The New Achilles

by Christian Cameron

  ‘I believe he was stabbed while he lay on the ground, unhorsed,’ Alexanor said.

  As he said the words he thought of the Amazon and the Greek on the temple pediment, and he felt the presence of his god. Ahhh, now I understand.

  ‘Interesting, and highly probable, although I can’t say that such a guess will help him in any way. What caused this wound?’ Chiron asked.

  Sostratos appeared and began to examine the Aegyptian ambassador to Athens, who lay three beds away. Two slaves fanned the ambassador while he was watching the priests and the wounded man with avid curiosity.

  Alexanor narrowed his eyes and bent low, sniffing at the wound.

  ‘Not a spearhead,’ he said. ‘A spike, or perhaps a saurauter. Perhaps a cavalry spear, reversed.’

  ‘Agreed,’ Chiron said.

  ‘It is possible that it has passed between the coils of the intestine.’

  ‘Unlikely.’

  ‘The edges of such spikes are rarely sharpened,’ Alexanor said.

  Chiron raised an eyebrow, but Sostratos interrupted.

  ‘He’s right, you know. Don’t be a stick, Chiron. If this boy got pricked by a saurauter, his intestines may be whole.’

  ‘There is no smell of the fluids of the abdomen,’ Alexanor said.

  Chiron bent down and sniffed.

  ‘So? What do you propose to do for the puncture?’ he asked.

  ‘I will clean and bandage the outward wounds – indeed, I will have them bathed, coated in boiled wine, and wrapped. But the puncture wound?’ Alexanor shook his head. ‘I will do nothing.’

  Chiron nodded. Sostratos nodded.

  ‘Is that right?’

  Alexanor thought about Nikeas, dying in the night. He’d lost twenty more patients since young Nikeas, but the first remained the hardest.

  Chiron shrugged. He looked at his peer, who smiled.

  ‘I have no idea,’ he said. ‘He is your patient, and he will live or die at the whim of the gods. What is your reasoning?’

  Alexanor’s turn to shrug.

  ‘I have no idea what has happened inside the abdomen,’ he said. ‘I do not want to introduce anything foreign. Even food could kill. So I will take no action and do no further harm. But I will say, with … caution … that if there is no smell of abdominal fluid after a twenty-hour ride, it seems possible that he will live.’

  Chiron frowned. ‘There is something in what you say. I will leave you to your washing and bandaging the lacerations. He is a healthy young hero, and if he survives the crisis, he may yet live, as you say.’

  Alexanor was trying to imagine what it had been like – the young man lying, unhorsed, already wounded, and a man over him on horseback stabbing down, over and over. Did the victim scramble free only to be stabbed, in the end, before he could get to his feet? Or was he lying stunned from his fall?

  He imagined it like the pediment of the temple. He looked at the young man’s back, but found no exit wound, so the blow had not been hard enough to pin him to the earth.

  He nodded respectfully to his teachers.

  ‘Excuse me. I’ll fetch what I need.’

  ‘Send for Leon,’ Sostratos said. ‘You two always work together – he needs the practice.’

  Sostratos glanced at the wounded man when Alexanor stepped into the room where practical supplies were kept. He glanced at Chiron.

  ‘You know what this means?’ he asked.

  Chiron nodded. ‘It means that if Alexanor is correct, and the young warrior lives, we must raise him to the rank of full priest.’

  Sostratos winked at Alexanor’s back, visible through the narrow doorway.

  ‘Far too soon,’ he said. ‘Let him sweat another fifteen years. No, I mean that Sparta has attacked Megalopolis, and thus, the Achaean league. And been successful.’ He looked back at the Aegyptian ambassador.

  Chiron made a sign of negation. ‘This is nothing to do with us.’

  ‘Apollo’s beard, how old are you? There was a Spartiate in your outer yard willing to defile the sanctuary. We are not immune from the politics of this peninsula.’ Sostratos shook his head.

  Chiron frowned again. ‘He was young and foolish. His king—’

  ‘Is young and ambitious. Surely …’

  Alexanor returned with the tools of his trade and two slaves bearing wine and honey and a little box of drugs. He sat on a stool and began to wash the wounds on the left arm, first with clean water, then with olive oil.

  The wounded man gave a cry and tried to roll over.

  Alexanor was perfectly still for a moment.

