I was a little above him on the hill and I had my shield fouled by the dead chieftain's axe. It was split and my shoulder was gushing blood, and I couldn't spin fully to face Aristagoras. So I rotated on my rear foot, pulling my left arm clear of the porpax as I spun and taking a second blow from Aristagoras on the reinforced shoulder of my scale thorax as I turned, so that I just managed to keep my footing.
Aristagoras thrust at me a third time, and his blade slid off my scales and down my thighs, cutting me. But I paid no heed. Instead, I completed my rotation, clear at last of the wreck of my shield – the gods must have decreed that shields would be my bane that day – and I cut at him, a long overhand blow that caught him behind the shield because I had spun so fast. I sheared through his swan and my blade rang on his helmet. I powered my right foot forward and lifted my blade with my right arm, catching it under the rim of the cheekpiece of his helmet and cutting into his throat – an ugly blow, no skill to it, but I had my blade inside his shield and I wasn't going to let him go.
I saw his eyes then, and he knew he was a dead man. He would have run, but I'd cut the artery in the neck. He wasn't dead, but he let his limbs go loose – a final cowardice. He might have cut me one more time, but he gave up.
I like to think he knew it was me. But I don't know that for certain.
My sword glanced off his neck guard, where the yoke of his corslet rose to cover his back, and I lifted it high in the 'Harmodius Blow', an overhand back cut with the legs reversed and the whole weight of a man's body and hips behind it, and I cut his head right off his body – no easy feat with a short sword. Try it the next time you sacrifice a calf.
The stump of his neck jetted blood like a newborn volcano, and he fell.
I won't lie. It was a sweet moment.
Herk caught my wounded left shoulder, and the pain brought me to my senses. 'Well done, lad!' he said. 'Now get out of here, before one of his men fingers you for it.'
The fighting was fading away. It was the ugly part of a fight – when the brave men find how bad their wounds are, and the cowards push forward and bloody their weapons on dead and wounded men, as if anyone can be fooled by such stuff. I had a dozen cuts, and my arms were both hurt.
Hermogenes had to prise the vambrace off my arm. It was twisted, the cut that had numbed my arm had deformed the surface, and he had to deform the metal to get it off me, putting the flat of his eating knife against my skin and using it like a crowbar. But my right hand and arm felt better immediately.
My left arm wasn't so easily fixed. I had four different cuts, and Hermogenes pulled his old chiton out of his pack, ripped it in four pieces and used one of them to wrap my arm. 'This is no life for a man,' he said, out of nowhere. 'Your friend Lekthes is dead.'
That was the first I'd heard, although I've already told you the manner of his passing.
Idomeneus had as many cuts as I had, and a deep gash on the outside of his thigh that wrapped around his hip and on to his buttock. You could see white at the bottom of the wound, where the deep fat was.
'That's not good,' Idomeneus said, looking at his hip, and fainted.
Hermogenes shook his head. 'This is no life for a man,' he repeated. 'Look at yourselves. And this for gold? Who needs fucking gold?' He laid out his leather bag, lit a lamp – he was a monster of efficiency, our Hermogenes, even then – and wrapped Idomeneus, even stitching his arse, which woke the poor bastard. He woke with a scream, but by then Herakleides and Nestor had his arms and he fainted again.
Herk came back with Agios and a wineskin, attracted by the lamp. There was no breeze, and the wounded were calling for water, and the night things were coming.
He handed me a cup of wine, but Hermogenes intercepted it and drank it. Fair enough – he was the one doing all the work.
'Still Thracians in the town,' Herk said. 'Miltiades is anxious to get off.'
Paramanos came up with Stephanos. Paramanos had a bandage around his head, and he sighed and pushed the wineskin away. 'One drink and I'll be out,' he said. 'I owe Lekthes' widow,' he said. 'He traded his life for mine.'
'He was a good man,' I said. The wine cup had come to me, and I poured a libation to his shade. 'Apollo light him to Elysium.'
'Aye, he went down like Achilles,' Herk said.
