Killer of Men

by Christian Cameron

  We had no dead. Dionysius was deeply unconscious, and he slurred his words for ten days and missed the third fight, but he lived to thank me for covering his body. That’s what his father thought I did, and it saved my life later.

  We picked up our wounded and treated them as best we could. The Athenians had taken it much worse. They had hundreds of dead.

  The Thebans had more. The north end of the valley was carpeted with Theban dead. We stripped them with gusto. Their herald came and they made their submission, and Myron hobbled off – Pater couldn’t even walk, he was so tired – and on that very spot on the south bank of the Asopus, the boundaries of free Plataea were settled between archons and heralds, a deputation of Corinthians – neutrals, and honest men – settling the matter and guaranteeing it.

  Myron was no fool – by settling the borders and not making high demands, he ensured that the treaty would last, and he ensured that he would be elected archon. And by enlisting the arbitration of Corinth, he won us another ally.

  As I said, we stripped their dead. Our boys and slaves brought the camp up, and we loaded carts with Theban camp furniture and Theban armour. Pater got quite a bit – he was strategos.

  A tribunal met and discussed Simon. He was not the only man to miss the fight, but he was no man’s friend and his cowardice was a public disgrace. Even other men who had missed the fight – too tired to keep up, they claimed – complained about him.

  Simon spoke well enough in his own defence. And he knew, as we all knew, that we still had to fight the Euboeans. So he asked that he be allowed to fight in the front rank.

  The phylarchs discussed it and refused, but they put him in the second rank, behind Bion. Two men in front of me. To earn back the respect of other men.

  After the tribunal, Pater told me that he’d asked that I have that spot. And so the gods speak to us, thugater. If I had stood there – well, I would be a bronze-smith in Boeotia and you would never have been born.

  I was tired after the fight and I slept before the light failed, but the next day I was full of energy. That’s how it is for the young, honey. You recover fast. Pater and Epictetus and Myron took much longer.

  We sent the spoils home over Cithaeron and marched east, into the rising sun, to fight the Euboeans. It was insane – three battles, in a week. Ah, you brighten – you’ve heard of the ‘Week of Three Battles’, eh?

  I was there, honey. And after the first two, the Plataeans thought that they were gods. And the Athenians the same. I said that every army has a heart, a soul, eyes and ears. After the Thebans, that army was as one. We were still Atticans and Boeotians, Athenians and Plataeans, but we shared water and wine and jokes.

  Not one of us doubted that we would rout the Euboeans.

  They were soft. Their days of greatness were in the past and they had hoped to ride on a chariot of war driven by Thebes and Sparta. Now their mighty allies were gone, and their army marched back out of Boeotia, over the bridge at Chalcis, and stood waiting for us.

  It was just seven days since the Spartans had sent their herald to Pater when we marched over the bridge around midday. We did it well – we’d been together for two weeks and by Greek standards we’d become veterans. I was in my second fight as a hoplite and my shin still hurt from the rock a week before. And I could see Simon, two places in front of me, as we closed our files to the right.

  The Euboeans formed very close and stood with their shields overlapping, awaiting our charge. They didn’t come forward, and to me, at thirteen, they didn’t look soft at all.

  We marched in easy, open order until we were a stone’s throw away. If they had any psiloi, they didn’t come out. Neither did ours.

  Then we closed. We closed by doubling our files from the rear, so that seventh-rank men became front-rank men – the ‘half-file’ leaders. This was the closest order. I remained in the fourth rank, and Zotikos was now in the front. He swore and complained and grumbled as we closed, and Bion told him to keep it clean for the gods, and Zotikos said something under his breath and older men laughed.

  Now we were a spear’s throw from them. We were locked up in the same close order. We were on the left, and again we were facing the cream of their warriors – the men with the best armour, the right of their line.

  Pater stood clear of our line. It was the only time I ever heard him speak before a fight, at least for so long. ‘We’re going to walk forward in time to the Paean, just as we did at Parnes. And when we hit their shield wall, we push straight on. Use your shoulders. Their line is thin, and they are already afraid. We have faced Sparta. We have nothing to fear here.’

