Marathon: Freedom or Death lw-2

by Christian Cameron

  To the navarch of this slave ship, all this meant that he could make a handsome profit selling half-trained rowers to the Persian fleet anchored on the beaches around Ephesus, supporting the siege of Miletus.

  I listened and managed not to speak.

  We were fifteen days making a three-day voyage, and I hated that ship by the time we landed. His long, black hull was swift and clean, and for a light trireme he was the very acme of perfection — yet this Phoenician cur sailed him like a pig. The Phoenician was afraid of every cup of wind, and he stayed on a coast to the very end of a headland and crossed open water with visible reluctance. I’ve never loved the Phoenicians, but most of them were brilliant sailors. Every pack has a cur.

  I sat alone in the bow, sang the hymn to Apollo as we sing it in Plataea — I have Apollo’s raven on my shield — and prepared myself to meet the god of the lyre and the plague. I tried not to think of how easily I could take this ship. Those days were gone. Or so I thought.

  The last night at sea, I had a dream — such a dream that I can remember wisps of it even today. Ravens came to me and carried my good knife away, and one of them set a lyre in my hand as a replacement. I didn’t need a priest to tell me what that meant.

  The most dangerous of the Iberians — you could see it in his eyes — had a raven tattooed on his hand and another on his sword arm. When the slaver’s stern was set in the deep sand of a Delian beach and his people were moving cargo, I dropped my heavy knife into the blackness under the Iberian’s bench, while he lay watching me, exhausted from rowing.

  Our eyes met. I nodded. His face was completely blank. I wasn’t even sure he’d seen the knife, and I went ashore, poorer by a good blade.

  Priests are priests the world around — I’ve noted a certain similarity from Olympia to Memphis in Aegypt. Many of them are good men and women; a few are remarkable, genuinely blessed. The rest are a sorry lot — people who probably, in my opinion, couldn’t make a living any other way, except as beggars or farm labour.

  The man who met me as I kissed the rock by the stern of the slave ship was one of the latter. His hands were soft and his hand-clasp was limp and unpleasant, and his soft voice wished me a speedy encounter with the god in a voice that seemed all too ready to wheedle and plead.

  ‘You are Arimnestos of Plataea,’ he said.

  Well, that took me aback. I was naive then, and didn’t know the effort to which the great priesthoods went to be informed. Nor did I suspect how carefully engineered this might be.

  ‘Yes,’ I allowed.

  ‘Brought here by the god to hear your penance for murder,’ he said in the same voice that a man might tease a girl into his blanket roll. I didn’t like him. But he had me, I can tell you.

  ‘Yes,’ I said.

  ‘The god has spoken to us of you,’ he said. He leaned his chin on the head of his staff. ‘What have you brought as offering?’

  Just like that. My feet were still in the sand of the beach and the priests of Apollo wanted their fees.

  I sighed. ‘I have served Apollo and Hephaestus all my life,’ I said. ‘I revere all the gods, and I serve at the shrine of the hero Leitos of Plataea.’ This by way of my religious credentials, so to speak.

  He said nothing. His eyes flickered to the purse in my hand.

  ‘I have twenty drachmas, less the one I owe as passage to that slave trader.’ Need I mention that the priests of Apollo played an active role in the trade?

  ‘Nineteen silver owls? That is all the duty you pay to the god, you who are called the Spear of the Greeks?’ He shook his head. ‘I think not. Go back and return when you intend to give the god his due.’

  Now, lest you young people miss the accounting, nineteen silver owls was the value of a farm’s produce for a year. But of course, it was as nothing next to the profits a man might make trading — or as a pirate.

  I didn’t know what to say. I had more respect for priests in those days — even venal creatures like this one. ‘These nineteen drachmas are all I have,’ I protested.

  He laughed. ‘Then Lord Apollo will give you nineteen drachmas’ worth of prophecy — I can feel his words in my heart. Go — and come back when you have learned enough wisdom to pay your tithe.’

  Perhaps at eighteen, I’d have obeyed.

  But I was older. ‘Out of my way,’ I said. ‘I need to find a priest.’

  He oozed insult. ‘I am the priest the god has assigned.’

