Killer of Men

by Christian Cameron

  Heraclitus sat with me every day after the other boys walked away, and we talked about laws – laws of men and laws of gods. You’ve heard it all from your tutors, I’m sure. Aye, I’ll have his head if you haven’t heard it, honey! That most laws are men’s laws for men’s reasons. In Sparta, every man takes a boy as a lover, and in Chios, it is death for a man to lie with a boy. These are the laws of men.

  But the gods hate hypocrisy and hubris, as any history that is true will show. And murder – and incest. These are the laws of the gods. And there are laws we can only guess at – laws of hospitality, for example. They seem like god-given laws, but when we meet men who have different guest-laws, we have to wonder.

  Bah – I talk too much. I should have been a philosopher, as the priest of Hephaestus said.

  And then there was Briseis.

  I can’t remember how long I had been in that house before I saw her again. I was in her father’s room, with her father’s permission – he was formal and polite to me, but a little cold – reading his scrolls. He had the words of Pythagoras and some of Heraclitus and Anaxagoras, too. And I was reading them. I was also helping him and Darkar do sums. I would have carried water to the well at this point, I was so bored and felt so under-used. Archi didn’t want me when he went to the daily conference, and so I seemed to have no duties at all except to match him in the gymnasium, at the palaestra and on the track.

  I was reading, as I say, when Briseis came in. She smiled at me – quite a happy smile – and took a scroll from my basket.

  ‘Have you read Thales?’ she asked. ‘For all that he sounds like a soothsayer, he seems the wisest of the lot. Or perhaps he just hated women less.’

  ‘Heraclitus doesn’t hate women,’ I answered hotly.

  ‘Oh!’ she said, and her eyes flashed. ‘Wonderful! I’ll ask him to accept me as a student straight away.’

  I had to smile. I raised my hand the way a swordsman does at practice, when he acknowledges a hit. ‘Well struck,’ I said.

  ‘I was happy at Sappho’s school,’ she said. ‘I wish I could go back, but I’m too old.’ Old at sixteen.

  Her father glared at us. ‘I’m working,’ he growled.

  ‘May we read in the garden?’ Briseis asked sweetly, and he kissed her hand – absently – his eyes on his work.

  We picked up the scroll baskets and walked into the garden together.

  ‘Why don’t you read to me?’ she said. There was very little question to it.

  And that was that. I read to her every day. We read Thales’ book on nature – really just an accumulation of his sayings. We read our way through Pythagoras, and laughed over what we didn’t understand, and Briseis asked questions and I taught her what I knew of the geometry, which was not inconsiderable, and I took her questions to Heraclitus, and he answered them. He was contemptuous of women as a sex, but friendly to them as individuals, which Briseis said was a vast improvement on the reverse.

  If I thought that I loved her when I was a slave, that was merely the lust for the unattainable. Every boy loves someone unattainable, and no few attain the one they want anyway, to their own confusion. But when we sat together, day after day, then I saw her another way.

  I am an intelligent man. All my life, my wits have cut other men like my sword.

  She was my better. I saw it with the geometry. In three weeks, she had everything I could teach. By the gods, if I could have taught her to smith, she’d have made a Corinthian helmet in three weeks! Once her mind bit into a thing, she would never let it go, like a boar with his tusks in his prey.

  Have you ever seen an eagle kill close to you? She turns, and you catch your breath, and she hits her prey, and if you are close, you can see the blood – a brief red cloud, a mist of blood – and your heart stops with the beauty of it, even as you think that this is an animal killing another animal. Why is it so beautiful?

  And so with the mind of Briseis.

  After two weeks, she leaned close while I showed her a bronze pyxis I had made for her – we had a small forge – and she leaned close and ran a finger down my jaw.

  ‘Come to my room tonight,’ she said.

  I leaned back, her touch like a burn on my jaw. ‘If I’m caught—’ I said, and like a coward, my eyes darted around for the slaves.

  She shrugged. ‘I wasn’t caught. Or am I braver than you, my hero?’

