Marathon: Freedom or Death lw-2

by Christian Cameron

  The first I knew of it was the sound of raised voices outside my forge. I pushed out through the hide curtains and there was Cleon, red in the face, and my brother-in-law was being held by Philip.

  ‘What are you doing?’ I asked.

  ‘This is what you brought me to Plataea to do?’ Cleon asked. ‘To be your servant?’

  Lykon sprang forward despite his wound. ‘Antigonus meant no offence,’ the boy said. ‘How could we know you are a free man?’

  In truth, Cleon looked as if he had slept with dogs — his wool chiton was badly soiled and had wine stains all around the hem and down the front. He had no leg wraps under his sandals, and no chlamys or himation. He looked like a slave.

  Antigonus had treated him like one, and Cleon had punched him.

  Antigonus was a gentleman. He apologized, and admitted that he had committed hubris.

  But Cleon’s lips trembled and he walked out of my gate. ‘I came. .’ he said, and then he spat. ‘Never mind. I won’t come again.’

  He stalked off down the hill. I called his name, but then I let him go. You can only do so much for a man.

  Mater was surprisingly sober. I’m not dull-witted — I know why. For once, Pen and I were living the life Mater had wanted, and she stayed sober enough to be part of it, although it might have been truer to the gruesome drunkard’s creed if she’d managed to be roaring drunk and ruin the whole thing for everyone — the element of self-loathing in the drunkard is the ugliest part of the whole thing.

  But she didn’t. She and Pen sang with Leda and the better slaves joined in, and she did loom work in the andron while the men argued.

  Mostly, we talked about the Persians. Antigonus and Lykon and Philip were equally awestruck that we’d served in the east. Philip saw the Great King as a force for good, a great aristocrat who would make the world a better place — but he liked a good war story. Lykon took the opposite tack — his father owned ships and had no time for Persia.

  We debated when, and if, the Great King would come for Athens. Idomeneus and I insisted that we could have won Lade, and Philip maintained that the Great King could never be defeated.

  We drank a great deal of wine. Pen mocked us from her loom, and Mater proclaimed that it was high time I stopped wandering the world like Odysseus and got myself a wife and some sons and daughters.

  What I didn’t know was that Mater had sent a messenger over the mountains, to Athens.

  During his recovery, Lykon couldn’t hunt, so he hobbled around the farm, asking hundreds of questions, and I returned one evening, cold through, with a deer across my horse and Philip’s laughter floating up the hill from the crossroads where he was drinking with Peneleos.

  Ting ting.

  Ting ting.

  I went into the forge, expecting to find Tiraeus, and there he was, sure enough, guiding Lykon through making a cup.

  I laughed. ‘I’m not sure what your father would think,’ I said.

  He laughed. ‘Pater worries that I’ll sleep with older men,’ he said. ‘He’d never object to a little work.’

  Lykon’s time in my shop put the seal of aristocratic approval on my smithing. I see that now. By the time Lykon was ready to go over the mountain, I had shown all of them how to start a helmet, and I had my brother-in-law’s deep-bowled Corinthian roughed out, so that the skull stood proud to the cheekplates and the elegance of the shape had begun to show.

  At any rate, we were fast friends by the time we rode up past the shrine, two by two — Antigonus with Pen, Idomeneus with Lykon, Teucer with Philip, Alcaeus with me, and a passel of slaves behind us on donkeys with hampers of food and some gifts. It was cold, and our breath rose to the heavens with the breath of the animals, as if we had fires burning inside us.

  We had a snowstorm the second day, and we chose to stay an extra night back at the shrine. The two women who lived there asked me about Apollonasia, and when I told them that she was free and had a dowry of forty drachmas, they laughed and offered to follow me over the mountain. I didn’t tell them the price the poor girl had had to pay for her dowry. I don’t brag of my failures. But it served to remind me, when I was feeling cocky, of what failure was like.

  I left the rest of them, rode to the summit despite the snow and made sacrifice there, surrounded by an endless field of white, with a clear view over all of the earth as far as I could see — out to sea to the south, and over all Boeotia to the north, so that the smoke of hearths in Thebes was a smudge that I could see far over the dance floor of Ares.

