Marathon: Freedom or Death lw-2

by Christian Cameron

  ‘The sons of men lie,’ she said, her voice hollow, so that just for a moment I wondered what goddess was sharing my campfire. ‘Will you be different?’

  ‘Try me,’ I said with a young man’s arrogance. I moved towards her, and as I put a hand behind her head, the ravens came, a great flock, and they alighted in the trees around my fire — the same trees where the Corvaxae feed them, of course — and they knew me. I had never seen so many. The fire reflected their eyes — a thousand points of fire — and when I put my mouth over hers, her eyes glowed red in the fire, too.

  We made love anyway. Ah, youth.

  We were five days crossing Cithaeron, at least in part because I became infatuated with her. Sometimes one body just fits another — hard to describe to you virgins. Suffice it to say that despite her twisted foot and odd face, my body adored hers in a way I have seldom experienced. I wanted her every minute, and the wanting was not slaked by the having, as it is so often with men, especially young men.

  After we had made love on a rock by the trail, where you can first see the rich blue of the sea over Attica, she rose from my best efforts, smiled and threw her chiton over her shoulder and strolled on, naked, by my horse.

  ‘Don’t you want to get dressed?’ I asked her.

  She smiled and shrugged. ‘Why? It will only come off again before the sun goes down a finger’s breadth.’

  And she was right. I could not have enough of her.

  She wouldn’t tell me her name, and sometimes I called her Briseis. That got a bitter laugh and a hard bite. I begged her and tickled her and offered her money, but she said that telling her true name would break the spell. So I called her Slave Girl, and she resented it.

  After the slowest trip over the mountain in the history of the Greeks, we came down by the fort at Oinoe, where my brother had died. I poured wine to his shade and we rode on, the horse useful now. We didn’t camp in Attica — I was a man of property, and we stayed in inns or I claimed guest status from men who I knew a little, like Eumenios of Eleusis, who was happy to see me, toasted me in good wine and warned me that he’d heard that the Alcmaeonids were out for my blood.

  I sneered. ‘They don’t even know who I am,’ I said. ‘I’m just some hick from Boeotia.’

  Eumenios shook his head. ‘No. You’re a warrior and a friend of Miltiades — and Aristides. It’s said in the city that you can lead three hundred picked men of Plataea over the mountain whenever Miltiades snaps his fingers.’

  I shook my head and drank my wine. ‘Who the fuck would say that? Myron is the archon — Hades’ brother. In Plataea we care very little for who lords it in Athens, as long as the grain prices are good!’

  But then I thought of the black wool on Cithaeron’s altar. Simon’s sons would spread that story, if it would help them to revenge.

  In the morning, Eumenios pretended he’d missed a night’s sleep because of my antics with my slave girl. He saw me mounted, poured a libation and sent me on my way. But before I’d turned my mare’s head out of his gate, he caught my ankle.

  ‘Go carefully,’ he said. ‘They’ll kill you if they can. Or bring you to law.’

  Nine days on the road, and we came to Athens.

  My daughter, and young Herodotus, have both been to Athens — but I’ll tell you about the queen of Greek cities anyway. Athens is not like any other city in the world, and I’ve been everywhere from the Gates of Heracles to the Mountains of the Moon.

  Most men come to Athens from the sea. We came down from the mountains to the west, but the effect is the same. The first thing you see is the Acropolis. It was different then — now they have new temples a-building, fantastic stuff in white marble to rival anything in the east, but it was impressive enough in my day, with the big stone buildings that the Pisistratids, the tyrants, had put up. New temples, and new government buildings, and power in every stone. Athens was rich. Other cities in Greece were stronger — or thought they were stronger — Thebes, and Sparta, and Corinth — but any man with his wits about him knew that Athens was the queen of cities. Her Acropolis had held the Palace of Theseus, and men from that palace went to the war in Troy. She was old, and wise, and strong. And rich.

  More people lived within the precincts of Athens than in the whole of Boeotia, or so men said. The city was bigger than Sardis, and had almost twelve thousand citizens of military age.

