Killer of Men (23 page)

Diomedes turned to run, but Kylix tripped him. Before he could get to his feet, I was on him.

Archi was recovering, although he was white as Athenian leather. ‘I killed him!’ he said. And then, ‘I killed him!’

‘If you so much as touch me, my father will have you ripped apart by dogs!’ Diomedes said. ‘Don’t touch me – I might be polluted by a family of prostitutes!’

He was a fool. We really should have killed him.

I grabbed his nose between my thumb and forefinger and broke it with a vicious twist. I’d seen a slave do it to another slave in the pits. ‘Bring your dogs,’ I said.

Archi kicked him in the groin while he writhed in the muck, his nose pouring blood. He kicked him quite a few times. In fact, it was then I discovered that my master wasn’t any nicer than I was.

We beat him pretty badly. I’ll save you the details. Except that when we were finished, we took a jar of Briseis’s paint and tied him to a pillar in the portico of Aphrodite and painted ‘I suck dicks for free’ on his back while he wept. Why the portico of Aphrodite? That’s where men sold their bodies in Ephesus. The boys cleared out while we did our work. They knew a revenge beating when they saw one.

We sneaked back into the house by the slaves’ entrance. We thought, I think, that if we weren’t caught coming in, Hipponax would swear to our innocence. Or some such adolescent foolishness.

The whole house was dark – it was late. Dinner had been served, and we’d no doubt been missed – so much for our so-called plan. And we were both covered in mud and blood and worse.

I got Archi past the kitchen, where Darkar was talking in a low voice, and to his room. ‘I’ll get you water,’ I said.

‘Bathhouse,’ he said. ‘I need to wash my soul.’ But then he smiled. It wasn’t a boy’s smile, or a nice smile. But it was a brother’s smile, not a master’s. ‘You need to be clean. If you’re caught, they’ll kill you. Me? I can take the weight.’

Frankly, I agreed. ‘I’ll bathe first, then,’ I said. I slipped out of the door and down the hall into the kitchen. Cook was leaning on the counter, talking to Darkar.

Darkar understood everything as soon as he saw me. ‘Burn it,’ he said, pointing at my chlamys. I dropped it in the kitchen fire and Cook piled wood on top, squandering shavings and bark prepared for fire-starting to make the blood-sodden thing burn. All my extra work and helpfulness and popularity had come to this – Darkar and Cook conspiring to keep me alive.

‘I need a bath, and then Archi needs one,’ I said.

Darkar squinted at my use of the young master’s name.

‘He says it’s death if I’m caught, but mere annoyance for him. So I bathe first.’ I pulled my chiton over my head – a work chiton of raw wool, and no loss to anyone. Kylix was in the kitchen by then, and I handed it to him. ‘Go and give this to the ragman,’ I said. ‘Better yet, just throw it on his pile.’

Darkar nodded.

‘Bath is hot,’ Cook put in. ‘You got the bastard?’ This is the ultimate sign of a good house – the slaves are loyal to the master’s revenge. Like the
Odyssey
.

I told them where he was. ‘They won’t find him until morning,’ I said. ‘Maybe some Spartan visitor will come and bugger him!’ That got a nervous laugh.

The kitchen was filling up with slaves. I hadn’t told Kylix not to spill to his friends – he was already spreading the whole tale. He told it to the slaves at the fountain when he took the cloak to the ragman’s pile, too. That’s the world of slaves. Word gets around.

We hadn’t considered that.

Darkar shut them up and pushed me out of the door. ‘You what?’ he asked as he pushed me towards the bathhouse. ‘
You what?
’

‘I told you,’ I said.

Darkar was alone with me in total darkness. The bath was like that – no windows. He smacked me, hard, in the head. ‘I thought you’d have the master beat him. Not you,
boy
.’

‘Ouch!’ Lo, the mighty warrior. The steward hurt me more than the Thracians had.

‘You will be killed. Do I have to remind you that you are a slave? You scout for him, you take a blow for him, but you do not strike a free man!’ Darkar slapped me again, this time at random, because he couldn’t see any better than I could. Then, after a pause in the dark, ‘I think you’ll have to run or die.’

