Hipponax’s shield came up with a flourish, and I saw the little fishing smack come to under the lee of the heavy trireme, and then we were moving. We rowed downwind, still cautious — I still wished I had my archers.
But my guess was correct. They were Greeks — Ithacans — on their way to join the allied fleet.
And they’d taken Dagon’s consort. That took a day to ascertain, but they knew Dagon, and he’d abandoned them when the fight went bad, running due east.
Always a pleasure to have been right. The Ithacans were in an old capture — a heavy Phoenician galley they’d taken ten years before. Possibly in an act of blatant piracy — it takes one to know one. But the other ship they’d taken in a fight, two ships to two, and they were out of water, out of cordage, and desperate — conditions were so bad that the recaptured oarsmen from the Carthaginian had already risen in mutiny once.
Worst of all, they had no idea where they were. They had fought off Ithaca — the irony was that I’d been creeping about for days while Dagon and his consort looked for me in the wrong places, caught the Ithacans, and lost their fight.
At any rate, it took me days of conversations — and interrogations — to discern all this, and to learn that the Carthaginians were not on a voyage of private vendetta. They had indeed been sold information about me — the notorious pirate. But they were en route to join Xerxes with dispatches.
I gave them almost all our remaining water, and exchanged half of my rowers for half of the Carthaginian capture’s rowers, and I led them north and east to Piraeus. We saw the Acropolis of Athens in the first light of the new day, and even the sickest rowers came back to life — one of the best pieces of navigation of my life, friends. By the time that girls were doing their dances at Brauron, we were ashore, and a hundred old men were embracing us.
After all, we had at our tail the first capture of the war. The first fruits of Nike.
We might have been feasted like heroes, but all the other news was grim. The worst was the thing I’d feared most — Xerxes was loose, across the Hellespont and marching at speed.
The allied fleet was forming all along the east coast of Attica — we hadn’t seen it coming in the dark, but as soon as the sun was well up we could see Athenian ships on all the beaches from Pireaus east to the headland at Sounion. The Spartan navarch was already around Sounion at Marathon, and the fleet already had a squadron of light ships scouting the north coast of Euboea for anchorages.
Themistocles came back from Sounion to see our capture and to embrace us all. I was put in the oddest postion — I hadn’t won the sea fight or taken the prize, but everyone treated me as if I had — I finally brought the Ithacan trierarch forward, a middle-aged pirate named Helios, and introduced him.
‘This is the man who actually took the Carthaginian,’ I said.
He shook his head. ‘We’d all be dying of lack of water right about now but for yon,’ he claimed.
That evening, over wine at Paramanos’ house in Piraeus, Themistocles laid out his plan.
‘I’d like you to crew all your own ships and five more from Athens,’ he said. ‘Can Plataea do it?’
I began to count in my head. ‘Not and send a single man with Leonidas,’ I said.
Themistocles made a gesture of dismissal. ‘Leonidas has eight thousand men to hold a pass less than half a stade wide,’ he said. ‘He’ll have Thebans and Thespians and his own Spartans and thousands of local men. It is at sea we need men.’
I sat back on my kline and sipped wine. ‘Where are my ships?’ I asked.
Themistocles nodded. ‘All at Sounion, on the beaches there, and around below Brauron,’ he said. ‘I will put all of your ships, and all the Plataeans, and Aristides’ ship under you.’
I fingered my beard and ate a date. I’d gone three days without food and I was permanently hungry and every old wound and muscle-pull ached or burned. Some ached and burned. Lack of food can really hurt.
‘I’ll send over the mountains,’ I said. ‘But none of my Plataeans will know how to row.’
He shrugged. ‘Half our fleet doesn’t know how to row,’ he said.
The next week I’ll pass over like the blur of exhausted activity that it was.
I sent a professional runner to Plataea for the Phalanx, and told them they’d be serving on ships — the Epilektoi as marines, the rest as oarsmen. I asked Myron to put it to the assembly. Then I took Andromeda around the long point of Attica and gathered ‘my’ ships at Marathon. Why not? It was the site of my greatest day. All of my best men had been there except Moire and a few of the young.
The Plataeans knew how to get there.
We towed five empty hulls, light as cockleshells with nothing aboard but cordage and oars, around. We got them ready for sea.
I took back from the fleet all of the men who were serving elsewhere. Cimon cursed me for taking Giannis back, but I had a place for him better than serving as a marine.
I had Lydia. She was five years old, but dry, sound as a nut, and had a crew — like no other crew I’ve ever had. After I shifted men around I still kept her old crew, so that out of a hundred and eighty rowers, I had only forty new men of Plataea.
Andromeda I gave to Megakles.
Demetrios had Aristides’ superb Athena Nike. The great man himself was still not allowed ‘home’ from exile and, stubborn and obedient to the letter of the law, refused even to board an Athenian ship as a marine. But, as you’ll see, he went aboard a Plataean ship.
Taciturn Harpagos had Storm Cutter.
Moire of Plataea — as he now called himself — had my troublesome Corinthian Amastis.
Paramanos — who should have been with Cimon — chose to be with me. He had Black Raven, the third ship of that name. He owned her, too.
Then I stripped my friends of their command elements to captain new ships. As an aside, you will have noticed that the first ships I’ve mentioned were all privately owned. I owned Storm Cutter, although years of careful maintenance (and that costs silver) may have made her Harpagos’s ship — in fact, we all behaved as if she belonged to him. Lydia was mine, pure and simple, and Amastis was mine in law — at least, in Plataean and Athenian law. Paramanos owned his ship and Aristides owned his — he had owned more, once, but they’d been lost.
The five ships I endeavoured to man were ‘public’ ships, purchased and fitted out by Athens as a state. This was a new arrangement. Demetrios told me that he’d commanded a state galley in the war with Aegina and he admitted that often they were indifferent ships — because there was no rich man to keep watch on the shipwrights. But of the five hulls they sent us, three were excellent and the other two merely average — all a little lighter than I’d have preferred.
Again, I’ve heard men claim that Athens built her light triremes because of her superior crews. It makes me smile. That summer, half the allied fleet was rowed by men who’d never seen an oar before that summer — like Boeotian farmers! Athens built light ships because they’d be easier for untrained men to handle, and because, to crew two hundred ships and send a phalanx, Athens had to skimp on marines. And finally, lightly built ships required less wood, and wood is expensive.
I just want you to get all this.
We were going to fight a fleet that outnumbered us two or three to one. They had professional crews and heavier ships and many, many more marines. They’d been together for almost a year and most of our oarsmen had never been out of sight of land.
I’d like to tell you that our advantage was that we were fighting for freedom, but I’m an old pirate and I’ll tell you that men fight wonderfully well for loot. Xerxes had promised his men the rape of Greece.