  Athens had bronze-smiths and potters — the best in the world — and farmers and fishermen and sailors and oarsmen and perfumers and tanneries and weavers and sword-smiths and lamp-makers and men who dyed fabric and men who whitened leather and men who did nothing but plait hair or teach young men to fight. Moreover, they had women who did most of these things. The world was turned on its head in Athens, and in my time I’ve met women who played instruments, women who coached athletes, women who wove and women who painted pots — even a woman philosopher. It was the city.

  The City.

  They’re a greedy, rapacious, foxy lot, the Athenians. They lie, steal and covet other men’s possessions, and they argue about everything.

  I’ve always liked them.

  I’d never been to Aristides’ house, but he was a famous man, even then, so it was easy enough to ask directions. But I had to turn down a dozen offers on my slave girl — the truth is, she shone with some power, and no man who saw her cared an obol about her limp — and for some reason men fancied me, too, and even offered for my horse and my saddle blanket and my sword and anything else visible.

  We should have passed around the shoulder of the Areopagus and walked on, down the hills to the cool countryside on the east side of the city. Instead, I paused for a cup of cheap wine. What I really wanted was to walk down the street of the bronze-smiths, so I left my horse with Slave Girl and headed to the Agora. Now, there’s a fancy new temple for Hephaestus. Back then, it was a much smaller affair, with tiny cramped streets all over the low hill and a small shrine to Athena and Hephaestus at the top — just one priest and no priestess. But I went, made a small sacrifice and left the meat for the poor, as befitted a foreigner, and then I walked down into the smiths’ quarter. I’d have done better to take the Boeotian dog-cap off my head — but I didn’t.

  I gave the sign to the priest, of course, and he passed me the sign for Attica, so that other smiths would treat me as a guest. Then I worked my way down the hill, looking at their shops, admiring their bellows or their tools — or their hordes of apprentices. I finally stopped where an iron-smith was roughing out spear-points — beautiful things, long as my forearm with light sockets and heavy ribs for punching straight through armour.

  ‘You look like a lad who can use one of these,’ the smith said. ‘For a dirt-eating Theban, I mean,’ he added.

  I spat. ‘I’m a dirt-eating Plataean,’ I said. ‘Fuck Thebes.’

  ‘Fuck your mother!’ he said with pleasure. ‘No offence meant, stranger. Any Plataean is welcome here. Were you in the three battles?’

  ‘Every one,’ I answered.

  ‘Pais!’ the master called, and when one of his boys came, he said, ‘Get this hero a cup of Chian.’

  ‘You?’ I asked politely.

  ‘Oh, I stood my ground once or twice that week,’ he said. He extended his hand and we shook, and I passed the sign.

  ‘You’re a smith!’ he said. ‘Need a place to stay?’

  That’s how it was, back then. Sad, to see those old ways go. Hospitality was like a god to us — to all Greeks.

  I had started to explain that I was on my way to see Aristides when a well-dressed man leading a horse leaned into the stall.

  ‘Did I just hear you say you were a Plataean?’ he asked.

  I didn’t know him from Oedipus, but I was courteous. ‘I have that honour. I am Arimnestos of the Corvaxae of Plataea.’

  The man bowed. ‘You’ve just saved me quite a journey, then,’ he said. ‘I’m Cleitus of the Alcmaeonids of Attica. And you are under arrest, for murder.’

  2

  The law of
Athens is a complex, dangerous monster, and no foreigner like myself could possibly master it. I stood there with my mouth agape, like a fool, and the smith came to my rescue.

  ‘Says who?’ he asked. ‘I haven’t missed an assembly since the feast of Dionysus, and no one has voted a capital charge.’

  The Alcmaeonid shrugged. ‘You don’t look like the kind of fellow to vote on the hill,’ he said casually. What he meant was that iron-smiths didn’t get invited to join the Areopagitica, the council of elders, mostly old aristocrats, who ran the murder trials. I think my smith might have let it go, except that this Cleitus was such an arrogant sod that he gave offence by breathing.

  ‘I don’t have to be a sodding aristo to know the law,’ the smith said. ‘Where’d the charge come from?’

  ‘None of your business,’ Cleitus said. He reached for my chlamys. ‘Best come along, boy.’

  Some men claim that the gods play no role in human affairs. Such statements always make me laugh. Cleitus and I have crossed wits — and swords — often enough. He’s as wily as Odysseus and as strong as Heracles, but on that day he couldn’t spare the time to calm the ruffled plumage of an iron-smith. What might have happened if he had?

