Then I took Gorgo up Kitharon, and we rode to my family’s altar — twenty of us, the queen, and Jocasta and Pen and Leda and Artistides and the two Spartan men, Gelon and Alexandros and Idomeneaus and Styges, of all people. And we made a sacrifice of a deer we’d speared on the way — Styges got it — and then we rode slowly down into the gathering twilight of a late spring evening.
I rode side by side with the queen.
‘I do this a great deal,’ she said, as if I’d asked a question. ‘Leonidas is a hero, but sometimes that stands between him and other men. I go to small places and great, and I visit women, and woo men — for the cause.’ She turned to me in the gathering darkness and she did not look downcast. ‘But I tell you, Plataean — this is a fine place. Your people are good people. The Pyricche and the women’s dances, the wine and the barley and the festivals and the temple. .’
As always, I was tempted to say that I did not need a Spartan’s good opinion to know my home was good. But instead I smiled.
‘I’m glad you see all these things,’ I said. ‘To me, it is merely home.’
She nodded. ‘Next spring, we’ll have an assembly of all the free Greeks. At Corinth, I think. Please come, with Myron.’ She smiled. ‘My husband wants you there as much as I do. Listen — we’ve made a good beginning. Most men accept that we must resist. Your reports and ours have spread far and wide.’
On the last night, she led a torchlight procession around the women’s shrines, and then she returned to my house. I had kline in the garden — all of them I owned and four borrowed from Myron, who joined us. I had a scandalous dinner — a mixed dinner, with men and women together. In Lacedaemon, it was sometimes done, and in Italy it was the norm. In Etrusca, a man and his wife might make love on their couch at the end of a meal and no one would think it odd.
Antiochus pretended to be scandalised, but Myron joined in with a will, dragging his shy wife from her chair and making her lie beside him. After a cup of wine she giggled as much as Gorgo and Jocasta.
We ate and drank. We spoke of nothing deep, or meaningful, except about children, and their upbringing. Gorgo smiled at Jocasta’s description of the perils of choosing tutors. Of course, Jocasta was far more directly involved in her son’s education than Gorgo, who had probably handed hers off to slaves minutes after childbirth. That was the Spartan way.
Yet despite a thousand differences, Jocasta and Gorgo were instant friends. It was odd — and somewhat miraculous — that Gorgo had somehow discerned this from a few descriptions, but their alliance helped all of the events that follow. Leonidas forged an alliance with the democrat, Themistocles. Gorgo made hers with Aristides’ wife.
When Gorgo and her train had ridden away — headed to Thebes for another social visit — Pen fell on to my lap in unpretended exhaustion. Myron sent a slave to ask all of us to dinner — because, the slave explained, he assumed we’d be too shattered to cook. He might have been right, although I suspect it was my cook and Eugenios who needed the night off.
That was the queen’s visit to Plataea. Ever after, Plataea was much more favourable to the Laconians in all their dealings. Thebes was merely polite, and Sparthius stopped with us one more night while Gorgo visited Thisbe — to tell me that the Thebans had been rude.
Nothing pleases a Plataean more than news of foolishness in Thebes.
‘They’re going to accept the Great King,’ Sparthius said.
I shook my head. For a Plataean, that was a major threat.
I took my daughter to spend her summer at Brauron by sea, in Lydia, and promised to pick her up again myself and not to spend all summer at sea.
You would think — after all we reported, and after Moire took Storm Cutter home early and reported on the Persian fleet in Thrace and the number of ships in the Bosporus — you’d think, I repeat, that all Greece would have rung with the sound of mallets driving pegs into new planks, of men straining to learn how to wield an oar, of legions of Jocastas weaving sails.
You’d think.
You’d think that the knowledge that only the bravery of the men of Babylon had kept the Persians from our doors that very spring might have served to alert Greece.
But Greeks like to talk. And everything had to be talked through, and every one — everyone who mattered — had to be allowed to speak, and when I entered Piraeus that summer, there were, in fact, forty triremes under construction — but only because of Themistocles and his silver mines.
‘I only got these by swearing that if the Persians didn’t come, we’d storm Aegina,’ he said. ‘Before the gods, all men are fools.’
I drank to that, and we discussed what he knew from all the captains who carried goods from Asia or Ionia. He said that the revolt in Babylon had been crushed, and that the Great King had ordered most of the nobles involved, and their wives and children and children’s children, put to death. Every Greek mercenary taken was executed as a rebel.
‘Now he’ll come,’ Themistocles said. ‘And we still won’t be ready.’
‘Gorgo says there is to be an assembly at Corinth,’ I said.
‘Only because Adamenteis is the most ruthless politician of our age,’ Themistocles said — this for a man who exiled all his opponents. ‘He told the Spartans that attendance at the Isthmian games by an entire Spartan delegation was his price for hosting the affair.’
I shrugged. ‘It must be somewhere,’ I noted.
A day later, I was in Piraeus when the sky to the east and south began to turn black — not grey, not even a dark grey, but black, like coal or charcoal. I have seldom seen a sky that colour.
As the winds rose, I gathered what oarsmen I could and got the Lydia into one of the new stone ship-sheds, where she was snug, high off the water, and dry. Her hull was waterlogged and had worm, and the ship-sheds were the very best place for my Lydia.
What followed was one of the worst storms I’ve ever seen. The wind was from the east, as strong as a northern gale, but longer and shriller. Noon on the second day we had shrill winds and an orange sky, as if the gods meant to burn the earth away.
Seasoned captains got their ships off the seas. Far to the south, off Crete, Harpagos took our pentekonter freighter into a little port for refuge. Moire ran Storm Cutter back into Corcyra despite having just left the sea wall. Megakles took Swan into Mytilini, and Lydia was safely in a ship-shed.
Far to the east, the storm smashed into the bridges on the Hellespont, and wrecked them.
At the time, I stood at the eastern edge of the Piraeus harbour and let the storm soak me to the skin as I watched it come in. I could feel its deadliness and the force of its winds and I prayed to Poseidon to preserve my friends and my ships. And eventually, I was wise enough to pray for any man at sea in such a storm, with a little more humility.
For four days the waves pounded Piraeus. For four days that late summer storm wrecked ships, ruined houses, flooded towns and river estuaries — it killed birds and fish and men. And then the skies dawned pink, and the storm was gone, and we were left to wonder whether it had all been a dream.
But to Xerxes’ plans, it was no dream, and ten days later, when an Athenian ore freighter came back in from the mines on Samothrace, he reported to us — and the priests of Poseidon and any other who would listen — that Zeus had broken the chain at the Hellespont, shattering ships and drowning men.
I spent the summer running cargoes. It was a piece with my life in general that I went from hosting royalty to helping a dozen oarsmen muscle sacks of Boeotian barley into the hold of a round ship in just a few weeks, but I’m a poor aristocrat. I can’t sit on my hands and watch other men work. I could either drive ships through the water or pound bronze, and I was not man enough to resist the look my sister gave me — or my domesticos. That man — supposedly a slave — had taken over my house and made it all too easy for me to live there. Food appeared as if by magic — wine flowed, or stopped, with more or less water.