The Saka were brave and very professional, but I learned a great deal about Xerxes’ army in those hours. The Saka were not particularly motivated. They didn’t press us as hard as they would have if, for example, we’d raided their camp. I have reason to know. In fact, they were almost desultory in their pursuit, as if they had better things to do. And it is worth noting that all their cousins were looting helpless Boeotia while they were getting killed, which must have seemed unfair.
But I found it hopeful that the elite of Xerxes’ army, with the possible exception of the Immortals and the noble cavalry, were so unambitious. Just possibly, they’d lost interest in the contest when Masistius went down, but he must have been re-horsed soon enough.
We did have some bodies to strip, and the Saka wore a great deal of gold. We took it and put it on the wagons and I saw to it that we took all their bows and all their arrows, too.
At any rate, the sun rose over Attica and it was empty. My whole body hurt like dull fire, like I’d lain on my anvil and pounded myself all day with a hammer. My hip was scored by the arrow that had come through my aspis and my head had a laceration where another arrow had passed between the crest box and the helmet, damaging both without penetrating either, and my arm had several punctures, all of them red and angry, and of course I’d lost two fingers on my left hand and my hand was puffy and swollen-
Idomeneus was still stretched overt the back of a horse, breathing like a man snoring in a bad sleep. Alcaeus’s son awoke from his stupor to scream in pain and we had to rig a different mode of travel for him. He’d been stabbed twice with spears, once to the bone in the thigh and once through the back of the shoulder under the wing of his corselet; sheer bad luck.
I didn’t want to lose either of them.
I confess I pushed my oarsmen across the plain of Attica like a madman. We ate garlic sausage from our bags as we walked and we kept moving. It was to my advantage that they were oarsmen, used to extreme performance, and not mere hoplites. Aristides would spit to hear me speak such blasphemy, because aristocrats are supposed to believe that the thetes class will always betray them and cannot be trusted in extremes, but my experience is the opposite — rich men will sell their city while the poor will fight on the walls to the last drop of their blood. After all, unlike the rich, they have nowhere else to go.
And of course, they are used to working hard. My oarsmen were magnificent, in a grumbling, angry, bitter, cynical way.
Leon, one of the oldest oarsmen, a man who had some special tie to me, for all he affected to despise me, was one of the best. He’d been aboard Storm Cutter, the first of the name, in the storm that had earned her the right to be called so. He’d been there when we killed most of the Phoenicians and later when we survived the hardest manoeuvre I’ve ever done in a storm. He lacked the voice or the poise to be an oar-master, but he was a big brute with a ready tongue, and he always seemed to end up with me, no matter how many times he collected his silver and went away to open a taverna.
He’d spent most of the last five years aboard Paramanos’s ships, but now he’d taken citizenship in Plataea and here he was swaggering his way across Attica.
‘Careful he doesn’t get you lost,’ he said aloud to a mate, cocking an eye at me. ‘Lord Arimnestos has been known to take a few long ways to get home, eh, lord?’ He laughed his big laugh.
Men muttered about the lack of rations and the fatigue, but Leon shouted, ‘What’s our hurry, Navarch? We’re running from the fucking Medes so that other Medes can kill us, eh?’
I jogged over alongside him.
‘I notice you’re still alive,’ I said.
‘Not for long,’ he said. But he grinned at me.
Where the road splits for Megara and Eleusis I halted them and let them rest in the olive grove. We fetched water from a well. The owner wasn’t there to ask. No one was there. It was wrong, somehow, to ride through villages with no people, or with one sad dog.
The sad dog was at the crossroads. He was a fine tall brute with a brindle hide, not a farmer’s animal but a hunting dog like those my friend Philip of Thrace raised, or Lykon of Corinth, my sister’s favourite. I fed him and he took the food with considerable dignity for a dog and looked at me that way that good dogs do. As if to say, I trust you, man. Are you worthy of my trust?
I have never been a great man for dogs or cats. But that dog — he was alone. He had known better days, and he deserved better than dignified starvation in a small town in a deserted Attica — or being killed by Persians for food.
I pulled the rope out of the lining of my good aspis and made a quick collar to hold him, but from the moment I fed him, he showed little inclination to run. He just wanted more sausage. I fed him most of what I had, noting that I seemed very hot for a man who had only walked a few stades, and that my left hand was bright red, which worried me.
But the grumbling was quite loud, so I wandered in among the oarsmen. ‘We must have taken four or five mina of gold,’ I said. ‘Tonight on the beach of Salamis, we’ll divide it in shares. I’d be surprised if every man didn’t get a daric.’
I suppose I could have given them a speech about saving Greece, but usually a little loot is better.
Or perhaps I’m just an old pirate.
We had to climb the low ridge that towers above the beach at Eleusis, and we were too strung out. I was conscious that we could meet Persian cavalry going in any direction at that point; they could be behind us, ahead of us, all around us. So I sent mounted men racing to the highest point, closer to Athens, and I ordered men to pick up their spears and shields when I saw two of the prodromoi galloping back to me.
But I smelled it before they reported on it.
‘Attica is on fire!’ they said.
And it was true. The Persians and the Medes must have struck the southern slopes of Mount Parnes that very morning, because we hadn’t seen anything from the top of the pass. From the ridge, though, we could see smoke to the north and east, as far as the eye could see. And we could smell it, too.
My new dog sat and howled.
I patted his head and gave him some sausage, which quieted him. Much like the oarsmen with Saka gold, come to think of it.
Before darkness fell, a pair of tubby tuna boats came and took forty of my people across to the Salamis side, where Harpagos and Seckla were waiting. As soon as they knew we were there, they got the hulls in the water with only the top decks manned, and skimmed across.
We saw them coming — five ships under a third of their oarsmen, and we knew they were for us. We’d only been gone from them a week, but it was like a homecoming. For most of the oarsmen it was more of a homecoming than going to an empty Plataea. We put the oarsmen into the ships, packed the top decks with terrified donkeys — not a story I’ll tell, but also not an experience I’d willingly repeat — got the horses aboard one of the tuna boats, and made it to Salamis before the Great Sickle rose into the heavens. Brasidas had made a tight camp, with sentries, and we landed like champions, stern first, and waded ashore with our menagerie of stock to find a hot dinner and fresh bread waiting.
Eugenios moved into my tent without a backward glance and for the rest of the war my food was hot and my dishes were clean. Styges served out the former slaves to Giannis, commanding Black Raven, who was the shortest-handed.
I’d missed a week of meetings, councils and officers’ calls. Fighting the Persians seemed like a worthwhile way to spend my time.