The New Achilles

by Christian Cameron

  Two nights later, while Alexanor slept fitfully on a chair by his bedside in the Abaton, Nikeas died.

  Alexanor rose and composed the body carefully. He was unhurried in his movements, his rage carefully in check, as he washed the now-familiar body one more time, and laid the man’s hands on his chest and put the linen sheet over him. Then, the fire of his anger untouched, he strode through the night to where Chiron sat, working by the light of a dozen oil lamps.

  ‘I cannot be a healer,’ he spat. He’d hoped to be composed and simple; instead, his anger leapt out of him and he snarled, ‘I can only kill.’

  Chiron was sitting at a table, writing with a stylus on wax tablets that Leon, the former slave, was copying slowly on papyrus. Leon looked away.

  Chiron sat back. ‘You want to leave us?’ he asked.

  Alexanor blinked. ‘Yes,’ he said.

  Chiron nodded. ‘Interesting. Leon, give us a moment, eh?’

  The thin man got up. On his way out, he put a hand on Alexanor’s shoulder.

  ‘Don’t go,’ he said.

  Chiron steepled his hands. ‘So, Alexanor,’ he said. ‘Why doesn’t the god heal all sick people?’

  Alexanor was frustrated, and very tired. And he didn’t really like Chiron. So he shrugged.

  ‘No idea,’ he said dismissively.

  Chiron nodded. ‘Me neither. Here’s the important thing, though. It’s not your fault. When they live, you may have played some small role – the right medicine, the right diagnosis. Or not – many we heal here might have healed at home. We know so little, Alexanor. And when they die?’ The old man spread his hands. ‘Who knows why they die? Who knows why Nikeas was hit with an arrow? He and his brother were shooting at marks.’

  ‘All I know is that he died,’ Alexanor said. ‘I am a killer.’

  Chiron nodded. ‘Bullshit,’ he said.

  Alexanor’s head snapped back as if he’d been struck.

  ‘Listen, pais.’ Chiron’s voice was different. He was angry, too. ‘I know that you like to make yourself responsible for anything that happens. Up to a point, that’s laudable – beyond that, it’s hubris. You are a proud man – far too proud. And you like to wallow in your emotions. I’ll guess you were your mother’s favourite. So intelligent.’

  Alexanor literally writhed at those words.

  ‘If you want to leave, leave. Don’t come and tell me so. There are no bars on our doors – even the slaves can just walk away.’

  Alexanor started to stand, and was ashamed and humiliated that hot tears were coming from his eyes. Angry words crowded to his lips.

  ‘But I think you should stay,’ Chiron said. ‘You’re going to be a brilliant priest, if we all survive your training.’ He smiled. ‘By Apollo, pais. I’ve lost enough patients to crew a warship in Hades. Get over yourself and get back to work.’

  Even then, with Chiron’s words burning in his ears, Alexanor was moved by some spirit of self-destruction to leave – to flee. He made it as far as the side gate, the gate that looked west into the mountains, where distant villages showed in the darkness as tiny pinpoints of firelight, and he stopped, and stood there in an agony of indecision.

  He heard the sound of running feet, and turned to find Leon, his long body gleaming with sweat.

  ‘Don’t leave,’ Leon said. ‘I’ll have to run all by myself.’ He put a hand on the taller man’s shoulder. ‘And you’re teaching me to read. And frankly, you are the only rich man who’s ever taken an interest in me. I need a patron. Stick it out, boss. Don’t quit.’

  Alexanor managed a smile, and went back to his room. He prayed a little, and then he lay down, and slept without a dream – haunted neither by love nor death.

  CHAPTER TWO

  Sacred Sanctuary of Asklepios, Epidauros, Northern Peloponnese

  223 BCE

  ‘Let me see your hands,’ the old priest said.

  Alexanor hid a smile. Once he might have bridled; no man training seriously for the priesthood of Asklepios would dare to bring dirty hands to the temple. But five years had changed him: five years of discovering that the great Asklepion was full of the sons of rich men who were visiting to drink wine and chase fine young bodies. Only a handful of the novices were serious. And sometimes they came to the temple with dirty hands.

  He held his out.

  The older priest looked at them.

