Killer of Men lw-1

by Christian Cameron

  Archi was a typical master. He'd never asked where I came from or what I'd done. Never. I loved him like a second older brother – but he never knew me well.

  We walked back along the beach, and I was pleased to see men looking at us and, I think, taking our measure. Games are good. Competition is good. That's how men measure themselves and others.

  The games were still a few days away, though. So I walked around the promontory to exercise alone. I had a sword of my own, although nothing like what I wanted. It was short and heavy, a meat cleaver. I wanted a longer thrusting blade, because that's what I'd learned with, but Ares had not seen fit to help me.

  When I'd worked up a healthy sweat and swum it off in the ocean, I walked back. Slaves cooked for us, and that made me think, every time I took bread from a boy, that I was lucky – and free. Honey, once you're a slave, you never forget it.

  Anyway, Heraklides came and sat with me.

  'How many ships does Athens have?' I asked my new friend.

  'Mmm,' he said. 'A hundred?' he answered, before spotting a pretty Chian girl up the beach. I let him go.

  Athens had a hundred ships, and Miltiades alone, or with his father, had another twenty. Then there were other Athenian noble families with ten or fifteen ships of their own.

  Athens was half-committed to the Ionians. Not even half. They sent a tithe of their strength. I had spent enough evenings listening to Artaphernes to believe him when he said that the weight of Persia would crush the Greeks like so many lice between his fingers. He always said this in sadness, never in boastfulness.

  I looked at our fleet, and it seemed very great to me. We filled the beach at Chios, and by the time the levy came in and all the Chian nobles and traders brought their warships, we had a hundred hulls – I counted them myself.

  That night, while men sang Ionian songs around the fires and chased Chian girls up the sand, I sat on my new aspis with Archi.

  'I think Athens is using us,' I said.

  Archi laughed. 'Stop being a slave!' he said, which made me angry. 'These men have great souls. I have talked to a dozen of the Athenian captains, and they are gentlemen. Why, one or two of them are rich enough to be Ephesians!'

  I shook my head, stung by his slave comment and sure that he was wrong. 'Athenians are the most grasping bastards in the world,' I said. I had watched the slow seduction of Plataea – I had been there as Miltiades brought the men of Plataea to his way of thinking. I could imagine him doing the same from island to island across the Aegean.

  Archi sat back, took a long drink of wine from a skin and laughed. 'We're going to go home heroes,' he said.

  'Has it occurred to you that we're going home just weeks after we left? Diomedes won't be over his injuries yet. His father will be panting for revenge. Niobe's children will be nothing on us, Archi!' I was growing louder and angrier because his good humour and cheerfulness were like the feathers on a heron's back, and my words rolled off him.

  Archi laughed. 'I understand that you are a good companion, warning me of dangers ahead. But I'm the hero – I won't be worried. You can whisper good advice in my ear and I'll use my spear to cut my way to glory.'

  He looked very much the hero on that beach, by firelight. He'd been homesick for the first few days, but he loved the sea life, camping on beaches and drinking wine by the fire every night.

  'Soon we'll be home,' he said, watching a pair of Chian girls run by, their oiled hair swinging and their linen chitons plastered to their bodies. One looked back over her shoulder. She knew just how to play the game. Archi shot me a look. Then he rose to his feet and chased her.

  Her companion flicked me a glance and then came nearer. She was younger and seemed too shy for her business.

  'Not interested,' I said gruffly.

  She stood there. I drank wine and saw in my mind's eye the Persian fleet crushing us against the coast. I must have been the only seventeen-year-old on that beach who wasn't chasing a girl.

  I'm a killer, and I lie sometimes, and my stories go on and on – but I have never been called inhospitable. So, when a hundred heartbeats had passed and she squatted by our fire and began to play with the embers, I poured my bronze cup full of wine and handed it to her. She was sitting on her haunches, a very unladylike posture. I'd never even seen a slave do it.

  'Careful,' I said. 'No water.' I sat back on my shield, curious about the Chian girls. 'Are you a porne?'

  She spat my wine in the sand, put down my cup and jumped up. 'No,' she said. 'And fuck you.'

  'Sorry,' I said. I stood up. 'Stay and drink the wine. I thought that you and your sister were prostitutes.'

