“Mother!” Tullus shouted. I had to grab him by the shoulders to keep him from darting out and being trampled to death—what could he, a boy, have done except get himself killed?
“Mother!” he cried again, struggling to free himself from my grasp.
It was Enkidu who saved her.
Twisting from the waist, he swung the great ax in a wide circle over his head, cutting the air with a sound like a gasp of astonishment. His hands parted and the ax tumbled through empty space, end over end, and then with a sickening thud buried itself blade-first in the chest of the first rider, yanking him from from his mount as if he had been pulled from behind.
The other two reined in their horses at once, making them rear up and claw at the air with their hooves.
Even over the horses’ wild neighing I heard the whisper of metal against leather as swords were drawn from their scabbards.
If they wanted to fight, I thought, well and good. I raised my javelin, waiting for the Sicels to charge, knowing that only then would these shadowy figures offer me a target.
But instead, after a second or two, they seemed to think better of the idea and wheeled about to flee.
“Cowards!” Tullus shouted after them. I let him go to rush into his mother’s arms, and Enkidu and I started running toward the house.
The man who had been standing in front of our door turned to look when his friends galloped past. He saw us too, realized that he was outnumbered, and scrambled to climb back on his horse, but he was an instant too late. I let fly, and as he took hold of the reins my javelin caught him somewhere in the left side of his back. It pulled loose and fell to the ground, but I knew from the way he seemed to sway in his seat that I had wounded him badly. He crouched down, holding on to the horse’s neck, and rode away.
Suddenly the farmyard was quiet again. The whole incident had lasted only a few minutes, yet nothing was the same now. Safety had vanished.
The door opened and Kephalos timidly stuck his head outside. An oil lamp burned in his hand, and he peered about like an owl blinded by the sunlight.
“Everything is over,” I said. “Who is inside with you?”
“Selana and Ganymedes,” he answered, after swallowing hard. He looked a trifle ashamed of his own fear. “I heard strangers riding up—no neighbor would call at this hour—and I bolted the door.”
“You acted wisely. Everyone is all right then?”
“Yes. Everyone is all right.”
He came out and together we looked at the spattering of blood on the ground.
“You killed one of them?”
“No.” I shook my head. “At least, he was not dead when he left here.”
Selana and Ganymedes came out, clutching at one another for comfort. They followed us to where Tanaquil stood with her two sons gathered around her. Ganymedes looked as if he could hardly restrain himself from throwing himself into Tullus’ arms.
A little way away, Enkidu had pulled his ax from the chest of the dead bandit and was busy dragging the corpse out of sight. A few minutes later he came back. He had wiped the ax blade clean and was holding the dead man’s severed head by the hair. His expression was like defiance but amounted to no more than a kind of harsh expectancy.
“Yes, there will be other trophies. We will go after them,” I said. The idea had just come into my mind, and as a settled matter. I had not decided anything, but only remembered what was required of me. Such men as had done this, who had ventured onto my land in order to rob and murder, could not be suffered to live.
“At first light we will pick up their trail. You need not think they will escape us, Enkidu. This whole island is not big enough for them to hide in.”
. . . . .
Nor was it. We found the first one not three hours after sunrise. His eyes wide with that surprise that so often overtakes men in the last instant of life, he lay where he had fallen from his horse, which was peacefully grazing some fifteen or twenty paces farther up the trail. My javelin had gone deep, and then torn a wide gash when it twisted loose. He must have bled to death fairly quickly.
The others we surprised that night around their campfire—I do not think it ever occurred to them that they would be followed into their own mountains. We slaughtered them like sheep and cut off their heads to take away with us.
We spiked the heads of the four brigands on poles and set them out at the approaches to our farm for the crows to feast upon. Anyone riding down from the mountains and intending mischief would be sure to come upon those grinning faces, with their empty eye sockets and the blackened, rotting flesh pealing away from the skulls, and they would know that intruders could expect harsh treatment.
The warning seemed to have its effect. Many farms were raided over the next few months, and with ever increasing frequency and violence, but my own was left untouched. Even the Greeks saw the lesson in this, for whenever I had visitors, and they passed by the grim trophies that were posted beside the road to my door, they too were reminded that Tiglath the Athenian had purchased immunity for himself at the price of blood.
Thus it was that at last they came to me one hot afternoon while I worked among my vines. I was not expecting callers, and they found me stripped down to my loincloth—a delegation from the Greek council, which, it seemed, had at last agreed on something, for they included in their numbers those two old antagonists Diocles the Spartan and my neighbor Epeios.
“I am embarrassed,” I said. “If you will accompany me back to the house I can offer you some wine.”
“We have not come to drink wine, Tiglath, but to seek your help,” Diocles, stepping forth from the group, spoke with his usual forthright bluntness. “Events have unfolded just as you said they would. We have tried to parley with the brigands—they take our silver and rob us just the same. You said we should hunt them to their dens and kill them there, but to do this we need a man to tell us how. We are but farmers and know not how to answer men riding war horses and armed with bronze weapons. By the Mouse God’s navel, we need a soldier.”
