Artaphernes followed us on to the plains, but now he had Lydian cavalry and some Medes, and they harried our retreat. We had bought Aristagoras a day, only for him to squander it like the fool he was. And so, just two days later, while my wounds were still un-healed and the aches from the fight at the pass were at their height, he forced us to battle.
Aristagoras arrayed us. He hated the Athenians by then, and he was visibly afraid – a traitor in a losing rebellion. Eualcidas didn't hide his contempt, and Aristagoras retaliated like any petty tyrant, by putting us on the left and questioning our courage. He put his Milesians on the right, opposite the Medes, and he put the Ephesians in the centre with the Chians and the Lesbians. He set the lines in full view of Artaphernes. The satrap responded by moving his best infantry – Carians, who later joined the rebellion – against us. Unlike Aristagoras, Artaphernes never believed his own propaganda. He knew that the Athenians and the Euboeans were the most dangerous.
Aristagoras set our lines in the late afternoon of the second day after the fight in the pass. We stood in our places until the shadows were long, and then we walked back to our fires and ate. I didn't have a slave, but Cleon's slave, a surly Italian boy, made me stew and took my coppers with carefully hidden delight.
Eualcidas and I sat together after we ate. Most men thought us lovers. Perhaps, if things had gone otherwise, we might have been lovers, because he was Patroclus in every way that mattered, and perhaps I was Achilles. At any rate, we sat and talked, and other men came and sat with us – not just Athenians or Euboeans, either. Epaphroditos came with some men of Lesbos, and there were Chians and even Milesians around that fire. We drank wine and Eualcidas's singer – he had a rhapsode – gave us a thousand lines of the Iliad. His son sang another poem, and Stephanos came, clasped my hand and drank wine with me.
Men treated me differently. I liked it. I liked being lord. I was a hero, and other heroes accepted me as such. We lay on sheepskins and listened to the Iliad and drank wine, and life was good.
Here's a truth for you, thugater. War is sweet, when you are one of the heroes.
Late in the evening, Archilogos turned up. He stood in the firelight until I saw him. I rose and went to embrace him, but he held his hand between us.
'We are not friends,' he said.
I remember nodding. I understood then, perhaps for the first time, that it was not possible for us to be friends and for him to retain his place in the world.
'I heard that you had the name of a hero,' he said. 'That you slew ten Medes in combat.'
I nodded.
He smiled, but only for a moment. 'Damn it, Doru! Why did you fuck my sister? We could have been brothers! My father loves you!' I reached out again, but he turned his head away.
'Pater intends to prosecute you in the courts,' he said. 'Aristagoras pretends he does not know what happened, but he has suggested that we revoke or deny your manumission and have you taken as an escaped slave. Neither Pater nor I will accept this.' He crossed his arms. 'Why?' he asked me, and suddenly he was angry. He had come to talk – but I had ruined his life, or so he reckoned it.
I knew that a shrug might start a fight. 'I don't know,' I said carefully.
'Was it because of Penelope?' he asked, his face towards the new moon.
I tried to reach him. 'The – the first time, I thought that she was Penelope.'
That made him turn. 'I didn't even know that you and Penelope were – anything,' he said.
'Yes you did. You just forgot – because you were the master and I the slave,' I said. Then I shrugged. 'Penelope liked you better. And like all of us, she wanted her freedom.'
'She's pregnant,' he admitted. 'I'll free her. And see to it she has employment. Mater will take her to weave.'
'She'll like that,' I said.
'My fucking sister will marry Aristagoras. Oh, he's a worm,' Archi spat.
'She – plans. She makes plans and then carries them out.' I decided that anything I said would make things worse. We were having a conversation, but it was a fragile thing, like a spiderweb in a flood.
'Why does she want to marry him?' Archi asked.
I paused again. Perhaps it was three days with Eualcidas, but I wanted to watch my words carefully. 'Part of her believes she deserves no better,' I said. 'Part of her wants a man she can control.'
'Which were you?' he asked. He was angry now. I had not given the right answer.
'Both,' I admitted.
He took a deep breath. 'If we win tomorrow…' he said, and my hopes rose. Because despite all my talking to your fine people about heroism, what I really wanted back was my family – that house in Ephesus, and daily lessons with Heraclitus.
'Yes?' I asked.
'Run,' he said. 'Run far. And don't let Aristagoras catch you.' He threw his chlamys over his shoulder. 'I wish I'd been there – in the pass.'
'Me, too.' That's all I could say. It was true. I knew my former master. He, too, had it in his soul. He would have run all the way into the Medes, or died trying.
He walked away.
I let him go.
I still think about it. I've changed that conversation a thousand thousand times, said better things, chased him and wrestled him to the ground.
That's not what happened, though.
Maybe, if I had, a great deal of pain might have been averted.
I never promised you a happy story, thugater. In the morning, we formed early. I was in the front rank now, and for the first time I could see the whole army. The Athenians were on a slight hill, with the remnants of an old town under our feet. I rested my shield on the edge of an old wall buried in the ground. This had been a village with a tiny acropolis a thousand years ago, I could see. Then I looked south along our lines, and I could see what a worthless army we were.
No two contingents would form together, except the hereditary enemies from Athens and Euboea. The rest of them were in little regiments, and their lines weren't even level. Aristagoras had put his Milesians slightly in front, to show us all how brave they were, and every time another contingent tried to match shields with them, he'd shuffle a few paces forward.
Aristides put us up on our little hill. He placed Eualcidas and his men on our right. They had a talk, and then Aristides came over and pointed behind us. 'If the army breaks,' he said, 'we go north. We can go all night and reach the estuary in the morning, and let the Medes catch the locals.' He shrugged.
Heraklides pointed at the Lydian cavalry who were coming up on Artaphernes' left – so they'd come at us. 'Why don't we just leave now?' he asked.
Aristides shook his head. 'Because no man will say that the Athenians ran first.'
Behind me, Cleon spat. 'I'll die knowing that I gave my life so that my city had a good reputation with the fucking Ionians,' he said. 'They already hate us. Let them do the dying.'
These sentiments were widely echoed, but Aristides ignored them, and we stood our ground while the Carians came and formed against us.
