I leapt first. I went aspis to aspis with a man as big as me or bigger. He lost his footing in the blood, and down he went.
That one to Ares, and no doing of mine.
Brasidas, despite the terrible footing and the three-sided fight in a densely packed foredeck, got his shield lapped with mine like the veteran he was.
It took the Ionians too long to realise we were not on their side. They were Samians — oh, the delicious revenge on that nest of traitors! I killed three before they fully understood and Brasidas heaved them off the forward gangway, back onto their own ship, and I lost him there. He chose to board into the Ionian ship. You must imagine that Xanthippus’s ship had three enemies bow to bow, like limpets stuck to a fish, and the Ionian was one, we were one, and the third was a sleek ship with a red hull.
Again, there was no time to think. Brasidas went forward into the Ionian and Hipponax went with him, and Alexandros and Sitalkes.
Idomeneus was in his old accustomed place at my shoulder. Achilles came with me, and the others.
There was no quarter asked or given. They were under the eyes of their emperor, and we knew we were fighting for everything.
Nor can I pretend to remember every blow. I know my spear broke and instead of going for my sword I hammered away at my opponent, a smaller man, with my butt spike, hitting him again and again, stunning him with my blows until his strong left arm sank. I hit him with the sauroter to his helmet and he staggered, limbs loosed, but I hit him again and his helmet collapsed into his skull, and it too gave way.
I took a wound there — he may have been the one who got me, as he was a canny fighter. It was in my sword arm, and the bronze saved most of it. But not all.
I didn’t know. I powered forward down the narrow catwalk. Behind me my people were still singing the paean, which was wonderful, because by the blessing of Poseidon the Athenian rowers by my feet knew I was on their side, and they began to foul the enemy and stabbed up into the catwalk with daggers and javelins, and suddenly the Phoenicians in front of me collapsed. Few survived to run — they were literally pulled down, as if by the tentacles of a monster called oarsmen, except one or two brave men, who stabbed down with their spears and leapt back to gain space to make a stand.
But another ship disgorged its marines into us from behind me.
The first I knew was that I could not feel Idomeneus pressing into my back. Long practice taught me to turn if he was gone, and there were plumes, towering plumes, the kind that our forefathers wore, the kind I wore in our first contests, a dozen or more of them, and lots of armour, and red cloth, red paint, red enamel. Very showy.
Idomeneus was adding to their red display. His face was lit by a beautiful, godlike smile, very like the one that Harpagos had worn. His right arm was poised high when I glanced at him, his smile like that of a man who has seen a god or found true joy, as he batted a thrown spear out of the air with his spear shaft, in just a twitch of his hand. His aspis licked out, caught his opponent’s, rim to rim, and pulled it aside, and his high right hand shot forward — his spear point went in under his opponent’s chin, buried to the base, so that when Idomeneus pulled, his wretched adversary tried to grab the point and was dragged forward; the spear shaft shattered, and Idomeneus used it like a club, as I had earlier, and then threw it overhand at the man behind his current opponent — all this in the time a runner would take two breaths. I couldn’t look longer.
I still had men in front of me. I had to be sure of them, and the man who’d backed away now dropped his spear and fell to his knees. His eyes pleaded for life. Behind him, another Phoenician was cut down from behind by a Greek, while a third was almost buried in my sailors.
I hate killing prisoners. It is against the will of the gods, against the justice men demand from men, and against the code by which warriors should act.
But I had a shipload of marines coming behind me and I could not leave this man to pick up his spear and attack me. And past me, my friends.
I killed him. I hate that I did, but there were other lives dependent on my actions. Probably he would have stayed in submission — or perhaps the sailors or the oarsman would have finished him. Or perhaps he’d have killed me, then Idomeneus, and then the rest, turning the tide of battle.
It does not matter. It was my choice, between one beat of my heart and the next, the way a man must choose inside the battle haze.
This is why we all despise the war god and his rage. But I did it, and then I turned, leaving remorse for other times, and put my shoulder behind Idomeneus’s back, and began to stab underhand with my victim’s spear, attacking his opponents in their thighs and feet.
And then he was down. He was standing, fighting like a statue of Poseidon come to life, and then a well-thrown javelin from his open side caught him in the side, under his sword arm. He finished his cut, sending one more foe ahead of him to Hades, and then he fell, with blood spurting far into the rowers’ benches — heart’s blood.
I got my left foot over him as he fell and squirmed, face down, the spear shaft still in him, and I went shield to shield with his killer. That blow broke mine, the laths of wood that supported the bronze face all cracking in against the layers of rawhide and linen. But his rim cracked and I stepped as far as I dared off to my right with my right foot, the ruin of my shield flapping like a sail in an adverse wind, but his spear stroke, overhand, couldn’t penetrate the bronze and rawhide wreckage as I tabled my shield, gathered my left leg to my right and reached over our locked shields and pounded my point down into the place where the shoulder and neck meet. My spear went in so effortlessly and so far that I lost hold of it, and Idomeneus’s killer fell, blood gushing from his mouth, and by the gods, he was in Hades before my friend.
But the marines in red were big, well armed, confident and capable, and the next man came forward undaunted. I was overextended, still amazed at the power of my overhand blow and its success, and he pushed his shoulder into me and knocked me over, and then only Ka saved me, as my adversary grew a black feathered arrow in his chest and fell over Idomeneus and his killer.
There were so many men on Xanthippus’s ship by then that it tipped back and forth like a living thing, and I began to wonder if a trireme could capsize from too many men on her fighting deck.
Like some of the newest Athenian ships, the heavy ones, Xanthippus’s Horse Tamer had a full top deck, so that the rowers sat in their boxes protected from arrows — and so that Xanthippus could carry twenty marines. But all this weight was high, which was bad for stability, and had to be countered with more ballast, which in turn made the ship harder to row and slower. Storm Cutter had been a similar ship, in her earliest form, and I confess that the full deck gave an element of protection to the rowers that was lacking when all they had was a canvas screen — and that deck also allowed a series of beams that helped stiffen the hull much better in heavy weather. But against that, the more difficult diekplous tactics of the Phoenicians required a lighter ship with a faster turn. Both fleets had every kind of trireme. Big and small, high and low, every shipwright had to try his hand at the perfect arrangement of rowers and oars, fighting deck and mast space.
When the Athenians built their new navy they made the rational decision to build heavy ships with big decks so that they could dominate boarding actions against the lighter, better-rowed ships of their traditional nautical enemy, Aegina. Of course, the sea wolves preferred the lighter, faster ships — and those of us who had fought in the west, off Magna Graecia, had come to prefer the hemiolas, which seemed to me then, and still seem to me, the best compromise of rowing, sailing, heavy hull and fighting platform.