Soldier of Arete

by Gene Wolfe

  I told him, "You don't have to pretend. A stool makes an excellent shield."

  Io said, "You used to fight the Thracians with a javelin in your other hand, master. I think they thought you were going to throw it, but you never did."

  I nodded. "Because if I had, I would have had nothing for my left hand except my cloak. But you can never be sure such a thing will not be thrown—your opponent may believe it will end the fight, or see something else he can use. If Polos were to throw his stool, for example, he might snatch up this other one.

  "But now that you have your swords and shields, you must forget about them for a moment. Do you remember that I said a sword fight was a sort of dance?"

  They nodded.

  "I said it because you must move your feet in the right way without thinking about them. If one of you were going to teach me a dance I didn't know, I'd have to think about moving my feet—but I wouldn't be a good dancer until I didn't."

  Polos performed a little dance to test himself.

  I told them, "An untrained sword fighter will nearly always favor one foot. Usually it's the left, because the left hand's got the shield. He'll step forward with that foot and drag his right foot behind it. For people like you two, who're liable to be a lot smaller than those you fight, that's a great advantage. You take a step back and cut at his leg. You don't have to wait to see it—it'll be there. Just make a quick cut that brings your point well in under the edge of his shield."

  I had them practice this, tapping my calf with their sticks while I used the other stool as my shield.

  "Now that you know how that's done, you know also that you mustn't advance your left leg like that," I told them.

  Io added, "And why Acetes's shieldmen wore greaves."

  "That's right," I said, though I do not remember who Acetes is. "And they didn't wear just one, did they? Didn't each man wear two?"

  Io and Polos nodded.

  "That's because a good fighter uses both his legs, and uses them equally. The next thing you have to learn is never to move one leg only. Whenever you move one leg, you must also move the other; and you mustn't favor the left leg over the right—or the right over the left."

  So we passed the time until Simonides came to lecture the children about proper behavior in the theater.

  THIRTY-ONE

  From the Tomb

  WE CAME UP THE HILLSIDE along a wide white street. Now the men from Riverland have gone, and so has the Median boy. The sky is light enough already for me to write. Soon we will leave, too; Themistocles says our road runs west to Stymphalos, then south through Bearland.

  Last night we went to see a play. I do not know whether I have been to a theater before—perhaps to one somewhat different from this. It seemed strange to me, but not entirely so.

  Our seats were at the bend (the best place) and well down in front. The long benches are curved like a horse's hoofprint. The acting floor is in the center with the actors' tent behind it. Pasicrates sat next to me until the black man changed his seat to sit between us—I think because Io asked it.

  The jokes concerned the doings of the city, yet many amused us just the same. The actors wore masks, contriving to change the expressions of these wooden faces by varying the angles at which they poised their heads and covering certain parts of the masks with their hands, which I thought very fine. These masks are carved in such a way as to make this possible, of course.

  It was pleasant to sit in comfort on a warm evening and be thus entertained; but from time to time my gaze left the actors and wandered away to the stars, seeing there the Ram, the Hunter and his Dogs, the Seven Maids toward whom so many temples look, and many other things. The cold moon-virgin appeared to warn me it was to her land we were bound; and as she spoke, Io whispered in my ear, "When we get back I'll have to tell you the story of the White Isle, master. I feel like I've just seen it." Then I could not help wondering what the watching gods thought of us, with our clever masks and our jokes. What we think of crickets, perhaps, whose singing we hear with pleasure, though some of us smash them with our heels when they venture into sight.

  After the play, the gaudy litters that had carried them to the theater awaited Adeimantus and his sons, Themistocles, and Simonides. The rest of us trooped after them, but the black man soon drew me aside. There are many wineshops here where one may drink and crack nuts, and trade banter with attractive women if one likes. The rule, as several women told us, is that they may enter only the ones that permit them, and that they must pay the owner (often once such a woman as themselves) one spit each time they leave with a man. Most asked for six, explaining that they could keep only three, having to pay one to the proprietor (as I said), one to the city, and one to the goddess of this place. A skin of unmixed wine was very dear, so the black man and I drank mixed wine by the cup—this so weak in some of the shops that he pretended to drown and once told me with his fingers that he had seen a trireme in the krater.

