Killer of Men

by Christian Cameron

  I drew an early opponent – but by the will of the gods, I drew a beardless Athenian boy who was in his first contest, as I was. We grinned at each other, and grappled, and I had his measure by so much that I could give him a throw. In fact, I dragged it out, because I was resting. And I made him look good. His father was there, and he slapped my back at the end and said I was kind.

  The boy grinned at me.

  Then I went to my second bout, against a big-arsed oarsman from Lesbos. He was tall and untrained and I was smaller and well-trained. There are men out there who’ll tell you that size doesn’t matter in combat, and what they are full of, honey, smells bad. Eh? Big men have all the advantages. I’m not big, but you can see that I have long arms – like an ape, an Aegyptian once told me – and those arms have saved my life a hundred times.

  I’ve put a hundred big men down in the dirt, but they always scare me and I always thank the gods when I walk away from a contest with one.

  This one saved me by being afraid of me. I could see it – I was a man who’d won the stadion and come in second in the run in armour and my muscles gleamed in the sun, and he flinched. I still had to wear him out, and it sucked the energy out of me. My ankles hurt where my second-hand greaves had bit them during the run, and those little things start to add up when it’s high noon on a hot beach in the third competition of the day.

  I played him, and he put me down once, and his morale improved, but by then I had him tired and the next time he came in at me I broke his nose with my fist, and then I had him.

  I got him a cloth for his nose, and on the way back I met Melaina, who was pouring water over her brother. She kissed me. ‘You go and win now,’ she said. ‘Then I can tell all the girls I slept with a great athlete.’ She giggled.

  Stephanos frowned.

  ‘You all right?’ I asked.

  ‘I drew that bastard Cleisthenes,’ Stephanos said. His sister didn’t worry him, I could tell.

  ‘You can take him,’ I said.

  Melaina spat in the sand. ‘His father’s our lord,’ she said. There was quite a lot of information in that short sentence.

  I stepped close to Stephanos. ‘You know how to break a finger?’ I asked.

  Of course he didn’t. Only trainers and professionals know tricks like that. I smiled to think that I could have been the best wrestler on Chios. So I bent close and told Stephanos how to break a man’s finger in the grapple.

  He looked at me, and I think he was shocked.

  I shrugged.

  ‘You’re a bastard!’ he said.

  ‘He’s going to knee you in the balls,’ I said. ‘I’d wager a gold daric on it.’

  ‘Aye,’ Stephanos said.

  ‘Get his hands at the first engagement, go for a leg sweep and go down with him. Break his finger in the tangle and apologize a lot after you’re declared the winner. And it is absolutely legal.’ I shrugged.

  Stephanos nodded. ‘I can take him.’

  ‘Not wheezing from a groin kick,’ I said.

  And then I was called for my third bout. It was another big man – bigger than the last. In fact, I remember him as being bigger than Heracles, but that can’t be true. But my good fortune was that he’d pulled a muscle in his groin in his last bout, and I took him. I took him so fast that he apologized afterwards. I told him that I thought he was probably the better man, and he liked that, and we clasped hands.

  Stephanos broke Cleisthenes’ hand. If we’d all been lucky, he’d have broken the lordling’s right hand. But he broke the bastard’s left, and he apologized, and Lord Pelagius himself said it was an accident.

  So it was me and Stephanos in the final. We were already breathing hard, and Archi strigiled me – as if he was my slave, he said, and I loved him for it – and put fresh oil on me. Melaina proclaimed that this was the best bout – because she liked both the contestants and was sure to be pleased – and Lord Pelagius looked at her fondly and then told the circle of men and women to keep quiet. It’s odd – at Olympia and Delphi, they forbid matrons to watch men compete, but allow maidens. In Ionia, women had their own foot races and they all watched.

  Stephanos came at me with a grin, and tried to break my left hand at our first engagement, the bastard.

  I didn’t fight back the same way. My blood wasn’t up, and I knew he had to pull an oar. I’m not always a bad man. So I punched him, even when we were grappling, and I got his shoulders down for a count and had a fall.

