I stabbed him five times before he stopped moving. He stabbed me just as often, but every blow caught on my cuirass, because the gods were with me and it was not my hour to die. Even unmanned by death, he tried to stab me again.
Persians. They can fight.
I got to my knees to find that Philocrates was also on his, and the younger Persian was hurrying the older Persian across the rocks and a dozen more Persians were on their way.
I retrieved my spear and stripped the corpse of the man I had killed with my dagger. His scale shirt was a model of perfection, small scales like the scales of a fish, washed in gold, with bronze and silver scales in patterns, edged in purple leather. I stripped him while watching the wary approach of the Persian relief column. They were calling their camp for more men, and a dozen Greeks were coming over the wicker walls to help us, too, but I didn’t want to be rushed while plundering.
When I had the shirt, I laid the man out neatly, his hands crossed on his chest. I left him his rings. He had fought well, and saved his lord.
We were all cut up, and shaking — for an ambush, it had been a sharp fight. Idomeneus carried Phrynichus back to the walls. Philocrates was stripping the man I’d killed first. He, too, had a fine scale shirt, and his bow-case was covered in lapis and gold wirework.
I ran to the site of Philocrates’s combat, and one of the oncoming Persians tried a long shot at me. The arrow skidded on the rocks, missing me by a horse-length or more.
As I had thought, the old man’s sword was lying between two big rocks. As I reached for it, two arrows passed through my shield. One scratched my hand at the antilabe, and only the heavy leather of the strap kept me from taking a bad wound. The other went right through the shield face and hit my greave, but again the thin bronze held.
I got my hand on the sword hilt and stumbled back. My left leg would barely take my weight. I took an arrow to my helmet and two or three more hit the rocks around me. I paused, stepped up on to the biggest rock and waved my new sword at them, and then I ran like Achilles for our wall, dodging right and left as I passed through the rocks to make their archery a little more difficult.
Miltiades was waiting for me at the walls.
‘You are a fool,’ he said fondly.
I handed him the sword. ‘First spoils, my lord,’ I said. Then I hobbled down the wall to Paramanos, who was better than most physicians at bones and such, and showed him my leg. He had to cut the greave off my shin — the arrow had deformed it. Underneath, the shin was red and black, and it wept blood right through the skin.
Other men — Herakleides, I remember, and his brother — came and helped us out of our armour, and we were brought wine.
After a while I lay down under a sail and slept. I was exhausted, and my leg throbbed. I remember waking to eat a double helping of barley broth, and then sleeping again — two days’ sleep in a single day. There’s nothing like combat to drain a man.
When I awoke the next day, men had brought me a new pair of greaves. It is good to be a hero. Every man is your friend, and men you have never met will work hard to win your praise — or merely to perform some good act for you, as if you were one of the gods. Those greaves were a poor fit, but they were better than nothing, and some other Greek went bare-legged to combat that day.
Idomeneus cut sheepskin from my bedding to make the greaves fit against my legs, and he rewrapped my leg, which was clearly infected, or poisoned. I felt fine — elevated, even — and that can be a sign of fever.
What I remember best was my eagerness to try that fine scale shirt. It fitted me the way a shield cover fits a shield. It weighed nothing, and I felt like a god.
One of the smiths had pounded the dents out of my helmet and someone had repaired my poor battered Boeotian shield, which now had a small bronze plate riveted to the rawhide to cover where the arrows had punched through.
We were all armouring up, because the sun was rising in the east, across the bay. Where the Persian fleet was putting to sea.
I’ve seldom been with men so elated before a battle. What the four of us had done the day before was to show the Athenians, at least, that we could take the Persians man to man. The success of our venture — a palpable success, I’d add, with looted armour, a bow-case and a magnificent sword — had a powerful effect on every man on our beach, Athenians, Chians, even the mercenaries. The personal wealth of the Persians was legendary — but we’d just proven it.
I’ll say this for Dionysius of Phocaea: his ship was the first off the beach, and he rowed up and down, coaxing us to greater efforts, telling every division, and even every ship, where to take their place in the line.
We formed in the bay with Lade behind us, and our line formed with the Samians on the left, with the Lesbians next. These two contingents made up more than half our line, one hundred and eighty triremes. Erythrae and Phocaea only contributed ten ships between them, but they were the best trained, and they were in the centre. Then came the Chians — a hundred ships under old Pelagius and his nephew, Neoptolemus, the finest of men and the proudest single force for size and beauty. On the right, we had the smaller contingents from Teos, Priene and Myos — about thirty ships altogether, perhaps the worst of our entire fleet. The smaller islands were hard-pressed to raise and crew a trireme. It was as if they had exhausted themselves by providing the thing, and had no energy left for training.
To the right of the mixed squadron were the Milesians, sixty-eight ships. On this day, Histiaeus came out of his city and led them in person. Some said that the men of Miletus had told him to go and not come back — his madness had worsened, and men feared him. But he left Istes in command of the Windy Tower.
And finally, to the right of the Milesians, there was Miltiades’ contingent and the Cretans under Nearchos. They called us the Athenians, but unlike the force that Aristides had led at Sardis five years before, we were really pirates. None of my rowers was an Athenian citizen, although many of them had been born under Athena’s gaze. More were Thracians, or Byzantines, or broken men from Boeotia and the Peloponnese. Even our marines were a polyglot bunch.
Nearchos’s contingent was another fine one, with five well-built ships and highly trained crews. I had drummed it into the boy to take war seriously, and he did. He had spent a fortune on his oarsmen, and his ships were painted red, his helmet was painted red and he had a red shield with gold fittings.
A group of us — my friends and old comrades, and Miltiades’ officers — met on the beach as if by common consent, to pour libations and pray and drink wine in the new dawn. It is nice to be the last squadron to form. There’s plenty of time to make sure that all the rowers have their cushions, that all the thole pins are sound and secure, the hulls are smooth, every buckle is buckled and every lace fresh, new and strong. The vanguard must hurry out in the dark, leaving their canteens behind, or some other thing that irritates you all day in a big fight.
Paramanos got us together, going from group to group as we armed and inviting us to Miltiades’ awning. When I arrived, I accepted the congratulations of every man on my feat of arms the day before.
‘Nice thorax,’ Aristides said. He took my hand. ‘And a noble fight,’ he added with a smile.
As Istes said, what would it be like to awaken one morning and find that you had forfeited all that adulation? And from such a man as Aristides?
That is what it is to be a hero. Unless you never deserved it, once you go up that ladder, you cannot come down.
At any rate, we were all there — all the best men of our contingent. Aristides made the sacrifices, and Cimon stood on one side of me, while Paramanos stood on the other, and Agios, Miltiades’ personal helmsman and my former mentor, winked at me across the sacrificial fire.