  Men beat their spears on the face of their shields.

  Miltiades came running down the face of the army. When he was in front of the left-most Athenians, he raised his spear.

  ‘Sing!’ he called, even as an enterprising Euboean threw a spear at him.

  Insults were called. We ignored them, although they were so close we could see faces, shield devices, bad teeth and good teeth. Pater started the song and every voice picked it up. We sang the first verse standing and then the whole army – Athenians and Plataeans – moved forward.

  Perhaps our line wasn’t perfect, but I remember it as perfect. And when we were a spear’s length from the Euboeans, I knew we’d won. A veteran at the age of thirteen, I knew as surely as if Athena sat on one shoulder and Ares on the other that the men of Euboea would break when our shields hit theirs.

  We must have had a bow in our line – because Pater and Bion hit them a heartbeat before the rest of the line, or perhaps the Euboean line had a curve in it. We hit, and the front opened like a door. Pater’s helmet flashed in the brilliant noontime sun, and his plumes shone like the wings of some god-sent bird, and we gave a great shout as the aspides clashed and their line broke up the way a pot breaks when dropped on flagstones from a height.

  Even as the Euboeans broke, I saw Pater fall. I saw the way his head turned, and I saw that he fell forward as if pushed, and I know now as if I had seen it that Simon had stabbed him in the back, under his back plate. But I couldn’t see, and battle deprives a man of many of his wits. All I thought at the time was that Pater was down, though the battle was already won.

  Pater was down. Somehow I got my legs on either side of his chest and stood my ground, because the Euboeans weren’t beaten. Their front ranks crumbled but then stiffened, much as ours must have done against the Spartans, and they came back at us like men. I saw Simon with a short sword in his hand, dripping blood. He was green, his lips were white with fear and his eyes met mine.

  I didn’t see it – oh, I’ll tell it in its place. But that’s when the Euboeans counter-attack struck, and I wasn’t in the fourth rank any more, because I wouldn’t give over Pater’s body. I had no idea if he was alive or dead, but I stood my ground like a fool, and then, in that moment, I found out why old men and poets call it the storm of bronze. I got my dead brother’s aspis up, and the hammering knocked me down over Pater – I was too small to stand the pressure of ten or fifteen weapons beating against my shield.

  But other Plataeans crowded in around me. They saw who was down and they were men, too. They pushed and killed. I could smell the copper of blood, the heavy waft of excrement that men release when they go down, the cardamom and onions they’d eaten for lunch. I got a knee under me and pushed my spear under the press and felt the soft, yielding resistance of flesh as I cut some poor bastard’s sinews.

  Then I took my first wound. It’s this one, see? And it saved my life, as you’ll hear. Right through the top of the thigh, honey – some big bastard stood over me and pushed his spear right down over my aspis. It didn’t cut the muscle, praise to Ares, but I went down, blood spurting between my fingers, with Deer Killer forgotten in the Euboean grass. I fell on top of Pater.

  I made the mistake of falling forward over my shield, and some Euboean bastard hit me on the head.

  When I awoke, I was rolling in my own filth and vomit, wearing the shackles o
f a slave.

  Part II

  Some Made Slaves

  War is the king and father of all, and some he shows as gods, others as men; some men are freed, and some are made slaves.

  Heraclitus, fr. 53

  6

  Hard to imagine what that awakening was like for me.

  I had a fever. My wound was oozing pus – not that I knew that yet, I was off my head. And I had never been on a ship. I had no idea why I was wet, why the world swayed, why it was so cold.

  It didn’t take me long to know, to know, honey, that I was dead and in Tartarus for some forgotten sin. I didn’t think that I was dead. I knew it. I flailed and swallowed my own filth. I was shackled under a rowing bench in the bottom rank of rowers. No one expected me to row – only free men rowed, back then – but I was shackled flat with eight other slaves, destined for market. Not that I understood. I knew nothing.

