He was deadly, with his calm voice, pitched not for beauty but for ease of hearing. You have to imagine that Pericles told his father and every oarsman within a hundred paces that he was a fool.
I thought perhaps Xanthippus would explode.
And then a woman appeared. She was no kore, but a mature woman of my own age or a year or two older, strong and tall. She wore a fine blue chiton pinned in gold and her feet were bare for walking on sand, which gave her a touch of informality. She’d thrown a woman’s himation over her chiton for decency. Athenian noblewomen did go out in public, then, but Salamis had made life even more informal. You cannot live on a beach and piss in a common latrine without a certain breakdown of the barriers of class.
I had never seen her, but one look at her and I knew she was of the Alcmaeonidae. She had Cleitus’s black brows and high forehead and his arrogance stamped around her mouth. But where Xanthippus’s arrogance rested on the soft sand of fear — fear of his status, I’d guess — Agariste’s arrogance rested on the bedrock of wealth, position and a solid belief in her own worth.
She flashed me a very private smile. It was all the apology I was ever to receive for the embarrassment of being privy to the family quarrel, but it was well done. Then her head turned — gracefully.
‘My dear husband,’ she said. ‘Of course our guest is anxious to depart! His daughter is over the ridge with the girls from Brauron. My niece says she is a very accomplished dancer.’
Her only acknowledgement of the difficulties of the scene, besides her presence, of course, was a single look at her son, Pericles. Their eyes met and she just lifted one eyebrow.
What she said in that lifted eyebrow I could read, as clearly as if my own mother had done it. ‘Really? Must you provoke your father in front of a famous guest who might be accounted an enemy of our clan?’ All this in one eyebrow.
And Pericles, the blue blood of all blue bloods, the scion of the very Alcmaeonidae who I had worked so hard to defeat politically on several occasions — I hope you are all staying awake — bowed to his mother. ‘I have not seen my cousin Heliodora in weeks,’ he said, with a respectful nod to me. ‘Perhaps I might accompany the mighty lord of Plataea.’
‘I’m not sure that mighty and Plataea can be said together in a sentence,’ I allowed. ‘My father was a bronze-smith.’
That was very definitely the wrong thing to say. Even Pericles winced.
However, I was already on my feet and I’d had enough of them.
‘Thanks again for the space to beach my ship,’ I said.
‘It was nothing,’ Xanthippus said, somehow suggesting the opposite.
It is remarkable how you can make an enemy of a man merely by being present when he’s made to look weak by his son and his wife.
I smiled at Agariste, who met my eyes with her own. Most women in those days dropped their eyes when a man looked at them and I’ve said before that I always preferred those who did not. Her eyes were not ‘interested’. Merely — annoyed. As I passed her, she said, ‘Yet even Cleitus says you are a son of Heracles.’
I nodded, and kept going. I just wanted clear of their family quarrel. I left Pericles to his mother but he slipped away.
Pericles followed me back to my own ships, with his Ionian at his heels. The other man, Anaxagoras, I mean, was tall, handsome, and graceful. I had Eugenios give them both wine while I changed from a bloodstained rag of a chiton in which I should never have been seen in public to a better garment. Eugenios clucked over me and, as a consequence, I strode down to the water’s edge and flung myself in. There was some good-natured cheering — many men were bathing — and I swam up and down. When I came back to the sand, a pair of my oarsmen poured a heavy jug of fresh water over me and I took a towel and dried myself and then strigiled carefully with good oil. Life was simply better with Eugenios close at hand: the clean bronze strigil, the fine oil, the oil bottle clean and well kept …
Well, there’s more to life than blood and war. I needed to be clean.
Hector and Hipponax joined me in swimming and cleaning. As we left the water I saw Brasidas and most of the marines go in. It had been a dirty business. Does seawater make you clean?
Cleaner, at any rate. Blood sticks to you. So does fatigue and pain. I had a feeling in my pectoral muscles, the deep ache caused by fighting in a bronze thorax, and the fatigue in my upper arms from too many sword blows, too many spear casts. I could no longer count the number of fights I’d been in since the first day at Artemisium, but by that day and that hour I had been in the longest sustained campaign of my life. It was as bad as the siege of Miletus. I was tired, and behind fatigue towered the black clouds of low spirits and disillusion like a storm coming in from the sea. Or in this case, from the land. I knew it affected every man and every woman; the danger, the stress, and the rising smoke over Attica that showed the complete mastery of our foe over our homes. Our world was dying, whether we were Athenians or Plataeans. It set us apart from the Corinthians and the men of the Peloponnese.
I only mention this because as I towelled myself and strigiled with oil, I was in the process of admitting that my joints and my hands and my ankles and my torso ached in a way that they had not ached at Lade, and I knew that I was no longer young. The smoke of Attica was not worse than the knowledge that sweet youth was no longer mine, that I could no longer drink all night, fight all day, and then do it again and feel better. Instead — instead, despite victory and fortune, I felt tired, old, and beaten. And if I felt that way, I had little difficulty in imagining how my people felt.
I confess that all these thoughts were the matter of a few beats of my heart. It takes longer to tell than the occurrence. But the knowledge that your youth is gone is alike a little death. I had learned much about myself from Heraclitus, from Pythagoras and his daughter, from Lydia and the way I treated her, from war and slavery and Euphonia and Aristides and Seckla and a hundred other men and women. But in that moment something changed.
The only outward show I made was to put on a fine chiton with embroidery and summon my two young lads to do the same. Pericles and Anaxagoras were both there. The four of them were … amicable. They were still sparring, but having shared a battle and a sea voyage, they were comrades.
‘I’ve changed my mind,’ I said. ‘We will collect Euphonia and then walk to the temple and make sacrifice.’
This seemed to suit my four young men. Now that I put my mind to it, they were already very clean and smelled of perfumed oil, and while I put on a very god piece of cloth I had time to notice that they were already well dressed.
I can be slow. Pericles was visiting his cousin, after all.
We walked over the headland. There were sentries in the improvised tower, a pair of marines off the Storm Cutter and two older girls from Brauron. I took a moment to take my two marines aside and explain to them, in plain terms, what might befall them if anything happened to the Brauron girls.
I’m pleased to say that I left them impressed with my powers of discernment. And other powers.
When we came to the tent camp of the priestesses, I asked to meet with Hippolyta, the High Priestess of Artemis. She was unavailable — in fact, she was performing sacrifices on behalf of the fleet — but one of her sisters came to meet me, a mature woman of my own age or perhaps older who was wearing a man’s chitoniskos, a very short garment indeed. She was tanned and brown and had muscles on her muscles, so to speak.
‘You do not require our permission to visit your daughter,’ she said cheerfully.
‘My lady, I want to speak about the guard tower,’ I said, pointing at the high rocky point.
She took offence immediately. ‘We were here first,’ she said. ‘We do not need help from your men to watch for the Persians.’