With the sun warm on his neck, he glanced over the sea as it appeared to widen before him – and missed a step, knocking into the man ahead, so that he cursed and stumbled. Some of the others were already pointing and drawing attention to the ships out there. Xanthippus swallowed drily, wishing the water boy had not gone running back.

There was a fleet out on the dark waters. They were not the sleek vessels of Eretria and Athens, nor even the lesser craft of Sparta. For any man who had grown up in a seaport, the ships were instantly strange, alien. The flags that streamed from them bore odd symbols and letters none of them knew. They moved in sluggish beats, with rowers heaving at their stems on both sides. The dimensions too were wrong, with heavy, wide decks. Xanthippus thought they would handle poorly in a swell, though perhaps they avoided the four months of winter when only madmen and suicides ventured out onto the deep. Most traders kept the coast in sight even in the summer months. Yet these were warships, carrying an army. There were just too many for them to be anything else.

The path the column marched took them close to the edge of the sea-cliffs before it began to wend its way back. Xanthippus tried to count more ships than he had ever seen before. His eyes were good, though the vessels shifted and blurred into the distance, making it impossible. It was like asking a boy to count soldiers, he thought wryly. How many of those tiny specks were triremes heading away from dropping armed men? How many were heavy-laden still? Were they landing horses for cavalry? Stone blocks for fortifications, weapons for the men? The ships moved, confounding every attempt to count them – and then the marching line was heading away from the sea, the sense of scale vanishing as they wound their way inland once again, step by step.

Xanthippus felt the drop in temperature as he passed through the shadow of the cliffs, but it went almost unnoticed. The chatter and nervous laughter in the column had fallen silent as every man there considered what such a vast fleet must mean. They were two hours or so from encountering the army those ships had dropped, fresh from victory and violence in Eretria, across the strait.

Xanthippus felt those around him looking over. Men needed to be reassured, or their nerve could fail. He considered his own dread. Perhaps he needed it too. It was one thing he had seen Themistocles do well. The thought made Xanthippus smile for the first time that day. No. He would not laugh and pound his friends on the back as Themistocles did. He would not call them appalling names that might have led to knives being drawn for anyone else. That could never be his style. Yet Xanthippus still sensed their eyes on him. He knew Aristides would have spoken to them, calming their nerves. They were not the golden automatons said to serve in Olympia, creations of metal made to cater to every whim of the gods. No, these were ordinary men, with fear coiling in their stomachs as if they had swallowed a viper.