But we’d done all this before, hadn’t we, my lovelies?
Their oar-master never said a word. He was dead on the deck and black blood flowed from his throat with the arrow Ka had sent him. And because he was dead, their oars lay on the water when we struck, and their whole ship seemed to scream as the long poles were broken by our bow and our port-side cathead, and the shipboard end of every oar struck its rower with all the strength of our ship.
Above me, Nemet shot and shot, straight down into their exposed decks. At my side, Ka emptied a whole quiver of Saka arrows as we passed.
The Ionian fell off in the direction of her now missing oars and as soon as she lost way the south wind took her and spun her like a top.
It was then that I had the idea of how to make this even better. It was too late to employ it right there, but I sent Hector to find a light rope, a grappling hook and an axe.
I was just looking over the port-side bulwark from laying the coil of rope down when I saw him.
My first boyhood enemy. The man who gave up Briseis. Diomedes of Ephesus. He had three of our arrows in his aspis and he’d managed to protect his helmsman — until that moment, when Nemet, high above, feathered the man through the top of his shoulder, and the arrow went in almost to the fletching, and the helmsman — just a few oar lengths from me — died before his head touched the deck. Ka put another arrow into his aspis — one of the last in his quiver.
He looked at us.
‘Diomedes, you cur!’ I roared. ‘How is Aphrodite!’ I had once roped him to the pillars of the temple of Aphrodite. Well, he tried to have me killed. You all know the story!
I could see the blood rush to his face as he recognised me, and then we were gone, Onisandros was calling and the oars were coming out.
Diomedes’ ship kept turning because no one had told his starboard side rowers to stop rowing.
So his bow fell afoul of the red trireme’s bow and the Red King, as we’d called him at Artemisium, had to pull in his oars and turn sharply to port himself. Archilogos, also trying to line up on us, now almost fell afoul of the Carian ship and had to pull in his own oars and turn away to port, losing us out of the melee altogether.
I laughed. For a moment, I was the king of the sea.
But we hadn’t yet accomplished a thing, except a sort of sea-jest.
But the collisions gave me a new option. I turned to Seckla.
‘Turn to port,’ I said.
He nodded, and before Onisandros even had our oars back in the water, we were turning — a shallow, easy turn, because there was no enemy that could touch us. We passed Archilogos’s ship, flank to flank, half a stade out, and I waved as I passed and forbade my archers to shoot.
I could see him — my boyhood friend — standing on his command deck. Even as I passed, he tilted the helmet back off his head.
So he knew I wouldn’t shoot.
But then he lifted his helmet — a beautiful Corinthian with hinged cheek plates — and waved. I waved back.
Then he shouted something and a heavy arrow punched into the face of my aspis.
And then his ship was falling away astern as my rowers pushed us forward. We were now heading south and west.
Now I was behind the leading Ionian ships that were pursuing Cimon and presenting them a dreadful tactical problem.
But that southerly wind was, if anything, rising, and turning our bow into it was a labour. The oarsmen had stopped curing to save their breath, but they were tired. Not dead tired — that was a long way off. But tired.
However, the Ionians — and Cimon — had been pulling into the teeth of that wind all day.
We rowed a stade, and then another.
And another.
All the Ionians edged away from me.
You have to picture this — here, I’ll do it in almonds — no, too sticky. Like this, then. Cimon’s ten ships are fleeing from a thousand. Thirty of them are far out in the lead, but of those only a dozen are swift enough to be right on him and three of those turned out of line to stop me. So there are nine ships left, all rowing as hard as they can to catch Cimon. But now I’m between the nine and their fellows, and I’m faster than they, and my rowers are far fresher.
Of course they edged away.
I let Nemet have all the arrows. He was higher, and despite the sway of the mast I knew he could drop arrows into the oar benches of the Ionians. Onisandros and Seckla and Leukas, who took the helm somewhere in this part, raised the stroke to being firmly faster than the Ionian stroke. And our hull was drier and better built to start.
We began to pull in on the last of the nine Ionians like fisherman landing a big tuna. Nemet began to loose arrows. Shooting into the wind — at an angle, no less — was tricky.
But when he got one clear of the enemy stern, the result was immediate. Oars went every which way on the port side and the ship fell off to port and we passed them, my other archers all shooting three or four shafts as we did so. We left them five oar lengths to our starboard side and swept on.
We began to catch the second ship of nine. But he simply turned away towards the coast of Attica. We passed him in a flash of oars and Ka dropped a well-shot arrow into the command station but we didn’t linger to see its effect.
This was intoxicating, like fine wine after a great day.
Seckla shook his head. ‘How long can we continue?’ he asked. ‘Surely they’ll all turn on us?’
I laughed. ‘More fool they, if they do!’ I said.
And then … they turned.
But it wasn’t the Ionians that turned.
It was Cimon. His ships seemed to come around by magic. It was close, but because all the Ionians had cheated their helms to starboard, they’d lost the angle that would give them immediate raking rams, and so Cimon’s ships slowed and spun end for end.
The Ionians were not our equals, but they were good sailors. They scattered like whitefish when the tuna attack them. And they went in almost every direction.
One slim trireme chose badly and turned towards us. He misjudged his turn. I looked over my shoulder at the big red trireme and Archilogos.
Archi was too far away to get his ram in my hull.
‘Take him,’ I said to Leukas. ‘Marines!’
He got his oars in and managed to retrieve his turn, but he’d lost too much way and our beak hit his cathead and splintered it, pushing his bow deep in the water. It bounced back out of the water like a leaping fish and then our bow scraped down his side and our grapples flew and Brasidas was over the side. I ran along my own half-deck until I liked the distance and then leapt.
It was over before my feet were on his catwalk. They were Aeolians of Lesvos, from Eressos, and they wanted no part of the Great King. When Brasidas killed their trierarch, the rest of the men surrendered and some cheered.
‘Greece!’ called a rower.
I leaned down into the oar decks. ‘Will you row for Greece?’ I roared.They were pressed men — always an error in a sea fight — and among the top-deck rowers were men who knew me and one or two I remembered from happier days.
I kept my marines aboard. I was too old to take chances on trust.
I waved to Leukas and summoned Seckla to take the helm. The Lesbian helmsman protested, but I ordered him to sit down on the deck and put Seckla into the steering rig, and then Cimon — a Cimon with a bad sunburn and dark circles under his eyes — was calling from under my lee.
We bellowed back and forth like fishwives. But when he understood, we all turned broadside on to the rising waves, something we didn’t think the Ionians would attempt, and we ran east.
Ran is probably the wrong word. We crept east for a few stades and then we raised sail and ran north and east, and then, when we felt safe, at the edge of darkness, we lowered our sails and rowed along the coast of Euboea. We landed on the first good beach we could find and lit no fires. It was a long, bad night.
But as Cimon said, while drinking my wine, it was not a night he’d expected to live to see.