It looked to me as if the Persians were forming for a fight. It was an afternoon of anguish, for over the horizon to the north the Great King’s fleet was offering battle to the league. Would they fight? By Poseidon, I was missing the great contest!
But Aristides, that prig, some might say, was the best man I knew.
We prepared what we could to lighten ship suddenly. Lydia had a dozen contrivances to make her a better ship — one of them was a small bricked-in hearth forward of the boat-sail mast, and we prepared to heave that over the side, as well as armour, weapons, and spares. If Aristides foundered, he’d have two hundred men desperate for life in the water — veteran men, and our friends, too.
Aside from preparing for disaster, there was little we could do but watch and fret and speculate about what was happening to the north. I looked at my son’s wound, but Brasidas had done a thorough job and he’d even come up with honey to put in the bloody slit. My boy behaved well — his head was high and he swore he was ready to fight again. Hector hovered about and looked miserable.
We’d run Attica under the horizon long before, lost the last Egyptian, and there was a high, blue sky almost without clouds, and we were alone on an empty ocean just a parasang from the largest fleet in history.
West we ran, and west, losing our northing as the world’s wind blew us farther south despite our best efforts. But along toward early afternoon, we sighted Aegina, and as the day began to wane we got Athena Nike on one of that island’s beaches, bow first, as gently as could be managed. As soon as the sail came down, Aristides’ magnificent ship began to take water, so that for a heart-stopping moment we thought we might lose her before we got her bow on the beach. Both our crews went ashore and dragged the Nike up the gravel.
Aristides shook his head in sadness — and perhaps awe.
His ram was gone, the bronze sunk in the depths of the ocean. He’d struck a floating log, perhaps some great tree ripped up by Poseidon’s wrath and sent far out to sea, and the blow had ripped away the ram, and somehow, by luck, one of the bow’s planks had been crushed inward with such force as to wedge it into the framing of the bow, so that the ship didn’t fill and sink instantly.
One by one, all his marines and oarsmen came and touched the bow.
Many raised their arms to heaven, faced the sea, and sang the hymn to Poseidon.
Aristides chose to remain on Aegina. We’d been seen coming in and he had access to some of the best shipwrights in the world to repair his beloved warship. After several embraces I took my own ship back toward Salamis. It was late afternoon. I was — desperate.
I admit that I considered, once again, taking Lydia down the Saronic Gulf and out into the open ocean and running for Ephesus. At Aegina, the war seemed far removed from our concerns. The Persian fleet was over the horizon, and they would never catch us, never even pursue us. I had waited my whole life, or so it felt, for Briseis, and now she waited perhaps as little as five days’ sailing away, with a fair wind.
But to do so seemed like desertion. Or perhaps I wasn’t sure what I wanted. Perhaps, after all those years of waiting, the achievement of my desire was … frightening. Does this surprise you? And yet, I was no longer the blood-mad boy I had once been. What would Achilles have been, if he had lived? Thetis offered him a long, happy life, or a brief life and immortal fame and I often think of Achilles. What would he have been, in his long, happy life? A bronze-smith in sunny Achaea? A prince of a happy realm, with his Briseis making babies and supporting him, ruling by his side, performing the dances of the goddess?
No man is simple, and desire is as complex as anything else. So is duty.
And at the same time that I could consider deserting the cause of Greece for my woman, I could also be distraught at the notion that I was missing the greatest sea fight in history. Oh, Poseidon, my heart beat faint to think I was missing it! I roamed the deck of my Lydia like a lion stalking prey, up and down the deck, and my sailors stayed clear of me.
Did I want Briseis? Did I want the undying glory of the great battle? Did I want a peaceful, happy life?
I wanted them all!
We came in through the mouth of the bay at the islands and there were no wrecks. The Aeginian ships were snug on their beaches, and there wasn’t a Persian to be seen.
We landed at the very edge of darkness. It wasn’t hard; there were so many fires lit along the beaches of Salamis that the navigation was, if anything, easier rather than harder, and many willing hands came down to the water’s edge to help warp Lydia ashore.
I landed my ship at Salamis.
Pericles came down to fetch me from the tedious business of getting my ship ashore. Lydia was landed, but she needed to be hauled clear of the water and dried so that her fine, light hull caught the full sun in the morning, and she had a small leak forward.
The things you remember! I can tell you almost anything about that ship, and yet, when I close my eyes, I cannot see my Lydia’s face very clearly; really, just a soft pale smudge of memory. But every splintered oar shaft and every bubble in her hull’s pitch is marked on my brain. That ship was more my lover than her namesake, I suspect. But …
Pericles came down wearing a himation that made him look even younger than he was.
‘Eurybiades has summoned all the trierarchs,’ the boy said. ‘Cimon is speaking even now.’
I picked up a spear — a little affectation, I admit, as no one carries a spear to a council any more but me — and walked up the sand. I remember my calf muscles hurting and my ankles complaining — too little exercise, and too much time sitting at campfires or standing on the half-deck.
It was a long walk, up over the first headland and along to the temple; long enough for me to consider that I was wearing an old chiton meant only to keep my armour off my naked skin, and a chlamys that had begun life as a fine shade of dark blue and now resembled the sky on a late autumn day; there was some blue in it, but not much, and the rest was a sort of muddy pale grey with a great deal of sea-salt and some spots of pine pitch. It was, in fact, the fine chlamys I’d purchased with my earnings on Sicily, at Syracusa, when I was first courting Lydia. Lydia was suddenly much in my thoughts.
In fact, that walk was … dark. Too much fighting can have this effect on any man, and I had reached my limit. My fingers burned on my left hand — isn’t it odd how a new injury seems to aggravate the old ones? The stumps of my missing fingers were livid and they throbbed in the darkness because of the new wound from the Persian arrow, a wound so inconsiderable that in youth I might never have mentioned it. Facing the Persian arrows had been exhausting and I have no idea why. The entire experience had lasted less than a minute, but I was stumbling on the sandy road and near weeping with the sullen darkness that often infected me after a fight.
Well.
Ahead of me in the darkness, a hundred men or more were gathered on the steps of the temple. They were surrounded by torchlight, as if a festival was going on, and in the clear air I saw the ruddy light before I saw the temple. I could smell the scent of pines and the reek of ash from Attica, and the sound of men’s voices stirred me somehow.
I stopped and looked up at the stars. I remember this very well — that surge of pure emotion, as I felt … something. It is difficult to describe, but my loss emptied a little, and my sense of the rightness of the world returned, looking at the stars. Some men see the gods in the stars, and others see the rational turning of the creation of the gods. Sometimes I see only the points of light by which a man navigates the deep at night and a sailor knows that everywhere you go, the stars change. Think on that. The stars change.