Salamis (6 page)

Of course, the staring was not entirely one-sided, and one girl, crowned with a magnificent double braid of her own red-brown hair, seemed to need to stretch each of her legs repeatedly just a horse-length from Hipponax, who watched her with the attention he usually saved for an adversary in a ship fight.

‘It’s not polite to drool,’ I said quietly.

Hipponax didn’t seem to hear me.

Hector dug a thumb under his arm. Hipponax squirmed, but he and the girl seemed to have their eyes locked together. I think I actually saw the arrow of Eros’s little bow go into his eye. He was slain dead on the spot.

Hah! That was a lovely morning.

At any rate, the girls began to dance – none too soon, for the boys. And there was nothing lovesome or erotic to their dance – they leapt and crawled, they kicked and growled, little bears indeed. Some of the girls were quite good – to my delight, Euphonia was one of them, her movements pure and graceful, her back straight. Once in a while she’d spoil it by taking her lower lip between her teeth in concentration, but she was
good.

I must have been grinning. The priestess leaned over. ‘She’s very good, although a little arrogant.’ She paused. ‘Have you found her a husband already?’ she asked.

Really, if the whole of the Persian fleet had rounded the promontory that instant, I wouldn’t have been more surprised. ‘No,’ I said.

Mother Thiale smiled. ‘Ah,’ she said. ‘She has much spirit,’ she said. ‘Is she to be a priestess?’

‘In Plataea, Mother, most priestesses are wives,’ I said. ‘We are a small city. My mother was hereditary priestess of Hera.’

Mother Thiale looked non-committal. ‘Ah,’ she said.

The girl with the double braid wrapped around her head – a man’s hairstyle meant to pad a helmet – was clearly one of the dance leaders. She did a movement with her legs and hips, exactly as we do it in Pyrrhiche, her feet both performing a sliding turn in place, her hips turning as if to face a new partner – or a new opponent.

All the other girls followed suit. In this portion of the dance, the braided girl did each figure alone, and then the rest of them would copy her. She kicked, jumped, stretched. While she was dancing, she was beautiful. When the figure was done and all the girls took water, she was revealed as being very tall and heavily built – almost as well built as a man. Proportioned – still pretty. But her beauty had been in her dance.

And she drank her water with her eyes on Hipponax.

After they drank water, the dancers came together for one more dance. This was a hymn to the sun and another girl led it, this one smaller, blonde and very serious and grave. But if the first girl’s dancing had been beautiful, this girl’s dancing was divine, or at least direct from the goddess. Her sense of the timing in the music was superb – in fact, I’ve never seen a professional dancer who was her equal. It was as if she understood something in the music that the other girls didn’t hear.

My Euphonia danced well – her movements were crisp and to the music, and this time she didn’t chew on her lip. But she was merely a devotee of the Goddess of the Bears. For the duration of the dance, the blonde girl was the goddess herself, and her legs flashed and moved with a precision that only the very best warriors could match.

They trained well, at Brauron.

The two girls – the braided one and the smaller one – were, as it always proves, best friends. Summers of competition at everything had only made them closer. You could see in the way they stood together, and the way they drank the water from their black ceramic canteens, and giggled.

Hipponax and Hector watched them with something like the adoration that dogs have for their masters.

Euphonia bowed low to her teachers, got a pretty hug from the blonde dancer, and came over to us.

‘You are a very good dancer,’ I said. The first duty of every parent – provide accurate praise. Empty praise is worthless, but children are like soldiers – they need praise to enable their work.

In fact, if you ask me, training soldiers and oarsmen is the very best training for being a parent. Except, come to think of it, women do neither of these things and seem to be very good at mothering, so perhaps my wits are astray.

At any rate, she hugged both her brothers, and accepted their praise.

Hector was the bolder of the two. ‘Who is the blonde girl? The one who danced—’

Euphonia laughed. ‘Heliodora? She’s the best dancer they’ve ever had here.’ She paused. ‘At Brauron I mean. Pater, why is the fleet not fighting at Brauron? The Persians will destroy the temple.’

I suppose I smiled. ‘My little bear, Athens will be lucky if the allied fleet agrees to make its stand here and defend Salamis.’ I looked around at the bay in the growing September sunlight. ‘If we could lure the Persians into fighting inside the bay—’

‘Brauron has a rocky promontory on which all the Persian ships could wreck themselves.’ She all but bounced while she spoke.

