Killer of Men

by Christian Cameron

  I shrugged. Nearchos was leaning against a pillar, whittling a stick with a pretty knife and looking at me when he thought I couldn’t see him.

  ‘I could live here for a season.’ I shrugged again. ‘But sooner or later, they’re going to know that my father was a bronze-smith. Not a noble.’

  Herk tried to hide a smile as he saw how it was with Nearchos, and he turned his back on the boy. ‘Lord Achilles is as rich a man as Miltiades and he’s asked me twice if you might be interested in staying on as his boy’s war tutor. And to fight in his war band, of course.’ The big Athenian sighed. ‘It’s a soft life here. But you already have a name. What’s waiting for you at home? A farm? Farming is for fools. Stay here, and be rich. And when you leave here, everyone will think of you as an aristocrat. Crete is the most aristocratic place in Hellas. What in Tartarus does home have, by comparison?’

  ‘I’ll let them know who I am,’ I said, with a little too much youthful emphasis. ‘All right. I’ll stay.’

  ‘And Cleon’s right – see a priest.’ My friend raised an eyebrow.

  ‘Before the furies come for you.’

  I looked at Nearchos. Then I looked back at Herk.

  ‘You don’t have to lie with him,’ he said. ‘Be unattainable. But teach him. You have a great deal to teach. You have a brain, lad – remember that sophist you took us all to see?’

  ‘Heraclitus?’ I asked.

  ‘That’s it. You have a formal education. You can teach.’ He pointed his chin at Lord Achilles, who was laughing with his leading men. ‘I’ll negotiate your price, if you like. And I can set it high – ten times what Miltiades would pay for a spearman.’

  ‘Very well,’ I said. And the knucklebones were cast. I was not going home.

  Both Idomeneus and Lekthes chose to stay with me as my ‘men’. Old Herk wrote them into the contract like the wily Athenian he was, and so we all had bed and board and wages from Lord Achilles, and they became my sworn men in the Cretan way. Idomeneus was all for it – he was a peasant from down the coast and he understood the system better than I. In three weeks he’d gone from bed-warmer to warrior. He began to grow proud.

  I had few friends on the ship, as I’ve said, but Cleon was one. We embraced, and I promised to visit him in Athens. He laughed. ‘I live in a house smaller than a grain-byre,’ he said. ‘But I’d love to see you. By Zeus and Hermes and all the gods, it is good to be going home, and here’s my hand and a prayer that I see you framed by my doors!’

  Good man. Listen, honey – the Poet talks about heroes, but there’s never enough about the Cleons – good men who love their wives and their children but still stand their place in the battle line. He hated war. But he did it.

  Then, richer and lighter, Heraklides and Cleon and their ship sailed away, and left me and my little entourage with the lords of Crete. And Cleon’s eagerness to be home rang in my ears.

  In fact, Idomeneus, the scared boy of the battlefield, Eualcidas’s catamite, became my confidant and adviser. He knew the local words, he knew the laws and he understood the complex relations between lord and lord – so much more complicated than life in Boeotia, or so it seemed to me then. Now I understand that every man’s customs seem natural to him and alien to a foreigner.

  When I discovered that Idomeneus and Lekthes were to fight in the line with me, I bought them simple arms and armour – good stuff from a local smith of god-sent talent called Hephaestion, a fitting name for a smith. They had simple leather corslets and good bronze helmets in the local style, and it was my fancy to have us all carry Boeotian shields, to mark us as different.

  You hardly ever see a Boeotian any more. Take mine down, thugater. Try that on your arm, young man. You see? The porpax runs the opposite way from what you might expect, eh? Long and narrow – and the cut-outs in the side are not for putting your spear through! Older men on Crete told me that those holes are for wearing the shield on your back in chariot combat – the holes make it easier on your back and elbows, or so I’m told.

  I think it’s just because that’s the way a bull’s hide cuts. Those old Cretan noblemen never made a shield, and I’ve made quite a few.

  But you can see that it is lighter than an aspis. Not as safe – thinner. And a man with a Boeotian shield has to be aggressive in his blocks – no messing around. You can stand behind an aspis and take blows, but with a Boeotian you have to get that forward edge out and in your opponent’s face.