  And all I could see in the rim of the world was war.

  And then we rode down into Attica.

  Aleitus had a tower. It was a fine building, of carefully cut stone in the Lesbian manner, and I liked it immediately, although the rooms smelled of smoke all the time. I had money — I thought that I might build myself a tower. Our house had had one once — a small thing. But the one Euphoria’s father had was another thing entirely. It was elegant and strong.

  He met us in his courtyard and I liked him, too, although he wasn’t sure of me. He wasn’t a big man, but well-muscled, grey-haired but with plenty of life left in his face, and he was surrounded by dogs — big boarhounds of a kind we don’t have in Boeotia. The dogs barked and barked at so many strangers.

  The blonde woman-girl who dashed into the courtyard and stood locked in an embrace with Leda had to be my intended bride, and I found that my tongue was stuck to the roof of my mouth.

  She was beautiful, the way Briseis was beautiful. I looked at her, and I became aware that Pen was laughing at me.

  Her father clapped me on the shoulder. ‘Happens to all the suitors,’ he said. ‘Don’t spend too much time with her — she’ll eat your brain and leave you a drooling idiot. I’ve seen it happen again and again.’ He laughed — the way a strong man laughs when he is wounded.

  The young woman in question glanced at me, smiled and went back to her friend. So much for my vanity.

  Still, that’s why we have rules of hospitality and customs — to pass the time when our brains are fuddled by sex. I managed to get down from my horse and introduce my friends and my sister, and then we were in his hall and my slaves were laying out a selection of my gifts.

  One of the many rewards for a life of piracy was that I had some beautiful things to give as gifts. Aleitus received a gold and coral necklace from Aegypt, and a gold cup that had come off the captain’s table of some Phoenician merchantman, with a long body and a swan’s head. That was for Euphoria.

  My Tyrian dyed wool passed without comment, and a pair of bronze water pitchers — my own work, let me add — were virtually ignored. But I’d made a pair of boar spears to match the ones I’d seen at Aristides’ house, with long staves and sharp bronze butt-spikes and heavy heads, and Aleitus passed over some much richer gifts to pounce on them.

  ‘Now, these are a sight for sore eyes, lad!’ he pronounced.

  No one had called me lad in quite some time. It made me laugh.

  Still, the company was good, and Euphoria sang and showed us her weaving, which I have to admit was superb. In fact, I’d never seen such fine work from a girl her age.

  ‘I love to weave,’ she said, and it was the first serious, grown-up thing I heard her say. ‘Do you know anything about weaving?’

  I thought about a number of answers — I had, after all, watched my mother and sister weave all my life. ‘No,’ I said.

  ‘Is it true that you are a master smith?’ she asked.

  ‘It is true,’ I said.

  Her eyes went back to her loom. ‘Are your hands always dirty?’ she asked.

  ‘Often,’ I allowed.

  She nodded. ‘Then if we wed, you must be careful not to touch my wool,’ she said. Her eyes flitted across mine. ‘I should like to marry a man who could make something,’ she added. ‘But Pater says you are low, so I shall not get my hopes up.’ She wore an enigmatic half-smile as she said this, and I was too much a fool to realize that this girl-woman was playing me li
ke a lyre.

  Low, is it? I thought. But I wiped the rage from my face.

  We hunted rabbits the first day, and I knew from the start that I was being tested. It was wonderful. I felt as if I was living in the epics, and here I was competing for Atlanta, or Helen, or Penelope.

  The wound on my leg didn’t bother me as it had, but I still had trouble keeping up with Lykon and Philip, and it was all I could do to run the rabbits down. Philip killed four and Lykon two — but Lykon, without a word, began to edge them my way in the last hours, and I managed to kill two with my club before the sun set.

  ‘I would have expected a man as famous as you to be faster,’ Aleitus said. It was not quite a sneer — indeed, by the standards of a rabbit hunt, any man who killed was allowed to wear a garland — but his barb went home. Fleetness of foot is one of the most important aspects of war-training, as the Poet recognizes when he calls Achilles ‘swift footed’.

