Killer of Men - Christian Cameron [155]
‘I won’t be coming back,’ I said, more harshly than I meant. ‘I offered to marry you and your father turned me down. He knows I won’t come back.’ I shrugged. I was growing to like the purity of telling the truth. Sometimes it was very hard – sometimes I still lied just to make things easier – but simple truths seemed to make things, well, simple. ‘Is your boy on my ship?’
She shook her head. ‘He wants to go, but Pater won’t let him.’
Pater – Troas – sounded smarter and smarter.
I gave her my gifts and we made love. It should have been gentle and tragic, but it wasn’t. Gaiana never had tragedy in her. She laughed in my mouth, and she laughed when our fingers last touched.
‘What shall I call your boy?’ she asked. ‘If he’s yours?’
‘Hipponax,’ I said.
16
The Battle of Amathus was my first sea-fight.
We sailed and rowed the long way around Crete, because Lord Achilles, who hadn’t been to war in ten years, was still a canny old bird and he had a head on his shoulders. So we rowed away towards Italy, and the rowers cursed.
Lord Achilles knew what he was about. We spent two weeks going around the island, and by the time we put our bows to the deep blue east of Crete, our muscles were hard as rock and our rowing was excellent. Our helmsmen – even me – could handle our ships. We could sprint and we could cruise and we could back-water.
I have said that Nearchos commanded the Thetis. In fact, I commanded it, while teaching him to command, while Troas taught me to be a seaman. Laugh if you like.
Lord Achilles commanded the Poseidon and his brother Ajax, a long-limbed nobleman I had only met twice, commanded Triton. We didn’t practise formations much, although we did take turns rowing in the middle of a three-ship line, so that we could get used to the length of another ship’s oars.
We made the rendezvous off Cyprus just a week late, and found the Council of Ionia in full assembly on the beach of Amathus.
I stayed at Nearchos’s shoulder. We spent a week listening to Aristagoras talk. Other men talked, too. The leader of the Cyprian rebels was Onesilus, king of Salamis. That’s Salamis on Cyprus, honey – your friend from Halicarnassus knows it, don’t you, lad? Technically, Onesilus had summoned all of us, and he was the leader of the fight on Cyprus. He and his men were laying siege to Amathus, a Cyprian city that had remained fiercely loyal to the Great King while the rest of the island had thrown off the yoke a year earlier.
Here, boy – fill this with wine. I need to talk about the Ionian rebellion, and that is thirsty talk!
It was the curse of the gods on the Ionians that they were doomed to listen to Aristagoras and his promises. From one end of Ionia to the other, the army of Artaphernes and the navy of his Phoenician allies, the greatest seamen in the world, defeated the Ionians every time they stood to fight. At Byzantium and in the Troad, at Ephesus, in a dozen ship duels, the Ionians had been worsted every time.
And yet the rebellion spread.
It was against all sense, and against all reason, but despite Artaphernes’ fairness and Aristagoras’s arrogance and failure, the rebellion grew with every defeat. The Carians, who had stood against us at Sardis and at Ephesus, were with us now. Cyprus was in revolt and all the Greek cities of Asia were in the Ionian Council, as they called themselves. Aristagoras was their leader and strategos.
We needed a victory. There really were no more cities to join in, unless Athens or Sparta chose to join. And neither seemed disposed to fight.
Aristagoras argued that we needed just one victory to convince both Athens and Sparta to join us. I doubted him. I had seen Aristides’ face when he boarded his ship, and I suspected that nothing short of a Persian fleet in the Piraeus would get him to fight again alongside the Ionians. But I was a mere helmsman and no one asked my opinion.
I had a week to get to know that fleet, and I counted two hundred and twelve ships on the beach. There