Long War 04 - The Great King Read online

  ‘Yes,’ I said.

  ‘May I come and sanctify your forge?’ he asked. And then, teasingly – ‘And see if your mastery is good enough for Boeotia?’

  I bowed. Greeks don’t bow often – mostly to gods. Sometimes to great athletes, or great beauty in men or women. Never to army commanders and seldom to kings.

  But he was a great priest. An suddenly, out of nowhere, the craft-longing was on me – to make something.

  ‘I would be honoured,’ I said.

  The King of Sparta was on my right and Antigonus of Thespiae on my left. I grinned. It is not every day that you can out-aristocrat your brother-in-law.

  ‘Antigonus of Thespiae, may I introduce Leonidas of the Agiad Dynasty of Sparta? Leonidas, may I introduce my brother-in-law, Antigonus Melachites.’ It is not every day you can introduce the King of Sparta to your friends.

  They clasped arms. It was an informal night – the air was full of mosquitoes and the fire was too hot and the wine was terrible, despite which we were all very conscious of why we were at Themistocles’ fire.

  Antigonus had the King of Sparta engaged – about horses – in moments. Leonidas could be made to talk, but I didn’t know enough about any of the subjects that interested him.

  Well – except one, as it proved.

  At any rate, I was just turning to Styges to get an account of my cousin’s usurpation of my farm when Themistocles stepped into the firelight and we all fell silent.

  ‘Gentlemen,’ he said, ‘I have called you all together tonight to save Greece.’

  We talked for four hours, and decided nothing.

  I suppose all the thinking men in Greece could, by then, have been divided into four factions. A few were openly in favour of the Persians. Those were mostly old aristocrats who – publicly – accepted the Great King as a sort of ‘first among equals’ of the whole human race.

  The second faction would be those who didn’t see a crisis. Who refused to see that the Medes and Persians were on their way – that the war had begun. Because men are men, this group was by far the largest – at the fire, on the plains of the Alpheos, and throughout Greece.

  The third group disliked the Great King and all his works, and believed that he would invade. But felt that it was hubris to attempt to resist, and intended to offer submission as soon as it was politically expedient. And wished Athens and Sparta, which could not submit, well.

  And finally, there was the fourth group, who believed that the Great King was on his way, and intended to resist. The men who represented that faction were at the fire. Leonidas of Sparta was the chief – he continued to represent his mad half-brother’s policy of aggression against the Medes. As the leader of the conservatives in the most conservative state in all of Greece, Leonidas was an odd ally for Themistocles.

  But Themistocles – the leader of the popular party in Athens, the most persuasive orator of our day and the bitter enemy of aristocrats everywhere – was the other pillar of the idea of resistance to Persia. And truly, I think it unlikely that either would have succeeded without the other.

  The men at the fire were, for the most part, committed to resistance. We couldn’t agree on when, or how, we should resist. As an example – I will not bore you with a full relation – Cimon and I held the rostrum for half an hour, outlining the advantages of a forward naval strategy that would burn the Great King’s fleet in its bases on the Syrian coast.

  Back then, we thought the Persians would only come by sea, as they did in Marathon year.

  I think we spoke well, but our views were ridiculed.

  ‘The Great King has a thousand ships – by your own admission!’ said a Corinthian. ‘And yet you think that with a hundred ships you can reduce his fleet.’

  Cimon scowled. ‘Yes,’ he said.

  ‘And get rich into the bargain,’ I added, which may not have been the wisest course.

  More men were for forming a great league, and marching into Thessaly to fight the Persians.

  ‘If they ever come, they will come by land,’ insisted a Corinthian aristocrat. ‘An army the size of the Great King’s cannot be transported by sea.’

  ‘Or fed by land,’ muttered Cimon.

  Leonidas watched it all, looking back and forth like a man watching an athletic contest, offering nothing.

  At length, the same Corinthian rose – Adeimantus, son of Ocytus. ‘I agree that we should resist,’ he said. ‘But these are Athenian tactics – the tactics of lesser men. In Corinth, we will not enfranchise the little men who are no better than slaves, just to have more rowers for our ships. We will not let ships decide the destiny of Greece.’

  Most men growled or openly cheered. So much for a forward naval strategy.

