Nothing irks an oarsman like rowing when the wind is favourable for sailing.
I lived in fear, moment to moment, that the Persian fleet would send ships to look at us. We were too far for me to see what ships they were, but I had to guess most of them were Phoenician.
All afternoon, I cheated my steering oars to the north and east, trying to be invisible, while one tiny sailing ship did the work, going right in among them. In late afternoon we landed on Thassos and bought sheep from shepherds so barbaric we couldn’t understand their Greek. We had all our marines in armour, and Aristides — an old campaigner — taught me a new trick by building a small tower on the headland, which would give us precious warning of an attack.
But we were not disturbed in our sleep, and in the morning we watched the sun rise in the east and we dried our hulls, all our cargo stacked in the bright sun on the beach — waiting for Megakles.
And waiting.
Noon passed, and the oarsmen slept, and the Spartans ran up and down the beach. My marines didn’t exercise — they were still on duty, sleeping in watches. As Bulis — well ahead of his friend — turned at the rocky promontory to run back, I saw him pause.
He was saying something to Brasidas.
Brasidas shrugged and continued towards the tower — really, just a set of poles tied together with a floor of boughs, but it placed a man at treetop height.
Bulis came running back down the beach, but during the time that he and Brasidas spoke, Sparthius had passed him, and now they were both sprinting, flat out, for the campfires and the line of boats. Men got up from their midday naps to cheer the Spartans, who looked like gods.
And that started a whole set of contests. Men wrestled and boxed and even fenced with oars — a very popular and very dangerous oarsmen’s game.
I stood on the beach and worried.
I was still in shock at what I had seen the day before.
After midday, Aristides came with several of his young men. He sat on a rock, and his hypaspist poured wine from a skin.
‘You worry too much,’ he said, but he had the same lines under his eyes as I had.
I shrugged. I remember looking around at his friends — I didn’t know most of them, although I knew his nephew, and I knew Aeschylus’s younger brother and of course I knew Heraklides. ‘I saw a great many Persian ships yesterday,’ I said.
Aristides rubbed the top of his nose — a much-imitated facial tic in the Athenian assembly.
‘One thing to hear of it and another to see it,’ he said.
We shared the wine, and I heard that Aeschylus’s younger brother was planning to go into politics, that the youngest man was actually my enemy Cleitus’s youngest sibling Alcibiades. He was a handsome devil, and he had that look — arrogance, yes, but also a total disregard for the opinions of others — that sets young men apart and makes them so easy to hate. He and his older brother Cleinias were both followers of Aristides. They were also rich and powerful enough to own ships, and they were with us to ‘learn the ropes’. Athenian aristocrats worked pretty hard, back then.
The two Alcmaeonidae watched me like hawks, but their fascination wasn’t devoid of respect. If Aristides even deigned to notice, he paid them no heed.
And while I thought all these thoughts, distracted for the first time in hours, Megakles crept over the horizon in his little Swan.
‘Elaeus is full of ships,’ Megakles shouted, before he leapt over the side of Swan and swam ashore like the fisherman he was.
Naked and dripping, he emerged like Poseidon himself. ‘There’re fifty warships in Elaeus bay, and another six or seven rowing guard. All Phoenicians. Nicolas saw two more hulls he thought that he knew — Samian Greeks.’
‘Could be worse,’ I said. Athens had as many ships. Aristides and I exchanged looks and then we were off, gathering our athletic oarsmen, pulling down the tower, and racing to sea — like pirates.
From Thassos we ran downwind, under sail, to Samothrace, and we kept the shoreline out of sight to the north all the way. We saw fishing boats twice, but no more warships, and we made camp on the south side of Samothrace, with a tower and guards, and doused fires as soon as the food was cooked.
And in the dawn — a cold, grey dawn with rain in it — we were off again, this time running under sail into the mouth of the Hellespont. If the Medes saw us — well, they saw us. You cannot hide in a body of water six miles wide.
It was late afternoon by the time we were near Troy. And now, despite our efforts at stealth, it was impossible to hide our presence. We had fishing boats all around us from the towns on the Bosporus, and we had a dozen military triremes — Ionian Greeks — patrolling the waters in the difficult, choppy sea just south of Troy.
I watched the ships as we ran in, looking for a sign that one of them was Archilogos, once my master, then my friend, and now my sworn enemy. It was hard to define how we all knew that these were Greek ships and not Phoenicians or Carthaginians or Aegyptians, but Sekla knew, I knew, and Aristides knew, and we ran down on them with all our rowers at their stations and all of our marines in harness.
They paid us no heed at all, so with a flash of oars, we turned on the opposite tack and sailed north into the main channel. I can only assume that they thought we were part of the Persian fleet. Why would they not?
Who expected Athenian ships in these waters? Cimon and Miltiades had been driven from here six years before.
We ran north, but again, we already knew what we would find.
The reality, however, was far more chilling even than what we had seen off Mount Athos.
First, the narrow Hellespont was choked with shipping. I stopped counting at a hundred boats — warships, merchant ships, fishermen. Access to the Euxine makes this one of the busiest pieces of water under the sun — I had lived and sailed here for years — but this was extreme.
And fifty stades north of Troy, we came in sight of the greatest concentration of shipping I had seen since we fled from the Persian fleet in the disaster at Lades.
I turned to Leukas, at the helm, and made a turning motion with my hand.
‘Ready about!’ Leukas screamed. Marines on the top deck threw themselves flat so as not to go over the side — neither triremes nor trimiolas have railings on most of the deck — and the deck crew ran about like ants in a disturbed nest trying to get the mainsail down.
The port-side rowers reversed their cushions, and Hector signalled frantically to Harpagos, the next ship aft of us.
There were at least two hundred warships at Abydos on the Asian side. I didn’t wait to learn more.
Xerxes was coming.
Two days later, we were sitting in the palace in Mythymna, on Lesvos. My hands had stopped shaking, but the terror was real. We had seen three hundred warships. Off Mount Athos, it had been possible to see an Athenian fleet stopping the Great King’s fleet, but with three hundred ships already at sea, and they only the harbingers. .
‘It doesn’t matter whether he’s going to build bridges or simply ferry his army a taxeis at a time,’ I insisted to Aristides. The Athenians were a talkative lot, and they were debating what the great fleet meant, and whether Xerxes was really bold enough to try and bridge the Hellespont.
Bulis fingered his beard. ‘I would like the kings to know of this,’ he said.
So we agreed to send Moire home in Storm Cutter with a cargo of Lesbian wine and oil and some Chian wine and mastic. He was ordered to touch at Athens and speak only to Cimon, and then go on to Sparta. Bulis wrote him a letter on papyrus.
Aristides was shaken. ‘Is there any point in going to Susa, if the Great King has set his mind on war?’ he asked. ‘I do not want to be cooling my heels at the Great King’s court while his troops lay siege to my city.’