The New Achilles

by Christian Cameron

  As morning dawned over the snow-capped mountains, a messenger arrived from Messene. Cleomenes had issued an ultimatum to the Megalopolitan exiles, and the citizens were going to vote on whether to return to their city and accept Sparta’s terms, or fight on under the king of Macedon.

  ‘I must be there,’ Philopoemen was saying. ‘Men will listen to me.’

  ‘You need another month to heal,’ Alexanor said, but he knew it was a waste of his breath. Dinaeos was already tacking up horses; Lykortas was collecting scrolls and Aristaenos was collecting food from the kitchens.

  Alexanor tried again with Lykortas, as he was in many ways the most interested in medicine.

  ‘Your wound is almost healed,’ he said, ‘but Philopoemen—’

  ‘I’m afraid you waste your breath, sir,’ Lykortas said stiffly. ‘My own father is proposing that we accept these so-called “terms” from Sparta. I would walk barefoot across the snow to dissuade him.’

  In the end, all Alexanor could do was walk out with the Achaeans. A light snow was falling, and the breath of the horses rose into the air. Philopoemen’s charger stamped, its hooves striking the earth like hammers.

  ‘Never worry about me, brother,’ Philopoemen said.

  He mounted with a wince, and circled his mount once.

  ‘You called me brother,’ Alexanor said.

  Philopoemen smiled. ‘You saved my life. And then you very carefully fenced me off from all the drugs. Don’t think I didn’t notice,’ he added, smiling. ‘We’ve boxed and we’ve argued. Are we not now brothers?’

  Alexanor reached up and clasped his hand, and the Achaeans rode away into the snow.

  A day later, Lykortas returned to collect their armour and spare horses. He got all of the horses into a paddock and ordered a pair of slaves to pack the armour in baskets, and then set himself to currying all the horses like a man possessed.

  ‘He’ll do himself a mischief,’ Sostratos said, reporting the event. Behind the older priest, Leon nodded. ‘Go talk to him, lad. He won’t listen to me.’

  Alexanor went out to the paddock by the sanctuary entrance, poured a libation to Hermes, god of travellers, and then found Lykortas with the horses.

  ‘You couldn’t wait to have your armour back?’ Alexanor asked in a light tone.

  ‘I couldn’t watch my father and that fool Cercidas try to betray our city and the League,’ he said to Alexanor. ‘They proposed that we … surrender to Sparta. Join Sparta. As if we Arkadians have forgotten.’ He was tacking up a horse; the bridle was on. He was fiddling with the reins. ‘But Philopoemen swayed them. He gave a speech and called them traitors.’ Lykortas shook his head. ‘My father is a traitor.’ He picked up a saddle cloth.

  ‘A cup of wine and a good night’s sleep will make it a little better,’ Alexanor said, putting his hand on the younger man’s shoulder. ‘You cannot ride all the way back tonight.’

  Lykortas stopped, as if he hadn’t given the matter any thought. He held the saddle cloth in his hands, and he was looking at one of their big military horses as if he’d never seen a horse before. He had deep lines in his face and Alexanor recognised all the signs of exhaustion: dark smudges under the eyes, like bruises, and deep lines in a young man’s face.

  ‘Come on,’ Alexanor said. ‘I have some good wine.’

  The younger man bit his lip.

  Alexanor was unused to the role of counsellor, as opposed to physician, but he put an arm around the other man’s shoulder and pulled, almost like wrestling.

  ‘We need to see to the horses,’ Lykortas said. ‘Fuck, I’m not even making sense.’

  Alexanor looked back at Leon, who had two of the temple slaves behind him.

  ‘The horses and all your armour will be ready in the morning,’ he said. ‘Come on.’

  ‘My father was just going to sell us to the Spartans,’ Lykortas said. ‘My father.’

  Alexanor, who was well used to living in the shadow of his famous war hero father, sympathised with the young man. He had left Rhodes to leave his father behind. The man could be difficult – domineering, overbearing, blustering … But he had never betrayed his city, nor anything like it. Alexanor couldn’t imagine what the young man was experiencing.

  But he did have good wine. He sat the boy down with Sostratos, and they heard it all: the speeches, the denunciation.

  And in the end, he said, ‘I ran away and left my family.’

  Alexanor shrugged, as if it could happen to anyone.

