They were all there, the friends of my first life, and some from my second — my pirates. Miltiades, and Phrynichus, and Nearchos whom I had trained, and his brother, and Idomeneus stood behind me with Phrynichus, and Philocrates took his share of the prayer without a ribald comment, and Herakleides the Aeolian, one of my first men, now commander of a trireme, and Stephanos. I smiled, because my men had done well.
We sang the paean of Apollo, and we made sacrifice, and then Miltiades handed round a great kylix of unwatered wine.
‘Today, we are not pirates,’ he said. ‘Today, we fight for the freedom of the Greeks, although we are far from home and hearth.’
Let me tell you, Miltiades was always my model of a man — of greatness. He stood taller, acted taller, than other men. I still ape his manners — the way I swirl a cloak and the way I put my hand on the hilt of my sword are his. And when the sense of occasion was on him, he was not like a god. He was a god. Even Aristides was like a pale, priggish shadow next to the blazing sun of his glory.
We all drank, and when the kylix came back to Miltiades, he raised it on high. ‘May we all be heroes,’ he said, and poured the rest into the sand.
My ship was the last one in the water — the rightmost ship in the rightmost division. It meant that we had to row far to the east, well down the bay.
I must explain the way of it, or you young people will never understand what happened in the battle. First I’ll draw the bay — a great shape like an empty sack, open on the west and with the bottom at the east. Up near the mouth of the sack — the lower side of the mouth, see? — is the island of Lade, and Miletus sticks into the mouth of the sack by the island, like a man pushing his thumb in. And the Persian camp, the siege, was south and west of the city, so that, as we formed our line, west to east, from the top of the sack to the bottom as it were, the city and the Persian camp were both behind us. We were, in effect trying to keep the Persian fleet from getting to the city and the camp.
Our line extended from the island all the way along the bay to well east of the Persian camp. Our line stretched for almost thirty stades.
There’s an irony, too. We fought there again — at Mycale. But I’ll tell that story when I get to it.
The Persians started forming earlier than we did and were still forming when my men rowed us the last few ship-lengths to form to the right of Stephanos in Myrmidon. So we rested on our oars and watched as the Aegyptian contingent formed opposite us, and then more Phoenicians beyond them.
Facing nothing.
Their line was, in fact, almost twice as long as ours. Part of that was because they left gaps between their divisions, and part was because aside from the Phoenicians, who were great sailors, and well trained, the rest of their ships had as little notion of keeping formation as the worst of ours. I could see the Cilicians, away at the Samian end of the line, and they were more like a cloud of gnats than a squadron.
For all that, I didn’t like being outflanked by the Phoenicians. They’d split their best contingent, putting a hundred Phoenician ships at either end of their great crescent. They put their worst ships in the middle. Their plan was clear — to close rapidly on our flanks and crush us before we broke their centre.
We were still lying on our oars when Miltiades came out of the line under his boatsail. He was the leftmost ship in our squadron, hard by Nearchos. Together, we and the Cretans had sixteen ships — the best manned, and probably the best trained except for the Phocaeans.
Miltiades passed down the line and hailed each captain as he came up. When he got to me, he turned his ship under oars so that it came to rest on my right, usurping my place of honour.
‘When we go forward, follow me,’ Militades called. ‘We’re going to form a column, race downwind to the east, and try to sting the Phoenicians.’ He laughed.
Fifteen of us against a hundred Phoenicians. ‘Long odds,’ I called back.
Whatever he replied was carried away by the rising wind, but I heard the word ‘hero’, and I waved.
Idomeneus had a mad grin on his face. ‘This’s what I came for,’ he said.
I looked at the mass of Phoenician ships and smiled.
Like most pirates, most of my rowers were pretty well armed. Every man had a javelin at least, and many had a pelte or a buckler. A good number had better gear — a helmet, a leather hat, an aspis. On board the mighty Ajax, every man had a helmet and a spear, and some had swords. The older and more successful a pirate was, the better kit his rowers had, and that gave us a huge advantage in a boarding fight. On the Phoenicians, their rowers were slaves or captives or paid freedmen, but none of them had arms. Not that that ever seemed to cause them to row any worse, but if a boarding fight lasted more than a few minutes, our ships would always overwhelm theirs. In fact, one of our ships could put two hundred trained fighters against ten of theirs. That’s why they preferred a fight of manoeuvre.
We’d also killed most of the best Phoenician crews at Amathus. They were shy now, and cautious of engagement.
But fifteen to a hundred was long odds at the best of times.
I pondered this, gathered my marines and my officers amidships on the fighting platform and told them what I knew. I pitched my voice to carry so that my oarsmen could hear everything I said.
‘We’re going to sail downwind on our boatsails, so lay everything on deck and stand ready,’ I said to my sailing master. He was a black Libyan with a barbaric name like a noseful of snot, but we all called him ‘Black’ and he answered to it. I’d bought him on the beach at Lade and freed him on the spot — he’d been a helmsman way out west at Sicily, and I knew quality when I saw it, for all that he was new to my ship. Paramanos was black, and look how good he was.
‘Then we’re going to drop sails, turn back west and attack the tip of their pincer,’ I said. ‘I’m going to guess that Lord Miltiades will try to lure them into a luffing match upwind — their rowers against ours — until we hit the shore. If we do that, nothing matters except how far east and north of the battle we can lure the bloody Phoenicians. Don’t get locked in a boarding fight if you can con your enemy into trying to outsail you. And friends — we in Storm Cutter can outsail anything they offer, can we not?’
They shouted back at me, and then I went forward to watch as Black had his sailors lay out the boatsail and Mal coached his rowers while Galas took the helm. I had promoted him to helmsman when I purchased Black. He watched Black with a critical eye.
I kept my eye on the Persians — though there probably wasn’t a Persian among them, except for a dozen noble archers on twenty or so of their command ships. Somewhere was Datis himself. He’d have a deck full of them. But the rest of their fleet’s people were vassals and slaves — and Cilician pirates, of course. Men just like us.
As I watched, there was a flash and a ripple all along the front of the Persians as their oars came out. It wasn’t neat, or well drilled, but the mass of their great half moon began to move. It was a terrifying sight, truth to tell — they outnumbered us so badly, and their line filled your eye, almost horizon to horizon. They must have taken up fifty stades of ocean — more than five hundred ships. Until then, no one had ever seen such a fleet.
I refused to be terrified. Today was the day Apollo would smile on the Greeks, the day I would win Briseis, fulfil my destiny and go to glory. I had half a notion that I might die in the victory — it would suit all I had heard of fates that I die achieving my ambition, and my curse to Briseis.
Death held little fear for me.