  I swallowed my anger and nodded. ‘I was swifter,’ I said, ‘when I was younger.’

  Aleitus laughed. ‘Not yet old enough to know when an excuse is hollow,’ he said.

  I almost rode away that day. But my friends calmed me.

  The second day we got a dose of winter rains, and we stayed indoors, listened to the women sing and swapped stories. I told some of the stories I’m telling now, and my host’s doubts were plain on his face, and some of his friends — local gentlemen — sneered.

  Let me pause here to say something about them. They were hippeis and richer — rich farmers, aristocrats, mostly of the eupatridae — and most of them shunned Athens the way other men shun impiety. They never went into the city — the city I had already come to love. They had their own countryside temples, and sometimes they went to the assembly to vote, but they were the ‘country’ party, and they loathed the oarsmen and the metics and the tradesmen, and wanted Athens to be Sparta — a land of aristocratic farmers. To them, I was a combination of alien things — a smith, a foreigner. But they were, taken together, good men.

  When the weather cleared in the afternoon, we went out into the fields below his tower to throw javelins. I have my moments with the javelin, but I’ve never practised as much as I ought, and while Apollo and Zeus have sent me some good throws, none came to me that day. My first was so bad that men laughed. One of the ‘local gentlemen’ was heard to say that my reputation as a killer of men must be one of those ‘provincial tales’ that would not stand up to scrutiny.

  Idomeneus grinned from ear to ear and came to stand by me. We shared the same thought — to kill the fool. But my brother-in-law, Antigonus, who by that time I loved like a brother, kicked me — hard — in the shin. I whirled on him, looking for blood. He stood his ground. ‘They want to provoke you,’ he hissed. ‘Do you want the girl or not?’

  Antigonus was the right man to be my brother-in-law, that’s for certain. I took a deep breath and walked away. It was a close thing — if one of them had laughed again, there would have been blood.

  The third day, we hunted deer in the hills north of the city. More of the local gentlemen came along, and it turned out that we were hunting in teams — in a competition.

  I had all my travelling companions in my team. We didn’t know the ground and we didn’t know the habits of the local deer, and neither my prospective father-in-law nor any of his friends showed the slightest compunction in abandoning us to our ignorance. We were left on a mountain road. In the distance, we could see the sea by the shrine of Heracles, over towards Marathon. The countryside was beautiful in the weak winter sun.

  I waited until my competition was out of sight.

  ‘Right,’ I said. ‘Philip, you are the best hunter. My guess is that we should go downhill to the water.’

  Philip glowed with pride at being singled out among so many warriors. ‘Water — yes,’ he said. Then he shrugged. ‘But I smell rotting apples, and if there’s one thing deer love in winter, it’s an old apple orchard.’

  We broke up then, going six different ways to locate the apple orchard like scouts for an army. It was down the hill, almost ten stades away — Philip had the nose of a hound. But we found it.

  Philip came up to me. I was still mounted.

  ‘There are deer lying in the orchard,’ he said. ‘At least six, and perhaps more. You and Idomeneus are the best spears — yes?’

  I nodded. ‘And Teucer,’ I said.

  Philip grinned — he valued the archer. ‘Of course. The rest of us will push the deer into you, if you’ll make the crawl.’

  He got me to a tall rock that rose like a temple column and helped me climb it. From the top, we could see the apple trees, hoary old things with all their leaves down, and I could see the brown-grey smears that were deer lying in the high, dead grass.

  Then passed an anxious hour, as Idomeneus and Teucer and I crawled around the orchard to get downwind of the beasts. Twice, we heard the local party blowing horns in triumph, and on one occasion we could see one of the bucks raise his head to look for the sound.

  Philip and the beaters started too early — or perhaps we were too slow pushing our spears through the wet, cold grass. Either way, we were a hundred paces from where we wanted to be when Philip blew his horn and the deer began to scramble to their feet.

  I leaped up, cursed and began to run.

  Teucer didn’t. He rose to one knee and started to shoot.

  He saved us from failure. We would never have reached those deer — my best throw with my best spear fell short — but Teucer knocked six down with eight arrows, incredible work at that range through scattered trees and high grass.

