Marathon: Freedom or Death lw-2

by Christian Cameron

  ‘Come,’ he said. ‘We will go to her gate.’

  In the near dark, Ephesus was inhabited mostly by slaves and men looking for prostitutes. No one paid us any attention as we walked together.

  I followed him up to the gate of the house of my youth. This time, my heart slammed against my chest and I was unable to think, much less speak.

  My master took me by the hand and led me to the gate as if I was a young student. I didn’t know the slave on duty there, but he bowed deeply to my master and led him into the courtyard, where she lay on a long couch. A younger woman fanned her, and the smell of mint and jasmine filled the garden, and my head. Suddenly, it was as if no time had passed. My eyes met hers, and I remember giving a twitch, as did she, I think — such was the power of our attraction in those days.

  She never spared the greatest philosopher of the age a glance.

  ‘You came,’ she said, after time had passed.

  I trembled. ‘You called to me,’ I said. I was surprised at how calm my voice was.

  ‘You didn’t hurry,’ she said.

  ‘We are no longer young lovers, playing at the Iliad,’ I said.

  ‘We never were,’ she returned, and her smile widened by some small fraction of one of Pythagoras’s figures. ‘We never played.’

  I nodded. ‘Why have you summoned me, Helen?’ I asked.

  She shrugged, and her voice changed, and she tossed her hair, like any other woman. ‘Boredom, I suppose,’ she said lightly. ‘My husband needs captains. It is time you became a great man.’

  I was not eighteen. She filled me, just lying on a couch. I could barely breathe. And yet, I was not eighteen. I took a deep breath, bit back my sharp response, turned on my heel and walked away.

  You were never promised a happy story, my young friends. I’m afraid that we are coming to the part where you might prefer to stay home.

  I headed out of the gate and back to my master’s house. I shivered as if from cold, I was so angry — and so afraid. As I stood in my master’s tiny courtyard, I raised my face to the stars.

  ‘What have I done?’ I asked.

  They didn’t respond.

  My head was full of thoughts, like a bag of wool stuffed to the very brim — that I should go back and beg forgiveness, that I should send a note, throw rocks at her window. . kill her.

  Yes, that thought came to me, too. That I should kill her. And be free.

  Instead, without much conscious thought, I packed up my leather bag, rolled my spare cloak tight and walked out into a quiet night in Ephesus. I had decided that if I could not have her, I might as well test myself or die. It is curious that we do our strangest thinking while we are under the influence of deep emotion. Suddenly I was not a trierarch or a lord. I was a young man bereft, angry, seeking death.

  That is love, my friends. Beware of the Cyprian, beware. Ares in his bronze-clad rage has not the power.

  I see consternation on your faces — I can only assume that none of you have ever been in love — you, thugater, I’d put a sword in you if I thought that you had, you minx! But listen to me. Love — the all-consuming fire that Sappho tells of, the dangerous game of Alcaeus, the summit of noble virtue and the depth of depravity described by Pythagoras — love is all. The gods fade, the stars grow pale, the sun has no heat to burn, nor ice to freeze, next to the power of love.

  When she said that she had written to me from boredom, she struck me with a rod of humiliation. No lover can accept such a blow and remain the same.

  I have had many years and many night watches, and the long hours before a hundred fights to think about love, and how each of us might have been, if we were not such proud and insolent animals.

  I think — close your ears, girls — I think that men come to love though a mixture of lust and challenge, while women come to love through a different mix of lust and wonder at their own power — and desire to subdue another. As with Miltiades and Dionysius, and many others locked in a competition, there is more dross than gold in the ore, but what is refined in the fire is finer than either of the lovers could have made alone. Men come to love by challenge — the challenge of sex, the challenge of holding the loved one against all comers, the challenge of being the better man in the lover’s eyes.

  Briseis never ceased to challenge me. Her company never came free, because she valued herself above any mortal, and her favours were the reward for heroic action, heroic determination — heroic luck. The idea that she would summon me from boredom was a mortal insult to both of us.

  So I shouldered my pack and went down the hill, past the sentries on the wall and out of the main gate. The moon was bright enough that I never stumbled. I was walking to Sardis. The Persian capital of Lydia — the heart of the enemy’s power.