  The young man’s eyes fluttered open and then closed.

  ‘Interesting,’ Chiron said. He held up the man’s right hand, coated in dried blood, and with blood under the nails. ‘He reminds me of someone,’ he said, and nodded. ‘Report to me if there is a change.’

  When the other Achaeans were clean they were carried to the Epidauros. Aristaenos, the youngest, was in the worst state. Alexanor sat with him for a while, but Aristaenos turned his face to the wall and refused to speak.

  Dinaeos, when questioned, lay back on his bed.

  ‘He ran from the fight in the courtyard. He is ashamed.’

  ‘Shame can kill a man,’ Alexanor said.

  ‘He cut and ran when his friends needed him,’ Dinaeos said. ‘Maybe death is the kindest thing.’

  Alexanor was cleaning his scalpel. He paused.

  ‘I take it you have never betrayed anyone out of fear, or failed a friend?’ he said, as mildly as he could manage.

  ‘Fuck no,’ Dinaeos said. ‘Do I look like a coward? When you’re born with red hair, you learn to fight. I like to fight.’

  ‘Perhaps young Aristaenos has never fought before.’

  Alexanor used pumice to clean his scalpel to mirror brightness. For some cuts, he would use obsidian from a volcano, but here …

  Dinaeos sighed. ‘I know what you are at. I’ve seen it too. Men get … taken … by fear. Good men. But hungry, wet, cold, and tired, suddenly they are afraid. You think it is that? And not that he is baseborn, because his mother fucked some slave?’

  ‘That seems an odd notion,’ Alexanor said. ‘And a terrible thing to say of a man. Do you always say such things?’

  ‘You talk like him.’ Dinaeos shook his head. ‘Yes, I’m a fuckwit. I say whatever comes into my head. No life of politics for me!’

  Alexanor nodded. ‘Some men are braver than others, I allow. But I don’t see much sign that it is due to birth, but rather, to inclination and training. Who are the others? The man with the sword cut on his thigh? And the tall man with the puncture wound in his side?’

  ‘Lykortas, son of Thearidas, took that sword cut in the agora of Megalopolis, defending a gaggle of women and children. He’s not even one of us – he’s a student at the Academy in Athens.’ Dinaeos leant over the wounded man, who was conscious.

  ‘You … exaggerate my role,’ the wounded man said. ‘I was trying to run, and Spartans kept getting in my … way.’

  Alexanor knelt by the man and looked carefully at the wound. Despite a lot of dried blood that the slaves hadn’t cleaned away, it was a neat slice. The boy had no fat, and the blade had done little damage to the muscle.

  ‘You’ll be with us for a while,’ Alexanor said cheerfully. ‘But with the help of the god and a gentle touch from Hygeia you’ll have a pretty scar and nothing more.’

  ‘That’s wonderful,’ the young man said. His eyes sparkled as if he had a fever. ‘I really only came for the pretty scar.’ He winked.

  Alexanor winked back.

  ‘You’re very attractive, doctor,’ Lykortas said wickedly. ‘Or am I just happy to be alive?’

  ‘Lock up the altar boys,’ Alexanor said to Leon. Leon smiled carefully.

  ‘And the badly wounded man?’

  Alexanor began cleaning the student’s wound as he spoke. Leon handed him a soft brush, and then a length of boiled linen.

  ‘He’s the bravest man in our city,’ D
inaeos said. ‘By Ares, doctor. The Spartans were in the streets – they surprised us in early morning … I’ve lost track. Was this two days ago?’

  Alexanor was giving them all a little poppy.

  ‘You rode here straight from Megalopolis?’ he asked.

  He moved from Lykortas to Dinaeos, and began to examine the man’s bandages.

  ‘They attacked us during a truce. And he got his companions mounted and fought back. He didn’t even have his armour, and he fought. Brilliantly. You should have seen him – like a centaur, clearing the agora, one of us to ten of them. Every blow put a Spartan down.’ The man’s eyes closed.

  Alexanor leant forward to draw the blanket over the man, but suddenly his eyes opened and he bolted upright in the bed.

  ‘Spartans! Ares’ dick. They weren’t Spartans, they were all fucking mercenaries. There are no Spartans, any more.’

  ‘Calm, calm,’ Alexanor said, pressing his patient back onto the blankets.

