We didn't see another ship until we were north of Miletus – the rebels and Miltiades between them had swept the oceans clean. North of Samos we caught a merchantman out of Ephesus – I knew the ship as soon as I saw him on the horizon. It had been Hipponax's pride, a big, long merchant with enough rowers to be a warship. I remembered what Briseis had said, that Diomedes had taken all their wealth, and we ran him down easily enough. They used slave rowers, and slaves will never save your cargo.
With my spear at his throat, the captain admitted that he served Diomedes of Ephesus.
I took the ship as well as the cargo, and all the slaves at the oars, too. But I put the deck crew ashore east of Samos. 'Tell Diomedes that Arimnestos took his ship,' I said. 'Tell him that I'm waiting for him.' I laughed to think how the little shit would react.
And then I took my new ship back to the Chersonese. On the way, I stood in my bow and wondered at what Troas had said, and how I had cried. How could I ever give this up to shovel pig shit? I was a lord of the waves, a killer of men. I laughed, and the gulls cried.
But over on the European coast of the Chersonese, a raven cawed, the raucous sound braying on and on. Miltiades came down to the docks to meet us, and I laid his share of the take at his feet – every obol – and he shook his head.
'Walk with me,' he said.
We walked down the beach, and I remember the smell of the sea-wrack and the dead fish rotting in the white-hot summer sun.
He put an arm around my shoulder. 'I thought you'd deserted,' he said. 'I apologize. Men will tell you that I said some things about you. But you are weeks overdue.'
'I had a lot of copper in my bilges,' I said. And it was true. 'I went to a port I know in Crete to sell it.'
He wasn't listening. 'Right, right,' he said. 'I have a note for you. From Olorus.' He handed me a small silver tube.
I opened it. It held a scrap of papyrus, and on it someone had written a verse of Sappho.
I smiled.
'I have a big draft of recruits coming in,' he said. 'You planning to crew that Ephesian ship yourself?'
'Planning to return him to his true owner,' I said. 'An old friend of mine. But I paid you your half.'
Miltiades shook his head. 'I told your father once that you were more like an aristocrat than most men I knew,' he said. 'You love this man enough to give him a ship?'
I had an idea – a mad idea. I'd thought about it since I'd had Diomedes' captain under the point of my sword. Or perhaps since Troas told me that I should go back to the plough and find a home.
I would need Miltiades' good will, though. So I shrugged and told the truth – always disarming with manipulative men. And women. 'I love Aristagoras's wife,' I said.
It was Miltiades' turn to shrug. 'I know,' he said. 'I've seen her. Even pregnant. And men tell me things. About you, too.'
'It is her ship,' I said.
Miltiades nodded. He turned to face me and he was a different man. He was dealing with me a new way – one warlord to another, maybe. Or one adulterer to another. 'If you send her that ship,' he said, 'her husband will take it – and lose it.'
'I thought that I might just kill her husband,' I said. And go back to my farm in Boeotia? I wondered.
'His people would follow you to Thule. To the Hyperboreans.' Miltiades shook his head. 'I hate the bastard, too, but if he goes down, my hand can't be in it, and that goes double for my captains. I feared you might have some such foolishness in mind.'
I turned away.
'Bide your time,' Miltiades said. 'You're young, and she's young. I assume she loves you, too? If she didn't, Aristagoras would hardly hate you the way he does.'
'Does he?' I asked. 'He's pretty dickless.'
Miltiades chuckled. 'It's true – his parts must be fairly small. But he did try to have you murdered on Lesbos,' the Athenian said. 'You'll recall that I saw to it.' He grinned. 'I've been a good friend to you.'
Ah, the delightful customs of the aristocracy.
'There's no rush,' Miltiades said again. 'Listen to me, boy.'
I was getting wiser in the ways of men – hard men. When Paramanos brought his daughters aboard, I knew he was mine – because he'd committed his life to the Chersonese. I liked him – but I needed him. And yes, I would have twisted his arm to keep him. The longer I spent with Miltiades, the more like him I would become. That summer, I was the highest earner of all Miltiades' captains. Briseis gave him a hold on me. He knew it, and I knew he knew it. I wasn't going anywhere.
'He looks like a good ship,' Miltiades said cheerfully. 'Crew him up and give him to Paramanos.' He looked at my new acquisition. 'When the time is right, when you need help, I'll see to it you have my aid in getting your girl. My word on it.'