  Lykortas gazed at him, aghast.

  ‘You, sir?’ he asked.

  ‘Our parents are often a disappointment.’ Sostratos laughed, but no one else did. ‘Perhaps your father did what seemed best at the time, lad,’ he went on.

  ‘Why did you leave?’ Lykortas asked.

  Alexanor gazed into the fire on the raised hearth. He shook his head.

  ‘Many reasons. My father believed me a coward, and so did …’ He broke off. He thought of Aspasia for the first time in a long time. And smiled. ‘I couldn’t forgive him. I can now.’

  ‘I don’t like the choices my father is making,’ Lykortas said. ‘He’s a traitor!’

  ‘We all love Philopoemen,’ Sostratos said. ‘But disagreeing with him is not treason.’

  ‘Cercidas will never forgive Philopoemen,’ Lykortas said. ‘But Philopoemen won. The men stood firm and refused to accept the Spartan yoke.’

  ‘What happens now?’ Alexanor asked.

  Lykortas looked at him as if he was a fool.

  Sostratos, the former mercenary, put down his clay wine cup.

  ‘Now the Spartan king will send his mercenaries to destroy the temples and cut down more olive trees and rape the women,’ he said. ‘That’s how it’s done.’

  Alexanor shuddered. ‘You did these things?’ he asked.

  Sostratos met his eye. ‘I did. It seemed perfectly reasonable at the time – it is the way of the world.’

  ‘Apollo, Lord of Light, stand with us,’ Alexanor said.

  Lykortas leant past him, his face animated for the first time in an hour.

  ‘What changed your mind, sir?’ he asked.

  Sostratos looked away. ‘Listen, boy. I always knew what I did was evil.’ He was looking off into the distance. ‘I told myself fucking stories about how my life as a mercenary was noble and virtuous and how the peasants we destroyed had it coming. One day the stories weren’t enough, and I knew it was all bullshit, and we were bad men.’

  Lykortas nodded, although his fatigue was beginning to show in drooping eyelids and slack features.

  ‘And then?’

  ‘And then I walked a long way. I came to a little shrine in Boeotia, up on the flanks of Kithaeron. A tomb to one of the men who fought at Troy. I dedicated my shield and had a long talk with the priest there, and he sent me here.’ Sostratos smiled crookedly. ‘And here I am, pretending to be good.’

  ‘Maybe pretending to be good is as good as we ever are,’ Alexanor said. ‘I was a marine, for Rhodes. I, too, have seen some … shit.’

  Lykortas shook his head; he was almost asleep sitting up. He turned to Sostratos.

  ‘Will my father … ever realise that he was wrong?’

  Sostratos frowned. ‘No one is good at that,’ he said. ‘But I promise you, you won’t change your father’s mind by yelling at him.’ He glanced at Alexanor, as if to make sure that the younger priest was aware of their patient’s exhaustion. ‘You are studying at the Academy in Athens at the moment?’

  ‘Yes, sir.’

  ‘Let our slaves take the horses and armour back to Megalopolis. You go on to your studies. When you read Plato, think of your father.’

  ‘When I read Plato, I think of Philopoemen,’ the young man said, and the name Philopoemen seemed to wake him. ‘We need a Herakles to clean the Augean stables, and Philopoemen is the best we have. Men like Cercidas and my father want money and power, and care nothing for the means they use. Philopoemen …’

  With that word on his lips,
the young man fell asleep. Alexanor and Sostratos carried him to a bed in the heated room, and tucked him in.

  ‘I hate even thinking about it,’ Sostratos said to the darkness.

  ‘War?’ Alexanor had been thinking of Aspasia. ‘It’s far enough from here.’

  In his mind, war was about rope and seawater and the sound of gulls, far from the peace of the groves of Epidauros.

  Sostratos sighed. ‘No,’ he said. ‘War is coming. That young man is the herald of Ares.’

  CHAPTER THREE

  Sellasia – 55 Stades from Sparta

  SUMMER, 222 BCE

  Alexanor was less than three hundred stades from the sanctuary at Epidauros. He sat on the back of a gifted horse and watched the king of Macedon bring war to the Peloponnese.