‘Perhaps, with Poseidon’s help, they will.’ I tried to make light of it.

Euphonia caught sight of my left hand. I’d been hiding it inside my himation, and she caught me, as children do. She pulled it out.

‘Oh, Pater!’ she said.

Even the priestess winced.

I smiled. You learn, in time, how to play the hero, and how not to say, ‘Yes, it hurts as if all the Furies had stung me themselves, and it’s also clumsy for eating.’ Instead, you smile and say, ‘It’s nothing. I never even needed those fingers.’

Or words to that effect.

Brasidas would, I’m sure, pretend that his hand was uninjured.

‘It only hurts a little,’ I said. To distract her, I drew lines on the sand. ‘Look, Little Bear, if I want to fight the Persians – you know they have a much larger fleet?’

She nodded wisely. ‘Everyone knows that. Everyone knows we beat them at Artemisium, too.’

The priestess smiled, proud of her charge.

‘So we did, girl.’ I went back to my drawing.

‘One of our ships is worth ten of theirs,’ Euphonia said.

That statement distracted Hipponax. He laughed. ‘Don’t you believe it, Little Bear,’ he said. ‘Their ships are mostly just like ours – as well trained, if not better. The Phoenicians are first-rate sailors, and the Ionians are no worse.’

Hector nodded. ‘And either of them is better than the Corinthians,’ he said. He spoke just a little too loudly and his head remained turned towards the two girls who were tying their sandals.

The girl with the braids spent quite a bit of time on her sandals.

The other girl seemed impatient – and unaware of the male attention that her friend was enjoying.

Euphonia put her hands on her hips. ‘They can’t be so good,’ she said. ‘They’re horrible alien barbarians.’

Hector laughed aloud – a little too loud, and he won his wager, because both girls allowed themselves to look at him. ‘The Ionian Greeks are our own cousins. In some cases, literally,’ he said.

‘Too true,’ I said. ‘Look, my sweet. If the Great King’s ships catch us in open water, they can envelop a flank – perhaps even both flanks. They have six or seven hundred ships. All they have to do is back water in the centre and the rest of the ships can take all the time they want. Eventually – ’ I drew arrows around the ends of my hypothetical allied line ‘ – eventually we lose. Brauron is a peninsula; we could only anchor one flank.’

‘And anyway, silly, it doesn’t have any beaches. Where would we camp? Where would all the ships start the day? We’d have to row from here!’ Hector mocked her.

‘I am
not
silly,’ Euphonia said.

Hipponax had the good sense to look as if he wasn’t there. Hector looked annoyed. ‘War isn’t for girls,’ he said dismissively. ‘It’s complicated.’

Euphonia didn’t burst into tears or anything of the sort. Instead, she crossed her arms. ‘Not as complicated as having a baby,’ she said. ‘Or running a household. But it’s funny that you want to insult me,’ she added wickedly, ‘as I know both their names, and I’m friends with them. And I doubt you’ll convince them to come talk to you by staring like statues.’

Hector, stung, pretended adolescent indifference. ‘Them? I don’t know who you are talking about,’ he said.

‘Oh,’ Euphonia said. ‘Fair enough then.’ She smiled, knowing her power.

I thought I had better step in before blood was shed. ‘You should gather your things, Little Bear. We have a ship for the mainland—’ I was in mid-sentence when I realised that taking Euphonia to Plataea was probably foolish. She would be caught in a column of refugees, dragged to Hermione …

On the other hand, Penelope, my sister, would take her. That made me worry about Antigonus – of course I didn’t know he was dead yet – and that made me think of Leonidas, dead. And other dark things.

Unbidden, I reached out and hugged Euphonia.

‘But my summer isn’t over for
two weeks!’
she said. ‘I’m going to stay here and help fight the Persians!’

Unbidden, I had a whole series of pictures – of my daughter as a slave, of the rape of the island of Salamis. Of Adeimantus, delighting in the destruction of Athens.

On the other hand, I didn’t want to drag her across Attica and Boeotia, especially if there really were already Persian cavalry patrols out in Boeotia.

‘Please, Pater?’ she said.

She didn’t squeeze my hand or bat her eyelashes or any of the things you see women do in plays. She just looked at me steadily. ‘Pater? I want to stay here and fight for Greece and dance with my friends,’ she said.

Naturally, I agreed.

She jumped up and down and clapped her hands. Her priestess appeared pleased, too.

