‘Anyone who doesn’t have a Persian bow, get back,’ Leonestes shouted. ‘Way the fuck back, boys. A hundred paces.’
The dismounted Persians in front of us — about fifty of them — walked confidently forward. Even as I watched, they stopped. Most of them planted arrows in the ground for easy shooting.
The cavalry reaching around our right flank was making heavy going of it — they’d found the tangle of walls and hedgerows. Some of the younger Athenians began to drop shafts on them, as if it was sport. It’s always easier to be a hero when the enemy can’t shoot back, I find.
The Persians to our front weren’t in any hurry. The cavalry gave up on our right flank — a poor, hasty decision and just the kind of thing that happens in war. They got low on their horses’ necks and rode across our front, and one of our archers with a Persian bow emptied a saddle as they crossed us — heading for our left flank, closer to the hills and the camp.
In war, people make mistakes, just as they do in peace. A few minutes ago, these self-same Persians had been chasing someone across our right flank. We’d put a stop to that — and in the to and fro of combat, our Persian adversaries had forgotten their original foes.
The cavalry rode hard to get around our left, and then suddenly they were fleeing, and they had empty saddles — and there were men behind them throwing spears, and other men with armour running at them.
This transformed our fight — one moment, the Persians were exchanging slow, careful shafts with our best archers, and the next, they were running to get their mounts before our friends on the left captured the lot. It was close, but the Persians won the race and rode away.
They rode about a stade, pulled up and were hit by an invisible hand that plucked a couple of them from their saddles and made all the horses scream — slingers. Only a dozen of them, as I later learned — but that was the final straw for the Persians, and they raced for their camp.
That’s the part of the fighting that I saw. I stayed out there, with the archers, for an hour or more, and men came past us — little men, as I say — dozens of them, with javelins and bows and slings, and a few with nothing but a sack of rocks.
No one will ever fully explain that morning. Word went out that Miltiades was in trouble, I guess. Or Themistocles asked them to go out and support the archers. Who knows? It wasn’t part of any master plan, that much I know. However it came about, a couple of thousand Greek freedmen and light-armed men — men too poor to have a panoply and fight in the phalanx, but citizens too proud to abandon Greece — flooded the fields and hedgerows and stone walls. I estimate that, with the Athenian archers added in, they might have killed three hundred of the enemy. Nothing, you might say.
Nor was there any glory to it. When you are naked and have no weapon but a bag of rocks, you don’t go walking out in the open. No — you crawl along hedgerows and share the stone walls with the foxes and the tortoises, too.
But the Persians and their allies simply didn’t have a horde of light-armed men to keep our light-armed men at bay, and they couldn’t afford the steady casualties it would have taken to clear the field. And our little men made those fields a nightmare.
As the morning wore on, our light-armed began to take losses. If they were too bold, in their little groups, the enemy would cut them off and slaughter them. All told, I would bet that if the gods made a count, then the barbarians actually killed more Greeks than we killed barbarians that day.
But again — as I keep saying — war is not about numbers. War is about feelings, emotions, fatigue, joy, terror.
I got up the hill to our camp and was thronged by men who had to clasp my hand or slap my back.
‘We lost you!’ Idomeneus was weeping. ‘Oh, lord, I am ashamed.’
I shook my head. Who would not be delighted by this display of loyalty?
Teucer had it the worst. ‘I was right at your shoulder, lord,’ he said, clearly unhappy. ‘And then I found that I was by another scaled shirt — and it was Idomeneus. I had lost you in the dark.’
‘All dirt comes out in a good wash,’ I said. ‘How many did we lose?’
Idomeneus shook his head. ‘Too many, lord. Almost twenty. And your brother-in-law, and Ajax, and Epistocles, and Peneleos.’
Ares, that hurt. Not Epistocles — his loss was Plataea’s gain. But the rest — Pen would kill me for losing her husband, and Peneleos. .
‘Maybe they’ll come in,’ Teucer said. ‘You did.’
I lay down, my spirits low. It always happens after a fight, but this was worse. I hadn’t done anything except get my men lost — I had scarcely bloodied my spear. But I’d lost twenty of my best — irreplaceable men with heavy armour and fighting skills. Ajax was as good a spearman as I was — or he had been.
I was lying in the shade, feeling bad, when Miltiades came.
‘You’re alive, then,’ he said. ‘Praise the gods.’
That made me smile, because Miltiades so seldom invoked the gods — not in that voice.
‘I’m alive,’ I said. ‘And unwounded. But I lost a lot of men.’
He still had his shield on his shoulder — you can reach a point of exhaustion where you simply forget to strip kit off. In fact, I was lying in my scale corslet. I clambered to my feet to embrace him. He was looking beyond me, back towards my camp.
‘I never got near their horses,’ he said, in disgust. ‘We waited for your diversion, and when it came, we struck whatever was nearest.’ He gave me a grim smile. ‘I missed their horse lines in the dark, and we were in among the Sakai. We killed a few, I suppose.’
I had never seen Miltiades so down.
‘And Aristides?’ I asked. I was suddenly struck with fear. What if Aristides was dead?
‘He made it to the horse lines,’ Miltiades said bitterly. ‘But accomplished nothing, and lost twenty hoplites getting away. He may have killed twenty of their horses.’
‘But he lives?’
Miltiades nodded heavily. ‘He lives.’ He shrugged. ‘It is chaos out in that field. Half the hoplites will have lost their shield-bearers before this debacle is over. Better if we’d fought a field battle.’ He stared at the ground. ‘How did it go so wrong?’
I had my canteen, and I poured him a cup of water, and he dropped his shield and sat heavily. He had a gash on his leg — he wasn’t wearing greaves. I washed his leg myself, and when Gelon came up I sent him for an old chiton I could rip to shreds for wrapping.
I didn’t want him to see that Miltiades was weeping.
You can see, from the hindsight of forty years, that all was not lost — but trust me, thugater, while Miltiades sat on his aspis and wept, I felt like joining him. We had lost many good men — and to our minds, schooled in the war of the phalanx, we had accomplished nothing.
We had not robbed the Persians of their cavalry, and we had not put heart into the phalanx with a bloodless victory.
But while Miltiades wept, the light-armed started coming in from the fields — and the barbarians did nothing to stop them. Indeed, had I gone to the edge of the field, I’d have seen something that five thousand other Greeks saw — a stupid act of bravado that changed everything.
One of the groups of psiloi had crawled quite close to the Persian camp and found no one to fight, so they grew bored. Before they could crawl back, one boy leaped up on a stone wall — in full view of both armies — and bared his behind at the Persians, sitting on their horses by their camp. He made lewd gestures, and waved, and fanned his buttocks.
The Persian cavalry sat tight.
Everyone saw this exchange — everyone but Miltiades and me, of course. And in those moments, our light-armed felt their power. The barbarians felt their power. Every thrown rock made our boys bolder and every empty saddle made the Persians more afraid.
Before I limped back to camp — with my aspis on my shoulder and my helmet on the back of my head — we owned the fields of Marathon from the mountains to the sea, although I didn’t know it yet. And not because of our gentry and our hoplites.