Killer of Men

by Christian Cameron

  ‘All together!’ I sang. My voice held, steady and high. If you want an order to carry in a storm or on a battlefield, you sing.

  My Boeotian shield was flapping in pieces. I used it to bat another javelin out of the air and the spine snapped.

  ‘Shield!’ I roared.

  An oarsman behind me passed his forward and Hermogenes held it for me. I dropped the useless corpse of a shield off my arm and thrust my left hand into the leather porpax of the cheap aspis, and then I was ready.

  ‘All together!’ I called again.

  ‘Heracles!’ they called back. It wasn’t the god’s own roar of the first shout, but it was sufficient to get us forward, and we went up the rocky ground. Someone started the Paean, and our voices rose like sacred incense to Ares, and he must have smiled on us.

  Thracians fight with ferocity, but they are not competitors in an athletic event, the way Greek warriors are, and they don’t practise together, dancing the war dances and measuring the swing of their weapons. They stand too far apart to have a solid line, and their crescent-shaped shields are too small to use in a close fight, where men to the left and right – and men in the rear ranks – can all take a thrust at you when your tunnel-vision is turned on a single opponent.

  They hit us hard with javelins as we started forward, though, and men fell. Gaps were opened in our wall and we weren’t deep enough for those holes to close naturally. So the fight that resulted was sheer deadly chaos, and the carnage was grotesque. Skill in arms counted for little – it was too dark. But we had the burning town behind us, and they were above us, and we could see them much better than they could see us, and in that fight, a minute advantage of vision was sufficient.

  And we sang. That’s what I remember – the red light of the dying sun, and the Paean of Apollo.

  It was no pushover. In the first contact, men fell like weeds cut by a housewife in the garden. I got three men so fast that when my borrowed spear fouled in the third, the first still hadn’t given up his life and fallen on his face. I dropped my spear shaft and pulled my sword again. The marines who should have been either side of me were gone, and Idomeneus was in the front rank, and Herk, of all men, his scarlet plume nodding, pushed in beside me.

  ‘Aren’t you supposed to be on the beach?’ I asked.

  He laughed. ‘Fuck that!’ he shouted.

  We all felt the impact as the Thracian charge struck Paramanos’s end of the line. The Thracian sub-chief hadn’t waited for Paramanos to come over the crest at him. He must have been wise enough to figure that we knew he was there.

  I didn’t see it, but I’ve heard the tale often enough. Paramanos went down – knocked from his feet by a barbarian – and Lekthes stood over his body until he rose. Lekthes died there, like a hero. He took three thrusts, but he didn’t fall until Paramanos was back on his feet.

  I didn’t know it, but Lekthes’ moment of heroism steadied the whole line.

  Paramanos’s men turned, unwilling to abandon their commander, and they stood where they might have broken. Even then, we felt the shock and our line bent back.

  But Stephanos was on their other flank with Aristagoras and his sally, and the fortunes of the Thracians began to ebb like the tide from a salt flat when fishermen go into the surf to collect the catch. Their line disintegrated the way an old linen sail rips when the rope-edge is lashed to the mast and the wind begins to tear at a weakened corner, so that each gust rips a little more of the sail, and then the sail goes, faster and faster, the rip wider and the rate of the tear faster with every gust, and then with the noise of a thunderclap, the whole sail rips out of its harness of rope and flutters away into the storm. Just like that, the Thracian line tore asunder.

  Towards the end, their centre gave way – or died. I began to kill men with every cut of my arm. My hand was growing better as I cut, and my opponents’ eyes were elsewhere – looking up the hill and behind them, where Stephanos’s men had climbed the ridge and now came back down on their left flank from above. Every cut and every thrust took another man down, and then none of them would stand against me. I killed twenty men, I think.

  Yet even as they ran, they fought. Thracians are never more dangerous than when they run – men will turn and throw spears, and they can form again as soon as they think you have lost your order. And my rowers had no stomach to follow them – nor could I blame them.

  So we pushed left, trapping their left wing in a pocket formed of the three forces – the sally from the town, Stephanos’s marines and my own left wing. My right separated from me, going up the hill with Paramanos, so that Herk and Idomeneus were the end men of our part of the line.

