And then I was chest to chest with Polymarchos and he grinned evilly.
‘You stopped for a bath?’ he laughed. ‘You look like a puppy someone tried to drown.’
‘Better than being dead,’ I said. I turned to Cleitus, still trapped on his back in the press, gave him my sticky right hand and got him to his feet.
He didn’t say anything. He just stood there for two breaths. When you go down on the deck in a boarding fight, you are very close to becoming a corpse or fish food. I knew — I’d just been there.
But there was no time for talk. He took a spear from someone and we pressed up the deck, finished the last Phoenician marines, who died well, and went over the sides. I led my people back aboard Lydia, where Ionian and Phoenician marines were fighting my deck crew and my top-deck rowers. My men were making a fight of it, but rowers are no match for hoplites.
I say my men, but there was one obvious exception — a tiny girl, dwarfed by the bronze men against her, was fighting with a spear. She mystified them, her steps sure, her movements deceptive, and two trained men could not kill her. She gave ground steadily, stabbing when she could, and even as we boarded she turned and leapt into the sea.
I knew her immediately — Cleitus’s daughter, Heliodora.
But the tide had turned. An Athenian ship came in behind Lydia and put marines over her stern even as we went back aboard over the starboard side, and the Phoenicians collapsed, dead, dying, or in the water before I could get my sword on one.
Then I saw my son.
Hipponax came down the gangway from the bow, at the head of my people who’d followed Brasidas — indeed, the Spartan’s plumes were just behind him. He fought like one possessed, or maddened, and his spear point was everywhere, his aspis was a battering ram and a trickster’s cloak, and yet he seemed to walk forward unopposed.
Then I knew where the girl had come from, and whose girlish voice had sung the hymn to Apollo.
As soon as my deck was clear, I ran to the side, but Hipponax beat me there — and she was not among those swimming.
Brave soul — to wish to face the Medes. I sent a prayer for her winning, and turned to Leukas, but he had two wounds, and I ordered Seckla gruffly into the oars. Xanthippus was cutting the grapples.
We were winning. But when you are outnumbered two to one, you cannot stop fighting for a local victory. As oarsmen went back to their cushions, I tried to climb my mast — and could not. Something was awry with my left shoulder, and my missing fingers were not helping. I could not climb at all.
I could not see Cimon’s Ajax, nor any of the ships of his squadron — nor any of the Corinthians.
We had stopped the Phoenician counter-attack, but that was all. The Ionians were backing water toward the straits, unbeaten. The survivors of the Phoenicians were gathered around that red and god-giant ship, and it towered above the others like one ship piled atop a second.
Off to the east there was a great roar, like the sound the crowd makes going to the mysteries at Eleusis — and then again, and then, a third time repeated, and again we heard the paean sung, and then a Laconian cheer, so different from our own.
Xanthippus, who was covered in blood and certainly one of the day’s heroes, leaned over from his ship’s rowing station. He shouted some words that were lost, and then ‘ … big bastard.’
I assumed he meant he was going for the big Phoenician.
I thought that was the best new attack. So I nodded emphatically.
Seckla was in the steering oars. My son Hipponax was on his knees, weeping.
Oh, rage. Ares and Aphrodite, together.
I pulled him to his feet and I struck him. ‘Cease your weeping!’ I shouted. I am ashamed now. I struck my own son, and I said, ‘Avenge her first. And then explain to her father why she died, you useless shit.’
He stood and looked at me like a whipped dog.
I struck him again and Seckla and Brasidas dragged me off him. I cannot ever remember being so gripped with rage, and the image of that poor girl, and the bravery of her leap in to the waves — a beautiful defiance.
But there were arrows in the air again, and Ka and Nemet were in the stern, lofting shafts at the Ionians. I was hit in the aspis and the shards of the cane cut my face and woke me from my rage.
But I didn’t apologise.
I turned to Seckla. Most of our rowers were in their positions. Onisandros was wounded but on his feet — by Heracles my ancestor, it seemed to me that every man on my deck was wounded, except my son and Brasidas, who seemed to have had godlike powers that day.
Leukas was sitting on the port-side helm bench, bleeding, with Polymarchos, stripped of his aspis, trying to staunch the blood and close the wounds. But elsewhere on the aft deck, surviving sailors were slicing cut cables and serving out new oars to men who’d lost theirs in the fighting. The men moved with decision.
We were still a fighting ship.
‘Fetch me alongside the big Phoenician, or ram him if you can,’ I said to Seckla. Leukas gave a great cry and fainted.
‘Hipponax!’ I called. He was standing with Brasidas, head down.
He came slowly, even as the oars came out raggedly and the once nimble Lydia gathered way.
He was crying, and he was ashamed.
I dropped my sword on the deck and put my arms around him.
‘That was ill-said,’ I admitted. ‘It was hubris for me to strike you.’
He looked as shocked as if I’d hit him again. ‘But you are right, Pater,’ he moaned. ‘I might as well have killed her myself.’
I held him for a moment. So complex are the weavings of the gods. I knew he would now fight like one with no hope — brilliantly. And perhaps take his death wound, uncaring. Killed, in a strange way, by Cleitus. So we are tied together. Yoked, like oxen in a field.
‘No time for tears,’ I said gruffly. I might have said — stay, live. But I did not.
‘No,’ he said. He straightened. ‘Only revenge.’ He managed a crooked, terrible smile. ‘Let me go up the side first,’ he said.
Brasidas shook his head.
‘Perhaps,’ I said. I turned away. I had once been young — how would I have felt if I had caused the death of Briseis? Who was I to tell my son that there would be other loves?
The Ionians deployed well, but now the battle had turned completely along the narrow north-south axis that Themistocles and Eurybiades had wanted. The Phoenician flagship was still closer to the coast of Attica than I liked, almost under the Great King’s throne, but the chaos of the fight had put us hard by and Themistocles was going into the remnants of the Phoenicians even as the Laconians — and the Corinthians, although I could not see them — were smashing into the Ionian centre.
And still there were mighty cheers coming from beyond our centre.
As Lydia went forward, Naiad, Storm Cutter and Black Raven joined us. There was a brief pause — the Great King’s fleet was collapsing in two directions, back against the coast of Attica for the Phoenicians and westernmost Ionians, and back towards Phaleron for the rest of them. Many ships were simply trapped. Ameinias in his Parthenos made another spectacular kill just then, right in the centre, far from us, but under the eyes of the main fleet, and as his doomed adversary broke in half, the Athenian main squadron gave a huge cheer.
There were no cheers from our adversaries. And we knew we were winning. We knew that, after many days of defeat, and some hard-fought draws and one victory squandered by the death of brave Leonidas, that now was our hour. Now was our moment. Now we were going to win. And yet, no one shirked. It is easy in the hour of victory to turn aside, to feel the weight of your wounds and wait for another man to do the final work and cut the throat of the downed enemy, but no one shirked.