  The smith stepped around the counter of his shop with a speed that belied his bulk. ‘Where’s your wand, then?’ he asked.

  Cleitus shrugged. ‘With my men, in the Agora.’

  ‘Better go and get it, rich boy,’ the smith said. ‘Hey, sons of Hephaestus!’ he called. ‘Down your tools and come!’

  Cleitus rallied his wits instantly. ‘Now — master smith, no need for that. I’ll get my wand. But this man is a killer!’

  ‘A killer of Athens’s enemies,’ I said. A good shot — and it went right into the bullseye. ‘Not an unlawful killer.’

  By then, there were fifty apprentices looking for a fight, and a dozen smiths, and every hand held a hammer. Cleitus looked around. ‘I’ll be back with my men,’ he said.

  ‘Bring your staff of warrant, or don’t bother,’ my new friend the smith called. Then he turned to me. ‘Tell me your tale, and make it swift. Men are missing work.’

  So I told him. I left nothing out — not even the dimple I’d left in my helmet.

  He sent an apprentice for Aristides.

  I sat on a folding stool that was provided for me — fine ironwork, and very elegant — and began to breathe more easily.

  And then I heard the screams. There were a fair number of screams in Athens — high-pitched, often in fun, sometimes in earnest. But by the third scream, I realized that this was my slave girl. I rose to my feet.

  My smith looked at me. ‘Where are you going?’ he asked.

  ‘That’s my slave,’ I said.

  He shook his head. ‘I’ve pledged my people to this,’ he said. ‘You aren’t going anywhere.’

  ‘I’ve made her an oath to free her,’ I said. ‘Send a boy — send a pair of men with hammers. Please. I ask you.’

  He spat orders at a couple of shop boys — big ones — and they hurried out of the door.

  ‘Arimnestos, eh?’ he asked. ‘I’ve heard of you. Killer of men, right enough. Thought you’d be bigger.’

  I tried to sit still. The screams had stopped. Time passed.

  More time passed.

  Finally, the boys came back.

  ‘Cleitus has left the market,’ the bigger of the two said. ‘He’s got your horse and your girl. He talked a lot of crap about what you took from his brother. Did you kill his brother, mister?’

  I shook my head. ‘No,’ I said, and I felt tired. Did I say I loved Athens? Athens makes me tired. They have a great many rules. ‘Can he really take these things from me?’ I asked the smith.

  He shrugged. ‘Alcmaeonids do what they like,’ he said. ‘Most commoners won’t even try to stand against them.’ He grinned. ‘Lucky you’re a smith.’

  ‘He’s no smith,’ said a voice behind my chair, and there was Athens’s leading pillar of justice, the greatest prig ever to lead warriors in the field. A man so driven by fairness that he had no space left for ambition.

  I embraced him anyway, because I loved him, despite the fact we had nothing in common. It was Aristides. He was still tall, lanky, graceful like a man who’s had the best training the drachma can buy all his life.

  ‘I gather you’ve turned to crime,’ he said. I like to think it was a rare show of humour, and not a statement of fact.

  ‘Not true, my lord. This scion of the Alcmaeonids was killed by a man in my service — at a shrine, for impiety. I’ve given orders for his body and his armour to be brought here, and all his possessions that weren’t looted by his own servants. They will be here in a matter of days.’ I shrugged. ‘I am a man of property, not a freebooter, my lord.’

  Aristides nodded solemnly. ‘I’m pleased to hear it.’

  ‘He’s a smith, right enough,’ the iron-smith said. ‘He knows the signs.’

  Aristides looked at me under his bushy eyebrows. ‘Always more to you than meets the eye, young man. So you are a smith?’ Young man, he called me. He was less than ten years my senior. But he had the dignity of an old man.

  ‘A bronze-smith,’ I said. ‘And a farmer now. My property brought me three hundred medimnoi this autumn.’

  Aristides laughed. ‘I never expected you to rise to the hippeis class,’ he said.

  ‘I’m not sure that I still qualify,’ I returned. ‘The Alcmaeonids just stole my best horse and my slave girl.’

  Aristides’ smile was wiped off his face. ‘Really?’

