I mention all of this because it is otherwise difficult for you youngsters to imagine that we were twenty feet above the water on a slightly convex deck that shed water and blood to the sides, and the sides had no real bulwarks, but just a narrow ‘catch-all’ the width of a man’s hand. In other words, a man who fell had a tendency to go overboard. My backplate was pressed against the ‘catch-all’ and my right arm dangled — empty-handed — over the sea.
The red marine towered over me, or so it seemed to me. And there, in utmost vulnerability, I knew him. It was Diomedes.
He recognised me, and just for a moment hesitated — savouring the moment of triumph? Wanting to take me prisoner to torment me? Who knows. His arm was poised for the kill — I was flat on my back in the blood at the deck edge and had no weapon and my aspis was broken and mostly off my arm.
I rolled over the side. It is hard to say exactly why. I think my last thought was to deny my boyhood foe his triumph. Or perhaps I had the sense to take my chance on Poseidon, who had saved me before.
I hit the water before I had time for another thought.
What’s that? Yes, sweet, I drowned — went to the Elysian Fields, met Achilles, and was then brought back by beautiful naiads, a dozen of them, who led me to an underwater cave, armed me in fresh armour, and then swam me to the surface.
No.
Impact with the water finished my aspis and wrenched my left shoulder, but I didn’t notice it. I was barefoot, and my armour weighted me down, but I had time to catch a breath and I had the wreck of my aspis off my arm in a heartbeat — and then I was swimming. Just for a moment I was deep, under the hull of Horse Tamer and looking up at the surface. There were dozens of men in the water, and blood — and sharks. And the hulls of ships as far as the eye could see, projecting down into the water with sunbeams slanting away into the depths.
Poseidon, it was terrifying down there, and the more so as I was afraid I was sinking, and I panicked, thrusting my arms out like a fool. But before I breathed water and gave myself to Poseidon, I made myself take a stroke, and I shot up — I could match my progress against the wreckage — and then I was close enough to the surface to raise my heart, and then I was breathing, the plumes of my helmet a sodden, hairy mess in my face, and I didn’t care.
I couldn’t rest. I had to keep swimming.
But Pericles and his friend Anaxagoras saved me. Naiad, the Lesbian ship, had come in to Xanthippus’s stern to put marines into the back of the fight and save the men still fighting around the helm. Anaxagoras had been the first man aboard Horse Tamer over the stern, and Pericles saw me go over the side. And saw — still waiting for his turn to go aboard the Horse Tamer — that I came to the surface. He grabbed a boarding pike and held it over the side from the marines’ box of Naiad. I grabbed it, and young Pericles hauled me aboard.
It took two Aeolian oarsmen and Pericles to pull me up the side — I was already spent. I know a man who swam to Salamis from one of the stricken Athenian ships, in his armour, and he deserves much praise for his swimming. I was only in the water for two hundred heartbeats and I was tired.
Hah! But I was alive.
I was on one knee on the catwalk for a long time — long enough for twenty more men to die aboard Horse Tamer. That fight had become the centre of the maelstrom.
I looked about. Pericles left me to go onto Horse Tamer. Even as I discovered my sword was still strapped to my side, and none the worse for a little salt water, I saw that my riposte into the Phoenician counter-attack had sufficed. Hipponax had killed again; his ship was backing water. Cimon’s brother was finishing off an Ionian ship that looked familiar, but I could not place her. Megakles and Eumenes were both taking ships.
It was here, and now. The Phoenicians were pouring men into this boarding fight and now there were more than a dozen ships all grappled together, and there were Phoenician marines aboard Lydia — I could see Leukas fighting in the stern with his bronze axe. I could see Brasidas’s plume two ships away, on board an Ionian which itself had a Phoenician boarding it over the stern, and behind him my son Hipponax’s spear went back and forth like a woman working wool on a loom.
Seldom have I had so much of a feeling that the gods were all about me. I drew my good sword — my long xiphos — and leapt down onto the ram of Naiad and then cambered up the stern of Horse Tamer. Once again, the enemy had pressed the ship’s defenders into the stern — there was Seckla, and there Pericles, and there Anaxagoras and beside him Cleitus, of all people, with Xanthippus roaring orders and throwing well-aimed javelins from the helmsman’s bench.
I took an aspis off a corpse. it was too heavy for my liking, but there it is, on the wall — Heracles and the Nemean Lion. As if it had been left for me.
I went forward even as Anaxagoras fell.
I got a leg forward, got my right arm well back, and stabbed from very close. I had three opponents, and only then did I realise how badly injured my left shoulder was from the impact with the water when I fell over the side because when my opponent bashed his aspis into mine, the blow ran up my arm to my shoulder like a wound.
But it is when everything is on the line that you show yourself.
Listen, then.
Seckla’s long-bladed spear baffled one of my opponents — he turned his head and I stabbed him in the throat-bole with a flip of my wrist, and then I pivoted and swung my sword backhanded. My second opponent was fouled by the falling body of his mate and he allowed himself to be deceived by the reverse my blade made in the air. I struck him full across the face with my blade, which cut the depth of two fingers into his skull, and then, good sword as he was, didn’t snap when I tore the blade free.
The third adversary got his spear into my helmet; a good blow, but the helmet held, and although I smelled blood, I got my blade over the top of his shield. I did him no damage, but my point lodged at the base of his bronze crest-box on top of his helmet, and the force of my blow moved his head. Where the head goes, the body follows, and he went backward — and straight over the side.
I found that I was roaring Briseis’s name as a war cry. Well, Aphrodite has turned a battle ere now, and on Crete they have a temple to her as Goddess of War. But by all the gods I was full of new fire, and perhaps it was Briseis and her own unquenchable spirit, or Aphrodite herself.
Cleitus fell by my side. Anaxagoras was up, pulled to his feet on the bloody deck by Pericles. And down the deck, two oar lengths away, I saw a familiar bulk: Polymarchos, at the head of my marines, pushing towards me, but the Red King’s marines and those of my foe Diomedes were fleeing back into the two triremes that lay, beaks in, amidships.
I got a foot over Cleitus and parried away his death blow from a Phoenician. Later, I prayed to my Mater that she not be offended. In the press, he was Athenian — indeed, he was my brother and not my foe, as I had promised all my men.
There must have been fifty men on that deck and another thirty corpses — and Poseidon only knows how many more gone to feed the squid over the sides. That ship was the epicentre of the western end of the battle.
But like a man waking from long illness, or recovering from injury, I felt the lightening of the pressure, roared my war cry, and baffled Cleitus’s would-be killer with a heavy blow to his head. He raised his shield and I cut his left thigh to the bone. I remember the delicious satisfaction of that cut.
I put my other leg forward, leaving Cleitus behind me, and Seckla cut a man’s hand right off his arm with the sharp edge of his spearhead — his favourite trick, cutting with a spear, which his people apparently did routinely.