Nothing needed to be said. From the fight at Sardis to this day in the Bay of Salamis, all had been defeat and retreat and now we had men who were willing to give their lives to be sure it was done.
I was one.
The Phoenician squadron under the Great King’s throne had to be beaten. It stood off our new flank as the battle turned, and if left unfought, it could change the tide again. And yet … they had no room to manoeuvre. Indeed, their sterns were almost on the beaches, and the Persian Immortals guarding the Great King were in position to bury us in arrow shafts.
But they had their own crisis, and the flagship suddenly had its oars out and was coming at us, trailing escorts the way a mother duck trails ducklings. It was badly coordinated and to this day I can only assume that the Phoenicians were humiliated that we were going to attack them without any response.
It was a foolish decision, because they came out from under the screen of their archers.
But it was also the closest thing to an open-water engagement that day: a dozen of theirs against about the same of ours. That was when I discovered that Xanthippus was not there. He’d gone to the big fight in the centre.
War is often like tragedy — the Fates walk, and dooms are laid, and what happens often seems either incredible or easily predictable. We had the same number of ships on either side, in that engagement. Our ships had fought two or three or four engagements that day, and most of theirs — the Phoenician reserve — were as fresh as a child waking from sleep.
But Harpagos was still avenging his brother, and his ram had taken the lives of four ships. Moire was just showing the Athenians how good an African helmsman who had once been a slave could be, and he wasn’t done with his demonstration. Giannis was close enough to me that I could see his tight-lipped determination, despite the three desperate fights his ship had seen that day, and Megakles — I had never seen him fatigued by the sea.
We were buoyed by Nike. Indeed, to this day, I think of her, and I think of Cleitus’s daughter leaping into the waves — later I will tell you why. But it was Nike herself who had us in her hand. We weren’t tired.
We were workmen determined to finish the task we’d been set.
Nor were we fools.
I gave no orders. Seckla determined to take one of the outermost Phoenicians and set us to rake her oars. Onisandros, his voice tight with pain, begged the rowers for another burst, and they came on like heroes, so that we went up to ramming speed from very close.
Then it went like a fight between wild dogs in the agora.
Our chosen prey baulked. At ramming speed, her helmsman panicked and yawed well out of line — and like a flash, Onisandros ordered the rowers to slow their stroke and Seckla turned us to port so fast I was thrown onto the deck. Another Phoenician flashed past our stern — I hadn’t seen him, screened by the first — and we struck the stern quarter of a third as he tried for the ship from Naxos that had come over to us a week before. Ka stood in the stern, loosing arrows into the Phoenician passing our stern, and even as I shouted for a grapple and a spear, Dy put an arrow into the helmsman and he fell forward into his oars. His ship skidded on the waves and came to a stop with half the rowers injured, all her oars going — and Harpagos cut off her stern, his fifth or sixth kill of the day.
We were gathering way again, all our oars out. We hadn’t hit our opponent very hard, but he was pulling away with all his might, and none of our grapples had clinched the deal. He backed water into the shallows, and men started leaping over the side — where the Great King’s Immortals began to slaughter them.
I didn’t have time to watch or laugh — the Phoenician squadron was gone. Half the ships were running east, and the rest were taken or driving their sterns ashore to be butchered by the Great King’s bodyguard. I assume he was consumed by rage.
Giannis took his ship against the tall flagship. He handled it brilliantly — feinted a head-to-head collision and then went off, forcing the bigger ship to go to ramming speed for nothing. He passed the behemoth’s stern and turned, his archers shooting up into the Persian archers crowding the enemy deck, but in this they were our betters and Giannis took an arrow in his right thigh as he turned and his helmsman was shot down at his side, and two of his marines killed.
But with all of their attention on him, they missed Harpagos, who had cut the stern off one Phoenician like a housewife cutting sausage and then turned, a long, easy turn to port, passed under my bow, and slammed his beak deep into the Phoenician flagship.
Too deep. He struck at a weak place between frames, and his ram went in. Immediately the Persian archers shot down into his ship, and the Phoenician marines, from their higher vantage, went to board.
About then, Seckla swept along the enemy flagship’s port side — opposite to where Harpagos had holed it — and raked along their trailing oars, killing oarsmen with their own shafts and breaking their oars or ripping them out of the ship like a man pulling the legs off a crab. And as soon as we were broadside to broadside, we went at the red and gold monster.
Her sides were a man’s height higher than our aft deck.
No one baulked, but it wasn’t like any other boarding action I’ve ever been in.
Usually you go over onto the enemy deck, sometimes off your own ram, like a bridge, and sometimes from your own upper deck or catwalk straight aboard the enemies’. It’s an art, a dance, not a science.
This time we went in through the rowing frames. Only on a ship so big could it even be done, and it meant we couldn’t take spears, and I, for one, left my aspis behind me. Scarcely mattered — my left arm was barely able to function.
As we slowed and our grapples went home — no misses now, because the enemy marines were all on the other deck, watching the wrong ship — Hipponax got to the starboard-side rail, ready to leap.
Bless Brasidas, he simply pulled my son off his feet and flung him to the deck. ‘Another day, boy,’ he said. He gave my son a smile — a smile I still treasure — and then he leapt for the enemy’s side, grabbed the edge of a rowing frame, and flipped over his arms, his feet slamming into the rower.
In truth, most of the rowers we faced couldn’t have fought us on their best day, and many were injured by Seckla’s oar-rake. But it is no treat going in an oar-port that is only slightly larger than your shoulders in your bronze thorax, which will not compress. I killed the oarsman in my entry port with my sword, and climbed over his dying body to get inboard — and took a spear full force in my back plate. It penetrated, too. Right here. See? About an inch into this muscle.
That motivated me to move faster.
I had no aspis under which to curl and I was cramped in the rowing frame. My opponent was above me. But I rolled over, which hurt my back wound like blazes, and parried with my sword — and got my weak left hand on his spearhead.
He pulled.
That hurt, but I held on, and he pulled me to my feet, mostly. I slammed the spear down and missed.
I scythed my sword across his ankles, and that was the end of the fight for him. Then I climbed out of the top-deck rowing frame. I was not the first man onto the enemy deck. Hipponax and Brasidas were ahead of me — without shields, and fighting against thirty Phoenician marines.
But the difference was that Nike was with us, and not with them. They already knew they were beaten. Even as I counted the odds, Moire’s Amastris grappled bow to bow. Moire had a gangplank for landing men and animals on open beaches, and he used it here, dropping it across to make a bridge for men with a good sense of balance, but Alexandros ran across the gap and onto the deck, and he had both aspis and spear, and suddenly there were a dozen more like him and then deck crew and top-deck oarsmen.