Touchingly, he knew who I was. So I leaned over him, shading him from the sun, while Brasidas got me out of my armour.
I screamed too.
Blood from the earlier wound to my lower back had dried, making a great scab pressed between the back plate of bronze and my flesh. Brasidas tried to use water to break the scab away, but in his haste he got salt water.
I screamed for some time, I promise you. And no one offered to put me down.
But my recovery was swifter because I’d been wounded — often — and knew that the wound had only gone into fat and muscle. In fact, my wrenching of my left shoulder when I hit the water was to prove the worst wound I took that day, but that’s another matter. Age magnifies wounds. Youth, however, fears them.
Eventually — and I swear it took us half the afternoon to cross six stades of water — we were nearing our landing beach, and the beach was full, crowded beyond belief with people. The whole population of Attica was there.
They were cheering and cheering. Xanthippus was just beaching — he came up from the east as we came from the north — and I saw Cleitus with a pang, knowing that the death of his daughter aboard my ship would reignite our feud. That is how men are. Someone must be blamed, and truly, my Hipponax was to blame.
He was by me, and I was glad he was alive. But I was going to make him do this thing.
I pointed at Cleitus’s golden head. The man looked magnificent and still had his armour on. I was stripped to a terrible old chiton and my greaves.
‘You must tell him,’ I said.
Hipponax’s eyes were red and his whole face was so puffy that he might have been badly beaten in a boxing match.
His head sank.
‘You loved her?’ I asked.
‘I was going to marry her,’ he said. His voice was barely audible for the cheering. ‘I thought you knew.’
I admit that in that moment I understood a great many things I’d been told and to which I’d paid no attention in the past month. ‘You brought her aboard?’ I asked, attempting, and failing, to conceal my anger.
‘She demanded it,’ he said. ‘You didn’t know her, Pater. She was like … a goddess, or a force of nature. She said that if I wanted to wed her, I needed to know that she was of the same — gold as me. That’s what she said. That she could row and oar and fight.’ He was crying again.
It was excruciating to hear him. I knew her only as the best dancer of the girls, nothing more. But Gorgo might have said the same to Leonidas.
‘She claimed it was her bride price …’ He hung his head. ‘I knew she could pull the oar. Onisandros helped me.’
I shook my head. But I could imagine Lydia or Briseis or Euphonia making the same demand and I know I’d have smuggled any of them aboard for the ultimate contest. And I had a sense — maybe because of what happened between me and Lydia — of what a woman’s life was like. How the horizon began wide and narrowed with marriage to become almost a cage with children in it.
But that didn’t assuage my anger, as a father and as a commander.
Anger, fatigue, fear, pain — all close friends. With the black mood that clouds your head after battle, a poisonous gang.
But I was no longer seventeen and I managed to walk away from my son and to help order the landing of the great Phoenician ship. She — he, I suppose, as most Phoenician ships were male — still had most of his rowers aboard with twenty Greek marines watching over them, and I had no intention of letting them be massacred by the crowd, or by Persians or Ionians either.
Brasidas led the unwounded marines ashore, despite his wound. They cheered him and the marines, but he cleared a large space and Xanthippus and his oarsmen pitched in, making space for the Phoenician ship to come ashore. The crowd began to bay for blood like hounds after a hunt, but some of the Priestesses of Athena and of Artemis were there and they silenced the crowd so that we could work the big Phoenician ashore.
We landed well, and the surf was down, and with the help of the priestesses the crowd went from vicious mongrels to willing hands. We got the ship up the beach as if he was made of parchment and a taxis of Athenian hoplites, eager to give us help, took the prisoners away, except the Persian, who I kept. Doctors came with a dozen remedies for wounds; one specialised in arrow removal and was very popular, and another had a preparation of vinegar and honey that he used on wounds, which he said averted the arrows of Apollo. The sheer number of helpers lifted my mood — there was even a man setting bones who looked at my son’s hand and splinted it carefully, and another who, as I have mentioned, used needle and thread to close the flap of skin on Brasidas’s shoulder and then pushed the Gaul down on the beach, knelt by him like a tailor of human flesh, and began on the slash to his neck.
Here is how close Sittonax came to death. While he fought, alone, a Phoenician marine or a Persian came behind him, threw his sword over the Gaul’s head, and was just tightening his grip and cutting my friend’s throat when an Athenian spear took the would-be killer from behind.
Onisandros and Leukas were taken with the rest of our badly wounded men to the big tents going up all along the streams — all made of our sails. Triremes, for the most part, don’t put to sea to fight with their mainmasts or their sails on board. The wood and canvas is heavy and the rowers don’t need the extra work. The handful of trihemiolias, like Lydia, had standing masts and rigging and made up for the weight in other ways. Suffice it to say we left our sails on the beach — most of us — and they made good tents for the wounded.
And then we had to contend with the adoration of the people of Attica. One of the oddest elements of that wonderful, terrible day is that we fought under the very eyes of our people. I don’t think any battle in which I had ever participated so clearly brought home to me the division between a war of justice — the defence of people who would otherwise be made slaves — and a war of injustice like the piracy which I had made for most of my life. To be wrapped in the thanks of thousands, or tens of thousands of people … the blackness of the day evaporated. It was not just me; every man coming off Lydia to pull her ashore lifted his head from the weight of pain and blood, saw the welcome prepared him, and smiled. Matrons kissed me while their husbands pumped my hand; little girls held my knees, and boys gazed on me with the devotion given to gods, and such was the favour shown equally to every marine and every oarsman, too, top deck or bottom deck.
Perhaps it was the cheering and the smiles that gave Hipponax the courage to face Cleitus.
I’m thankful that at the last moment, I stripped my sword over my head — lest it be misconstrued — and followed him. I could not leave him to face Cleitus alone. I admit it: I feared Cleitus would cut him down on the spot, and my enemy — I still thought of him as such — was still in his panoply, very much the aristocratic warrior.
I had seen him on the deck of Xanthippus’s Horse Tamer, but I lost him when he leapt into the shallows to help drag his own ship ashore. And I had other things to which I needed to attend; anyway, I trotted a little although my shoulder burned and caught my son on the wet sand.
‘I’ll come with you,’ I said.
He gave me such a look. So many meanings.
I stayed with him.
We went through the crowd around our own ship — every slap on my back hurt me — and then out of it, and then through the admiring crowd around the capture: ‘Did you help take this monster? Was this the Great King’s ship? Did you fight in the war, mister?’
Out the back of that crowd, trailing admirers. I confess that I was proud of my son. He was determined to face the consequences, even while attractive maidens threw themselves at his feet.