Now, Miltiades was as foxy as his red head proclaimed, subtle, devious and dangerous. He lied, he stole and he would do anything, and I mean anything, for power. But when he gave his word, that was his word. He was the very archetype of the kind of Greek the Persians couldn't understand – the kind of man Artaphernes detested, all talk and no honesty, as Persians saw it. But when he gave his word, a thing was done.
'Even if I'm dead,' I said.
He took my hand, and we shook. 'Even if you are dead. Athena Nike, Goddess of Victory, and Ajax my ancestor hear my oath.'
And that was that. I named the new ship Briseis and I kept the newly enfranchised rowers, crewing the deck and marines from Miltiades' men, including all his former slaves. Our new recruits came from Athens, three hundred men. I let Paramanos pick himself a crew from the best of them. Miltiades had an arrangement with the city – it was a secret, or so I reckoned, since even Herk and Cimon were closed-mouthed about it. But the men who came were thetes, low-class free men of Athens, and sometimes of Athenian allies like Plataea or Corcyra. The cities were rid of their malcontents and we got motivated men, ready to fight for a new life. Miltiades swore them to service – he was absolute lord in the Chersonese, and he didn't play games with democracy like some tyrants – and made them citizens.
He got aristocrats, too – not many, and most of them down on their luck – but he bought their loyalty with land and rich prizes and they served him as household officers and marines.
The positive side to the arrangement was that new men – former slaves – like Idomeneus and Lekthes – and me – were at home in the Chersonese. The aristocrats needed us and treated us as equals, or near enough.
Miltiades' informants said that the Great King, Darius, was tired of the pirates in the Chersonese, and intended to send a strong naval expedition against us. On the opposite shore of the Bosporus, Artaphernes and his generals, Hymaees and Otanes and Darius's son-in-law, Daurises, campaigned against the Carians. The first battle was a bloody loss for the men of bronze, and they sent to Lesbos for help from their supposed confederates, the men of Aeolis, but the new tyrant ignored them. They fought a second battle to a bloody draw, and though they lost many of their best men, they drove the Medes from Caria – for a time.
We felt like spectators – worse, we felt like truants or deserters. The fighting was so close that we could sometimes see troops moving on the opposite shore. I would train my marines with actual sparabara, the elite Persian infantry, visible across the straits.
By midsummer, Miltiades could take no more. He added another pair of triremes to his fleet, purchasing them from Athens, got another draft of new men to crew them, then took us to sea to attack the Phoenician squadron that supported Darius's army.
We had better rowers. Our ships, except mine, were lower and faster under oars, and we could turn faster. Miltiades insisted that we were fighting for profit, not glory, so we were cautious, attacking only when we had overwhelming odds, seizing a store ship here and a Lebanese merchant there.
By the great feast of Heracles, I couldn't stand it any more. My ship was not suited to these tactics and all my crewmen were grumbling because we were snatching at snacks while the other crews feasted.
I wonder now if Miltiades intended that I should revolt.
A great many things happened in the space of a few days, and the course of events is lost to me now. I can only tell this as I remember it. I remember sitting in a wine shop on the quay, drinking good Chian wine with Paramanos and Stephanos. Paramanos had his own ship, the Briseis, and he wanted Lekthes as his marine captain.
I shrugged. 'Can't you find your own?' I asked.
He laughed. 'Why not give me all your marines? You don't use them any more.' He chuckled, and I frowned. It was true. My ship was too heavy for the new tactics.
Stephanos shook his head. 'Why don't we go after them where no one can run?' he asked.
Now, it's worth saying that the Phoenician commander, Ba'ales, had a dozen warships at Lampasdis, down the Bosporus towards the Troad. Miltiades had eight ships, all smaller. We always ran when the warships came out. They always ran from us when they were outnumbered.
It was a hard summer for oarsmen on both sides.
I fingered my beard and admired my ship. I loved to sit and look at him while I had a cup of wine. 'Miltiades can't risk it,' I said. 'We only have to lose once and Artaphernes has us. He can lose two or three squadrons and he can always force Tyre to send more.'
Stephanos drank some wine, admired the woman serving it and began to dabble in the spilled wine on the table. 'I just keep thinking of the Aegyptian raid,' he said. 'No risk, no blood and a crippling blow.'
