‘Cut the halters and undo the hobbles,’ I ordered. My survivors spread out and caused chaos on the horse lines, ripping pickets out of the ground. I ran to the top of a low hill and looked back at the city, and only then did I realize that we had the whole width of the enemy camp between us.
More immediately, men were boiling out of the camp, backlit by the lights on the city wall. Persians love their horses. My ten men weren’t going to last a minute against a regiment of Persian cavalrymen.
I thought of stealing horses and heading inland, but that sort of thing only works in epics. In real life, your enemies have more horses and native guides, and they ride you down. Besides, my men were sailors in armour, not cavalrymen. Most of them had probably never forked a horse.
I was out of ideas, but Poseidon stood by us. Horses scattered in every direction, and I didn’t have to be Odysseus to reckon that we could escape with the herd. A few of us mounted, and others simply clung to manes, even tails — and we flowed with the horses, moving west and north, back towards the city. I got mounted, lost my bearings and my companions, and spent a watch among the rocks south of the city, where my horse left me.
The gods help those who help themselves, or so I’ve heard it said, and while I lay in the rocks watching the city and the force of Persian archers between me and the walls, cursing my fate, I realized that it was a six-stade walk along the ridge of rock to the beach opposite Tyrtarus. And not a sentry on the way.
I took the time to poke along the ridge of rock. Every piece of waste ground has trails, if you know where to look — goats make them, and shepherds, and boys and girls courting or playing at being heroes. The moon came up late and the rain ceased, and I walked to the beach opposite Lade, stripped to my skin and swam to the hulls opposite — really just a few horse-lengths, well less than a stade. I rose up, dripping, by the black hulls, close enough to the enemy camp to hear the snores of Archilogos’s oarsmen, or so I reckoned. Then I swam back and picked my way among the rocks. As I had expected, the Persians had gone back to bed. I crawled through the mud and shit to the walls of the town, and wasted another half an hour persuading the sentry to let me climb the wall without gutting me. Oh, the romance of siege warfare!
I was the last man back from the raid, and my sword had not left its scabbard. There were men in the upper city who were of a mind to laugh at me. I let them laugh. I was no longer a hot-blooded boy, and I didn’t need a blood feud in the town. I wanted to take my gold and go, although I was keen to show Istes what I was made of. He’d killed three Persians, and brought in their bows and arrows as proof.
I slept well enough. In the morning I ate honeyed almonds in the upper city and took a long bath to kill the smell of the mud. Histiaeus and Istes joined me.
‘Your men accomplished a miracle,’ he said. ‘Not a slave is working on the siege mound today. They’re all out searching for the horses.’ He smiled grimly. ‘We didn’t get Datis, but we hurt them — a deserter says we killed fifteen Persians and some others.’
I nodded. None of this interested me much. This war of tiny increments was not something I could really appreciate. To me, the city looked doomed, and I wanted out before I was sold into slavery again.
‘Will you raid again tonight?’ I asked.
He shook his head. Even he — the best-fed warrior in the city — had circles under his eyes like shield bags, and the lines on his face were as deep as new-ploughed furrows. ‘No,’ he said. ‘We’ve been out two nights in a row. We can’t keep it up. The fighters are exhausted. The real fighters — the men of worth.’ His eyes flicked to Istes, who also looked like a man at the edge of exhaustion.
‘I’m leaving tonight,’ I said.
He shook his head. ‘I don’t recommend that,’ he said. ‘Mind you, if you stay much longer, I’ll be selling you your grain.’
‘I’d appreciate a dozen of your archers to help me get clear,’ I said. ‘I’d bring them back on my next trip.’
‘You plan to shoot your way out?’ Istes asked. ‘Archers are our most valuable troops.’ He shrugged. ‘You are the best friend this city has made in many months — but the loss of ten archers would be a blow.’
‘I understand. But I need the archers for my diversion, and I’ll leave you a trireme as surety — the Phoenician I took on my way in.’ I pointed to the hull. ‘On a dark night — you might use her to get some people out.’
