Her husband’s dog. Agariste wasn’t sure how she felt about that. In his exile, Xanthippus had taken up with a local woman in Corinth. The dog had returned with him, a constant reminder of that part of his life. Agariste had not been too upset when the animal had leaped into the sea to paddle after its master. Her husband had seemed close to weeping, but he hadn’t been able to stop and go back, not with a ship crammed with women and children and the Persians coming around the point of the land. Agariste had assumed the mastiff had drowned with so many others that day.

Pericles took advantage of his mother’s slight hesitation, her pause for thought. He was climbing down the rocks before she’d raised enough will to stop him. The moment was gone and Agariste was left with both Eleni and Ariphron in wide-eyed pleading.

‘Oh, very well,’ she said, waving them off. ‘Go and see. Come straight back!’

In a moment, all her children were racing away. Agariste rose to her feet and brushed sand from her skirts. She sensed every half-glance and head turning to watch her. She was of the Alcmaeonidae family. To see her without trappings of wealth and power, without guards or slaves or high walls, was a little like seeing her naked. Heads bent to whisper and she firmed her jaw. Her children were running across the beach below, heading to one brown mark in a line of dead men. She nodded to herself and saw a path that would take her down to them. Perhaps the dog lived. The children needed something to celebrate. They all did.

Themistocles watched. He had risked his life and his entire crew to land a single lad, the carpenter’s boy, fresh and unwounded and full of importance for the task entrusted to him. Without a small boat for the task, they’d considered rowing the galley right onto a beach. By then, though, Persian soldiers swarmed like hornets around their king – and like hornets, they would attack anyone they saw as a threat. The simple problem had seemed impossible for a while, until the carpenter showed Themistocles a slim cedar box that could be sealed in wax, the whole thing heated and smoothed into a shell. The boy could swim and, by Poseidon, they all knew that shore and the best places to land. Themistocles had lowered the lad into the water with a pack roped to one arm so that it bobbed in the waters behind him.

They’d pulled back into the strait then, his rowers still gasping from their labours. Themistocles let the trierarch keep watch for threats. His own attention was on the tiny figure of the running boy, heading towards the most powerful man in the world, as Xerxes sat in his pavilion and Athens burned behind him.

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