I handed the cup back to Hermogenes. 'I'm going for the town,' I said. Stephanos stepped forward and I shook my head. 'You gather up the wounded,' I said to him. 'Make sure men go aboard the right ships. Herakleides – I'll bring Briseis to her namesake. Be ready.'
I embraced them all, one by one. 'I don't know if I'll be back,' I said.
They all embraced me again, and then I headed downhill, to the sally port from which Aristagoras had come. Paramanos came with me. When I turned to look at him in the moonlight, his eyes sparkled. 'You need a keeper,' he said.
A party of Aristagoras's men was carrying his body through the gate. A young man had his shield over his shoulder. We followed them.
If there were Thracians, we didn't see them, although we could hear screams and occasional sounds of fighting from lower in the town. We followed the body up two narrow alleys and a long staircase set into an outer wall, and then we were at a torch-lit gate. It was a small place, compared with Kallipolis. There were two sentries, and they were too young and raw to have gone with the sortie.
I don't know what I expected, honey. I think that I thought that she would throw herself into my arms and weep. It wasn't that way at all, of course.
The hall was small, and she was waiting to receive the body. Her handmaidens were around her, and they took his body – the man I'd beheaded an hour before – and they washed it. She caught my eye and started. She raised an eyebrow – that was all the greeting I got – and then went back to her task. Her role. Like a priestess, she had her part to play, and she played it well.
An old woman sewed the head back on. While that happened, I stepped up next to Briseis. She bowed.
'Lord Arimnestos,' she said. 'We are honoured.'
She bowed to me – imagine, Briseis the untouchable bowing to Doru the slave. It was all like a dream.
'I am a poor hostess,' she said, and led the way out of the hall, on to a balcony over the sea.
I still expected an embrace.
'I killed him,' I said quietly, and I think I smiled.
She nodded. 'I know that,' she said. 'And I thank you. Now – go. You should not be here.'
'But-' I couldn't believe it. She was pregnant again, I could tell – about three months. But her beauty was unchanged, and her power over me. 'But I came – to rescue you.'
Such things, once said, sound very weak indeed.
'Why do you think I need rescuing?' she asked. Then she laughed. She stood on tiptoe and kissed me. He tongue darted in and out of my mouth, and then she stepped back and licked her lips. 'Blood in your mouth and all over you,' she said and she smiled. 'Achilles. Now be gone, before people talk. I'm a widow and my reputation will matter.'
'I don't care,' I said. 'I'm your next husband.'
Then she looked – hurt. Not proud, and not angry, and not sad, but as if some deep pain had touched her. She reached out and touched my bloody right hand. 'No, my love,' she said. 'I will not marry you.' She shook her head. 'I have children to protect – beautiful children. And where would we go?'
I felt as if the Persian's axe had got me. 'I want to take you home,' I said.
'To Ephesus?' she asked.
'To Plataea,' I said. 'To my farm.'
She smiled then, and I knew that my dreams were foolish. The gods must have laughed at me all autumn.
'Listen, my love,' she said gently. 'I am not called Helen by other men for nothing. It is not my fate to be a farm-wife in Boeotia, wherever that may be.' Her smile became bitter – the bitterness of self-knowledge. 'That is not my fate. Nor would I want it. I will be the lady of a great lord.' Her hand remained on mine. 'I love you, but you are a killer. A pirate. A thief of lives.'
'You seem to ne
ed me from time to time,' I said, and my bitterness was too close to the surface.
She looked past me, into the room where her husband's body was being washed. She had things that she needed to be doing, she said with her eyes. 'Be glorious, so that I may hear of you often, Achilles,' she said softly.
'Come with me,' I pleaded.
She shook her head.
Well, I had my pride, too – and that was my foolishness. When Archi walked away from me, I should have wrestled him to the ground, and when Briseis chose another life, I should have put her over my shoulder and taken her. We'd both have been happier.
But I was proud.
'In the harbour, there will be a ship in ten days,' I said. 'Unless Poseidon takes him. His name is your name, and he is your ship. I took him from Diomedes of Ephesus. The rowers are yours until the end of autumn.'
