Killer of Men - Christian Cameron [180]
I took it and we clasped.
Miltiades looked over his shoulder. Then he looked back. I think he was measuring my value to him. I met his eye.
I trusted Miltiades. As I heard it from him, Aristagoras had plotted to kill her, and me, and that was enough.
Later, he came back and told me. ‘I earned every penny of the ransom you tried to hide from me, ungrateful boy,’ he said. Then he waved, always the great man. ‘Forget it,’ he chuckled. ‘We’re going to have some wonderful times together.’
I never forgot, though, and I assume he didn’t either.
He sent me to sea immediately, that evening, with orders to haunt the Asian coast. It should have been a happy autumn, but the politics of the Ionian camp were vicious, and I would have done better to enquire more closely from where my fountain of gold had come. Now that I served Miltiades, I was tied to the faction that favoured the war. There was a peace faction led by none other than the author of the revolt, Aristagoras, who now espoused a peaceful solution. Men said that he had been bought by the Medes with golden darics, and other men said that he feared the Great King.
I discovered, in between short cruises in the Ionian Sea, that Miltiades had informers everywhere, and that being his man did have benefits. He heard of a pair of Phoenician biremes taking a cargo of copper and ivory up the coast of Asia for Heraklea in the Euxine. We took them off the islands – without so much as a fight – and you can be sure that I had Miltiades’ half bagged and ready before my stern touched the beach.
Autumn was well-advanced when we heard that the Ionian cities of the Troad had all fallen in two short weeks, as Artaphernes took the Great King’s army and besieged and captured them. Our morale plummeted, and men and ships deserted. The last of the Chians sailed away and only the Aeolians remained.
The tyrant of Mytilene demanded that Miltiades leave. Our piracy – that’s what he called it – was bringing the city into ill repute. What the bastard meant was that our ongoing commercial war against the Medes was costing his city, which was losing business to Methymna, around the coast of Lesbos.
Salamis, the last free city of Cyprus, fell in late autumn.
Miltiades called his captains to council. It was a fine day, with a stiff west wind blowing. We’d been beach-bound for ten days with bad weather and no targets. The Asians were staying well clear of Lesbos, and the bad feeling between Aristagoras and Miltiades had reached a new height. Men said I was to blame. Some even said that Briseis had had an affair with Miltiades himself – foolishness, as she was eight months pregnant and hundreds of stades around the coast of the island, but that’s the sort of wickedness that spreads in a divided camp.
‘We’re leaving,’ he said. That was it – the whole council reduced to a few words. He wasn’t much for a lot of talk, unless it was his own.
‘Back home?’ Heraklides asked.
‘What do you call home, Piraean?’ Miltiades asked.
‘Chersonese,’ Herk said. He grinned. ‘Don’t act the tyrant with us, lord. The wind is fair for the Chersonese and we can lie on our couches with buxom Thracians before the first snow falls.’
One of Miltiades’ captains was Cimon, his eldest son. Metiochos, his second son, was his other most trusted captain. That’s how the old aristocratic families worked – plenty of sons who could be trusted as war captains. I love to hear men call the Athenians ‘democrats’ as if any of them ever wanted to give power to common men. If Miltiades had had his way, he’d have been lord of the Chersonese first and then tyrant of Athens. He only loved democracy when it packed the phalanx with fighters.
Hah! I’m a fine one to talk. Look at me, lording it in Thrace. There’s no hypocrite like an old hypocrite.
At any rate, Cimon was my age, a man just coming into his reputation. I liked him. And he was not afraid of his father. ‘We’re going back to bad wine and blonde Thracian women because