They glittered. Not for nothing did the Medes call them the men of bronze. They had more armour than any men I'd ever seen, and every man in the front rank had a bronze corslet and greaves, and most had thigh pieces and armlets and some had cuffs of bronze and even bronze foot armour that covered their sandals. Their shields were faced in bronze, and they were big men. I've always hated fighting men who were bigger than me.
Artaphernes rode up and down his line, and they cheered him, even though he was the foreign overlord. He had more Ionian Greeks in his army than we had in ours, I'd wager.
Aristagoras didn't give a speech. We stood around all morning and then, just before midday, the Milesians sang their Paean and went forward.
The rest of the rebels went forward, too, but they did it by fits and starts, and the left hung back. Aristides didn't seem in a hurry to leave our hill.
The Lydian cavalry rode forward at a brisk trot, determined to flank our phalanx and rip us apart. I watched the cavalry and I feared them. Greeks don't have much cavalry, and we aren't always good at standing against it.
But Aristides had done his job, and over on the flank of our hill there were orchards and vineyards – small, but walled – and all our slaves and skeuophoroi were inside those walls. They ripped into the flanks of the cavalry with slings and javelins, and the Lydians didn't stay to fight. They turned and rode off. I've always thought that the fatal flaw with cavalry is the ease with which they ride away.
Then the Carians came forward. From my ripe old age, I now suspect they had intended to hit us while the cavalry chewed our flanks to ruin, but as with most plans that require men to cooperate on a battlefield, they screwed it up, so that the men of Caria came forward alone.
Aristides came and said a few things. They sounded good, and we cheered him, but all I could see was that wall of bronze coming at us, and how big the Carians were. I didn't feel like a hero at all – I kept waiting for that wonderful feeling to come, and it wouldn't come.
'When they reach the foot of the slope,' Aristides said, finally, 'we will sing, and go forward into them.'
I could see that this surprised the men around me, and that meant it would surprise the Carians. We had a nice secure hilltop, and they had to climb to us in the sun.
'Fuck,' Cleon said behind me. 'Look at that.'
We all stopped watching Aristides and looked south instead. We had a superb view of the battlefield, so we were able to watch as the Milesians broke and ran.
They had never even reached the Persian lines.
Aristides stared at them with disgust.
The Carians would have done better to give us a few minutes. We'd have marched away. The battle was over. Our strategos was already running.
Instead, they did as they'd been ordered and came forward.
'We beat them, and then we get out of here,' Aristides said. Then he gave orders for something we'd practised but never actually done in combat. 'Rear-half files!' he cried. 'Close to the front! March!'
We formed a dense wall – what Spartans call the synaspismos, where we put shield on shield. But we were only half as deep – only four men instead of eight.
As soon as we formed close, we raised our voices and sang, and we moved down the hill.
In many ways, this was my first fight in a phalanx. Oh, I know – it was my fourth or fifth, but in all the others I'd been at the back, and the fighting had broken up quickly, or I'd been alone, as in the fight at the pass.
This time, both sides fought like lions.
When you are in the front rank, there's an instant just before the lines close when a skilful man can hurt his opponent with a spear thrust. Once the lines come together, there's no fine spear-fighting – you just thrust as fast and hard as you can until the shaft breaks, and then you draw your sword.
I had two spears – most of us had a pair, balanced for throwing, with long leather thongs. When we were five paces apart, I stepped forward with my left foot in time to the Paean and threw my first spear. Most of us did, and two hundred heavy spears crashed into the Carians as their spears came right back at us. If the pounding of the Medes' arrows had been like the fall of hail on my shield, the jar of a Carian spear was like being hit with a log.
I had my second spear in my hand in the last three paces. I remember being pleased at how well I threw and changed hands, and I stepped forward, planted my foot and thrust overhand, diagonally right.
We crashed into their front and they stopped us dead. And we stopped them.
My spear went in under the Carian's helmet and he went down.
I let the spear go. I was locked up against a big man and his spear was over my right shoulder, trying to kill Cleon. Ares, that press was close! We were doubled up, and we had the hill behind us. They had armour and size.
No one gave a foot.
I got my sword from under my arm and I thrust under my shield, because the crush was too close for a cut. The point glanced off his thigh armour and I thrust again and again, and finally – gods, it seemed to take for ever – I got the blade around his out-thrust leg and cut his sinews and he went down.
I raised my sword up over my head in the single breath before his file-mate slammed his shield into mine. I cut at his helmet and scored, shearing off part of his crest and slamming the helmet against his cheek. He stumbled and I pushed into his shield – and he fell, tripping over his mate, and quicker than thought my sword went left and right at waist level or a little below. I cut at their buttocks and the backs of their legs – back-cut, fore-cut – and then the third-ranker got past the tangle into me, and I hammered my sword into his helmet. He had no crest and his helmet rang and I hit him again. He dropped his spear to get at his sword and Cleon put his spear right into the tau of his faceplate – a magnificent thrust.
I knew my job – and now I felt the power. I roared and pushed past the dying man, slammed the fourth-ranker with my shield and back-cut at the third-ranker without even looking at him, so that my sword broke on his helmet, but he went down, probably unconscious.
Cleon thrust over my shoulder and I took his spear. He let go and I started fighting with it, and he must have got another from the men behind him, because when that spear broke he gave me another.
They were pushing away from me now, the fourth- and fifth-rankers in the Carian host. None of them wanted to face me and I began to hurt them, sniping against their thighs and necks with accurate spear thrusts. A killer like me is most dangerous when no one will face him. Never give a man time to plan his hits, or he'll reap a whole rank.
I didn't kill them. I just made them bleed and they fell. No one is brave with the red flowing from an open vein.
Beside me, Aristides and Heraklides and all the files on either side of mine pushed forward into the hole I was cutting, and they pushed.
And then, as suddenly as the storm of bronze had begun, it was over. The pressure on my chest faded and then it was gone. The dust rose and I punched my borrowed spear at a man as he turned away, knocking him sprawling without killing him. As I stepped over him, he tried to roll and get his shield up, but I put my spear point into the unguarded spot at the top of his back and it grated on his spine and he thrashed like a gaffed fish, dead already and alive enough to know it.
Cleon grabbed one of the wings on my scale shirt that covered my shoulders and tugged.
'Let's go!' he said.
The whole Athenian phalanx was turning away into the dust. The Carians were running, and we were running, too – unbroken, but we knew what was coming.
I wanted to run every fucking Carian down and kill them. They were just men, under all that bronze, and now that the power was on me I wanted to punish them for making me afraid.