  I shrugged and pushed past him. ‘I suspect the god can do better.’

  He followed me up the rock and his voice became increasingly shrill as he demanded that I speak to him, but I continued up the steps to the temple complex. At the gate, he was still shouting at me as I asked the porter to find me a priest.

  The porter grunted and I gave him a drachma, and he sent a boy.

  ‘Arimnestos of Plataea!’ the priest from the beach persisted. ‘This is not the way a gentleman behaves!’

  ‘Only eighteen drachmas left,’ I said. ‘And by the time I get a new guide to the altar, there will be none.’

  ‘Your arrogance will be your death,’ he said. ‘You seek to cheat the god!’

  ‘I do not,’ I said. ‘I am a farmer in Boeotia, not a pirate in the Chersonese. These coins are a fair share of my fortune in the last year.’

  I said so — but I began to be afraid. Those coins were, as you know, taken from the corpses of men who tried to kill me. Perhaps the coins were polluted. But essentially my words were true ones. The eighteen coins in my purse were more than a tenth of all the coins I had in the world.

  ‘Why have you requested a second guide?’ a hard voice asked. This priest was older, dressed in a simple wool garment that had seen better days. ‘Thrasybulus? Why have I been summoned?’

  ‘You may go back to your cell,’ the oily man behind me answered. ‘This arrogant Boeotian is attempting to bargain with god.’

  ‘I wish to be washed by the god for a murder committed in Athens,’ I said. ‘If the god has words for me to hear, I would laugh with delight to hear them. But this man asks me for money I do not have.’ I pointed at the younger priest.

  The older man rubbed his beard. ‘What price have you offered?’ he asked.

  ‘He is-’

  ‘Silence, Thrasybulus.’ The older priest seemed a different kind of man.

  ‘I have offered eighteen drachmas,’ I said. ‘It is all I have.’

  ‘The cost of three new bulls?’ He looked at me.

  ‘He can do better. Much better.’ Thrasybulus pointed at the metalwork on my empty scabbard.

  The older man sighed. ‘This is unseemly. The priesthood of Apollo does not bargain like fishwives on the beach.’

  The porter’s laugh suggested that this statement was not entirely true.

  ‘I am Dion of Delos,’ the older man said. ‘I am principally a scholar, and I seldom lead men to the gates — but Thrasybulus has, I fear, earned your displeasure.’ The older man glared at the younger. ‘You will need silver for food — and passage home, as well. Will you not?’

  I nodded.

  ‘Give me twelve drachmas for your sacrifices, and I will lead you to the god,’ he said.

  Thrasybulus spat. ‘You are a liar before the god,’ he said, pointing at me.

  Not an auspicious start to my time on the island of Apollo.

  That evening, I made the first of my three sacrifices — this one on the so-called altar of ash. I sacrificed a black lamb, a symbol of my crime, and I told the god and all the other men waiting to sacrifice how I had come to kill the thug in Athens and what my sin was — the sin of hubris, in feeling that I was as fit to decide his fate as the gods.

  Other men sacrificed for other crimes. One, from Crete, had killed his son with a javelin — an error, a grievous miscast while hunting. Another had slept with a foreign woman during her courses and felt unclean. I almost laughed, but everyone else seemed to feel this was a serious thing. Several men were soldiers — mercenaries — who had come t
o atone for killing other Greeks — over dice, or in battle. Two men were guilty of gross impiety.

  My sacrifice was refused. I took the animal to the altar and killed it, but the fire would not accept the beast. I saw it myself.

  The same happened to one of the men guilty of impiety, and the man who had killed his son.

  My priest — Dion — led the three of us from the altar. He took us to a hut made of brush on the cliff high above the beach. ‘You will remain here for a week, eating clean food and drinking only water. Consider how you became unclean. Consider your life. I will return for you.’

  That was a long week.

  The Cretan was called Heracles. He was tall and strong, noble in his carriage, and so broken by grief that it was hard to speak to him. He felt the guilt that I did not feel. He felt that he had killed his son and deserved the wrath of the god, while I felt that I had acted hastily — selfishly — but that I had now learned my lesson and did not deserve the wrath of Apollo. Yet I had enough sense to see that I had far more culpability than this Cretan lord.