  Smiths and apprentices pressed around him, each telling his own version of the story.

  ‘Come to my house,’ Aristides said. ‘I’ll send to the council and announce that I have you in my custody and that I’ll represent you at the trial. Then everything will be legal.’

  ‘What about my horse?’ I asked. ‘And my girl?’

  He didn’t answer.

  I shook hands with every smith who had aided me, thanked them all and walked off into the evening with Aristides and a dozen young men he had about him — all armed with heavy staves, I noticed. When we were clear of the industrial quarter, Aristides wrinkled his nose.

  ‘I’ve seen you in the storm of bronze, Plataean. You are a man of worth. How do you stand the stink of all that commerce?’ He didn’t slacken his step, and he was a tall man.

  I shrugged. ‘Money smells the same, whether earned at the point of the spear or in the sweat of a shop,’ I said.

  Aristides shook his head. ‘But without virtue. Without glory.’

  ‘You’re arguing with the wrong man,’ I answered. ‘My master taught me that “War is the king and master of all, some men it makes lords, and others it makes slaves.”’ I laughed, and then my laughter stopped. ‘What’s happening here? Your lads are all armed, and those Alcmaeonids were out for my blood.’

  ‘Later,’ he said.

  We walked around the steep hill, its rock worn smooth from hundreds of men climbing to the top, where criminal trials were held, and then past the slums on the east side and back up a big road, the road to the Temple of Poseidon at Sounion. The moon was up by the time we came to a big gate.

  ‘My farm,’ Aristides said with pride. ‘I don’t sleep in the city any more. I expect I’ll be exiled soon, if not killed.’ He said it with the flat certainty you hear from a veteran on the night before he takes his death blow.

  ‘You? Exiled?’ I shook my head. ‘Five years ago you were the golden boy of Athens.’

  ‘I still am,’ he said. ‘Men think I seek to be tyrant, when in fact I seek only to provide justice — even to your friends the smiths.’

  ‘There are noble men — men of worth — even in the forges and the potters’ shops,’ I insisted.

  ‘Of course! Democracy wouldn’t function if there were not. But they keep trying to insist on increased political rights, when any thinking man knows that only a man of property can control a city. We’re the only ones with the training. That smith could
no more vote on the Areopagitica than I could dish a helmet.’

  Aristides shed his chlamys and chiton, and I noted he was still in top fighting trim. As we talked, slaves attended us. I was stripped, oiled and dressed in a better garment than I’d worn since my last bout of piracy — all while listening to Aristides.

  ‘Helmets are raised, not dished,’ I said.

  ‘Just my point,’ he said.

  I shook my head. ‘Allow me to disagree with my host,’ I said.

  He smiled politely.

  ‘Perhaps it is that the perfection of any trade — war, sculpture, poetry, iron-smithing, even tanning or shoe-making — provides a man with the tools of mind to allow a mature man to take an active part in politics,’ I said.

  He rubbed his chin. ‘Well put. And not an argument I’d heard put in exactly that way before. But you are not proposing that all men are equal?’

  I sneered. ‘I’ve stood in the haze of Ares too often to think that, my lord.’

  He nodded. ‘Just so. But an equality of excellence? I must say that I admire the notion. But that equates politics and war, which are noble pursuits, with ironwork and trade, which are not.’

  I took wine from a woman who had to be his wife. I bowed deeply, and she smiled.

  ‘Arguing with my husband?’ she said. ‘A waste of breath, unless it’s about the running of this house, and then he loses all interest. You are Arimnestos of Plataea?’ She had gold pins in her chiton and her hair was piled on her head like a mountain. She was not beautiful, but her face radiated intelligence. Athena might have looked so, if she were to dress as a matron.

  ‘I am he, despoina.’ I bowed again.

  ‘Somehow, from my husband’s stories, I thought you might be bigger. On the other hand, you’re as beautiful as a god, which he somehow forgot to mention. Every slave girl in the house will be at your door. I’ll just go and lock them away, lest we have a plague of the nine-months sickness in my house, eh?’ She smiled.

  ‘Women are not allowed in the assembly,’ Aristides said, ‘because if they were, we’d be left with nothing to do but move heavy objects. This is my dear wife Jocasta.’