Killer of Men lw-1

by Christian Cameron

  I was in camp on an errand to Artaphernes, carrying a herald's staff for my master. Artaphernes had a tent in camp and a lavish establishment, and he was sometimes there and sometimes at our house, for reasons that were beyond me. When he was in camp, I was the herald, mostly because he liked me and I could get to him faster than other messengers.

  I was picking up a little Persian – camp Persian, hardly what anyone speaks at court. But I was there every day or two, and the delivery of a message to a satrap of Persia is never a simple or quick task, especially if there is an answer. One time I remember cooling my heels all day only to discover that the satrap was already at our house.

  At any rate, one day my four Persians were on duty outside the satrap's tent-palace, and after I showed them my staff, I entertained them by pretending it was a sword and doing my exercises, since I was missing lessons by running errands. And Darius – in those days, it seemed that all Persians were called Darius – called out and asked my name.

  'I'm Doru,' I said, 'companion to Archilogos, son of Hipponax.' I shrugged.

  'You have the wrist of a real swordsman,' Darius said. He took my herald's staff, a pair of solid bronze rods, and hefted it. 'I'd be hard put to do my cuts with this. Cyrus, try your sword arm on this toy.' He tossed my staff to his brother, who caught it.

  They were as alike as statues in a temple portico – skin the colour of old wood, jet-black hair and clear brown eyes, handsome as gods.

  Cyrus whirled my staff through some exercises – not my exercises, so I watched with fascination. He tossed it to me. 'Let's see you do that, boy!' he said.

  So I did. I copied his moves, interested in the differences, and all four Persians applauded, and after that we were all friends. They were easy men to like, and we fenced sometimes. They never used shields, which made them very different men to face. Cyrus also taught me a trick that has saved my life fifty times – how to kill a man with his own shield. Have you seen it?

  Here – you, scribe. Take that shield off the wall – I won't eat you – and put it on your arm. So you do know how to hold a shield – good for you. My opinion of you just went up. Now face off against me – damn this hip. Pretend you have a sword. Now watch, honey.

  Just like that, and I've broken his arm and killed him. Sorry, lad. You can get up now. Useful trick, eh? All I do is grab the rim of the shield and rotate it. There's no man born, no matter how strong, who can hold the centre of a wheel while I rotate the rim. Yes? This is based on a mathematical principle that I could explain if I was given enough wine, but for the moment, it suffices that it is true. And see how our pen-pusher's arm is in the porpax – that bronze strap across his upper forearm? So he can't escape his shield once I start to rotate the rim – and I break his arm.

  If he was a killer, he might gut me with his blade while I break his arm. If he isn't – and few men are killers, thank the gods – then I push his now helpless arm and shield rim into his face, smash his nose and he's dead. See? Cyrus taught me that, bless him.

  They were free-giving, hard-drinking men, and I grew to love them in two weeks. They seemed more alive than other men. More real. They fought duels all the time, cutting other Persians over fancied or real slights, over a misspoken word or a cold shoulder. They were dangerous dogs, and they bit hard.

  My status as a slave meant nothing to them, of course. To them, all Greeks were their slaves. Which rankled, but they were so far above me that I couldn't be offended at their attitude to the Ionians – an attitude I shared.

  At any rate, the summer passed with lessons and struggles. I was seeing an Aethiopian girl from a house as lavish as ours, the Lekthantae, hereditary priests and priestesses of Artemis, one of the noblest and richest families of the city. Salwe was tall and thin and dark like night, and while we never loved each other, she had a sharp mind and a vicious tongue and we entertained each other, in and out of bed. I loved going out to the Persian camp. I loved working through the ever more complex problems of geometry that Heraclitus gave me. I would sit in the fountain house – after Master lifted the ban – and sing on my lyre, and Salwe would sing with me, her voice capable of curious harmony that she said her people in Africa always sang. It was a good summer.

  The tyrants of Ionia were gathering in the houses of the upper town, and so we had dinner with Hippias again, and dinner with Anaximenes of Miletus, who had replaced the traitor Aristagoras as tyrant of Miletus. Aristagoras was reputed to have spoken that summer to the assembly of Athens, just as Hippias predicted, and to have been granted a fleet of Athenian ships to come and make war on the Great King in the name of the 'rebellion'.