  In the third or fourth, we came upon a slender, dark-haired girl from Babylon who could speak the black man's tongue as well as the one I use among these people. The black man wished to go with her— and for me to come, too, for it is by no means safe to visit such places alone. Here was a difficulty: I liked neither the Babylonian nor the friend to whom she introduced me, while the Babylonian would have to pay double if both of us left with her. It would have been better if I had given her an additional spit, but we soon arranged that they would linger in the street; and I, soon after they had gone, would meet them there.

  This settled, they left. I stretched, yawned, and gossiped a few moments longer with the Babylonian's friend, a skinny girl who said she was from Ithaca, drained the last cup and wiped my mouth, and wandered out.

  I had drunk enough to heat my face and ears; I still recall how pleasant the night breeze was, and how I wondered why we had chosen to linger so long in the close, smelly wineshop. When I began to walk, I discovered that I was not as steady on my feet as I had expected to be, although I flattered myself that no one else would have observed it.

  It appeared that the black man and the Babylonian had gone on without me; but I soon caught sight of them, deep in talk, a few doors off. I waved, and they made their way arm in arm down the street. I hurried after them, then realized that the black man would not relish my company and maintained a distance great enough to allow them some privacy. After a time, they left the narrow, dirty street for another narrower and dirtier still. I recall turning the corner to follow them.

  It seemed then that a great wave overwhelmed the city, and I was tossed with many another among rushing waters. I could not breathe this dark water, and indeed I could scarcely breathe the air of the strand on which it left me at last; but it seemed I had no need to. I got to my feet, my body hardly heavier than a child's, and stared about with unbelieving eyes at the immense cavern in which I stood.

  Its shadowed ceiling was as remote as the highest mountain peak. Through it here and there streamed vagrant silver light, much as one sometimes sees the sun thrust golden fingers through the chinks of a stormy sky; it did little more than emphasize the general gloom.

  If the cavern was lofty, its height was as nothing to its breadth. In desolate plains, barren hills, and sullen meres, it stretched on, mile upon mile, in every direction, until at last all was lost in darkness. During the whole time I spent there, I never so much as glimpsed a bird, or a single bat, or indeed a beast of any kind, though once or twice I crossed their watery tracks, dim prints deeply impressed in the soft clay. Here and there, however, I saw wandering human figures, bent, naked, and alone.

  I called to some. When none responded, I set out after the nearest, an elderly man whose painful, shuffling gait gave clear evidence that I would quickly overtake him. "Who are you, wise one?" I inquired, feeling it would be best to make some friendly overture before asking where this cavern was and how I could get out of it.

  "I am myself," he grumbled, "just as you are yourself. Go. Leave me in peace." />
  "But what's your name?" I insisted.

  He shook his head and shuffled forward. He would not meet my eye.

  "I am..." I found that I could not complete the thought. Frantically, I searched my memory. "I'm called the mercenary," I said at last. "There's a statue—a lion with a man's face—that knows my name."

  For the first time, he glanced at me. "Give me your hand." He clasped it between his own, which were as cold as snow. "You are not wholly gone," he told me.

  I said at once that I would leave if my presence disturbed him.

  "No, stay. When I lived, I was called Gortys. That is how we speak here, though it was not truly I that lived. The part of me which lived is now dead, and what you see is the part that never lived, hence cannot die."

  I tried to draw my hand away; his freezing grasp had grown painful. "The child called me master," I said, "the one-handed man Latro, as I told you."

  "I will come with you." He took my arm.

  Some distance from us was a man wrestling a boulder almost as large as himself. I saw him squat, get his fingers under it, and lift it nearly upright before it escaped his grasp and fell. Having nothing better to say, I asked who he was and what he was trying to do.