My eyes met Paramanos's over the rims of our wine cups.
'We could catch them on the beach,' he said. I had the same thought in my head.
'They must have lookouts and coast-watchers,' I said. 'All down the strait. Every three or four stades.'
'We certainly do,' Stephanos said, morosely. Indeed, every farmer on our side of the Bosporus reported on ship movements.
We broke up without any decision. But we talked about it every time we were together – catching Ba'ales on the beach, his men asleep.
And some time just after that, while I was arguing with Paramanos on the beach, Cimon brought a man up beside me.
'I can make Lekthes' career,' Paramanos was insisting.
I knew he was right. But Lekthes was closer to me than any of my other men except Stephanos and Idomeneus, and I was loath to give him up. Thugater, there is no argument as harsh as one where you know that you are wrong.
'By Zeus of the waves, you are a thankless bastard. I found you a prisoner and I've made you a captain-' I was spitting mad.
'You? Made me a captain?' Paramanos grew in size. 'Without me, you'd be at the bottom of the ocean three times over. I taught you everything you know. There's no debt between us-'
'My lords?' Cimon asked. He was my own age, of impeccable ancestry and had beautiful manners. He was already a prominent man, not least because he disdained his father's politics. Cimon always wanted to fight. What he wanted was glory – glory for himself and glory for Athens. On that day, he leaned forward, holding his staff, and the only sign that anything was amiss was the trace of a smile on his lips that suggested we were making a spectacle of ourselves.
'Your heart is as black as your skin, you fucking ingrate!' I did say that.
'And which of us is a former slave? I can smell the pig shit on you from here, turd-flinger!' Paramanos pointed a finger at me. 'You are like all dirt-grubbers – you can't stand to see another man succeed. You think it makes you fail! Lekthes deserves-'
Cimon stepped between us. 'My lords?' he said again.
'Keep out of it, Cimon. I'm tired of his poaching my best crewmen. ' I was equally tired of how, now that he was an independent captain, Paramanos was the highest earner. It suggested that he was right – he had made me. And that enraged me.
Some friend. Youth is wasted on the young. I knew he was right about Lekthes, and I suspected that he was right about how much I owed him.
'Arimnestos?' asked a voice I knew.
The man standing at Cimon's side was dressed like a peasant, in a dirty hide apron over a stained chiton, with a dog's-head cap on blond curls. The name was said so softly that I wasn't sure I had heard right, and I turned, my tirade draining out of me.
'Arimnestos?' he asked again, and his voice was stronger, happier.
'Hermogenes?' It took me a moment. I hadn't seen him for eight years. He was a man, not a boy. He had a bad scar on his face, a cut that went from the top of his scalp to the top of his nose.
He grinned as if he'd just won the Olympian Games. 'Arimnestos! '
We fell into each other's arms.
Such was my happiness – the instant, life-affirming happiness of rediscovering a friend from home – that I burbled the story of my life in a hundred heartbeats, leaving out everything that mattered, and then turned to Paramanos.
'I'm a fucking idiot,' I said. 'Lekthes needs to go and be an officer. And I do owe you my life.'
That shut him up. Ha! What a tactic. Capitulate utterly. Leaves your opponent with nothing to say. He sputtered, and then he embraced me. We sat in my favourite wine shop, Hermogenes and me, Lord Cimon, Miltiades' son, and Herk.
'You never came back,' Hermogenes said. He was happy and angry at the same time. 'We waited and waited, and you didn't come back to camp. And then Simonalkes came back and said that you were dead.' He shrugged. 'I searched the battlefield for your corpse and I couldn't find you. I asked everyone – even Miltiades. He knew who you were, and he knew where your father had fallen.' He looked at me. 'You've changed,' he said accusingly. 'You haven't talked to Miltiades about any of this?'
I shrugged. 'No,' I said. 'He doesn't concern himself with petty things.'
'Petty?' Hermogenes asked. 'Petty? Arimnestos, your cousin Simonalkes has married your mother and taken your farm. Is that nothing to you?' He drank down his wine. 'My father sent me – I don't know, three years back? Sent me to Athens to find Miltiades – and you, if your shade was still in your body. Simonalkes always said that you were dead – killed in the last rush of the Eretrians. But there was no body.' He looked at me. 'What happened?'
