Killer of Men (49 page)

21

That night, I asked Miltiades for permission to go home once the sailing season ended. Miltiades heard me out and nodded. He was a good overlord, and he had a reputation to protect. Besides, I had just put new laurels on his brow.

‘Go with Hermes, lad. In fact, I’ll see to it that Herk or Paramanos runs you home. Take a couple of men – you’ll want to kill the bastard and not take any crap from neighbours.’ He nodded. ‘Anything you need, you ask. It’s as much my fault as anyone’s. I knew something was wrong – I didn’t give it enough thought. When your father died, I mean.’

He shrugged. I knew what he meant – when the Plataeans helped Athens defeat the Eretrians, Miltiades was done with that part of his busy plotting, and he let his tools drop. That was the sort of man he was. But he was also enough of a gentleman to regret that he had allowed the tools to become damaged when he dropped them.

I spent the next few weeks making arrangements for my absence. I didn’t tell Miltiades, but I wasn’t sure that I
would
return.

I gave Herakleides one command and Stephanos the other.

Herakleides and his brothers were trusted men by then, and they showed no signs of running back to Aeolis. Both Nestor and Orestes were promising helmsmen, and they had the birth and military training to carry rank.

Stephanos did not. He wasn’t an aristocrat, and he didn’t have all the command skills that I had learned – nor the enormous, heroic and largely unearned reputation that I had acquired, which grew with every day and vastly exceeded the reality of my accomplishments, even though I was in love with it.

Reputation alone is enough to carry most men – but Stephanos was a fine seaman and a careful, considerate officer. He’d led the marines for a year and they worshipped him. I thought that he was ready.

Idomeneus informed me that he was coming with me. So was Hermogenes. ‘You think I came all the way out here just to grab a pot of Persian silver?’ Hermogenes asked. ‘Pater sent me to find you so that you could restore order. Simonalkes is a bad farmer and a fool. But when he’s dead, it will take time to rebuild.’

I found it comic that Hermogenes had spent three years looking for me so that he could get the farm in order.

Paramanos offered to take me home, all the way to Corinth if I wanted, but I had other plans. Plans I’d worked at for a long time.

Miltiades supported me as I moved captains. So Paramanos moved from
Briseis
to the newly rebuilt
Ember
, the ship we’d taken, still smoking from our attempt to burn her, during the boat raid. The smaller ship we’d taken was
Raven’s Wing
, and Stephanos had her, and Herakleides took command of
Briseis
. I had
Briseis
stowed for a long voyage, and I gave him his own two brothers as officers – Nestor as the oar master and Orestes as the captain of marines. I spent money like water – I had plenty. And the rowers in that ship still owed me three months of service before wages were due.

I intended to sail that ship into Aristagoras’s town at Myrcinus, in Thrace, and take Briseis – or give her the ship and go horseback, overland. It was a foolish plan, a boy’s plan, but without it, the next weeks would have been worse. It is a fine example of fate, and how the gods work. Had I left all to chance, I would have died, and many others with me. But I planned carefully. My plans all failed, of course – but among the shards of my broken plans lay the makings of an escape.

The first rain of autumn came and went, and my intentions were set. I sent Briseis a message via the Thracian king, asking her to be ready. Miltiades cautioned me again – directly – against killing Aristagoras. I don’t remember what I told him. Perhaps I lied outright. I thought myself tremendously clever. So did Miltiades. The hubris flowed thick and fast, that autumn.

The grain was sheaved in the fields along the Bosporus. The peasants had their harvest festivals, and the sun shone in an autumn that seemed more like summer – when Hymaees descended on the Troad with thirty ships and a thousand marines. The first we knew of his arrival was that our southernmost town was burned and all the inhabitants sold into slavery, and the refugees poured up the one bad road with tales of war and slaughter.

The next day we heard that Hymaees himself was in Caria with twenty thousand men, and the Carians were unable to make a stand. Just like that, the northern arm of the revolt was going down.