That's how men feel when the enemy breaks – for a little while, they all become killers, and many husbands and fathers die before they regain their wits and realize that the enemy is running and they can sit down and revel in victory.
Men are fools.
Cleon was not a fool, and he'd held my back like a champion in story and probably saved my life. So when he turned uphill, I followed him and we moved fast, up through the dust and over the hilltop, and then down the other side, heading north.
I stopped at the top and looked south. Even through the rising swirls of battle haze, I could see that the whole Greek army was in flight. In the centre, where Artaphernes stood with his bodyguard against the Ephesians, the great Eagle of Persia shone like the sun and the Ephesians ran like frightened children.
I looked back over my shoulder and saw the Lydian cavalry moving forward.
I called a warning to Aristides and got back in my place. We trotted along together, down the old acropolis and out on to the plain, then around a farm pond.
Aristides shouted and we turned. There was a moment of confusion and then our shields locked – and the cavalry turned away, throwing spears.
Six times we turned and stood our ground. The last time, I'd had enough, and as they turned to run, I broke from the front of the phalanx and ran after them. They were contemptuous of us and the dust was high, and I caught my man before he'd even begun to ride away. My spear killed his horse, and then I put my point in his eyes as he lay under the animal. Other horsemen began to turn to come back, and that was their error. Aristides charged them, the whole Athenian phalanx changing directions like a school of fish, from prey to predator in a heartbeat. The Lydians wrestled to control their horses and we must have killed fifteen or twenty of them before they broke away.
The first Lydian I killed had gold on his sword strap, and Cleon helped me pull it over his head. Then I saw the sword, and it was a fine weapon – a long leaf-blade, thin near the hand and wide and sharp near the point. See – there it is on the wall. Take her down – that's my raven's talon. Her blade snapped on me later and I got her a new one. Same scabbard – long story there, she took some time to come back to me once, like an angry wife.
Touch that blade, honey. Fifty men's lives fell across that edge. Aye, maybe more. That Lydian had a good sword and a good horse and later I heard that he was a good man – a friend of Heraclitus, more's the pity, but Ares put him under my hand and I took him. He thought we were beaten and he and his mates died on our spears.
And then we got back in our ranks and scampered off.
We went ten stades at something like a run, and then we stopped. It was mid-afternoon, and the sun was still high. We drank water – we'd run clear and we were safe enough.
The Euboeans were weeping.
Eualcidas had fallen, and they had left his body. I never heard how it happened. He must have gone down in the first moments of the fight against the Carians, because that's when mistakes happen. And when we turned to run, no one was quite sure he'd been hit. The Euboeans took more casualties than we did, and perhaps all the men around him died, too.
But the shame of leaving his body to be spoiled was more than could be borne.
Aristides, for all his nobility, couldn't understand what they were talking about. We'd lost two dozen men in the fight, and we were leaving them so that we could run for our ships. To Aristides, base as that was, abandoning the corpses was the price of saving his command, and he was never a man to put his own honour above the saving of his men – which is why we loved him.
But the Euboeans began to shout, and they were weeping, as I said.
'Will the Medes accept a truce to bury the dead?' Heraklides asked.
Aristides shook his head. 'We're rebels against the Great King,' he said. 'Artaphernes won't accept a herald from us.'
Men started to look at me. I don't know who started it – but soon a dozen heads were turned my way, and I knew what was expected. It's the most unfair part of high reputation – once you choose to be a hero, you have no choice in the matter.
I reslung my new sword until I liked the way it hung, and hefted my borrowed spear. 'I'll go and fetch him, then,' I said. 'Shall I?'
I could see it all cross Aristides' face. I wasn't a citizen – I didn't count against his numbers. My loss was – acceptable. And yet, he was a truly noble man.
He came over to me. He kept his voice low. 'We all saw you,' he said. He meant, we all saw you shatter the Carians. His eyes rested on mine. 'Say the word, and I will forbid your going.' He meant, if I wanted out, he'd provide me with an excuse. That, my fine young friends, is nobility.
Damn, he was a good man. A man who understood men like me. And remember, he stood in the front rank five or six times – not because he loved it, but because it was his duty. He was brave. Because he didn't love it. Oh, no.
But I shook my head. 'I'll go,' I said. 'Give me two slaves to carry the body.'
Cleon volunteered his Italian, and the Euboeans pushed forward their hero's Cretan boy. He was weeping.
I took a deep breath, searching for the power of combat and finding nothing. I didn't even want to walk to the ships, much less turn and go back ten stades. I had no plan and no idea what I was up against.
But I knew my role already – Eualcidas had taught me. So I shrugged as if it was nothing. 'I'll meet you at the ships,' I said, trying to sound reassuring, grand and noble.
I had taken three paces when Aristides caught me and embraced me. Our breastplates grated together, his bronze thorax and my scales. And then Herk came up.
'Go straight to the river,' he said.
'How?' I asked. I wasn't really listening – I was trying to get my head around what I'd just said I would do.
He pushed an arm out and pointed down the long slope to the distant river. 'I'll set my rowers moving as soon as I get to the beach,' he said quickly. 'Go south with the body. I'll come to you. I swear it by the gods.'
Suddenly, it didn't seem so bad. It was still stupid and impossible – but Herk was going to come and rescue me. 'You're a fine man,' I said. 'No matter what I say about you when your back is turned.'
He laughed – we all laughed, the way heroes are supposed to laugh. And then I turned to the slaves. 'Let's go,' I said.
And we were off. The first thing I did was to tell the slaves that they were free as soon as we got that body to the ships. That changed their demeanour. Desperate mission, impossible odds – but if freedom was the reward, they were game. Heh – I was a slave, thugater. I know the rules.
We walked forward. I wasn't in a hurry – in as much as I had a plan, my plan was to lie low until dark and then go for the corpse. We made it back to the farm pond, and there were Lydian slaves burying the men we'd killed. We went around a thicket, well to the north of the corpses, and then we stopped in a copse of olive trees and had something to eat and drank some of the wine and water that the three of us carried – which, to be honest, was a fair amount. By now, I was afraid – afraid to turn around and quit, and afraid to go down to the battlefield.