With that, he left me to the bath.

It was a big oak tub, the kind where men crush the grapes at harvest time when they don’t have stone basins. It leaked slowly, but it held enough water for two to bathe together. Archi and I had shared it many times but, covered in blood, a man doesn’t really want to touch anything much. Different from a feast-day bath.

There was pumice and oil, and I worked hard. I knew I had blood under my nails and in my hair. Even then – even as a slave – I had long hair.

I was washing my hair when the door opened. The bath was in a low shed and that door let a little light in from the kitchen windows, so I saw Penelope’s robe fall to the floor. Then she was in the bath with me and water sloshed over the sides and on to the floor.

If you imagine that I was going to take this moment to protest about her faithlessness while her naked skin was under my hand, you don’t know what it is to be young. I put my mouth on hers before she could speak, and she laughed into my mouth – not something she had done before. Perhaps I should have cared that she was unfaithful to my master – and now, I think, my friend – Archi.

Instead, I half stood and half sat with her astride me, and we kissed and kissed, her breasts against my chest and the hot water up to our hair. Her kisses were clumsy at first, and then warmer and deeper. My hands roved her and then she planted herself on me – her choice, and perhaps I had a qualm, or a suspicion that this was wrong, because I remember that I hadn’t pushed into her.

It makes me smile, though. Hah! The gods are often kind, and Aphrodite chose to send me to Tartarus with a glimpse of heaven. When we were finished, we kissed, and kissed, and kissed.

Darkar called my name from the back door. Penelope slipped out of the tub, picked up her robe and vanished – not a difficult trick in the dark. I was sore and happy and suddenly clear-headed, and I had the taste of cloves in my mouth. I got over the side of the tub and thought that on a normal night there’d be trouble from Cook for making such a mess of the bathhouse. Then I grabbed the olive oil, doused myself and strigiled as fast as I could.

I went through the kitchen as clean as a newborn. Darkar tried to slow me down, but I passed him and went into the hall.

Penelope was crying in Archi’s arms. Archi was still covered in blood and crap, and so was Penelope.

And her hair wasn’t wet.

A chill went through me like a rainy wind in winter blowing across my soul. In my nose, I discovered the scent of mint and jasmine. The hair began to stand up on the back of my neck.

Archi let go of Penelope. ‘You look worse, not better.’

Penelope looked at me. ‘You’ll both be killed,’ she said.

Oh, Aphrodite. Oh, Mistress of Animals. Who had I just been with in the bath?

‘I am afraid,’ I admitted to Archi. I just didn’t tell him why. ‘You must go and bathe.’

‘Stay where you are,’ Hipponax said from behind me.

I assume that Darkar told him. We were young and stupid. We had not thought through the consequences. And the game of revenge has no rules.

Hipponax looked at his son. Archilogos met his eyes. They were the same height, by then. ‘What have you done?’ he asked.

Archi shrugged – I’ve mentioned what I think of this as a gesture from child to parent, eh?

‘What have you done?’ he shouted.

Archi smiled. ‘What needed doing,’ he said. ‘Diomedes called my sister a whore and we made him one.’

Well, not precisely, but it made a good line.

And then Hipponax surprised me. I should have known – he was always a good man and a poet. He understood rage and lust and the human and the divine. He stood back from the doorway, so that Darkar could enter.

‘You must go away,’ he said. ‘Tonight. Now. I will have a ship manned.’

Then there was a flurry of packing and crying. Archi took his panoply and his sea bag, and I took mine. He went for a bath, and Hipponax took me aside.

‘Heraclitus tells me you swore an oath to protect my son,’ he said.

I nodded. I raised my eyes to his.

‘Here is your freedom. I expect you to keep that oath. As does Heraclitus. Until the end of the war. You stand by him. But as a free man, Diomedes will have to try you, at least. I wrote out your manumission for yesterday. A friend will witness it in the morning – as if it had been done yesterday.’ He shook his head. ‘I should have freed you for what you did with the Persian,’ he said. ‘Is all my family cursed?’