  There was no rebellion. All the leaders of Ionia were in and out of our house, and the great cities – Miletus, Ephesus, Mytilene – were, if not solid in loyalty to the Great King, at least uninterested in revolt. Some men wanted war, but most of them were penniless exiles.

  It was odd, but as a slave, I probably knew more about what was happening than the satrap. I knew that on the dockside, where young men gathered when the ships came in from all over the Ionian, men spoke of Aristagoras as a hero and of Athens as a liberator. Gentlemen and rowers, seamen, small merchants – they were all fired by the idea of independence. But the nobles and the rich in the upper town were insulated from this talk, just as they were insulated from the gossip of their slaves.

  As the number of incidents between the Persian soldiers and the townspeople – and the sailors – mounted, Artaphernes was forced to confront the reality that there were people in Ephesus – many people – who viewed any Persian as a foe. And his soldiers didn't help. Darius and Cyrus thought nothing more comical than to separate a pretty Greek girl from her Ionian boyfriend – by a mixture of force and persuasion that, let's be honest, young women enjoy. Some young women. At any rate, multiply their efforts by a hundred, and there wasn't a Greek virgin left in the lower town to marry her behorned and already cuckolded man, and that is the fastest way to violence.

  The Persians were fastidious. They didn't rape and they didn't pick on slaves, the way Greek soldiers will. So the slaves didn't mind them. But the Greeks – the smallholders of the lower town – killed a few in ambushes, and then the swords were out all over town, and Artaphernes' troubles began in earnest.

  It wore him out. I saw him every day and ran messages for Mistress to him, offering him a remedy for headache or sometimes just carrying a verse or a flower. I liked running errands for my mistress, because she was kind to me, gave me money and it was an excuse to be in the women's wing. She favoured me, and she must have said something, because suddenly, after a year of forced parting, Penelope warmed to me again, and we were allowed to go out together on errands to the agora and to be together in private.

  This is what I mean, my honey, when I say that masters have effects on their slaves that they never intend. I don't think Hipponax ever intended that I never see Penelope again, nor, I think, did Mistress understand how far Penelope and I might go – or perhaps she knew exactly what was happening. In fact, even as I tell this, I wonder if she sought to end another liaison – one whose discovery hurt me more than anything.

  Anyway, it was on one of our errands together that I contributed unwittingly to the problems of the town. I was in the agora with Penelope – hand in hand – when a man clouted me in the head and sent me tumbling into the muck beneath the tanners' stalls. Penelope screamed. Once again, there were two attackers, but this time I was badly hurt. If my attackers hadn't been fools, I'd have died. One started kicking me and the other grabbed Penelope. In a crowded agora, that was a foolish move. She had a healthy scream and she bit him hard. Unlike a free-born girl, slave girls know just how to deal with attack. But I didn't see any of it, because my initial attacker had put his foot into my guts and I puked. He grabbed my hair – and then I was covered in blood.

  Cyrus killed both my attackers. It was the will of the gods that Cyrus and Pharnakes, his particular friend, were in the market, looking for trouble, and I provided i
t. They killed my assailants with the joy with which men do such things.

  But because there was a Greek lying on the ground and a screaming woman, many others in the agora jumped to the wrong conclusions. As I began to return to my senses, an ugly crowd was forming and Penelope was still screaming. She'd never seen a man's intestines before. Not her fault.

  I got to my feet and had the sense to offer my hand to Cyrus, and he had the sense to take it, mud and blood and all. Then I embraced Penelope, and she let me lead her away.

  'Best come with me, lord,' I said to Cyrus, and he and Pharnakes did as I suggested, like good soldiers. I led them up the hill and the crowd followed us for a few streets, but soon enough we got free.

  After that I was much more careful when I was out of the house. Diomedes wanted me dead. I had forgotten him. The very best revenge. His betrothal had been put off all summer, and I suppose he thought to take it out on me. I told Hipponax before he went off to Byzantium on a short cruise, and he told me that he would see to it.