  'That's an apology?' she asked. 'Some alien stranger calling me a prostitute?' But she squatted down again and picked up the cup. 'I'd slap you, but your wine's too good.'

  I sat back down. 'There's bread, olive oil and fish.' I waved around the fire. We were messy, and our baskets were spread over three or four oxhides of beach. Men only learn from long campaigns to be tidy when they camp, and we were as raw as an ingot of copper.

  She wandered from basket to basket, picking a dinner. It was getting dark, but I could see that her chiton showed the signs of hundreds of washings, with that patina of old dirt and hard work that a garment gets when it is worn and worn. I remembered my own chiton at home, in Plataea.

  She wasn't beautiful, she wasn't exactly pretty, but her legs were long and muscular and the angle of her hip pushed against her chiton. Her face was too pointy and her eyes were a little too close together, but she was quick-witted and bold without being rude – a good thing in a woman.

  'If I told my brother you thought I was a prostitute, he'd kill you,' she said. 'We're fishermen. My father and my brother will pull oars for Lord Pelagius.' She smiled, under her hair, which was long, black and heavily oiled. 'He's big.' She rolled some of our fish in bread, poured a little oil on top and went back to her odd squat by the fire, eating her meal with satisfaction. She licked her fingers when she was done.

  I thought that she was like a cat – a kitten, actually. Lesbos and Chios are full of cats – hungry ones.

  'So,' I said, curious, but seeking to avoid offence, 'what are you doing, wandering among men, galay?' Galay is the local word for a cat, or a ferret, and I used it with affection – she was like a ferret – a pretty ferret.

  'You're a westerner, aren't you? You keep your women in houses and screw each other, right?' She laughed. She was maybe fourteen. Everything from the motion of her hips to her language made Penelope, the slave, look like a lady of quality. Anyway, I remember how she laughed, as if she pitied me. 'Chian girls have their own lives, at least until some man fills us with a baby.' She shrugged. 'I've killed a deer!' she said, with a childlike change of topic.

  I laughed and leaned back. 'Me, too.'

  She stuck out her tongue at me. We both laughed, and that was the end of the coldness.

  An hour later she was sitting with her back against me. It was a chill evening, and I had put my cloak around her. I told her stories of hunting on Cithaeron, and about my sister, and Pater, until I cried a little. She was kind and said nothing. She told me about riding her father's boat in a storm, and I told her about the storm we'd ridden up by Troy, and then we talked of the gods and we sang some hymns together.

  People passed us constantly – don't imagine we were alone on that beach. While we were singing, Heraklides came to the fire with a girl called Olympias, the grandest name for the broadest-hipped peasant in all Hellas, but she and the girl in front of me were from the same village and they chatted in their rapid Ionian that I could just barely follow.

  Herk was older than me, but he was a good companion. He drank some wine and made jokes – good jokes – and then we were all silent together. Oh, honey, I remember that evening as one of pure happiness, the happiness of good fellowship. It raised my mood, so that I didn't feel so doomed. Which was wrong, of course. I'd have been better to be wary and afraid, but really – and I ask you, sir, to agree wi
th me – if we worry all our lives, when will we drink wine and enjoy ourselves? Eh?

  Exactly. Hours passed. We sang again, and now I noticed that the girl leaning against me – I still didn't know her name, although I knew her sister's and her father's and how old she was when her first blood came and which goddess she followed – I noticed that she had a beautiful voice. I had heard the choir at the Ephesian Temple of Artemis, mind you – I knew a good voice when I heard one.

  I was just pondering how a village girl got such a voice when a trio of big men came to our fire.

  'That's my sister, lad,' the biggest said. He said it with a smile that robbed his words of malice. He was too damned big to have to worry about any man on that beach.

  I had come to my full growth, minus a finger's width or so, and I was not a small man, but this Chian stood a head bigger and a hand's span broader.

  'Stephanos!' my girl said, and she leaped up, taking my spare chlamys with her, and embraced her brother.

  I got up, too, in the complex welter of thoughts that affects a man when he's confronted by the brother of a girl that he has not debauched. I didn't want to seem afraid, but he was big. He didn't seem angry, but I'd seen men like him launch a blow without a sign of it crossing their faces. He had that look.