  ‘Tell me, doc. Will he …? Is he …?’

  Dinaeos started up again. One of his wounds was bleeding through the bandage, and Alexanor realised how tired the man was, and he knew that the forearm wound ought to be bandaged again. But healing started in a man’s mind, or in a woman’s. He knew that from repeated experience.

  He leant down.

  ‘He’s still alive. I cannot say more. I expect the crisis soon. Then perhaps we will know more.’ He forced a smile. ‘What is the name of this new Achilles?’

  Alexanor pressed the big red-headed man back down into the bed again.

  The red-fringed eyes fluttered closed.

  ‘Philopoemen.’ The Achaean smiled. ‘Like Achilles – yes. The best of the Achaeans.’

  Alexanor’s struggle with Philopoemen’s wound was like a labour of Herakles. The wounds on his arms closed in time, but the puncture wound continued to weep a strange, clear fluid that didn’t stink. The edges of the wound grew angry and red, and Alexanor prepared for the crisis, sitting by the wounded man’s bedside as he had sat by Nikeas five years before, and dozens of pilgrims since. He read aloud from plays of Menander, and from the works of Hippocrates. He sang, and he washed the man’s body, and he became increasingly convinced that he should attempt some intervention in the puncture wound. It would not close. Only the patient’s superb physique kept him from an early death, but as days turned to weeks, the man’s heroic constitution began to erode, and his fever mounted.

  Night was falling outside, and autumn was in the air. A brazier burnt in the Epidauros, and the air was laced with incense.

  ‘Take no action,’ Chiron said. ‘Let him go to the gods, if that is their will.’

  Alexanor washed his hands in a basin held by a slave and said nothing. But when his teacher was gone, he rolled the man with the slave’s help and while Leon, who was also a skilled nurse, held the wounded man’s arm, Alexanor looked over the wound again. It was like an old friend or an old foe, by then, and its refusal to heal or show the slightest sign of closing was infuriating.

  It had changed, though. After the first few days a curious line of inflammation, like the decorated border on a garment, had appeared, running from the wound in the man’s side down towards the hip. Today, Alexanor could follow a whole line of bad tissue down the wounded man’s side; there were bright red lines, new ones, radiating from something like a scarab of infection a hand’s breadth below the wound. He put his thumb on it, very cautiously; the wounded man groaned. He had been awake, several times, but never to any purpose; he’d soon passed back into his feverish coma.

  The scarab was very hot. Soft, full of blood.

  Alexanor sat back on his stool, estimating what this could mean in terms of the humours. Hot, and wet. And far out of balance.

  He rose and went looking for Chiron, but found Sostratos. The old soldier was chatting with the Achaeans; they all seemed to get along well enough. Aristaenos had made a recovery, and that was due in no little part to the former mercenary, who’d talked to him about nothing, and everything.

  They were all lying on kline, with shawls over them, watching the sunset. Alexanor could smell the wine.

  ‘A word, master,’ Alexanor said.

  Sostratos groaned, but he rose smoothly to his feet like a much younger man and stepped in off the portico. Alexanor took him by the arm and led him down the hallway to the wounded man’s bedside.

  Sostratos sat, winked at Leon, who was still patiently holding the Achaean, and looked.

  ‘See this?’ Alexanor said.

  ‘Hmm,’ Sostratos said, interested.

  ‘What is it?’ Alexanor asked.

  Sostratos poked at it. The patient whimpered. His eyes fluttered open.

  ‘Sing,’ he muttered, ‘O Muses …’

  ‘What?’ asked Alexanor. ‘Is that the Iliad?’

  Sostratos nodded to Leon, who let the patient relax.

  The older man stepped back out of the long room full of beds, his head tilted to one side like a good dog listening to a distant master. Sostratos beckoned to Alexanor.

  ‘I have a theory, but for once, we needn’t rely on guesswork. Come.’

  He led the way back to the drinking party.

  ‘Why don’t they leave?’ Alexanor asked. ‘Are they waiting for him to die?’

  ‘That, and other things,’ Sostratos said. ‘They love him, and hope for a miracle. And the Spartans have taken their city. They are in shock. Where can they go?’

  Alexanor exhaled slowly, and then they were out on the portico.

  Sostratos waved the others to silence.

  ‘Tell me,’ he said. ‘When your friend Philopoemen fell, what was he wearing?’

