‘That was remarkable!’ he said. ‘You hide your light too much!’
I laughed, uncomfortable, but let’s be honest, pleased with his praise, and I saw his eyes harden.
Aristides came up to me.
Themistocles let go of my hand. He didn’t glance away, but said, ‘By now, the exile must have been lifted.’
‘Until the assembly informs me so, I serve only as a Plataean,’ Aristides said.
Themistocles nodded. He turned to me, and said one of the few genuine, unposturing things I ever heard from him. He said, ‘When Athens exiles me, will I too be welcome in Plataea?’
‘How’re your farming skills?’ I asked.
Aristides laughed and slapped my shoulders. ‘I hope you give him shelter, when I have him sent away. He is dangerous — but he may have saved Greece.’
When you think of us — Athenians and Corinthians and Aeginians and Spartans and all — remember this.
We didn’t agree about anything except that the Great King had to be defeated.
We formed well. The oarsmen were tired, but I had us go to ramming speed for about sixty heartbeats, all together, on the way to our station, and then everyone’s muscles were loose — like men stretching for the Olympics, really.
By the time Eurybiades raised his shield in the centre of the line, the Persians were coming off their beaches. I have heard since that they were amazed that we were coming to fight with such a small fleet, and came into the water in no great order, each eager to make a kill.
That’s what it looked like to us. They had so many ships that I couldn’t begin to know, but we think — now that years have passed and all the Ionians are friends again — that there were about six hundred of them facing two hundred and seventy-one of us. But instead of forming a line, they came at us in a long mass, shaped like an egg — the first ships off the beach in the lead. And then they split — every captain for himself — to encircle us.
As soon as we were sure they were coming — and by the gods, my friends, it was hard to swallow! I’m not sure I have ever known such pure fear as that morning, watching that behemoth come for our little fleet — Eurybiades signalled for the wheel.
I had Brasidas with me. He was in a good panoply. Bless rich men — my Cimon had a full spare panoply that fitted our Spartan escapee. Brasidas passed the navarch’s signals, and we began to back-water.
The lead Ionian ships went to ramming speed, despite being twenty stades away. They were that eager. Never doubt, my friends, that they wanted to defeat us. I have heard a great deal since Artemesium about how we won because the Ionians fought badly. That’s foolishness. No one fights ‘badly’ in a sea fight where all the losers drown.
We backed faster, and I watched the front face of the wheel form up. The Corinthians were going to face the first rush. And by Poseidon, for all the crap I’ve said about Adamenteis, that day he was a Greek. Perhaps I’m wrong, and he was never a traitor. Or perhaps, confronted with the choice to fight or die, he fought well.
Either way, we had longer to form the wheel than we’d ever had in practice, because the fool Ionians charged into what had been our centre, instead of going for the edges where the ships weren’t in the formation yet — and then flinched away. They turned away rather than face the serried phalanx of the Corinthians, and only then did they begin to circle like sharks — but by then, Lydia’s stern was nestled against Black Raven on one side and Nemesis on the other, and I could see Aristides coasting in beside Cimon’s magnificent Ajax as we, the outermost arms of the fleet, closed and locked.
We were in.
I’m not sure any Greek fleet — or any fleet anywhere — had ever formed such a big wheel. I suppose it was awesome — Ionians and Phoenicians who were there have told me so — but to us, it seemed very small, and the fleet against us surrounded us, and I, for one, began to doubt the strategy we’d adopted. Because we went after the Persian fleet, we were well across the straight, far from our camp and unable to swim for shore.
Only then, trapped in the wheel, did it occur to me that my captures and my camp and all our spare masts and all of our food were sitting on the beach, and all the Persians needed to do to win the war was to dispatch twenty ships to burn our camp.
War is the strangest of man’s endeavours, ruled by the whims of the gods and men’s foolishness more than by stratagems and intellect. The Persians never sent a ship to burn our camp. They wanted to fight us ship to ship.
Twice, whole squadrons of them rushed our wheel.
A lone trireme out on the water is barely stable. It has to be balanced. When ten marines cross the deck, the oarsmen curse. Eh? And the ram has to be powered to do damage — at least the speed of a cantering horse.
But tie two hundred ships in a circle, and the decks are steady, moving only up and down with the swell, and the rams — in close series like spears — are steady. They don’t move backwards or bounce. The rowers — all free men — don’t need to row. If every one of them has a spear or a javelin, you have, in effect, two hundred marines in every ship.
Did I mention the swell? The wind was mild, from the east, but the sea was running higher and higher, and the swell was beginning to make it difficult to maintain formation.
At any rate, as I say, they rushed us twice — once the Samians and once Carians.
They retreated and we didn’t pursue. But they made no impression whatsoever.
The sun passed the top of the sky. I passed out water and watched Aegyptians watching us.
We were doing it. We were holding the whole might of Persia.
Brasidas had been regaling us — if a nearly silent man who speaks fifteen words an hour can be said to regale — with the Babylonian revolt. He turned and handed young Pericles, who had apparently joined our ship, his water. ‘Eurybiades is signalling “attention!”’ he said.
‘Rowers to your cushions!’ I called. ‘Marines forward! Ka!’
He held up a thumb and pointed with an arrow.
Hermogenes took a deep breath.
I could see his fear, and he, no doubt, could see mine.
‘Everyone ready!’ I called.
I knew the plan. After all, Themistocles, for all his failings, was a genius. And Eurybiades, for all his caution, was a Spartan.
The bronze aspis in the centre of the fleet flashed three times.
I thumped my spear’s saruater into the deck hard enough to put a small hole in the planking and shouted, ‘Row!’
And while I pulled down the cheek plates on my helmet, the allied fleet went over to the attack.
The Persians weren’t a Persian fleet. I doubt that there were fifty Persians aboard six hundred ships. There were Carians, and Phrygians, and Ionians and Aeolians and Samians and Paphalogians and Syrians and Phoenicians and Carthaginians and Aegyptians, but they were so very large that they weren’t really a fleet. They were really six fleets under six very powerful Persians, and not a one of those powerful men spoke the language of the trierarchs and navarchs under him.
Not a one of them expected us to attack.
And suddenly, on a majestic scale, it was the battle of the day before. No lines, and every trierarch forced to make his own decisions.
Lycomedes made the first kill. He was the first ship out of the circle, his rowers straining like hounds, and he struck a Cypriote, the King of Salamis’s ship — shattered the enemy oar bank, and his marines stormed the ship in a hundred beats of a hoplite’s heart.
The enemy collapsed in chaos. We took forty ships in as long as it would take for the assembly to vote on something routine — Hermogenes misjudged our little trick, and we sank a Syrian trireme, our bow climbing so high out of the water that I was terrified that we’d capsize, and we lost a marine over the side and he sank away into the depths, armour sparkling. That was grim, but the enemy fled like whitefish from tuna.