I felt a rush of memory. It wasn't that I had hidden the memories, it was only that I hadn't thought about them – I hope that makes sense, honey. Young people live in the moment. I had lived in the moment for eight years. Hidden, if you like. Men in stories rush home to avenge their fathers. I had been a slave. I didn't want to go home.
Sometimes, in the silence of my slave cubicle at Hipponax's house, or on my bed in Lord Achilles' palace, I would think of home. Sometimes I would dream of ravens flying west, or I would see a raven and I would think of home – always a home with Pater and my brother. As if they were alive.
But they weren't alive. They were dead. And I knew, as soon as I let myself think about it, that Simonalkes had killed my father. I could see him, turning away from the fighting line, the fucking coward, his sword red at the tip, and Pater falling. Stabbed from behind.
It is like the difference between hearing that your woman is sleeping with your friend and finding them together in your bed. Hermogenes was there. It was time to face the facts.
'I was sold into slavery,' I said, slowly. 'I was at Ephesus, as a slave. For years.'
Hermogenes pursed his lips and fingered the scar on his forehead. 'That would have been hard for you, I think,' he said. There spoke a man who had been a slave.
'It was hardest at first,' I said, and I told him about the slave pens. More than I've told you, actually. He was born a slave, and in our family. He was never sold, nor bought.
'That was – terrible,' he said. 'Zeus Soter – I never had to do any of that. Pater did, though. He's told me the story, a dozen times – how he was taken, how he struggled and failed to escape, and how your father bought him.' Hermogenes shrugged. 'Simonalkes tried to re-enslave us, but old Epictetus stuck up for us. Thanks to him, Pater is a citizen now.' 'And you've been looking for me for three years?' I asked.
He shrugged. 'On and off, friend. I had to eat.'
'What did you do?' I asked.
He looked at the wine shop table. 'Things,' he said. 'A little carpentry. Some gardening.' He took a sip of wine. 'Some theft.'
'By the father of the gods,' I said, 'how did you come here?'
He flexed his shoulders and rubbed his scar again. 'An Athenian magistrate gave me the choice: come here or have an ear cut off.' He smiled. 'Not a hard choice. And then, when I was waiting in a warehouse with a bunch of other lowlifes, I heard a man mention your name – he said we'd be fighting under Miltiades of Athens, and Cimon, and Arimnestos Doru. When I got here, Cimon took me for his crew. He said that you were a Plataean. It seemed too much to hope. But here we are.'
Cimon shook his head. 'What a tale!' He looked at me. 'I take it this man is your friend, as he claimed to me.'
I nodded. 'Absolutely.'
Cimon smiled. 'I shouldn't give him to you. For the things you shouted at Paramanos.'
I hung my head. 'I was in the wrong,' I said.
Cimon shrugged. 'You know what I like about you, Arimnestos? That you can say it – just like that. "I was in the wrong."' He nodded. 'Have your friend, and may your friendship always be blessed. You owe me an oarsman.'
'I'll see to it you get the best I have,' I said. Having Hermogenes sitting by my side was like a drink of clean water on a hot day, for all that his news disturbed me.
'I don't need your best. He may be your friend, but he's a scrawny sewer rat. Send me another and we're quits.' Cimon rose. His eyes grew serious. 'This man Simonalkes really murdered your father, Doru?'
I nodded.
Cimon made a face. 'You have to do something about that, don't you?' He shrugged. 'Some day, some bastard – probably an outraged husband – will kill Pater. And then I'll have to kill him, or the furies will haunt me.'
Suddenly, with the clarity of long-delayed realization, I understood the raven dreams. 'Yes,' I said.
Cimon nodded. 'Pater will have a fit if you leave before the sailing season ends,' he said.
He raised an eyebrow and left us alone. The next day, I took Hermogenes for a sail with Paramanos, Stephanos, Lekthes and Idomeneus. Hermogenes already looked better, cleaner, wearing a new chiton and new sandals. I'd armed him and put silver in his purse. He was two finger's breadths taller when he was clean and dressed. I hadn't had a hypaspist since Idomeneus rose to warrior status, and Hermogenes took the job immediately. It made him laugh to dress so well – it was days before he stopped hiking his chiton to look at the purple stripe.
