Men laughed nervously.
‘What we’re fighting for right now is a pocketful of silver and the thanks of the good citizens of Gortyna. And survival. Let’s face it, friends, if we break, we all die. So hold the line, for your own hide and your brothers’, and we’ll be richer tomorrow.’ He grinned. ‘The Aetolians aren’t worth a fuck, anyway, as fighting men.’
He stepped down off the rock.
‘You don’t believe that,’ Alexanor said. ‘You aren’t here fighting for a few drachmae.’
‘Maybe you need to hear Sostratos talk about battlefield speeches a few more times,’ Philopoemen said. ‘Sufficient to the day, brother. You’ll fight?’
‘I love my skin as much as the next man,’ Alexanor said.
A dozen of the Thracians had Scythian bows. As soon as the Aetolians were all dismounted, Philopoemen told the archers to loose. They took their time, but every shaft fell into a mob.
Twenty men went down in a minute.
‘We are very fortunate they don’t have any actual Cretans with them,’ Philopoemen said, watching under his hand. ‘Most of their military class train with the bow – heavy bows, like these.’
Even as he spoke, one of the Aetolian officers in a fine bronze breastplate and a crested helmet came forward to look at the wall he was facing, and fell with an arrow right through his bronze.
Thodor gave a whoop. He waved his bow over his head, and the Aetolians, without any orders, charged.
‘That’s about the best we could hope for,’ Philopoemen said aloud, as if he was chatting with Ares about the theory of war. ‘No order.’
He turned. ‘Get ready!’ he roared. ‘Form close!’
The Achaeans had long spears, held in both hands. The Thracians mostly had heavy javelins, with a sprinkle of bowmen in the rear rank. It didn’t look terribly well organised, at least to Alexanor, but he had to assume they had practised, because Philopoemen practised everything.
The archers continued to shoot until the very last moment, down lanes left by their mates. They didn’t seem to hit anything; the wave of enraged Aetolians came at them, unstoppable, apparently uncountable.
Then men fell, and other men fell over them. They had hit the little rubble field in front of the low walls that Dinaeos had encouraged his men to create by throwing stones too small for the wall out in front of it – round volcanic stones and sharp flakes.
The archers shot and shot again.
The horde of Aetolians went over the men who fell with twisted ankles and the victims of the Thracian archery, and came up the last rise of Petra, the Rock, which was steeper than it appeared from a stade away: an almost sheer rise a little bit higher than a man’s waist, topped with the new wall of rubble and olive branches.
The Achaean spears began to reap men. The Aetolians were cavalrymen too: they didn’t have shields. They had to watch their footing and climb into a forest of close-order spears. Their weapons could only just reach the rubble wall and the bronze-armoured legs of the Achaeans were safe behind it.
It was very one-sided for what seemed a long time. Men pushed and shoved below him as Alexanor’s spear plunged into them, every stab down drawing blood from unprotected necks and shoulders.
Then their numbers began to tell. The men safely at the back realised that the Achaean force could not defend all four walls at once. They began to flow around the fighting, looking for a safer way in, as the Aetolian casualties were already terrible.
Then the fighting became close, personal, and deadly. Once a few Aetolians were at the rubble wall to the sides and rear, there was no line, and the chaos Alexanor had experienced in the fighting in the darkness of the Gortyna gate fell on the struggle at Petra.
Alexanor hadn’t realised that Philopoemen had held back from the fighting until he heard his war cry of ‘Zeus, Zeus!’ The pressure on the front of the Achaeans was gone; no one wanted to face the spears and the climb. Alexanor turned and saw Philopoemen facing a crowd. The Achaean’s heavy spear licked out, caught a man in the cheek and went up into his brain and then, as the man’s knees folded in death, seemed to pull him from his feet. A second man, determined, leapt in to grapple.
Somehow, Philopoemen’s left hand had a dagger readied, drawn, and thrust in a single motion straight into the man’s nose, even as he one-handed his spear into a third man with his right hand. Before the tide could overwhelm him, Dinaeos and Alexanor were there, and then Lykortas, and Thodor, loosing shafts over Lykortas until the fighting was so close that the Thracian lord thrust an arrow under the brow of a man’s helmet and drew his sword.
