Long War 04 - The Great King

by Cameron, Christian

  But later that day, as we wound our way through the Comana valley, they struck. They charged our rearguard – not quite by surprise, but their total commitment was fearsome, and they killed two of Cyrus’s men at the first encounter – and then it was a fight. Bulis and Aritides had doubted whether, when put to it, Cyrus would fight. I never doubted it. But Persians are as given to blood feud as most men, and after the deaths of Altris and Eza, two of our younger Persian escorts, the rest turned to fight with a will.

  Cyrus laughed grimly, loosening his sword in its sheath. ‘Mardonius must have offered a mighty reward for you,’ he said. ‘Nothing else would cause these men to risk everything like this.’

  They came on recklessly.

  For their part, Cyrus’s men waited patiently. No word was spoken for a long time, and even I wondered whether it was possible that we were betrayed – Bulis was growing restless, and Sparthius already had his sword in his hand.

  And then, without a word spoken, both sides began to loose arrows, and for a moment we were in a hail of shafts. I had faced Persian archery before, but it was worse mounted – because my horse took two arrows before I had any notion that we were being hit, and she reacted by throwing me over her head.

  By Apollo, by whom I seldom swear – that was a heavy fall, from a horse on to rock, and jagged rock, at that. I lay unmoving for too long, and suddenly there was a cavalry melee over my head, and I, the vaunted warrior of the Greeks, was lying on my back almost unable to rise from the pain in my hip where it had struck the rock.

  I was stunned. I couldn’t get up.

  Hector saved me. He stood his horse right over me, and when the enemy charge came home, he used his spear like a hero, keeping a pair of Medes at the point of his spear – one of them missed a cut with his sword and clipped his own horse’s neck, and his horse bolted – and Hector put the other down with a fine thrust. I was nothing but a spectator.

  Nor, to my shame, could I tell the two sides apart at first. Dust rose all around us, and every one of them had their facecloths buttoned across their faces against the biting cold and the blown grit. Sparthius had an arrow in his thigh and was out of the fight, and Bulis and Aristides were swapping swaggering sword-thrusts with a pair of Medes – Bulis, the better swordsman, was getting the worst of it because he wasn’t a good horseman, and Aristides, who had a magnificent horse, was steadily pushing his opponent back, turning him, until the man’s horse stumbled and went over the lip of a gully, never to rise again. Some of the Persians used their bows at point-blank range, instead of spears or swords. Aristides’ servant, Nikeas, took an arrow in the face and went down.

  My mare, despite the two arrows in her, had tossed me and then stood stock still, within reach. How like a horse, eh? I must have twitched, because Hector – with a courage few could have emulated – dismounted to help me up. He got her reins and handed them to me and I got her head around and with a gut-wrenching wave of pain I got my left leg over her back and turned her to face the next wave of enemy, Babylonian sword in my hand, to drive Sparthius’s opponent off him. He was badly hit and barely in the fight; his strength was ebbing, desperation on his features.

  I couldn’t reach his opponent, but I could reach the rump of his opponent’s horse, and I cut down into the horse’s hindquarters mercilessly and the horse gave a great shudder and fell, one leg clawing the air and the other apparently ruined by my cut. I hate to hurt a horse – but Sparthius was about to go down, and I got an arm around him and put my horse into the man fighting Bulis. By ill luck – for him – he’d just turned to deal with Aristides, and I cut him so hard in the neck I almost severed his head, but my Babylonian blade was too flexible for such a cut and it bent – but didn’t break.

  He fell dead, and the blade returned to shape.

  Hector speared a Lydian who was about to throw his spear into Cyrus’s unprotected back.

  And the fight was over.

  Horse fights with bows are deadly. Most of the enemy force were dead – or were dead a few moments later when dismounted men cut their throats. We had six dead and another three with mortal wounds – most of them from arrows.

  Nikeas, blessed by the gods, had a nasty and disfiguring scar; the arrow had ploughed a furrow along his forehead and torn a length of scalp the width of my hand, so that it hung free – and knocked him unconscious. But the boy’s skull was thick and well formed and turned the point, although we were all treated to a sight of bone itself.

  Aristides – Athenian gentleman of many talents – came to the fore. As Cyrus’s men killed their mortally wounded, there was a young man – too young, I thought – with an arrow lodged deep in his chest. He was incredibly brave – sitting with his back against a rock, making jokes.

