I ran until I could not see, until my breath came like fire into a bellows, and sweat flew from me. I had run thirty stades in armour, fought a battle, and now I was running another thirty stades. My right arm was all blood to the elbow, sticky and brown, and there were wounds on my thighs and ankles and a deep cut on my left bicep — no idea how it came there — and still I ran.
Did I think that I could save her if I ran far enough?
Perhaps I wanted to burst my heart.
I remember seeing that I had run all the way to the fork at the foot of the hill, and what I remember best was the strange temptation I had to keep going — over the stream and up to the hero’s tomb. And perhaps away over the mountain to Attica, and over the sea to Aegypt. To keep going and never go home, and never know.
Perhaps I lost my wits.
But I turned my feet, lengthened my stride and ran up the dusty lane, sharp gravel under my hard feet.
Halfway up the hill, the road turns just a little, and you can see straight to the gate in the wall that surrounds my house.
The house itself was burning. Although it was stone and mortar, and solidly built, they’d fired the floorboards and the roof beams, and the stone was cracking and falling, and the whole thing had become a chimney, carrying my riches to the skies in an intended sacrifice.
I didn’t give it more than a glance.
My great wooden gate, for which my father had forged the straps and hinges and cut the oak, was broken and twisted. On the ground was a heavy beam from one of the sheds — Tiraeus’s shed, as it later proved. They’d used it to break the gate.
Around the gateway, women lamented. They keened, high wails like the cries of bloody-handed furies tearing to the heavens, demanding revenge. Well — they had their revenge, but as usual, it brought no child born of woman back to life.
I pushed through them. The gateway was packed with corpses, some of them black with fire.
My farm had not fallen lightly, and my people had not died alone.
Bion lay across the threshold, his spear broken in his hand, his body ripped asunder.
Cleon lay by him, throat ripped and with ten great wounds in his body and a broken axe clutched in his hands.
They lay across the woman they had died defending, and even she had a sword in her hand, and the edge of the blade was bloody. She had not gone down easily. She had not been raped. She was dead before such thoughts could occur to any man, however evil.
She was not pregnant, and as I stood there, I realized that her hair was not blonde.
It was not Euphoria. It was Mater. Mater had died in the gateway, sword in hand.
My mind couldn’t accept it — couldn’t take in the loss of the three of them in one blow. In truth, all my being had been aimed at Euphoria, and I had forgotten how many people I loved were in this farm.
Mater.
I lifted Bion off her legs and laid him down with dignity, although his intestines trailed behind him as I dragged him across the yard.
I lifted Cleon too, and now I was weeping, because he had died like a great man, and there were dead enemies at his feet.
And Mater — how I had hated her for so many years. Yet here she was, sword in hand, like any hero you might name. Ares, she died well. And sober.
I rolled her corpse over, and she had that smile on her face — that smile she wore when she saw that I could say the verses of Theognis, or when I brought Euphoria under the roof, or when she met Miltiades.
That she wore that look with a spear in her guts made her seem very great to me.
But when I went to lift her, two other hands reached beneath her shoulders — bloody hands, but smaller.
Euphoria’s hair was wild, her chiton was unpinned at one shoulder, so that one breast showed on the right, and there was blood on her feet. She took Mater’s shoulders and lifted, and we laid her down with the other heroes who fell defending the dooryard.
‘She locked me in the basement,’ Euphoria said. She wasn’t crying. ‘She said it was my duty to live.’
Tiraeus and Styges had held the door to the forge. The hired warriors had given up after they lost two men, then went and fired the house and ran off. So Styges had let my wife out of the basement before the house collapsed into it.
And more, Mater had saved so much — wall hangings, gold and silver — all thrown into the forge building. Bion and Cleon held the gate while she did it, and then she joined them, and they all died together. Or that’s how Styges told it, who had stood in the door of the forge and held it.
Euphoria held me, crooning. She was strong, and I was suddenly unmanned. It was everything — Bion’s death, Cleon’s, Mater’s — and Euphoria being alive. And fatigue, I suppose.
Styges asked me if we had fought. I must have told them something, because the women stopped screaming for vengeance. And then Euphoria brought me wine — neat — and I drank a cup, and passed out like a drunkard.