  I couldn’t see whether the Thracians were rallying in the trees beyond the crest or not.

  One of their chieftains commanded their left, and he must have known that the end was on him. A handful of his men threw themselves at us – there were three of them, and there was still a gap between Herk and Stephanos as he came down the hill to close the circle. But I put my cheap shield into the face of one and knocked him flat, and his falling fouled the other two, then we put them down in less time than it takes to tell it, Herk thrusting hard past my shield with his spear and Hermogenes giving me a rap on the helmet in his haste to kill the third one over my shoulder.

  It was clear to all that the Thracians were going to die. The chieftain had a scale shirt, a double-bitted hunting axe and a tall helmet of scales crowned with a boar’s head in gold. He was bellowing challenges, but neither Stephanos nor Aristagoras intended that we would fight him man to man, and the circle tightened.

  I had other plans. I ran at him – two paces, all the space that the dying mêlée allowed. His axe went up and I gave him the edge of my aspis and he split it, gashing my shoulder so that I saw white. But I had his axe trapped in my shield, and my good sword thrust into his face as if of its own accord. I stabbed him twice, but I think he was dead after the first.

  And then I was helmet to helmet with Aristagoras. He was trying to claim my kill, and he cut at me, probably because his vision was blurred and it was dark – or because he knew me and hated me.

  Now, I keep promising that I will be honest. I want to tell you that we duelled at the edge of the dark, me the hero and he the villain. But, in fact, I had lost the crest of my helm and had a rower’s shield, and unless he knew me by my scale shirt, he had no idea who I was. But by the gods, I knew him. The last of the Thracians were dying noisily, and I had him all to myself.

  I was a little above him on the hill and I had my shield fouled by the dead chieftain’s axe. It was split and my shoulder was gushing blood, and I couldn’t spin fully to face Aristagoras. So I rotated on my rear foot, pulling my left arm clear of the porpax as I spun and taking a second blow from Aristagoras on the reinforced shoulder of my scale thorax as I turned, so that I just managed to keep my footing.

  Aristagoras thrust at me a third time, and his blade slid off my scales and down my thighs, cutting me. But I paid no heed. Instead, I completed my rotation, clear at last of the wreck of my shield – the gods must have decreed that shields would be my bane that day – and I cut at him, a long overhand blow that caught him behind the shield because I had spun so fast. I sheared through his swan and my blade rang on his helmet. I powered my right foot forward and lifted my blade with my right arm, catching it under the rim of the cheekpiece of his helmet and cutting into his throat – an ugly blow, no skill to it, but I had my blade inside his shield and I wasn’t going to let him go.

  I saw his eyes then, and he knew he was a dead man. He would have run, but I’d cut the artery in the neck. He wasn’t dead, but he let his limbs go loose – a final cowardice. He might have cut me one more time, but he gave up.

  I like to think he knew it was me. But I don’t know that for certain.

  My sword glanced off his neck guard, where the yoke of his corslet rose to cover his back, and I lifted it high in the ‘Harmodius Blow’, an overhand back cut with the legs reversed and the whole
weight of a man’s body and hips behind it, and I cut his head right off his body – no easy feat with a short sword. Try it the next time you sacrifice a calf.

  The stump of his neck jetted blood like a newborn volcano, and he fell.

  I won’t lie. It was a sweet moment.

  Herk caught my wounded left shoulder, and the pain brought me to my senses. ‘Well done, lad!’ he said. ‘Now get out of here, before one of his men fingers you for it.’

  The fighting was fading away. It was the ugly part of a fight – when the brave men find how bad their wounds are, and the cowards push forward and bloody their weapons on dead and wounded men, as if anyone can be fooled by such stuff. I had a dozen cuts, and my arms were both hurt.

  Hermogenes had to prise the vambrace off my arm. It was twisted, the cut that had numbed my arm had deformed the surface, and he had to deform the metal to get it off me, putting the flat of his eating knife against my skin and using it like a crowbar. But my right hand and arm felt better immediately.