  I caught Cyrus looking at him, and he turned away. ‘He knows the mercy stroke is coming,’ Cyrus said, and he choked on the words.

  But Aristides, who was crouched over Nikeas, looked up. ‘What?’ he asked. He left his hypaspist on the ground and went to the Persian boy. He made a measurement with his fist laid against the centre of the boy’s chest – and looked back at me.

  There was a man – Amu. He was the largest of Cyrus’s men, with a big hennaed beard. I had spoken to him several times, mostly to hear the tales of his life in the East, because he came from the mountains above mystical India. He stood behind the boy with a wicked knife in his hand – and frowned.

  Aristides looked right at Amu. ‘No!’ he said.

  Amu spoke no Greek. Arisitides spoke no Persian.

  But Cyrus was there, and he shouted ‘Hold!’ in Persian and leaped to put his hand on the big man’s arm. Amu paused. Every one of the surviving Persians looked at Arisitides.

  ‘I can save him,’ he said.

  He opened the boy’s jacket. Without warning, he struck the arrow – hard – with the palm of his hand. The head burst out the boy’s back, and there was blood – but not too much blood, I felt.

  Every head followed Aristides as he moved around the boy, holding his shoulder. He leaned the boy forward. He was chatting away in Greek – I have told a poor story if you don’t know that Aristides never chattered, but now he spoke of the weather, the trees, the boy’s bravery . . .

  I knelt down and translated it all. The boy watched me as if I were a priest of his god of light, and suddenly Aristides said:

  ‘Tell him, “Be brave. There will be a lot of pain.”’

  I repeated his words. With Amu’s help, Aristides seized the arrow and cut it at the entrance wound with a tool they used for horses’ hooves, and then pulled by the head – unbarbed, by the gods – and it came out with a wet sucking noise.

  He pushed honeyed wine into both ends of the wound and put pads of combed flax – which we had in abundance – on both entrance and exit wounds.

  The boy’s eyes never left mine, and he never uttered a squeak. Amu sat down by him – knife carefully sheathed – and praised him.

  ‘It’s his son,’ Cyrus said. ‘Pactyans, from Argosia. Hard men.’ He put a hand on my shoulder. ‘Tell your Athenian I thank him. We all thank him.’

  I watched Aristides, now sewing up his hypaspist’s scalp. ‘We got you into this,’ I said.

  Cyrus shrugged. ‘We say co istādehi daste oftādeh gir in the north.’

  It was an expression I’d often heard. ‘As long as you are standing, give a hand to those who have fallen.’

  He shrugged. ‘Yes. But also, it is hard to see which comes first. Mardonius is my master’s enemy – and a man whose actions are, I believe, bad for the Great King and bad for the empire.’ He met my eye. ‘But I sense that we are soon to be foes.’

  I could tell you some marvels of that trip – the monster we killed in the high passes of the Antitauros Mountains, and the spiders of the high plains of Cilicia – but that is not tonight’s tale. We rode for fifty days from Melitene, nor did we escape winter unscathed, and those shivering nights along the Paroreios come back to me on cold nights here, lying under three blan
kets with the wounded boy between me and Amu; hiding for a day in a highland village because Sparthius’s wound had become infected and Aristides, who’d become our doctor, wanted honey to put on it. The mountains seemed full of armed men – the reward offered for us must have been immense enough to engage the interest of every bandit in the hills.

  I have never been so cold. But as the boy Araxa fevered, grew worse, and then – very slowly – began to recover, Amu grew closer to us, and then the natural bonds of a fight and shared food saved us, and by the time was saw the green fields of the upper Kogamos, we were comrades – Spartans and Athenians and Persians all together, and Sparthius’s recovery – he was emaciated but growing stronger by the day – was as much a cause for cheer to Karesna, one of the Persians, as the boy Araxa’s recovery had been.

  By a quirk of fate, we were all hale – aside from some virulent head colds and a lot of coughing – as we rode down out of winter into the green valley that led to Sardis.

  Two days later, I stood before Artapherenes.

  He looked terrible.

  He had circles under his eyes and his skin looked grey. His face was puffy, and he had a paunch, and he clearly found movement difficult. His son – also Artapherenes – waited on him – and glowered at me.