I stood silent, awed by his generosity, and conscious of what I had just done in the bath. The furies were laughing. And sharpening their nails.

But I was
free
.

It was worse when Archi went to say goodbye to his sister. Worse because she wept, real tears without anger. She loved her brother better than the rest of us, I think.

And worse because her hair was wet.

She looked at me several times, and her look was one of calm triumph. She was
beautiful
.

Thugater, I have never doubted the presence of the gods. In that moment – in that look from that damp-haired girl – the long, dark shaft and the barbed point of the arrow that comes from Aphrodite’s bow went through me, and the pain was never sweeter. Even when Hipponax announced to the whole oikia that I had been freed – even when all the slaves crowded around me, and Penelope took my hand and gave it a tentative squeeze, all I could see were her eyes, that glance. I see it still.

I’m an old fool. Forget me. Imagine what it was like for poor Penelope, honey. Her free lover was leaving her. Her chance of freedom was walking away. And Archi said nothing. I think Hipponax might have freed her, had Archi asked. But he didn’t. He wasn’t bad, my master. Just a self-centred ephebe who thought he’d just made himself a hero.

The Pole Star was high, and the oarsmen, grumpy and drunken, had been roused from their brothels to their oars, but by luck, the trade trireme
Thetis
was supposed to leave the north beach with the sun anyway, bound for Lesbos with a cargo of Cyprian copper and some finished armour for the gentlemen of Methymna. We walked down through the town in the first light and boarded, Kylix carrying our gear. For all we knew, Diomedes was still tied to his pillar. I wondered if by putting him there, I had made sacrifice to Aphrodite, so that she granted me – Briseis.

As the sea wind blew my hair, I let myself think that I had kissed Briseis in the bath, and – what word suffices? Did I ‘possess’ her? Never. If anyone was the owner, it was she. Did I ‘take’ her? No. Men’s words for sex are often foolish, you’ll find, honey. Briseis was more like a goddess than a woman.

And then, as the good salt wind blew over me and the rain squalls danced to the north, towards where Miltiades might be rising from his bed, it suddenly struck me.

I was free.

Archi was next to me at the bow-rail, over the box where marines might ride in a fight. Today it was full of bull hides for aspides. Every item between our benches had to do with war. The world was going to war, and I was free.

‘I’m free!’ I said.

Archi punched me in the back. ‘You are,’ he said. ‘Will you – leave me at Methymna?’

It is odd, looking back across the years at that boy – oh, aye, I’d have put my fist in a man’s face for calling me a boy then, but I was, and my actions shout it. But in that moment, I knew that I was free – and I had no idea who I was or what I wanted.

No, that’s not right, either. What I wanted was Briseis. Hah. More wine. That’s all I wanted, and all I could keep in front of my eyes. And then there was the little matter of my oath to Artemis. To defend Hipponax and Archilogos. For all that home – Plataea – had begun to seem sweeter, the sudden, heady unwatered wine of freedom washed that dream away.

I shook my head. I couldn’t tell Archi that I loved his sister. ‘No,’ I said. ‘I promised your father I’d watch you for a while.’

Archi smiled. ‘Well, that’s not so bad, I guess,’ he said, but his smile said it was anything but bad.

I bent and started to look at the armour we were carrying. The breastplates were bronze and they were unfinished, but they had fancy decoration worked in, the waist and closure left undone so that the final fitting could be made by a local smith. I shook my head.

‘Mediocre work,’ I said. ‘I want better. I want a panoply. I assume we’re going to fight the Persians!’

Archi grinned. We embraced.

It sounded like fun. We were young.

11

I’ve already said that I think Lesbos is the prettiest island in Ionia, and I still think Methymna is the handsomest town in Hellas. I always swore that if Plataea sent me into exile, I’d go and be a citizen in Methymna.

She’s no Ephesus. Methymna sits high above the sea, yet the sea is at her doorstep. Methymna is where Achilles landed and took the first Briseis as his war bride. The beach is black and the town rises to a high citadel on the acropolis that has foundation stones laid by the old people – or giants. The town itself climbs the hills and sits below the fortress where the lord lives. That fortress is the only reason the men of Methymna are not serfs of Mytilene. It is almost impregnable. Indeed, only Achilles has ever taken it.