  Cyrus told me that it was I who had saved his life, by leading them out of the agora, and not the other way around, and he treated me with courtesy and gave me more lessons. As the summer passed, my Persian got better, and by the time Hipponax returned from his ship, no one else had tried to kill me.

  The 'conference' went on and on. The tyrants were not willing to raise men for Artaphernes or to give the assurances he wanted. Nor were they awed by his soldiers. Most of them were islanders, and they had a hard time imagining the Great King's cavalry coming to their shores.

  Oft-times, when the guards admitted me to the satrap's presence, I would find him sitting with his head in his hands, staring at his work table. That's how bad the summer had grown, towards the end. Not that he was ever less than courteous to me, and he always paid me a compliment and gave me a tip. Even when he became my mortal foe, I never forgot his basic goodness. Artaphernes was a man. Some men are noble by nature, honey. He was one. Heraclitus once told us that the value of a man could be measured in the worth of his enemies. Well, if that's true, I was doing well.

  One day in late summer, I brought Artaphernes an invitation from my mistress for dinner. We walked back together – he usually rode, but this time he left his escort in camp, and all he had was my four friends in a loose knot about him. Twice he stopped to speak to common people with petitions. He was that kind of man.

  I waited on him at table, and Archi, who was suddenly tall and handsome, shared his couch and they talked together like old friends while Euthalia plied them both with fine food and too much wine. Kylix was mixing the wine as thin as he dared, but still all three were drunk in fairly short order. My four friends were in the kitchen with Cook and Darkar waiting on them. They were lords, but they were simple soldiers, and they weren't offended. We were having a fine evening. I went back and forth from kitchen to andron, and sometimes I'd carry a joke from the high to the low, or even back.

  Late in the meal, Hipponax came in. He'd taken a new ship to sea that morning to try her, and he was back early and none too happy with what he'd just seen.

  'There was a riot in the lower town,' he said.

  This was old news to me, and shows how little they knew, really.

  'Two of your men dead and five lower-class people – but citizens, damn it!' Hipponax shook his head. 'Artaphernes, you must send those soldiers away before you create the very climate you seek to avoid.'

  Artaphernes sat up on his couch. 'No man tells me what I must do,' he said quietly, 'except the Great King whose servant I am.'

  Hipponax smiled. 'It's like that, is it? Very well, be the satrap, lord. But those soldiers are doing more harm than good.' He wasn't drunk, thank the gods, or we might have had trouble.

  Artaphernes shook himself. 'Bah, I'm drunk,' he admitted. 'I need to get out of this cesspool. Before I do something I'll regret.' His frustration showed. And something about Hipponax's arrival set him off. He frowned. 'This stinking cesspool.'

  Hipponax refused to take offence. 'I've never heard sacred Ephesus described as a stinking cesspool before,' he said. 'I must say that it won't make it as a poetical contribution.'

  His wife laughed. She brought wine to the satrap with her own hands. I could smell her perfume from my station – heady, musky stuff. 'Perhaps I will smell less like a cesspool, lord,' she purred.

  'You are the only thing worth having in this town,' Artaphernes said.

  Hipponax's eyes met mine. I bowed and fetched two slaves to help me move a kline for him, and we set him up with a wine cup and some food. Darkar came up from the kitchen and caught my eye. I slipped out.

  'You have this under control?' he asked.

  I shook my head. 'There's something here I don't get,' I admitted. 'The satrap is angry and he's taking it out on Master.'

  Darkar looked at me with something very like pity. 'I will take your place. You go and wait on your young master only, and get him to bed as quickly as you can convince him – or just feed him wine.'

  'What of Cyrus and the others in the kitchen?' I asked.

  He shook his head. 'They're no trouble. Off to your duty, now.'

  So I tried to put wine into Archi. I needn't have bothered. He had a head for wine by then, and he could probably have gone bowl for bowl with his father, but suddenly he smiled at me and shook his head, pushing away his bowl. 'I'm for bed,' he said.