  ‘Dirt under your nails can kill a patient,’ he said, for the thousandth time. ‘Old blood can carry the arrows of Apollo from one visitor to another.’

  Alexanor nodded politely. ‘Yes, Hierophant.’

  Sometimes he worried that Chiron was too old, and repeated himself too often.

  ‘Don’t “Hierophant” me,’ the old priest muttered.

  It was early, very early; the great temple complex was silent. The magnificent temple to the God of Healing rose among the pines, its innumerable pillars of milk-white marble as superb today as they had been on the evening of Alexanor’s arrival five years before. This morning they were touched with pink as the sun rose; Apollo’s chariot had not yet crested the eastern hills, and the light had a presence.

  Alexanor loved serving the god in the early morning. He loved being alone at the altar …

  ‘Fetch some incense, will you, pais?’ the old man snapped, interrupting his reverie.

  The term pais no longer rankled. Alexanor had learnt many things in five years at the temple: to run like the wind; to fight with his hands; to open a man’s body and remove his impurities; to balance four humours; and to know when to take no action at all. He’d learnt to forget, as well – to forget his home, his brothers and sisters. Aspasia. The dead.

  The last rule, the great unwritten rule of all the followers of Pythagoras and Hippocrates and Apollo’s son Asklepios himself, was one that applied not just to the crisis of treatment but to everyday life, to speech and action. He knew that the old priest meant no insult; hence, there was no reason for him to take insult.

  As if reading his mind, the older priest made a wry face.

  ‘Apologies, Alexanor. But the new slaves have not put out the water or the censer. I’ll fetch the water.’

  ‘Yes, master,’ Alexanor said. And when he said the word master, he meant it.

  He went back down the long aisle of the temple, his white leather sandals making a rhythmic sound on the floor that echoed up into the coffered ceiling.

  Doves cooed. The pink light of morning seemed to radiate from the marble, pulsing like the beat of a divine heart. Alexanor paused at the top of the temple steps, overwhelmed. There was something bubbling in the world – something immanent. He extended his arms in an attitude of prayer.

  But the moment passed. He folded his arms and trotted down the steps, intent on his duty.

  He was tempted to run, once he was down the steps. It was a magnificent morning, but then, almost every morning at the Temple of Asklepios was superb, and five years had not robbed the mornings of wonder. The sun was just rising over the hills away to the east; the mountains to the west were tipped in gold and orange. The light was like the hand of Apollo gilding the world, and changed subtly from rose pink to golden.

  Running would make him sweat, and sweat was dirt in the eyes of the god. Good dirt, honourably earned when you played a game, but not for serving at the altar in the first light of Apollo’s sun. He walked briskly, settling his himation, a garment unsuited to athletics at the best of times.

  The skeuotheke was familiar ground now, the small wooden building by the temple that housed all the things a priest didn’t want to intrude in the temple: stores of clean white linen cloth; spare vases and metal ewers; spare braziers and fine charcoal and incense – not the ones of solid gold and silver, given by the great donors like the king of Macedon or the king of Aegypt. They lay in wood shavings in the treasury under the floor, behind the altar, cased in white marble. Here were the plainer ones of bronze for every day. Alexanor took a silvered-bronze censer from its hook and moved it to the narrow wind
ow built for just this purpose; he opened the shutter and hung the censer’s chain, and then used tongs to move small chunks of charcoal into the censer. It was quicker, he knew, to use his hands – quicker and much dirtier, and wearing a milk-white himation was difficult enough on the very easiest day. All of them had brown himations for work, but white for serving at the altars.

  Alexanor half-filled the pierced silver ball, and then lit it from the oil lamp that burnt all year: a sacred fire brought down from a lightning bolt of Zeus on the slopes of Olympus and passed from temple to temple. He thought of his family home on Rhodes; of the slave who had taught him to kindle fire on Kos. He held one coal in the tongs over the flame until it snapped and popped, and then dropped it into the others and blew gently until all the coals were burning well. Then he added a spoonful of incense, saying aloud a prayer for the intercession of his god, and only then, after all was billowing smoke out of the window, did he close the top of the censer, singeing his fingers in the process.