  Anyway, that was my whim. I was flattered by the attention of all these Cretan aristocrats, and the word of my killing the warrior Goras on the east coast had come to Gortyn.

  I trained the two of them and Nearchos together. Nearchos had already received years of training, or what the Cretans called training, meaning that he was in top shape and could recite the Iliad. So we ran, and we hunted, and I began by teaching them the Pyrrhiche – the Boeotian war dance in armour that shows a man how to move his body, flex his hips, thrust low and high, and drills a group of men to move in unison. I drafted an old flute player from the hall and in two weeks they were able to do the dance. Men came and watched and laughed.

  Lord Achilles watched one afternoon. Nearchos was surly, because he hated performing in front of people. I knew him a little by then and liked him a little better. There was a noble young man buried beneath the angst and the boyhood and the burning desire.

  When we had completed the dance ten times, and all three of my students were stumbling with fatigue, Lord Achilles got up and nodded. ‘You give them grace. But how is it different from our dances?’

  I had seen their dances. In Gortyn, when the ephebes dance, they dance with weapons and armour, but it is all show – postures meant to show a man’s muscles, to stretch him and prove the soundness of his legs. On Crete, they use the dances to pick the fittest – by which they mean the most beautiful.

  It’s the same dance in Plataea, and yet utterly different. We dance for war, and our dance has all the feints, all the attacks, all the shield parries – and the first figure is the hardest, where men learn to rotate from one rank to another. On Crete, they never rotate ranks – the front-rank dancers are the most beautiful. I don’t know what they do when they get tired in combat.

  ‘If we are all trained the same way,’ I said, ‘we will all move together in combat.’ I shrugged, I think. ‘And he needs something different. This is different.’

  Then I remembered something that Calchas had said. ‘And men are scared in combat,’ I added. ‘If they learn to block and thrust by rote, over and over, then they can do it even when terror and panic pull at their guts.’

  Old Achilles had been in a fight or two. He nodded. ‘How many fights have you seen?’ he asked.

  I thought for a minute. ‘Four field battles. Ten duels.’ That was an exaggeration, but not by much. ‘A skirmish or two,’ I added with modesty that was, in fact, the exact truth. And some beatings and a murder, I thought. I was just eighteen, and I’d seen more violence than any of the men in the lord’s hall.

  After that day, there was less laughter when we danced, and other men came and asked to join in. They came self-consciously, with servants carrying their armour. I accepted them all, and I moved the dancing to the broad field with a rose garden behind it. The scent of roses coloured everything that summer, for me. We danced, and then I put a heavy paling in the ground with the help of some slaves and I taught my students to use their swords and spears on the paling, cutting at it, lunging at it, developing the fine control of the weapon that allows you to put your spear into a man’s throat or between his eyes, to feel how much thrust it takes to kill and how much is too little.

  Winter came and we trained in the hall, we ran in a pack across the hills and we hunted deer. News came that Ephesus had fallen. According to a Cyprian merchant, when the Persian siege mound was even with the walls, Aristagoras filled his ships and sailed away, leaving the Ephesians to their fate. And the Ephesians had surrendered on terms.

  I cried. I should have b
een there. I was wasting my life in a back-water, far from the woman I loved. It was a good life but dull, and I was beginning to get tired of avoiding Nearchos. I wasn’t home, I wasn’t with Briseis and I wasn’t – anyone.

  The next spring, when the plants were in bud and all women were becoming equally attractive to me, I was saved by Heraklides, who arrived with a cargo and told me that Aristagoras was raising men and ships throughout Ionia to liberate Cyprus.

  ‘And his wife?’ I asked.

  ‘Medea come to life.’ Herk rolled his eyes. ‘He is a fool to marry a girl so young, and so intelligent. If only she was the strategos.’ He laughed and I went back to dreaming of my lost love.

  In the autumn, as the wheat was coming in, Aristagoras came to Crete. He came with five ships and he toured the lords, asking for support – and receiving it. Cyprus was rich and the Cretans longed to have a piece of Cyprus. They had not been to war for many years, and every young man clamoured to go.