We beached on the black gravel and kissed the first good ground. The beach was full of hulls – twenty, stretching along to the east, each black ship with its own fire and two hundred men, so that the beach itself was like a city.

I went to a shrine to Aphrodite and said a prayer that Briseis would not quicken. Archi found the customers who had ordered his goods and began putting things ashore. It was early afternoon before we had the benches clear. We sold every hide we brought and every ingot of copper that hadn’t been ordered. I saw that Archi had kept a full ingot back.

I raised an eyebrow and pointed.

‘Your armour,’ he said. ‘You can pay an armourer and have your metal, too.’

I clasped his hand. ‘Thanks,’ I said. I couldn’t think of a jibe worth giving. Then we climbed into the town, up the steep streets, some with more steps than a temple, and explored, leaving flowers at the shrines. Later we went back to the beach to meet the other shipowners.

The men on the beach were Athenian. When they learned we were from Ephesus, one of their helmsmen came up to us and joined us where we’d started a fire to feed our rowers. Heraklides was a short, powerful man with sandy blond hair and a no-nonsense manner. He looked at our helmsman and spoke to him, and our man sent him to Archi. They clasped hands and Archi had me fetch a cup of wine. Slavery doesn’t just fall away from you.

By the time I’d returned, they’d exchanged all the formulas of guest-friendship. Captains were always careful that way. When you meet a man on a beach, you want to be sure of him.

I handed them both wine, and then defiantly poured my own. Archi smiled.

‘Doru, this is Heraklides of Athens, senior helmsman of Aristides or Athens. He commands three ships.’ Archi was excited.

‘Arimnestos of Plataea,’ I said. ‘Son of Technes.’

‘Technes the war-captain of Plataea?’ the older man asked. His clasp tightened. ‘Aye, you have the look, lad. Every man who stood his ground against the fucking Euboeans knows your father.’

I wept. On the spot, without preamble, as if I’d been struck. I was free, and on the first beach I landed as a free man, I met men who knew my home and honoured my father. Heracles was with me – even in the name of our new friend.

‘I was there,’ I said, perhaps more coldly than was warranted. ‘I saw him fall.’ Suddenly I was chilled on the beach. And afraid, as if it was all happening again.

Archi looked at me as if he’d never seen me before.

‘You were there?’ Heraklides asked. He wasn’t exactly suspicious, but he gave me a queer look. ‘He died. There was a fight over his body. Aye,’ he said, peering at me. ‘I remember you. You took a blow, eh? We sent you home in a wagon. My uncle, Miltiades, said you were to get special treatment. We sent you home with your cousin. Cimon? Simon?’

‘Simonalkes?’ I said, and a terrible suspicion came to me. ‘I fell at the bridge when they tried to strip Pater’s armour,’ I said. ‘When I awoke, I was a slave in a pit.’

That took him aback. He looked at Archi. Archi shook his head. ‘I’ve never even heard this story,’ he said. ‘We just freed him, the day before yesterday.’ He looked at me. ‘Why didn’t you tell me?’

I drank some wine. I knew Pater was dead – but there is knowing and knowing.

Heraklides shrugged. ‘Aye, I too was a slave for a year when pirates took my ship. What’s to tell? Masters don’t give a rat’s shit, eh?’ He nodded at me. ‘Thing is, you’re free now. Miltiades will want to know. He was – an admirer of your father, eh?’

‘I’ve met Lord Miltiades,’ I said. But I had to sit. My knees grew weak, and down I sat on the sand, unmanned.

It’s all very well to say I never mourned Pater. In a way, that’s all crap. Cold bastard that he was, he was my
father
. And the next thought that came unbidden – unworthy – was that the farm was mine, and the forge. Mine, not anyone else’s.

I needed to get my arse home and see what was what. Because if they’d sent me home with Cousin Simonalkes – why, then, what if the bastard had sold me into slavery himself? That thought came to me from a dark fog, as if the furies were signalling my duty through a cloud of raven feathers. What if he was sitting on my farm, eating my barley?

