Hipponax stepped up close to her, as if moved by some external force, as if pulled by a rope, against his will.
She looked at him: a flick of the eyes, and then a movement of her head as she appreciated who it was standing close to her.
‘You do not weep for Athens?’ my son asked her.
Not bad, I thought.
‘I don’t want to bear sons to avenge Athens,’ Heliodora said. ‘I want to fight the Persians myself.’
I was close enough to hear every word, hidden by chance and the way we all stood, and I felt like an intruder. At the same time I could see her face, and his. In a moment, it struck me that perhaps they should wed. There was something remarkable to see the two of them, or perhaps this is an old story repeated many times.
And when she made this pronouncement, I feared for how my sometimes desperately immature son would respond. Derision? Mockery?
‘I could get you aboard a ship,’ my son said.
It was a terrible idea. But it was a wonderful, heartfelt reply.
‘You could?’ she asked. ‘I could row all day!’
I did nothing. What a terrible mistake. And yet, so glorious.
We stood and watched until our hips ached and our feet hurt.
It was so terrible that we couldn’t walk away.
Eventually, the fires burned down. Girls took other girls to bed, and the priestesses moved among them.
I can say that I was never more than a few arms’ lengths from my son, but I must have missed something. And when we walked back to our camp, Pericles looked sombre, Anaxagoras kept looking back, and Hector wouldn’t meet my eye.
‘Who is Iris?’ I asked.
Pericles made a dismissive gesture, mostly lost in the dark. ‘My cousin’s friend. She’s nobody; a Thracian or perhaps Macedonian.’
‘She is not nobody!’ Hector said hotly.
‘Boys,’ I said. We were at the guard towers above the bay and a stream of sparks shot into the air over the Acropolis as something enormous collapsed.
We walked down into our own camp silently.
That was the night Athens fell to the Persians.
The next morning, I was unable to sleep in — the usual reasons — and I went up the beach, pissed into the thin belt of bushes and vines, and then went for a run. The beach was not tidy and I had to stay along the water and run into the surf around the bow of every ship. It was a difficult run.
I needed a difficult run. I came back, watching the column of black smoke still rising from the Acropolis, and then I ran into the sea and swam.
Hector was waiting for me on the beach, with a towel.
‘I need to talk to you,’ he said.
Well, he’d brought oil and a strigil and there was almost no one awake. ‘I am at your service.’
‘Am I a gentleman?’ he asked.
I almost cut myself with my strigil. But … these are real questions.
‘Yes,’ I said.
‘Was Anarchos my father?’ he asked.
His face was a frozen mask. ‘Yes,’ I said slowly. ‘That is, I believe so.’
‘A criminal,’ he said bitterly.
‘Pfft,’ I said, or something equally annoying.
‘He was! Seckla says he was a terrible man who broke people to his will, ran prostitutes …’ He was going to cry.
‘Hector,’ I said. I took him in my arms. I was still big enough to prevent him from getting away. ‘Hector, shut up.’
‘No!’ he swore. ‘You-’
‘Shut up, Hector,’ I insisted. ‘Your father did some terrible things, and some good things, like most men.’
‘He got me on some slave and sent me to you as a debt payment!’ he shouted.
An oarsman popped his head out of his tent.
Well, that was one interpretation, sure.
I think that Anarchos, wily as Odysseus, even at the end of his life, sent me his son as a penance and a reward, a threat and a promise. I had given it some thought, but not enough; I wasn’t prepared for this.
But then, who is?
‘I think that you were his only son and he loved you, in his way,’ I said.
‘He was a criminal!’ Hector shouted.
I wished for — of all people! — Jocasta. She would know how to deal with this.
‘What brings this on just now?’ I asked. I thought I’d try humour. ‘As we’re about to try conclusions with the Persians, you thought-’
‘No, you shut up!’ he said. ‘I’m nobody!’
‘Don’t make me hurt you,’ I said, because he was struggling with me. ‘You are not nobody. You are a citizen of Plataea and you have a full share of everything we take. You are a hoplite, a man of valour. You are a man we can count on, on any deck, on any field.’
He didn’t relax all at once. But there was a sea change and his arms moved a fraction.
And then, as suddenly as a storm coming and blowing away, he let go of me, gathered the towel, and walked away, as if he was still my pais and he had chores to do.
I suppose that at some remove I should have expected it, but I hadn’t. To me, he was my second son. He had been with me almost five years by then. He’d been to sea with and without me, and the sea is not for weaklings.
It turned out that there was a great deal I didn’t know, but that’s always true, isn’t it?
That evening there was a command meeting. It was widely attended; the best attended in many days.
The Peloponnesians were anxious to sail.
Eurybiades gave a set of sacrifices, which, I’ll add, he did beautifully, like any Spartan gentleman, and then he invited the Corinthians to speak.
Adeimantus was the orator. He stood forth and I had a moment: because, by chance, Cleitus was standing across the slope from Adeimantus and both were together in my vision. I thought of what Pericles had said about our quarrel, and how it divided the best men, and I considered how much more I hated Adeimantus for what I still view as his treason and how merely habitual my hatred for Cleitus was.
‘It is time to call a vote,’ Adeimantus said. ‘Let all the cities of the alliance vote whether we can leave for the isthmus.’
Themistocles laughed. ‘How do we vote, Adeimantus — one vote for every city, or perhaps by the number of ships we provide?’
Adeimantus turned and looked at Themistocles with contempt. ‘You don’t even have a city. Your city is destroyed. Your gods are thrown down.’ He gestured exactly as one does in dismissing a slave. ‘You are not even Athenians any more. Wait, and we will tell you what we, who have cities, have decided.’
Adeimantus had misjudged. The Spartan trierarchs were appalled; to mock a man for the loss of his city would, under most circumstances, be considered low, but this was terrible, a deliberate insult, hubris committed with forethought.
In fact, even a few of the Corinthians winced.
Themistocles judged the audience like the professional politician he was and responded. He didn’t laugh or frown or curse. He was mild.
‘As long as we have two hundred warships, we have the largest city in Greece,’ he said.
And by implication, of course, he suggested that, unlike their cities, his could go where it pleased. It was, in fact, the most brilliant speech I ever heard: short, to the point, but redolent with other meanings.
And yet, when I think back now, what did he mean? Fully? Now that all is exposed, what was his thinking that fateful night, when the fate of Greece teetered on a razor’s edge?
He carried them, for that night, because Adeimantus had been a fool.
The next morning, the Persian fleet worked its way onto the beaches below Athens, the beaches of Phaleron. They were not opposite us, but north of us and we were spared the vision of their great fleet blackening the sea, but from the northern headlands of Salamis it was easy enough to see them, a near-endless stream of warships landing in ordered chaos on the beaches of Phaleron.
Cimon put to sea in his own Ajax and hovered off the southern edge of their fleet, openly challenging them to single-ship combat, but they stayed on their beaches.