We weren’t. We had taken too long — far too long. And the sun was coming up in the east — still only a line of grey-pink out over the ocean towards Euboea, but it was going to rise like the hand of doom. We were just eighty men, caught a long way from our camp.
I cursed and killed a man. By then we were fighting Medes — real soldiers. They weren’t swarming us, but their braver souls started to come in close while others shot at us from a distance. The light was still bad, their bowstrings were damp and Teucer and his lads were shooting back, so we were relatively unscathed, but I could see better with every passing minute, and that meant that they could, too.
I was in the centre of my own line. Nothing for it — we needed a miracle.
‘Ready to charge!’ I called out.
There was that reassuring sound as every man closed a little to the centre and the shields tapped together. Perhaps you’ve heard it in drill — it is a sound that always gives you heart, that rattle. It means your friends are still together — still in good order, still with enough heart to fight.
I took a deep breath. We were fighting Medes — they couldn’t understand me.
‘When I say charge,’ I bellowed, as loud as my throat and lungs could manage, ‘you go fifty paces forward, turn and run as if the hound Cerberus was at your heels. Hear me, Plataeans!’
There was a cry — something like a war cry, something like a sigh.
‘Charge!’ I called, and we went at them.
The Medes were ready for it. They broke as soon as they saw us come, and only our boldest and fastest caught any of them. I certainly didn’t — the Mede I had my eye on vanished into the near-dark of the bushes up the beach.
Idomeneus, bless him, sounded a single blast as I hit my forty-seventh stride, and we turned together, like a figure in the Pyrrhiche — which it is — and ran. We were off down that beach like frightened boys chased by an angry parent, and every man understood that we had to break contact now, or die when the sun rose.
But Persians have good soldiers, too. Somewhere in the scrub was an officer who knew his business, and within seconds of us running, they were chasing us and arrows began to fall. Then it was every man for himself. Some of my boys cut inland, across country. A few ditched their shields. Most didn’t — when archers are shooting you, the last thing you want to give up is your shield.
I stuck to the beach, and most of the Medes followed, worse luck. Had they stayed a little longer, run away from our false charge a little further, we might have made a clean exit, but we were not so lucky.
After a few minutes of running, I looked back and they were gaining. After all, they had light body armour, which most of them were not wearing anyway, as they’d been awakened by our attack. They had neither helmets nor greaves.
They were cautious, but they were getting the measure of us.
An arrow hit the middle of the back of the yoke of my armour. Thanks to Ares’ hand, it turned on the two layers of bronze, but the power knocked me flat. As I rose, another arrow hit the same place, then another glanced off my shield, heavy arrows, and another rang on my helmet, and I thought — Fuck, this is it.
I got my feet under me and turned.
One of the Medes fell to the beach, his life leaking out between his fingers as he grabbed at the shaft embedded in his guts.
Teucer was right at my shoulder, shooting calmly. One, two — and men fell.
‘Turn a little left,’ he said.
I did, and two arrows hit the face of my shield, and he shot back — zip, pause, zip.
With every shot, a Mede fell.
Another arrow into my shield, but now the Medes were scrambling for cover — Teucer dropped four right there, coughing their lungs out in the sand.
‘Run,’ I said. I gave him three steps while I stayed — another arrow off the top of my helmet — and then I turned and ran.
My breath was coming like a horse’s after a gallop — I sucked in air the way a drunkard sucks wine and my legs burned as if I had run ten stades. The wound Archilogos had given me in the fall of Miletus had a curious numbness to it against the pain of all my other muscles, and sweat rolled down my forehead and into my eyes.
The light was growing. I was running down a beach that was well enough lit for target practice, and I was going more and more slowly.
Ares, it makes me want to spit sand to remember it: fleeing like a coward, and knowing — knowing — that in a few moments I would be dead anyway. When it is your last — when all is lost — it doesn’t matter whether you were a demonstration or a deception or a last stand, friends. No one worth a shit wants to die with his back to the foe.
So I turned.
An arrow meant for my back screamed off the face of my shield.
I meant to take one with me, but I was out of everything, the daimon had no more to give me, and I — the great fighter of the Plataeans — slumped down behind my shield. I got smaller and smaller as the arrows thudded in.
But I could breathe, and I did. I panted like a dog, and I couldn’t think of anything, and arrows fell on my shield like hail on a good crop — twice, arrowheads blew right through the face of my aspis.
Oh, children, that hour was dark. When I had my breath back, I knew it was just a matter of how I chose to die. I could make it last, down under the rim of my aspis, until they got a man into the brush to my left who could shoot me in the hip or the arse. No laughing matter. I could try to turn again, but to Hades with that. My legs were gone. It seemed to me that the best course was to attack them. It would get the whole thing over with the quickest, and if anyone watched me — if there was a single bard left in Greece to sing after this debacle — at least men would say that Arimnestos died with his face to the foe.
I took a dozen more breaths, rationing them, taking the air in deep. Then I allowed myself five more — the margin of life and death. Five breaths.
Arrows continued to slam into the face of my shield.
On the edge of the fifth, I rose to my feet. I sneaked a last glance down the beach behind me — and my heart leaped with joy. It was empty. My men had got away.
In some situations, nothing would be grimmer than to die alone, but in this one, it filled me with power. Being alone made me feel less a failure. More a hero.
I leaned forward, into the arrow storm, summoned up power in my legs I didn’t think I had and charged.
Anyone asleep?
Hah! You flinched, thugater. You think perhaps I died there, eh?
Pour me a little more wine, lad.
Yes, I charged. As soon as I got my face over the rim of my aspis, I could see that they were well bunched up, about fifty strides away — that’s why so few arrows missed, I can tell you.
I remembered running with Eualcidas, at the fight in the pass. Here, like there, my feet crunched on gravel. I kept my shield up, and the arrows fell on it like snow on a mountain.
And then they stopped.
There were screams — screams of pain and screams of terror. I lowered my aspis a finger’s breadth and peered forward, though the pre-dawn murk, the sweat, the slits of my helmet.
The Medes were falling — a dozen of them were down and the rest were scattering. When I reached them — alive, of course, you daft woman — not a man was alive, and they looked like porcupines for the arrows in them.
I turned away from rosy-fingered dawn and the pale sea. There were men coming out of the bush — a hundred men, with bows.
The Athenian archers had found me.
I laughed.
I mean, what in Hades can you do but laugh?
When you write this, I suppose you’ll leave out all the little men — the archers and peltastai. And when I say ‘little’, I mean small in the eyes of the great. But they were good men, as you’ll see. The psiloi. The ‘stripped’ men who wear no armour. This is the story of the little men, and you can ignore what happened next if you wish. But it had more effect on the battle than most of the heavily armed men and the gentry would ever want to admit.