Then she threw her arms around my neck. 'Oh, thank you!' she said. 'Now I am truly free.'
I turned to leave – but then it struck me. 'You will marry Miltiades!' I said, and there was death in my tone.
Her lip curled in disgust. 'You are worth ten of him,' she said. 'And if it were my fate to be a pirate queen, I would be yours.'
'Who then?' I asked. 'I could protect your children.'
'And make them tyrants of Miletus?' she asked. 'Lords of Ephesus?' She came and put her arms around my neck, and I had no hatred for her in my body. 'Go! Let me hear of you in songs of praise, and perhaps we will meet again.'
We kissed. It cannot have helped her reputation much, since every woman in that hall could see us, but it did me a world of good. That kiss had to hold me for many years. Part VI Justice Citizens must fight to defend the law as if fighting to hold the city wall. Heraclitus, fr. 44
For gods on the one hand, all things are beautiful, good, and just; but men, on the other, suppose some things to be just and others to be unjust. Heraclitus, fr. 102
22
I had almost recovered from my wounds when I stepped wearily off my own gangplank like an old man and limped up the beach at Piraeus. The red wounds were closed and the bruises had faded, but the black hole where my guts had been was never going to close.
Herakleides landed me from Briseis, and he embraced me like a brother. To be honest, I'd never really forgiven him for selling the information of the value of our ransoms to Miltiades, but in his way he'd done me a favour, showing me who I worked for and what a life I'd come to. So when I limped down the plank, I turned and took his hand.
'Take this ship back to its owner, and she'll keep you as captain,' I said. 'You are too good a man to spend your life as a pirate and die face down on the sand. And you're not good enough with the bronze and iron to stay alive. Do you hear me, friend?'
He nodded.
'Take this ship to Briseis and we're quits, you and me – no blood price over a certain matter back on Lesbos. Fail to deliver, and I'll find you. Am I clear?' Behind me, Hermogenes and Idomeneus and a pair of Thracian slaves – men I'd taken as part of the booty – were carrying my goods down off the ship.
'Aye, lord,' he said. 'I swear it by all the gods, and may the furies track me down and rip my guts from me-'
'Stop!' I said. 'You're hurting me. And never, ever swear by the furies.'
And so it was done. I embraced him, and he sailed away.
Idomeneus and I watched that ship until it vanished around the great promontory.
He had tears in his eyes.
I laughed bitterly. 'I didn't ask you to come with me,' I said.
Hermogenes grunted. 'Some people would be nostalgic about torture,' he said. 'I'm going to hire a wagon. You can afford it, lord.' He had a wicked glint in his eye. 'Best forget about anyone calling you that – ever again.'
I traded some silver for copper and tin in the city at Athens, and got bitten by bedbugs in a horrible tavern, lower than anything I'd seen since I had become a slave. And then we started walking home.
A day on the roads of Attica, and I remembered all too well – Greece, land of farmers. Every man was equal and surly farmers cared nothing for swagger. I could put my hand on my sword hilt and they would just glower the more. We came to Oinoe, and I looked up at the tower in the sunset. We camped within easy walk of the place where my father and his friends had stopped the Spartans. Hermogenes and I told the story to Idomeneus – and the two slaves, who were already becoming part of the household. They were decent men, not too smart, tough as nails. I told how my brother died.
That night I wept. Look at me – even now, I blubber.
Listen, honey. May you never know the loss of love. But you will. I loved Pater, for all his ways, and he died. And my brother. And those losses will never be redeemed. You will lose me, and your mother, and your brothers, too. And if the gods don't favour you, you will lose a child. No – I don't mean to be cruel. But that night, with the watch tower at our backs, while I sat watching our cart, I wept for Briseis, and for Pater, and for Archi, and for Hipponax, and for Lekthes. I wept for the man who I killed in the dark on the battlefield at Ephesus. Most of all, like most people, I wept for myself.
