Marathon: Freedom or Death lw-2

by Christian Cameron

  In those days, a small city like Plataea knew that its warriors were its lifeblood, and we danced together as often as the feast cycle allowed. Young men hunted together on Cithaeron, and some — a few — came to the forge and learned spear-fighting, or went up the hill to Idomeneus or down the Asopus to Lysius. We all taught the same things — how to use your shield and your spear-shaft to keep the enemy’s iron from your body, and only later how to plunge the iron home yourself.

  As the bronze-smith, I had a fair idea who had armour and how good it was. As a group, Plataeans were well-to-do, thanks to the money Athens paid us for grain. And those famous three victories in a week had put good helmets and greaves in almost every farm. They might not fit every generation, but they were there, and when a new generation appeared, there was some trading and some trips to the bronze-smith. The men were as ready for war as dancing the war dance and wearing armour to exercise could make them.

  That summer, I started the custom of taking a large group of young men up on to Cithaeron, camping, living hard and hunting. We are not aristocrats in Plataea, but what the Spartans say is true — it is only through hunting that men grow accustomed to war. Well, actually, life as a slave can make an adequate substitute, but I wouldn’t recommend it as a training programme.

  When the barley and the wheat were in the ground, when I’d sent two wagons of finished bronze away to Athens and another to Corinth, and before my grapes began to ripen, I told the men, young and old, who had gathered on a pleasant summer evening in the yard of my forge that I would lead a hunt on the mountain.

  There were only two dozen of us, that first year. We walked up the long road on Cithaeron’s flank, and I thought of my old tutor, Calchas, and how much he had taught me. I took the boys — I can’t call them anything else — to Idomeneus, and he added in a dozen young men of his own, boys who had been sent to him to learn the ways of war. We stayed the night there and had a bonfire, and the boys listened open-mouthed as we told them war stories.

  Cleon came along. He didn’t say a word, and he drank too much — but he knew how to hold a spear.

  And the next day we began to teach them to hunt deer.

  Some of those boys had never thrown a real javelin. Now, boys are boys, and no boy in Plataea — at least, no citizen’s son — was so poor that he hadn’t made himself a straight stick with a sharp tip. But we Plataeans lack the organization of the Spartans or the Cretans or even the Athenians, where every citizen gets some training.

  I wish I could tell you that I had the foresight to see what was coming — but I didn’t. I felt, instead, that I owed something to my home city. By training boys, I could pay it back. So I led them up Cithaeron, killed some deer and tried not to laugh as I watched them stumble about, cut each other with axes, mis-throw their javelins and tell lies.

  Boys. Was I ever so young?

  Still, it was all a great success, although I had to keep Idomeneus off some of the prettier boys with a stick, and I truly wondered what kind of Cretan vices he was teaching the boys who were sent to him — but I was not his keeper. Together we led them up the mountain, and two weeks later when we came back down, they were leaner and faster and better men in every way — or at least, most were. And not just the boys. Cleon was much more himself. But in every herd there are a few animals doomed to die, and man is no different.

  After the first time, men came and asked for their sons to be taken, and even some of the older men — such as Peneleos, son of Epictetus, who had no war training and wanted to catch up — came to me, and my life filled up. I worked, and in between bouts of work, I trained the young.

  In early autumn, when the grapes began to ripen and I was watching the weather and all the farmers around me to see who would plough and plant barley, my sister arrived with gifts and a new baby, and we hugged her. She went and saw Mater, who mostly lived alone in a wine haze with a couple of slaves who knew their business. Then she came back, took a bite of dinner and shook her head.

  ‘You need a wife,’ she said.

  I all but spat out my food.

  ‘I’ve found you a fine one,’ she went on. ‘You need someone to run this house and take care of Mater. When’s the last time you ate a decent meal?’

  I looked at the food on my fine bronze plate. ‘What’s wrong with this?’ I asked.

  ‘Any peasant in the vale of Asopus eats better than this,’ she said. ‘Bread and cheese?’

  ‘My own barley and my own cheese!’ I said.