  My left arm wasn’t so easily fixed. I had four different cuts, and Hermogenes pulled his old chiton out of his pack, ripped it in four pieces and used one of them to wrap my arm. ‘This is no life for a man,’ he said, out of nowhere. ‘Your friend Lekthes is dead.’

  That was the first I’d heard, although I’ve already told you the manner of his passing.

  Idomeneus had as many cuts as I had, and a deep gash on the outside of his thigh that wrapped around his hip and on to his buttock. You could see white at the bottom of the wound, where the deep fat was.

  ‘That’s not good,’ Idomeneus said, looking at his hip, and fainted.

  Hermogenes shook his head. ‘This is no life for a man,’ he repeated. ‘Look at yourselves. And this for gold? Who needs fucking gold?’ He laid out his leather bag, lit a lamp – he was a monster of efficiency, our Hermogenes, even then – and wrapped Idomeneus, even stitching his arse, which woke the poor bastard. He woke with a scream, but by then Herakleides and Nestor had his arms and he fainted again.

  Herk came back with Agios and a wineskin, attracted by the lamp. There was no breeze, and the wounded were calling for water, and the night things were coming.

  He handed me a cup of wine, but Hermogenes intercepted it and drank it. Fair enough – he was the one doing all the work.

  ‘Still Thracians in the town,’ Herk said. ‘Miltiades is anxious to get off.’

  Paramanos came up with Stephanos. Paramanos had a bandage around his head, and he sighed and pushed the wineskin away. ‘One drink and I’ll be out,’ he said. ‘I owe Lekthes’ widow,’ he said. ‘He traded his life for mine.’

  ‘He was a good man,’ I said. The wine cup had come to me, and I poured a libation to his shade. ‘Apollo light him to Elysium.’

  ‘Aye, he went down like Achilles,’ Herk said.

  I handed the cup back to Hermogenes. ‘I’m going for the town,’ I said. Stephanos stepped forward and I shook my head. ‘You gather up the wounded,’ I said to him. ‘Make sure men go aboard the right ships. Herakleides – I’ll bring Briseis to her namesake. Be ready.’

  I embraced them all, one by one. ‘I don’t know if I’ll be back,’ I said.

  They all embraced me again, and then I headed downhill, to the sally port from which Aristagoras had come.

  Paramanos came with me. When I turned to look at him in the moonlight, his eyes sparkled. ‘You need a keeper,’ he said.

  A party of Aristagoras’s men was carrying his body through the gate. A young man had his shield over his shoulder. We followed them.

  If there were Thracians, we didn’t see them, although we could hear screams and occasional sounds of fighting from lower in the town. We followed the body up two narrow alleys and a long staircase set into an outer wall, and then we were at a torch-lit gate. It was a small place, compared with Kallipolis. There were two sentries, and they were too young and raw to have gone with the sortie.

  I don’t know what I expected, honey. I think that I thought that she would throw herself into my arms and weep. It wasn’t that way at all, of course.

  The hall was small, and she was waiting to receive the body. Her handmaidens were around her, and they took his body – the man I’d beheaded an hour before – and they washed it. She caught my eye and started. She raised an eyebrow – that was all the greeting I got – and then went back to her task. Her role. Like a priestess, she had her part to play, and she played it well.

  An old woman sewed the head back on. While that happened, I stepped up next to Briseis. She bowed.

  ‘Lord Arimnestos,’ she said. ‘We are honoured.’

  She bowed to me – imagine, Briseis the untouchable bowing to Doru the slave. It was all like a dream.

  ‘I am a poor hostess,’ she said, and led the way out of the hall, on to a balcony over the sea.

  I still expected an embrace.

  ‘I killed him,’ I said quietly, and I think I smiled.

  She nodded. ‘I know that,’ she said. ‘And I thank you. Now – go. You should not be here.’

  ‘But—’ I couldn’t believe it. She was pregnant again, I could tell – about three months. But her beauty was unchanged, and her power over me. ‘But I came – to rescue you.’

  Such things, once said, sound very weak indeed.

  ‘Why do you think I need rescuing?’ she asked. Then she laughed. She stood on tiptoe and kissed me. He tongue darted in and out of my mouth, and then she stepped back and licked her lips. ‘Blood in your mouth and all over you,’ she said and she smiled. ‘Achilles. Now be gone, before people talk. I’m a widow and my reputation will matter.’