  She said nothing more – nothing. Not a glance did she give me, nor a touch of her hand.

  I went to her room wondering with every heart-pounding step if I had, in fact, created the whole thing in my head. Had she really asked me? Really?

  I stopped in the hall outside her room, although there was no cover there. I took a breath and my knees were weak and I shuddered. I had done none of these things before I killed Cleisthenes. Every man is brave for some things and a coward for others. I stood there for a long time, and I’ll tell you in honesty that I could feel the shit at the base of my intestines, I was so afraid.

  Aphrodite, not Ares, is the deadliest on Olympus.

  Then I made myself push through her curtain.

  She laughed when her skin was against mine. ‘You weren’t this cold in the bath,’ she said.

  ‘I thought that you were Penelope!’ I said with foolish honesty.

  There are women who might be offended by that sort of revelation. Briseis bit my ear, rolled off the couch and lit a lamp from her fire jar.

  ‘Aphrodite!’ I said. Probably squeaked.

  She got on top of me. ‘I want you to see me,’ she said. ‘So that next time you won’t mistake me for my maid.’

  When we were done – and the moment we were done, she laughed and bounced to her feet – I asked, ‘Why?’ I reached out and touched her flank. ‘Why did you come to me? In the bath?’

  She laughed, and her eyes flashed in the lamplight. ‘I decided that you should have what Diomedes gave away,’ she said. ‘Promise me that if you ever have the chance, you’ll kill him for me?’

  I shrugged. Later, I swore.

  I’m a man, not a god.

  I took to spending my days in the little forge shed in the work yard. It was a tiny shop with one small bench, and Hipponax only had it so that his pots could be mended without being taken to market, but Darkar once told me that they had had a slave who had some skill with iron.

  I made instruments at first – a compass for Briseis, and then a ruler marked out in daktyloi. I made a fine compass for Heraclitus, as well. It was simple work, but good. Briseis was pleased by her geometry tools, as she called them, and Heraclitus was delighted, embracing me. I think that he had no use for such things, as he once told me that he could see the logos and all its shapes in his head. But the long bronze dividers were comfortable in the hand, and excellent for showing a student, and their points were sharp and probably used to prick a generation of dullards, which gives me some satisfaction.

  When I had my eye back, I bought some scrap bronze and poured myself a plate, pouring directly on to a piece of slate. Then I forged the pour into a sheet, which made me feel better. Making sheet is long work, and finicky. I did an adequate job, although my heart told me that I stopped planishing too early.

  Oh, lass, you’ll never be a bronze-smith’s daughter! Planishing – endless tiny hammer strokes to smooth the forge-work. When you change something’s shape, you use the curved surface of the big hammers, pulling the metal or pushing it, this way and that. But that leaves big, lumpy marks. See this cauldron? Look at these marks. See? But a good smith, a master, never lets an item out of his shop with these divots. He uses ever-smaller hammers, working the surface a blow at a time, until it is one continuous surface – like my helmet. See?

  Making sheet is about getting the surface to a single thickness and a flat shape, two things that seem like enemies when you are new to the process. More than you wanted to know, eh? But something had changed since I killed Cleisthenes, and I wanted to go back, I think – back to a world where I could do good work.

>   I had begun to have dreams about home. I had the first in Briseis’s bed, the first night I went to her. I dreamed that ravens came and stripped my armour from me, and took me to their nest.

  I dreamed of ravens, and their green nest of willows, night after night, until I realized that the ravens were Apollo’s, and the green nest was Plataea – was home. And then, for the first time in years, I was homesick. I began to dream more fully, about the farm on the hill, and about the tomb of the hero on the slopes of Cithaeron, and about hunting with Calchas.

  The dreams were powerful but they could never compete with the reality of Briseis. Or the coming war. I told myself that it was time to go home – soon.

  Anyway, I tell this story awry. I gambled on the waterfront and made love to Briseis; I listened to Heraclitus and read philosophy in the garden; I worked and played on the palaestra and in the gymnasium with Archi. It sounds like a good life. In fact, it was a bad time, but I could not tell you why, except that I could feel the doom over me.

