Men nodded. They grinned and laughed and muttered darkly — and in that moment I loved them.
I had decided to send Seckla and Brasidas and twenty of my rowers to the Lesbian ship, and I had promoted six men from the oar decks to the rank of marines under Alexandros.
Brasidas hopped up on a rock and held up a wax tablet. ‘I am given to understand that the following men have the great fortune to have been promoted to being marines,’ he called. He read out six names. ‘To welcome all of them to our ranks, all marines can meet me in full panoply for a little run and a little dance.’ He didn’t grin. Spartans didn’t punctuate their unspoken threats with grins. They just said things and did them.
All through the crowd of oarsmen there was backslapping and good-natured cursing as the lucky six — perhaps feeling less fortunate — hurried to find their helmets.
I walked down in my own panoply. Perhaps it was penance for the day before, but I felt I needed to exercise. And Eugenios, perhaps because of his new freedom, had polished my whole kit so that the bronze shone like gold. I sparkled in the firelight and the rising sun.
So did Brasidas, and we began to exercise, first in simple stretches and then in a run up the beach to the headland and back, sprinting all the way.
Oh, for youth. I was last — last! And the new marines laughed at me. In a good-natured way. Naturally, I hated the lot of them.
And then we began to dance the Pyrrhiche. I probably forget to say everything important, but by that time, thanks to my time with the Spartans and Brasidas joining us, we had more than a dozen dances. In fact, sometimes when only the veterans did them, we improvised, adding elements, or took turns in a dance game where one of us would lead and the others would imitate the leader’s motions: thrusts, cuts, throws. Armed and unarmed, swords and spears and shields, drawing and sheathing, footwork …
But the first dance was still the old dance of the spear from Plataea, with some Spartan modification, and we began to teach it. Many oarsmen knew it and some did it every morning, hoping to be promoted, but none knew it in the detail with which Brasidas preached it. Now the worm turned; the biters were bit and Brasidas and I pointed out any small errors — phalanxes of them — to our new marines.
One man, Polydorus, shook his head. ‘What does it matter whether I turn my foot or not?’ he whined.
Brasidas didn’t smile or frown. He merely paused. ‘It only matters,’ he said, ‘if you would rather live, than die.’
‘Ouch,’ muttered Sitalkes.
Cimon emerged out of the murk of the early morning with young Pericles at his shoulder. He swirled his cloak to get my attention and I trotted over to him.
Pericles nodded at the new marines. ‘You train them,’ he said, ‘as if training can make a man into a gentleman.’
‘Young man, the Spartans, held as the noblest of all the Greeks, train relentlessly, and so do you.’ I shrugged.
‘When this is over, we are going to be in debt to our oarsmen,’ Cimon said. He was looking out to sea.
‘When we faced the Medes at Marathon, your father used the little men to shame the hoplites,’ I said. ‘Are you more of an aristocrat than your father?’
‘What in the name of Pluton is that?’ Cimon said. My stinging remark was blown away on the west wind. Pericles heard it and raised an eyebrow
I saw it too. The flash of oars, coming from the north-east.
‘Poseidon’s dick,’ Cimon said. ‘ALARM!’ he roared.
We were off the beach faster than a boy drops his chiton for a run. Cimon’s Ajax was first off and that annoyed me, but I was trying to help Seckla get his less-than-piratical Aeolians into their places while my own Lydia, in the very peak of training, waited for orders.
There were three ships. They were spread over a wide swathe of the ocean, as if not really together. And because of the sun rising in the east behind us, our hulls were black against the black rock of the coast, an old pirate’s trick, and they didn’t see us for a long time.
Farther out there was a line of ships, perhaps sixty, but they were hull down, just a flash of oars on the horizon.
Then things grew more complicated.
The closest enemy ship turned towards Cimon’s Ajax and ran right at her. But they ran something up to their masthead and they didn’t take down their mast, which almost any trireme did before combat.
I was still on the beach, virtually the last man on it, chivvying the Aeolian oarsmen into their ship. Watching the drama at sea play out, my heart in my mouth, desperate to get aboard Lydia. Naiad got under way and began to turn end for end.
Well out from Ajax the enemy ship turned her bow towards the beach, laying her vulnerable flank open to Ajax’s ram and folding in her oars like a bird preparing for a rough night at sea.
Ajax turned in a flash of oars — a beautiful display of seamanship — took in her oars and lay longside to longside. But no grapples flew.
I ran into the shallow water in my armour — how poor Eugenios must have cursed me — and got over the side. Lydia was hovering in the shallow water just over the first drop-off of the beach — another fine art of rowing — and the moment Leukas roared ‘on board’ the oars all dipped and we were away like a sea eagle.
The other two enemy scouts were running, but Cimon’s brother in Salamis was faster. He had everything in his favour — better rowers, better rested, with a drier ship.
And he dared run the fleeing enemy down, in full view of their oncoming fleet. There were sixty ships bearing down on us.
Of course, they all had their masts down. Even though the west wind was at their backs, they were rowing.
Because they were afraid of us.
But Metiochus was not afraid of them, and while Lydia left the beach and ran upwind under oars to where Cimon and his capture lay, Metiochus caught the fleeing trireme and rammed it in the stern. You seldom see it, even though it is the dream shot of oared combat. But his ram caught her right under the curve of the swan’s neck, and although we could neither see nor hear because we were a dozen stades away, she sank.
Metiochus turned and came back, seeming to skim the water like a bird of prey.
Cimon’s capture had, in fact, come right up and raised a branch of laurel. She was from Naxos, crewed with various survivors of the storms of three weeks before, and the crew had voted to change sides.
Leukas lay us alongside Ajax as prettily as a kore dances at Brauron, and I jumped from helm to helm.
Cimon’s helmsman laughed. ‘They’re all over there,’ he said. ‘Tell ’is lordship that if we don’t want to join the Persians, we need to get underway.’
I jumped again, onto the deck of the Naxian ship, Poseidon. She was a fine vessel — a decked trireme, a heavy ship built on the latest Phoenician lines, capable of carrying cargo or fighting. A little slow for running away, though.
I grabbed Cimon’s arm. He was mobbed by excited Greeks — Euboeans and Ionians. Being a heavy ship, they had more than twenty marines. They also had a pair of Persian captives — two men assigned to the ship by their admiral, Ariabignes.
‘They just sailed up and joined us!’ Cimon shouted.
‘Your helmsman wants to get out of here,’ I shouted. ‘So do I.’
Cimon grinned. ‘This is a sign. From Poseidon.’ He slapped my back. ‘You were right!’
I pointed over the Naxian ship’s starboard bulwark. ‘There is a Persian squadron right there.’ I waved. ‘Can we help Poseidon help us by not fighting them all ourselves?’