‘I thought you wanted to be rescued,’ I said.
‘You fool!’ she muttered. ‘You need saving. As a pirate — Achilles as a pirate? Come — come and be with my lord. And with me.’
‘You spurned me, when I killed Aristagoras!’ I said. ‘And now you propose that I should share you with Artaphernes!’ I shook my head, trying to clear it of the red rage. I had enough sense to see that if I killed Briseis, my life would end.
‘I have children!’ she said softly. ‘I have dependants, women and slaves and family. My brother can’t live without my protection. You expect me to leave all that, abandon my own, so that I could live as a farm wife in Boeotia?’ She sat up. ‘I have said it, Arimnestos — I love you. You, foolish child of Ares. But I will not be a farm wife or a pirate’s trull. I have found a way for all of us to be happy. The Persians — Artaphernes is the best of men. And he loves you. And he is not young.’ She smiled. ‘I have enough honey for both of you,’ she said.
‘Yes,’ I said. I had lived for two days as a Persian, and honesty was coming a little too easily to my lips. I could see it. Taste it. Like poison. ‘You could,’ I said, and my contempt was too obvious.
‘Oh, how I could hate you,’ she said. ‘I should hate you, as you, by your last statement, have told me that you think I’m a faithless whore who lies with men for power — and yet you love me! Which of us is the greater fool?’
I stuck by honesty. ‘I have wronged you,’ I said. ‘But I love you. And I don’t want to lose you through pride. Our pride. Come away with me.’
She stood up. She was tall, and even barefoot her head was just below mine, and her lips were inches from mine, and she pressed close.
‘I have offended you, but I love you, and I don’t want to lose you through pride, either.’ She smiled then, and standing, I could see her face in the torchlight from the garden. ‘But I will not be second to you. You wish to be the hero of Greece? So be it.’ She must have given a sign.
The blow to my head might have been from a rock, or a sword hilt.
I awoke with a pain in my head like a lance driven into one eye — the sort of pain boys get from drinking unwatered wine.
Too many blows to the head can add up, and this second felt as if it had fallen directly on the one received from the oars off Miletus. I couldn’t see very well. I must have moaned.
‘There he is,’ Philocrates said. ‘You all right, mate?’
They were all around me — my friends. Someone caught my hand, and I was gone again.
Recovery from wounds is dull story-telling — and not very heroic, when you find that you’ve been wounded by the woman you love. Not by any barb of Eros, either. Briseis didn’t hit me herself — later I learned that it was Kylix — but it might as well have been her own hand, and she was never a weak woman.
‘Ares and Aphrodite,’ I cursed.
‘Are both figments of the imaginations of men,’ Philocrates blasphemed. ‘We thought you were a corpse.’ He grinned. ‘A pair of slaves brought you to the beach, with that philosopher you prate about — bony thief of a man!’ he laughed.
‘Even in the dark, he was wise,’ Idomeneus said, which was high praise from the Cretan, as he was not much for wisdom, as a rule.
‘Fuck her,’ I muttered.
‘Heraclitus told us to run,’ Philocrates said. ‘We didn’t linger, as you were covered in blood and he told us about the six hundred ships.’
I had been out-generaled by the Lady Briseis, knocked unconscious and sent back. And in my pack was the ivory scroll tube, in which she had meticulously detailed the ships that would serve Datis, the names of the men who she thought had already been bribed. So that I would use the knowledge to crush Datis and help her husband.
I had to laugh. This scene was never going to make my version of the Iliad, I thought. But I’m telling it to you, and I hope your busy lad from Halicarnassus puts it in his book. She played me like a kithara, between love and lust and hate and anger and duty, and I sailed to Miletus with the information she provided, because to withhold it to spite her would have been foolish.
How well she knew me.
I lay in the bottom of the fishing smack and tried not to look at the sun, and the pitching of the waves made me sick for the first and only time of my life, and we sailed along with perfect weather, all the way back to Samos and the rebel fleet.
We were four days sailing back, and my head was better by the time we landed on Samos. I put on clean clothes, then Idomeneus and I went directly to Miltiades. He was sitting under an awning with Aristides, playing at knucklebones.
‘Datis has six hundred ships,’ I said. ‘They are forming at Tyre and they intend to crush us here, at Samos, in two weeks’ time.’ I looked around, ignoring the consternation on their faces. ‘Datis has men in our camp, offering huge sums of gold to the commanders to desert, or even to serve the Persians,’ I said.
Aristides nodded. ‘I was offered ten talents of gold to take the Athenians and go home,’ he said.
I was deflated. ‘You already know?’ I asked.
Miltiades laughed grimly. ‘To think that Datis offered such a treasure to Aristides and not to me!’ He shook his head. ‘I think I’m offended.’ He made his throw and rubbed his beard. ‘Where has he got six hundred ships, eh?’
So I told them everything I’d heard from the old Jew and from Briseis.
They listened to me in silence, and then went back to their game.
‘Should I tell Dionysius?’ I asked.
Aristides nodded. ‘You should,’ he said. ‘But I doubt he’ll pay you much attention.’
‘I suffered through his classes,’ I said. ‘He’ll listen to me.’
So I walked across the beach, my fighting sandals filling with sand at every step. Dionysius had a tent made of a spare mainsail, an enormous thing raised on a boatsail mast with a great kantaros cup in Tyrian red decorating the middle.
There were armed guards at the door of the tent. Idomeneus spat with contempt, and we almost had a fight right there, but Leagus, Dionysius’s helmsman, was coming out, and he separated the men and then faced me.
‘Can I help you, Plataean?’ he asked.
‘I have news of the Great King’s fleet,’ I said. And immediately he ushered me into the tent. Idomeneus followed me after a parting shot at the guards.
‘Act your age,’ I spat at him. ‘We’re all Greeks here.’
Dionysius was sitting on a folding stool of iron, looking like any great lord. He was surrounded by lesser men — no Aristides or Miltiades here.
‘So, Plataean. How went the mission on which I sent you?’ he asked.
I saluted him — he liked that, and it cost me nothing. ‘Lord, I went to Ephesus and contacted a spy paid by Miltiades. And another, a woman.’ I didn’t love him, and saw no reason to mention Briseis.
Dionysius smiled. ‘Spies and women are both liars.’
That stung me. ‘This spy does not lie.’ But Briseis lied very easily, I thought.
‘Spare me your romances,’ the navarch said. ‘Women are for making children, and have no other purpose except to ape the manners of men and manipulate the weak. Are you weak?’
I summoned up the image of Heraclitus in my head, and refused this sort of petty combat. ‘My lord, I have intelligence on the fleet of Datis. Will you hear it?’
He waved his hand.
‘Datis has six hundred ships at Tyre,’ I said. ‘He has the whole fleet of Cyprus — over a hundred hulls, as well as two hundred or more Phoenicians and as many Aegyptians. He has mercenaries from the Sicels and the Italiotes, and Cilicians in huge numbers.’
Dionysius nodded. ‘That’s worse than I expected. They cannot, surely, all be triremes.’
I shrugged. ‘Lord, I did not see them. I merely report what the spies report.’
He rubbed his beard, all business now. ‘The Cilicians, at least, haven’t a trireme among them. They’ll be in light hulls. And the Aegyptians — light hulls and biremes. But still a mighty fleet.’