  When I had my bronze sheet forged, I cut some scrap from the edges and began to work them, chasing figures into them as practice. I did olives and circles and leaves and laurels, and then I tried a stag, but my stag became a raven early in the process. I made six or seven ravens, until I had done one well.

  I remember that raven, because while I admired my work, Darkar came in and asked me to wait on Archi at dinner. That was the third time that Hipponax hosted Aristagoras. This time Briseis was the hostess, with most of the great men of the army as guests. The house was busy, and in those days, it was perfectly acceptable for a free man to wait on his lord, and I did it willingly enough.

  I should have refused.

  First, Aristides was confused to find me at his elbow. He smiled at me. I had to look at him for a long time to see the cool swordsman – my toughest opponent from the beach. ‘So,’ he gave his slight smile, ‘you have come to take your place among the captains?’

  I grinned, and walked off to pour wine for Archi, and then I caught the Athenian’s look, and it was one of anger. None of the men at the party knew how to talk to me – was I a cup-bearer or a champion? It made them uneasy. Which, in turn, made me uneasy.

  Then there was Briseis. She moved among them, dressed in a Doric chiton of pure new linen, shining white, and transparent, and they watched her the way dogs watch the slave with the food.

  I had to watch the interplay among the captains, and I didn’t like it. Aristides was not the chief of the Athenians – that was Melanthius, an older man, and an astute politician, but not, I think, much of a fighter. Melanthius shared a couch with Aristagoras and they drank together like friends, but I could see that Aristides thought little of either of them. Aristagoras was belligerent and fawning by turns, a depressing sight. Diomedes’ father, Agasides, was there and Briseis treated him as if he were made of dung, which he reciprocated. And yet, Hipponax supported him as the war leader of the Ephesians.

  There was a captain named Eualcidas from Eretria in Euboea, a famous athlete who had been praised by Simonides the poet, and another Eretrian, Dikaios, who made clear that he loathed all the Athenians more than he hated the Persians. I stared at them, for every one must have been at the fight by the bridge where my father died and I was made a slave.

  The Eretrians had come with five ships because of their ancient alliance with the men of Miletus, of which Aristagoras was once again ruler, although he disdained the title of tyrant now that he had returned to them, and claimed that he would liberate all the Greeks of Asia and give them democracies.

  The Milesians and Eretrians had sailed up the river together, fifty ships or more, and landed their men in the precinct of Koressos. Aristagoras was now the accepted commander of the war, and the whole purpose of the war had changed, because all the Greek cities had declared. Now it was the Trojan War. Now all the Greeks were going to make war on Persia. They planned to seize Sardis, expel the satrap Artaphernes and then perhaps march on Persepolis. And that night was the first I had heard of any of these things.

  None of them noticed me, but they bickered among themselves aplenty, thugater. If I had been half the veteran I thought myself, I’d have smelled the trouble the way Aristides did.

  Aristides watched them with contempt, and Archi worried and fidgeted. Hipponax watched them looking at his daughter, and Briseis rode the wave of their lust like a skilled helmsman.

  It was not a pretty party, and I should not have been there. They drank, and quarrelled, and each of them thought he was Agamemnon or Achilles. On the sixth bowl of wine, Dikaios the Eretrian raised the cup.

  ‘Your daughter moves like a dancer – can her lips do what flute girls do?’ he asked.

  Men hooted – and then fell silent. Hipponax rose from his kline and he looked ready to kill.

  ‘Leave my house,’ he said.

  Dikaios laughed. ‘You dress her like a whore and put her at a party, and then you’re offended when I speak what every man thinks? You easterners are soft, and your women are whores.’ He drank the wine.

  The cup rang like a gong when it hit the floor, and his head hit only a moment later. It rang hollow, like a gourd. He was out.

  I had put him in that condition, and now I lifted him – I was strong, then – and carried him to the courtyard, then threw him into the street, in the dung. Oh, it is easy to make enemies!