  But then teamwork came into it, because none of his arrows killed, and we ran at the wounded animals, me calling out orders, the other men spreading out from two sides.

  I was running hard, cursing my leg, and I saw my mis-thrown spear sticking in the ground and managed to grab the haft without slowing. The biggest buck was vanishing from view into a thicket of dogwood and thorns. I plunged after it and it turned — a big stag, as tall at the shoulder as a small horse.

  I threw my good spear and the beast shied and took a blow meant for the head on the shoulder, but he fell, and I was on him with my other spear. I thrust home twice, and the animal shuddered, and his eyes filmed over, and he lay still.

  I felt more for that stag than I do for many men I kill. He was a magnificent animal, trapped, with no chance at all — the dogs had been released by then and they were hard by us.

  So I knelt, closed the stag’s eyes and said a prayer to Artemis, then I pulled my throwing spear clear of his shoulder and followed the sound of the dogs.

  By the time I caught the pack, all six animals were dead. We were a good group, and every man followed the nearest target without much shouting and did his duty.

  Then came the work. We had six dead deer, and we treed them in the apple orchard, split and gutted them, then began to clean them. We were far from water, and despite the chill of the morning, we stripped naked to save our clothes. And we were pious men, and Lykon and Philip, who both revered Artemis, led us in a hymn we didn’t know, and we burned the first fruits of the beasts — their hearts and livers — on a rock that had certainly served as an altar before. By the time the last carcass was ready to be moved, we were covered in blood and ordure, and we walked down the road like a Dionysian revel gone hideously awry. We bathed in a stream, and laughed, and threw icy water at each other.

  But when we were dressed, I arranged to put the carcasses on donkeys, and I paid a pair of farm boys to bring them along by the high road and not the farm road, and then my whole party returned to the tower, apparently empty-handed.

  Aleitus and his friends were drinking in the courtyard, and they laughed at our discomfiture, and made ribald comments about what we could have been doing in the woods, ten men alone, that we were wet and had no deer and were so clean.

  Euphoria came down the stone steps from the tower to the courtyard with a tray of wine cups, and conversation stilled. Sh
e had that effect, with her slanting eyes and her long, straight nose.

  ‘If you caught no deer,’ she said to me quietly, as she handed me a cup, ‘why do you have blood under your nails?’

  I smiled into her eyes. ‘You are observant,’ I said.

  ‘You play dangerous games,’ she answered.

  And truly, when our deer arrived, the local men were silent, and their eyes were not friendly. We had killed six to their two. Now let me tell you children, lest you wonder, that in those days, a kill of two deer for a party of ten men was a fine catch — and six deer was a ridiculous bag, almost an affront to Artemis. Bordering on hubris.

  I cared nothing for those men. If men will seek to compete, they must take the consequences. I do not push myself on others — but ever they will strive against me, and the result is always the same. I mean no boasting, by the gods!

  Aleitus looked at the row of carcasses and he turned to me, and his face was red. ‘Do you not fear that you affront Artemis, with so many kills?’

  I shook my head. ‘No, lord. I made immediate sacrifice of the first fruits of every animal, and I prayed as soon as my spear went home in the stag, who is, you must allow, a magnificent animal.’ I walked over to him. ‘Am I mistaken, lord? Or was it your intention that we should compete at hunting?’ And I laughed in his face.

  He was angry. But he mastered his anger, like a man of breeding, and merely raised an eyebrow. ‘The slaves will eat well,’ he said. ‘If I’d known of your prowess, I’d have invited more guests.’

  There was a laugh from the gate — a laugh I knew well. ‘Did you set Arimnestos a challenge?’ Miltiades said.

  He slid off his horse, magnificent in a cloth-of-gold chlamys over a purple chiton worn double-belted for riding. His horse had a gold harness, and there were four men with him, each armed with a boar spear and riding matching black horses.

  Miltiades defied convention by embracing me before embracing the host. Then he turned to Aleitus. ‘He used to drive me wild,’ Miltiades said. ‘Any task he’s set, he excels — or breaks the tools. And when challenged, he is a dangerous animal, our Plataean.’