersonese hadn’t blown on Lesbos. The allied fleet had gathered three weeks before and sailed for Samos. And they had appointed Dionysius of Phocaea as navarch.
If we hadn’t had Aristides and the Athenians with us, I think Miltiades would have deserted the rebellion right there, but he couldn’t appear petty in front of his Athenian rival, and we sailed south for Samos. Suddenly, we were a surly crew.
Keep that change of daimon in mind, thugater, for we were the best-disciplined of all the Greeks.
We came into the fleet’s anchorage on the beaches of Samos a little before dusk, and my breath caught in my throat. I had never imagined that the Greeks would do as well.
I stopped counting at one hundred and eighty black-hulled triremes. In fact, I was later told by Dionysius that at its height, we had more than three hundred and seventy in the fleet — probably the mightiest gathering of Greek ships that there ever was. Everyone had come — Nearchos, my former pupil from Crete, was there with five ships, and the Samians had a hundred. Miletus itself had crewed seventy, leaving the city with a skeleton army to guard it.
And Miltiades was a great enough man to smile and shake Dionysius’s hand.
However it had been done, the alliance was the work of gods, not men. Never had so many quarrelling Greeks come together. They filled the beaches of Samos, and the Persians ought to have surrendered in terror.
But both Datis and Artaphernes were made of sterner stuff than that. Datis fortified his camp to an even greater degree and sent out the word all along the Asian coast, demanding the service of every vassal that the Great King had. And Artaphernes gathered his guards and his court, and moved his personal army to Miletus. He was not the kind to lead from behind.
Dionysius was a fine admiral and a great sailor, but he was a poor orator and worse leader of men, and his constant harping on the ill-training of the Ionian and Aeolian oarsmen smacked of racial superiority, as his own men were mostly Dorians. The Samians hated him. They hated Miltiades just as much, and openly pressed for a Samian — Demetrios, in fact — to take command of the fleet. Let me just say, thugater, that their claims had a certain justice. They had a hundred ships and no one else had nearly that number. Miletus had but seventy, despite being the richest Greek city in the world, and Histiaeus declined to leave his citadel anyway, even though he was the one man who might have taken command without a voice being raised against him.