I thought about Polymarchos, and I thought far too much about the young slave I’d killed with my first cut on the beach of Africa. He hadn’t deserved to die. He had mostly been in the wrong place at the wrong time.
He was the same age as my son by Briseis. I had seen the boy, carried by a nurse, in Thrace, when I killed the man I had assumed to be his father.
I had a son.
The bow ploughed the waves, and I thought about what Heraklitus the philosopher said about dipping our toes in the river. And we rushed on.
The next day was very long. We were already low on water, and all the salted pork was gone, most of the dates, all the bread.
My veterans had done all this before.
The new men, the former slaves — they were plainly terrified. I began to worry that they would mutiny again — not because they had any real chance of success, but because such behaviours can become a habit.
But an hour before dawn, I could smell land. I had the most exact scent of a charcoal fire, and the very first grey light of pre-dawn showed me the coast. I ran along it for an hour as the sun rose, and I became increasingly sure that it was Zacynthus. I’d run down that coast only three weeks before. I was almost sure, and the oarsmen were openly begging us to land, when I saw the temple of Poseidon at Hyrmine gleaming on the opposite headland. Brasidas confirmed it, and the newer oarsmen looked as if they’d been granted a new lease on life.
Sekla slapped my back. ‘A brilliant piece of navigation.’ He grinned.
I shrugged. ‘Vasileos would have put the bow into the mouth of the Alpheos,’ I said.
Megakles just smiled, as Laconic in his fisherman’s way as Brasidas. But his smile was good praise. I was pleased. And before the men were too hungry, we landed on an open beach, bought sheep, sacrificed Melitan wine to Poseidon and a good cup too, and sacrificed the animals. We had a feast on the beach, and the new oarsmen kissed the sand, and the older oarsmen teased them.
But the shepherds were men of Elis, and they confirmed that the games started in four days.
We were still full of mutton while we pulled around the point and into the very narrow estuary of the Alpheos. There were a dozen merchantmen and almost forty triremes pulled up on the narrow pebble beach. Olympia nestles amidst mighty mountains, and the mountains seem to reach right down to the sea, as does Kitharon at home, and the beaches are steep and narrow and difficult.
Despite which, my heart fairly leaped with joy to see Cimon’s Ajax and Paramanos’ Black Raven and Harpagos’s Storm Cutter and all the other ships we’d lost in the storm.
I waited for the men of Elis to choose me a landing place, and I enjoyed seeing the alterations they’d made to the beach. The hand of man can alter almost anything. That year was the seventy-fifth Olympiad, and the people of Elis had had three hundred years to make the landing area as comfortable as possible. Hellenes made the pilgrimage from Ionia and from Italia and Magna Greca and Sicily and as far as Massalia in the west and Ephesus and Sardis in the east, from Thrace and from Chacedon and from everywhere in Boeotia and Attica and the Peloponnesus. And for a moment, as I looked over the shipping and the tents and booths, I thought of my son — my son, running his stades and throwing his javelins in far-off Sardis.
And then my grand thoughts were ruined by the pair of Elisian factors demanding that I pay their outrageous landing fees. There may be an Olympic truce on war and strife, but there is none on greed, as I can attest. And it is fifty stades up-country into the mountains to Olympia, and I had thought to rent a horse, but I had to count my drachma — the prices were exorbitant, and I was feeding two hundred men.
My mother was sometimes a harridan, a harpy, an old drunkard. But she had the soul of an aristocrat, and she did teach me one valuable aristocratic lesson — there is a time to pinch pennies, and a time to let the gold flow through your fingers. A man is lucky if he attends the Olympics once in his life. I don’t mean Spartans, or men of Argos — with a little effort, they can make the trip every year. But for a Boeotian, it is a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity — at any rate, I was on the beach, and I wasn’t going to be dissuaded.
On the other hand — I had two hundred men trained to a high pitch, and I saw no reason not to use that training, so we stripped the ship, made packs, and marched up-country carrying our own shelter and all of our amphorae of wine. I spent my Illyrian loot freely, but we camped rather than renting flea-ridden lodgings. When we arrived on the plain of Olympia below the temple complex, a pair of priests emerged from the town and led us to a site where we could camp. I asked after Cimon and the priest smiled — he was a pleasant fellow — and nodded.
‘Lord Cimon is present. The Athenians are on the other side of the treasuries. And your fellow Boeotians are just there, by the stream.’ He pointed at the nearly dry course of the river.
‘Thebans?’ I asked.
He nodded. ‘Yes.’
I didn’t quite spit. ‘Respected sir, I am a man of Plataea, and I would walk a dozen stades to avoid a man of Thebes.’
He laughed. ‘It is a wonder that the Greeks have any common ground at all,’ he said. ‘Come — any man who brings two hundred followers to the games gets my attention. Are you the man who was at Marathon?’
I nodded.
He smiled. ‘I thought so. I’ll send a slave to tell Lord Cimon you are here.’
We’d come to the edge of the valley.
I had seldom seen so many people gathered in one place in all my life. I saw Cyrenes and Italiotes and Athenians and Messenians and Corinthians — and Spartans. More Spartans than you could shake a spear at. And with them, their women — tall, mostly blond, and all with the muscled arms and legs that mark Spartan women everywhere you meet them.
Women were not allowed to compete at Olympia during the main festival. They had their own festival later in the season, but in the Olympic year, this was the men’s event. Nowadays, there is talk of forbidding women from watching, but in those days, women came right into the sanctuaries and cheered — not just maidens and whores, either, but married women. I think this is because in Sparta, men and women were more used to each other’s nudity in games, and girls thought it no great matter to see a naked man. Athens is altogether more prudish. The men of Elis are of old allies of the Spartans and members of the Peloponnesian League, and they have many of their ways. At any rate, in that year, there were almost as many women as men in the tents, under shelters, or in the town.
Every house in the town had a porch built for ten or twelve beds. And sometimes rooms inside as well, and they would charge three or four drachma a day — for two wooden boards and some old straw, they charged a day’s pay for an Athenian hoplite or an elite rower. And the more enterprising men of Elis and the surrounding region would put up big tents and offer space in them at similar rates, or they would build temporary buildings, with each peg and each beam marked with a number so that they could be taken down and rebuilt, like the wooden theatre of Dionysus in Athens. There was one great inn where a room cost twenty drachmas a night and only great men like Aristides were welcome.
All of my recent ex-slaves were earning their keep by hauling the great amphora of Chian wine, and when we had our campsite, my two hundred ran up our mainsail and two boat sails and four more military tents, and the smallest tent was quickly fitted with stumps and larger stones for men to sit on, and we began serving wine before we had our own quarters up, with a pair of marines on guard — not in armour, as that would have been impious — and with Alexandros and Giannis, who had a flair for such things, managing the pouring.
I oversaw the tents myself — and had to pay two hard silver coins for wood to make pegs, as we’d left all of ours on the ship, like fools. It was hot work, despite the altitude, and I was pleased to see that Polymarchos and his young athlete pitched in, working themselves hard, pounding pegs, and holding poles until the work was done.