And then the Aetolians broke. Alexanor never knew exactly why. One moment, he was pressed so close that the fighting more resembled pankration than spear fencing, the next he was breathing like a blacksmith’s bellows and Thodor and Dadas were cursing their lack of shafts.
The dew had not yet burnt off the olives, but already the base of the wall was so thick with dead and dying men that the shape of the slope had changed.
Alexanor wanted to sleep. Instead, he forced his hands to release the spear. They felt like an old man’s hands: his joints ached, and his knuckles were bruised. He didn’t even remember using them.
‘You should rest,’ Philopoemen said. He was watching the Aetolians.
‘We will see to the wounded,’ Alexanor said proudly. ‘Including the Aetolians.’
Philopoemen looked at him for a moment, and then managed a tired smile.
‘You are a good man,’ he said. ‘I admire you. But I beg you to wait until they either mount to ride away, or charge us again.’
‘No,’ Alexanor said.
He crouched, flexing his knees, and then called for his terrified novices. One had a bloody dagger, another a javelin. One was dead. Two were sitting, stunned, as if they couldn’t function. The eldest was missing two fingers from his left hand, and Alexanor started with him, bandaging his hand carefully before all of them went to look at the other wounded.
‘Come,’ he said.
They clambered down a section of the wall where there were fewer bodies and Alexanor began the process of triage. He was looking for someone to save. He needed someone to save. He felt ill at the killing, at the ease of it.
He found a young man bleeding out – a simple cut to the thigh. Absent a fire and a red-hot iron, he could do nothing for the boy. He let him die and went on to the next, and then the next, until he found a man with a cut he could close, and then another.
‘Brother,’ Philopoemen said.
Alexanor was crouched over his fifth or sixth stab wound, a grown man weeping over the pain in his groin, just one of his four wounds. None of them had to be mortal.
‘Go away,’ Alexanor said. ‘Linen thread, boy.’
One of the novices, his own hands gory with blood, fumbled to make a loop in the thread. Philopoemen took it from him and made the loop.
‘The Aetolians are requesting permission to bury their dead,’ Philopoemen said. ‘And they hope to reclaim their wounded.’
‘We should execute every fucking one of them,’ Telemnastos said. His eyes were too bright – fatigue, the daemons of combat, terror, courage and too much killing, all in one man.
Dinaeos shook his head. ‘Nah. This is one thing I’ve learnt from Phil. War needs good manners, and you don’t teach manners to clods by out-clodding them.’ He was standing by the heap of dead men. ‘By Demeter, we killed a lot of them.’
‘A hundred,’ Alexanor said. ‘Give or take.’
Deftly, he slipped the loop over the man’s artery and closed it, saving the man’s life.
The Aetolians declined his offer to continue caring for their wounded: it was clear they thought him mad, or lying, when he claimed he would save whomever he could on both sides. So he worked on Lykortas, and then men he didn’t know as well, until his novices were all but weeping with fatigue. He washed in water that Thodor brought with his own hands, and saved a young Thracian with a spear thrust in his shin, right through his fan
cy metal greaves, and then …
He was finished.
He looked at them all again, and Dadas brought him wine.
‘Men send you their ration,’ he said in his careful Thracian Greek. ‘Men give up wine after fight. For you.’
Alexanor drank the wine, watched the valley for a little while, and fell asleep.
When he awoke, there was a fire, and wine. And the wonderful smell of roasting mutton, a harbinger of the wonder of the meat itself, warm, salty, and delicious.
Philopoemen crouched by him, waving a leg of mutton under his nose.
‘Get up and eat dinner,’ he said. ‘Come on, Alexanor.’
The priest raised his head. His whole body ached; he had been sleeping against the stone wall. There were flies everywhere.
‘What’s happened?’
‘Gortyna is ours,’ Philopoemen said. ‘Periander is in the citadel. We have a hundred hostages. The oligarchs surrendered when the town was burning around their ears.’
Alexanor nodded dully, looking at the flies, and the blood.
