It was on the fourth day that Aristides exploded.
‘If the Medes could be destroyed with talk, we would certainly triumph!’ he shouted. It came from nowhere, and his orator’s voice carried across the summit of the camp, and all the strategoi fell silent. Gods, half the camp fell silent.
The Athenian polemarch glared at him. ‘It is not your turn to speak,’ he said.
Aristides, the Just Man, stood his ground. ‘This is all drivel,’ he said. ‘If no one else will say it, I will. The Persians are peeling our army apart. There is dissension and fear. Our numbers are even — they have a few more men, perhaps. We must attack them and defeat them before our men follow the Euboeans home.’
Cleitus — the unlikeliest ally — agreed. ‘We must do something about their cavalry,’ he said. ‘Our men fear the horses like nothing else.’
‘Why don’t we simply return to Athens and show them the strength of our walls?’ Leontus asked. He was the most brazen of the anti-war strategoi, a handsome man who had the reputation of being a servant of the Alcmaeonids. ‘I hear so much about how we should fight a battle. Are you fools?’ He grinned. ‘Datis has a few thousand men more than we have, and a force of cavalry we can never hope to match. If we pack and march away in the night, he’ll burn some olive groves and go home. He hasn’t the time to lay siege to Athens.’
He looked around. Many of the strategoi agreed with him. I had to admit that he had a point — and I loathed him, politically.
‘Miltiades brought us here to save the Euboeans,’ he went on. ‘And look what we saved! A few beaten men. The assembly never meant for us to fight Persia. Let’s gather the army and have a vote. I’ll wager gold against silver that they vote to go home and defend the walls. And who can blame them?’
But arrogant men often over-reach. I’ve done it a few times myself, and I know. He carried on when he ought to have been silent.
‘You think you have an army? We have nothing. There aren’t enough gentlemen to fight any one of their regiments, and the rest of these men are chaff — useless mouths. The Plataeans will vanish at the first onset — bumpkins, a political stunt by Miltiades to make the rest of you credulous fools feel as if we have allies. The best men of Euboea didn’t stop the Medes for ten days. And their own lower orders sold the town to the enemy.’
Leontus might have carried the hour if he’d shut up before he offended every man standing there.
Aristides gave me the slightest of smiles and nodded his head. He was encouraging me to speak. In fact, he was egging me on.
‘Are you bought and paid for?’ I asked.
Leontus whirled, face red.
‘You lie,’ I added. I wasn’t angry, but I put on a good angry face. I knew what politics required. If I humiliated Leontus — immediately and publicly — his suggestions would wither and die on the vine. ‘My men stood and faced the Persian cavalry. You lie when you say we will run. But since the Persians have bought you, you are paid to say such things.’
I walked over to him — deadly Arimnestos, killer of men.
Leontus was not, in fact, a coward. ‘This is insane,’ he said. ‘I only say what-’
‘How much gold have the Medes paid you?’ I roared.
He flinched. He only flinched from my bellow, but the men in the circle thought that he looked guilty, and there was a murmur.
‘We are going to be massacred!’ he shouted, and left the meeting in a swirl of his cloak.
That helped morale, I can tell you.
The next day, the fifth day since the Persians landed, I sent my servants down to the stream in the morning to draw water, with all of Teucer’s men concealed in the rough ground at the foot of the hill.
But the Sakai had not been the eyes and ears of the Persian Empire for nothing. A dozen horsemen came up, looked at the Plataean servants in the stream and rode away. They smelled a rat.
Such is war.
At the other end of the line, Miltiades tried a similar stunt, sending a forage party far out into the fields near the beach to gather hay and cut standing wheat, and laying an ambush with his old soldiers, but the Mede cavalry looked it over and rode away.
In the centre, emboldened by our success, the city men of two tribes went down the hill with sickles to gather wheat. Most men had eaten all the food they had brought, and fear of the Persian cavalry was keeping supplies from reaching us.
The Sakai fell on them in full view of the army, killed or wounded fifty and dragged twenty of them off into slavery. In an Athenian tribe of a thousand men, the loss of fifty was considerable.
At the next meeting, Miltiades finally spoke. Many men disliked him and feared his pretensions — he made little secret of his intention to make himself tyrant. Generally, he did best for the cause of the war by saying little. But that evening, he had had enough.
‘War is not a game for children,’ he said bitterly. He had their attention, right enough. ‘Demostocles, your men went down the hill like fools.’
‘We only did what you did!’ Demostocles shouted.
Aristides shook his head. ‘You don’t have a clue, do you? You don’t understand, because you’ve never made war.’ He crossed his arms. ‘This is not a day of battle with Aegina. This is not a war of Greeks with Greeks. The Plataeans and Miltiades’ men laid ambushes and had reinforcements ready. We call this “covering” our foragers. And the Sakai and the Medes and the Persians — they have made war, too. They saw little things — a broken bush, a line of footprints in tall grass — and they knew that the men were covered. And let them be. But in the centre, you took no precautions-’
‘Leontus is right!’ Demostocles said. ‘They are better men than us, and we will all be killed. I am not afraid of your Plataean thug, Miltiades! No one can accuse me of taking Persian gold! They are better at this skulking manner of war than we are. I want to demand a vote — right now — to go back to the city.’
Aristides’ voice was calm — and strong. ‘You are afraid. And like a schoolboy caught in a lie, you don’t wish to admit that you made an error. So, better that we abandon the campaign and retreat to the city than face the Medes, eh? Or is it that you’d rather abandon the campaign than admit that you need to ask the rest of us how to make war?’
‘Vote,’ Demostocles demanded. ‘And fuck you, you pompous prig. I was killing men with my spear when you were shitting green.’
‘Too bad,’ I said. ‘If you’d learned anything about war, you’d be a better strategos.’ I held up my hand to silence him. ‘Listen — I’m not pissing on you. When we went after the Euboeans, I almost lost my whole phalanx. Why? Because I had no idea how fast the cavalry could come at me. Our servants still had our shields — Ares, it could have been a disaster.’ I shrugged. ‘And I’ve been at war since I was seventeen. Fighting the Persians is not like any other war. We have to roll with the punches and learn from mistakes, the way a good pankrationist does when he fights a bigger man. Eh?’
It was always rewarding to say something sensible and have men like Aristides give me that look, the look that indicated that in the main they thought me a mindless brute.
Demostocles looked stunned that I’d admitted to failing. It took the wind out of his sails and left him speechless. Concession and apology can be like that.
‘We need a concerted foraging strategy,’ I said. ‘Every taxis cannot go on its own. And I think we need to contest the plain with them — even if it costs us. We need to go down there and show them who owns those fields, man to man. If we let their cavalry ride where they please, eventually they will beat us. Or that’s how it seems to me.’