The Wooden Walls of Thermopylae Read online

  He threw his cup across the room; it shattered on the far wall and the dregs and lees trickled down the new plasterwork, leaving a dark stain. This was a trick I’d seen before, there was no point reacting: we sat in silence for a while then he got up and fetched a fresh cup from the counter, filled it, topped up mine and picked up where he’d left off.

  “Doesn’t matter what I’m driven to write about, they’re there: If I choose Hector, Andromache worms her way inside, if I write about Thebes there’s Antigone. Even in my work on Prometheus, which as you know I’ve been told to keep for safer times, my speaking voice the chorus are women. I can’t silence their voices; Why? Phrynichus doesn’t have this problem, neither does anyone else.”

  I wish he were still alive now, I’d be able to tell him that Pericles’s pet poet Sophocles and, it is rumoured, the schoolboy Euripides share the same problem. But back then Sophocles hadn’t started writing and Euripides’s parents hadn’t even met, so all I could find to say was,

  “Write about war and courage in the face of the Gods.”

  It was this innocent statement that led him to the strangest of his musings.

  “You think that’s the only form of courage, Mandrocles?”

  He didn’t want an answer; at least, he didn’t wait for one.

  “What about Andromache watching Hector from the walls of Troy, seeing her son killed yet surviving slavery to end in dignity?”

  I knew the answer to this one.

  “She had no choice, that’s not courage, all she did was endure.”

  “What about a woman prepared to sell herself to protect her family honour?”

  I knew he meant Elpinice: this hurt and stung but before I could tell him he said something; something which at the time I didn’t understand. Something so close to me and my life. Something I was ignorant of, that I didn’t even suspect.

  “What if a woman keeps a secret which destroys her life because she doesn’t want to compromise her man?”

  I didn’t know what he was talking about, and anyway I’d become bored with the topic. I didn’t reply, just yawned. We finished our wine and began to talk about my trip to visit Cimon at Brauron. I knew there was more to it than just that, but whatever it was, he wasn’t going to tell me. Whatever the purpose I was ready for a change.

  By now the lamps were lit and it was dark. A group of men with blistered hands and wind burnt faces were sharing a chou of wine after a hard day learning to work their oars. I knew them, or rather, they recognised me and called me over to drink with them. When they left I helped Aeschylus close up the bar before we went to bed. As we went up to our pallets he said, as if our earlier talk hadn’t finished,

  “Compare the voice of the women in my plays to the voice of women in the city.”

  I replied,

  “They have no voice in the affairs of the city.”

  “Yes, they do, but we don’t hear it.”

  “How would you know?”

  “Because it’s there. I write about it because it’s there.”

  The next day I was up early and rode out of the Piraeus before the sun had reared its head from below the waters. Passing through the mass of shacks that now formed a substantial shanty town beyond the gates, I realised that like ten years earlier, refugees fleeing from the might of the Persian Empire were flocking towards Athens for safety.

  The city was growing beyond its capacity. The same applied to the fields beyond the city limits and the mountain foothills: every spare plot that was capable of growing anything was under some type of cultivation.

  Our city was changing rapidly; soon, the nucleus of the original sacred precinct with its temples and dwellings would be overwhelmed by a tent city of the dispossessed, destroying that which they desired. The day was pleasantly warm: summer was on the breeze and once into the routine of the ride I settled into that beatific state of trance that such days bring with them.

  Once over the mountain pass, that almost ten years earlier I’d marched across to Marathon to fight for freedom, I took a slight diversion through the grove of Heracles to the great mound: the mound on the beach which covered our dead.

  I stood for a moment in its shadow looking up towards the pennants and trophies decorating its summit. Inside were the bones of some of the best men to whom Athens ever gave birth. I said a particular prayer to the goddess of victory for the brother of Aeschylus, who had bled to death on the beach during the skirmish round the Persian ships. Turned to the sea and invoked the forgiveness of the Persian boy who I needlessly killed and whose shade still haunts my dreams.

  The blood-soaked salt marshes, dead lands before Marathon but now ghost-filled, lay forbidding in the dying sun. In that place of victory and death you could feel the living presence of the sly and malign God Pan.

  Wandering through the groves that house his shrine, where we camped before the battle, I felt the presence of the dead more than the living. Here in this home of the God of sudden fear, I knelt and wept for the shade of Miltiades. His story would have ended well if he’d died here at the site of his triumph. He would have lain in honour next to his friends and not had his dishonoured bones tossed out for the dogs.

  Strange how emotion is deferred, how we understand and feel our lives backwards. I think I felt closer to Miltiades there in death more than I did in life. But grieving or not, I had to leave. No man can spend long alone in the solitary glades of that grim place. A creeping feel of unease gradually crept over me, growing to panic. I set off back to where the horse was tethered; walking at first before breaking into a jog then running full pelt.

  Don’t laugh, reader, or, at least, if you feel so inclined try spending some time alone there yourself. See if you feel like laughing then. The horse was fretful when I found him: whatever was there, he felt it too, and as soon as I mounted he broke into a canter. Behind me I could hear the shade of the Persian boy weeping for the manhood he never knew.