  Penelope looked at me steadily. ‘Listen, Hesiod,’ she said, and giggled, and I had to laugh with her. Hesiod was a fine farmer and a brutal misogynist, and while I loved his words, I didn’t agree with all of them. I knew what Pen meant.

  ‘I don’t need a wife,’ I said.

  ‘Which slave warms your bed?’ she asked. ‘Alete? Is it you?’

  Alete was an old Thracian woman who helped with Mater. She grinned toothlessly. ‘Nah, mistress,’ she said. She laughed.

  Pen looked around. ‘Seriously — who is it?’

  I shrugged. ‘You are embarrassing me, sister. I have no bed-warmer in this house. It makes for bad feeling.’

  ‘I’ll tell you what makes for bad feeling,’ Pen shot back. ‘Surly men without wives, in dirty houses with dull food.’ She looked at me. ‘Unless that Cretan has trained you to like boys?’

  I could feel the telltale signs of defeat. ‘But I don’t need a wife,’ I said feebly.

  ‘My lord’s sister Leda went to school — a school for girls — at Corinth.’ Pen was remorseless, like Persian archery. ‘You get to choose her hair colour and I’ll take care of the rest.’

  ‘Black,’ I said, almost unbidden. Black like Briseis, I thought. I cannot marry — I love Briseis.

  But I knew Briseis was lost to me for ever, and I was lonely, in the brief heartbeats where I allowed myself to think about anything but work and training.

  Later that autumn, when Atlas’s fair daughters the Pleiades set, when all the grapes were in and those that went for wine were trodden and we had a week while we waited to see how good the wheat might be, I took almost a hundred men up the mountain. The harvest was already looking to be fabulous — perhaps legendary. And we needed a break from labour. Besides, deer meat kept many hearths fed that summer while we waited to see if the new year would do better than last year’s evil rains, and the Milesians were poor — they had started with nothing, and every deer we killed kept their eyes shining. And in those days, honey, most Greeks lived and died on barley — and barley, as Hesiod says, goes into the ground when the Pleiades set and comes up when they rise — a winter crop. The Milesians needed food to get them through the winter.

  This time we swept the slopes of the mountain with something like efciency, and Idomeneus cursed and said we’d ruin the hunting. I promised that the next hunt would go up behind Eleutherai, a longer expedition and better training — and a new stock of deer. We killed seventy animals and carried the meat home, and while we were up on the mountain, the older men discussed politics and war.

  The Persians were coming closer. The Great King had sworn to burn Athens, or so men said, and Eretria in Euboea too. The rumour was that Thebes was willing to swear fealty to the Great King for aid against Athens.

  ‘We’ll have to fight,’ Peneleos said.

  Everyone looked at me. And I was old and wise.

  ‘Bullshit,’ I said. ‘The Persians are mighty, and their armies are huge and they own more triremes than all of the Greeks ever did — but do you know how far Sardis is from Athens?’ So much for my wisdom. My only concern was closer to home. ‘If the Thebans get involved,’ I said, ‘then we could find ourselves in a fight.’

  ‘My pater says one Plataean is worth ten Thebans,’ said young Diocles, son of Eumenides. Eumenides had stood his ground when my brother died at Oinoe.

  ‘Your pater should know better,’ I said. ‘When the Thebans come, they’ll have ten men for every one of ours. And our knees will rattle together
like dry leaves in a wind.’

  ‘We can stand against them in battle or stay in our walls,’ Idomeneus said. ‘What I would fear is raids — greedy men, well led, coming for cattle and slaves.’

  ‘That’s a scary thought,’ Peneleos said. ‘That’s war the way bandits make war on honest men.’

  Hermogenes was eating deer meat, and he belched. ‘That’s how war is made, out there in the world,’ he said.

  ‘Aye,’ Cleon said.

  ‘We should have an alarm, and a select group that could come out at a moment’s notice and run down thieves,’ Idomeneus said. ‘Better yet, four or five alarms, all a little different, for the quarters of the territory around us, so that the moment we hear the alarm, we know where to run.’