  I went down again.

  I awoke a second time when a tall man poured water over me while another man held his nose. They looked at the pus – that’s when I saw my leg, red and angry and inflamed – and flinched. The tall man with the pointed beard prodded my leg and I was gone again.

  I surfaced a third time in a pen, somewhere in Asia, I learned. I wasn’t shackled, but my thigh still bled pus like a boy’s spots. I had a fever like a child. And the other slaves – there were hundreds – avoided me as if I had the plague. For all they knew, I did. Slaves don’t help each other, honey. That lesson hits you right away, when you go from the brotherhood of the phalanx to slavery.

  I was never completely out again. I raved – and no one bought me. I wasn’t worth an obol. The wound on my thigh wept pus, as they say, and because of it, no one buggered me, not even the sick bastards who live at the bottom of the muck of the slave trade. No one made me play their flute, or any of the other things they do to slave boys and girls. You ever wonder why Harmonia flinches every time you move your hand, honey? You don’t want to know.

  Have you seen the kind of slaves who sit in corners rambling, talking crazy, and never raise their eyes? No – you haven’t. I never buy ’em, not even for rough work. People can be broken, just like toys.

  I missed being broken because I was so disgusting. Bless the Lord of the Silver Bow and his deadly arrows. His ravens sit on my shield to this day because of that beautiful, stinking pus. I watched it – they raped a boy until he stopped complaining just a spear’s length from where I lay. He was Thracian, and he got up silently from their abuse and killed himself, ripping his guts out with a stick, but few are so determined. Honey, you have no idea what a person can put up with, what depth of cowardice we discover when, by small surrenders, we can stay alive. Eh?

  Oh, yes. Me, too. I’m sure I’d have given in. I was just a boy, and unlike the brave Thracian, I was utterly disoriented. I couldn’t imagine how I’d come to be a slave, and I couldn’t get my feet under me, so to speak, and I had a wound.

  The slaves themselves prey on the weak. Oh yes! No honour among slaves. I had no food – ever. No honest boy came and brought me bread. They ate my gruel and my soup, and one day I awoke to find two bigger boys discussing my squalor and deciding I wasn’t worth ‘a fuck’ – pardon me, honey, but they meant it. And then they pulled up their rags and pissed on me.

  This is harder for you than the death of Pater, isn’t it? Hard to picture the noble aristocrat as a victim, your own father with boys raining yellow urine in contempt. Hard to imagine me as a worthless slave. The dishonour. The shame. Eh?

  Listen, honey – you know what Achilles says? Better to be the slave of a bad master than King of the Dead. Right? I was alive.

  I told you that I tell the truth, at least as I remember it. Who is this fellow you’ve brought to listen to me? You look like an Ionian, young man. Well – eat well. You are my guest, and guest-friendship still counts for something, eh?

  Odd as it sounds, I’ve always thought that the urine saved me. Being pissed on. It made me angry, and I think it washed the wound. Persians and Aegyptians use piss that way. Maybe not. Maybe the Deadly Archer simply looked the other way and I healed.

  But, by the Lady, I was weak. I was so weak that I couldn’t stand. I hadn’t eaten for two weeks at least. I didn’t even know where I was, but I knew that I was angry, and I wasn’t going to die so that they could defecate on my corpse. I decided that I had to eat. And to eat, I had to fight off all comers and take food. The thing is, I couldn’t fight. I could barely drag myself to the place where the food trough was filled. The boys who ate the most food were bigger, tougher, and none of them had a wound.

  I’d like to say that I thought of something noble, like the Plataeans at Oinoe. They didn’t win by fighting better. They merely refused to break. Fair enough. But I didn’t really have a thought in my head. I was an animal. I decided that if I could endure pain, I could eat. I noticed that other slaves tried to take their food off into a corner and eat, like animals on a kill ripping a haunch and running. But it occurred to me in my feverish desperation that I could simply eat while they beat me. I’d tear food out of their hands and put it in my mouth. I’ve seen a starving cat do the same, on a wharf in Aegypt.