  The Satrap of Lydia and Ionia returned my bow of thanks and waved his eldest son away. ‘Go and embrace Cyrus!’ he said. ‘I must talk to Arimnestos alone.’

  We were served cups of hot cider by a slave who spilled some, and then we were alone.

  ‘I should ask you about your trip, but you are here, and that is all I need to know. Cyrus says you fought your way out. That Mardonius has put a price on your head. Unofficially, I already know this, and when the courier comes – any day – I will not be able to pretend I don’t know where you are. So you must be gone.’

  ‘Are my ships in Ephesus?’ I asked.

  He looked pained. ‘I don’t know. If I were you, I would not go to Ephesus – Archilogos would like nothing better than to be the means of your arrest.’

  He paused, winced, and I thought he looked . . . old.

  ‘I can go to Phokaia,’ I said. Athens bought alum from Phokaia for her tanning industry. Athenian ships called there all the time.

  ‘In winter?’ he asked. He raised a hand, clearly tired. ‘My friend, I’m sorry. Sorry for all of it. But we are, to all intents, at war, and any hour now, I will be ordered to seize you. My son wishes you taken immediately.’

  I didn’t even know his son. ‘Why?’ I asked.

  ‘There is a rumour – as yet unconfirmed . . .’ Artapherenes looked at me and scratched his beard. ‘Do I treat you as a friend, or a dangerous enemy? Do I – by telling you this – aid your cause and work against my own king?’

  I shook my head. ‘I have no idea of what you speak,’ I said. I took his hand and kissed it, as I would have that of my own father. ‘Thank you for Cyrus and the others. Without them, I would be dead.’

  He nodded. ‘Well – without you, we would all be dead. Our tale of exchanged favours goes back many years, young man. You wish to go and pay your respects to Briseis. I recommend that you be brief – and circumspect.’ His voice grew harder.

  I got up from my knee. ‘I am always at your service,’ I said.

  He laughed. ‘You are a fine man. Try and stay alive in what is coming – and remember that if ever you wish to bend your stiff Greek neck, I have a place for you in my house.’

  ‘I can certainly serve cider better than the boy you had here – I wouldn’t spill any.’ I laughed, and for the first time since I’d come in, Artapherenes smiled.

  ‘Oh, Ari,’ he said. ‘When this war comes, it will be the end of everything for which I worked.’

  He caught my hand. In a low voice he said, ‘When I die – you must take Briseis. My son will kill her.’ He looked into my eye – not pleading, but with the resolve of the warrior. ‘Swear to me.’

  ‘I swear by all the gods in Olympus,’ I swore, having learned nothing, apparently, about swearing oaths.

  ‘And until then, do an old man the grace of keeping your hands off her,’ he said with a hard smile.

  I swallowed.

  He nodded. ‘Go. I may not see you again – or if I do, it will be in Greece.’

  Briseis was, I think, thirty-two that year.

  Motherhood had mellowed her – had filled in her stomach a little, perhaps, and made her breasts lusher. It had not changed her eyes, or her neck, or her shoulders, or the quality of her smile – that complicated instrument she wielded as I wield a spear.

  She rose with her accustomed grace as I entered, and she kissed me on the lips – a brush of her lips on mine that struck me like a Persian arrow.

  Nothing ever changed.

  She put the back of her hand on my chest when she kissed me, as if to ensure that I didn’t crush her to me, and even that small warmth went to my heart like a Levin bolt.

  ‘I must go,’ I said foolishly. ‘Artapherenes asked me to . . . come for you when I hear he is dead.’

  ‘His son wants me for his own, and hates me for my contempt.’ She shrugged. ‘It is, I think, an old story.’ She took my hand – oh, the softness of that hand, and the cool warmth of her touch – and drew me on to a kline. ‘Cyrus will not let me die so easily, nor be used so ill. Neither will any of the old guard. I am not afraid.’ She smiled. ‘But I will be happy to have you as my last husband, my dear. The Greek ambassador to the Great King! Friend of the King of Sparta and Lord of Plataea!’

  ‘I am not the Lord of Plataea. Plataea is the size of a large farm and has an assembly of a thousand bickering old men – older than me.’ I laughed. ‘But I served at the Olympics as a priest.’

  ‘Oh,’ she said, with complete seriousness. ‘You are a great man, now – not just a great sword.’