  Darkar stopped me from going back to the party. So I went to my bed, and later I went to Briseis, and she embraced me with a vigour that frightened me.

  ‘I loved how you hurt him,’ she said. ‘What do flute girls do?’

  I explained, with some blushes, what they do. She laughed. ‘Not enough in it for me,’ she said. ‘What pleasure does the girl get?’ and we laughed together.

  The next morning, I ran six stades with Archi and he beat all of us. We threw javelins and fought with spears. After we had clashed shields and bruised each other for an hour, Agasides came and ordered us down to the beach. Heralds were crying in the agora and on the steps of all the temples, and the whole army was assembling for the first time.

  The beach was a vision of Chaos. We stood together in a mob, perhaps seven thousand men, and Aristagoras placed his contingents in the phalanx. He put the Athenians on the right of the line, in the place of honour. The Ephesians were in the centre, towards the left.

  When Agasides had his place in the battle line, he chose men for the front rank. He chose Hipponax, but he did not choose me or Archi. Few men of Ephesus knew me, and despite my excellent armour and my victory in games, the Ephesians didn’t see me as a citizen (which I was not). Agasides, of course, knew me – as one of the men who had injured his son, and as a former slave.

  So Archilogos and I were placed together – in the fifth rank. We were, without a doubt, the two best athletes in the city, and probably the best men-at-arms, but Ephesus had known three generations of peace, and Agasides placed men according to his likes and dislikes and with no eye towards the phalanx as a fighting machine. Hipponax had fought pirates several times, and despite his reputation as a soft poet, was a good choice. But all the other front-rankers were Agasides’ drinking companions, business partners and political allies.

  We were one of the last contingents to form, and we looked bad. Other contingent commanders came and stared at us while we grumbled and switched places endlessly. A man would make his claim to the front rank – always couched in political terms – and Agasides would stand indecisively, balancing one interest against another.

  When, at last, we were in our places, Aristagoras came and addressed us, and for all his faults he had lungs of brass. We were told that the army would march up-country to Sardis over the passes in the mountains, and that all the hoplites and their slaves should assemble in two days, after the feast of Heracles – that is the feast that they celebrate in Ephesus, nothing like our Boeotian feasts. Two days, and we would march.

  It was the first time most men had heard that we’d be marching up-country, and ther
e was much grumbling.

  I talked to the men around me and realized that none of them had ever stood in a shield wall or fought with bronze or iron. They were like a pack of virgins going to do the work of flute girls. I was a mere seventeen, but I had seen three pitched battles and I had killed.

  Archi took me aside after the muster. ‘You’ve got to stop talking so much,’ he said. ‘You’ll take the spirit out of us! Sometimes I regret that you are free. You cannot speak to the first men of the city as if they were simpletons.’

  I shrugged. ‘Archi, they are fools, and men are going to die. I have fought in a phalanx. None of these men have. I should be in the front rank.’

  Aristides had his helmet perched on his brow. He was leaning on his spears, listening to us, and then he came over. He glanced at Agasides and spat. ‘You were there when your father stopped the Spartans?’ he asked.

  I nodded. ‘I was there,’ I said. I didn’t mention that I had been a psilos throwing rocks.

  He nodded. ‘You should be in command, then. These children,’ and he nodded to Archi, ‘will die like sacrificed goats if we face the Medes.’

  Archi blushed. ‘I will stand my ground,’ he said.

  Aristides shrugged. ‘You’ll die alone then,’ he said.

  I went back to the house and spent hours putting a pair of ravens over the nasal of my helmet. I softened the worked metal by annealing it, and then I had to cut my punches shorter to use them from inside the bowl of the helmet, but the work came along nicely enough. Sitting on a low stool at the anvil, tapping away at my work, alone in the shed, I was safe from the anger that had followed me from the muster.

  I had started putting a band of olive leaves at the brow when the light from the doorway was cut off.

  ‘I’m working!’ I called without turning my head.

  ‘So I see,’ Heraclitus said. He came in, and I stood hurriedly.