  Did I say I wasn’t eighteen any more? When Briseis is involved, honey, I’m always eighteen.

  Or perhaps fifteen.

  I walked all night, and all day the next day. I climbed the great pass alone, my head almost empty of thought from exhaustion, but I stopped and poured a libation for the men who died there fighting the Medes. At the last moment, speaking my prayer, I added the Medes who had fallen there — to my spear, and to others. My voice hung on the air, and I shivered involuntarily. The gods were listening.

  I walked down the far side of the pass in a daze, and I didn’t stop to eat or rest, and by the evening of the third day, I came to Sardis. Just as on my first visit, the gates were open. Unlike my first visit, I didn’t kill anyone.

  Sardis is a great city, but not a Greek city. There are Greeks there, and Persians, and Medes, and Lydians — a swarthy, handsome people, and the women are dark-haired, with large eyes and beautiful bodies, which they don’t trouble to hide.

  I was not of this world when I entered the gates. I must have looked like a madman, but Sardis had plenty of them. My Persian was still good, and I spoke it rather than Greek, and men made way for me. Most probably thought that I was one of the many prophets who afflict Phrygia, wandering and foretelling doom.

  In my head, I was locked in a fearful fantasy, where the waking world of shops and handsome women merged with the chaos and death of the battle I had fought here. In the agora, I looked from booth to booth, trying to find the dead men I knew must be lying there.

  I sound mad, but even as I was having these thoughts, I knew I needed rest, sleep, food. It occurred to me to hurry back to Heraclitus to tell him that I had found a place where the stream ran twice — that I could be in two times at once, merely by running a few hundred stades without rest or food.

  My next memory is of sitting in a cool garden, eating lamb. It is a curious thing — one I have experienced all too often — that as soon as the rich, sweet food passed my lips, the curious half world of battle and gods vanished and I felt like a man again.

  I was sitting across a broad cedar table from Cyrus, now captain of a hundred noble cavalrymen in the bodyguard of Datis.

  I ate ravenously, and he watched me carefully — a healthy mixture of friendly concern and suspicion. We’d crossed swords often enough in the last years for him to know perfectly well where my sympathies led. On the other hand, I had saved his life and his master’s, and that means more to a Persian than mere nationality.

  He watched me eat, and he put me to bed, and the next day his slaves awakened me, and I ate again. I was young, bold and healthy — I recovered swiftly.

  On that second day, he was waiting in the courtyard. ‘Welcome to my house,’ he said in Persian.

  I knew the ritual, so I made a small sacrifice — barley cakes — to the sun, and ate salt on bread with him.

  He nodded at my bag and gear. ‘You are carrying a fortune,’ he said. My gold and glass Aegyptian bottle was sitting before him on the table. He twirled his moustache. ‘It pains me, but I must ask you how you come to be here.’ He looked into my eyes. ‘And why.’

  Slaves brought me a hot drink. Persians drink all sorts of things hot, because mornings are often cold in their moun
tains, or so I’ve been told. This had the aroma of anise, and tasted of honey. I held his gaze, and I decided that having come all this way, I would behave as a hero and not as a spy.

  ‘My lord,’ I said, ‘I will tell you everything, and to the utmost degree of honesty — like a Persian, and not like a Greek. But let me first say three things. And then you may decide if you need to know more.’

  He nodded. ‘Well spoken. Please, be my guest.’ He waved at bread and honey, which he knew I loved, from the days when I was Doru the slave boy, and he and his friends fed me just to see how much I could eat. He raised a hand. ‘I doubt not that you will tell me the truth. But lest you misunderstand — I know exactly who you are. You are a great warrior.’ He smiled. Persians don’t lie, and it was a genuine grin of admiration. ‘I often dine for free or am given gifts of wine because I can tell stories of when I knew you as a boy. It is an honour to be your friend.’

  I stood. Persians are very formal. ‘It is an honour to be the friend of Cyrus, captain of the hundred that guards Artaphernes,’ I said.

  He blushed and rose, and I saw that his right arm was swathed in bandages. ‘Wounded?’ I asked.

  ‘Yes,’ he sighed. ‘A petty skirmish over horses at Miletus.’

  ‘Last autumn, at the edge of winter?’ I asked.