  The wheat was in jars by the time Aristagoras made his way to us at Gortyn. He lorded it over us, wearing a purple cloak and flaunting his wealth, and they followed him as men will follow a Siren. I avoided him at first – a difficult trick in the close confines of a hall – but soon enough I saw that he didn’t know me from any other Cretan, and then I listened to his words and attended his dinners.

  He was a hollow man, his vanity unchanged by failure at Sardis and Ephesus, and I listened with the blood pounding at my temples as he described how the Athenians had broken and run in the great battle near Ephesus, leaving the Ionians to struggle on alone. Men in the hall looked at me. I wanted no part of this man, but my own reputation would suffer if I allowed him to denigrate the Athenians. Finally, I stood up.

  ‘You lie,’ I said.

  Silence fell over the hall, and Aristagoras turned, his face composed and regal. ‘I lie?’ he asked in the voice of a councillor or an advocate in the courts.

  ‘You lie,’ I said. ‘I was at Sardis, when the Milesians hung back and stayed out of the town. I fought in the agora with the Persians, and then I stood my ground at Ephesus when we stopped the Carians cold and sent them back to their sisters. The centre broke first. I know, because when I looked out over the battle, the centre was already gone – and I was still standing my ground.’

  Aristagoras looked around. ‘Who is this man, that he is allowed to speak in your hall?’ he asked Achilles.

  ‘He is my son’s war tutor,’ Lord Achilles said. He crossed his arms. ‘He is young and full of fire – but he has the right to speak here.’

  Aristagoras shrugged. ‘I say that the Athenians were the first to break.’

  I smiled. ‘I say you lie. And there are other men here who were at the battle, Aristagoras. Perhaps you should watch your words. Cretans are not as ignorant as you seem to think.’

  But Aristagoras was not to be tripped up by a man as young as I. Instead, he smiled at me, rose from his couch and crossed the hall. ‘Young man, you know how it is in battle. Neither you nor I could see anything beyond the eye-slits of our helmets. Men tell me that the Athenians were the first to flee. Myself, I was fighting.’

  I was old enough to know that loud assertions would only lose me the argument. But my temper was up. ‘I was in the front rank,’ I said, ‘and I was done fighting when the Carians ran. When I had killed three of them, my spear in their necks.’ I looked around the hall. ‘Any man who says that the Athenians or the Eretrians were the first to run – lies. And can meet my sword.’ That was the Cretan way, as I had discovered my first night on Crete, against Goras.

  Aristagoras took my hand. ‘We should be friends – our argument causes the Persians to laugh at us.’ His words were sweet – but his eyes were full of hate. I had interrupted his performance. What a petty tyrant he was. Even now, my hate for him makes my hands shake.

  ‘How’s Briseis?’ I asked.

  It must have been in my voice. He froze, his hand clasped in mine, his other hand on my elbow, and both of his hands tightened. Oh, she’s a bad girl, I thought. My smile must have been too knowing.

  ‘No man speaks of my wife in public,’ he hissed. Men around us looked at him curiously. His mask of benevolence was slipping.

  ‘Really?’ I asked. ‘Let go of my arm, my lord. Before I kill you.’ There – it was said, right out in public. He didn’t know me from before, the fool. My hand was on my fighting knife – we didn’t wear swords in the hall, but hung them on pegs, as the poet says.

  Oh, the hate in his eyes. ‘You – you were Aristides’ butt-boy,’ he said in a gentle voice, as the recognition dawned. And then his expression changed, as he felt the prick of my dagger against the inside of his thigh, hidden from the other men in the hall.

  ‘Send my regards to Briseis,’ I said. In one push of the dagger, I could make her a widow.

  And then she’d marry another nobleman. That was the way of the world, lass.

  Aristagoras looked at me in disbelief. He was a coward in his soul, for all his posturing, and I could see the collapse in his eyes. He let go of my elbow and stepped back. I bowed slightly and dropped my blade on the couch behind me so other men would not see what had passed, and Aristagoras backed away quickly.

  But Achilles liked him, or liked his ideas, or was simply too greedy to see the foolishness of what was proposed, and he promised three ships for the campaign against Cyprus, to be launched the next autumn.

  Aristagoras sailed away. Then the war preparations started in earnest.

