Only treason, the treason of Lade and every other great battle against the Persians, only treason or lack of will would save them.
Oh, Poseidon, my heart beat like a hammer, and I was under no threat. The opportunity was there, if only we could grasp it.
Ameinias of Pallene’s ship was first to strike an enemy. I was very close, maybe a hundred paces away. His helmsman yawed and then turned suddenly back into line, as fast as the stoop of an eagle. He caught the Phoenician a third of the way down the side. The enemy ship had its oars in and the angle was too shallow for Ameinias’s beak to bite home, but he jarred the enemy ship, ripped a strip along the side, and grappled.
The Phoenician behind him — second in the column — came forward full speed. Unlike at Artemisium, their files were well closed up, close enough to support each other, but also close enough to be enveloped. The second Phoenician drove for the bow of Ameinias’s ship Parthenos, turning slightly to the east to get a better angle.
I trusted everything to Harpagos. There was a Phoenician bearing down on me for a bow-to-bow attack from their next column, so I ran back along the catwalk over the forward oars, and back along the half-deck. I was not going to be in time, and running has not been the best of my talents since the wound, so I merely pointed at the other Phoenician, the one running at Ameinias’s flank.
Seckla bet with me, on Harpagos saving us, and Lydia turned a few degrees, perhaps an eighth of a circle, to point at the place where Seckla guessed that the Phoenician would be, in the time it would take a good man to run the stadion.
I can only describe this in terms of bronzeworking. When you make greaves, with all the intricate curves of the human leg, you can only guess how to hit the metal so that it curves in two ways. You cannot know. Seckla had to aim where the Phoenician might be, while his flanker came for us, and we trusted Harpagos to take him.
To my port side aft, I heard Harpagos roar an order.
His crew pulled harder.
He was at ramming speed, and he got them to row faster.
It is hard to describe what happened without some almonds and a big table. But let me try.
We were turning to our starboard side — not far, but enough to become the hypotenuse of a triangle. The Phoenician opposite us kept coming, but had to turn off his intended line, too.
Harpagos, who had been so close behind us that we might have leapt from ship to ship, began to pass us.
Onisandros, at my urging, let the men rest for three strokes. Let me add that only the finest oarsmen can do this. Most ships can only go from a crawl to cruising speed, and from cruising speed to ramming speed, with time for the stroke to change. But a really good ship with rowers and officers long together can stop and start rowing at almost any speed. Remember, friends, that any hesitation by an oarsman can mean death: if he catches a crab at ramming speed, he’s going to get his oar shaft in his teeth at least, and he may do the same to other men.
We drifted at top speed for the time it would take a man to leave his house and call to his wife.
Harpagos went straight at the Phoenician who came straight for us.
‘Now!’ I called.
Onisandros began to pound his spear on the deck.
We shot forward.
‘We have to bring in the port-side oars,’ Onisandros shouted.
‘No! Everything you have!’ I roared.
Off to starboard, Ameinias’s marines were storming along the narrow catwalk above the Phoenician’s rowers.
The Phoenician headed for his flank was so close …
We slammed into his cathead, and before you could count to five, Harpagos’s beak went into the second about fifty paces before his beak slammed into me. Thus, the margin between victory and defeat.
Ameinias’s oarsmen were cheering us. Our Phoenician broke in two as our oars came in — we hit him so hard that our ram scraped paint off Parthenos.
On my port bow, Harpagos’s marines, all men I knew, were going into the third Phoenician. I had no idea how the rest of the battle was going, but within a hundred paces of me we were winning.
Their third ships were coming up, but so were ours, and Cimon led his ships in from the west. The gods — and good fortune, and good planning, and strong rowing, had put us just off their western flank, and now, like sharks closing for the kill, Cimon’s veterans came into the flank of the oncoming Phoenician charge and scattered them. They had to turn to meet his attacks, and then we were free. Seckla, without orders from me, turned us back west, where a dozen Phoenicians were going head-to-head with Cimon’s ships — and exposing their flanks to us.
It was glorious.
We sank a second ship, catching him flat-footed, trying to face in two directions at once.
We ran down the side of a third, coming up from behind his stern — I can’t remember how we lay, or how we got there — it was too fast. The marines leapt before the ships touched, so eager they were, and I followed them, the last man aboard, which felt odd. But I leapt aboard amidships, my old trick, right in among their rowers. I got a foot on each of the beams nearest me and killed the two oarsmen closest and then stabbed up at the catwalk, putting my spear into the legs and feet of the Phoenician marines. I watched Hector go forward like a man ploughing a field, and his spear was like one of the thunderbolts of the Lord of Olympus. He was not a big man like Hipponax, but lithe and so quick that each step forward seemed to baffle his opponents, and he gathered himself so that he seemed to sway side to side like a maiden walking in the marketplace, except that each sway was a deception, and his spear always struck home — left foot forward, right foot forward, a brilliant series of strokes, each delivered with the fastidious precision of a cat and the power of Ares come to earth.
I was so proud.
Behind him came Hipponax, who threw his spear to give Hector room to breathe and got another handed over his shoulder from Brasidas, who was third.
With such marines as these, what need of me?
I contented myself with tripping the men behind the men my Hector was killing, and in a moment — a moment of pure glory — the survivors broke and fled for the false safety of the stern, where they threw down their weapons and begged mercy.
They were lucky they were facing me and Brasidas and men we had trained. There was not much mercy for the Great King’s looters and rapists that day, but we gave it, perhaps because our hearts were high and perhaps because we’d stormed their ship without a man lost or a single wound.
I gave the ship to Hector to get it to the Greek beaches, and gave him two sailors to help him. We disarmed the marines and put them to the row benches, and then we were cutting our grapple-ropes and poling off.
Brasidas was the last man off the enemy vessel. He told them in good Persian that if they rose against Hector, we would capture them again and kill every man aboard, with no exceptions.
But that had all taken time. A sea fight, as I have said too often, is an odd corruption of the way a man perceives time. Nothing seems to happen, and everything is, as it were, trapped in honey and sluggishly crawling, and then everything seems to accelerate, the way a horse goes from a walk to a trot, and a trot to a canter, and then suddenly to a gallop, faster and faster. But then it can slow again, more than a land fight.
I wasn’t even winded, and only the very tip of my spear was red. My armour had not even begun to seem heavy. I went up my mainmast. It was left standing on a trihemiolia, as I have said before, and we had built a little platform amidships, by the mast — only two steps up, like a ladder, but it could give an officer a greater view. I went up it, and then up the pegs we’d set into the mast.