  We all agreed that the Cretan had a fine idea, and when next the assembly met after the feasts and contests of Heracles, I moved that we create a select militia and that the alarms be built, and it was carried. So those who took part in my deer hunts on the hillside became the Plataeans’ epilektoi, the picked men, and we built the alarm fires and set signals after the wheat harvest, which old men said was the richest in twenty years, and some said the richest they’d ever seen. At the feast of Hera every one of us made sacrifice, so that smoke rose without cease to the heavens, and Hera smiled on us. The Milesians filled their cottages and their new barns, and sold the surplus over the mountains in Attica as we did, and their sons came up the mountain with me, and some began to buy my armour.

  Cleon somehow managed to have a poor harvest in a year of plenty. I went to visit him, taking a wagon to fetch his surplus, and he brought me just ten medimnoi of grain.

  ‘What in Pluton’s name?’ I swore. ‘Did you sleep all day?’

  Cleon looked at the ground. ‘I’m not cut out to be a farmer,’ he said.

  ‘What will you eat this winter?’ I asked.

  He made a face. ‘Your handouts?’ he asked, and his voice was bitter.

  Despite Cleon’s failure, it was a good year. After my second ploughing and before the turning of the year, when the days finally begin to get longer and the rains let up a little, I travelled over the mountains into Attica to meet my prospective bride, a girl of fourteen years called Euphoria, whose father was a wealthy cavalry-class man from the hills north of Athens. She had been Leda’s schoolmate at Corinth, and she could read and sing and weave, and when I arrived. . well, she’s worth a better story than that. So perhaps I should tell you how I met Euphoria.

  12

  She didn’t have black hair. She was as blonde as the sun, and her hair was like a banner for men’s attentions. Men crowded around Euphoria like vultures on a battlefield, like ravens on a new corn crop, like seagulls on a fishing boat with a fine catch, and she may have loved the attention she received, but she appeared to be immune, as some men are to the arrows of Apollo. She was showered in presents from the time she was old enough to walk, and some men called her Helen. Her father was Aleitus, a famous hunter, and her mother, Atlanta, had won every woman’s foot race in Greece and was that rarest of creatures, a female athlete. Euphoria had the body of a grown woman when she was fourteen, with deep breasts and wide hips — and she had hair of gold. Have I mentioned that?

  My sister filled me in on these details as we sat at the big farm table in the main kitchen of our house at the edge of winter. The hearth smoked, and the smoke rose through the rafters in beams of sunshine, like the arms of the gods reaching to earth. Still makes you cough, though.

  Pen raised her hand and ordered more small beer with a crook of her finger. Life as the wife of an aristocrat agreed with her.

  Her husband, Antigonus, was a good man. He doted on her and yet made good company for me, and several of his friends slept in the andron and would accompany us over the mountains. Pen told me that I needed some aristocratic friends. But the very idea of marrying into the aristocracy of Attica made my stomach roil, and the thought of marrying a famous beauty put me off my food.

  ‘You are a famous man,’ my sister said. ‘You need to marry well.’

  ‘I am the bronze-smith of Plataea,’ I said. ‘What will her father say if I take Tiraeus and Hermogenes?’

  Pen stuck her tongue out at me. ‘If he’s as well bred as people say, he’ll welcome them, and you. But why try his patience? And why don’t you have any presentable friends?’ She rolled her eyes at her husband’s sister, Leda, who smiled knowingly and batted her eyelashes at all the male guests indiscriminately, despite being married to some lordling at Thebes.

  ‘Miltiades? Aristides?’ I laughed. ‘Perhaps Idomeneus? Have you met Cleon?’

  Mater made one of her rare appearances. She dropped on to a stool by Leda and barked her laugh. ‘Idomeneus is very well bred,’ she said, ‘for a wolf.’ She looked around at all of us. ‘If you take Idomeneus, make sure he doesn’t kill anyone. Penelope, motherhood agrees with you more than it ever agreed with me.’ She beamed a mixture of wine and affection at us. ‘I am so pleased to see both of my children returning to the class that your father abandoned.’ She turned to me. ‘Cleon is a stray dog, not a wolf. You’d do better to put him down — he’ll bite your hand in the end.’

  I went straight out to the forge and began to pound a lump of bronze with a hammer. I pounded it into sheet — a slave’s job, but one that allowed me to hit something very hard, again and again, until I was calm and Mater was back in her rooms, drunk and silent.