  The second fall, he roared like a bull and came in at me, going for a throw. I stayed away, avoiding his hands, and just barely kept him from pinning me against the crowd. But by my third retreat the crowd was hissing at my apparent cowardice – especially as I was up by a fall – and like a foolish boy I let the crowd noise sway me. I saw my opening. Went over the attack, and found myself face down in the sand.

  Then I was angry – angry at myself – and I tried to stand toe to toe with him. I got a leg behind him and I went for a throw and missed – we all miss sometimes, honey – and he got hold of me and then I was grappling a bigger man. He got me, although we put on a long grapple and a good contest and we were both covered in sand and sweat, and when we rose, Stephanos looked at me with a certain wariness.

  Down two throws to one, I was a sober fighter. I was bone weary, but still unhurt.

  Stephanos made a mistake, or was unlucky. Seconds into the fourth round, as I circled him, he crossed his legs – a foolish thing to do, and something even Chians must have trained against. I was on him in a flash and he was down, and although he was strong I got my legs around his hips and I had a control hold on one arm. I knew I had him – and after some long minutes of struggle and some grunting, he knew it too.

  They applauded us like heroes after that round. We looked good. And I had him. He’d squandered energy trying to match my hold with sheer strength, and now he was beaten.

  So I stepped in to finish it, grappled him and got dropped on my head for my pains.

  Never believe all those stupid country-yokel stories. That Chian played me like the city boy I had become. He let me think him exhausted. He let me believe it with everything from posture to his weary ‘you’ve got me beaten’ smile as we stretched our arms out and started the last engagement. I don’t think I ever made that mistake again.

  I came to with fifty men around me, and Stephanos all but weeping on my chest. He’d dropped me just wrong – but thank the gods, he hadn’t snapped my neck, although it hurt like blazes, a line of cold that was worse than fiery pain running up my spine.

  Heraklides was there, too. He had a reputation as a healer, and he had my spine under his palms. ‘Can you move, lad?’ he asked me.

  ‘Yes,’ I said, and swore. Ares, I hurt! My fingertips hurt. But I was on my feet, swaying, but up.

  They gave me a lot of applause and some back-slaps, and somebody, one of the Athenians probably, groped me. So much for heroism.

  ‘Sorry, mate,’ Stephanos said.

  I laughed, and we clasped hands. ‘Last time I teach you anything,’ I said.

  He grinned. ‘I like to wrestle,’ he said.

  Then we had a break before the next event – until the sun was past a certain point in the sky, no water-clocks on a beach on Chios. I slept, and when I awoke, Stephanos came and massaged me himself.

  ‘I can’t throw a javelin, and I’ve never touched a sword,’ he said. ‘So you’re my man to win. You’re ahead, you know.’

  I lay like a corpse under his hands. He knew how to get his thumbs deep in the muscle. He said his father taught him. Melaina had the trick too – she came and did my lower legs and feet, bless her.

  When they were finished, I felt like quitting once and for all. And I felt like sex. Melaina suddenly appealed to me – the touch of her hands – hard to explain.

  Instead, I got up and took javelins from Archi. I didn’t even have my own – they were back in Ephesus. Archi slapped my back. ‘You’re in first place, you dog!’ he said. ‘That’ll teach
me to drink too hard.’

  Not just sour grapes. Archi and I were always a dead match, except as swordsmen. If I was winning, he’d have been with me – except that the luck had been going my way in every encounter. It takes luck to be a winner. I’ve seen the best man trip on a stone or lose his footing in a match. Read the chariot race in the Iliad, honey – that’s the way of it. The best man does not always win.

  Or maybe it is the will of the gods, as some men say. Or the logos seeking change, so that one man does not dominate others, or to effect some other change.

  I was never a great man with a javelin. I’ve killed my share of men with spears, thrown and pushed, as they say, but that’s because the daimon in me doesn’t lose its skills in the press of bronze. In a contest, I can’t throw as well as other men, and that’s a fact.

  But that day I threw the best spears of my life. My first throw did it – which god stood at my shoulder I don’t know, but I smelled jasmine and mint and I swear that it was Athena putting her hand under mine and lifting my spear. Other men matched my throw, and Cleisthenes beat it, the bastard. I threw twice more, and never came within a stride of my first throw.

