I looked at Idomeneus. It was his choice, really. He shook his head.
‘No,’ he said. ‘We have shed enough blood, and the hero craves no more.’
He sacrificed a ram we’d brought for the purpose, looked at its entrails and shook his head.
‘This isn’t going to be good,’ he said.
I spat. ‘I didn’t need entrails to tell me that,’ I said.
We slept in our cloaks, and in the morning, after Teucer and the light-armed men rejoined from their raid into Thebes, we marched away over the mountains.
16
It was hot on the plains of Boeotia, and cold in the passes above Cithaeron. But when we came down off the passes, the sweltering sea-heat nearly choked us, and the humidity was such that a man could sweat through his chiton before he had it over his head.
I intended to keep to the high roads as long as possible. I didn’t want to give away my march. This sounds odd, in light of what transpired, but I was very conscious of the passage of days, and it seemed all too possible, to me, that we would arrive to find Athens surrendered, or beaten — in which case I needed to get away unmolested by the Persian cavalry. I was very aware — as Myron wanted me to be — that I held the future of Plataea under my hand.
So we were wary, and stayed to the north of Attica as the shadows lengthened and the summer ended. We turned east as we came down the main pass, and marched for two days across uncultivated land, skirting Oinoe. Men saw us, but they did not come forward to speak to us, and I had a handful of my light-armed mounted on horses to keep me informed of the terrain, and we made good time.
A week into our march, and we were in Attica proper — an Attica bereft of citizen men. Doors were locked against us, and there were only slaves and women, and few enough of them, too. It was as if a dread disease had swept the land and killed them. There was even wheat left in some fields. One night when we camped, my men reaped a whole field with their swords and left three silver coins on the doorstep of the empty house in payment, and we baked bread the next night after grinding it in an empty grist mill and baking it in ovens we found cold.
A day’s march from Athens, and we could see the Acropolis as clear as day on the horizon. It was not on fire, and I assumed that if Athens had surrendered or made peace, all these folk would have come flooding back down the roads to their farms. So I left my brother-in-law in charge, took my new slave and rode hard for Athens as the sun rose.
The gates were still open.
The streets were packed with people — all the farmers from the farms I’d just marched past, I expect. Most of them didn’t pay me a glance as I rode by, because the only men who would have been interested in me were in the Agora, voting. Any man still on the streets was a slave, a freedman or a foreigner.
If I had thought that the Agora was full for Phrynichus’s play, I was shocked to see how packed it was that late-summer day. I had to dismount and leave my horse with Gelon. Then I shouldered my way forward — I’m not a small man, but neither am I a giant, and no one wanted to make way for me. It took me an hour — five speeches — to make my way from the Tholos to the centre of the Agora, where the speakers stood.
For most of that time, I could see Miltiades.
He stood virtually alone. The men who stood by him were unknown to me, except Aristides and Sophanes, both of whom stood so proudly that they looked like men fighting in a desperate last stand.
When I was close enough, I could hear a man argue from the
When I was almost close enough to touch Miltiades, a man ascended the bema who looked like one of Themistocles’ men. He stood with his head bowed for a moment, and then he raised it.
‘What more can we do?’ he asked. ‘Miltiades asks that we form the phalanx and march to defend the coast — even to save Chalcis. But I ask — why must we fight alone? We have walls. And Sparta is
He got quite a cheer, too.
While men were cheering — it is easy to cheer for other men to do the hard work while you sit home, I find — Miltiades raised his head. He was plainly dressed, for him, in a dark chlamys over a plain white chiton with one stripe. The gold pin at his shoulder was his only concession to rank. He raised his head and his eyes met mine — and lit up the way my eyes lit when they crossed with Euphoria’s.
He waited until he could clasp my hand. And then he pulled me sharply, so that he towed me as one ship will tow another after a storm. He didn’t bother to mount the bema. He simply raised my hand, the way a judge in games raises the hand of a victor.
‘You lie,’ he roared. ‘Plataea is here!’
Chaos.
Men shouted — one thing, and then another. I saw my father-in-law in the crowd, and I saw Aristides, and I saw Cleitus. I had thought him an exile until then. Our eyes met, and the hate flowed like wine.
I was still locked in that when the archon basileus pushed to my side.
‘Do you have an army?’ he asked.
‘A thousand hoplites,’ I said. ‘Which is every man we have.’
He embraced me. He, an aristocrat, who had no love for me or mine, but he embraced me, and then he pointed to the bema. ‘You have my permission to speak,’ he said.
So, although I was a foreigner, I mounted the speaker’s platform. The crowd was not quiet, but I didn’t care. I raised my hand.
‘I have brought the full muster of Plataea,’ I shouted. ‘And left Thebes afraid. Plataea stands with Athens!’
And by the time I came down from the platform, they were already voting Aristides and Miltiades as strategoi, and sending the phalanx out to fight.
As every schoolboy knows, the assembly voted ten strategoi. Aristides and Miltiades were but two of them, and Cleitus of the Alcmaeonids a third. And even when they began to muster the phalanx, half of the generals were still dead set against war — or at least, offensive war. The very next thing they did was to vote for a runner to be sent to Sparta to beg for help — that’s how it sounded to me, anyway. And why not? The Spartans, for all my sneers, were the best soldiers in Greece — perhaps in the world.
I stood with Miltiades as he hurried men to get their kit. Many men of the phalanx were already prepared — had been so for days. Men of the other party were unprepared, or at least most were, so assured were they that the phalanx would not march.
The polemarch of Athens was Callimachus of Aphidna. He was an older man with a fine reputation, both as a warrior and as a politician. I have heard men say that he hesitated, that he only marched when Miltiades threatened to take his men and sail away — Miltiades, after all, had his own army from the Chersonese, almost a thousand hoplites with more military experience than the rest of Athens put together. Not so. Let us be fair. He was hesitant — extremely hesitant — to march. Remember, this was before the Persian fleet had even been sighted. The Persians were just a rumour of terror up the coast — although on a clear day, you could see the fires in Euboea rising to the heavens.
He was hesitant for a reason. I tasted this hesitancy myself.
It is one thing to march in the phalanx. It is another to go in the front rank — and yet another to be a killer of men, a hero, a man who can change a battle. But
