Killer of Men - Christian Cameron [182]
He grinned at me. We were almost friends again – which is to say, he was unchanged, and I had almost forgiven him. Miltiades’ land of the Chersonese was the most polyglot kingdom I’d ever seen – Thracians and Asiatics and Greeks and Sakje at every hand, at dinner and in the temples. If Paramanos was the only black man, he was not the only foreigner. He loved the place, and my fear about his loyalties began to relax. At any rate, that afternoon, we had been joined by Olorus, the king of the local Thracians and Miltiades’ father-in-law.
He grunted. ‘That Aristagoras,’ he said. ‘I visited him over the winter. He’s a greedy fool, and if he keeps taking slaves out of the Bastarnae and the Getae, they’ll kill him.’
Miltiades nodded. ‘He is a greedy fool,’ he said.
‘Does he have his wife with him?’ I asked, trying to sound uninterested.
He grinned. ‘Now, that is a woman!’ he said. ‘By all the gods, Miltiades – count yourself lucky you didn’t marry her. She is all the spine Aristagoras lacks.’
Miltiades shrugged. ‘I met her on Lesbos,’ he said. ‘She is too intelligent to be beautiful.’ He looked at me.
Heh, honey, that’s how men like Miltiades like their women. Dumb. Fear not – I won’t marry you to one of those. Miltiades’ chief wife – he had several concubines – was Hegesipyle, as beautiful as a dawn and as stupid as a cow tied to a post. Olorus’s daughter, in fact. I couldn’t stand to talk to her. She had never read anything, never been anywhere – my Thracian slave was better educated. I know, because I taught her Greek letters in exchange for her teaching me Thracian, and then we read Sappho together. And Alcaeus.
Oh, I’m an old man and I tell these stories like a moth darting around a candle flame.
The point of telling you about that dinner is that Miltiades rose and told us that we would not be joining the rebels. ‘The Ionian Revolt is only dangerous to the fools who play at it,’ he said, and his bitterness was obvious. He was a man who sought constantly for greatness, and greatness kept passing him by.
Cimon was there. He had a lovely girl on his couch, I remember, because she had bright red hair and we all teased him about what her children would look like. Miltiades had red hair, too, remember.
He rose. ‘So what will we do to win honour this summer?’ he asked.
Miltiades shook his head, and he sounded both bitter and old. ‘Win honour? There is no honour in this world. But we’ll fill the treasury while old Artaphernes is busy with his rebellion.’
He had a grand plan for a raid down the Asian coast, all the way past Tyre to the harbour of Naucratis. I frowned when I heard it, because I knew the idea must have come from Paramanos.
We sailed after the spring storms seemed to have blown themselves out. We sailed right past the beach at Mytilene. They must have thought we were on our way to join them, but we didn’t so much as spend the night. We stayed on Chios instead, and Stephanos gave money to his mother and impressed all his friends with his riches and then sailed away, and I was a little jealous of the ease with which he returned home and left. His sister was married now and had three sons, and I held one on my knee and thought about how quickly the world was changing. And I wondered if Miltiades was right, that there was no more honour to be had.
We fell on the Aegyptian merchants like foxes on geese. All the cities of Cyprus had fallen by then, and they didn’t think there was a Greek within a thousand stades. We came out of a grey dawn, five warships, our rowers hard and strong from the trip south, and they didn’t have a single trireme to protect them. I didn’t even get blood on my sword. Greeks have a name for when a wrestler wins a match without getting his back dirty – we call it a ‘dustless’ victory. We took those poor bastards and we were dustless.
I took three merchants myself.
When a squadron came out of the port, too late to save their merchants, we scattered.
I ran south,