The Carians didn’t give in without a battle, but we were too busy to help them. Miltiades ordered all the ships manned. We worked night and day to refurbish the two triremes taken in the night attack and with them we had ten hulls. On the first day of the new month, Miltiades led us to sea, down the Bosporus past the still smoking ruins of our town. He had no choice – if we didn’t fight, Hymaees would plug the Bosporus like a cork in a bottle and take us, one town at a time. And no one would come to our aid. That’s the price of being a pirate.

We sailed down the Bosporus in early morning, and the Phoenicians got their hulls in the water. Then they did the oddest thing. They formed a defensive circle. They outnumbered us, but they pulled all their sterns together, pulled in their oars like a seabird tucking in its wings, and waited for us.

I had never seen anything like it, but Miltiades had. He spat in the sea and leaped from his ship on to my
Storm Cutter
. ‘Bastards,’ he said. ‘All they have to do is
not lose
.’ He shook his head.

I nodded. ‘Say the word, lord – say the word and I’ll go at them.’

Miltiades slapped my armoured shoulder. ‘I’ll miss you when you leave me, Arimnestos. But there’s no point.’

He went back to his own ship, and we spent a fruitless day circling them. Twice, Paramanos tried to lure one of them into an attack by passing so close that his oar tips almost brushed their beaks, but they weren’t coming out.

We camped close to them, just four stades up the coast, and the next morning we went for them in the dawn by ship, but they were awake and ready. We threw javelins and they shot bows and I went ashore in the surf and cleared a space on the beach, killing two men in the surf, but Miltiades ordered me back to my boat. I took a pair of prisoners – Phoenicians, of course – and I gave them to Paramanos.

I still think Miltiades was wrong. We had the moral advantage – those Syrians were afraid of us. If we’d landed—

But he was the warlord and he saw it differently.

That night Paramanos called us all together. ‘There are ships missing,’ he said. ‘The two boys that Arimnestos captured say that eight ships went north last week.’

Miltiades was incredulous. ‘Eight
more
ships?’ he asked.

‘Where bound?’ I asked.

Paramanos looked at me. ‘Myrcinus, in Thrace,’ he said. ‘They went to get Aristagoras.’

I walked away, calling for my officers.

Miltiades chased me down. ‘You are not going,’ he said.

I ignored him.

‘This is my fleet,’ he said.

‘I own two ships,’ I said, ‘perhaps three. I owe you nothing,
lord
. I was leaving anyway. And I am going to Myrcinus.’

He seemed to swell, and in the torchlight, his hair caught fire. He was like a titan come to life – larger than a mere man. ‘I give the orders here,’ he said.

‘Not to me,’ I said. ‘I have your
word
.’

That took him aback, and he changed tack. ‘There’s nothing you can do, lad!’ he said, his voice suddenly pleading. He was a good rhetorician. ‘The town will already be on fire.’

‘You don’t know that. It rained two days last week. If the storm caught them on the coast, they would have lost days.’

‘Give it up!’ he said.

I walked away. My men – my trusted men, Lekthes and Idomeneus and Stephanos, Herakleides and Nestor and Orestes, and Hermogenes – got the rowers together and started loading
Storm Cutter
and
Briseis
and
Raven’s Wing
.

But Heraklides, always the voice of reason, came up to me out of the dark and wouldn’t let me act in anger. ‘Miltiades has been a good lord to you, and you owe him better than this,’ he said. And he was right, although at the time I growled at him.

Herk fed me a cup of wine, his arm around my shoulders. My men were standing around, waiting for my word, and there was some pushing and shoving at the edges between them and Miltiades’ men.

‘This won’t end well,’ Herk insisted. ‘Listen to me, boy. I knew you when you were a new free man. A pais. You’re a big man now, a captain, lord of five hundred rowers and marines. Every merchant in the Aegean pisses himself when your name is said aloud – but you are nothing without a base and a lord. And if we squabble with Miltiades, who will fight the Medes?’

