‘Just as you did,’ I said, and slapped him on the back in turn.
I had brought a pair of guides from Miltiades, both local men from the Athenian phalanx who knew all the trails and small roads that led east from our position. So we made good time, although the way was never straight and at one point we actually crossed some poor farmer’s wheat field — two thousand men and as many animals crushing his precious crop. But it was the only way to join two paths. Attica had some of the worst roads in the world then.
I rode ahead with Gelon and Lykon and Philip the Thracian, both serving as volunteers as their cities had no part in this war, and we found a camp — three hayfields, all fallow or recently cut, with stone walls all around, on a low ridge with a stream at the bottom. It’s one of the best positions I’ve ever found, and I went back to it on another occasion. We slept secure. I had sentries every night already — a lesson learned from my first campaigns.
We rose with dawn — all that hunting on Cithaeron had good effect — ate hard bread and drank a little wine, then moved. Before noon we were up with the tail of the Athenian force, which was moving down through the olive groves that crowned the ridges around Aleitus’s farm and tower. I knew the trails here — again, from hunting — and my guides were off their own ground. So I took us a little north, over the same ridge where Aleitus’s party had killed two deer, and down through the old orchards where mine had killed six.
Aristides was first that day — the tribes have a strict rotation in everything, from order of march to place in the battle line — and he was the strategos in charge, because the Athenians rotated the command. He was choosing his camp when I rode up with my little party.
He smiled when he saw me. I didn’t smile — any pleasure was wiped from my heart when I saw that he was with Cleitus.
Aristides raised a hand. ‘Stop,’ he said.
I had my hunting spear in my fist.
‘We are here to fight the Medes, not each other,’ Aristides said.
‘Look,’ I said. ‘You found a horse!’ I snorted. ‘I thought I heard that something had happened to them.’
Cleitus had his sword in his hand. ‘How’s your mother?’ he asked.
Aristides hit him — hard — in the temple with his fist. Aristides was a good athlete and a fine boxer, and Cleitus fell from his horse.
But when I rode over to him, Aristides caught my spear hand in a grip of iron.
‘In this army,’ he said, ‘there are other men who hate each other — political foes, personal enemies, men with lawsuits. We have tribes with rivalries, and men with conflicting interests in money — men who have absconded with wives and daughters, men who committed crimes. And worst of all, as both of you know, we have men who have taken money from the Great King and who will use their power to break us the way they broke the East Greeks at Lade — through defection and treachery.’
Cleitus got to his feet and put a hand to his head. ‘You have a heavy hand, sir.’
Aristides nodded. ‘We are in the precinct of Heracles — ancestor to all three of us. You will both come with me to the altar and swear — to the gods — to keep the peace and fight together like brothers. You are leaders. If you fight each other — we are finished.’
‘He killed my mother,’ I said. ‘And his actions served the Great King. He’s taking the Great King’s money. He planned to kill me to keep the Plataeans out of this.’
Cleitus looked at me with the kind of contempt I hadn’t seen in a man’s eyes since I was a slave. ‘You live in a world of delusion, peasant. I would never do anything to serve the Great King. I am an Athenian. I will crush you like the insect that you are — for hubris. For treating my family as if we were at your level. Killed your mother?’ He laughed. ‘It should have been you — and it is no care of mine if some raddled Boeotian whore got in the way.’ He turned to Aristides. ‘I swore to kill him and all his family. He has insulted me and mine.’
Aristides crossed his arms. ‘Cleitus — most men in this army think your family are traitors.’ Cleitus whirled around in angry denunciation, but Aristides cut him off with a raised hand. ‘If you refuse to swear my oath, Cleitus, I will send you from the army, and I will cease defending you to the demos.’ More quietly, he said, ‘This is not the agora, nor the palaestra. He insulted your family? You insulted his? By all the gods, we are talking about the existence of our city! Are you a playground bully or a man of honour?’
I had lowered my spear-point. Aristides always had that effect on me. His moral advantage was almost as great as Heraclitus’s — he lived the words he spoke. But I was still angry.
‘Aristides,’ I said, ‘I honour you more than most men, but he killed my friends and fellow townsmen — and my mother. He killed them for vanity. His so-called revenge? He brought it on himself, by trying to treat me the way he treats the demos — as lesser men.’
‘You killed his horses — fifty horses. The value of ten farms. You killed them.’ Aristides stood in front of me, imperturbable. ‘You killed them to humiliate the Alcmaeonids. Not to save Miltiades — but for your sense of your own honour. Deny it if you can.’
‘He murdered my people!’ Cleitus said. ‘Family retainers!’
‘Thugs,’ I said. ‘Aristides, this is foolishness. You, of all men, know why I did what I did.’
‘I do,’ Aristides said. ‘You did what you did to achieve what you perceived as justice. As did Cleitus.’
‘He killed my mother!’ I yelled.
‘My family is in exile,’ Cleitus said. ‘My uncle died — he died — far from our city. Thanks to you, the dogs of this city bay for our blood and the little men — tradesmen, men whose grandfathers were slaves — treat us with contempt. For that, I would kill you and every man and every woman with a drop of your blood in his veins.’
‘So both of you can wallow in selfishness, pride, self-deceit — and Athens can be burned by the Medes.’ Aristides raised an eyebrow. ‘Come with me — both of you.’
Such was his authority that we followed him. He led us over the brow of the hill on which the precinct of the shrine of Heracles stood. Suddenly, in the blaze of the late-summer son, we were looking down the hill to the plain, the fields and olive groves of one of Attica’s richest areas, all the way to the beach at Marathon.
And from the curve of the beach, as far north as the eye could see, were ships. Hundreds of ships — ships as thick on the sea as ants around an anthill when the plough rips it asunder. Many of them were already stern-in to the beach, over by the marsh at the north end of the bay. They were unloading men, and tents — or so I guessed.
Closer to us, in the open ground at the foot of the hill, there were a dozen Sakai cavalrymen. They were looking up the hill at us. They had gold on their arms, in their hats, on their saddles, and every one of them had a heavy bow at his waist and a pair of long spears in his fist.
‘There they are. The Persians, the Medes, the Sakai — the armoured fist of the Great King, here to chastise Athens for her sins. Now — choose. Stand here, in the sight of the enemy, and fight each other to the death — and on your heads be the future that you squander. Or both of you can swear my oath. Fight side by side. Show the army — every man of whom knows your story, and your hate, believe me — that war with Persia is bigger than family, bigger than revenge. And when the Persians are gone, you may kill each other, for all I care.’
Silence, and the wind sighing over the golden wheat fields down by the sea.
I nodded. ‘I will swear,’ I said. What else could I say? Aristides was the Just Man. What he asked was just.
Nor was Cleitus — for all that I still burn with hate for him — less a man than I. ‘I will swear,’ he said. ‘Because you are right. I will go farther — because I am a better man than this Boeotian pig. I paid men to fight against you, Plataean. But I am sorry that your mother died. For that — alone — you have my apology.’