In the dooryard where Mater had fallen, she poured the libations on my shield and wiped it with a new linen towel, and then she did the same to my sword and my spear, and finally, defying convention, to my helmet.
I longed to crush her to me, but I did not. We were Greeks, not barbarians. Our women send us to war with dry eyes, and we left as if going to the fields and not to face death.
There was still smoke rising to the heavens from the funeral pyres when we marched. As we climbed the hills towards Cithaeron, we were joined by the main body from the agora of the city itself. In the distance, as we climbed, we could see smoke rising over Theban territory, and there were wolfish smiles as we went. The epilektoi marched first, up the same road they’d marched just ten days before on their way to the late-summer hunt.
They weren’t boys any more. When they had torn into the hired men, they took losses — ten killed outright, another dozen dying of wounds. In a community as small as ours, the loss of twenty young men was a knife wound in the gut. Everyone was the friend, the lover, the wife, the sister or brother of one of the dead.
But they had killed, and won, and that changed them most of all. When we walked up the trails to the tomb of the hero, every man in my front rank knew that he was worthy of the blood of his fathers. He knew that he had been proven in fire, and like bronze, hardened by the working.
I could make you an argument that the hired men did us a favour by attacking us, but I’d be full of shit. There is no ‘good war’.
We stopped at the shrine, as Plataeans have since the Trojan War, and we poured libations. Some men shouted for me to sacrifice my new slave on the tomb. His name was Gelon, and he was a Greek from Sicily. He heard them call for his blood and he stood there with my shield on his shoulder, watching me.
I looked at Idomeneus. It was his choice, really. He shook his head.
‘No,’ he said. ‘We have shed enough blood, and the hero craves no more.’
He sacrificed a ram we’d brought for the purpose, looked at its entrails and shook his head.
‘This isn’t going to be good,’ he said.
I spat. ‘I didn’t need entrails to tell me that,’ I said.
We slept in our cloaks, and in the morning, after Teucer and the light-armed men rejoined from their raid into Thebes, we marched away over the mountains.
16
It was hot on the plains of Boeotia, and cold in the passes above Cithaeron. But when we came down off the passes, the sweltering sea-heat nearly choked us, and the humidity was such that a man could sweat through his chiton before he had it over his head.
I intended to keep to the high roads as long as possible. I didn’t want to give away my march. This sounds odd, in light of what transpired, but I was very conscious of the passage of days, and it seemed all too possible, to me, that we would arrive to find Athens surrendered, or beaten — in which case I needed to get away unmolested by the Persian cavalry. I was very aware — as Myron wanted me to be — that I held the future of Plataea under my hand.
So we were wary, and stayed to the north of Attica as the shadows lengthened and the summer ended. We turned east as we came down the main pass, and marched for two days across uncultivated land, skirting Oinoe. Men saw us, but they did not come forward to speak to us, and I had a handful of my light-armed mounted on horses to keep me informed of the terrain, and we made good time.
A week into our march, and we were in Attica proper — an Attica bereft of citizen men. Doors were locked against us, and there were only slaves and women, and few enough of them, too. It was as if a dread disease had swept the land and killed them. There was even wheat left in some fields. One night when we camped, my men reaped a whole field with their swords and left three silver coins on the doorstep of the empty house in payment, and we baked bread the next night after grinding it in an empty grist mill and baking it in ovens we found cold.
A day’s march from Athens, and we could see the Acropolis as clear as day on the horizon. It was not on fire, and I assumed that if Athens had surrendered or made peace, all these folk would have come flooding back down the roads to their farms. So I left my brother-in-law in charge, took my new slave and rode hard for Athens as the sun rose.
The gates were still open.
The streets were packed with people — all the farmers from the farms I’d just marched past, I expect. Most of them didn’t pay me a glance as I rode by, because the only men who would have been interested in me were in the Agora, voting. Any man still on the streets was a slave, a freedman or a foreigner.
If I had thought that the Agora was full for Phrynichus’s play, I was shocked to see how packed it was that late-summer day. I had to dismount and leave my horse with Gelon. Then I shouldered my way forward — I’m not a small man, but neither am I a giant, and no one wanted to make way for me. It took me an hour — five speeches — to make my way from the Tholos to the centre of the Agora, where the speakers stood.
For most of that time, I could see Miltiades.
He stood virtually alone. The men who stood by him were unknown to me, except Aristides and Sophanes, both of whom stood so proudly that they looked like men fighting in a desperate last stand.
When I was close enough, I could hear a man argue from the bema — the speaker’s platform — that there was no need for Athens to march to the aid of Eretria, that Euboea was an ancient enemy of Athens (true enough, friends) and the Great King was welcome to lay them low. And more such stuff. In that hour, as I bulled my away across the Agora and felt every wound on my body, I heard every cringing excuse to avoid war, every noble sentiment against it, speeches of cowardice and speeches of sublime nobility.
When I was almost close enough to touch Miltiades, a man ascended the bema who looked like one of Themistocles’ men. He stood with his head bowed for a moment, and then he raised it.
‘What more can we do?’ he asked. ‘Miltiades asks that we form the phalanx and march to defend the coast — even to save Chalcis. But I ask — why must we fight alone? We have walls. And Sparta is not coming. Thebes has made their own peace. We are alone, men of Athens. Are we the protectors of Greece? Sparta craves that title — let them act the part.’
He got quite a cheer, too.
While men were cheering — it is easy to cheer for other men to do the hard work while you sit home, I find — Miltiades raised his head. He was plainly dressed, for him, in a dark chlamys over a plain white chiton with one stripe. The gold pin at his shoulder was his only concession to rank. He raised his head and his eyes met mine — and lit up the way my eyes lit when they crossed with Euphoria’s.
He waited until he could clasp my hand. And then he pulled me sharply, so that he towed me as one ship will tow another after a storm. He didn’t bother to mount the bema. He simply raised my hand, the way a judge in games raises the hand of a victor.
‘You lie,’ he roared. ‘Plataea is here!’
Chaos.
Men shouted — one thing, and then another. I saw my father-in-law in the crowd, and I saw Aristides, and I saw Cleitus. I had thought him an exile until then. Our eyes met, and the hate flowed like wine.
I was still locked in that when the archon basileus pushed to my side.
‘Do you have an army?’ he asked.
‘A thousand hoplites,’ I said. ‘Which is every man we have.’
He embraced me. He, an aristocrat, who had no love for me or mine, but he embraced me, and then he pointed to the bema. ‘You have my permission to speak,’ he said.