Marathon: Freedom or Death lw-2

by Christian Cameron

  Being lower-class men themselves, they knew where I could find other men — informants and the like. That was likely to prove the breaking point of my plan, and I had a simple solution to my need for information.

  Money.

  Twice I walked up the hills of Athens to Miltiades and asked him for more money — ostensibly to plead my case. As he was my proxenos, it was his duty to help me, and the first time he did so with a good grace. The second time, he was none too happy to loan me the value of a good farm in silver coin. But he did.

  ‘What in the name of Tartarus do you need all this silver for, you Plataean pirate?’

  ‘Buying jurors,’ I said.

  Crime eats money the way vultures eat a dead beast. Bribing a jury is an old and honourable tradition in democratic Athens, one that blatantly favours the rich, of course. Heh, democracy.

  All forms of government favour the rich, honey.

  I bought quite a few men. I divided the sailors and marines into teams, and I gave one to Cleon, and set them to watching Phrynichus. That was the most public team, and I was going to make Cleon vanish later. He had an additional set of duties, paying informers to look for my girl.

  Agios led the scout team. They reconnoitred the Alcmaeonid estates.

  The problem with paying out so much money is that it is impossible to keep it quiet.

  It was near dark — every window had an oil lamp in it, and the more civic-minded brothel-owners had a big lamp out front, hanging from the exhedra, as well. I was climbing the hill in the alleys south of the Panathenaic Way to check on Phrynichus when they came at me — four men.

  Two of them filled the street ahead of me. They had swords.

  ‘That’s him — the Plataean,’ one called out.

  ‘A friend sent us,’ said the smaller of the two men ahead of us. ‘We think maybe we should reason with you.’ He laughed.

  I could hear movement behind me, and I knew there were more of them. But the two in front of me were right on the edge — we were just shy of that moment when they would be keyed up enough to attack me. I’ve watched the process often enough — some men take for ever to be ready to fight, and others can fight at any moment.

  I put a hand on my own sword — Athens was none to keen on men carrying weapons in the streets, but at dark, with a heavy cloak, no one would say anything about it. The smaller man laughed again. The odds were bad — one against four is insanity, unless you have no choice. The street I was in — an alley, really — was no wider than a man lying on his back full length, and I was at an elbow where someone’s semi-legal building crowded the street and made it bend.

  One of the men behind me stubbed his toe on a cobblestone and cursed. I heard the curse and felt the movement of his arms as he windmilled them to save himself — and I turned on the ball of my foot and punched the point of my sword into his side. I wasn’t as clever as I’d wanted to be, and my blade skidded over his arms and the point caught in his ribs, and his fist connected with my face — not hard enough to stun me, but hard enough to rock me back.

  Worst of all, as he fell away from me the point of my sword remained lodged in his ribs and the hilt was wrenched from my hand.

  I pulled my cloak off by yanking it against the fine silver pin — which popped open and tinkled as it landed in the street, a nice find for the first child to look out of his door in the morning. The cloak weights slammed the smaller of the two men in front of me in the face — luck and training there — and made him duck back when he could have gutted me.

  There’s no conscious thought in a fight like that. There were no openings, no holds, no attacks that were going to get me free. I had no weapon. I kicked at the bigger of the men in front of me as I changed my stance, and then I leaped through the unshuttered window to my left, my back foot catching the oil lamp on the sill so that it landed behind me and exploded, lamp oil on my cloak and on the floor and fire spreading up my cloak.

  But I had a wall between me and my attackers. I threw my burning cloak at them and turned to find three young men staring at me as if I was an apparition from the heavens — perhaps I was, with all the fire running along the floor behind me.

  The fire — not a very big fire, I have to add — kept my attackers back for the space of three or four heartbeats, and by that time I was through the room curtain of wooden beads. This was not a brothel or a wine shop. It was a private house, and I passed through a room with four looms against the four walls, through another door as men shouted behind me and out into a courtyard. There were two slaves standing by the gate, and they looked as confused as men usually look in a crisis. I went past them — between them — without slowing, and I was in another street.