  He took the lit censer by the chain, and swinging it softly, he walked back out of the skeuotheke and up the steps of the great temple. His eyes were drawn, as they always were, to the painted figures in the pediment, Greek men and Amazons fighting a brutal but beautiful battle. Just over his head, a magnificent woman on horseback thrust a spear through a naked hoplite who lay on the ground.

  What a savage wound that would make, he thought.

  Alexanor passed into the temple. Chiron and Leon were the only men present; the complex of fifty buildings seemed as silent as Alexanor imagined the underworld to be. Chiron had the water ewers filled for purification and Leon, working with him, had lit the oil lamps from another branch of the sacred fire. The master priest took the censer from Alexanor with a regal bow and censed the altars. They offered barley cakes as a sacrifice, and together they sang the service of the dawn to the rising sun, and a hymn to Epidauros, son of Apollo, and then the paean to the god Apollo.

  Alexanor loved ritual, and he let his mind float away amid the incense and the song. It was faster than meditation; his thoughts died away and he was still, alive with his sense of the immanence of his god. His thoughts turned to the terrible wound dealt to the fallen Greek by the mounted Amazon. He considered them, and it came to him, a vision from the god: the sudden onset, felt the dirt under his body, the horse rearing over him …

  There was a loud metallic crash. He snapped into reality, saved from the downward stroke of the Amazon’s spear. A pair of slaves had entered the south end of the temple and had begun to wash the floor, apparently unmoved by either the sacred or the aesthetic. One of them had kicked over his bronze bucket.

  Chiron finished the morning invocation as Alexanor stood as confused as a man newly awakened from a dream. The two men stood side by side in the perfumed smoke for perhaps ten beats of their hearts.

  They bowed to the images of Apollo and his sons, Asklepios and Epidauros, in whose name the hospital had been built.

  ‘Do you ever …?’ Alexanor was embarrassed the moment he opened his mouth. He flushed.

  ‘Speak, lad,’ the older priest said. ‘Do I ever? Ever what? Wash?’ He laughed.

  Alexanor smiled. ‘No, master. Do you ever have dreams so real …?’

  ‘I am a priest of the god,’ Chiron said. ‘Of course I have dreams that are real.’

  Alexanor was looking off into the middle distance beyond the temple. He sighed, annoyed with himself. Closer to, Bion was admonishing the two new slaves. Their lowered voices carried, echoing through the sacred space.

  ‘Well,’ said the older priest, understanding his silence. ‘Shall we change out of these robes and see who has come to be healed today?’

  He handed the censer to Leon and swept out of the temple.

  Almost no one came to be healed early in the morning. It was twenty stades to the port and forty or more to a good town. Men either came by ship, to the town on the coast, or via Hermione or Troezen, or by land, coming down through the Peloponnese from Corinth or Isthmia by easy stages; after all, most of the visitors were sick. New guests came in the heat of afternoon; veteran guests came in early evening, when the shade was cool and the dinner was ready to be served. The great temple had beds for two hundred guests, maintained by enormous donations from the distant kings who tried to control Greece with armies and bribes: Antigonus Doson, king of Macedon, and Ptolemy of Aegypt, whose ambassador to Athens lay on one of their beds, recovering from an operation and dreaming, Alexanor hoped, of the god.

  Alexanor put away the ritual vessels and went to his cell, where he changed his spotless white himation for the plain brown wool chiton and a light chlamys; the chlamys was more an expression of his youth and status as a junior priest than it was a necessary garment. In the month of Agrianios – being Rhodian-born Alexanor always thought in the Rhodian months, even in the Peloponnese – it was always hot. Not the brutal heat of the Attic plain, where his father had estates; more like the sea-cooled late summer of the Aegean islands, Rhodes or Lesvos, where he had grown to manhood, and Kos, where he had begun to dream of medicine and the gods.

  He untied his white sandals, something only priests and rich women wore, and changed them for good Laconian shoes, a style favoured by soldiers and men who had to walk. He emerged from his cell to find Chiron standing in the long hall of pillars, the stoa of Kotys, off which they lived, looking out of the window. It was cool under the shade of the high roof, even on the second storey, where the priests slept.

