house wall. The burned beams had been stacked and three pyres of scrap wood from all the surrounding farms built on the hilltop. All that in a few hours.
By now I was much calmer. I’d had time to breathe, and no one let me do any work — nor did Idomeneus do any, as he was a lord now and a priest. Alcaeus was the same, so the three of us watched other men lift stones while we debated the campaign.
And when Myron asked, we were ready.
‘How are the towers?’ I asked.
‘The west tower is done, and the east will be complete tomorrow or the next day, if the wind continues to blow dry.’ He shrugged. ‘They’ll be done before Thebes can march.’
That confirmed what we’d hoped. ‘Then this is our plan,’ I said. ‘First, we free all the slaves who built the towers.’
‘Zeus Soter!’ the archon said. ‘That’s the whole year’s profits gone.’
I nodded. ‘Not just for you, lord. But listen. We lost ten men yesterday — we’ll lose ten times that in the next month, and that is
He shook his head. ‘Perhaps later-’
I disagreed. ‘We need them now. Because we want to put them in the armour of the dead hired men, install Lysius as their officer and leave them with another fifty picked men to guard the walls. In fact, we don’t want them to sit within the walls. We want them to march down to the ford and camp, with light-armed men prowling around. If you dare-’ I looked around, ‘I’d send Teucer tonight to burn some barns in Thebes.’
Myron shook his head. ‘You are talking about kicking a hornets’ nest,’ he said.
Idomeneus raised a long, plucked eyebrow. ‘Ever faced down a bull in a meadow, archon?’ he asked.
Myron nodded slowly. ‘I have, too. You think that as long as we look tough, they’ll back down.’
Alcaeus laughed. ‘Not really, lord. The truth is, they have twelve thousand hoplites and we do not. But a show of aggression — especially after the tanning we gave those hired men — might slow them up for a week or two.’ He shrugged. ‘Lysius can always pull inside the walls later, when he sees the dust cloud coming.’
Myron gave a grim smile. ‘All this planning suggests that you won’t be here — with the phalanx.’
‘That’s right,’ I said. ‘According to our prisoners, Euboea was burning yesterday. Chalcis is being served up to the Persians. By the time we march, Euboea will have fallen.’
Alcaeus nodded. ‘And Datis has the heart of the sailing season at his back,’ he said. ‘He’ll move straight on to Athens.’
‘And Athens will fall without my phalanx?’ Myron asked softly.
I laughed. ‘A thousand hoplites?’ I made a face. ‘Athens can find twelve thousand, and perhaps fifteen. They don’t need the weight of our spears.’ Secretly, I suspected that they
He looked at me, and I looked at him.
‘Archon,’ I said, ‘please. If Athens falls, or Medizes, Plataea is doomed. Thebes will eat us the way a gull eats a snail. Our only hope of preservation is to act — aggressively — for Athens.’
Myron looked out from our hilltop. Men were still carrying brush for the pyres to burn the bodies, and below, other men — my neighbours — were breaking up the biggest chunks of rubble with iron tools.
‘When I was a much younger man,’ he said, after a while, ‘I stood in your forge yard with your father and a few other men, and we agreed to make an alliance with Athens to preserve our city from the yoke of Thebes.’ He turned, and met my eye. ‘I think the decision for today was made that day. I was wrong to slow the muster. I will see to it, and you will take my citizens over the mountain and do what you can.’ He stood straight, as if ten years had fallen from his shoulders. ‘May Zeus and Ares and Grey-Eyed Athena stand by you, for if you lose the phalanx, even in victory, why then our city will fall.’
When he went back to his mule, Alcaeus looked at me. ‘Plataea is lucky to have so many great men in so small a city. Would that Miletus had done as well.’
‘We may yet fail,’ I said.
He shrugged. ‘Of course. But not for the lack of trying.’
‘Let’s go and kill some Medes,’ Idomeneus said, and he grinned.
We burned Mater, Bion and Cleon on the hilltop that afternoon, with wine and sacrifices and a priestess of Hera from the temple. And when they were ash, and the fires were great smoking columns not unlike the pillars of smoke that the raiders had left behind, the priestess came to me and proposed that I pay for a statue of Mater in the temple.
‘She was a great woman,’ the priestess said. She was a matron with iron at her temples and a vast reserve of dignity. ‘Young women need examples of how to live — and die.’
I all but spat at her. ‘She was drunk every day of her wedded life,’ I said.
The priestess stepped back. ‘Speak no ill of the dead!’ she commanded. ‘Is that the way you will speak of her? Or as the hero who fell defending your home?’
I gave her the money. There’s a new statue that bears no resemblance to her — the Persians broke the one a local man made, smashing it to gravel with hammers. But in Plataea, the new temple honours Mater as an avatar of Hera. Take from that what you will.
While I mourned, the phalanx mustered.
A thousand men may not sound like many, but every man needs a slave and a donkey or a mule to carry his kit, to cook for him and keep him in fighting trim. And a thousand mules with two thousand men is a long column to lead over mountain tracks. It takes time for men to put their houses in order, and time to gather enough food for thirty days, and time for the slave to kiss his own wife. Time to make sure you have your second-best cloak as well as your war cloak, time to make sure that someone packed you some garlic sausage and some fresh onions from the garden.
My packing was done — my mule was still picketed high above Eleutherai, and my friends had rescued my kit from where I left it by Asopus. My good Persian shirt of scale was on Lysius’s back, and my old helmet with the raven crest was on his head to puzzle the Thebans — and he did it no dishonour.
Euphoria fussed about, finding me oil with lavender in it, and retrieving — as if by a miracle — my father’s heavy walking stick from the collapsed cellar of the house, charred a little but still strong as iron. And when she had seen me cared for, she took me by the hand and led me to our spring, up by the vineyard, and then she bathed with me, in the deep hole by the spring. There were men all about us on the hill, but none came near, and the olive grove hid us. There’s no modesty when you bathe in an open sink of rock, and pregnancy or none, we made love. And then we washed again, and she put on the robe Mater had saved — a beautiful thing of red-purple, with gold embroidery. And I helped her put up her hair in a net of linen.
In the dooryard where Mater had fallen, she poured the libations on my shield and wiped it with a new linen towel, and then she did the same to my sword and my spear, and finally, defying convention, to my helmet.
I longed to crush her to me, but I did not. We were Greeks, not barbarians. Our women send us to war with dry eyes, and we left as if going to the fields and not to face death.
There was still smoke rising to the heavens from the funeral pyres when we marched. As we climbed the hills towards Cithaeron, we were joined by the main body from the agora of the city itself. In the distance, as we climbed, we could see smoke rising over Theban territory, and there were wolfish smiles as we went. The epilektoi marched first, up the same road they’d marched just ten days before on their way to the late-summer hunt.
They weren’t boys any more. When they had torn into the hired men, they took losses — ten killed outright, another dozen dying of wounds. In a community as small as ours, the loss of twenty young men was a knife wound in the gut. Everyone was the friend, the lover, the wife, the sister or brother of one of the dead.
But they had killed, and won, and that changed them most of all. When we walked up the trails to the tomb of the hero, every man in my front rank knew that he was worthy of the blood of his fathers. He knew that he had been proven in fire, and like bronze, hardened by the working.
I could make you an argument that the hired men did us a favour by attacking us, but I’d be full of shit. There is no ‘good war’.
We stopped at the shrine, as Plataeans have since the Trojan War, and we poured libations. Some men shouted for me to sacrifice my new slave on the tomb. His name was Gelon, and he was a Greek from Sicily. He heard them call for his blood and he stood there with my shield on his shoulder, watching me.