  I ran up the hill. I could see the Pisistratids’ palace on the Acropolis as a landmark. I remember offering my prayers to Heracles that I had so easily averted an ambush that should have killed me — really, if they hadn’t stopped to talk to me, I’d already have started to rot, eh?

  My prayers may have called the god to my aid, but they were otherwise premature. At the next corner I ran full tilt into the larger of the two men who’d confronted me in the alley. I bounced harder than he did, and he landed most of a blow with something in his left hand — a club, I suspect.

  It caught me on the outside of my left bicep — hard — and numbed my arm. I stumbled back into a closed door and he recovered his balance, grinned in the feeble light and came to finish me.

  But he paused to yell ‘I’ve got him!’ to his mates, and as he did that, the door under my numb hand opened and I fell through it, my legs pumping frantically to keep me upright, so that I carried the young man who’d opened the door right back into the room and knocked him flat.

  He was quite small, pretty, and had make-up on his eyes — which were wide with sudden terror. I’d hurt him, no doubt.

  There was a cloak hanging on a wooden stand at the edge of the bed — probably the boy’s own, or forgotten by a client. I snatched it as the big man came through the door. I got it on my left arm, which was numb but not useless, and got my feet under me — this was moving so fast that the pain of the blow from his cudgel was just hitting me. The big man was coming in for the kill and I swirled the cloak, which seemed to fill the tiny room, and my right arm moved behind the cloak, lost in it, and my attacker flinched back.

  It is a thing known to any trained man that men will flinch from a cloak or a stick, when neither can do them any real harm, even with a direct blow to the face. But my cloak and my fist were both feints, and my right-foot kick caught him in the knee before he could shift his weight off it, and I heard the joint pop. He roared and went down. The hand with the cudgel swept past me, and it was as if he’d decided to hand me his cudgel — despite the dark and the confusion, his left hand brushed against my right, and the club was in my hand.

  There were men in the alley outside. By the sound of it, there were quite a few of them — not just the initial four.

  My recent opponent was thrashing on the floor and roaring. As he made no move to harm me, I took a deep breath and hit him behind the ear with his own cudgel, and he went out.

  The painted boy squeaked and ran through a doorway I’d missed. I followed him, eager to avoid the men on the street. We went straight into the building’s central courtyard, which was full of men and boys on couches. My hip caught a table of pitchers of water and wine, and the whole thing fell with a crash. Then I was across the room, through a door that seemed to me the biggest and into the building’s andron, with painted wall panels and a garishly painted ceiling — Zeus and Ganymede, as you might expect. Then I ran out of the main door under a pair of kissing satyrs and into a street that was brilliantly lit by cressets in the building I had just left — a prosperous brothel.

  By the flickering light, I could see men coming for me from the downhill end of the street — a dozen, at least.

  So I turned and ran, uphill. There is no fighting a dozen men at the edge of darkness.

  I went on
e street and turned into an alley. I saw a big ceramic rain-cistern under a house gutter and leaped to it at full stride. I got a leg over the roof edge and I was up. I lay flat on the roof. I was unable to breathe, and my two wounds had burst into pain the way a flower opens with the dawn, and it was all I could do not to cry out.

  I heard men run by — they were an arm’s reach away — and meet with other men in the next street.

  I looked around the roof. It was a low building, the sort of cheap private residence that filled the south slope of the hills before Pericles rebuilt the city. One storey, mud brick on a stone foundation with beams holding a roof that was also a place to cook, sleep in warm weather — make love, when privacy was required. The couple wrapped in blankets and furs had various naked limbs sticking out, and the man pulled the blankets closer, as if blankets would protect him.

  I ran to the centre of the roof and looked. South was the high wall of the brothel and east was the wide Panathenaic Way, but north, uphill, the next roof beckoned. I had to keep moving — the men below were not fools.

