Christian Cameron: The Great King

I dropped my aspis. He was bleeding then.

‘You!’ he said. ‘Come and take what I have for you.’

His mad eyes showed no defeat.

His right hand dropped the shards of his broken sword and I could see white where he tried to flex his left.

He attacked me, arms reaching for me despite what must have been blinding pain, and I did what I had wanted from the first. I stepped through his arms, locked his right with my left, the high lock of pankration, and he screamed as I broke his arm — I didn’t pause or hesitate, I had done this a hundred times in my sleep, and I pushed my left leg deep behind him and threw him over it — over my leg, over the rail, and into the three decks of slave oarsmen below.

He was alive when he left my hands.

They tore him apart. I would have, if I’d ever had a chance like that.

Then I fell to my knees.

Behind me, Brasidas snapped, ‘Boy! Take the helm!’

For a moment, like Miltiades after Marathon, I was out of my body, but Brasidas brought me back.

Many of my old shipmates have asked me whether I killed Dagon, and I am proud to say — no. I merely took him where he could die the way he deserved.

We lost eighty ships on the fourth day of Artemesium. We lost Gelon. We lost Paramanos — swarmed by Aegyptians when I was far away. Cimon lost a son and two cousins and every Plataean lost someone.

Athens lost forty ships.

Aegina lost twenty ships.

We stood on the beach with our captures and our wounded — Hermogenes, white from blood loss, and Sekla, who had an arrow though his foot and a cut across his head, and Giannis, who lost his left hand to a Phrygian axe that went through his aspis.

It was not a victory to celebrate.

Eurybiades gathered the fit trierarchs, and there were about a hundred, and that included a lot of men with bloody rags, like me.

Themistocles looked like a man going to a funeral.

I put a hand on his shoulder. ‘We did not lose,’ I said.

He turned, and the orator was crying.

Eurybiades stood alone. He was not crying, but his face was closed. He was elsewhere.

I thought perhaps they were in battle shock. So did Cimon. He put a hand on Themistocles’ shoulder as I had. ‘We are a trifle singed,’ he said. ‘But the Great King’s fleet will not come off their beaches tomorrow. Listen — Arimnestos and I can put to sea. .’

I was going to glare at him, but then I saw Abronichus standing with Phrynicus, and both of them were weeping openly.

I assumed that meant Aeschylus was dead, or some other worthy man, and indeed, as I watched, another Athenian, Lycomedes, pulled his chlamys over his head to hide his tears.

Tired men weep easily.

Eurybiades shook himself like an old dog. ‘We must. . retreat,’ he said.

Cimon was looking at Lycomedes, as flustered as I was. ‘Retreat? We won. We lost good men — great men — today, so that we would break them and we broke them! Now we must finish the job-’

‘Peace,’ Themistocles said. ‘Be silent, Cimon. We have no choice.’

‘No choice?’ Cimon asked.

Eurybiades sighed. ‘As dawn broke this morning, the Persians seized a pass above Thermopylae,’ he said, like a man reporting on a race at the Olympics he had once seen. ‘King Leonidas sent the allied army away. Then, with all the Thespians, he formed his phalanx.’

No one moved, or spoke, or groaned. The wind itself stopped.

‘The king died this morning. His body was lost twice, and eventually regained.’ He shook himself again. ‘About the time we engaged the enemy today, the last men died. Thermopylae has fallen.’

I can’t remember anything more of that hour except the desolation.

Leonidas was dead. The army was destroyed.

We had fought for four days, for nothing.

We had lost.

No — I’ll leave you there. You know what happens next. But it is always darkest before the dawn, and that night, with King Leonidas dead across the straits, his corpse defiled by King Xerxes in a fury of unmanly pettiness, every Greek thought the same.

But when next we meet, I’ll tell you more — of Salamis, and Plataea. Of how I met the Great King one more time.

Of what we did, we men of Greece.

But tonight, drink to Leonidas of Sparta, who died for Greece — aye, and Antigonus of Thespiae and all his men, who died with the Spartans. And all the men — Corinthians and Plataeans and Athenians and Aeginians and Spartans and Hermionians and Tegeans and every other man of Greece who fell into Poseidon’s waters off Artemesium, fighting for Hellas.

Here is to their shades!