  'I'm called Doru,' I said. 'Your sister's my guest-friend. Sit at the fire and drink some wine, if it pleases you.'

  Pretty good, eh? You know, honey, sometimes we make up these speeches later to sound better to bards like your friend, but I'd had the right amount of wine that night – enough to loosen my tongue and not enough to clog it up, eh?

  Stephanos grinned. 'Guest-friend, eh?' he said. He laughed. 'You must be a gentleman, sir. No Chian fisherman would ever have a "guest friend".'

  He grunted when he tasted the wine. 'Good stuff. Sorry, lord. I guess you are a gent and I'm making an ass of myself.'

  No one had ever called me lord in all my life. 'Stephanos, I was born a farmer in far-off Boeotia and I've been a slave for years. Just freed. No lords here, unless my master Archi comes back.'

  Then he slapped my back and laughed – he laughed quite a bit, a deep, throaty laugh that made everyone else want to laugh, too. Ares, he was big! And he introduced his two friends – oar friends, the men who sat below him in his spot in his lord's ship. I don't remember their names. I know where they died, and I'll tell that part when I get to it. But they were good men, and good companions, and I'm sorry I've forgotten them. Here's a sip of wine to their shades.

  I hate it when I forget names, honey. The names are all we have, and all that ever gets remembered. Now I'm a lord, and while I live, every son of a bitch in the Chersonese will fear me and know my name. But when I die – who will remember me? Who will know the name of Arimnestos?

  By the ravens of Apollo, pay me no attention. Fucking maudlin old man. Too much wine. What was I saying? Aye, it was a good evening. The night I met Stephanos.

  We ended up all curled together around the fire. Archi never came back that night, but there were a dozen or so of us, and one of the local girls ran off and came back with a bundle of straw – she'd been selling it all day, she said – and we lay on the straw like chicks in a nest and slept, woke and talked, and slept. Melaina was her name, I learned from hearing Stephanos chide her for sleeping next to me.

  'You'll wake up with his dick in your arse,' he said, and laughed. That's what passed for a sense of humour, on Chios. They thought we all loved boys. Or pretended to think that.

  I woke with the dawn. Melaina's hair smelled like fish. She snuggled her hips against me and whispered that I was not allowed to move. But I had to get up and I was embarrassed by the, mmm, projection I had grown, but she just laughed, not even awake, and told me that if I had to piss, I should piss for her, too, so she could go on sleeping.

  Only when I was well away from our fire, pissing in the sand, did I realize that the games were to start in a matter of hours – perhaps less, as games always began with the sun – and I had been awake most of night. I blessed Lord Apollo that good company had kept me from drinking a foolish amount.

  I went back to the fire and warmed up while I built it up. All the slaves were asleep. Then I oiled myself. Archi was nowhere to be seen. I was pretty sure Stephanos had mentioned wrestling, so I woke him.

  'Are you in the games?' I asked.

  'Mother fuck!' he said, or words to that effect, and rolled out of his cloak. 'You are a good man,' he said. 'Can you spare some oil? I can't run home and get back in time – the foot race is first.'

  So I oiled him, and we went up the beach together. In those days, men didn't compete naked, like fools. We wore loincloths, and I had to give him my spare. Then we ran. He had long legs but no training.

  We got to the crowd just in time to catch the second heat of the two-stade race. I won – not easily, but I had his measure from the run up the beach and all the other competitors were local boys who were no match for him.

  You run the foot race, honey – and you, sir? Good. Easier to tell this to people who know how games go. But in those days it was all informal. The lord had put up cairns, and we started by one, turned at the other and elbows flew in the turns. If I wanted to beat a man as big as Stephanos, I needed to be well clear of him at the turn, eh? Heh, heh. Otherwise I would have kissed the sand.

  Then we watched another heat, this time mostly gentlemen – hoplites, especially Athenians. They were all trained men, and they didn't even trouble to jostle each other. It was like watching a different sport. And most of them ran naked, which I found – imposing. And odd.

  A final heat of local gentry, and a big youth won by knocking most of his competitors flat. Stephanos stood by my shoulder watching. As first and second in our heat, we'd be running in the final. He pointed at the winner. 'Cleisthenes,' he said. 'He's a right bastard.'