  Darkar shot me a glance, but it was none of my doing. I escorted my master to bed, but he was impatient with me, and after a few attempts at conversation I was dismissed.

  I went back to the kitchen to visit my friends. I was off duty, unless Cook or Darkar, the two senior slaves, chose to order me about. In fact, as I waited on the Persians while I chatted to them, we were all at our ease. I served them wine and they laughed and joked and flirted with Penelope when she came through – I assumed on an errand for Briseis, bored in the women's wing and not invited to the party. I'd seldom seen Penelope in the kitchen. She didn't linger.

  After an hour, Darkar leaned in and shot me a look. I drank off the wine I'd poured and followed him into the hall. He looked flustered and somehow apologetic. 'Master is going back to his ship,' he said. 'I need you to be a porter.'

  Well, that's the life of a slave. It wasn't my job, but by this time all our porters were asleep or drunk. It was a feast day, I think – I can't even remember where they all were. So I went to the portico and hoisted Master's bags and followed him through the dark town.

  He didn't say a word.

  The Pole Star was high by the time we made his ship. He exchanged a few terse words with his boatkeeper and walked along the waterside. Then he whirled on me.

  'I'll be damned if I'm to be thrown out of my own house,' he said, as if I had ordained this strange fate.

  I fell back a step.

  'Oh – sorry, lad. Not your fault. Come on!' He started back up the hill.

  It was a hard walk, but we were healthy men, and anything I had on him in youth was balanced by the weight of his sea bags. At the portico, he put a hand on my shoulder. 'Here's a daric,' he said – a fortune. A gold daric? Then, suddenly, I knew that something was wrong. Masters don't give slaves a daric for carrying their bags. Not on purpose, anyway. 'Go somewhere, Doru. Go – go and check on Archilogos.'

  Whatever was happening, he wanted me gone.

  I bowed, took the coin and walked into the house, heading into the men's quarters. I walked across the hallway that separated the servants and slaves from the family, and something – automatic obedience, I suppose – caused me to walk into Archi's room instead of going straight to my bed.

  He had lamps lit, and he was riding Penelope. She saw me instantly, over his back, his buttocks pinned between her thighs, her mouth slightly open. She wasn't unwilling, to say the least.

  He didn't see me.

  I flattened against the wall, my heart beating as if a horse race was crossing my chest. Let me say it – I had never ridden the girl myself. She had been very careful
with me, and I got a blow to the ear if my fingers strayed.

  But I didn't see red, either. I've said it before – when you are a slave, you know that you don't have control of some things. Such as your body. If Archi had ever had a mind to have me, I'd have had no choice. He took Penelope, instead. And I'm no hypocrite – I'd been with a girl or two that summer. Penelope owed me nothing.

  I walked around the corner, then stopped and took some deep breaths.

  I don't know how long I stood there. Longer than I realized, because suddenly she was there, a shawl over her, slipping along the wall of the portico towards the women's side. I knew her movements. I followed her and called her name. She looked back and ran.

  I ran after her. I ran right into the women's quarters.

  Then everything began to happen in slow motion. I was running like a fool and suddenly she stopped. In the light of a single hall lamp, I saw that there was a man in the hall, and that Penelope had run into him full tilt. He had a sword.

  Penelope screamed.

  But I knew him immediately. It was Master. With a sword. In my state, I took it in without understanding – somehow I thought he was there to punish me for entering the women's quarters.

  Penelope must have recognized him, because she was silent after that first scream.

  And then Artaphernes stepped out of the room behind me – Mistress's room – and I understood.

  'You've always told me that you never lie,' Master said to Artaphernes.

  He had the sword loosely in his hand. He was no swordsman. And he was calm – murderously calm, I think. He had already dismissed Penelope and me as superfluous to the scene. Penelope backed away from him and into my arms. I put a hand over her mouth.

  Artaphernes was naked, and it was no secret what he'd been doing. 'I do not lie,' he said. He was afraid, but covering it well.

  'Why did you have to fuck my wife?' Hipponax asked.

  Artaphernes met Hipponax's eyes. He shrugged. 'I love her,' he said. 'And if you kill me, Ionia will burn.'