‘I should ask you about your trip, but you are here, and that is all I need to know. Cyrus says you fought your way out. That Mardonius has put a price on your head. Unofficially, I already know this, and when the courier comes — any day — I will not be able to pretend I don’t know where you are. So you must be gone.’
‘Are my ships in Ephesus?’ I asked.
He looked pained. ‘I don’t know. If I were you, I would not go to Ephesus — Archilogos would like nothing better than to be the means of your arrest.’
He paused, winced, and I thought he looked. . old.
‘I can go to Phokaia,’ I said. Athens bought alum from Phokaia for her tanning industry. Athenian ships called there all the time.
‘In winter?’ he asked. He raised a hand, clearly tired. ‘My friend, I’m sorry. Sorry for all of it. But we are, to all intents, at war, and any hour now, I will be ordered to seize you. My son wishes you taken immediately.’
I didn’t even know his son. ‘Why?’ I asked.
‘There is a rumour — as yet unconfirmed. .’ Artapherenes looked at me and scratched his beard. ‘Do I treat you as a friend, or a dangerous enemy? Do I — by telling you this — aid your cause and work against my own king?’
I shook my head. ‘I have no idea of what you speak,’ I said. I took his hand and kissed it, as I would have that of my own father. ‘Thank you for Cyrus and the others. Without them, I would be dead.’
He nodded. ‘Well — without you, we would all be dead. Our tale of exchanged favours goes back many years, young man. You wish to go and pay your respects to Briseis. I recommend that you be brief — and circumspect.’ His voice grew harder.
I got up from my knee. ‘I am always at your service,’ I said.
He laughed. ‘You are a fine man. Try and stay alive in what is coming — and remember that if ever you wish to bend your stiff Greek neck, I have a place for you in my house.’
‘I can certainly serve cider better than the boy you had here — I wouldn’t spill any.’ I laughed, and for the first time since I’d come in, Artapherenes smiled.
‘Oh, Ari,’ he said. ‘When this war comes, it will be the end of everything for which I worked.’
He caught my hand. In a low voice he said, ‘When I die — you must take Briseis. My son will kill her.’ He looked into my eye — not pleading, but with the resolve of the warrior. ‘Swear to me.’
‘I swear by all the gods in Olympus,’ I swore, having learned nothing, apparently, about swearing oaths.
‘And until then, do an old man the grace of keeping your hands off her,’ he said with a hard smile.
I swallowed.
He nodded. ‘Go. I may not see you again — or if I do, it will be in Greece.’
Briseis was, I think, thirty-two that year.
Motherhood had mellowed her — had filled in her stomach a little, perhaps, and made her breasts lusher. It had not changed her eyes, or her neck, or her shoulders, or the quality of her smile — that complicated instrument she wielded as I wield a spear.
She rose with her accustomed grace as I entered, and she kissed me on the lips — a brush of her lips on mine that struck me like a Persian arrow.
Nothing ever changed.
She put the back of her hand on my chest when she kissed me, as if to ensure that I didn’t crush her to me, and even that small warmth went to my heart like a Levin bolt.
‘I must go,’ I said foolishly. ‘Artapherenes asked me to. . come for you when I hear he is dead.’
‘His son wants me for his own, and hates me for my contempt.’ She shrugged. ‘It is, I think, an old story.’ She took my hand — oh, the softness of that hand, and the cool warmth of her touch — and drew me on to a kline. ‘Cyrus will not let me die so easily, nor be used so ill. Neither will any of the old guard. I am not afraid.’ She smiled. ‘But I will be happy to have you as my last husband, my dear. The Greek ambassador to the Great King! Friend of the King of Sparta and Lord of Plataea!’
‘I am not the Lord of Plataea. Plataea is the size of a large farm and has an assembly of a thousand bickering old men — older than me.’ I laughed. ‘But I served at the Olympics as a priest.’
‘Oh,’ she said, with complete seriousness. ‘You are a great man, now — not just a great sword.’
‘Will you still be my wife if I am a penniless exile in Italy?’ I asked. ‘Because if Xerxes has his way, there will be no Athens, no Sparta — and no Plataea.’
Her smile fell away. ‘Yes,’ she said. She met my eye and bit her lip, and for perhaps the first time in all our years together, I saw her hesitate. ‘Yes, Ari. Our world is coming to an end. The world of Sappho and Thales and Heraklitus — of Melitus and Ephesus and Mytilini.’ She held my eye. ‘What will come after? Imperial Persia, and the Great’s King’s winged lions on every doorstep?’
‘No,’ I said.
She smiled. ‘You truly believe — even after Lades — that Greeks can stop the Great King?’
I nodded. ‘Athens and Sparta,’ I said. ‘We are not ready for what is coming. I have seen the Great King’s preparations. I cannot count his soldiers. I’m sure his fleet will be greater than five hundred hulls.’ I was suddenly bitter. ‘I sailed to Alba — do you know that? For tin. For. . a pothos. Better that I had been here, working to build a resistance to the Great King among the Greeks. Now — it is too late. In three months, he will march.’
She bit her lip. ‘No,’ she said. She looked around — again, showing fear for the first time I could remember. ‘No, he will not march in the spring.’
I felt the blood rush to my ears as if I’d taken a blow. ‘Why?’ I asked.
She leaned closer — I thought to kiss me. ‘Babylon is in revolt,’ she said.
That was all she knew.
I tore myself from her sight, took my Spartans and my Athenians, and fled for the coast. I learned — much later in life — that the Great King’s messenger came two days later. Artapherenes was sick — and his son turned out all his father’s household troops to pursue us.
But the gods had other ideas. The gods had their own plans for Greece, and for Persia. It was like. . like living in mythology, except it was real.
We rode across the plains of Sardis and over the mountains to the coast like a storm. By then, even the Spartans were excellent riders — we’d had five months on horseback with expert teachers.
And I have to tell you, my friends, that the sight of the sea — even in winter, blue and blue, rolling away into the west — made us all weep.
Aristides pulled his riding cloak over his head to hide his face. When he had mastered himself, he said, ‘I will never come to Asia again — not willingly.’
We rode down into Phokaia about the time that Artapherenes’ household guards began searching for us in Ephesus.
And there on the beach of Phokaia was my Lydia, and when we cantered along the coast road, one of the first men I met was Leukas.
It can seem, in a tale like this, as if I was the hero — the great hero, or perhaps even, if I tell it awry, the only hero. Let me say that I was surrounded by heroes, and that many, many other men said, and did, the right things.
Megakles and Sekla and Leukas were three of them. What might have happened, if they had not used their heads? They took Lydia into Ephesus at the turn of the seasons with a cargo of white Athenian hides and Phoenician dyes, and they sailed away two days later, leaving a pair of trustworthy oarsmen and a light boat to find them if I returned. The open hostility of Archilogos — the richest shipowner in Ephesus — made the harbour there unhealthy for them. So they rowed up the coast to the port that had the friendliest relations with Athens, and rented a portion of the beach for the winter — bought a small house, sold their cargo, and settled in. They had men in every port from Samos to Lesvos, and they were collecting rumours like professional spies.
Sekla, as it proved, knew more of what was happening in Babylon than Artapherenes, the satrap. Because Phokaia had alum — most of the dyers’ alum in the world — and thus it had merchants who came from Susa and Babylon and Athens and even Syracusa. Sekla’s news of the revolt was first-hand, from an eyewitness.