  But the next morning she was back again. ‘Why don’t you ask Miltiades to meet you?’ she asked. ‘He can stand as your mentor. He’s a man of property, and as I have cause to remember, he has beautiful manners.’

  ‘He’s killed more men than Idomeneus,’ I spat.

  ‘Why must you behave like a beast, my love?’ Mater asked, putting her hand on my face, so that I could smell the wine on her breath.

  I steeled myself and gave no reply, except to go back to the forge and make sheet out of bronze stock — again.

  My aristocratic guests were surprisingly tolerant of my affection for my forge. Idomeneus took them hunting, and on the third day of their visit I joined them, and we flushed a boar up behind Eleutherai in driving rain. Antigonus was there, and Alcaeus, the leading man of the former Milesians, as well as Teucer, who had a farm hard by my own purchased from waste land that Epictetus had been saving for his sons, Idomeneus, of course, and Ajax and Styges. My guests were Lykon, a very young man with pale skin like a girl and longer lashes than was quite right, and Philip, Antigonus’s guest-friend from Thrace.

  Philip was an excellent hunter, and in fact had been included by Penelope because his skills might impress the prospective father-in-law. Lykon was recklessly brave — the sort of courage that you have to show when you look like a pretty girl and have a high-pitched voice. I liked Lykon immediately — he was not afraid to wash our wooden bowls around the campfire, and now, faced with a boar, he simply lowered his spear-point and went at it.

  Lykon was between the boar and me. We were in open woods, high on Cithaeron. The ground was broken and rocky and rose steeply behind the boar, and it was littered deeply with oak leaves that muffled sound and made movement treacherous. It was cold enough to numb your hand on your spear, and raining.

  The hounds were as surprised as the rest of us. We’d been on the trail of a deer — a deer that Philip had wounded and we all wanted to bring home. The boar was no part of our hunt, but now our youngest man was facing it, and it was not small.

  The boar put its head down and charged. Teucer leaped up on a stump and shot — no aiming, no pause to think — and his heavy war arrow punched the animal in the side and deflected it. It skidded to a stop and Teucer shot it again, then Lykon tried to get the point of his spear into it — but from inexperience, he didn’t know that you never spear a pig in the face. The spear-point caught on the beast’s snout, which is full of muscle and gristle, and glanced off its tusks — and the creature barged under his point, into his legs, and down he went.

  Teucer put a th
ird arrow into it as it tried to savage Lykon.

  Philip and I reached it at the same instant. It backed a step and I put my point deep in the chest, under the chin, a low thrust as good as any I made in battle, and Philip, may the gods bless him, leaped high and plunged his point right down between the animal’s shoulder blades. Then another arrow thudded home — I was so close that I saw dust fly from the beast’s hide as it hit despite the rain — and Antigonus and Idomeneus were both there, adding the weight of their spears, and the thing was dead.

  Lykon lay still, and for a long moment I thought his slim back was broken.

  His right leg was ripped from knee to groin, a long but thankfully shallow gash that missed his privates by the breadth of a finger. And where he’d curled up to cover himself, the boar’s snout had broken his nose and its tusk had slashed across his face.

  He looked up at me, his face a mask of blood and tears. ‘Sorry,’ he said. ‘I fucked that up.’

  We laughed. Lykon was a man after that. The facial scar was a gift from the gods. No man would ever have taken him seriously without it. As it was. .

  Well, you’ll hear, in time.

  Lykon was the son of an important man from Corinth, a magistrate and shipowner, and Pen was very fond of him — all of us were. So we voted, like Greeks, to wait for his leg to heal before setting out. That meant two weeks of guesting three aristocrats, and the consequent drain on my pantries and staff.

  I tried to think of it that way — the peasant way — but the truth is, they were fine men and I had a fine time. We hunted some days, and Idomeneus and Ajax came and stayed — for the first time, I’ll add — and there was wine and talk in the andron every night.

  In the second week, Cleon turned up. He had been to the house before, and Hermogenes liked him. So he came into the courtyard and Styges brought him wine.