Killer of Men (12 page)

Miltiades came to Pater with a wagon. He had a dozen Athenians with him, important men with Tyrian purple in their cloaks. Pater was eating a bowl of eggs with a scrap of stale bread.

‘Technes of Plataea, all Athens mourns your losses.’ Miltiades bowed.

He had a priestess of Athena with him, and she was dressed, even at that hour, in the whitest chiton I’d ever seen, with gold thread in the hems. Bumpkin that I was, I couldn’t take my eyes off her.

Pater had a mouth full of egg. He swallowed. His eyes were red from weeping, and he wore a damp
chitoniskos
of linen that had once been off white and neatly pleated, and was now grey with age and shapeless. There were slaves in our force who dressed better than Pater.

He rose to his feet. ‘I was not chosen in the assembly to lead the men of Plataea,’ he said formally. ‘But until the assembly chooses another, I accept your words on behalf of all the men of our city.’

Miltiades spread his arms wide. It was interesting to watch him be a public man – I had only seen him at close range. He was about twenty-five then. Just coming into his powers.

‘Plataea brought one eighth of the force we had to face the Peloponnesians,’ Miltiades said. ‘We offer Plataea one quarter of all that we took with our spears, and we call you the bravest of the allies.’

The wind ruffled their cloaks. Pater said nothing, but the men of Plataea behind him were gathering, and they began to shout – approval, almost a cheer. Then the priestess stepped forward and she chanted a prayer to the Lady, and all the men present joined her. Then she purified us, for killing. She was good – her voice was gentle and firm, and every man felt better for her words, and the spirit of the goddess that we call the Lady and Athenians call Athena was on all of us.

Miltiades invited Pater and Myron to attend him at a meeting of the commanders. I found Pater my best chlamys, and I put it on him with a gold pin from the loot. Pater was above such things, but Myron gave me a nod of approval. No one wanted Pater to look like a ragman in front of the Athenians.

The two of them came back before the sun was high, and their faces were strained, and Pater had black marks in the corners of his eyes. Pater ignored my questions, and sent me and Hermogenes and every other boy we could find to assemble all the Plataeans.

There were only a thousand hoplites and another thousand boys and slaves. We assembled before the birds stopped singing. We were on the hilltop by the old fort, and Pater and Myron carried spears, as if they, jointly, were Speakers. Pater nodded at Myron, and Myron held up his spear.

‘Men of Plataea!’ he said. He was leather-pale. He’d lost quite a bit of blood, and he walked carefully where the Athenian doctor had burned the wound near his groin. He might have been a walking dead man, if the deadly archer willed it. But Myron had the courage that allows a man to go about his business, even with a wound. ‘The archon died serving the city. We have no new archon and we have no
strategos
.’

‘Who cares?’ someone called. ‘Let’s go home. We can debate in the assembly!’

‘Men of Plataea,’ Myron said. His voice was quiet, but men were silent to listen to him. ‘The army of Thebes is a day’s march away, and the men of Athens call on us to stay and fight.’

That was greeted with a wave of grumbles and muttering.

Pater stood forth. He held up his own spear. ‘Don’t be fools!’ he shouted. ‘We fight them tomorrow with Athens by our side, or we face them in a month at home, alone.’ That shut them up. Then Pater nodded. ‘We stopped Sparta!’ he said. ‘What has Thebes got?’

Now they cheered. Everyone hated Thebes. Sparta was a noble and scary monster from travellers’ tales, but Thebes was the familiar enemy.

Myron pointed at Pater. ‘I move that Technes of the Corvaxae be strategos.’

They didn’t roar. Pater had none of the magnetism that can make men love you. But every hand went in the air.

Myron nodded to Pater. Pater pointed his spear at Myron. ‘I move that Myron of the house of Heracles be archon of the Plataeans until we stand in the assembly.’

And so it was done.

Before the day was another hour older, the shield-bearers were packing. We had donkeys now – dozens, as part of the spoils of the Peloponnesian camp. I was trying to figure out a foreign pack frame on a stubborn beast when Pater’s hand fell on my shoulder.