When I came to, it was night and I could scarcely move. My thighs hurt so much that I had trouble rolling over. I was lying on gravel in my forge yard, and I had a blanket of my wife’s weaving over me, and she was snuggled to my side, her head against my shoulder.
‘I thought you were dead,’ I said.
She shook her head and her arm embraced me, a good, long squeeze.
In the morning, my legs still ached as if I was an old man. My shoulders and arms weren’t much better, and one of the cuts on my thigh was deeper than I had thought and wept pus.
The bastards had raped any female slave they caught and killed three of my male slaves. So my yard had the mourning of defeat, along with the dreadful fear of my slave girls that they were pregnant. I went to the stream and washed myself, with a prayer to the stream itself for the filth I was putting in her, and then I went back up the hill carrying water, and Euphoria began to wash the women clean, which is the only kindness you can do for a raped woman.
I got Styges and Tiraeus, who both had small wounds, to bind mine, and then I helped with theirs, and then we began to take stock.
We hadn’t lost an animal — the byres were up the hill, and the bastards never made it past the yard. They’d burned the one barn they reached, which was full of barley and hay. It was a loss, but it only held the ready stores for the house and the animals. The house was gone, though. A house that my great-grandfather built of stone and mortar — the best house in all of south Plataea. The home of the Corvaxae, great and small.
Simon burned it, destroying the work of his own family, and he killed his own step-mother in the courtyard. May the furies rip his liver for ever. May every shade in Hades treat him with the contempt of a matricide and a traitor.
I was standing in the yard, looking at the wreck of the house — rubble and not much more — when men came through the gate. Teucer and Hermogenes, Idomeneus and Alcaeus and all the men of the epilektoi.
I walked over to Hermogenes and put my arms around him. ‘Bion died in the yard,’ I said.
I took him by the hand to where his father was laid out. The women had already bathed his body with the water I brought them, and anointed him with oil, and put coins on his eyes. Hermogenes fell to his knees, wept and poured sand over his head.
Other, smaller steadings had also been hit. On the way back to Thebes, the hired men had lost their discipline — if they ever had any — and they’d killed and raped whatever they could catch. So I was not alone in my mourning.
But Teucer took me aside. ‘Are you blind with rage?’ he asked.
I shook my head. ‘Euphoria is alive, and the unborn baby,’ I said. ‘I have my wits about me today.’
Teucer led me outside the old house wall. ‘This man was with them,’ he said. ‘I took him alive. He is my slave now.’
Fair enough. A hired man was nobody’s — not a citizen anywhere. Capture meant enslavement. I had played by those rules — I knew the game.
‘I won’t kill him,’ I said.
The man met my eye for a moment as I approa
ched him. Then he looked at the ground.
‘You fought for my cousin Simon?’ I asked.
‘Simon?’ The man spat. ‘Cleitus paid us. Simon came along for the ride, the incompetent fuck.’
You think he should have held his tongue, friends? But why? He was our slave, and he knew what he had to do if he wanted to live. We needed no threats. Nor would I have done any differently, had I stood in his shoes.
I nodded. I looked at Teucer.
‘Ask him why they came,’ Teucer prompted.
‘Okay, I’m game. Why did you come?’ I asked.
‘We were fucking paid to kill you, mate.’ The man shrugged. ‘Nothing personal.’
Teucer kicked him so hard he fell to the ground. ‘Lord — Arimnestos is called “lord”.’
The man got himself upright. ‘We were paid to kill you, lord,’ he managed. ‘Could have just told me.’
‘Can I buy him from you?’ I asked Teucer.
‘You will kill him?’ Teucer said.
I shrugged. ‘Perhaps.’
‘Buy me a good working man, then. This one will be a lazy fuck.’ Teucer put the man’s rope in my hand. ‘All yours. Now ask him what signalled them to start.’
I looked at the captive. He was squatting in the dust, but his eyes still had the glint of — pride, or resentment, or just stubbornness. I liked him a little for that. He was beaten, but not defeated.
He nodded. ‘We was told to wait until we saw fires at Chalcis,’ he said. ‘Runner came in yesterday morning.’
Teucer nodded. ‘See?’ he asked.
I did see. If there was smoke rising over Chalcis — why then, the Persians must be in Euboea.