  Chiron was watching a dust cloud to the west. Visitors on horseback were often visible stades and stades away; the sanctuary had been placed where it was to provide a beautiful view for initiates, guests, and the gods themselves. In the busy time in spring, sharp-eyed slaves and young under-priests would sound trumpets from the hillside to announce important visitors, whose purple clothes and gold horse trappings would show ten stades away.

  Today’s visitors glinted more bronze than gold. Alexanor knew the colour.

  ‘At dinner last night the Aegyptian was saying there was trouble in the west,’ the older man said.

  ‘That is your diagnosis, sir?’ Alexanor asked. ‘That the trouble is coming here?’

  Chiron smiled. ‘Men are riding to us swiftly, and behind them comes another group, larger, also riding swiftly.’ He shrugged. ‘One does not have to be Plato to guess that trouble is coming here. Come – let us greet them.’

  But the old priest paused at his cell and took from the peg on his door, not the sword that hung there, but his stainless white himation, which he put back on, and he picked up the staff of his rank.

  He rapped on the door of the next cell with his knuckles.

  ‘Sostratos!’ he called. ‘Trouble.’

  ‘On my way,’ came the answer.

  Sostratos was now a senior priest – old, wise, and humble, quicker with a joke than Chiron but lacking something of his dignity. Alexanor had long since learnt that Sostratos had fought the Gauls in his youth, taken a wound that should have been his death, and been healed by a priest of Asklepios.

  A woman’s voice floated through the door; a squeal, and a protest, and the door opened. The old soldier was naked, the scar of his near death an angry brown line like a trench that ran from the top of his groin to his ribs. He slipped a sword-belt over his shoulder, snapped a chlamys off the door and came out on to the portico of the stoa.

  Chiron led the way down the stairs at a rapid rate; down from the upper level of the stoa, then along the path past the altar of Asklepios, out past the stadium to the edge of the sacred precinct, where there was a large courtyard, stables, and two wine shops which operated with the toleration, if not the approval, of the priests. A foreigner, a northerner, someone’s slave with ugly white skin and pale hair, sat in the dust with a carpet covered in amulets – tin hands; bronze feet; a penis, a vulva – and a variety of statues in pale yellow pottery: an Athena, far from her home; several Aphrodites, and a veritable phalanx of Apollos and Asklepioses.

 
; He didn’t glance at the two priests emerging from the gate.

  Empedocles, the steward, hurried towards them from the gatehouse.

  ‘How can I help you, Alexanor?’ he asked.

  He was more efficient than servile. He was as Greek as Alexanor himself, or more so; he’d been sold to the temple as a child, to pay his father’s gambling debts, it was said.

  Chiron put a hand on his arm.

  ‘Maybe trouble,’ he said. ‘Maybe I’m an old fool. But close the inner west gate and warn the guests. Put a guard on the Propylon.’

  ‘At once!’

  Empedocles bowed deeply and, hiking his long robe, ran for the gatehouse.

  ‘I’ll see to the Epidauros,’ Sostratos said.

  The Epidauros was the hospital itself, dedicated to the son of the god.

  Chiron slapped his shoulder and walked towards the road. There was an outer gate, where the road came into the stable yard.

  Alexanor had never seen the outer gate closed. It was only a wooden bar across the road.

  ‘Master? What is happening?’ he asked.

  He had never seen the way of the pilgrims barred, and something in Chiron’s posture unnerved him.

  Chiron raised an eyebrow. ‘I have no idea.’

  ‘Will you close the outer gate?’ Alexanor asked.

  The older priest gave him a wry smile. ‘What is the first rule?’

  Alexanor nodded. ‘Commit no hubris. Do no harm.’

  ‘It applies even here. We will receive these visitors and see what the god has sent us.’

  Chiron turned to the open outer gate.

  The horses were audible now: a steady patter of hoof beats like rain on a roof. Perhaps a dozen horses, ridden hard. A boy ran into the stables and a pair of slaves emerged. One brought water and began to fill a horse trough.

  Chiron leant on his staff. It was nothing but a long stick of cornel wood, as tall as his shoulders, bent at the top, no more than any shepherd in Arkadia would carry. But, in any of the forty Asklepions around the Greek world, the staff marked a master priest, and it had become Alexanor’s dearest wish. Even if it was twenty years away. He was not yet a full priest; he had far to go.