  In fact, he was mistaking sorrow for guilt. I sat with him, night after night, held his hand and spoke to him of hunting, and of Crete, a place I knew well. I could get him to listen, and I could make him smile, and then some chance of speech would cast him back into the pit.

  ‘I am cursed,’ he said. ‘I have killed my son, and now my wife is barren.’

  ‘Take a concubine,’ I said, with all the arrogance of youth.

  ‘I cannot replace eighteen years of my life and his, just by making another squawking babe,’ he shot back — with more spirit than I’d seen so far.

  ‘Lord, you can. And then you must toil for as many years again, until he comes to manhood, so that your patronage is secure.’ I spoke carefully, for I felt I might be speaking wisdom.

  He sighed. ‘Perhaps,’ he said. ‘You are young. When you have seen fifty winters, tell me how you feel about lasting through another fifteen seasons of war and the hunt. My joints hurt just lying here.’

  The other man was a blasphemer. I could tell this because he swore by various gods every hour on the hour, and cursed the gods for setting him on Delos. He was a little man — in mind, not stature — and a lesson to anyone who would listen about the vices men can get into through idleness and superstition. I might have been a foolish young man, but I was the very king of piety next to Philocrates.

  ‘If you care so little for the gods, why did you come here and confess?’ I asked him.

  He shrugged. ‘I swore an oath — nothing big — just part of a business deal. I never meant to pay the bastard — he was cheating me. But the priest of Zeus in Halicarnassus will not let me do any business in the agora until I atone.’ He shrugged. ‘All mummery. No greater liars or thieves than those priests.’ And grunted. ‘And now I have to put up with this. My money is as silver as everyone else’s. Fuck the gods. Why am I singled out? Because they think I should pay more.’ He spat.

  I didn’t like his attitude, but I had to agree with the sense of his complaint. ‘You are hardly repentant,’ I said.

  ‘What are you, some kind of aspiring priest?’ he asked. ‘Fuck off. I’ll eat my bread and water for a week, and if they don’t take my sacrifice, I’ll sail away and let them dance for the money.’

  ‘But the god?’ I asked.

  ‘How much of a bumpkin are you?’ he asked me. ‘Listen, there’s a pair of bellows behind the altar — they manipulate them to decide which sacrifices are accepted and which rejected. Right? You understand, boy, or are you too thick? There are no gods. All you get is what you take.’

  I felt the sort of shock that a man feels when lightning strikes too close at sea. I had thought of myself as a man of the world — I was a hardened killer, a soldier of fortune, a former pirate. But that men would manipulate the sacrifices of the gods? Or that this man would claim there were no gods?

  Heraclitus told us that such men were contemptible, but very brave. ‘Only small men are incapable of seeing something greater than themselves,’ my master once said.

  So I shook my head at Philocrates. ‘You are a sad case,’ I said.

  He just smirked. ‘Bumpkin,’ he shot back.

  The week was hard. I drank water and watched the sun, and I sang a hymn to Apollo every day. I set myself a task — to remember all the men I had killed. Of course, there were men I couldn’t remember — the Carians at Sardis and Ephesus had died in the anonymity of their armour, and the Phoenicians I’d killed on my ship during the mutiny didn’t even have faces in my memory — but I was able to conjure up fifty men in the theatre of my head, and that seemed a great many. And I had probably killed twice that, or even three times.

  A week of consideration, and it seemed to me that the god was right to refuse my sacrifice. I killed too easily, I decided. It wasn’t a hard decision to reach. After all, Heraclitus had said as much most of the days of my youth.

  When old Dion came for me, he was leading another black ram. ‘Did you dream?’ he asked.

  I shrugged. ‘I had dreams,’ I said. ‘I dreamed once of a man I killed — a boy I put out of his misery on a battlefield. And I dreamed of a woman I love.’

  Dion led me to the highest headland on the island — ten stades or more from our hut. The ram followed along obediently. Then he sat me down on a seat carved from the living rock.

  ‘And why do you think the god refused your sacrifice?’ he asked.

  I looked out over the sea. There were a dozen ships on the beach below me. Two of them I knew, and I sat up with a start.