  ‘Just a chiton of wool his wife made him,’ Dinaeos said. ‘He had no time to put on armour.’

  Sostratos looked pleased. Alexanor understood immediately.

  ‘There’s cloth in the wound,’ he guessed.

  ‘Thank the gods it is wool and not linen or cotton,’ Sostratos said. ‘Where are you going?’

  ‘I know what to do. What I would have done yesterday, or a week ago.’

  Alexanor went back down the hall. Sostratos followed him but said nothing. With Leon’s help, they put a sheet of thin wood under the patient’s side and covered it in sea-kelp.

  ‘You are sure?’ Sostratos said.

  ‘Yes.’

  Alexanor took a small knife with an obsidian blade held in a masterfully crafted bronze and silver handle. It was a tool for removing tumours and warts.

  Leon raised the patient’s arm.

  Alexanor looked at the scab again. And then he made a single incision along the flank of the red pustule, and it burst. Blood and bile flowed, and Sostratos mopped at it with a sea sponge, and then pounced with tweezers and held up an obvious scrap of bloody wool.

  ‘Get it all,’ Alexanor said, rather unnecessarily. He realised he’d just admonished his senior, but Sostratos was grinning.

  ‘Yes, master,’ he said with gentle sarcasm.

  Leon barked a laugh.

  Alexanor looked at the line of infection, which seemed paler already, and frowned.

  ‘How did the cloth get way down there?’ he asked.

  Sostratos, with both hands on the wound, still managed a shrug.

  ‘When you have done this as long as I have, young man,’ he said, ‘you’ll realise that we know nothing about how the body functions. Perhaps the gods put it there for us to find. Perhaps the body has subtle protective mechanisms to move alien objects out to the surface of the skin – think of a splinter. Perhaps the cloth floats on the fluid of the body.’ He stared down into the wound. ‘Perhaps little pink men run about inside us and do all these things.’ He tossed the tiny, blood-soaked tuft of wool into the dish Leon held with his free hand. ‘That’s all I see.’

  Alexanor was a little appalled by the level of his intrusion into the body cavity. He could see the muscle under the skin. Dissection of any kind was an abomination, or so most of his teachers told him, but he h
ad seen dead men before, and so he had some idea of how the abdomen worked.

  He shook his head. ‘Close him up?’

  Sostratos washed his hands in a bowl of hot water. The Aegyptian ambassador had come over and brought a stool; now the great man held a washbasin.

  ‘I’d say wash the wound and wait a little,’ Sostratos said, ‘if you are asking my opinion. Sometimes I think we are too fast to close.’ He shrugged. ‘Soldiers often keep wounds open to let them breathe.’

  Alexanor nodded. ‘Let us keep it open, then. I will pray.’

  In the morning, the infection was down. The patient’s eyes opened as soon as Alexanor ordered him rolled, and for the first time, they were clear.

  ‘I am not dead?’ the man asked.

  His heavy, blunt features might have caused him to be taken for a mere bumpkin, or one of those empty, handsome men sculptors loved. But when he smiled, his features changed, and he radiated charisma like the sun.

  ‘Not so far,’ Alexanor said.

  ‘I had such dreams,’ Philopoemen said.

  ‘Dreams are good,’ Alexanor said. ‘I am Alexanor of Rhodes, a priest of the god. Tell me your dreams – they will speed your healing. Often the god sends men dreams about their cure. I am trained to interpret them.’ He paused. ‘You have had both lotus flower and opium, which give richer dreams.’

  ‘I wondered. The colours were …’ The young Achilles fell silent.

  ‘I had a waking dream about you and your wound, before you came,’ Alexanor said.

  Philopoemen managed a wry smile. ‘The spear went right into me. How am I alive?’

  ‘The grace of the god,’ Alexanor said.

  ‘Your skill, too, I imagine.’ The Achaean lay back. ‘Zeus, I am tired. All my muscle will rot away. The only dream I remember was all fire and snakes. I think I was a snake. There was a fire, and I was a snake and I went through the fire and then I was burnt. And then there was another fire, and a rat, and I ate the rat and went through the fire, and I was burnt again.’ He raised his eyes. ‘It doesn’t sound like much.’

  ‘It sounds very much like a dream from the god. How many fires did you pass through?’