  ‘But,’ he went on, ‘how do we know the Medes are coming?’ He raised a hand. ‘The Persian empire is vast – yes. But it has its own rebellions and its own problems. Are we so sure? And if we are sure – I think every man here would like to know how much time we have?’

  Themistocles glanced at me. He was standing quite near me – I think in support of my forward naval strategy.

  ‘Arimnestos of Plataea can tell you more than I,’ he said. ‘As he had Artapherenes on his ship as a guest not a month ago.’

  That was like kicking a hornets’ nest.

  But it was true. And I happened to look at the King of Sparta before I began – and in a glance I realised why he had asked me whether I spoke Persian. It was because he had already heard this tale.

  So I began. I told the story simply – that my ship had been caught in a storm, and emerged to find the wreck of Artapherenes’ ship close at hand and in the throes of a mutiny. I spoke of taking the satrap into Carthage and sailing out again, and I left out the difficulties.

  Men frowned.

  ‘Surely Artapherenes would have made a mighty hostage,’ Adeimantus said. ‘Or are you some sort of secret Persian lover?’

  There are insults that must be avenged in blood – although as I get older there are fewer and fewer of those – and then there are insults so ludicrous they deserve no more than a laugh. I laughed.

  ‘I love Persian gold,’ I said. ‘But I find it easier to take it from them than to ask for it on bended knee.’

  Cimon snarled.

  ‘So you say!’ Adeimantus shot back.

  ‘If you had been at Marathon . . .’ I said, and let it go.

  The king smiled at me. ‘I saw the bodies,’ he offered. ‘At Marathon.’ As usual, a short speech, but one that conveyed all the meaning he needed. He raised an eyebrow – just as his wife had. ‘But – why?’

  I shrugged. ‘He was an ambassador, and his life was sacred. And – I owed him my life.’

  Leonidas nodded. ‘Good,’ he said.

  ‘And he told you that the invasion was imminent?’ the Corinthian asked. I could see Lykon looking at the older man with distaste.

  ‘Yes,’ I said. ‘He told me, his wife told me, and the captain of his guard – an old friend of mine, a guest-friend – warned me.’

  The men around the fire spoke for some time.

  I raised my voice. ‘The Great King intends to build a canal across the isthmus under Mount Athos,’ I said. ‘And bridge the Hellespont.’ I shrugged. ‘So says his Satrap of Phrygia.’

  Adeimantus was openly derisive. ‘Bridge the Hellespont!’ He laughed. ‘I think you are trying to shock us with marvels, Boeotian.’

  Even Cimon paused. ‘That’s laying it on a bit thick,’ he murmured. ‘A bridge over the Hellespont!’

  Leonidas, on the other hand, looked at me with real interest. ‘That would be . . . glorious,’ he said. His gaze was distant. Then his eyes snapped to me. He seemed an inch taller. ‘You believe this to be true?’ he asked slowly. ‘I mean no offence. Different men will use words to sway other men.’

  I nodded. ‘A man I trust told me, and I believe him,’ I said.

  The King of Sparta nodded sharply. ‘Then he is bringing a land army, and he means to have a real contes
t.’ His eyes went to Themistocles. He implied that a sea battle was not a real contest.

  Of course, to the Spartans, it was not – because it depended on the rowers and the helmsmen, not the hoplites.

  Later, when the drinking was done and most of the men had gone to their beds – or their piles of flea-infested straw – I sat in the pleasant fireside air, blessedly free from the flies and mosquitoes which had descended like some curse of the Olympians at sunset and eaten us alive for three hours. Aristides sat by me – and Styges, and Lykon of Corinth and Cimon, Empedocles of Thebes, Calliteles the Spartan and a dozen other men. Brasidas was with me, too – ignoring Calliteles, who was studiously ignoring him.

  The king had made me angry. I didn’t realise it until he left in a swirl of red as his cloak settled about him. The arrogance of his cloak – was that it? I admired him as a man – and yet, the way he entered and left, as if he were king not just of the Spartans but of all Greeks . . .

  I was stung by the words a real contest.

  I lay on my cloak, allowing resentment to penetrate my maturity.