  He nodded.

  ‘I was there!’ I said.

  He nodded. ‘I know, young Doru. So — you will tell me three things. I must hear them.’

  I sat back and warmed my hands with the ceramic cup full of hot tea.

  ‘I serve Miltiades of Athens,’ I said carefully.

  Cyrus nodded.

  ‘I love Briseis, daughter of Hipponax, wife of Artaphernes,’ I said.

  Cyrus started, and then slapped his knee. ‘Of course you do!’ he said. ‘May Ahura Mazda blast my sight — I should have known.’ Then he schooled his face. ‘He is my lord, of course.’

  ‘I am in Sardis seeking news of how Datis will fight us,’ I said. ‘But the bottle of scent is for Briseis, and the money is my own, and none of it is to buy treason.’

  Cyrus drank tea, looking at the roses that grew up the wall of his courtyard in the morning sun. ‘If I arrest you,’ he said, ‘you will be sent to Persepolis. The Great King has heard your name. You will be a noble prisoner and a hostage. In time, you might rise in court and be a satrap — you might command me.’

  I shrugged.

  ‘Or I might kill you. You do not deny that you are the enemy of my master?’ He raised his eyebrow.

  ‘No. Nor do I deny that I am here to learn your weaknesses. You see — I am a bad Greek.’ I laughed.

  He did not laugh. ‘I never thought to say this — but a small lie on these matters would have let me sleep better.’

  I shrugged. I had the advantage that I didn’t care. I never loved the Ionian Alliance, friends. They were mostly East Greeks to me, soft-handed men who argued about firewood while the flames of their fire died. They had great men among them — Nearchos and Epaphroditos come to mind. But Briseis had hurt me, and I cared for nothing.

  But — my role as a hero required me to speak.

  ‘Instead of a lie, I’ll give you a truth. I am here as a private man. I seek to give my gift to Briseis, and speak with her in Ephesus. I make no war on Sardis.’ I frowned.

  ‘Unlike the last time, you rebel!’ He slapped his knees again. ‘I was sword to sword with you in the marketplace!’ He looked around. ‘Does she love you, Doru?’

  I shook my head. ‘I don’t know, Cyrus. I have loved her — since I was a boy. And she loved me.’ I shook my head. ‘Once, she loved me.’

  ‘You have lain with her?’ Cyrus asked. Persians are not shy about such things.

  ‘Many times,’ I assured him.

  He nodded. ‘She loves my master,’ he said. He twirled his moustache again.

  Now — I have to go off the tale again, to explain that among Persians, adultery, a mortal offence among Greeks, is something of a national aristocratic pastime, like lion-hunting. So my passion for his lord’s wife made me all the more Persian, to Cyrus. I wasn’t in a mood to calculate and manipulate — but I knew that this simple truth would render my mission for Miltiades almost incidental.

  ‘Why?’ I asked.

  ‘He ruined her mother, of course.’ Cyrus knew it as well as I. We had both been there. ‘I would say — to a brother — that she tastes the forbidden because it is forbidden. That she loves power, but not Artaphernes.’

  I might have rushed to her defence — except that his words struck me as truth.

  ‘To lie with the mother and the daughter is a sin in Persia,’ Cyrus went on. ‘Many of us want him to leave her.’

  I took a breath and let it go, and the balance changed.

  ‘Let me go, and I will try to take her with me,’ I said.

  ‘Hmm.’ He put his hand on the table. ‘I am caught between what I want for my lord and what he wants. I will not be the agent of corrupting his wife. Despite my misgivings.’ He contemplated me and combed his beard. ‘I find I cannot order your death, although, to be honest, I have a feeling that would be best for the King of Kings.’

  I remember shrugging. A foolish response, but then, what should a man do when his death is proposed?

  ‘Swear to me that you will do nothing to harm my master, and that you will leave this city in the morning,’ he said.

  I put my hand in his. ‘I swear that I will return to Ephesus tomorrow, and once there, my only purpose will be to see her and leave,’ I said. If your wits are quick, you’ll see how full of holes my oath was.

