He drank, and handed me my canteen.
‘Poseidon watched your dance,’ he said. He nodded sharply. ‘Goodnight.’
The next day, we left the beaches in much better order and went north. Having secured a whole set of operational beaches at Artemesium, Themistocles wanted to manoeuvre the fleet in the waters where Leonidas wanted us to fight. Simple ideas like this are the very sinews of strategy. It was a brilliant concept — to rehearse the fleet where we intended to fight. We spent two days learning the shoals and the anchorages north and south of the channel, and the narrows and the current and the tides.
The weather was superb — for Persia. Either Poseidon was spurning our prayers, or busy elsewhere. But the habit of praying to Poseidon with every cup of wine had spread to the whole fleet, so that every night when the watches were set and the fires alight, we had forty thousand men pouring their first drops of wine on the sands and shouting Poseidon’s name.
We heard that King Leonidas had reached Thermopylae, and Eurybiades sent an Athenian in command of a scout ship, a pentekonter, to Thermopylae to make sure that the fleet and army were in constant contact. The Athenian was Abronichus, son of Lysicles, who was a patron of Phrynicus and a friend of Miltiades. At Artemesium one of our volunteer Ionians, Polyas, kept a pentekonter in constant alert, ready to row for Thermopylae to report any victory or defeat we suffered. He even camped a headland separate from us, to prevent his being taken in the event of a surprise. In this way, the army and fleet of the allies could act in concert, even though they were many stades apart.
The boats went back and forth almost every day, so that we knew that although Leonidas had only three hundred Spartans with him — because of the festival, or so the Spartans would have it — he had another four hundred Thebans; he had the whole phalanx of Thespiae, almost two thousand men, including almost a hundred veterans of Marathon and my brother-in-law Antigonus, and the Phocians — almost two thousand of them, and a further two thousand Locrians.
Leonidas, then, had fewer than six thousand hoplites, where we had almost fifty thousand men with the fleet. But that seemed reasonable to the men who had designed the allied plan of campaign. All of us feared a sudden stroke from the Phoenician element of the Persian fleet — a landing in the Peloponnesus, let us say, or in Attica — that would endanger all of our plans. On the other hand, the rumours of the enormous size of Xerxes’ army — most men set the number at a million — caused us to dread it, but not to respect its speed. We knew how slow a Greek army was, and how disorganised. We assumed that with Xerxes marching so late — nearly harvest time — we need only delay him a few months. And we assumed it would take him one or two of those months to reach us. So the Greek states celebrated the Olympic games, and even Athens sent a large contingent. Sparta threw her efforts not into war, but into the Carneia.
The fleet waited to fight the Persian fleet.
And Leonidas settled down to hold the fifty-foot-wide pass of Thermopylae until the main army came up and he could have the battle that all the Spartans wanted, to try the worth of men.
Cimon’s squadron returned from their scout along the coast of Thrace. They had not found the Persian fleet, but they had made contact with refugees fleeing the Great King’s army, and they had spoken to boats whose crews claimed to have seen the enemy fleet. Cimon feared to be away too long — like the rest of us, he feared the Phoenicians’ blue-water navigational powers. He feared that while he scouted the Thracian coast, which he knew so well, they would go to sea, the bowstring to his bow — slip past him and attack us, and we could not spare a dozen crack triremes manned by professional crews with ten years’ experience.
Cimon’s closest friend was Lycomedes, son of Aeschrydus, who had been one of his father’s captains. Lycomedes came in the evening of our fifth day at Artemesium.
I saw him come in, grabbed a spear and ran to Eurybiades’ awning. All the navarchs were gathering — we were starved of news.
The young Athenian — younger than me, at any rate — shook his head in answer to a question I hadn’t heard. ‘We can’t be sure. We never saw them. But if the fishermen are to be believed, they sailed from Therma yesterday.’
Themistocles gnawed a fingernail. ‘Where are our scouts? We have three ships at Skiathos.’
Lycomedes shrugged. ‘The fishermen say that there’re Persians and Phoenicians at Skiathos,’ he said.
Themistocles looked in a bad way.
Eurybiades didn’t panic. But he did turn to one of his Spartan officers and whisper, and the man sprinted away into the gathering darkness.
‘And the land army?’ Eurybiades asked.
‘Marched from Therma in Thrace fourteen days ago,’ Lycomedes said. ‘A refugee from Thessaly — a gentleman — said the Persians are making a hundred stades a day.’
‘Impossible!’ shouted Ademanteis.
Eurybiades ran his fingers through his beard. ‘That means that Xerxes is — at most — a week away.’
That got a storm of protest.
Eurybiades ignored the murmurs and turned — I’m not sure who he was looking for, but his eye fell on me. ‘You Plataeans are always ready for sea,’ he said.
Well — we tried. He didn’t need to know how long Gelon’s ship had taken to get off the beach that morning, or that the two Ithacans had decided to join my squadron — ignoring the navarch’s order of battle — and they were always late.
‘At your service, sir,’ I said.
‘I’ve already sent a dispatch boat to Leonidas today. But he needs to know this immediately.’
I snapped my fingers and Hector appeared at my elbow. At my whisper he pulled out a pair of wax tablets.
Eurybiades nodded in Laconian satisfaction and dictated a rapid message.
Midway through, he turned. ‘Is that all?’ he asked Lycomedes.
The younger captain raised both eyebrows.
‘Cimon is lying at Aphetae tonight,’ he said. ‘He thinks the weather is about to turn bad.’
‘Why Aphetae?’ I asked. ‘Why not here?’
Lycomedes laughed. ‘I promised not to tell,’ he said, and grinned wickedly. ‘When you are out to the east, the headlands look like one single stretch of land — eh?’ He drew them on the sand, and I could see how, if you had too much southing, Artemesium and Aphetae would look like one peninsula.
He put his stick into the sand. ‘We missed Artemesium and landed at Aphetae. Cimon was one of the last to come up — he knew the error, and sent me here. We’re all still mocking Callisthenes, who led the way to the wrong beach.’
It was, as you’ll see, an easy error to make.
We didn’t have any Euboean triremes, but for the last five days we’d been fed a great deal of fish by Euboean fishermen, and Eurybiades summoned all those in camp to our impromptu council.
I walked down the beach at sunset. The sky was the warm pink of a beautiful evening. There was nothing that might have piqued my weather sense except the merest flash of white, far off on the eastern horizon, and a cool breeze out of the east. We had olive groves all the way down to the beach on the headland of Artemesium, and suddenly, like the voice of the god, all the leaves moved together.
I walked back to the council.
One of the older fishermen was humming and hawing, clearly anxious at speaking in front of so many great men. Another tall brute in a Phrygian cap pushed him gently aside.
‘Weather might be ugly the next four days, gents.’ He shrugged. ‘And it might not. Storms come off Africa — sometimes right down the channel.’ He looked at me for some reason. ‘If you are worried about the anchorage — an’ you should be — just slip back to Troezen.’
Themistocles slammed his fist in his palm. ‘We can’t anchor both flanks at Troezen. We cannot cover Leonidas from Troezen. We must be here!’
Adamenteis shoved his way forward. ‘Leonidas can’t hold the Gates against a million men! We should go back to the isthmus — now, while we have a fleet.’