I stood up so quickly that I bumped my head against Archi’s chin where he’d leaned down to comfort me.

I think I’d have gone for home that very night – that hour – if I could have walked. Or – and the gods were there – if there hadn’t been war. But war was all around me, and Ares was king and lord of events.

I took to Heraklides very quickly. Most men who’ve been slaves never admit to it – you flinch every time I mention it, honey. He had it worse than me – pirates and a lot of ill treatment – but it never broke him, and you’ll get to know him as the story goes on. He was a few years older than me, but young to be a helmsman already, and getting a name as one of the best. He wasn’t really any relation of Miltiades at all, but his father’s brother had died in the family service and that made them like family – Athenians are like that.

The Athenians were on their way to Miletus, because Aristagoras had convinced them that the town was ready to revolt. That evening, over roast pig, I met Aristagoras for the first time. A few weeks ago we’d called him the traitor of the Ionians – running off to Athens, revolting against the King of Kings – and now I was standing behind him on a beach of black sand and toasting the success of the war.

He was not the leader I would have chosen. He was handsome enough, and he pretended to be a solid man, a leader of men, bluff and honest, but there was something hollow about him. I saw it that night on the beach – even with everything at the high tide of success, he looked like a stoat peering around for a bolthole.

He promised them all the moon. Greeks can be fools when they hear a good dream, and Ionian independence was like that. What did Ionians need with independence? They were hardly ‘oppressed’ by the Medes and the Persians. The taxes laid by the King of Kings were nothing –
nothing
next to the taxes that the Delian League lays on them now, honey.

More wine.

You’d have thought that Persians had come to Methymna and raped every virgin. The men on the beach were ready for war. They had their own ships, and they’d already met with their tyrant and held an assembly. Methymna manned only three ships, but they were all joining the Athenians, and so were the eight ships from Mytilene. And you knew, back then, that if the men of Methymna and Mytilene were on the same side, something was in the wind.

But what really excited the Athenians was that Ephesus – mighty Ephesus – had sent the satrap packing.

‘We could have this war over in a month,’ the Athenian leader said.

He too was no Miltiades. In fact, at the ripe old age of seventeen, I looked at the Athenians – good men, every one – and the rest and thought that we were forming a mighty fleet, but we didn’t have a man as good as Hipponax – or Artaphernes or Cyrus, for that matter – to lead.

Even a seventeen-year-old is right from time to time.

I never did get that panoply made, and that ingot of copper sat in our hull as ballast – well, you’ll hear soon enough – until she went to the bottom. None of the smiths in Methymna were armour-makers. They made good things – their bowls are still famous – but none had ever shaped the eyeholes on a Corinthian. I did buy an aspis, though – not a great one, but a decent one.

We took on a cargo of men – men of Methymna. We took the hoplites who hadn’t made the grade to go on the town’s three ships. Archi counted as a lord of the town – he was a property owner there, and his mother’s people were citizens, so they treated us as relatives.

A trireme can take about ten marines – more if you don’t plan to do a lot of rowing, fewer if you plan to stay at sea for days and days. When you fit a fleet, you pick and choose your marines, at least in Ionia – it’s different in Athens, as I may have cause to explain later, if I live to tell that part. Even little Methymna had three hundred hoplites. Her ships rowed away with thirty of them. We took another ten and left good men on the beach. Then we cruised south, weathered the long point by the hot springs and beached at Mytilene. We picked up ships there and drank wine. It was more like a party than a war.

The next night we were on Chios. I had rowed all day and felt like a god. The rowers were all paid men, but one was sick with a flux and I wasn’t proud. I was free.

Heraklides approved and offered me a place on his ship.

‘Hard to be a free man with your former master,’ he said. He made a motion that suggested that he assumed we were lovers. No, I won’t show you!

I laughed. ‘I swore an oath,’ I said. One thing all Greeks respect, from Sparta to Thebes and all the way to Miletus, is an oath.

‘Will Miltiades join us?’ I asked.

He rubbed his beard. ‘Heh,’ he said. ‘Good question. Miltiades is fighting his own war in the Chersonese. You might say he’s been fighting the Persians for five years.’