The two slaves – Idomeneus and Lekthes – were not afraid. Idomeneus had been Eualcidas's bed-warmer, a beautiful boy with kohl on his eyelashes, but the muscles in his arms were like ropes, and he had wept for his master until the kohl ran down his face. He looked like a fury, or a mourner at a funeral.
Lekthes was a different kind of boy, short and squat and just growing into heavy muscle, with a thick neck and a pug nose. He was brave enough to give me lip when I told him to polish my armour, so I had some faith in him.
I was a famous warrior, and a hero. They believed in me, and I could see it in them, which made me braver. Sad, but true. I drank in their admiration, and when I'd had enough food and enough wine, we walked down into the darkening fields where vultures already ripped at the corpses.
The little acropolis was easy to find, and the Carians hadn't disturbed the bodies. They lay where they had fallen.
And then the task began. I'd expected – Hades, I don't know what I expected, but I think I'd wanted to fight fifty Persians and take the body by force. Instead, the three of us moved from ruined body to ruined body, turning each over to look at the man.
Don't ever go on a darkening battlefield.
Most of the bodies were already stripped. Imagine – we were forty stades from Ephesus, no one had come to bury the dead, but human greed was enough that every peasant in the area was hurrying to the battlefield to strip finger rings. Only the gold was gone – most men were still in armour, although here and there a good helmet was missing.
After we combed the hill once, I realized that I was looking for a bareheaded man. The human vultures would have stripped his high-winged helmet.
My hands were foul with old blood and ordure – most men soil themselves in death, and many spear wounds open a man's entrails anyway. I stopped to throw up, drank some wine and held my hands away from my face because they stank. And then I went back up the hill. This time, I tried to think like a philosopher. I found my own place on the battlefield, and then I reasoned where Eualcidas should have been, at the right-most point of his line. And then I walked down the hill, being Eualcidas in the half-dark.
I found him just as Idomeneus whistled. I had left the Cretan boy at the hill crest because he was weeping and because I'd decided that we needed a lookout. His whistle froze me, my hand on Eualcidas's shoulder. He was dead, with a clean stab through his throat-boll that had almost decapitated him.
Lekthe was a tough bastard, and he was right by me. 'Cavalry,' he said.
I glanced down at them. They were behind us, half a stade away. 'Strip him and put him on a stretcher,' I said. 'Use his cloak and some spears.'
He nodded.
I picked up a pair of spears – they were everywhere – and went uphill until I reached the Cretan kid. 'Go and help Lekthe,' I said.
'You – found him?' he asked.
I pushed him down the hill. Then I crouched by a rock – or perhaps the foundation stone of the old temple – and watched the Lydians. They weren't interested in me.
From the height of the hill, I could see a hundred other parties gathering wounded, and my hopes rose immediately. There were wounded men all over the field, of course. Why hadn't I thought of that?
In fact, the worst mistake I'd made was to come armoured and armed. Because the winners, as soon as the fighting ends, shed their kit and go and find their friends. Of course they do.
But I was not abandoning my arms. So I went down the hill and rooted among the dead men until I found one with his himation strapped inside his shield to pad his shoulder – older men do it – and I used the cloak to cover me. By then the slaves had the body on a couple of spears. I used one of my spears as a walking staff and discarded the other, and I made Lekthe carry my aspis on his back while Idomeneus carried his master's shield – a scorpion – on his own back.
And then, like a funereal procession, we walked down off the old acropolis and into the valley, heading for the river. I felt clever, brave and more than a little godlike.
Heh. The gods can smell hubris a stade away. Any of you young people ever been on a corpse field? Eh?
I'll take that as a no.
It is not quiet. We say 'as quiet as the grave', and it may be that once the soul has flown out of the mouth and gone down with the other shades, the grave is quiet, but a battlefield is a noisy place. The animals come to feast, the crows and ravens fight over the tastiest morsels, and men scream their last pain or defiance to the gods, until they cannot scream, and then they cough and pant and rattle.
Once dark falls, it is the worst place you can imagine.
May the gods preserve you from ever having to visit one in the dark or pass your last hours there, although I always expected it for myself. It unmans me just to think of it. Better a clean death in the heat of battle, so that the soul goes burning with the pure fire of strife to the logos, than the foul death amidst the carrion-eaters.
And women and children who have to go searching among the corpses for a father, a lover, a brother, a husband – by Hades, that is a cursed way to see a man for the last time, with the ravens picking at his eyes.
We walked down from the hill that the Athenians and Eretrians had held, and darkness fell as we made our way among the corpses. I didn't know it, but it wasn't so bad there, because the worst of the kills happen after one side runs – and we didn't run, and neither did the Carians, so there were not as many dead as there might have been.
It was down in the valley that the corpses became thick, and they were all Greek. Hades, but they were thick, honey. The darkness hid the worst of it, except for the sounds, but I still had to stop and retch when I saw a dog rooting inside the chest cavity of a man and his eyes seemed to move. The slaves saw and dropped the body. When I had finished retching I put my spear in the man's throat to make sure.
I think the slaves wanted to run away.
I didn't blame them, but I wiped the spear and then myself. 'If you won't carry him to the ships, I'll run you down and add you to the pile of bodies,' I said.
Neither of them met my eye. They picked up the spear-poles and we started off again, stumbling and cursing.
There were pinpoints of light in the dark, most of them in a clump to the west. We made to skirt around them, and ran into our first patrol.
I had assumed that the battlefield was empty except for scavengers and mourners, but of course the Persians, who organized everything in their lives, had patrols to keep the scavengers from the corpses of their own slain until the sun should rise again. I heard them in time, and the three of us lay flat. There was some moonlight, just enough to make the whole scene hazy and hard to see, like a foul dream. I lay there, the pale circle of my face hidden in my cloak, and listened.
All I could hear was a dying man at my side grunting. He tried to grab my elbow.
'Please?' he managed. The poor bastard had lain there for six hours or more. No water. I could smell his guts.
I elbowed him. Now I could hear footsteps.
'He-eh? He-eh?' the dying man said. And little grunts and mewls, like those a toddler makes.
'Camel-fuckers!' a Persian voice said. They were close. 'Come to loot our dead, the cowards. Effeminate boy-fuckers! I hate the Greeks. Run from a battle and come back to steal from the dead!'
The man ranted on and on, as men do after battles. I didn't know his voice.
'Shush, brother,' another voice said. 'Shush. Ahriman walks the dark. No man should curse here.'