‘Take your brother’s armour,’ he said. ‘And take Hermogenes as your shield-bearer. You will stand with the men tomorrow. No more playing with the boys.’

And just like that, I was a hoplite.

5

We marched east, across Attica, and the Thebans retired before us, confused by this turn of events. I sweated in my brother’s armour, and Pater adjusted it at an Attic forge, borrowing tools to change the waist of my brother’s bell corslet and the pinch of his greaves. His helmet fitted me very well.

Pater wept while he worked.

By the third day, we thought that the Thebans would melt away, and then we had word that there was yet another army coming – from Euboea. The Euboeans hated Athens. Truth to tell, Athens is arrogant and most cities hate her.

Then Miltiades’ father showed why he was a strategos to be reckoned with. He woke us four hours before dawn, and we left our fires burning and the slaves and boys to watch them, and we marched east and then north. Men who travelled said we were somewhere near Tanagra. I only knew that the weight of my dead brother’s arms, his panoply, was the same as the weight of a five-year-old girl, and I was carrying it over a mountain.

Miltiades the Elder had a good plan – to march around the Thebans and catch them napping, and force them to fight, cut off from the Euboeans. But the Thebans were no fools. They had spies and scouts, and their slaves probably traded food with our slaves. They knew we were coming, and they marched in the dark, too, determined to ambush us on the flanks of Mount Parnes. And as with most battles, neither plan bore the least resemblance to the mess that followed.

Plataeans were the left of the army, and this meant that we were the rearguard – the last men to march. Crossing the flank of Mount Parnes on goat tracks, we marched in double file – two wide. It took hours to go a few stades, and where I trudged, we seemed to stop more than we walked.

By the luck of tribe and farm, I walked next to Simon. No one had mentioned that he had run from the Spartans. I didn’t even
know
that he had run – only two or three men had broken, and while I was pretty sure he was one, he wore a plain old helmet with no crest and he had no blazon on the leather face of his shield – like most of our men. Now he walked beside me, and we did not talk.

He was much taller and broader than me. Indeed, I was thirteen, and too young to stand the storm of bronze, but I think that Pater felt that we needed to make up the holes in our phalanx. Who knows what he thought? He never discussed such stuff with me. At any rate, Simon was a head taller and much heavier with muscle. And in the dark, on the flanks of Parnes, I learned what he really was.

His spear-butt flashed in the moon and I ducked. And then he used his hip and almost pushed me off the trail – and off the mountain.

Calchas, dead Calchas, saved my life. Rough-housing with a bigger, stronger man had taught me many tricks. I swayed, armour and all, and got my feet planted. Simon kept right on walking, and the man in the file behind me cursed.

That was the first of three times he tried to trip me, and once I think he meant to put his spear-butt through my eye. But I was wary, and after the third time, someone in the file – we were all neighbours, and Myron’s Dionysius was right ahead of me – someone said something to our phylarch, old Epictetus, and he trotted back and asked Simon what he was doing.

Simon flashed me a smile. ‘I’m just clumsy,’ he said. ‘And this boy can’t really carry the weight of his panoply.’

Epictetus peered at me. I had my helmet up on my head and I was sweating like a deer bleeding out. I tried to grin.

‘Too heavy for you?’ he asked.

‘No,’ I said. ‘Simon’s a bastard.’

Epictetus shot him a glare. ‘Yep,’ he said. Most of our file laughed. ‘Watch yourself, Simon. I’m watching you.’

That’s when I think Simon decided to kill us. Right there on the mountain. Up until then, I think he just hated us quietly. But I called him a bastard, and old Epictetus agreed, and everyone laughed, and the fates spun.

We were the last. Miltiades and his tribe were the first. And the Thebans were waiting in ambush. It should have been a disaster. There’s no better position for a phalanx than catching your opponent strung out over a goat track.

But the Thebans moved late, and they were late straggling into their ambush site. Hoplites don’t usually ambush each other. Maybe they felt unmanly. Who knows what a Theban thinks? At any rate, they fucked it all up.

The result was that their men blundered into Miltiades in the dark. Instead of an ambush, we had a mob fight in the first light.

