Killer of Men lw-1

by Christian Cameron

  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.