Heraklides very quickly. Most men who've been slaves never admit to it – you flinch every time I mention it, honey. He had it worse than me – pirates and a lot of ill treatment – but it never broke him, and you'll get to know him as the story goes on. He was a few years older than me, but young to be a helmsman already, and getting a name as one of the best. He wasn't really any relation of Miltiades at all, but his father's brother had died in the family service and that made them like family – Athenians are like that.
The Athenians were on their way to Miletus, because Aristagoras had convinced them that the town was ready to revolt. That evening, over roast pig, I met Aristagoras for the first time. A few weeks ago we'd called him the traitor of the Ionians – running off to Athens, revolting against the King of Kings – and now I was standing behind him on a beach of black sand and toasting the success of the war.
He was not the leader I would have chosen. He was handsome enough, and he pretended to be a solid man, a leader of men, bluff and honest, but there was something hollow about him. I saw it that night on the beach – even with everything at the high tide of success, he looked like a stoat peering around for a bolthole.
He promised them all the moon. Greeks can be fools when they hear a good dream, and Ionian independence was like that. What did Ionians need with independence? They were hardly 'oppressed' by the Medes and the Persians. The taxes laid by the King of Kings were nothing – nothing next to the taxes that the Delian League lays on them now, honey.
More wine.
You'd have thought that Persians had come to Methymna and raped every virgin. The men on the beach were ready for war. They had their own ships, and they'd already met with their tyrant and held an assembly. Methymna manned only three ships, but they were all joining the Athenians, and so were the eight ships from Mytilene. And you knew, back then, that if the men of Methymna and Mytilene were on the same side, something was in the wind.
But what really excited the Athenians was that Ephesus – mighty Ephesus – had sent the satrap packing.
'We could have this war over in a month,' the Athenian leader said.
He too was no Miltiades. In fact, at the ripe old age of seventeen, I looked at the Athenians – good men, every one – and the rest and thought that we were forming a mighty fleet, but we didn't have a man as good as Hipponax – or Artaphernes or Cyrus, for that matter – to lead.
Even a seventeen-year-old is right from time to time. I never did get that panoply made, and that ingot of copper sat in our hull as ballast – well, you'll hear soon enough – until she went to the bottom. None of the smiths in Methymna were armour-makers. They made good things – their bowls are still famous – but none had ever shaped the eyeholes on a Corinthian. I did buy an aspis, though – not a great one, but a decent one.
We took on a cargo of men – men of Methymna. We took the hoplites who hadn't made the grade to go on the town's three ships. Archi counted as a lord of the town – he was a property owner there, and his mother's people were citizens, so they treated us as relatives.
A trireme can take about ten marines – more if you don't plan to do a lot of rowing, fewer if you plan to stay at sea for days and days. When you fit a fleet, you pick and choose your marines, at least in Ionia – it's different in Athens, as I may have cause to explain later, if I live to tell that part. Even little Methymna had three hundred hoplites. Her ships rowed away with thirty of them. We took another ten and left good men on the beach. Then we cruised south, weathered the long point by the hot springs and beached at Mytilene. We picked up ships there and drank wine. It was more like a party than a war.
The next night we were on Chios. I had rowed all day and felt like a god. The rowers were all paid men, but one was sick with a flux and I wasn't proud. I was free.
Heraklides approved and offered me a place on his ship.
'Hard to be a free man with your former master,' he said. He made a motion that suggested that he assumed we were lovers. No, I won't show you!
I laughed. 'I swore an oath,' I said. One thing all Greeks respect, from Sparta to Thebes and all the way to Miletus, is an oath.
'Will Miltiades join us?' I asked.
He rubbed his beard. 'Heh,' he said. 'Good question. Miltiades is fighting his own war in the Chersonese. You might say he's been fighting the Persians for five years.'
'In Ephesus, Heraklides, we called him a bandit,' I said.
Heraklides grinned. 'Aye. Well, one man's pirate is another man's freedom-fighter, right enough.' He laughed. 'And you can drop the formality and call me Herk. Everyone does.'
That gave me something to think about. Miltiades was a soldier – a real soldier. And he wasn't coming. And Herk's friendship was worth something.
The next night, we were on another Chian beach. The Chians had a lot of ships, and a lot of men, and they were powerful and had never been conquered. They were going to have seventy or eighty hulls to put in the water. The Athenians were delighted, and decided to wait. The local lord, Pelagius, declared a day of games on the beach, and offered prizes. Really good prizes, so that even Archi wanted them. There was a full panoply for the winner. Spectacular stuff – a scale shirt, the smith's nightmare, six months to make. The aspis was fair, nothing spectacular, but with a worked bronze face to it, and the helmet was fine, although not as good as the shirt and nothing on my father's work.
There was a race in armour – just becoming the fashion, then – as well as a fight with swords, wrestling and javelin-throwing.
I was a free man, and Archi encouraged me, so we walked down the beach to where Lord Pelagius had his ship pulled in by the stern. We wrote our names on potsherds while his steward watched us, and the lord himself came up – an old man, as old as I am now, but sound.
'Now, there's a pair of handsome boys, that the gods love to watch compete. You'll race?' he asked Archi. Archi had the best body of anyone our age. He had surpassed me in size by a finger's breadth, and his muscles had a sharp edge that mine never had.
We both blushed at such praise. 'We'll enter all the contests,' Archi said.
The old nobleman smiled but he shook his head. 'Not the swordplay, lads. That's for men.'
Archi nodded, but that was my best event, I thought in my youthful arrogance. I spluttered.
'Fancy yourself a swordsman, do you?' the old man asked. He peered at me. 'Well, you look old enough to take a cut. If there's a place left, I'll put you in. But we don't fight past the first cut, and if you die, or kill a man, it's your fault. We expect careful men, not wild boys.'
I blushed again, and nodded. 'I've trained since I was ten, lord,' I said.
He looked at me again. 'Really?' he said, and smiled. 'That might be worth seeing.'
Archi put an elbow in my ribs as we turned away. 'Trained since you were ten? The gods will curse you for a liar, my friend. Even though you are the best sword I know.'
Archi was a typical master. He'd never asked where I came from or what I'd done. Never. I loved him like a second older brother – but he never knew me well.
We walked back along the beach, and I was pleased to see men looking at us and, I think, taking our measure. Games are good. Competition is good. That's how men measure themselves and others.
The games were still a few days away, though. So I walked around the promontory to exercise alone. I had a sword of my own, although nothing like what I wanted. It was short and heavy, a meat cleaver. I wanted a longer thrusting blade, because that's what I'd learned with, but Ares had not seen fit to help me.
When I'd worked up a healthy sweat and swum it off in the ocean, I walked back. Slaves cooked for us, and that made me think, every time I took bread from a boy, that I was lucky – and free. Honey, once you're a slave, you never forget it.
Anyway, Heraklides came and sat with me.
'How many ships does Athens have?' I asked my new friend.
'Mmm,' he said. 'A hundred?' he answered, before spotting a pretty Chian girl up the beach. I let him go.
Athens had a hundred ships, and Miltiades alone, or with his father, had another twenty. Then there were other Athenian noble families with ten or fifteen ships of their own.
Athens was half-committed to the Ionians. Not even half. They sent a tithe of their strength. I had spent enough evenings listening to Artaphernes to believe him when he said that the weight of Persia would crush the Greeks like so many lice between his fingers. He always said this in sadness, never in boastfulness.