Paramanos wasn't even angry. He just shrugged. 'Angry men talk shit,' he said with a smile. 'I don't need a picnic on the sand to make it better.'
'You'll want to be at this picnic,' I said.
We had a fishing smack, a light craft, lovingly built, with a single mast. We took turns sailing it, racing along the Bosporus in a way that real fisherman would never risk their rigging or their boat. Hermogenes looked anxious and Stephanos shook his head at what he, a lifelong fisherman, saw as recklessness.
We sailed down the Bosporus for twenty stades and put in at a gravel beach well south of Kallipolis with an old shrine to a hero long forgotten. I sacrificed there sometimes. So I went ashore first, and Hermogenes and I sacrificed a lamb in thanksgiving, and then we all had potted hare and chicken and lamb and lots of wine.
After we ate, Paramanos sat back, poured a libation and we all shared a cup. Then he rose. 'Well?' he said. 'Is this all by way of apology? Or because you've rediscovered your friend?'
I shook my head. 'No. I know how to come at Ba'ales' squadron.'
Paramanos nodded. 'I thought as much. So – tell?'
Instead of telling, I pointed at the upturned hull of our smack.
Paramanos shook his head. 'Brilliant,' he said. He shook his head. 'Why didn't I think of it?'
That was that. And it was that week, or the next week, that an ambassador came to us from the Carians, begging us to help them. I was invited to hear him, and Paramanos came with me. We lay on couches with Miltiades and his sons, Agios and Heraklides and the other captains, and the Carians asked us to help them with the Persians.
'Anywhere we go, Ba'ales can drop troops behind us on the coast,' the lead Carian insisted. 'You have a great reputation as a lover of freedom. Men say you were the architect of the great victory at Amathus. Can't you defeat Ba'ales?'
Miltiades shook his head. 'No,' he said. 'And I no longer serve the Ionians.' He shrugged. 'I'm a pirate, not a liberator.'
Callicrates, the leader of the embassy, shook his head. 'We thought you might say such a thing.' He handed over a gold-capped ivory scroll tube – the kind that the Great King used. 'We captured this.'
Miltiades took it and unrolled the scroll. He read it by the light of the window, and then handed it to Cimon. Cimon read it with Heraklides and then Herk brought it to me, and Paramanos and I read it together.
It was a set of orders. The orders were to Ba'ales and his subordinates. They were ordered to raise twenty more ships and take Kallipolis and our other ports, and also the Thracian coast, including Aristagoras's town.
'The new ships are almost ready,' Callicrates said.
Miltiades looked angry. 'Why don't I know any of this?'
'There have been rumours,' Cimon said. His brothers nodded.
'Plenty of time to run for Athens,' Miltiades said bitterly. 'I can't fight thirty ships.'
I looked at Paramanos. 'My lord – if I may. I have a way you can knock Ba'ales out of the campaign – for this year, at least. Very little risk – at least, for you.'
Miltiades was leaning on his hands, staring out of the window. He turned. 'Really?' he asked. His voice said that he didn't expect much. Like most arrogant men, Miltiades assumed he'd thought of everything.
'In short, my lord, I propose that we catch Ba'ales at dawn and take or burn his ships while they are beached.' I sat up on my couch.
'No,' Miltiades sounded like a bored schoolteacher talking to stupid children. 'His coast-watchers will see us coming.'
I smiled. 'Fishing boats,' I said. The story of the boat raid has been told so often that I won't bore you with it. Every fisherman in these waters can tell you how we borrowed their boats, sailed down on the outflow from the Euxine, as the fishing fleet does every evening in summer, and caught Ba'ales on the beach at moonrise.
It was slaughter. We had just two hundred men, all fighters – the pick of Miltiades' men. The only hard part was the last ten stades – when we could see their hulls, black in the moonlight, and we could see their fires, and for all we knew, they were lining the beach ready for us.
They were not. Someone gave the alarm when we were a stade out, but they never got formed. We raced the last stade, rowing our open boats as if they were triremes. My boat went a man's length up the gravel beach when it hit, and I was over the side almost dry-shod, with Stephanos on one side of me and Hermogenes on the other.
Paramanos had one half of the men. Their mission was to secure our retreat by taking the likeliest of the enemy triremes and getting it afloat. My men were to set fire to the rest of the ships and kill as many oarsmen as we could.
