About noon he set sail again.The wind sat in the north-east, but the wall of Pelion turned it into a light stern breeze which carried him swiftly westward.The four slaves, still leg-weary and arm-weary, lay like logs beside the thwarts.Two slept; one munched some salty figs; the fourth, the headman, stared wearily forward, with ever and again a glance back at his master.But the Lemnian never looked his way.His head was on his breast, as he steered, and he brooded on the sins of the Hellenes.He was of the old Pelasgian stock, the first bords of the land, who had come out of the soil at the call of God.The pillaging northmen had crushed his folk out of the mainlands and most of the islands, but in Lemnos they had met their match.It was a family story how every grown male had been slain, and how the women long after had slaughtered their conquerors in the night."Lemnian deeds," said the Hellenes, when they wished to speak of some shameful thing: but to Atta the shame was a glory to be cherished for ever.He and his kind were the ancient people, and the gods loved old things, as those new folk would find.Very especially he hated the men of Athens.Had not one of their captains, Militades, beaten the Lemnians and brought the island under Athenian sway? True, it was a rule only in name, for any Athenian who came alone to Lemnos would soon be cleaving the air from the highest cliff-top.But the thought irked his pride, and he gloated over the Persians' coming.The Great King from beyond the deserts would smite those outrageous upstarts.Atta would willingly give earth and water.It was the whim of a fantastic barbarian, and would be well repaid if the bastard Hellenes were destroyed.They spoke his own tongue, and worshipped his own gods, and yet did evil.Let the nemesis of Zeus devour them!
The wreckage pursued him everywhere.Dead men shouldered the sides of the galley, and the straits were stuck full of things like monstrous buoys, where tall ships had foundered.At Artemision he thought he saw signs of an anchored fleet with the low poops of the Hellenes, and sheered off to the northern shores.There, looking towards Oeta and the Malian Gulf, he found an anchorage at sunset.The waters were ugly and the times ill, and he had come on an enterprise bigger than he had dreamed.
The Lemnian was a stout fellow, but he had no love for needless danger.He laughed mirthlessly as he thought of his errand, for he was going to Hellas, to the shrine of the Hellenes.
It was a woman's doing, like most crazy enterprises.Three years ago his wife had laboured hard in childbirth, and had had the whims of labouring women.Up in the keep of Larisa, on the windy hillside, there had been heart-searching and talk about the gods.
The little olive-wood Hermes, the very private and particular god of Atta's folk, was good enough in simple things like a lambing or a harvest, but he was scarcely fit for heavy tasks.Atta's wife declared that her lord lacked piety.There were mainland gods who repaid worship, but his scorn of all Hellenes made him blind to the merits of those potent divinities.At first Atta resisted.There was Attic blood in his wife, and he strove to argue with her unorthodox craving.But the woman persisted, and a Lemnian wife, as she is beyond other wives in virtue and comeliness, excels them in stubbornness of temper.A second time she was with child, and nothing would content her but that Atta should make his prayers to the stronger gods.Dodona was far away, and long ere he reached it his throat would be cut in the hills.But Delphi was but two days' journey from the Malian coast, and the god of Delphi, the Far-Darter had surprising gifts, if one were to credit travellers' tales.Atta yielded with an ill grace, and out of his wealth devised an offering to Apollo.So on this July day he found himself looking across the gulf to Kallidromos bound for a Hellenic shrine, but hating all Hellenes in his soul.A verse of Homer consoled him-the words which Phocion spoke to Achilles."Verily even the gods may be turned, they whose excellence and honour and strength are greater than thine; yet even these do men, when they pray, turn from their purpose with offerings of incense and pleasant vows."The Far-Darter must hate the hubris of those Hellenes, and be the more ready to avenge it since they dared to claim his countenance."No race has ownership in the gods," a Lemnian song-maker had said when Atta had been questioning the ways of Poseidon.
The following dawn found him coasting past the north end of Euboea in the thin fog of a windless summer morn.He steered by the peak of Othrys and a spur of Oeta, as he had learnt from a slave who had travelled the road.Presently he was in the muddy Malian waters, and the sun was scattering the mist on the landward side.And then he became aware of a greater commotion than Poseidon's play with the ships off Pelion.A murmur like a winter's storm came seawards.He lowered the sail, which he had set to catch a chance breeze, and bade the men rest on their oars.An earthquake seemed to be tearing at the roots of the hills.
The mist rolled up, and his hawk eyes saw a strange sight.The water was green and still around him, but shoreward it changed its colour.It was a dirty red, and things bobbed about in it like the Persians in the creek of Sciathos.On the strip of shore, below the sheer wall of Kallidromos, men were fighting-myriads of men, for away towards Locris they stretched in ranks and banners and tents till the eye lost them in the haze.There was no sail on the queer, muddy-red-edged sea;there was no man on the hills: but on that one flat ribbon of sand all the nations of the earth were warring.He remembered about the place: Thermopylae they called it, the Gate of the Hot Springs.The Hellenes were fighting the Persians in the pass for their Fatherland.
Atta was prudent and loved not other men's quarrels.He gave the word to the rowers to row seaward.In twenty strokes they were in the mist again...
