My kit was neatly stowed under the leather cover of my aspis. Gelon had done it — he must have — after the muster of the freedmen. My corslet had been buffed until the scales shone, and the helmet was like a woman’s mirror, and the reflected gleam of the fire danced on the curved brow and the ravens on the cheekplates.
Gelon came and knelt by my side. I hadn’t seen him get up. ‘Good enough?’ he asked, as he had on other mornings when he’d done a half-arsed job. This wasn’t half-arsed.
‘Splendid,’ I said. He’d even mounted my fancy plume — the one Euphoria had made me — and laid out the cloak, too.
‘Might as well look the part, polemarch.’ He gave my arm a squeeze. ‘I gather from Styges that you brought my armour.’
‘I did,’ I said. ‘But I haven’t polished it for you.’
He laughed soundlessly. ‘You’re all right,’ he said. ‘In the baggage?’
‘With Styges’ mule. I didn’t want you to find it.’ I waved down the hill.
In the east, the black-blue sky was moving towards grey.
A thousand of us had only a few hours to live.
I ate alone — a bowl of hot soup and a big chunk of pork from the feast the night before. I dunked bread in the soup, and drank two big cups of water and another of wine.
Then, clad only in my arming chiton, a stained thing of linen that had once been white, I crossed the camp to where the strategoi met. The day was warm already, and promised to be as hot as my forge.
I was the first strategos there. Miltiades was second, which says much about the state of his mind, and Aristides was third. Then the rest came in a clump, and this time we stood together with no regard to who voted for battle and who voted against. In fact, I helped Leontus tie his thorax while Miltiades spoke. Leontus had a beautiful white tawed-leather cuirass with a heavy black leather yoke and scales on the sides, and his armour tied with scarlet cords.
‘So,’ Miltiades said. He looked around in the half-light. ‘Today’s my day, and today we’ll fight. As soon as the boys have food in them, we’ll go down the hill. I want the Plataeans down first. They get their leftmost man’s shield up against the hills, and then we’ll all form on them, so there’s no gap. And friends,’ he said, and he looked around, ‘all we need to do to win is keep the line solid from end to end. No gaps. No spaces. Nothing. Shield to shield all the way from the hills to the sea.’
Everyone got it. We all nodded.
‘You all know the order, left to right, yes? So each contingent goes down in order, and no rushing, and no pushing. Forming the line is the key to victory. Once we’re formed, we’re halfway to it. Fuck this up and we’re all dead men.’
Aristides raised an eyebrow. ‘We get it.’
Miltiades didn’t crack a smile. ‘See that you do. Next thing. When we reach the bowshot of the enemy — the range where they shoot — we charge. Understand? Dead run, and to Hades with the man who slows or falls.’
That got them talking. ‘We’ll fall apart!’ Leontus protested.
Miltiades shook his head. ‘It works in the east. Young Arimnestos there once charged a hundred Persians all by himself-’
‘With ten other men!’ I said.
‘And the rest of the phalanx came in behind. It wrecked them — right?’ Miltiades said.
I got the last of Leontus’s ties done and faced the others. ‘It hurries their archers,’ I said. ‘They lose time and space to shoot.’ I looked around. ‘We’re the best athletes in the world, and we can cover that ground in no time, with the gods at our backs.’
‘You’re in command,’ Leontus said to Miltiades. He shrugged. Then he smiled. ‘All right. I’m fast. I’ll run.’
‘Just make sure the rest of your tribe goes forward too!’ Sophanes said.
That was it — perhaps our shortest command meeting to date. Callimachus asked Miltiades where he should stand, and Miltiades nodded gravely. ‘You are the polemarch,’ he said. ‘You take the right of the line.’
Callimachus bowed. ‘I am honoured. But the place is yours if you wish it.’
Miltiades shook his head. ‘When I’m polemarch, I’ll take the place of honour,’ he said, and that was that.
Then many of us embraced, and if my voice chokes to tell this — I embraced many men I loved for ever, and we all knew it. We all knew that win or lose, the price would be high. That is what a battle is — a culling. Except this time, instead of standing with strangers and ‘allies’, I was standing in an army with my friends in every rank, and every dead man would be the loss of someone I knew. It was all very personal.
More wine, girl. And this for the shades of the heroes who fell there!
So my friend Hermogenes, phylarch of the leftmost file of Plataea, was the first man down the hill, the first to form and the lynchpin of our line. And Callimachus was the last file-leader down the hill, and formed the farthest to the right in the front rank. Hermogenes’ shield brushed against the trees, and Callimachus’s right sandal was in the water, or so we used to tell the story.
Our Plataeans were twelve men deep and one hundred and twenty men wide. We took up a little more than a stade of the plain’s width, and our rear rank was just twenty-four paces at normal order from our front rank.
The three tribes next to us had been ‘bolstered’ with light-armed men, and they, too, had twelve ranks. Many of the Athenian archers had also been put in the phalanx on the left. So they were deep, and they stretched three more stades.
We couldn’t even see the middle as it started to form. Aristides was in the centre with his Antiochae, and they formed twice as wide as we did and only half as deep — just six deep — to cover more frontage. That’s where the richest, best-armoured men were, and Miltiades felt confident that they could take the brunt of the archery. At least, I hope that’s what he thought. Because otherwise, what he thought was that the cream of the enemy’s archers — the Sakai — would rid him of a world of political opponents.
There were three tribes in the centre, and they covered almost five stades.
And on the right there were three more tribes, double depth as we were, and they covered three more stades. So our line was twelve or more stades from end to end.
No one could keep a line that long from buckling and flowing and bending. But we formed it well, and even as we formed, the barbarians came.
They did what they had done the day before, but it all went mad, like a sudden thunderstorm.
First, the forming of the Persians was terrifying from ground level. Yesterday, I’d watched it from a hundred feet above the plain. It had been majestic and professional. At eye level, it was like a lion pouncing. They flooded out of their camp in silence, twelve thousand professional soldiers all running to their posts in about as much time as it takes to tell the story.
And then they came forward at us.
My end of the line had settled in position. Men were kneeling to tie a sandal, wiping the dew from their shields, laughing, resting their heavy shields on the ground, or on the instep of their left feet.
The onset of the barbarians blasted the laughter from us. They flowed over the plain like a sudden flood, and the horsemen on their flanks looked like gods in a blaze of sunlit gold. They came on without a sound except the ring and jingle of harness, of metal on metal, the hollow knocking of wooden shields on armoured legs.
Just as yesterday, they put their Phoenicians and Greeks on our right, so that I was opposite Persians, the front ranks armed just as we were armed, big men with heavy armour and shields — mostly oval shields, almost like our old Boeotians, with short heavy spears — but with six ranks of archers behind them. Opposite Hermogenes was a troop of Persian noble cavalry. Directly opposite me was a man in a helmet that seemed to be made of gold. As he came forward in the new sunlight, he called out a war cry and his men answered, all together, a single shout that carried to us like a challenge.