I looked at our fleet, and it seemed very great to me. We filled the beach at Chios, and by the time the levy came in and all the Chian nobles and traders brought their warships, we had a hundred hulls – I counted them myself.
That night, while men sang Ionian songs around the fires and chased Chian girls up the sand, I sat on my new aspis with Archi.
'I think Athens is using us,' I said.
Archi laughed. 'Stop being a slave!' he said, which made me angry. 'These men have great souls. I have talked to a dozen of the Athenian captains, and they are gentlemen. Why, one or two of them are rich enough to be Ephesians!'
I shook my head, stung by his slave comment and sure that he was wrong. 'Athenians are the most grasping bastards in the world,' I said. I had watched the slow seduction of Plataea – I had been there as Miltiades brought the men of Plataea to his way of thinking. I could imagine him doing the same from island to island across the Aegean.
Archi sat back, took a long drink of wine from a skin and laughed. 'We're going to go home heroes,' he said.
'Has it occurred to you that we're going home just weeks after we left? Diomedes won't be over his injuries yet. His father will be panting for revenge. Niobe's children will be nothing on us, Archi!' I was growing louder and angrier because his good humour and cheerfulness were like the feathers on a heron's back, and my words rolled off him.
Archi laughed. 'I understand that you are a good companion, warning me of dangers ahead. But I'm the hero – I won't be worried. You can whisper good advice in my ear and I'll use my spear to cut my way to glory.'
He looked very much the hero on that beach, by firelight. He'd been homesick for the first few days, but he loved the sea life, camping on beaches and drinking wine by the fire every night.
'Soon we'll be home,' he said, watching a pair of Chian girls run by, their oiled hair swinging and their linen chitons plastered to their bodies. One looked back over her shoulder. She knew just how to play the game. Archi shot me a look. Then he rose to his feet and chased her.
Her companion flicked me a glance and then came nearer. She was younger and seemed too shy for her business.
'Not interested,' I said gruffly.
She stood there. I drank wine and saw in my mind's eye the Persian fleet crushing us against the coast. I must have been the only seventeen-year-old on that beach who wasn't chasing a girl.
I'm a killer, and I lie sometimes, and my stories go on and on – but I have never been called inhospitable. So, when a hundred heartbeats had passed and she squatted by our fire and began to play with the embers, I poured my bronze cup full of wine and handed it to her. She was sitting on her haunches, a very unladylike posture. I'd never even seen a slave do it.
'Careful,' I said. 'No water.' I sat back on my shield, curious about the Chian girls. 'Are you a porne?'
She spat my wine in the sand, put down my cup and jumped up. 'No,' she said. 'And fuck you.'
'Sorry,' I said. I stood up. 'Stay and drink the wine. I thought that you and your sister were prostitutes.'
'That's an apology?' she asked. 'Some alien stranger calling me a prostitute?' But she squatted down again and picked up the cup. 'I'd slap you, but your wine's too good.'
I sat back down. 'There's bread, olive oil and fish.' I waved around the fire. We were messy, and our baskets were spread over three or four oxhides of beach. Men only learn from long campaigns to be tidy when they camp, and we were as raw as an ingot of copper.
She wandered from basket to basket, picking a dinner. It was getting dark, but I could see that her chiton showed the signs of hundreds of washings, with that patina of old dirt and hard work that a garment gets when it is worn and worn. I remembered my own chiton at home, in Plataea.
She wasn't beautiful, she wasn't exactly pretty, but her legs were long and muscular and the angle of her hip pushed against her chiton. Her face was too pointy and her eyes were a little too close together, but she was quick-witted and bold without being rude – a good thing in a woman.
'If I told my brother you thought I was a prostitute, he'd kill you,' she said. 'We're fishermen. My father and my brother will pull oars for Lord Pelagius.' She smiled, under her hair, which was long, black and heavily oiled. 'He's big.' She rolled some of our fish in bread, poured a little oil on top and went back to her odd squat by the fire, eating her meal with satisfaction. She licked her fingers when she was done.
I thought that she was like a cat – a kitten, actually. Lesbos and Chios are full of cats – hungry ones.
'So,' I said, curious, but seeking to avoid offence, 'what are you doing, wandering among men, galay?' Galay is the local word for a cat, or a ferret, and I used it with affection – she was like a ferret – a pretty ferret.
'You're a westerner, aren't you? You keep your women in houses and screw each other, right?' She laughed. She was maybe fourteen. Everything from the motion of her hips to her language made Penelope, the slave, look like a lady of quality. Anyway, I remember how she laughed, as if she pitied me. 'Chian girls have their own lives, at least until some man fills us with a baby.' She shrugged. 'I've killed a deer!' she said, with a childlike change of topic.
I laughed and leaned back. 'Me, too.'
She stuck out her tongue at me. We both laughed, and that was the end of the coldness.
An hour later she was sitting with her back against me. It was a chill evening, and I had put my cloak around her. I told her stories of hunting on Cithaeron, and about my sister, and Pater, until I cried a little. She was kind and said nothing. She told me about riding her father's boat in a storm, and I told her about the storm we'd ridden up by Troy, and then we talked of the gods and we sang some hymns together.
People passed us constantly – don't imagine we were alone on that beach. While we were singing, Heraklides came to the fire with a girl called Olympias, the grandest name for the broadest-hipped peasant in all Hellas, but she and the girl in front of me were from the same village and they chatted in their rapid Ionian that I could just barely follow.
Herk was older than me, but he was a good companion. He drank some wine and made jokes – good jokes – and then we were all silent together. Oh, honey, I remember that evening as one of pure happiness, the happiness of good fellowship. It raised my mood, so that I didn't feel so doomed. Which was wrong, of course. I'd have been better to be wary and afraid, but really – and I ask you, sir, to agree with me – if we worry all our lives, when will we drink wine and enjoy ourselves? Eh?
Exactly. Hours passed. We sang again, and now I noticed that the girl leaning against me – I still didn't know her name, although I knew her sister's and her father's and how old she was when her first blood came and which goddess she followed – I noticed that she had a beautiful voice. I had heard the choir at the Ephesian Temple of Artemis, mind you – I knew a good voice when I heard one.
I was just pondering how a village girl got such a voice when a trio of big men came to our fire.
'That's my sister, lad,' the biggest said. He said it with a smile that robbed his words of malice. He was too damned big to have to worry about any man on that beach.
I had come to my full growth, minus a finger's width or so, and I was not a small man, but this Chian stood a head bigger and a hand's span broader.
'Stephanos!' my girl said, and she leaped up, taking my spare chlamys with her, and embraced her brother.
I got up, too, in the complex welter of thoughts that affects a man when he's confronted by the brother of a girl that he has not debauched. I didn't want to seem afraid, but he was big. He didn't seem angry, but I'd seen men like him launch a blow without a sign of it crossing their faces. He had that look.
'I'm called Doru,' I said. 'Your sister's my guest-friend. Sit at the fire and drink some wine, if it pleases you.'
Pretty good, eh? You know, honey, sometimes we make up these speeches later to sound better to bards like your friend, but I'd had the right amount of wine that night – enough to loosen my tongue and not enough to clog it up, eh?
Stephanos grinned. 'Guest-friend, eh?' he said. He laughed. 'You must be a gentleman, sir. No Chian fisherman would ever have a 'guest friend'.'
He grunted when he tasted the wine. 'Good stuff. Sorry, lord. I guess you are a gent and I'm making an ass of myself.'