‘In Ephesus, Heraklides, we called him a bandit,’ I said.

Heraklides grinned. ‘Aye. Well, one man’s pirate is another man’s freedom-fighter, right enough.’ He laughed. ‘And you can drop the formality and call me Herk. Everyone does.’

That gave me something to think about. Miltiades was a soldier – a real soldier. And he wasn’t coming. And Herk’s friendship was worth something.

The next night, we were on another Chian beach. The Chians had a lot of ships, and a lot of men, and they were powerful and had never been conquered. They were going to have seventy or eighty hulls to put in the water. The Athenians were delighted, and decided to wait. The local lord, Pelagius, declared a day of games on the beach, and offered prizes. Really good prizes, so that even Archi wanted them. There was a full panoply for the winner. Spectacular stuff – a scale shirt, the smith’s nightmare, six months to make. The aspis was fair, nothing spectacular, but with a worked bronze face to it, and the helmet was fine, although not as good as the shirt and nothing on my father’s work.

There was a race in armour – just becoming the fashion, then – as well as a fight with swords, wrestling and javelin-throwing.

I was a free man, and Archi encouraged me, so we walked down the beach to where Lord Pelagius had his ship pulled in by the stern. We wrote our names on potsherds while his steward watched us, and the lord himself came up – an old man, as old as I am now, but sound.

‘Now, there’s a pair of handsome boys, that the gods love to watch compete. You’ll race?’ he asked Archi. Archi had the best body of anyone our age. He had surpassed me in size by a finger’s breadth, and his muscles had a sharp edge that mine never had.

We both blushed at such praise. ‘We’ll enter all the contests,’ Archi said.

The old nobleman smiled but he shook his head. ‘Not the swordplay, lads. That’s for men.’

Archi nodded, but that was my best event, I thought in my youthful arrogance. I spluttered.

‘Fancy yourself a swordsman, do you?’ the old man asked. He peered at me. ‘Well, you look old enough to take a cut. If there’s a place left, I’ll put you in. But we don’t fight past the first cut, and if you die, or kill a man, it’s your fault. We expect careful men, not wild boys.’

I blushed again, and nodded. ‘I’ve trained since I was ten, lord,’ I said.

He looked at me again. ‘Really?’ he said, and smiled. ‘That might be worth seeing.’

Archi put an elbow in my ribs as we turned away. ‘Trained since you were ten? The gods will curse you for a liar, my friend. Even though you are the best sword I know.’

Archi was a typical master. He’d never asked where I came from or what I’d done. Never. I loved him like a second older brother – but he never knew me well.

We walked back along the beach, and I was pleased to see men looking at us and, I think, taking our measure. Games are good. Competition is good. That’s how men measure themselves and others.

The games were still a few days away, though. So I walked around the promontory to exercise alone. I had a sword of my own, although nothing like what I wanted. It was short and heavy, a meat cleaver. I wanted a longer thrusting blade, because that’s what I’d learned with, but Ares had not seen fit to help me.

When I’d worked up a healthy sweat and swum it off in the ocean, I walked back. Slaves cooked for us, and that made me think, every time I took bread from a boy, that I was lucky – and free. Honey, once you’re a slave, you never forget it.

Anyway, Heraklides came and sat with me.

‘How many ships does Athens have?’ I asked my new friend.

‘Mmm,’ he said. ‘A hundred?’ he answered, before spotting a pretty Chian girl up the beach. I let him go.

Athens had a hundred ships, and Miltiades alone, or with his father, had another twenty. Then there were other Athenian noble families with ten or fifteen ships of their own.

Athens was half-committed to the Ionians. Not even half. They sent a tithe of their strength. I had spent enough evenings listening to Artaphernes to believe him when he said that the weight of Persia would crush the Greeks like so many lice between his fingers. He always said this in sadness, never in boastfulness.

I looked at our fleet, and it seemed very great to me. We filled the beach at Chios, and by the time the levy came in and all the Chian nobles and traders brought their warships, we had a hundred hulls – I counted them myself.