When I walked away from the ship in Piraeus, I walked away from myself – my reputation, my riches. All gone. I was going home to avenge my father's killing against a man whose face I couldn't hold in my mind. Not because I wanted to, but because I could think of nothing else to do.
I think it was the loss of Briseis most of all. I think that I had been certain I would have her – that I would bring her up this pass to the foot of Cithaeron, lie with her in the grass by Leitos's tomb and carry her over the threshold into my father's stone house.
Without her, it seemed an empty exercise. I cared nothing.
I promised when I started this story that I would tell the truth. So here's a truth for you – I didn't care much about avenging my father. Oh – I see the shock. Listen, honey – listen, all of you. When you are young, and you listen to the poet, you take in the rules of life – the laws of all Hellenes. Oaths, gods, laws of gods and men.
When I sat with my back to the stone fort at Oinoe, I had probably killed a hundred men. My love had chosen another life over me, and I had turned my back on the only calling I had ever felt.
Every time you kill a man, the doubt grows. Every time you take a ship, empty it of valuables and enrich yourself with the blood and sweat of other men, every time you make another man a slave, every time you buy a woman for sex and discard her when she's pregnant, you have to wonder – are there any laws? Are there any gods?
There weren't any laws for me just then. No rules. Perhaps no gods. Nothing mattered.
The darkness of that night is absolute, even in memory, and I was afraid to go to sleep.
I don't remember much more than that, until we came to the foot of Cithaeron. The next day, I hadn't slept, and I was morose and ill-tempered, and yet curiously happy to be walking the southern slopes where I could see my home mountain. Cithaeron is an old god, and he reached out to me and touched the blackness.
The cart slowed us, and it was nightfall when we came to Pedeis.
Pedeis was the typical border town, with high prices and crap for wine. Dionysus first preached just over the mountains at Eleutherai, and the grape grew there first, and my money says that his worship never spread to Pedeis. The girls were ugly and there was a wooden Temple of Demeter that was a disgrace to gods and men. I snarled at my men to keep moving, and we rolled through the streets and camped in the stony fields north of town.
The border garrison, if they existed, were so slipshod that we passed without a road tax, almost without comment. We climbed the pass to Eleutherai, up and up in switchbacks, and our cart filled the road so that the faster traffic of men walking and men with packs on donkeys ended up in a long queue behind us like the baggage train of an army. Men chatted to Idomeneus or Hermogenes. I walked on in silence.
We found the body near the summit of the pass. The corpse was that of a young boy, probably a slave, about twelve years old. He'd been
killed in a bad way, with a series of hacks to his face and neck from a dull, heavy knife. He lay in his own blood in the middle of the wide space near the summit where wagons turn to begin the descent, and where polite men pull to the side to let the faster traffic pass. There are deep ruts in the rock where the old men cut a road for their chariots, and he lay across the stone tracks like a botched sacrifice.
He looked so pitiful. He was just about the age I had been when I stood in the phalanx for the first time. Frankly, from the ripe old age of twenty-two, he looked too small to have died by violence. Had he tried to fight? I would have.
I was already low, and the sight of the dead boy almost moved me to tears again. I knelt by him and cursed because his sticky blood got on my chiton. But I determined to bury him – no idea why, either. In general, I leave corpses for the ravens.
I got him on my sea cloak, which had seen worse than blood, and men from the rest of the caravan behind our slow wagon came up and joined me, quite spontaneously. In fact, my opinion of men went up, right there. I was reminded of why Greeks are good men. We cleared a space, and every man, slave and free, gathered rocks, and we built a cairn as fast as you can tell the story. I put coins on his eyes and another man poured wine over the grave. More and more men came up – they must have been cursing my wagon all the way up the pass – and every one joined in.
There was a small man, a pot-mender, and he had a pair of donkeys and a young slave of his own. He came up when the cairn was half-finished. He looked more angry than sad. I caught his eye, and he looked away.
'You know him?' I asked. A pair of korai from Thebes who were travelling to the Temple of Artemis at Athens were washing his face under their mother's direction. They were good girls, conscious of so many men around them and yet aware of their duties as women.
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