If the Persians were in Euboea, then the attack on Attica was close — two or three weeks away, at most.
If the Persians were about to attack Attica, then Athens would be paralysed, and it was safe for Simon to attack Plataea.
Secrets inside secrets, like the boxes which nest inside other boxes, smaller and smaller, until there’s a tiny nut or a silver bell in the centre of seven or eight of them. Someone had plotted this very carefully — as I had suspected.
‘Want to be free?’ I said.
‘You bet,’ he said.
‘Hmm. We’ll see. That corpse is my mother. That one is a man who saved my life fighting. That’s my best friend’s father. Those women? My slaves.’ I looked at him, and he grew pale.
‘I-’ he sputtered.
‘Do as you’re told,’ I said. ‘I know you’re a hoplite. Somewhere, you are probably a gentleman.’ I looked around. ‘Right now, you’re a slave, and if you fuck up, someone will kill you. Now — truth now — did you rape?’
He shook his head. ‘No,’ he said. And as I said — it was obvious he had been a gentleman. I believed him.
‘Good. Then go and start helping.’
I sent Styges and one of my forge boys running for Myron, and I asked him to order the muster of the whole phalanx on my say-so.
Myron arrived on a mule, without ordering the muster. ‘Why?’ he asked, as soon as he had his leg over the beast’s back. ‘You slaughtered Thebans on their own ground. We’re in for it now.’
I shook my head. ‘Bold front, archon. I don’t think that we did wrong — ask any man here, whose wife is lying with her throat slit. That’s my mother over there.’
He spat. ‘Fucking Thebans. Very well. What do you suggest, polemarch?’
I had the advantage that all the epilektoi were together, so that my officers — that is, my real officers — were there to advise me.
We’d had two hours to plan, and we’d hammered it out while we waited for Myron and cleared the rubble of the house. A hundred men — even a hundred tired men — can accomplish a great deal in a short time. My burned barn was now a dark smudge on the ground and my ruined house was a pile of fire-blackened stone out beyond the house wall. The burned beams had been stacked and three pyres of scrap wood from all the surrounding farms built on the hilltop. All that in a few hours.
By now I was much calmer. I’d had time to breathe, and no one let me do any work — nor did Idomeneus do any, as he was a lord now and a priest. Alcaeus was the same, so the three of us watched other men lift stones while we debated the campaign.
And when Myron asked, we were ready.
‘How are the towers?’ I asked.
‘The west tower is done, and the east will be complete tomorrow or the next day, if the wind continues to blow dry.’ He shrugged. ‘They’ll be done before Thebes can march.’
That confirmed what we’d hoped. ‘Then this is our plan,’ I said. ‘First, we free all the slaves who built the towers.’
‘Zeus Soter!’ the archon said. ‘That’s the whole year’s profits gone.’
I nodded. ‘Not just for you, lord. But listen. We lost ten men yesterday — we’ll lose ten times that in the next month, and that is if we win. We need those men as citizens. Yes?’
He shook his head. ‘Perhaps later-’
I disagreed. ‘We need them now. Because we want to put them in the armour of the dead hired men, install Lysius as their officer and leave them with another fifty picked men to guard the walls. In fact, we don’t want them to sit within the walls. We want them to march down to the ford and camp, with light-armed men prowling around. If you dare-’ I looked around, ‘I’d send Teucer tonight to burn some barns in Thebes.’
Myron shook his head. ‘You are talking about kicking a hornets’ nest,’ he said.
Idomeneus raised a long, plucked eyebrow. ‘Ever faced down a bull in a meadow, archon?’ he asked.
Myron nodded slowly. ‘I have, too. You think that as long as we look tough, they’ll back down.’
Alcaeus laughed. ‘Not really, lord. The truth is, they have twelve thousand hoplites and we do not. But a show of aggression — especially after the tanning we gave those hired men — might slow them up for a week or two.’ He shrugged. ‘Lysius can always pull inside the walls later, when he sees the dust cloud coming.’
Myron gave a grim smile. ‘All this planning suggests that you won’t be here — with the phalanx.’
‘That’s right,’ I said. ‘According to our prisoners, Euboea was burning yesterday. Chalcis is being served up to the Persians. By the time we march, Euboea will have fallen.’