  He was with the great man’s staff: a dozen officers; as many courtiers without obvious military office; the great man’s Macedonian physician, who glared at Alexanor whenever he thought he was unwatched; a male concubine named Phaex, who wore a sword he’d clearly never drawn and wasn’t comfortable on horseback; and a dozen women including an Athenian hetaera and her servants. They were halfway between Megalopolis and Sparta, and apparently the king of Sparta had erected fortifications across the one good road. Ahead of them rose two hills, conical, like a young woman’s breasts, and behind the hills ran a ridge that was taller than either, like a woman’s shoulders above her breasts. The king of Sparta occupied all three heights. A river, the Oenus, flowed rapid and shallow across the front of the hills, and the road crossed it at a ford to the left of the Allied position, which consisted of a low ridge and the Oenus that ran, very shallow, but with deep cut banks, along the ground below them.

  To Alexanor, the Spartan position appeared impregnable.

  The king of Macedon had camped well away, almost thirty stades distant, with the river Oenus between them. Alexanor had never seen a war on land before; he was surprised at the tents and all the baggage, and surprised again to be treated by the Macedonians as if he was roughly equal in importance to Phaex, the male concubine.

  Alexanor thought that his presence was the direct result of his age, and his military experience. When they understood that the king of Macedon was coming to the Peloponnese in person to prosecute the war against Sparta, the priests of the temple of Asklepios hadn’t imagined that they would be involved in any way. But as the spring wore into summer, the king had sent gifts, and requests that were very like commands; he wanted a priest to attend him. A liver complaint, or perhaps a stomach disorder.

  At the festival of the Spring Equinox, Alexanor had been made a full priest and an initiate of the highest degree of the order; he was shown the sacred signs, and asked to volunteer to attend the king of Macedon. As he was now the youngest full priest, he accepted. Indeed, he had already begun to experience the change in his relations with his peers. It was one thing to be the best of the students, but another to be the first to be promoted to priest.

  Philopoemen, busy in the north playing politics, had sent him a horse as a gift. A damn good horse, with word that he had been appointed commander of the Megapolitan Exile cavalry.

  Alexanor had ridden over the mountains with Leon and a mule loaded with surgical instruments and drugs, to find that the king of Macedon didn’t seem to know anything about him, so that today he had ridden along behind the great man, his escort, and his courtiers from hilltop to hilltop without yet being recognised. He’d left Leon with the main army.

  ‘Well,’ the king said.

  He was perhaps the most powerful man in the world – certainly the most powerful in Greece. Now he was standing two horse lengths away, pissing on the ground. He looked up and his eyes met Alexanor’s for the first time.

  ‘Who the fuck are you?’ he asked, his voice polite.

  ‘Alexanor, son of Philokles,’ he said. ‘You sent for a priest from the temple of Asklepios.’

  The king pulled his chiton down over his hips and then raised his cavalry breastplate and let it down, shrugging his shoulders to seat it.

  ‘Huh,’ he said. ‘Did I? Antipater, how far does his flank run down that hill? Don’t they look like a woman’s tits?’

  ‘Great tits.’ Antipater was a young cavalry officer, also clearly a favourite. ‘Most tits sag when a woman lies on her back. Not Gaia.’

  Most of the men laughed.

  The king smiled. ‘I did order up a priest, at that. When I was pissing blood this spring. You know anything about stomach problems?’

  Alexanor considered a host of answers.

  ‘Perhaps,’ he said.

  The king nodded. ‘Where’s Prince Alexander?’

  Antipater waved into the valley of the Oenus River at their feet. ‘He went down to look for fords.’

  The king shook his head. ‘That’s a beautiful position Cleomenes has there, and we’re going to lose a lot of boys from Pella taking it.’ He walked over to Alexanor and put a hand on the borrowed horse’s bridle. ‘Nice horse. Thessalian?’

  Alexanor shook his head. ‘No, my lord. He was gifted me by a friend – I really don’t know the breed.’

  The king of Macedon patted the horse’s head.

  ‘There, my friend – there’s a fine fellow, open your mouth for the king.’

  The horse opened his mouth and gave a little shudder.

  The king stepped away.

  ‘A fine gelding. Too good a warhorse for a quack. Who’s your friend? The king of Syria?’

  Alexanor smiled. ‘No, my lord. The Hipparchos of Megalopolis. Philopoemen.’

  ‘Oh.’ The king turned to his cavalry orderly, Antipater. ‘Who’s Philopoemen?’