“I too am a farmer,” I said, for in my bowels I shrank from what they proposed.
“Now perhaps, Tiglath, but I think it was not always so.” Diocles raised his hand and pointed to my bare chest. “If I understand anything of the world, it was not by tending vines that you received such wounds as you carry upon your body.”
“We ask you to accept the office of Tyrant,” Epeios broke in, smiling as if at last he had found me out. “For six months you will have absolute authority—for twelve if the situation demands it and the council agrees. Then you must surrender your power and answer to your fellow Greeks for the uses you have made of it.”
“I must have time to consider.”
“My all means, consider. But do not take too much time, for, Tiglath my friend, time runs against us.”
We walked back to the farmhouse together, and Selana broke open a wine jar. An hour later they departed, leaving me with a dark and divided mind.
“You must accept,” Kephalos told me, when the evening meal was over and we had stepped outside to enjoy the cool of the sea breezes. “You must, Lord. It would be for our safety as well as theirs, since the brigands will in the end remember that we are few and they are many.”
“I would be as powerful as any king—for six months. Kephalos, my friend, have you and I not seen enough of the evil power brings, and most especially to those who hold it?”
“Yes, Lord, but there must always be men who hold authority over others. For in the rule of one over many lies the only safety, the only peace. Our neighbors understand as much, so they turn to you—as men have always turned to you. The greater evil now would be to refuse power.”
He shrugged his shoulders and smiled rather lamely, as if to excuse himself for speaking the truth.
“We enter now into a season of war,” he went on, “And these men who call upon you to lead them are farmers, not soldiers—I say no more than they acknowledge themselves. You are the soldier. There
was a time when men called you the greatest soldier living. A ruler is not wicked if he holds power by consent, and you know there is no one else.”
“Yes, I know.”
That night I dreamed of my father.
“Do this which they ask of you,” he said. “Only do not let them make of you a king, my son. It is a bitter thing to wear a crown, although once that was all I wished for you. Besides, I do not care to think of my son as a king among foreigners—such a thing would be undignified. Yet do this which they ask of you, for you were born to it.”
The next morning I sent Kephalos to Naxos with my answer. It seemed the god had not finished with me yet.
XXVI
“How many forges have we altogether for working iron?”
“Four—all in Naxos. The king ignores them because they are used only to make farming tools.”
“He will not ignore them much longer, not once we have begun hammering out swords under his very nose. We must disassemble them so they can be moved to safer locations. We must work in secret.”
“No secret like that can be kept forever.”
“We will not need forever. Once we have a sufficient quantity of arms, he will think long and hard before attacking us. If we can keep two forges working for a month, we will be safe enough.”
“You sound as if you are planning to make war against Ducerius instead of against merely a handful of brigands.”
“It may come to that. Few kings are foolish enough to tolerate the presence of a foreign army in their midst—and that is what we shall become before we are finished, an army. Besides, to strike at the brigands is to strike at Ducerius. We all know it amounts to the same thing.
“We will need to train and equip at least two hundred men, since we will need to keep half that number in reserve lest our enemies decide to attack our homes while we are off in the mountains chasing shadows. Thus I propose a levy of all able-bodied men between the ages of fifteen and thirty. There will be no exceptions. That the burden will be shared out evenly, during harvest time farms where no man is left may claim aid from more fortunate households.”
“It shall be as you say, Tiglath, for we have appointed you Tyrant over us.”
We sat beneath the sibyl’s chaste tree, within sight of the house my neighbors had helped me to build. There were six of us, including Kephalos and myself: Epeios and Peisenor, representing the Greek council; Diocles, whom I had decided upon as my second-in-command; and a man named Talus, who could speak for the merchants and craftsmen of Naxos.
“There is a wide plain north of the city,” I went on. “It is a good spot to drill soldiers. Let all those liable to service gather there in five days’ time, with such weapons and horses as they can bring. If men must fight they must be taught the arts of war, for the only thing a rabble can do in battle is die. The sooner we begin the sooner we will be ready.”
“I know that spot—Ducerius will be able to watch us from the walls of his citadel.”
“That is true, Peisenor.” I smiled, as if pleased that he had guessed my private thoughts. “I never claimed we could hope to keep our intentions a secret. And that which cannot be kept secret, even for a short time, is best done as openly as possible. If we do not behave like conspirators, Ducerius will lack an excuse to move against us as such. And we have only to remind him that he has given us his mandate to solve this problem for ourselves—‘It is sport I willingly leave to you,’ he said, and before many witnesses. Let it be the king, and not the Greeks, who breaks the peace between us.”
. . . . .
