Xerxes trotted his mount towards them. Mardonius did come forward and knelt in the dust, his haunches in the air. Xerxes rewarded the man with a smile, gesturing for him to rise. Mardonius would not speak first, of course. It meant that silence stretched between them. Xerxes turned his horse in place while a breeze blew from over the waters.

His father had always found it easy to converse with such men, from the lowliest soldier in the ranks to a veteran general of thirty years’ experience, warriors of flint and dust and iron. If the old man’s spirit resided in him that morning, it was quiet. Xerxes felt he lacked the same ease of manner, retreating instead to formality and stern orders. Still, as long as they obeyed, it did not matter.

‘I am pleased, Mardonius,’ Xerxes said at last.

He waved a hand at the standing squares stretching into the far distance, but his gesture took in the bridge itself. He felt his breath catch as he saw both its importance and its fragility. What if another storm came while he was away? His army would be stranded. There were far too many for the mere land to feed. They were a capital city on the march, without half the chains of food and water that allowed such a city to survive.

It was a horrible image, of regiments slowly starving. He had used every old ship in the fleet for the first road and its replacement. The hulls he had employed all needed to be baled as it was, with slave boys living beneath the main causeway, working all day just to keep the seawater from rising. He thought he had heard their voices as he’d stood with the priests. If a storm battered them apart, or if the waters rose too fast and some of them sank, the great floating road might break again. He would …

‘Your Majesty? It will be all right,’ Mardonius said.

He had seen the sudden change of mood in the young king, as he had a thousand times before in the previous months. Xerxes worried about everything, where his father had been content simply to trust his wishes would be fulfilled. Perhaps it was the lot of a son trying to follow in his father’s greatness; Mardonius did not know. His own four sons were competent soldiers, rising in the ranks of the Immortals with very little supervision from their old man.

For a moment, Xerxes closed his eyes, overcome by the simple words from his general. He felt tears sting him and blinked them away.

‘What if the bridge sinks or breaks again, Mardonius? How will you come home then?’

‘When victory is ours? We’ll have the fleet, Majesty. If you wish, you could order those captains to form a bridge. If there was no longer any danger, no need for them at sea, you could have all our ships lashed together and planked over in days, weeks at the most. We could leave the masts in, perhaps, or cut down the cross-yards to use as …’