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‘What can we do for you, Arimnestos?’ Miltiades asked.

I had the good grace to laugh. ‘Nothing, unless it is to make sure that Phrynichus doesn’t starve while you all plot the future of Athens.’ And then I had a thought. ‘Perhaps I will have something after all. I have in my hand a set of manumission papers for a slave girl. They’ve all been signed by a magistrate — how about if you all sign them?’

Her name, it appeared on the tablets, was Apollonasia — quite a mouthful for a twist-foot slave girl from Boeotia, but Apollo’s daughter she certainly was. And all three of them — the three most famous men of their generation — put their stamps and their names across the magistrate’s mark on her tablets.

It was the best gift I could give her. I went and fetched her, and introduced her — her eyes cast modestly down — and each swore that they would remember her.

She walked with us, out of the city. I stopped on the Acropolis hill to say farewell to Phrynichus, and I stopped in Piraeus to say farewell to Agios and Paramanos, and I stopped at Eleusis to say farewell to Eumenios, who I’d barely seen, because in Attica, eighty stades is reckoned a great distance. Cleon came with me, of course. And on our last night in Attica, at Oinoe, where my brother died, she came into my blankets, and kissed me.

‘I’m going in the morning,’ she said. ‘I’ll be a farmer’s wife in Attica, and my sight tells me I will see you again. I was a vessel to lead you, and now I am free.’

I murmured something, because I was hard as rock and wanted to have her, and I didn’t need any of her moon-gazing female nonsense just then, but she bit my shoulder hard to get my attention.

‘You owe me,’ she said. ‘Give me a child of yours, or I’ll curse you. Again.’

So I did.

In the morning, she was gone. I did hear of her again, and I know who she married and who our child grew to be, as you’ll hear eventually, if you all keep sitting here.

But I’ll say this of her in eulogy. She was a hero, as much as Eumeles of Euboea or Aristides. She was a vessel for the gods, and she stood her ground, and when they treated her like shit, she did not become shit. Eh?

I can never lose the notion that if I had gone back for her, the Greeks might have won at Lade. Foolishness. But I still carry the guilt for leaving her to bloody Cleitus for a year.

And he didn’t send her to a brothel because he was evil, either. That’s what you do with a club-footed chattel with good breasts, if she has no skills. Right?

I’m an old man and I have few regrets, but she is one. And when she lay with me that night and took my seed — I felt better. I won’t say otherwise. Much better.

When I awoke in the first light, she was gone, but sitting on my leather bag, where her dark head had lain just hours before, was a great black raven. It cawed once, and the beat of its wings frightened me, and then it rose into the sky with a cry.

I lay still with my heart beating hard, and my body felt lighter. Indeed, when I rose from my blankets, my hip and lower leg hurt less — much less. I’ve never run the stade since Lade, but from that moment I got something back. Something more than mere muscle and tissue.

11

My third return to Plataea was the easiest. Perhaps my fellow townsmen were becoming accustomed to my travels, or perhaps Simon, son of Simon, had just lost his supporters in Thebes and had no money with which to blacken my name. In any event, I went back over Cithaeron in winter, froze my arse in the high pass and made a sacrifice on the family altar nonetheless, and came down to green Plataea in time for spring harvest.

The truth is that Plataeans can be ignorant hicks, and it’s possible that the winter was so cold that they never noticed I was gone.

Either way, I was there for the first harvest, the barley harvest, and my spirits were high — whatever the raven gave me, it was strong. I settled Cleon on a small farm in Cithaeron’s shadow, and he seemed happy enough. I ploughed my fallow land with Hermogenes, and won his grudging praise for my unstinting work. I made new props for grape vines and I pruned everything I could get a sickle to. I gathered all my male slaves and on the spot freed the two Thracians who had been with me since my first return, and then told the rest exactly how they could work their way to freedom.

When the spring farm work was done, I threw myself into the forge, making pots and pitchers and cups and temple vases with Tiraeus and Bion. For twenty days, my forge was never silent. Even Hermogenes worked the forge, and that was rare, because despite his skills, he’d become a farmer first and foremost.

At the feast of Demeter, we danced the Pyrrhiche and I eyed the new crop of boys-become-men with the wary amusement that men have for boys. They preened and slunk away by turns, and lost their heads whenever a pretty girl walked by. Despite which, by the end of the festival, I had a notion of who was worthy and who was worthless, and where they might stand in the phalanx.

I had not taken naturally to being the strategos of the town — or perhaps I had. My father was briefly the polemarch before his death — the war archon. And no man had been formally appointed to either role since his death. The Plataeans had not stood in battle a single day since the Week of Battles. Indeed, in all the town, there were only six of us who had faced iron in the storm of Ares since then.

There was me. There was Idomeneus, who was accepted as a citizen despite his alienness, because he was the priest of the hero. There was Ajax, a Plataean who had served with the Medes against us in the Chersonese, and of whom we nonetheless thought highly. There was Styges, who had followed us to Lade. Hermogenes had served me for two years in the Chersonese, and had fine armour and a steady hand. Lysius of Plataea was another local man — he’d served for four years under Miltiades before buying a good farm along the Asopus. That was it, in my generation.

The fifty Milesian families brought us a wealth of war experience. Teucer was the best archer our town had ever seen, and I used him to organize the men who carried bows — in those days, honey, archers still walked with the phalanx. And Alcaeus, who was the chief lord of the survivors, was as good a man in spear-fighting as Idomeneus, and owned full panoply, with thigh guards and arm armour and even foot armour shaped like his own feet, so that when he was fully kitted, he looked like a bronze statue.

The Milesians added real fighting power. And that allowed them — as Ionians and foreigners — to gain acceptance more rapidly than they might otherwise have done.

And finally, there was Cleon, who took one of Simon’s former farms, a Corvaxae property that I granted him, just over the hill from mine, running hard by Epictetus’s vineyards. He was never fond of war, but he’d stood in the front ranks several times. Plataea was delighted to have him, and Myron got up a collection to buy him an aspis and a helmet, as he had sold his.

In those days, a small city like Plataea knew that its warriors were its lifeblood, and we danced together as often as the feast cycle allowed. Young men hunted together on Cithaeron, and some — a few — came to the forge and learned spear-fighting, or went up the hill to Idomeneus or down the Asopus to Lysius. We all taught the same things — how to use your shield and your spear-shaft to keep the enemy’s iron from your body, and only later how to plunge the iron home yourself.

As the bronze-smith, I had a fair idea who had armour and how good it was. As a group, Plataeans were well-to-do, thanks to the money Athens paid us for grain. And those famous three victories in a week had put good helmets and greaves in almost every farm. They might not fit every generation, but they were there, and when a new generation appeared, there was some trading and some trips to the bronze-smith. The men were as ready for war as dancing the war dance and wearing armour to exercise could make them.