I can only tell this as I saw it, honey. What I will say is what I saw.
Helen came to me on the wall — or Aphrodite, or perhaps Briseis. I like to think it was Briseis. Her hair was unbound, and her skin glowed like a goddess.
‘This is not your fate, love,’ she said. And she was gone.
That’s what I saw.
So I threw the spear as hard as I could, right along the parapet. I stumbled backwards, my fingers reaching for the rope, almost blind. I found it even as a blow rang off the scale shirt on my back — a spear-thrust on the heavy yoke over the shoulders. I fell, my hands holding the rope, and my feet dropped free of the wall, and I slid down the rope. My palms burned, but I wouldn’t let go.
I’m told I hit the mast quite hard. I was already pretty far gone, and I fell to the deck as if dead, all my sinews cut. But my armour did its job, and the wool stuffed in my helmet.
I remember the men crowding around me. I remember hands on my leg, and fire.
I have never run the stade since.
The women wept and keened, and men as well, as the oarsmen pulled us away into the dark. I lay cushioned in blood loss, far away and yet able to think clearly enough, and Black Raven unfolded his wings and swept us out to sea. The Phoenicians and the Cilicians and the Aegyptians never saw us, or thought we weren’t worth their trouble, or simply let us go. We saved Teucer and a hundred other soldiers, five gentlemen of property, and another hundred women and children. Four thousand died and forty thousand were sold into slavery.
And that was just the start.
We made Chios in three days — three desperate days, when Harpagos, Idomeneus and Black did the work of keeping us alive while my body made the hard choices between life and death. I missed the moment when Idomeneus made a speech — he ordered the treasure thrown over the side, and he told them that the babes of the Milesians would be their treasure, and asked them to count the weight of the silver and tell him which was the most valuable, and they cheered as they threw it over. I missed that, although it is all part of the story.
The Milesians pitched in and rowed, and we shared what food we had, and everyone who had lived to flee the walls of Miletus lived to see the beaches of Chios.
The next thing I remember was Melaina weeping. There was a pyre for Stephanos, and another for Philocrates, and Phrynichus wept as he said their elegies. Alcaeus of Miletus — one of the gentlemen we’d rescued — organized funeral games.
Melaina cared for me, cleaning my wounds, bathing me, cleaning away the wastes of my body. My fever broke in the second week, and by the third week I could walk. Summer was almost over.
‘The Persians will come,’ I said. ‘Come with me. I owe you — and your brother’s shade — that much.’
She shrugged. ‘I’ll stay anyway,’ she said. ‘I’m a fisherman’s daughter. I don’t like the change. And my father is here, and my sisters, and all the children. Can you move the whole of Chios?’
Another week, while my body healed. Black was restless, eager to get to sea. Suddenly, there were Cilician pirates everywhere, and down the coast, a village burned.
Finally, I set a sailing date. The evenings were brisk, and the sun was lower in the sky.
We sat and drank wine until the sun set, wine that went straight to my head, and we ate a big tuna that Melaina’s father caught. He came and clapped me on the shoulder. ‘Stephanos loved you,’ he said. ‘You’re a good man.’
That made me cry. I cried easily in those days.
It was harder to abandon Chios than it had been to leave Miletus, because unlike these cheerful fisherfolk, I knew what was coming to them. The light hand of Persia was about to be replaced by an iron fist. I watched the sun set, and I knew that it would be a long time before I saw it rise here, in the east.
Melaina came into my bed that last night, while I lay looking at the rafters. I didn’t send her away, although our lovemaking had more grief to it than lust. But she left before dawn, and she was a proper daughter again on the beach when she poured a libation and washed Harpagos’s shield in wine.
Then my keel was in the water, and I ceased to think of her, because we went to sail an ocean full of enemies.
We ran north, evading everything we saw, until we entered the Bosporus.
Kallipolis was still free. We beached, and I embraced Miltiades.
I’ll make this brief. We wintered there. In the spring, Histiaeus — Istes’ brother, who left him to die — came to us, asking that we follow him to make a pre-emptive attack on the coast of Phoenicia — to show that the East Greeks weren’t beaten. It was a strategy that was a year too late.
‘I’ll stay and defend the Chersonese,’ Miltiades said. ‘It is mine. But I will lose no more men in Asia.’
Histiaeus was captured in Phrygia a month later, trying to forage for food for his oarsmen. Datis executed him for treason. It was a cheap death for a man who had led the Ionian Revolt. He should have died on the walls with his brother.
Less than a week later, Datis flooded the Chersonese with Scythian and Thracian mercenaries. He outspent Miltiades, ten to one, and in a week we lost four of our towns.
We expected it, though. The east was lost. We loaded our ships, taking every Greek man and woman — the survivors of Miletus, and Methymna and Teos, and all of Miltiades’ men and their women. We filled ten triremes and as many Athenian grain ships, and we sailed away. The Scythians burned Kallipolis behind us, but we left it empty.
Datis landed an army on Lesbos, and he swept the island with a chain of men all the way across, looking for rebels. He crucified those he caught, and he took the best of the boys and all of the unmarried girls, and sold them as slaves or took them for the harem. Then he went to Chios and did the same.
There was no force in the world that could stop him. He harried the Aeolians, selling their children to brothels, and then he harried the Ionians, and humiliated them, island by island, until there was no longer the sigh of a girl or the worship of Aphrodite from Sardis to Delos. He broke the world of my youth. He destroyed it. I grew to manhood in the world of Alcaeus and Sappho. He destroyed Sappho’s school and sold the students to satisfy the lusts of his soldiers.
You children know the world Athens made, and you think it good. I love Athens — but there was a fairer world once, a brighter place, with better poets and freer ways. Where Greeks and Persians could be friends with each other, with Aegyptians and Lydians.
Datis killed it, to break the spirit of the Greeks and reduce them to servitude. Truly, it was the rape of the islands that taught us Greeks what the Persians were capable of, and showed us why we would have to fight, or see our culture die.
Artaphernes resisted Datis, of course. But Datis was the Great King’s nephew and had won the great battle, and Artaphernes was considered soft on Greeks.
Datis raped the islands, and we sailed away and left them. I sailed Black Raven into Corinth and unloaded the refugees, While Black took him back to sea as a paid ship, for Athens, I brought them north, to Plataea.
Idomeneus was a bastard, for all I loved him, and when the treasure had gone over the side, none of it was mine or his — so I still had riches, and I spent them that summer. I settled forty families in the vale of Asopus, and when I was finished, the money of my piracy was gone, washed clean in rescuing them from poverty, or so I hoped.
And then I was just another farmer with a forge, for my gold was gone.
While I was spending money like a drunken sailor, I heard the rumours — that I was a murderer, that I was accursed of Apollo. All my father’s friends spoke up for me, as well as all my own friends — Hermogenes and Epictetus the Younger, and Myron and his sons — but my absences, my riches and the constant murmurs of the sons of Simon, from Thebes, had their effect. Men pushed me away, in the little ways that men use when they are afraid. And to my shame, I responded with arrogance and let the distance grow.