Selana had made up a leather corselet for me, sewing strips of copper on the front and back in the childish expectation that these might stop a sword thrust and thus save my life. On a summer day it was hot as a pottery kiln and I felt like a fool in it, but she would not be easy in her mind until I promised to wear it, so for her sake did I go off thus to make war against the brigands.
We assembled on what was called locally the Plain of Clonios, after a farmer who had once had a house and some vineyards there, two hundred and twenty Greek men, not fifty of whom had even served in a city militia, and of these only eight had ever felt the shock of battle. These eight I immediately appointed squad leaders, even though one of them had two fingers missing from his right hand and another looked as if he could hardly stand up under the weight of his dented iron war helmet.
Yet what they lacked in experience and skill they compensated for in enthusiasm. They stumbled like blind men through even the most basic drill and many carried only pruning staffs and wooden swords, but not one among them was not eager to fight the brigands, and anyone else for that matter. For men accustomed to spreading dung over their fields and listening to the endless complaining of their wives, the enterprise of war had almost the welcome character of a holiday. It is always so.
About ten of my more prosperous neighbors had brought their own horses, and they thus became our cavalry. In the Land of Ashur cavalry were of some importance in war, but the Greeks appeared to be hopeless in this regard. Above a trot, they could not seem to keep their seats unless they held on to the reins with one hand and the horse’s mane with the other, and thus occupied they would be of little value in a battle. I decided I would use them for reconnaissance and divided them into two companies of five men each, leaving them to spend the whole first day charging up and down one end of the plain at full gallop, that they might at least learn how not to fall off. This was a lesson they would have to master for themselves, and one with which I could not help them very much. Besides, my immediate concern was with the foot soldiers.
“Most of you imagine that a soldier is required to be brave and daring,” I told them, that first morning while we sweated under the unforgiving summer sun. “You all hope to distinguish yourselves by some great act of courage, and even if you die for it you think you will be numbered among the heroic dead. Allow me to disillusion you: there are no heroic dead. If a soldier dies in battle it is generally because he is unlucky or, more probably, has done something stupid, and the dead are merely dead. If you are killed, your wife will grieve for you for two months and then marry some other man, and your children, by the time they are grown, will have forgotten your name. The fruits of victory belong only to the survivors.
“Now let me tell you how to survive. It is a simple matter, really: one only has to remember that battles are fought not by individuals, one man against one man, but by armies, and that an army exists to protect its members and to crush its enemies. There is no such thing as single combat, not unless both commanders’ plans have gone hopelessly wrong, so there is no place for individual prowess. There are no heroes in an army; if you long to be a hero, then compete in the games. An army is made up not of men but of soldiers, and soldiers become an army by submerging themselves in discipline and drill. Follow your training, look out for those who fight to the right and left of you while they look out for you, and remember that the one who breaks and runs is usually the first one killed. If you can hang on to these three rules, you have a good chance of living long enough to tell lies to your grandchildren about the glory of war. When all of this is over and we can go home again, you are free to believe whatever you like. But for now, believe what I tell you.”
Of course they did not—I could see as much in their faces—but at least they had been warned. Now my task was to drill them until it no longer mattered what they believed, until they had forgotten that they were many rather than one, until thought had been replaced by habit. Then perhaps we would not be utterly abandoned to fate.
I started by forming them up into three battle squares, each eight men deep. They found this a clumsy and comical proceeding, and none of them seemed to believe that armies could possibly wage war thus.
“How can men fight, all bunched up together like this?” they asked with some asperity. “Perhaps, Tiglath, after all you acquired those scars fighting in taverns.”
“A man cannot even draw his sword when the next fellow is jamme
d against his elbow. We will make a lovely target for the brigand horsemen—they will trample us down like spring grass.”
I listened, and said nothing, and held them to their drill. We were at it all of the first and most of the second day before they could advance without breaking up their lines. As I watched their progress I picked out the best men and moved them to the front ranks, where their skill and persistence, which two are the only real courage to which a soldier can lay claim, would be of most use.
After the third day, when the basic lessons had sunk in, I set them to fighting mock battles, more like shoving matches, in which two squares would run against one another and try to crack each other’s formations. They enjoyed this—it was great sport—and by the end of the fifth day I began to hope these farmers might at last have the makings of an army.
After eight days most of them had exhausted the food they had brought with them and, besides, it was time they learned the use of weapons.
“Go back to your womenfolk,” I told them—an order that was greeted with cheering. “And while you are at home, I want each of you to cut a staff from wood fresh enough not to have grown brittle. Make it half again as long as a man is tall, and to a thickness of two fingers. When you return, we will tip them with iron spearheads. Remember, if they are not strong, if they break, it will be your own lives you impale upon them.
“And let every man make himself a shield. Let it be round, and as wide as a man’s arm is long. Cover it with as many layers of oxhide as will allow you to carry it through a day’s fighting. Let those of you who are skilled with the javelin and the bow bring these weapons as well when you return. We will all assemble here again in five days.”
The Blood Star Page 45