  Finally I turned, ignoring what Styges had just asked. ‘Why does your king call a land battle “a real contest”?’ I asked. The king, of course, used the same words that we use for a race at Olympia. ‘You are a Spartan, and you have seen a sea fight.’

  Brasidas looked off into the darkness for so long I thought that he wouldn’t answer. And why should he? It was an angry, rhetorical question.

  But he coughed, and sat up. ‘When I was young, and had just finished the Agoge,’ he said, ‘we went to war with Argos. It wasn’t much of a war, really. We knew we would win, and so did the Argives – good fighters, but not like us. And we had more hoplites.’ He turned, to make sure he had my attention. He looked into the fire. ‘Cleomenes was the king. He was attempting to breathe new life into the Peloponnesian League and to let the allies have more say. One of the allied leaders made a suggestion about tactics.’ He shrugged. ‘And Cleomenes allowed the allies to follow this man – even though his brother, Leonidas, derided the notion as un-Greek and unworthy. So the allies marched off slightly to our left, and at a set command, they moved at an incline – very rapidly – like this.’ His right hand was the Spartan phalanx, moving forward, neither slow nor fast, but inexorable.

  I had seen it. Faced it. Nothing, in the aspis of the world, is more to be feared than the Spartan advance.

  His left hand swung out wide to the left and then accelerated in from the flank.

  Total silence had fallen. Brasidas never told a story – even those who did not know him paused to hear him. And Calliteles nodded, almost imperceptibly supporting Brasidas – yes, it was as he says.

  ‘As soon as they saw themselves outflanked, the Argives broke and ran,’ Brasidas said.

  Many men nodded. Cimon looked like a boy who knows the punchline to the joke.

  I shrugged. ‘Outnumbered, facing Spartans, and outflanked?’ I said. I nodded. ‘I’d run, too.’

  Brasidas nodded. ‘They ran a stade – out of the jaws. Then they stopped. They reformed their phalanx.’

  His eyes flicked to Calliteles, who was older. He was an Olympian, and that meant, I knew, that he’d probably been in the Hippeis – the Spartan Royal Guard – with Cleomenes.

  He raised one eyebrow. ‘Then they mocked us.’

  Calliteles nodded.

  ‘They sent a herald. They said, “O Spartans, mighty in war – have your arms lost their strength, that you stoop to trickery? Meet us chest to chest and shield to shield in a real contest, or march home and be damned.”’

  Brasidas allowed himself a small smile. ‘We told the allies to stand aside. We marched down the field, and the Argives came to us, and we fought.’ He nodded. ‘We defeated them, of course. They sent heralds to offer submission and to request permission to bury their dead. We granted it.’ He nodded.

  Calliteles nodded also.

  Cimon nodded in his turn. ‘I know that I have heard this story told a dozen times,’ he said. ‘I was at dinner with Leonidas and Gorgo one night and an ephor told the story. I thought the point was that the Peloponnesian allies had wrecked the pincer movement by being too slow. I said so, and Gorgo looked at me – well, the way a wife looks at you when you say something foolish at temple.’ He raised his eyebrows and spread his hands like a mime.

  Brasidas looked at the ground.

  Calliteles looked at the stars.

  Styges had grown to manhood with Idomeneaus. He understood immediately – as did I, thanks. I had been with the Cretans. He leaned forward – a young man, and thus not quick to offer his views – but after several breaths, he said, ‘I understand.’

  Brasidas looked at him. ‘Yes?’ he asked. He sounded tired, as if using so many words had exhausted him.

  ‘There’s more to victory than occupying ground,’ Styges said. ‘My . . . mentor, Idomeneaus, says that victory and defeat are . . . in men’s minds. Some men die, and yet are not defeated. Other men kill, but at the end of the day, they allow themselves to feel defeated.’ His dark eyes searched around the fire – looked at me, looked at Cimon and then Brasidas. ‘I have seen it, too.’

  We all nodded. ‘The Argives were completely undefeated by the clever trick. Angered, but not even shamed. They had come to test themselves – man to man – against the Spartans, not to dick about with manoeuvre.’ I had it, by then. ‘Leonidas wants the Greeks to measure their spears against those of the Medes. Man to man. Like the Argives.’

  Brasidas nodded. ‘Not the Greeks,’ he said. He shrugged. ‘Or perhaps. But mostly, the men of Lacedaemon.’