  ‘That’s my ship!’ I said. It was Storm Cutter, and he still had the raven of Apollo on his sail, the first ship I had ever owned, spear-won from the Phoenicians. Even now, his navarch was likely to be one of my chosen men.

  Dion raised an eyebrow. ‘Men have been asking for you for three days,’ he said. ‘But you are in the god’s hands. Answer my question.’

  ‘The god refused my sacrifice because I kill to easily, and for little things,’ I said. ‘And yet, even as I say this, I wonder what the god asks of me. I am a warrior.’

  Dion nodded. ‘I thought you were a farmer and a bronze-smith?’

  Dion was a decent priest. So I said what came to mind. ‘The sight of that ship raises my heart in a way that my anvil never does,’ I confessed.

  ‘So,’ Dion said. Now he smiled. ‘So now you are confused?’

  I laughed. ‘Yes,’ I said. ‘Answer me a question, priest.’

  He shrugged. ‘It is my place to ask. But I’ll answer one question, if I can.’

  I pointed at the temple. ‘Is there a pair of bellows mounted in the altar of ash to control the flame of the sacrifices?’

  Dion nodded. ‘When you work bronze, do you use bellows?’ he asked.

  I nodded.

  ‘And do you pray to Hephaestus to guide your hand when you work?’

  ‘Of course!’ I said. ‘Before I started my helmet, I omitted the prayer, and my work failed.’

  Dion nodded again. ‘And yet you had bellows and a hammer and an anvil, I expect.’

  ‘I did,’ I said, seeing his point.

  ‘And if you sought to work bronze, and you prayed, and yet had neither bellows nor an anvil?’ he asked.

  ‘I’d be a fool,’ I agreed.

  ‘Some of us here are fools,’ Dion said. His eyes narrowed. ‘I am not one of them. Are you?’

  ‘I’m still not sure I understand what the god asks of me,’ I said.

  ‘The confession of confusion is often the beginning of wisdom,’ he said, and slapped my knee. ‘Let’s make sacrifice.’

  My ram died well, and the god accepted him in a blast of fire, and I walked down the steps of the altar, my bare feet treading on the burnt remnants of thousands of animals sent to the heavens here, so that I wondered for a moment what a herd they’d make, and what the first animal to die here had been.

  Let me also note that the god accepted the sacrifice of the impious trader and rejected
the sacrifice of the Cretan lord who had killed his son. My confusion deepened.

  ‘There is more to god than a pair of bellows and an altar,’ Dion said. ‘He’s a good man, and the god will send him home when he is. . ready.’

  The next morning, in the first blush of dawn, I waited in the cleft at the base of the altar, clad in simple white linen without so much as a stripe woven in. The cleft smelled of almonds and honey, and I was afraid. Hard to say why, exactly.

  Dion held my shoulder while the first supplicant crawled up and into the cleft. He was gone for a long time, and when he returned he was as white as a corpse and couldn’t stand up, so that three acolytes had to carry him. When he was able to speak, priests gathered around him like sharks around a kill, demanding to know what words the god had spoken.

  Then it was my turn.

  Men were known to die confronting the god in the cleft. No amount of spear-craft on my part could avoid death if the god intended it for me, and I was afraid.

  The cleft itself was odd. A big shelf of rock overhung another, and the cleft was between them, so that a man had to climb up first, as if into a hearth. I could just get my head and shoulders through the gap, and I banged my knees badly, and the smell of almonds grew stronger all around me. The priests had told me not to flinch and not to stop climbing, so I felt in front of me with my hand — all black, and me lying on my back — and I found the next handhold and pushed myself up with my legs, crouching and pressing myself flat against an invisible rock surface. My head bumped rock, and I felt a breeze on my face. I got a knee up, and scraped it again, but the pain was far, far away, and then I was up on the second shelf, breathing like bellows. .

  ‘Eh-eh-eh. .’ said the dying man at my elbow.

  I looked at him, and he was younger than me — and kalos, even at the point of death, with big, beautiful eyes that wanted to know how his world had turned to shit. His skin, where it was not smeared with sweat and puke, was smooth and lovely. He was somebody’s son.