  Once away the horse calmed and settled to a walk and we passed the temple of Hercules and the Deme boundary and at length, there ahead of us, lay the ancient homestead of Miltiades’s ancestors: Brauron. I was relieved to have arrived but even here, safe within its precincts, I felt haunted. Not by the dead but by the living, now dead to me. For my mind was full of the memory of the night of bliss I spent with Elpinice in the olive grove beyond the estate walls.

  So with nerves shredded and thoughts confused I rode through the gates to be greeted by the fierce barking of the family hunting dogs. But there was no relief to be found inside. Cimon had been hunting with his friends and afterwards drinking. He was stone drunk, barely recognising me; able only to slur out an uncertain greeting. So the rumours were true. But that was nothing to what came next.

  A woman emerged from the female quarters clad in a peplos and veil of mourning. The figure beneath the covering was haggard, emaciated and unsteady. Despite all that I recognised her instantly. Elpinice.

  “Welcome, my brother will greet you tomorrow if his head has cleared.”

  No warmth or recognition of what we’d been to each other. In fact, the tone carried an edge of blame. But before I’d the chance to think of a reply,

  “I will show you to where the purpose of your visit is waiting.”

  She turned and walked away down the passage leading to the andron. Confused, I followed.

  The lamps were lit but the place carried an air of gloom. A day already disturbingly unworldly had become more so. She paused before the door of the andron and motioned for me to enter. As I moved passed her, she whispered,

  “But I don’t know what you’ll be able to achieve.”

  Up close I caught the whiff of her breath: not perfumed as I remembered but unclean, foul as if some sickness resided within both her spirit and body. Thus disturbed and disordered I blundered into the ill-lit room, unprepared for what awaited me.

  At the far end, beyond the effective range of the oil lamps, lying on one of the dining couches and shrouded in some form of bedding
was the unmoving form of a man. I heard the door close behind me and the room seemed to grow darker.

  I waited in the silence, wondering what was required of me. I began to detect the low pitched sound of irregular breathing. Then a muffled groaning: the type of noise made by those struggling to awake from the grip of a nightmare. I felt I was myself drifting into a nightmare state, so unexpected was the turn of events.

  The noises from the couch grew in intensity until with a shriek the bedding was thrown aside and the panicked figure sat upright. I found myself staring into the visage of the architect of the fleet and saviour of Athens: Themistocles.

  Chapter Twenty-Three

  Not very heroic, is it reader? And certainly something his enemies would have paid good money to know: but I’ve always been loyal. Not that I’m sure if that’s a virtue or a sign of inflexibility. Maybe that’s why the Gods sent me to Themistocles. After all, I’d seen Miltiades in a similar state more than once and been a comfort to him. I’ve been around enough powerful leaders to recognise the strain their ambition and the world place upon them.

  They try to hide this, of course, but if you think about it, reader, it becomes clear that you don’t challenge the existing order of things without paying a price. For Themistocles, Miltiades and, I suspect, many others that price is a darkness of the spirit that periodically turns the world black and freezes the soul. Then courage becomes fear, command melts into vacillation and anxiety hangs like a shroud smothering light and hope. I’d had more than my own share of such experiences so I had no trouble recognising the malaise and its symptoms.

  There was no point trying to talk to him that night and from the blank look in his eyes and the smell of stale wine in the room he was in no position to speak to me. I summoned the housekeeper and had her prepare a particular potion Miltiades had used to clear his head when the black dog of despair shadowed him.

  With difficulty I persuaded the great man to take it, and then I left the chamber. I waited outside the door and after some time heard the sound of retching which indicated that the potion was taking effect. So I stole away to the barn where I used to sleep at Brauron in younger and happier days.

  It was a long and uncomfortable night but at least I had things to think on other than myself. I woke early to the familiar itching that sleeping in such a place induces, sluiced my head in the water butt and headed for the kitchens to find breakfast.

  Cimon was already there; he said nothing, just nodded then continued to dip his stale crust into a bowl of oil. He was bleary eyed but otherwise looked in good condition. I wondered what to say but needn’t have bothered, he spoke for me.

  “It would be a good day to ride the estate boundary, don’t you think, Mandrocles?”

  With that last night was forgotten and whatever lesson there was to learn from it he’d taught himself. There was no need for me to say anything. Minutes later we were outside preparing the horses and shortly after rode through the gates, exchanging the sick rooms of Brauron for the healing air blown in from the sea. It was to be my last such day of peacetime careless country living for many years.

  Cimon was a countryman at heart; if the Gods had not made other choices for him he could have settled as a contented rustic knight. You know; the type it’s become popular to lampoon in the new and cynical comedies that have recently become so fashionable with the Athenian mob.

  The estate was in good order and alive with activity in the early summer sunshine. The land we rode across could have been any demesne in Attica. Stony and thin soiled towards the coast where olives struggled amongst poor grazing for goats, but more fertile inland, good enough to support grain as well as vines. But Cimon’s delight in the estate was focused on the pasture land that lay beyond the vegetable plots, close to the farm itself. This is where he kept his horses.

