‘This is — incredible!’ Themistocles said.
I almost hit him.
His hands were shaking.
Let me pause here, on the edge of saving Greece, and say again: I think he was as guilty as an adulterer caught in the act. So why not expose him?
Think about it. If I exposed him, who would fight? The Athenians would shatter instantly into pro- and anti-Themistoklean factions. What? You think the democrats and the oarsmen would convict him out of hand? You must be joking. Facts? There were no facts. It was all intuition and supposition. Heraclitus did not train me to think for nothing. The only hope for Greece was to pretend that Themistocles had all along planned to force the Greek fleet to fight. Perhaps it was even true.
Perhaps he intended the Greek fleet to cut and run — into the closing jaws of the Persians. Perhaps he imagined that the Corinthians and Peloponnesians would be caught and destroyed piecemeal, leaving Athens and Aegina in a powerful bargaining position and making his position tenable.
It makes my head hurt.
‘The Persians will be at sea any moment,’ I said. ‘It’s time to reveal this to the fleet, so that we can prepare. To fight.’
Themistocles allowed his eyes to meet mine. He was searching me. I knew, just the way a girl knows when a man is looking at her breasts and not into her eyes. He wanted to know what I knew.
Cleitus tugged at his beard. ‘Reveal what?’ he asked.
Themistocles stiffened, and then rose to his feet. ‘I have a plan to save Greece,’ he said portentously.
Well, whatever else might have been true, from that moment he bent his will to save Greece.
The gods play a role in most affairs of men, so it will not surprise you that they had some part in that night. The first was probably my rescue by Ka, but the most vital was to come. We were walking back to the council, which was still loud. My friend Lykon was speaking, promising the men of Athens that Adeimantus did not speak for all Corinthians. We were twenty paces from the firelight, near the outer ring of listeners where men stood to piss against the trees and slaves waited with wine skins. Out of the darkness came Aristides.
‘Themistocles,’ he said.
‘Aristides,’ the democrat answered.
If I wanted to know what Cleitus and I looked like when speaking to one another, here it was — a tableau of mutual antipathy. Yet they had worked together from the first for the liberation of Greece. If I was correct, Themistocles had changed his mind or given up. But Aristides had not.
‘We are surrounded,’ Aristides said. ‘Do you know?’
‘Surrounded?’ Themistocles asked.
Aristides nodded. Behind him, two of his slaves held torches. ‘I left my Nike back on Aegina,’ he said. ‘I came with a pair of Aeginian triremes carrying sacred statues of their gods. Aeginian fishing boats reported to us after sunset.’ He looked around. Cleitus stepped closer, and other men began to gather; Cimon was there, and Xanthippus too. It was Aristides’ voice gathering them, his friends and his enemies too.
‘The entire Persian fleet is at sea,’ he said. ‘The beaches at Phaleron must be empty. We came through the Egyptians. We were challenged repeatedly, but one of my oarsmen speaks Egyptian and Persian as well.’ He shrugged.
Themistocles gave a false laugh. ‘Ah, Aristides, we may be adversaries, but you are the man to appreciate my cleverness. I have brought the Persians.’
‘You?’ Aristides asked.
‘I sent for them,’ Themistocles joked. He looked at me. ‘Ask Arimnestos.’
Oh, he was clever. Aristides would never believe I was involved in a treason plot. Themistocles had just played me — again.
I could not allow myself to care. This was for everything. ‘Now we have to fight,’ I said.
Themistocles took Aristides by the hand. ‘You saw the Medes?’
‘Medes, Persians, Phoenicians and Egyptians, and far too many Greeks,’ Aristides said.
Themistocles pumped his hand. ‘You must tell the council. No one will believe me. But all know how you hate me — you will be believed.’
‘Say rather that I will be believed because I do not make a habit of telling lies,’ Aristides said. It was true and false, too — Greeks have a foolish habit of believing men that they would like to be telling the truth, rather than those they know to be honest.
Themistocles winced but did not let go of my friend’s hand.
Cleitus came up behind me, and very softly said, ‘What in the name of black Tartarus is going on?’ he growled.
‘We’re saving Greece from the barbarians,’ I said.
Cleitus laughed. ‘Not the first time,’ he said.
I roared with laughter. Men turned, and saw me laughing, and before the gods, I embraced the bastard. ‘Too right, mate,’ I said.
He returned the embrace and Aristides smiled in the torchlight.
‘If those two can be at peace,’ he said, ‘I will make peace with you. And it is only the truth, after all. Take me to the council.’
So it was that Themistocles, the arch-democrat, led Aristides the Just, the priggish, snobbish arch-conservative and my best friend, to the rostra in front of three hundred captains. It was deep in the night.
Themistocles pointed to the man standing ready to speak.
‘There is my nemesis, Aristides, returned from exile to speak to the captains,’ he said. ‘Pay heed, and know that I support his every word.’
Aristides looked around. His eye met mine, and then passed over — he was never a man to wink. He was silent for long enough that men coughed and the silence became edgy.
‘The Persian fleet is already at sea,’ he said softly. ‘They are all around us. They have ships on the beaches opposite us to the north, and they have sent a squadron to close the western passages to the isthmus.’
Now the silence was absolute.
‘There is no longer a choice to be made,’ he said. ‘I will argue nothing. Unless you choose to submit and be slaves, we must fight.’
The silence stayed, and then a babble began, the usual Greek game of finding whose fault it must have been, might have been. It rose all about us, and then Eurybiades struck the speaker’s rostra with his staff — I remember the sound like a thunderbolt.
‘Are you children?’ he asked.
He was going to say more, and Themistocles stepped past him into the firelight. ‘I have a plan,’ he began.
‘Silence, or I strike,’ Eurybiades said, raising his stick. He was angry, as any commander would have been.
‘Strike, but only listen,’ Themistocles begged. He actually bent his knee like a beggar requesting alms.
Zeus, it was a masterful performance.
There stood the Spartan, stick raised, and there the Athenian knelt before him in supplication.
‘Speak,’ growled the Spartan.
Themistocles leapt to his feet. ‘The Persians think this is a land battle,’ he said. ‘They think that having their right overmatch our left will lead them to collapse us. They imagine that we will fight with our lines spread east to west. They don’t know the waters, and their ships will have been at sea all night, their hulls damp, men tired. We can win.’
Say what you will — and I have — once he was committed, he was brilliant. I saw it immediately. Other men had to be convinced; some had to hear the whole thing two or three times, and all the while Eurybiades was sending the lesser men to bed, and ordering heralds to wake the rowers an hour before sunrise.
It was not in any way my plan, although in its relation I knew that my words had played a part. Certainly Themistocles planned to use the dawn chop and the breeze, but his notion that we could form the trap by backing water, despite having inflicted two defeats this way at Artemisium, was entirely his own. He told them that the Great King expected the treason of whole bodies of Greeks and thus would expect us to flee.
Well. I still had an eye on the Corinthians.
But it was a good plan, simple enough, with the flexibility so that if the weather went our way, he’d make use of it, and if the day was calm, we had alternatives.