  I ran, leaped and my feet came down badly, punching straight through the seagrass of the roof so that my groin landed on the beam, and for a moment it was all I could do to curl my legs around the beam and moan. In the building underneath me, people screamed — and their screams were answered by running feet.

  Sometimes the initial pain is worse than the resulting injury. I got a knee up on the beam and the blow to my groin wasn’t as debilitating as I had feared. I sidestepped north as men gathered around the building, and north again, and this time I stepped over the roof barrier on to the next roof — slate, thank the gods! — and I ran across the firm surface. I could smell a fire that burned charcoal and I could smell hot metal, and I realized I was crossing the roof of a smithy — a big one.

  There was an alley at the northern edge of the smithy, and I leaped it without pausing to reflect — and my arms just caught the edge of the higher roof — much higher, because the alley was like a giant step up. I hung there for long heartbeats, trying to gain control of my legs over the pain — and I swung my right leg over the roof edge and rolled.

  My hips hurt and my groin hurt and my left shoulder screamed as if I’d been scalded with boiling water. This roof had an outdoor kitchen and a small shed where the owner stored his brazier and spare pots. I got myself into it — a counsel of desperation, let me tell you. If they found me there, I was dead — no more retreat. But I wasn’t thinking well, and my instinct was the instinct of the wounded animal. I pulled the door closed and lay there, panting.

  I listened to the men in the street as they searched the houses — broke in, beat people or threatened them. But actions have consequences, and the fates were not blind to my predicament. As they went from house to house, causing mayhem, men — and women — turned against them. Greeks don’t take happily to the invasion of their homes, however poor.

  I heard the smith roar with rage as his dinner crashed to the floor when the thugs overturned his table, He had weapons and the strength to use them, and he hit a thug so hard that the blow had that telltale sound of a broken melon — and then the wounded man started calling for his fellows.

  The smith roared for the watch. His voice carried, and other voices — housewives, prostitutes and the patrons from the brothel — joined in.

  Athens was a mighty city then — but not so big that the uproar of throaty thugs and fifty citizens didn’t carry quickly.

  The Scythian archers — the city police since the time of the tyrants — came just as a party of thugs were breaking into the house where I hid. I could follow their progress on the street by the sudden change in sound — the babble of citizens telling the Scythians what had happened.

  My breathing was better, although the pain was still there. I lay still, my eye pressed to the door of the shed.

  A man’s head came up the ladder from the main room below. I didn’t know him, but his ragged haircut and his expression told me he was one of my pursuers. He looked around the roof quickly, and then I heard him say that the roof was clear.

  ‘Fucking Scythians!’ came a voice from below, over the shouts of the householder, an older man with a shrill voice.

  ‘Villains! Out of my house, you scum!’

  I heard the man take a blow — a blow so sharp that his voice was cut off in mid-imprecation.

  ‘We’ve got to get out of here!’ a man said.

  ‘Fuck that — this bastard is worth a hundred drachmas. Beat the Scythians and make them clear out. He’s hiding — right here. Somewhere.’ I knew the voice — my man from the alley.

  ‘You fight the cops, you mad bugger.’ The man who’d checked the roof was not having any of it. ‘I’m off.’

  ‘Coward,’ the leader hissed, but by then, there were Scythians pounding on the door.

  Then both of them came up the ladder and on to my roof. Beneath our feet, the Scythians were breaking in the door.

  My two would-be attackers slowed briefly at the roof edge, then they dropped over the edge, heading south.

  I just lay there, unable to do much to change my fortunes. I saw the Scythians check the roof — they spoke in their barbaric tongue, glanced around carefully, one man by the ladder with an arrow on his bow while another man poked around with his sword, but they didn’t check the little shed.

  I waited a long time after they vanished — I waited until the whole quarter was silent. Then I limped down the ladder, picked the householder up and put him on his bed, and sneaked out of the door.

