kept my shield up, and the arrows fell on it like snow on a mountain.
And then they stopped.
There were screams — screams of pain and screams of terror. I lowered my aspis a finger’s breadth and peered forward, though the pre-dawn murk, the sweat, the slits of my helmet.
The Medes were falling — a dozen of them were down and the rest were scattering. When I reached them — alive, of course, you daft woman — not a man was alive, and they looked like porcupines for the arrows in them.
I turned away from rosy-fingered dawn and the pale sea. There were men coming out of the bush — a hundred men, with bows.
The Athenian archers had found me.
I laughed.
I mean, what in Hades can you do but laugh?
When you write this, I suppose you’ll leave out all the little men — the archers and peltastai. And when I say ‘little’, I mean small in the eyes of the great. But they were good men, as you’ll see. The psiloi. The ‘stripped’ men who wear no armour. This is the story of the little men, and you can ignore what happened next if you wish. But it had more effect on the battle than most of the heavily armed men and the gentry would ever want to admit.
The archers were elated — they’d saved a famous hero and laid waste to the Medes, and I knew that as long as those men lived in their little houses and their shacks on the flank of the Acropolis, they’d tell and retell that story in their wine shops, at the edge of the Agora, in the bread stalls.
Several of them — the boldest — sprinted down the beach and tore a souvenir loose from the huddle of corpses. The first man to pass me shot me a grin.
‘You alive, boss?’ he asked as he ran by.
I had fallen to one knee. I gave him a smile, got to my feet and wandered after him.
In the distance, the Medes began to rally. Did I mention that they were first-rate soldiers? Just lost half their numbers in an ambush, and they were coming back. I hate any man who says the Medes and Persians were cowards.
The Medes on the sand were wearing gold and silver — professional soldiers wearing their pay. The Athenian archers were poor men and my friend, the first who passed me, whooped when he reached the bodies. But he was a public-spirited man, and he held something aloft that flashed in the new sun and he shouted ‘Gold!’ and the rest of the archers came pouring out of the scrub at the edge of the beach, some men jumping down the bluffs and sand dunes.
They stripped those corpses like men who knew their way around a corpse. I cast no aspersions, but by the time I caught up with them, there was nothing left but skin, gristle and bone.
‘Better look to your bows, lads,’ I said, pointing down the beach. I stepped forward and fielded an arrow that might have hit a man, scooping it on the face of my shield, and the muscles in my shield arm protested hard.
‘Lad, my arse,’ an older man said, but he grinned. He had thick arms and heavy shoulders — an oarsman, I suspected. ‘You’re that Plataean, then, eh?’
‘I am,’ I said. Then I put some iron in my voice. ‘Bows!’ I shouted.
Most men jump when I say jump. The archers did.
‘Who’s the master archer, then?’ I asked.
After most of them had loosed a couple of arrows — with no effect beyond driving the Medes back up the beach — the older man turned to me again. ‘With the other half of the boys — they went for the centre of the camp. We couldn’t find you. And I kept getting lost — so I made for the beach.’ He gave a lopsided grin. ‘I’m a sailor — or was. Beaches make sense to me.’
I had to laugh. ‘We need to get out of here,’ I said.
‘That’s sense, too. We’ve had our lick at the Persians.’ He looked around. ‘And we’ve got whatever they brought.’ He called to the men by the bodies, ‘Got all the bows? All their quivers? Arrows?’
To me, he said, ‘All their kit is better than ours — better bows, by far.’
‘I know,’ I said.
‘Give me a Persian bow anytime,’ he said, flourishing his own.
‘These aren’t Persians,’ I said. I pointed at the low felt hats and boots. ‘They’re Medes, a subject people of the Persians — similar, but not the same. They wear less armour. Sakai are different again — bigger beards, more leather and better bows.’
‘Ain’t you the sophist, though.’ The former sailor held out his arm. ‘Leonestes of Piraeus.’ Arrows began to drop all around us.
‘Let’s run,’ I said.
We did. After a few hundred strides, they had to carry me — I was mortified, to say the least. One young sprig took my aspis and another peeled off my helmet.
We left the beach when it began to angle away from our camp and we ran inland. It was easier in daylight — I could see the line of hills and mountains at the far edge of the plain and the rising ground that marked the shrine and sanctuary of Heracles.
As soon as we left the beach, we lost the Medes. I think they’d finally reached the end of their enthusiasm. My Plataeans must have put down twenty of them — perhaps as many as fifty. It’s never good when armoured men face unarmoured. And then the ambush by the archers probably dropped at least another thirty. Fifty dead is more like a bad day’s battle than a couple of skirmishes before breakfast.
The Medes retired to lick their wounds. We carried on across the hayfields and wheat fields and fallow barley fields, jumping stone walls and avoiding hedgerows. We were about halfway to the sanctuary of Heracles when I felt the ground moving. I needed to stop — my lungs were white-hot with pain. Other men must have felt the same — as soon as my group stopped, all of them did.
The feeling that the earth was trembling increased. I looked around — and saw the dust.
‘Cavalry!’ I panted. ‘Into the brush!’
To our right was a fallow field with low stone walls and patches of jasmine and other low bushes. It was also full of rocks.
We piled in, in no particular order.
‘Get to the wall. This one! You — stand there! Bows up!’ That was me — the orders flowed out of me as if I was channelling the power of Ares.
Leonestes joined me. ‘Form a line — get your arse to that wall, boy! Bows up — you heard the man! Get a shaft on the string, you whoreson.’
The cavalry was almost on us. But as is so often the case on a real battlefield, they hadn’t seen us. They had other prey.
‘The first volley will win or lose this,’ I said. My voice was calm. I remember how all the fear of the night raid had been replaced by my usual steady confidence. Why? Because in the dark I had no idea what I was doing, did I? Out here, it was just a ship-fight on land.
Men on the flank of the galloping cavalry saw us, of course — but far too late to make any change of direction for the mass. But if Miltiades had raided the horses, he hadn’t had much effect, I remember thinking to myself.
I glanced at Leonestes, because he was taking so long to give the order that I wondered if he was waiting for me to give it.
He winked. Turned his head to the enemy — raised his bow.
‘Loose!’ he roared. ‘Fast as you can, boys!’
The next shafts rose while the first flight were in the air. Rose and fell, and a third volley came up, far more ragged than the first two. Some of the Athenian archers were little more than guttersnipes with bows, while others had fine weapons and plenty of training — probably archers from ships.
So among a hundred archers, there were maybe twenty real killers, another fifty halfway decent archers and thirty kids and makeweights.
Same in the phalanx, really.
The arrows fell on the cavalry and they evaporated. I remember that when I was a child snow fell on the farm — and then the weather changed and the sun came out, hot as hot, and the snow went straight to the heavens without melting. The cavalry went like that: a brief interval of thrashing horse terror, all hooves and blood, and some arrows coming back at me — a man took one and died just an arm’s length from me — and then they