'Heh-eh,' the dying man cried. He gave a convulsive jerk.
'What was that?' the first Persian said.
'Men take a long time to die. Come, brother. Keep walking. If I stop, I will have to start getting water for these poor bastards.' The second Persian sounded familiar. Was he someone I knew?
It didn't matter, because even Cyrus and Pharnakes would kill me if they took me, or so I thought.
'Boy-fuckers,' the man who was angry spat, and they walked off. I heard him stumble on a corpse, and he fell. 'Ah!' he cried. 'I am foul with the juices of his body.' His voice shook. 'I am unclean!'
The second Persian spent half the night reassuring him. He was a good man, that one. While he talked to his frightened brother, he emptied his canteen into two wounded men, and then he started killing them. I heard him, and though it sounds foul, I knew that he was no murdering fury, but a bringer of peace.
'Eh-eh-eh…' said the dying man at my elbow.
I looked at him, and he was younger than me – and kalos, even at the point of death, with big, beautiful eyes that wanted to know how his world had turned to shit. His skin, where it was not smeared with sweat and puke, was smooth and lovely. He was somebody's son.
I drew my short dagger, really my eating knife, from under my scale shirt where I keep it, and I put my lips by his ear.
'Say goodnight,' I said. I tried to sound like Pater when he put me to bed. 'Say goodnight, laddy.'
'G'night,' he managed. Like a child, the poor bastard. Go to Elysium with the thought of home, I prayed, and put the point of my eating knife into his brain.
Give me some fucking wine.
Oh, war is glorious, thugater. I dream of him. I never saw his face in the dark, you see. He could have been anyone. Any one of hundreds of men I've put down myself. Battlefields, sieges, duels, ship fights – all leave that wastage of dead and near dead, and every one of them was a man, with all of a man's life, before the iron or the bronze ripped the shade from him.
It's funny. I have killed so many men, but that one comes back to me in the dark, and then I drink more and try to forget.
Here, fill it. The Persians lingered and lingered, but at last the older one got his brother to walk away into the dark, and I picked myself up, found the two slaves and we headed west to avoid more Persian patrols.
West brought the sound of mourning. Here the Persians and the Lydians had reaped the Ionians like weeds at the edge of a field, cutting them down from behind as they fled. Now local women were out looking for their men, and fathers and children, with torches. The Persians didn't disturb them, and they thought we were more of the same – which we were, or close enough.
As the moon climbed, we could see the curved line of corpses like sea-wrack on a beach, and men and women desperately turning them, pushing torches down to look into a face. Grim work.
I knew Heraclitus by his voice. He was talking to a boy and the boy was weeping by his side. I couldn't help myself. I walked up to him in the dark and he raised his torch.
'Doru!' he said. 'You live!'
I threw my arms around him. I wept. I was no different from the younger Persian – I was unmanned by my reaction to the fight and then to the battlefield.
He let me cry for as long as my heart beat a hundred times – no longer. 'You are searching for him too?' he asked.
'I – I came for Eualcidas. Of Euboea.' My voice shook. 'Searching for who?'
Heraclitus nodded. He had a torch and it made his face look like a statue's. His eyes were pools of darkness. 'Hipponax fell here, trying to keep the line from breaking,' he said.
'Ah.' I choked. I remember that suddenly I couldn't breathe. The weeping boy was Kylix, the slave. 'Is Briseis here?' I asked.
'Don't be a fool,' Heraclitus said. 'News won't even be in the city yet.' More softly, he asked, 'Will you help me find him?'
'Put the body down and rest,' I said to the slaves. 'These are friends.'
Lekthes came and touched my arm to get my attention. He pointed to the river, which was clear, just a stade away in the moonlight. 'We are close, master,' he said.
He didn't want to risk his soon-to-be-accomplished freedom, he meant.
'Stow it,' I growled. I came back to Heraclitus. 'You fought?' I asked. I had a hard time picturing him in the phalanx.
'Do I look like a slave?' he asked. 'Of course I fought.' He reached out and touched my sword. 'This is a bitter night for me, Doru. And for you – I know.' His eyes were shadowed, but I knew he was looking over my shoulder. 'Help me find him,' he said quickly.
'Of course, master,' I said.
I found him in a matter of moments. I knew his bronze-studded sandals. I had put them on his feet often enough.
I sobbed to see that alone of the men at that part of the line, he lay with his face to the foe and he had a great wound in his side where a spear had gone in under his armpit where his rank-mate should have protected him. A Mede lay by his head, and Hipponax's spear point was stuck in the man's ribs.
I assumed that Hipponax was dead, but that was not his fate, or mine. I touched him to roll him over and be sure, and he flinched and then screamed.
That scream was the worst sound I had ever heard.
It happens sometimes, that a man will go down on the field – a blow to the head or a sudden cut, and the shock of it puts him under. But later he awakens to the awful truth – that he is almost a corpse, lying amidst pain, waiting to die.
That was Hipponax's fate. He had a second wound, a cut that had gone right into his leather thorax, so that his guts glistened in the torchlight and lay hidden under his body, and when he moved, the pain must have been incredible. But worse than the pain – I've seen it – is the realization.
When you see your guts in a pile, you know you are dead.
He screamed and screamed.
Have I not said that I loved him? If not, I'm a fool. He was more my father than Pater – with his humour and his slow anger, his sense of justice and his poetry. He was a great man. Even when I was a slave and he ordered me beaten – even when he threatened me with a sword – I loved him. I hated to leave him, and I knew that if I had not been exiled from his side, he wouldn't be screaming away the last heartbeats of his mortality amidst the ravens.
I got down in the bloody mud and put his head in my lap.
He screamed.
What could I do? I tried to stroke his face, but his eyes said everything. The unfairness and the pain. Remember that he never wanted war with the Great King. And yet he had fallen with his face to the foe and his spear in a Persian's guts, while worse men ran.
Have I mentioned the glories of war, thugater? Fill it to the top, and don't bother with water. All the way. All the way. When I give an order I expect it to be obeyed.
That's better.
Where was I?
Oh, I'm not even to the bad part yet. I told you how he screamed. You have heard women in childbirth – that's pain. Add to that despair – which most women, thank the gods, don't need to fear in childbirth – and that was his scream.
He'd been out, so his voice was fresh and strong.
After ten screams, I couldn't think.
