Artaphernes – are like lions, eager for a fight all the time.
They only had ten paces to come at us. I had a stranger behind me and another on my right, but I had Heraklides on my left. I looked back at the man behind me. He seemed steady. When the Medes charged, I stood crouched, shield on shoulder, and as they came up I punched out with my first spear and caught Cyrus in the leg, my spear in his calf, and down he went. Pharnakes was right with him, and he had a heavy axe, which he put in the face of my shield as I threw my second spear into the second rank, where an unshielded man took it in the gut – a Persian – and went down. I pushed my shield in Pharnakes' face, axe and all, and the man behind me stabbed him while I got my sword out from under my arm.
And Heraklides yelled, 'Back! Back up! Back, you dogs!'
I raised my shield and backed a pace. Our line was shattered. Lydians were butchering the men who ran.
I got back in the line – I'd pushed forward into the Medes – but they weren't fighting my partner or me. They were flowing around us, left and right, towards easier pickings, as men do when the melee becomes chaotic. I got my shield under the front edge of Heraklides', and the man who had been at my back now stepped up to fit in next to me – it was all going to shit – and then he was gone, an axe in his head, and his brains showered me.
I grabbed a spear and fought with it until it broke. We could hear Aristides and we followed his voice – back and back and back, and the enemy seldom fought us, because we kept together. There were men behind us, Agios and two others, and I never knew them, but they stayed with us, and more than once a spear from over my shoulder kept me alive, until the four of us made it to an alley entrance where the Athenian captain had another little knot of men. He had waited for us. I never forgot that, either. It probably only took us a minute to reach him, but he might have been as safe as a house for that minute, and he stood and waited.
Well, Heraklides was his helmsman, of course.
We got to the alley, and then we ran. We ran all the way to our ships, eh? Well, not quite. We ran back across the bridges and made a better stand, and Artaphernes took a light wound as his advance was stopped. I fought there, and I was in the front rank, and I probably put a man or two down, but it was desperate stuff, no ranks or files, and the Ionians were a pack of fools with no order. Mostly, I was trying to keep Heraklides on my left and my shield with his. I don't know who hit Artaphernes, but that man saved our army. Because their attack petered out at the bridges, and we managed to withdraw to Tmolus across the Hermus River, and there was no pursuit.
Half of the army had never been in the fight at all, and they wanted to storm the city again. Those of us who had fought were angry, and those who had run magnified the number and ferocity of the enemy, and many angry words were said.
I was sitting, bleeding from a few wounds and breathing like the bellows for a forge, when a man came up. He was an Eretrian and he had a scorpion on his aspis, and he looked like a hard man.
He came straight up to me.
'You are the Plataean?' he asked.
I was sitting on my shield, so he couldn't quite see the device. I nodded. 'Doru,' I said.
He nodded. 'You saved my father – he's telling everyone how you covered him against the arrows and drew the one from his shoulder.' He offered me his hand. I took it. 'I'm Parmenides.'
I clasped his hand, and he offered more praise. I shook my head. But later, he came back with his father, and they brought a full skin of wine, which I shared with my mess. Then Stephanos came from the Aeolians – the men of Chios and the coast of Asia opposite – and sat with my mess group. He was a sixth-ranker, and proud just to wear the panoply. For him, it was an enormous promotion – as great as my step from slave to free man. The Aeolians take noble blood much more seriously than Atticans or Boeotians.
When Stephanos went back to his own mess, I lay down, my head spinning from the wine. Heraklides lay down beside me, and we missed the part where Aristides accused the Milesians of cowardice.
I've done poor Aristides an injustice if I've failed to make him sound like a prig. He was always right, and some men hated him for it. He never lied and seldom even shaded the truth. Indeed, among the Athenians, some men mocked him as a man who saw only black and white, not the colours of the rainbow.
But Melanthius had taken a wound in the agora of Sardis, and Aristides was in command of the Athenians now, and he took this very seriously. We loved him, for all his priggish ways. He was better than other men. He just couldn't keep his mouth shut.
A failing I understand, honey.
Anyway, the Milesians had, indeed, hung back from the city. Aristides apparently told them that their cowardice had cost us the city. Aristagoras, as their chief, resented the remark, and the army's factional nature increased to near open enmity.
The next day, my body ached, I was filthy, with blood under my nails and matted in my hair, and there wasn't enough water, because we were too far from the banks of the river and the Persians would shoot any man who went down the bank for a helmet of water – filthy water, in any case. Later in the day, parched, angry and dirty, we stumbled back to the pass, and we heard that the Lydians were rising behind us – that the men of all Caria were marching to the aid of their satrap. In those days, the Carians were called the 'Men of Bronze' because they wore so much armour, and they were deadly. Later in the Long War, they were our allies. But not that week.
We washed at the springs of the Hermus, and we filled our canteens and drank our fill and were braver. But we were no longer an army, we were an angry mob. The Athenians did nothing to hide their contempt for all the Ionians as soldiers. The Ionians returned their contempt with angry rejection, and it was muttered that the Athenians were sacrificing the Ionians for their own ends.
Which was true, of course.
Aristides grew angrier and angrier, his pale skin constantly flushed, and he walked along in silence, his slave trotting to keep up.
I stood around, watching Aristides, watching the army disintegrate, and I understood why soldiers were deserting. We were doomed, and the rush of bad omens that surrounded us, including a live hare dropped on a sacrificing priest by an eagle, only confirmed what every man knew. In addition, men who had murdered and raped in the city knew that they had brought their own doom upon them, and they were sullen, guilty or merely dejected.
The Athenians did not suffer from these problems. Heraklides gave me a heavy necklace of gold and lapis that he had snatched from the stall in the agora. 'You only saved my life ten times,' he said. 'And I saved my loot. I got the whole bag behind my shield.' He laughed, showing his snaggle teeth. He was only six years older than me, but he seemed like the old man of the sea himself. I put the necklace on, drank wine from my canteen and marched with the Athenians, who were still a disciplined band. We had come over the pass as the advance guard, and we were going home as the rearguard, with the Eretrians just ahead.
'At home, they're our worst enemies,' Heraklides grunted at me. 'But you know that, eh? You were in the fight at the bridge?'
'I was,' I said.
'They held us a long time there,' Heraklides said. 'Good fighters. Glad to have them, out here.'
Aristides came up to us. 'You can go into the front rank in place of Melodites,' he said without preamble. He didn't smile, but I did. He had his helmet on the back of his head – all the Athenians did, because they marched ready to fight at all times, as did the Eretrians.
I grinned like a fool. 'Thanks, lord,' I said.
He looked grim. 'Don't thank me. When we face the Medes again, you'll be the first to face them.'
I shrugged. 'I was in the front rank in the marketplace,' I said. 'Let's not stand around and let them shoot us, next time.'
He walked off, and I thought that he hadn't heard me, or, more likely, had chosen to ignore me. I was young – very young to be in the front rank.
I took the dead man's place and was a file-leader, and the other men of my file thought well enough of me to help me make a plume-holder and a plume to mark my new rank.
I no longer thought of Briseis. I was in the grip of Ares.
When Aristides saw me with my horsehair plume, he came up and slapped my shoulder. He didn't say anything, but it was one of the proudest moments of my life. From the top of the pass we could see the river in the distance, and the Ephesians cheered as if we'd been gone a month and marched a thousand stades. We were the
