Brasidas shook his head. ‘I’ll stay and train the marines,’ he said. He meant the ten best oarsmen he’d chosen to replace all the men who’d died on Black Raven. I pitied them. But I also knew I’d sleep better knowing that he and Seckla would run a tight camp with sentries and watchtowers — and that Brasidas, although it hurts me to say it, could command a respect from the Athenian oligarchs that Seckla would not. I was to regret not taking him, but that’s the way decisions go.
That night on the beach we burned Paramanos. We’d saved his body, or rather, Harpagos and Cimon had, in hard fighting, and we put him on a funeral pyre as his people’s traditions’ demanded, sang the paean of Apollo and other hymns, and drank too much. He had been first my captive, then my not-very-willing helmsman; then a rival pirate under Miltiades and, only later, my peer and friend. He was the best navigator I ever knew, except perhaps Vasileus. He was a good father to his daughters and a right bastard to his enemies. Here’s to his shade.
Aristides the Just was in exile. He wasn’t even supposed to be on Salamis, but we all stretched a point. He was eager to get over the mountains to Plataea where his wife awaited, but he wept — openly — to see the whole of the population of Attica gathered on the beaches of Salamis, like a nation of beggars. His words, not mine.
The camps of the Athenians stretched inland, on every path of flat ground the island had to offer. Ajax the Hero may have come from Salamis but it is not the most prosperous place, nor well inhabited, and it lacked the resources to feed the whole population of Attica for any significant time.
But I digress like an old man, which I certainly am! We held our meeting, and our leaders — Myron and Draco, as Timaeus was already gone with the messengers — chose to take the Plataean people over the isthmus to the Peloponnese. Well, Myron had already made that decision and had sent messages to that effect, but sometimes democracy is retroactive tyranny.
In fact, the Spartan navarch had invited all of our people to go to Sparta — probably meant as an honour, it led to a lot of loud talk and some rough jests in our meeting. In the end, they decided to go to Hermione, a small town on the west coast, one of Sparta’s allies, a member of her league. Hermione was five days’ hard walking from Plataea and a man could pack a cart with enough food for that journey. Because many men had gone to Epidauros to be healed at the sanctuary of the God-Hero Asclepius, many knew the roads to Hermione. Myron hoped to find shipping at the isthmus, and although it plays almost no role in this story, I’ll say that my three merchant ships never joined the fleet because they ferried Boeotians — first, people from Thespiae and then Plataeans — to Hermione from the Gulf of Corinth.
At any rate, that was the plan that seemed best. And the phalanx would march home under Hermogenes. I was determined to go to Plataea and come swiftly back over the mountains to the ships. The sight of thousands of Attic refugees crowding the beaches of Salamis taught me a lesson; I knew from the moment I saw them that Athens would fight. The Athenian fleet was not going to sail to the isthmus to defend Corinth and Sparta. It was going to fight right here.
Of course, there was another alternative that didn’t bear thinking about — the possibility that Themistocles would sell the alliance out to the Medes. Thebes had, as I have said, already gone over to the Great King. Athens might make the same choice.
But I doubted it.
Aristides found all the Brauron girls after Paramanos’s feast, when he met a friend of his wife’s on the beach. The next morning, as the phalanx of Plataea loaded themselves into a dozen Athenian grain ships on our beach, I rode over the headland with my sons to find Euphonia as a skope in a small lookout tower, watching the waters of the Gulf of Salamis for Persians. All her Brauron sisters were living in a camp of Laconian severity, at the foot of the cliff. The girls were very proud of the orderly, military camp. They had stacks of firewood, simple tents, and when I came, they were practising dancing on the wet sand.
Euphonia laughed and embraced me, which brought a lump to my throat, and still does. She was becoming a young woman and not a slip of a girl — becoming, but not yet there, although her body was lean and hard from a summer of dancing and archery, riding and fighting and hunting. Brauron was like a Spartan academy, but for the girls of the wealthy. The women who ran it, the priestesses of Artemis, had been required to abandon their temple with its magnificent Pi-shaped stoa and its great dining hall where women learned to recline on couches like their brothers — and not spill their wine, I hope.
She began talking without sparing her brothers so much as a look. ‘I love to be sentry,’ she said. ‘I pretend I’m Atlanta, running with Heracles. Or perhaps Achilles. And I want to be the first to spot the Persians. I saw your ships, Pater! I was on duty yesterday, too, and I sent my pais running to say that the fleet of Plataea was on the beaches! And I won the younger girls’ dancing, but we had to dance on the sand and not in the great hall, because the Persians are going to burn it, and Mother Bear Europhile says that the dance counts anyway, but Eustratia said it wasn’t fair. And next year I’ll be allowed to wear the red cord! Unless the Persians burn the temple,’ she said in sudden deflation.
I kissed her. ‘Euphonia, this is your brother, Hipponax, and no doubt you remember Hector.’
Euphonia gazed at them her usual adoration. ‘I saw them,’ she said. She smiled. ‘Hector is no longer anyone’s hyperetes,’ she added. ‘I can tell, because Mother Bear Thiale lectured us on armour, and that thorax is a very good one. Anyway, I didn’t need the lecture — you own lots of armour, and you even used to make it, so I raised my hand and said-’
At this point the boys crushed her in two manly, armoured embraces that stopped even her flow of words for a few moments.
She waved a red shield — a small thing of hide — down at the camp, and instantly, as if they were all Spartan peers, a girl sprinted out of the camp and up the ridge to us. She and Euphonia exchanged salutes — exactly like my own epilektoi! — and my daughter grinned.
‘We want to carry swords or at least knives, but Mother Bear Thiale will not let us,’ she said. ‘I want to kill a Persian,’ she added. ‘Anyway, we’re going to do our special “little bear” dances this morning, and I want you to see them. It’s an honour even to be asked to see them,’ she said to the two young men.
They chose — wisely, I feel — to look respectful and impressed.
What followed was better than a mere delight. Despite our hurry — and believe me, I felt the beating of the wings of time’s winged horses with the passing of every moment — we sat on stools provided by the priestesses. Wine was brought us, and we poured libations to Artemis and heard them sing her hymns — three of them, one disturbingly like a marching paean.
Mother Thiale turned to me. ‘You believe that is too warlike for women,’ she said.
I cocked an eyebrow. ‘No,’ I said. ‘I’m delighted to see what a little Titan you’ve made of my daughter.’
Thiale seemed ready for a different answer. She looked at me carefully. ‘Report has it that you are a man of blood,’ she said.
I shrugged. ‘I am, at that. So I imagine my daughter bears the same blood that all the Corvaxae bear, and perhaps even the same daimon.’
She frowned. ‘The girls are ready to begin,’ she said.
The girls dancing were between the ages of eight and fifteen. Fifteen was quite old for an aristocratic woman to still be at Brauron — most of them were married by then. But some stayed — some stayed for ever as priestesses, and some remained as guides and junior teachers for the younger girls, summer after summer. In truth, it must have been a fine life for a girl who liked sport, and I know that some weep bitter tears when they leave the sanctuary for the last time. Who encourages women to run the two-stade race after they have borne a child? Who gives new mothers the time to dance the sacred dances or shoot a bow? What of the girls who excel at athletics the way boys do? Well might they be bitter when their fathers announce to them that they must put away childish things and bear children.