We moved down to the beach. The fighting seemed heaviest by the ships, and we could see black hulls launching all along the bay. It seemed too good to be true, but one after another, ships pushed their sterns off the sand and their oars came out. Some stayed in close, rescuing men from the water.
Others simply fled.
That was when we knew we’d won.
The barbarians had formed a line by the ships — whether by intention or merely in desperation — and Miltiades’ men were fighting there. Most of my men and many of Miltiades’ went up into the camp and started to loot.
The fighting by the ships was deadly. Aeschylus’s brother fell there, and Callimachus, the polemarch of Athens. Cimon, Miltiades’ eldest son, took a wound there, and Agios was wounded when he leaped aboard an enemy ship and started to clear it.
We were walking — I can hardly call it a march — along the beach, passing over the wreckage of the Persians — corpses of men and horses as thick as seaweed after a storm, dead Medes cut down by Miltiades’ men. And as clear as an actor on the stage of the Agora, I heard Agios calling. Then I saw him, on the stern of an enemy ship half a stade away.
I wasn’t going to let him die while I had breath in my body. I started to run.
At my back, all my oikia followed me.
Aristides and Miltiades heard him, too.
And like a flood, the best spears of the army converged on the stern of that ship. We weren’t far — a hundred paces.
How long does it take to cut your way through a hundred paces of panicked Medes and desperate Persians?
Too long.
I went through the remnants of the Medes with my trusted men at my shoulders, but then we hit the Persians, and we slowed. There were a dozen of them — not men I knew, thank the gods, but the same sort of men as Cyrus and his friends, and they fought like demons, and we slowed.
Agios probably died then, while I was face to face with an armoured Persian. The Persian fought well. We must have exchanged four or five cuts before my spear ripped his forearm and my next thrust sent his shade down to Hades. As I stepped past him, the Persians backed away, grabbing at a man with a hennaed beard. His helmet was gold and set with lapis, and I’d seen him before.
Datis.
I thrust at him and saw my spear drive home under the skirts of his armour, and then his men were all around him. I was an arm’s length from the ship where Agios lay dying, pierced fifty times, shot with arrows and continuing to call the battle cry of Athens, so that the whole army heard him, and men pressed forward, possessed with the rage of Ares. The barbarians could have rallied — they certainly should never have lost a ship. But we cut into them the way the sickle cuts into the weeds at the edge of a garden.
Agios’s shouts grew weaker, and my blows fell faster, and I got a Mede against the stern of the ship and punched my spear at him so hard that my spearhead stuck in the tar-coated wood. Then I dropped my shield and jumped. As I got my leg over the thwart a Sakai archer cut at me. His short knife caught in my chlamys and turned against my scale armour. With that axe in my right hand I cut into him, and he fell away, and I got my feet under me.
I could see the faces of the panicked oarsmen — and Agios, collapsed across the helm. A spearman stood over him, having just stabbed him, and my axe licked out and cut the back of his knee so that his leg gave way and he fell, spraying blood — but I hit him again, and again, and again, until the side of his helmet caved in.
Now the blows of five men fell on my armour, and I had no shield. I took a wound in the thigh — just a pin-prick — but enough to snap me out of the blood rage. Suddenly Aristides was beside me — using his spear two-handed — and then Miltiades came over the other gunwale, then Styges, Gelon, Sophanes, Bellerophon, Teucer, Aeschylus, and we stormed that ship, the living wrath of Athena.
Six more ships were taken and cleared before they could get to sea. The Athenians and the Plataeans were no longer an army — nor were the barbarians. They were a fleeing mob, and we were in the red rage of Nike and Ares, when men die because they care about nothing but more blood. Our fire burned hot, and many were consumed. Indeed, I’ve heard it said that more Athenians died by the ships than when the centre broke — but I’ve heard a great many things said by Athenians about the battle, and a few of them are true, but most are pig shit. We lost a lot of men, and so did Athens, although Cimon will tell you otherwise.
We burned like a bonfire in a high wind, and then their last ship was away, and we burned to ash. We were spent.
We came to a stop, so that a hush fell over the field. I suppose that wounded men screamed, and gulls screeched, and horses trumpeted their pain, but I remember none of that. What I remember is the hush, as if the gods had decided that all of us deserved a rest.
I leaned on the haft of my looted axe, and breathed. I don’t know how long I was out of it — but ask any man who’s been in the battle haze, and he’ll tell you that when you are done, you don’t cheer. You just stop. When I came back to myself, I was sitting on the blood-soaked planks of the marine box. My thigh wound was open and bleeding again, and Miltiades was beside me. We’d cut our way from the stern, by Agios’s corpse, to the bow. I was covered in blood — sticky, stinking blood.
‘I think we’ve won,’ Miltiades said. He didn’t sound proud, or arrogant, or in any way like the hero of the hour. He sounded awestruck.
We all were, children. I don’t think that we really believed we could win — or perhaps the issue was so much in doubt that we couldn’t separate what we dreaded from what we hoped for.
But as we watched the last shreds of the Persian cavalry swimming their horses out, and the ships closing round them to save them, we knew that these Persians were not coming back. Especially when they abandoned their horses in the water.
I remember then, watching the ships creep past us from the north. Many had lost oarsmen as well as hoplites, and they didn’t move fast. Behind me, the victorious Athenians had started to sing — some hymn to Athena I didn’t know.
Out across the water, a ship’s length away or less, I saw the scorpion shield standing on the stern of a light trireme. The enemy ship was going past us, picking men out of the water, bold as brass.
Teucer had an arrow, and he drew it to his chin, but I put my axe head in front of his arrowhead just when he went to loose, and he cursed.
Archilogos saw it all. His mouth formed an O and his head tracked me as my eyes must have followed him. He raised his shield.
‘Tell Briseis I send my greetings!’ I called across the water.
His men rowed him away and he didn’t reply.
It was harder to leap down from that hull than it had been to climb aboard — my muscles were seizing, and I remember Aeschylus catching me as I stumbled. We were much of an age, he and I. He was a good man, despite his jealousy of Phrynichus’s success.
Idomeneus had my shield. ‘You alive, boss?’ he asked. ‘You’ve got a cut.’
So we bandaged my thigh again and then we looked after the dozen cuts he had — one in his bicep so deep I couldn’t see how he could use his sword arm. Aeschylus helped. I didn’t realize then that he was standing a few paces from the corpse of his brother.
Miltiades came up to me.
‘I need the best men,’ he said quietly. ‘We’re not done.’
Just north of the plain was an extensive stand of olive trees surrounded by a stone boundary wall. The Persians who had run north and west when their line gave way ran all the way around our army, but were cut off from the beach by the ruin of their camp. Being true Persians, they refused to surrender. They went into the walled olive grove and determined to die like men.
Half of our army must already have started back across the fields to our camp by the time Miltiades became aware of what was happening, and good men had died — some of them Plataeans — trying to storm the olive grove. The rumour spread that Datis was there, and the Persian command staff.