The sign of Poseidon. ‘A fine name.’
He grinned again. ‘So — how do we make some money?’ He kissed his sister and pointed up the beach. ‘Go and find Harpagos, dear.’
Harpagos proved to be Stephanos’s cousin. Melaina brought him down to the beach, and he was no smaller than Stephanos and his hands were hard as rock. Stephanos introduced him with flowery compliments.
‘This is my useless layabout cousin Harpagos, who wants to ship with me. He’s never been to sea.’ Stephanos spat on the sand and laughed.
Harpagos had the look of a man who’d kept the sea his entire life. His hair was full of salt. But he stood, abashed.
I winked at Stephanos. It was like old times. ‘You’re a trierarch now, my friend. No need to consult me on every raw man.’
‘I’ve been helmsman on a grain ship,’ Harpagos said.
‘I want him as my helmsman,’ Stephanos admitted. Then he said, ‘I need him where I can see him.’
I liked Harpagos. His embarrassment at all this attention shouted of the sort of solid, quiet confidence that makes a man able to go to sea and fish every day for forty years. ‘On your head be it,’ I said. ‘Harpagos, can you fight?’
He shrugged. ‘I wrestle,’ he said. ‘I teach the boys in the village. I can take this big fool.’ He indicated Stephanos.
‘Hmm,’ I allowed. ‘Well, he can take me, and that would be bad for discipline. Ever used a spear and shield?’ I asked.
Harpagos shook his head. ‘Can’t say I have.’
‘Ever killed?’ I asked.
Harpagos looked out to sea. ‘Yes,’ he said, voice flat.
We all stood together in silence, and the fine wind blew across us. ‘Well,’ I said, ‘welcome aboard. We’re pirates, Harpagos. Sometimes we fight for the Ionian rebels, but mostly we take other people’s ships for profit. Can you do that?’
He grinned — the first grin I’d seen. ‘Yes, lord.’
Melaina listened to this exchange and brought more wine, and we ate fresh sardines and a big red fish I hadn’t eaten often — with flesh like lobster. We drank too much wine. Melaina pressed herself on me, and I flirted with her, smiled, even held her for a time while standing by the fire on the beach. But I didn’t take her into the dark. My head was full of Briseis, and Melaina wasn’t a beach girl. She was Stephanos’s sister, and she dressed like a woman of property. Somewhere, she had a man she was going to marry. And to bed her would have been to betray my guest-friendship with Stephanos.
In the morning, I gave him half the grain, and the next evening, full of food and a little too much wine, we were off the beach, rowing soft in the moonlight for Miletus.
Our plan was simple, like most good plans. We both had Phoenician ships — both newly repaired and looking fairly prosperous. We sailed due south, got behind the coastal islands, west around Samos, rowing all the way, and came into the Bay of Miletus from the south-west — that is, from the direction of Tyre and Phoenicia — as the sun set in the west, mostly behind us. We stood straight down the bay, bold as brass, apparently a pair of their own ships bound for the blockade fleet at Tyrtarus on the island of Lade.
The fishermen of Chios had been able to lay the whole siege out like a scroll for us, because they smuggled fish to the rebels and sold them openly to the Medes, Persians, Greeks and Phoenicians who served the Great King, too. Miletus is an ancient city, founded before Troy, and she stands at the base of a deep inlet of the sea, just south of Samos, although the bay over towards Mycale is starting to silt up. Miletus has a steep acropolis, impregnable, or so men used to say, and her outer town is protected by a circuit of stone walls with towers. The Persians began by moving their fleet to Ephesus, just a hundred stades up the coast. Once they had a base there, they moved in and stormed Tyrtarus, a fishing village with a small fort, and used it as their forward base, so that ships from there could easily launch into the narrow channel and catch any vessel heading into Miletus.
Mind you, it is possible to row north around Lade. The problem is that anyone holding the fort on Lade can see you coming fifty stades away, and when you turn north, they’re waiting — and the currents around the island favour the side that holds it.
Once the Persians had the fort at Tyrtarus, they brought up their land forces on the landward side of the peninsula. Artaphernes came in person, and they built a great camp in the hills overlooking Miletus. After a few weeks of skirmishing, he started on the siege mound.
Men tell me the Assyrians invented the siege mound, and perhaps they did, although as usual the Aegyptians claim they invented it. Either way, it was not the Greeks, who prefer a nice flat field and a single day of battle to a year’s siege. But the Ionians and Aeolian Greeks have fortified cities, and when the Lydians or the Medes come against them, they fight a war of shovels. The Persians dig a giant hill that runs from the flat of the plain to the top of the walls, and the Greeks in the city counter-dig, trying either to raise the wall by the mound or to destroy the Persian mound. And while both sides dig, the men outside make sure that the men inside receive no help, no weapons and, most of all, no food.
Sometimes the men inside the walls triumph, boring their opponents into backing off. And sometimes a single load of grain can be a mighty weapon. First, because the men inside the walls can eat, and their hearts rise; second, because the men outside the walls know they must struggle for so much longer each time a cargo reaches their enemies.
But in my experience, sieges are rarely settled by the hand of man. Usually, the Lord Apollo hurls his fearsome arrows of disease into one side or the other — or sometimes into both — and the dead pile up as if Ares had reaped them with a sword, but faster. Sieges
I didn’t know that then, as the sun set over my stern. I was twenty-five years old, and I had never seen a siege.
South of Samos, and no guard ship came to look at us. We stood straight on, and as we entered the Bay of Miletus, we bore up and sailed along the south coast of the bay, as if bound for the island of Lade. We were sailing in light airs, but every bench was manned and we were ready to run.
In the last light of the day, two of their ships headed out to meet us. They took a long time coming off the beach, and we didn’t hurry towards them.
‘Oar-rake and past,’ I called softly to Stephanos, and he nodded and repeated my orders to Harpagos, whose hooked nose could just be seen above the stem of the ship. We could see Miletus in the distance now, rising on the next headland, due east down the channel.
There’s a world of difference between being ready for action and expecting nothing to happen, and that world of difference separated our ships and theirs. They came out thinking we were Phoenicians. We knew exactly what we intended to do, and when we were at hailing distance and the lead ship called to us in their Phoenician tongue, I clapped my hands once — I remember that the sound carried over the water and made a little echo against the nearer enemy hull — then every back bent on my ship, and the oars twinkled in the setting sun. If they had been ready, they’d have leaped into action right there, but many heartbeats passed while their navarch and his officers tried to work out why we were rowing so hard.
The lead Phoenician was so ill-prepared that his crew caught a crab and he fell away from his course, which was almost the end of my plan. I wanted to oar-rake the pair, Stephanos taking the port-side enemy and I the starboard, and my plan was that we’d crush their oars and race through before any other ships could launch off the beach.
But the lead Phoenician turned broadside on to us, and we had no choice but to ram him or abandon our attempt. The channel was too narrow to avoid him, so I caught him just aft of amidships and Stephanos caught him a few heartbeats later, well forward, and together we rolled him over, dumping his rowers in the water.
We’d turtled one ship, but the impacts tested our bows and cost us all our speed and hard-earned momentum, and we were all a-stand for the second ship.
He knew his business, and now that he’d had a moment to think, he was ready. He loosed a flight of arrows, and some of my rowers were hit, but Galas had them in hand and we were moving forward.
‘Oars in!’ I called.
It was sloppy, but we had all our oar shafts in as our bow slammed into the second ship. We weren’t moving fast — neither was he — and the two ships didn’t have the power to get past each other. As we came to a dead