Those ships burned like torches. We had fire pots rigged on poles, heavy crockery filled with coals, and we smashed them inside the enemy hulls as we went, two pots per hull. They were afire before the enemy recovered, and we were armoured men, formed at the edge of the firelight against the desperation of an unarmed rabble.
The sad truth is we burned too many – we could have taken more. Our two hundred men broke the Phoenicians. Most men fight badly when surprised, and they were no different. Ba'ales died in the first attack, although we didn't know it. I hardly fought – I was too busy giving orders.
By Athena Nike, we drove them! Where they were brave, we killed them, and where they ran, we reaped them. Hah! That was a victory.
When it became clear that we were masters of the field, we managed to beat out the fires in one of the smallest of the enemy ships still on the beach, and we turned it over in the water, doused the embers and got it afloat too. So we managed to capture two of their dozen hulls, while the rest burned to their keels, and we got away with ten dead and as many wounded. Only Ares knows how many of their oarsmen and marines we left face down on the sand. We rowed, tired but happy, back up the Bosporus, towing the fishing boats in long lines behind us.
It sounds wonderful that way, doesn't it? That's the way a proper singer tells a battle, without mentioning that the ten dead men were dead, and their children were fatherless, their mothers widows, their lives over, perhaps for ever, because Miltiades chose to remain master of the Chersonese. Eh?
And another thing, though it shames me to tell it. I don't always remember men's names. The men who fell there on the beach? Making my reputation and saving Miltiades? I can't remember them. The sad truth, honey, is that some time that summer I stopped learning their names. They died in raids, in little ship fights and of fevers. Men died every week. They came out from Athens, lower-class men with nothing to lose, and most of them brought their deaths with them. Some were too weak. Some never learned to handle their weapons.
We were pirates, thugater. I can coat it in a glaze of honey, set it in epic verse, but we were hard men who lived a hard life, and it wasn't worth my time to learn the new men's names until they'd survived for a while.
Don't mind me. I philosophize.
At any rate, the next morning the Carians ambushed Daurises' columns as he tried to push into the mountains west of the Temple of Zeus of the Army at Labraunda in Caria, and destroyed them, killing Daurises and quite a number of Persians – the first real victory of the whole war. The news went through the Ionians like a bolt from Zeus, and sacrifices appeared on Ares' altars from Miletus to Crete.
I didn't know it at the time, but Pharnakes, who had been my friend, and with whom I had twice crossed swords, died at Labraunda in the ambush.
In the aftermath of these two small victories, we heard that Darius had lost all patience with the revolt, and with Greeks in general. He ordered his satraps to prepare a major armament for the reduction of the Chersonese, and he bragged that he would see Athens destroyed.
That didn't please the democrats in Athens, who were aware that Miltiades was responsible for Darius's anger. But that's not part of my story – just a comment.
As summer gave way to autumn, Miltiades received word from various sources about Darius's preparations. He had ordered fifty ships to be levied from the Syrian towns, and the satrap of Phrygia was to aid Artaphernes in raising an army to destroy Caria and retake Aeolis.
We lay back on our couches and laughed, because that would all happen next summer. There was only six weeks left in the sailing season.
Miltiades toasted me in good Chian wine. 'One stroke,' he said, 'and I am once again master in my own house. You are dear to me, Plataean.'
I frowned. 'Next summer, Darius will come with a vast army.'
Miltiades would not be sober. 'For all your heroism,' he said, 'you have a great deal to learn about fighting the Medes.' He looked at Cimon.
Cimon laughed and spoke up. 'Other provinces will revolt this winter,' he said.
Miltiades nodded. 'You think we hit Naucratis for pure profit?' he asked me. I could see Paramanos grinning. I had thought we went there for pure profit.
'Yes,' I said.
Miltiades nodded. 'Not to be spurned, profits. But when we took their ships, we showed the Greek merchants and the Aegyptian priests that their Persian overlords couldn't defend them. And when it appears that we are winning, they will evict their garrisons as they did in my father's time, and Darius will have to bend all his will to Aegypt. And then we will have lovely times!' He laughed. The whole Greek world was speaking of our coup on the beach south of Kallipolis, and Miltiades' name was on every man's lips in Athens, and all was right in the world.
It was a good dream, but we had underestimated Darius, and we had forgotten those twenty ships that were on their way to reinforce Ba'ales.