  That was my plan, and it worked well enough.

  It only worked because they feared the guards.

  We had Scythian guards. Now that I know the Sakje better, I suspect that few, if any, were actually Sakje. They were probably a rabble of Persian bastards, half-Medes, half-Sakje and Bactrians. Scum. But armed scum, soldiers with bows.

  They didn’t do a lot, except prevent escape and punish us if we hurt each other too much. After all, we were worth money. But they watched us with the lazy, amused contempt of the better man for the worse. All free people know they are better than slaves. Slaves have no honour, no beauty, no dignity, nothing that makes them worth knowing. Why? It’s all taken from them with their freedom, that’s why. The ones who might have had dignity kill themselves.

  They watched us for entertainment. They loved it when we fought, and they would wager money on their favourites.

  One old fellow had wagered money that I would live. I figured it out from listening to him argue – he felt that I’d already beaten the odds. So the first day that I decided to eat, when I grabbed bread from the trough and stuck it in my mouth, and when a bigger man hit me with his fist, I kept eating.

  I took a blow to the head, and my nose broke, and blood sprayed.

  I kept eating.

  Then the cage opened and the old Sakje waddled in and kicked my tormentor in the head.

  I ate his food, too. While he lay unconscious, I ate it all.

  The next morning, he was groggy. I ate his food again. His partner, one of the boys who had pissed on me, hit me in the face, where my nose had been broken, and I vomited from the pain. Then I picked up my bread and ate it. Disgusted yet?

  In the evening, I felt better, despite the inflammation of my whole face. I got to the food trough and waited.

  When the bread loaves began to fall into the trough, I waited for the food mêlée to begin and then I punched the biggest boy in the ear. Down he went. Once he was down, I kicked him in the head and took his bread. While I ate, I kicked him again and hurt my foot.

  The next morning, the other slaves gave me space at the trough. My guard laughed when he saw me. Later I heard him demand payment, but the other soldier told him I would be dead before the end of the day. He said this in Ionian Greek, a variant on our language – well, you know, honey. And this fellow you brought with you grew up with it, so I won’t bore you with how it still sounds alien to me now.

  It didn’t take long to realize that my two tormentors were planning to kill me. Murder was not so infrequent in the slave pens. I watched them from under my hair – my lank, filthy hair, full of bugs – and saw they were together. I had united them. Or perhaps they were allies before my coming, although, as I say, such alliances are rare for slaves.

  Of course, they were waiting for my Scythian to go of
f duty.

  I watched them, and I waited, and I tried to plan. But I was still wounded, and I was still weak, and they were bigger and tougher and there were two of them.

  I was beginning to think of attacking them – if only to get it over with while my Scythian was on duty – when the cage opened and a priest came in. He was fat, and clean, and his eyes were sharper than Deer Killer.

  Six of the archers came in behind him. He began to gesture with his staff, and the men and boys he pointed out were taken.

  I was the last to be chosen.

  Someone was purchasing a packet of slaves – ten or twelve in a single lot. I was being used to make weight, which meant that somebody was getting swindled. I was as likely to die as live.

  Slave traders. The very lowest form of life, eh?

  We were fettered together by the necks and wrists and marched off up the road. I had no idea where I was, and no idea where I was going, and I didn’t care. I had already surrendered. I might not have broken yet, but I was breaking, because I had no one to talk to and no one to care about. I plodded along behind another man, as close as if we were file-mates in the phalanx, and I didn’t know his name.

  On the other hand, neither of the boys who had wanted me dead were in the purchase. I was going to live, if I could just get through the walk to wherever we were going.

  I had thought that the trip over Parnes was the hardest thing I would ever do, marching with all the weight of my brother’s armour, but this was far tougher, although the pace was gentle enough. I was touched with the whip only once – for falling – and otherwise we were fairly treated.