  "He is a king," the old man told me. "Do you see that hill over there?"

  I nodded.

  "Sisyphus must roll his stone to the summit and leave it there. While it remains in place, he will be released from his torment."

  I watched him spit on his hands, wipe them on his thighs, and lift the stone again. "Who'll release him?"

  "The god who condemned him."

  I led the old man over to him, and it was a long and weary distance indeed, for the floor of that vast cavern was streaked with dark gorges too broad to leap that could not be seen until they gaped at our feet; most held sunken streams and were lined with slimy stones.

  When at last we reached the toiling king, it seemed that he had advanced his boulder by no more than three strides. He was as naked as the old man whose icy fingers still clasped my arm, though his body was smeared with the ocher mud of the place; and his cunning face was beaded with sweat and sagging with fatigue.

  "Are you permitted to accept help?"

  He shook his head impatiently and bent again to his stone. "What would you want for your help?"

  "Nothing," I told him, "but perhaps two of us could do it."

  My hands were already on the boulder as I spoke. Together we rolled it forward, though it twisted in our grasp as though its center leaped within it. Dirty and wet already, my chiton tore as I heaved away; I tore it off and tossed it aside. In that moment the stone, which we had then rolled nearly halfway up the hill, slid from the king's grip.

  I caught it, though I cannot tell how; and in an agony of frustration lifted it clear of the mud. Every joint in my body creaked, and it seemed that every bone was about to snap, but I staggered to the hilltop with it and slammed it down, embedding it in the soft soil around the spring.

  For a moment it trembled there, like an egg about to hatch; then it split. The report was deafening, the rush of light from it blinding. I reeled and fell.

  As I lay on my side in the half-frozen mud, I saw the faces of the black man and the Babylonian girl within the stone—faces wreathed in flames. The black man shouted something I could not understand and extended his hand to me. I helped the king rise, and together we clambered up and into the narrow, fetid alley I recalled.

  The Babylonian had ten thousand questions, none clear to me thanks to my bewilderment and her accent. She and the black man held blazing torches. I took hers from her and dropped it into the hole from which the king and I had clambered.

  For a moment I glimpsed age-blackened masonry, bones, a green sword, and armor rotten with verdigris; but soil from the alley was already sliding into the hole. I felt the ground give way beneath my feet and stepped hurriedly back. A crack shot up the wall above the hole. The Babylonian screamed, and the king and the black man pulled me away. With a roar like the storm's, the entire wall fell. We fled, coughing and wiping our eyes to free them from its choking dust.

  The black man and the Babylonian—her name is Bittusilma—came to tell me they are married. When I raised my eyebrows, she explained that she is going with the black man, who wants to return to his home in Nysa. She will leave him when they reach Babylon, or come near it.

  The black man spoke to her then, and she said, "He thought the chief man in your party wouldn't let me go with you, but he says he won't refuse now. He says you're his friend. You have to insist that both of us be allowed to come."

  I promised to do my best.

  "I was married to a captain," she told me. "He was killed here last year—then I couldn't get away. Hepta Leones wishes me to tell you I'm his third wife." [Usually translated, but here in the original Greek, perhaps to indicate Bittusilma's careful pronunciation.—GW]

  Proudly the black man held up three fingers.

  I questioned her about the pit in the alley. She said she and the black man had lain together for a long time; that was when they agreed to marry. They thought I was waiting outside. When they found me gone, they made torches with which to search the alley. I asked what had happened to me, wishing to hear how she would explain all she had seen. She said that when the king and I had entered the alley, the roof of a vault, "one forgotten perhaps for many years," had given way.

  I should say here, too, that I spoke much with the king while we walked back to this house. It was he, he said, who had built the first tower upon the hill, thus founding this city, which he calls Ephyra. He described it.