After twenty screams, I stopped trying to talk to him.
Who knows how many times he screamed.
Finally, I put my knife under his chin. I hugged him close, and I kissed him between screams, and then I pushed it up under his jaw and into his brain. Heraclitus had told me once that this was the kindest stroke. I've done it often enough, and I know that it ends the screams the fastest. Cut a man's throat and he has to bleed out. I don't know how long I sat there. Long enough to fill my lap with his blood.
'You – killed him,' Archi said. His voice was surprisingly calm. I had no idea how long he had been standing there.
Heraclitus had his hand on my shoulder. 'You are a brave man,' he said to me.
'You killed him,' Archi said again. Now there was a lilt to his words.
'Archilogos.' Heraclitus stepped between us. 'We must take his body and go.'
Kylix came, still crying. He began to strip the armour from his dead master's body. Another of the house slaves was there – Dion, the water boy. No doubt he had come as Hipponax's skeuophoros. Together they rolled the corpse off my lap and stripped him. Idomeneus helped without being asked.
'You killed him,' Archi said, after the body was rolled roughly in a himation and laid across spears.
Heraclitus struck him – a sharp blow with his hand open. 'Don't be a fool, boy.' He turned to me. 'Your eyes are younger and sharper than mine. Can you lead the way?'
'YOU KILLED HIM!' Archi roared, and came at me. His sword was in his hand, and he cut at my head.
I drew and parried in one motion, and our swords rang together with the unmistakable sound of steel on steel.
It was dark, and the footing was bad. The only thing that kept him alive was that I wasn't fighting back. He made wild, savage sweeps at me and I parried them, and my new sword took the whole weight of his wide cuts and the blade held, notching his blade again and again.
He hacked at me and I parried, and Heraclitus finally tripped him with a spear and then rapped him on the head with the spear-butt.
But it was too late for us. Even as Archi slumped to the ground, half-stunned, the hoof-beats that I had half-heard while I blocked his savagery came closer, and suddenly we were surrounded by torches and Persian voices. They surrounded us efficiently, despite the bodies on the ground. Most of them had spears, and there were more than ten.
I knew Cyrus immediately, even mounted in the dark. He was giving orders.
'Hail, Lord Cyrus,' I shouted.
He pushed his horse forward past his companions and raised a torch. 'Doru? Why are you here – oh! Of course. You were looking for your master.' Cyrus slid from the horse's back. 'This is Hipponax – a fine man.'
'That's one of yours,' I said, pointing my sword at the dead Mede.
Cyrus held the torch back over his head so that he could see the ground.
'Darius,' he said. 'He didn't muster after the battle.'
More hoof-beats.
'Sheathe that sword or you are a dead man,' Cyrus said at my side.
I looked at him. I felt – perhaps I felt a hint of what Hipponax felt, awakening to pain and the knowledge that there was nothing to come but death. They would enslave me. No one on earth would pay a ransom for me, and I would not be a slave again.
So I smiled, or my face made an imitation of a smile. 'I think I'm a dead man anyway,' I said.
'Why?' Artaphernes asked from the dark. I knew his voice, too. 'Put up that sword.'
Heraclitus took my arm and stripped the sword from my hand as if I was a child. I had forgotten that he was at my side.
'Damn you,' I spat.
Artaphernes was on a white horse. He rode between the two close-wrapped corpses, Hipponax and Eualcidas. The wind was picking up, and the torches were snapping like angry dogs.
Oh, he owed me a life. But only a born nobleman expects the world to work like that – like an epic poem. A slave expects the instant revocation of every favour, every promise.
But Artaphernes was a different sort of man. He gestured to me. 'You,' he said. 'You are a rebel?'
Cyrus spoke up, and he was never a better friend to me than in that hour. 'Master, they came to retrieve the body of Hipponax, your guest-friend in Ephesus.'
It was obvious in the torchlight that I was wearing a scale shirt. 'You were in arms today, boy?' the satrap asked.
'Yes, lord,' I said.
He nodded. 'I have already declared an amnesty for all those taken in arms,' he said. 'No man will be sold into slavery or executed if he returns to his allegiance. I will punish only those who came from over the sea to attack my lands. The Athenians and their allies.'
I shrugged. 'I served with the Athenians,' I said. 'And you won't find another one to punish. They broke your Carians and then marched off to their ships.'
'Are you a complete fool?' Cyrus hissed in my ear.
'But you were born in the west. I remember you telling me so.' The satrap shrugged. 'Go home, boy. Tell them in the west that the Great King is merciful.'
He was going to let me go. I took the ring – his ring – off my hand and held it up to him. 'You repay my favour,' I said.
He shook his head. 'Gentlemen never repay,' he said. 'They exchange. Keep the ring. Go with your gods. Who is that other man?'
I knew he didn't mean the slaves. 'Heraclitus the philosopher,' I said.
Artaphernes dismounted. 'I have long wanted to meet you,' he said.
Heraclitus shrugged. 'You have the advantage of me, lord.'
'You were in arms today?' the satrap asked. He ignored the insult.
'Aye, lord,' Heraclitus said.
'Do you accept my amnesty?' Artaphernes asked.
Heraclitus bowed his head. 'I do not, lord.'
'Your name carries much weight,' the satrap said. 'Will you not speak to your fellow citizens?'
Heraclitus shook his head. 'No,' he said. 'No words of mine could sway the wind that blows now, lord. War, not reason, is master here. Too many men are dead.'
'Can we not stop before more die?' Artaphernes asked. 'There is nothing for you Greeks to fight for. We do not enslave you – you do that to yourselves. This freedom is a word – just a word. A Greek tyrant takes more from a city than one of the Great King's satraps ever would.'
Heraclitus grunted. He raised his face, and his tears showed in the firelight. 'The logos is but words,' he said. 'But words can take on the breath of life. Freedom is a word that breathes. Ask any man who has been a slave. Is it not so, Doru?'
'Indeed, master,' I said.
'Every man is slave to another,' Artaphernes said.
'No,' Heraclitus said. 'Your ancestors knew better.'
Artaphernes let anger master him. 'You have been held up to me as a wise man,' he said. 'As long as I have come here, men have told me of the wisdom of Heraclitus. Yet here I stand, surrounded by the stinking corpses of your friends. I offer to preserve your city, and you prate to me of freedom. If my men storm Ephesus, who among you will be free? Have you ever seen a city stormed?'