The first I knew was that the files started to move faster, and then they stopped, and then we could hear it – fighting. One battle made me an expert. But this didn’t sound like the fight with the Spartans. This sounded like Chaos come to earth, and it was.

Neither side ever got a phalanx formed. That’s what everyone remembers about the Battle of Parnes. Our files and theirs poured into each other in the scrubby, broken ground on the northern shoulder of the mountain, and the push of men behind kept adding fighters. It was so dark that, with your face inside your helmet, you couldn’t be sure of the man on your right or left unless you tapped their shield with your own. Twice, Epictetus stopped us without orders and formed our files up close. He was doing what he knew how to do – forming the block that would keep us safe. But both times the path soon narrowed to nothing again and we had to file off.

An hour after we first heard the fighting – exhausted with the fear of waiting and the fatigue of marching – we rounded a bend and saw the fight. The sun was a red ball on the horizon to the east, and we caught glimpses of the sea to the north as the trail climbed and dipped, and then the fight was right there, a spear’s throw away.

I could see Pater’s double plume. He was standing still, shield against his knees, arms crossed.

The valley was full of men locked in combat, and it was a swirl of death. Because the armies had never formed, no man had a front or a back, and there was no safety and no shield wall.

The Athenians were begging us to come on, COME ON! And still Pater looked out over the valley. I, for one, was in no hurry to plunge into that maelstrom.

And then Pater made his decision. I could see it in the set of his shoulders and the movement of his back. He made his decision and we were moving – not down into the battle, but across the hillside to the north. Pater began to run, and the files ran after him.

It might seem a simple thing, to lead a thousand men around a battle that is only two stades or so wide. One man can run the stade in the time another man sings a song, but a thousand men take a hundred times longer, or so it seems when the fate of your city rests on the outcome. And we were scared, honey. We’d been promised a stratagem and an easy fight, and this was chaos and death.

Pater ran north and the files followed him. Just over the brow of the low hill where you first see the polis at Tanagra in the distance, he turned west, halted and ordered the files to form. That was easy. He’d picked a piece of flat ground, and each file ran up, directed by their phylarch and Pater’s spear, and they halted to the left of the file before them, so that in the time it took the sun to rise a finger’s breadth, the phalanx was formed, minus the cowards and the men who couldn’t make the run.

I made it.

Simon didn’t. I wonder what he might have done had he made it to the front, but the run left him behind. About sixty men stayed in the rear. This always happens. So the phylarchs say a few words to the men who make it to the fight, and then they close the files.

Suddenly I was in the fourth rank. My hand was cold and clammy on Deer Killer. I had a heavy javelin to go with her, and that’s all I had. I had no sword. On the other hand, I had armour like the best men.

Epictetus put me in the fourth rank because, in his opinion, I was more fit for combat than the eight men behind me. He was right. But at the time I thought him a monster for putting me so close to the front.

I was one file from the far right. Bion was my file-leader, and Pater was about a spear’s length away when we closed our ranks and files in the
synaspismos
.

Then we sang the Paean. Usually men sing it before they charge, but not always. I don’t know what happened to the Paean at Oinoe – whether I have forgotten it, or whether we didn’t sing it. But I was
in
the phalanx at Parnes, and I remember singing, roaring my fear out inside the bronze helmet that my brother had died wearing.

In the closed ranks, you are three feet from the men on either side, so that the rim of your shield can just touch if you move to tap them – something men do all the time as they wait. You start a few feet from the men in front and behind, but as a fight goes on, everything closes in. Well, that’s what usually happens. You end up in a tight-packed mob that pushes together and sees only with the eyes of the front rank. In that fight, I had no idea what was happening in front of us from the moment that our files closed up. I could see Dionysius’s leather-clad back, and I could see Pater’s plumes and the rim of my own aspis.

We pushed forward.

We marched together to the sound of the Paean. We had a slight hill behind us and we went down the hill and then our front slammed into the fight. Friends? Enemies? The front of a phalanx has no allies. We went down into the fight, and the only sign I had that Pater was facing death was an increased pressure on my shield.

But they melted in front of us. I stepped over a man who was down. I looked down – hard enough in a helmet – and saw his eyes peeking over the rim of his shield, and the black blood on his legs. I let him live, and so did everyone else.