  'I can tell,' I said.

  Kylix came up then, and Archi. Archi shook his head. 'My own damned fault,' he said. 'Hard to be a hero in the night and morning too,' he quoted from Heraclitus, who was full of such sayings for the young.

  'Archilogos, this is my new friend Stephanos,' I said, with Ephesian formality. They eyed each other as potential rivals, and I was annoyed that they couldn't be friends – but neither saw in the other what I saw in both, and they stood apart.

  I sent Kylix back for my armour. I looked at Archi, but he shook his head. 'You have to be the hero today, Doru,' he said. 'The only muscles I have that are hard are in my head and my dick.'

  That got a laugh from all the men. Indeed, Archi was not alone, and half the men there – more than half – were showing signs of a good night of feasting. I heard later that the man they called 'Kalos', the beautiful, the best of the Athenian athletes, was hung-over from the beginning to the end.

  So we lined up in the sand for the two-stade final. I was next to the big Chian lordling, with Stephanos on my other side. Luck of the draw.

  I'd watched the lordling in his first race, and I knew I'd get an elbow in the ribs off the starting line. So when Lord Pelagius dropped his arm, I shot off from a low crouch just as the trainers in Ephesus taught, bless them. Then I cut diagonally across the field.

  The tall, pretty Athenian, Kalos, was on the inside and I let him lead me. From the first, we were alone. There was a roar behind me, and some shouting, but I just kept pounding up the beach, and the naked Athenian was a stride ahead.

  Damn, he was fast. And he was better trained, I'd say. Hangover or not, he was the better man. And he wasn't running full out, either. He was saving himself, measuring me.

  I decided on my tactics well before the turn. As we closed on the cairn, I poured it on, everything I had, and I passed him in one burst before he was on to my tactic. I was ahead of him at the cairn by a stride and I angled sharply across him so that he had to lose a stride or risk crashing into the cairn – not the most genteel manoeuvre. Illegal, in the Olympian Games. But that's youth. And then I hammered my feet on the sand, my trick done, and
all there was left was to run the stade back.

  There's a point in the race where it is no longer muscle and training. It's all in your head, eh? I was ahead. He would put everything into catching me, but my burst of speed must have made him wonder. And I thought – fuck it, if I can burst like that, I can run like that all the way home, if I have the guts.

  So I did.

  I might have been the depth of an aspis ahead of him when I crossed the line. But by Ares, I took him, and after he vomited in the sand, he came and wrapped his arms around me. 'Good run,' he said.

  I grinned – I knew he was the better man. And I liked him for his good humour.

  In those days, all the games counted and there was no resting. So while I was still breathing hard, Kylix brought my armour for the next race, the hoplitodromos.

  That's a laugh. My armour was an old leather spolas that I bought on the beach from a mercenary, recut by a leatherworker to fit me. I had an outdated Boeotian shield that Hipponax had bought and a pair of greaves. Without them, I wouldn't have been allowed to compete in the race. On Chios, they carried an aspis and wore greaves, that was all. In Plataea, we ran in full panoply. So I snapped on my greaves, which fitted well enough, and lined up.

  Lord Pelagius played no favourites, although by the time I had my armour on, I knew that the big lordling was his grandson. He could have made me run in the first heat, but he didn't, and he ran the pulls – the removal of names from a pot – fairly. He was, in fact, a good lord and a fair judge – a rarer bird than you might think, friends.

  Cleisthenes and Stephanos hadn't finished the two-stade final, as they'd ended up fighting on the sand. Stephanos said that the big aristocrat tripped him, and the lordling claimed the same. But they were still in the contest. They ran in the third heat – I think the judges felt that they hadn't squandered the energy that Kalos and I had used up in the run. We ran together in the fourth heat, with another pair of Athenians and one of the Lesbian hoplites from our own ship. He ran well, too. He and Kalos and I led our pack, and Kalos was well ahead until the cairn and then he dropped back, his wine head stealing his chance for glory while the Lesbian nipped me for the victory. Epaphroditos was his name, and he couldn't believe he'd won. I worked to be as gracious as the Athenian boy had been with me. It wasn't easy. I hate to lose.