Heraclitus shrugged. 'My wisdom is nothing,' he said. 'But I am wise enough to know that war is a spirit that can never be put back in a wine jar once released – like the spirits of strife in Pandora's box. War is the king and master of all strife. This war will not end until everything it touches has been changed – some men will be made lords, and others will be made slaves. And when the world is broken and remade, then we can make peace.'
Artaphernes took a deep breath. 'Do you prophesy?' he asked.
'When the god is on me. Sometimes I see the future in the logos. But the future does not always come to pass.'
'Listen to my prophecy then, wise man. I will come in two days with fire and sword, and I predict that submission would be the wisest course.' Artaphernes remounted his horse. 'I desire to show mercy. Please allow me to do so.'
Heraclitus shook his head. 'Every woman whose husband lies here will demand vengeance,' he said.
'And their vengeance will be to spread their legs for my soldiers?' Artaphernes sighed. 'There is no Greek army in the world that can stand against the Great King. Go – use your head, philosopher.'
Heraclitus was wise enough to bow, instead of saying what came to his lips.
Cyrus came over to me. 'You are a fool,' he said. 'Ten times over. Why do I like you?' He embraced me. 'Do you need money?' he asked, with typical Persian generosity.
I shook my head. 'No,' I said. 'I have my loot from Sardis,' I added, with the foolishness of youth.
'Don't let me find you at the end of my spear,' he said. 'Walk in the light,' he called as he mounted, and then he followed his lord and they rode away into the darkness.
And just like that, the enemy left us with our dead.
The enemy. Let me tell you, friends – I never hated Artaphernes, not when he was ten times deadlier to me than he was that night. He was a man. Hah! It is fashionable to hate the Medes now. Well, many are better than any Greek you'll find, and most of the men who tell you what they did at Plataea or Mycale are full of shit. Persians are men who never lie, who are loyal to their friends and love their wives and children.
Aristagoras, now. I hated him. We walked down to the river together. We had no choice, because Heraclitus and I had to carry Archi, who was unconscious – so deeply gone that I had begun to fear that the teacher had hit him too hard.
We only carried him a stade, but it gave me a taste of what the slaves had endured all evening.
When we got to the water's edge, I realized that I had no plan past that point. As I stood there, my hand in the small of my back like an old man, panting from the exertion, I wondered where Herk could be and what I would do if he didn't come.
Heraclitus sat in the grass, catching his breath. He was not young, and he had stood his ground in the phalanx – or the mob, to be honest – and then helped carry the bodies. Now he was done. Too tired to move, or even be wise.
I left them in the false dawn, cold and desperate, and walked the riverbank a stade to the south and then back again.
Herk appeared just as the first streak of orange came to the sky. Every Persian must have seen his ship in the river, but no man stirred to challenge the triakonter.
I got my party aboard and fell heavily on to the helmsman's bench.
Herk was full of apologies. 'My ship wouldn't go far enough upriver. We had to row to Ephesus and take this pig of a vessel from the docks,' he said. 'Who are they?'
I shook my head. 'Men of Ephesus,' I said.
We took them downstream. I slept fitfully, and then the sun was scorching my face and I felt as if I had drunk wine all night. We took the boat to the beach below the city, where some jabbering fool insisted that we had stolen his ship until he saw the philosopher, and then he was silent.
That man aside, it was a silent city. The army was sprawled in exhaustion just upstream. A few panicked fools had made it home, however, and the city held its breath, waiting to find out how bad it might be.
We brought Hipponax home, and his son. I hired a pair of public slaves to carry Archi, and as we climbed up the town, my sense that this was an evil dream was heightened by the routine around me – men were rising to transact business, and slaves waited by the wells and fountains to fetch water.
At every little square, women came and asked us for news of their husbands, and I protested that I had served with the Athenians, and Heraclitus didn't speak. I think he knew, or had an idea, and even his courage was insufficient to meet the needs of telling a hundred wives that they were widows.
We didn't go quickly. The sun was high by the time we made the upper town and the steps to the Temple of Artemis gleamed white, like a stairway to Olympus. I began to think that Heraclitus would take me aside, awaken Archi and we would go and have lessons, and when I came back down the white steps, I would be a happy man, and Hipponax would meet me in the courtyard and ask me to fetch him a cup of wine. Time plays tricks like that – Heraclitus used to speak to us often of how, with age, a wise man begins to doubt the reality of what we imagine is time. It seems so possible that Hipponax, dead, is in the same place as Hipponax, alive and laughing.
Heraclitus used to tell us that time is a river, and that every time you dip your toe, the water it meets with is different – but that all the water that ever flowed over your toe is still there, all around you.
And then we came home. Euthalia met us in the courtyard, and she knew who was wrapped in the himation. She took charge of his body and her face was set and hard.
Archi had been conscious for half an hour by then. But every time he raised his head he retched. I offered him water, but he turned his head away from me.
Doubt the gods if you like, thugater, but never doubt the furies. I had sworn to protect Archi, and to protect Hipponax. But it was my knife that took his life, and that polluted me, and they took my friendship – almost my brother – as their price. Fair? There's no such thing, honey.
Nothing is fair.
Penelope came and she and Dion took Archi away.
I stood in the courtyard, waiting for Briseis.
She didn't come.
After a while, I left with Heraclitus. He offered to take me to his home, but I shrugged him off and went down the hill to where Aristides was camped, and I rejoined the Athenians.
The next morning I went back to the house, and Darkar met me in the portico.
'You are not welcome here,' he said. 'Go away.'
'How is Archi?' I asked.
'He will live. You killed Master? My curse on you.' Darkar slammed the gate on me.
The following day, as the Persian army came down the river and prepared a siege, I tried the house from the back, the slave gate. And I found Kylix. He embraced me.
'I told Darkar,' he said. 'I told him you did what you did from love, not hate.' He kissed me.
'Will you take a message to Briseis?' I asked him. He had always worshipped me.
He shook his head. 'She's gone!' he said. 'She is to marry the Milesian lord – Aristagoras. She has gone to his brother's house.'
'She will come back for the funeral,' I said.
Kylix shook his head. 'I doubt it. The things she said to her mother – Aphrodite, they hate each other.'
I had scribed some words on a piece of bronze. 'Give this to her if she comes.'