We started to plough through the maelstrom. Dust rose with the sun, and the battle was
not
ending. We pushed forward a step at a time, and I was hot and miserable, my spear held point-up so that it wouldn’t foul the men ahead of me. Sometimes the man behind me – a middle-aged farmer from two farms beyond us, a bitter man named Zotikos – pushed too hard, and I was sandwiched between the curved front of his aspis and the curved back of my own. I was too small for this, and it hurt.

Zotikos always apologized to me every time he slammed in. ‘Sorry, kid!’ he’d grunt. ‘No good at this shit!’ He was pale with fear – but he pushed.

I know – now – what happened in the front rank, but at the time I knew nothing except that Pater was alive, because I could see his plumes and hear his voice. And we should have been winning an easy victory – we were the only formed troops on the field, and the Thebans were outnumbered.

Maybe they were stubborn Boeotians, just like us.

Maybe the phalanx isn’t as important as men think. To be honest, I’ve seen unformed mobs stop a phalanx several times. Only Ares knows. We pushed forward and our front-rankers stabbed with their spears, Athenians rallied on our right and Thebans melted away, and then, suddenly, we stopped.

Calchas was right – it is the killers who are dangerous. The rest of war is very like a sport. Like pushing and pulling and spear-fencing all together. But when the killers come, it is nothing like a sport.

I don’t know who they were. A brotherhood? Some men who had trained together as boys? Or more likely, a band of aristocrats. They had good armour and they knew their business. Perhaps they were mercenaries. At any rate, they hit our phalanx when we were tired and lazy and confident that nothing would stand against us. Epictetus went down and, as I raised my head to look, Dionysius took a blow to the helmet and down he went.

And just like that, I was in the front rank, facing a killer. I had all the time it took him to push past Dionysius to see that he was clad from head to foot in bronze, with thigh guards and arm guards and knuckle guards like a professional, and he had a bronze-faced shield and a heavy spear and a double plume of red.

You must lock your shield with your neighbour’s, put your head down and refuse to take chances.
That’s what Calchas said.

When you are faced with a killer in the bronze storm, there are two things that tempt you. One is to run. That way lies instant death. The time to run has long passed when the man in bronze is at the end of your spear. The other temptation is to attack. This is a twin child born of the same parent – fear. You attack to prove to yourself that you are not afraid, and because you have no real hope. Or to get it over with. I have seen lesser men kill greater, but it doesn’t happen often, so the second is as hopeless as the first, although it makes a better story for your mother. Because you’ll be dead.

Calchas’s way is the way that takes care, and time, and discipline. But as Dionysius fell, his aspis fouled the killer’s spear and I got a breath to think.

I backed one step and shoved my aspis
high
and hard against the man next to me. He was Eutykos, a young man from a good family. Later on we were friends, and I loved his sister. I’d met her, of course, at festivals, and she was pretty – but at thirteen you don’t look at girls as much as you should. Hah!

So I locked my shield with Eutykos and the killer’s doru crashed into my aspis – high. He was going for my helmet, but I had tucked my head so that only the top of the helmet came above the rim of my aspis. He swung again and his doru glanced off my helmet, but I had no crest to catch the point and he lost his balance and crashed against me, breast to breast.

Old Zotikos stood his ground. He threw his shoulder against my back and held me against the killer’s shove, bless him. And he went one better. While the killer rained blows of his spear on my head and aspis, Zotikos rammed his spear into the killer’s shield, full force.

I got to breathe.

Eutykos poked at him, too.

On my left, Straton, Myron’s older son, locked his aspis against mine.

Only then did I realize that the voice shrieking ‘Lock up!’ was mine.

Now the killer was facing three men – six, really, because none of our followers flinched – and the spear points were coming for him.

Locked up and secure, we began to kill him. I have no idea who got him. Later, my spear point was bloody and the blood dripped down the shaft and over my hand. But Zotikos also had blood on his and so did Straton. Perhaps we all took him. It doesn’t matter. No man – no man born of women – can face six steady hoplites, even if they are so scared that shit runs down their legs.