  ‘Will you still be my wife if I am a penniless exile in Italy?’ I asked. ‘Because if Xerxes has his way, there will be no Athens, no Sparta – and no Plataea.’

  Her smile fell away. ‘Yes,’ she said. She met my eye and bit her lip, and for perhaps the first time in all our years together, I saw her hesitate. ‘Yes, Ari. Our world is coming to an end. The world of Sappho and Thales and Heraklitus – of Melitus and Ephesus and Mytilini.’ She held my eye. ‘What will come after? Imperial Persia, and the Great’s King’s winged lions on every doorstep?’

  ‘No,’ I said.

  She smiled. ‘You truly believe – even after Lades – that Greeks can stop the Great King?’

  I nodded. ‘Athens and Sparta,’ I said. ‘We are not ready for what is coming. I have seen the Great King’s preparations. I cannot count his soldiers. I’m sure his fleet will be greater than five hundred hulls.’ I was suddenly bitter. ‘I sailed to Alba – do you know that? For tin. For . . . a pothos. Better that I had been here, working to build a resistance to the Great King among the Greeks. Now – it is too late. In three months, he will march.’

  She bit her lip. ‘No,’ she said. She looked around – again, showing fear for the first time I could remember. ‘No, he will not march in the spring.’

  I felt the blood rush to my ears as if I’d taken a blow. ‘Why?’ I asked.

  She leaned closer – I thought to kiss me. ‘Babylon is in revolt,’ she said.

  That was all she knew.

  I tore myself from her sight, took my Spartans and my Athenians, and fled for the coast. I learned – much later in life – that the Great King’s messenger came two days later. Artapherenes was sick – and his son turned out all his father’s household troops to pursue us.

  But the gods had other ideas. The gods had their own plans for Greece, and for Persia. It was like . . . like living in mythology, except it was real.

  We rode across the plains of Sardis and over the mountains to the coast like a storm. By then, even the Spartans were excellent riders – we’d had five months on horseback with expert teachers.

  And I have to tell you, my friends, that the sight of the sea – eve
n in winter, blue and blue, rolling away into the west – made us all weep.

  Aristides pulled his riding cloak over his head to hide his face. When he had mastered himself, he said, ‘I will never come to Asia again – not willingly.’

  We rode down into Phokaia about the time that Artapherenes’ household guards began searching for us in Ephesus.

  And there on the beach of Phokaia was my Lydia, and when we cantered along the coast road, one of the first men I met was Leukas.

  It can seem, in a tale like this, as if I was the hero – the great hero, or perhaps even, if I tell it awry, the only hero. Let me say that I was surrounded by heroes, and that many, many other men said, and did, the right things.

  Megakles and Sekla and Leukas were three of them. What might have happened, if they had not used their heads? They took Lydia into Ephesus at the turn of the seasons with a cargo of white Athenian hides and Phoenician dyes, and they sailed away two days later, leaving a pair of trustworthy oarsmen and a light boat to find them if I returned. The open hostility of Archilogos – the richest shipowner in Ephesus – made the harbour there unhealthy for them. So they rowed up the coast to the port that had the friendliest relations with Athens, and rented a portion of the beach for the winter – bought a small house, sold their cargo, and settled in. They had men in every port from Samos to Lesvos, and they were collecting rumours like professional spies.

  Sekla, as it proved, knew more of what was happening in Babylon than Artapherenes, the satrap. Because Phokaia had alum – most of the dyers’ alum in the world – and thus it had merchants who came from Susa and Babylon and Athens and even Syracusa. Sekla’s news of the revolt was first-hand, from an eyewitness.

  I got it as our rowers pulled us out of the harbour into a cold, sunny winter day. There was rain on the northern horizon and storm heads out over the Aegean.

  I chose a multitude of compromises. Megakles concurred. We put the bow due north – and sailed within sight of land, all the way around the great bow, as Greeks call it – the coast of Asia, and then the coast of Thrace, under the lee of magnificent Samothrace and then down the coast of Thessaly to Euboea and Athens. It is a very, very long way to sail and row compared to skipping from Lesvos to Skyros and then to the coast of Euboea, but it has the signal advantage that if a squall hits you, you might survive a swim to the shore. And every storm-tossed day, there’s at least the possibility of an anchorage or a beach.