The Great King by Christian Cameron

exact scent of a charcoal fire, and the very first grey light of pre-dawn showed me the coast. I ran along it for an hour as the sun rose, and I became increasingly sure that it was Zacynthus. I’d run down that coast only three weeks before. I was almost sure, and the oarsmen were openly begging us to land, when I saw the temple of Poseidon at Hyrmine gleaming on the opposite headland. Brasidas confirmed it, and the newer oarsmen looked as if they’d been granted a new lease on life.
    Sekla slapped my back. ‘A brilliant piece of navigation.’ He grinned.
    I shrugged. ‘Vasileos would have put the bow into the mouth of the Alpheos,’ I said.
    Megakles just smiled, as Laconic in his fisherman’s way as Brasidas. But his smile was good praise. I was pleased. And before the men were too hungry, we landed on an open beach, bought sheep, sacrificed Melitan wine to Poseidon and a good cup too, and sacrificed the animals. We had a feast on the beach, and the new oarsmen kissed the sand, and the older oarsmen teased them.
    But the shepherds were men of Elis, and they confirmed that the games started in four days.
    We were still full of mutton while we pulled around the point and into the very narrow estuary of the Alpheos. There were a dozen merchantmen and almost forty triremes pulled up on the narrow pebble beach. Olympia nestles amidst mighty mountains, and the mountains seem to reach right down to the sea, as does Kitharon at home, and the beaches are steep and narrow and difficult.
    Despite which, my heart fairly leaped with joy to see Cimon’s Ajax and Paramanos’ Black Raven and Harpagos’s Storm Cutter and all the other ships we’d lost in the storm.
    I waited for the men of Elis to choose me a landing place, and I enjoyed seeing the alterations they’d made to the beach. The hand of man can alter almost anything. That year was the seventy-fifth Olympiad, and the people of Elis had had three hundred years to make the landing area as comfortable as possible. Hellenes made the pilgrimage from Ionia and from Italia and Magna Greca and Sicily and as far as Massalia in the west and Ephesus and Sardis in the east, from Thrace and from Chacedon and from everywhere in Boeotia and Attica and the Peloponnesus. And for a moment, as I looked over the shipping and the tents and booths, I thought of my son – my son, running his stades and throwing his javelins in far-off Sardis.
    And then my grand thoughts were ruined by the pair of Elisian factors demanding that I pay their outrageous landing fees. There may be an Olympic truce on war and strife, but there is none on greed, as I can attest. And it is fifty stades up-country into the mountains to Olympia, and I had thought to rent a horse, but I had to count my drachma – the prices were exorbitant, and I was feeding two hundred men.
    My mother was sometimes a harridan, a harpy, an old drunkard. But she had the soul of an aristocrat, and she did teach me one valuable aristocratic lesson – there is a time to pinch pennies, and a time to let the gold flow through your fingers. A man is lucky if he attends the Olympics once in his life. I don’t mean Spartans, or men of Argos – with a little effort, they can make the trip every year. But for a Boeotian, it is a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity – at any rate, I was on the beach, and I wasn’t going to be dissuaded.
    On the other hand – I had two hundred men trained to a high pitch, and I saw no reason not to use that training, so we stripped the ship, made packs, and marched up-country carrying our own shelter and all of our amphorae of wine. I spent my Illyrian loot freely, but we camped rather than renting flea-ridden lodgings. When we arrived on the plain of Olympia below the temple complex, a pair of priests emerged from the town and led us to a site where we could camp. I asked after Cimon and the priest smiled – he was a pleasant fellow – and nodded.
    ‘Lord Cimon is present. The Athenians are on the other