I smiled, and then nodded to my young men. ‘Make your bows, gentlemen,’ I said. ‘Euphonia is in good hands and we will return here in a few days.’ I made my own bow to the priestess. ‘I expect to be five days at most. My ships are beached in the next bay and if my daughter needs anything – money, or other things – my friend Seckla has my purse and my ships.’

The priestess nodded with dignity. ‘It is inspiring to the girls,’ she said, ‘for one of the men who fought at Artemisium to watch the dances.’

‘We all three fought at Artemisium,’ Hipponax said.

The priestess looked at him as if he was made of dung. ‘Really?’ she said. ‘I’d have thought you too young.’

Both of them flushed.

Euphonia laughed.

I smiled, I confess. ‘They fought very well – like heroes in the Iliad,’ I said. ‘The two of them cleared a Phoenician ship.’

‘Oh,’ the priestess said with renewed respect. ‘You fought as marines!’ She smiled – she was so dignified that her smile was a contrast and it spread like sunshine. ‘My brother is a marine sometimes.’

The boys didn’t hold a grudge. They bowed, and then turned, almost as one, to watch the two girls, who were still lingering, held by the power of attraction of Eros and youth.

‘Last chance,’ Euphonia whispered. ‘I could introduce you.’

Hipponax looked at her. ‘Please, little sister?’

‘He has to say he’s sorry,’ Euphonia said. ‘I’m not silly.’

Hector smiled and you’d have thought that he was the gift of the sun, his face was so bright. ‘I’m sorry, Little Bear,’ he said. ‘You are not any sillier than the rest of us.’

She grinned. ‘As long as you understand that they’re way too good for either of you,’ she said, in her mature age-ten wisdom. She ran over to the two girls and took their hands, swinging back and forth on the braided girl’s long, muscular arm.

Both girls smiled and, without hesitation, came across the sand to us.

The priestess paused at my back. ‘I don’t let girls talk to boys,’ she said. Then she smiled. ‘But I suppose that if they fought for Greece, they’re men, are they not?’

‘I suppose,’ I said. I tried to let her hear all of my lack of belief in their maturity. She laughed, and I laughed – we were old people of thirty-five or so.

But Hipponax and Hector were lost, aswim in a sea of Eros and Aphrodite. But my daughter, like the good girl she was, walked the two young women right past the boys and to me.

‘Pater, this is Heliodora, the best dancer we have ever had. And this is Iris, who wins every sport.’ She laughed. ‘This is my father, Arimnestos.’

Heliodora looked at her friend and arched a brow. ‘I think I have won
some
contests outside dancing.’

Iris laughed. ‘Far too often. But it is a great honour to meet a man so famous. Indeed, my father calls you “Ship Killer” and says you are a living hero.’

Any woman’s admiration is worth having. There’s something remarkable about the pure admiration of the young. I smiled at her smile.

Heliodora bowed her head. ‘I won’t repeat what
my
father says of you, sir,’ she said quietly. ‘My father is Cleitus of the Alcmaeonids.’ Then she raised her eyes.

My daughter nodded with surprising dignity. ‘Heliodora and I decided that it’s nothing to us that her father’s men killed my grandmother,’ she said. ‘Women’s lives do not need to involve revenge, do they, Mother Thiale?’

The priestess met my eye, not my daughter’s. ‘The principal role of women in revenge,’ she said, ‘is as convenient victims.’

‘I’ve known a woman or two to exact a bloody revenge,’ I said. ‘Heliodora, your father and I have renewed our oaths of non-aggression until the Medes are defeated. Please accept my oath that I mean you no harm.’

She smiled. ‘Oh, I like everything I hear about you, except killing our horses,’ she said. She tried to say this with dignity and becoming modesty, all the while trying not to give her attention to young Hector – or Hipponax. It was a pretty fair performance for so young a woman.

I decided to take pity on all of them. ‘Despoinai,’ I said to the two young women, ‘it would be rude of me not to introduce my son Hipponax and his inseparable warrior companion, Hector, son of Anarchos, both of whom serve me as marines. They fought quite well against the Persians.’

My son shot me a look of pure love.

Parenting. Much like military leadership. Certainly.

The next morning, a day behind Hermogenes and the phalanx, we crossed into Attica. We landed on the open beach where pilgrims going to the great mysteries landed, and there were still great crowds there – hundreds of families with their sheep or goats or oxen. And there were ships, two great Athenian grain freighters as big as temples, waiting to load the people and perhaps even the goats.