  Antipater winked at Alexanor. ‘An officer of Megalopolis,’ he said. ‘Commanding the Exile cavalry.’

  ‘The Achaean League?’ the king asked.

  Antipater shrugged. ‘My lord, I cannot keep track of all these pissant little Greek states.’

  King Antigonus, known as ‘Doson’,’ laughed.

  ‘Who can?’ he asked. ‘But the Achaean League has its uses. Do you know the man, Antipater?’

  ‘He did a lot of scouting the last two weeks. Alexander says he’s got the stuff. The balls.’ Antipater looked around and then back at the king. ‘They took a raid right to the gates of Sparta, or so Alexander said.’

  ‘Ah,’ the king of Macedon said. ‘He’s a good judge of horseflesh, too. Right. Get me Alexander, and tell Demetrios to take the Illyrians and clear the middle ground. Get all those crap psiloi and peltastoi out of the river bottom. We’ll do this one step at a time, like peeling an onion.’ He looked up at the two peaks, which were dense with the enemy’s phalanxes behind earthworks. ‘By the rage of Ares, though, gentlemen – this is going to be a tough nut.’

  The sun climbed through an empty sky, and the pleasant air of early morning gave way to the forge heat of the full weight of the sun, which fell on every man like the strokes of a hammer. Eventually Alexanor dismounted; he was not such a veteran rider that he really wanted to spend all day on a horse, no matter how highly praised the beast was. But he had no groom and he had to wander the hillside with his reins over his arm until the hetaera, a tall, thin woman in perfectly respectable riding clothes, called out to him.

  ‘Are you the priest of Asklepios?’ she asked.

  Her face, under the veils she wore against the sun like any rich Athenian lady, was beautiful; her skin was like the finish on the finest Athenian pottery, her red lips so crisply defined that they might have been made by the chisel of a master sculptor, and her eyes a vivid green-brown. Her smile was not predatory or vulpine, merely friendly.

  ‘I am, despoina.’ He bowed.

  ‘Let Thais here take your horse. What a beauty. My father raised them. I’ve seldom seen a better head.’ She flashed her magnificent smile at him.

  He was surprised at his own response. Hetaerae were known to be clever, but they were merely women, and often dissolute women at that, and here he already wanted to win her good opinion.

>   It was a long time since he had sought a woman’s good opinion.

  ‘The king of Macedon thought so, too,’ he said, and then thought that sounded pompous. ‘What I mean is, yours is the second compliment today. I am merely the horse’s custodian.’

  ‘I heard.’ She turned her head so that he could see her profile, her pert nose and long neck under her enormous straw hat. ‘Thais, my sweet, get the horse out of the sun. He doesn’t fancy it any more than you do.’

  She suited action to words, taking Alexanor by the hand and leading him into the shade of a silk parasol that her ladies had erected. As soon as his head was out of the sun, Alexanor felt better.

  He also realised that he’d just been very gently reprimanded.

  ‘You await the king’s pleasure?’ he asked.

  She laughed. ‘I await the king’s sexual pleasure. You are a doctor – surely I can use the term “sexual” with you?’

  He flushed. ‘Yes,’ he said.

  She shrugged. ‘I am distressing you.’

  He shook his head. ‘I do not have many chances to discourse with women.’ Especially about sexual matters,’ he added, hoping he sounded worldly.

  She nodded. ‘Well, we’ll do what we can to save you, won’t we, Artemis?’

  She addressed another of her women, who poured him a plain, earthenware cup of sparkling red wine that must have been iced, it was so cold.

  ‘My lady, I am in your debt.’ He bowed.

  She smiled. ‘Listen, you are not here of your own will, are you? I’m going to guess that he asked for a man from your temple, and you drew the short straw.’

  Alexanor could not help but be moved by her sparkle.

  ‘There’s some truth in your assertion,’ he conceded.

  ‘You sound as if you are debating with Socrates,’ she said.

  ‘You know Socrates?’

  She smiled wryly. ‘Well, he’s been dead for almost two hundred years, but I’ve heard of him. Something to do with clouds, I think.’

  ‘You are mocking me,’ Alexanor said.

  ‘Yes,’ the hetaera said. ‘Shall I continue?’ She smiled again. ‘I only mock men I like. I’m exceptionally polite to other men.’