  Men flocked to my teaching, and soon I was teaching my way of war in the agora, and I found that I was saying Calchas’s words and Heraclitus’s words together, as if they were one philosophy. And perhaps they are, at that. We danced, and we cut and thrust at billets of wood, and at each other.

  The need for men – armoured men – drove Hephaestion the smith to distraction, and I began to spend more time with him. I was no smith, but I could make sheet out of an ingot, and none of his apprentices could.

  In the agora, or at his shop, I spent a lot of time in the town. And the town was full of dangers.

  The dangers all had to do with sex. Will I shock you, thugater? I wanted someone to share my bed, and Nearchos wanted to share my bed, but the two were in opposition. We were a balanced duality, as the Pythagoreans say. If I had taken a slave girl, Nearchos would have pouted for weeks – indeed, his father might have disowned me. Nearchos and his father had assumed that I would take Nearchos as a lover when he reached some level of heroic achievement that existed in their imaginations.

  In fact, I was coming to like the boy, and by my second spring with them, he was my equal in most things. I had no idea whether he would stand in the battle line, but he was fast and strong and he could use his spear point to chip out his name in a billet of wood – a neat trick.

  A year and more, I had lived like a Pythagorean, taking no lovers. To be honest, for a long time I had no interest, at least in part because I wanted no woman but Briseis. By the second spring in Crete, however, my body was becoming too much for me. The spring dances were all around me, the older men took younger men hunting, and I was alone.

  I went to the smithy to hide from my lust, and hammered bronze into sheet with Hephaestion, who enjoyed my company but was not inclined to empty flattery. Far from it. He was the teacher I never had, at metal-forming, critical and derisive when I deserved it, full of praise when I did well. His only son was long dead, fallen in one of their local cattle-raid wars, serving his lord. Hephaestion taught me many things about forming bronze, and yet he was not the smith my father was. That is one of the mysteries of learning and teaching, I suppose.

  I’ll take this moment, while this pretty girl serves me wine, to say that good times, like the time I spent with Hephaestion, are never as memorable as bad times. It is odd, and sad, that I cannot make a story out of Hephaestion, because in a way I loved him the best of all the men I knew on Crete. He was gentle, strong, kind, garrulous and grumpy. He might strike a slave in anger,
but he apologized later. And he was never above learning from me, either, when I could remember my father’s techniques, for instance. I would have gone mad without him.

  The other warriors thought it odd that I played with bronze, but they feared me, so there was no talk that I heard – and they needed armour. Swinging the hammers made me stronger too, and kept me from trouble. I practised arms until I was exhausted, and then I swung a hammer until I was exhausted all over again. That was life.

  And then, as I said, the second spring came, and all my careful reserves began to melt away as the sap rose in the trees and the first flowers bloomed. Persephone was returning to the earth.

  I wanted a girl. All girls were beginning to look equally beautiful to me, young or old, fat or thin, and yet I knew that to tumble a slave in the lord’s hall would have instant consequences.

  Women know things, too. Well might you toss your head, you hussy – I’m sure that women know what men want as soon as their hips get broad. All the women in the hall knew me for what I was – a man who liked women. And that fascinated them, because their men made a fashion of disdaining women at every turn. The lord had three daughters and all of them made Nearchos look handsome, but they all tossed their heads at me just like that – blush as much as you like, young gentlewoman, I love your blushes. My thugater should bring you every day!

  But there were other girls. Down by the beach there was a town – not big enough to be a city, even such a city as Plataea, but Gortyn had two or three thousand free people, and a substantial number of pretty girls.

  Hephaestion’s shop was at the top of the town, in the no-man’s-land between the lord’s hall and the merchants. I would work at his forge and girls would come to watch me, stripped to my waist, the famous warrior getting his hands dirty.

  It was the day before the Thesmophoria, which has a different name in Crete. All the girls were getting ready – on Crete, it is a woman’s holiday, and all the unmarried girls dress like priestesses in their best linen chitons, so that when the sun is behind them, no man need doubt a line of their bodies. They put sashes around their waists and flowers in their hair, and the girls who came to the forge were waiting for disc brooches that the smith and I had spent the morning making. Now we were polishing with the slaves – just to get the job done.