Cimon shook his head. ‘I feel the power,’ he said.
‘Feel it when you have two hundred brothers at your back,’ I said. ‘Sixty to ten is long odds.’
Cimon laughed. ‘Sixty to twelve is only five to one,’ he said. But he shook his head rapidly, indicating he was only leading me on. ‘I agree. Let’s go.’
He left his marines aboard, however, like the practical old pirate he was, and he took half the Naxian’s marines as hostages. He made it sound like guest-hosting in the most noble and ancient way and the Naxians — well, the Ionians, really — leapt to the Ajax with a will, delighted to be invited aboard.
We all put our oars in the water. By then the oncoming Persian squadron, all Phoenicians, were ten stades away.
I had time to see young Pericles in an animated conversation with one of the Ionian marines, a boy only a little older, maybe eighteen.
Then I jumped back to Lydia and we turned south.
By a good chance, Cimon had scrawled his usual message inviting the Ionians to desert on the rocks above our beach and that’s what the Phoenicians found when they went inshore. They didn’t really bother to chase us. In fact, as we rowed due south, I wondered if they’d make a blunder. If they raced after us, a dozen ships well manned, we might have snapped up their lead ships, especially as I had a sailing rig.
But they did not. They chose to be cautious and, in truth, their ships were the very antithesis of the ships for a long chase; they were heavy and slow and damp.
We put them over the horizon in two hours and then turned west at a flash of Cimon’s shield, a loose line abreast to a long, straggling column, but we were old shipmates and we knew the signals. We neatened up the line as we rowed, only one deck at a time to rest the oarsmen. Just in case. It wasn’t just the Phoenicians who were cautious.
But we made good time. The west wind was gentle, barely rippling the water. We had started the morning with a victory and that put great heart into the men.
But for all that, the west wind was against us, and by mid-afternoon it was clear we would not make Salamis. We’d come too far west to make Andros and night was coming.
Cimon and I had the same thought — to find the narrow beach two bays west of Sounion. But we were cautious; just short of the bay we went in lone in Lydia and Alexandros and four mariners swam ashore, naked. They ran up the beach and climbed the ridge behind.
We hovered, the sun sank, and our oarsmen cursed.
Alexandros ran back down the sand and did a little dance, the agreed ‘all clear’ signal.
We landed. It was tight; it required all our seamanship and, to be honest, a great many blasphemies and some splintered wood to get us all ashore. The last ship in, Metiochus’s Salamis, was beached between two big rocks and no sane trierarch would ever have put a ship there.
Not to mention that we had neither food nor wine.
We put all our marines together in a body under Brasidas and sent them inland to fetch any forage that could be managed, with two hundred oarsmen to carry it and all our archers as a covering force. Cimon and I went as volunteers and it was as scary as campaigning in a foreign land. North, we could see fires burning unchecked on the ridges and mountains towards Brauron and Marathon. East, the mountains toward Athens were afire.
Aside from Persians and their slaves, Attica was empty. There wasn’t much food. We found some olives and some grain and, not far from the beach, we found a village that had chosen not to evacuate.
We found it by the busy cries of sea birds and ravens, feasting. We came into the town at sunset, the sky red as blood at our backs, and to my best guess the poor peasants had tried to send a delegation to offer earth and water to the invaders. At least, that’s what it looked like — a tumble of amphorae meant for water, all broken, and two big red clods of Attic earth, dyed redder and browner by the blood of the two young girls who had carried them.
They had died hard. I will not say more … Bah! I remember one young girl had her eyes open, and the whites were still clear, as only young eyes can be, and I hesitated to touch her, to close them, as if I might hurt her. And the sound of the flies everywhere — they assault your senses with a buzz that warns you not to look … too late.
There were bodies throughout the village, a village which was more like the sheds of a big farm or a small estate, really just a crossroads. There was a small shrine, with a middle-aged woman dead across it as deliberate desecration, and six houses, all smouldering, with men lying in the road in fly-swarmed sticky puddles and the smell of cooking flesh to tell us where the rest of the people must have been.
They were, at least most of them, slaves. And the Persians — or Medes or Saka or Egyptians or perhaps even other Greeks — had used them and killed them.
All of us were moved. It was impossible to look on it and not hate. I have seldom hated the Persians. The Persians of my youth were great men. But this was like the rape of a whole land. Done apurpose.
Brasidas stood looking at the two young girls who had carried the earth and water. His face … moved. The muscles of his jaw leaped up and down like a ship on the sea and tears came to his eyes. This, from a Spartan.
‘This is despicable,’ he said.
Ka glanced at the high ridge to the north. I’m going to guess that he had seen more atrocities than I. It is trite to say, but Heraclitus has the right of it: killing in the heat of battle is a very different animal from killing a couple of maidens in a village, much less raping and killing the entire village. A village of slaves. By the rules of war, the Medes might have rounded them all up and carried them away, the same way they took the bronze statues or the silver coins they found.
But they massacred them.
At any rate, Ka said, ‘They are close. The blood is still wet and red.’
Brasidas dropped his shield and spear. He lifted one of the dead girls and carried her, tenderly, to the place where the village shrine was. Hard by it was a small graveyard.
He never gave an order, and neither did Cimon or I, but men found picks and a damaged shovel.
Ka shook his head. ‘They are close,’ he said.
I mastered myself, although the smell of the dead, the burned people in the houses, was in my nose and lingers there to this day. Darkness was coming down fast.
We put out a dozen watchers in the hills around the crossroads and gave them horns. Ka took the archers and hid them along the northern branch of the road.
Two oarsmen broke into the smouldering barn and found that there was food: sausages, and wine jars. The Medes hadn’t even looted. They had merely killed.
When the work of burying the dead, all forty or more of them, was well advanced, I sent half the hoplites back to the ships with Cimon. I was worried that the Medes would attack the ships. I was in a black place and nothing made much sense to me. I slept a little and dreamed of the boy whose soul I sent down to Hades with a sharp knife one dark night on a battlefield in Asia …
When I awoke, Ka had a hand over my mouth.
‘They come,’ he said.
Who knows why they came back. Really, I want them to have been the same men, but perhaps they were another patrol, another group. I can only assume that they smelled our smoke, or saw movement in a valley that should have been dead.
They were careless, riding abroad in the first hour of the day, spread across the northern fields in a long line of perhaps sixty horsemen with more coming on the road.
I had perhaps forty hoplites and a dozen archers. And Brasidas, of course.
They came across the fields at first light and up the road.
We killed all of them we could reach. It was an ambush and there was nothing worthy about the fighting. Nothing I will tell you. We threw our spears into their horses and Ka and his archers dropped them until they broke.