  Calliteles had worked hard to avoid appearing to speak to Brasidas, but now he couldn’t help himself. He nodded emphatically, and his right fist smashed into his left hand. ‘To see who is best,’ he said simply.

  I went to sleep and dreamed of Herakles. I remember it well. Herakles was striding the earth, with the club on his shoulder, and he was coming to Olympia to compete. It was a beautiful dream and it was followed by another that had Gorgo, naked, riding a horse.

  I don’t need a priest to interpret either.

  I awoke and went to piss, again, and again I passed from anger to joy at the very early morning and the camp. I was used to the smell. There was a gentle sea breeze creeping up the valley, and I dropped my chiton and ran. My old wound hurt – it was my third day of running – but I was determined, and I ground along the river.

  After six stades or so, my right ankle began to hurt. By my tenth stade, it hurt a great deal.

  It is one thing to endure pain, and another thing to fear real injury. Most men can endure enormous pain if they know the consequence. What makes you a coward is the fear – the fear of permanent injury, laming, rupture, loss.

  My ankle didn’t look bad, but I moved farther from the stream, into the meadow where the ground was softer.

  It grew worse.

  Gorgo rode round the bend in the valley, her horse at a dead gallop. I knew her immediately, because she was a woman on a horse with no clothes on, and there simply couldn’t be so many of them. Even at the Olympics.

  I forgot my ankle. This is how simple the male animal is. I forgot my ankle and flew.

  Well. I thought that I flew.

  She reined in by me. ‘Arimnestos, if I didn’t know that you had taken that wound fighting the Persians at Lades, I’d say that you were the most shameful runner I’d seen in many years.’

  I grinned, suddenly delighted to have an excuse to stop.

  ‘I see that in one way, at least, the Spartans are like other Greeks,’ I said.

  Gorgo shrugged. She backed her horse a step. ‘How is that?’ she asked.

  ‘Women are more talkative than men,’ I said.

  She laughed. ‘Shall I leave you to hobble home, then, Plataean?’ she asked. ‘I had not taken you for the sort who prefer to pretend that women have no wits.’

  I stopped and laughed. ‘No. But no man likes to be told he hobbles, when
once he was young and fleet. Achilles never hobbled.’ I held up a hand like a pankrationist who submits. ‘Spare me, Queen! I’ll walk by your side and endure your jests. Truly, my ankle is killing me.’

  If she offered me any sympathy I didn’t see it. ‘You speak Persian,’ she said.

  ‘It is true.’ Unbidden, the phrase ‘nice tits’, often used by Persian soldiers in Ephesus, came to mind. I turned my head to hide my smile.

  She nodded. ‘You have many friends inside the border of the empire?’ she asked.

  ‘And a few enemies,’ I admitted. It is very, very difficult not to posture in front of an attractive woman. Luckily, she was above me on a horse.

  We went along in companionable silence for a stade.

  ‘I gather from my husband that I can welcome you to our League,’ she said.

  ‘League?’ I asked.

  ‘The conspiracy to save Greece,’ she said.

  I stopped and bowed as I would to a priestess. She was – hard to explain – like a priestess of Greece, if Greece were a goddess.

  ‘I wonder if you would consider . . .’ she began, and then frowned.

  It was deliberate. I saw through it, because I knew women – not all women, but a woman like Gorgo. I knew Briseis. This was a woman used to getting her way from strong men – not by flaunting her sex, but by using her mind. The body was there to be admired, but it was only the bait.

  Nor did I imagine that the wife of the King of Sparta was . . . licentious. I can be a boy of nineteen with Briseis, but I am not utterly a fool. Gorgo wanted something.

  It pleased me to play the Spartan, and walk along the valley with her, and act as if I hadn’t heard her.

  The camp came into sight.

  ‘How did you come to count Brasidas among your friends?’ she asked.

  I thought this was a digression, but I liked the way it led. At least she had named him. ‘I found him at liberty on the dockside of Syracusa,’ I said. ‘I needed a good man to captain my marines.’ In truth, I had a good man in Alexandros. Brasidas was more like a force of nature.

  She smiled. ‘My husband hates him,’ she said. ‘Although it might be said that Brasidas hates my husband, as well.’