‘Are you ready?’

‘You’ll have to let us know the moment,’ one of them called. ‘I can’t see.’

‘Then they can’t see you,’ Aristides replied. ‘Very well. On my command, rise and hit the Persian officer you marked before. Black stallion.’ He considered the dust that was already choking, the air thick with it. ‘If you can’t spot him, look to me. I’ll point him out.’

Ahead of them, a thousand horsemen raced in, trying to make the Greeks break and run. If they did, they would be slaughtered. Aristides felt the ground trembling. His hoplites would hold that place, neither advancing or retreating. Of course, it meant the Persians were free to swing in, throwing spears with terrible force and then arcing back out again. Aristides watched them come for the first pass, his expression dark. He could see the officer he had noted before. The man gestured this way and that, revealing himself by his commands. Whoever he was, he was lean and black-bearded. His horse stood a hand higher than the rest, a magnificent animal. Aristides pointed it out to the archers peering through their own ranks at the enemy.

‘Here they come ,’ someone shouted in the lines. One of those fools who could not remain silent. Aristides found quite a few of the men made ridiculous comments as they marched towards an enemy. He’d heard it all at Marathon, years before: pointless jokes and crude descriptions that made those around them either grin or swear or roll their eyes. Men dealt with fear in different ways. It did not matter, as long as they followed orders and held the ground.

He watched the leading horsemen get closer and closer, testing their own nerve as they risked being impaled on the spear-points. His men had the butts known as lizard-killers hard into the dirt, with a foot pressing down. It meant they crouched beneath their shields, like bronze apes.

Aristides swallowed. They were confident, the Persians. He could hear them whooping and yelling as they had before, driving one another on. They dragged dust from the dry ground as they came, so that it seemed to rise with them. He kept his eye on the one he had marked as their officer. Aristides asked for a blessing from Odysseus, if the man’s shade watched. He had no idea if the archers he’d gathered had half the skill of the old king of Ithaca.

At the last moment, dangerously close, the Persian horsemen swung left along his lines. The spears they threw crashed into hoplon shields with appalling force. Some bounced clear overhead in the impact and shot past. Others punched through the skin of bronze and even the wood beneath, standing out. The sound was a clatter, with cries of pain and gasping breath, all smothered under the thunder of hooves, of animals and men too close together and moving at frightening speed.