  ‘I don’t care,’ I said. ‘I’m your next husband.’

  Then she looked – hurt. Not proud, and not angry, and not sad, but as if some deep pain had touched her. She reached out and touched my bloody right hand. ‘No, my love,’ she said. ‘I will not marry you.’ She shook her head. ‘I have children to protect – beautiful children. And where would we go?’

  I felt as if the Persian’s axe had got me. ‘I want to take you home,’ I said.

  ‘To Ephesus?’ she asked.

  ‘To Plataea,’ I said. ‘To my farm.’

  She smiled then, and I knew that my dreams were foolish. The gods must have laughed at me all autumn.

  ‘Listen, my love,’ she said gently. ‘I am not called Helen by other men for nothing. It is not my fate to be a farm-wife in Boeotia, wherever that may be.’ Her smile became bitter – the bitterness of self-knowledge. ‘That is not my fate. Nor would I want it. I will be the lady of a great lord.’ Her hand remained on mine. ‘I love you, but you are a killer. A pirate. A thief of lives.’

  ‘You seem to need me from time to time,’ I said, and my bitterness was too close to the surface.

  She looked past me, into the room where her husband’s body was being washed. She had things that she needed to be doing, she said with her eyes. ‘Be glorious, so that I may hear of you often, Achilles,’ she said softly.

  ‘Come with me,’ I pleaded.

  She shook her head.

  Well, I had my pride, too – and that was my foolishness. When Archi walked away from me, I should have wrestled him to the ground, and when Briseis chose another life, I should have put her over my shoulder and taken her. We’d both have been happier.

  But I was proud.

  ‘In the harbour, there will be a ship in ten days,’ I said. ‘Unless Poseidon takes him. His name is your name, and he is your ship. I took him from Diomedes of Ephesus. The rowers are yours until the end of autumn.’

  Then she threw her arms around my neck. ‘Oh, thank you!’ she said. ‘Now I am truly free.’

  I turned to leave – but then it struck me. ‘You will marry Miltiades!’ I said, and there was death in my tone.

  Her lip curled in disgust. ‘You are worth ten of him,’ she said. ‘And if it were my fate to be a pirate queen, I would be yours.’

  ‘Who then?’ I asked. ‘I could protect your chi
ldren.’

  ‘And make them tyrants of Miletus?’ she asked. ‘Lords of Ephesus?’ She came and put her arms around my neck, and I had no hatred for her in my body. ‘Go! Let me hear of you in songs of praise, and perhaps we will meet again.’

  We kissed. It cannot have helped her reputation much, since every woman in that hall could see us, but it did me a world of good. That kiss had to hold me for many years.

  Part VI

  Justice

  Citizens must fight to defend the law as if fighting to hold the city wall.

  Heraclitus, fr. 44

  For gods on the one hand, all things are beautiful, good, and just; but men, on the other, suppose some things to be just and others to be unjust.

  Heraclitus, fr. 102

  22

  I had almost recovered from my wounds when I stepped wearily off my own gangplank like an old man and limped up the beach at Piraeus. The red wounds were closed and the bruises had faded, but the black hole where my guts had been was never going to close.

  Herakleides landed me from Briseis, and he embraced me like a brother. To be honest, I’d never really forgiven him for selling the information of the value of our ransoms to Miltiades, but in his way he’d done me a favour, showing me who I worked for and what a life I’d come to. So when I limped down the plank, I turned and took his hand.

  ‘Take this ship back to its owner, and she’ll keep you as captain,’ I said. ‘You are too good a man to spend your life as a pirate and die face down on the sand. And you’re not good enough with the bronze and iron to stay alive. Do you hear me, friend?’

  He nodded.

  ‘Take this ship to Briseis and we’re quits, you and me – no blood price over a certain matter back on Lesbos. Fail to deliver, and I’ll find you. Am I clear?’ Behind me, Hermogenes and Idomeneus and a pair of Thracian slaves – men I’d taken as part of the booty – were carrying my goods down off the ship.