  We clasped hands, and he finished his tea. ‘I have business in the marketplace,’ he said. ‘Gather all the news you like. It will only discomfit you. You cannot fight the Great King. His power is beyond your imagination. I should send you to Persepolis as a prisoner — I would be doing you a favour. But I will let you see your doom — and then let you go to it. Perhaps you will save a few Greeks to be the Great King’s subjects.’ He pointed out the gate. ‘Go — learn. And despair. And leave Briseis to her own end, is my advice.’

  We embraced like old comrades. It is odd how we saw each other only in snatches, here and there — and how he had known me, not as a great hero, but as a slave boy — and yet we were ever friends, even when our swords were bloody to the wrist and we swung them at each other.

  Never believe that Persians were lesser men. Their best were as good as our best — or better.

  His permission — and it was that — to go and spy in Sardis chilled me, and I dressed and went out into the agora.

  I passed from booth to booth, buying wine at one, a packet of herbs at another, listening to the gossip and the news.

  I had been a slave, and I knew how to avoid being watched. Cyrus may have loved me, but he was a professional soldier, and before the sun was above the low houses, I knew he had put two men to watch me — Lydians, dark-haired men. One had a bad scar on his knee that gave him away even at a distance when he walked, and the other had the habit of crowding me too close — afraid he’d lose me.

  I had learned about such things when I was a slave. Slaves follow each other, aiming at masters’ secrets. Masters train slaves to follow other slaves, also searching secrets out. Slaves take free lovers and have to hide — or vice versa.

  I noticed them before I completed my first tour of the shops and stalls of the agora, and I lost them by the simple expedient of walking into the front of a taverna on the corner of the agora and passing through the kitchens to exit at the back.

  Then I walked up a steep street to the top, sat in a tiny wine shop and watched my back trail the way a lioness watches for hunters. I watched for an hour, and then I walked through an alley spattered with someone else’s urine and walked down the hill on another narrow street until I came to the street of goldsmiths. I went into the second shop, kept by a Babylonian, and examined the wares. He had a speciality — tiny gold scroll tubes, for men who wore amulets of written magic. They
were beautifully done. I bought one.

  The owner had a Syriac accent, a huge white beard like a comic actor and more hand gestures than an Athenian. We haggled for a cup of tea and then a cup of wine. I was buying a tube of gold, not silver or bronze, and my custom was worth ten days’ work, so I played at it as long as he wanted to, although our haggling was largely done in the first five exchanges.

  He wrapped it in a scrap of fine Tyrian-dyed leather.

  ‘Miltiades sent me,’ I said after I counted my coins down.

  ‘I should have charged you more,’ he shot back. But he raised an eyebrow and winked. And put my coins in his coin box. ‘I’ll send for more wine. I thought the Greek had forgotten me.’

  ‘When we lost Ephesus, we lost the ability to contact you,’ I said.

  He made a face. ‘I have written some notes,’ he said, and went upstairs into his house. I could hear him talking to his wife, and then moving around. Finally he returned.

  ‘These are written in the Hebrew way,’ he said, ‘and no one — no one not a sage like me — could ever read them.’ He smiled. ‘Would you like a nice spell to go with your pretty amulet, soldier?’

  ‘It’s not for me,’ I said.

  ‘Beautiful woman?’ he asked. ‘You’ve been her lover for many years. And she loves you. And both of you too proud to surrender to the other. Eh?’

  I stared at him, open-mouthed.

  ‘Not for nothing am I called Abrahim the Wise, son. Besides, it’s not exactly a rare story, is it?’ He laughed wickedly. And began to make tiny dots on a piece of vellum.

  He was making a pattern — a tiny pattern, meticulous and perfect. Of course, he was a goldsmith, and such men can always draw.

  ‘The Persians?’ I prompted him.

  He peered at his work. ‘Datis is forming his fleet at Tyre,’ he said. ‘He intends to have six hundred ships.’

  I confess that a curse escaped me, despite my new-found piety.

  ‘That’s not the worst of it, son,’ Abrahim continued. He glanced at his notes, and shook his head with his lips pursed. ‘Datis has approached each of the islands — and all the leaders — with money. Gold darics. Sacks of them.’ He looked at his work again. ‘I saw the money caravan come through from Persepolis — not three weeks ago. Datis is determined to take Miletus and break the rebellion — even if he has to buy it.’