  For a man whose military reputation was forged at sea he would have made a great cavalry commander. He loved horses, had a gift in training them and they, for the most part, responded to something they could sense in him. We spent ages in the rough corral as he showed me his colts, stallions and brood mares. It was past noon when he selected two we would ride to the far end of the estate, the part that bordered the Bay of Marathon. It was a day of freedom and delight like the first one I’d spent in his company, far away in the Thracian Chersonese where his father had ruled as tyrant.

  Then he was a boy and that land was his inheritance, now he was a man, older than I’d been at Marathon, and the land was part of the Persian Empire. Any betting man with a good eye for odds would wager that this land was destined for the same fate. We didn’t talk much: Cimon was the rare type of man who didn’t need to say much, his company was enough. When sober, that is. We rode to the sea, swam in a creek, I can’t remember much else; except …

  Except for his one oblique reference to the preceding night.

  “I’ll be coming back to Athens with you, Mandrocles, I have to begin my work, and war changes the natural order, allowing young men of my age a role.”

  He smiled, as if to himself before adding,

  “I’m to have the Athene Nike, Lysias will remain trierarch for the present, you will lead the marines. Themistocles reckons that between you, you’ll keep me safe.”

  He touched his heels to the mare’s flanks and sped away. I followed in his train. On our return, as we walked sweat-stained into the house, it was like entering a different world to the one we’d left that morning; Themistocles greeted us, saying to me,

  “I give you thanks for the physic, Mandrocles, it was most efficacious.”

  He smiled as he said this but no further mention of his condition was forthcoming. Whatever it was that haunted him was gone. He was ready to face his destiny. Something else was missing too.

  Elpinice, gone back to Callias, back to her duty like Themistocles and Cimon. She left a note, Themistocles gave it to me. Not much a few words, nothing about the past or love. But maybe something more than that. She thanked me, said her courage had returned. Although I’d done nothing really, it seems that the effect of my overnight visit had in a strange way liberated the three of them, woken them from nightmares.

  Have patience with this rambling account of a visit to the countryside, reader, I promise you more action than you’ll be comfortable with in what follows. But for now, humour me and think on this.

  I think I accomplished more for Athens in those twenty four hours of doing nothing than with all the blood I shed in defence of the city of the Goddess. I only really understand this now looking back.

  Strange, isn’t it? Strange also that I never found out who it was that summoned me to Brauron. At the time I didn’t think about this. Aeschylus gave me the message but of course he’s long dead. Maybe I’ll ask him when I reach Hades.

  Whatever devils were toying with Themistocles’s head in Brauron, he was clear of them. The next days were a blur of activity. He returned to Athens and convened a meeting of the five hundred on Pnyx hill. The fact that he hadn’t the authority to call the meeting was no hindrance.

  The city was frenzied, desperate to be led and walking up the hill to the assembly the noise, like a swarm of bees buzzing round the threatened hive, grew louder. It was to be my last night in Athens for some time and one to be remembered.

  Themistocles gave them the leadership they wanted all right. He had two main points to put across: the first was that an Athenian delegation must leave next day for Corinth to put together a defensive alliance of free Greek states. Then, standing solid like an oak on the rostra, he moved to the issue at the forefront of his mind.

  “Athenians, friends, patriots.”

  I noted the deliberate absence of any mention of the Demos: there was no room for factionalism or polis style trickery now. We were all in this together. He was, of course, helped by the fact that all of his heavyweight opponents were in exile. It was this that made his next appeal all the more surprising.

  “We stand here today on the verge of changing the world. However w
e need for a moment to turn our attention to foreign shores. Foreign shores where Athenians with whom in the past we have had our differences are straining to catch an echo of our words.”

  He gave us a moment to let this sink in and for the more slow-witted amongst us to realise he’d moved onto another tack.

  “Men who, admittedly, have made errors of judgement. But men who in the past have stood with us in the shield wall and dealt death-dealing blows to the barbarian invaders. Citizens, do you know of whom I speak?”

  A disingenuous question if ever I heard one, but it was greeted by a full throated roar of assent.

  “To punish these men for their intemperance was just and right. But to punish them by denying them the right to defend their families, their friends, their City and the honour of the Goddess; is that not too cruel a penalty?”

  Most of us had picked up where this was leading and shouted back.

  “Yes, too cruel.”

  “Do I detect that you, wise citizens, like me, wish to make the city whole again, to close ranks against the barbarians?”

  A great roar of ‘yes’; even the stupid were up to speed by now.

  “So friends, what must we do?”

  He had the momentum now, even those with something to fear from the return of the exiles joined in the shouts of,

  “Bring them home.”

  Never one to curtail the satyr play element of such gatherings, Themistocles squeezed the last oil from the olive. Hamming it up like a second rate chorus touring rural theatres he affected a slightly quizzical look. Then he shouted back,

  “Bring them home? Bring them all back home?”

  “Yes, all of them.”

  “Even Aristides?”

  “Bring him home.”

  “And Xanthippus?”

  “Bring him home.”

  “And Megacles?”

  Just ahead of the beat some wag shouted,

  “Even that fucker?”

  And the crowd shouted,

  “Bring the fucker home.”