  I made it to Phrynichus’s house under my own power. His poor wife was terrified at my appearance.

  Phrynichus got me into bed — his own bed, as his apartment was too small for such luxuries as guest chambers. I lay there, trying to frame something polite to say — and then, finally, my psyche released its hold on my body, and I went away.

  The next day, I limped about escorted by half a dozen oarsmen. I told all my people to lie low, and I made myself look afraid — and abashed — when Cleitus pushed past me in the Agora.

  ‘Done meddling?’ he asked with a smile. ‘You don’t look well, foreigner. Perhaps you should stop playing with fire and go home.’

  ‘Yes, lord,’ I breathed, exaggerating my injuries. In fact, my paid informants were bringing me titbits by the hour. All my plans and preparations took time, and I warned my people — the oarsmen, the informants and some paid thugs — that I wanted no violence until I said the word. And money — some Miltiades’ and some mine — flowed like blood in a sea-fight.

  Some of my new friends disliked being made to lie low. There were a few defections, but I was careful with my plans and no one — except Cleon, Paramanos and Herk — knew what I had planned. The informants were blind — each of them had a particular task — and given the scale of reward offered, I expected results, and got them.

  Let me interject here. A man who’s been free all his life might struggle at all this — but a man who’s been a slave knows all about how and where to get information. How and where to buy violence. And how to plan revenge. Remember that the world of Athens ran on slaves, and slaves, at some level, dislike being slaves.

  A week after my arrival in Athens, I knew where my girl was. She was working in a slave brothel by the Agora. I was tempted to grab her — but to do so would have given the game away. Shortly after my informers found her, the best pair — Thracians, former slaves who ran an ‘inquiry service’ — brought me the names of the men Cleitus had hired to beat Sophanes and Themistocles. I paid them a small fortune, and they left the city for a while — they guessed what I had in mind. Smart lads. Another informer — a woman, a prostitute with a quick mind — located my attacker, the smaller man in the alley, based only on my description. He was a big man in the lower-class neighbourhoods, a wine-shop owner and a money-lender. I paid the woman well and sent her to Salamis, too. My desire to send these people out of the city when they had served my needs was not altogether altruistic — I truste
d none of them, and this way my prostitute could not counter-inform to Cleitus. Perhaps I wronged them — many were happy to help, just to strike a blow against the oppression of the aristocrats — but talk is cheap and informing can become a habit. So I sent them away, and Miltiades’ money paid and paid.

  I didn’t share my plan with Aristides, or Miltiades, or even Phrynichus, although he was beginning to catch on, as was Cleon. Many Athenians are fine men, and their brilliance is legendary. Trust an Athenian to plead a court case or to write a play. But what all those brilliant men like Aristides and Miltiades had missed was that the Alcmaeonids weren’t playing by the rules. They had taken Persian gold and used it to pay the mob — the same mob that should have been baying for their blue blood — to beat better men.

  I had grown up in Ephesus, where the Persians intimidated the citizens, and where the citizens used force to intimidate each other. I had been a slave. I knew how the world worked, in a way that neither the Alcmaeonids nor the Just Man ever would.

  When I was ready, I prompted Aristides to bring my civil suit, and he summoned Cleitus to appear in my case just one day after the Attic feast of Heracles, which seemed auspicious to me. The civil court met briefly, eager to be away to their feasts and holidays — many men went to the countryside for the feast of Heracles, of course, and some for the feasts of Dionysus. Across the Agora, a party of shipwrights were raising the theatre — a wooden stage and the big wooden building behind it called the skene, and the wooden benches where the best men sat. I was astounded at the speed with which they put it up — between the opening and closing of the law court, the workmen had the skene completed.

  The law court was well briefed and Cleitus was caught by surprise. He turned bright red and shouted some foolishness. A date was set, and Aristides explained to the sitting members of the Boule that Miltiades would have to be released from prison to plead for me, because he was my proxenos.