I’d known Gorgo for less than a day, and she put a hand on my arm with a disturbing warmth. This is why non-Spartans believe all Spartan women to be licentious. They are not — they are merely without so-called ‘womanly’ reserve.
Perhaps I go on too much, but you must understand what an impact the Lacedaemonians had on me. I affected to despise them — no, in reality I did rather despise them. But to walk among them was rather like a man walking among the gods. In a gathering of fifty Spartans, there was no man with flesh on his belly — no woman with sagging breasts. Their arms showed the muscle of high training. All of them. Their skin glowed with health and expensive oil. Their hair was long, impractical and scented — all the time. I suppose that I had considered Brasidas an exceptional man. Here — among his own kind — I realised that he was ‘merely’ representative of a kind.
Well.
Gorgo put a hand on my arm, and Leonidas smiled. ‘Welcome, Plataean!’ he said. He offered me his hand, and we clasped hands and then the hulking mass of Calliteles all but obscured the sun. But in that moment, Gorgo saw Brasidas. And the king saw her head move and the flicker of emotion around the corners of her mouth, and he looked. His lip twitched.
Then all I could see was the mountain that was Calliteles.
‘I gather my son owes you his life?’ he said. His voice was flat, eyes giving nothing away.
The pressure of his hand on mine, however, told a different story. Since I wasn’t a Lacedaemonian, I smiled and shrugged. ‘I suspect his chariot would have stopped,’ I said. ‘By the favour of the gods, he had fallen well — on to the floor of the chariot.’
Gorgo looked at me and raised an eyebrow. Let me say that now she was as well dressed as any matron in Athens — a superb wool chiton worn in the old Dorian fashion, heavily embroidered, especially on the fall of the peplos. She wore a lion-head bracelet on her right arm and a simple white linen fillet in her hair.
I took her raised eyebrow for interrogation, and I nodded. ‘The doctor — an admirer, may I add, of you both — reports that until the young man awakens from his sleep, he is with the gods and there is nothing to be done.’
Calliteles nodded, face under control. ‘Thank you, stranger,’ he said.
I glanced around. There were twenty Spartiates in the square, by now, but they stood at a distance — I had only Brasidas, the king and queen, Calliteles and a pair of helots within earshot. I looked at the helots.
‘Unyoke the horses and see to them,’ Gorgos said without so much as turning her head to the slaves.
With a rattle of harness and wheels, the chariot moved off, the tired horses swishing their tails to keep off the flies.
‘He was hit with a sling stone,’ I said. My words were well covered by the movement of the chariot, but Gorgo and Leonidas heard me. The king’s eyebrow went up. Gorgo smiled.
That was an odd reaction.
The silence went on. Lacedaemonians can be uncomfortable ‘friends’ in a social situation. They speak very little, and I had learned with Brasidas that one had to exercise a great deal of patience to have a conversation.
So I consciously relaxed my muscles and stood easily, waiting.
‘I understand that you speak Persian?’ the king said.
That was unexpected. ‘Yes,’ I said.
‘Thank you,’ said the king, inclining his head very slightly.
I nodded. Emulating the Lacedaemonians is a chancy business at best. But if they weren’t going to be more talkative than this — well, I didn’t particularly need them, either. And you’ll note that they had not spoken to Brasidas or recognised him in any way. This annoyed me.
I suppose that I allowed my annoyance to show. I am, after all, a Boeotian from Plataea, and I have not been schooled my whole life to give nothing away on my face.
Far from it.
As I turned away, the king extended his hand, palm down — a rhetorical gesture that came naturally to him, I think. I paused.
‘Why do you bring this man into my camp?’ he asked.
‘He is my friend. And a Lacedaemonian. It seemed natural enough.’ I knew I was at the edge of being insulting. But I was, as I say, annoyed.
The king’s eyes never left my face. ‘Perhaps he was born in Lacedaemon,’ the king said. ‘He has chosen not to be a Spartan.’
Bloody Spartans.
‘I’m sorry I took you,’ I said.
Brasidas smiled. ‘It might be best if you didn’t take me again,’ he said.
‘I gather this means I’ll have the continued pleasure of your company commanding my marines?’ I asked.
‘You use so many words,’ he said. And shrugged. ‘Yes.’
Astylos slept for a long time, and then he ran. He ran short, fast distances and then some longer ones — then he stretched, with Polymarchos helping him, and then he did it all again. I watched him, and I learned a great deal about stretching.
When the heat of the sun was gone, Polymarchos had a brief conversation with Ka, and Ka stripped to a loincloth — the Africans lack our views on nudity — and ran with Astylos. The Greek man was faster, but the African could stay with him through almost anything, and Astylos had to work very hard to put more than a stride or two between them.
Polymarchos stood with me. ‘Really, it is a pity we can’t find some way to make Ka a believable Greek,’ he said.
One of the few requirements of the Olympics was that a man had to be free-born and Greek. The definition of Greek was sometimes elastic and sometimes very rigid — these things come and go. But at minimum, it required that a man speak Greek perfectly. The colour of a man’s skin was not nearly so important.
Ka’s stumbling attempts at sentences longer than five words would not have made him welcome anywhere — well, except perhaps a Spartan mess.
That night, Themistocles gathered almost a hundred men at his own fire. Cimon was there, and Aristides. I embraced the man that most Athenians, even those who hated him, called ‘the Just’. He sometimes looked at Themistocles with undisguised loathing — but he was there.
So was Leonidas of Sparta. There were a dozen Corinthians, there were Megarans, there were two aristocrats of Aegina and a few Thebans. While I was controlling my urge to spit, the eldest among them came forward from the stool on which he’d been sitting. He was a bent old man with no hair on top of his head, and it took me a moment to recognise him, and then I crushed him in an embrace, despite his Theban ways.
‘Empedocles!’ I shouted — so loud that the King of Sparta turned his head. I’m sure the Spartans thought me a buffoon.
Empedocles laughed noiselessly. ‘You are here? You live?’ He shook his head. ‘There will be some very disappointed men in Plataea, my son.’
His words gave me a chill in the warm summer air. ‘Disappointed?’ I asked.
‘Your cousin’s younger son has your farm,’ Empedocles said. ‘But there are men here who can tell you more than I. It is enough for me to clasp your hand — I feel ten years younger — nay, twenty!’
And behind the old priest in the firelight were a dozen Boeotians that I knew well. Perhaps best of all, I knew my own brother-in-law, Antigonus. He was standing a little aloof, looking at me.
I walked straight up to him and threw my arms around him. There was little he could do but respond.
At my shoulder, Cimon said, ‘I told you!’
Antigonus just shook his head and crushed me to him. ‘We all thought you. . were dead,’ he said. ‘By all the gods, Arimnestos — where in Hades have you been! Your sister mourned you for a year.’
He was still balanced between anger and love — like a mother whose child has vanished on a summer day, and comes back hours later.