‘We buried our dead,’ Philopoemen said. ‘I lost eleven men. Almost all of them men I knew. My tenants.’ He turned away.
You woke me up because you needed someone to talk to, Alexanor thought with the annoyance of a tired man woken too soon.
But he enjoyed the mutton and stale bread and watered wine, and then he slept again. And the next morning, he helped curry horses. There was no longer any point in holding the rock; they were leaving as soon as they had watered the horses.
Alexanor walked down the hillside alone, looking for a spring that Telemnastos said was there. Instead he found the dead man.
He was older, and had probably been very tough. He had good armour, and a fine sword still sheathed in a silver-encrusted scabbard under his arm. The chiton under his bronze armour was beautiful, or it had been before it was soaked in blood and intestinal fluids – red, embroidered with doves and roses by a loving wife.
A chance spear-blow had opened his throat; the man’s hand was at his neck, trying to hold his life in. He’d crawled a long way in the underbrush, and then fallen down a little cliff and died.
Alexanor’s immediate intention had been to see if the man was alive; his second was to take the fine xiphos at his side. But then he tugged away the breastplate and the backplate, a looter with a solid knowledge of the paralysis of death and how to strip a body.
And then …
And then he had a nearly naked man before him who was clearly dead. His eyes had already been pecked out by ravens; maybe that made the difference.
Alexanor paused and prayed.
Then he drew his sharp neck knife from its scabbard and traced a long cut from pelvis to throat with the point. He had a feeling of guilt – of sacrilege. But his curiosity overwhelmed his scruples; and he had questions.
He took the man’s arms and dragged him to a flatter space, and then traced his cut again, and he prayed. He prayed to Zeus, and to Asklepios, and then he said, ‘Brother, I do not know who you were, but I … I only do this to save others.’
Even then, his knife hand trembled as it never had with a living patient, and he hesitated for perhaps fifty heartbeats.
And then he cut. He opened the chest, and found the heart, and then opened the abdomen and found the intestines and the stomach. He knew them from opening animals, but in a man they had an element of the sacred that he had never ascribed to a cat or a deer carcass. He went to the spring, washed, and returned to open a shoulder, but he could not make sense of the incredibly complex workings of the shoulder muscles and tendons.
An hour later, men were calling for him, and he was covered in blood. He had more questions than he had started with. He clambered down to the little spring again and turned it red, then climbed back to where an angry Philopoemen towered over him on his big horse.
‘You kept forty tired men waiting in the sun,’ Philopoemen said in a quiet voice.
‘Maybe someday that time will save all their lives,’ Alexanor said.
He mounted, feeling filthy, and rode through the beautiful day in a black mood. The image of his friends as living, animated corpses, mere machines of sinew and gristle and sticky blood, would not leave him.
‘All of us are but corpses,’ he said aloud.
‘You are so much fun,’ Dinaeos said.
Gortyna did not improve his mood. Everything smelt of smoke; there were scorch marks on the Temple of Apollo, and no priests could be found, because Creon, Primarch of the Presbyteroi, had been high priest of Apollo. There was no one to purify the temple, and the temple slaves sat in huddles.
Alexanor spent a day arranging the affairs of someone else’s temple, finding responsible priests who were not tainted by the oligarchy and would continue the sacrifices. A day later, he himself had been purified, and the temple operations were running, if not smoothly, at least regularly. Alexanor found Philopoemen in the agora, dispensing justice. He sat on a camp stool, surrounded by soldiers, looking a little too much like a statue of a tyrant for Alexanor.
Leon saw him and beckoned him forward, and Alexanor realised that the man currently standing, glowering, between two of Periander’s men was Zophanes, the father of the former high priest.
‘I have no need to defend myself, since you, a foreigner, have no status in law,’ Zophanes said.
‘Kill him!’ roared the crowd.
Philopoemen shook his head. ‘My father and grandfather were both citizens of Gortyna—’
‘Honorary citizens!’ shouted Zophanes.
Philopoemen shrugged. ‘I might say, Zophanes, that I’m the one in command of this city and you are perhaps the most hated man in it, after Creon.’