  I placed seventh. Cleisthenes won. But I placed in the top eight, and by the Chian rules I had won or placed in every contest, and no other man had done that. Cleisthenes argued that he had, but his grandfather overruled him, saying that he had failed to finish the two-stade run.

  I had won. I couldn’t believe it.

  I think my slavery really ended there, on that beach, just before the sun started to swoop for the sparkling blue sea. I wasn’t just free – I was a man who could win a contest with hundreds of other free men.

  We Greeks love a contest, and we love a winner. They mobbed me, and I was kissed a little more than I liked and patted a little too much, but I didn’t care. They put a crown of olive leaves in my hair.

  And then Lord Pelagius took me aside.

  ‘Listen, lad,’ he said. ‘You’re the winner – clear winner. No judge even needs to count.’

  ‘There was a goddess at my shoulder, sir,’ I said.

  He nodded. ‘What a very proper thing to say! Who was your father?’

  ‘Technes of Green Plataea, lord.’ I bowed.

  ‘I gather you were a slave?’

  ‘I was taken,’ I said. ‘The family that had me – freed me.’

  He nodded again. ‘A fine story. Damned fine. The way good people should act.’ He was an old aristocrat, and he had the best notions of how his class ought to behave. A few of them do.

  The rest are rapists and tax-takers with pretty names and better armour.

  At any rate, he put his arm around my shoulders. ‘Listen, lad. You asked to fight with the sword. You’re welcome to do it – we can all see you’re a trained man. But after winning today, no one – and I mean no one – will think you’re a shirker if you want to step aside.’

  But, ignoring the hubris of it, and the sound of wings I might have heard, I shook my head. ‘I want to fight, lord.’

  He smiled. ‘Well,’ he said, ‘I can’t give you your prize yet. So go and armour up.’ He meant that all the prizes were given at sunset.

  So I put on my old leather spolas, not a tenth as glorious – or protecting – as the scale shirt I was so soon to own. I put my aspis on my arm and my crude, cheap and cheerful helmet on my head, picked up my meat-cleaver sword and went down to the lists.

  In those days, we took wands – willow or linden, usually – and planted them at the four corners of the lists, and then we fought to the first cut. Men died from time to time, but most men were careful, and few fought all out in the lists.

  Calchas had told me about such fighting, back on Cithaeron by the shrine of the hero, and I had thought that it sounded like the Trojan War. Here I was, five years later, standing by a row of black ships on a beach with a blade in my hand and the weight of my bronze helmet pressing down on my nose. While I listened to the judges caution us against using our full strength, my heart sang inside me – freedom and victory in games are a heady mix, like wine and poppy juice. The stars were out, although the sun hadn’t set. There were only eight of us to fight – which, had I thought of it, might have made me wonder about our army.

  Yet I tell this badly. I wanted to talk to the past. I wanted to tell the boy in the olive grove, and the slave boy in the pit, that there was this at the end of the road – that someday I’d stand on the sand, a hero.

  Who knows? Heraclitus says that time is a river, and you only dip your toe once. But maybe you can skip a stone, too. I only know that the boy in the olive grove and the boy in the slave pit made it to be the victor on the beach.

  You don’t understand. Perhaps just as well. And just as well that the victor on the beach didn’t know what was to come, either.

  Count no man happy until he is dead.

  We paired off, and I was up against a Chian. We exchanged names, but I’ve forgotten his. I was too inexperienced to be afraid, and too eager to show my skill.

  We circled for a while. No man with steel in his hand lurches into a fight without feeling his opponent. It’s like foreplay with a beautiful woman. Well, it’s not, actually. But there are a few things in common, and I like making your friend blush. Young lady, if you turn that colour every time I mention sex, we’ll be good friends. What’s your name? Ligeia? How fitting.

  At any rate, we circled, and then we started to make jabs at each other’s shields. It is hard to hit a man who has an aspis, when all you have is a short sword. The only targets are his thighs, his ankles and his sword arm. In a contest, his head is out of the question. Bad form. Which is funny, because in a real combat, that’s what you go for.