  He asked whether I knew of Asopus the river god; and I, not wishing to appear ignorant, told him I did. This river god, the king said, had ever been his friend. He is not a great god like the Twelve upon the mountain, and the king himself is—or so he says—a son of the storm king by a nymph whose father is Asopus; thus he and the god are related, and differ less in the respect due them than gods and mortals commonly do.

  When the river god's daughter Aegina had been stolen, the king had witnessed it. He told the river god where the girl had been taken, and asked in return for a spring at the foot of his tower so that he and his men might never lack water during a lengthy siege—thus he was punished as he was. He told me that he had always hoped the river god would remember him and find some way to help him. He thought I was the aid the river god had sent. He asked what reward had been promised me, and I was forced to tell him that if I had been sent by the god—or anyone—I was not aware of it.

  "I never gave anything away while I was among you," he said sadly, "and anyone who wished my help could have it—at a price. You have seen the riches I gathered by it."

  Bittusilma, the Babylonian, happened to overhear this and looked around. The king saluted her, whispering to me, "I know my own breed. If she plays you false, I'll ask them for leave to make her suffer for it." I do not know to whom he referred.

  That was when we came to the house and found the soldiers from Riverland terrorizing everyone.

  THIRTY-TWO

  For the Second Meal

  WE HAVE HALTED HERE NEAR, the lake. Though we did not leave the city early, we put in a hard morning—even the black man rode on the cart before it was done—and ate the first meal long after the usual time. We did not go far after that, and Themistocles has chosen to stop here, where a cool wind blows from the water and there are good facilities for travelers. As we walked, Io talked of the hauntings last night, which seem to have disturbed everyone. I have read about the theater and how I assisted the king, but it seemed I did not write much about them; thus I have been anxious to speak with Pasicrates or Simonides, and when we sat to eat the second meal, I contrived to sit between them. Had Simonides or Themistocles told me to take a lower place, I would have, of course; but if Pasicrates had done it, we would have had words. No one did.

  "This is the lake," Simonides remarked, "at which Heracles killed so many monstrous birds."

&n
bsp; This interested the black man, who asked (through his wife) whether these were the same birds that visit his own country and war against the small men of the south.

  Before Simonides could reply, Pasicrates announced proudly that this Heracles was an ancestor of his. It seems that he is related on his mother's side to the Agid royal family. "But I can recount these family matters for you anytime," he said to the black man's wife. "Ask your husband whether he has seen the creatures himself."

  The black man nodded and spoke to his wife, who translated. "He has seen them flying over, and once he saw one some children killed."

  Everyone except Pasicrates and the black man laughed loudly at that. Pasicrates was very angry, I think. Through his wife, the black man said seriously, "Sometimes these birds attack our children. We think it's because they think our children are the small men of the south—that's the reason every boy in my land carries his own little spear. The long beaks of the birds are like spears themselves, and their necks are very long, too. They strike like snakes, and because they can fly, they're formidable enemies, though they won't often stay to fight a warrior. They fly very high—far beyond the reach of our arrows. If this man Heracles killed many, he was our friend."

  Everyone wanted to talk of something else then, I think, so I asked Pasicrates whether he had been disturbed by the ghosts, as Io had.

  He nodded. "I was awakened by someone's screaming—one of Adeimantus's daughters, I think. I sprang from my bed and found myself face-to-face with a tall man who had a barbed spear and a big shield. I remember thinking—even then—that it was exactly like the one on the wall; it had the same horizontal stripe. The man thrust at me..."

  Pasicrates fell silent, staring at the stump of his missing hand. Possibly I was mistaken, but it seemed to me that he went pale. At last he muttered, "It isn't much of a ghost story, I'm afraid, but then I didn't make it up. He jabbed at me with his spear, as I was about to say. Then spear and shield dropped to the floor. When I got a light for my lamp, I saw they were the ones that had been hanging on the wall of my room. I won't tell anyone about this back in Rope. They'd laugh at it, just as all of you laughed at the slaughter of the Stymphalian birds, which has occupied so many great poets and artists. But there may be more to it than appears—again, like the birds."