‘Should I care, that dogs and crows dislike me?’ Zophanes said proudly.
‘You are winning yourself no friends, Zophanes,’ said Antiphatas.
‘Kill him!’ roared the crowd. A few voices called ‘Achilles!’
‘Exile him,’ Alexanor called out.
Philopoemen turned and looked at him. ‘If we exile him, he will simply go to Knossos and work against Gortyna.’
Alexanor nodded.
‘I propose that he maintain full citizen rights and remain here, inside the city. Not free, but under house arrest until such time as the Assembly restores his rights.’ Philopoemen looked at Antiphatas.
The Cretan frowned.
‘Do better to him than he did to you,’ Philopoemen said. ‘He may yet serve the common good.’
‘What if he’s as venal as his son?’ Lykortas asked quietly.
Many of the citizens had reservations, and it was obvious that the crowd wanted blood, but Zophanes was led away to his own house.
‘You are merciful,’ Alexanor said.
‘Merciful nothing,’ Philopoemen said. ‘In a few days they will awaken from rage, and be happy that we did not begin the new democratic government in a thunderstorm of blood. You are returning to Lentas?’
‘I have no place here – there are factions in the temples and I want nothing to do with them. I need Leon.’
‘Leon is a fine thinker. I could use both of you in government,’ Philopoemen said.
Alexanor nodded. ‘Perhaps when my temple is on a surer footing.’
CHAPTER TWO
Lentas and Gortyna, Crete
220 BCE
For all his feelings of disgust at the hasty dissection he had performed, the first thing he did on returning to Lentas, after a long hot bath, was to sit and sketch the bodily formations he had seen under the skin. The heart. The muscles of an arm. The coils of intestines, in as much detail as he could remember. He sat in his cell, watching his own left arm raise and lower a bar of iron, and he thought of the gristle and meat under his sharp knife in the bright sun of the hill of Petra. His gorge rose, but he kept drawing. He tried to make sense of the shoulder; he played with a chicken leg that night at dinner. He had begun eating meat. His Pythagorean beliefs were falling away in the presence of so much vio
lence.
For a few days, he promised himself he’d never dissect again.
But a week later, when a dog died in the town, he made his preparations. And he began to consider what he might do when a poor pilgrim died.
And then, as summer turned to autumn, a letter arrived from his father. It took him three days to raise the courage to open it; nor had he been wrong. It was a tirade of anger and accusation. His father assumed that he was a child, and treated him as one, for leaving an important party, for leaving his mother to worry, and for failing to report on important events in Crete.
‘Important interests, business interests beyond your comprehension, hinge on our victory on Crete,’ his father wrote. ‘Your silence suggests that your loyalties to Rhodes have been affected by your other senseless behaviour. If you do not reply immediately, I will have no choice as a father and citizen but to disinherit you and erase your status as a citizen of Rhodes. This is in my power, as I am your father and under law have absolute rights over you.’
Alexanor put the letter aside. He reread it several times in the next days, but he made no move to respond, and he moved about his work pretending to himself that the letter had had no effect. Instead of allowing himself to think about it, he trained his novices and, with his priests, he did his best to heal the sick, or at least take them where the god could heal them. Days passed into weeks; festivals were celebrated, and incense and holy water began to clean his internal wounds. The flow of pilgrims increased dramatically, and the novices showed promise, and he sent word to Gortyna that he needed six more boys and two girls for the shrine.
A runaway slave died in the town. The body lay where the man had died for half a day, gnawed by dogs. Alexanor was tempted to try dissection again, but he resisted. Instead he fetched the corpse with his own hands and the temple paid for it to be burnt. He sent the ashes in an urn to the cemetery and took no further action. He sent for books on anatomy from Alexandria, and gathered oregano on the hillsides, and watched the stars at night.
He heard rumours, of course. His novices were local; they had family in Gortyna. The war was not over: Knossos was raiding Gortyna daily, had destroyed the city of the Lyttians, had attacked Polyrrhenia by land while the Rhodian fleet attacked it by sea.
The New Achilles Page 26