‘I am
not
nothing,’ I said. But I knew that he was right. I couldn’t keep a crew together by myself – unless I wanted to engage in pure piracy, bloody murder for profit. And I did not. Heraclitus was too strong in me, even then. In fact, what I liked least about Miltiades was his ceaseless search for profit.

I remember sitting there, on a damp rock just above the tide line, my feet in the sea-wrack, when I heard a raven – not a gull, but a raven, cawing in the dark, like Lord Apollo’s voice speaking. I held up a hand to silence Herk and I listened, and then I got to my feet and walked off down the beach to where Paramanos and Miltiades were arguing. Herk followed at my heels, clearly afraid I was about to open the breach – but I was not. The god had given me the answer, and I thrust between Paramanos and Miltiades and shouted for them to listen. Their faces were backlit by the big fires we had burning at the sentry posts – we didn’t want the Syrians to surprise us, either.

‘We should all go,’ I said.

That silenced them.

I almost remember what I said. I felt as if Lord Apollo stood at my side, whispering fine words, good arguments, into my ear. Or perhaps Heraclitus, his servant.

‘Listen, lord. You think I am blinded by love – perhaps I am. But if the Mede is foolish enough to send eight ships away, we can catch them and destroy them. And then the balance is ours. It might make him hesitate. It will increase our power over the Phoenicians.’ I paused. ‘If we
take
those ships—’

Honeyed words, Homer calls them. No sooner were they out of my mouth than Paramanos was agreeing. Sometimes, there is a right answer – an answer that suits every man. It took us less time than it takes to heat a beaker of wine to convince our lord that we had a winning strategy, and then he grinned, drank wine and clasped my hand, and we were friends again, instead of rival pirates.

We left in complete darkness. That was the campaign where I learned the value of having
all
my men in high training – the value of making my rowers feel as elite as the hoplites felt. We left that beach like champions. We left our fires burning to deceive the enemy and we raced north under oars, and every man felt as if he was swept along on Nike’s wings.

We came on Myrcinus as the sun set on the third day. The lower town was afire and the Syrian ships were drawn up on the rocky beach south of the town.

Miltiades summoned me aboard his ship, and I leaped from my helmsman’s rail to Paramanos’s and then on to the
Ajax
, the black-hulled Athenian trireme that was Miltiades’ pride. Cimon and Herk were already there. We never slowed – we were under sail, the wind under our sterns, and our sails must have looked like flowers of fire in the ruddy light.

Miltiades’ face was lit as if from within. He was a foot taller than a mortal man, his hair glowed in the sunset as if he was an immortal and his words flowed thick and fast.

‘Beach your ships as you find room,’ he said. ‘Get ashore, get their ships and sweep the beach clean. Paramanos, you and Arimnestos land your full compliment, every man on the beach. Form tight and get between us and the town.’ He grinned. ‘Once we own those hulls, this campaign is over. Their commander is a fool.’

‘Or it is a trap,’ his younger son said. He shrugged.

Cimon, the older son, shook his head. ‘Don’t be a stubborn ass, little brother. There’s no trap because they shouldn’t know we could even
be
here!’

Miltiades nodded his approval of his older son’s thinking. ‘Even if it is a trap,’ he said, ‘there’s not much they can do to us if we keep our ships manned and only land our marines. You two can cover us on the beach – if we have to run, your crews are fast.’ He laughed. ‘Oh, I can feel the power of the gods, companions! We are about to burn the Great King’s beard!’

We were five stades off the beach when I leaped back to Paramanos’s ship. The Medes and the Syrians could see us coming, and men were running down from the burning town to form on the beach. Most of them were Greeks – I could see from their arms. In the centre was a knot of Persians, but their line wasn’t long enough to cover the whole length of the beach, even two deep.

But there were other men – Thracians. Some of them came down from the town in clumps, like thick honey dripping from the comb. Others hung back.