Alcaeus nodded. ‘And Datis has the heart of the sailing season at his back,’ he said. ‘He’ll move straight on to Athens.’
‘And Athens will fall without my phalanx?’ Myron asked softly.
I laughed. ‘A thousand hoplites?’ I made a face. ‘Athens can find twelve thousand, and perhaps fifteen. They don’t need the weight of our spears.’ Secretly, I suspected that they did need the weight of our spears. ‘But Athens has factions, Myron — factions the like of which you can’t imagine. If we appear — to honour our agreements, and without being asked — we will strengthen Miltiades’ hand. Enormously.’
He looked at me, and I looked at him.
‘Archon,’ I said, ‘please. If Athens falls, or Medizes, Plataea is doomed. Thebes will eat us the way a gull eats a snail. Our only hope of preservation is to act — aggressively — for Athens.’
Myron looked out from our hilltop. Men were still carrying brush for the pyres to burn the bodies, and below, other men — my neighbours — were breaking up the biggest chunks of rubble with iron tools.
‘When I was a much younger man,’ he said, after a while, ‘I stood in your forge yard with your father and a few other men, and we agreed to make an alliance with Athens to preserve our city from the yoke of Thebes.’ He turned, and met my eye. ‘I think the decision for today was made that day. I was wrong to slow the muster. I will see to it, and you will take my citizens over the mountain and do what you can.’ He stood straight, as if ten years had fallen from his shoulders. ‘May Zeus and Ares and Grey-Eyed Athena stand by you, for if you lose the phalanx, even in victory, why then our city will fall.’
When he went back to his mule, Alcaeus looked at me.
‘Plataea is lucky to have so many great men in so small a city. Would that Miletus had done as well.’
‘We may yet fail,’ I said.
He shrugged. ‘Of course. But not for the lack of trying.’
‘Let’s go and kill some Medes,’ Idomeneus said, and he grinned.
We burned Mater, Bion and Cleon on the hilltop that afternoon, with wine and sacrifices and a priestess of Hera from the temple. And when they were ash, and the fires were great smoking columns not unlike the pillars of smoke that the raiders had left behind, the priestess came to me and proposed that I pay for a statue of Mater in the temple.
‘She was a great woman,’ the priestess said. She was a matron with iron at her temples and a vast reserve of dignity. ‘Young women need examples of how to live — and die.’
I all but spat at her. ‘She was drunk every day of her wedded life,’ I said.
The priestess stepped back. ‘Speak no ill of the dead!’ she commanded. ‘Is that the way you will speak of her? Or as the hero who fell defending your home?’
I gave her the money. There’s a new statue that bears no resemblance to her — the Persians broke the one a local man made, smashing it to gravel with hammers. But in Plataea, the new temple honours Mater as an avatar of Hera. Take from that what you will.
While I mourned, the phalanx mustered.
A thousand men may not sound like many, but every man needs a slave and a donkey or a mule to carry his kit, to cook for him and keep him in fighting trim. And a thousand mules with two thousand men is a long column to lead over mountain tracks. It takes time for men to put their houses in order, and time to gather enough food for thirty days, and time for the slave to kiss his own wife. Time to make sure you have your second-best cloak as well as your war cloak, time to make sure that someone packed you some garlic sausage and some fresh onions from the garden.
My packing was done — my mule was still picketed high above Eleutherai, and my friends had rescued my kit from where I left it by Asopus. My good Persian shirt of scale was on Lysius’s back, and my old helmet with the raven crest was on his head to puzzle the Thebans — and he did it no dishonour.
Euphoria fussed about, finding me oil with lavender in it, and retrieving — as if by a miracle — my father’s heavy walking stick from the collapsed cellar of the house, charred a little but still strong as iron. And when she had seen me cared for, she took me by the hand and led me to our spring, up by the vineyard, and then she bathed with me, in the deep hole by the spring. There were men all about us on the hill, but none came near, and the olive grove hid us. There’s no modesty when you bathe in an open sink of rock, and pregnancy or none, we made love. And then we washed again, and she put on the robe Mater had saved — a beautiful thing of red-purple, with gold embroidery. And I helped her put up her hair in a net of linen.
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