  I became bored with circling and tapping shields. I shuffled forward, shield foot first, and then I cut at his shield, stepped in hard with my back foot and cut back – the ‘Harmodius blow’ they call it in Athens – and caught him just above the greave. A nice cut and no real harm.

  I think I made him happy – he was out with honour.

  Men are fools. Combat is not for honour. I hadn’t learned that lesson yet, but I almost knew it, and I was annoyed with him, that he’d wasted my time and energy.

  I was the first to finish, and I watched the others fight. Cleisthenes had his broken hand inside his aspis, and he was hammering his opponent, an older Athenian who was angered and afraid of Cleisthenes’ bullying, hammering attacks that were well beyond the spirit of the contest. Cleisthenes was swinging as hard as he could, chopping his opponent’s shield with his heavy sword, a curved kopis or falcata, depending where you’re from, a weapon like an axe with a sword blade attached.

  Another Athenian effortlessly dispatched his man after a long shuffle in a circle. I saw him do it. He faked a cut to the man’s head and tagged his thigh under the rim of his shield – perfect coordination, perfect control. He was one of their noblemen. He was fast and elegant and had better armour than anyone else, including bronze on his thighs and upper arms.

  It was good that I saw him, because he was my next opponent. The light was starting to go, and we fought between two bonfires. He smiled at me – he had an Attic helmet with spring-loaded cheek-pieces, and as soon as I saw it, I knew my father had made it. I held up my hand to him.

  ‘My father made that, sir,’ I said, pointing at the helmet.

  He took it off. ‘You’re a son of Technes, the smith of Plataea who fell in Euboea?’ he asked.

  ‘I am, sir.’ I bowed.

  He returned my bow, although he was a child of the gods, the son of the greatest family in Athens. ‘I am Aristides,’ he said, ‘of the Antiochae.’

  I nodded. ‘I am Arimnestos of the Corvaxae,’ I said, ‘of green Plataea where Leitos has his shrine.’

  He grinned. He liked that I could play the game. Then he put his helmet back on and I pulled mine down, and we faced off.

  The Chians cheered us, because we were both foreigners. Aristides was probably the best-known man in the fleet,
while I had just won the athletics, and that made it a good-natured match with lots of cheering. I could hear Melaina’s clear soprano and her brother’s bass.

  And then they all went away, and I was alone on the sand with a deadly opponent. He moved the way a woman dances, and I admired him even as I tracked his motion.

  As far as I was concerned, he was beautiful, but he put too much energy into it. That is, he looked wonderful – and he was good, very good, a true killer. But he also played to the crowd.

  He had not, on the other hand, run several stades and wrestled.

  Early on, he came at me with his kill shot. All swordsmen have one – a simple combination they have mastered, that can get the fight over in a hurry. Listen – if you live past a man’s kill shot, it’s a whole different fight. But most men go down, in sport or play or on a blood-spattered deck. Calchas taught me that, and every sword-fighter in Ephesus said the same.

  I didn’t buy the feint to my head and my shield caught his blow to my thigh, then I cut back at his arm and my blade ticked against his arm guard.

  He nodded at me as we drew apart – acknowledgement that I’d hit him. Then we circled for a long, long time, until the crowd was silent. I wasn’t going after him. He was better than me. And he wasn’t in a hurry. And, frankly, I knew he was the best man I’d ever faced – better than Cyrus or Pharnakes, even.

  Twice, we went in. The first time, he came forward gracefully – and fooled me, his swaying approach a trick as he darted to the right and his blade shot out in a cut to my right hip, of all unlikely targets.

  I parried the blow on my blade and hammered my aspis into his. I cleared my weapon and tried to reach under his shield, but he didn’t allow it, and we were kneeling in the sand, shield to shield, pushing. The crowd roared but the judges separated us.

  The second time, I saw him stumble. It was dark now; the fires gave unsteady light and the helmets didn’t help. But before my attack was even fully developed, he had his feet under him. He cut low and then high, and our blades rang together, and we both punched with our shields, leaning our shoulders into the push, and our blades licked out and we both rolled left and broke apart. The ocean cold of his blade had passed across my sword arm and my blade had ticked against his thigh armour.