He shook his head in puzzlement. ‘Why leave a ship?’ he asked.
I grunted. I didn’t want to tell him. As in any siege, the town was riddled with deserters, traitors and double agents, I had no doubt. ‘We’ll be away in the dark of the moon,’ I said.
‘Poseidon bless you, then,’ the tyrant said. But his eyes flicked to his brother, and something passed between them that I didn’t like.
Oh, I was eager to be gone.
I slept most of the day and mustered all my men — marines, oarsmen, deck crews — at dusk. I put my plan to them as the sun vanished into clouds, and enough men volunteered to give me hope. I wish I could say that they all volunteered, but a week on half rations in a doomed city is enough to sap anyone’s morale.
I took my party out of the harbour sally port when the rain started. We made the rocks south of town in the end, although I had an anxious time finding them in the dark. It is always easier to go
We were soaked through and shivering by the time we made the rocks, and then we crept along, spear-butts sounding like avalanches as they scraped the stone. Philocrates cursed steadily. When we were on the beach opposite Lade, we stripped and swam, clinging to our spears as best we could.
We missed our way — the darkness was deep and there was no moon. Let me just say that swimming in the dark — no sight of anything, cold through, so that you shiver, clinging to your weapons — is perhaps the ultimate test of the warrior. Men turned back. And who am I to blame them?
We ended up on the rocks east of the ships, and there was nothing for it but to crawl. I’d explained this part, but the execution was much harder than I’d anticipated. Try crawling on a rainy night, naked but for a wet chlamys, and keeping a spear with you, across broken ground thick with brush.
Hah! We sounded like a herd of cattle. But fools that we were, and inept, the enemy were as bad or worse.
I made the most noise as I was wearing Histiaeus’s gift, the bronze cuirass. I wore it swimming, and it wasn’t bad, but when I crawled across rocks it was loud and the flare around the hips caught on
That was one of the longest, darkest hours of my life. I had not reckoned on losing my way again — we only had a stade of open ground to cross — but I did. In the end, I had to rise to my feet, stumbling like a drunkard, and turn slowly — in full view of the enemy sentries, if there had been any — to realize that I had crawled right past the enemy encampment.
Too late to correct my course. I was well south of my target, but I could see the black hulls of their triremes just to the left, shiny in the darkness. I had at least a dozen men with me — men who had chosen to follow me even when their sense said they’d gone wrong — and now we crept across the dunes, then clattered across the tongue of rock that separated the mudflat from the sea until we were crouched by the ships.
Most of the men had packets of oiled cloth and pitch, or even bitumen — there was plenty of it in Miletus — and we built a pile of the stuff under one hull.
Although there was no moon, the rain abated while we crouched there. The camp had fires — mostly coals — and several Iberians crept between the boatsails erected as tents and lit their torches at the fires. By now there were thirty or forty of my men among the hulls of their ships, and we all called ‘Alarm! Alarm!’ in Greek for all we were worth. Our Iberians ran through the camp with lit torches before thrusting them into our prebuilt pyre.
And then chaos came.
The fire roared up in the time it would take a man to run the stade — from a few flickers of flame to a conflagration twice the height of a man’s head and as loud as a horse race. The ship caught immediately — hulls coated in pitch are an invitation to flame, even in the rain. My sailors ran back and forth, feeding sails and oars into the inferno, and then throwing the lit wreckage into other hulls.
Men came out of the tents, and we killed them. As we were the ones calling the alarm, they kept on coming to us for many minutes, unarmed or with buckets to put out the fire, and we put them down.
By then we had three ships alight, and my two were out in the channel, already running free while the archers on their decks shot fire arrows into the black hulls. A fire arrow is a feeble thing, and none of them caught, but it provided further distraction. The enemy was misled — again — into believing that the fire arrows were the cause of the fires. It took them a long time to realize that we were in amongst them.