Kylix nodded and I gave him a coin. Worship is one thing – service another.
I walked back down the hill. That was the day that Eualcidas had his funeral games. We were a beaten army, but he was a great hero, a man who had triumphed at Olympia and stood firm on fifty battlefields. I felt sick and low, and I won only the race in armour. There was no hoplomachia, no fighting in armour. Stephanos won the wrestling, and Epaphroditos won overall and carried away the prize – a magnificent feathered helmet. Then we all drank until we couldn't stand, and we set fire to his corpse, and the two slaves were formally freed.
Epaphroditos stood by the fire with his arm around Idomeneus and tears streaming down his face. 'May I end as he did,' he said.
Stephanos shook his head. 'I'll take home and hearth, lord.'
I thought of the battlefield. 'He went fast, and in the fullness of his strength,' I said. I nodded. I was drunk.
Herk laughed and held out his hand for the wine. 'Don't camp on the wineskin, lad. When it's your turn – and you're one of them, I know that look – you'll think your time was too short. Me – I'm with the Chian boy. Home and bed, and all my relatives gathered around, arguing over the pile of silver I'm leaving.'
Cleon looked at the fire. 'I just want to get home,' he said.
I stood there, and loved all of them, but the one I wanted with me was Archi. And that door was still locked. Every man in the army knew me now, but I was not a captain or even an officer. So when they had their great conference, I did not go. Aristides went to speak for Athens, and he took Heraklides and Agios and another file-leader. Too many of the other leading men were wounded or dead.
They came back so filled with anger that it showed as they walked towards us on the road.
Aristides ordered the ships loaded. Then he summoned me. 'We're leaving,' he said. 'You served with me and you served well, but you are not one of mine. Yet I don't think I can leave you here. Aristagoras knows your name – what have you done that he hates you so much?'
I shook my head. 'It is a private matter,' I said. Had sex with his bride? But how would the fool ever learn that?
'Why are we leaving, lord?' I asked.
Aristides raised an eyebrow. Even in democratic Athens, men like Aristides are not used to being questioned by peasants from Plataea. 'Apparently, we abandoned the men of Miletus on the battlefield,' he said.
'Ares!' I said.
'Aristagoras is one of those men who not only lie to others but to themselves,' he said. And shrugged. 'I am not sorry to leave. Will you go to Athens?'
I took a deep breath. 'I think I'll go home, lord. To Plataea. Unless you would take me in service? As a hoplite?'
Aristides laughed. 'You are a foreigner. Listen, lad. Here you see me as a warlord with a retinue – but once I go home and lay my shield on the altar, I'm done – I'm just another farmer. I don't keep warriors. We're not Cretans – we're Athenians.'
Herk spoke up for me. 'We could find him work, lord,' he said.
Aristides shook his head. 'He's a killer, not a worker. No offence, lad. I would have you at my back in any fight. But I don't see you as a farm worker.'
I nodded. 'It's true.' I had to laugh. 'I could find a bronze-smith. Finish my training.'
Aristides looked interested. But Agios shook his head. 'You said that you knew Miltiades.'
I nodded.
Heraklides narrowed his eyes. 'I could take him. I have half a cargo for Byzantium, and I can get copper at Cyprus or Crete.'
Aristides shook his head. 'Herk, you'll make a profit off your own death.'
They both looked at me, and I was warmed by how much they both sought to do right by me. 'Lord, I think that it is time that I went home. I will not go to Miltiades,' I said.
'I will write you a letter,' Aristides said.
'Come with me anyway,' Herk said. 'I'll end up in Piraeus soon enough if Poseidon sends a good voyage – you'll make a few coins with me, and be the richer for it this winter at home.'
I was still afraid of going home. There's no easier way to put it. A few weeks with Herk seemed delightful – a respite. 'Yes,' I said. 'But I have sworn an oath, and I must see to getting my release.'
'We'll be off with the evening breeze,' Herk said. 'If you have goodbyes, say them.'
I ran up the hill.
I ran all the way to the gate, and then I knocked, and Darkar opened it, and I pushed past him into the house, until I found Archi. He had a bandage around his head.
'Get out of my house,' he said.
I had had time to think, and I spoke words I had considered. 'I am leaving,' I said. 'Aristagoras has cast the Athenians out of the army – the fool. I'll go with them.'
'Go!' he spat.
'But I swore to support you,' I said. 'And you need to get your family into ships-'
'Support me? The way you supported my father? And my sister? You are the fucking curse of this family!' He rose to his feet and then sank back, still woozy from his blow to the head.
'You have to get out of here!' I shouted at him. 'Pack the slaves and go! When Artaphernes takes the city-'
'I don't need any words from you!' he screamed.
'Have you freed Penelope yet?' I said, and he froze. 'Free her. You owe her. By Ares, Archi, get your head out of your arse.' I stood over him.
Darkar came back with two big slaves. I looked at them, touched my sword and they backed away.
'Go!' Archi said.
'Diomedes has not given up on revenge,' I said. I didn't know it – it came to me from the gods. 'Your father is gone and Briseis's idiot husband intends to hold the city against Artaphernes.'
'Scuttle off, cockroach,' he said. 'We will hold the city.'
I took a breath and let it out. 'I would stay, if you wanted,' I said. All my plans for careful speaking were gone, and I could only beg.
'So you can kill me?' he said. 'Or would you rather fuck me? Whichever way you choose to wreck me? Did you hate us so much? Did we treat you so badly? By Zeus, you must have lain awake plotting how to bring us down. Did you bring Artaphernes into the house, too?' Spittle was coming from his mouth. 'The next time I see you, I will kill you.'
I shook my head. 'I will not fight you,' I said.
'The better for me, then,' he said grimly. 'But your oath didn't protect my father and it will not protect me. Run far, Plataean.'
So much for friendship.
At the door, Kylix pressed a slip of papyrus – a single leaf – into my hand. Written in her hand, it said only 'stay away'.
So much for love.
When we sailed, the men of Chios and Miletus gathered on the beach to mock us as cowards.
There is no fairness, honey.
I thought that I was sailing away towards home – I hoped I was. But when we sailed out of doomed Ephesus, I was leaving home, and I wept. Part IV Scattering the Leaves The wind scatters the leaves on the ground, but the live timber burgeons with leaves again in the season of spring returning. So one generation will grow while another dies. Homer, Iliad 6.147