So they did it, not I. The Ionian fell off, oars in confusion. As we passed his stern, Ka ran down the length of our ship from the bow, loosing a shaft every few paces — truly, a magnificent feat of arms. When he reached the stern, he leaped high on the curved gunwale of the swan’s neck and loosed a final shaft into his stricken victim.
The Ionian was scarcely damaged, but bad luck and a long, thin trail of blood from her oar decks suggested she’d lost too many starboard-side oarsmen and now she was turning to starboard against the pull of their dead hands on oars stranded in the water.
The original pursuer, the former lead ship, had a superb helmsman. Even as Pye, our tallest archer, loosed his first shaft at the new adversary, he turned downwind even as Seckla jinked for the stern rake.
Onisandros was more awake to the crisis than I. ‘Oars in starboard side!’ he roared. Leukas joined him.
The oars were coming in.
Ka was loosing. He was standing by the helmsman’s rail and I raised the aspis I’d taken from a sailor so that my raven flashed in the morning sun. The rail, just near the stern, had few supports and no bulwark, and Ka knelt suddenly so that I had to lean over him with the shield.
An arrow slammed into it. The shaft exploded and sprayed us both with splinters of cane.
Oars came in. All this in two or three heartbeats.
Another arrow slammed into my aspis, then skidded off the face and up into my helmet, knocking my head back.
Another screamed into the face of my aspis. My left hand burned as a shaft went through the front face and into my antelabe, the bronze head pressed against my hand.
We began to pass down the length of the enemy ship. We were moving faster, and both vessels were now coasting. We were perhaps a man’s height apart, gunwale to gunwale.
It was terrifying.
The Persians on the enemy deck were higher. They were noblemen in scale armour — men like my friend Cyrus, bred from birth to shoot straight and tell the truth.
But they were all together in a huddle in the stern because of the Ionian’s design with high sides and only a catwalk amidships.
I’m guessing they’d never faced a trihemiolia before. My half-deck was perfect for archery, and the low bulwarks nonetheless provided some cover.
It was the grimmest archery duel I have ever witnessed, made more chilling because I could cover my archer but I could do nothing to strike at the enemy. When you are shot at without the means to reply, you are in a different position from a man facing mere combat.
We passed the length of that ship in perhaps five breaths. In that time, I don’t think I breathed at all.
This is what I saw.
A Persian leaned out over his stern to shoot down into our amidships. He killed an oarsman but, luckily, the man’s oar was in.
Ka killed the Persian, putting an arrow into the man’s back.
Pye, the tallest of the Nubians, shot almost straight up into a second Persian and hit him and the man collapsed back, but a third Persian drove an arrow down into Pye’s neck, killing him instantly. Ka’s second arrow caught the third Persian, again in the back, and then we were helm to helm for a moment — side by side, the two ships not quite colliding, all the oars in on both sides.
Ka and the Persian loosed together, ten feet apart. The arrow went through my aspis, splinters exploded off the inside, and Ka went down, his face all blood. The arrow went into the top of my thigh, but I wear leg armour and it did not penetrate the bronze.
I threw my spear.
A woman knocked it down.
There was no hiding that she was a woman. She was tall and strong and she wore a fine thorax of bronze that had been fitted perfectly to her very obvious woman’s breasts. I had never seen such a thing.
I had the sense to get my aspis up as we blew past her, which was as well, because she threw my spear back at me. I batted the spear down onto the deck with my aspis. My left hand hurt, but the rest of me was intact.
It was one of my best spears. No need to drop it into the ocean.
Then we were past them. I looked back around the swan of the stern, heedless of the arrows that might have flown, but there were none. She was a woman, a tall woman in a plumed helmet, and she was pushing her way into the steering oars where the oarsman had apparently been killed, and then I lost her behind the curve of the swan as she began to scream orders in Greek.
Artemisia, Queen of Halicarnassus. I’m sure you know all about her. Well, there she was, the most bloodthirsty of the Great King’s captains. But we’d cleared her deck of archers and we’d killed her helmsman, which had a curious result I’ll share with you later.
For the immediate future, she yawed suddenly to the north to avoid our grapnels — we weren’t, in fact, throwing any. Hipponax had a Persian arrow through his aspis and his left bicep and Brasidas was cutting the head off and pushing it through. Achilles, son of Simonides, was down, with blood all over the deck, and three of my oarsmen were dead or maimed; as vicious an exchange as I’ve ever seen.
I looked down at Ka. To my joy, he was plucking splinters out of his face. One was through both cheeks. But he had not lost an eye and he was far from dead.
Close abeam, Aristides was turning back into the open sea, due south. He had the wind in his great mainsail and he had some sort of temporary steering oar out, a normal pulling oar tied to the rail. Together, the two sufficed to bring his head round, and the wind on the sail and the long side of his ship gave him considerable speed.
I saw his stern, crowded with men packed close like a tub of new-caught sardines. I knew then what must have happened: he was raising his bow by pushing the stern down, and that meant he’d opened a seam.
Poseidon!
That was the longest hour I’d known in some years. We ran south on the wind and Leukas got our sail, laid ready to the spar, up the mainmast in record time, and followed Aristides across the Saronic Gulf. Behind us, the Great King’s ships fell behind, but as we sailed south the northern horizon became filled with the Great King’s ships. They were still pouring off the beaches, and we watched Artemisia abandon the chase and turn west, and even saw the rest of her Ionian squadron close around her before we sunk them over the rim of the world. The whole Persian fleet was off the beaches and moving.
Leukas watched with me, under his hand. He shook his head. ‘They can’t all be coming for us,’ he said.
Odd, given the way they’d refused engagement, but the Egyptians stayed with us longest, and there were a fair number of them. But as the sun reached its highest point in the sky, the Egyptians also turned west. We gradually left them behind.
But, best we could make out in the sunny autumn haze, the whole Persian fleet was forming an enormous line at the mouth of the Bay of Salamis and we were off their left or port-side flank. Only when we left them all over the horizon did we turn west across the seas, which by then, just after midday, even though every one of us felt as if it had been a month since morning, were calm and gentle.
Aristides and all his crew bailed as if the Furies were aboard them. I could do little more than hang off his starboard rail and hope to save what could be saved.
I won’t repeat a dozen frustrating shouted conversations, but eventually we understood that he could not point any nearer the wind than due west — and that he was running for Aegina before his ship sunk under him.