In a moment of clarity, Themistocles realised they could not win. Panic surged again at the thought. Then he began to think, to use the mind he had been given, the genius that had made him first in Athens, of a golden generation. The Spartans always complained about Athenian cunning, he reminded himself. Well, he was the greatest Athenian, wasn’t he? There had to be a way to turn the battle. As he closed on the hapless Persian ahead, Themistocles looked again to the shore, where Xerxes himself watched two fleets battering one another to the death. Half the Persian fleet had yet to engage, waiting like sharks to ease into the strait and join the battle. Smoke rose from the city he loved. Themistocles saw the end of all he knew, coming down like a hammer blow he could not stop.

3

‘Don’t stand so close to the edge , Pericles!’ Agariste snapped. ‘What will I say to your father if you fall to your death on the rocks?’

Her youngest son looked back at her from under the fringe of thick black hair he preferred to wear right down to the level of his eyes. He stared always in shadow, his resentment palpable. Agariste waited, refusing to look away until he decided he had made his point and shrugged, taking a half-step back. In truth, she had spoken more to relieve her own nerves than out of fear for him. At sixteen, Pericles was like an eel, compact and muscular. She knew he could swim, so had no terror of him falling into deep waters. Yet the rocks were like knives. Agariste was not usually superstitious, but the fate of Athens was being played out on the strait by Salamis. She was afraid to see bright blood that day, not while her husband risked his life against an overwhelming host. They needed the gods to grant them strength and victory. They needed a storm to scatter the Persians.

Xanthippus was out there, perhaps already lost. She could not know, though the possibility gnawed at her. Would she feel his death, sense him breathing his last or sinking away from the light? Xanthippus was both stern and unforgiving, but by all the gods, he had grown into the man she’d once seen in him. Her father had thought him beneath a daughter of the Alcmaeonidae family, but she’d glimpsed something in Xanthippus – personal discipline perhaps, coupled with ambition. She felt a touch of pride at that. She’d taken a man with a little too much kindness in him – and turned him slowly on the coals of their marriage until he had hardened. He had become the husband she knew she needed, her greatest work.