He began to blow on his sea whistle, and I fell in next to him. He had his shield and I had mine, and other men who were not utterly in the grip of chaos and panic joined us, and in a few moments we were a hundred men. I noted that the man on my right was the athlete from Eretria, Eualcidas, whose friend I had thrown from the symposium. War makes strange shield-fellows. Agios was close on me, standing behind Herk.
The Lydians stopped short of us.
That was their mistake, because as soon as the other Greeks saw the Lydians halt, they turned and became men. So it is in any fight.
Aristides was there, then. He ran across the front rank and praised us for standing, a few quick words, and more men joined us, Chians, mostly. Our shield wall covered the agora, and we were four or five men deep – not a proper phalanx, but a deep line of mixed men.
Then the Lydians came at us. They weren't big men, or well armoured, except Artaphernes' bodyguard in the centre, where I was. And the fates laughed, because the man coming at me in the fire-lit afternoon light was Cyrus, with his three friends around him. They halted ten paces from us, to see if we would give way, but we had Aristides to give us some wood in our backbones, and we shuffled but held.
Artaphernes' men began to shoot at us with powerful bows at close range. Eualcidas on my right took an arrow through his shield into his shield arm – that's how strong their bows were close up. I saw that Heraklides slanted his, and I did the same, and then, under cover of my shield, I got the shaft out of Eualcidas's arm and two other Eretrians dragged him to the rear. The next man to stand beside me got Cyrus's arrow in his ankle – I saw the shot – and then Aristides exposed himself to the fire and ran along the front, ordering us to kneel behind our shields, and we did. He was magnificent. He was only a couple of years older than me, and I wanted to be him.
So I indulged in some bravado of my own. I called Cyrus's name until he saw me, and I stood up and took off my helmet. Arrows rattled on my shield, and one pinked my naked thigh above my greaves, scraping along the muscle without penetrating.
'Cyrus!' I roared.
He raised his axe over his head and waved it at me. 'You fool!' he called, and laughed. The Greeks around me wondered aloud how I knew a Persian, one of the elite, and I laughed.
And then their line stopped shooting and charged us.
Artaphernes led his men from the front. Never believe all that crap about the Medes whipping their men forward – that's the slaves they sometimes use as living shields. The real Persians and Medes – like Cyrus and Artaphernes – are like lions, eager for a fight all the time.
They only had ten paces to come at us. I had a stranger behind me and another on my right, but I had Heraklides on my left. I looked back at the man behind me. He seemed steady. When the Medes charged, I stood crouched, shield on shoulder, and as they came up I punched out with my first spear and caught Cyrus in the leg, my spear in his calf, and down he went. Pharnakes was right with him, and he had a heavy axe, which he put in the face of my shield as I threw my second spear into the second rank, where an unshielded man took it in the gut – a Persian – and went down. I pushed my shield in Pharnakes' face, axe and all, and the man behind me stabbed him while I got my sword out from under my arm.
And Heraklides yelled, 'Back! Back up! Back, you dogs!'
I raised my shield and backed a pace. Our line was shattered. Lydians were butchering the men who ran.
I got back in the line – I'd pushed forward into the Medes – but they weren't fighting my partner or me. They were flowing around us, left and right, towards easier pickings, as men do when the melee becomes chaotic. I got my shield under the front edge of Heraklides', and the man who had been at my back now stepped up to fit in next to me – it was all going to shit – and then he was gone, an axe in his head, and his brains showered me.
I grabbed a spear and fought with it until it broke. We could hear Aristides and we followed his voice – back and back and back, and the enemy seldom fought us, because we kept together. There were men behind us, Agios and two others, and I never knew them, but they stayed with us, and more than once a spear from over my shoulder kept me alive, until the four of us made it to an alley entrance where the Athenian captain had another little knot of men. He had waited for us. I never forgot that, either. It probably only took us a minute to reach him, but he might have been as safe as a house for that minute, and he stood and waited.
Well, Heraklides was his helmsman, of course.
We got to the alley, and then we ran. We ran all the way to our ships, eh? Well, not quite. We ran back across the bridges and made a better stand, and Artaphernes took a light wound as his advance was stopped. I fought there, and I was in the front rank, and I probably put a man or two down, but it was desperate stuff, no ranks or files, and the Ionians were a pack of fools with no order. Mostly, I was trying to keep Heraklides on my left and my shield with his. I don't know who hit Artaphernes, but that man saved our army. Because their attack petered out at the bridges, and we managed to withdraw to Tmolus across the Hermus River, and there was no pursuit.
Half of the army had never been in the fight at all, and they wanted to storm the city again. Those of us who had fought were angry, and those who had run magnified the number and ferocity of the enemy, and many angry words were said.
I was sitting, bleeding from a few wounds and breathing like the bellows for a forge, when a man came up. He was an Eretrian and he had a scorpion on his aspis, and he looked like a hard man.
He came straight up to me.
'You are the Plataean?' he asked.
I was sitting on my shield, so he couldn't quite see the device. I nodded. 'Doru,' I said.
He nodded. 'You saved my father – he's telling everyone how you covered him against the arrows and drew the one from his shoulder.' He offered me his hand. I took it. 'I'm Parmenides.'
I clasped his hand, and he offered more praise. I shook my head. But later, he came back with his father, and they brought a full skin of wine, which I shared with my mess. Then Stephanos came from the Aeolians – the men of Chios and the coast of Asia opposite – and sat with my mess group. He was a sixth-ranker, and proud just to wear the panoply. For him, it was an enormous promotion – as great as my step from slave to free man. The Aeolians take noble blood much more seriously than Atticans or Boeotians.
When Stephanos went back to his own mess, I lay down, my head spinning from the wine. Heraklides lay down beside me, and we missed the part where Aristides accused the Milesians of cowardice.
I've done poor Aristides an injustice if I've failed to make him sound like a prig. He was always right, and some men hated him for it. He never lied and seldom even shaded the truth. Indeed, among the Athenians, some men mocked him as a man who saw only black and white, not the colours of the rainbow.
But Melanthius had taken a wound in the agora of Sardis, and Aristides was in command of the Athenians now, and he took this very seriously. We loved him, for all his priggish ways. He was better than other men. He just couldn't keep his mouth shut.
A failing I understand, honey.
Anyway, the Milesians had, indeed, hung back from the city. Aristides apparently told them that their cowardice had cost us the city. Aristagoras, as their chief, resented the remark, and the army's factional nature increased to near open enmity.
The next day, my body ached, I was filthy, with blood under my nails and matted in my hair, and there wasn't enough water, because we were too far from the banks of the river and the Persians would shoot any man who went down the bank for a helmet of water – filthy water, in any case. Later in the day, parched, angry and dirty, we stumbled back to the pass, and we heard that the Lydians were rising behind us – that the men of all Caria were marching to the aid of their satrap. In those days, the Carians were called the 'Men of Bronze' because they wore so much armour, and they were deadly. Later in the Long War, they were our allies. But not that week.