Christian Cameron: Salamis

Despite which, he didn’t really think I was any good with horses. And he was right.

Then we were there.

At the last moment a little of my boyhood flowed into my hands, and despite my himation and my gilded sandals, I napped the reins. My four greys leapt forward — like most horses, they wanted to run. The street in front of me was empty; well, mostly empty, and I enjoyed making Cimon leap for a sausage stall, and we moved down the last hundred paces at a fast trot and I left my crowd behind.

The entrance to the yard of the house that Archilogos had rented was not very wide, and at right angles to the street. I had, naturally enough, never been in the yard, but I knew I was to take the chariot in. And I do like to make an entrance.

One of the tricks you learn when you learn to race a chariot, or to be a charioteer in combat — you paying attention, ladies? I trained for this as a slave — is to stop one wheel and pivot the whole chariot on the other. It takes great horses and good timing, and some terrible daimon of youth invaded me and made me try to do it entering the courtyard of the house of my bride.

I checked the horses with my voice, threw all my weight to the right, and reined in the lead horse, and he all but pivoted on his back feet.

By Poseidon, Lord of Horses, the gate seemed narrower than the wheels of my chariot. It was a foolish chance to have taken with a vehicle my friends and I had rebuilt from worm-eaten wood and rotted rawhide.

My right hub clipped the doorpost hard enough that white plaster fell like a little shower of snow, and then we were through, still moving very fast.

There’s a thing you do, as a charioteer, to pick up your master: you pivot the chariot all the way around and rein in, all but scooping the man off his feet with the back deck of woven cords. The daimon was strong in me, and I now reined my offside leader and my back wheels skidded on the smooth marble.

It was almost perfect.

Unfortunately, the axle clipped a small, very elegant standing column.

And knocked it over. It took a long time to fall, and it broke into several sections and lay there, accusingly.

Archilogos — by the eternal irony of the gods, the master for whom I would have driven my chariot in combat, had the world ever gone that way — stood under the stoa of the courtyard and laughed very hard. He was beautifully dressed, and his ruddy curls bounced with his mirth. He tried to say something — and was off again in another paroxysm of laughter.

Behind me, my crowd of friends and about a thousand oarsmen approached the gate. They made a roar like the sea.

And then Briseis stepped out into the open.

It was not what she was wearing; it was not the magnificent gold earrings she had in her ears, the crown of a priestess on her head, the gold bracelet she wore or the gilded sandals that cradled her arched feet.

It was her eyes, which were only for me.

Somehow, in that moment, we were wed. Never before, not ever, anywhere, had those eyes been entirely intent on me and no one else — no ‘next thing’, no plot, no intrigue. Her brother was laughing, and as she passed him, her right hand reached out and viciously poked him in the side — a very sisterly act. Remember that they had not been together in many years.

He reached for her arm to respond in kind, and froze, aware that three hundred or more men were watching him.

They grinned at one another.

And then she reached out a hand, and the smell of musk and jasmine and mint embraced me. I took her hand and she rose into the chariot like Venus riding the dawn.

‘Please do not hit another column,’ she said very quietly. Her lips parted, and sound emerged, and it was all I could do not to stare at her for ever, or take her in front of all those people!

Instead, training and good breeding took hold, and I snapped the reins. My horses leapt forward and by luck — or the grace of Aphrodite — we sailed through the doorposts without blemish, although I was ashamed to note a long white gouge on the one as we passed. Men flattened themselves to be out of my way, and called out.

Oh, in those days, thugater, men and women said such things.

She swayed, and I put a hand around her waist. And the fingers of my left hand found that her chiton was open-pinned, not sewn down the side, and at the contact with the smooth skin of her hip, I almost lost my horses.

‘Drive the chariot, my husband,’ she said. ‘Drive me later, if you will.’

And she laughed, and all the happiness that a man could feel, that the gods allow, flooded me. By Zeus Sator, by all the gods who sit in Olympus, what more can we ask? Victory in war, and the woman you love …

The street cleared. I made the turn at the base of the hill and it was flat for two hundred paces until the promontory rose away with the temple of Poseidon sitting atop it, and I tightened my grip on her waist and snapped the reins and gave a shout — and my horses obeyed.

From a walk to a trot, trot straight to a gallop, and we tore along that stade of a street, scattering a few bystanders, and our clothes and hair billowed, dust rose in a cloud, and for the length of the time it takes a man to sing a hymn, we were gods. And then, as the horses began to take the rise in the road and I reined them in, perhaps not beautifully, but competently, and they slowed, so that they were shiny with sweat, composed and walking elegantly, as we entered the sacred precinct.

‘That is my answer,’ I said. And was rewarded with her smile, and her blush. Who knew she could blush like that?

And we walked up into the temple.

I had, of course, forgotten to bring a sword. But you need a sword for sacrifices, and I felt a fool until Eugenios stepped out of the crowd and put my own sword belt over my head as if the whole thing was planned.

I did not behead a bull. The chariot-driving had been as much adventure as I needed on my wedding day and I killed a ram fastidiously, raising the hem of my himation before the blood could flow.

But the auspices were brilliant, in birds of the air and in the livers of dead animals, and my sons made their kills and the smell of roasting fat rose to the gods. The sun on the pine trees all around the shrine — the last of the summer was ours for that day, and the scent of pines and the smell of cooking meat, the salt air, the spilled wine …

We did not short the gods. Libations were poured to many gods and many absent friends: Paramanos, Onisandros, Idomeneus, and many others. We prayed and then we ate, we drank and then we danced.

I won’t relate the whole. I could make it longer than the Battle of Salamis, for truly, it was better in every way. Weddings are about life, while battles are about death.

But I will say that the three brides, Iris and Heliodora and Briseis, danced together. And I confess that, for once, Briseis was not best. She was beautiful, and she was all I wanted, but the Brauron girls danced the dance of Artemis for the last time, and they were superb. And then we all danced together, men in the outside ring, women in the inside, and wine and the flash of limbs and the open sides of many a chiton began to work on me, so that passion became very like lust. I remember a woman, who looked very much like Gorgo but insisted that her name was Io, which made me laugh. She and Jocasta danced and talked and danced and talked. I saw the two of them with my bride at one point, and they all laughed together, and I worried.

I danced until my head was clear, and then I went and sat and I found myself with Cimon and Aristides, and Eugenios and Ka — a very eclectic group of couches indeed. I ate a barley roll, the white kind we call ‘of Lesvos’, and chased it with some wine.

‘You should take your bride to your house,’ Aristides said. He was watching his wife dance again. ‘Because if you do not, there will be Lapiths and Centaurs on this very grass.’